As a (Protestant) theologian, I read Francis’ theology of encounter as a metaphysics. Wilfrid Sellars famously presents metaphysics as accounts of how things in the widest sense hang together in the widest sense. Metaphysical accounts are accounts then that picture how things hang together. The former pope’s notion of encounter depends on an explicitly theological picture of how things hang together. Namely, they hang together as connected in God. Not some things, but all things. This follows Francis’ 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si’, where he makes his case for creation care on this same metaphysical picture of how things hang together. There, the Holy Father contrasts a hyper-capitalist metaphysics of things hanging together through competition with a metaphysics of things hanging together in inescapable interdependency (theologically, “love”) that has long been the church’s claim about creation (recall Thomas Aquinas formulation of essence and existence, where insofar creatures exist at all they exist in inescapable dependence on the one whose essence is to exist, making creatures qua creatures utterly dependent/connected). This is the same metaphysical picture operative in 2020’s Fratelli Tutti out of which Francis’ encounter theology emerges.
Both teachings advance Christianity’s long-held grammar of metaphysical interdependence. Without Francis’ foundational metaphysical account, without this fundamental ontology, without this basic and basically orthodox Christian theology, encounter will be interpreted sentimentally (and therefore dismissed), skeptically (and therefore doubted) or voluntaristically (and therefore problematically applied). With the metaphysics in place, encounter is an action that begins as an inclination. We encounter others (friends, lovers, strangers, enemies, etc.) by leaning into networks that are already there ontologically, since anything that exists already exists in relationship to all else that is creation (again, the big Thomistic lesson of Laudato Si’). The moral responsibility of encounter isn’t about pulling out of thin air encounters that save for one’s voluntarist efforts wouldn’t be there. Rather, the moral responsibility Fratelli Tutti’s theology put to us is making good on a set of relations one is always already constituted by. Encounter’s moral prescriptions come in its metaphysical descriptions. Francis’ call isn’t that each one of us should heroically (and implausibly) pull ourselves up by our encounter-bootstraps so as to encounter the other. Rather, he calls us to lean into what is already there, what is always the case. Again, this is an ontology, and its proper conceptual orientation is metaphysics.
Consider a counterfactual. ICE (and Customs and Border Patrol) agents have been seen as cosplaying real police and real military, when in fact they are only wannabe police and military. But the cosplay goes deeper. According to the ontology of encounter, ICE agents cosplay the non-human. And they do so in order to do the inhumane work they do. Their cosplay outfits (armed head to toe) serve the robocop role they play so as to belie the fact of the human—they dehumanize themselves to avoid human dependence/connections and their attending moral obligations. They deny the human and so dress the part. But as cosplay, this is fiction. They want to believe that the fantasy they live is reality. But it is not. The real world according to Francis is one of connection and interdependence—that is, creation and love. Rather than acknowledge this, ICE agents cosplay.
