Gazing Through a Prism Darkly: Reflections on Merold Westphal's Hermeneutical Epistemology 9780823237678

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Gazing Through a Prism Darkly

Series Board James Bernauer Drucilla Cornell Thomas R. Flynn Kevin Hart Richard Kearney Jean-Luc Marion Adriaan Peperzak Thomas Sheehan Hent de Vries Merold Westphal Edith Wyschogrod Michael Zimmerman

John D. Caputo, series editor

P E R S PE C T I V E S I N C O N T I N E N TA L PHILOSO PHY

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Edited by B. KEITH PUTT

Gazing Through a Prism Darkly Reflections on Merold Westphal’s Hermeneutical Epistemology

F O R D H A M U N IV E R SI T Y P RE SS New York

2009

Copyright 䉷 2009 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gazing through a prism darkly : reflections on Merold Westphal’s hermeneutical epistemology / edited by B. Keith Putt.—1st ed. p. cm.— (Perspectives in continental philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3045-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Westphal, Merold. 2. Philosophical theology. 3. Knowledge, Theory of (Religion) 4. Hermeneutics—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Putt, B. Keith. BT50.G38 2009 230.01—dc22 2009006196 Printed in the United States of America 11 10 09 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

For Spencer to see his smile is to gaze through a prism brightly

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Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

The Benefit of the Doubt: Merold Westphal’s Prophetic Philosophy of Religion B. Keith Putt

1

Despoiling the Egyptians—Gently: Merold Westphal and Hegel William Desmond

20

Merold Westphal on the Sociopolitical Implications of Kierkegaard’s Thought C. Stephen Evans

35

Levinas and Kierkegaard on Triadic Relations with God M. Jamie Ferreira

46

Appropriating Westphal Appropriating Nietzsche: Merold Westphal as a Theological Resource Bruce Ellis Benson

61

Remaining Faithful: Postmodern Claims, Christian Messages Edith Wyschogrod

74

The God Who Refuses to Appear on Philosophy’s Terms Martin Beck Matusˇtı´k

86

What Is Merold Westphal’s Critique of Ontotheology Criticizing? John D. Caputo

100 ix

Transcendence in Tears Kevin Hart

116

Between the Prophetic and the Sacramental Richard Kearney

139

Taking the Wager of/on Love: Luce Irigaray and the Caress James H. Olthuis

150

The Joy of Being Indebted: A Concluding Response Merold Westphal

163

Talking to Balaam’s Ass: A Concluding Conversation B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

181

Notes

207

List of Contributors

235

Index

237

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Contents

Acknowledgments

To ‘‘edit’’ is to ‘‘bring forth’’ or to ‘‘give’’ (e-dere), specifically to collect and/or alter materials in order to present them—that is, to make a present of them to the public by ‘‘publishing’’ (publicare) them for general distribution. The editor, therefore, ostensibly acts out of grace, motivated by a desire to donate something of intellectual or aesthetic worth that will benefit all who accept the gift. In other words, the editor is a benefactor. Ironically, however, the editor is not exclusively the agent of giving but is concurrently also the indirect object of the gracious activities of others, one to whom various patrons contribute gifts of support and assistance that actually empower the editor’s own patronage of the text. Consequently, an ‘‘edited’’ text is both a gift from the editor and a gift to the editor. I certainly have been the fortunate recipient of significant gifts from several people while preparing this volume of essays, gifts for which I am genuinely and deeply grateful. Helen Tartar, Kathleen (Katie) Sweeney, and Eric Newman of Fordham University Press have been liberal with both their insights and their patience throughout the many months of this process. I appreciate all three of them for their guidance. There would have been no process at all had it not been for the generosity of the contributors to this anthology. I thank them for the time and creative energies they invested in this text. I am also grateful to the editors of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory for permission to use my article on Merold as the opening chapter of this book. Furthermore, Sharon Baker xi

helped perform the ‘‘thankless’’ task of preparing the index, for which I am genuinely ‘‘thankful!’’ Special gratitude goes to Jack Caputo, who introduced me to Merold fifteen years ago at a conference in Virginia. Without that introduction, not only would I not have the honor of editing this collection of essays on Merold’s thought, but I would also not have the joy and privilege of calling him ‘‘friend.’’ And Merold’s friendship is, indeed, the sine qua non for this book. Several years ago in Atlanta, when I mentioned the idea of preparing an anthology of essays focusing on his work, Merold quickly blessed the idea and gave me his permission to pursue it. Throughout the project, he has been a constant encourager, a wise counselor, and a witty companion who has kept me on the proper paths and had me laughing throughout the journey. I thank him for who he is and for what he has accomplished—both of which have ennobled so many of us. Now, one last personal word about gifts and giving. During the final stages of work on this text, I received a most precious gift: a new grandson. This book will always remind me of his birth and of the ineffable joy that he has brought to me, and I hope that in the future whenever he pulls this volume from my shelf and reads the dedication, he will always know how much his ‘‘Daddo’’ treasures him.

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Acknowledgments

Gazing Through a Prism Darkly

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The Benefit of the Doubt Merold Westphal’s Prophetic Philosophy of Religion B. KEITH PUTT

In recent years, several scholars in the United States have exploited the implications of Continental philosophy for developing new and innovative approaches to religious and theological studies. These thinkers— including but not limited to Carl Raschke, Mark Taylor, Charles Winquist, Edith Wyschogrod, and John Caputo—have embraced various expressions of European philosophy, not in order to offer simple commentaries on those expressions but to utilize them as raw material for developing a uniquely American species of philosophical theology. These new American philosophical voices speak critically and constructively to the biblical paradigms lying behind Western theory, to the traditional religious and theological themes developing out of those paradigms, and to the cultural and social transformations that have changed how those paradigms are appropriated. Merold Westphal, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, certainly belongs in this chorus of voices proclaiming a new postsecular philosophical theology. He continues to add a provocative and, one might say, more conservative counterpoint to the new American Continentalist refrain by articulating an epistemology sensitive to the realities of cognitive finitude and moral weakness and by reminding his readers that wisdom begins only with the fear of the Lord. With a prophetically critical voice, he calls for humility and commitment, always confessing that human beings can encounter meaning and truth only as human beings, never as gods. 1

This essay results from giving an ear to Westphal’s creative voice and seeks to respond by developing a brief introduction to and exposition of his ‘‘prophetic’’ philosophy of religion. It focuses primarily on the wisdom of humility that characterizes his thought and how that wisdom, expressed through the redemptive dynamic of doubt, may contribute to developing a postsecular ‘‘apologetic’’ for faith. The Structure of a Philosophy of Religion Revolution Merold Westphal identifies two traditional approaches to philosophy of religion that purport to offer a ‘‘scientific’’ perspective on the discipline. First, natural theology and its corollary, evidential apologetics, center on the issues of truth and justification, seeking through logical argument and/or empirical evidence to verify specific religious claims about God and reality. Consequently, they produce various metaphysical arguments for God’s existence, proofs of biblical miracles, and models of theodicies.1 Since the seventeenth century, these metaphysical syntheses of faith and reason have privileged the theories of truth accepted by mathematics and mathematical physics, thereby ensuring that philosophy of religion can consider itself a genuine science.2 As ‘‘genuine scientists,’’ natural theologians and evidential apologists allege that they follow a pure method of thought and reach objective truth devoid of any temporal or cultural contaminants, thereby ensuring that philosophy of religion will function as a normative science. Second, phenomenology of religion seeks to avoid the explicitly objective metaphysical investigations of natural theology and rational apologetics by focusing instead on philosophizing about religious experience. Taking a positive cue from Kant, who claims that epistemological investigations that endeavor to construct metaphysical systems of God and religion exemplify a transcendental illusion, phenomenologists of religion bracket the issues of truth and evaluation, focusing instead on religion as a phenomenon of human existence in order to describe ‘‘the life-world of faith.’’3 Taking a negative cue from Kant in rejecting his insistence that objects should conform to the structures of the mind, they follow Husserl’s ‘‘principle of principles’’ that a phenomenon should be allowed to give itself according to its own unique structures. As a result, phenomenology of religion becomes the one truly scientific approach to philosophy of religion, since it both reduces its subject matter to empirically observable religious expressions and adequately brackets all personal or communal prejudices that would hinder objectivity. Consequently, philosophy of religion becomes a descriptive science.4 2

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Initially, Westphal responds positively to both approaches. On one hand, he recognizes the necessity at times to raise the truth question regarding the justification of specific faith claims. Certainly, if one confronts an evidentialist atheist who attempts to deny theistic assertions on the basis of rational and/or empirical arguments, the only proper response might well be to respond in kind and produce evidential arguments that make those assertions ‘‘rationally respectable.’’5 These arguments would constitute, therefore, a type of evidentialist apologetic and would embody a certain metaphysical character. On the other hand, Westphal has himself written one of the most creative and influential phenomenologies of religion of the past two decades, God, Guilt, and Death. Obviously, then, he has no aversion to the descriptive science of phenomenology, insisting that placing one’s own religious commitments and opinions in brackets and adopting a ‘‘detached’’ stance allows one to get ‘‘acquainted with the familiar’’ in experience—in this case, with the religiously familiar.6 Notwithstanding his positive responses to the two ‘‘sciences’’ of philosophy of religion, however, Westphal expresses significant concerns over whether ‘‘science’’ functions as the only appropriate paradigm for doing philosophy of religion. His primary hesitation comes at the point of the putatively disinterested methodologism of the sciences. Can one genuinely bracket personal opinions, existential commitments, and religious presuppositions so as simply to enquire into objective questions of truth or to engage in detached descriptions of religious experience? Or are human beings so immersed in the flux of existence and so prone to error, intentional or unintentional, that no ‘‘pure science’’ is ever possible? Westphal contends that both attempts at a scientific philosophy of religion fail to acknowledge—or to acknowledge consistently—that human knowing is situation-dependent, always infected by forestructures of culture, tradition, sociopolitical ideologies, and psychological motives steeped in personal desires and interests, all of which quite often operate surreptitiously. He doubts that philosophy of religion can be done well if reduced to the traditional models; consequently, he advocates a paradigm shift, a shift to a more Hebraic typology, specifically to a prophetic model of critique. Of course, Westphal insists that his contamination of philosophy of religion with Hebraic prophetism should not be construed as an attempt to develop a ‘‘kerygmatic philosophy of religion that is indistinguishable from preaching.’’7 A prophetic philosophy of religion can never assert the same authority as the God-called prophet.8 Instead, it should be construed as a ‘‘thought experiment’’ dedicated to making philosophy of religion more practically therapeutic and more intellectually honest.9 Through discourses characterized as personal, untimely, political, and eschatological, B. Keith Putt

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the biblical prophets brought messages that were not universally grounded but oftentimes were ad hoc admonitions fitted to the particularities of a given situation. The prophets admonished their listeners that truth was often absent not because of a lack of mental capacity but because of intentional rebellion against the precepts of God.10 Westphal contends that prophetic philosophers of religion should likewise speak critically against the unattainable absolutism of universal foundations and against the reality of calculated deception and delusion for purposes of oppression and manipulation. In a broader sense, Westphal’s new version of philosophy of religion glosses the philosophical hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur by fleshing out in a more complete form the dynamics of Ricoeur’s distinction between a hermeneutics of retrieval and a hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur, himself, recognizes that human beings always exist in the interstices between a demand for totality and the realization of limitation, what he terms the ‘‘imperialism of truth’’ and the ‘‘vertigo of variation.’’11 This interstitial existence comes to expression in the tension between Hegel and Kant, between the desire for a complete system of knowledge and the critical realization that reason cannot supply that completion. Consequently, Ricoeur chooses to do a ‘‘post-Hegelian Kantianism,’’ which demands that epistemology be a hermeneutics, a wager for the unity of meaning within the constraints of the plurivocity of textuality. This post-Hegelian Kantianism requires that one always choose between hermeneutics and absolute knowledge,12 which is, indeed, a decision between finitude and absolute knowledge.13 Ricoeur confesses that he refuses the Hegelian synthesis of absolute knowledge because it absorbs all transcendence into the immanence of the process, because in some way it turns faith into gnosis, and because it makes the Promethean claim of having recapitulated evil within the structures of the Aufhebung.14 He also protests that Hegel’s system does not take seriously the ‘‘horizon of unfulfilled claim’’ with reference to human action. Ricoeur insists that something is broken at the heart of human action that prevents any partial experience of achievement from being equated with the whole field of human action.15 Consequently, whether totality is presumed theoretically or practically, the ‘‘initial lie’’ is always the arrogant assumption that closure is possible.16 Whenever, therefore, one chooses absolute knowledge, one engages in a deceptive premature closure, resulting in or from a false consciousness that ‘‘is no longer either error in the epistemological sense or lying in the moral sense, but illusion.’’17 Such illusion demands the type of iconoclastic suspicion one finds 4

The Benefit of the Doubt

in a Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud, who begin their hermeneutics of suspicion with the presupposition that consciousness has deluded itself and must be demystified in order for there to be any new understanding.18 Although Ricoeur does not develop an explicit philosophy of religion, he does investigate the religious implications of his distinction between finitude and absolute knowledge and the need for a hermeneutics of trust and of suspicion. Actually, for him, there is a definite Christian eschatological concern with the dynamics at work in the liminal tensions between the ‘‘not yet’’ of the desire for unity and the ‘‘already’’ recognized reality of fragmentation. The demand for the ‘‘unity of truth’’ is a ‘‘hoped-for’’ reality, an eschatological ‘‘not yet’’ that is a ‘‘timeless task.’’19 Consequently, hope has ‘‘a fissuring power with regard to closed systems.’’20 Hope, functioning through the ontologically explorative operations of the imagination, accepts that reality reveals both a paucity and a polysemy of meaning, turns its attention toward the future ‘‘in spite of ’’ the present and embraces the asymptotic flow of history as the flux of freedom.21 For Ricoeur, this architecture of meaning is a gift that mediates the superabundance of grace and reveals what Kierkegaard calls an ‘‘absurd logic’’ and what the Apostle Paul distinguishes as a logic of displacement within a new creation.22 This eschatological philosophy of hope as the proper dialectic between skepticism and dogmatism is but another translation of the prophetic and kerygmatic message of scripture. Ricoeur agrees with Westphal that a philosopher should not feign being a preacher, since philosophers always speak in a discourse that lacks the finality of the evangelist; however, although philosophers should not be prophetic preachers, they may indeed be prophetic ‘‘poets of religion,’’ to use again a Kierkegaardian phrase.23 As prophetic poets of religion, philosophers must always engage the ‘‘fundamental gesture of philosophy’’—an avowal of the historically conditioned character of human understanding and an act of defiance against distorted human communication that conceals dominating and violent intentions.24 Although Westphal explicitly cites Kierkegaard and Kant as the two primary philosophical influences on his new structure for philosophy of religion, there is no mistaking that it also bears a definite Ricoeurean configuration. He predicates his new paradigm on biblical categories as does Ricoeur; he uses Ricoeurean nomenclature, such as ‘‘believing soul’’ and ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion’’; he concentrates on the tension between the demand for unity and the recognition of limitation; he adheres to Ricoeur’s principle of the liminality of philosophy; and he admits that the issue of epistemology rests ultimately on hermeneutics, specifically the B. Keith Putt

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hermeneutics of finitude and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Like Ricoeur, his prophetic philosophy of religion might be characterized as simul fidelis et infidelis, since he recognizes the positive import of maintaining a healthy doubt with reference to the cultural-linguistic relationality of all human knowing and with reference to the possibility that knowledge has been intentionally subverted and distorted for ulterior motives. One could also change the simul to semper and admit that Westphal’s prophetic philosophy of religion does not use doubt merely as a station along some Cartesian itinerary toward certainty or as some thetic moment in a worldhistorical dialectic toward absolute knowledge. Instead, like the tenacity of the prophetic word of judgment, doubt remains a necessary component of an honest philosophy. Consequently, like Ricoeur, Westphal would insist that the hermeneutics of finitude and the hermeneutics of suspicion express the benefit of the doubt as a means for preserving epistemological humility and noetic repentance. The Inescapable Hermeneutics of Finitude If one traces the family tree of Westphal’s prophetic paradigm shift, one discovers that the trunk is the radically Christian critical philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard, while the roots are the biblical conceptual network of poets, prophets, and apostles. In both scripture and Kierkegaard, one discovers explicit expressions of the hermeneutics of finitude and the hermeneutics of suspicion—the two hermeneutical branches from which extend the limbs of Ricoeur, Kant, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. In Psalm 139:6, the Hebrew poet contemplates the divine knowledge and humbly admits: ‘‘Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is too high, I cannot attain it.’’ Westphal reads this confession as an explicit attestation to the limits of human knowledge, or as he states it, the ‘‘limit to the psalmist’s self-knowledge is human finitude. Period.’’25 He also finds a similar endorsement of the reality of human finitude—what he calls the ‘‘earthiness of our epistemic equipment’’—in Paul, who writes in 1 Corinthians 13:12 of seeing only through a ‘‘mirror dimly’’ and not ‘‘face to face.’’26 For Westphal, the prophetic quality of Kierkegaard’s philosophy develops these poetic and Pauline themes in its criticism of every attempt at crowning reason as the prince of existence. Reason, with its ahistoricity, its universal applicability, and its insistence on putting together the whole of reality into a nice consistent system fails to inculcate what is truly real—the singular individual in his or her particularity and contextuality. Existence might be a system for God; however, it never is for the existing 6

The Benefit of the Doubt

individual, who can never extricate her/himself from the ‘‘sensible, temporal, linguistic, historico-cultural milieux’’ in order to move upward to some Platonic realm of universal ideas or forward toward some Hegelian holism of absolute knowledge.27 Westphal contends that Kierkegaard denies the Cartesian cogito as a transcendental ego existing outside the confines and constraints of time and tradition. At this point, Kierkegaard adopts a position quite similar to Kant’s antirealistic perspectivism.28 In an intellectually autobiographical essay, Westphal writes of having encountered both Kant and Hegel during graduate studies at Yale and confesses that he emerged from those studies more Kantian than Hegelian, having developed what could be his own version of Ricoeur’s post-Hegelian Kantianism. What seduced him so strongly in Kant was the hermeneutics of finitude that underlay Kant’s distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal.29 Kant does not deny that the noumenal exists as a reality separate from and independent of human cognition; however, he does deny that human beings have the objective perspective from which to know that reality in itself. By definition, only God’s eternal and perfect intellect can have direct access to that reality. God knows the Ding an sich, but humans cannot, because they are embedded in the flux of existence, infected by culture, tradition, language, and social and political antecedents.30 Consequently, Westphal reads the distinction as a specifically theistic antirealism, the Kantian affirmation that humans are indeed not God. In other words, Kant’s distinction between appearance and reality analogizes Kierkegaard’s assertion that existence is only a system for God. Kant, therefore, contributes another prophetic voice to philosophy of religion, one that sings in harmony with Kierkegaard’s, that given the ‘‘penultimate (at best) character of our current theories and of the de facto pluralism of perspectives,’’ one should accept ‘‘that our best theories to date, including our own theologies, are in their very structure and not just in their details fallible.’’31 The Pauline and Kierkegaardian themes that constitute the hermeneutics of finitude have found contemporary expression for Westphal in certain types of postmodern philosophy critical of the untenable claims made by traditional modernism. Modern philosophy and theology may both be viewed as ‘‘the Luciferian project of being ‘like the Most High’ ’’ (Isa. 14:14).32 The miscegenation of ontology and theology—that is, of philosophical discourse about being and theological discourse about God— results in an ontotheology that claims to have discovered the self-presence of both absolute meaning and absolute truth.33 This identity of being and thought classically defines God; consequently, every metaphysical claim to have discovered any self-attesting foundation for meaning and truth B. Keith Putt

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simultaneously claims to have discovered and to have occupied the place of God. As Lucifer in his arrogance sought to usurp that place for himself, so, too, in the hubris of human reason, modern philosophy offers perspectives from which to view the world sub specie aeternitatis, or, in other words, to ‘‘peek over God’s shoulder’’ in order to view the world ahistorically and immediately.34 Westphal summarizes this ontotheological project, especially in its Enlightenment expression, as one of substitution, specifically, the substitution of mythos with logos, tradition with critique, and authority with autonomy.35 These substitutions take place on the basis of a foundationalist epistemology predicated upon the notion that human beings have come of age, have left the former darkness of superstition and historical dependence, have encountered through the light of reason the transparency of ideas devoid of any opacity of doubt, and have established personal experience as the arbiter of empirical truth through the incorrigibility of direct perception. But as Lucifer can take the shape of an angel of light, so, too, can Enlightenment foundationalism be the incarnation of an idolatrous desire to be God. For Westphal, postmodern philosophy attempts to exorcize the demon of hubris that results from Cartesian immediacy and Hegelian totality by reminding individuals that whatever intellectual treasure they possess is held in ‘‘earthen vessels.’’ It attempts to bring individuals back down to earth and to remind them that: (1) they are inextricably caught up in various narratives about reality (mythoi) and that no philosophical project has ‘‘an exclusive copyright on ‘Logos’ as its logo’’;36 (2) they cannot escape the influence of tradition, since history and language are the matrix, the womb, within which individuals grow and develop; and (3) they cannot attain any pure autonomy, since they can never cut the umbilical cord that connects them to some authoritative heteronomy. Postmodernism, in other words, is another expression of the hermeneutics of finitude dedicated to reminding human beings that they are not God.37 In this respect, ‘‘positive postmodernism’’ offers something akin to a neo-Kierkegaardian critique of reason on behalf of faith. As a matter of fact, Westphal classifies Kierkegaard as a ‘‘decisively postmodern’’ thinker, since he criticizes the foundationalist’s claim that one can achieve, through the light of reason, ‘‘a pure gaze at naked truth by means of a recollective withdrawal from earthbound situatedness.’’38 Postmodernism contributes to a prophetic philosophy of religion by offering another version of the fides quaerens intellectum,39 which for Westphal never should be interpreted as a fides quaerens securitatem. Yet, ironically, at this very point he apparently fails to appreciate the fuller implications of postmodernism for a prophetic philosophy of religion. He 8

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claims that if the postmodern critique questions the truth of religious discourse, ‘‘it might be hard to see how it could have positive import for religious reflection.’’40 Within the context of his own prophetic philosophy of religion, however, it really is not that hard to see the benefit of a postmodernist doubting of religious truth. Since faith seeks understanding always within the structures of existence, that seeking is a timeless task that should not succumb to the seduction of security offered by the idols of modernity. In other words, faith seeking understanding should come to expression in a prophetic philosophy of religion that always maintains an element of doubt concerning whether truth and meaning have indeed been discovered. Postmodernism, then, as another expression of the hermeneutics of finitude, has the same prophetic import as do Kierkegaard and Kant. Westphal’s prophetic, postmodern, Kierkegaardian prophetism illustrates what James William McClendon calls the ‘‘principle of fallibility,’’ which states that human interpretations at worst are wrong, while at best are incomplete. In other words, since there is no transcendental subject outside of an ‘‘historical and cultural specificity and rootedness,’’ there is always an element of doubt concerning whether truth has been discovered, but there should be no doubt about whether all truth has been discovered—in the finitism of the flux there can be no holistic grand unified theory.41 Ricoeur may be correct that truth is ultimately a unity in itself; however, Westphal contends that ‘‘the mirror in which we see it dimly is also a prism that renders our grasp of it irreducibly manifold.’’42 The Pauline ‘‘glass darkly’’ becomes a Westphalian ‘‘prism darkly,’’ thereby rendering hermeneutics ‘‘inescapable.’’43 It does not necessarily eventuate in a sophistic relativism or nihilism—which would be just another premature closure, the totalization of doubt. It should, however, remind human beings that they are not God and that outside of their own places of dwelling there is only the utopic—the ‘‘no place.’’ This postmodern prophetic word, then, could be a gloss on another biblical poet: ‘‘The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’’ (Ps. 111:10 NASB), with the ‘‘fear of the Lord’’ including the concession that human beings are creatures and not the Creator. A Prophetic Deduction of Transcendental Depravity The benefit of the doubt in Westphal’s prophetic philosophy of religion not only addresses the issue of finitude and the amorality of a situational epistemology but also, and more importantly, acknowledges the specifically ethical implications of human sin and its possible noetic effects. Here B. Keith Putt

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again the biblical roots of this approach surface. Jeremiah clearly admits that the ‘‘heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?’’ (Jer. 17:9).44 The Apostle Paul concurs when he writes that human beings ‘‘are disposed to ‘suppress the truth’ and thereby to become individuals whose ‘senseless minds [are] darkened’ ’’ (Rom. 1:18, 21).45 Consequently, if Christian philosophers genuinely desire to embrace the prophetic paradigm, they must decipher sin as ‘‘an essential epistemological category.’’46 Here the Kierkegaardian trunk of Westphal’s prophetic family tree once again becomes prominent, in that Kierkegaard does indeed factor into his own ‘‘doubtful’’ hermeneutic the significance of human sinfulness as an obstacle to ‘‘knowing’’ God properly.47 He develops this theme most succinctly in Philosophical Fragments, in which he contrasts Socrates’ anamnestic epistemology with Jesus’s creational occasionalism. Precisely because of human rebellion against God and its refusal to accept God’s truth, the divine Teacher must be a Savior who grants the occasion for knowledge and supplies that knowledge in the moment of encounter.48 Accordingly, faith and knowledge are ultimately ethical issues, whose opposite is not doubt but disobedience.49 For Westphal, then, Kierkegaard just acknowledges the Pauline, Augustinian, Lutheran, and Calvinian affirmations of the ubiquitous effects of the Fall on human beings. Sin distorts, subverts, contaminates, impedes, and rejects knowledge and truth. The sinfulness of the human knower, therefore, means that a prophetic epistemology must move ‘‘beyond the hermeneutics of transcendental finitude to the hermeneutics of transcendental depravity.’’50 Epistemological depravity as a transcendental ‘‘ground’’ of human knowing results in the hermeneutics of suspicion as an unavoidable second aspect to a prophetic philosophy of religion. Such a hermeneutics correlates with the hermeneutics of finitude at the point of the historical embeddedness of human existence. Since there is no escaping the forestructures of tradition and language, there can be no disinterested encounter with religious truth. Yet, this restriction of nurture must be extended to the restriction of nature, specifically the sinful nature that ensues when these forestructures become malignant, infected by human desires, prejudices, and narcissism. These malignant motivations directly affect rationality in both the individual and communal dimensions, substituting rationalism for reason and ideologies for traditions.51 The skepticism of suspicion confronting these mutations of epistemic sin directly challenges the integrity of the person and the public.52 Unlike Cartesian doubt, which ostensibly invokes the clarity of reason in order to overcome the limitations of experience, suspicion directs its protest at the ‘‘evasiveness 10

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and mendacity of consciousness,’’ calling into question not so much truth as motivation.53 For a more complete understanding of the hermeneutics of suspicion, one must venture out onto three new branches of Westphal’s prophetic family tree. One must go out on a limb and acknowledge the contributions of three militant atheists: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. These hermeneuticists of suspicion are for Westphal ‘‘the great secular theologians of original sin,’’ since they mercilessly expose the transcendental depravity that results in religion’s being just another way that human beings manipulate, oppress, dehumanize, violate, exclude, and rationalize.54 These hermeneuticists of suspicion, in denouncing the false consciousness and intentional self-deception of religious communities, so consistently parallel the attacks on hypocrisy made by the prophets and by Jesus, Westphal accuses them of plagiarizing their denunciations!55 Like the prophets and Jesus before them, so, too, do Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud concern themselves with the practical repercussions of religious beliefs. For them, doubt is not directed toward the propositional truth of religious statements. They begin with the presupposition that those statements are simply not true. They, instead, examine the practical antecedent ‘‘reasons’’ for and the subsequent achievements of communities espousing particular religious interpretations. That is, they seek to ascertain the ulterior motives behind beliefs, hoping to unmask the egocentric and ideological desires served by those beliefs.56 Suspicion, therefore, may be understood as a ‘‘cross examination’’ of motivations for believing,57 or, to extend Westphal’s use of ‘‘cross,’’ one might reference Jesus’s call for divine forgiveness uttered at his crucifixion as a request for God to forgive the crucifiers not so much because they know not ‘‘what they do’’ but because they know not ‘‘why they do it.’’ A jaundiced eye turned toward the ‘‘praxicality of truth’’ quite often allows one to see that knowledge becomes a weapon used against the other or as a shield to protect the arrogant desires and deceitful heart of the self.58 In such cases, a traditional apologetic designed to give evidence of the veracity of specific religious worldviews lacks all palliative value, since the sinful misuse of religious beliefs may occur even when those beliefs are correspondently or consistently true. True beliefs may still be used by sinful thinkers in order to ‘‘justify ungodly practices of exploitation or domination whether based on race, ethnicity, nationality, class, gender or whatever.’’59 Using a powerful Kierkegaardian analogy, Westphal indicts theology (and by extension also philosophy of religion) for being a whore prostituting itself indiscriminately to whatever ‘‘will to power’’ offers to meet its desires. This prostitution occurs in one of three ways. First, B. Keith Putt

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through overt espousal, religious structures may explicitly condone practices such as anti-Semitism, Western cultural imperialism, or male chauvinism. Second, through vague generality, religious communities can express their critiques of evil in the abstract while never practically seeking to diminish evil concretely. Third, by use of a dualistic hermeneutics, believers may bifurcate reality into the sacred and the profane or into spirit and matter, thereby releasing themselves from having to interrelate the two spheres.60 Regardless of the explanation for the epistemological infidelity, the fact remains that an ethics of belief may be perverted into expressions of cognitive and conative disobedience. Original noetic sin also results in hypocrisy and in epistemological autoredemption. With reference to hypocrisy, Westphal admonishes his readers not to be blind to the beam in their own eyes while staring selfrighteously at the splinter in the eye of the other. This type of epistemological pharisaism quite often develops whenever religious believers delude themselves into thinking that only unbelievers are victimized by transcendental depravity. Unbelief, however, ‘‘is not the only way of suppressing the truth about God . . . only the most honest.’’ Believers are just as prone to the cognitive implications of sin as unbelievers and may have evil, selfserving desires inducing them to embrace a particular faith perspective or to eschew living out in love the practical truth of their faith.61 One might understand Westphal as paraphrasing the Jacobean imperative: ‘‘But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves’’ (James 1:22). With reference to autoredemption, Westphal integrates the hermeneutics of suspicion with the hermeneutics of finitude as both relate to the illusion of foundationalism. Foundationalist epistemologies may be aware of sin as an authentic noetic category; however, they make a Pelagian attempt to neutralize it by their own arrogant methodologism, which is ‘‘void of contrition, confession, or dependence upon divine grace.’’ Foundationalism endeavors to realize an ‘‘epistemological sanctification’’ achievable through the exercise of human cognitive and perceptual instrumentality.62 In other words, ‘‘foundationalism is not only the quest for certainty, but equally the quest for purity.’’63 Westphal condenses all of the issues targeted by the hermeneutics of suspicion into one fundamental problem—the idolatry of instrumental religion. When God and faith become tools present at hand for individuals to utilize as means to selfish ends, then the resulting religious structures, whether doctrinally true or not, become exercises in self-deception and expressions of, not so much a false consciousness, as a fallen one.64 As God disdains ritualistic observances of sacrifice, so, too, does God disdain orthodoxy when it becomes a ruse for domesticating the deity.65 Westphal 12

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acknowledges that the temptation toward instrumentalizing piety rests implicitly in the relationship between transcendence and self-transcendence associated with every theology. If faith involves the perception of divine transcendence along with the apperception of a justifiable selfinvolvement, then given that all people suffering the effects of the Fall are tempted to self-assertion and egocentricity, one can understand the potentiality for making either the ‘‘cognitive self absolute’’ or the ‘‘collective self absolute.’’66 The prophetic dynamics of the hermeneutics of suspicion can bring a word of judgment and remind individuals that the proper human response to divine transcendence is ‘‘Useless Self-Transcendence,’’ that is, a redirection of the incurvatus in se outward toward God for God’s sake alone.67 Although Westphal does not explicitly reference Kierkegaard’s The Purity of Heart, this work, by his most important prophetic philosopher, illustrates well what Westphal intends by ‘‘useless self-transcendence.’’ Kierkegaard’s text is an extended gloss on the condemnation of doublemindedness in James 4:8: ‘‘Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts ye double-minded.’’68 Kierkegaard declares that a pure heart wills only one thing—the Good—and wills it for no other reason than the truth of willing it. Willing the Good is a good thing as such, but one must always cast a doubtful eye on why the Good is being willed. A false willing of the Good would be any willing predicated upon instrumentality, that is, willing the Good as a means and not an end. For example, willing the Good for the sake of reward is double-minded,69 willing the Good in order to avoid punishment is double-minded,70 willing the Good ‘‘out of self-centered willfulness’’ is double-minded,71 and, finally, willing the Good halfheartedly is double-minded.72 All of these examples of double-mindedness are examples of instrumental piety, which is the result of transcendental depravity, which in turn should be the object of a hermeneutics of suspicion. The hermeneutics of suspicion turns doubt away from the purely epistemological issues of truth and meaning and projects it toward the ethical issues of personal motivations and social ideologies. It functions as a hermeneutics of the Fall, encouraging individuals to admit the reality of transcendental depravity and exercise constant vigilance over desires, interests, intentions, and expressions of power. The benefit of the doubt vis-a`-vis suspicion may be a gift of the Holy Spirit, whereby genuine sanctification takes place in the lives of individuals and communities as they are led from epistemological humility to noetic repentance to doing truth truthfully.73 Westphal serves as a prophet himself by addressing philosophers of B. Keith Putt

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religion and calling them to the prophetic ministry of ‘‘personal and corporate self-examination.’’74 Such self-examination can then lead to an affirmation of divine grace as the guarantor of truth and to a redemptively critical faith akin to Ricoeur’s second naivete´.75 Toward an Apologetic for Paralogetics T. S. Eliot, in the second of his Four Quartets entitled ‘‘East Coker,’’ expresses a poetic hermeneutics of finitude. He writes,76 There is, it seems to us, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been (81–87) Human beings always experience reality from finite perspectives, always standing between some protological moment of immediate clarity and some eschatological moment of total realization. Consequently, they live out this finitism through ontological patterns, various attempts at ordering reality into cosmetic world structures that give value to existence. These patterns always falsify to greater or lesser degrees in that they are either opaque to reality and, hence, in error, or offer numerous intensities of translucence, and, hence, promise only incomplete views of existence. Eliot seems to give in these lines a poetic translation of the irreducible manifold previously referred to as Westphal’s ‘‘dark prism.’’ Yet Eliot continues by directing his reader’s attention to the sources of these patterns and, in doing so, implicitly broaches the hermeneutics of suspicion:77 Do not let me hear Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God. (93–97) Since individuals are never born in vacuo, they never live outside of various world patterns that have preceded them. These patterns of reality are legacies bequeathed to each generation by its ancestors, those whom Eliot calls the ‘‘old men.’’ Their patterns are the wisdom that offers guidance, stability, truth, and meaning to the community, legitimating the community’s legislating interpretations by embracing systematically and boldly 14

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all aspects of culture and nature. In accepting the authority of the ‘‘old men’’ and their wisdom, individuals live out these systems as comprehensive and uncontaminated. With what may be the audacity of ingratitude for what he has been given by his ancestors, Eliot confesses that he has grown weary of listening to what the elders accept, to what is intellectually palatable to them. He now desires to engage what they refuse to swallow, the detritus that their systems cannot digest. He craves to hear of the ideas that have been left out or perhaps to hear from the people who have been left out. He knows that reason can be manipulated and used as expressions of power and control. So he no longer has an appetite for reason but for folly, for that foolishness that does not fit what the elders prescribe as rational. In other words, he suspects that through ‘‘fear and frenzy’’ something has been distorted. Eliot, in a manner of speaking, has given an aesthetic rendering of Westphal’s prophetic philosophy of religion. Westphal, too, believes truth for finite individuals may only come to expression in patterns, and he, too, doubts that the ‘‘wisdom of old men’’ is as pure and comprehensive as they often insist it is. In good postmodern fashion, Westphal quests for what has been left out and why, always questioning theories and motivations as a good prophet should. He agrees with John Caputo that reason (‘‘the wisdom of old men’’) ‘‘is a function of the system of power which is currently in place,’’ which has been institutionalized and instrumentalized in order to protect the status quo. Conversely, the irrational (‘‘folly’’) ‘‘is what is out of power,’’ what the ruling authorities have abandoned and ostracized as not adhering to stable structures, that is, to the proper patterns.78 More important, perhaps, he agrees with Jesus when he condemns the Pharisees for including tithing in their system but neglecting (read: ‘‘leaving out’’) justice, mercy, and faithfulness (Matt. 23:23). Westphal as a philosophical prophet keeps constant vigilance on what has been omitted, erased, or ruled out as folly or insignificant by the rulers who wish to manipulate truth and meaning in some profane ritual of instrumental piety. Westphal’s provocative paradigm shift from science to prophecy holds compelling didactic implications for the teaching of philosophy of religion, especially in more conservative contexts in which apologetics has dominated. Embracing his twofold hermeneutics of finitude (patterns) and suspicion (folly) does not necessitate the preemption of apologetic approaches but offers a more dialectical methodology that revolves elliptically around two foci: defending the tradition and questioning the tradition. Of course, the key term is ‘‘tradition,’’ what Eliot calls ‘‘pattern’’ B. Keith Putt

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and ‘‘the wisdom of old men.’’ The word ‘‘tradition’’ derives from the Latin tradere, meaning ‘‘to hand over,’’ which in turn develops out of the Indo-European root do¯, which means ‘‘to give’’ and etymologically gives rise to such words as ‘‘donation,’’ ‘‘donor,’’ and ‘‘endow.’’79 Consequently, ‘‘tradition’’ refers to what has been handed over or handed down, given from one generation to another. It refers, for example, to the patterns and wisdom of old men and women donated to each new generation, giving them a sense of what the world is, of who they are, of what is good, of what is true, of what is beautiful, and of what is holy. Each generation has a responsibility to be good stewards of this gift of tradition—to protect it, defend it, and then to pass it on, that is, to give it to the next generation. Ironically, however, tradere also means ‘‘to hand over’’ or ‘‘to give’’ in the sense of treason or betrayal. It is also the root for ‘‘traitor.’’ In other words, tradition might not be a gift but a betrayal, a treacherous act of systematically distorted patterns and subverted, oppressive ‘‘wisdom.’’ Consequently, certain aspects of tradition might well be a gift to be refused, something to be left out, a present that needs to be consigned to the past and passed up, since it may misrepresent truth and meaning. On one hand, in philosophy of religion, tradition as gift demands the response of apologetics, of genuine appreciation for and defense of the faith once delivered. The apologist in many ways acts like a priest, one who preserves the history and legacy of the culture. The priest is a maintenance worker, one who conserves the integrity of the community by respecting its rituals and interpretations, communicating them to others, and championing them when they are attacked or questioned by those who do not receive the gift. The priestly philosopher of religion, then, must always be ready to send a word (logos) away from (apo) the tradition that will justify it, protect it, and, perhaps, persuade others to embrace it. Tradition gives the gift of voice, of a language given to express the community’s inherited patterns of reality and to respond to other voices calling those patterns into question. Given the plurivocity of these finite patterns and the conflict that ensues from their inevitable competition, some form of ‘‘priestly’’ apologetics is a necessity for every particular tradition. On the other hand, since tradition might also be a betrayal, and since priests in their passion for conserving the status quo might act as traitors both in omitting ideas and individuals that do not fit and also in striving to propagate misinterpretations that support the powers that be in the community, there is the need for another approach in philosophy of religion. If desire and egocentricity often contaminate logic and reason, then that which is illogical or irrational might not be absurd but simply what 16

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is left outside the system, that is, what is forced to remain beside (para) the acceptable word (logos) of the old men. When the logical becomes oppressively ideological, then the paralogical becomes an appropriate response. In such cases, the philosopher of religion needs to become a prophet and engage in ‘‘paralogetics,’’ admitting both the hermeneutics of finitude—that reality is a system only for God and cannot be totalized—and the hermeneutics of suspicion—that ideas and individuals must often be purged as a result of motives and truths perverted for instrumentally ‘‘pious’’ purposes. The paralogist obeys what Peter Berger calls ‘‘the heretical imperative,’’80 that constant sensitivity to the choices (hairesis) that must be made with regard to the straight (ortho) opinion (doxa) that has been authorized by those who have the hermeneutical power in the tradition. Admitting that traditions are never univocal, the paralogist listens for the faint echoes of voices announcing alternative interpretations, voices that have been silenced or drowned out by the shouts of the orthodox arbiters of truth and meaning. The paralogist, suspicious of just how ‘‘straight’’ the accepted opinions of a tradition really are, pursues heresies and heretics in order to discover why the other (heteros) opinions (doxa) have been rejected and why those that suggest them may have been violated.81 Consequently, the paralogist consorts with alterity in the form of heretics and heterodoxies in order both to query the ‘‘wisdom of old men’’ about its hegemonic claims to truth and to require it to be ethically responsible for how it uses the truth. As Westphal warns, even if the orthodox pattern is true, truth should never be used as ‘‘a security blanket to be hugged, nor a trophy to be displayed, nor a weapon to be wielded’’ (emphasis added).82 The paralogist ironically shares with the apologist a love for the tradition and intends every offensive inquiry into its patterns to eventuate in a defensive affirmation and reception of its gift. Paralogy and apology do not have to contradict each other. One may indeed be both a priest and a prophet within one’s religious world structure and aspire to honor one’s heritage by handing it over to the next generation as a purer gift. The apologist/paralogist walks the straight and narrow with something of a crooked gait, yearning to be one of the faithful followers but always with what Jacques Derrida calls ‘‘a kind of filial lack of piety’’ toward the tradition.83 This ‘‘filial lack of piety’’ leads the apologist/paralogist to engage in an immanent critique of the tradition, a critique that, although often dependent upon different idioms borrowed from other traditions, determines to locate the reflexive reversals where the tradition turns back upon itself and is called into question by its own legislating language. Westphal refers to this immanent critique as an ‘‘inside job’’ predicated upon ad B. Keith Putt

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hominem speech by which prophetic philosophers of religion ‘‘are always appealing to the tradition against the tradition . . . [and] are always affirming that which [they are] critiquing.’’84 The apologist/paralogist (dis)respects the tradition enough to believe that she or he can find God in it without idolizing the tradition and mistaking it for God. Of course, the apologist/paralogist risks being labeled an ungrateful recipient of the gift and a destructive heretic threatening to destroy the community. Yet, such a risk cannot be avoided, since apologetics/paralogetics is always an attempt at translation, at finding a different voice through which to defend and purify the tradition. But as in all translation, something is lost in the paraphrase so that for the hermeneutical guardians of the tradition, every attempt at transcription becomes an expression of transgression, and the apologist/paralogist becomes the traitor— traduttore, traditore. Yet, as a prophet, the apologist/paralogist should not be surprised at the reception. As Jesus, himself, admitted, the prophet is always without honor in his or her own community. As one who once taught philosophy of religion in a confessional context, I am particularly sensitive to the apologetic/paralogetic tension in Westphal’s prophetic paradigm shift and to the risk involved in admitting doubt into the curriculum. My formative confessional tradition was Southern Baptist, and I once embraced it as a gift not only from my ancestors but also from God. Through the culture and language of this tradition—through the wisdom of its old men and women—I had patterned for me the good news of Jesus Christ as savior of the world, the centrality and authority of the Bible as God’s revealed word, and the importance of the church as Christ’s spiritual body on earth. I unapologetically committed myself to being an apologist for that tradition and desired to defend it and to communicate it to others, because I was convinced that its idioms, its narratives, and its images appropriately disclose the truth and meaning of God and the divine love. Unfortunately, that same tradition betrayed me. For example, (un)faithful forefathers used God’s word to pattern an unchristian racism, taking the language of God’s revelation and distorting it as a means for maintaining white supremacy over blacks. In 1869, Jeremiah Jeter, the editor of Virginia’s state Baptist paper, insisted that ‘‘God had placed between the races ‘an instinctive repugnance . . . which no training and no philosophy can eradicate, and which divine grace does not.’ ’’85 In a series of articles in the Tennessee state Baptist paper in 1872, an unnamed author established his condemnation of racial equality on the so-called biblical account of Noah’s ‘‘curse of Ham,’’ a curse physiologically indicated by dark skin and sociologically indicated by subordinate status.86 During a 18

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college pastorate in northern Mississippi in 1975, I heard one of my faithful deacons espouse the same argument in a Bible study class! Little had changed in a century. Of course, there are plenty of instances of Baptists adopting a more truly biblical position on the question of racism; however, my point is that, in my tradition, certain ungodly ‘‘truths’’ were held and propagated specifically as God’s transparently revealed position. Perhaps there are other ‘‘truths’’ such as these that cry out for paralogetics, for a hermeneutics of suspicion that does not naively accept the wisdom of old men but instead realizes that it is their folly that might be the better gift. Westphal, himself, confesses, on one hand, that ‘‘no human order . . . is entirely void of virtues to be received in gratitude and passed on in celebration.’’ Yet, he also confesses, on the other hand, that ‘‘no human order . . . deserves to be immune from the kind of suspicion associated with the cultural left.’’87 Consequently, his prophetic philosophy of religion oscillates between affirmation and suspicion, acceptance and doubt, or, in the language of this essay, between apologetics and paralogetics. This tension perpetuates both epistemological humility and noetic repentance in the endless task of coming to religious truth and meaning. In this asymptotic process, one should hope to acquire the wisdom that is as endless as the task. As Eliot writes,88 The only wisdom we can hope to acquire Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless. (97–98) Westphal’s prophetic paradigm seeks this very wisdom and teaches that humility—the fear of Lord as the consciousness of finitude and fallenness—is the preeminent benefit of (the) doubt.

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Despoiling the Egyptians—Gently Merold Westphal and Hegel WILLIAM DESMOND

Merold Westphal is one of the most significant interpreters of Hegel in the English-speaking philosophical world. He has worked on Hegel for the whole of his academic career. His first book, History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology, is still referred to with continuing respect for the help it offers students in finding their way through Hegel’s labyrinthine work.1 Westphal was also one of those thinkers intimately involved from early on in the ‘‘Hegel revival’’ in the United States, as well as more generally in the Anglo-American world. He served as vice president and program chair for a biennial meeting whose proceedings were published under his editorship as Method and Speculation in Hegel’s Phenomenology.2 An evident token of the respect in which his work has been held is the fact that he was an early president of the Hegel Society of America. He has not forfeited that respect as a Hegel scholar, although he has occupied himself with thinkers other than Hegel, including some postmodern thinkers not entirely kosher among Hegelians of the ‘‘true observance.’’ I should mention that he also collected some of his most important essays in Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity (1992), published, I am glad to say, with the SUNY series in Hegelian studies. In more recent years, Hegel has remained a point of reference in his discussions, even as the relation to him seems to have moved into a more explicitly critical gear. I refer especially to chapters in Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith3 and Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul.4 20

I will primarily focus my essay on this critical phase, a phase that, perhaps, was always a complication in his relation to Hegel. His work often recovers, against many caricatures, something of the deeper complexities of Hegel, frequently seeing how Hegelian ideas could be put to productive use today, without commitment to the full Hegelian scheme of thinking. But in the end, the fullness of his heart is elsewhere. This is evident in the investment of equal passion, if not more, in the reading of Kierkegaard. He was elected president of the Kierkegaard Society as well as the Hegel Society. Impossible conjunction of opposites? Possibly. Yet, it is a token of the man. The complexity of Westphal’s relation to Hegel becomes further evident as he engages a variety of post-Nietzschean thinkers. Hegel comes to function as an Other who diminishes the true power of religious and ethical otherness. Hence, Hegel has to be both understood and yet resisted. How resisted? This is where I come across what I find most remarkable in the manner of Westphal’s relating to Hegel. He is not a Hegelian, but if and when there is a critique of Hegel, there is nothing violent about it. Sometimes when the critique takes place, one wonders if the card-carrying Hegelian has even noticed it! The critique is always carried through with justice and faithfulness to the texts of the maestro. Westphal is despoiling the Egyptians, but he is despoiling them gently.5 The Egyptians might not even know that they have been despoiled, since the transition takes place so gently sometimes as we pass out of the land of the pharaoh of the concept. Lines of Approach Let me look first at a variety of ways of reading Hegel, for we can find versions of almost all of these ways in Westphal’s engagement with Hegel. A first line of approach is the predominantly scholarly process in which the explication and interpretation of Hegel’s texts are at the fore. This is an approach governed especially by fear and trembling before the authority of those whom I will call the philological police. I can say that Westphal has earned his license with these police officers. I suppose his earlier work shows him paying more dues for this license. There is a species of Hegel scholarship that does not progress much beyond the inspection of papers of legitimacy, but Westphal travels to places of philosophical interest on his philological passport. A second line of approach might be called the defensive. Here, rather than erudition satisfied with self-display within the charmed circle of philologists, there is a desire to communicate the worthiness of Hegel to the William Desmond

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unbelieving or the skeptical. I think here of the ‘‘Hegel revival’’ in the English-speaking philosophical world, both in terms of its general significance and of Westphal’s contribution to it. One must remember that for well nigh a century, Hegel has more often than not been a philosophos non grata in the dominant approaches of the English-speaking philosophical world. Hegel has also been a kind of philosophos non grata in some quarters on the Continental side of things, but not for the same reason, and in due order Westphal also will try to communicate the measure of Hegel here as well. I recall how it was an uphill struggle at a certain time even to get a hearing for the study of Hegel. Westphal was part of the first generation of scholars and thinkers in that revival dating from around the late 1960s and early 1970s, often identified with the Wofford conference on Hegel’s philosophy of religion.6 From this time also dates the founding of the Hegel Society of America, in which Westphal has long held a place of honor. To gain a space for just the hearing of Hegel in such hostile or indifferent circumstances, the worthiness of the Hegelian manner had to be defended. Defensiveness comes in degrees, of course, and Westphal was never an unqualified defender. I would say his generous character is in evidence here in being an advocate for the defense. I find him meticulous in seeking to make the strongest case possible for hearing Hegel and for considering the intelligibility of what Hegel wants to communicate. Being an advocate for the defense is a role he has played with honor not only in circles less oriented to the Continental, but also in postmodern Continental circles where we sometimes find resort to rather simple, even caricatured versions of Hegel. A third line of approach I will call comparative. This is a way of approaching Hegel by comparison with other significant thinkers among whom can be found both overlaps and divergences. One of the strengths of this approach is to demonstrate the relevance of Hegel outside purely Hegelian scholarship—and not only to the Hegelian aficionados but also to the admirers of the other thinkers who are invited to enter into the comparative lists. The instructiveness of this kind of comparative approach is especially evident in Westphal’s collection Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity. There we find, among other things, illuminating studies of Hegel and Gadamer, Hegel and Husserl, Hegel and Tillich, and Hegel and Pannenberg. These studies are not merely dutiful investigations that compare and contrast. All the essays are thematically focused, such that it is as much the theme itself that is under scrutiny as the diverging or converging approaches of the thinkers in comparison and conversation. One can find 22

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in this comparative approach something of an implicitly ecumenical thrust. That is, the barriers ghettoizing different thinkers are unobtrusively dismantled. Beyond the hidden lines of intellectual apartheid we sometimes find in academic philosophy, we are invited into an illuminating middle space of respect that allows different thinkers to be in communication with each other, sometimes surprisingly. Westphal’s excellence as a facilitator of such mediation is here in evidence, though not on show in any manner that would insist on calling attention to itself. He opens a space of communication where others have not even heard silence. Westphal, despite the thick Kierkegaardian blood that circulates in the body of his thought, is himself very strongly a mediator between different philosophers. The hatchet job of a simplistic ‘‘either/or’’ is not to his taste.7 A fourth line of approach I would call the companionate. I mean that there is a way of relating to another philosopher in which he or she plays the role of a companion in the formulation of the thoughts that are dearest to one’s own intellectual and spiritual concerns. A companion is someone to whom one listens, but in trying to formulate one’s own response, one does not simply parrot the companion. One may be finding one’s own voice, but into that voice the heard voice of the companion may have entered intimately—even when the voice of that other is not explicitly speaking. I think Hegel has been a companion in Westphal’s work in that sense. Certain Hegelian ways of thinking are taken up in a manner that help Westphal move forward in his own reflections, although the movement further may not always repeat what the companion has said otherwise in his own words. Of course, one senses that Kierkegaard is the more intimate companion than Hegel for Westphal. Intimate to this companionship is Westphal’s own desire to bring philosophy into dialogue with his personal Christian commitments.8 Worth remarking here is the manner in which Westphal uses the notion of the Hegelian Aufhebung: this manner gives evidence of the sense of companionship about which I am talking. Often the notion of Aufhebung is excoriated by many of Hegel’s critics but—and perhaps this is despoiling the Egyptians gently—Westphal makes it do productive, indeed, benign work for him. He connects the Hegelian Aufhebung with Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical, and this brings these two, his companions, into their own kind of companionship. As negating, transcending but also preserving, something analogous to an Aufhebung is seen to be at work in the Kierkegaardian negation and transcendence of the ethical into the explicitly religious. The ethical is not done away with but preserved and restored in its truer significance. William Desmond

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Here we have an instance in which Westphal perceives the possibility of a kind of philosophical friendship where many commentators see only divergence and even oppugnancy. This is not to deny the possibility of conflict, but it is to deny conflict as the last word. This may sounds suspiciously Hegelian, but there are ways of pointing beyond, or even being beyond, conflict that do not have to be articulated in more standard Hegelian terms. The other may continue to be a valued companion even when the other’s thought does not quite chime with one’s own. This is certainly the case with Hegel for Westphal. Indeed in the conclusion to Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, he confesses explicitly to the Hegelian structure of his book. Though he ends with Kierkegaard in relation to the love of God, he gets to this end by a quasi-Hegelian route. That is to say, he moves from the relatively abstract to the more fully concrete, but getting to the concrete does not mean the abandonment of what allows passage thereto. There is where the Aufhebung is invoked as a form of advance in which the more concrete and ultimate position both negates and transcends, yet preserves, the less developed and abstract position. If the form of the Aufgehung is Hegelian, the more ultimate position is Kierkegaardian, and it is to be divined in what the teleological suspension of the ethical signifies—namely, the religious relation as that beyond which we cannot go. Our great challenge is not to get beyond this relation but to discover how to get to it in the sense of living truly within it.9 I will mention a fifth line of approach to Hegel, which I do not find in the work of Westphal: the ventriloquist approach. There are some commentators for whom Hegel’s work becomes a kind of dummy through which they can say what they themselves want to say. One need have nothing against putting the work of another philosopher to uses that are not the same as that of the philosopher himself or herself. But ventriloquizing is something different from this. Hegel becomes a kind of prop that can be used, perhaps because of his historical prestige, or perhaps because the audience addressed is sympathetic to Hegel, or perhaps it wants to hear about a sympathetic Hegel, or perhaps even because Hegel has no prestige with the audience and the ventriloquist wants to arouse interest by getting the despised Hegel to say surprising, even sympathetic things that affect the hearer like stimulants or emollients. There is sufficient complex lability in Hegel’s thinking to allow many modalities of ventriloquizing. After all, Hegel did say the true is the whole. The ventriloquist can easily take this part or that part and use it for purposes that are relatively independent of Hegel’s version of the whole, perhaps even inconsistent with or incompatible with that Hegelian sense of the whole. The face may be Hegel’s and the lips moving may 24

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move with more or less familiar words, but the voice is the voice of the ventriloquist, albeit speaking a garbled dialectic of ‘‘Hegelese.’’ One is more liable to get ventriloquizing in a context where Hegel is not immediately received with sympathy. Then his corpus is squeezed in this or that direction, not for purposes of being faithful to the master, but for gaining a hearing with contemporaries who are hostile or indifferent. We then make Hegel say what we ourselves want to say. He is our mouthpiece for views that he might not at all have endorsed, certainly not entirely endorsed in the form in which they are now announced. They are now announced as at last being properly comprehended by the oh-so-superior contemporary scholar who, at last, at long last, enables us to see and read the real Hegel hitherto buried under the undiscerning babble of the incompetent commentary of the last two centuries! Do I exaggerate? If I do, it is only slightly. In any case, I do not approve of the ventriloquizing approach. I repeat I have nothing against the use of Hegel for purposes that are not coincident with Hegel’s own. But an honest commentator should, in the first instance, seek to be true to what Hegel said and intended in his own words. One must have the integrity to let Hegel be Hegel and the forthrightness to acknowledge that what the ventriloquizing commentator does is aimed more at contemporary relevance, or as a prop for the latecomer to make his or her way in das geistige Tierreich of contemporary scholarship. Let Hegel be Hegel, and if we must use his body for ventriloquizing purposes, let us not pretend it is otherwise. Of course, the Hegel we let be Hegel may be far more interesting than the puppet pliant to contemporary fashions. I dwell on this approach a little, for while Westphal does not practice it, it has relevance to his philosophical concerns. I am thinking particularly of how Hegel has sometimes been repackaged as nonmetaphysical and nontheological. This nonmetaphysical reading wants to do away with any suggestion that the Hegelian Geist is a transhuman or superhuman agency. It tends to read Hegel primarily as a philosopher of categories, understood in a revisionist Kantian sense in which no metaphysical and certainly no theological claims are being made. I think this approach has some qualified merits, but it cuts Hegel down to size, as it were, and reassures the contemporary reader that there is nothing really big about Hegel, nothing alarming, nothing metaphysical, nothing theological. Hegel is reassuringly like the contemporary professor who relaxes in the centrally heated milieu of the research seminar. The difference of Hegel to our zeitgeist and its comfort levels also tends to vanish reassuringly from consideration. I will come back to this nonmetaphysical reading of Hegel, because Westphal takes very seriously the question of God in Hegel. William Desmond

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Hegel epitomizes much of what Heidegger names ‘‘ontotheology,’’ and Westphal is interested in criticizing this as not entirely faithful to the God of biblical religion. A sixth and final approach to the work of Hegel is the critical one. Unlike the scholarly, the defensive, the comparative, the companioning, and the ventriloquist approaches, here it is conflict that takes pride of place, conflict in the sense of our meeting something to be countered, if not rejected. After all, even gently despoiling the Egyptians is still despoiling, and none of this would be possible at all did not the need assert itself to escape from the land of the Pharaoh. To be critical is not necessarily to wish to be done with the one who is opposed. In philosophy surely there is no such thing as being entirely free of those whom one might criticize even in the severest terms. There can be a kind of adieu in criticism, but adieu is not only a good-bye; it is also a kind of blessing. I find something of this doubleness in Westphal’s critical approaches. In what he criticizes he does not give up on the position or the philosopher criticized. As I have already implied, there is something gentlemanly and generous in the way he approaches other philosophers—even those with whom he disagrees. This is not to be oblivious to his use of the firmest of hands in the oftentimes most velvet of gloves. To move to other limbs, I might say that he is not weak-kneed, yet also not inclined to apply the boot! There is something to practicing the truth with love in this more generous way. Of course, there are some who might be impatient with too gently despoiling of the Egyptians—I am a sinner myself when it comes to impatience—but the way of generosity is the better way. The despoiling is then no destructive despoliation, but a disclosure to the other of a better way in the very place the other currently occupies. This is a kind of transformation of the notion of immanent critique, in which it is not negativity that deconstructively serves as the engine of movement but the spirit of practicing the truth with love. The Search for God In terms of the critical approach, let me say a little on Westphal’s more recent exploration of the Heideggerian theme of ontotheology, in tandem with Westphal’s own desire to explore together both human self-transcendence and divine transcendence, God and the soul in Augustinian terms and in the very words of his book’s subtitle. Augustine is, of course, entirely apposite for our discussion. Augustine, educated in classical rhetoric and Platonist philosophy, justified the practice of ‘‘despoiling the Egyptians’’: the worthy elements of classical culture were to be put in the 26

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service of Christianity. In the introduction to Transcendence and SelfTranscendence, Westphal invokes Augustine’s famous words from The Soliloquies: ‘‘God and the soul I seek to know. Nothing more? Nothing whatever.’’10 Augustine’s willingness to relate to and engage with the pagan philosophers, even when he had moved through and beyond them, was not a matter simply of reason versus faith. It was a more subtle conversation. There can be a porosity between the pagan and Christian and a transformation of the former in affirming the latter. This is not a simple ‘‘either/or,’’ though it would be equally wrong to describe it as a simple ‘‘both/and.’’ In Westphal’s explicitly Christian commitment, I find it interesting to see Augustine and Aquinas figure as thinkers who are not ontotheologians in the more strict and invidious Heideggerian sense. Westphal’s critical reading of Hegel is here crucial and tells us much about where his allegiances lie. He makes deft use of Heidegger’s notion of ontotheology, first to interpret and then to criticize Hegel. The stress falls on the purported aim of ontotheology to bring God into philosophy on terms that are determined by philosophy itself. God has to meet the requirements set by a philosophical approach or system, and God is only to be considered on those terms. The result might well be the productions of conceptual idols rather than reverence for the God of living religion, especially the God of biblical revelation. In Heidegger, Spinoza and Hegel come in for special mention, two thinkers Westphal explores in relation to what he terms ‘‘cosmological transcendence.’’ Neither philosopher is a simplistic reducer of God to the world; nevertheless, serious questions are to be asked about the character of transcendence that remains after God has been brought into their respective systems of thought. Giving all due qualifications to the use of the term pantheism, Westphal considers Spinoza to be a pantheist of nature and Hegel a pantheist of history. Or, in other words, Spinoza is a pantheist of the object, while Hegel is a pantheist of the subject. Now, I am very sympathetic to what Westphal is suggesting, and the spirit of his intentions overlaps with my own critical engagements with Hegel on this issue. Ontotheology, in the terms defined here, is in the business of the production of what I call counterfeit doubles of God.11 They look much like the God of biblical theism, but something essential has either been excluded or reconfigured. The result is a kind of philosophical changeling—though, of course, the philosophical changeling claims for itself the ultimate position of true absoluteness in place of the penultimate God of religion. Westphal is careful to delineate what terms he makes use of from Heidegger. This is a companioning use of Heidegger, not a ventriloquizing. Indeed, Westphal demurs when it comes to the use of ontotheology as a William Desmond

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totalizing claim concerning the entire tradition of Western philosophical and theological thought. Heidegger moves between the more delimited and the more generalized usages. When Heidegger makes insinuations about ontotheology in the more generalized sense, I sometimes think of the old conundrum in introductory logic. Question: Have you stopped beating your wife yet? A hard question to answer, if you are not a wife beater! If a figure in the tradition never was a wife beater, I mean guilty of ontotheology, it is hard to know how to give a direct answer, especially when the charge seems aimed at all of Western culture. Westphal wants to exonerate thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, to name but these— and rightly so. But Heideggerian mud sticks. The charge of ontotheology is sometimes hardly uttered, and the verdict is already in, and that’s the end of it—guilty as charged, off with their heads, as the Red Queen said too often. The attempted exoneration of this or that thinker tends to be already situated in the context of a more insinuating and all-pervasive stain. One might be guilty, whether knowingly or not, even if one consistently protests one’s innocence. Aquinas is a traditional philosopher and theologian, is he not? Has he stopped beating his wife yet? No, he is not like the usual wife-beating ontotheologian. And yet . . . the guilt by association can continue to stick, even if he seems exonerated, since the guilt sticks to everything. Forensically, Westphal narrows the case, but the scattergun accusation (sometimes shot as such by Heidegger) stills pocks his innocents. And it is no use protesting that Aquinas had no wife! Hegel did have a wife, and interestingly, after Hegel’s death, she found in her husband’s manuscripts on the philosophy of religion things ‘‘vexatious for faith’’ and initially was reluctant to allow their publication. Fortunately, the widow Hegel did finally consent.12 I think Westphal would not be entirely unsympathetic to the vexed Mrs. Hegel. In many places, Westphal addresses Hegel’s philosophy of religion, not only in its relation to philosophy, but especially with respect to the ethical and political aspects of the matter. A number of his discussions in Hegel, Freedom, and Modernity address this aspect. In Transcendence and Self-Transcendence he is less concerned with this and more taken up with the issue of ontotheology. In this latter treatment, Westphal rightly situates Hegel in relation to Spinoza, pinpointing the time when Hegel took his leave from the moral God of Kant and the personal God of the theistic tradition. Westphal is alert to Hegel’s own terms and is especially sensitive to the political and social vulnerability of Hegel when accused of pantheism. Hegel reformulates the nature of pantheism in order to open up a space of self-protection 28

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against charges that might have cost him his beloved professorship. Westphal is not taken in by Hegel’s strategic redefinition of certain basic notions in relation to God. At one level, Hegel can protest that these redefined terms are faithful to the Christian view of God. Nevertheless, at another level, Hegel offers conceptual (re)formulations that clearly bring his listener or reader toward a view not at all to be identified with the God of theism and Christianity. In a way, Hegel’s strategy is rather like despoiling the Egyptians, but it moves in a somewhat reverse direction to someone like Augustine. It is not a matter of theistic religion going companionably to pagan philosophy in the mode of seeking friendship with wisdom. It is rather that philosophical thinking must transcend the limitation of religious representation, despoiling them in one sense, since what is deficient in their form must be negated, though the claim will be made to preserve the content of representation in another form. What is absolute but not fully explicated about the content in the representation is to be expropriated in properly conceptual terms. This is not a Christian Augustine standing companionably in relation to a pagan Plato. It is a post-Kantian Spinoza of Geist appropriating Christianity philosophically. It is especially an expropriation through conceptual reconfiguration of the unity of the human and divine, now rendered as the divine humanity, itself only properly and absolutely accessible to the truly rational philosopher. The nonpersonal absolute of the philosophers supersedes the personal God of theistic religion. Hegel’s philosophical concept claims to be true to the religious representation but then also claims to surpass it in terms of the absolute form of truth, which is conceptual alone. Revelation is rendered in terms that submit to reason as absolute self-determining thought, such that there is nothing anymore in reason of the exceeding mystery of God. God is known not only in human self-consciousness, but also as human self-consciousness. For the Hegelian philosopher, the truth of God is that there is finally no divine transcendence, and we end up immanently with divine humanity. If Hegel is a paradigmatic instance of ontotheology, Westphal must depart from the nonmetaphysical reading of Hegel, though this issue is not at the fore. If the nonmetaphysical reading is our hermeneutical key, this key will creak, if not crack in a number of locks it tries to open in Hegel. Jettisoning metaphysics and theology may make things, once again, less offensive to the comfort levels of our zeitgeist, but it makes Hegel into a much less interesting and challenging thinker. One might note in Westphal a kind of convergence with the nonmetaphysical reading William Desmond

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in that the effect of Hegel’s ontotheology is the superseding of the transcendent God of classical theism. Hegelian thought, even as ontotheology, comes out on the immanent side, supposedly beyond the God of classical theism, and with a postreligious humanism not entirely uncongenial to the nonmetaphysical readings. Hegel is not really interested in God as transcendence. He has gotten rid of all ‘‘beyonds.’’ But this does not get us off the hook from considering the metaphysical and theological implications of Hegel’s speculative/dialectical airbrushing of divine transcendence out of the picture. One might reply: religion is really only a matter of the most comprehensive human values in a society or culture. We simply treat religion in terms of these human values. Something like this can be found in the nonmetaphysical reading. It is one of its weakest points. It is cutting off your religious nose to spite your metaphysical face, and all in order to produce a nonmetaphysical makeover. Hegel specifically objects to those in his own time who in speaking of religion have nothing to say about God as such. He scorns them for just that reason and offers, instead, a speculative concept of God in order to ‘‘save’’ religion from the emptying out of religion by both Enlightenment reason and pietistic faith. One cannot avoid these issues just by saying that one’s interpretation is a nonmetaphysical interpretation. Nonmetaphysical interpretations are metaphysical interpretations; they only hide the metaphysics from view lest they embarrass us with something that might ruffle the comfort levels of our zeitgeist. In engaging the issue of cosmological transcendence in Hegel’s pantheism of spirit, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence does not primarily stress the existential, ethical, and, indeed, political dimensions that go with this. These dimensions are explored more so in Hegel, Modernity, and Freedom. I cite one very apposite and well-put remark on the relation of the political and the religious community in Westphal’s essay ‘‘Hegel, Tillich, and the Secular’’: When is the Kingdom of God? Hegel says now. Tillich says never. Even when all the desired qualifications are added to each answer, both of them prove embarrassing to be sustained. The one says of the essential structures of the modern world, ‘‘This is the best God can do.’’ The other, while not wishing to say that, ends up saying, ‘‘I’m afraid He can’t do any better.’’13 Westphal’s own suggestion calls for an acknowledgement of the elided King in the Kingdom, moving the focus into the different dimension of God’s (apocalyptic) sovereignty with regard to history. 30

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The systematic shunning or reconfiguring of divine transcendence in Hegelian thought, makes one wonder again about a despoiling of the Egyptians in Hegel himself, but in the reverse sense mentioned earlier, a despoiling that turns more into a despoiling of the Israelites, so to say, something we find to be more and more extremely so in Hegel’s successors. For Hegel, the politics of the modern state surpasses and succeeds the merely spiritual community of religious reconciliation. Among Hegel’s left-wing descendants, God and religion are even more evacuated of anything transhuman. Geist is essentially the human spirit. Feuerbach did a lot of work in this direction already in reducing theology to anthropology, and he made no dissimulation about the fact that the human was now the divine. We have seen many offshoots from this reduction of theology to anthropology, not least in Marx and Nietzsche. Today, nonmetaphysical Hegelians often want a kind of humanistic, postreligious Hegelianism, but why we need to keep talking about spirit and use the kind of tortured dialectically equivocal language Hegel does is not evident. We cannot avoid issues here just by the ‘‘say-so’’ strategy: we find them incredible and that’s that. To be an echo of the zeitgeist is not a philosophical response. If Hegel is a banner carrier for a postreligious humanism, the likelihood of creatively contributing to the deep rethinking of religion and God in our time is slimmer than more pious Hegelians seem to realize. If Hegel’s universal self-consciousness were to become incarnate today, I wonder whether pious Hegelians of the nonmetaphysical sort would prefer it to become incarnate as the Last Man, not the Godman. If so, the fulfillment of times would end up, by a cunning of reason, with Hegelian Geist boring itself to death. Between Religion and Nonreligion Hegel is not the only Egyptian, of course. There are potentially pharaonic bondages in other post-Hegelian practices of philosophy, particularly with respect to the philosophical exploration of God. There has been talk of a recent ‘‘turn’’ in Continental philosophy to religion, and Westphal is sometimes identified as one notable thinker who participates somewhat in this turn. Westphal, in fact, has never made a turn to religion, in that he was always turned in that direction, even when the fashionable crowd was turned in quite a different direction. I myself have a long enough memory of a time in the recent past when to mention religion or God was to invite immediately a kind of social ostracism among certain groups of Continental philosophers. Mention religion or God and an embarrassed, even icy, silence might descend on the company. Nietzsche might William Desmond

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be resurrected to help the company say: It is not argument that stops us talking, it is that these things are now no longer to our taste. The view, stated or unstated, was that God was dead, and any thinking that was with it was heir to the overcoming of metaphysics, or the deconstruction of ontotheology, if not already ‘‘full-bloodedly,’’ or perhaps ‘‘thin-bloodedly,’’ postmetaphysical. One was to be embarrassed into silence. The attitude reminded me of how it might have been in Victorian parlors if the word ‘‘sex’’ was unfortunately used—we do not talk about such things. Mirabile dictu, there has been a change in the air, and now after what looks like Derrida’s nihil obstat, free thinkers are free to think about religion, too. Westphal never needed, and never sought, any such a nihil obstat, whether from religious or from postmodern popes. His engagement with religion was always unfeigned and remains refreshingly honest in its willingness to expose itself to questioning in its witness to the seriousness of what is at stake for the human being. Of course, this willingness to witness sometimes places him in an uncomfortable ‘‘between’’ place: not only between himself and his postmodern interlocutors not interested in religion, but between himself and religious believers hostile to these postmodern interlocutors. One of Westphal’s worries about these believers is the tendency to demonize their nonreligious, or antireligious, others. His ecumenical philosophical spirit extends to both the believer and nonbelievers, and he has tried to be an intermediator from both sides, not only of belief to the nonbeliever, but of the worthiness to be heard of the nonbeliever to those who are Christians. This is more reminiscent of a faith in reconciliation as per Hegelian mediation than of any Kierkegaardian ‘‘either/or.’’ That is to say, Westphal’s ecumenical philosophical practice has, at times, more of the Hegelian spirit of the ‘‘both/and’’ than the Kierkegaardian knife that can cut through knots with an uncompromising ‘‘either/or.’’ I refer briefly to his Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism.14 To some believers this book might look like an appeal to return to the land of the pharaohs. Westphal sees it otherwise. Despoiling the Egyptians means also being touched by what one brings out of the land of the others. Their atheistic splendors can serve purposes that are not atheistic. This is Westphal’s hope. He explicitly draws attention to the similarity of purposes in this book and Transcendence and Self-Transcendence.15 Readers familiar with some of Westphal’s other books will again meet with his notable virtues: wide-ranging familiarity with the issue under discussion, close and intensive interpretation of individual thinkers, illuminating insight on many essential points, an easy elegance of style that communicates well with the reader. Readers will not be surprised by 32

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Westphal’s concern with religion, but they might be taken aback, at least initially, at his very sympathetic reading of perhaps the most influential critics of religion in recent modernity, namely, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The point is the religious uses of modern atheism for purposes of a Lenten exercise and our guides are to be the master of modern suspicion. Westphal is determined to makes use of their negativities for positive purposes, namely, to invite the believer to an examination of conscience, precipitated by an uncomfortable reading of the ‘‘enemy,’’ one that plots the enemy’s indictment of religion. Addressing believers who might be expected to be suspicious of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud is not an essay in preaching to the converted, but an effort to convert the religiously converted to a more sympathetic hearing of these three preachers of atheism. He wants provocatively to accentuate the ‘‘positive’’ in these atheists, to jolt his religious reader into reconsideration of their critique of its opponents, at least partly justified. One of Westphal’s targets is the religious person who makes irreligious use of religion. He uses the irreligious abusers of religion to unmask those religious users. The three masters had their day in the twentieth century, and I have wondered myself, perhaps needlessly, if there is not something a bit quixotic in riding piggyback on their mischievous polemics.16 One can see the polemic in the context of their times, but their times are not quite ours. Will the spiritual poverty of our time be alleviated by an appeal to thinkers who have contributed in their own way to that poverty? Their suspicion may have displaced God from the superego of many contemporary intellectuals, but there are times when they seem to have taken up resistant residency in that same superego. Has the time come—if I may despoil a Nietzscheanism—to put them politely on ice? This is a matter of judgment, of course, a question of finesse with regard to an equivocal situation. Inevitably, any ‘‘despoiling of the Egyptians’’ carries with it an essential ambiguity. For one might be despoiled by what one despoils. Coming out of bondage, one might carry with one contaminations that were unsuspected, and so fall victim to continuing effects of the bondage from which one believed oneself to have escaped. Supping with the devil requires a spoon longer than one might be able easily to calculate. One might say that postmodern contaminations seem to break down more and more eating prohibitions. But one should also remember that Jesus broke many a taboo in eating with women, respectable and outcast, with tax collectors and the untouchables. Perhaps there is a sense in which the practice of philosophy requires one to be a taster of poisons. One does not want any foe to assassinate the king. One might become a helper to others in alerting them to toxins, William Desmond

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initially intoxicating, sometimes sleeping in beguiling mutations, but in the longer run liable to be deadly to mind and spirit. The danger always is that one also succumbs to the same toxins. As a poison taster, as one builds up some immunity in oneself, one might pass on, unwittingly or wittingly, some mortal gifts. Philosophy entails the willingness to go to forbidden places, not to do forbidden things, but to understand the forbidden. To understand need not mean to enact or to endorse—though one knows the possibility in oneself. Philosophy is a dangerous vocation. There are thoughts that can warp the soul. Though we gently despoil the Egyptians, as Westphal well instructs us, we need not be foolish virgins.

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Merold Westphal on the Sociopolitical Implications of Kierkegaard’s Thought C . S T E P H E N E VA N S

Søren Kierkegaard is widely regarded as an archindividualist with little concern for political and social issues. Furthermore, it is well known that he himself had extremely conservative, even reactionary, political views. He was, for example, not happy about the elimination of absolute monarchy in Denmark in 1848.1 He also was distinctly unsympathetic with the cause of women’s emancipation, an issue I will discuss in more detail later in this essay. Merold Westphal has for many years waged a campaign to show that the textbook characterization of Kierkegaard as an apolitical individualist is mistaken. On Westphal’s view, social and political concerns lie right at the heart of Kierkegaard’s work. Furthermore, the thrust of Kierkegaard’s thinking is radical and not reactionary. Followed consistently, Kierkegaard calls for a radical critique of Western society, not a reactionary defense of it, much less a deification of the social and political structures that dominate modernity. Westphal has powerfully argued that Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian philosophy and his critique of Christendom are two fronts of the same battle. Hegelianism, with its deification of the state and its appeal to Sittlichkeit as the highest ethical standard, is the philosophical or esoteric expression of Christendom. Christendom assumes that ‘‘all are Christians’’ and that there is an essential identity between Western culture and Christian faith, such that a person who is enculturated as a proper Dane (or German or Italian or American) thereby becomes a Christian. Such a view grounds a spiritual complacency that makes it possible for someone to 35

think that the way to attain advanced spiritual standing is to become learned and cultured; after all, ordinary people already have the practical virtues of faith just by virtue of being part of the society. So Christendom justifies the rationalistic assumption that knowledge or speculative understanding is itself the highest form of spiritual life. Westphal not only recognizes the connection between Hegelianism and Christendom (something Kierkegaard himself makes clear) but also sees the corollary: a critique of one is necessarily linked to a critique of the other. Kierkegaard’s attack on Christendom is not primarily a theological critique of doctrines; for the most part, he has no problems with historic Christian beliefs. It is, instead, a critique of how the doctrines are understood and used. And his critique of Hegel is not merely a critique of Hegel’s epistemological pretensions, but a critique of the way Hegel’s thought necessarily deifies the state or society and consequently undermines the authority of the true God. Westphal’s Case for Kierkegaard as a Politically Charged Writer All of these points may be seen in a good deal of Westphal’s writings on Kierkegaard. For example, ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B’’ argues that Kierkegaard’s later writings are dominated by the following theme: the true Christian is not merely someone who assents to God’s transcendent revelation, but someone who allows that revelation to have authority over his or her practical life.2 This means that the true Christian necessarily will come into conflict with ‘‘the established order’’ and will face suffering as a consequence, a suffering that is voluntary in that it could be avoided if the individual were content with a religious ‘‘hidden inwardness.’’ Westphal goes on to argue that this politically radical and transformative religious vision provides the overall telos for Kierkegaard’s whole authorship.3 Some have objected to this essay on the grounds that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on an outward action that brings the individual into conflict with the established order is not a new and further ‘‘stage on life’s way,’’ and thus that the notion of ‘‘Religiousness C’’ as a form of religiousness beyond what Kierkegaard calls ‘‘Religiousness B’’ in Concluding Unscientific Postscript is misleading.4 This criticism may or may not have validity; I think that in the end nothing important hinges on retaining the language of ‘‘Religiousness C.’’ I agree with the critics that much of the emphasis on outward action that is seen in Kierkegaard’s later writings is 36

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already present, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in Kierkegaard’s earlier work; however, ultimately that does not undermine but confirms the point Westphal is trying to make, which is that being a follower of Christ, one who ‘‘lives contemporaneously’’ with Christ and thus comes into conflict with the established order, is precisely the final goal of the whole authorship. The theme of this important essay reappears as the conclusion of Becoming a Self, Westphal’s commentary on Concluding Unscientific Postscript.5 The essays collected in Westphal’s Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society all develop variations, in one form or another, of this theme of Kierkegaard as a politically relevant critical philosopher, and I will try to give a brief summary of some of the main points.6 ‘‘Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion That Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy’’ and ‘‘Kierkegaard as Prophetic Philosopher’’ both look at the argument as to whether philosophy ought to aim at being ‘‘rigorous science’’ or instead see itself as a form of ‘‘critique of the given order.’’ Kierkegaard, on Westphal’s reading, shows that at least for philosophy of religion, the latter model is more adequate; one might even say it is more ‘‘scientific’’ in the sense of giving a truer picture of the subject. A ‘‘prophetic’’ philosopher, inspired by the Old Testament conception of the prophet, does philosophy in a way that is both intensely personal and political. ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Politics’’ argues that Kierkegaard’s ‘‘individualism’’ is not a reversion to the ‘‘compositional individualism’’ of philosophers such as Locke and Hobbes, but a ‘‘dialectical individualism’’ similar to Hegel’s that sees individuals as essentially shaped by the social relationships in which they participate. There is, of course, a difference with Hegel as well, namely that Kierkegaard takes a relationship with God to be a genuinely social relationship, one that can and should relativize all human social relationships. Such a relationship with God, therefore, is always a potential source of critique when any human relationship is taken to be absolutely defining of the self. ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Sociology’’ presents us with a Kierkegaard who is a social critic in the traditions of Marx and Nietzsche, but one who presents us with a social critique that is strikingly original and disturbingly relevant even today. While Nietzsche sees mass society as the product of a ‘‘leveling’’ that comes about when Western culture has rejected Judeo-Christian metaphysics but has clung to Christian morality, Kierkegaard sees this same leveling as the product of a culture that has supposedly clung to Christian metaphysics but has, in fact, rejected its morality in favor of a lifestyle of egoistic acquisitiveness.7 C. Stephen Evans

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In ‘‘Abraham and Hegel,’’ Westphal gives a reading of Fear and Trembling that highlights the Hegelian conception of ‘‘the ethical,’’ a conception that dominates the thinking of the pseudonymous author of the book, Johannes de Silentio. Johannes clearly argues that Abraham’s action in being willing to sacrifice Isaac at the command of God cannot be understood in ‘‘ethical’’ terms, but only in terms of the perspective of ‘‘faith.’’ As Westphal reads the book, the focus is not really on the question of whether contemporary people should worry about whether God might appear to them in a vision and demand the sacrifice of a child. Rather, if ‘‘the ethical’’ is identical with Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, the ‘‘laws and customs of a people,’’ the discussion of the supremacy of the ethical is really a discussion of whether any radical challenge to the dominant patterns of thinking and acting of a society can be mounted. The book is not a defense of immoralism but a consideration of whether the existing ethical norms of a society can ever be legitimately challenged, or whether society is really ‘‘the divine’’; therefore, Fear and Trembling has clear political relevance. ‘‘Kierkegaard and the Logic of Insanity’’ shows that Kierkegaard’s supposed irrationalism is linked to this social critique. If what we term ‘‘reason’’ is defined by the practices of a given society, then by definition any radical challenge to those practices will be termed ‘‘irrational.’’ What Kierkegaard shows, on Westphal’s view, is that the forms of reasoning of contemporary Western societies are not universal and inevitable. On the contrary, reason itself can be a contested notion, grounded in a particular perspective, one that is embedded in social practices, both linguistic and nonlinguistic in character. The perspective of ‘‘subjectivity’’ that Kierkegaard sees as the necessary precursor to authentic Christian faith is one that will be seen as ‘‘insanity’’ by the dominant order; however, the compliment is returned in kind, since ‘‘subjective thinking’’ sees the kind of ‘‘objectivity’’ that has become dominant in the modern world to be itself a form of madness. Ultimately, Kierkegaard tries to show that there is a ‘‘logic’’ to the ‘‘madness’’ of subjectivity. The overall thrust is to show the perspectival and interested character of what is called ‘‘reason,’’ which turns out not to live up to its own ideals of objectivity and disinterestedness. ‘‘Inwardness and Ideology Critique’’ completes and in some ways summarizes the whole book by trying to show that Kierkegaard, like Marx and other ‘‘masters of suspicion,’’ is giving us a critique of ideology. Kierkegaard’s philosophy of ‘‘inwardness’’ is not a bourgeois retreat to an inner, personal world, but leads to a politically subversive set of practices. Kierkegaard’s critique of ideology, however, unlike Marx’s, is one done from within the perspective of genuine religious faith. It is a critique in 38

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the spirit of the Old Testament prophets who denounced their own religious institutions when they were used to justify social injustice, but did so precisely out of loyalty to what ultimately lay behind those institutions. This review of Westphal’s work could certainly be extended to more recent writings that relate Kierkegaard to postmodern philosophy, as well as Westphal’s own substantive contributions to the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology. Nevertheless, I hope that I have said enough to show the pervasiveness of this political reading of Kierkegaard in Westphal’s work as well as the power of this reading. In what follows, I want to support Westphal’s type of reading of Kierkegaard by a closer look at what Kierkegaard says about human equality in Works of Love. This text, more than any other, presents Kierkegaard’s views on how humans should relate to each other and, as a result, is a crucial test of whether Kierkegaard’s philosophy logically leads to a social critique. On the surface, much of what Kierkegaard says in this context seems to be at odds with the Westphal thesis. I will argue that Kierkegaard’s view, followed out consistently, does indeed imply the legitimacy and necessity of radical political and social critique, even though Kierkegaard himself at points shrinks from acknowledging this.8 Political and Social Equality in Works of Love Kierkegaard has a lengthy discussion of what he terms ‘‘temporal dissimilarity’’ in Chapter II C of Works of Love.9 The book was published in 1847, a time of political ferment that was shortly to boil over into revolution throughout much of Europe. Socialist demands for an economic equality that went far beyond the political equality that was a dominant ideal in the French Revolution were being heard.10 In Works of Love as a whole, Kierkegaard argues that Christian ethics implies a deep commitment to equality, since it is rooted in God’s command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, with every human person being, in fact, my neighbor. Every human being has a kinship with every other human being, a kinship that is grounded in the fact that God has created every person and that every person can have a relation to God through Christ.11 Kierkegaard clearly acknowledges that this Christian ideal of equality is one that has concrete implications for society, and he claims that even nonbelievers acknowledge the beneficial impact of these Christian ideas on Western society: Even the one who ordinarily is not inclined to praise God and Christianity does so when with a shudder he considers that depravity, how in paganism people are inhumanly separated one from another by the dissimilarities of earthly life or by the caste system, how C. Stephen Evans

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this ungodliness inhumanly teaches one human being to disclaim kinship with another, teaches him presumptuously and insanely to say of another human being that he does not exist, is ‘‘not born.’’12 Here Kierkegaard seems to echo a Nietzschean theme, namely the claim that much secular ethical thinking (and here one might include both utilitarianism and socialism) is deeply indebted to the Christian ideal of equality, although Nietzsche, of course, deplores this fact and Kierkegaard celebrates it. ‘‘The times are past when only the powerful and the prominent were human beings—and the others were bond servants and slaves. This is due to Christianity.’’13 Kierkegaard takes a very similar perspective on the position of women in Western society, praising the fact that women are now recognized as persons and not as possessions, and he again attributes this gain to the influence of Christian ideals: ‘‘What abominations has the world not seen in the relationships between man and woman, that she, almost like an animal, was a disdained being in comparison with the man, a being of another species.’’14 Surprisingly, however, Kierkegaard does not embrace contemporary calls for women’s emancipation. Instead, he adopts an attitude of indifference or even opposition to struggles for women’s equality. The ‘‘change of infinity’’ that Christianity makes in women’s status turns out to be a change that is mainly ‘‘inward.’’ ‘‘Outwardly the old more or less remains. The man is to be the woman’s master and she subservient to him; but inwardly everything is changed.’’15 This lack of enthusiasm for women’s equality reflects a general lack of support for other social reforms inspired by the Christian ideal of equality. Instead of lending support to contemporary calls for change, Kierkegaard seems to adopt a conservative view that inequality is inevitable. There will always be differences between human beings with respect to such things as money and power: ‘‘Dissimilarity is like an enormous net in which temporality is held.’’ For this reason, ‘‘Christianity has not taken away the dissimilarity any more than Christ himself would take or would ask God to take the disciples out of the world—and this indeed amounts to the same thing.’’16 It is simply impossible for there to be human life without differences that are the result of birth, position, circumstances, education, and so on.17 The Christian attitude toward this inequality, according to Kierkegaard, is not to seek to lessen it by ‘‘worldly reforms’’; rather, ‘‘everyone is to lift himself up above earthly dissimilarity.’’18 Earthly dissimilarities tempt us to do otherwise. Those with money and social status are tempted to forget their kinship with the poor, and those of the lower classes may 40

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be tempted to regard the upper classes not as their neighbors to be loved but as class enemies to be destroyed. According to Kierkegaard, the true Christian (and here ‘‘Christian’’ is not so much a sectarian label as a term for someone who loves the neighbor) fights against all such temptations. Whether a person is the king or a day laborer, the task is to recognize one’s kinship with all other humans. Kierkegaard has some penetrating and challenging things to say about what this ‘‘lifting oneself above’’ dissimilarity amounts to, and I will discuss his insights here at the conclusion of this essay. At this point, however, I want to make a case that there is something deeply wrong with Kierkegaard’s conservatism, and that his own principles should, in fact, lead him to be open to constructive social and economic changes. Notwithstanding his mistaken conservatism, he is not completely wrong even on this point, and before proceeding to make the criticism I want first to acknowledge where he is right. Why does Kierkegaard fail to endorse a program of social and economic change, or even the possibility of such a program? Essentially, the reason has already been given. It lies in his pessimism about the possibility of success: ‘‘To bring about worldly similarity perfectly is an impossibility.’’19 No matter what kind of society a person lives in, there will always be inequalities of various types; therefore, a person will always be tempted to forget his or her kinship with all other persons, and it will always be necessary for people to ‘‘lift themselves above’’ the dissimilarities. The ideal of worldly equality is ‘‘a pious wish,’’ and the task of achieving it is one that ‘‘will never be achieved in temporality.’’20 Furthermore, the approximations of this impossible ideal that can be achieved are by no means the equivalent of Christian equality, because whatever dissimilarities remain can always become the basis for ‘‘inhuman alliances’’ in which one segment of society refuses to recognize the humanity of others.21 I am inclined to think that Kierkegaard’s premise here is totally correct, but the conclusion he draws from that premise is only partially correct. He is right that inequalities will always be present in human societies and right to recognize that human attempts to eliminate inequality often simply substitute a new form of inequality for the old one. One might here think of the common complaint that under Soviet-style communism, a ‘‘new class’’ of state and party officials simply replaced the merchants, industrialists, and landowners who had dominated the old societies, resulting not in equality but simply a new, less efficient form of inequality. Because inequalities of some kind are ineradicable from human societies, Kierkegaard is correct to note that someone committed to love of the C. Stephen Evans

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neighbor will always have to ‘‘lift himself or herself above’’ these dissimilarities to recognize the kinship with all other persons; however, it does not follow from these points that someone committed to love of the neighbor will be indifferent to or even opposed to social, structural changes that attempt to reduce or eliminate various forms of inequality. There are several reasons why this is the case. First, the fact that a form of inequality may tempt a person to treat another person in an inhuman way is itself a prima facie reason to try to eliminate or reduce that form of inequality.22 And Kierkegaard clearly admits that forms of inequality do provide such a temptation; in fact, he stresses how difficult it is to ‘‘lift oneself above’’ the dissimilarities and acknowledge one’s kinship with others. If some circumstance constitutes a temptation for me to do wrong, however, that in itself provides a reason to try to modify that circumstance. Consequently, if some particular form of inequality presents a strong temptation to disregard the humanity of the other, there is a prima facie obligation to do something about this. The obligation to remove the inequality is only prima facie for several reasons. It may be impossible to remove the inequality. Or it may be possible, but removing the inequality may lead to some other form of inequality that is even worse. Regardless, there is no good reason to think that such conditions always hold, and, therefore, it seems right for a person committed to love of neighbor to be open to recognizing cases where love demands action to reduce inequality. Kierkegaard himself actually admits this by recognizing and praising past social changes. He affirms that it is a good thing that slavery and feudal serfdom have been eliminated, and we can easily see why this is so. A human being who is a slave is legally a possession, a piece of property that the owner can dispose of as he or she wills. Such a form of inequality constitutes a grave temptation to refuse to recognize the humanity of the slave. In fact, one can go further and argue that in the case of slavery, the social structure not only tempts people to fail to recognize the humanity of the slave but itself also contradicts that humanity. Something similar must surely be said about the case of women’s equality, and, thus, we can understand both Kierkegaard’s recognition that treating women as the property of men is a practice that love of the neighbor must reject and his affirmation that it is good that this does not occur. It is odd that he does not see that the remaining forms of male-female inequality, in which a woman must acknowledge a man as her ‘‘master,’’ suffer from the same defects as earlier social forms. Moreover, there is no good reason to think that slavery and treating women as subservient to men are the only social 42

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structures that are degrading in this way, and certainly not the only structures that tempt us to fail to recognize the humanity of others. It is simply inconsistent of Kierkegaard to applaud the fact that the principle of neighbor love has required that we modify unjust past social structures and not allow for the possibility that similar changes must be made today and in the future. So it must be granted that Kierkegaard’s judgments on particular social and political issues of his day often reflect conservative biases, and this might appear to undermine Westphal’s reading of Kierkegaard as a radical social critic. Yet, we look to philosophers for core principles, not everyday political judgments. I believe that Kierkegaard’s own core principles push strongly in the direction of a radical social critique, and, consequently, Westphal’s reading is on the whole shown to be right. Kierkegaard and the Need for ‘‘Hands-On’’ Concern for the Disadvantaged One might be suspicious that Kierkegaard’s emphasis on an ‘‘inward’’ concern and his lack of interest in structural social change reflect an ideological cop-out, in which inner thoughts and feelings substitute for the outward actions that are, in fact, required of one. On the contrary, it is not true that Kierkegaard thinks of love of the neighbor as a kind of inner feeling that does not have to be manifested in outer action. Rather, he stresses that genuine love necessarily expresses itself in its ‘‘fruits,’’ which are indeed works of love. It is therefore not surprising that he claims that a person’s recognition of kinship with all other humans requires actions and cannot consist solely in inner sentiments and thoughts. In particular, Kierkegaard thinks that a genuine love for the neighbor demands an openness to actual contact with the neighbor, a willingness to allow one’s life to intersect the lives of the poor in concrete ways, including physical contact. In fact, I believe Kierkegaard’s concerns here are an additional reason why he is less than enthusiastic about the social movements for reform in his own day. Although I do not think his reasons here are adequate, they do reflect a serious problem or genuine danger that often is linked to movements for social changes. The problem is that it is easier to love people at a distance, to support them abstractly as groups, than it is to love actual, concrete human beings. There are many cultured, well-to-do people who think of themselves as champions of the poor. Kierkegaard believes that at least some of these people actually do not love the people whose cause they claim to champion. This is shown by the fact that they C. Stephen Evans

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are careful to arrange their own personal lives—where they live, where they eat, where they spend their leisure time—in ways that ensure that they will never actually have contact with the poor. If I may engage in some psychological speculation at this point, perhaps the support for the poor is actually a form of compensation. If I am in favor of policies that will help the poor, I can feel good about myself and continue to live my own personal life in a way that causes the least amount of discomfort. Kierkegaard gives a scathing account of the hypocrisy of this kind of ‘‘limousine liberal,’’ and one might well think that in the following passage he is describing a comfortable academic in a contemporary university: ‘‘In the company of scholars, or in a setting that secures and emphasizes the dissimilarity as such, the scholar would perhaps be willing to lecture enthusiastically on the doctrine of the similarity of all people— but that of course is to remain within the dissimilarity.’’23 It is easy enough to support equality and the ‘‘kinship of all humanity’’ if one actually does not have to have any dealings with ‘‘them’’ or ‘‘those kind of people.’’ It is worth noting here that Kierkegaard himself made a point of conversing freely with people from all stations of life on his famous walks around Copenhagen and believed that he had a duty to engage people as equals, regardless of their standing in society.24 Kierkegaard himself thinks that the attitude of the upper classes in his own day is largely one of subtle snobbery and elitism. It is no longer acceptable openly to flaunt one’s superiority over others in the modern world, where we are all supposedly equal, since it might be dangerous to let the masses know that one does not respect them, and in any case such open contempt for others is ‘‘bad form’’ for a cultured person. This does not mean, however, that the upper classes genuinely care about the masses or are willing to acknowledge their common humanity. In a withering passage, he describes a cultured individual who is skillful at putting this elitism into practice: He must never be seen among the more lowly people, at least never in their company; and if this cannot be avoided then the distinguished condescension must be apparent—yet in its subtlest form in order not to offend and incite. He may very well use an exaggerated courtesy toward the more lowly, but he must never associate with them as equals, since that would express that he was—human, but he is—distinguished. If he can do this smoothly, dexterously, tastefully, elusively, and yet always keeping his secret (that the other people do not exist for him nor he for them), then this distinguished corruption will vouch for his having—good form.25 44

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How is Kierkegaard’s concern over this kind of hypocrisy linked to his lack of support for social change? I think it was a visceral reaction to the people around him that he saw as leading the liberal charge. Kierkegaard did not see these people as having much actual concern for the disadvantaged people they claimed to support, but in fact sees their support for liberal causes as a kind of substitute for costly actions that might actually be required of them. There is a valid warning here that I personally find important to heed. It is tempting to pat oneself on the back and see oneself as a good and loving person because one supports the right political and economic policies, especially if that support costs a person very little. I agree with Kierkegaard that a genuine love for human persons should express itself in a willingness to act in personal ways, even if such actions are inconvenient and uncomfortable. Ultimately this Kierkegaardian concern, however, valid as it is, does not justify political and social quietism. For the danger of substituting political action for personal action that Kierkegaard calls to our attention is only a danger. We are not faced with an either-or in this case: either personal action or social action. There is no reason why a caring person cannot support policies that will be helpful to those who are disadvantaged or the victim of injustice, and also personally seek to show kinship with those people in costly ways. The ethic of neighbor love that Kierkegaard develops in Works of Love is one that, followed consistently, would lead a person to support attempts to alleviate forms of inequality and injustice that are themselves unloving. I conclude that Westphal’s sociopolitical reading of Kierkegaard as a philosopher whose thinking should lead to social and political critique is confirmed by the ethic Kierkegaard develops in Works of Love.

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Levinas and Kierkegaard on Triadic Relations with God M. JAMIE FERREIRA

Merold Westphal’s many insightful comparisons and contrasts between Emmanuel Levinas and Søren Kierkegaard prompt me to reconsider one aspect that continues to intrigue me—namely, Westphal’s characterization of the triadic relation found in each thinker. In ‘‘Kierkegaard and Levinas in Dialogue,’’ Westphal offers the following picture: ‘‘Whereas Kierkegaard would repeat Jesus’ summary of the Torah, that the first commandment is to love God and the second to love one’s neighbor as oneself (Mark 12:28–34), Levinas reverses the order. For him ethics is first, then religion, and the neighbor always stands between me and God, while for Kierkegaard religion is first, then ethics, and God always stands between me and my neighbor.’’1 A similar view is found in a recent essay by John Llewelyn, who writes, ‘‘Whereas for Levinas, the move to God is made through the other human being, the human being comes after and through God for Kierkegaard.’’2 This view, or something like it, seems to be common. In what follows, however, I want to reconsider this suggestion that for Levinas, ‘‘the neighbor always stands between me and God,’’ while for Kierkegaard, ‘‘God always stands between me and my neighbor.’’ Before beginning my reconsideration, it is important to note that Westphal does not take up Levinas’s own understanding of the relation between Judaism and Christianity, for Levinas suggests that the contrast is one between a threesome (in Judaism) and a twosome (in Christianity). That is, Levinas insists upon the triadic nature of his account precisely as a contrast to Christianity. He writes, ‘‘Consider Jeremiah, Chapter 22 or 46

Isaiah 58:7: ‘to bring to your house the poor who are outcast.’ The direct encounter with God, this is a Christian concept. As Jews, we are always a threesome: I and you and the Third who is in our midst. And only as a Third does He reveal Himself.’’3 Westphal is correct not to agree with Levinas’s version of the contrast—indeed, Kierkegaard’s many references to ‘‘the Third,’’ at least in Works of Love, inform the picture of a Christian triadic relation. Instead, Westphal locates the contrast between Kierkegaard and Levinas in the opposed priorities or ordering within the threesome. In fact, it is possible to find formulations by each thinker that seem to support the contrast Westphal makes: for example, we can contrast Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘‘Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person—God—a person, that is, that God is the middle term’’4 with Levinas’s claim that a ‘‘You is inserted between the I and the absolute He,’’5 where the human other is the middle term. In such formulations they seem to have opposite views of who is the middle term and differing conceptions of the one to whom the I has the most direct relation. But I want to reconsider Westphal’s contrasting ordering in two ways. First, and very briefly, I want to consider some qualifications in the case of Kierkegaard and, then more at length, some qualifications in the case of Levinas. In each case, I want to add nuance to Westphal’s understanding by suggesting that there is something in each thinker that gives reason to reverse Westphal’s attribution. That ‘‘something’’ does not invalidate such a contrast as Westphal draws—it has its uses—but it does need to be acknowledged because it adds depth to each account. In Kierkegaard’s case, noting the qualifications adds moral depth, precluding the emphasis on God from instrumentalizing the neighbor. Ludwig Feuerbach, in The Essence of Christianity, wrote that religious belief precludes genuine love of other human beings because it loves people ‘‘for the sake of God,’’ not for their own sake. ‘‘Religious love gives itself to man only for God’s sake, so that it is given only in appearance to man, but in reality to God.’’6 Loving people ‘‘only for God’s sake’’ means that I love people indirectly; it means I love people for something other than their own sake, that other people become a means to my end—my faith, my virtue, or my salvation. It means that if I am religious, I treat others as a stepping-stone to God; such religion is individualistic, in the sense of making my personal relation to God and salvation the ultimate value. I find that view of religion dangerous, precisely because I want people to be the direct object of our love. In Levinas’s case, noting the qualifications adds metaphysical depth, precluding both a reductive humanism and a M. Jamie Ferreira

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deification of the neighbor. It makes ‘‘divinity’’ and ‘‘transcendence’’ genuinely more than human. It helps explain why Levinas so easily attributes to his position the characterization of ‘‘threesome,’’ in spite of the fact that so many see his account as one that effectively makes God redundant or dispensable. Qualifications for Søren Kierkegaard First, let us consider some qualifications that can be made in the case of Kierkegaard’s view. Kierkegaard’s claim that God is the ‘‘middle term’’ in our relationships with others is one of the most important themes in Works of Love: ‘‘Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person—God—a person, that is, that God is the middle term’’ (Mellembesttemelse) (107; the emphases are Kierkegaard’s). But to determine what this amounts to and what its implications are, we should look more closely at several contexts of discussion of the ‘‘middle term’’ in Works of Love. God is the ‘‘middle term’’ in the sense that ‘‘as soon as one leaves out the Godrelationship, the participants’ merely human definition of what they want to understand by loving, what they want to require of each other . . . become the highest judgment’’ (112). It is in this sense that the ‘‘loverelationship requires threeness: the lover, the beloved, the love—but the love is God’’ (121). In other words, God is the ‘‘middle term’’ by being the center of the relationship because ‘‘the love is God.’’7 Such a passage certainly does not ontologize God, nor does it instrumentalize or marginalize the human being in the threesome. Kierkegaard recharacterizes the ‘‘middle term’’ in later deliberations in Works of Love, where he discusses ‘‘the third.’’ He writes: ‘‘One would think, and probably most often does, that love between human beings is relationship between two. This is indeed true, but untrue, inasmuch as this relationship is also a relationship among three. First there is the one who loves, next the one or the ones who are the object; but love itself is present as the third’’ (301). He elaborates: ‘‘as the two in love relate themselves to each other, they relate themselves, each one of them separately, to love’’ (304). The point here is that because there are three, neither human being can make it that ‘‘the relationship is broken,’’ because ‘‘the third . . . is love itself, to which the innocent sufferer in the break can then hold.’’ The sense in which one party can ‘‘prevent the break’’ is that ‘‘the one who truly loves never falls away from love’’ (304–305). Another example of talk of ‘‘the third’’ comes even later in Works of Love and makes a very different point. Kierkegaard suggests that ‘‘when there is not a third party in the relationship between human beings, every 48

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such relationship becomes unhealthy, either too ardent or embittered. This third party, what thinkers would call the idea, is the true, the good, or more accurately, the God-relationship.’’ He goes on: ‘‘Truly, the one who loves is too loving to face the one overcome directly and be himself the victor who savors the victory—while the other is the one overcome. It is indeed simply unloving to want to master another person in this way’’ (339). The notion of ‘‘the third’’ is used here to indicate the moral sensitivity appropriate to human relations. Here again, such discussions do not support a version of the triad in which God is given an ontologized priority over the other. Against this background, I want now to present two qualifications of Kierkegaard’s religious triad. First, there is a way to understand the idea of a ‘‘middle term’’ according to which the ‘‘middle term’’ is an intermediary, a means to the goal; in such a case, we might say that seeing God as ‘‘middle term’’ places the neighbor as the direct object of our love, for whom God is the medium. If, however, critics insist on seeing the expression ‘‘middle term’’ as one that marginalizes or diminishes the one who is on the other side of the ‘‘middle term,’’ then we should notice that in at least two instances Kierkegaard refers to the ‘‘neighbor’’ as the ‘‘middle term.’’ In the most striking instance, he writes: ‘‘it is God who by himself and by means of the middle term ‘neighbor’ checks on whether the love for wife and friend is conscientious’’ (Works of Love, 142). Moreover, in his continuation of this passage he uses the phrase ‘‘middle term’’ to refer to both God and neighbor as if interchangeably: ‘‘Before there can be any question of loving conscientiously, love must first be qualified as a matter of conscience. But love is qualified as a matter of conscience only when either God or the neighbor is the middle term, that is, not in erotic love and friendship as such’’ (142, emphasis added). Thus, whenever ‘‘either God or the neighbor is the middle term,’’ then love is a matter of conscience. That Kierkegaard could use them interchangeably in this way suggests that we are not meant to read the idea of ‘‘middle term’’ as one that prejudicially divides two people. God is not the ‘‘middle term’’ by being the direct object of our love in such a way as to love the other person only ‘‘for the sake of God.’’ A second qualification of Kierkegaard’s view of the triadic relationship reveals itself in his portrayal of God as directing us away from Godself to other people. In the deliberation entitled ‘‘On the Duty to Love the People We See,’’ Kierkegaard explains that God’s mercy is shown in that God is ‘‘continually pointing away from himself, so to speak, and saying, ‘if you want to love me, then love the people you see; what you do for them, you do for me.’ God is too exalted to be able to receive a person’s love M. Jamie Ferreira

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directly, to say nothing of being able to take pleasure in what can please a fanatic’’ (160). He continues: ‘‘God does not ask for anything for himself, although he asks for everything from you’’ (161)—that is, everything for the neighbor, which means the direct object is the neighbor. Note that Kierkegaard imagines God as not saying ‘‘if you want to show that you love me,’’ but saying ‘‘if you want to love me’’—service to others is not the sign of love for God, it is the love. Now this means that Kierkegaard does not envision religion simply in terms of my personal subjectivity, my existential authenticity, or my salvation scorecard with God. Admittedly, Kierkegaard goes on to say that we should serve the neighbor ‘‘with the thought of God,’’ but I think the fact that he so clearly is alluding to the biblical story of the Last Judgment uniquely qualifies that statement. In this story (Matt. 25), everybody is surprised. On one hand, those who thought they were serving God are told that they are not doing so, because they are not serving their neighbor. On the other hand, those who did not even intend to serve God are told that they are, in fact, serving God through their concern for the ‘‘least of these.’’ To some, the King says, ‘‘Come, you whom my father has blessed, inherit the kingdom prepared for you, for I was hungry and you gave me food, and I was thirsty and you gave me drink.’’ The ‘‘virtuous’’ reply, ‘‘when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink?’’ And the King will answer, ‘‘insofar as you did this to one of the least of my brethren, you did it to me.’’ To others, the King says, ‘‘Depart from me, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you never gave me food, I was thirsty and you never gave me anything to drink.’’ And they ask in astonishment, ‘‘when did we see you hungry or thirsty . . . and not come to your help?’ And the King replies, ‘‘insofar as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.’’ So the Gospel story told by Christ does not require that help be done ‘‘for the sake of God,’’ or even with the ‘‘thought of God.’’ In other words, all the attention goes to the neighbor—the neighbor is loved directly, without any intermediary. The commandment to love God is thus the commandment to turn away from God toward the ones to whom God directs us. The commandment to do what God wants is the commandment to love the neighbor. In a sense, it is the commandment to forget that it is the commandment to love God. It is the commandment to see the other person directly—we are told to direct our attention to the value, the dignity, the equality of other people. The redirection to which Kierkegaard points foreshadows Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s understanding of God-in-the-neighbor. For Bonhoeffer, we 50

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must serve the neighbor ‘‘as if there were no God,’’ or ‘‘even if there were no God’’ (etsi deus non daretur).8 He contrasts ‘‘intellectual integrity’’ with the ‘‘dream’’ of going back to childhood: ‘‘God himself compels us to recognize it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God.’’9 His is a Christian version of ‘‘ethics before metaphysics.’’ Once this second qualification is in place, it is less clear that we should say, with Westphal, that for Kierkegaard ‘‘God always stands between me and my neighbor.’’ Kierkegaard’s triad begins to sound rather like one in which, as Westphal puts it, ‘‘the neighbor always stands between me and God.’’ It begins to sound like Levinas’s account of triadic relationship. So it is appropriate now to reconsider Levinas’s account of the ‘‘threesome.’’ Qualifications for Levinas Westphal’s description of Levinas’s triadic relation as one in which ‘‘the neighbor stands between me and God’’ seems to take for granted the idea of God in Levinas’s thought and to see the difference with Kierkegaard in terms of the ordering of the triad. I agree that Levinas’s thought includes God, but since some have suggested that Levinas’s contestation of the ‘‘primacy of ontology’’10 precludes any genuine third in his triad (other than the other neighbor—the ever-present ‘‘third’’ that constitutes the realm of ‘‘justice’’11), it is worth considering briefly this first question—Is there a third?—before continuing with the question about the role and status of the third. A Third? Levinas’s friend Jean Wahl thought it clear that ‘‘for Levinas, if the human is not foreign to him, it is fundamentally because there is a God. It is because of the superhuman that the human is not foreign to him.’’12 I agree with Wahl’s judgment, and I want to reconsider what supports such a view of Levinas (a view in which there is no naturalistic reduction to morality). Levinas’s overwhelming insistence on the priority of ethics has consequences for what he will say about God. When the question is asked ‘‘Is morality possible without God?’’ Levinas’s response is to ‘‘answer with a question: is divinity possible without relation to a human Other?’’13 There M. Jamie Ferreira

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is no denial of God, but an important qualification: ‘‘only as a Third does he reveal himself.’’ This approach is consistently used: ‘‘I do not want to define anything through God because it is the human that I know. It is God that I can define through human relations and not the inverse. . . . I do not start from the existence of a very great and all-powerful being. Everything I wish to say comes from this situation of responsibility.’’14 Nonetheless, Levinas’s choice not to do theology15 does not exclude God from the picture. Levinas concedes that there is a ‘‘necessity for a philosophical meditation to resort to notions such as that of the Infinite or God’’16 and he sees ‘‘the problem of transcendence and of God’’ as a single problem (which is tied to ‘‘the problem of subjectivity irreducible to essence’’).17 He agrees with Descartes that ‘‘the idea of the infinite . . . is the thought addressed to God’’—the thought that thinks more than it can think, ‘‘or which does better than think’’ by going ‘‘toward the Good.’’18 He identifies the ‘‘idea of the Infinite’’ and the ‘‘idea of God’’: ‘‘The idea of God, the cogitatum of a cogitatio which to begin with contains that cogitatio, signifies the noncontained par excellence.’’19 The ‘‘idea of the Infinite,’’ shorn of the ‘‘substantialist language’’ found in Descartes, is still God for Levinas:20 ‘‘I think that if the infinite was an infinite, under which there would be substance, an Etwas ueberhaupt (which would justify the substantive term), it would not at all be the absolutely other, it would be an other ‘same.’ And there is no atheism in this way of not taking God for a term. I think that God has no meaning outside the search for God.’’21 In this respect, it is interesting to note that Levinas actually invokes Kierkegaard in support of the priority of the search, noting that ‘‘in the infinite order, the absence of God is better than his presence, and the anguish of man’s concern and searching for God is better than consummation or comfort. As Kierkegaard put it, ‘The need for God is a sublime happiness.’ ’’22 All of this suggests that there are ways in which Levinas can speak of God—namely, in terms of a God who cannot be thematized, who surpasses any idea of God, or in terms of the Infinite that is not an Infinite. Perhaps this explains his exasperated response to interlocutors: ‘‘The notion of God—God knows, I’m not opposed to it! But when I have to say something about God, it is always beginning from human relations.’’23 His project of ‘‘ethics before ontology’’ rejects a thematized God, but Levinas allows a ‘‘metaphysics’’ that ‘‘survives ontology,’’ and so allows some kind of metaphysical understanding of God.24 On the other hand, he says at one point that his notion of ‘‘ethics’’ is ‘‘more ontological than ontology’’: ‘‘for me, ethics is not at all a layer that covers over ontology, but 52

Levinas and Kierkegaard on God

rather that which is in some fashion more ontological than ontology; an emphasis of ontology.’’25 He continues: ‘‘ethics is before ontology. It is more ontological than ontology; more sublime than ontology. It is thus a transcendentalism that begins with ethics.’’ The difficulty in answering the question whether God exists is that the ‘‘search for the Infinite, as Desire, accedes to God but does not lay hold of him; it does not thematize him as an end. Finality would be insufficient to describe the relationship with the Infinite.’’26 God is nonthematizable, because ‘‘for ethics, it is only in the infinite relation with the other that God passes (se passe´), that traces of God are to be found. God thus reveals himself as a trace, not as an ontological presence which Aristotle defined as a Self-Thinking-Thought and scholastic metaphysics defined as an Ipsum Esse Subsistens or Ens Causa Sui.’’27 And lest we counter that this is true only ‘‘for ethics,’’ Levinas insists that ‘‘it is in this ethical perspective that God must be thought and not in the ontological perspective of our being-there or of some Supreme Being and Creator correlative to the world, as traditional metaphysics often held. God, as the God of alterity and transcendence, can only be understood in terms of that interhuman dimension which, to be sure, emerges in the phenomenological-ontological perspective of the intelligible world, but which cuts through and perforates the totality of presence and points towards the absolutely other.’’28 Moreover, Levinas insists that there is no reduction of God to the human other: ‘‘I’m not saying that the other is God, but that in his or her Face I hear the word of God.’’29 Similarly, he writes, ‘‘It is not, of course, that the other man must be taken for God or that God, the Eternal Thou, be found simply in some extension of the You.’’30 So, Levinas does speak of God, and he speaks of ‘‘the Infinite, the absolutely Other’’ as ‘‘He and third person.’’31 In fact, it strikes me that there is an implicit argument in Levinas’s thought that makes a genuine third absolutely central to his ethics. The passage I find crucial is the following: ‘‘What we call lay morality, that is, humanistic concern for our fellow human beings, already speaks the voice of God. But the moral priority of the other over myself could not come to be if it were not motivated by something beyond nature. The ethical situation is a human situation, beyond human nature, in which the idea of God comes to mind. In this respect, we could say that God is the other who turns our nature inside out, who calls our ontological will-to-be into question. . . . God does indeed go against nature, for He is not of this world. God is other than being.’’32 Levinas’s sine qua non is that we owe other human beings infinite responsibility. This only makes sense if we M. Jamie Ferreira

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reconstruct an argument as follows: (1) Finite beings are due infinite responsibility; (2) Finite beings have finite value (by definition); (3) Only infinite value can ground infinite responsibility. Conclusion: Insofar as finite beings are due infinite responsibility, it is because of the presence of a third, the Infinite (God) in them. The Infinite must be in the midst of the You. In other words, the command comes from the fact of the God in the You. And this is indeed ‘‘a third person, the he in the depth of the You.’’33 God, or the Infinite, accounts for why I owe any finite person an infinite debt: ‘‘The idea of God is God in me’’; ‘‘there is an idea of God, or God is in us.’’34 Such an idea is also formulated in the language of ‘‘the trace.’’ Levinas himself affirms Wahl’s interpretation that ‘‘for Levinas, if the human is not foreign to him, it is fundamentally because there is a God,’’ when he locates the human person ‘‘in the trace of ’’ God, Illeity, the Other. ‘‘The Infinite, the absolutely Other,’’ ‘‘this divinity,’’ leaves a trace—‘‘Only a being that transcends the world, an absolute being, can leave a trace’’ and ‘‘It is in the trace of the Other that a face shines.’’35 He goes on: ‘‘A face is of itself a visitation and a transcendence. But the face, wholly open, can at the same time be in itself because it is in the trace of illeity.’’36 He continues: ‘‘To be in the image of God does not mean to be an icon of God but to find oneself in his trace.’’ ‘‘The revealed God of our JudeoChristian spirituality maintains all the infinity of his absence. . . . He shows himself only by his trace. . . . To go toward Him is not to follow this trace, which is not a sign; it is to go toward the Others who stand in the trace of illeity.’’37 The ‘‘perspective of height’’ opened up ‘‘through the human’’ is the trace of the Infinite, the trace of the absolutely Other—that is why God is not encountered ‘‘outside of humans.’’38 The appropriateness, indeed the necessity, of valuing the human other infinitely is only accounted for by reference to a third, the Infinite, the ‘‘image of God’’ in whose trace we all stand. The human other is not infinite; the human other signifies the Infinite: ‘‘To my mind the Infinite comes in the signifying of the face. The face signifies the Infinite.’’39 The ‘‘overturning of intentionality’’ by the idea of the Infinite ‘‘consists in the fact that the I receives absolutely and learns absolutely (though not in the Socratic sense) a signification that it has not itself given’’—this reception is a nonmaieutic revelation that marks the ‘‘creature.’’40 The ‘‘shimmer of the face’’ is precisely the ‘‘witness borne of the Infinite.’’41 It is interesting to note that one of Levinas’s discussions of the trace takes place in a section of an essay in which he has praised what he repeatedly calls ‘‘the Kierkegaardian God,’’ the 54

Levinas and Kierkegaard on God

God who passes ‘‘incognito.’’42 This suggests the possibility of an alignment between Kierkegaard’s ‘‘Wholly Other’’ and Levinas’s appeal to nondisclosure and nonpresence. The earlier formulation of the implicit argument given here does justice to Levinas’s sense that the reference to God is ‘‘second,’’43 but since he also says that God cannot be deduced from the command,44 the argument could also be read as follows: (1) God, the Infinite, exists in human others: that is, others stand ‘‘in the trace of God.’’ (2) This God in them gives them infinite value. (3) (Their) Infinite value calls for, warrants, (our) infinite responsibility. Conclusion: Finite beings are due infinite responsibility. But what is the status and role of the third, God, in Levinas’s account? The Status of the Third As I noted earlier, Levinas’s claim that a ‘‘You is inserted between the I and the absolute He’’45 seems at odds with Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘‘Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person— God—a person, that is, that God is the middle term.’’ The model of ‘‘person—God—person’’ seems quite different from the model of ‘‘I— You—absolute He’’ (or person—person—God). But I want to suggest that certain qualifications that need to be made concerning Levinas’s account can bring him closer to a Kierkegaardian sense of the directness of relation to God. I propose that the process of illuminating a metaphysical understanding of God also at the same time reveals why it can be misleading to say that for Levinas ‘‘the neighbor stands between me and God’’ and why, on the contrary, it can be true to say that for Levinas ‘‘God stands between me and the neighbor.’’ In particular, I want to argue that Levinas’s understanding of our metaphysical desire for the Infinite includes in it a moment of redirection that provides a way of understanding God standing between me and the neighbor; admittedly, there remain other differences between Kierkegaard and Levinas on the character of God.46 The implications of Levinas’s priority of ethics over ontology inform his account of the ordering of the threesome. And it seems to be in great part a reaction against a certain Christian view in which the priority is given to love of God in such a way that neighbor is not loved directly. In a short piece entitled ‘‘The Word I, the Word You, and the Word God,’’ Levinas reveals what his animus is directed against when he quotes Pascal: ‘‘If there is a God, we must love Him only and not the creatures of a day, says Pascal.’’47 Now, whether or not he gets Pascal right, he is clearly M. Jamie Ferreira

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seeing our ‘‘spiritual heritage’’ as one in which ‘‘love of one’s neighbour . . . would at best be only the second commandment, after the love of God. And that ethics, according to the theologians would never equal the true essence of the relation to God, always understood as being.’’ He reads Pascal as affirming that love is to be measured ‘‘according to being—in its permanent or passing nature.’’ The consequence is that ‘‘at the religious level, morality would be considered something we have moved beyond.’’48 By way of reaction against this kind of Christian view, Levinas appeals to another Christian view, in ways that are particularly intriguing given our earlier analysis of Kierkegaard. Levinas writes in ‘‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love’’: ‘‘I cannot describe the relation to God without speaking of my concern for the other. When I speak to a Christian, I always quote Matthew 25; the relation to God is presented there as a relation to another person. It is not a metaphor: in the other, there is a real presence of God. In my relation to the other, I hear the Word of God. It is not a metaphor; it is not only extremely important, it is literally true.’’49 Clearly, the parable about the Last Judgment (Matt. 25) is important to both thinkers, and it seems to serve the same purpose. When Levinas insists that ‘‘it is not a question of God encountered outside of humans,’’50 this doesn’t necessarily imply an elimination of God or an identification of God with human, for we saw in Kierkegaard’s case that one can read such a declaration in light of the Last Judgment parable, in which it was made clear that if one did not serve the lowliest, one did not serve God—this amounts to saying that God can only be encountered through humans. Levinas’s strategy throughout is ‘‘to adhere to an ethics without worrying about its doctrinal presuppositions,’’ because this ‘‘is surely to proceed in the way most in keeping with the Biblical spirit.’’51 Insofar as we see both Kierkegaard and Levinas appealing to the biblical spirit, we can see an important parallel. Kierkegaard’s allusion to the Last Judgment parable suggests that if we see God directing us away from Godself toward the neighbor, we can guarantee that neighbor-love is morally direct, rather than an instrumental love. If we read Kierkegaard’s model of ‘‘person— God—person’’ in that way, we can find something of a parallel in Levinas’s account, when he too affirms the Last Judgment parable. But in addition, we can find the same parallel with Kierkegaard if we turn to Levinas’s metaphysics. This parallel, revealing a relation to the neighbor that is somehow the result of being turned toward the neighbor by God, is found in the delineation of Levinas’s metaphysics of desire.52 In such a relation, God is not redundant nor in competition with neighbor-love, yet is appropriately called the middle term. 56

Levinas and Kierkegaard on God

In Levinas’s anthropology (or metaphysics), the I (ego) is happy and contented in its aloneness—it can satisfy its own needs—but it is still restless, due to the metaphysical desire that moves us outward and forward. The ‘‘pattern of desire’’ is first enunciated in Totality and Infinity: it is ‘‘the need of him who lacks nothing, the aspiration of him who possesses his being entirely, who goes beyond his plentitude, who has the idea of Infinity.’’53 Originally, then, there is both a satisfaction and a restlessness, but they are on different levels: the satisfaction is physical, the restlessness metaphysical. The same metaphysics of desire is found in ‘‘God and Philosophy’’ (1975), where Levinas analyzes the locus of desire as ‘‘a passivity or a passion in which desire can be recognized,’’ noting that ‘‘this desire is of another order than the desires involved in hedonist or eudaemonist affectivity and activity, where the desirable is invested, reached, and identified as an object of need. . . . It is a desire that is beyond satisfaction, and unlike a need, does not identify a term or an end. This endless desire for what is beyond being is disinterestedness, transcendence—desire for the Good.’’54 That is, we are immediately, directly, desiring the Infinitely Desirable. God is the Good, the infinitely Desirable: ‘‘Even the superlatives of wisdom, power, and causality advanced by medieval ontology are inadequate to the absolute otherness of God. . . . This is why I have tried to think of God in terms of desire, a desire that cannot be fulfilled or satisfied. . . . I can never have enough in my relation to God, for he always exceeds my measure, remains forever incommensurate with my desire. In this sense, our desire for God is without end or term: it is interminable and infinite because God reveals himself as absence rather than presence.’’55 It is important that this immediate relation to the Infinite is a relation without ‘‘end,’’ a disinterested desire (otherwise Levinas undermines his own notion of the good without return), because it results in a particular ordering of the triad.56 He writes: ‘‘For disinterestedness to be possible in the Desire for the Infinite . . . it is necessary that the Desirable or God remain separated in the Desire, as desirable it is near but different: Holy. This can only be if the Desirable orders me to what is the nondesirable, the undesirable par excellence—the other (autrui).’’ 57 This last claim is remarkable—the disinterestedness of the desire for the Infinite is guaranteed insofar as ‘‘the Desirable orders me to what is the non-desirable, the undesirable par excellence—the other.’’ The model could be drawn: ‘‘I— Desirable—undesirable,’’ and it would parallel Kierkegaard’s model of ‘‘person—God—person.’’ M. Jamie Ferreira

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This withdrawal and redirection amount to a ‘‘reversal’’—what Levinas calls ‘‘the extraordinary reversal of desirability of the Desirable, the supreme desirability’’—and ‘‘through this reversal the Desirable escapes desire. . . . The desirable is intangible and separates itself from the relationship with desire which it calls for’’; this separation maintains the Infinite as ‘‘a third person, the he in the depth of the You.’’58 In language that is deeply reminiscent of Bonhoeffer, Levinas affirms the priority of ethics over ontology: ‘‘In this ethical reversal, in this reference of the Desirable to the Nondesirable, in this strange mission that orders the approach to the other (autrui), God is drawn out of objectivity, presence, and being.’’59 The withdrawal of absolute alterity provokes a reversal—the ethical reversal—the redirection of desire to the alterity available to it. I seek the Desirable, but the Desirable refers me to the undesirable, so in a real sense I seek to be referred to the undesirable. God turns me toward the neighbor, so meeting the undesirable needs of the other is following the path of my desire for the Infinite. Welcoming the other amounts to doing what the Desirable wants; in my desire for the Desirable I seek, in some sense, a meeting with the undesirable. The maintenance of my desire in the face of its nonsatisfaction, its redirection, accounts for my ‘‘disinterested’’ embrace of the only alterity I find. By continuing to desire, we are guaranteeing our nonsatisfaction, but our desire is nonetheless ‘‘nourished’’ by the Desirable. The way in which alterity excites me, and the concomitant riches that I discover in myself, somehow allow my ‘‘welcome’’ of the other to ‘‘answer’’ to my unquenchable desire for the Infinite. But our desire remains ‘‘disinterested’’ because the Infinitely Desirable cannot be welcomed, it will not present itself as an end, and because the term I do inevitably encounter is one whose ‘‘burdensome’’ needs both render it undesirable to me and put me in ‘‘debt.’’60 It is the Desirable, God, who refers me, who ‘‘orders’’ me to the other. The You is the one to whom I am turned by the Infinite, more precisely by the withdrawal of the Infinite. ‘‘The Infinite, to solicit Desire, a thought thinking more than it thinks, cannot be incarnated in a Desirable, cannot, qua infinite, be shut up in an end. It solicits across a face, the term of my generosity and my sacrifice. A You is inserted between the I and the absolute He.’’61 That is saying that God inserts the You between us. God turns us away from Godself and to others. The ‘‘term of my generosity’’ is the open-endedness (the lack of closure) of desirability— namely, undesirability; moreover, ‘‘its term is not an end,’’ because ‘‘the more I answer the more I am responsible.’’62 Absolute alterity, the Absolute Other, redirects us away from itself. This redirection gives a different 58

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ordering to the triadic relation than would seem to be the case if we neglect the all-important understanding of the dynamic of desire—it suggests one way in which a ‘‘person—God—person’’ model can be appropriate. As Levinas writes in Otherwise Than Being, ‘‘the illeity in the beyondbeing is the fact that its coming toward me is a departure which lets me attempt a movement towards a neighbor.’’63 But ‘‘lets me attempt’’ is rather too weak a phrase, because that departure actually compels me toward the other: ‘‘He does not fill me up with goods but compels me to goodness, which is better than goods received.’’64 This compulsion is the other side of withdrawal. And it accounts for Levinas’s willingness to use the term ‘‘commanded love.’’ The command to welcome alterity is achieved in the withdrawal and redirection by the Infinitely Desirable— this could be read as being commanded by the Infinite, the Desirable. In an interview, Levinas responded to the question of where duty originates by referring to scripture: ‘‘In Deut. 10:19 it says: ‘Thou shalt love the other. In the otherness of the other is the beginning of all love.’ ’’65 The command of God redirects us to the ‘‘neighbor who bears the trace of a withdrawal ordering it as a face.’’66 This command is, in a sense, the same command that desire gives itself (or the command that desire is) not to turn away from alterity in whatever form it finds it. Needy alterity is the only alterity I encounter. In the situation of encounter with alterity, which excites me, I am obliged to deal with alterity in the way it asks me to if I am to continue to engage with alterity at all.67 The irresistible dynamic of desire directs me to the Desirable; the continuing dynamic of my relation to the Desirable directs me to turn toward another. The command of God to love the other arises in the form of the withdrawal of God. Levinas’s preference for the term ‘‘responsibility’’ rather than ‘‘love’’ for the neighbor is an understandable one.68 The word ‘‘love’’ can too easily fail to portray what is at stake—namely, it can fail to announce strongly enough that ‘‘I am ordered toward the face of the other,’’ who ‘‘commands’’ me.69 My response is his ‘‘right,’’ and ‘‘the right of the human’’ has the very strong connotation of ‘‘commandment.’’70 Still, despite his preference for the ‘‘grave’’ or ‘‘harsh’’ view of love as responsibility for the other, Levinas does fall back time and again to using the word ‘‘love.’’71 It is only Levinas’s appreciation that ‘‘there is something severe in this love; this love is commanded’’72 that allows him to recur at times to the language of love as long as it is seen as commanded. In fact, toward the end of his life, Levinas explicitly comes closer to Kierkegaard when he speaks about ‘‘the commandment of a gratuitous act’’ like love; he writes M. Jamie Ferreira

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that ‘‘commanding love signifies recognizing the value of love in itself,’’ and that ‘‘God is a commandment to love . . . the one who says that one must love the other.’’73 His understanding of desire is itself triadic: ‘‘Desire, or the response to an Enigma or morality, is an intrigue with three personages: the I approaches the Infinite by going generously toward the You, who is still my contemporary, but, in the trace of Illeity, presents himself out of a depth of the past, faces, and approaches me. I approach the infinite insofar as I forget myself for my neighbor who looks at me. . . . I approach the infinite by sacrificing myself.’’74 The triadicity of desire both guarantees a third and indicates the role of the third as what ‘‘I approach’’ and as what redirects me to the neighbor. The claim that ‘‘the I approaches the Infinite by going generously toward the You’’ has overtones of a direct relation to the Infinite and an indirect relation to the You. But the directness of the relation to the Infinite and the indirectness of the relation to the You both have to be understood precisely. On one hand, the directness of the relation to God does not mean a relation to God as an end, since God cannot give Godself as an end, the Infinite cannot give itself to me as an end. Levinas says that the Infinite ‘‘directs the neighbor to me without exposing itself to me.’’75 And the relation to the other is not an instrumental one. Instead of a reduction of one to the other, or an identification, Levinas suggests that although ‘‘the other is indispensable for my relation with God,’’ the other ‘‘does not play the role of a mediator [le roˆle de me´diateur].’’76 In sum, when Levinas writes, ‘‘ ‘Going towards God’ is meaningless unless seen in terms of my primary going towards the other person. I can only go towards God by being ethically concerned by and for the other person,’’77 he is tied to Kierkegaard by a common appreciation of Matthew 25. In this essay, I have tried to show my appreciation of Westphal’s insights while adding nuance to his understanding. To repeat: my account does not attempt to invalidate the contrast Westphal and others have made, but rather to acknowledge another important dimension—one might call it a chiasmic relation—in each of these thinkers.

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Levinas and Kierkegaard on God

Appropriating Westphal Appropriating Nietzsche Merold Westphal as a Theological Resource BRUCE ELLIS BENSON

In pointing out that Friedrich Nietzsche can be rightly read as a ‘‘theological resource,’’1 Merold Westphal has done people of faith a great service: that is, he has read Nietzsche carefully and helped them truly hear Nietzsche’s critique. The result is that Westphal has shown how useful Nietzsche can be for believers (Christians, of course, but not them alone) in thinking about their faith and theology.2 Although not uncritical of Nietzsche, Westphal has teased out the implications of Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity and made a forceful case for Nietzsche being all too often right. It is Nietzsche’s conception of suspicion that Westphal puts to such useful work. Citing Nietzsche’s claim that ‘‘it is [the philosopher’s] duty to be suspicious these days, to squint as maliciously as possible out of every abyss of mistrust,’’3 Westphal makes the crucial distinction between suspicion as directed at one’s interests in holding a belief rather than directed at the belief ’s truth value. With that distinction in mind, I want to examine the interests of religious believers of which we should be suspicious. Since Westphal gives us his most sustained analysis of Nietzsche in Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism,4 I will focus primarily on that text, using others to supplement it. While there are many things in Christianity of which Nietzsche is suspicious, three seem particularly important to his account: ressentiment, love, and pity.5 As will become apparent, I argue that true love of the other is the way to avoid both ressentiment and the false sort of pity that is itself a manifestation of ressentiment. Following Westphal’s lead, I will consider 61

examples of how ressentiment and perversions of pity and love are manifest in scripture and in the present age. As such, I want to expand upon and deepen Westphal’s analysis. But I want to go beyond Westphal’s analysis by considering what would count as appropriate manifestations of pity and love and, even more important, if and how ressentiment might be overcome. To that end, I will also be appropriating the thought of JeanLuc Marion, who well supplements Westphal’s thought. While it is impossible to put Nietzsche’s worries to rest, I do think it possible to argue that alternative interpretations of seemingly loving acts, for example, are equally as plausible as Nietzsche’s suspicious interpretations. That is not to say that suspicion is neither necessary nor undesirable. Rather, it is to say that suspicion is only a hermeneutical moment, one we desperately need but must eventually pass beyond. Yet, before simply diving into the labor of appropriation, a word concerning how it works and its propriety is in order. For appropriation is exactly the appropriate word for a significant portion of the philosophical work that Westphal has done. Quite simply, if Nietzsche can be rightly termed a ‘‘master of suspicion,’’ then I think we can safely say that Westphal is a ‘‘master of appropriation.’’ Given that the logic of appropriation is neither simple nor necessarily benign, it is worth considering exactly how Westphal appropriates and toward what end. Appropriation No doubt, the first question of any believer skeptical of the very project of appropriating from what many would consider the archrival of religion in general and of Christianity in particular would be the following one: what could a Christian possibly learn from Nietzsche? Let me provide an example of exactly that sort of question. I recently had the opportunity to participate in a blog on postmodernity and Christianity. My post (titled ‘‘What Is Postmodernism?’’) was the first of eight, and the very first response to it was: ‘‘If the philosophers you quoted were all either agnostic or in some cases virulently atheistic, what makes you think you can start with their presuppositions and produce a different result?’’ That I was merely using such philosophers to supplement rather than ground Christian thought was something the respondent completely overlooked. But it was the idea that borrowing from agnostic or atheistic philosophers was somehow inappropriate that was really central to his question. For that very reason, I replied: ‘‘Adapting/adopting from non-Christians/pagan/ atheistic philosophers is something that Christians have been doing since the early days of Christianity.’’6 In one important sense, Westphal is doing 62

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what Christians have done since the inception of Christianity. Indeed, it was Augustine who famously commended ‘‘plundering the Egyptians’’ (as the phrase is commonly put today).7 Where would Christian theology be today if it hadn’t appropriated so much from Plato or Aristotle, not to mention so many other philosophers (many of whom were either pagan or atheistic or simply had questionable theological views)? In any case, there would be neither Augustine nor Aquinas, at least as we know them. Christianity has always been about taking into itself anything that it deemed useful. As the Gambian-born missiologist and historian Lamin Sanneh notes, we are all ‘‘syncretists,’’ though that is a term we usually reserve ‘‘for the religion of those we don’t like.’’8 Westphal specifically addresses this objection in ‘‘Nietzsche as a Theological Resource’’ by arguing that Nietzsche provides us with something particularly useful. After posing the hypothetical question of why one should in effect waste time studying someone like Nietzsche when one could study a theologian like Kierkegaard, Westphal replies that, even though he himself devotes more energy to Kierkegaard than to Nietzsche, studying Nietzsche is particularly helpful because Nietzsche’s thought, by virtue of its being atheistic, ‘‘has built in a special protection against the fallacy of misplaced transubstantiation.’’9 For Westphal, ‘‘transubstantiation’’ occurs when an intentional act takes on the characteristics of the object it intends. For example, in theology the temptation is to assume that, since God is absolute, the act that intends God likewise is absolute. Given Nietzsche’s insistence on perspectivism—that is, that all perspectives are just perspectives—it is much harder to make the move of turning any particular perspective into an absolute one. Of course, Nietzsche’s perspectivism immediately raises certain problems.10 One is that any believing theologian will want to insist that the gospel is not just one perspective among many and, therefore, not just another opinion. To anyone who wants to make absolute claims about God, Westphal points out that it is Paul himself who ‘‘insists that our knowledge is partial, that we see as in a riddle.’’11 So Nietzsche actually helps Christians—particularly those inclined toward a conservative dogmatism—to remember that all claims regarding the gospel are ones made in light of a (as Westphal puts it) ‘‘cognitive finitude.’’ Westphal, though, is quick to point out that our not knowing from an absolute perspective in no way implies there is not such a perspective. That we do not see from a God’s-eye view hardly means that God doesn’t. And that brings up a second possible ‘‘objection.’’12 Perhaps those of the ‘‘Christian Coalition’’ need such a reminder, but those in the AAR hardly do.13 If anything, they have a very loosely held and highly truncated ‘‘gospel.’’ To this concern, Bruce Ellis Benson

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Westphal (quite rightly) responds that ‘‘there are fundamentalisms of the left as well as of the right’’ and that AAR members often simply have different dogmatisms, no less dogmatically held.14 Properly applied, then, Nietzsche can be useful to both the left and the right, for his critique is against dogmatism in any form.15 But, even if adapting from pagan ritual, religion, and philosophy has been a standard and acceptable Christian practice and even if taking some cues from someone like Nietzsche can be appropriate, a different question then arises: is there something vicious or violent in the very act of appropriation (a question that was actually put to Westphal in an interview and certainly implied by the very notion of ‘‘plundering the Egyptians’’)? In effect, Westphal gives two answers to that question. First, while admitting that ‘‘there is an inescapable aspect of what could be called violence in rejection and reappropriation,’’16 Westphal contends that there is still a fundamental point of agreement. Although Nietzsche undoubtedly puts his insights to use in a very different sort of project, Westphal has no problem agreeing with Nietzsche on certain important respects. As he puts it (speaking hypothetically to Nietzsche): ‘‘Look, I agree with you about these insights insofar as they have real force.’’ Indeed, that force is so strong that Westphal sees it as part of his job to let that force be felt. I discovered in the very early days of my teaching after graduate school that in Marx and Nietzsche . . . there were insights that were compelling and that illuminated my own personal life and the social life of which I was a part. I found myself saying, Hey, my job isn’t to refute these insights, but to recognize their force. Gradually, it dawned on me that what these thinkers were doing was reflecting on the fallenness of human nature, though they didn’t use that vocabulary.17 Even though Marx/Nietzsche and Westphal wouldn’t agree on the name of the condition they are describing, the description remains the same. In effect, Nietzsche is a good phenomenologist. Thus, Westphal suggests that ‘‘anyone interested in doing phenomenology of religion in the Husserlian tradition should take Nietzsche seriously.’’ Or, put otherwise, the Husserlian phenomenologist can ‘‘supplement his methodological theism with a methodological atheism.’’18 Second, Westphal insists that ‘‘borrowing’’ insights from Nietzsche and others in no way deprives them of using those insights for very different purposes: ‘‘I leave them in possession of their insights, while I put them to work for my own purposes.’’19 Whereas the Egyptians really lost their gold, Nietzsche’s gold is still his. Fortunately, ideas can be shared in a way that gold cannot. 64

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Yet there is another way in which Westphal could defuse the charge of ‘‘violence’’ in appropriation, for his appropriation in many cases—at least that of Nietzsche—is a rather unusual sort. ‘‘Plundering the Egyptians’’ is a way of speaking about Christians taking all the ‘‘good stuff ’’ they can from the pagan philosophers. Yet Westphal’s appropriation might be better construed as taking all the ‘‘bad stuff ’’ from people like Nietzsche. In other words, it is precisely the nasty charges that Nietzsche hurls at Christianity that Westphal so willingly accepts. The insights Nietzsche provides are exactly the kind that Christians would rather not hear, not because they are false, but because they are true. Of course, Westphal is not merely interested in compiling a list of Christian failings. He instead calls upon the Christian community (1) ‘‘to take seriously the critique of religion generated by suspicion and (2) to lead the way in using it as an aid to personal and self-examination.’’20 If that is the kind of appropriation that Westphal is about, it is hard to find that type of appropriation either truly violent or inappropriate. For Westphal is in effect saying: ‘‘We take your critique seriously and we want to change in such a way that the critique is no longer true.’’ It’s hard to imagine Nietzsche finding that kind of appropriation offensive, for it both admits that Nietzsche is right and seeks to do something about it. Of course, Nietzsche would hardly admit that one could do anything about it, precisely because he thinks that the motive of revenge or at least some kind of personal gain is behind all action. Ressentiment Having considered the logic of appropriation, let us now turn to the first of the aspects that Westphal appropriates from Nietzsche: the logic of ressentiment that Nietzsche thinks is actually behind both the rise of Christianity and all of Christian action. Assuming Nietzsche is right that ‘‘the birth of Christianity’’ arises ‘‘out of the spirit of ressentiment [resentment],’’21 then the question must be asked: just what is it that Christians resent? The short answer would be: (1) their lack of privilege and (2) the fact that they—like everyone else—suffer. On one hand, Nietzsche describes Christian morality as a ‘‘slave morality,’’ which turns out to be exactly the sort of morality one would expect of slaves. Whereas ‘‘the noble type of person feels that he determines value, he does not need anyone’s approval . . . he creates values,’’ the slave has no such confidence.22 Indeed, the very values of the noble—such as pride in oneself—or even the unwavering belief that whatever he judges to be good is good cannot be shared by the slaves, for the slave is seemingly in no position to value Bruce Ellis Benson

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the ‘‘good.’’ On the other hand, the suffering of slaves is surely greater than those of nobles. Whereas the ancient Greek nobles (at least according to Nietzsche) could simply accept suffering as part of the tragedy of the human condition, the slaves were in much greater need of at least some kind of explanation. Given this lack of privilege and the reality of suffering, Christians find themselves deeply embittered by resentment, and resentment normally breeds the desire for revenge. Yet, not only does their status prove to be what they resent, it likewise proves to be what keeps them from taking that revenge. So the desire for revenge smolders. Yet eventually they find a way to take revenge by moralizing. Whereas the distinction between good and bad had been parallel to that of noble and base, on Nietzsche’s account, the slaves ‘‘invent’’ the category ‘‘evil.’’ In effect, then, the pair ‘‘good/bad’’ is supplanted with a quite different value system: ‘‘good/ evil.’’ As Nietzsche puts it, ‘‘the slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.’’23 Once the notion of ‘‘evil’’ is invented, the virtues of the noble become the evil vices of the slaves, which means that in the slaves’ value system ‘‘pity, the obliging, helpful hand, the warm heart, patience, industriousness, humility, and friendliness receive full honors.’’24 Although Nietzsche claims that the ‘‘slave revolt in morality begins with the Jews,’’25 Christianity continues that revolt by intensifying these virtues. Whether one agrees with Nietzsche’s account of either the birth of morality or the birth of Christianity is irrelevant for our purposes here.26 For the question that concerns us is really whether one can find evidence of revenge and resentment in Christians. Without doubt, there is good evidence to think Nietzsche is right, though working out exactly how revenge or selfishness is to be found in Christian faith and practice requires some care. Since I fully agree with Westphal’s account of Nietzsche, my goal here will be to elaborate and build upon that account. Clearly, the most important element is the basic move that the slaves make—simply reversing the values of the nobles—for it provides a logical pattern that continually recurs. Westphal calls this move the ‘‘Fonda Fallacy,’’ after Jane Fonda’s conclusion in the 1970s that, since the governments of the United States and South Vietnam were evil, then clearly Ho Chi Minh must be ‘‘good.’’ It’s not too hard to see what is fallacious about such reasoning: the possibility that they are all evil (to some degree or another) is simply ignored. Yet this logic that we might summarize as ‘‘the one who oppresses me is evil, therefore, I must be good’’ is not simply at the heart of the slave revolt but of a great deal of religious thinking. Indeed, if anything is the problem, it is that the ability to see evil in others 66

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and to think somehow that such evil either absolves or mitigates the evil in oneself that makes even writing on this phenomenon a little dangerous. Now, Westphal is clearly aware of this problem and goes out of his way to avoid falling into self-righteousness. That he suggests the meditations on Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud he provides in Suspicion and Faith be used ‘‘as a Lenten penance’’ for oneself is a powerful guardrail against falling into any kind of Fonda Fallacy.27 In that respect, his text is truly exemplary. Yet the ease of slipping into the Fonda Fallacy is all too real, even when that very fallacy is being exposed. Westphal tells a story (which one would at least like to hope is not true) about a Sunday-school teacher who presents the parable of the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not like the wicked tax collector. The teacher closes the lesson by having the children bow their heads and thank God that they are not like the Pharisee! Let me make Westphal’s point even more strongly. If Westphal is right that there is a kind of revenge that ‘‘consists of branding one’s enemy as evil,’’ then branding anyone as evil could always become an act of revenge.28 As it turns out, it is all too easy to cite examples of modern day Pharisees. But this opens one up to a certain kind of danger precisely because of the logic of exposing evil. For example, consider the following quotation from Pat Robertson: ‘‘Just like what Nazi Germany did to the Jews, so liberal America is now doing to the evangelical Christians. It’s no different. It is the same thing. . . . More terrible than anything suffered by any minority in history.’’29 My guess is that almost anyone reading this will immediately identify it as so wrongheaded that it is difficult even to know where to begin one’s reply. Certainly, it sounds very much like Robertson is guilty of the logic in which ‘‘the one who oppresses me is evil, therefore, I must be good.’’ Perhaps Robertson would protest to the contrary, but few would likely take his protestations seriously. Yet the moment that concerns me here has less to with Robertson than it has to do with me in citing it or you, gentle reader, in reading it. For it is hard not to cite such a thing without the accompanying moment—recognized or unrecognized—of thanking God that one is not like Pat Robertson. That, of course, is precisely the point that Westphal wants us to recognize. The story of the Sunday-school teacher appears in his concluding chapter of Suspicion and Faith, in which he considers the ‘‘dangers of suspicion’’ and notes how easy it is ‘‘to become a Pharisee in the process of unmasking Pharisaic hypocrisy.’’30 So what keeps any such act from becoming an act of revenge? I think the answer—if there is anything like ‘‘the answer’’—would have to go something like this: one would have to follow Paul’s dictum of ‘‘speaking Bruce Ellis Benson

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the truth in love’’ (Eph. 4:15). In one sense, I hesitate to make this suggestion precisely because this passage is sometimes rather cavalierly uttered by Christians—and sometimes in a cynical way. Yet it strikes me that, if we take Paul seriously, we do actually have the formula for avoiding revenge. Of course, while this might seem simple enough, actually loving someone else is no easy task (as we will later see). Given that, it is appropriate at this point to turn to Nietzsche’s critique of love and pity, which provides an opening for considering what true love might look like. Love and Pity Nietzsche opens On the Genealogy of Morals with the declaration that morality—and particularly Christian morality—must be completely reevaluated. As he puts it: ‘‘we need a critique of moral values, for once the value of these values must itself be called into question.’’31 Putting the values themselves into question is a remarkable act, for it is usually they that allow one to question the morality of other acts. Although the section from which this quotation is taken specifically singles out ‘‘pity’’ or ‘‘compassion’’ (Mitleid, which can be translated by either term), Nietzsche is equally suspicious of any kind of love that is altruistic in nature. As he puts it elsewhere: ‘‘Actions are never what they appear to us to be!’’32 While that may be far too sweeping a claim (as I will argue later), there can be no question that they often are motivated by something other than their ostensible motives. In the same way that he argues that the slaves’ revaluation of values is an act of revenge and so done out of self-interest, so he argues that any seemingly altruistic act is, in reality, one motivated by self-love. Yet, since Nietzsche has both specific and general critiques for altruistic love and pity, we need to consider them both separately and together. At first glance, it might seem strange that Nietzsche claims the following: ‘‘Benefiting and hurting others are ways of exercising one’s power over them—that is all one wants in such cases!’’33 While ‘‘hurting’’ might seem an obvious way of exerting power, ‘‘benefiting’’ is considerably less obvious. Yet Nietzsche is clear that we only benefit those who are dependent upon us in some way and that ‘‘we want to increase their power because we thus increase our own.’’34 So any benefit given to others is always designed to benefit us. In response to any who might claim that there are truly altruistic actions, Nietzsche would simply respond, ‘‘No Altruism!’’—indeed, ‘‘the ‘neighbour’ praises selflessness because it brings him advantages.’’35 Nietzsche is convinced that the praise given to 68

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‘‘selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice, or sympathy (Mitgefu¨hl) and compassion (Mitleiden)’’ is done so ‘‘naively,’’ that is, by people who simply do not understand what is really at work in such actions.36 Perhaps no better example of the true selfishness at work in love is what is widely held up as the pinnacle of love: romantic love. For Nietzsche, ‘‘sexual love . . . is what most clearly reveals itself as a craving for new property.’’37 As much as one might be tempted to disagree with Nietzsche—‘‘oh no, it’s nothing like that’’—one must admit that Nietzsche has a whole tradition of love poetry and ballads that affirm his contention. Or, to make the point even stronger, it is precisely in the very declaration of love that real motivation of ‘‘owning’’ the other is likewise declared. The title of one of Elvis Presley’s hits makes that point as well as any: ‘‘I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.’’ In fact, it is particularly telling that the declaration of love is preceded by the wanting and needing. The logic would seem to be clear: I want you; I need you; therefore, I love you! Yet simply considering the repertoire of love songs in virtually any genre (whether in opera, jazz, rock, etc.) makes clear that this is not merely an incidental part of declared love but a central, perhaps even the central, aspect of such love. As Nietzsche puts it: ‘‘the lover wants unconditional and sole possession of the longed-for person,’’ which leads him to marvel at the fact ‘‘that this love has furnished the concept of love as the opposite of egoism when it may be in fact the most candid expression of egoism.’’38 Nietzsche’s indictment of love is all the more significant in light of his claim that Christianity is ‘‘the immortal chandala vengeance as a religion of love.’’39 In that one phrase, we have the whole sordid mess that Nietzsche takes Christianity to be: a philosophy of hatred and revenge that masks itself in altruistic love. Indeed, the vengeance that is brought about by the ‘‘chandala’’ (the Hindu term for the untouchable—that is, the slaves) is eternal. To prove his point, Nietzsche quotes both Tertullian and St. Thomas, who speak of the heavenly ‘‘bliss’’ (as Thomas puts it) of watching the damned suffer in torment.40 With such splendid ready-made examples, Nietzsche’s case seems rather easy. Thus, the ‘‘love’’ of which Christians so lovingly speak turns out to be something rather different. But Nietzsche has not quite exhausted the motive of Christian love by claiming it is a kind of revenge. He also thinks it is motivated by reward. As Nietzsche puts it, ‘‘The principle of ‘Christian love’: in the end it wants to be paid well.’’41 The verse that Nietzsche quotes before this comment is Matthew 5:46: ‘‘For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?’’ The implication, at least as far as Nietzsche is concerned, is that the reward is the true Bruce Ellis Benson

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reason for love. In the end, then, altruistic love is reduced to vengeance and reward—exactly the opposite of what such love is supposed to be. Pity, as it turns out, is equally bad for Nietzsche. Once again, this has a particular effect upon Christianity, for Nietzsche terms it ‘‘the religion of pity.’’42 There are at least two problems with pity for Nietzsche. The first is that, like love, it is not really what it seems to be. Pity would seem to be about the other person, just as altruistic love pretends to be. Yet, Nietzsche contends that, even if we are ‘‘not consciously thinking about ourselves,’’ we are ‘‘doing so very strongly unconsciously.’’ For Nietzsche, this becomes clear when we realize that, if we can avoid seeing someone suffer, we normally look away. But there are cases in which we realize ‘‘we can present ourselves as the more powerful and as a helper’’ or ‘‘we are certain of applause’’ or ‘‘we want to feel how fortunate we are in contrast.’’43 In all three of these examples, it is clearly we, and not the other, who are the true focus of the action. It is not hard to see how this kind of motivation could be the case in many instances of pity. For pity can easily become the opportunity to demonstrate power, win accolades, or simply recognize one’s own good fortune. The illustration of the Pharisee thanking God that he is not a tax collector could be used here just as well. Or we could point to the way in which organizations ministering to the poor often play on a sense of the superiority of their donors and make them feel both powerful and worthy of honor.44 Those lists at the end of opera and symphony programs of the various levels of givers are successful on all three counts. Even the phrase ‘‘those less fortunate’’ makes it clear who is fortunate. And, even if we insist that ‘‘being fortunate’’ has nothing to do with what we ‘‘deserve,’’ it is hard to shake off that sense of superiority, honor, and power. Perhaps, one might ask, we ought to think of pity in other terms, as ‘‘compassion.’’ To be sure, the term Nietzsche uses (Mitleiden or Mitleid) is more literally translated as ‘‘suffering with’’ or ‘‘compassion.’’ Yet, Nietzsche has a ready response to this, and here we come to the second problem concerning pity (or compassion). ‘‘Pity (Mitleiden), insofar as it really causes suffering (Leiden) . . . increases the amount of suffering in the world.’’45 The point couldn’t be simpler: why multiply suffering? If I suffer alongside you, there are now two people suffering instead of one. The numbers simply don’t make any sense. While I will address this problem later, it is clear that Nietzsche advocates what is, in effect, a Stoic sort of approach. In order to minimize pain, I don’t truly suffer alongside the other (even if I might pretend to do so as a way of being gracious).

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Appropriating Westphal Appropriating Nietzsche

True Love What should be clear at this point is that Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity can be summed up by the claim that the ‘‘religion of love’’ is really the religion of selfishness and revenge. Sometimes those motives are cleverly concealed, and sometimes they are fully apparent. Rather than argue against Nietzsche’s charge, Westphal shows in Suspicion and Faith just how right Nietzsche is. And that admission—along with its correlate of considering one’s own motives—is appropriate not merely for Lent. Of course, once one admits that Nietzsche is right, a new question arises: what would true love look like? Now Nietzsche is certainly not going to admit that such a thing either exists or could exist. Indeed, even the very expression ‘‘true love’’—the title of multiple films, songs, and books— conjures up precisely the egoistic ‘‘romantic love’’ that Nietzsche so vehemently criticizes. It would be tempting, then, to declare true love simply impossible. In one sense, it certainly is. If ‘‘love’’ means a wholly pure regard for the other in which there is absolutely no regard for the self, then it would seem that there can be no such love. Thus, I fully agree with Jacques Derrida when he remarks: ‘‘There is not narcissism and nonnarcissism; there are narcissisms that are more or less comprehensive, generous, open, extended. . . . Love is narcissistic.’’46 It would be far too much to expect that there could be any kind of love that wholly excluded the self. Yet, having freely admitted that, I am not inclined—as is Derrida—to say, therefore, that love (like justice or the gift) is ‘‘the impossible,’’ since I have a more modest conception of love that does not exclude all possible love of self.47 On my account, love of self is not necessarily incompatible with true love of the other. But, of course, that love of the other must be true or genuine. Still, what exactly is a genuine love for the other? A typical definition of altruistic love is that one has a true or genuine concern for the other’s well being that is not simply a disguised form of concern for one’s own being. I say ‘‘simply’’ here because, again, I don’t see the mixture of love of self and love of the other as some kind of ‘‘contaminated’’ love. It is when love of self is either the exclusive or dominant moment in the love of the other that there is a problem. So altruistic love can have a range of possibilities in which the self plays a greater or lesser role. Obviously, the more the emphasis is on the other, the higher the form of altruism. But this logic need not lead us to conclude that pure love of the other is necessarily the pinnacle of altruistic love. It does, however, lead us to move from thinking of love in terms of reciprocity. That is not to say that there

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cannot be something like reciprocity that results from altruistic love. For the one loved may also become a lover. Yet reciprocity can never be the focus.48 For, once it becomes the focus of love, altruism is simply impossible. To describe how true love of the other actually works, it is helpful to consider Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenological reflections in The Erotic Phenomenon. As Marion forcefully demonstrates, we cannot arrive at a genuine love of the other if we begin with the question, ‘‘Does anyone out there love me?’’ Not only can we never be assured that someone loves us, but even beginning with such a concern simply cannot lead us to loving the other. Marion considers various reasons why such a move will not work, but here I wish to focus on the following one: that such a starting concern reflects an interest for reciprocity that simply cancels out the possibility of true love. If I begin with such a question, then I will only love in return, after the fact, only if someone loves me first and only as much as someone first loves me. I will play the game of love, certainly, but I will risk the least amount possible, and on condition that the other go first. Love thus is definitely put into operation for such an ego, but always out of panic, in a situation of lack and under the yoke of reciprocity . . . thus love does not really come into play.49 Any sort of ‘‘love’’ that is generated out of the desire to be loved can really be no more than self-love, for whatever love comes into play is limited to—and measured by—whatever love is directed toward me. Instead of beginning with that question, then, Marion insists that one must begin with a radically different question: ‘‘Can I love first?’’ That is, can my love must be ‘‘an advance?’’ If so, then I simply love the other and, consequently, make the first advance. And I do so without expecting that the other will make the first move or even subsequently love me. As Marion puts it: ‘‘The lover appears when one of the actors in the exchange no longer poses prior conditions, and loves without requiring to be loved, and thus, in the figure of the gift, abolishes economy.’’50 Such love is not motivated by ‘‘reason’’; indeed, reason is quite insufficient to establish such love, which is why Marion speaks of the ‘‘principle of insufficient reason’’ when it comes to love. It is not that love goes against reason or that they are at odds; rather, reason simply can provide no support for love. One is reminded of the famous French saying (which, interestingly, Marion does not cite): ‘‘L’amour de Dieu est folie’’ (the love of God is folly). From the perspective of reason, love makes no sense, and the love 72

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of God all the less so. Moreover, it is important to be clear as to the motivation at work in love: I simply love the other. There is no further justification. Thus, instead of loving the other because the other is lovable, it is the very loving of the other that makes the other lovable. Although Marion says that the lover still hopes the beloved will love the lover, those hopes are never certain, and even what the lover hopes for, ‘‘does not belong to the order of that which one possesses.’’51 Why? Because neither the other nor the love of the other can be possessed, precisely because one can at most only ‘‘touch’’ the other. In such love, there is no revenge or disguised self-love. There is also no pity that wins me applause or makes me feel superior. But there certainly is compassion in that I may suffer alongside the other. Here Nietzsche truly has a point: such compassion really does multiply suffering. Yet, if compassion truly leads to more suffering, then that compassion must be motivated by genuine love. For why would I actually suffer alongside someone if I did not truly care for that person? True, I could find the suffering of someone else discomforting because it reminds me that I could—or, perhaps, someday may—suffer too. But, if that were the focus of my discomfort, then I would not be experiencing true compassion. If one really suffers alongside the other, it is because of the love of the other, not because of some reference to self. Again, should such suffering alongside be accompanied by a reference to self, it is not, thereby, negated as true compassion. Rather, true compassion exists when one truly loves the other. Could I ever hope that Nietzsche might accept such an account? Perhaps we could say that such a hope is like that of the lover who loves without reason and without knowing if the beloved will love the lover. Of course, he would have to move from the mode of suspicion to the mode of love, in which suspicion is simply a nonstarter. But, as I have suggested, suspicion should only be a moment. As useful as it may be, when it takes center stage, it should become suspicious of itself. Only when suspicion goes to its final stage—achieving suspicion of suspicion—could there be any room for love to find a place.

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Remaining Faithful Postmodern Claims, Christian Messages EDITH WYSCHOGROD

Thinking about religion in postmodernity may make strange bedfellows, stranger even than those allegedly made by politics. In this context, Merold Westphal makes a compelling case for linking the seemingly incompatible faith claims of Christianity and the indeterminacy, randomness, and paralogistic strategies that are generally attributed to postmodern philosophers (without entering the fray of what counts as post) from whose worlds God has often been evacuated and rejected as an appropriate philosopheme. In Overcoming Onto-Theology, a collection of essays most of which were published between 1993 and 2001, he expands and comments upon recent critiques of ontotheology, from Heidegger’s exhumation of the meaning of being to Derrida’s undoing of the logic of presence, in order to draw out their relevance for Christianity’s account of faith and revelation.1 Westphal appropriates not only recent postmodern thought but also its nineteenth-century Hintergrund in Hegel, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche in the interest of further developing a ‘‘religiously significant discourse about the personal Creator, Lawgiver and Merciful Savior’’ of Western religious traditions. Westphal has from the get-go not only called upon philosophers and theologians but also challenged pastors and teachers within the Christian community to appropriate critiques of religion, what he calls the ‘‘atheism of suspicion,’’ in the interest of dispelling an all-too-easy faith. In the first part of his 1984 work, God, Guilt and Death, he throws down the gauntlet using Rudolph Otto’s terms, the mysterium tremendum and fascinans to 74

designate the sacred as that which is both terrifying and fascinating.2 The human response to the sacred, as expressed in differing religious perspectives, is the consciousness of guilt and death. Westphal finds an exemplary testimony to these two issues in Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, who affirms the possibility of forgiveness in order to be ‘‘freed of fear’’ and delivered ‘‘from the cloud of death.’’ Far from advocating the cheap grace of untroubled assent to what Kierkegaard would have called the commonplaces of Christendom, Westphal proposes the possibility of an imaginative entry into the experience of another, Nietzsche’s hermeneutic of radical suspicion—that ‘‘malicious squint’’ we must focus upon ourselves in regard to claims of self-knowledge3 —and Hegel’s transferal of the knowledge of God to that of man.4 In his earlier work, Westphal places Kierkegaard in the conspectus of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Hegel, philosophers whom one admires but of whom one must remain wary. Thus he concludes: ‘‘(l) We should learn from Kierkegaard not to confuse the relatively easy task of understanding objective meanings with the much more difficult task of understanding what it means to be religious and (2) we should continue to assume that whether or not we are religious, we can deepen our understanding of the religious life.’’5 Yet I would maintain that as his work progresses, Westphal becomes even more Kierkegaardian, not because a given persona belongs to a hierarchical arrangement of personae in which a persona may be overcome in the interest of a more elevated perspective, but rather (in a more nuanced fashion) because each perspective can become a critical instrument with regard to the others. Consequently, in the ecstatic discourse found in the first part of Either/Or, the aesthetic perspective suggests that one continually vary oneself as to its real secret, in order to ensure that one can produce one’s moods at will. This studied arbitrariness that the aesthete recommends opens the possibility for the enjoyment of all of existence and, thereby, allows ‘‘reality to run aground.’’ The more subjective or inward standpoint of the aesthetic as eluding both a rationally limited empathy and also the ethical might be said to color affectively the various modes of religiosity themselves. I shall return to this centrality of Kierkegaard in Westphal’s work in due course. In his early work, Westphal turns to three modes of religion to describe the modalities in which traditions have attempted to provide exit pathways from guilt and death: (1) the antiworldly ‘‘exit strategies’’ of exilic religion (for example, Advaita Vedanta and Gnosticism), (2) the mimetic (for example, the mythological structures of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt), and (3) the covenantal religions of the Bible that focus upon punishment and forgiveness. It is specifically the last (both directly or indirectly) that continues to provide the focus in his later work. In a terse Edith Wyschogrod

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formulation of the divine human relation, he maintains that ‘‘God’s role is to demand repentance, while offering reconciliation. The human role is to acknowledge guilt, while accepting forgiveness.’’6 I am in agreement with much of Westphal’s compelling account of the covenantal and, in what follows, shall try to draw out some of its implications, as well as the ways in which I differ from those implications. Beyond Ontotheology Before bringing together the earlier work with his more recent essays, I should like to focus on Westphal’s reflections on the problems generated by recent critiques of ontotheology. To do so, I wish to turn to a conversation held at a session of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) that was devoted to his book, Overcoming Onto-Theology.7 In this text, Westphal, always the sensitive reader and astute critic, ponders postmodern thinkers as offering salutary critiques of religion that must be taken into account by Christian thinkers. Might it not be assumed that the incompatibility of Christian faith (as Westphal reads it) and postmodern perspectives could be condensed in the dismissive postmodern apothegm: Christianity is a metanarrative, one of many ‘‘big stories’’ intended as an umbrella to cover the meaning of individual and communal experience, just another legitimating narrative, as Lyotard would express it, that place a stamp of approval upon the cultural discourses and practices of modernity? Westphal addresses this critique directly and astutely observes that Christianity as Heilsgeschichte is first-order rather than second-order language and, as such, a meganarrative rather than a metanarrative, the latter originating in philosophy, especially the philosophy of the cognitive subject. It is the stress upon the cognitive subject that (famously) led Heidegger to interpret the meaning of Being in the present age as the being of techne. Westphal notes that the most important difference between Heilsgeschichte and metanarrative consists in the function of the latter ‘‘primarily to legitimate ‘our’ practices, both theoretical and political [whereas] the biblical meganarrative is more nearly a delegitimation discourse, holding before us the Kingdom of God . . . reminding us of the continuing gap between the kingdom and our language games.’’8 I would again stress that, with and against Heidegger and Derrida, Westphal often adopts the conceptual persona of Kierkegaard (in the sense, as Gilles Deleuze would have it, that the philosopher’s identity is not different from that of her or his concepts). Are not the critical strategies of Johannes de Silentio or Johannes Climacus akin to the pointed jabs of postmodern critics aimed at 76

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the pretensions of modern philosophy in its rationalist or empirical guises? Does faith in its own distinctive register not accuse the rationality of secular modernity of an uncritical dogmatism? In Buddhist-like language, Westphal seeks ‘‘a middle way,’’ somewhere ‘‘between the rejection of the referent and an uncritical jumping on the bandwagon of this month’s politically correct fad.’’9 Westphal’s midpoint is a nonsite, one at which I often find myself poised, less like Nietzsche’s tightrope walker than as one suspended on a monorail between an Augustinian vision (a figure frequently evoked by Westphal) and postmodern gestures of protest. Elsewhere I have described this as an embodiment of the joyful swooner and the protesting cynic, kunikos understood in its classical sense as the Ur-hippie of the ancient world kicking up a storm!10 Westphal’s protest, therefore, is like that of Diogenes of Sinope, whose search with a lamp was first brought to prominence not in the figure of Nietzsche’s madman but in Tertullian’s praise for Diogenes’s luminous quest as contrasted with that of the heretic Marcion.11 Heidegger’s Christianity: Geglaubt oder Gedacht Consider first Westphal’s exploration of whether and how to construe the beyond of ontotheology as considered in his richly evocative readings of Heidegger. Westphal warns that one must discern that Heidegger is more Kierkegaardian than Nietzschean and must identify Heidegger’s real adversaries to be Hegel and Aristotle rather than Augustine or even Nietzsche. For Heidegger, God enters philosophy under philosophy’s aegis: ‘‘God is conceived as causa prima and causa sui,’’12 thereby conforming to the demands of human rationality—a project that culminates in the subordination of God to a value, albeit the highest value. Heidegger contends that this account of the elevation of value is ‘‘sheer blasphemy meddling in the theology of faith.’’13 The latter affirmation would seem to support the view that the believing attestations of faith triumph over the primacy of the meaning of being.14 There is (or is there?) another Heidegger, the Heidegger of the 1927 (Marburg) and 1928 (Tu¨bingen) lectures that have garnered much attention and are given consideration by Westphal in his essay ‘‘Heidegger’s Theologische Jugendschriften.’’15 I agree with Westphal’s claim that the express aim of Heidegger’s essay ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology’’ is to rescue philosophy from having foisted upon it the rationality of science. In that context, Heidegger proclaims in Pathmarks that theology is an ontic science, ‘‘founded primarily by faith, even though its statements and procedures of proof formally derive from the free operation of reason.’’16 Edith Wyschogrod

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Thus Heidegger’s interest in the status of theology is played out against his demurral that ‘‘philosophy is not a science.’’17 Moreover, if theology is all about faith, theology is not speculative knowledge of God but of ‘‘religious life seen as a case of factical life.’’ Westphal maintains that it is here, in the context of factical existence, where Kierkegaard influences Heidegger’s project, that is, the task of seeking ‘‘the right region for any encounter with Christianity’s claims.’’18 Yet, Heidegger’s words remain deeply confounding: ‘‘qua philosopher one is not religious but as philosopher [one] is also a religious person. The trick is to be both.’’19 A crucial question for Westphal then is if, as Heidegger maintains, theology is an ontic science that thematizes that which is prior to scientific disclosure, namely faith, is faith to be interpreted as a mode of factical existence, a Stimmung analogous in its mode of disclosure to the Angst of Sein und Zeit, thereby requiring the subjecting of factical faith to basic ontological inquiry? Yet Heidegger also maintains that in faith existence, when struck by revelation, comes to know itself as a forgetting of God, in sum, that faith understands itself not philosophically but only in believing. Indeed, Heidegger writes to a friend in 1919 that although the system of Catholicism is problematic, he has not lost his Christian faith.20 Does this claim not suggest that God enters theological discourse as an Urgrund or, even better, a ‘‘nonground’’ that must be read otherwise than being? Does Heidegger not evade the question of faith’s claims to primordiality by turning to pre-Christian existence, to guilt as an original determination of the Dasein that is taken up and included in the reborn Dasein’s encounter with itself as a sinning Dasein? If we pursue this tack of guilt’s inclusion, is Heidegger’s concession that faith to be faith is a rebirth, a radical making new and putting off of the old, then vitiated? Is guilt not a post hoc constitution of the ‘‘origin’’ of sin, a covering over or obfuscation of what came later, that is again, sin, while remaining more primordial from the standpoint of faith? Does this reversal of sequence not parallel the manner in which primordial disclosures (for example, that of language and language’s fallenness into Gerede or ‘‘idle chatter’’) are brought to light, such that ontological clarification follows upon what is factically prior? To be sure, we have learned from Heidegger and Derrida of the difficulties inherent in pinning down the ‘‘who’’ that functions as the referent designated by the proper name. The issue for Westphal is not ‘‘will the real Heidegger now stand up,’’ but how we are to parse these primordiality claims. In his remarks at SPEP, Westphal noted that there is ‘‘a fatal ambiguity’’ in Heidegger’s early essay ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology,’’ in which 78

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he considers ‘‘the primordiality and autonomy of faith as a mode of factical existence.’’ But Westphal contends that ‘‘what Heidegger gives with one hand he takes away with the other, for he then claims that theology must be subjected to an autonomous ontological inquiry . . . and that theology must be corrected by his kind of phenomenological ontology grounded in pre-Christian existence.’’21 Somewhat later, Heidegger will invoke the primordiality claims of Pauline faith (although somewhat Hellenized) against ontotheology, thereby leaving his position uncertain.22 In this regard, I am in accord with Westphal. Nietzsche: Daybreak or Nightfall Westphal’s Kierkegaardian sympathies do not preclude his appealing to Nietzsche’s critique of modernity. ‘‘Like the prophets before him and Levinas after him, Kierkegaard is a philosopher of shalom rather than of polemos.’’23 Yet, in his ‘‘Nietzsche as a Theological Resource’’ (and in consonance with my monorail metaphor earlier), Westphal deduces that Nietzsche belongs to the tribe of prophetic protesters. ‘‘Placing no constraints upon what we can say about God but only on the how,’’ Nietzsche directs his hermeneutical suspicion toward the existential import of a belief rather than toward its truth claims.24 Holding a belief in a spirit of vengeance embodies what I (albeit not Westphal) would call the stance of Miss Piggy of Muppets Show fame, the Moi of vengeful vanity. But is the Nietzschean manner of discrediting a belief not an instance of the genetic fallacy? No, in that one does not try to disprove the content of a belief through the act of discrediting. The truth or falsity of the content is beside the point. Moreover, Westphal sees Nietzsche’s suspicion of the revenge motive as a powerful instrument for deconstructing the claims not only of ontotheology but also those of theologically generated conceptions of justice grounded in ressentiment. What is salutary in all of this for Westphal is Nietzsche’s pointing out a slippery slope: from the absoluteness of belief in theology’s object, one slides into predicating absolute certainty with regard to the rationality of the human subject.25 Nietzsche, Westphal has suggested, turns to the how of thinking rather than to the truth claims of the content of thought. But is not the ‘‘how’’ always already imbricated in the ‘‘what?’’ By describing the ‘‘how,’’ does the ‘‘how’’ not morph into a ‘‘what,’’ into a proposition that, in turn, must be interrogated with regard to its ‘‘how,’’ which leads to an infinite regress of continuing interrogation? Does Levinas’s distinction between Saying and Said alleviate the difficulty, for even if the Said belongs to the regime of the ‘‘what,’’ the Saying itself cannot turn into mere content, Edith Wyschogrod

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into another ‘‘what.’’ Saying remains an Austin-like performative, a promise that it, the Saying, stands as a guarantor for the said. Although Westphal concedes that the ‘‘what’’ changes with the ‘‘how,’’ he argues in his remarks that the meaning of performatives presupposes a constative core and that, at an abstract level, there may be an identical content in several statements. But the question must then be raised as to whether there can be a constative core that is itself context-free, that can be embedded in differing performative utterances, among them those that make ethical demands. No One Is Like the Other Before turning to Westphal’s account of Levinas, especially with regard to the matter of guilt, I should like to maintain that intrinsic to Levinas’s account of the other is the view that each of us is other of the other, an assumption that would seem to entail the claim that the other be absolved not only of guilt but of the guilt of mine that he or she has taken on. This position is well articulated in a silent meditational text sometimes printed in the Jewish New Year prayer book: ‘‘I have come to plead before thee on behalf of thy people who have made me messenger though I am not deserving or qualified for the task. . . . Blame not [the others who have commissioned me] for my sins. . . . Convict them not for my iniquities.’’26 Thus each one is released from the shame of the other, thereby widening the sphere of responsibility beyond what is predicated by Westphal. Yet he might endorse this widening insofar as responsibility belongs not only to the ethical as justice, but also to the necessity for forgiveness, a forgiveness that is not bound up with repeatable infractions. Current interpretations of the other have ranged from Levinas’s privileging of the other as an ethical imperative to Anglican theologian John Milbank’s claim that the other who exceeds description is a vacuous concept. In his essay, ‘‘Faith as Overcoming Ontological Xenophobia,’’ Westphal faults a certain privileging of alterity as a tactic that forces alterity to carry the burden of meanings generally attributed to God, especially the meaning of unknowability. Yet in his key essay, ‘‘Overcoming OntoTheology,’’ Westphal maintains that the hermeneutical turn in its various versions forces us to acknowledge that absolute knowledge ‘‘is not in the cards for us,’’ so that, it would seem, Westphal might be ready after all to climb on the alterity bandwagon.27 But he astutely perceives that the entailments of an affirmation or rejection of the unknowability claim demands extensive inquiry, for example, on the dissenting side, ‘‘theoretical

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negation may be in the service of a practical denial,’’ as Feuerbach saw.28 What is more, in the same essay Westphal shows that if the unknowability of the radically other requires a negative theology as Derrida warns, negative discourse itself expands so that all discourse becomes de facto theological. Derrida writes, ‘‘Every time I say X is neither this nor that I would start to speak of God. God’s name would suit everything that may not be broached [except negatively].’’29 Why then Derrida? Westphal maintains that Derrida brings us close to a genuine reflection on God, to the xenophobic terror of meeting a stranger. For Westphal, the notion of the stranger earlier put forward by Paul Tillich—as a student in one of Tillich’s classes, I am no stranger to the conception of the stranger!—can only be overcome as reconciliation by the courage to meet the one who has become a stranger. But the radically other Other subordinates claims to self-sufficiency grounded in ‘‘the Neuter, in Being.’’ Thus Levinas contends, and in this regard Derrida may be his heir, one’s own freedom is put into question by the other whose strangeness is absolute. Being hardens the will but, for Levinas, ‘‘freedom is ashamed of itself ’’ when confronted by the other.30 For Levinas (as for Sartre), Westphal points out, we encounter the look of the other as one of moral condemnation. It is in guilt or shame that we are called into account. For Westphal, ‘‘fault . . . is the necessary condition for religion. Only by repenting and submitting to a heterological will, does Augustine overcome the ‘‘xenophobia that takes place as ontology.’’31 Might one ask Westphal (with some trepidation in light of the troubled conceptual relation between Heidegger and Levinas) whether Levinas’s account of the shame that calls my freedom into question and opens the way for the incursion of the infinite bears a resemblance to the guilt that, for Heidegger, is the precondition for Dasein’s encountering itself as sin, a guilt that is taken up into Dasein’s Christian rebirth. Westphal replies that this cannot be the case in that guilt refers to oneself whereas shame presupposes the other. Yet he astutely observes that both may be unrecognized encounters with ‘‘a Divine Stranger’’ whose presence is not recognized.’’ What is more, ontological xenophobia may open the way to a new understanding of the temporalization of the religious that leads to a return to what is prior to the advent of shame and guilt. Repentance is—if I may make the analogy—a mode of time travel that erases time by turning time back as though the infraction had never taken place and, thereby, reverting to the time prior to its commission. If so, then shame and guilt are always already bound up with the possibility of their undoing.

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Is Westphal’s Derrida Different? It should come as no surprise that for Derrida ‘‘God is and appears as what he is within difference . . . as difference and within dissimulation.’’32 All of this is (as laid out in Derrida’s account of Jabe´s) the utterance of one who is both rabbi and poet, with the rabbi chastising the poet that the text is not a result of the legerdemain of the poet and the poet reminding the rabbi that his relation to texts is no open sesame, that texts are, in other words, ‘‘systems of contingent meaning.’’33 For Westphal, this double Derrida brings in a chain of differential meanings so as to ‘‘welcome meaning into the source of meaning,’’ another translation of ‘‘God himself is and appears as what he is in difference.’’34 Furthermore, Westphal’s Derrida is also a thinker of play but not a subject of play, since, for Derrida, there can be no subject of play. There is the play of the structure of the world, but, strikingly, the desiring subject desires certitude.35 It is precisely the play of the world that deprives us of the security of the certainty that we desperately crave. Thus Derrida’s account of play and desire in effect reminds us that we are not God. I should like to propose another Derrida (if indeed he is other) for Merold’ s consideration in order to inquire as to whether this Derrida comports with the poet, the rabbi or the thinker of play. In what I consider one of Derrida’s clearest and most succinct texts, his comments on faith and knowledge at a 1994 conference held on Capri, Derrida contends that the question of religion is inextricably bound up with ‘‘the evil of abstraction,’’ whose sites are conjoined with religion: ‘‘religion and cyberspace, religion and the numeric, religion and digitality,’’ religion that ‘‘reacts antagonistically and reaffirmatively to them.’’36 Can this conjoining be configured within the dyadic tension between the rabbinic and the poetic? Can abstraction lie along the fold of the juridical and prophetic? For Derrida, to think their imbrication, one must retreat to a desert to ponder ‘‘two fountains or tracks . . . the messianic and the chora.’’37 Messianism is seen as an opening to the future, to the coming of the other as a singular event. In the essay ‘‘Deconstruction of Actuality’’ in Negotiations, Derrida claims that one who arrives, the arrivant, cannot be reduced to the sheer fact of arrival. As an ‘‘absolutely other singularity,’’ the arrivant lies beyond anticipation, an absolute surprise.’’38 Does the beyond of anticipation, like the temporalization of repentance, not overturn the thinking of time? Is not the ‘‘to-come’’ the repetition of an ‘‘already-havingcome’’ in conformity with Levinas’s ‘‘archaic past’’ and Derrida’s ‘‘architrace,’’ neither of which can be made present? But must we not ask Derrida whether if the one who is to come cannot arrive, one may still anticipate? Westphal’s Hegelian side suggests that ‘‘Derrida has become a 82

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species of Unhappy Consciousness . . . [intending] a meaning he intends to be absolute (not deconstructible) . . . meaning that cannot be fulfilled in intuition or clearly intended.’’ As such, ‘‘Derridean thought remains without hope, anticipating no future time in which we will be present to a just world.’’39 Still, does a suspicion with regard to actual messianic claims not have a helpful effect of calling attention to the preempting of these claims by the powerful, as the history of messianic claimants has demonstrated? May we not now segue into that which resists both ontotheological and Abrahamic revelation, the vexing and endlessly debated question of Chora, of that which is ‘‘impassible, heterogenous to all the processes of historical revelation’’?40 In attempting to think Chora, I identify with the little head-scratching Microsoft icon of befuddlement that appears on the screen of my laptop while the text of an attachment, a supplement to a message, enters and retreats. For Derrida, as the womb of forms, ‘‘Chora will never have entered religion, never present itself to be sacralized . . . or historicized.’’ He considers that since Chora is ‘‘neither being, nor the Good, nor God nor man nor history, it will always have been yet remains irrecoverable.’’41 Without entering into the complexities of the ways in which infinity is explored and exploded in Derrida, are we precluded from alluding to an infinite that Derrida describes as allowing for inscription and for the play of substitutions, an infinite open to the dissemination of meanings without totalization, in other words, as Chora? If, in addition, we may speak of Chora as the nontotalizable ‘‘non-place of originarities, of the revealed and the revealable’’42 is Chora exposable to the charge that it exhibits an infinitist metaphysics, that of the bad infinite, das Schlechte Unendliche of Hegel?43 Hegel and Derrida—Derrida and Hegel—in endless flight and reappropriation. One can only eagerly await Westphal’s elaboration of a claim made in his oral remarks that there are in fact two Derridas, the early Nietzschean Derrida and a softer later Levinasian thinker who allows for the ‘‘equiprimordiality of meaning and nonmeaning.’’ Whose Hermeneutic? What Suspicion? In his courageous endorsement of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as instruments for the cleansing and renewal of religion, Westphal argues for their salutary effect upon the certainties of a self-assured piety. This endorsement is grounded in what he perceives to be their affinity with the internal critics of Christianity, ‘‘with Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees, Paul’s critique of works righteousness, [and] James’s critique of cheap grace.’’44 But are Edith Wyschogrod

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we not here compelled to appeal to another radical hermeneutics of suspicion? Must the views of the critique themselves not also be called to order by a questioning that must arise anew in ripostes that question the questioner? Must we not also ask whether the demonization of the Pharisees has resulted in the demonization of Judaism? Should there not also be a discipline of ‘‘ritual rectitude’’ as an expression of the ethical that calls antinomian extremes to order? Is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s celebrated questioning of cheap grace not itself a criticism of the failure to act, of belief that does not put into practice what is demanded by rectitude? Is there not a system of relays in which each of these suspicions has the potential for assuming a posture of self-righteousness? Westphal’s grasp of paradox as envisioned by Kierkegaard indicates a profound awareness of the tension that lies in conjoining incongruous elements that lie within belief itself. Thus, he writes that the ‘‘impossibility of things behaving contrary to their nature is not a logical impossibility [but] introduces the absurd, the sign of the miraculous. The choice is between unbelief which finds sheer madness in the affirmation of faith and belief that sees in this madness a divine wisdom.’’45 I should like to reinscribe this tension as existing not only within belief but also between the juridical (into which the ethical may often be folded) and belief itself. In this connection, I am reminded of the Talmudic story of the oven of Aknai in which relations of authority and dissent are brought to light in the context of determining the oven’s ritual purity.46 Because only unified objects can be declared impure, the revered Rabbi Eleazer, against the majority opinion, declares the oven to be pure in that its layers are not unified, whereas, because of its cement coating, the majority regards the oven as impure. At this point, Eleazer ceases to appeal to textual sources and, instead, calls upon the physical world to testify on his behalf: to the carob tree that responds by flying out of its place, to the stream that proceeds to flow backward, and even to the walls of the academy itself that start to topple. Another revered figure, Rabbi Joshua, then rebukes the walls that in response stop actually falling out but nonetheless remain bowed in respect to Rabbi Eleazer, who then calls upon heaven itself to endorse his interpretation of the oven’s status. But Rabbi Joshua and the sages emphatically reject heavenly intervention in that once the Torah has been given, they maintain, the law evolves through human interpretation. The sages then excommunicate Rabbi Eleazer, an act that in its turn sparks disaster in the natural world. Somewhat later, Rabbi Gamaliel, the head of the Academy who represents the sages, is threatened by a natural disaster in the form of a tidal wave. Appealing to God, Rabbi Gamaliel claims that the action against Rabbi Eleazer was taken to avoid factionalism. The 84

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wave that threatens Rabbi Gamaliel subsides but, nonetheless, the treatment of Rabbi Eleazer leads to Gamaliel’s eventual death through divine intervention. What are we to make of these tensions? One can with trepidation suggest that the story can be read as a vindication of rabbinic or human authority that goes so far as to reproach the vine, but also as a narrative attesting the power of divine authority as a corrective to human hubris. In conclusion, must we not ask: Where does the hermeneutic of suspicion come to rest?

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The God Who Refuses to Appear on Philosophy’s Terms M A R T I N B E C K M AT U Sˇ T ´I K

On April 1, 2000, sixteen scholars gathered to celebrate the lifework of my former Purdue colleague, Calvin O. Schrag, on the occasion of his retirement. In his critique of Schrag’s move ‘‘beyond classical theism,’’1 Merold Westphal encapsulated some of the main arguments developed in his later works concerning overcoming ontotheology and transcendence and selftranscendence. Westphal’s oeuvre represents one of the most consistent and sophisticated contemporary philosophical defenses of Christian theism, and yet his is not a philosophy in service of unadulterated Christian apologetics. He develops the cutting-edge work in Continental philosophy of religion in which the theistic God refuses to appear on terms set by philosophical reason. These apparent paradoxes express Westphal’s deployment of a postmodern critique of reason in order to make space for faith in a personal God. Meditating on the theme of God who does not arrive on the beckoning of philosophy, I examine at first concerns behind Westphal’s critique of Schrag, thereby laying out the appeal that a personal God holds for theistic philosophers of religion. Second, I ask whether the God who indeed need not show up on philosophy’s terms (God would respond to Tertullian with certain predilection for Jerusalem over Athens) is also radically free to refuse playing the a/theistic language game. How Classical and Postmodern Theists Speak of God Can philosophers of religion speak of God, yet not invoke the divine name on their own predefined terms? This question is famously associated 86

with Heidegger’s corrective to philosophy, as well as theology, in which he calls for overcoming ‘‘The Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics.’’2 First, the problem with the God conceived by classical philosophical theism and philosophical theology as ens causa sui (Being that grounds or causes itself ), is that the deity, so conceived, would have no choice but to enter our horizon of understanding ‘‘only insofar as philosophy, of its own accord and by its own nature, requires and determines how the deity enters into it.’’3 Philosophy provides the form, and so in no uncertain terms dictates the shape, in which the divine may appears to us. While not taking a religious step himself, Heidegger unmasks all philosophical translations of religious faith into the categories and concepts of understanding—from Kant’s moralized God, to Hegel’s rationalized God, to Nietzsche’s ‘‘dead’’ God to, in anticipation, Habermas’s linguistification of the sacred—as religiously disingenuous. Second, one cannot pray to an ens causa sui; one can ‘‘neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this God.’’4 Westphal accepts Heidegger’s critique of philosophy’s hubris with which it wants to set the terms (whether kataphatically, positively, as in ontotheology, or negatively, both in terms of apophatic tradition of negative theology and in Nietzsche’s post-Christian lamentation that ‘‘God is dead,’’ or even hypernegatively, in Derrida’s deconstructive undecidability between praying to God and praying to the impassable silence of the chora) for God. And yet Westphal wants to save theism from this very critique. In this nuanced corrective to Heidegger’s philosophical corrective to philosophy of religion and theology, Westphal draws on the pseudo-Dionysian and Catholic tradition of Deus absconditus (absent God) as well as the Lutheran, Kierkegaardian tradition of the crucified, dark, hidden God (note that just as the ‘‘death of God’’ was not invented by Nietzsche, so also the hiddenness of God was not discovered by analytical philosophers of religion). I have identified five interrelated concerns that motivate Westphal’s exoneration of theism from Heidegger’s corrective: Speaking of God otherwise than supreme being (one learns to speak thus from Levinas as much as from Marion) is not necessarily speaking otherwise than theistically. Religious faith should be freed up from critique of ontotheological metanarratives. If ontotheology does not speak for religious faith, then its overcoming cannot be equated with the destruction of theism. Martin Beck Matusˇ tı´k

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Hermeneutics of suspicion and postmodern philosophy need not be identified with the object of Nietzsche’s proclamation of the ‘‘death of God’’; indeed, they can become the ancillae theologiae, aid to theology and faith. Theism holds out for no more but also no less than God who is a personal Creator and Redeemer. Westphal’s qualified acceptance of Heidegger’s overcoming of ontotheology in order to save theism stands out more sharply against the backdrop of Schrag’s acceptance of Heidegger’s corrective as a decisive way beyond theism. Schrag rejects all ‘‘theo-metaphysics’’ or the ‘‘metaphysics of theism’’5 and endorses Tillich’s call for transcending theism.6 Tillich distinguishes three grades of theism. Nonreflective theism operates with traditionally received and largely cultural and psychological notions of God prevalent in popular and political discourses. Personalistic theism arises from lived biblical descriptions of the human-divine encounter. In that it becomes more concrete, yet in its uncritical literalism it lives in constant danger of falling into anthropomorphism and fundamentalism. Philosophic-theological theism is housed largely in arguments for God’s existence and descriptions of divine attributes. While the first theism is, for Tillich, religiously uninteresting and the second overreaching, the third is bad philosophically as well as theologically, forcing God to appear on terms constructed by our categories. This critique of all theism marks Tillich’s answer to Heidegger’s question whether or not philosophers of religion can speak of God on other than their own terms. Alfred North Whitehead sought to revise classical theism, the immutable divinity that seems unaffected by our world, in the notion of a process God. He attributed the roots of modern atheism to classical theism’s view of unmoved divinity. Similarly, Schrag endorses Tillich’s conclusion that roots of modern atheism lie in that classical view of ‘‘theo . . . [as] an invincible tyrant who controls all of the lower orders of being through an exercise of absolute knowledge and power and in doing so invites a justifiable atheism.’’7 These revisionists blame classical theism for forcing God to play on philosophy’s terms. They do not charge Hegel’s crucifixion of reason and Nietzsche’s transvaluation of all values in will’s own power to posit values for the post-Easter kerygma of the cultural and religiously unredeeming ‘‘death of God.’’ Schrag bridges Tillich’s transcending of classical theism with Heidegger’s overcoming of ontotheology. Tillich, however, describes God in categories of Heidegger’s Being of beings. Moving even beyond Tillich’s ‘‘God above God’’ of theism8 that is still rooted in Heidegger’s ontological difference between beings and Being, Schrag develops a Levinasian-Derridean and Kierkegaardian philosophy of religion. God appears 88

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as otherwise than Being. In this ethico-religious move, inspired no less by Marion’s critique of philosophical idolatry, Schrag seeks the divine in the ‘‘excess of Being,’’ in the semantics of works of love and the gift.9 It is in this at once hermeneutical and religious sense (and is this not a core of any authentically biblical Midrash?) that Schrag counsels to move beyond classical theism. Westphal is quite uneasy with Schrag’s universalizing claim that all theism fails to locate genuine sources of human self-transcendence and divine transcendence.10 I think that Westphal is worried how the path that leads from Heidegger’s corrective to the hubris of thought and speech about God to Tillich and Schrag’s move beyond all theism and perhaps also to Levinas’s passage through atheism and Derrida’s religion without religion increasingly throws out the baby of faith with the dirty water of ontotheology. What is overlooked in the corrective to ontotheology, Westphal contends, is the ‘‘Pascalian character of Heidegger’s critique.’’11 Heidegger does not object to speaking of God, though he refrains from doing so himself. He, however, objects to the philosophical drive for the rational grasp of the whole of reality. Kant coined the notion of ontotheology to describe ontological proofs of God’s existence, that is, all attempts at proving the necessity of God’s existence by analyzing the concept of the supreme being wholly without appeal to experience. Kant critiques all proofs of God’s existence utilized by classical theists. He shows, first, that causal, cosmological, and design proofs take recourse to a concept of the supreme being, thus relying on an ontological argument for its intermediary step. Second, ontological arguments falsely infer necessary existence from the innate concept of the supreme being. Kant allows us at best to postulate God as an incentive for practical reason to guide the life of virtue. Heidegger deploys Pauline faith against the Greek thought of Being.12 If for Heidegger there is but silence about God in the realm of thinking, and for Marion Being is but a hermeneutical screen of God, could we not affirm that to us God, even as a saturated phenomenon, could not but appear in light of our understanding (horizon, context, interpretation, Midrash) and yet never appear on its terms (God remains mystery, absent, hidden even when revealed)? If this is so, we can better appreciate Westphal’s question: How can we think ‘‘as if theism were automatically ontotheological’’?13 If the overcoming of ontotheology must not yield the rejection of theism, then what are the salient differences between these two notions? Ontotheology stands for ‘‘calculative-representational thinking.14 ‘‘Insofar as theology adopts its philosophical categories, it no longer participates in Martin Beck Matusˇ tı´k

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faith. As Heidegger shows in his critique of theology, faith is to be identified neither with belief nor with doctrine or speculative knowledge of God. Genuine spiritual faith expresses ‘‘rebirth,’’ and the role of genuine theology is to thematize faith, not to theorize about concepts or values, even the highest ones, even their transvaluation.15 One can worship and dance before mystery, not before some ready-to-hand equipment, object or tool of our life world, certainly not before one’s own will to power.16 Following Kierkegaard and anticipating Levinas, the early Heidegger aspired to dehellenize theology, to separate Jerusalem from Athens, because the former needs the latter neither for revelation nor for legitimation. Yet, paradoxically, theology needs a philosophical corrective precisely at the point where it harnesses metaphysics in order to morph into a correct belief (doxa) rather than learning from lived faith. Phenomenological philosophy offers a corrective and guidance to the formation of theological concepts.17 Yet, as Marion asks, does Heidegger not replace classical theistic arguments with a new philosophical master narrative of fundamental ontology, thereby either reducing or submitting God to Being?18 If God is not to be found among beings or entities, does it mean that God is the Being of beings? And if God is not the latter, then must God appear (at least to us, to Dasein) in terms of ontological difference? While Marion accentuates a more Catholic and Westphal a more Protestant grasp of faith, they both meet halfway in their postmodern, phenomenological retrieval of the Neoplatonic, pseudo-Dionysian, and Kierkegaardian divine excess or transcendence of human understanding. Westphal defends the Heideggerean corrective as ‘‘a formal indication’’ that limits metaphysics in order to makes space for ‘‘theistic theology.’’19 The cluster ‘‘metaphysical theism’’ decried by Schrag is precisely what Westphal considers to be a misnomer, as to abandon ontotheology, or theology grounded in beliefs, is to open oneself to faith. Theologically deployed ontotheology yields to fundamentalism, God becoming at our conceptual and political disposal to legitimate every form of political theocracy.20 But must theism, conceived along the lines of Pauline, pseudoDionysian, Pascalian, Lutheran, Kierkegaardian faith as distinguished from the Platonic and Aristotelian pistis and doxa, domesticated by medieval ontotheology, be guilty by association for the hubris of thought? Perhaps having both Levinas and the title of Schrag’s book in mind (God as Otherwise Than Being), Westphal considers theism to be speaking ‘‘otherwise than onto-theologically.’’21 This ‘‘otherwise’’ comprises the priority of Jerusalem over Athens in the religious domain, love of the other over thinking about the other, saturated over common phenomena. 90

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This is because he identifies theism with faith, the theological thematizations of faith, and ‘‘practices of faith,’’ whereby, citing Marion, ‘‘predication must yield to praise.’’22 Westphal’s theism as a practice of faith all but loses its umbilical connection to that philosophy of religion that has always been interested in arguments for God’s existence and so, for better or worse, has been closely tied to metaphysics. St. Thomas Aquinas’s citation of the negative theologian pseudo-Dionysius almost two thousand times does not render the character of Thomistic philosophy any less prone to metaphysics. Westphal, however, refuses to draw a fork between the Thomistic (and certain Catholic) and Augustinian (and certain Protestant) traditions. This would be a false heady either-or, as opposed to a lived Kierkegaardian either/or self-choice The silence of St. Thomas reveals that even the best philosophical architectonic is but straw when it comes to the love of the living God who may be discussed about but who as such cannot appear on philosophy’s magnificent terms. Aquinas and Karl Rahner both affirm that even in the beatific vision, God remains for us a mystery, which means that our terms, however enlightened and attuned and elevated to the divine love, can never comprehend the infinite. This is why Westphal resists the wedge driven between Aquinas and Augustine.23 Does this self-limitation render philosophical terms of classical theism acceptable to the God who might come after metaphysics? Does the postmodern Parisian turn to theology redeem Aquinas’s Paris, making it at once more Kierkegaardian or Levinasian if not also Derridean and Marionean? Westphal portrays genuine transcendence in classical theism by emphatically postmetaphysical, indeed, postmodern means. Finding Derrida standing closer to Augustine than did Descartes, he appropriates ‘‘the decentering (not the death) of the self ’’ and overcoming of ontotheology for ‘‘the renewal of theism . . . and theists.’’24 Long before either modernity or postmodernity, the believing soul has understood the God relation as a call to abandon the project of being the alpha and omega of its own existence. But since the decentered self is a central theme of postmodern philosophy, there will be something surprisingly postmodern about the life of the faith that lives out this spirituality.25 Westphal’s theism always already emerges from Jerusalem rather than Athens, even though isms are the domain of the Greco-Roman architectonic and law. Post-Temple, rabbinical Judaism develops the rich hermeneutics of Talmud and Midrash always already better suited to faith (Jerusalem overcoming ontotheology before its arrival) than anything Martin Beck Matusˇ tı´k

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Christianity borrowed from Greece and Rome on its own long rediscovery of the hermeneutical. Theism’s terms, Westphal insists, are provided by faith in ‘‘personal Creator, Lawgiver, and Merciful Savior of Jewish, or Christian, or Muslim monotheism.’’26 Unlike philosophers in ancient Athens or theologians in medieval Paris, he portrays theism as one would speak of faith in a personal, biblical God, the one to whom ‘‘prayer and encomium can be addressed in the second person.’’27 If ‘‘theism’’ and ‘‘faith’’ are exchangeable terms, as they are in Westphal’s hermeneutically and biblically nuanced version, then it makes good sense to hold that speaking otherwise than ontotheologically, one must not speak about theism as philosophers do in their arguments; one should participate in it as the first person vis-a`-vis the second person of the wholly other. God appears in an I-Thou relationship, not in arguments. Westphal’s religiously deployed atheism delivers us to critical theism: a theism in which God is not expected as an item coming to us on our terms (however apophatic or kataphatic our theology might be), a theism that cannot be fashioned into our prosthetic extension (Freud), or into the nihilism of God as the highest value (Nietzsche and Heidegger), or into ideology of oppression (Marx), or into acoustical illusion (Kierkegaard).28 Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics and subsequent postmodern critiques of the totalizing aims of reason, for Westphal, unwittingly clear the field not only for faith but also for rehabilitation of classical theism. Heidegger only appears to be against ‘‘a personal Creator and Redeemer,’’ the God of Abraham, Job, Jacob, and Jesus; [but] he is against the God of the Aristotelian metaphysics of the highest being and the Hegelian ontology of absolute spirit.29 The God who comes after ontotheology speaks from radical alterity. Yet, Westphal insists with St. Augustine that the wholly other to whom I can pray and before whom I can dance is closer to me than myself. In an essay that takes off from Schrag’s work, Westphal offers three postmodern correctives to philosophy of religion and theology that are formal yet faithful indications of the terms on which biblical God can appear:30 God is mystery exceeding the terms of human wisdom. God is irreducible to our vision or comprehension. God is the gift of love exceeding all our ways of imagining, thinking, or seeking God. These formal indicators overlap with Westphal’s threefold transcendence on whose terms we can speak of God and God speaks to us. Heidegger formally indicates why ontotheology is not the way to speak about God, though he does not go on speaking about God. The word 92

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‘‘Being’’ would not occur in Heidegger’s discourse if he wrote theology. ‘‘Being’’ does not occur in the Continental discourse about God after Heidegger. God’s name is an icon, pace Marion, rather than an idol whose intuitions can become fulfilled in the intentional field of the visible and comprehensible. Idolatry tries to subject God to human gaze.31 Westphal indicates that ‘‘cosmological transcendence’’ safeguards our approach to God from two forms of pantheism, one that identifies God with nature and the other that reduces God to human community.32 Pantheism leaves no room for mystery (the ontological other) and revelation (the epistemic other), that is, there is no hiddenness of God.33 Westphal then goes on speaking nevertheless about God, for one can pray and dance before theism that affirms biblical revelation and mystery. ‘‘God’s transcendence (original independence) of the world means that the creation of the world is not a necessity but a free act of self-giving love. . . . The God of theism is personal, while the God of pantheism is impersonal.’’34 God addresses us in ‘‘epistemic transcendence’’ as revelation and mystery that overflow the terms set up by the Greek wisdom and ontotheology.35 Westphal’s ‘‘theistic antirealism’’ admits with humility that our positive knowledge of God can never be adequate.36 The break with ontotheology occurs prior to the postmodern turn: negative theology speaks about God as otherwise than Being, which we can grasp, and even the most sophisticated positive discourse apprehends God only indirectly— through analogy. God speaks to us through divine revelation and as mystery. God’s radical alterity is not reducible to our vision even in the most intimate I-Thou relationship; indeed the intimacy of prayer lets go of the intellectual drive for adequacy and comprehension. To reiterate Rahner, one might claim that God remains mystery for us even in the beatific vision. ‘‘The First Speaker is an interiority and a freedom that can never be fully transparent to the one who hears.’’37 God addresses us in ‘‘ethical and religious transcendence,’’ whereby I am called to self-transformation in loving God and neighbor.38 God suspends not only my imagination and comprehension but also my agency. My aims (for example, worldly ways of justice) are teleologically suspended for the sake of higher calling to forgiveness and love (for example, the economy of the gift). God is the iconic gift of love exceeding our imaginary as well as conceptual intentions.39 Theorists speak about God, but when speaking to God, theory must yield to ‘‘wise silence’’ and ‘‘songs of praise.’’40 The postmodern retrieval of the three modes of transcendence expresses Westphal’s sophisticated theism. He defends theism with a healthy suspicion of idolatry which he learned from master atheists, Nietzsche, Martin Beck Matusˇ tı´k

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Freud, and Marx as much as from critical theorists such as Habermas. The unmasking of idolatry is underwritten at once by faithful biblical and skeptical postmodern prophets. At the end of the day, his theism articulates a confession of faith in a personal God who is a Creator and Redeemer. Admittedly, this invokes much more than the theistic atheists of Being and alterity are willing to say in words on behalf of their tears and prayers. Westphal answers the question, ‘‘how can our God talk avoid reducing the Divine Other to the human same?’’ by letting predication yield to praise and theoretical theism yield to the practice of faith.41 Who is the God who refuses to appear on philosophy’s terms and yet who can be spoken of and spoken to as Thou? This divinity is wholly other, ‘‘if it enters my experience on its own terms and not mine, if it permanently exceeds the form and categories of my transcendental ego and permanently surprises my horizon of expectations.’’42 Yet Why Neither Devils Speak as Atheists Nor God as Theist I will raise two series of questions. First, why should adherence to Creator and Redeemer rise or fall with adherence to theistic stocks? Why force God to play on terms of the a/theistic language game? What’s so special about theism that is not delivered by faith? Why not apply Ockham’s razor and distinguish between theoretical pronouncements about God (beliefs, what) and relationship to/with God (faith, how)? Theism and atheism belong to the former and the lived embrace of a personal God to the latter. Second, why should Creator and Redeemer not be allowed also to have an impersonal dimension? Why should the ‘‘impersonal’’ side of a personal God—the hidden, private, dark, unrevealed, mysterious—be conflated with the terms provided by ontology, ontotheology, or even pantheism? Just as Westphal decouples the overcoming of ontotheology from living theism, could we not delink from terms of philosophy, on which we repeatedly compel God to appear (from Greek metaphysics, to Cartesian and Kantian architectonic of thinking, to the Hegelian synthesis of truth and history, to the phenomenological structure of the saturated phenomena) or vanish (from all deconstruction of classical and modern rational metaphysics to all delimitations of possible experience), the impersonal side of God we are never shown? Westphal skillfully harnesses the hermeneutics of suspicion developed by the nineteenth-century theologians of atheism. Along with them, he deploys the postmodern skepsis of grand rational narratives in order to make room for faith. The postmodern a/theistic ‘‘holy undecidability’’ between praying to a living, personal God and praying to the empty nothingness of the space that allows all things to appear, that is, the chora, 94

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is admittedly philosophically more interesting than the methodological atheism of their antecedents.43 Yet does it not render the a/theistic language game itself suspect even for the God who might appear as an event (nonspatial moment of the creative, messianic, forgiving, redemptive gift) rather than entity (some ‘‘what’’ one could worship in time-space or sacralized place)? In praying with Meister Eckhart to free one from the idea of ‘‘God,’’ one’s faith may benefit from Nietzsche’s ‘‘death of God,’’ the death of the idol as the highest entity or value in the world.44 Atheistic theists profess a holy undecidability also about the God who does not arrive in and of space and so who does not require the spacing of the chora (does not need deconstructive terms applied against idols erected in space) to appear, God before whom one sheds tears and speaks the language of love. I find at least three strands of undecidable a/theism. The dialectical atheist Max Horkheimer suspects both theism and atheism of having their martyrs and tyrants.45 Walter Benjamin offers his materialistic theology of ‘‘a weak Messianic power,’’ whereby our hope is now redeemed by the works of future generations.46 And philosophers of religion without religion, Derrida and Caputo, speak of God only to allow themselves rightly to pass for atheists.47 To be sure, Westphal’s insisting emphatically on rehabilitating classical theism as a postmodern way to rediscovery of personal God as personal does not find many receptive ears in this milieu. Given my own doubts about undecidable or atheistic theisms as genuinely self-transformative paths, that fact is not the most compelling reason to doubt theism. But what if God does not play this game at all? There are good historical and etymological reasons for not wanting God to come in terms set by ‘‘theism.’’ Theos/thea is a Greek word applicable to the full pantheon of male and female deities as well as royalties that claim their divine right to rule. Theos never originally named a good God in heaven, some personal Creator and Redeemer. Some of the gods, like the supreme deity, Zeus, were not so nice. Never mind that the Latinized Zeus became Deus, who then immigrated to European languages to name God: Il Dio (It.), El Dios (Sp.), Le Dieu (Fr.), Teus (Ger., Gru¨ss Teus/ Gott). There is indeed something curious that in saying God, we hail Zeus, in greeting, adieu, we are sending others to Zeus. We might as well say adieu to this ‘‘God’’ or become godless, sans dieu.48 While overcoming of ontotheology does not necessarily signal the death of faith, I am not convinced that the defense of a personal Creator and Redeemer necessarily compels us to rehabilitate theism. I propose instead that the silverlining or interfaith path of this overcoming leads by way of radical existential self-transformation. Does the threefold transcendence of God who Martin Beck Matusˇ tı´k

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comes after ontotheology deliver us to the God of theism? Heidegger provided a worldview-neutral and so methodologically atheistic phenomenological corrective as a formal indication for genuine theology. For Marion, even Heidegger’s philosophy of the Being of beings remains dangerously close to idolatry.49 Against old and new orthodoxies, Kierkegaard refuses to defend Christianity, for it is not a doctrine but existence-communication, and so the way of faith cannot pass through an adherence to a ‘‘what’’ but rather by way of one’s inherence in ‘‘how.’’ Faith is not primarily an intellectual assent to possess or espouse something but rather a decision in one’s mode of existing. Theism, even simply because it is an -ism born of Athens and Rome, encourages adherence to a ‘‘what’’ of God, albeit invoked after Zeus as universal humanity’s personal Creator and Redeemer. The spatial ‘‘what’’ of God emphasizes speculation, theory, and the noun view of religion. The existential ‘‘now’’ or ‘‘how’’ of faith invites one on the way of spiritual self-transformation: to ‘‘religere’’ or the verb mode of living. God refuses to appear on philosophy’s spatial and noun terms of ‘‘a religion,’’ but God may appear on life’s temporal and verbal terms of our existential ‘‘to religion.’’ It would seem that Kierkegaard in particular corrects, and not just by way of formal indications, the penchant for speculative a/theism. Personal God arrives in one’s lived faith, and for this I-Thou meeting even ‘‘a holy undecidability’’ about the a/theistic event does not seem very interesting. Thinkers such as Levinas, Kierkegaard, and Marion as well as Camus prefer decidably atheistic atheism to religious irreligiosity or aesthetic religiosity: the self-limitation that one knows God or stands for God can never be idolatrous. Levinas loves a transcendent God in loving the neighbor, the twofold commandment to love one’s God and neighbor are melded into one, whereby God is loved in the other stranger, widow, orphan. Kierkegaard is secure with an infidel praying truthfully to an unknown God more than with an adherent to orthodoxy praying unfaithfully. Marion’s God arrives as a saturated, iconic phenomenon that exceeds our intentional horizon, expectations, and the ego and perhaps against Marion’s philosophical blind spot paradoxically transgresses the very phenomenological terms required for divine appearance that Marion unwittingly smuggles in. All these preferences lie at the heart of the intuition of God as otherwise than Being. The thetic, entitative, spatial naming of God (Spinoza’s Deus sive natura) always runs the danger of worshiping an idol or atheistically celebrating that one has killed another fold of a spatial, sacralized ‘‘what,’’ but a false god. Heidegger’s crisis of Christian faith yields to awareness of the mystery of Being. But he resists the temptation of assigning the mystery any theistic satisfaction. Lest one worship Being 96

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without God, one manages to resist idolatry by holding out one’s religious intuitions open onto nothing—venerating the abyss of thinking with piety and thanking. How does the piety of thinking and thanking yield to the religious? What institutes the religious? Asking otherwise, could God ever arrive on terms set up by our a/theistic debates? Rereading Kant’s critique of religion, Derrida introduces a concise definition of the religious: ‘‘The possibility of radical evil both destroys and institutes the religious.’’50 What institutes the religious is the possibility of both the best and the worst—radical evil institutes either possibility as the religious. The upsurge of wanton evil remains inscrutable to reason, Kant admits. Yet, he in vain protests the possibility of the diabolical in human acts. He defends the inviolability of human reason and freedom by assigning the corruption of our maxims for action to weak and impotent human will. If humans can never act cruelly in unforgivable ways, as Kant holds in his denial of diabolical human volition, then the religious as the possibility of forgiving the unforgivable has never existed.51 The post-Kantian, Kierkegaardian site of the religious as defined by Derrida is no longer preoccupied with a holy undecidability of whether God exists. The religious is instituted for the first time when speculative doubt yields to the possibility of the worst or the best—existential despair or faith. Existential fiction and philosophy provide excellent evidence for my thesis that neither devils speak as atheists nor God as theist. And if they do not, should we? Let me mention but two. Dostoyevsky portrays the Devil not as some intellectual doubter suffering on account of God’s hiddenness or from an rational feebleness to prove God’s existence.52 In his nightmarish vision of the Devil, Ivan Karamazov does not predicate about God; alas, instead of yielding to praise, he rejects the entrance ticket to God’s creation and paradise. The Devil is the author of ‘‘The Grand Inquisitor.’’ Like the Inquisitor, the Devil sees God and yet does not believe. The Devil does not suffer from an epistemic or metaphysical angst about there being no proofs of God’s existence: The Devil is not an atheist. Demons despair about accepting God’s unconditional love. We undermine Dostoyevsky’s genius if we read Ivan’s anguish about the suffering of the innocent as an evidential argument from evil against God’s existence. The comportment of defiance unlike atheism is as follows: even if God existed, I would want to have no truck with God. Derrida’s philosophical definition of the religious matches Dostoyevsky’s literary language game. God and the Devil are spiritual realities unaffected by intellectual doubt. What is undecided is not whether or not God exists—God does not speak to us as theist—but rather, before God who exists, whether one lives in despair or Martin Beck Matusˇ tı´k

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faith, whether one self-destructs or accepts creation, healing, and unconditional forgiveness. The language of Dostoyevsky’s novel institutes the religious drama as the best and the worst battling for tikkun olam (mending of the world) and human freedom in one’s inwardness. Kierkegaard locates the core spiritual issue of the religious sphere of existing not in the ‘‘what’’ of existence (spatial or even choral a/theism) but rather in the ‘‘how’’ of possibility (the moment born of despair or faith). That there is possibility is another way of God arriving on God’s and not our terms. God is the redemptive possibility, a moment of teshuvah (turning), at the site of the worst. That one’s unforgivable deeds may be forgiven and one’s self thereby become resurrected and redeemed; that cruelty may yield to compassion and self-love; that one’s abandonment and annihilation of the other may be overturned in blessings of unconditional love are signs of the arrival of the messianic now. At the religious site of the worst and the best, God does not play the a/theistic language game, as if theism could convince spirits who in their defiance are always already more demonic than both ordinary and sophisticated theistic atheists. The possibility of the impossible is not an intellectual exercise in antinomies or aporias; rather that very possibility is given in the hellholes of the world where no hope should be expected, it announces God’s coming otherwise than on our terms. To our despair, God speaks not by arguments but through silence and works of love. That God creates and redeems reveals both personal and impersonal dimensions of the divine. I think that we miss a lot if we simply identify a personal God with theism and equate the impersonal with either ontotheology or pantheism.53 There is a sense in which each creature matters infinitely and so testifies to the personal face of the divine. There are myriad personal faces of God, whether one meets but does not see God as Moses did in the cloud of unknowing or in the burning bush, or one sees God’s face in the incarnate prototype of agape in Jesus Christ. Even Buddhism, one of the most impersonal and egoless of self-transformative paths, invokes in its Pure Land variety the compassionate, personal Amida. There is a sense in which none of us matter personally, as God is a thoroughly indiscriminate and polymorphous lover. God is easy, goes with everyone on intimate terms, and yet one knows that in loving another and all others God is not a tease but an earnest and faithful lover of every single one. This annihilation of the ego as the basis for loving and being loved before God’s impersonal face is not some sadistic cruelty of the Creator who endowed us with a self and face; it is the very condition for learning the ways of divine love that embraces us not on our terms. 98

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God’s love is impersonally personal in acts of creation and redemption. God’s personal loving is never personally preferential (religiously egocentric or nationalistic), because it is unconditional. God is a jealous lover, demanding my personal love, yet one cannot be jealous at God for being everything to all others. One cannot be jealous at God for being impersonal, hidden, mysterious, and always already infinitely more than at any moment given to one. God does not offend one by loving all. God loves one and all intimately, in one embrace, in a polymorphous play of myriad of stars and wild meadow flowers, everywhere and in all embraces with infinite intensity. No human love satisfies one’s yearning for God’s love. No human terms can exhaust the gift of love. God in us loves God. From Merold Westphal’s thorough overcoming of ontotheology, we learn that God refuses to appear on philosophy’s terms because in God’s transcendence and our self-transcendence the personal God would appear as otherwise than Being. But then the a/theistic language game—whether in a holy a/theistic undecidability of philosophers of religion or in a postmodern defense of classical theism—does not in itself explain what institutes the religious as the site of the worst and the best. And theism does not explain why the divine ‘‘otherwise’’ ultimately signifies that a personally loving Creator and Redeemer in loving unconditionally always already loves also impersonally. God arrives on other than human terms.

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What Is Merold Westphal’s Critique of Ontotheology Criticizing? JOHN D. CAPUTO

If Merold Westphal were the leader of the Christian Right, we would all be better off. I do not mean, God forbid, either that we would all be better off if Merold had a change of heart and suddenly headed to the Far Right, or that the Left would be better off without him. Far from it. I mean that if the generous views that he has carefully staked out in an impressive series of books and articles and in scores of lectures and conferences at colleges and universities in the United States and in Europe were the conscience of a Christian conservative, as far to the right as the Christian intellectual spectrum would swing, we would all be blessed indeed. Tom Sheehan once described Karl Rahner as the most liberal version possible of a fundamentally conservative idea, and I myself have repeated that about the hermeneutical theories of Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur. I am also inclined to think that the same thing can be said fundamentally about Merold (which, of course, puts Merold in excellent company indeed). By ‘‘conservative’’ I basically mean a position that holds the classical orthodox faith, but I do not at all reference the mean-spirited and reactionary simulacrum that passes for conservative today, either in evangelical Christianity or in politics. Merold has advanced a view of Christian philosophy that ought to make the Right think twice, which would be, I am tempted to say, two more times than it has already thought! That the word ‘‘conservative’’ need not be a bad word for me may be gleaned from the several occasions on which Jacques Derrida describes himself as a very 100

conservative person, one who wants to conserve the most cherished traditions of justice and emancipation, the most cherished institutions of the university, of democracy, and of free speech. Analogously, Merold would confess that he desires to conserve the most cherished traditions of a Christian philosophy and of a biblical religion. Indeed, he defends the philosophical world first described by Augustine and Aquinas, who tempered their taste for metaphysical theology with the medieval tradition of negative theology. That world is then fine-tuned by the reformers, who remind us of the role of faith and, beyond finitude, the fallenness of our faculties, and is finally given a witty and polemical formulation by Søren Kierkegaard. Merold’s present interests in the debates surrounding the work of Jean-Luc Marion and what he calls the ‘‘ethical suspension of the religious’’ in Emmanuel Levinas are but the latest fields in which he tills and plants his vision of a certain postmodern Christianity. Were this world according to Westphal to become a fact, contemporary religious wars, of thirty years or more, would cease and a great peace of Westphalia would settle upon us all. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Merold has deployed his many gifts around a watchword from Johannes Climacus that the world may not be a system for us, but that does not mean it is not a system for God. On that basis he has sketched a generous vision of Christian philosophy that is organized under what he sometimes calls ‘‘epistemological humility,’’ an idea that shows up in Immanuel Kant’s First Critique, according to which we confess that we see things from the point of view of finite intuition and not from the point of view of the originary intuition and for that reason have to put a lid on knowledge in order to make room for faith. God does not labor under the limits under which we labor in saying the name of God. Or, as Merold puts it in his distinctive way, we must not slip into the arrogance of thinking that what my net does not catch is not a fish.1 By the same token, when we affirm the absoluteness of God, that absoluteness does not rub off on us any more than we end up turning orange by looking at a pumpkin! He has set forth this vision of epistemological humility with a clarity and wit, with an incisiveness and erudition, that have placed him squarely among a handful of leaders of the flourishing movement of Continental philosophy of religion in Western Europe and the United States today. I have chosen to interrogate Merold’s broader vision as it is refracted through his book Transcendence and Self-Transcendence. This text serves as an integral part of the project he has launched in recent years under the rubric ‘‘overcoming ontotheology,’’ a project that relies specifically on John D. Caputo

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Heidegger’s contention that the God of ontotheology is not the God before whom we can sing and dance. This book, which is truly a tour de force of Merold’s take on the history of metaphysical theology, allows me to raise an issue with him—the one that I always raise with him—about just what is at stake in the critique of ontotheology. As its title indicates, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence moves along a dual track: on one hand, the transcending of the self as an autonomous and self-centered agency, and on the other hand, the transcendence of God, the irreducible alterity of God, beyond the confinements and constructions by which we humans seek to contain God’s being. The former is a function of the latter: the more God’s transcendence is respected, the more decentered and self-transcendent the self becomes. Quite clearly, this dual track along which Transcendence and Self-Transcendence moves corresponds to two essential themes in postmodernism: the decentering of the self and the critique of ontotheology. In this way, therefore, Merold means to ‘‘appropriate unexploited, even ‘repressed’ possibilities of secular postmodernism for the renewal of theism and its essential linkage to the renewal of theists’’ (6). This dual track is also a ladder of ascent that passes through three stages or successive attempts to do justice to the transcendence of God. The first stage does justice to God’s cosmological transcendence, to the God beyond the physical world, since the being of God transcends the world of space and time. This stage takes the form of a sustained critique of Spinoza and Hegel and of their quasi-pantheistic views that, without identifying God with any particular being or mode, bring God down to what Gilles Deleuze called the plane of immanence by identifying God with the underlying substance or being of particular entity. This, of course, has the consequence of elevating human thought and activity to the center of the universe, as the special place where divine or infinite substance is realized in the beings in which it is actualized. But even more justice is done to God’s transcendence by respecting God’s ‘‘epistemological transcendence,’’ the God beyond knowledge. By ‘‘epistemology,’’ a term borrowed from modern philosophy, Merold does not mean the debates about whether the world exists outside consciousness, but rather the great tradition of negative theology that is found paradigmatically in a writer like Pseudo-Dionysus, yet is also never far away from the great kataphatic theologies of Augustine and Aquinas. He addresses this kataphatic connection when he says that Aquinas belongs to the tradition not of realism but of nonrealism, a claim likely to roil most Thomists. The God whom we can comprehend is not the eternal God, a point that registers on both tracks: by first confessing the heights of the God beyond knowledge, we secondarily confess the decentering effects on 102

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our ability to comprehend or get a hold on God. In the medieval elaboration of the limited knowledge we can attain of an incomprehensible God, Merold finds a particularly felicitous theology, which is not ontotheological in Heidegger’s sense. One of the more interesting features of Merold’s argument is that the highest way we do justice to the transcendence of God, the highest rung on the ladder of ascent, lies in the affirmation of the ethico-religious transcendence of God, of the God beyond our will, whose sanctity or holiness exceeds our finite and faulty will. Merold patterns just such a philosophy of transcendence by weaving together Levinas’s ethic, which constitutes something of an ethical suspension of the religious and may not even exclude a certain atheism—a point that I think is well taken—and Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of ethics, which does not drop but takes up ethics into a higher movement. As a result, the God who judges and forgives in turns evokes the greatest selftranscendence. The Meaning of Ontotheology I want now to take up Merold’s argument by going back to his central concern with ‘‘ontotheology’’ and revisiting just what is being criticized under this name. The word ‘‘ontotheology,’’ to my knowledge, is Kant’s, who used it to describe proofs for the existence of God that were a priori in character, or based on mere concepts, as in the various ontological proofs in Anselm or Descartes, as opposed to ‘‘cosmotheology,’’ which makes use of proofs based on experience, like Aquinas’s proof that from the motion visible in the world we may infer a First Mover. When Heidegger took over the word from Kant, he made it identical with ‘‘metaphysics’’ itself, which was in turn characterized as the attempt to think Being itself in terms of some entity—like God or the human subject—or regional characteristic of entities—like matter or the will. Heidegger settled on Kant’s word because he thought the etymology of the word brought out a problem that stretched from Aristotle to Hegel and Nietzsche. Heidegger was referring to the long-standing debate in Greek and medieval philosophy about an ambiguity in Aristotle. Does metaphysics, or first philosophy, refer to the science of the First and Highest Being, as in Book XII of the Metaphysics, or does it refer instead to the science of Being as such, as in Book IV? Thomas Aquinas gave a well-known resolution to this ambiguity in the ‘‘Introduction’’ to his Commentary on the Metaphysics when he claims that metaphysics is both of these things, but in an ordered way; it is the science of being in general in virtue of the fact that it is the science of God, in which all being is exemplarily contained. John D. Caputo

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To know anything about God is to know being as such, to know it paradigmatically, in its finest hour (in eternity), as it were, and to know that to which any being, insofar as it is a being, can aspire. Heidegger thinks the same problematic shows up in Hegel, where Heidegger gives his best and most powerful formulation of the sense in which he has taken over Kant’s word. ‘‘Ontotheologic’’ is a circle or circulatory system in which Being serves as the ground of entities, and entities return the favor and serve conversely as the ground of Being. That is to say, Being is the common ground of everything that is, that which they all have in common, their common base, ground, or support, even while the First Entity (God) is the causal ground of other entities, thereby setting in motion the distribution of Being among entities, so that entities may have Being at all. Both Being and entities play crucial but complementary roles within the circulatory system of ontotheology. Without Being, there is nothing for the First Entity to distribute; without the First Entity, nothing will get distributed. Now it is important to see that Thomas Aquinas would have rejected this sense of ontotheology. He would not have accepted the notion that Being serves in any way as a ground of God, and, therefore, even of entities themselves. Being in general or as a common ground, what he called ens in communi, does not in any way precede or ground God, except in the sense of what he called a ‘‘being of reason’’ (ens rationis), an artifact of our thinking, an abstraction we construct for our own convenience. We may say that ‘‘being’’ is what God ‘‘has,’’ as if there were some being before God for God to have, but that is just a feature of our modus significandi, the way we speak among ourselves, not of the modus essendi, the way things are when we are not around. In reality, Being is what God is. God does not have Being, God is Being, ipsum esse per se subsistens. Indeed, in one very important sense God is not ‘‘a being’’ at all, not an individual, since God’s being is not the individuation of a common nature. The sense in which God is an ‘‘individual,’’ Aquinas said, is that his preeminent being is undivided, not broken up or communicated with others—there are no other gods—although, of course, the analogical likenesses of the divine being are received in a proportionate measure by what we call ‘‘creatures.’’ In that sense, Aquinas—and I wager nearly every medieval theologian before Scotus—was decidedly not an ontotheologician. He—and they—did not think that God belongs inside a circulatory system between Being and entities, but that entities belong inside a circular system of God (some version of exitus and reditus). As Etienne Gilson and other Thomists pointed out half a century ago, the turning point in this story is Duns Scotus, who argued for the primacy 104

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of a common sense of being, of which finite and infinite would be kinds or types. That is the point that Jean-Luc Marion seizes upon in his account of ‘‘modern’’ Cartesian and post-Cartesian philosophy, which he very nicely summarizes in an interesting discussion of the phrase causa sui. For Thomas Aquinas, this was a phrase that made no sense, for in order to be a cause of oneself one has to give oneself what one does not have, lack something and then make up that lack by giving oneself what one lacks; it means to lift oneself up by one’s bootstraps, to pass on to oneself a bit of information that one does not have. For Aquinas, God is not caused at all, is not an effect of anything, is not even the cause or the effect of Godself. God is all cause and in no part effect; God is the first cause uncaused. Why then would people as smart as Descartes and Leibniz call God a self-cause? Because, as Marion points out, they held to the conceptual priority of metaphysical ‘‘principles’’ to which everything, God included, would be subject, and that goes back to the Scotist gesture of giving ‘‘being’’ a conceptual priority over anything that has being. Whatever is in any way, finite or infinite, God included, ought and must conform to these ‘‘principles,’’ such as the principle of sufficient reason or the principle of causality. To be sure, God passes with flying colors all of the tests that the principles put to him. He comes out first in his class, summa, nay, maxima cum laude. God not only has a cause, but God is also his very own cause, in no need of anything other than himself to cause his being. That is why Descartes redefined the principle of causality. He did not say it was the principle by which act is communicated to a being in potency; he said there is at least as much reality in the cause as in the effect, which is, of course, true but does not get to the heart of the causal principle. That particular sidestep allowed him to say that God is the cause of himself, who thus passes muster before the principle of causality. Nevertheless, the very fact that such a test was put to God, that God stood before the court of the principles, would be rejected by Aquinas and most medieval philosophers. Aquinas would say not that God passes the tests of the principles, but that the principles pass the test of God, that the principles are made in the likeness of God, are reflections of God’s subsistent being, and are but finite and conceptual models constructed in imitation of God’s being. We are prone to deploy a ‘‘principle of causality’’ in our thinking only because God is pure self-sufficient being in and of himself. It is with their borrowed subsistence that everything that is not God imitates imperfectly the self-subsistence of God. Everything has and needs a sufficient explanation of its being because God is explanation itself. Consequently, Aquinas is not an ontotheologian in Kant’s sense, because like Kant he, too, rejects the attempt to prove the existence of God John D. Caputo

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by mere concepts. His proofs are, in Kant’s sense, cosmotheological, which does not get them off Kant’s hook, of course. But more importantly, he is not an ontotheologician in Heidegger’s sense either, if that means the circulatory system described in the ‘‘Onto-theological Constitution of Metaphysics,’’ since for St. Thomas, God is in no way a case of or in any way falls under ‘‘being’’ or ‘‘principles.’’ On the contrary, they fall under God. So far we have focused on the primacy of the ‘‘onto’’ over the ‘‘theo’’ in ‘‘ontotheological,’’ but we have not yet said anything about the ‘‘logic,’’ which is why Heidegger will sometimes hyphenate ‘‘onto-theo-logic.’’ By ‘‘logic,’’ Heidegger means ‘‘calculative’’ thinking, discursive-causal reasoning from effects to causes. On one level, Aquinas and his fellow medieval theorists would plead guilty as charged on this one: they have every intention of offering a rational argument for the existence and attributes of God. They are ‘‘scholastics’’ or ‘‘schoolmen,’’ or, as we would say, ‘‘academics.’’ They write books, make arguments, and test their results by submitting them to public critique and cross-examination. They are the beginning of the history of our Western academic tradition, which shows up in the very discourse of the academy, which to this day is all in Latin— summa cum laude, doctor philosophiae, magister artis, and so on. But there is a profound difference between these theologians and the Cartesians and post-Cartesians who came after them (many of whom, curiously enough, were not university men), and it is in that sense that even the ‘‘logic’’ in ‘‘ontotheologic’’ does not fit the medieval paradigm, and this is what Merold is calling ‘‘epistemological transcendence.’’ For the schoolmen were theologians before they were philosophers, and they were believing Christians and men of prayer before they were theologians. They were friars, monks, and saints who started, punctuated, and ended their day with prayer, and whose theology was part of a larger life of liturgy and praise of God. Consequently, they were filled with awe before the divine life, and they spoke of God in terms that reflected the deepest sense of mystery. While they thought that there were many assertions that we could justifiably make about God, these assertions must always be understood within the context of the mystery of God. So St. Thomas argued that the reason for describing God as ipsum esse per se subsistens was not that this captured the essence of God, but that it was the least confining, least constrictive thing one could say about God. It is the best way to talk about God, if one wants to preserve the incomprehensibility of God. One may make certain conceptual and judicative determinations about God while understanding that the divine being is only ‘‘approached’’ by these determinations—the word via in the quinque viae is a term of respect for the 106

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distance of God—and not tapped or exhausted or fully conceived by them. That indeed is why Jean-Luc Marion had later on to eat his words when in God Without Being he said that Aquinas’s notion of ipsum esse subsistens was a conceptual idol. He would later confess that, just like the clever interpretation Marion had given of Anselm, Aquinas was deploying a conceptual icon, not an idol, that is, a concept whose very terms yield to, indeed demand, something inconceivable. Precisely here, on the point about the ‘‘logic’’ in ‘‘ontotheologic,’’ is where, I think, Merold is at his best. He shows in no uncertain terms that while men like Augustine and Aquinas made every effort to be logical, they were never held captive by the hegemonic ‘‘logic’’ that Heidegger is describing, by which Heidegger meant a ‘‘calculative’’ thinking that made human conceptual thinking the measure of all things, a mode of cognition that broke out with a fury in modernity. They thought that God provides the measure of all things, not ‘‘logic,’’ which is why there was a tension between them and the ‘‘secular masters’’ of the day—mostly logicians and the closest thing to ontotheology in the Middle Ages. I believe that Heidegger implicitly concedes as much himself in his own penetrating reflections on The Principle of Reason (50–58),2 written at the end of his academic career, in which he shows that this ‘‘principle,’’ while ‘‘dormant’’ throughout the history of metaphysics, wakes up and stretches its limbs only in modernity, with Descartes and Leibniz (Heidegger does not mention Spinoza), where it achieves explicit formulation and gets the wakeful attention of the philosophers. That implies it was still asleep in the Middle Ages, where the focus was on God, not being as such, on God, not principles, and where logical discourse always marched several respectful steps behind in a procession before the mystery of God. That is why Merold will repeatedly say that these theologians, masterful metaphysicians though they were, are taken more by what Heidegger called the God before whom we can sing and dance, activities that correlate well with a Thomistic tradition, given that Aquinas authored one of the most beautiful liturgical hymns in the Latin rite. It is useful then to distinguish between a narrow and a broad sense of ontotheology. In the strictest and most rigorous sense, Augustine and Aquinas are not onto-theologians They are, instead, theologians, but they are also not onto-theo-logicians, since neither the ‘‘onto’’ nor the ‘‘logic’’ is a fitting description of what they are doing for two very good reasons: (1) they do not put being before God or treat being as in any way having a priority over God (ontology); (2) while they try their best to reason logically and well, they do not think that conceptual, logical thinking sets the measure for God, that it can ever begin to exhaust the inexhaustible and John D. Caputo

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incomprehensible being of God (‘‘logic’’). They neither sign on to the ‘‘onto’’ nor do they embrace the ‘‘logic’’ in what Heidegger calls ‘‘ontotheo-logic.’’ All that remains in the appellation ‘‘onto-theo-logic’’ for them is theology, theology, as Marion puts it, which is first and last about what Karl Rahner describes as the ‘‘mystery we call God.’’ Decentering and the Widened Scope of the Critique of Ontotheology Yet there is a broader and more sweeping sense of ‘‘ontotheology’’ in Heidegger, when he uses the term interchangeably with ‘‘metaphysics.’’ Then it becomes clear that the critique of ontotheology is no less a delimitation of the ‘‘theo’’ in ‘‘onto-theo-logy,’’ which is the middle or central term in this tripartite expression, what I propose to call here for our purposes the ‘‘Center,’’ a term I choose because of Merold’s interest in decentering. This is the sense that Derrida and other contemporary Continental philosophers have picked up on and what they chiefly have in mind when they use the word. For all the reasons that Merold has so wonderfully worked out in his series of valuable contributions over the years, the metaphysical theologies of the pre-Cartesian philosophers of the Middle Ages are not ontotheological in the strict sense of that word. But in a broader sense, where ontotheology means metaphysics itself, be it modern or even premodern, they are indeed included in what is being called ontotheology. That is what I want to turn to now. It would be misleading to think that because the medieval and other Christian philosophers have nothing to do with the narrow sense of ontotheology they have avoided the wider critique of ontotheology in contemporary Continental philosophy. For the critique of ontotheology is not simply, or not merely, a critical delimitation of our power to know God, an insistence that any such knowledge as we would have about God is limited by the incomprehensible being of God on one hand and the finitude or even sinfulness of the human mind on the other. It is minimally that, at the very least that, but we were already well informed on that point by Augustine, Aquinas, and medieval mystical theology; as a result, we did not need to wait for Heidegger or Derrida to receive that instruction. If postmodern thought is reduced to that, then it is merely premodernism under another name, and the critique of ontotheology is old wine in new skins. Then, I think, the word ‘‘ontotheology’’ has been divested of its distinctive sense, divested of the work that it is really doing in these philosophers. 108

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The way I want to bring this out is to say that the critique of ontotheology is a critique of the Center and of any possible ‘‘centrism,’’ be it God or anything else. This critique is not merely a delimitation of our knowledge of what the Center is, a confession of our limits and the Center’s excess, but also a delimitation of our very ability to hold or declare a Center at all, of whether there is a Center. The critique of ontotheology might then well be redescribed as a critique of ‘‘onto-theo-logico-centrism,’’ of any attempt to make being, God, or logic the center. It represents a critical delimitation of our power to affirm that what it is of which we have limited knowledge may be called ‘‘God’’ or ‘‘Being.’’ Beyond that, it is a critical delimitation of our power to say that what we have limited knowledge of is or may be called ‘‘Absolute Spirit’’ or ‘‘Matter,’’ for that matter, or ‘‘State’’ or ‘‘History’’ or ‘‘Life’’—all of which are replacement candidates for the place formerly held by God, or, if I may say so, replacement candidates for ‘‘the Artist formerly known as God!’’ In Of Grammatology, Derrida states that his critique of the ‘‘book’’ includes ‘‘the encyclopedic protection of theology and of logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against difference in general.’’3 He could say exactly the same thing about ontotheology. What is being criticized is confidence in the Center itself and the protection it affords, the confidence that there is a Center that holds firm and encompasses all. He describes a situation in which we are more radically decentered, decentered not because we are merely fallen and finite while the Center itself is infinite, holy and incomprehensible to our finite minds and wills, but because the Center itself is in question. What we have available, therefore, is only the ‘‘aphoristic energy of writing,’’ that is to say, the nonencyclopedic and rhizomatic inventiveness of thinking otherwise than ontotheologically. That is why Nietzsche said we will not be rid of God until we are rid of grammar, by which he meant to open up a world decentered and divested of the implicit metaphysics suggested by classical Western grammar. Derrida critiques all the various ‘‘centrisms’’ by which we have been visited in metaphysics—logocentrism, phonocentrism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, and so on—just in virtue of their metaphysical— rather than merely strategic—centeredness. Whenever he speaks of the gesture of theology or the theological operation itself in Of Grammatology, he treats it as a matter of positing a fixed Center. Marx himself, one of the great masters of suspicion, would be an ontotheologician for him, because Marx thinks that he can treat matter and dialectics and pure usevalue as ontological realities by means of which he can drive out the very ‘‘hauntological’’ specters upon which, as Derrida shows, the spirit of a John D. Caputo

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certain Marxism depends. Levy-Strauss’s distinction between a pure nature and a fallen culture is ‘‘theological,’’ relying on the theological distinction between the natural purity of what God has made and impurity of what cultural man has corrupted. Indeed, as Derrida has shown in Of Spirit, to the extent that Heidegger tends to let ‘‘Being’’ play the role formerly played by God, he, himself, falls victim to his own critique of ontotheology. That raises a separate and fairly complicated issue that I simply acknowledge here—I am certainly not about to try to resolve the question of Heidegger and God! So when it comes to ontotheology, Derrida says, ‘‘we must not think of a ‘theological prejudice’ functioning sporadically’’ (139), here or there, in this or that concept of God, or in this or that concept of humanity, truth, ethics, or the nation, but of the theological gesture itself, which is the very gesture of holding on to the Center. Not only can we finite beings not comprehensively understand the Center, we cannot know there is one. I hasten to add that this critique of ontotheology does not drive out every sense of God, theology, and religion. This critique is indeed, as Merold likes to say, an exercise in humility, and my remarks are aimed at showing that it is a humility that goes quite far indeed. But I very much agree with Merold that this exercise in humility cuts both ways and leaves us decentered in every sense, not just theologically. If it means to cut down theological and metaphysical hubris, it has no business doing so by means of an opposing atheistic counter-hubris. That is why many of us who are interested in what is nowadays called ‘‘Continental philosophy of religion’’ have argued—this time against what I will call here the ‘‘secularizing deconstructors’’—that this critique of ontotheology is not some sort of ontological argument for the nonexistence of God, an ontological disproof of the existence of God, or in any way an argument against God. It is rather an insistence that the name of ‘‘God’’ belongs to a chain of substitutions that can never be stopped. That is why Derrida very acutely says of himself that he ‘‘rightly passes’’ for an atheist: he has no idea whether he is one. But it is an argument that the chain of substitutions cannot be stopped, set forth with much care in several places, of which the third chapter of Of Grammatology, the critique of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Copenhagen school of linguistics, is for me exemplary. It is not, or ought not to become, a ‘‘Dogmatic Declaration from the Secular Bishops of Paris’’ that the chain cannot be stopped. So the critique of ontotheology is a Janus-faced argument. On one side, against metaphysical theology, in either its classical or modern expressions and in either the narrow or the broader sense of ontotheological, it is an argument that the chain cannot be stopped at the name of God. On the 110

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other side, it also launches an argument against the secularizing deconstructors, in that although the chain cannot be stopped at God, God does indeed belong to the chain. The name of God touches a nerve in the human heart and suggests something ‘‘undeconstructible,’’ and that is the Augustinian heart at the heart of the critique of ontotheology, the confessing, circumfessing Augustinian cor inquietum, whose counterpart in Derrida is the ‘‘desire’’ or ‘‘affirmation of the impossible.’’ It is in Augustine, not Aquinas, and in the Confessions not the City of God, that Continental philosophers can find an antecedent. So it is sheer dogmatism, as Merold argues repeatedly, to ‘‘reduce’’ God to a desire for our mommy, or to an opium of the people, or to the Platonism of the people, or to an expression of our resentment. We should be grateful to the masters of suspicion for the excellent reminders they give to religion to beware of degenerating into those kinds of religion, but in virtue of the contemporary critique of metaphysics, there is nothing in what the masters of suspicion have pointed out to show that God is ‘‘nothing more than’’ that. Getting rid of every ‘‘nothing other than’’ and converting over to a posture of openness is a big part—shall I say the central part?—of the critique of ontotheology. To summarize my main point, on my accounting, the broader and distinctively contemporary critique of ontotheologic not only criticizes privileging the ‘‘onto’’ over God, or the excessive rationalism of its ‘‘logic,’’ but it also criticizes the privileging of the ‘‘theo’’ in ‘‘ontotheologic.’’ It is only when all three ingredients in the expression are given their due weight that we can come to grips with this critique in its distinctive sense. This broad and sweeping critique—probably better described as ‘‘overcoming metaphysics’’ than as ‘‘overcoming ontotheology’’—includes a long line or a wide array of philosophical or theological positions. It criticizes any effort anywhere to arrest the play under any name, including names like ‘‘state,’’ ‘‘nation,’’ ‘‘capital,’’ ‘‘man,’’ or ‘‘God.’’ Indeed, it would make for an interesting day’s work to see how a long list of such names one might compose. It would include ‘‘ethics’’ in Levinas’s sense, and it would also include ‘‘art’’—which is where I think a lot of secularizing postmodernism would like to get off the train and stop the chain of substitution. Nonetheless, to stop the chain of substitution anywhere, with science, art, ethics, or theology, is to fix upon a Center, a fulcrum, a point of leverage, an Archimedean point, and that is ontotheological to the core, or perhaps better stated, to the center! In other words, to locate a Center is the central move in ontotheology. It matters not how much we insist, John D. Caputo

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after the fact, that our knowledge of the Center is finite, limited, and imperfect, or how contrite we are about the violence of naming the Center, or how humble we are about how much we can claim to know about this deep infinite and absolute Center. Indeed, the very complementarity between our humility, finitude, and guilt on the one hand and the Center’s glory, infinity, and holiness on the other is not a counter to ontotheology—and this would be the main point I raise with Merold—it is the very structure or architecture of ontotheology, which goes back to a decidedly classic, premodern version of ontotheology or metaphysics. I agree with Merold that in premodernity there is a more modest and humble sense of the Center than the ones we have seen in modernity. Merold rightly takes to task the more modern ontotheologicians who feel their oats and make excessively systematic claims of the sort we find in Spinoza and Hegel. But it is the Center that is at the center of the trouble with ontotheology in the distinct sense that philosophers like Heidegger and Derrida are concerned about. It is not enough to be decentered around the Center, to decenter the finite self and knock it down a peg or two, so that it would recenter upon the True Center, not the simulacrum of the center that is the self. The dual track that Merold sets up in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence is a formula for recentering: for the greater the transcendence of God, the more the self decenters around itself and recenters on God. Merold’s decentered self is all the more profoundly Godcentered. It is decentered as autonomous, but recentered as heteronomous. His self-transcendence issues in a transcendent self, a ‘‘soul’’ lifted up into a share of the infinity and glory of God’s life and company. But what if the critique of ontotheology requires the humility to confess that we have been cut adrift, have lost the Center, or have to constantly ask, to use Derrida’s probing Augustinian inquiry which I will, with a full sense of irony, call a central passage in the Confessions, ‘‘What do I love when I love my God?’’ Having a Heart, Not a Center, or Taking Humility All the Way Down What now? Where would we go from here? What would it be like to lack the Center? Would it be possible to have a certain religion, or even a faith in God, beyond any possible centrism, in a God beyond theocentrism? I maintain the result would be, to stick to the terms that Merold has set for himself, an exercise in humility, but in a more far-reaching and decentered humility. The results would not be irreligious but, if I may say so, Ur-religious, resulting in an archiconfession, a circumfession, of a very 112

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definite religious sort, and maybe even—I do not want to start a new religious war here—more confessional or circumfessional and archireligious than Augustine’s Confessions. The results would not be to divest oneself of prayer but to invest in a more searching prayer, in a more wounded word. I think the text of Circumfession is a good example of the sort of thing that would come next. We remember the graphics of that text, with Bennington overhead writing the ‘‘theological’’ program called ‘‘Derrida,’’ the omniscient ontotheological program, in the future perfect, in which everything that the Jacques/Jackie down below has ever said, or ever will have said, will be contained as a case in point or an instance or an example of the program. Jacques/Jackie complains that Bennington (G) up above seeks to rob him of his event and his future, tries to circumcise him again, to suck his blood and put it in a vial labeled ‘‘Jacques Derrida,’’ to appropriate his secret by robbing him of his secret name, of his ‘‘salvation,’’ of his ‘‘resurrection.’’ It would be no help to point out to Jacques down below that his knowledge is finite and sinful while G above is infinite and holy, as it would be no help to Johannes Climacus to point out to him that while the world is not a system for him down there, it is indeed system up above for God. That is the very problem for Jacques/Jackie, what troubles him down below, what he struggles with. The difference between Of Grammatology and Circumfession is that the ‘‘ontotheological’’ God up above is not the only God or theology to be found in the book. There is another God down below, down among the bleeding bodies of Jacques and his mother, the one Jacques/Jackie calls ‘‘my God,’’ the one about whom he has been asking himself all his life what he loves when he loves his God. Here the name of God is not associated with the theological program up above but with the questions written in blood, with sick children and dying mothers, questions like, ‘‘What do I love?’’ ‘‘What do I desire?’’ ‘‘What is the name of what I love and desire?’’ The name of God is not associated with a ‘‘program’’ or a ‘‘book’’ or an ‘‘encyclopedia’’ or with an omniscient providence, but with what in Of Grammatology is called the ‘‘aphoristic energy’’ of writing, of writing with one’s blood where the name of God is associated with blood and tears, with the singularity of the ‘‘event,’’ with the unforeseeable future, with a hope and a promise for something I know not what. The name of God is one of the names in Derrida’s chain—his mother must have known that the constancy of what is called God for him goes under other names as well. The name of God is an important name, but one of many names, for the possibility of the impossible, a possibility for which we lack a fixed and proper name. In other words, the critique of ontotheology is John D. Caputo

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a confession of a lack of proper, determinate, and fixed names for what we love or desire, a profession or confession of the open-endedness of our desire, of our faith in something, of our hope for something, and of our love of something open-ended. It is an exercise of even greater humility, of radical humility, and it offers up an even more wounded and circumcut word, which is Chre´tien’s beautiful definition of prayer. It is a more circumcut version of Augustine’s prayer and tears. In Derrida’s Specters of Marx, this desire/hope/promise shows up under the name, or the nickname, of the pure Messianic. Here he says that ‘‘the effectivity or actuality of any promise’’—he is thinking here of the promise lodged in democracy or in Marx—‘‘will always keep within it, and it must do so, this absolutely undetermined messianic hope at its heart, this eschatological relation to the to-come of an event and of a singularity, of an alterity that cannot be anticipated . . . and who or what will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power . . . just opening which renounces any right to property . . . messianic opening to what is coming.’’4 This open-endedness is described here as the ‘‘heart’’ of the determinate forms in which our faith and hope, our desire and expectation, take shape. The pure messianic is not an overarching form in the manner of a Kantian transcendental structure, of which the concrete messianisms are empirical instances. It is instead the open-ended heart, the pure opening of faith (foi) and expectation themselves, of which any determinate belief (croyance) or hope is a contraction or determination or partial closing. The critique of ontotheology is not finally a critique but an affirmation, not finally a closing off but an opening up, not finally a critical cut but a cut that opens, like the circumcised ear or circumcised heart, which opens itself to something I know not what. As Deleuze says, thinking beyond ontotheology is not representation—not a matter of getting the right picture of things, even if we allow a multiplicity of representations and perspectives organized around a common center—but experimentation, attempting to renew and reinvent ourselves.5 That is why Heidegger thought that ‘‘thinking’’ could never coexist with ‘‘faith.’’ Derrida rejected that and said instead that we need to distinguish between the more determinate faiths (croyance) and the open-endedness of faith itself (foi). We are called upon by this critique to make a more radical confession of the humility of our condition, one in which we offer up still more wounded words, to expose to ourselves a more radically unforeseeable future. Have we then come around full circle to inaugurating a new Center now traveling under the incognito of the ‘‘pure messianic’’ or ‘‘undeconstructible’’? That is an interesting question, and a more interesting objection to deconstruction than the ones by which it is usually visited. The 114

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short answer is that I do not think this is so, at least not in any rigorous sense, because centering lies in the very fixing of the proper term of desire, the identification or appropriation of the secret, the settling of the restless heart (cor inquietum) on something proper and determinate, something that has been constructed and, hence, is deconstructible. In ‘‘centering,’’ we fix a center in the open instead of remaining open to a coming that may come in any direction. There is a difference between the figure of an open, which spreads out in every direction, and the figure of a ‘‘center’’ around which everything is oriented and toward which everything is directed. I would say that this messianic expectation has a ‘‘heart,’’ an open heart, that lies at the heart of any determinate promise, but that it does not provide the comforting orientation of the Center. Rather than a centered discourse, we have an earnest but more errant traveler, a desert traveler, in a more choral situation, a searcher haunted by the specter or invisible spirits conjured by names like ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘justice,’’ ‘‘God,’’ one with a heart to keep asking, ‘‘What do I love when I love justice or democracy, when I love the gift or God? In sum, my concern is that in Merold’s version of overcoming ontotheology, this critique has been cut down to size, that the openness it demands has been contracted to, assimilated into, or appropriated by the most classical Christian conception of the mystery or incomprehensibility of God, with the result that this critique is stripped of its most novel and disturbing features. Merold wants to enlist the help of the critique of ontotheology within the context of his Christian faith, which puts a limit on the critique of ontotheology. What would it look like to situate his Christian faith in the context of the critique of ontotheology, taken in all of its ‘‘aphoristic energy,’’ as Derrida puts it? But that concern is trumped by my gratitude to Merold for the way he has given us all, the many readers of his numerous books, and the many people, inside and outside the academy, who have had the opportunity to learn from him, especially those who have been fortunate enough to know him personally, a more generous vision of religious faith and a more gentle vision of the human condition from which we all have to learn, one that, if enacted, would produce that profound and widespread Westphalian peace.

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Transcendence in Tears KEVIN HART

‘‘I propose to explore the transcendence of God in strict correlation with human self-transcendence,’’ Merold Westphal writes at the start of Transcendence and Self-Transcendence.1 His ‘‘basic idea,’’ he says, ‘‘is that what we say about God should have a direct bearing on our own self-transformation. Descriptions of divine being and prescriptions for human becoming are flip sides of the same coin’’ (2). And he concludes by telling us, ‘‘Where divine transcendence is preserved in its deepest sense, the affirmation of God as Creator is not merely the attribution of a certain structure to the cosmos but above all the commitment of oneself to a life of grateful striving’’ (231). That is to say, my prayers, and my reflections on a life of prayer, should make me pass from questions of cosmological transcendence (God’s relation to the world) through epistemological transcendence (how to talk of God) to ethical-religious transcendence (how to live, both with other people and before God). There is much to discuss in this thesis, not least of all the provenance and force of the ‘‘should’’ that impels us to pass from how we talk of God to how we act. If we shift from ethics to theology, we might wonder about the places of revelation and grace in Westphal’s design, for God reveals to us what we may say about Him. Scripture and the sacraments provide the I wish to thank Harold Bloom, Brad S. Gregory, Sian White, and Robin Darling Young for help of various sorts while writing this essay. I would especially like to thank Richard Strier for his close reading of an earlier version of this essay. 116

media for much of our ethical-religious transcendence. Perhaps the thesis should be recast: What God reveals of Himself determines both how we think of Him and how we are to act in the world. Still other questions press to be considered, including how Westphal’s thesis relates to Karl Rahner’s argument that we achieve self-transcendence in transcendental experience, which is an experience of God even if we do not realize it.2 Westphal is more concerned with what we say about God than Rahner is, yet the difference between them does not run smoothly along the line that separates the creedal and the transcendental. One question that interests me is the case of the person who affirms the transcendence of God but cannot achieve any measure of self-transcendence; and, as part of a long and pleasurable conversation with Merold Westphal, I would like to consider this counterexample. I bring to the conversation something I often talk about, though never before, as it happens, with Westphal. Call it ‘‘theology and literature,’’ and let it be something for us to talk about in the future. Some scholars in the field of theology and literature would insist that they are never far from speaking of sacramental theology, since poetry has a sacramental function. Hans Urs von Balthasar raises the issue in his theological aesthetics, pointing out that some poetry exemplifies the saying sacramenta continent quae significant, namely, sacraments contain what they signify.3 One problem is that Balthasar wishes to restrict the sacramental nature of poetry to the highly particular Catholic language of Gerard Manley Hopkins; another is that if there is no restriction of this sort, then more poetry than seems suitable would be deemed to have a sacramental character. I am reluctant to go far in either direction, although I would suggest that poetry might play a quasi-sacramental role in people’s lives. If sacramentals, such as prayers of blessing, imitate the sacraments, then it is as though poetry imitates the sacraments, being the sign of a communication of mystery, if not always the mystery of our redemption. So a poem could be thought as analogous with a sacrament considered as sacram signum, as Saint Augustine puts it; and perhaps a poem could also be regarded as a sacrum secretum, albeit in a different sense from the one intended by Saint Isidore of Seville, for it contains a secret that draws us to it, the absolute singularity of its idiom.4 At any rate, I wish to place between us a poem that could not fail to fascinate Merold Westphal, even if it is a poem about the ostensible failure of selftranscendence, a poem that doubts that it contains what it perhaps wishes to signify, at least in a sacramental manner: Geoffrey Hill’s ‘‘Lachrimae,’’ from his collection Tenebrae (1978).5 Kevin Hart

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‘‘Lachrimae’’ There can be no question of offering a full reading of a poem as elliptic and allusive as ‘‘Lachrimae’’ in one essay, no more so than considering all of Westphal’s concerns that might bear on it: history and truth, suspicion and faith, God and death, as well as transcendence and self-transcendence.6 To consider ‘‘Lachrimae’’ in the context of Hill’s poetry would call forth a vast commentary, as would placing it within theology without any boundaries marked: martyrology and Christology would press incessantly on the poem, as would the theologies of prayer and sacrifice. Hill himself cautions us that if we are to develop ‘‘a theological view of literature,’’ we should be careful not merely to restate ‘‘neo-Symbolist mystique celebrating verbal mastery.’’7 I agree, although I also think we can go in directions other than the one Hill takes, namely the equation of style and faith in Milton, Donne, and Herbert. As Hill readily concedes, ‘‘In most instances style and faith remain obdurately apart.’’8 In order to circumscribe the topic, I present ‘‘theology and literature’’ under the sign of something that Merold Westphal and I often talk about, ‘‘phenomenology and theology.’’ Perhaps Westphal will agree with me that a poem presumes that a phenomenological reduction has taken place. Perhaps he will disagree with me when I say that poets tend to perform the reduction better than philosophers do. The natural attitude is suspended the moment a poem begins to be written; another way of seeing takes over, one that is at once more concrete and more detached: concrete in that it is embedded in intentional horizons and detached in that consciousness withdraws from its intentional objects to consider how they are placed with respect to itself. Endless variations in this movement from what to how are possible. For the reader, too, a poem cannot be read without a conversion of the gaze. Prompted by one or more layers of the text that reveal the writing to be strange, thick with codes—tropic, formal, or generic—the reader senses that the transcendence of the text has been thwarted; its drive toward meaning and truth has been retarded, momentarily or for ages, so that we experience what Walter Pater calls ‘‘the finer edge of words’’ and, with them, feelings and meanings that return us to ourselves ‘‘more truly and more strange.’’9 Geoffrey Hill insists on the strangeness of his poem even before we start to read it. His title, ‘‘Lachrimae or Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans,’’ repeats the title of a haunting and austere piece of Tudor consort music by John Dowland. This composition for five viols, or violins, and lute, was first heard in 1595, was published in 1604, and 118

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soon won deep admiration.10 In a sonnet to ‘‘his friend Maister R. L.,’’ Richard Barnfield writes, ‘‘Dowland to thee is deare; whose heavenly tuch / Upon the Lute doth ravish humaine sense.’’11 Another sixteenthcentury horizon is set in place by the epigraph. It, too, is by a Catholic, the British martyr Saint Robert Southwell, whose St Mary Magdalens Funerall Teares (1591) reads, ‘‘Passions I allow, and Loves I approve, only I would wish that men would alter their object, and better their intent.’’ With sixteenth-century Catholicism, we enter a world in which theology has long since classified tears as signifying penitence, love, or compassion for the crucified Jesus.12 Southwell focuses on the Mary Magdalene whose penitential tears were shed years before, and who now weeps out of compassion and love for the dead Jesus. In his turn, Hill uses the figure of tears of compassion and love, while a resistance to penitence, hardness of heart, exerts a pressure throughout the sequence. ‘‘Lachrimae’’ refers to, and participates in, a world where ‘‘tears poetry’’ has already been inaugurated. We can take Luigi Tansillo’s madrigals ‘‘Lagrime di San Pietro’’ (1568) as a model, one that was brought from Italy to Britain by Southwell (partly translated as ‘‘Peeter Playnt’’) and adapted in his own ‘‘Saint Peters Complaint’’ (1595).13 We think also of Marie Magdalenes Lamentations, For the Love of Her Master Jesus (1601), perhaps by Gervase Markham, and Nicholas Breton’s The Ravisht Soul and the Blessed Weeper (1601), both influenced by Southwell. In prose, there come to mind Thomas Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593) and Thomas Lodge’s Prosopopeia Containing the Teares of the Holy, Blessed, and Sanctified Marie, the Mother of God (1596).14 Hill has testified to his admiration for Richard Crashaw’s verse, especially the use of technique to shape and sharpen emotional and ethical response as well as to respond to purely formal issues.15 Doubtless this is at the root of his interest in the hardwon welding of style and faith in Donne’s sermons and elsewhere. Yet ‘‘Lachrimae’’ avoids the rather maudlin and sometimes bizarre ‘‘tear poetry’’ of a poem such as ‘‘The Weeper.’’ There Crashaw says of Christ and Mary Magdalene, ‘‘He’s follow’d by two faithfull fountains / Two walking baths; two weeping motions, / Portable, & compendious oceans.’’16 Nor does ‘‘Lachrimae’’ bypass positive religion for a primal religiosity, as happens when Rene´ Char meditates on the cave paintings at Lascaux. ‘‘La beˆte innomable’’ becomes for him ‘‘La Sagesse aux yeux pleins de larmes.’’17 Completely unsentimental, ‘‘Lachrimae’’ is highly, almost painfully, self-conscious both as poetry and in its stance with respect to religious belief. Yet it is in a positive relation with the Christian faith. If we think that Hill’s sonnets are a literary counterpart to or a translation of Dowland’s music, we will be mistaken. Only four sections refer Kevin Hart

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directly to Dowland’s sequence—‘‘Lachrimae verae,’’ ‘‘Lachrimae coactae,’’ ‘‘Lachrimae antiquae novae,’’ and ‘‘Lachrimae amantis’’—and these are not in the same order as the original pavans.18 The other three sections—‘‘The Masque of Blackness,’’ ‘‘Martyrium,’’ and ‘‘Pavana dolorosa’’—develop from other works or Hill’s imagination.19 If, once we begin to read them, we think that the sonnets are lyrics ‘‘by’’ Geoffrey Hill in any simple or straightforward sense, we will be in error. Several of them are translations or adaptations from Counterreformation Spanish lyrics. Whose tears are these? If they are Hill’s, they are refracted through Dowland and Southwell, Lope de Vega Carpio, Francisco de Quevedo, and anonymous poets of the same age. One of the things that some readers find strange about Hill’s poem is that it refuses to remain as first-order religious discourse, prayers to God, or second-order theological discourse, a reflection on what Westphal calls cosmological, epistemological, and ethical-religious transcendence. The poetry is at once ardent and dialectical. It also transcends its sixteenth-century sources, becoming a poem on its own account while allowing them to live on in new ways. More importantly, the poetry transcends the ‘‘I’’ of apparently unmediated experience. The poem may examine, and even offer, testimony, but it confesses little or nothing. For ease of exposition, I begin in the middle of Hill’s sequence and will gather the other sonnets, insofar as it is possible, into my discussion as I proceed.20 Here, then, is ‘‘Lachrimae coactae’’: Crucified Lord, however much I burn to be enamoured of your paradise, knowing what ceases and what will not cease, frightened of hell, not knowing where to turn, I fall between harsh grace and hurtful scorn. You are the crucified who crucifies, self-withdrawn even from your own device, your trim-plugged body, wreath of rakish thorn. What grips me then, or what does my soul grasp? If I grasp nothing what is there to break? You are beyond me, innermost true light, uttermost exile for no exile’s sake, king of our earth not caring to unclasp its void embrace, the semblance of your quiet. Is this a lyric of forced tears or about forced tears? Both and neither. Its twofold manner is characteristic of the entire sequence, as is the motif of 120

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doubling, especially a doubling of prayer and poem, and yet two streams of meaning cannot be separated and analyzed by themselves. ‘‘Crucified Lord’’: the salutation immediately marks the utterance as prayer, the tears as those inspired by the Passion, and nothing that follows completely erases that mark, although ‘‘Lachrimae coactae,’’ like the sonnets before and after it, also allows prayer to be regarded as a literary genre by reader and writer alike. Is Christ ‘‘Lord’’ because he is confessed as such, or because the title is conventional? Who is addressed, Christ or a representation of Christ? Or, if you wish, is Christ regarded as transcendent with respect to Hill, or is he immanent in Hill’s imagination, one figure among others? The problems and the pathos of the sequence arise from the speaker being unable to answer these questions as clearly as he wants to and needs to. Attracted to the faith, he is also repulsed by it.21 Drawn to what transcends him, he is unable to follow Southwell’s advice and change his object and better his intent. He writes poems as prayers, while fearing that Coleridge might be right when he says, ‘‘Poetry—excites us to artificial feelings—makes us callous to real ones.’’22 The speaker (call him Hill) does not burn for paradise but ‘‘to be enamoured’’ of it. To want to be inspired to desire heaven suggests a working up of emotion, such as those crocodile tears evoked in the title. Certainly, as the first stanza makes plain, only attritio, imperfect contrition, motivated by fear of divine justice, is achieved, not the contritio that is free love for God in Himself alone and that indicates true repentance. So Hill ‘‘falls,’’ suddenly switching the valence of ‘‘burn’’ in the first line. It is not a direct plummet into hell but into a situation that paralyzes him. He finds himself caught between ‘‘harsh grace’’ and ‘‘hurtful scorn.’’ If the adjective in the second expression seems a little lazy, the one in the first expression rubs up the noun in the wrong way and, in doing so, recalls the Tridentine doctrine of justifying grace as the pardoning of the ungodly. Or maybe ‘‘harsh’’ does not qualify ‘‘grace’’ so much as underline the difficulty of a life lived after accepting it, or even a repugnance to that life, a life without life in the eyes of the world, which are partly Hill’s. Not to accept grace is to express contempt for God. Yet to accept grace is to expose oneself to the contempt of the worldly; and, either way, it could leave one prey to self-contempt in any number of overt or covert ways. Even if we assume that Hill sincerely addresses Christ as ‘‘Lord,’’ he is nevertheless not fully converted, as he attests. Why not? Because, as Jesus says to his disciples, ‘‘he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me’’ (Matt. 10:38), and ‘‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me’’ (Matt. 16:24). Kevin Hart

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Recusant Catholics under Elizabeth could hardly avoid images of Christians carrying crosses if they used contemporary manuals of prayer.23 Robert Southwell goes farther than others of his time and painfully combines the figures of bridal mysticism and martyrdom: ‘‘Thy soul is espoused to the Crucified One,’’ he tells himself, ‘‘and therefore thou must be crucified both in soul and body.’’24 And Christ’s injunction finds its way into Hill’s consciousness by other means as well. ‘‘All or Nothing,’’ says Ibsen’s Brand, and Brand is never far from Hill’s religious imagination.25 Christ is indeed ‘‘the crucified who crucifies’’: he places Hill in an excruciating position, ‘‘between harsh grace and hurtful scorn,’’ while demanding that if he accepts grace, he will be crucified to himself, if not actually martyred for his belief. Yet the situation in which Hill finds himself is even worse than this. For Jesus, as Hill directly tells him, is ‘‘self-withdrawn even from your own device.’’ I do not find any hint here of Christ as the supreme artist withdrawn behind his work.26 Rather, I see the Savior having distanced himself from the emblematic figure of himself on the cross, not because of the resurrection (for the death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ form a deep unity), but because the crucifix is a token of what happened centuries ago on Golgotha. The crucifixion has long been a frozen image, even in churches, calling forth devotion at the risk of containing it or misdirecting it. Such images can become caricatures, as Hill realizes when he speaks to Jesus, with a flicker of humor, of his ‘‘trimplugged body, wreath of rakish thorn.’’ ‘‘Lachrimae coactae,’’ like the entire sequence to which it belongs, leads us to ask about the relations of religious devotion and art. In Transcendence and Self-Transcendence and elsewhere Westphal shows how Emmanuel Levinas illuminates the relations between ethics and religion, though he never, to my knowledge, discusses Levinas’s essay ‘‘La re´alite´ et son ombre’’ (1948), where art receives criticism at least as fierce as that urged by Plato in Book X of The Republic. Levinas begins that essay by silently borrowing a distinction drawn by Jean Wahl between ‘‘transascendance’’ and ‘‘transdescendance.’’27 Art is disengaged, not because it transcends the world, pointing us up toward the ineffable, but because it passes beneath the world, pulling us toward an impenetrable darkness. The concept is ‘‘grasped’’ (saisi), known; it is ‘‘the intelligible object.’’28 The image, on the other hand, neutralizes any relation between reality and the viewer. Now if art substitutes the image for the object, as Levinas maintains, it is not properly spoken of in terms of creation and revelation. Instead of the highest spiritual categories, magic and enchantment are the proper terms in which it should be discussed. ‘‘The image is musical,’’ Levinas says (79), intending this as anything but a compliment. Images enmesh us in 122

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rhythm, he thinks, distracting us from our responsibilities in the world. Never an icon, art is always only an idol; it requires sharp criticism, not passive appreciation. Levinas begins his case insouciantly enough: ‘‘Let us say that the thing is itself and its image’’ (82). That is, when a phenomenon gives itself to consciousness it gives not only itself but also its image. It is as though there is ‘‘a split in being,’’ a gap between ‘‘being and its essence’’ (85), so that essence can be detached from being and used to divert it from its proper path (the real, the true) into a deviant course (the nonreal, the nontrue). A sharp distinction, originally Sartrean, between two irreducible modes of intentionality is drawn and distributed in a way foreign to Sartre.29 For Husserl, imagination is a modification of perception. Sartre insists that the two are distinct but does not use them to distinguish different sorts of person or generic activity.30 Not so for Levinas. When a philosopher looks at something, he suggests, he or she performs the reduction, and thereby grasps the phenomenon. Yet when an artist looks at something, he or she tries to hold onto the image, the unreal and not the real. As Levinas puts it in a fine sentence, ‘‘So art drops the prey for the shadow’’ (89). In missing the phenomenon, art does not produce a symbol but an ‘‘allegory of being’’ (82); it arrests time, not as a flash that captures a moment and holds it aloft above time, as it were, but as a passage beneath time to a ‘‘life without life’’ (86) in which the future is suspended forever. The image is a tableau, a ‘‘caricature of being’’ (85): classical art seeks to correct the element of distortion, while modern art, which incorporates philosophical critique of the image, draws attention to it. The only ethically responsible art, for Levinas, is iconoclastic.31 Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which stands as a prime example of art that erases the signs of its nonbeing and nontruth, is for Levinas a constant temptation to ‘‘nasty, selfish, and cowardly’’ pleasure (90). Art takes us away from the world and our responsibilities there. What then of Philippe Halsman’s Dali as Mona Lisa (in which Lisa del Giocondo is given Dali’s eyes and moustache)? Presumably it would be ethically sanctioned by virtue of emphasizing the element of caricature in Da Vinci’s masterwork. Of course, it would be utterly implausible to argue that Halsman’s painting is superior as a work of art to Da Vinci’s, that the Renaissance man is ‘‘just an artist’’ (91) while the modern man is somehow more than one, and hence his work is to be valued the more highly. Yet Levinas seems unable to explain why this is so, if, indeed, he is not already committed on ethical grounds to prizing the later work over the earlier. The criticism of art that he develops rests on the ‘‘literary absolute’’ of Friedrich Schlegel and his friends, and uncritically affirms avant-garde assumptions about art that, endlessly repeated, have tended to become gestures Kevin Hart

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and nostalgias.32 To figure ethics in art solely as criticism of the image is to fix ethics too narrowly in that sphere, while to correlate ethics and modernity in art is unhistorical and fantastical. When Levinas allows ‘‘modern literature’’ to begin as long ago as Shakespeare (91), he is not finding a moment when literature becomes ethical by acts of self-criticism but extending the assumptions of Jena Romanticism back to the Renaissance. Expanding ‘‘criticism’’ to include technique is a valuable concession, although it does not go sufficiently far. ‘‘Technique’’ is not something learned only by Shakespeare and those who come after him, nor is it always used in the service of the concept. Pound’s comment is closer to what poets do at their best: ‘‘The poet’s job is to define and yet again define, till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice.’’33 Yet not all poets are the same. So I would not only add justice but also wisdom, and not only the wisdom of the Greeks, Romans, and English but also that of the Bible.34 My first, general criticism of Levinas opens the way to other worries about ‘‘La re´alite´ et son ombre.’’ One might argue that it is the task of philosophy to investigate the deepest level of reality, which for Levinas would seem to be prior to the distinction between being and essence, namely the ‘‘split in being’’ that he identifies. If the artist attends to this ontological fissure, then it would be the artist, not the philosopher, who responds to what is most profound. Such is the position developed by Levinas’s friend Maurice Blanchot.35 Besides, can we be so sure that the artist as artist differs so fundamentally from the philosopher? Could it not be that when Leonardo paints Lisa del Giocondo’s portrait, he puts out of play the natural attitude and leads us back to something deeply mysterious in the human being? Gazing at that face for five minutes might make one understand the vulnerability of the other person, her infinite preciousness, more concretely than any argument proposed in a philosophy seminar. And could it not be that, in terms of ethics, the philosopher at his desk, reading Totalite´ et infini, is like the person in the next room who is admiring a painting? Could not they be equally deaf to the call of the widow, the stranger, and the orphan precisely because the work in hand is so absorbing? That ‘‘Lachrimae’’ incorporates a critique of ‘‘mere art’’ is not to be doubted; it harbors an iconoclastic impulse, as does all his poetry, though one that is animated by another concern than the one that motivated either Constantine V or Levinas. And that poetry has a ‘‘menace’’ is something we know from Hill’s inaugural lecture at the University of Leeds, even if he is insufficiently clear about what he means by the word.36 The doubling that sends a tremor through Hill’s poetry in general, and that to 124

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some degree stimulates it, is not simply one of image and concept but, as Christopher Ricks sees, one of prurience and imagination.37 Poetry allows one to speak of anything, even the most terrible suffering, while distancing itself from it in the name of art. ‘‘Lachrimae’’ may well be partly about the distraction of images in a life of religious faith, but the self-criticism that Hill folds into his poetry is a sharp objection to the complacency and self-regard that accompany art and the appreciation of art. That it is embodied by way of technique is evident to any reader of the poetry sensitive to paradox, line endings, ambiguity, scansion, and punctuation. Hill’s self-criticism is not motivated by a perceived fissure in being but by an all-too familiar and deeply felt failure to realize an intention with sufficient purity. It is the self-criticism of a moral rigorist, not that of someone drawn to attack Orthodoxy or to propound ethics as first philosophy. After noting that Christ has withdrawn from all images of himself, Hill asks, ‘‘What grips me then, or what does my soul grasp?’’ The two questions need to be separated. Notice that he does not ask, ‘‘Who grips me?’’ No personal experience of the risen Christ is explicitly entertained, but he registers the horror of Christ’s suffering even in the caricature of the Passion that is the crucifix before him. Or, as he admits in the second question, there is no objective reality that grips him; there is only him grasping for something, longing for a reality that might not be there. The slight asymmetry between ‘‘grip’’ and ‘‘grasp’’ needs to be registered: Christ, or something transcendent (in either the phenomenological or religious sense of the word), grips Hill, holds him firmly, or he grasps at Christ, clutches at him greedily. A hesitance in the subject requires notice, for we pass from ‘‘What grips me then’’ to ‘‘what does my soul grasp?’’ to ‘‘If I grasp nothing’’ (my emphasis throughout). The self in the accusative is perhaps gripped, whereas only the soul grasps—understands spiritually— which is quickly modulated into the self in the nominative perhaps grasping nothing. It may be that the soul can grasp something intellectually, yet the whole self, emotional as well as spiritual, cannot grasp anything. At any rate, no sooner is the second question uttered than the possibility of delusion is raised and an answer is touched in imagination: ‘‘If I grasp nothing what is there to break?’’ The problem here is to work out exactly what is being asked. There are many possibilities, and I give only their general matrix. (1) If I grasp nothing, if God does not exist, then nothing will break, neither my relation with God nor my heart in true contrition, because these things are unreal. (And yet the heart may break because there is no God.) (2) If there is no God, no light will ever shine on me. (3) If I understand nothing because I have no faith—Crede ut intelligas, as Saint Augustine said—there will be no illumination for me.38 (4) If I Kevin Hart

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grasp nothing because Christ has removed himself from me and is detached from my plight, then what follows? I must hope for him to come closer to me. Every believer of any sophistication or honesty prays at times in the midst of anxieties and doubts, although seldom as many or as virulent as these. They are not overcome but tightly folded into the final sentence of the sonnet, which needs to be read in the awareness that Hill’s first question, ‘‘What grips me then?’’ has neither been answered nor dismissed. ‘‘You are beyond me,’’ Hill says to Christ, partly in exasperation, partly in affection, partly in praise: I do not understand you or your ways, nor can I because you are beyond being. Christ’s absolute transcendence does not contradict his immanence in the depths of the soul. He is ‘‘innermost true light,’’ lumen gratiae; he is deus interior intimo meo, the God who is closer to me than I am to myself. The paradox of Christ being outer and inner is Christianity’s, and only the delicately managed tone of ‘‘You are beyond me’’ makes it Hill’s as well. That and the poet’s own relish for paradox, for without a pause he figures Christ as ‘‘uttermost exile’’ because of his radical kenosis (Phil. 2:7–8). Why does Christ leave heaven? For sinners like Hill, of course, whose faults must be atoned for ‘‘on the hill’’ as we hear in ‘‘Lachrimae verae,’’ even though Hill in 1978 is not an exile from his homeland, and not one of those who pray nobis post hoc exsilium. Looking still at the crucifix, and presumably at the inscription INRI (Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum), Hill addresses Christ as ‘‘king of our earth,’’ perhaps also half-recalling the title in use in the late sixteenth century, ‘‘King of the Glorious Martyrs.’’ With arms outstretched on the cross, Jesus seems as though he stands with the earth embracing him. At first one thinks of lines from Boris Pasternak’s second poem, entitled ‘‘Mary Magdalene’’: ‘‘Thy arms, O Lord, upon the Cross / Embrace too many in the world.’’39 Yet the embrace that concerns Hill holds nothing, not too much. It is a ‘‘void embrace’’ for two reasons: because Jesus holds only empty air and because life on earth promises only the void after death. By the time we get this far into any of the parts of ‘‘Lachrimae,’’ we can see that the poem gambles everything it has, not once but twice. Every sonnet proposes a scansion of the history of the sonnet. Little in these sonnets recalls sixteenth-century religious verse, certainly not Henry Lok’s Sundry Christian Passions, Contained in Two Hundred Sonnets (1593) or Barnabe Barnes’s A Divine Centurie of Spirituall Sonnets (1595). Donne’s ‘‘Holy Sonnets,’’ from the early seventeenth century (1607–19), are the most secure point of contact with Hill’s poem one can find in English religious verse. It cannot be a surprise, for Hill inherits many streams of 126

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‘‘metaphysical poetry’’ from Donne, as well as from critics such as Eliot and Empson who affirm Donne’s poetry as a model for modernist poetry. The flair for paradox is common to Donne and Hill, of course, and so too are certain themes, such as the fear of pandering to God (‘‘Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one’’) and the experience of ‘‘harsh grace’’ (‘‘Batter my heart, three-personed God’’).40 Yet the baroque era in the history of the sonnet is brought to the fore, mostly by allusion to Spanish poets, perhaps ones that Donne had read, and the risk is run of appearing overly literary, even of the English verse reading as though it has been translated (albeit with great skill). The poet’s mask could seem contrived, self-conscious, and fussy. Second, the poem highlights baroque Catholic spirituality, and takes its chances as being read as trading in theological commonplaces. For all its risks, however, the poem has a directness that almost completely overcomes its weaker moments (as in the sestet of ‘‘Lachrimae coactae’’). Hill tells us that, ‘‘ambiguities and scruples seem to reside in the object that is meditated upon.’’41 This is true, but only if one acknowledges that the ‘‘in’’ ventured here does not exclude a structure of subjectivity in the writer. Those ambiguities and scruples, along with the literary devices and theological commonplaces, are ‘‘in’’ the noemata as irreal, Husserl would say; they are linked to the noetic pole of the writer’s gaze.42 They are not objective in a naı¨ve realist sense, and responsible action with respect to them involves an acknowledgment of the self ’s involvement with them. The problem at issue is not that of the self-criticism of prurience but the styling of one’s relation to the world so often in terms of ‘‘difficulty.’’ That the events that stimulate poetry are given to us in an excess of intuition is not to be doubted, but to consider that excess so often by way of difficulty—rather than mystery or richness, say—is to yield to intellectualism.43 To say repeatedly that something is difficult, whether or not it is overcome, is a subtle form of self-aggrandizement. In this sense, difficulty and mystery are very far from one another. Mystery is compatible with an affirmation of the simple, though never the simplistic, and in its world to speak of difficulty is already reductive. The final image is of doubling once again, and once again it is ambiguous. Here, as elsewhere in Hill, we do not find the ‘‘fruitful ambiguity’’ that the New Critics talked about so much as what we might call a ‘‘thornful ambiguity.’’ We might say that just as Christ’s embrace of Hill is quiet (‘‘If I grasp nothing . . .’’) because it is empty, so the earth promises Jesus only the void. The dying Jesus does not care to unclasp the earth’s embrace in a triumphant gesture, or he does not bother to do so: it is far too late for that or anything. On the first reading, Jesus maintains the embrace to the very end, because he must bear the full weight of sin Kevin Hart

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for the redemption of the world to be efficacious. His quiet is not a deathly silence but a submission to the will of the Father that we are enjoined to imitate. On the second reading, however, Jesus cannot shake off the embrace of the void. He cries out, ‘‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’’ (Matt. 27:46). The poem has brooded on the crucifix as an image of Jesus on the cross, yet in its final line it is the earth that becomes an image of Jesus. Is it that the silent earth is a poor copy of Jesus’ quiet, and instead of calmness and peace it reveals emptiness and blankness? Or could it be that both Jesus and the earth are finally still, a dead body and a world facing the void? The questions are not answered, no more so than the one that haunts the sestet, ‘‘What grips me then?’’ Poetry and Prayer Can one pray in a poem? Should one pray in a poem? An important critical tradition, running from Samuel Johnson to Donald Davie, answers both questions firmly in the negative. With nonscriptural verse, at least, either the poem will be compromised as art or the speaker will delude himself or herself.44 Yet there are many strong poems that are also prayers, from the psalms to anonymous lyrics of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, seventeenth-century devotional verse, T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘AshWednesday,’’ and beyond. Other poems—George Herbert’s ‘‘Jordan’’ I and II, for instance—explicitly query religious lyrics, prayers or not, that prefer metaphor to plain speech. The metaphor required to express the transcendence of God can distract writer and reader from the truth of the faith. Detaching the rhetoric of prayer from belief in God is a familiar practice: Jules Supervielle and Yves Bonnefoy have composed poems that address a God who does not exist.45 And that prayers not intended to be poems nonetheless have literary qualities is well known: The Book of Common Prayer (1559) provides many examples. Similarly, prayers that might have no literary value whatsoever may be informed by deliberate exertions of the imagination, as Saint Ignatius Loyola commended in his Spiritual Exercises (1548). Prayer can be regarded as an art itself, an exemplary discipline.46 Even acts of devotion, up to and including martyrdom, can be regarded as works of art. Ibsen’s Brand exhorts us, ‘‘Don’t forget / life’s the real work of art!’’ and Pierre Janelle tells us that Saint Robert Southwell’s ‘‘trial and execution are in themselves a work of art of supreme beauty.’’47 In his essay ‘‘The Absolute Reasonableness of Robert Southwell’’ (1979), Hill glosses Janelle’s comment by way of ‘‘transfiguration,’’ a word that for Hill, at least here, is associated with art and not faith.48 In 128

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Tenebrae (1978), though, he is more doubtful that a religious vocabulary can be transferred to art. ‘‘Lachrimae coactae’’ has already shown a concern with the image, and a vigilant awareness of the ambiguities of the imagination can be found throughout the sequence. In the first sonnet of ‘‘Lachrimae’’ the crucified Christ is told, ‘‘This is your body twisted by our skill,’’ meaning not only Roman techniques of torture and execution but also the craft of making images, both crucifixes and poems. Christ’s words ‘‘Take, eat; this is my body’’ (Matt. 26:26) are themselves twisted in the poem, as though in acknowledgment of how the spiritual can be distorted to fill aesthetic hungers. And when Hill tells Christ, ‘‘I cannot turn aside from what I do,’’ it is important that the ‘‘I’’ be recognized as both sinner and poet, the two being impossible to separate in his case. The sinner cannot achieve conversio, conversion, partly because he is a poet, committed in advance to tropes or turns, with a hardened tendency to drop the prey for the shadow. In the sixth sonnet he will talk of our devotion that is ‘‘bowed beneath the gold,’’ indicating both an attitude of prayer and a distortion. The current of criticism of the Church’s selfdistraction with icons and art is also a self-criticism: the casting of religious devotion as art, as ‘‘Lachrimae,’’ introduces self-regard in moments of what could have been sincere prayer. Religious transcendence in prayer is contaminated by literary transcendence in composing a work of art. In Hill’s terms, the desire for atonement runs aground in the quest for atone-ment.49 Whether it must do so or whether it usually does so is left undetermined. The first and sixth sonnets, ‘‘Lachrimae verae’’ and ‘‘Lachrimae antiquae novae,’’ are titles drawn from Dowland. More attention to the possibilities of corruption in art (or, more darkly, art as corruption) is given in the three sonnets that depart from the titular musical work. Consider the second of the series, ‘‘The Masque of Blackness’’: Splendour of life so splendidly contained, brilliance made bearable. It is the east light’s embodiment, fit to be caressed, the god Amor with his eyes of diamond, celestial worldliness on which has dawned Intelligence of angels, Midas’ feast, the stony hunger of the dispossessed locked into Eden by their own demand. Self-love, the slavish master of this trade, conquistador of fashion and remark, Kevin Hart

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models new heavens in his masquerade, its images intense with starry work, until he tires and all that he has made vanishes in the chaos of the dark.50 The sonnet is about art as well as striving itself to be highly polished art. It cites the title of Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness (1605), which was performed before James I and in which his wife, Anne of Denmark, acted with blackened face and arms. Also it adapts Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnet ‘‘Retrato de Lisi que traia en una sortija.’’51 Some preliminary comments on these two works are needed to clarify the lyric. Brought to a high pitch of spectacle by Inigo Jones, Jonson’s masque was a great success as art, if not for consolidating Queen Anne’s reputation at court: people talked about the flimsiness of her costume.52 The masque traced the passage of Ethiopian daughters, who desire perfect beauty, from Africa to England. It is a piece about tears of vanity, for the River Niger (‘‘in form and color of an Ethiop’’) speaks of his daughters crying: ‘‘They wept such ceaseless tears into my stream, / That it hath thus far overflowed his shore / To seek them patience.’’53 The cause of this vanity is traced by the River Niger to the poets, ‘‘Poor brain-sick men’’ who have ‘‘sung / The painted beauties other empires sprung’’ and let ‘‘their loose and winged fictions fly / To infect all climates, yea, our purity’’ (ll. 130–135). Eventually the daughters reach Britannia and bathe in the rays of James I, the sun, who can turn black into white: For were the world with all his wealth a ring, Britannia, whose new name makes all tongues sing, Might be a diamond worthy to enchase it, Ruled by a sun that to this height doth grace it, Whose beams shine day and night and are of force To blanch an Aethiop, and revive a cor’s. His light sciental is, and, past mere nature, Can salve the rude defects of every creature. (ll. 221–228) A ring also forms the conceit of Quevedo’s sonnet in which he speaks of a portrait of Lisi, which is imprisoned (‘‘aprisionado’’) in a ring. Here the empire is not that of James but of Love (‘‘y grande imperio del Amor cerrado’’). Like many others of its day, the sonnet reworks sacred motifs in a secular register. Lisi’s teeth are pearls set in diamond (‘‘en un diamante’’). Hard like diamond, she speaks with scorn, like tinkling ice (‘‘con desde´n sonoro yelo’’), and tyrannical fire (‘‘fuego tirano’’). The masque gorgeously contains in its narrow limits all the magnificence of life at court: dance, costume, music, and poetry, combined with 130

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coruscating visual effects. The Queen played Euphoria, an Ethiopian, while various ladies of the court played lesser roles. Blackened and heavily jeweled, Anne came on stage in a mother-of-pearl shell drawn by seahorses, accompanied by tributaries of the River Niger and several sea monsters.54 Watching her was James I, absolute monarch of Britain (the ‘‘new name’’ that Jonson speaks of ), who also holds the title King of France but without possessing the land, and, as a Stuart, takes himself to be Christ’s sovereign representative. Masque and court are the ‘‘east / light’s embodiment,’’ the metaphor applying to James I in particular. He is able to revive the dead, as the Masque proclaims. Yet he is less Christ than he is ‘‘the god Amor’’ with his empire of conquest spread before him in the court, and his ‘‘eyes of diamond’’ suggest rarity, artificiality, hardness or even tears. He is fit to be caressed by male or female. (Rex fuit Elizabeth: nunc est regina Jacobus, people in the know said wryly after the coronation in 1603.) In its brightness and pomp, not to mention its decadence, the court exhibits ‘‘celestial worldliness.’’ Yet the court also knows angelica mens, ‘‘the intelligence of angels,’’ in the sense that Pico della Mirandola gives to the expression. ‘‘It is a commonplace of the schools that man is a little world, in which we may discern a body mingled of earthy elements, and ethereal breath, and the vegetable life of plants, and the senses of the lower animals, and reason, and the intelligence of angels, and a likeness to God [Tritum est in scholis, esse hominen minorem mundum, in quo mixtum ex elementis corpus et spiritus coelestis et plantarum anima vegetalis et brutorum sensus et ratio et angelica mens et Dei similitudo conspicitur].’’55 Hill’s poem explores the ‘‘little world’’ of the court of James I, and the way in which the king and the artist both seek to be free creators of their own worlds, and, in mistaking ‘‘self-love’’ for ‘‘love,’’ become prisoners of desire rather than free creators of new worlds. Pico has God tell man at his creation, ‘‘We have set thee at the world’s center that thou mayest from thence more easily observe whatever is in the world. We have made thee neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, so that with freedom of choice and with honor, as though the maker and molder of thyself, thou mayest fashion thyself in whatever shape thou shalt prefer. Thou shalt have the power to degenerate into the lower forms of life, which are brutish. Thou shalt have the power, out of thy soul’s judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, which are divine.’’56 Hill’s ‘‘Lachrimae,’’ and ‘‘The Masque of Blackness’’ in particular, explores this Renaissance Platonic theology, not merely dramatizing its options, but underlining the difficulty of choosing between them in the world of art, in the making of beautiful things, and in the world of religion, in the Kevin Hart

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making of a life that God sees as beautiful. The very diagnosis of corruption in ‘‘The Masque of Blackness’’ is itself contaminated by ‘‘self-love,’’ as Hill indicates when he refers to poetry (and the writing of the poem in question) as ‘‘this trade.’’ The court itself is ‘‘Midas’ feast,’’ a familiar scene from Ovid. Or rather two scenes: the ten-day party to welcome Silenus, and the dinner in celebration of the gift from Bacchus—the ability to turn anything into gold. It is the second feast that presses the harder in the poem, the image of the king as ‘‘both a wretch and rich,’’ as Arthur Golding has it in his translation of the Metamorphoses.57 Hill may well have a contemporary version of the myth in mind. We think of what Apollo says in John Lyly’s Midas (1589), played before Elizabeth I: ‘‘To be a King is next being to a God’’ (IV, i, 65–66).58 Hearing that, though, we remember that Mellacrites has already told Sophronia about the feast: ‘‘Your highnes sees, and without griefe you cannot see, that his meat turneth to massie gold in his mouth, and his wine slideth downe his throte like liquide golde’’ (II, i, 46–48). The luxury of court life is anything but nourishing for the soul. ‘‘Stony hunger’’ is overcome only by listening to ‘‘every word of God’’ (Luke 4:3). Dispossessed, but only in the sense of coming from Scotland and Denmark, James and Anne are locked into the brilliant yet superficial life at court ‘‘by their own demand,’’ that is, by their legal claim, their imperious requests of Parliament, and their almost unlimited desires. They live in a false Eden, not even the forest of Arden where one feels ‘‘not the penalty of Adam,’’ but a twisted version of the society that B. L. Joseph rather nostalgically calls ‘‘Shakespeare’s Eden.’’59 Thus far the sonnet has shifted from the concerns of ‘‘Lachrimae verae’’ to courtly entertainment at the very time when Dowland was composing ‘‘Lachrimae’’ and the Baroque poets of Spain were writing sensuous religious sonnets. It comes as a jolt in the sequence in its definitive arrangement; although, as king, James I is the representative of Christ, ‘‘The Masque of Blackness’’ is not a Christological poem so much as an exploration of what happens when ‘‘the god Amor’’ is substituted for Christ, and there is sufficient power to make the substitution take hold for a while.60 The structure of doubling is clear and, here as elsewhere in the poem, Southwell’s desire for men to ‘‘alter their object and better their intent’’ is pertinent. The sestet is more direct in its criticisms. The ‘‘trade,’’ whether in gold, colonial slaves, or sex, is directed by ‘‘Self-love,’’ the fuller name of ‘‘Amor,’’ who cannot separate himself from what he does, and who sets le bon ton in all the registers of cleverness and cruelty. Yet ‘‘this trade’’ is surely also the writing of poetry, including at the edge of all condemnation the very sequence ‘‘Lachrimae’’ that we are reading. There 132

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is a shift from The Masque of Blackness to the masks worn by the poet of Tenebrae.61 A similar move will be made in ‘‘Pavana dolorosa,’’ where Southwell is addressed as ‘‘Self-seeking hunter of forms,’’ and told ‘‘there is no end / to such pursuits,’’ a comment that flicks back on Geoffrey Hill, who can be seen equally to be addressing himself. His project of selfcriticism, his hunt for ‘‘good form,’’ can never end, for his version of the literary absolute can always be admired by himself and others precisely for its moral integrity. The ‘‘verbal mastery’’ of the Symbolists can always be criticized and the poet’s words become a higher form of mastery, one that rises above ethical concerns by dint of having addressed them and turned them into tropes. And, of course, there is a sense in which the writing of prayerful sonnets is pointless if the aim is the salvation of one’s soul. Like Southwell, at least to the extent that both are artists, he is ‘‘self-seeking,’’ in quest of his true self and promoting that self. To exhibit free beauty, Kant says in the third Critique, an artwork must have ‘‘finality without end’’ (Zweckma¨ssigkeit ohne Zweck); it must be cut off from religious purposes as well as all others.62 For Kant, a poem that is also a prayer would not exhibit free beauty and most certainly would not have a proper understanding of prayer.63 To return to ‘‘The Masque of Blackness,’’ the new heavens are not those of Revelation 21:1, but others devised by Inigo Jones. They are modeled like the latest fashions in clothes, the passing moment being deemed a success only because of the enormous amount of misdirected work behind it. Yet Self-love cannot sustain any interest beyond itself, and the Masque, along with everything like it, ‘‘vanishes in the chaos of the dark.’’ The final metaphor is biblical, referring us to the tohu wa-bohu of Genesis 1:2: ‘‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’’ A certain sort of art, such as that exemplified by Jonson and Jones, passes from creation to uncreation. Poetry as Sacrament Those who figure poetry as a sacrament are likely to be discomposed by ‘‘Lachrimae.’’ The sequence represents a poem as a funeral monument, a martyrium, and casts doubt on the image of the martyr as someone testifying purely and simply for his or her faith. Martyrs, both secular and sacred, if the distinction can be trusted here, appear throughout Hill’s poetry, for he is deeply interested in the equation of witness and suffering, and of the possible atonement that comes from suffering. Consider the third sonnet, ‘‘Martyrium’’: Kevin Hart

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The Jesus-faced man walking crowned with flies who swats the roadside grass or glances up at the streaked gibbet with its birds that swoop, who scans his breviary while the sweat dries, fades, now, among the fading tapestries, brooches of crimson tears where no eyes weep, a mouth unstitched into a rimless cup, torn clouds the cauldrons of the martyr’s cries. Clamorous love, its faint and baffled shout, its grief that would betray him to our fear, he suffers for our sake, or does not hear above the hiss of shadows on the wheat. Viaticum transfigures earth’s desire in rising vernicles of summer air. I take the ‘‘Jesus-faced’’ man to be Southwell, and ‘‘Jesus-faced’’ to summon ‘‘Janus-faced’’: for Catholics the saint-to-be is indeed looking to Christ, though the Protestants of the time of Elizabeth I believe him, and all Jesuits, to be in league with Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies. While studying at the English College in Rome in 1585, Southwell received a letter describing the examination and martyrdom of George Haydock. ‘‘The Catholic faith, the devel’s faith,’’ bystanders cried out at Tyburn when Haydock asked for prayers from ‘‘Catholicks’’ and defined the word to mean members of ‘‘the Catholick Roman Church.’’64 The writer of the letter had been standing ‘‘under the gibbet’’ (61), like the priest imagined in the first stanza. Now, though, the age of Christians dying in odium fidei has faded; what remains are reliquaries and images, which call forth devotions, real and florid, appropriate and skewed. Considering them, Hill parallels what Southwell says in St Mary Magdalens Funerall Teares. ‘‘Passions I allow,’’ the saint concedes, which Hill adapts in the third person, ‘‘Clamorous love . . . he suffers for our sake.’’ The martyr allows tearful, importunate devotion, stemming from grief, which can easily become a displaced figure of our own fear of death. Yet ‘‘suffers’’ also takes on the usual, darker sense; the martyr experiences pain for us, just as Christ did upon the cross, and to the same end. Or is the ‘‘Clamorous love’’ entirely earthly, the tears of Eros that have not been directed to a divine object or bettered in intent? And can we trace the border between the holy and the profane with any confidence in the devotion of the time, the poetry of the time, or in ‘‘Lachrimae’’? 134

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At any rate, as the lyric makes plain, it could be that the martyr does not hear our cries, by dint of the intensity of his focus, as a recipient of special grace, or in a more dubious state of abstraction. The lines in the sestet are more elusive than one usually finds in Hill, perhaps most obliquely so in ‘‘the hiss of shadows on the wheat.’’ Is this an allusion to John Wilkinson, the silk mercer who stood beneath the scaffold where Henry Garnet was executed in 1606 so that the linens he had brought with him might be spotted with the martyr’s blood? Garnet’s blood fell on a wheat stalk caught in Wilkinson’s clothes, and some thought that one of the grains miraculously assumed the features of Garnet’s face.65 Or are we directed to the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:30)? More likely, I think, Hill’s line alludes to the Eucharistic metaphor of the martyr as bread to be consecrated by his or her witness to Christ. The metaphor is patristic, although of course patristic sources were much used by recusant Catholics, including Southwell, and those who suffered in the early Church were liturgically commemorated in the Roman Martyrology (1584). They were hardly distant figures for sixteenth-century Catholics.66 So we think of Saint Ignatius of Antioch writing in his letter to friends at Rome before he suffered: ‘‘I am the wheat of God, and am ground by the teeth of the wild beasts, that I may be found the pure bread of God.’’67 And we think of The Martyrdom of St Polycarp: ‘‘The fire produced the likeness of a vaulted chamber, like a ship’s sail bellying to the breeze, and surrounded the martyr’s body as with a wall; and he was in the center of it, not as burning flesh, but as bread that is baking or as gold and silver refined in a furnace!’’68 Those who would harm a recusant martyr are no more than shadows when considered eschatologically, even though they rail against him or make flames hiss around the cauldron in which his heart will be thrown. A figure of the Eucharist, the martyr becomes viaticum for those who witness his or her testimony, and this has the power to transfigure worldly desire, including all longings for self-preservation. Whenever the martyr’s blood is shed, Southwell says, it ‘‘engendereth a wonderful alteration in men’s manners, making them embrace the truth.’’69 Just as Veronica was revered after Jesus’ death, so too was the handkerchief with which Southwell wiped his face before he threw it into the crowd assembled to watch his execution. He is ‘‘Jesus-faced,’’ and never more so than at his martyrdom. To be sure, reliquaries, or a martyrium, or even the desire for martyrdom, can be a distraction for the believer. The form of a religious devotion, and a formal adherence to it, can reverse its value: a fast can become a feast of asceticism, and one can seek martyrdom for the wrong reason. If love can be misdirected, endangering self-transformation, so too can Kevin Hart

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passion. ‘‘Pavana dolorosa’’ begins by tilting Southwell’s concession, ‘‘Loves I approve and passions I allow,’’ so that it flips into, ‘‘Loves I allow and passions I approve.’’ With a slight push, Hill edges Southwell’s deeply incarnational theology farther in the direction of sensuality than he would wish to go.70 Where Southwell affirms a proper ordering of love and passion under grace, Hill reflects that the order can never be absolved from possible distortion. Art is a passion that flirts with and mimes love; it can create the truths of religion, and encourage the artist to pass from creation to uncreation, or indeed to pass to a Creator who does not exist. ‘‘Decreation,’’ the movement from creature to Creator, is Simone Weil’s coinage. She says in her Notebooks: The universe is so made that a creature is able to love God in a pure manner. In other words, creation contains within itself the condition for decreation.71 The Hill who wrote, ‘‘Our God scatters corruption,’’ meaning both that God eliminates corruption and that He spreads it, is unlikely to agree without qualification.72 Doubtless the terrible ambiguity stems from the thought of the deity being ‘‘Our God’’; but can the possessive, with its hints of church and party, ever be completely removed? There are times when Hill seems to rail against our embodied state, seeking a purity we can never find. So when Hill talks (in a tone reminiscent of Four Quartets) of ‘‘the decreation to which all must move’’ it could be an undoing of the self in a slide toward death, what I have been calling uncreation, as much as an act of self-transcendence. The poet may become a martyr to his art: the sacrifice of the ‘‘I’’ in the quest for a self-transcendence that never comes. It is a theme familiar to readers of Ho¨lderlin and Blanchot. I have been attending to the relation of devotion and art in ‘‘Lachrimae,’’ yet it needs to be underlined that this relation, like any other, is framed by a broader political context, one that has variously compelled Hill’s attention for many years. When the ‘‘Bloody Question’’ was put to Catholic priests and others, it was to force them to make a hypothetical choice between the monarch and the pope, and if they answered in favor of the pope or were taken to equivocate, they were executed for treason, not for their faith as such. A rather different imbrication of religion and politics can be seen in the concluding lines of ‘‘Lachrimae antiquae novae.’’ Christ is told, ‘‘We find you wounded by the token spear. / Dominion is swallowed with your blood.’’ What wounds Christ is that our faith is perfunctory. Were we to take Southwell’s advice and better our 136

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intent, we might fully accept Christ’s sovereignty when taking Communion. Yet this possibility is always contaminated. Dominion, the right to govern in church or state, is ‘‘swallowed’’ when the Eucharist is taken: Christianity and Christendom are inextricably entwined, a fact we must accept, and Christendom (as Kierkegaard recognized so well) can be a perpetual distraction from the practice of Christianity. When we take Communion, we ‘‘swallow’’ Christ’s Lordship; we repress it in the very gesture of apparently accepting it. According to the first sonnet, ‘‘Lachrimae verae,’’ we merely ‘‘pander’’ to Christ’s name. Or, in the words of the final sonnet, ‘‘Lachrimae amantis,’’ we keep ourselves ‘‘religiously secure,’’ grounded in creed and ritual, rather than opening our hearts to accept Christ. ‘‘Lachrimae amantis,’’ and the entire sequence, ends with the lines, So many nights the angel of my house has fed such urgent comfort through a dream, whispered ‘‘your lord is coming, he is close’’ that I have drowsed half-faithful for a time bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse: ‘‘tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him.’’ The sonnet freely translates Lope de Vega Carpio’s ‘‘¿Que´ tengo yo que mi amistad procuras?’’ and it is instructive to compare the original Spanish with Hill’s version: Cua´ntas veces el a´ngel me de decı´a: ‘‘¡Alma, aso´mate agora a la ventana, vera´s con cuanto amor llamar porfı´a!’’ Y cua´ntas hermosura soberana: ‘‘¡Man˜ana te abriremos’’—respondı´a, para lo mismo responder man˜ana! 73 Notice that in the Spanish the speaker resolves to welcome Christ and then apparently defers the event indefinitely. It is just possible, given the poet’s use of ‘‘respondı´a’’ (I would answer), that the deferral is in the past, and that a commitment to Christ has been made. Hill translates the ambiguity. The dominant possibility is that he has promised in the past and will do so in the future while never fulfilling the promise. Yet there is a slightly stronger possibility than in de Vega’s original sonnet that he will indeed welcome Christ on the morrow. For the colon can be taken to indicate not only a statement often said and often bringing remorse but also a resolve that contrasts with past behavior. We do not know if the Kevin Hart

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speaker will act on his resolve, but we at least experience more fully that act than we do in de Vega’s original. ‘‘Lachrimae’’ ends without it being clear whether the poet personally affirms the transcendence of Christ. Does Hill countersign the theology in Lope de Vega’s poem, or just his poem? Even if we take the preponderance of evidence to be that Hill wishes to believe in the transcendence of God, the poem concludes without any sign of the poet’s self-transcendence, except, to be sure, in the writing of the poem itself. The poem, as poem, achieves transcendence in tears; the poet remains in tears, though whether real or forced we cannot say. He is ‘‘bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse,’’ the frightening word being ‘‘pure.’’ If we search for an explanation of this failure of religious self-transcendence, we will find it, at least partly, in the poet’s allegiance to ‘‘difficulty,’’ especially in his defense that it comes from an objective situation in which his subjectivity plays no part.

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Between the Prophetic and the Sacramental RICHARD KEARNEY

Merold Westphal has been one of the most significant voices in Continental philosophy of religion in recent years. He, along with Paul Ricoeur, has contributed what might be called a specifically Protestant inflection to the ongoing ‘‘theological turn in phenomenology,’’ a movement that otherwise bears the largely Catholic accent of thinkers such as Marion, Henry, and Chre´tien. Yet another contributor to this debate, the theologian David Tracy, has made a useful distinction between what he calls the ‘‘sacramental’’ character of the Catholic vision and the ‘‘prophetic’’ character of the Protestant. He sees both as complementary, the former emphasizing the more immanent and incarnational aspects of Christian revelation and the latter the more transcendent and eschatological. It is, perhaps, something of a paradox to find Merold and me switching roles in this respect, at least in terms of a recent debate on the relationship between the ‘‘God-who-is’’ (actuality) and the ‘‘God who may be’’ (possibility). As Merold himself wryly puts it in ‘‘Hermeneutics and the God of Promise’’: ‘‘I the Protestant [am] more sympathetic to Aquinas than he [Kearney] the Catholic’’!1 But what lies behind this denominational quip is a deeper issue, namely, Westphal’s prioritizing of divine actuality over divine possibility. He links this preference back to great Christian metaphysicians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm, as well as to the Hegelian dialectic. He acknowledges that he and I share a common commitment to an eschatology of promise that goes beyond an ‘‘ontotheology’’ of static presence. ‘‘Essences and substances,’’ he agrees, ‘‘do not, as such, make 139

promises’’ (86). He also endorses our common vision of an ethical, personal, and dynamic deity, in addition to our emphasis on the historical and phenomenological character of divine ‘‘everlastingness,’’ as opposed to some purely abstract and atemporal ‘‘eternity.’’ But he affirms that it is a mistake to confine the entire metaphysical tradition to the limits and shortcomings of what Heidegger and deconstructionists call ‘‘ontotheology.’’ Wishing to rehabilitate a strong ontology of act and actuality against my own hermeneutics of divine posse, Westphal clarifies our difference as follows: ‘‘It seems clear that there can be no promises without an actual promiser. The possibilities opened up by the promise have their ground, at least in part, in the actuality of the promiser, which of necessity precedes them insofar as they are not reduced to mere logical possibilities. The very logic of promising requires us to ‘to subordinate the possible to the actual’ in this sense.’’ He elaborates: ‘‘Only an actual God can make promises. From the fact, affirmed in faith, that the possible exceeds the horizon of the actual, as defined by the natural and social orders as we are familiar with them, it does not follow that it exceeds the horizon of the actuality of the God who promises. It is, rather, the very act of promising that opens up those excessive possibilities and thus precedes them’’ (87). According to Westphal, my hermeneutics of a possible God is unwarranted by a proper reading of Western metaphysics or the Bible. Neither, he claims, supports my suggestion that ‘‘God is as dependent on us as we are on God’’ (88). The God of the Bible is a God of love and promise, no ifs, buts, or maybes. Divine love is not conditional or dependent on us. Consequently, Westphal insists that the correct translation of Exodus 3:14 is the traditional ‘‘I am who am’’ rather than my nontraditional revisionist translation, ‘‘I am who may be.’’ Now, I concede much of what Westphal says. I think it is true that, at least in The God Who May Be, I somewhat underestimated the need for a proper balance between divine possibility and actuality. To be fair, I did speak of an ‘‘onto-eschatology’’ at crucial points in my argument in order to avoid an unhelpful ‘‘either/or’’ dichotomy between ontology and eschatology (for example, in my critique of Levinas and Derrida); but I admit that I did not lay enough emphasis on this implication of ‘‘onto-eschatology’’ or link it back to the great medieval metaphysicians like Augustine, Aquinas, and Anselm (although I did attempt a number of ‘‘hermeneutic retrievals’’ in my brief concluding readings of Aristotle, Cusa, and Schelling). I was still too much under the sway of the Heideggerean ‘‘overcoming’’ (a term obviously amenable to Westphal!) of metaphysics, in spite of my critique of the lack of an ethical eschatology in Heidegger’s ontology. As a result, my reversal of the old metaphysical priority of act over possibility was probably overdetermined 140

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and, as Levinas might say, ‘‘hyperbolic,’’ although not to the point of Ricoeur’s accusation against Levinas of ‘‘paroxysms of hyperbole!’’2 So I stand corrected on this score. And I am grateful to the Protestant Westphal for calling me back to my more Catholic roots, that is, for leading me from an excessive emphasis on the prophetic (messianic, eschatological, ethical, futuristic aspects of religion) to a more considered appreciation of an ontology of being and act. It is this latter appreciation of a more traditional ontology that I hope to explore in this essay under the liturgical rubric of the ‘‘sacramental.’’ In what follows, I want to heed Westphal’s timely recall by sketching a phenomenology of flesh that restores the centrality of a sacramental ontology. First, a personal word on my past tendency to neglect my Catholic intellectual tradition too readily and rapidly. When I was a student at University College Dublin in the early 1970s, I felt oppressed by the excessively Catholic ethos of the philosophy department, especially as chaired by the Thomist scholar, Professor Desmond Connell, later to become Cardinal of Ireland. It is not an exaggeration to say that my fellow students and I were force-fed Thomism without any accompanying encouragement to read St. Thomas. By this I mean that we imbibed a metaphysical system called ‘‘realism’’ with little direct textual reference to the works of Thomas Aquinas himself (I imagined my contemporaries in Eastern Europe at the time having a similar experience reading Marxism without Marx). Many of us, myself included, reacted to this intellectual hegemony, or hyperorthodoxy, by embracing the Continental philosophies of Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, which we felt allowed us to reflect on ‘‘ultimate questions’’ without having to toe a Catholic party line. And the sense of wishing to escape from confessional categories of thought was accentuated by the fact that in Northern Ireland at that time Catholics and Protestants were still killing each other in the name of the ‘‘true faith.’’ I realize now, in retrospect, that this historical situation prejudiced me against many of the riches of my Catholic heritage, which it has taken years to remedy. Indeed, I remember how already during my doctoral studies in Paris in the late 1970s, my professor and thesis director, Paul Ricoeur—like Merold, another Protestant hermeneuticist from the Reformed tradition!—would ask me to clarify textual details from Aquinas or medieval metaphysics that came up in our weekly seminar. He would say, ‘‘Kearney, vous devez avoir ´etudier tout ¸ca a` Dublin, non?’’ To which I was wont to reply, wanly, ‘‘J’aurai du.’’ Already I was beginning to regret the lacuna caused by my lost opportunity of scholarship, one reflected, as Westphal rightly observes, in my virtual occlusion of the medieval metaphysical tradition from my hermeneutic deliberations on Richard Kearney

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the God question. In short, from the time of my initial Dublin studies in ‘‘realism,’’ I was determined to think against Thomistic metaphysics. So if Aquinas wrote, for example, that ‘‘God is pure act without any possibility’’ (Deus est actus purus non habens aliquid de potentialitate), I was tempted to respond by trying to think God in the one way excluded by this maxim, that is, precisely as possibility. Call it the anxiety of influence, reaction to authority, suspicion of ecclesiastical power or just normal student revolt, but one of the babies I threw out with the Thomistic bathwater seems to have been the metaphysical concept of actuality. I am grateful to Westphal (along with other recent critics of my work in After God) for reminding me of my responsibilities to this neglected intellectual child. And in what follows, I propose—‘‘with firm amendment’’—to try to remedy this neglect, somewhat, by exploring resources for a more sacramental approach to being, act, and incarnation in the ontology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Julia Kristeva. That both of these thinkers are ‘‘agnostics,’’ albeit formed in ‘‘eucharistic’’ liturgical traditions, is not irrelevant. For while I am happy to be brought back to the rich ontological resources of my Catholic tradition by a Protestant friend and colleague like Westphal, I must confess that I feel happier still in a postdenominational space of phenomenological inquiry. I hasten to add, however, that the suspension of denominational faiths does not involve the suspension of all faith. I have always believed, as I think Westphal does as well, that phenomenological description invariably unfolds within an horizon of hermeneutic understanding, that is, of seeing and interpreting things as this or that. Neutral transcendental consciousness is neither feasible nor desirable. This basic lesson Westphal and I both have learned from Paul Ricoeur’s critique of Husserl’s idealism. My suggestion in what follows is that a specific phenomenology of flesh—adumbrated by Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva, in the wake of Husserl and Heidegger—may help us to foster and appreciate a sacramental account of the sensible universe. My concern here, and elsewhere, is not just to restore an ontology of actual incarnation to an eschatology of possibility, but also to consider the option of restoring a postconfessional sense of the sacred to the profane world of ordinary experience. That is why I speak in The God Who May Be (2003) of an onto-eschatology of the everyday.3 Husserl blazed a path towards a phenomenology of the flesh when he broached the crucial theme of embodiment in Ideas 2. He proposed to bring Western philosophy back to the flesh of prereflective lived experience; however, for all of his talk of returning us to the ‘‘things themselves,’’ he remained caught in the nets of transcendental idealism and 142

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never quite escaped the limits of theoretical cognition. Heidegger took a step closer to the flesh with his existential analytic of ‘‘moods’’ and ‘‘facticity,’’ but the fact remains that Heideggerian Dasein has no real body at all: it does not eat or sleep or have sex. It, too, remains, despite all the talk of ‘‘being-in-the-world,’’ captive to the transcendental snare. While Max Scheler made several sorties into a phenomenology of feeling and Sartre offered acute insights into shame and desire, it was really only with Merleau-Ponty that we witnessed a credible return to the flesh—and not just as cipher, project, or icon, but also as flesh itself in all its ontological depth. With Merleau-Ponty the ghost of Cartesian and Kantian idealism is at last exorcized, as we finally return to the body in all its unfathomable thisness. Some might say, indeed, that phenomenology thus reopened the possibility of a kind of incarnational ontology not seen since Thomas wrote of quidditas or Duns Scotus of haecceitas. It is telling, I think, that Merleau-Ponty chose to describe his own phenomenology of the sensible body in explicitly sacramental language, amounting to what we might call—without the slightest irreverence—a Eucharist of profane perception. In the Phenomenology of Perception (1944), we read: ‘‘Just as the sacrament not only symbolizes, in sensible species, an operation of Grace, but is also the real presence of God, which it causes to occupy a fragment of space and communicates to those who eat of the consecrated bread, provided that they are inwardly prepared, in the same way the sensible has not only a motor and vital significance, but is nothing other than a certain way of being in the world suggested to us from some point in space, and seized and acted upon by our body, provided that it is capable of doing so, so that sensation is literally a form of communion.’’4 This is a bold analogy for an Existentialist writing in France in the 1940s, a time when close colleagues like Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus considered militant atheism as de rigueur. Merleau-Ponty goes on to sound this eucharistic power of the sensible as follows: ‘‘I am brought into relation with an external being, whether it be in order to open myself to it or to shut myself off from it. If the qualities radiate around them a certain mode of existence, if they have the power to cast a spell and what we called just now a sacramental value, this is because the sentient subject does not posit them as objects, but enters into a sympathetic relation with them, makes them his own and finds in them his momentary law.’’5 It is, tellingly, when Merleau-Ponty traces the phenomenological return all the way down to the lowest rung of sensible experience that he discovers the most sacramental act of communion, or what he also likes to call ‘‘chiasmus.’’ He uses this trope to signal the crossing over of ostensible Richard Kearney

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contraries: the most in the least, the highest in the lowest, the first in the last, the invisible in the visible. Here we witness, as a reversal of Platonism and Idealism, a return to flesh as our most intimate ‘‘element,’’ namely, that which enfolds and envelops us in the systole and diastole of being, the seeing and being seen of vision. Phenomenology thus marks the surpassing of traditional dualisms (body/mind, real/ideal, inner/outer, subject/object) in the name of a deeper, more primordial chiasmus where opposites traverse each other. This is how Merleau-Ponty describes the enigma of flesh as mutual crossing-over in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964): ‘‘The seer is caught up in what he sees . . . the vision he exercises, he also undergoes from the things, such that, as many painters have said, ‘I feel myself looked at by the things, my activity.’ So much so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another and we no longer know which sees and which is seen. It is this Visibility, this anonymity innate to Myself that we have called flesh, and one knows there is no name in traditional philosophy to designate it.’’6 It is here, I suggest, that Merleau-Ponty gets to the heart of this nameless matter and descends—in a final return, a last reduction that suspends all previous reductions—to the incarnate region of the ‘‘element’’: ‘‘The flesh is not matter, in the sense of corpuscles of Being which would add up or continue on one another to form beings. Nor is the visible (the thing as well as my body) some ‘psychic’ material that would be—God knows how— brought into being by the things factually existing and acting on my factual body. In general, it is not a fact or a sum of facts ‘material’ or ‘spiritual.’ ’’ ‘‘No,’’ insists Merleau-Ponty, ‘‘the flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we would need the ancient term ‘element,’ in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire, that is, in the sense of a general thing midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of Being wherever there is a fragment of Being. The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being.’’7 No eschatology worth its ‘‘promise’’ should ignore, I believe, the radical implications of such an ontology of being. Returning to examples of painting—Ce´zanne and Klee—in Eye and Mind (1964), Merleau-Ponty expounds on his chiasmic model as a mutual transubstantiation of the seer and the seen in a ‘‘miracle’’ of flesh: ‘‘There really is inspiration and expiration of Being, action and passion so slightly discernible that it becomes impossible to distinguish between what sees and what is seen, what paints and what is painted. . . . There is no break at all in this circuit; it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here. It is mute Being which itself comes to show forth its own meaning.’’8 In Signs (1960), a collection of essays 144

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devoted to questions of language and art, Merleau-Ponty repeats his claim that the flesh of art is invariably indebted to the bread of life. There is nothing so insignificant in the life of the artist, he claims, that is not eligible for ‘‘consecration’’ in the painting or poem. But the ‘‘style’’ that the artist creates converts his corporeal situation into a sacramental witness at a higher level of ‘‘repetition’’ and ‘‘recreation.’’ The artwork still refers to the life-world from which it springs, but opens up a second-order reference of creative possibility and freedom. Speaking specifically of Leonardo de Vinci, he writes, ‘‘If we take the painter’s point of view in order to be present at that decisive moment when what has been given to him to live as corporeal destiny, personal adventures or historical events, crystallizes into ‘the motive’ (i.e. the style), we will recognize that his work, which is never an effect, is always a response to these data and that the body, the life, the landscapes, the schools, the mistresses, the creditors, the police and the revolutions which might suffocate painting are also the bread his work consecrates. To live in painting is still to breathe the air of this world.’’9 In short, the bread of the world is the very stuff consecrated in the body of the work. Before leaving Merleau-Ponty, I wish to mention one other intriguing passage in Signs where the author, who is no theologian and certainly no Christian apologist, has an interesting interpretation of Christian embodiment as a restoration of the divine within the flesh, a kenotic emptying out of transcendence into the heart of the world’s body, becoming a God beneath us rather than a God beyond. He writes, ‘‘The Christian God wants nothing to do with a vertical relation of subordination. He is not simply a principle of which we are the consequence, a will whose instruments we are, or even a model of which human values are the only reflection. There is a sort of impotence of God without us, and Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man. Claudel goes so far as to say that God is not above but beneath us—meaning that we do not find Him as a suprasensible idea, but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates our darkness. Transcendence no longer hangs over man; he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer.’’10 The insight of ‘‘immanent transcendence’’ is not, of course, original to Merleau-Ponty. Many medieval Christian mystics, including but not limited to John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, and Meister Eckhart, said similar things. So, too, did Jewish sages such as Rabbi Luria and Franz Rosenzweig and Sufi masters such as Rumi and Ibn Arabi. Indeed, I am also reminded here of the bold claim of the Catholic thinker Teilhard de Chardin that God does not direct the universe from above but underlies Richard Kearney

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it and ‘‘prolongs himself ’’ into it. But what Merleau-Ponty provides is a specific philosophical method, namely, a phenomenology of radical embodiment that articulates this ‘‘nameless’’ phenomenon of sacramental flesh. And it is arguable that a number of recent Catholic phenomenologists have followed Merleau-Ponty’s lead (or parallel path) when seeking to inventory the sacred dimensions of the flesh. I am thinking especially of Jean-Luc Marion’s writings on the ‘‘flesh’’ as a saturated phenomenon in On Excess or Jean-Louis Chre´tien’s phenomenological commentary on the Song of Songs.11 But Merleau-Ponty has the advantage, in my view, of not only being the first phenomenologist to identify explicitly the sacramental valence of the sensible but also of maintaining a certain apophatic distance (which is not the same as neutrality) with regard to the theistic or atheistic implications of this phenomenon. Indeed his philosophy of ‘‘ambiguity,’’ as he liked to call it, is particularly well suited when it comes to interpreting sacramental idioms of embodied existence. Of course, Merleau-Ponty is no crypto-evangelist, as several of those belonging to the ‘‘theological turn’’ in phenomenology have been accused. And this chimes well, it seems to me, with the poetic license enjoyed by artists and writers when it comes to the marvel of transubstantiation in word, sound, or image. For poetic license entails a corollary confessional license from which no reader is excluded. In this respect, we could say that the phenomenological method, which brackets confessional beliefs but not ‘‘faith’’ as such, is analogous to the literary suspension of belief and disbelief for the sake of an all-inclusive entry into the ‘‘kingdom of as-if ’’ as the kingdom of the possible. And this suspension, I suggest, allows for a specific ‘‘negative capability’’ regarding questions of doubt, proof, dogma, or doctrine, so as to appreciate better the ‘‘thing itself,’’ the holy thisness and thereness of our flesh and blood existence. The attitude of pure vigilance and attention that follows from such exposure to a ‘‘free variation of imagination’’ (the term is Husserl’s) is not far removed, I believe, from what certain mystics have recognized to be a crucial preparatory moment for sacramental vision, calling it by such different names as ‘‘the cloud of unknowing’’ (Julian of Norwich), the ‘‘docta ignorantia’’ (Cusa) or, in Eastern mysticism, the ‘‘neti/neti’’—neither this nor that—which paves the way for the highest wisdom of reality. In other words, true belief comes from nonbelief. Or as Dostoyevsky put it, real ‘‘faith comes forth from the crucible of doubt.’’ In the free variation of imagination—indispensable both to the phenomenological method and also to all great works of fiction and art—everything is permissible. Nothing is excluded, except exclusion. All is possible. By allowing us to attend to the sacramental marvel of the everyday without the constraints of any 146

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particular confession (Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and so on), Merleau-Ponty offers fresh insights into a eucharistic character of the sensible. Another contemporary philosopher, Julia Kristeva, also has something important to add to an ontology of sacramental embodiment, especially as it relates to what she explicitly calls an aesthetic of ‘‘transubstantiation’’ in Proust and Joyce. As a linguist and psychoanalyst, Kristeva adds new perspectives to the phenomenological vision of Merleau-Ponty. In particular, she ventures rich insights into the workings of unconscious tropes and associations in modernist writing about sense and sensibility. In Time and Sense, Kristeva writes: A sensation from the past remains within us, and involuntary memory recaptures it when a related perception in the present is stimulated by the same desire as the prior sensation. A spatio-temporal association of sensations is thus established, relying on a link, a structure, and a reminiscence. Sensation takes refuge in this interwoven network and turns into an impression, which means that sensation loses its solitary specificity. A similarity emerges out of all these differences, eventually attaining the status of a general law in the manner of an idea or thought. The ‘‘general law,’’ however, is no abstraction, for it is established because the sensation is immanent in it. . . . This process keeps the structure from losing its sensorial foundation. Music becomes word, and writing becomes a transubstantiation in those for whom it creates ‘‘new powers.’’12 Kristeva links the aesthetic of transubstantiation that she finds in Joyce and Proust back to the writings of the later Merleau-Ponty, which she calls ‘‘mystically significant.’’13 Indeed, her notion of a ‘‘general law’’ of ideational sensation is surely not unrelated to Merleau-Ponty’s reference to a ‘‘momentary law’’ cited earlier. Most specifically, Kristeva relates the eucharistic aesthetic to the chiasmic relation between the visible and invisible, the inner feeling and outer expression, that Merleau-Ponty describes as a reversible interpenetration of flesh. Refusing the dualistic division of spirit and body into two separate substances, both Kristeva and MerleauPonty counsel us to rethink flesh more phenomenologically as an ‘‘element, as the concrete emblem of a general manner of being.’’14 And in this respect, Kristeva keenly endorses Merleau-Ponty’s claim that ‘‘no one has gone further than Proust in fixing the relations between the visible and the invisible,’’ although she would want to add Joyce to the list.15 Indeed, by identifying Merleau-Ponty’s model of reversibility with the Richard Kearney

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notion of ‘‘transubstantiation’’ in Proust and Joyce, Kristeva sees the miracle of the flesh as a model both for therapeutic healing and for reading literary texts. In both cases, the reversible transubstantiation of word and flesh expresses itself as a certain catharsis.16 Kristeva goes on, rather boldly, to suggest that it is their aesthetic of transubstantiation that saves writers like Proust and Joyce from the prison of linguistic idealism into which certain structuralist readings have consigned them. This, mind you, is a linguistic semiotician speaking: ‘‘Although Proust never stops ‘deciphering’, his world does not consist of ‘signs.’ At any rate, his world is not made of sign-words or idea-signs and certainly not of signifiers and signifieds.’’17 Proust, Kristeva observes, was disappointed or amused by ‘‘empty linguistic signs’’ and preferred instead the fluidity of ‘‘atmospheric changes,’’ a ‘‘rush of blood,’’ a sudden silence, an ‘‘adverb springing from an involuntary connection made between two unformulated ideas.’’18 Kristeva finds support for this aesthetic of ‘‘real presence’’ in the young Proust’s aversion to ‘‘signs’’ and ‘‘strict significations’’ and points to the fact that Jean Santeuil (Marcel avant la lettre) conceives of art as a ‘‘work of feeling’’ that focuses on a ‘‘sort of obscure instinct of permanent brilliance’’ or ‘‘lava about to overflow,’’ as well as on ‘‘what is not yet ready to come forth.’’ The paradigmatic Proustian text, she avers, rises up ‘‘against the abyss between language and lived experience’’ and operates as a work which expresses ‘‘the vast array of impressions that the hero’s sentence strives to communicate (despite his reservations about language) by associating weather, villages, roads, dust, grass, and raindrops through a mass accumulation of metaphors and metonymies.’’19 Kristeva surmises that the metaphoric and metonymic chiasm between language and lived experience paves the way in Proust ‘‘for the impression which makes up for the weakness of linguistic signs.’’ And so words are only useful for Proust when they exert an ‘‘evocative power’’ over our ‘‘sensibility’’ and display a kinship with a sort of ‘‘latent music’’ (the terms are Proust’s).20 Resisting the temptations of semiology and Platonism, Proust’s eucharistic writing aims for a ‘‘lively physical expressiveness that resists the passivity of the civilized sign.’’21 It strives instead toward a language of the lived body, what Proust calls ‘‘the vigorous and expressive language of our muscles and our desires, of suffering, of the corruption or the flowering of the flesh.’’22 Whether we are concerned in such literary and phenomenological works with an aesthetic religion or a religious aesthetic—or both—is a crucial 148

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question that I cannot address here. But I do believe that a depth phenomenology of flesh, elaborated respectively by Merleau-Ponty’s ontology and Kristeva’s semiotics, may guide and illuminate inquirers like Westphal and myself in our ongoing investigations into a hermeneutics of promise and incarnation. I suspect that both Westphal and I could find common ground in an onto-eschatology of the flesh where the ‘‘actual’’ and the ‘‘possible’’ are intertwined. For this would open up a chiasmic space that overcomes both a narrow scholasticism of actuality and a groundless factionalism of possibility. There are, I realize, several outstanding issues in this reflection on a sacramental ontology. These include the complex relationship between a phenomenology of flesh and a hermeneutics of signs, between confessional ‘‘belief ’’ and pre- (or post-) confessional ‘‘faith,’’ not to mention the question of hermeneutically retrieving Catholic and Protestant traditions in the light of a postreligious eschatology. It is in terms of this last point—seeking a return to religion after religion—that I am currently seeking to explore the category of ‘‘anatheism.’’23 But that is work for another day, work that I hope to conduct in continued conversation with challenging and creative thinkers like Merold Westphal.

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Taking the Wager of/on Love Luce Irigaray and the Caress J A M E S H . O LT H U I S

My dear friends, keep yourselves within the love of God. —Jude 21

In her prologue to i love to you,1 Luce Irigaray tells of the ‘‘miracle’’ (7) that happened when a debate with a man surprisingly turned into a ‘‘meeting with the other, the different’’ in the between, in ‘‘mutual respect.’’ ‘‘We were two: a man and a woman speaking in accordance with our identity, our conscience, our cultural heritage, and even our sensibility’’ (9). Since that time, more than ever, Irigaray has been an avid ‘‘political militant for the impossible, which is not to say a utopian.’’ Rather, in Derridean fashion, she wants ‘‘what is yet to be as the only possibility of a future.’’ All her subsequent publications (the Way of Love2 and to be two3 deserve special mention) have been dedicated to preparing for a wisdom that ‘‘opens the way to another becoming, a becoming woman, a becoming man, a becoming together’’ (to be two, 55). Since thematizing love has been an abiding concern for me throughout my life, I have found Luce Irigaray a most congenial and inspiring philosophical partner. That affinity is deepened due to the fact that for both of us—Irigaray is a psychoanalyst in addition to being a philosopher, while I am a psychotherapist as well as a philosopher—the nurturing of mutuality is an existential concern. Her concern, as is mine, is to work for philosophy as the wisdom of love, which, in her words, is fuller, richer and more crucial than the ‘‘above all, mental wisdom which Western philosophy has claimed to be’’ (the Way of Love, vii). 150

In this chapter, which is written in honor and appreciation of the person and work of Merold Westphal, I set out to join Irigaray in her efforts to ‘‘prepare for a wisdom of love between us’’ (vii). To attend to Irigaray’s work in an essay dedicated to Westphal seems particularly apt, since he, too, has been a pioneering companion (literally, one with whom you share bread) of mine in efforts to work toward a postmodern Christian philosophy that, as Irigaray would put it, ‘‘joins together, more than it has done in the West, the body, the heart, and the mind’’ (2).4 In her efforts to see philosophy as a plural—the love of wisdom, and wisdom of love (2)—Irigaray sets out to develop what she hopes may become the ‘‘third era of the West . . . of the spirit and the bride’’ a ‘‘new ethics of the passions.’’5 In particular, she insists that we need to attend to what she variously addresses as ‘‘a third term,’’ the ‘‘between,’’ the ‘‘interval,’’ or the ‘‘divine,’’ ‘‘angel,’’ ‘‘air,’’ ‘‘spirit,’’ ‘‘god,’’ and ‘‘love.’’ Only if we attend to the ‘‘between’’ will we be able to give shape to a sexual ethics in which ‘‘man and woman may once again or at last live together, meet, and sometimes inhabit the same place’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 17). Beginning from sexual difference, Irigaray sets out to develop what I call a paradigm of nonoppositional difference in which the divine as Love is both discovered and generated in the ‘‘between.’’ The tapestry she is weaving for ‘‘the redemption of women’’ and ‘‘the redemption of love’’6 contains at least six threads and strands: wonder, the interval, irreducible difference, the excess of love, mucous and air, and Love’s caress. Always Wonder Difference bedazzles and delights. It gives rise to wonder, and wonder evokes desire. Irigaray, standing in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant, identifies wonder7 as the first passion, indispensable to the creation of an ethics, a passion that calls us beyond the realm of the same and motivates us to know the other. As she succinctly states, ‘‘Wonder must be the advent or the event of the other’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 75). That other to which we are drawn in wonder is ‘‘impossible to delimit, impose, identify (which is not to say lacking identity and borders): the atmosphere, the sky, the sea, the sun’’ (81). It is wonder that keeps the ‘‘space of freedom and attraction between’’ the sexes, ‘‘a possibility of separation and alliance’’ (13). We find ourselves in a network of relations that is our Befindlichkeit, our personal hermeneutics of facticity—Il y a difference, es gibt Differenz. ‘‘Generally,’’ as Irigaray puts it, ‘‘the James H. Olthuis

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phrase there is upholds the present but defers celebration’’ (14). In fact, ‘‘there is,’’ in its neutrality and generality, leads to quite abstract and nonspecific discussions that hide the fact that they are hopelessly male and exclusively homogeneous.8 Es gibt—there is—misses the ‘‘wonder of the wedding, an ecstasy that remains in-stant’’ (14). For Irigaray, the abstract there is is no longer neutral, as in Heidegger, without fecundity and copulation. The ‘‘divine is present as the mystery that animates the copula’’ (19). There is gives way to ‘‘ ‘we are’ or ‘we become,’ ‘we live here’ together’’ (129). In wonder, the other is no longer something to get a jump on, surmount, get beyond (Nietzsche), overcome (Heidegger), or lift up (Hegel), but a particular flesh and blood person with whom to dance in glory and grace. When that pas de deux occurs, ‘‘a sensible transcendental—the dimension of the divine par excellence’’ (115)—comes into ‘‘being through us, in which we would be the mediators and bridges’’ (129). When such an ‘‘enstatic’’ meeting between the sexes transpires, there is a simultaneous two-way movement: the flesh becomes word, and the word becomes flesh.9 As Irigaray explains, however, too often ‘‘attraction, greed, possession, consummation, disgust, and so on’’ (13) have defused the wonder in efforts to control or bridge the gap to the other and avoid the inherent risks of loving another. The whole patriarchal tradition has been ‘‘marred by an original sin: to have mistaken the reason of man for the universal’’ (i love to you, 147). In the process, love, entrusted to woman, has been confined to home, and woman becomes a home for man without a home for herself. Irigaray begins her response by asking why we have to give up love in order to become wise or learned. ‘‘It is love that leads to knowledge, whether in art or more metaphysical learning. It is love that leads the way and is the path. A mediator par excellence’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 21). For Irigaray, the subordination of the feminine is both a clue to and a symbol for all kinds of imbalance and cultural pathologies. Reason coded masculine and transcendent, she is saying, is pathological. That in no way means a denial of rationality. She does see the need to reconstruct and reconceptualize knowledge as issuing from passion. Knowledge is generated by love, and losing that source is the critical tragedy of modern epistemologies in which technology, the deification of rationality, is encoded as masculine at the expense of the passions, which are encoded as feminine. In other words, it is not the reality of love or the concept of love that is the problem, but Western rationality that excludes its primordial source and then presumes to name love and woman the irrational residue that defies symbolic law. 152

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Interval as Border and Entrance In the conventional, modernist view, space is a mode of isolation. Every body occupies its own place, with clearly defined boundaries, in splendid isolation with empty space yawning between it and every other body. This mechanical view of space as a vacuum leads to a view of the absolutely different as merely numerically and spatially distinguished, while otherwise absolutely the same. In such a view, space, working like a vacuum, prevents overlapping. Like Newtonian billiard balls bouncing into each other, relationships remain external, not altering the inner essences. Since, according to this understanding, two distinct bodies cannot coincide, if a man and a woman each has his or her own space, there arises an immense problem when they come together. The only two possibilities in the oppositional bumping that takes place are, finally, domination of one over the other (whether through force or voluntary submission) or monadic isolation (with no real connection). Working with such a theory of space, Freud developed his view of transference in which subjects pathologically project their understandings through the vacuity of space onto other persons. Since, for Freud, the fundamental issue is intrapsychic (how can the ego manage its unruly id), other people are primarily objects to be used in pursuit of an individual’s self-realization; consequently, little attention is actually paid to interpsychic subject-subject relations. Moreover, and more ominously, love of the other happens at the expense of love of self. According to quantum physics, however, space is not a fixed grid where things are simply here and not there. There is no space between separate objects, no separate objects, and even no such notion as separate. Space is not an emptiness or a lack, but a continuum of greater and lesser densities of energy, a field of forces characterized by excess and fluidity without clear boundaries. Since space is not a thing, but a mode of existence dealing with extension, we are better served by talking of a spatial dimension. The way space is experienced and represented depends on the entities that are positioned and in particular the kinds of relations that subjects experience. A subject or object in its spatiality is connected and has parts without simple distinction of inner and outer. There are no isolated persons or things. At the same time, it is not that persons and things lack selfidentity. It is rather that interrelationship with others is intrinsic to each person’s self-definition and each thing’s identity. One’s core identity is a textured web shaped, altered, transformed, or traumatized in, through, and by (dis)connecting with others. Irigaray creatively stretches the new spatial sensitivity into what could be called a ‘‘quantum ethics’’: space fulfills itself as an ethico-spiritual James H. Olthuis

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place of mutuality, with the interval as the place where the divine happens. Irigaray reconceptualizes space as ‘‘the interval that is both entrance and the space between,’’ the only possibility for ‘‘unhindered movement, of peaceful immobility without risk of imprisonment’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 120) between the sexes. The ‘‘between-us’’ is the space where identity and difference constantly intermingle, not in an economy of dialectic opposition, but in an economy of nonoppositional difference with difference and closeness, difference and connection. In short, it is an economy of love. The only path to mutuality for Irigaray is to give due place to a ‘‘third term’’ (12) a mediator, intermediary, or interval, that is a ‘‘Between’’ (53). The interval that ‘‘cannot be done away with’’ (49) is the place of the ‘‘production of intimacy’’ (53). The ‘‘third’’ acts as both entrance and border, and borders always connect by separating and separate by connecting. These between-spaces—what I call the wild spaces of love10 —are the spaces of freedom and attraction that establish both singularity and connection without separation or fusion. Taking the interval seriously is to recognize that a change is needed in the economy of desire. Without the interval as third term, ‘‘he or she becomes all-powerful’’ (12). Traditionally, man expresses desire, and woman is the desirable. But, Irigaray argues, since ‘‘overcoming the interval is the aim of desire’’ (48), if desire is to exist as other than the all-powerful, possessive and deadly, a ‘‘double desire’’ (9), or ‘‘double place,’’ or ‘‘double envelope is necessary’’ (48). With female and male desire interacting, back and forth, to and fro, a ‘‘chiasmus or a double loop’’—or spiral, as I prefer—is produced in which ‘‘each can go toward the other and come back to itself ’’ (9). It is not for Irigaray a matter ‘‘of substituting feminine power for masculine power. Because this reversal would still be caught up in the economy of the same.’’11 Instead of the phallus as bridge, Irigaray talks of ‘‘angels’’ circulating as mediators to ‘‘destroy the monstrous’’ (15) and of the mediating ‘‘God’’ who insures the ‘‘reciprocal limitation’’ (93) of both man’s and woman’s envelopes. Unless space becomes a dwelling for living-with, a place of negotiation rather than a site of penetration and domination in which the phallus, penetrating female space, is considered the bridge between lovers, the same old battle of the sexes will continue unabated. The genus of love must be constructed or reconstructed so that man and woman may once again, or at last, come together, meet in the middle, and sometimes inhabit the same place. Irigaray calls this rapturous coming together of the human and divine the sensible transcendental, which ‘‘is in some manner a transmutation of earth into heaven, here 154

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and now’’ (53). It is a parousia that is as fully corporeal (fleshly, tactile, fluid, viscous, personal, individual) as it is ethical (universal, transpersonal, harmonizing, divine). It is jouissance, ‘‘communion in pleasure.’’12 In contrast to Lacan, where desire is the gap between demand and need, for Irigaray desire is the excess running over with wonder between the sexes. This turns male-female relations into celebrations with a sensibility that is transcendental rather than a master-slave polemic. ‘‘The link uniting or reuniting masculine and feminine must be horizontal and vertical, terrestrial and heavenly,’’ with ‘‘both angel and body . . . found together’’ (17). Yet, although the ‘‘sensible transcendental’’ is a crucial notion for Irigaray, it remains, importantly and indispensably, complex, multivalent and mysterious.13 The sensible transcendental is ‘‘an alliance between the divine and the mortal’’ (17), ‘‘a permanent becoming’’ (27), which confounds the opposition between immanence and transcendence (33), a wedding of body and soul, sensation and mind, sexuality and spirituality, outside and inside, mortal and immortal, human and divine, female and male. Irigaray reads Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s cries about the ‘‘death of God’’ to be, paradoxically, ‘‘a summons for the divine to return as festival, grace, love, thought’’ (140). She desires the return of the divine in a form that humans can experience corporeally, a jouissance of the carnal, of flesh rejoicing with flesh, which would exist as ‘‘an accessible transcendental that remains alive’’ (27). For Irigaray—in distinction from Levinas—the caress and fecundity of eros is the caress and fecundity of the divine. The experience of the sensible transcendental is to be touched bodily with divinity, specifically divine ‘‘enstasy.’’ Irigaray develops this eros for transcendence in and through a refurbishing of a pre-Socratic philosophy of the four elements—‘‘Earth, water, air, and fire are my birthright too’’ (Elemental Passions, 34)—of which we are composed and in which we live. ‘‘They determine more, more or less freely, our attractions, our affects, our passions, our limits, our aspirations.’’14 Irigaray finds Empedocles’s original plurality of four elements, which are drawn together into a unity by Love and broken down by Strife or Hate, to be an astonishingly apt metaphor for pondering how the two sexes can retain their difference and connect in a higher communion without fusion.15 For Irigaray, as for Empedocles, love is a ‘‘daimon’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 23),16 a conatus or motivating force that brings things together and, in so doing, creates the opportunity for the fortuitous, miraculous, and aleatory (Derrida) coming into being of a ‘‘sensible transcendental,’’ one of which ‘‘we would be the mediators and bridges’’ (129). James H. Olthuis

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Irreducible Difference/Asymmetrical Mutuality Irigaray says that staying with the wonder in the ‘‘between’’ of the sexes will allow for a ‘‘nontraditional, fecund encounter between the sexes,’’ which now ‘‘barely exists’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 6). Moreover, it is important to note, ‘‘a love between the sexes . . . is essential to the discovery of an individual and collective happiness, one which is both empirical and transcendental’’ (Elemental Passions, 5). Indeed for her, ‘‘an ethics of the couple’’ acts as a kind of paradigm for possible changes in society. It serves as an ‘‘intermediary place between individuals, peoples, States’’ (Sexes and Genealogies, 5). Man and woman, woman and man, always meet as though for the first time, ‘‘because they cannot be substituted one for another’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 13). Ontically, we are nonexchangeable, ultimately inaccessible mysteries to each other, existing in asymmetrical mutuality. ‘‘I recognize you is the one condition for the existence of I, you, and we’’ (i love to you, 104). Alterity is irreversible. ‘‘Who or what the other is, I never know’’ and remains ‘‘forever unknowable’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 13). The other is a mystery to me, and I am a mystery to the other. Virginity, ‘‘a dimension of preservation of spiritual identity and becoming’’ (Key Writings, 1, 63), is the mystery that safeguards each of us and calls for respect, the necessary condition for a word of love to be passed between us. ‘‘The veil of mystery’’ lets things and people be in their integrity, before any appearing. These veils are ‘‘woven of the air in which every living being lies: is born, lives, grows’’ (the Way of Love, 33). ‘‘Is it not,’’ Irigaray asks rhetorically, ‘‘because I do not know you that I know that you are’’ (to be two, 9)? We are irreducible in us, between us, and yet so close. Without this difference, how do we give each other grace? ‘‘The origin, if I can say this, of the love between us is silence’’ (62). The silence is two, the silence in me that I must protect, and the silence in you that I must respect. The silence is also three, in that a third is ‘‘generated by the two but which does not belong to either’’ (62). Between us is the air in which we dwell and which dwells in us, touching us as an ‘‘invisible presence’’ (2). How do we share the air? How do we inhabit the air of the us? We do so by listening ‘‘to the other’s love’’ (14). And in listening and welcoming the other, we weave ‘‘a groundless ground,’’ which does ‘‘not end in any ground’’ (the Way of Love, 72) but in a ‘‘co-belonging in the opening’’ (75), an ‘‘interrelational world in which love happens.’’ In other words, subjectivity is intersubjectivity. Recognizing your difference and its mystery draws me to you, ‘‘attracts me, like a path of becoming. . . . I go towards that which enables me to 156

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become while remaining myself ’’ (i love to you, 104). ‘‘I will never reach this other, and for that very reason, he/she forces me to remain faithful to him/her and us, retaining our difference’’ (105). But I am afraid of this space in between us, afraid that if I don’t try to control the space between us, you will abandon me, and I will be alone. ‘‘Not in me but in our difference lies the abyss. We can never be sure of bridging the gap between us. But that is our adventure. Without this peril there is no us. If you turn it into a guarantee, you separate us’’ (Elemental Passions, 28). Between Us: The Excess of Love For Irigaray—in distinction from thinkers such as Freud and Lacan—the other’s unbridgeable singularity, which indelibly marks my incompleteness, always bespeaks an excess rather than a lack, a promise of enrichment more than an indictment of failure. The other person is not, in the first place, a burden, a competitor, or an enemy, but an invitation, a lightness of being—an ‘‘excess’’ that ‘‘resists’’ any and all efforts to ‘‘assimilation or reduction to sameness’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 74). Love—‘‘never fulfilled, always becoming’’ (21)—is the ‘‘irreducible mediator’’ (30), the air that is not under the control of either party. ‘‘For lovers to love each other, between them must be Love’’ (30). ‘‘If the pair of lovers cannot safeguard the place for love as a third term between them, they can neither remain lovers nor give birth to lovers.’’ The odyssey of love, therefore, is a ‘‘perpetual journey, a perpetual transvaluation, a permanent becoming’’ (27) with ‘‘no guard but love itself ’’ (201). Only in the flow of love is a person able to fashion an identity even as she or he is connected with another person. When love wells up as the energy of one’s life, not only does one’s unique identity take shape and form in a centripetal movement of gathering, but simultaneously, there is also a centrifugal movement outward of giving, sharing, and connecting. The two movements belong together. When my identity is an envelope of love, it is never closed off: ‘‘But when lips kiss, . . . Closed lips remain open’’ (Elemental Passions, 63). As Irigaray writes, ‘‘I love you makes, makes me, an other. Loving you, I am no longer the same; loved, you are different. Loving, I give myself you. I become you. But I remain, as well, to love you still’’ (74). In contrast, when my identity is an envelope of fear, it is never really open, but in its dearth, remains defended against the other. The other—with whom I am inextricably bound—becomes an enemy that I try to appropriate in order to feed my hunger and satiate my inner emptiness. Love, the ‘‘vital intermediary’’ (An Ethics of Sexual James H. Olthuis

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Difference, 27) disappears—and envelopes become empty caverns, prisons, and eventually tombs. The interval remains as . . . ‘‘that gap—death’’ (Elemental Passions, 11). Air/Mucous In love, the interval is not a gap, an abyss, or a container within an inside and an outside, but a threshold, an opening to a ‘‘communion beyond skins’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 44). It is to ‘‘inhabit the air of the us’’ (to be two, 10). ‘‘The air is sweet . . . it is as tender as a caress’’ (6). We ‘‘discover the divine between-us’’ (13). In the event of love, a ‘‘transcendence exists between us’’ (16), and ‘‘in this infinite being touched, the wound vanishes’’ (2). Love, for Irigaray, is the air that brings us together and separates us’’ (i love to you, 148). In a subtle critique of Heidegger, she exclaims that ‘‘to forget being is to forget air’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 127). Heidegger’s opening, clearing, or interval is too downto-earth, too hemmed in, too regimented, too horizontal. It needs air. We need to escape the ‘‘waters of the womb’’ for the air. ‘‘Once we were fishes. It seems that we are destined to become birds’’ (Sexes and Genealogies, 66). Indeed, ‘‘air keeps the copula from hardening up or disappearing into is. ‘To’ and not is’’ (i love to you, 149). For Irigaray, not only air is a reminder of excess, but so also is mucous. Both are equally reminders that beings do not exist without remainder. Mucous and air function as thresholds marking the uncertain, sticky passage from inside to outside. The interval ‘‘approaches zero when skins come into contact. It goes beyond zero when a passage occurs to the mucous’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 48). In reality, there is no void between: ‘‘Sameness . . . lives in mucous’’ (109). In its materiality, mucous is the unthought that needs to be thought through today (110); being neither simply fluid nor solid relates it to the angel. Mucous is viscous, escaping control. To whom does it belong? Where is its border? Mucous makes for mutual touching but belongs to neither toucher nor touched. It is through this spiritual threshold of mucous that incarnation proceeds. The mucous summons a ‘‘god to return or to come in a new incarnation, a new parousia,’’ but it stands in ‘‘the way of the transcendence of a God that was alien to the flesh’’ (110). Consequently, Irigaray, along with Levinas and Derrida, argues for the primacy of the sense of touch—‘‘the source of all the senses’’ (192), ‘‘our first sense’’ (Sexes and Genealogies, 59)—over against the more usual privileging of sound, voice, and sight. The tangible is the precondition for sight—the domain in which lack is located, the domain in which difference between subject and object is 158

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clear—while the tactile, on the other hand, is related to mucous, where the borders are more dim and murky. Love’s Caress Each day we need to renegotiate anew the mucous passage between us and to give birth to love anew. ‘‘The act of love is neither an explosion nor an implosion but an indwelling. Dwelling with the self, and with the other—while letting the other go’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 212). Love is ‘‘a sort of sun that illuminates in us and between us’’ (i love to you, 150). The ‘‘in us and between us’’ is crucial for Irigaray, because love is not an ‘‘ecstasy’’ in which we leave ourselves behind ‘‘toward an inaccessible total-other, beyond sensibility, beyond the earth’’ (104). It ‘‘remains in me, enstasy, rather than ecstasy, but ready to meet with the other’’ (105). Since, for Irigaray, saying ‘‘I love you’’ (je t’aime) risks reducing the other to the object of my love, she has begun to say, ‘‘I love to you’’ (j’aime a` toi) (102). The ‘‘to’’ speaks of gift and mediation, thereby preventing ‘‘the relation of transitivity.’’ As she summarizes it: ‘‘The ‘to’ is a site of non-reduction of the person to the object’’ (110). Irigaray describes a mutual, intersubjective dynamic in which a man and woman seek, in their irreducible otherness, ‘‘to find a rhythm in the other’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 53). In this ‘‘non-hierarchical loving relationship’’ (Elemental Passions, 4), there is a return to self. ‘‘With no return to self, woman/women [and man/men] cannot truly engage in dialogue’’ (i love to you, 98): ‘‘No love of other without love of the same’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 104). The difference is whether our returning to self is necessarily exclusionary of others, or is there the possibility of an economy beyond exchange ‘‘that would amount to attentiveness and to fidelity rather than passivity’’ (i love to you, 38). Instead of weaving the fabric of intimacy in the between, we can easily spin a ‘‘destructive net’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 53). Not finding the rhythm of love leads to an ‘‘insatiability,’’ a fearful disease in which there is a ‘‘squandering of its abundance, the exploitation of its availability, its joyfulness, its flesh, or to the abandonment and repetition of its gestures, which become broken and jerky, instead of progressive and inscribed in duration’’ (111). Love can so easily be transmuted into a covetous knowing that betrays; however, when it is not, we are surprised by joy and graced with the ‘‘miracle’’ quality of love. A mutual ‘‘intercoursing’’ happens without fusion or distance, without ‘‘cutting or annihilation’’ (42). A dynamic of mutuality emerges that I call ‘‘with-ing’’ (Beautiful Risk, 130), a celebrating-with and suffering-with without submission or James H. Olthuis

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domination, a being-with in which we are true to ourselves even as we exist in connection with each other. Irigaray here develops, in contrast to Levinas, a ‘‘phenomenology of the caress’’ (to be two, 25). ‘‘I caress you; you caress me, without unity— neither yours, nor mine, nor ours. The envelope, which separates and divides us, fades away. Instead of a solid enclosure, it becomes fluid, which does not mean that we are merged’’ (Elemental Passions, 59–60). A caress unfolds as an intersubjective act of ‘‘double desire’’ (to be two, 29). I want to return to myself, and I want to be with you. Even as I caress you, I become more myself. Even as you are caressed, you open yourself as you become more of yourself. The caress is an awakening to you, to me, to us, an awakening to a life. To caress is both to hold and to receive. But who is holding and who is being held? Sometimes we know; sometimes it escapes us. It is these carefree, not-knowing moments—when who is holding and who is being held is irrelevant, who cares!—that are the moments of truth, the sites of transfiguration marked by ‘‘each giving the other necessity and freedom’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 93). The touch of the caress ‘‘binds and unbinds two others in a flesh that is still and always untouched by mastery’’ (186). The caress is ‘‘an awakening to intersubjectivity, to a touching between us which is neither passive nor active’’ (to be two, 25), but always remains both. Here we need the middle passive voice. When we say in the active voice, ‘‘I love you,’’ we are performing an action and are, therefore, outside the action. Similarly, when we say in the passive voice, ‘‘I am loved,’’ we are receiving action— and this is also outside the action. The situation is decidedly more complex, however, when we say, ‘‘I am in love.’’ Now we are talking, in the middle voice, of an action that contains the person—we as speaker are inside the process of love in which we are agent. To be in love is thus to be caught up in the rhythm of love, even as we are an active agent of that love in two senses (see Beautiful Risk, 68): we are achieving love even as love is being achieved in us. This space of mutual caressing, in which love comes to dwell between us, is not ruled according to an a priori rational logic of hierarchy, of parts under wholes, of tit for tat, an economy of scarcity and lack. But every day, ever anew, in every situation, love calls for a shaping of life together with a mutual ascertaining of what is just and true, right and wrong. Together we are called to beat out a rhythm and a cadence of love in a nonidentical repetition. It is a matter of faith that what we discover and share together, and the shared order we live by, is beyond definition, risky, open to the future, and, in the end, mysterious and sacred. Instead of the mind of safety that goes with tit for tat exchange, there is, in the mutuality of love’s caress, the buoyant combination of joy and risk. Without risk, we repeat and walk on paths that, in 160

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being reproduced, lose the magic, for, as Irigaray puts it, the gods have fled and the rule of the Same triumphs. The entire process, in which we are caressed by love as we caress in love, is for Irigaray an entering into a ‘‘fluid universe where the perception of being two persons (de la dualite´) becomes indistinct, and above all, acceding to another energy, neither that of the one or that of the other, but an energy produced together’’ (‘‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,’’ 111). Beneath every speech made, every word spoken, every point articulated, every rhythm beaten out, they [woman and man] are drawn into the mystery of a word that seeks incarnation. While trusting beyond measure in that which gives flesh to speech: air, breath, song, they reciprocally receive and give something as yet unfelt/beyond reason (l’encore insense´), and are thereby reborn. (Sexes and Genealogies, 52) Before I conclude, it is important to note that, although Irigaray talks of love’s caress as becoming divine, a rendezvous with or a transport to glory, indeed, a ‘‘new Pentecost’’ of fire and wind (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 147), she is hesitant, even resistant, to relate this energy and incarnation to God. ‘‘Is its name God?’’ (to be two, 13), she wonders in passing. This is because, as Irigaray reads the Western tradition, God ‘‘has been created out of man’s gender’’ (Sexes and Genealogies, 61) and has been conceived of ‘‘as an absolutely unknowable entity of the beyond . . . that we must try to approach, even though he remains . . . radically estranged from us, absolutely other’’ (Key Writings, 171). For Irigaray, this belief in ‘‘vertical transcendence’’ (to be two, 13) ties in closely with conceiving of love as ecstasy (going outside oneself )—the very thing she is trying to get away from—instead of love remaining in us, in a horizontal transcendence between us, or enstasy. In contrast, she entreats: ‘‘Could we not imagine the divine differently’’ (Key Writings, 172)?17 Instead of the god of ontotheology,18 which she calls ‘‘the object-entity God,’’ Irigaray is in search of a ‘‘God appropriate to the feminine’’ (Key Writings, 170), conceiving God to be ‘‘a form of energy that would inspire us to develop fully into ourselves, and to live fully our relation to the other, to others, and the world around us’’ (Key Writings, 172). In my view, we can go along way toward the reimagining of the divine differently if we return to the biblical confession: ‘‘God is love’’ (I John 4:7). In a recent article, entitled ‘‘Creatio ex Amore,’’19 I have explored at some length the implications of seeing God’s love as the generating and regenerating energy at the heart of the universe. Love is a gifting/calling that needs to be heard and heeded to be experienced as an invigorating James H. Olthuis

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blessing. Instead of ‘‘to be or not to be,’’ ‘‘to love or not to love’’ is the cardinal question that marks and measures our humanity. To be a lover is to be caught up in the intrigue of Love, even as one is an active agent of that love. In the touch of the caress, as Irigaray emphasizes, we generate love even as love discovers us. Gathered up in the flow of love in the world, we participate in God’s movement of Love that energizes the world (cf. Beautiful Risk, 68). By risking the wager20 of/on love with Irigaray, working for love’s redemption, new possibilities open for us to become inscriptions of hope, incarnations of love in a hurting world where compassion is in exile. The action of love in the wild spaces is a risky, disconcerting dynamic, yet it is the only promise and supreme guarantee of renewal and rebirth. Indeed, anything less than this wager leaves us only with a culture of violence.

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The Joy of Being Indebted A Concluding Response MEROLD WESTPHAL

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to the contributors to this volume. For years they have been my friends and teachers, and I have been in their debt in many ways long before the present project. Now the care and seriousness with which they have addressed my work makes me all the more indebted. I do not pretend that these brief words of response repay that debt; nor would I wish them to. For the joy of being indebted is, it seems to me, an essential aspect of friendship. I would like to offer special thanks to B. Keith Putt for his kind and generous work in putting this volume together. Writing a book can be hard work, but editing a book is simply impossible. No doubt Keith has learned from either Kierkegaard or Derrida (or both) that the impossible happens, and now he knows this in practice and not just in theory. I especially want to thank him for the charming title he has given to the interview with which this volume concludes. Hey, what are friends for? Keith’s essay forms a nice introduction to the volume. First, a word about the two modes of philosophy of religion that sometimes present themselves as scientific. With regard to evidential apologetics, I say yes and no. Yes because I think the issues discussed are genuine issues and worthy of discussion and debate, and no because I do not think those on either side of these debates are entitled to claim ‘‘scientific’’ objectivity and conclusiveness for their arguments. Although I think this is a legitimate field of inquiry, I am not very good at it and do not devote my energies to it. 163

With regard to the phenomenology of religion, I regularly describe my work as phenomenological. But already in God, Guilt, and Death, I am engaged in hermeneutical phenomenology a` la Ricoeur rather than phenomenology as ‘‘rigorous science’’ a` la Husserl. My subtitle, An Existential Phenomenology of Religion, emphasizes the fact that this mode of reflection is about possible modes of my own existence, and I probably didn’t thematize the hermeneutical finitude of the project sufficiently; but Ricoeur was the primary inspiration and tutor, and the subtitle might well have been A Hermeneutical Phenomenology of Religion. The phenomenology is hermeneutical in two ways: it consciously operates within a particular hermeneutical circle and it makes what Ricoeur calls the ‘‘detour’’ through texts of particular traditions. So it is especially helpful that Keith almost immediately goes on to call attention to Ricoeur’s importance in my thought. It would doubtless be better to say that I agree with him than to say, ‘‘Ricoeur agrees with Westphal.’’ The phrase ‘‘Kant’s perspectivism’’ is a helpful one if its double meaning is kept in view. On one hand, since he does not have a pluralized view of the a priori, the contrast for Kant is simply between the human and divine perspectives on the same reality, and thus the distinction between phenomenal and noumenal, appearances and things in themselves. On the other hand, while retaining this distinction as crucial, in my postHegelian Kantianism, there is a plurality of human, all too human a prioris, presuppositions, horizons, language games, and so forth, each of which is a distinct human perspective. So I find Keith’s translation of seeing in a ‘‘glass darkly’’ as seeing in a ‘‘prism darkly’’ right on target. My most recent encounter with T. S. Eliot was hearing Sarah Brightman’s delightful rendition of ‘‘Macavity: The Mystery Cat,’’ and I confess that it has been a long time since I last read Four Quartets. But I find Keith’s use of ‘‘East Coker’’ very helpful. The ‘‘folly’’ motif draws attention to a Pauline theme that I find compelling in Augustine and the Protestant Augustinians: Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard, and Karl Barth. The ‘‘wisdom of old men’’ theme highlights my deeply Gadamerian attitude toward tradition as both a gift to be treasured and passed on and as itself in constant need of revision and even replacement. My difference from Gadamer lies in my affinity with Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Barth and their emphasis on revelation as that which interrupts and breaks into the otherwise immanent development of tradition, even when that process of revision and replacement is not uncritical. For many years, I described my area of specialization as nineteenthcentury Continental philosophy. It began with Hegel, and Kierkegaard was quickly added to the mix, along with Marx and Nietzsche in due 164

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course. I used to say that I was happy to grub around in the nineteenth century because it seemed to me that the issues raised by these thinkers are still with us and are as contemporary as any that have arisen since. I still think so; so in addition to courses on Hegel or Kierkegaard, I still give a graduate course every other year on these four thinkers. Though open to all our graduate students, it is especially designed for our ‘‘scholastics,’’ young Jesuits who have completed their novitiate and are taking a rigorous MA degree in the history of Western philosophy in preparation for the study of theology. I believe wrestling with these giants is a splendid prolegomenon to theological study and an important dimension of any historically conscious philosophical education. So I am pleased that several essays in this volume deal especially with my work on nineteenth-century thinkers. William Desmond’s typology of ways to study Hegel’s thought provides a wonderfully illuminating way to think about Hegel scholarship in general. His use of it in relation to my own work makes me think he has understood my relation to Hegel even better than I do. The line between the companion model, in which one finds one’s own voice in and through dialogue with another, and the ventriloquist model, in which one uses the other to give prestige to one’s own thought, is not always easy to locate. I am, of course, grateful that William does not find the latter in my work. I hope he is right. I have no problem with trying to distinguish what is living and what is dead in Hegel’s thought, but I think it misleading to talk as if what ‘‘we’’ find dead is actually not to be found in Hegel’s thought or even at the very heart of it. William Desmond rightly notes that one of my deepest debts to Hegel as a companion is the notion of Aufhebung, which I have come to see as the original name for what Kierkegaard’s Johannes de Silentio calls teleological suspension. X is aufgehoben or teleologically suspended in Y when X is recontextualized as a dimension of Y, which is a larger whole which is the telos or true home of X but of which X is not the organizing first principle. Thus a dialectical presentation is one that moves from an abstract point of departure to the ever richer and more concrete contexts without which it could neither be nor be understood adequately. Years ago a colleague of mine gave a course entitled ‘‘Hegel and the Aftermath.’’ In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the ‘‘aftermath,’’ as I see it, consists in large degree of Hegelians without the Absolute, holists without the Whole. They recognize the wisdom in that aphorism from the seminary homiletics teacher: ‘‘a text without a context is a pretext.’’ Over against atomistic semantics and ontologies, Hegelian holists recognize the reality of internal relations and thus the importance Merold Westphal

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of context. Everything is itself not in spite of but in virtue of its relations to what is other than itself while being at the same time part of itself. The thinkers of the ‘‘aftermath,’’ among whom I number myself, recognize with Hegel that the True, ontologically (and the Truth epistemically) is the Whole and against Hegel that we are never in possession of it. The finitude of our knowledge is qualitative insofar as we always presuppose but are never able to articulate the all-inclusive totality of either meaning or being. We see in part, from a finite perspective that conceals in the very process of revealing. Holism also means that X in the context of Y is not the same as X in the context of Z. ‘‘God’’ in the context of Spinoza’s Ethics is, as it is intended to be, radically different from ‘‘God’’ in the context of the Bible. That is the key to despoiling the Egyptians, whether they be Hegel or the masters of suspicion (Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud) or the atheistic postmodernists of the twentieth century. The reappropriation or expropriation of ideas from nontheistic thinkers for the sake of theistic or even specifically Christian thinking is a recontextualizing of those ideas. This is sometimes seen as a violent act, but it would be so only if it were theft, only if the Egyptians had a rightful legal claim to ownership, a patent, as it were, on ideas they express. But how could such a claim be defended? (See note 7 in Chapter 5, the essay by Bruce Benson.) So my appropriation of themes from Hegel, or Heidegger, or Derrida, or the atheistic masters of suspicion is not an act of violence. Whether it is gentle is a matter of style and rhetoric, and I hope William Desmond is right in his verdict on this matter. Our next two contributors are the finest Kierkegaard scholars to be found anywhere. We all owe them a great debt for the major contributions they have made to our understanding especially of Works of Love and to giving it its rightful place in Kierkegaard’s authorship. I am entirely in agreement with Steve Evans’s claim that while there is considerable social and political import to Kierkegaard’s thought, he is to be criticized for not developing it, for remaining complacently conservative himself and allowing Christian ethics too often to seem no more than the individual’s relation to other individuals. Three thoughts on this theme. First, it is painful, for it reminds me of the degree to which I, too, am a ‘‘limousine liberal.’’ Second, I sometimes think it is a good thing for us that there is no real Kierkegaardian politics. For if there were, it would be dated at best, and in its absence the task is all the clearer for those of us who find Kierkegaard’s thought to be socially relevant, namely to develop its implications for our own situations. Third, 166

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I think Steve’s warning against a utopian, triumphalist optimism regarding social reform is doubly apt. Such attitudes overestimate both the wisdom of one’s policy commitments and the ability of social reform movements to produce genuine equality. I do not disagree with the claim that Kierkegaard’s politics, if we can call it that, is ‘‘already present, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, in Kierkegaard’s earlier work.’’ But I do not see this as an objection to my notion of Religiousness C for two reasons. First, I think it is clear that the strong emphasis of the ‘‘first authorship’’ so far as the specifically Christian is concerned is on Christ as the Paradox to be believed and that the emphasis on Christ as the Paradigm or Prototype or Pattern to be imitated comes in the ‘‘second authorship.’’ Second, I view the movement from Religiousness A to B to C not primarily as a chronological one, either for Kierkegaard or the Christian believer, but as a dialectical presentation in the Hegelian sense. Religiousness A is (properly) aufgehoben in Religiousness B, and Religiousness B is (to be) teleologically suspended in Religiousness C. The relation is structural rather than temporal even if the emphasis on doctrine and its inward appropriation precedes the emphasis on outward works of loving discipleship in Kierkegaard’s writing. The movement is formally similar to that in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic, and Philosophy of Right. Jamie Ferreira’s suggestion that for Kierkegaard the neighbor is also the middle term between the individual and God and that for Levinas God is also the middle term between the individual and the neighbor is, as usual, both philosophically illuminating and the result of the most careful reading of the texts at issue. I hope that she is right about Levinas, for, as I have often said, I hope the reduction of the divine to the human that I find in Levinas is a misreading, though I have not been able to persuade myself that it is. Regarding Kierkegaard, I do not see how making God the middle term between self and neighbor involves, as Feuerbach suggests, instrumentalizing the neighbor, seeing others as means to my ends in a kind of ‘‘salvation score-card with God.’’ Kierkegaard suggests two ways in which God functions as the middle term: motivating and enabling neighbor love. The motivation, or, if you prefer, the rationale for loving the neighbor is two fold: the neighbor is created by God and redeemed by Christ and thus, in these senses, worthy of our love, however unworthy in other ways. This is why the enemy is also the neighbor who is to be loved. The enabling moment stems from the fact that God is love and the source of all love; so wherever love is truly found in human relations it is by virtue of a participation in God’s love. Moreover, when Kierkegaard speaks of the Merold Westphal

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neighbor as the middle term, it is between husband and wife, not between either and God, at least as I read the text. As such the neighbor is a check on the self-centeredness of the We, as in the prayer, ‘‘Dear God, Please bless me and my wife and our two kids. Us four. No more. Amen.’’ The key points of the passages cited in which God directs attention away from Godself to the neighbor seem to me to be two. On the one hand, only the fanatic (or the liar, according to 1 John 4:20–21) thinks it is possible to love God without loving the neighbor. Thus Matthew 25. On the other hand, love is not a zero-sum game in which to love God is to subtract something from love of neighbor or vice versa. The formula here as elsewhere is to love God first and then, because of creation, redemption, and the divine command, to love the neighbor. One way to express this is to say that God is the middle term. The case with Levinas is more complex, and I can reply only briefly to Jamie’s careful and detailed analysis. It seems to me that Levinas creates an artificial either/or when he suggests that the only alternative to the God who can be found only as a trace in my encounter with the neighbor is the Ipsum Esse Subsistens or Ens Causa Sui of scholasticism. There is also the God of the Bible, a fully personal being who makes promises and gives commands, a speaker whose voice is neither my own nor that of my neighbor. This God can be encountered, yes, in the face of my neighbor, but also in scripture, in preaching, in prayer, in worship, in sacraments. I have a hard time finding this God in Levinas. The reason why I worry that there may be, in the final analysis, a reduction of religion to ethics in Levinas’s thought, is his negations. There is no significance to our God-talk beyond our relations with other humans. God is not our interlocutor. There is no world behind the scenes. I discuss my concerns about these texts in Levinas in Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 of Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue. These negations seem to me to cancel any reality to God beyond that which is found in and resides in the neighbor. When Levinas identifies God as ‘‘the he in the depth of the You,’’ I worry that this God may be nothing more than the depth dimension of the human person by virtue of which I find myself unconditionally and infinitely responsible to and for the neighbor. This is not incompatible with Levinas’s claim that ethics is motivated ‘‘by something beyond nature,’’ even beyond human nature as that term is normally understood. He is surely seeking to express something for which naturalisms and humanisms cannot give a sufficient account. But is his God an actual speaker, an actual lover, and an actual agent distinct from both me and my neighbor? Is his God a Savior, a Redeemer, a Reconciler? 168

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Bruce Ellis Benson brings us back to a theme in William Desmond’s essay, the logic of appropriation, recontextualizing, ‘‘plundering the Egyptians.’’ As I was arguing in my response to William that ‘‘despoiling the Egyptians’’ was not an act of violence because it did not involve taking what another owns, I remembered that I had earlier spoken of a certain violence in appropriating and recontextualizing the ideas of another for one’s own purposes. Sure enough, Bruce cites an interview in which I say, ‘‘There is an inescapable aspect of what could be called violence in rejection [of the other’s context, for example, Nietzsche’s atheism] and reappropriation.’’ Then he kindly offers another sense in which the violence is only apparent. The other is not prohibited from using the ideas in question as he (in Nietzsche’s case) sees fit. He remains free to argue that calling others evil in order to be good by default, simply by being different from ‘‘them,’’ whoever ‘‘they’’ may be (the Fonda fallacy), is the whole story about religion or at least the most fundamental fact about its origin. Moreover, Nietzsche calls attention to the parallel between his critique and Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees, acknowledging that the idea is not original with him in any case, and that he is already appropriating and recontextualizing the ideas of others. I also welcome Bruce’s point about it being the ‘‘bad stuff ’’ rather than the ‘‘good stuff ’’ that is appropriated. This is not always the case in borrowing and recontextualizing, but when it is the hermeneutics of suspicion that is appropriated from, say, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the critique of them—namely that the phenomena to which they call attention are real but not the whole story—is secondary. The main point is not to refute them but to revive the prophetic dimension of the religious life in which critique has its motivation in theological understanding and is directed by believers toward the believing community (to which they themselves belong) for the sake of personal and corporate self-examination, repentance, and renewal. At the conclusion of Suspicion and Faith I noted three dangers associated with practicing the hermeneutics of suspicion: pharisaism, cynicism, and forgetting divine grace by which we are both forgiven and changed. Each of these results when we stop too soon. The first occurs when we practice suspicion on ‘‘them’’ but not on ourselves. The second and third occur when we do not move beyond suspicion by seeing it as in need of teleological suspension in love. Bruce’s essay makes this last point eloquently. I turn now to essays that, without entirely ignoring my ‘‘grubbing about’’ in the nineteenth century, engage my conversation with twentieth-century thinkers and my own hermeneutical phenomenology of religion as it emerges from those conversations. Edith Wyschogrod rightly Merold Westphal

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calls attention to the centrality of Kierkegaard in my thought. Though I have spent lots of time working on the texts of other thinkers, I feel most at home with Kierkegaard. A charcoal copy of a portrait of the young Søren hangs on my wall, and his deep eyes look not so much at me as through me. If I do not aspire to be like him as a person, I know that my thinking has been deeply shaped by his work. When Edith says that I ‘‘often adopt the conceptual persona of Kierkegaard,’’ I hope this signifies the relation of companion and not ventriloquist. I do indeed see Kierkegaard as a proto-postmodern thinker and would only add to the names of Johannes de Silentio and Johannes Climacus on this score those of AntiClimacus and Kierkegaard himself. Edith recognizes that a central issue in my relation to Heidegger concerns the relation of his early essay ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology’’ to his later critique of ontotheology. In the former he says that while faith does not require philosophical tutelage, theology does need the ‘‘correction’’ of its concepts by a phenomenological ontology grounded in preChristian existence. This strikes me as more a relic of Enlightenment modernity than of postmodernity. I find it in stark contrast with the critique of ontotheology, which protests against philosophical claims to hegemony in relation to religious discourse, God-talk if you like. I would like to think that this represents a change in Heidegger’s thinking, but there are, it seems to me, indications in his later thinking that the break with his earlier thought is anything but complete. I am glad to have written about Nietzsche if for no other reason than to get Edith’s wonderful Miss Piggy interpretation of the resentment and revenge themes in his work. I fully agree that while we can distinguish the ‘‘what’’ and the ‘‘how’’ of our discourses, the result is an abstraction and that in reality they are not neatly separable. Am I ‘‘ready to climb on the alterity bandwagon’’ with Levinas (and Derrida)? I think I already have. I think that all our knowledge is qualitatively finite and that we never completely understand anything. As the poets regularly remind us, mystery is to be found at every hand. But I also think that alterity and mystery come in varying degrees, that in persons we encounter the deepest mysteries of all, and that God is even more deeply personal and mysterious than human persons. What makes me nervous about Levinas (and Derrida) is the tendency I find in them to collapse the difference between the human mystery and the divine mystery. But I welcome, for both its political and its religious significance, the way they both develop the notion that human persons are also, as I would want to put it, wholly other. 170

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Thus the God of the covenant, a theme I find utterly crucial to both Jewish and Christian piety and whose significance in God, Guilt, and Death Edith rightly notes, comes to us as ‘‘a Divine Stranger.’’ But the covenant relation, ‘‘I will be your God, and you will be my people,’’ means that God, while being wholly other, is not wholly wholly other. God becomes known and understood within the mysteries of love, of promise and command, of judgment, repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This seems to me every bit as much the case in the Hebrew scriptures as in the New Testament. Which brings us to Derrida. I do not think that he would mind being tagged with the Hegelian charge that difference signifies a ‘‘bad infinite.’’ For any ‘‘good infinite’’ would represent the totality that Derrida, along with Levinas, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, among others, denies to human understanding. But if Chora is the ground of all things, or better, the abyss in which all grounds are ungrounded, I see no path to covenantal, biblical religion in either its Jewish or its Christian forms. It may well be that in terms of certain philosophical criteria, it is undecidable whether what is most basic is Chora or the God who, as the maker of heaven and earth, enters into covenantal relation with those who thereby become the people of God. But undecidability is not an excuse for paralysis but a call to decision, and my decision is for the God of the covenant, a lover, a speaker, and an agent beyond all human love, speech, and agency. Finally, so far as the hermeneutics of suspicion goes, I insist on its biblical origin, not only with ‘‘Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees, Paul’s critique of works righteousness, and James’s critique of cheap grace,’’ but even more primordially in the Hebrew prophets. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are but a series of footnotes (or plagiarisms) to the Hebrew prophets. One of the things this means is that whenever Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees becomes an excuse for anti-Semitism, we have suspicion run amok in a new pharisaism. Edith is entirely right in insisting with Bruce Benson that suspicion cannot be the final stage of thought and most especially not the ideology of complacent self-assertion. Martin Matuˇtı´k poses important questions about my relation to theism. I regularly describe my position as theistic, and I sometimes call it classical theism. But I have discovered that this latter phrase is ambiguous. To some people it means pretty much what Heidegger means by ontotheology, a discourse about God that (1) restricts itself to abstract, impersonal categories in speaking of God such as being, substance, cause, and so forth, (2) often focuses on proving the existence of God and establishing God’s (abstract, impersonal) attributes by reason apart from revelation, and (3) emphasizes explanation and comprehension in ways that tend to push mystery out the door. Merold Westphal

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Many would call this ‘‘scholastic’’ theism, but it is surely a distortion of what, say, Aquinas is up to. As I have argued in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly (Spring 2006), this reading is possible only if one reads (and not very carefully) only those portions of Aquinas that make it into the anthologies. But if one reads the whole sweep of his theology, it becomes clear that the abstract, metaphysical portions are but a prolegomenon to a theology of a truly personal God about whom we learn from biblical revelation rather than Aristotelian reason. His theology is what I called a dialectical presentation in which he works, as if anticipating Hegel, from the most abstract and least adequate categories for speaking about God, to the richer, more concrete and personal categories in which the former are aufgehoben. When I speak of my own thought as theistic, or even classically theistic, it is the personal God of the Bible that I have primarily in mind, an agent, a speaker, and a lover distinct from me, my neighbor, and my culture. This God is a ‘‘personal Creator, Lawgiver, and Merciful Savior.’’ But, just as Karl Barth, no friend of Thomistic natural theology, has no problem calling God the ens realissimum, so I have no problem calling God First Cause, Supreme Being, or Ipsum Esse Subsistens. I only insist with Aquinas and in the spirit of Hegel and Heidegger that God is not reducible to these abstract descriptions. God is not less than First Cause, but a whole lot more, as we might learn from the psalmist who from the description of God as creator immediately draws the conclusion that we are God’s people and the sheep of God’s pasture (Ps. 95:6–7; 100:3). Creation in the merely causal sense is teleologically suspended in covenantal relation. More generally speaking, the abstractions of metaphysics are always to be aufgehoben in the personalism of biblical revelation. This theism is not ontotheology because (1) it does not restrict itself to abstract categories under the principle of sufficient reason and (2) it highlights rather than eliminating mystery in our knowledge of God. Is there a danger of anthropomorphism and fundamentalism here? Doubtless, but as Foucault reminds us, everything is dangerous, and, as Bruce Benson reminds us, the fundamentalism that can be found in the American Academy of Religion among some who have gone ‘‘beyond theism’’ is different from but not less dogmatic than the fundamentalism to be found in the Republican Party. I think a better defense against anthropomorphism, in the pejorative sense of the term, is something like a Thomist doctrine of analogy, and a better defense against fundamentalism is the hermeneutical humility that emerges in both the hermeneutics of finitude and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Otherwise we risk, as Martin puts it, throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 172

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Martin asks, ‘‘Why force God to play on terms of the a/theistic language game?’’ It’s a fair question, and if by theism one means ontotheological theism, I agree with Heidegger that this would be an illegitimate violence. But I do not see the theism I affirm as merely a human language game into which God is then required to fit. It is rather an attempt to express faithfully God’s self-revelation in and through the Bible. It is, of course, a human, all too human attempt, and the assumption that God must fit into my (or our) theology perfectly and without remainder is the very essence of the fundamentalism Martin and I both wish to avoid. Barth’s distinction between revelation and religion as the human reception thereof is helpful here. But the project, always incompletely and imperfectly carried out, is not to make God fit our language but to shape our language in the light of God’s self-revelation. I believe that theistic language (though I do not insist on the term) in the sense I have described it is the most appropriate horizon within which to carry out this task. When Martin remains unconvinced ‘‘that the defense of a personal Creator and Redeemer necessarily compels us to rehabilitate theism,’’ I suspect that I have not made my use of the term sufficiently clear. For by theism I mean precisely discourse about God as personal Creator and Redeemer. That the Devil is not an atheist is clear enough. ‘‘Even the demons believe—and shudder’’ (James 2:19). But I do not see the relevance of that for the question of our God language. The Devil knows all to well that God is real; it is just that the Devil does not wish to accept God’s rightful sovereignty, to be numbered among the people of God and the sheep of God’s pasture, or to be, like the prophets and apostles, a servant of God. In colloquy with John C. Caputo, I once suggested that he write a prequel to his two books on radical hermeneutics. Paraphrasing William James, I suggested that he might call it Not So Very Damn Radical Hermeneutics. In vintage form, he responded that it would not be necessary, since I had already written that book myself, namely the one we were discussing, Overcoming Onto-Theology (see Faith and Philosophy, July 2005). Now he has graciously responded to my thought as expressed in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, once again suggesting that my thought is insufficiently radical. I am indeed a conservative in the sense of holding to the classical orthodox faith. Jack rightly recognizes my tutors, beyond the Bible itself, as prominently including Augustine, Aquinas, the Reformers, and Kierkegaard. I would add Karl Barth to that list. That means that my faith is Christian faith, though my philosophical reflection has not usually been Merold Westphal

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on such specifically Christian themes as Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement, but on the theism Christianity shares to a significant degree with the other Abrahamic monotheisms and some forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Native American piety. By theism I mean the affirmation of a personal God, one who is capable not only of being an agent (not just a cause), but also a performer of speech acts and a lover. I am grateful that Jack notices that the apophaticism of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Aquinas (again I would add Karl Barth) may lead to a spirituality of silence but does not preclude a theology of predication and affirmation, albeit analogical and not strictly adequate to its intended ‘‘object.’’ He calls Aquinas’s ipsum esse per se subsistens ‘‘the least confining, least constrictive thing one could say about God. It is the best way to talk about God.’’ Within the constraints of finitude and fallenness, I think God-talk should be concerned with ‘‘the best way to talk about God,’’ but I do not want to restrict this to such negations as ‘‘least confining, and least constrictive’’ modes of predication. Nor, I think, does Aquinas. If one read the Summa beyond the early parts that get anthologized, one finds a quasi-Hegelian movement from the most abstract (and impersonal) predicates to more concrete (and personal) predicates, so that eventually one finds the former to be but abstract adumbrations of the language of biblical personalism—a God who commands, forgives, and reconciles. This is in keeping with Jack’s reminding us of a ‘‘most beautiful liturgical hymn in the Latin rite’’ that he loves. This God is indeed one to whom one can sing. I am only surprised that Jack does not pun his preference for this Latin rite over the religious Right that he mentions at the outset. Jack’s apophaticism, unlike that of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, and Barth, ‘‘is not merely a delimitation of our knowledge of what the Center is . . . but also a delimitation of our very ability to hold or declare a Center at all, of whether there is a Center . . . the Center itself is in question. . . . What is being criticized is confidence in the Center itself and the protection it affords, the confidence that there is a Center that holds firm and encompasses all.’’ The point is ‘‘an insistence that the name of ‘God’ belongs to a chain of substitutions which can never be stopped . . . the Center itself is in question.’’ But it can be stopped, if only by a decision of faith (a Kierkegaardian point, of course), and one’s faith, we might say, is just the decision about where to stop or whether to stop anywhere at all. Such stopping is hermeneutically subject to revision and/or replacement. Jack rightly notices that secular decisions about where or even whether to stop are as risky as those of religious 174

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faith, and he rightly notes that there is a veritable plethora of what William Desmond calls counterfeit doubles. But it is possible to stop somewhere or other, and perhaps that is one definition of faith, whether it be religious or secular. Metaphysical thought is always some faith or other seeking understanding. Jack writes, ‘‘Indeed, the very complementarity between our humility and finitude and guilt, on the one hand, and the Center’s glory and infinity and holiness, on the other hand, is not a counter to ontotheology— and this would be the main point I raise with Merold—it is the very structure or architecture of ontotheology.’’ My response is twofold. 1. This may be the case for Derrida, for whom deconstruction functions as what Rawls calls a ‘‘comprehensive doctrine.’’ But it seems not me not to be the case with Heidegger, who is my point of departure. For him ontotheology involves the use of abstract metaphysical language under the guidance of the principle of sufficient reason in order to eliminate mystery from our God-talk, with the result that such God-talk, whatever the substitutions for the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is religiously otiose. This is, I think a more formal critique of various ‘‘theologies,’’ religious and secular. One can appreciate and appropriate it, I think, while maintaining the faith that affirms the reality of a Center, however imperfectly and incompletely comprehended. 2. Foucault warns us that everything is dangerous. A theology that is insufficiently apophatic can be dangerous both in its epistemological hubris and in its sociopolitical triumphalism, which is all too likely to be not only arrogant but also oppressive. But apophaticism is also dangerous, as Feuerbach reminds us. He speaks of the one who ‘‘denies God practically by his conduct—the world has possession of all his thoughts and inclinations—but he does not deny him theoretically, he does not attack his existence; he lets that rest. But this existence does not affect or incommode him; it is a merely negative existence, an existence without existence, a self-contradictory existence—a state of being which, as to its effects, is not distinguishable from non-being.’’ I am not saying that the above is an accurate picture of Derridean deconstruction. But if the former danger is the one to which I, along with Aquinas, Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, Luther, and Karl Barth, am prey, the Feuerbachian danger strikes me as the one to which Derridean deconstruction is prey. It is between this Scylla and this Charybdis that Jack and I live. I will not call this later alternative the more radical of the two, for who is getting closer to the root of the matter is precisely the question at issue. My own belief is that there is a Center who is better described in Merold Westphal

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the more concrete and personal terms in which I have been defining my own theism. Kevin Hart suggests that my thesis about the correlation between divine transcendence and our own self-transcendence should perhaps be recast as follows: ‘‘What God reveals of Himself determines both how we think of Him and how we are to act in the world.’’ This rightly captures the fact that for me what we can know and understand about God is crucially dependent on divine self-revelation. So the two formulas, ‘‘Word and Sacrament’’ and ‘‘Word and Spirit’’ are of utmost importance to me. However, while I am closer to Karl Barth than to Thomas Aquinas on the question of natural theology, I do not want to deny that there is a natural knowledge of God not captured by these formulas, however distorted it may be (Rom. 1:18–21) and whether it is best described in transcendental or metaphysical terms. While God’s self-revelation in Word and Sacrament under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is central to my theology, my philosophical interest in Transcendence and Self-Transcendence lies in the ‘‘ ‘should’ that impels us to pass from how we talk of God to how we act.’’ In this respect it is formally like Aquinas’s doctrine of analogy, since it applies to any God-talk, whether its source is natural reason or supernatural revelation. So the ‘‘and’’ in Kevin’s reformulation is not strong enough and might better be ‘‘and therefore.’’ What about this ‘‘should,’’ this ‘‘therefore’’? What is the bridge from is to ought in the movement from theological indicative to ethical, political, and spiritual imperative? (I take the political-outward and the spiritual-inward to be the two dimensions of the ethical.) A move sometimes made in ethical theory when the is/ought question is raised might be helpful here. In connection with certain roles people inhabit, we move easily from descriptions of who they are to prescriptions of how they should behave. Thus we say, ‘‘He is a father; so he should be a role model for his children.’’ Or ‘‘She is a judge; so she should be fair and impartial in all matters pertaining to a trial.’’ My suggestion, I think, is twofold: (1) as we move from cosmological to epistemic to ethical and religious transcendence ever richer and more complex imperatives are implied by our descriptions of God, and (2) one sign of a lapse into ontotheology is that our God-talk increasingly loses this imperative dimension and becomes a lifeless heap of warranted assertions. We use God to render reality intelligible, but do not allow God to call us to epistemic humility, to political justice, to prayerful dependence, compassion, praise, and thanksgiving. God is our Explainer, but not our Lord. Thus the Romans passage just cited is harsh on those who though they knew God ‘‘did not honor him 176

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as God or give thanks to him.’’ Transcendence did not issue in selftranscendence. Of course, the failure to move from affirming the transcendence of God to a corresponding measure of self-transcendence is not just a possibility for theology as theory; it is more fundamentally a pitfall for persons. It is probably a matter of degree such that there is always some discrepancy between my sincere beliefs about divine transcendence and my accomplishing the appropriate self-transcendence. My, how I would love to sit in on a course on ‘‘theology and literature’’ taught by Kevin. He brings to this field such a wealth of knowledge and such skillful sensitivity as a reader. I agree with his suggestion that there is a certain kinship between poetry and the sacraments, and with him I do not want to push the affinity too far. In other words, I want to preserve the important distinction Kierkegaard drew so powerfully between the genius and the apostle. When the genius supplants the apostle we have romanticism’s elevation of art to an alternative religion or an alternative to religion. So I would qualify the quasi-sacramental character of poetry in two ways. First, I think this applies to all the arts, and for me (though this is of no philosophical import) music, fiction, and drama are more ‘‘quasily’’ sacramental than poetry. Second, while Kevin thinks I would agree that poets (and other artists) perform a phenomenological reduction but disagree with the suggestion that they perform the epoche´ better than philosophers, I would like to split the difference between agreement and disagreement on this second point by suggesting that the philosopher and the poet suspend the natural attitude differently. It would be a fun but challenging task to spell this out, and I hope Kevin will undertake it, for I can think of no one better equipped to do so. Two comment on only the first of Hill’s sonnets that Kevin discusses, ‘‘Lachrimae coactae.’’ To burn, not for paradise but ‘‘to be enamored of it,’’ reflects the thin line that separates the aesthetic (in Kierkegaard’s sense as a mode of existence) from the religious. Is it the greed and lust for a certain feeling, an attachment to the pleasures of the spirit against which St. John of the Cross warns so insistently? Or is it an imperfect love that yearns to love more deeply and cries out to God, ‘‘Lord I love you; help my lack of love.’’ We need not assume that there is a neat either/or here. If, as suggested above, the self is many, the believing soul may well be an incoherent mixture of the aesthetic and the religious, of self-transcendence always infected by self-assertion. So is the sonnet a prayer? I don’t see why not. It can surely be read as a prayer both of confession and of petition, and as such it does express not only the ‘‘self-criticism’’ of Hill but also a ‘‘critique of ‘mere art,’ ’’ or, Merold Westphal

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as we might put it, of the aesthetic existence sphere. There is always the danger when an Augustine, a Kierkegaard, a Henry Nouwen or, in this case, a Hill writes very personal prayers for publication that the purity of the prayer will be compromised, but (1) it is not self-evident that purely private prayer is immune from impurities of various sorts, and (2) sharing such prayers with others for their benefit as an act of generosity does not cease to be such because it is not perfectly generous. I like Richard Kearney’s assimilation of realism without Aquinas to Marxism without Marx. I, too, grew up in the context of a rather narrow, rigid, and exclusionary ‘‘party line,’’ that of Protestant (dispensational) fundamentalism. But there was one important difference, in respect to which I take myself to be fortunate. For instead of a ‘‘system’’ without the classic texts it was supposed to present, I got a ‘‘system’’ that included an emphasis on reading and even memorizing the Bible for myself. So I had read it from cover to cover several times before I even got to college. Through my own reading and with the help of many others who were better readers than I, I gradually discovered that the ‘‘system’’ was not a mirror image of biblical truth, simply identical with the faith ‘‘once delivered unto the saints’’ (Jude 3), but one human, all too human interpretation among others. I learned the fundamental facts of descriptive hermeneutics before I ever heard of Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur. Though I am no longer at home in the horizons within which my faith was born, I am grateful for the emphasis within it both on the Bible as divine revelation and on the centrality of scripture in the life of the believer and the church. My emphasis on the actuality of God has its roots in the biblical portrayal of God as agent, speaker (of promises and commands), and lover. I appreciate its translation into metaphysical language in Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas, but consider this secondary, especially when it succumbs to ontotheological impersonalism. So my urging Richard to give more weight to God’s actuality, as he seems quite willing to do, is not only a nudge toward reappropriating his Catholic heritage (though my Augustine is also a Protestant, a primary source for Luther and Calvin), but even more a nudge toward a more truly biblical way of thinking. Since Vatican II, as I understand it, Catholics, too, are encouraged to read the Bible in a sacramental sense in which human words become God’s word to us. What I said about the ‘‘quasi-sacramental’’ character of art in response to Kevin Hart’s essay was written before I had the chance to read Richard’s essay. As I have gotten older, the sacramental life of the church has become increasingly important and precious to me, and that may be a 178

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reason why the use of ‘‘sacrament’’ and ‘‘incarnation’’ as metaphors beyond their strictly ecclesial usage is one I welcome. I once wrote myself that in prayer Eros is transubstantiated into Agape. So I welcome Richard’s discussion of Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva. So far as the body is concerned, the work of Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, and Marion on our embodiment is an important element in my understanding of the hermeneutics of finitude, though I have not developed it, leaving that to others more capable of doing so. But I see my own thought as not just open but welcoming to various phenomenologies of embodiment, even so far as using the theologically loaded term ‘‘incarnation’’ to talk about the chiasm we are. I do not think that either as individuals or as communities or as a species we are the dialectical union of human and divine that Jesus is, but I think there are structural similarities that are illuminating. So I remind myself that in the creed I confess the hope I share with Christians across the ages, not in the immortality of the soul but in the resurrection of the body. So far as the arts are concerned, I share with Kevin and Richard, along with Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva, and a host of others, what I have called the quasi-sacramental character of art. The ‘‘quasi’’ caveat is only meant to resist the romantic substitution of art for the sacraments of the church and the revelation of scripture. If I read him right, Richard is not suggestion such a substitution in any case. Perhaps he will join me in saying that Word and Sacrament are dangerous supplements to the arts if I will join him in saying the reverse. James Olthuis gives a beautiful concluding essay on Irigaray. I have to confess that my attempts to read her, like my attempts to read Lacan, have not been very successful. I have found other feminist writers more helpful. No doubt this is because I haven’t tried hard enough. Or maybe I’m a bit slow. Whatever the reason, and in spite of the fact that I share with Jim a desire to understand philosophy as the love of wisdom that is always also the wisdom of love (see the Levinas quotation in his note 4), that elective affinity that has drawn me to a variety of thinkers, including a good many with whom I have deep disagreements, just hasn’t been there when it comes to Irigaray. As I read Jim, I realize that I am the poorer for my sloth or slowness. Just two comments about Irigaray via Olthuis. First, the themes of wonder, excess, and mystery are important in her analysis of sexual love. ‘‘Is it not,’’ she asks, ‘‘because I do not know you that I know that you are?’’ We might gloss this as ‘‘that I know that you are you, a you and not an it.’’ Who can tell whether the loss of wonder and mystery is greater in our sexual lives or in our religious lives? There does seem to be a hunger Merold Westphal

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for their renewal in both arenas. But how are they to be reawakened? We live in a culture, both erotic and religious, that is more the problem than its solution; and it seems unlikely that theory or method is the right direction to look. The problem is urgently practical (in the Aristotelian sense, praxis with phronesis and not poiesis with techne). Can we learn from Irigaray or Olthuis, perhaps from their work as therapists as much from their work as theoreticians, how to attain such a second immediacy? Second, I get nervous when Irigaray speaks of Eros as ‘‘the caress and fecundity of the divine.’’ I am allergic to pantheism in all its forms, and as skeptical of substituting sexual love for religious faith as I am of substituting art for religion. I get even more nervous when she speaks of God as ‘‘a form of energy that would inspire us to develop fully into ourselves, and to live fully our relation to the other, to others, and the world around us.’’ It is not these developments that worry me; they are much needed. It is the description of God as ‘‘a form of energy.’’ Unless it is clear that God is not less but crucially more than a form of energy, this is not the alternative to ontotheology it is said to be but a lapse into the impersonal categories that are the trademark of a god to whom one cannot pray. Still, the Song of Solomon remains in my Bible, and I treasure the long Christian history that has made sexual love a metaphor for love between the believer and God. Especially important in that tradition is the emphasis on touch. My own phenomenological philosophy of religion is concerned with arguing for the primacy of the voice over sight and the inverted intentionality involved in the notion that before we see with our eyes or our mind, we are seen and, more importantly addressed by the promises and commands of God. So I am glad to be reminded of touch as a way of speaking about our relation to God. It is not physical touch, to be sure, so the relation is one of analogy or metaphor. But believers as different as St. John of the Cross and William Gaither find this language indispensable. The refrain of a gospel song by the latter, rooted in a gospel pericope about the healing of a leper (Matt. 8:3), goes like this: He touched me, O, He touched me, And O, the joy that floods my soul; Something happened, and now I know, He touched me and made me whole. Perhaps it is only as we open ourselves to encounters with God that can express themselves in this kind of language that wonder, mystery, and awe can be reborn in our souls’ journeys into God.

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Talking to Balaam’s Ass A Concluding Conversation B. KEITH PUTT AND MEROLD WESTPHAL

B. Keith Putt: Merold, in your intellectual autobiography, Faith Seeking Understanding, you refer to the significant influence of Arthur Holmes, one of evangelicalism’s finest scholars, whose clarion call was ‘‘all truth is God’s truth.’’ How has that epigram shaped your own appropriation of philosophy in its various manifestations, whether analytical, Continental, or postmodern? Merold Westphal: I guess there are two ways. First, I haven’t felt the need to think that truth would only be found exclusively in theological contexts. ‘‘All truth is God’s truth’’ means that one may discover truth in contexts that aren’t overtly religious, in subject matter that isn’t overtly religious, and in voices that are not overtly religious, on the contrary, perhaps even antireligious. I sometimes remind myself and my friends that on one occasion Balaam’s ass spoke the word of God [laughter]. But the other, the second, impact is that if all truth is God’s truth, then, everything that I think of as truth needs to be brought into relationship with God. It doesn’t just sit off in some separate compartment. I don’t understand that to mean that it’s my task to construct a perfectly synthesized, fully integrated system of thought. That’s one of the things that I don’t think we should try to do or even can do. But— well, let me tell you this story. The vicar at our church was leading a confirmation class in the aftermath of the killings at Colorado, at Columbine, and he asked a group of eighth graders to think about that tragedy in relationship to what they had been doing in the class. And 181

that question sort of stumped them. They weren’t in the habit of doing that type of overt practical application. Consequently, one of the students asked the vicar, ‘‘Do we have to relate everything to God?’’ And he answered, ‘‘Yep!’’ Putt: That’s a great story. Westphal: And they proceeded that way. I thought the question was just wonderful. Putt: Well, then, do we have to relate everything to God? Westphal: Yep! [Laughter] I think that’s part of what I came away with from ‘‘all truth is God’s truth.’’ Everything has to be related to God, which, by the way, doesn’t mean that it has to be converted into theology. Putt: Of course. What’s interesting about your being so influenced by that broader understanding of truth is that you came out of a decidedly fundamentalist evangelical background. Westphal: Oh yes. Wheaton College was a broadening experience for me. Putt: And you mention in the article that your parents never really understood this broadening, this openness toward encountering other people and other perspectives. Westphal: That’s right. That was very painful. Putt: Was it? Westphal: Yes. It truly was. Putt: So your philosophy, your move into philosophy, was not just intellectual—there was an existential and even spiritual dynamic at work in it? Westphal: Yes. Although not in the sense of ‘‘I have to get away from where I’ve been; I must find someplace else.’’ What happened is I just gradually found myself someplace else, arriving there in small steps not in great leaps. I just gradually found myself living in a different space, and as that space moved, it got farther away from the space in which my parents still lived. Putt: Speaking of that space, were we to do a genealogy of your philosophical development, we would discover Hebraic categories, Kantian hermeneutics of finitude, and Kierkegaardian hermeneutics of suspicion. Personally, in reading you, I think I find a strong Ricoeurean influence, especially Ricoeur’s post-Hegelian Kantianism. Could you speak briefly on how you correlate these different influences on your thought? Westphal: Sure. A lot of the structure of my thinking revolves around both the hermeneutics of finitude and the hermeneutics of suspicion. 182

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The first I think of as a philosophical correlate of the doctrine of creation; finitude is the limitedness of our creation, of our createdness, which undermines certain aspirations within the philosophical tradition to overreach and to achieve, particularly in terms of the comprehensiveness and certainty of knowledge, a level of philosophical hubris that ends up being akin to ‘‘I will ascend into heaven; I will be like the Most High’’ (cf. Isa. 14:14). I see the hermeneutics of finitude as an essentially Kantian critique of that aspiration, a reminder that human thinking is always human, never divine, and I see a whole variety of thinkers contributing to that critique. I actually think of philosophy not so much as a series of footnotes to Plato but a series of footnotes to Kant! So in the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur, in the pragmatism of the classical American Pragmatists, in the Kuhnian movement of philosophy of science, and in postmodernism, both in its Nietzschean/Heideggerian and its French poststructuralist versions, I see a series of footnotes to Kant developing that very motif. Then, on the other hand, I see the hermeneutics of suspicion as the philosophical correlate of the doctrine of the Fall, a way in which our knowing is contaminated by desires that we’re not eager to acknowledge. I think the origins of this go back, at least, to Paul’s notion in Romans 1:18 that in righteousness we suppress the truth, a notion that comes to expression later on in both Augustine and Kierkegaard. Furthermore, I’ve followed Ricoeur in taking Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the three great secular philosophers of suspicion, and that’s where I also place Foucault and his thesis about knowledge and power. I don’t try to squeeze everything I do into these two rubrics, but an awful lot of my thinking falls into those two hermeneutical categories. Putt: Well, it’s quite interesting how, in several of your works, you correlate what you call Kant’s ‘‘antirealism’’ with Kierkegaard’s conclusion that existence is a system only for God. These two perspectives appear to bear directly on your hermeneutics of finitude. Westphal: Yes. Ironically, they’re the sandwich in which Hegel is the ham [laughter], but coming from rather different points of view, although both of them are overtly theistic. Kant and Kierkegaard are reminders that we are not God and that human knowledge—what should count as truth within the human domain is the best way for human beings to think. Both of them, however, think that that will not correspond to the best way to think, period, that is, the way God thinks, that we are not in a position to see the world through God’s eyes, to peek over God’s shoulders and see things in the intuitive immediacy and comprehensive totality that the divine mind is capable of. B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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Putt: In a previous, brief interview with Gary Percesepe, you actually expressed that notion in a postmodern idiom. You say, if I’m recalling correctly, that there is a metanarrative, but we’re not in on it. Westphal: Yes. There is truth with a capital ‘‘T,’’ but our truth is truth with a small ‘‘t.’’ The world is a system for God, but not for us. There are several ways in which you could express that distinction. The philosophers of finitude after Kant, who are very secular, often argue like this: if you look closely at human knowledge, you’ll see its limitedness, and they have a variety of ways of pointing out its contingencies, its particularities, its incompleteness, and so forth. Then they often seem to draw the conclusion ‘‘obviously, that’s the only knowing there is,’’ because although they haven’t spelled out their assumption, much less tried prove it, they just assume that there is no God. Now what I try to do in appropriating their thinking is to notice the power and force of their analysis of human understanding and notice that, if you plug in alongside of it the assumption that there is a God, then you’ll come up with conclusions like Kant and Kierkegaard, distinguishing human knowing from divine knowing, rather than drawing the conclusion that this finite incomplete knowledge is the only knowledge there is. That ends up being a lot closer to Hegel than many contemporary postmodernists would like to think, namely, our knowing is the only knowing there is—this is the best there is, and it doesn’t get any better than this. They certainly don’t think we can accomplish as much epistemologically as Hegel thought, but they share the assumption that we’re the only game in town. Putt: Somewhere you actually make that particular critique, specifically of Derrida, when you say that he commits the non sequitur of moving from a critique of metaphysical totalization to the assumption that there is nothing transcendent because we can never reach it. Westphal: He certainly often leaves the impression that that’s the conclusion he’s drawing. It’s possible to read him as simply saying, ‘‘This is an analysis of human knowledge. Whether there’s anything beyond that, I don’t know; I’m agnostic about that.’’ He certainly isn’t careful in making that distinction and restricting the scope of his conclusions, and he often will say things, which on the face of it certainly seem to be that non sequitur—‘‘this is ours and that’s all there is.’’ Someone like Nietzsche, of course, is completely explicit about that. Putt: In an early article entitled ‘‘Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy,’’ you discuss the two traditional approaches to philosophy and religion, the 184

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analytical Anglo-American perspective with its evidentialist, rationalistic, and empiricistic theories of natural theology, and the Continental perspective of phenomenology of religion in which you, yourself, have worked. Then over against those two, you posit a third, one that you call the ‘‘prophetic’’ paradigm, according to which one does philosophy of religion as a prophet. What do you mean by that? Westphal: Let me back up just a moment and address the first perspective you refer to. I was thinking of the analytical tradition primarily in the sense of philosophy of religion as apologetics, and my understanding of that was not restricted to an evidentialist strategy. Putt: I see. Westphal: I think that’s one possible strategy, but I think there are others. So if I were to distinguish that paradigm, it would be philosophy of religion as apologetics in its many different modes, and then phenomenology of religion as a more descriptive approach to the philosophy of religion. The prophetic model has an Enlightenment link with its notion of philosophy as critique. There has been within the philosophical traditions, going back at least to Socrates and to the Socratic irony and the Socratic questioning and so forth, the notion that the task of the philosopher is to raise critical questions about our beliefs and practices and to examine them and to cross-examine them. That, it seems to me, is distinguishable from both a purely descriptive phenomenology and an apologetics, and it seems to me that there are important reincarnations of that in a variety of ways in the history of philosophy. I think the movements we sort of lump together under the heading ‘‘Enlightenment’’ had that, perhaps, as an important uniting theme: philosophy is critique, critique of tradition, critique of power—what is that famous footnote in Kant about how neither religion nor politics is exempt from critique? It seems to me that Christian thinkers have every bit as good a rationale as secular thinkers to include critique as one of the tasks of reflective thought and, so, to a certain extent, the other two models, apologetics and phenomenology, can be expressed using the scientist as sort of a paradigm of what the philosopher is about. What I would suggest is that a different paradigm could be that of a prophet, the biblical prophet, and I include Jesus here, since although I think Jesus is more than a prophet, I don’t think he is less than a prophet. Consequently, I like to think of philosophy, including Christian philosophy, as raising critical questions about our beliefs and practices. Putt: You explicitly acknowledge the influence of Jeremiah and of the Psalms on this prophetic paradigm— Westphal:—and Marx and Nietzsche. B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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Putt: Right. But is Kierkegaard not a ‘‘major prophet’’ for your paradigm as well? After all, you wrote an article entitled ‘‘Kierkegaard as Prophetic Philosopher.’’ Westphal: Yes. Putt: Is it because he does both a hermeneutics of finitude and of suspicion? Westphal: Well, perhaps. He certainly does both. But in doing them, he also explicitly thematizes certain sociopolitical implications. He’s not just an epistemologist. I often say that his attack upon Christendom begins as early as Fear and Trembling. There is also a sense in which one could push it back one step further and say that the little homily at the end of the second volume of Either/Or that puts Judge William in question, the edification in the thought that against God we are always in the wrong, which really pinpricks Judge William’s complacency, already signals the attack upon Christendom. As I read the Kierkegaardian corpus, there are two tracks going simultaneously, at the theoretical level it’s a sustained assault on Hegel and the system, but at the same time it’s a sustained assault on Christendom as the practical correlate of the Hegelian system, a certain sense of having arrived, a certain sense of—I don’t have a theological term for it— perhaps a ‘‘realized eschatology.’’ Had Kierkegaard read Nietzsche, he would have loved the phrase ‘‘wretched contentment’’ from Zarathustra that Nietzsche applies to the Good and the Just. There’s a sense in which the Kierkegaardian corpus is an attempt to disturb the good conscience and the deep sleep of a Christendom that is too complacent, wretchedly content with both its beliefs and its practices. Putt: This all sounds quite similar to your idea of sin as an epistemological concern. You contend that sin becomes a philosophical idea that you choose to prosecute, again, with reference to St. Paul, Jeremiah, and also Kierkegaard. Westphal: Well, and Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud also. Putt: Yes. Of course. Westphal: If you want to use theological language to describe what these last three thinkers are doing, you can say that they are looking at the ways in which human sinfulness corrupts human thinking. Putt: Precisely. In that sense, you call them ‘‘secular theologians of original sin.’’ Westphal: That’s exactly what it seems to me they are doing. Freud is the one who’s closest to recognizing that. He will often quote theologians on the topic of original sin and say, ‘‘Yeah, that’s what I’m up to; I’m showing the same thing.’’ Nietzsche and Marx are nowhere near as 186

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fond of that rhetoric, but it’s there in their thought, nonetheless. For example, in Marx the idea finds expression under the label ‘‘ideology,’’ which is the way we rationalize the political and social systems that privilege us over others. I believe that this idea goes straight back to Amos and Isaiah. Putt: In other words, back to the prophetic paradigm. Westphal: Yes. Putt: In your critical discussions of this issue, you go so far as to construe the hermeneutics of suspicion and the epistemological implications of sin as signals of the ‘‘transcendental depravity infecting all human beings.’’ Would you identify this nomenclature as one of your most explicitly Calvinistic contributions to a Continental philosophy of religion? Westphal: Well, I don’t want to suggest that Calvinists have a monopoly on sin [laughter]. I think I would put it this way: the Lutheran and Calvinist ways of developing the Augustinian tradition have been more explicit about sin as an epistemological category than the Thomistic way of developing the Augustinian tradition. I do think that it’s there in Aquinas, but it’s not as conspicuous; you have to dig deeper to find it. Whereas, in both the Lutheran and the Calvinist traditions, that Pauline motif, that Augustinian motif, is very explicitly thematized, and, yeah, I guess it’s my own exposure to those that—but actually there’s a sense in which that was at work in the fundamentalism in which I grew up. Fundamentalism is a hermeneutics of suspicion about everything except itself, and one way to learn the hermeneutics of suspicion is to practice it on ‘‘them,’’ whoever they may be. The trick is to get to a place where you can put aside those things as exercises and turn that skill, if it is a skill, into self-examination, and that’s what Kierkegaard was up to. He’s a Christian thinker who puts Christendom in question, the very community to which he belongs and of which he’s a part. It’s a little bit different, therefore, from what Nietzsche does when he puts Christendom on trial. I have often said that there’s a terrible danger of pharisaism in the hermeneutics of suspicion, and it becomes that for sure if you only practice it on people that are different from yourself, the ‘‘them’’ that have different beliefs and different practices. Putt: You make that explicit claim in the brief gloss to your concluding admonitions in Suspicion and Faith regarding the temptations that plague a prophetic hermeneutics of suspicion. You identify pharisaism as the first of those temptations, cynicism as the second, and amnesia toward God’s grace as the third. Please elaborate on those. B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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Westphal: Well, I just said a word about the pharisaism. The cynicism, theologically, is what you get if you think only of the doctrine of the Fall and forget Creation and Redemption. If you myopically perceive only a fallenness that obliterates the goodness of creation, and you don’t notice a wider angle the restorative work of redemption, then you are going to end up being cynical and seeing nothing but the bad. That’s sort of a comforting game to play; you look around you and see something wrong with everything and feel good about yourself, because you can put everything else down. Granted, it’s a little bit sick. But whenever this critique runs amok, it always ends up with cynicism. Amnesia, on the other hand, would be the forgetfulness of God’s grace. We can lapse into a thing where I can see the deficiencies of others, and then I turn that view onto myself, or ourselves, and I then think that my task is to get everything straightened out and get us all cleaned up and make us perfect. And if I don’t succeed in that, then I get very angry and frustrated, and I forget that in the final analysis it is God’s grace and not our accomplishments that wins the day. Putt: Is this ‘‘fixing it ourselves’’ what you mean by the Pelagian character of modernist epistemology, the Pelagian nature of Enlightenment thought? Westphal: Yes. That’s it. I mean, the Enlightenment knew—and you can trace this thread straight through from Descartes to Freud—the Enlightenment thinkers knew that human thought goes astray and messes things up. Yet, their belief was that if you are careful, if you find the right method, if you proceed in carefully rational ways—of course, there are multiple and different accounts of what these ways might be—but the general notion is that you can heal yourself, you can fix this, you can void, if not avoid, all that disrepair. And that’s what I mean by the Pelagianism of Enlightenment epistemology. Yeah, there’s fault all right, but it’s eliminable by our own efforts, and particularly it’s eliminable by adopting the right method. I think we inherit from Descartes a great faith in method as an alternative to grace. Putt: So would Westphal agree with Heidegger that only a God can save us? Westphal: Oh sure. Well, I— Putt: Although Westphal’s God is different. Westphal: Oh, yes. I was going to say that I’m not sure that what I have in mind is exactly what he had in mind. And I do think that most of the people on the scene today, especially Christian philosophers, would say that. I don’t think there are a lot of Pelagians running around on the scene, in spite of very substantial philosophical differences to be 188

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found, say among the people who make up the Society of Christian Philosophers. Putt: At first blush, this issue of grace appears to complement the recent emphases found in your good friend Jack Caputo’s philosophy of the ‘‘gift’’ and ‘‘forgiveness.’’ Would you consider his position on these topics to approximate a more postmodern Protestant theory of justification by faith, or do you think he finally fails to factor grace into his ‘‘radical hermeneutics’’? Westphal: The kind of grace I’m talking about presupposes God in a fairly specific sense, a personal creator and redeemer, someone who might show up on the theoretical level in theistic accounts of the world. I don’t find God in that sense at work in Caputo’s thought. I think he’s quite comfortable in saying with Derrida that, in his thinking, what others call God goes by other names, or when the name ‘‘God’’ does appear, it signifies other things, something else. So to the degree that I have given him a fair reading in this area, I would insist that there couldn’t be anything in his thinking quite like what I have in my mind when I’m talking about grace. What there is in his thinking, and he emphasizes this himself, is an analogous structure with a different content. There’s a willingness to break with the Enlightenment’s commitment to autonomy, a willingness to recognize that there is an Otherness to which we are responsible—and there the Levinasian motifs in his and Derrida’s ethics come to the fore—but also an Otherness from which we receive what we cannot give ourselves and, in that sense, upon which we are dependent and are gifted and forgiven. But it isn’t God who’s doing the giving and God who’s doing the forgiving; it’s we who give to each other and forgive each other. So, it’s hard to sort it out completely. On the one hand, over against an Enlightenment autonomy, there’s a deep affinity; on the other hand, in so far as God isn’t very obviously on the scene, Caputo’s postmodernism and secular Enlightenment thinking seem to have more in common with each other than either does with what I’m trying to do. Putt: His notions at this point are more nebulous, more abstract, than what you’re doing. Westphal: Yes. Putt: Of course, Caputo’s response to you would be that what you’re doing is yet another hermeneusis, another way of reading the flux. Westphal: Well, there’s no question about the fact that—let me back up and put it this way. I’m not claiming to be reading from a direct transcript derived by pure intuition after having climbed out of the cave and gazed at the naked Forms in the pure sunlight of the Good beyond B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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Being! Of course, my account of things is an interpretation, and his account of things is an interpretation. We both acknowledge this. The question, I take it, is what’s the relation of these two interpretations to each other, and it seems to me that Jack’s interpretation has a lot of formal similarities with mine, but some very substantial differences with reference to content. Putt: Right. You mentioned—to continue the discussion about grace— you mentioned Levinas, and we began talking about this with reference to Kierkegaard. You have a couple of articles, ‘‘The Transparent Shadow’’ and ‘‘Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task,’’ in which you compare and contrast Levinas and Kierkegaard. Would you elaborate on how they compare with reference to a religious critique of metaphysics, and then would you address what you take to be a significant point of contrast between them, specifically Levinas’s failure to allow for a soteriology, for any kind of redemption? Do you think that he is guilty of the temptation that we just talked about, an amnesia toward God’s grace? Westphal: Well, in the first place, I find his concept of God very illusive, and much of the time I’m inclined to think that he’s an atheist. When he says, for example, as he does emphatically, that we mustn’t talk about a world behind the scenes, it’s not clear that there’s any room in his thinking for the kind of God I’m thinking about, who is a world behind the scenes. When he says, for example, that God is not our interlocutor, then it seems to me that there isn’t anything in his thinking that corresponds to what God is in mine, because God is First Interlocutor, in a sense, before God is First Cause in the thinking of someone like Kierkegaard and in my own thinking as well. As a result, I’m not sure if in Levinas’s thinking there’s a God who could be a savior in a meaningful sense. Furthermore, there’s another feature in his thought that sort of—well you know, they say a Puritan is somebody who pictures God as desperately anxious at all times, lest someone somewhere is happy [laughter]. Levinas sometimes seems that way. He seems scared of happiness; he’s like Kant in this way. He thinks that the moral life is corrupted at any moment that happiness shows up in it, or satisfaction, or fulfillment; then what we’re doing is, as Kant would also say, not of moral worth. So on both of these fronts, his anxiety about happiness as being corruptive of responsibility—and one can understand that, I mean, I can be irresponsible in my pursuit of happiness and satisfaction by giving myself over to my inclinations, so the critique of inclination and the critique of hedonism and so forth is an integral part of any serious ethics. It just seems to me that Kant and 190

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Levinas push that to an extreme where it becomes problematic in its own right. Yet, you combine that allergy to any eudaimonism with the absence of any God who could be a savior, and there just isn’t the makings in Levinas’s thinking for a soteriology. I sometimes say, ‘‘Well, here’s a philosopher of law without grace.’’ Now I genuinely hesitate to say that, because some people will respond, ‘‘Well, yes, of course, he’s Jewish,’’ and I would be quick to say ‘‘No, no, no. It is not that.’’ Indeed, the Hebrew scriptures have an enormously rich theology of grace. I don’t for a moment want to say Jewish thinking is based solely on the law, and then Christianity adds grace to it. But Levinas, it seems to me—and in a sense like Derrida—could only have a grace or a gift that comes to us from other humans. In fact, in his book on Levinas, Derrida points to some often-overlooked texts in which Levinas has the Other not simply placing us under responsibility, but saying ‘‘Yes’’ and welcoming us. It’s not just that there’s a question of whether we welcome the Other, but we find that we have always already been welcomed; that’s not a conspicuous motif in Levinas, but Derrida noticed it and pointed it out. Putt: Let me pursue the Kierkegaard-Levinas relationship a little farther. In a couple of articles entitled ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B’’ and ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Faith as Suffering,’’ you do something quite creative in identifying what you call a ‘‘Religiousness C’’ stage of existence, in which Christians are called to be doers of the word, which sounds to me like a reintroduction of the ethical as obedience to Christ’s commandment to love the Other. First, is this a fair assessment of what you mean by religious suffering and Religiousness C? Second, if so, do you recognize any correlation at this point between Kierkegaard and Levinas’s philosophy of substitution, his concern for and his response to the call of the Other? Westphal: On that last point, absolutely. In fact, I’m just finishing teaching a graduate seminar in which we’ve been reading Works of Love in relationship with Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being and noticing the strong parallel between the notion of commanded love in Kierkegaard and the Levinasian analysis of the ethical situation, the ethical relation, the heteronomy of it insofar as I’m not a law unto myself, but find myself confronted by another who demands that there be a caring for the other that isn’t restricted by my inclinations, my preferences, or my conatus essendi. I think that the Kierkegaardian ethic and the Levinasian ethic have very, very powerful affinities. What I call Religiousness C in Kierkegaard is an attempt to get people to read Kierkegaard past the Postscript. The traditional reading tends to stop B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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there and assume that what Kierkegaard presents to us through a pseudonym about Christianity ends with the notion that it’s reduced to the paradox to be believed and all of the epistemological problems revolving around that belief. If one goes on, however, and reads the enormous literature that Kierkegaard produced after the Postscript, including Works of Love and Practice of Christianity in particular—but there are other works as well—then Christ is presented there not as the paradox to be believed, not just as the paradox to be believed, but also as the pattern to be imitated, and that’s where the ethics comes back in. Climacus complains that the system has no ethics, and there is a sense in which the Postscript, itself, has no ethics. The Postscript is so completely preoccupied with the individual’s relationship to God that the neighbor falls off the radar screen, simply doesn’t show up at all. Some people, identifying Kierkegaard with Climacus and then assuming that Kierkegaard stopped at that point, have complained that there’s a loss of the ethical, that the ‘‘religious’’ means the disappearance of the ‘‘ethical.’’ It seems that nothing could be farther from the truth. What Kierkegaard is up to, it seems to me, is trying to think through what is necessary to get the individual alone with God, but then he goes on. Kierkegaard would claim that one of the things that happens if the individual ever gets alone with God is that God says, ‘‘Get back out there where you came from, and the first person you meet is going to be your neighbor, and thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’’ So the radical loneliness of the individual with God is not the final stage of the journey; it’s part of the process that culminates in an ethic of love for ‘‘thy neighbor.’’ Kierkegaard is just strictly following Jesus—the first commandment is ‘‘you shall love the Lord your God,’’ and the second commandment is ‘‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself ’’—let’s take them in that order, and in his writings, in effect, he does. He first worries about what it is to get rightly related to God, and then out of that develops an ethic about neighbor love that is very Levinasian. Admittedly, Levinas doesn’t like that. He doesn’t want to start with God; he thinks that every time you start with God, the neighbor is going to get left out of it. But that just seems to me wrong, Putt: And he’s quite critical of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling for placing ethics under suspension. Westphal: I know. He misreads Fear and Trembling as if it were a critique of what he, Levinas, means by the ethical, which it isn’t at all. It’s a critique of what Hegel means by the ethical, that is, Sittlichkeit, ethical life, the laws and customs of the people. The point of Fear and 192

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Trembling is that the laws and customs of any people are not the highest norms for human behavior. Instead, the law of God, the will of God, is a higher norm for the individual than the laws or customs of my people. That’s where the attack upon Christendom begins. Our laws and customs are not absolute and final; they can be trumped; they are subject to critique; and they are not the last word. Of all people, Levinas wants to make that same critique of the Hegelian ethic or variations of it, in which the social ethos of a particular culture is taken to be the final word about what individual responsibility is. His analysis of the face of other is something that cuts through that and always places a higher demand upon me than the laws and customs of my people will. So there’s a deep agreement between them that Levinas doesn’t recognize, and, as a result, his critique of Kierkegaard at that point seems to miss the target. Putt: In your own thought, does all of this come back to the issue of ‘‘useless self-transcendence?’’ You explicitly use that phrase with reference to our relationship to God, but does it also have an ethical component—self-transcendence not only toward God, but also toward the Other? Westphal: Yes, ‘‘useless’’ in the sense of being noninstrumental, in the sense of being something that’s not merely the way in which I go about getting something else accomplished. Putt: Obviously, then, this is your way of critiquing the notion of a ‘‘pure economy.’’ Westphal: Yes. Putt: Of doing the idea of ‘‘gift.’’ Westphal: Yes. Yes. And it’s the way of critiquing Levinas’s fear of happiness that I mentioned earlier. If I learn to desire the right things and find them intrinsically worthwhile doing and, therefore, find a satisfaction and a delight in helping someone else, in loving the neighbor, or in loving God, then that isn’t something to fear. I think the older Augustinian ‘‘love and do as you please’’ comes in here, but only when you’ve learned to love the right things and learned to love the right things the right way. When that happens, you can follow your inclinations and derive a satisfaction from doing what you want to do, because that’s what you want to do. C. S. Lewis has this wonderful line where he says, ‘‘You aren’t corrupting the pure in heart when you tell them that they’ll see God; only the pure at heart want to see God.’’ If that’s what gives you satisfaction, then you have been transformed, ‘‘transformed’’ in the way the ethical life and the religious life call for transformation. The Kantian notion is that the moral life consists of doing B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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what we don’t want to do, because we’re supposed to do it. And I think that the Christian view is that we have a duty to become sufficiently transformed to the point where what we ought to do is, in fact, what we want to do, and that’s where we find our happiness. So we’re not doing it out of duty; we’re not doing it because it’s obligatory; but we’re doing it because that’s what we enjoy doing, that’s where we get our satisfaction. If we’ve learned to love God and love our neighbor, then we are decentered. Our agenda isn’t the dominant issue. The question is ‘‘what can I do to help so and so; what can I do to make so and so happy?’’ If that’s what gives me my delight, then, it seems to me, instead of calling that an egoism, which is the task of ethics to obliterate, I would say that that is the overcoming of egoism. Putt: In a manner of speaking, then, you’re returning to the issue of sin as an epistemological category, that is, if you understand sin as the traditional incurvatus in se. You’re now determining desire as no longer narcissistic but as aimed outward toward God and toward the Other. Westphal: Right. And the fact that—if I have learned to long for God, to desire God, and to delight in God, the fact that I do delight in God is not narcissism. Putt: Precisely. This is also your way of critiquing the Enlightenment idea of autonomy, a critique that you find in some respects already in Kant and Kierkegaard. But to a certain extent this also ties you in with Husserl, because I believe useless self-transcendence is part of what you call a post-transcendental turn. How exactly does this relate to a Husserlian understanding of the subject? Is that even a correct association? Westphal: I’m not sure the relationship is too close. Useless self-transcendence, or the decentering of the self, is primarily an ethical and religious category. When I talk about post-transcendental, I’m talking primarily in epistemological terms. Putt: I see. Westphal: And what I mean by post-transcendental is to ask the question—and you can ask this of Husserl or Kant or even of Descartes, Descartes’s cogito—who is the transcendental subject, who is the condition for the possibility of my experience? Descartes, Kant, and Husserl all talk as if the transcendental subject were a formal structure of an individual consciousness. It seems to me that a whole variety of philosophical facts and traditions have suggested that the a priori at work in my experience of the world is more concrete than that and is more social than that. We are the transcendental subject, where ‘‘we’’ is a fairly concrete historical set of practices and traditions and so forth, in which I find myself immersed. I have grown up, been socialized, and 194

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been enculturated in that process. The things that my group takes for granted become a priori for me, and that’s the transcendental subject. Now when you plug in contingent, historical, and sociological formations of thinking, you’ve got room there for ethical concerns, and the transcendental ego’s going to get contaminated by the ethical biases of my culture. So it’s not wholly unrelated to questions of ethics, but it moves away from a purely formal, purely individual, conception of human thinking to a much more social and dialogical interactive way of thinking. Putt: These things that we’ve been discussing obviously take us over into postmodernism. In many ways, you are a postmodernist, whatever that may mean; you certainly seem to live and breathe in that milieu. Granted, you appropriate postmodernism critically, for example, you critique the more nihilistic or hermeneutically relativistic variants of it. But you seem to interpret postmodernism as a kind of contemporary idiom for the Augustinian strategy of ‘‘faith seeking understanding,’’ a phrase that, as mentioned earlier, serves as the title of your intellectual autobiography. Under these circumstances, if I may reference Paul Tillich, another Augustinian, and his famous statement about existentialism, would you agree that, perhaps, postmodernism might be the good fortune of Christian theology as it moves into this new century? Westphal: I think it can be. I don’t want to make any exclusive claims for it, as in ‘‘it’s the only good fortune that Christian theology could have,’’ but I think if Christian theology appropriates what’s strongest and most compelling about postmodernism, that could be a plus. I think some of the characteristics of postmodernism that can be appropriated and recontextualized into a theistic or, more specifically, Christian context, aren’t wholly unique, if you take my earlier statement about the series of footnotes to Kant. Postmodernism may well be within that series. But in philosophical hermeneutics, in pragmatism, and in other philosophical traditions, there are similar kinds of footnotes. Thus the caveat about no uniqueness. But I do think that the philosophers who get labeled ‘‘postmodern’’ often have insights into the limitations of human thinking, both in terms of finitude and in terms of suspicion, that ought to be integrated into the self-critique of theological discourse, so that one doesn’t get carried away into thinking that one has transcended interpretation or that one has in hand any one metanarrative in considerable detail and knows how the story ends in any but an anticipatory way. I sometimes wonder whether when I talk this way, if I’m not just pointing to negatives: ‘‘Here’s a reminder, don’t make B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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these exaggerated claims for what you are doing.’’ And to a certain extent that’s true, and I think theology always needs to be reminded that it is a human discourse about God, that the divine attributes of its subject matter don’t spill over on to it. We don’t become divine by talking about God any more than we become purple when we talk about violets [laughter]. But I think there’s more than that. For example, I think Foucault’s analysis of the inextricable intertwining of knowledge and power doesn’t merely supply a basis for a critique of the ways in which our theological discourse is, in fact, embedded in various social practices that involve power relationships that are always imperfect and always unjust, but also provides for theology a program and a project for thinking about how our ‘‘God-talk’’ can contribute to building and reshaping those social practices so that the power relations inherent in them are less unjust. In that sense, one could have a postmodern conceptual apparatus that could be an impetus to something like liberation theology, which wouldn’t have to be tied to the particulars of the thirdworld context in which those traditions have emerged and that aren’t always immediately transferable to theology in our own context. One might be able to work more effectively from Foucault than from Gutierrez in thinking about how to do theology in the United States. Similarly, with a thinker like Derrida, it seems to me that some of his analyses of hospitality, and gift, and forgiveness, and so forth could be very stimulating. Of course, I have some critical reservations about some of them, but I think there are some positive stimuli that can be found there, precisely to a degree that some of these thinkers are addressing issues that are in substance of a theological nature, even if they aren’t themselves theologians or are not even theists. Someone like Derrida is, perhaps more than anyone else, a perfect example of this. Putt: That goes back to ‘‘all truth is God’s truth.’’ Westphal: Yes. Putt: As we discussed earlier, you may be postmodern, but you are postmodern as a conservative Christian and as a significant presence in evangelical theology and philosophy. As a matter of fact, you are an active member of the Society of Christian Philosophers, which is traditionally more associated with the analytical perspective than the Continental one. To be honest, when I read you, I often think that you intentionally seek opportunities to infect that perspective with a bit of postmodernism. Why is that? Westphal: Well, since my days in graduate school, I have found myself drawn to the Continental traditions of philosophy and, more recently, 196

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have included among those traditions what we now call postmodernism. That’s where I do my work; those are the texts that I read, not to the exclusion of everything else, but more than anything else I read Continental philosophy. Increasingly over the last decade, I’ve been reading postmodern texts. Of course, I’m a member of several different communities. I’m a member of communities of people who are oriented primarily to Continental philosophy, and when I go there I don’t check my religious faith at the door. Many of my colleagues in that context are quite secular or, at least, have a much more amorphous sort of religiosity than I’m comfortable with. I simply try to be myself in those contexts and do my Continental philosophizing in the framework of my own Christian faith. Conversely, if I’m, say for example, in the Society of Christian Philosophers among philosophers who share my Christian faith—as a very large number of them do, but do in other modes and, in some cases, in modes that are deeply allergic to Continental philosophy in general and postmodernism in particular—I again try to contribute to the conversation by being myself. I say, ‘‘Hey, look, some of the things you think about postmodernism are just misconceptions and have gotten bandied about and you have absorbed them without having looked carefully enough at the text. When you look a little more carefully at the text, there’s some interesting things that we should be looking at very seriously, things that we can learn, things we can appropriate, although, to be sure, things to be criticized.’’ Look, I understand why political conservatives react quite negatively to postmodern thought, and I think there’s good reason for them to do so. Yet, I don’t think that Christian theistic thinkers have the same good reason. Of course, insofar as postmodern thinkers ‘‘rightly pass for atheists,’’ as Derrida says, and have very secular agendas, and in many cases no religion at all—if there is any it’s often pretty amorphous— that establishes a significant disagreement about, let’s say, God and what we can say about God. But, again, if all truth is God’s truth and they have, as I think they have—I’m talking about the postmodern philosophers—if they have some compelling analyses on what goes on in human thinking and human practices, then those of us who are theistic thinkers or, more specifically, Christian philosophers could do well to pay attention. I’m simply inviting my Christian colleagues to do that. Putt: Is that similar to the reasoning you give in Suspicion and Faith for why Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud could be Lenten meditations? Westphal: Absolutely. Absolutely. And here’s Balaam’s ass again! In order to say something that’s important, one doesn’t have to be credentialed B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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first as a saint or on the right side of whatever is at issue. Sometimes our worst enemies will tell us what our best friends won’t tell us, and we need to hear that. But it’s not just the critique of faith and of religious practices and so forth; I think there’s much more to be found in a number of postmodern writers. Putt: You have acknowledged that postmodernism contributes a muchneeded critique of foundationalism and of Enlightenment hubris. In a 1995 article entitled ‘‘Postmodernism and Religious Reflection,’’ however, you challenge whether postmodernism really serves a positive function if it questions the truth claims of religion. Do you still feel that way over a decade later? Westphal: I prefer to put it this way. So far as I can see, postmodern critiques, in their cogency, don’t place any constraints, any distinctive constraints, on what we can say about God. For example, they don’t make it inappropriate to say that there is a personal creator per se. They do place some constraints on the meta-claims we can make about the first-order statements we assert about God in terms of their adequacy, their mirroring of the world, their finality and so forth. Consequently, if postmodernism is read as saying that when we are tempted to take our beliefs to be truth with an capital ‘‘T,’’ it will keep reminding us that our beliefs are, at best, truth with a small ‘‘t’’—maybe we don’t even think they’re that but at best that’s all they could be—then I have no problem with that. It seems to me that there are good religious, theological motives for saying the same thing. If postmodernism is taken, as it sometimes is, as having provided, if you like, negative warrants against making any theological claims, then I think it’s mistaken. I think it misunderstands itself. My own sense, however, is that the major postmodern thinkers don’t understand themselves in that way, although they sometimes speak carelessly and talk as if they had firmly established what they presuppose about God. Now they are entitled to their presuppositions. We all start with presuppositions; we don’t start, as Descartes would like us to have started, with a blank slate. But both the admirers and the detractors of the major postmodern thinkers are often all too eager to read them as having a thinking that is substantively at odds with theistic thinking, either to make the world safe for my secularism, or to give me good excuse to cast aspersions on these disturbers of the peace. I think that both are mistaken. I don’t think there is a substantive incompatibility between a deconstructive theory of meaning or a Foucauldian analysis of knowledge and power and the basic theistic and Christian beliefs that I hold. 198

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Putt: Let’s go the other way. What would you take to be the significant critical contributions that a more conservative Christianity, such as in your tradition, might offer to postmodernism? What could it bring to the dialogue? Westphal: The first one would be simply the reminder that a fairly traditional orthodox Christianity has not been excluded from the table or from the conversation. The Enlightenment often talked as if it had been, one way or another, and I think the thrust of postmodern philosophy is to discredit those Enlightenment assumptions and make it clear that one can’t just a priori eliminate a theistic worldview from consideration. Think for a minute about George Marsden’s analysis of what’s happened in the American university. At one time, the university was dominated by a certain kind of, at first, fairly traditional orthodox but, eventually, more liberal Protestant Christianity. In reaction to that now, almost anything is welcomed within the university, except what used to be the dominant force. And he’s pointed out, I think rather convincingly, that there’s something irrational about that, understandable but, nevertheless, irrational about that. I think on the philosophical scene postmodernism shows the same thing, the irrationality of the a priori dismissal of any worldview that has its right to speak up and to articulate its vision of things. I think the challenge to a substantively Christian thinking is not simply to enjoy the fact that what one friend of mine calls ‘‘the blackmail of the Enlightenment’’ has been lifted, but also to look at the issues that are shared, pressing issues of contemporary discussion and address them from the perspective of a Christian and theistic perspective, not merely repeating the fundamental elements of such a view but developing them in terms of the global village, cyberspace, technology in its various forms, and the reemergent Balkanization of the world, which, while it becomes one village, also becomes this Balkanized pluralism. These kinds of issues seem to me important for a theological thinking that develops out of a perspective that believes that ‘‘God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself ’’ (2 Cor. 5:19), specifically how that belief gets translated into the kinds of questions that are of political and social concern. Putt: It becomes a question of mediation or of a dialectical relation, doesn’t it? Speaking of which: I really think that Kathy Caputo captured you best on the cover of Modernity and Its Discontents [laughter]. Westphal: Jack has never forgiven her for that [more laughter]! Putt: She correctly situates your name boldly in the middle of a jagged line separating two alternative positions. B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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Westphal: I was just describing for you, a few moments ago, one of the senses in which that’s true. I seem just hopelessly religious to some of my secular and postmodern friends and hopelessly postmodern to some of my Christian friends. I don’t think there’s any magical formula for finding the golden mean. Although I like to say that if I’m getting shot at from both sides it must prove I’m right, I genuinely don’t believe that for a minute. On the other hand, looking for a middle ground between extremes, looking to integrate elements, from very different corners, into as coherent a worldview as possible doesn’t mean either that you will become a lowest common denominator or that you will become acceptable to people from whom you’re drawing ideas. It could be just the opposite. If you constantly appropriate and recontextualize issues, not everyone is going to appreciate that; people generally like to keep things in the context in which they have them. Putt: Is all of this yet another expression of the traditional tension between faith and reason? Or, while inclusive of that, is it something more? Westphal: Well, I think what a lot of the footnotes to Kant, including the postmodern footnotes, have helped us to see is that what goes under the name of reason is always some particular faith, not necessarily religious faith, but a view of the world that is without an absolute grounding. Reason can’t fully justify itself, and one constantly enters into it through processes that are not purely deductive or guaranteed by some natural process. Putt: Derrida’s ‘‘Il faut croire.’’ Westphal: Yes, and Gadamer’s ‘‘prejudices,’’ his pre-judgments. I think a lot of philosophical analysis in the twentieth century has helped us to see that such a position is not just a license to believe whatever you want to believe. Instead, it undermines the assumption that there is such a thing as pure reason distinct from faith and helps us to see that the conflict of interpretations is a conflict of faiths, a conflict of semisystems or patterns or habits of belief, none of which can give ultimate noncircular justification of itself and all of which are in dialogue with each other in ways that, as Lyotard, among others, points out, have the difficulty of not being able to appeal to common criteria by which the differences are to be resolved. Conversation or, if you prefer, negotiation, that is, any expression of a willingness to converse, is like an interfaith dialogue, even when you’re not just talking about Christians talking with Jews or Muslims with Buddhists but when you’re talking about modernists talking with postmodernists or hermeneuticists with deconstructionists. Those, too, are interfaith dialogues. There’s a very 200

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significant sense in which instead of thinking in terms of how faith and reason are related, I find myself thinking that everybody’s an Augustinian, everybody’s out there doing ‘‘faith seeking understanding,’’ starting with assumptions that they can’t give an ultimate justification for, trying to think out the ramifications of them, and in the process changing them and, as I was talking about earlier, moving from one side to another and sometimes very incrementally, oftentimes very incrementally. That, it seems to me, is the nature of philosophical reflection. Putt: Do you think the danger arises when ‘‘faith seeking understanding’’ deteriorates into ‘‘faith seeking security,’’ at which point you have to put the shield up because somebody’s going to shoot at you? Westphal: I do. I think there’s something unfaithful about the desire for a security that’s going to consist of something I can provide for myself. Protestant hymnology is filled with wonderful acclamations about not having any security other than what God gives us. The risk and the trust that have to be involved in willing to count on that rather than whatever raft we can build for ourselves in the midst of the ocean and—one of the reasons I’ve thought more in terms of the prophetic analogy instead of the apologetic analogy is that philosophy as apologetics can often degenerate, I don’t think necessarily, but can often degenerate into ‘‘faith seeking security.’’ Putt: It’s interesting that you mention hymnology. In ‘‘Overcoming Ontotheology,’’ your Villanova conference paper, you begin and end with the hymnic, the idea of praise, a genre of discourse that even Derrida refers to as something other than normal discourse with its common concern for predication and correspondent truth. Hymnic discourse does not involve truth as adequation. It’s something else; it’s another discourse; it’s a discourse of Otherness. What do you think is the significance of that kind of discourse? Westphal: One of the things I find in Kierkegaard, in Levinas, and in speech-act theory is the reminder that language is not simply about making assertions or stating facts, spouting propositions that can be judged to be true or false. We do so many other things with words. From a religious point of view, prayer and praise are among the most important of these ‘‘other things.’’ I don’t want to isolate them entirely from questions of fact or questions of truth; however, I do think it’s important to realize that theology is not simply a speculative enterprise. Its goal is not simply to end up with a pocketful of true propositions. As I mentioned a little while ago, our God-talk needs to be oriented toward creating or revising structures of practice, in order for the distribution of power among human beings to be less unjust than it is in B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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present practices. What you mention here about praise is another direction our God-talk ought to be oriented, to evoking and informing praise as well as advising my social practices and so forth. I’m very fond of Marion’s contention that predication must give way to praise, not that predication is abolished, but that it’s not its own telos, it’s in the service of something beyond itself. I think whether one thinks of that as praise or thinks of that as love, it’s important to affirm that transspeculative dimension. Putt: As a phenomenologist of religion, indeed as the author of an awardwinning text in phenomenology of religion, God, Guilt, and Death, do you think that the phenomenologist is more comfortable with doxological theology over against propositional theology? Is the former easier to describe than the latter? Westphal: I would never say doxological theology over against propositional theology. Putt: Okay. Westphal: I would say doxological theology over and above, understanding that the propositional dimension is necessary and important but not the ultimate expression of theology. I think that any philosophical approach that reminds us that we aren’t just proposition machines is helpful. I think phenomenology does that; I think speech-act theory does that; I think pragmatism does that; and I think Foucauldian genealogy or archaeology does that. Wherever that reminder comes from, I think it’s a good reminder. Sometimes it even comes from theology itself. Sometimes it’s a theologian who reminds us that our God-talk should be in the service of justice and not merely of propositional information. I do suspect that some forms of analytical philosophy are so oriented toward propositions, their meaning, and their justifications that it risks losing sight of the larger picture. At this point, however, speech-act theory is a significant corrective to that, and, ironically, it comes out of a type of analytical philosophy. Consequently, within the analytical philosophical tradition there’s a corrective against an exclusive preoccupation with constative or assertorical propositions. Putt: We have distinguished analytical philosophy from Continental philosophy, identifying the provenance of the former with British and American traditions. Yet, over the past several decades, a provocative and creative American Continental philosophy has developed. Theorists such as Mark Taylor, Jack Caputo, Edith Wyschogrod, and, of course, Merold Westphal, among others, speak and write in their own unique voice. How do you account for this development? 202

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Westphal: You need to turn the recorder off and let me think about that [laughter]! Putt: Okay, let me rephrase the question. The uniqueness of American Continental philosophy, in many ways, is a preoccupation with religion, faith, and theology. Of course, European Continentalists deal with these topics—for example, Derrida and Marion, to mention two of the more prominent names. Yet, even they seem to get more of a particularly sympathetic hearing here in the United States. Westphal: Yeah, but there are people, particularly in France, who are, and to some degree in Italy, less so in Germany—both in Italy and France, there’s quite a bit going on. Furthermore, one must acknowledge also that Continental philosophy here in the United States is for the most part very secular. There are, in both contexts, a number of thinkers who are preoccupied with religious matters. Why that should be more the case in France than in Germany, I don’t know. I don’t know that there is any similar disparity on this side of the pond. But I don’t think it’s a phenomenon unique to America. In fact, it does seem to me that discussions of religion in the phenomenological or postmodern context are just sort of exploding all over the place. It’s really quite remarkable how much has happened. Putt: Okay, so you think it’s a wider phenomenon than just here. Westphal: I do. Putt: Would you say then that, at least currently, more creative philosophy of religion is being done in the Continental tradition? Westphal: Than? Putt: Than, let’s say, in the analytical tradition. Westphal: No, I wouldn’t say that. Here in the United States, what’s going on in the Continental tradition is on a much smaller scale. It’s a small business, not a giant corporation. What’s going on is different, but I wouldn’t say it’s more creative. It’s creative in different ways, but there’s some very creative things going on in analytical philosophy of religion these days. Perhaps, if it seems less creative, and I wouldn’t say that myself, it’s because it has a longer history, and there seems to be more continuity. Whereas the sorts of things you are talking about in Continental philosophy of religion don’t have either that long a history or that broad a scope. Putt: In other words, discussions of middle knowledge have been going on far longer than discussions of Derridian perspectives on textuality. Westphal: Yes. They go back several centuries. Putt: Well, let me ask you to be a bit predictive. What do you see as the future for Continental philosophy of religion worldwide? B. Keith Putt and Merold Westphal

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Westphal: I think the resources of Continental philosophy have shown in a number of ways that you can’t eliminate religious discourse on the grounds that you want to be rational. I think that there’s an increasing awareness of the fact that religion isn’t going away, in any case, and if the kind of explosion I see particularly in terms of the discussions on postmodernism and religion that are going on in France, Italy, the United States, Australia, and so forth, if that continues for a couple of more decades, the landscape will change very, very significantly. Yet, in all honesty, while I try to be prophetic as a philosopher, I won’t prophesy! Putt: You only embrace the prophetic as critique and not as prediction! Westphal: Precisely! Putt: Merold, my final question goes back to the issue of your background and your unique contributions to Continental thought as a conservative Christian, one who respects the centrality of the Scriptures. You have an article entitled ‘‘The Canon as Flexible Normative Fact,’’ which reveals your perspectives on the traditional Western literary and philosophical canons. In this article, you state that one should always approach canons with both affirmation and suspicion. Would you say the same were you to speak of the canon of scripture? Or, would you exempt those texts from that polarity? Also, would you make a distinction between being affirming and suspicious of scripture over against affirming or suspecting interpretations of scripture? Westphal: I certainly would want to make that subtle distinction. But going back to the literary and philosophical canons, I was pointing out that what’s in the canon in those areas is continuously in flux; texts fade out and come back in and so forth. That seems to me obviously not the case in the biblical canon. That question is closed, not that there’s complete agreement about the Apocrypha, for example. But it isn’t the case that the Epistle of James is sometimes part of the Bible and sometimes not a part of the Bible. So that isn’t a question. When I was talking about suspicion there, I was talking about the current fads that exclude things from the canon and bring things in. I don’t think that’s the voice of pure reason. Putt: I see. Westphal: If Spinoza falls out of the canon and then comes back into the canon, I think one should look at how that happens in ways that are both appreciative and suspicious. Insofar as I was talking about the formation and re-formation of secular canons, I think that’s what I had primarily in mind. Still, your question suggests, ‘‘Well, what about the texts themselves? Does one approach them with suspicion?’’ Of course, 204

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it seems to me that the first thing to emphasize is the point that you have already suggested. We never have the texts themselves; we always have interpretations . . . on interpretations . . . on interpretations, and those are certainly subject to suspicion. But then there still remains the question, ‘‘What about the production of the texts themselves?’’ Granted, in terms of deciphering its meaning, we are always working in a tradition of interpretation, but what about the possibility that things went into the composition of those texts of which we should be suspicious? I confess that I’m not a biblical scholar nor am I explicitly informed of the kinds of issues that generate that sort of question; however, my own view is that since the Bible is composed of human texts, they’re going to have about them issues that arise from the conspicuously human and not issues that fall directly down from out of heaven. And yet, God’s involvement in the production of those texts is such that they are the Word of God. So there’s an analogy with Christ, in that he was both human and divine. Analogously, scripture is both human and divine. In the case of Christ, that meant that his humanity was sinless. Do we want to say the same thing about scripture? I don’t know. I don’t feel an overwhelming compulsion to deny that human sinfulness was part of the process by which the scriptures came to be, for example, that in writing up the story of the kings, the authors may have had political motivations that were of a power-seeking sort and not entirely dispassionate. Exegetical work might well expose some of these motivations. On the other hand, I wouldn’t want to lose the faith perspective, which seems to be the bottom line, that God was involved in the production of those writings in such a way that we can turn to them and expect to hear God speaking to us. Putt: Obviously, the analogy with Christ’s Incarnation would break down in that we’re not going to worship the biblical texts as we would Christ. Westphal: Correct. We should never take it that far. Putt: Assuming that a conversation with a Christian Continentalist appropriately ends on the topics of scripture and Christ, I will bring our conversation to a close! Please allow my final word to be one of gratitude. Thank you, Merold, for your insights and perspectives. Westphal: You are quite welcome.

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Notes

The Benefit of the Doubt: Merold Westphal’s Prophetic Philosophy of Religion / B. Keith Putt 1. Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 2. 2. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,’’ in Phenomenology of the Truth Proper to Religion, ed. Daniel Guerrie`re (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 105. 3. Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), 7. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Taking Suspicion Seriously: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism,’’ Faith and Philosophy 4 (January 1987): 29. 6. Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death, 13. 7. Ibid., 12. 8. Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 21. 9. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy of Religion Which Will Be Able to Come Forth as Prophecy,’’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4 (Fall 1973): 141. This article is reprinted in an edited form as the first chapter of Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society. In the book, Westphal omits the confession that his prophetic prescription is a thought experiment; however, given the nature of his paradigm shift, it is not inappropriate to interpret his approach using the earlier characterization. 10. Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 12–18. 11. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 42. 207

12. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Appropriation,’’ in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, ed. Mario J. Valdes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 98. 13. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,’’ in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 74. 14. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 526–527. 15. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,’’ in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed. Mark I. Wallace (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 211. 16. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 176. 17. Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 26. 18. Ibid., 33. 19. Ricoeur, History and Truth, 55, 181. 20. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Freedom in the Light of Hope,’’ in The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 412. 21. Ibid., 409–411. 22. Ricoeur, ‘‘Hope and the Structure of Philosophical Systems,’’ 205–206. 23. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Religion, Atheism, and Faith,’’ in The Religious Significance of Atheism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 60, 69. 24. Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,’’ in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 63. 25. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Socrates Between Jeremiah and Descartes: The Dialectic of Self-Consciousness and Self-Knowledge,’’ in Philosophy and Theology 204. 26. Merold Westphal, ‘‘The Ostrich and the Boogeyman: Placing Postmodernism,’’ Christian Scholars Review 20 (1990): 115; see also Merold Westphal, ‘‘Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory: An Essay on Appropriation,’’ in Pledges of Jubilee: Essays on the Arts and Culture, in Honor of Calvin G. Seerveld, ed. Lambert Zuidervaart and Henry Luttikhuizen (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1995), 108–109. 27. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Postmodernism and Religious Reflection,’’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 38 (1995): 131. 28. Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 89. 29. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Faith Seeking Understanding,’’ in God and the Philosophers: The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason, ed. Thomas V. Morris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 218–219. 30. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution,’’ in Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge, ed. C. Stephan Evans and Merold Westphal (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 167. 31. Ibid., 176. 32. Westphal, ‘‘The Ostrich and the Boogeyman,’’ 115. 33. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Onto-theo-logical Straw: Reflections on Presence and Absence,’’ in Postmodernism and Christian Philosophy, ed. Roman T. Ciapolo (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 264–265. 208

Notes

34. Westphal, ‘‘Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory,’’ 118–119. 35. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics,’’ in The Very Idea of Radical Hermeneutics, ed. Roy Martinez (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997), 52. 36. Westphal, ‘‘Postmodernism and Religious Reflection,’’ 134. 37. Westphal, ‘‘Deconstruction and Christian Cultural Theory,’’ 117. 38. Westphal, ‘‘Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics,’’ 61. 39. Westphal, ‘‘Postmodernism and Religious Reflection,’’ 127. 40. Ibid., 134. 41. Westphal, ‘‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,’’ 114. 42. Ibid., 117. 43. Westphal, ‘‘Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics,’’ 48. 44. Westphal, ‘‘Socrates Between Jeremiah and Descartes,’’ 204. 45. Westphal, ‘‘Christian Perspectives on Religious Knowledge,’’ 177. 46. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Taking St. Paul Seriously: Sin as an Epistemological Category,’’ in Christian Philosophy, ed. Thomas P. Flint (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 200. 47. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Phenomenology of Faith as Suffering,’’ in Writing the Politics of Difference, ed. Hugh J. Silverman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 60; Westphal, ‘‘Faith Seeking Understanding,’’ 221; Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 22. 48. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, ed. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 9–18. 49. Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 95. 50. Westphal, ‘‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,’’ 118. 51. Westphal, ‘‘Socrates Between Jeremiah and Descartes,’’ 212. 52. Westphal, ‘‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,’’ 120. 53. Westphal, ‘‘Taking Suspicion Seriously,’’ 27. 54. Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993), 77, 110. 55. Ibid., 265. 56. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Appropriating the Atheists,’’ Books & Culture 24 (May–June 1997): 25. 57. Westphal, ‘‘Taking Suspicion Seriously,’’ 37. 58. Westphal, ‘‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,’’ 108–109. 59. Westphal, ‘‘Appropriating the Atheists,’’ 25; Westphal, ‘‘Taking St. Paul Seriously,’’ 218. 60. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task,’’ Modern Theology 8 (July 1992): 251. 61. Westphal, ‘‘Taking St. Paul Seriously,’’ 214. 62. Ibid., 209, 211, 218; Westphal, ‘‘Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics,’’ 58. 63. Westphal, ‘‘Taking St. Paul Seriously,’’ 208. 64. Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 6, 13. Notes

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65. Ibid., 15. 66. Westphal, ‘‘Levinas, Kierkegaard, and the Theological Task,’’ 244. 67. Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death, 138–139. 68. Søren Kierkegaard, The Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper & Row, 1948), 53. 69. Ibid., 69. 70. Ibid., 79. 71. Ibid., 99. 72. Ibid., 104. 73. Westphal, ‘‘Appropriating the Atheists,’’ 25. 74. Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 16. 75. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B,’’ in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), 116. 76. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 26. 77. Ibid., 26–27. 78. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 229. See also John D. Caputo, ‘‘Beyond Aestheticism: Derrida’s Responsible Anarchy,’’ Research in Phenomenology 18 (1988): 63. 79. Joseph T. Shipley, The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 73. 80. Peter L. Berger, The Heretical Imperative: Contemporary Possibilities of Religious Affirmation (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1979), 28. 81. Westphal might express this paralogetic heretical imperative by referencing Nietzsche and Marx, who recognize that priests, who hold a ‘‘hermeneutical monopoly,’’ may become the ‘‘ideal legitimizers of violence’’ (Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 245). 82. Westphal, ‘‘Phenomenologies and Religious Truth,’’ 109. 83. Jacques Derrida, Points . . . Interviews, 1974–94 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 130. 84. Merold Westphal, ‘‘A Philosophical Dialogue,’’ in Modernity and Its Discontents, ed. James L. Marsh, John D. Caputo, and Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press, 1992), 137. 85. Rufus B. Spain, At Ease in Zion: Social History of Southern Baptists, 1865– 1900 (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), 52. 86. Ibid., 120. For another account of the slavery issue in the Southern Baptist Convention, see John Lee Eighmy, Churches in Cultural Captivity: A History of Social Attitudes of Southern Baptists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1987). 87. Merold Westphal, ‘‘The Canon as Flexible, Normative Fact,’’ The Monist 76 (October 1993): 437–438. 88. Eliot, Four Quartets, 27. 210

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Despoiling the Egyptians—Gently: Merold Westphal and Hegel / William Desmond 1. Merold Westphal, History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998). 2. Merold Westphal, Method and Speculation in Hegel’s Phenomenology (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982). 3. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). 4. Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 5. On spolia Aegyptiorum, ‘‘despoiling the Egyptians,’’ see Exodus 3:21–22, 11:2–3, and 12:35–36 and Psalm 105:37. On their departure from Egypt, God made the Egyptians disposed to the Israelites, who carried out with them ‘‘jewelry of silver and gold.’’ Needless to say, ‘‘Egyptian’’ will be used symbolically in my reflections here and involves no imputation about citizens of Egypt. 6. Published as Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion, ed. D. Christensen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970). 7. Some of the books Westphal edited offer examples of his ecumenical, intermediating skills. I think of Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). I cannot imagine Kierkegaard organizing the seminar and then conference that brought such a diversity of participants into conversation, participants whose contributions later made up the chapters of this book. 8. See, for example, the subtitle to Overcoming Onto-Theology, namely, Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith. 9. At Yale, Paul Weiss, I believe, was an erstwhile teacher of Westphal. I mention this only to note a kind of familial resemblance. Weiss said that in Being and the Between (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995) I had redone Hegel from within, with a kind of Kierkegaardian inwardness. This is not quite the ‘‘Humpty Dumpty Hegelianism’’ that Westphal once humorously ascribed to me. 10. Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, 6. 11. See William Desmond, Hegel’s God—A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003). 12. See Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 577. 13. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Hegel, Tillich, and the Secular,’’ Journal of Religion 52 (July 1972): 236. 14. Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1992). 15. Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, 10. 16. See my review in International Philosophical Quarterly 34 (December 1994): 511–512. Notes

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Merold Westphal on the Sociopolitical Implications of Kierkegaard’s Thought / C. Stephen Evans 1. For Kierkegaard’s reaction to the events of 1848, see Joakim Garff, Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), particularly 498–500. 2. See Merold Westphal, ‘‘Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B,’’ in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1992), 110–129. 3. Ibid., 110–111. 4. For the notion of ‘‘Religiousness B,’’ see Concluding Unscientific Postscript, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 1:555–586. The criticism of Westphal I mention here is one I have frequently heard from other Kierkegaard scholars. 5. Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1996), 194–200. 6. Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1987). 7. Ibid., 43–44. 8. The argument that follows is similar to one given in my Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 215–222. 9. Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 69–90. 10. Gregor Malantschuk actually suggests that Kierkegaard may have read Marx and, at the very least, was consciously responding to Marxist-type views. See his ‘‘Har Kierkegaard Læst Marx?’’ (Has Kierkegaard Read Marx?) in Den Kontroversielle Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Vintens Forlag, 1976), 62–70. 11. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 69. 12. Ibid. Although I cite the Hong translation’s pagination, I have felt free to modify the translations from the Danish. 13. Ibid., 74. 14. Ibid., 138. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 70 (italics Kierkegaard’s). 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 72 (italics Kierkegaard’s). 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. I am pleased to acknowledge that the germ of this argument came from Merold Westphal in a graduate seminar I took from him at Yale. 23. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 77. 212

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24. For a detailed analysis of Kierkegaard’s views on the ‘‘common man’’ and relations with ordinary people, see Jørgen Bukdahl, Kierkegaard and the Common Man, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001). 25. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 75. Levinas and Kierkegaard on Triadic Relations with God / M. Jamie Ferreira 1. Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, ed. Martin Matuˇstı´k and Merold Westphal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 274. 2. John Llewelyn, ‘‘On the Borderline of Madness,’’ in The New Kierkegaard, ed. Elsebet Jegstrup (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 106. 3. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘Ideology and Idealism,’’ in The Levinas Reader, ed. Sea´n Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 247. 4. Works of Love, Kierkegaard Writings 16, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 107. 5. ‘‘Enigma and Phenomena,’’ Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 77. 6. Ludwig Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity (1841), trans. George Eliot (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989), 274; ‘‘Love should be immediate . . . but if I interpose [something] between my fellowman and myself . . . my fellowman is an object of love to me only on account of resemblance or relation to this model, not for his own sake’’ (Ibid., 268). 7. Later, in speaking about love as a ‘‘middle term,’’ Kierkegaard notes that ‘‘love is by no means a separate third thing’’ (Works of Love, 260). 8. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 360. 9. Ibid., 325–327, 360. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘Is Ontology Fundamental,’’ Basic Philosophical Writings, 10; see also ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ in ibid., 21. In ‘‘Ethics of the Infinite,’’ Levinas says that ‘‘philosophy can be ethical as well as ontological’’; see Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers: The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 57. 11. Reference to the human ‘‘third’’ and justice is found in Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or, Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonsus Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), 16, 157–161; ‘‘Questions and Answers,’’ in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 82–83; ‘‘Peace and Proximity,’’ Basic Philosophical Writings, 168. 12. ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ 28. 13. ‘‘Ideology and Idealism,’’ in The Levinas Reader, 247 (but just preceding this, he seems to disallow use of the term ‘‘divinity’’ [246]). He also speaks of ‘‘this divinity’’ as ‘‘the Infinite, the absolutely Other’’ (‘‘Meaning and Sense,’’ Basic Philosophical Writings, 62). 14. Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ 29. 15. Ibid., 30. Notes

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16. Levinas, ‘‘Meaning and Sense,’’ 57. 17. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 17. 18. Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Intelligibility,’’ Basic Philosophical Writings, 156, 158. 19. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ ibid., 136. This correlates with his understanding of transcendence: ‘‘I am looking to think about a transcendence that might not be in the mode of immanence, and which does not return to immanence: in the less is the more, which is not the containable’’ (‘‘Questions and Answers,’’ 97). 20. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 135. This essay and ‘‘Transcendence and Height’’ are essentially discussions of the Idea of the Infinite. 21. Levinas, ‘‘Questions and Answers,’’ 95. Note that he suggests that his metaphysics is ‘‘atheistic’’ (Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969], 78); no reference to a creator God (‘‘Questions and Answers,’’ 96), yet reference to creature ignorant of its Creator. 22. Levinas, ‘‘Ethics of the Infinite,’’ 68. 23. Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ 29. 24. Ibid., 31. Levinas repeats that ‘‘philosophy cannot confine itself to the primacy of ontology’’ (21). In the discussion following, he clarifies: ‘‘The declaration of the end of metaphysics is premature. This end is not at all certain. Besides, metaphysics—the relation with the being (e´tant) which is accomplished in ethics—precedes the understanding of being and survives ontology’’ (31). He does contrast two kinds of metaphysics. In 1979, he writes, ‘‘Contrary to the celebrated Heideggerian analyses, the fact of humanity approached from dialogue would reintroduce into philosophical reflection the beyond the world, without this signifying a simple recourse to what Nietzsche calls ‘the worlds behind the world’ in the sense of traditional metaphysics’’ (‘‘Dialogue,’’ 47). 25. Levinas, ‘‘Questions and Answers,’’ 89–90. 26. Ibid., 97. 27. Levinas, ‘‘Ethics of the Infinite,’’ 67. 28. Ibid., 56–57. 29. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love,’’ in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 110. 30. Levinas, ‘‘Dialogue,’’ 151. 31. Levinas, ‘‘Meaning and Sense,’’ 62. 32. Levinas, ‘‘Ethics of the Infinite,’’ 61. 33. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 141. 34. Ibid., 146. 35. Levinas, ‘‘Meaning and Sense,’’ 62–63. 36. Ibid., 64. 37. Ibid. Otherwise Than Being elaborates: ‘‘Illeity lies outside the ‘thou’ and the thematization of concepts. A neologism formed with il (he) or ille, it indicates a way of concerning me without entering into conjunction with me’’ (12). 214

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38. Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ 25. 39. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. R. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 105. 40. Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ 19, 21. 41. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 144. 42. Levinas, ‘‘Enigma and Phenomena,’’ 71–72. 43. He writes: ‘‘Divinity is not met as a great Other, as ‘the absolute Thou’ of Buber. . . . The passage from the Other to divinity is a second step’’ (‘‘Ideology and Idealism,’’ in The Levinas Reader, 246). 44. ‘‘The trace wipes out its traces,’’ which means that ‘‘I cannot deduce it from this command’’ (Otherwise Than Being, 12). 45. Levinas, ‘‘Enigma and Phenomena,’’ 77. 46. For Levinas, there is only an absolute He, never an absolute You (to be addressed) such as Kierkegaard would presume, though even this is not absolute; moreover, K’s God is a Christian Triune God. 47. First published in Le Monde, 1978. See Emmanuel Levinas, Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 95. 48. On the contrary, Levinas holds that ‘‘the face of the other bears the trace of its straightest, shortest, and most direct movement.’’ 49. Levinas, ‘‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love,’’ 109–110. 50. Levinas, ‘‘Transcendence and Height,’’ 25. 51. Levinas, ‘‘Beyond Dialogue,’’ Alterity and Transcendence, 80. 52. ‘‘To posit metaphysics as Desire is to interpret the production of beingdesire engendering Desire—as goodness and as beyond happiness; it is to interpret the production of being as being for the Other’’ (Totality and Infinity, 304). 53. Ibid., 103. ‘‘Egoism, enjoyment, sensibility, and the whole dimension of interiority . . . are necessary for the idea of Infinity, the relation with the Other which opens forth from the separated and finite being. Metaphysical Desire, which can be produced only in a separated, that is, enjoying, egoist, and satisfied being, is then not derived from enjoyment’’ (Ibid., 148). 54. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 149. 55. Levinas, ‘‘Ethics of the Infinite,’’ 68. 56. For more on this, see my ‘‘The Misfortune of the Happy: Levinas and Dimensions of Desire,’’ Journal of Religious Ethics 34 (September 2006): 461–483. 57. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 140. 58. Ibid., 141. 59. Ibid., 141, 147. 60. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 109. 61. Levinas, ‘‘Enigma and Phenomena,’’ 77. 62. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 93. 63. Ibid., 13. 64. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 141. Notes

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65. Florian Rotzer’s Conversations with French Philosophers, trans. Gary E. Aylesworth (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995), 61. 66. Levinas, ‘‘Substitution,’’ Basic Philosophical Writings, 92. 67. For more detail, see again my ‘‘The Misfortune of the Happy.’’ 68. Levinas, especially in his later years, spoke of ‘‘love of one’s neighbor,’’ which he defined as ‘‘love without Eros, charity, love in which the ethical aspect dominates the passionate aspect, love without concupiscence’’ (‘‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love,’’ 103; also ‘‘Peace and Proximity,’’ 167). However, because he learned early on to ‘‘distrust the compromised word ‘love,’ ’’ he chose more often to speak of ‘‘the responsibility for the Other, being-for-the-other’’ (Ethics and Infinity, 52). In sum, Levinas has what he calls ‘‘a grave view of Agape in terms of responsibility for the other’’ (‘‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love,’’ 113). 69. Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, emphasis mine. 70. ‘‘Peace and Proximity,’’ 167, emphasis mine. 71. Ibid., 169; Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 140. 72. Levinas, ‘‘Philosophy, Justice, and Love,’’ 108. 73. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘The Paradox of Morality,’’ in Provocation of Levinas: Rethinking the Other, ed. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (London: Routledge, 1988), 176–177. 74. Levinas, ‘‘Enigma and Phenomena,’’ 76. 75. Levinas, ‘‘God and Philosophy,’’ 146. 76. ‘‘The other is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is indispensable for my relation with God. He does not play the role of a mediator’’ (Totality and Infinity, 78–79). The coincidence of foci of desire does not identify God with the other person. 77. Levinas, ‘‘Ethics of the Infinite,’’ 59. Appropriating Westphal Appropriating Nietzsche: Merold Westphal as a Theological Resource / Bruce Ellis Benson 1. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Nietzsche as a Theological Resource,’’ Modern Theology 13 (1997): 213–226; reprinted in Nietzsche and the Divine, ed. John Lippitt and Jim Urpeth (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), 14–29, and in Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 285–301. 2. Nietzsche’s critique, although most frequently directed against Christianity, would be an excellent theological resource for other religions, as would Westphal’s appropriation of that critique. 3. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34. 4. Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993). 5. The first two of these, ressentiment and pity, are treated at length in Suspicion and Faith, while love of is only treated by implication. However, since the theme of love is central to Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and since it is so closely related to ressentiment and pity, I will consider it here in more detail. 216

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6. The posts and the conversation that ensued have appeared in book form. For the question and my response, see Myron Bradley Penner and Hunter Barnes, A New Kind of Conversation: Blogging Toward a Postmodern Faith (Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2007), 11. 7. Augustine writes, ‘‘Any statements by those who are called philosophers, especially the Platonists, which happen to be true and consistent with our faith should not cause alarm, but be claimed for our own use, as it were from owners who have no right to them. Like the treasures of the ancient Egyptians . . . which on leaving Egypt the people of Israel . . . surreptitiously claimed for themselves.’’ The reference is to the Israelites asking ‘‘the Egyptians for jewelry of silver and gold, and clothing’’ exactly ‘‘as Moses had told them’’ to do (Ex. 12:35). As Ex. 12:36 puts it: ‘‘And so they plundered the Egyptians.’’ See Augustine, On Christian Teaching, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 64. 8. Lamin Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel Beyond the West (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 44. 9. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 291. 10. The first of the problems Westphal mentions is the self-referential one: when Nietzsche claims that all perspectives are simply perspectives, he would seem to be making an absolute claim and so contradicting himself. Westphal concludes that a more ‘‘charitable and plausible’’ reading of Nietzsche would be that even the truth of perspectivism is perspectival, and so it cannot be an ‘‘absolute truth’’ (ibid., 292). But here I am less concerned with this particular problem than the two others that Westphal mentions. 11. Ibid., 293. 12. In ‘‘Nietzsche as a Theological Resource,’’ Westphal uses the classical medieval style of objection and reply. 13. The American Academy of Religion is an organization of theologians and teachers of religion not known for being particularly conservative. 14. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 295–296. 15. Westphal makes what amount to similar points in his essay ‘‘Overcoming Onto-Theology,’’ in ibid., 22. There he speaks of having in mind two audiences, one Thomistic or Calvinist in orientation and the other secular. 16. Merold Westphal with Gary J. Percesepe, ‘‘Appropriating the Atheists,’’ Books & Culture (May–June 1997): 25. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Nietzsche and the Phenomenological Ideal,’’ Monist 60 (1977): 278, 281. 19. Westphal and Percesepe, ‘‘Appropriating the Atheists,’’ 25. 20. Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 16. 21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1968). 22. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260. 23. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. Maudemarie Clark and Alan J. Swensen (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), I:10. Notes

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24. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 260. 25. Ibid., 195. 26. While one could dispute this claim that Christianity arises from ressentiment, I will not undertake such a task here precisely because it would be counterproductive to the appropriation process. Of course, it should be pointed out that Nietzsche’s account is meant to be more symbolic than literal, a battle that he sums up with the phrase ‘‘Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome’’ (The Genealogy of Morality, I:16). 27. Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 3. 28. Ibid., 236. 29. From an interview with Molly Ivins, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, September 14, 1993. 30. Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, 285. 31. Preface to Genealogy of Morality, 6. 32. Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 116. 33. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Josefine Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), §13. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., §21. 36. Ibid., §345. 37. Ibid., §14. 38. Ibid. 39. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), VII:4. 40. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, I:15. 41. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ(ian), in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1954), §45. 42. Ibid., §7. 43. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §133. While Nietzsche may be right that in many cases we avert our eyes when we encounter suffering, I am not sure this is always the case. Traffic accidents on highways, for instance, normally cause delays on the other side of the road from those seeking a view. This may be simply an instance of a kind of ‘‘pity’’ in which we thank God we’re not the person in the car. But I would suggest that suffering is sometimes greeted by a macabre sense of curiosity. 44. Westphal gives the example of a Christian organization that not only was advised by fundraising experts to appeal to potential givers’ sense of superiority but also followed that advice. See Suspicion and Faith, 261. 45. Nietzsche, Daybreak, §134. 46. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘There Is No One Narcissism (Autobiophotographies),’’ in Points . . . Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. Elisabeth Weber (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 199. 47. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Sauf le nom,’’ in On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), 74. The full sentence reads: 218

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‘‘But why not recognize there love itself, that is, this infinite renunciation which somehow surrenders to the impossible [se rend a` l’impossible]?’’ Here Derrida gives a somewhat different reason for love being impossible, that of the impossibility of surrendering wholly to the other. Yet, since my conception of love does not demand the ‘‘infinite renunciation’’ of self that is central to Derrida’s conception of love, this does not prove problematic either. 48. On my account, it may be a motivation, but that motivation should play a relatively small role in the overall motivation of loving another. 49. Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 69. 50. Ibid., 78. 51. Ibid., 88. Remaining Faithful: Postmodern Claims, Christian Messages / Edith Wyschogrod 1. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). 2. Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 3. Ibid., 16–17. 4. Ibid., 21. 5. Ibid., 16. 6. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 251. 7. The session in which Westphal, John Caputo, and I participated took place at the annual meeting of SPEP on November 6, 2003, in Boston. Westphal kindly provided commentators with the text of his responses to their prepared comments. 8. In the body of this text, I shall refer to citations derived from his unpublished but written comments delivered at the session. 9. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 76. 10. ‘‘Between Swooners and Cynics: The Art of Envisioning God,’’ in Theological Perspectives on God and Beauty, ed. William Parsons (Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 2003), 66–85. 11. Ibid., 79. 12. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 231. 13. Ibid., 233. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 29–46. 16. Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Meraldo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 49. 17. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 32. 18. Ibid., 39. 19. Ibid., 38. 20. John Van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 134. Notes

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21. Ibid., 201. 22. For an analysis of Heidegger’s critique of the progressive Hellenization of Christianity from Paul to medieval thought, see ibid., 157–202. 23. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 146. 24. Ibid., 295. 25. Ibid., 289. 26. ‘‘Reader’s Meditation’’ preceding the Musaf prayer, High Holy Day Prayer Book, Rosh Hoshanah, trans. Philip Birnbaum (New York: Hebrew Publishing Company, 1958). 27. See Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 1–28. 28. Ibid., 231. 29. Ibid., 235. 30. Ibid., 253. 31. Ibid., 254. 32. Ibid., 164. 33. Ibid., 165. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 186. 36. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, Religion, trans. David Webb (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 2. 37. Ibid., 17. 38. Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, ed. Eliza Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 96. 39. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 218. 40. Derrida and Vattimo, Religion, 20. 41. Ibid., 21. 42. Ibid. 43. Rudolphe Gasche´, Inventions of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 130. 44. See Merold Westphal, ‘‘When Not to Refute Atheism: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud for Christian Reflection,’’ Reconsiderations 4, no. 1 (September 2004): 2. 45. Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), 102–103. 46. Babylonian Talmud, 59a. The God Who Refuses to Appear on Philosophy’s Terms / Martin Beck Matusˇtı´k 1. Martin Beck Matusˇtı´k and William L. McBride, eds., Calvin O. Schrag and the Task of Philosophy After Postmodernity (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 215–220. 2. Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969). 3. Ibid., 56. 220

Notes

4. Ibid., 72. 5. Matusˇtı´k and McBride, Calvin O. Schrag, 11. 6. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 182–190. 7. Calvin Schrag, God as Otherwise Than Being: Toward a Semantics of the Gift (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 14. 8. Tillich, The Courage to Be, 186. 9. Schrag, God as Otherwise Than Being, 16, 90ff. See also Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 10. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Transcendence, Heteronomy, and the Birth of Responsible the Self,’’ in Matusˇtı´k and McBride, Calvin O. Schrag, 215ff. See also Calvin Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 134–138. 11. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 4. 12. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 54ff. 13. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 4 n. 7. 14. Ibid., 11. 15. Martin Heidegger, ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology,’’ in The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 10. 16. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 15–18. 17. Ibid., 18ff.; Heidegger, ‘‘Phenomenology and Theology,’’ 19ff. 18. Marion, God Without Being, 68ff. 19. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 20ff., 35. 20. Ibid., 23. 21. Ibid., 24. 22. Ibid., 28; Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 118. See also Marion, God Without Being, 106ff. 23. Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, 121–141. 24. Ibid., 7. 25. Ibid., 5. 26. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 3. 27. Ibid., 236. 28. Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1993). 29. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 257. 30. Ibid., 256–284. 31. Ibid., 266ff. 32. Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, 15–90. 33. Ibid., 80–85. 34. Ibid., 231. Notes

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35. Ibid., 10, 230. 36. Ibid., 7. 37. Ibid., 231. 38. Ibid., 177–226. 39. Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, 269ff. 40. Ibid., 270; see also Marion, God Without Being, 76ff., 106ff. 41. Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, 11. 42. Ibid., 3. 43. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 277ff. 44. Ibid., 33. 45. Max Horkheimer, ‘‘Theism and Atheism,’’ in Critique of Instrumental Reason (New York: Continuum, 1974). 46. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 254. 47. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 265ff. 48. Ibid., 264–299. 49. Marion, God Without Being, 25–107. 50. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limit of Reason Alone,’’ in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 100; see also Martin Beck Matusˇtı´k, Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). 51. Jacques Derrida, Given Time/Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 165 n. 31. 52. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff (New York: Penguin, 2003). 53. Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence, 70, 202, 231. What Is Merold Westphal’s Critique of Ontotheology Criticizing? / John D. Caputo 1. Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 146. 2. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 3. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, corrected edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 18. 4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 65. 5. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 69. Transcendence in Tears / Kevin Hart 1. Merold Westphal, Transcendence and Self-Transcendence: On God and the Soul (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 2. 222

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2. See, for example, Karl Rahner, ‘‘Experience of the Holy Spirit,’’ Theological Investigations, XVIII: God and Revelation, trans. Edward Quinn (New York: Crossroad, 1983), 189–210. 3. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Studies in Theological Style: Lay Styles, ed. John Riches, trans. Andrew Louth et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1986), 3:393–394. See also Philip A. Ballinger, The Poem as Sacrament: The Theological Aesthetic of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Louvain: Peeters Press, 2000). 4. See Saint Augustine, De Civitate dei, 10.5.16; Saint Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 6. 9. 40. The well-known expression does not occur as such in the text. The relevant sentence reads, ‘‘Quae ob id sacramenta dicuntur, quia sub tegumento corparalium rerum virtus divina secretius salutem eorundem sacramentorum operatur; unde et a secretis virtutibus vel a sacris sacramenta dicuntur.’’ Jacques Derrida talks of the secret in literature as an absolutely singular idiom. See Derrida, ‘‘La litte´rature au secret,’’ in Donner la mort (Paris: Galile´e, 1999). 5. All quotations from Geoffrey Hill’s poems are taken from his Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). The volume contains a number of lyrics that, if considered, would greatly amplify the scope of my argument. In an interview, Hill remarks that ‘‘the grasp of true religious experience is a privilege reserved for very few’’ and observes that he ‘‘is trying to make lyrical poetry out of a much more common situation . . . the sense of not being able to grasp true religious experience.’’ John Haffenden, ‘‘Geoffrey Hill,’’ Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 89. 6. See Westphal’s books History and Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology, 3rd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Suspicion and Faith: The Uses of Modern Atheism (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998); and God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 7. See Hill, ‘‘Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement,’ ’’ Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Andre´ Deutsch, 1984), 17. 8. See Hill, Style and Faith (New York: Counterpoint, 2003), xiv, 139. 9. Walter Pater, ‘‘Style,’’ Appreciations: With an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1927), 13; Wallace Stevens, ‘‘Tea at the Palace of Hoon,’’ Collected Poems (New York: Knopf, 1954), 65. 10. For a discussion of the music, see Diana Poulton, John Dowland: His Life and Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), Chapter 5. 11. Richard Barnfield, ‘‘If Musique and sweet Poetrie agree,’’ in Richard Barnfield: The Complete Poems, ed. George Klawitter (Selinsgrove, Penn.: Susquehanna University Press, 1990), 181. Thomas Campion also wrote a poem (in Latin) in praise of Dowland. See his ‘‘Ad. Io. Dolandum,’’ Poemata (London, 1595). 12. On tears and theology, see E. M. Cioran, Tears and Saints, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 13. ‘‘Saint Peters Complaint,’’ along with earlier versions of the poem, can be found in James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown, eds., The Poems of Notes

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Robert Southwell, S.J. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967). The translation of Tansillo, ‘‘[The] Peeter Playnt,’’ is given in Appendix I. Louis L. Martz first analyzed the poetry of tears in The Poetry of Meditation: A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 199–203. Richard Strier provides an important supplement to Martz in ‘‘Herbert and Tears,’’ ELH 46, no. 2 (1979): 221–247. 14. On the line of ‘‘tears poetry’’ that runs from Southwell to Crashaw, see the fine discussion by Alison Shell in her Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Chapter 2. 15. Haffenden, ‘‘Geoffrey Hill,’’ 80, 87. Hill alludes to Crashaw’s poem ‘‘Wishes: To his (supposed) Mistresse’’ in the final poem of For the Unfallen, ‘‘To the (Supposed) Patron,’’ Collected Poems, 57. 16. Richard Crashaw, ‘‘The Weeper,’’ The Poems: English, Latin and Greek, ed. L. C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 312. The poem is generally known as ‘‘Saint Mary Magdalene, or, The Weeper.’’ Hill observes that he admires Crashaw’s verse in his interview with John Haffenden (80). Calvin Bedient’s estimate of ‘‘Lachrimae’’ as ‘‘mawkish’’ can only be regarded as a hasty judgment. See his essay ‘‘On Geoffrey Hill,’’ in Geoffrey Hill, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 108. 17. Rene´ Char, Les Matinaux suivi de la parole en archipel (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 105. 18. Dowland’s sequence runs ‘‘Lachrimae Antiquae,’’ ‘‘Lachrimae Antiquae Novae,’’ ‘‘Lachrimae Gementes,’’ ‘‘Lachrimae Tristes,’’ ‘‘Lachrimae Coactae,’’ ‘‘Lachrimae Amantis,’’ and ‘‘Lachrimae Verae.’’ 19. ‘‘The Masque of Blackness’’ adapts Francisco de Quevedo’s sonnet ‘‘Retrato de Lisi que traia en una sortija,’’ ‘‘Martyrium’’ is Hill’s composition in its entirety, and ‘‘Pavana dolorosa’’ alludes to Peter Philips’s composition for keyboard. 20. I discuss ‘‘Lachrimae Verae’’ in more detail in ‘‘Varieties of Poetic Sequence: Hughes and Hill,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, ed. Neil Corcoran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 21. Hill cites Joseph Carey’s observation about Eugenio Montale’s ‘‘Iride’’ with obvious sympathy: ‘‘a heretic’s dream of salvation, expressed in the images of the orthodoxy from which he is excommunicate.’’ Three Modern Italian Poets: Saba, Ungaretti, Montale (New York: New York University Press, 1969), 316. 22. Hill quotes Coleridge’s note in ‘‘Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement,’ ’’ 4. 23. Images of Christians carrying crosses are to be found in Luis de Granada’s Of Prayer and Meditation (1582) and John Bucke’s Instructions for the Use of the Beads (1589). See Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 276. 24. J.-M. de Buck, SJ, ed., Spiritual Exercises and Devotions of Blessed Robert Southwell, S.J., trans. P. E. Hallett (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1931), 59. 224

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25. Henrik Ibsen, Brand: A Version for the Stage, ed. Geoffrey Hill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 69. Hill prepared his version of Brand in 1976–77, toward the end of the period in which he was composing Tenebrae. 26. See W. S. Milne, An Introduction to Geoffrey Hill (London: Bellew Press, 1998), 133. 27. See Jean Wahl, Existence humaine et transcendance (Neuchaˆtel: E´ditions de la Baconnie`re, 1944), 37. It should be stressed that ‘‘image,’’ for Levinas, is far broader in scope than ‘‘image’’ as used by Ezra Pound, for example. 28. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘‘Reality and Its Shadow,’’ in Unforeseen History, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 78. 29. See Jean-Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Weber (London: Routledge, 2004). Sartre argues that the imagination has an intentional structure that is irreducible to perception. He also talks of the ‘‘original poverty’’ of the image on page 16. 30. See Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1983), 43. 31. See Emmanuel Levinas, De l’obliteration: Entretien avec Franc¸oise Armengaud a` propos de l’oeuvre de Sosno, 2nd ed. (Paris: E´ditions de la Difference, 1998). 32. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 33. D. D. Page, ed., The Letters of Ezra Pound (London: Faber and Faber, 1951), 366. Hill quotes this sentence in his interview with Haffenden (99); it is at the root of his equation of style and faith in Milton, Donne, and Herbert. 34. On this issue, see Bloom, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? (New York: Riverhead Books, 2004). 35. See Maurice Blanchot, ‘‘Two Versions of the Imaginary,’’ in The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 254–263. Blanchot, of course, will not accept the mimetic account of art that Levinas assumes. See my exposition and analysis of Blanchot’s position in The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 36. See Hill, ‘‘Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement,’ ’’15. 37. See Ricks, ‘‘ ‘The Tongue’s Atrocities,’ ’’ in Bloom, Geoffrey Hill, 56. 38. Augustine, Letter 120 to Consentius (410), Letters 100–155, in The Works of Saint Augustine II, ed. Boniface Ramsey, trans. Roland Teske, SJ (Hyde Park, N.Y.: New City Press, 2003), 2:130–140. 39. Boris Pasternak, Poems, trans. Eugene M. Kayden (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 168. 40. Conversation with Richard Strier on the influence of Donne on Hill has been illuminating for me. Strier notes, in addition, that there are echoes of George Herbert in ‘‘Lachrimae.’’ The third stanza of Herbert’s ‘‘Mattens’’ certainly resonates with the opening of ‘‘Lachrimae Amantis’’: ‘‘My God, what is a Notes

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heart, / That thou shouldst it so eye, and wooe, / Powering upon it all thy art, / As if that thou hadst nothing else to do?’’ The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 62. 41. Haffenden, ‘‘Geoffrey Hill,’’ 90. 42. See Husserl, Ideas I, xx. See also Derrida’s comments in his interview with Derek Attridge, ‘‘This Strange Institution Called Literature,’’ Acts of Literature (London: Routledge, 1992), 44. 43. In his interview with Carl Philips, Hill does use the word ‘‘mystery,’’ but almost as though it were synonymous with ‘‘difficulty’’: ‘‘Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. . . . Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when, if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves, we would find it demeaning?’’ ‘‘Geoffrey Hill: The Art of Poetry, LXXX,’’ Paris Review 154 (2000): 276–277. That poetry should not simplify is surely right; that it should therefore be ‘‘difficult’’ does not follow. The difficulty of modern poetry is caused in part by internal procedures and literary inheritances and in part by its mimesis of situations in the world. On excess of intuition, see Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), Book IV. 44. See Samuel Johnson, ‘‘Life of Waller,’’ The Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon, 1967), 1:291–293; Donald Davie, ed., The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), xxviii–xxix. Needless to say, this tradition rejects the blend of prayer and rhetoric exemplified at a very high level by Augustine in his Confessions. 45. See Jules Supervielle, ‘‘Prie`re a` l’inconnu,’’ La fable du monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1950), 39; and Yves Bonnefoy, ‘‘La lumie`re, change´e,’’ Poe`mes (Paris: Mercure de France, 1978), 211. 46. See, for example, Martial Lekeux, OFM, The Art of Prayer, trans. Paul Joseph Oligny, OFM (London: Sands and Co., 1962). 47. See Hill’s stage version of Ibsen’s Brand, 17. See also the lines about martyrdom on 67 and the odious Dean’s observation, ‘‘Religion’s like High Art,’’ 148. Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1935), 286–287. 48. Hill, ‘‘The Absolute Reasonableness of Robert Southwell,’’ The Lords of Limit, 28; see also pages 30, 54, and 103. 49. See Hill’s essay ‘‘Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement,’ ’’ and Christopher Ricks, ‘‘Tenebrae and at-one-ment’’ in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), 62–85. 50. ‘‘The Masque of Blackness’’ was originally the fifth in the sequence when ‘‘Lachrimae’’ first appeared in Agenda (Winter–Spring 1975, 29–35). 51. See Francisco de Quevedo, Obra Poe´tica, ed. Jose´ Manuel Blecua (Madrid: Editorial Castilia, 1969), 3:652–653. 52. See Ethel Carleton Williams, Anne of Denmark: Wife of James VI of Scotland: James I of England (London: Longman, 1970), 126. 226

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53. Ben Jonson, The Masque of Blackness, ll. 146–148, in Ben Jonson’s Plays and Masques, ed. Richard Harp (New York: Norton, 2001), 320. 54. See Williams, Anne of Denmark, Chapter 11. 55. Pico della Mirandola, as translated by Walter Pater, in his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (New York: Macmillan, 1900), 42. See also Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, ‘‘Oration on the Dignity of Man,’’ in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 225. 56. Pico della Mirandola, ‘‘Oration on the Dignity of Man,’’ 225. 57. Arthur Golding, trans., Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ed. Madeleine Forey (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 139. 58. John Lyly, Midas, II, i, 46–48, in The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), 3:124. 59. See Shakespeare, As You Like It, II, i, 5. I should note that ‘‘not the penalty of Adam’’ is regarded as a textual crux by some editors who are inclined to render it as ‘‘but the penalty of Adam’’ or ‘‘yet the penalty of Adam.’’ See Richard Knowles, ed., A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ‘‘As You Like It’’ (New York: Modern Language Association, 1977), 70. See also B. L. Joseph, Shakespeare’s Eden: The Commonwealth of England, 1588–1629 (London: Blandford Press, 1971). 60. See the interpretation developed by Cathrael Kazin, ‘‘ ‘Across a Wilderness of Retrospection’: A Reading of Geoffrey Hill’s Lachrimae,’’ Agenda 17, no. 1 (1979): 43–57, esp. 46–48. 61. For Hill’s meditations on the mask, see especially his Scenes from Comus (London: Penguin, 2005). 62. See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 10. 63. See Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), 182–183. 64. ‘‘About George Haydock and His Companions,’’ Publications of the Catholic Record Society, 5: Unpublished Documents Relating to the English Martyrs, ed. J. H. Pollen (Leeds: J. Whithead and Sons, 1908), 61. 65. Gregory discusses this incident in Salvation at Stake, 309. 66. See, for example, Henry Garnet’s Treatise of Christian Renunciation (1593), the final chapter of which consists of quotations from the Fathers. 67. Saint Ignatius of Antioch, ‘‘The Epistle of Ignatius to the Romans,’’ Chapter 4, in Ante-Nicene Fathers (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1994), 1:75. Southwell quotes Saint Ignatius in An Epistle of Comfort: To the Reverend Priests, and to the Honorable, Worshipful, and Other of the Lay Sort, Restrained in Durance for the Catholic Faith, ed. Margaret Waugh (London: Burns and Oates, 1966), 229. 68. The Martydom of Saint Polycarp, 15.2, in The Didache, The Epistle of Barabbas, The Epistles and the Martyrdom of St Polycarp, The Fragment of Papias, The Notes

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Epistle to Diognetus, trans. James A. Kleist (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1948). 69. Southwell, An Epistle of Comfort, 179. 70. Scott R. Pilarz, SJ, observes, ‘‘Southwell does more than merely ‘allow passions’; he celebrates them when they are rightly ordered,’’ Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature, 1561–1595: Writing Reconciliation (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004), 176. 71. The Notebooks of Simone Weil, trans. Arthur Wills (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), 1:279. 72. See Hill, ‘‘Annunciations 2,’’ Collected Poems, 63. 73. See J. M. Cohen, ed., The Penguin Book of Spanish Verse (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1956), 247. This is the text that Hill used when composing ‘‘Lachrimae.’’ The prose translation of the sestet is: ‘‘How many times did the angel say to me: ‘Now, soul, look out of your window, and you will see how lovingly he persists in knocking!’ And how many times, oh supreme beauty, did I reply: ‘I will open to-morrow,’ only to make the same reply upon the morrow!’’ The translation requires more commentary than I can offer here. For instance, Hill has Christ at his door in the first stanza, and yet, in the third stanza, the angel tells him, ‘‘you lord is coming.’’ In what sense can Christ be present yet still to come? Colin Thompson begins work on a close reading of the translation in his fine essay, ‘‘ ‘The Resonances of Words’: Lope de Vega and Geoffrey Hill,’’ Modern Language Review 90, no. 1 (1995), 55–70. Between the Prophetic and the Sacramental / Richard Kearney 1. Merold Westphal, ‘‘Hermeneutics and the God of Promise,’’ in After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy, ed. John Panteleimon Manoussakis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 79. 2. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 336–337. 3. See R. Kearney, ‘‘Eschatology of the Everyday,’’ in After God. See also Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2002), 246. I am grateful to John Manoussakis for this reference. See his extended discussion of this theme in God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). 5. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 248. 6. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), cited in Richard Kearney, Modern Movements in European Philosophy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 88–89. 7. Ibid., 89. 8. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eye and Mind, in Continental Aesthetics, ed. Richard Kearney and David Rasmussen (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 288ff. 228

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9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964); cited in Kearney, Modern Movements, 85. 10. Kearney, Modern Movements, 83–84. 11. See also the work of Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), and Manoussakis, God After Metaphysics. Nor should we omit reference here to Gabriel Marcel’s intriguing philosophical reflections on incarnation and embodiment, which exerted a considerable influence on the ‘‘religious’’ phenomenological writings of Ricoeur and Levinas. See also here the work of my Boston College colleague Steven Schloesser, SJ, on what he calls ‘‘mystic modernism,’’ in Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1923 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005). 12. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 251. 13. Ibid., 246. Transubstantiation is defined as: (1) ‘‘The changing of one substance into another.’’ (2) ‘‘The conversion in the Eucharist of the whole substance of the bread and of the wine into the blood of Christ, only the appearances (and other ‘accidents’) of bread and wine remaining: according to the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church 1533’’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). What fascinates both Joyce and Proust about this process, according to Kristeva, is that such an act, mixing the secular and the sacred, combines both an ‘‘imaginary’’ and a ‘‘real’’ character. I would not wish to confine the sense of transubstantiation in this essay to the Christian only, inasmuch as I believe it carries a certain interreligious charge. See, for example, how much of what is said below about transubstantiation chimes with the mystical Islamic notion of ‘‘transubstantial movement’’ (haraka jawhariya), as a sacred rhythm of the cosmos, as invoked from Sufi sages from Ibn Arabi to Ostad Elahi. ‘‘No creature is completely immobile; they are all constantly in a . . . ‘trans-substantial movement.’ This universal trans-substantial motion exists in all beings and animates the entire universe. This movement is caused by the absolute movement of the Divine Essence to which each being is directly connected. This is the phenomenon that they call the ‘immediate connection’ between God and each of his creatures, which explains how God is present everywhere in all creation. . . . This trans-substantial movement exists in minerals, plants, animals and in general in every creature.’’ Cited in James Morris, Orientations: Islamic Thought in a World Civilisation (Cambridge: Archetype, 2004), 81. For the Sufi sages, this mystical cosmic motion of interanimating substances was intuited by the human heart (qalb) capable of seeing the deep inner convertibility between finite and infinite forces. Gerard Manley Hopkins would be pleased, I think, as would Joyce, Proust, and Woolf. 14. Kristeva, Time and Sense, 246. 15. Ibid. 16. See ibid., 247: ‘‘A state of flesh,’’ writes Kristeva, ‘‘appears to underlie the therapeutic act, but it can become a true therapeutic act only if language is led to the reversible and chiasmic sensation that supports it’’ (what Proust calls the ‘‘impression’’ or ‘‘transubstantiation’’) (247). For Kristeva, this reversibility of Notes

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flesh can take the form of (1) a literary act of writing and reading as a ‘‘two-sided sensoriality’’ or (2) a psychoanalytic act of transference and countertransference. Interestingly, neither Proust nor Joyce was insensitive to the powers of psychotherapy, any more than they were to the powers of religion—without practicing either. One thinks of Joyce’s exchanges with Jung—when he was ‘‘jung and freudened,’’ as he puts it in Finnegans Wake—or of Lacan’s intriguing pun on Joyce as ‘‘sinthome’’ (symptome/saint homme or ‘‘holy man’’). And one recalls the following observation by Proust in Contre Sainte-Beuve: ‘‘Reading is at the threshold of spiritual life and can lead us to it though it does not constitute it. . . . For someone who is lazy, books play the same role that psychotherapists do for those afflicted with neurasthenia’’ (cited in Kristeva, Time and Sense, 385). Kristeva cites and comments on a number of key passages from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, 246ff. 17. Kristeva, Time and Sense, 251. 18. Ibid, 252. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. Kristeva also comments interestingly on the Eucharistic and sacramental tropes at work in the work of James Joyce, ‘‘Joyce the Gracehoper,’’ in New Maladies of the Soul (Columbia University Press, 1995), 172–188. See in particular her opening statement on 173: ‘‘Joyce’s Catholicism, which consisted of his profound experience with Trinitarian religion as well as his mockery of it, impelled him to contemplate its central ritual—the Eucharist—which is the ritual par excellence of identification with God’s body and a springboard for all other identifications, including that of artistic profusion. This ritual is also prescribed by the Catholic Faith. It is likely that the cultural context of Catholicism—which Joyce had completely assimilated—was challenged by a biographical event that endangered his identity and enabled him to focus his writing on the identificatory substratum of psychic functioning, which he masterfully laid out against the backdrop of the grandest religion.’’ She continues: ‘‘The obsession that Joyce the ‘Gracehoper’ had with the Eucharist theme is exemplified by his many references to transubstantiation or to Arius’ heresy, to the consubstantiality between father and son in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and between Shakespeare, his father, his son Hamlet, as well as to Shakespeare’s complete works in the sense of a veritable source of inspiration. Let us recall, moreover, the condensation of ‘trinity’ and ‘transubstantiation’; in Joyce’s umbrella word ‘contransmagnificandjewbangtantiatiality’ ’’ (247). Pointing out that Joyce had read both Freud and Jung by 1915, Kristeva offers many intriguing psychoanalytic readings of Joyce’s Eucharistic aesthetic including the following: ‘‘In this way can Dedalus-Bloom achieve the plenitude of his text-body, and thus release his text to us as though it was his body, his transubstantiation. The narrator seems to say, ‘This is my body,’ and we know that he sometimes identifies with HCE in Finnegans Wake. As for the reader, he assimilates the true presence of a complex male sexuality through textual signs and without any repression. This is a prerequisite for enigmatic sublimation: the text, which restrains but doe not repress libido, thereby exercises its 230

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cathartic function upon the reader. Everything is to be seen and all the places are available; nothing is lacking and nothing is hidden that could not indeed be present’’ (176–177). Other informative treatments of Joyce’s sacramental aesthetic include William Noon, Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Robert Boyle, James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978); and J. Houbedine, ‘‘Joyce, Litte´rature et religion,’’ Exce`s de langage (New York: Denoel, 1984). Although Stephen Dedalus rejects the Eucharist of Jesus for the art of Icarus early in A Portrait, later in the novel he revisits an aesthetic of the sacred in his reading of Thomistic radiance (claritas): ‘‘The supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. . . . The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . . . called the ‘enchantment of the heart’ ’’ (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [New York: Penguin, 1992], 231). It is typical of Joyce’s incarnational aesthetic to link Aquinas’s transcendental category of beauty here with the more physiological category of heart and flesh. Tellingly, we are told in the concluding lines of A Portrait of the wish that Stephen ‘‘may learn in (his) own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. So be it. Welcome, O life!’’ (275). 22. Proust, Against Sainte-Beuve, cited in Kristeva, Time and Sense, 252. Kristeva is close here to the hermeneutic model of extralinguistic ontological refiguration that Paul Ricoeur speaks of in Time and Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See Ricoeur’s claim, for example, that ‘‘What a reader receives is not just the sense of the work, but, through its sense, its reference, that is, the experience it brings to language and, in the last analysis, the world and the temporality it unfolds in the face of this experience’’ (78–79). Or again in ‘‘Life in Quest of Narrative,’’ On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood (London: Routledge, 1991), 26: ‘‘My thesis is here that the process of composition, of configuration, is not completed in the text but in the reader and, under this condition, makes possible the reconfiguration of life by narrative. I should say, more precisely: the sense or the signification of a narrative stems from the intersection of the world of the text and the world of the reader.’’ (This is already ‘‘prefigured’’ by the world of the author). Ricoeur goes so far as to construe this surrendering of author to implied author (of the text), and the subsequent surrender of implied author to the reader, as acts of kenotic gift and service to the other, which ultimately amounts to a sacramental transubstantiation of author into reader: ‘‘Whereas the real author effaces himself in the implied author, the implied reader takes on substance in the real reader’’ (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 3:170). In short, the author agrees to die so that the reader may be born. 23. I have been exploring the implications of this category of ‘‘anatheism’’ (beyond the alternatives of dogmatic theism and atheism) in a number of recent Notes

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pieces, including ‘‘Epiphanies of the Everyday,’’ in After God, and the final part of ‘‘Sacramental Imagination,’’ in Phenomenology and Theology, ed. Conor Cunningham (London: Routledge, 2008), and Kearney, Anatheism. Taking the Wager of/on Love: Luce Irigaray and the Caress / James H. Olthuis 1. Luce Irigaray, i love to you, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 1996.) 2. Luce Irigaray, the Way of Love, trans. Heidi Bostic and Stephen Pluhacek (London: Continuum, 2002). 3. Luce Irigaray, to be two, trans. Monique Rhodes and Marco CocitopMonoc (London: Routledge, 2001). 4. In which case, as Levinas declares, ‘‘Philosophy is the wisdom of love at the service of Love.’’ Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingus (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 162. 5. Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 148, 12. 6. See Luce Irigaray, Key Writings (New York: Continuum, 2004), Chapter 13, pp. 150, 169. 7. It is also worth remembering that both Plato and Aristotle identify wonder as the motivation for philosophizing (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk A 2, 9826 12f: ‘‘For it is owing to their wonder that men both now and at first began to philosophize.’’ Plato, Theaetetus, 155d: ‘‘For this feeling of wonder shows that you are a philosopher, since wonder is the only beginning of philosophy’’). 8. In this vein it is instructive to note, as does Derrida in Spurs, that Heidegger does not discuss the issue of sexual difference. Moreover, as Levinas remarks, for Heidegger, Dasein is never hungry. 9. My emphasis on the two-way movement in Irigaray contrasts with Margaret Whitford’s reading of Irigaray, which highlights the flesh becoming word as an ‘‘audacious reversal’’ of the traditional the ‘‘word becomes flesh.’’ Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1991), 48. 10. James Olthuis, The Beautiful Risk (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, 2006), 48–49; also Knowing Other-wise (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 3. The spaces are wild because they are uncharted and venturing into them is to take the beautiful risk. They can become pastures of love, but they can also be battlefields of hate. 11. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 129–130. 12. Luce Irigaray, ‘‘Questions to Emmanuel Levinas,’’ in Re-reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomfield: Indiana University Press, 1991), 110. 13. It is also at points ambiguous as when she, in the fashion of Heraclitus, describes the sensible transcendental as ‘‘in some manner a transmutation’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 53), ‘‘a perpetual transvaluation’’ (27), and ‘‘a resurrection and transfiguration of blood, of flesh through a language and an ethics 232

Notes

that is ours’’ (129). However, her general spirit and tone is not the oneness of the invisible harmony of ever-living fire underlying the warring tension of elements perpetually turning over into each other, as with Heraclitus, but rather her basic emphasis, with Empedocles, is on the harmonious coming together, the fitting together of an original plurality of elements, of transcendent and nontranscendent, divine and human without fusion. And although Empedocles does envision strife and ceaseless change as a cosmic state, in contrast to Heraclitus (and Heidegger), he (with Irigaray) does not have a primordial polemos that holds everything together in its warring tension. Empedocles—and Irigaray—find fault with strife, praise love, and seek to promote relations of love and works of peace. 14. Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 57. 15. Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1968), 169. 16. At the same time, it is worth noting that, in distinction from Empedocles, Irigaray does not talk about hate as the opposite daimon of rupture and repulsion, preferring to speak of ‘‘the failure of love’’ (An Ethics of Sexual Difference, 27) when it ‘‘appropriates the other for itself by consuming it’’ (Elemental Passions [New York: Continuum, 2000], 27). However, she does speak of ‘‘devils’’ in contrast to angels who are ‘‘mediators for heaven and earth’’ whose ‘‘job’’ it is ‘‘to disrupt and to confuse,’’ blocking ‘‘mediation.’’ 17. In this same book, Irigaray talks of having ‘‘returned to my [Roman Catholic] tradition in a more enlightened manner.’’ She confesses that the ‘‘revelation of Jesus’’ as a ‘‘master of energy, capable of living extraordinary, ‘miraculous,’ experiences of transmutation of matter, capable of healing’’ speaks to her (Key Writings, 150–151). 18. See Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). 19. In Transforming Philosophy and Religion Love’s Wisdom, ed. Norman Wirzba and Bruce Ellis Benson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). See also Beautiful Risk, Chapters 3 and 5. Of note in this connection is Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), as well as Irigaray’s comment that her new book will be called In the Beginning, She Was (Key Writings, vii). 20. See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 357.

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Contributors

Bruce Ellis Benson is professor of philosophy and chair of the Philosophy Department at Wheaton College. John D. Caputo is Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities and professor of philosophy at Syracuse University. William Desmond is professor of philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the David R. Cook Visiting Professor in Philosophy at Villanova University. C. Stephen Evans is University Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Baylor University. M. Jamie Ferreira is the Carolyn M. Barbour Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. Kevin Hart is the Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. Richard Kearney is the Charles B. Seelig Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. Martin Beck Matusˇtı´k is Lincoln Professor of Ethics and Religion at Arizona State University. 235

James H. Olthuis is professor emeritus of philosophical theology at the Institute for Christian Studies in Toronto and a psychotherapist in private practice. B. Keith Putt is professor of philosophy at Samford University. Merold Westphal is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Edith Wyschogrod is J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought Emerita at Rice University.

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Contributors

Index

Abraham, 38, 83, 92, 174–75 absence, 52, 54, 57, 166, 191 absolute spirit, 92, 109 abyss, 61, 97, 148, 157–58, 171 adieu, 26, 95 aesthetic, xi, 15, 75, 96, 117, 129, 147–48, 177–78 aesthetics, 117 agnostic, 62, 142, 184 alterity, 17, 53, 58–59, 80, 92–94, 102, 114, 156, 170 altruistic, 68–72 America, 1, 20, 22, 35, 67, 172, 174, 183, 185, 199, 202–3 analogy, 11, 81, 93, 143, 172, 176, 180, 201, 205 Anselm, 103, 107, 139–40, 178 anthropology, 31, 57 antirealism, 7, 93, 183 apologetics, 2, 15–16, 18–19, 86, 163, 185, 201 apophatic, 87, 92, 146, 174–75 appropriation, 62, 64–65, 83, 115, 166–67, 169, 181 Aquinas, 27–28, 63, 91, 101–8, 111, 139–42, 172–76, 178, 187 Aristotle, 53, 63, 77, 103, 140, 151

art, 111, 122–25, 128–31, 133, 136, 145–46, 148, 152, 177–80 atheism, 32–33, 52, 61, 64, 74, 88–89, 92, 94–97, 103, 143, 169 Athens, 86, 90–92, 96 aufgehoben, 165, 167, 172 Aufhebung, 4, 23–24, 165 Augustine, 26–29, 63, 77, 81, 91–92, 101–2, 107–8, 111, 113–14, 117, 125, 139–40, 164, 173–74, 178, 183 authority, 3, 8, 15, 18, 21, 36, 84–85, 142 Barth, Karl, 164, 172–76 being, 7, 52–54, 56, 57–59, 71, 74, 76–78, 81, 83, 87–90, 92–94, 96, 99, 102–10, 116, 123–26, 141–44, 147, 152, 155, 157–58, 166, 168, 171–72, 175, 190 Bible, 18–19, 75, 124, 140, 166, 168, 172–73, 178, 180, 204–5 biblical, 1–2, 4–6, 9–10, 18–19, 26–27, 50, 56, 76, 88–89, 92–94, 101, 133, 161, 171–72, 174, 178, 185, 204–5 Blanchot, Maurice, 124, 136 237

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 50, 58, 84 Buddhism, 98, 174 Calvin, John, 164, 178 Calvinist, 10, 187 Camus, Albert, 96, 143 Caputo, John, xii, 1, 15, 95, 173, 189–90, 202 caress, 129, 131, 150–51, 155, 158–62, 180 Catholic, 87, 90–91, 117, 119, 127, 134, 136, 139, 141–42, 145, 147, 149, 172, 178 Catholicism, 78, 119 causa sui, 53, 77, 87, 105, 168 centrism, 109, 112 Chora, 82–83, 87, 94–95, 171 Christ, 18, 37, 39–40, 50, 119, 121–22, 125–26, 129, 131–32, 134–38, 145, 167, 191, 199, 205 Christianity, 27, 29, 39–40, 46–48, 55, 61–63, 65–66, 69–71, 74, 76–77, 83, 92, 96, 100–1, 137, 174, 191–92, 199 classical theism, 30, 86, 88–89, 91–92, 95, 99, 171 command, 38–39, 54–55, 59, 168, 171 compassion, 68–70, 73, 98, 119, 162, 176 consciousness, 4–5, 11–12, 19, 29, 31, 75, 83, 102, 118, 122–23, 142, 194 conservative, 1, 15, 35, 40, 43, 63, 100–1, 166, 173, 197, 199, 205 Continental philosophy, 1, 31, 86, 101, 108, 110, 139, 164, 187, 196–97, 202–3 creator, 9, 53, 74, 88, 92, 94–96, 98–99, 116, 136, 172–73, 189, 198 cross, 11, 121–22, 126, 128, 134 crucifix, 122, 125–26, 128 crucifixion, 11, 88, 122 culture, 3, 7, 15, 16, 18, 26, 28, 30, 35, 37, 110, 162, 172, 180, 193, 195 cynicism, 169, 188 Dasein, 8, 90, 143 death, 3, 28, 31, 74–75, 85, 87–88, 91, 95, 118, 122, 126, 134–36, 155, 158, 164, 171, 202 238

Index

decentering, 91, 102, 108, 194 deity, 12, 87, 95, 136, 140 Deleuze, Gilles, 76, 102, 114 democracy, 101, 114–15 Derrida, Jacques, 17, 71, 76, 78, 81–83, 91, 95, 97, 100, 108–15, 140–41, 155, 158, 163, 166, 170–71, 175, 184, 189, 191, 197, 201, 203 Descartes, Rene´, 52, 91, 103, 105, 107, 151, 188, 194, 198 desire, xi, 4–5, 8, 10, 16, 21, 23, 26, 53, 55, 56–60, 66, 72, 82, 111, 113–15, 121, 129–32, 134–35, 143, 147, 151, 154–55, 160, 179, 194 despair, 97–98 devil, 33, 50, 97, 173 dialectical, 15, 30, 37, 95, 120, 165, 167, 172, 179, 195 discourse, 5, 7, 9, 74–76, 78, 81, 93, 106–7, 115, 120, 170–71, 173, 195, 201, 204 disinterestedness, 38, 57 divine, 6, 10–14, 18, 26, 29–31, 38, 76, 81, 84–91, 93–96, 98–99, 102, 104, 106, 116, 121, 126, 131, 134, 139–40, 145, 151–52, 154–55, 158, 161, 164, 167–71, 176–80, 183–84, 196, 205 dogmatism, 5, 63–64, 77, 111 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 97, 146 Doubt, 2, 6, 8–11, 13, 18–19, 62, 66, 95, 97, 133, 146, 163, 179 Duns Scotus, 104, 143 economy, 72, 93, 154, 159–60, 193 Eliot, T. S., 14–15, 19, 127–28, 164 empirical, 2–3, 8, 77, 114, 156 Enlightenment, 8, 30, 170, 185, 188–90, 194, 198–99 epistemological, 2, 4, 6, 10, 12–13, 19, 36, 101–2, 106, 116, 120, 175, 186–87, 192, 194 epistemology, 1, 4–5, 8–10, 102, 188 eschatology, 139–40, 142, 144, 149, 186 ethical, 9–10, 13, 21, 23–24, 28, 30, 35, 38, 40, 53, 58, 75, 80, 84, 93, 101, 103, 116–17, 119–20, 123–24, 133, 140–41, 155, 176, 190–95

ethics, 12, 39, 46, 51–53, 55–56, 58, 103, 110–11, 116, 122, 124–25, 151, 153, 166, 168, 189, 191–95 Eucharist, 135, 137, 143 event, 82, 95–96, 113–14, 137, 151, 158 evil, 4, 12, 66–67, 82, 97, 169 existential, 3, 30, 50, 76, 79, 95–97, 143, 150, 164, 182 factical, 78–79 faith, 2–4, 8–10, 12–14, 16, 27–28, 30, 32, 35, 38, 47, 61, 66–67, 71, 74, 76–80, 82, 84, 86–92, 94–98, 100–1, 112, 114–15, 118–19, 121, 125, 128, 133–34, 136, 140–42, 146, 149, 160, 169–70, 173–75, 178, 180–81, 188–89, 191, 195, 197–98, 200–3, 205 fallenness, 19, 64, 78, 101, 174, 188 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 31, 47, 81, 167, 175 finitude, 1, 4–10, 12, 14–15, 17, 19, 63, 101, 108, 112, 164, 166, 172, 174–75, 179, 182–84, 186, 195 flesh, 135, 141–49, 152, 155, 158–61 forgiveness, 11, 75–76, 80, 93, 98, 171, 189, 196 foundationalism, 8, 12, 198 Freud, Sigmund, 5–6, 11, 33, 67, 83, 92, 94, 153, 157, 166, 169, 171, 183, 186–88, 197 fundamentalism, 88, 90, 172–73, 178, 187 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 22, 100, 164, 178, 183, 200 God, 2–4, 6–14, 17–18, 20, 24–33, 36–40, 46–60, 63, 67, 70, 72–84, 86–113, 115–21, 125–29, 131–32, 135–36, 138–40, 142–45, 150–51, 154–55, 158,161, 164, 166–68, 170–78, 180–84, 186, 188–94, 196, 197–202, 205 Good, 13, 52, 57, 83, 186, 190 gospel, 50, 63, 180 grace, xi, 5, 12, 14, 18, 75, 83–84, 116, 120–22, 127, 130, 135–36, 143, 152, 155–56, 169, 171, 187–91 Greek, 66, 89, 93–95, 103

guilt, 3, 28, 74–76, 78, 80–81, 112, 164, 171, 175, 202 happiness, 52, 156, 191, 193–94 hermeneutics, 4–15, 17, 19, 84, 88, 91, 94, 139–40, 149, 151, 169, 171–73, 178–79, 182–83, 186–89, 195 history, 5, 8, 16, 20, 27, 30, 67, 83, 94, 102, 106–7, 109, 118, 126–27, 165, 180, 185, 203 Holy Spirit, 13, 176 humanism, 30–31, 47 humanity, 29, 41–44, 110, 162, 206 humility, 1–2, 6, 13, 19, 66, 93, 101, 110, 112, 114, 172, 175–76 hypocrisy, 11–12, 44–45, 67 icon, 54, 83, 93, 107, 123, 129, 143 idealism, 142–44, 148 ideology, 38, 92, 171, 187 idolatry, 12, 89, 93–94, 96–97 Ignatius Loyola, 128, 135 illeity, 54, 59–60 image, 54, 122–25, 127–29, 132–33, 146, 178 imagination, 5, 93, 120–23, 125, 128–29, 146 impossible, 21, 40–42, 62, 72, 144, 151, 163 the impossible, 71, 98, 111, 113, 150, 163 incarnation, 8, 142, 149, 158, 161–62, 174, 179, 205 incarnational, 136, 139, 143 Infinite, 52–55, 57–60, 79, 81, 83, 91, 99, 102, 105, 109, 112–13, 124, 158, 171 injustice, 39, 45 interpretation, 9, 11, 17, 21, 30, 32, 54, 62, 84, 89, 107, 145, 170, 178, 190, 195, 200, 205 inwardness, 36, 38, 98 Isaac, 38, 175 Isaiah, 47, 187 Jerusalem, 86, 90–91, 119 Jesus, 10–11, 15, 18, 33, 46, 83, 92, 98, Index

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119, 121–22, 126–28, 134–35, 169, 171, 179, 185, 192 Johannes Climacus, 76, 101, 113, 170, 192 Johannes de Silentio, 38, 76, 165, 170 Joyce, James, 147–48 Judaism, 46, 84, 91 Judeo-Christian, 37, 54 justice, 15, 21, 51, 55–56, 71, 79–80, 93, 101–3, 115, 121, 124, 176, 202 kataphatic, 92, 102 Kierkegaard, Søren, 5–11, 13, 21, 23–24, 32, 35–52, 54–56, 59, 63, 74–79, 84, 87–88, 90–92, 96–98, 101, 137, 163–64, 166–68, 170–71, 173–74, 177–78, 183–84, 186–87, 190–94, 201 Kingdom of God, 30, 76 knowledge, 4–7, 10–11, 14, 36, 63, 75, 78, 80, 82, 88, 90, 93, 101–3, 108–9, 112–13, 122, 152, 166, 170, 172, 174, 176–77, 183–84, 196, 199, 203 Kristeva, Julia, 142, 147–49, 179 Lacan, Jacques, 155, 157, 179 language, 7–8, 10, 16–19, 31, 36, 52, 54, 58–59, 76–78, 86, 94–95, 97–99, 117, 143, 145, 148, 164, 173–75, 178, 180, 201 Leibniz, G. W., 105, 107 Lenten, 33, 67, 197 Leonardo da Vinci, 124, 145 Levinas, Emmanuel, 46–48, 51–60, 79–81, 87, 90–91, 96, 101, 103, 111, 122–24, 140–41, 155, 158, 160–61, 164, 167–68, 170–71, 179, 189–93, 201 Lewis, C. S., 193 literature, 117–18, 124, 177, 192 logic, 5, 16, 28, 38, 62, 65–67, 69, 71, 74, 106–9, 111, 140, 160, 167, 169 logos, 8, 16–17 love, 12, 17–18, 24, 26, 39, 41–43, 45–50, 55–56, 59–62, 68–73, 89–93, 95–99, 112–15, 119, 121, 240

Index

129–36, 140, 150–62, 166–69, 171, 177, 179–80, 191–94, 202 Luther, Martin, 164, 175, 178 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 76, 200 Marion, Jean-Luc, 62, 72–73, 87, 89–91, 93, 96, 101, 105, 107–8, 139, 179, 203 Marsden, George, 199 martyrdom, 122, 128, 134–35 Marx, Karl, 5–6, 11, 31, 33, 37–38, 64, 67, 83, 92, 94, 109, 114, 141, 164, 166, 169, 171, 178, 183, 185–87, 197 Mary Magdalene, 119, 126 masters of suspicion, 38, 109, 111, 166 Matthew, 56, 60, 69, 168 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 142–47, 149, 179 Meister Eckhart, 95, 145 mercy, 15, 49 messianic, 82–83, 95, 98, 114–15, 141 metanarrative, 76, 87, 184, 195 metaphysical, 2–3, 7, 25, 30, 47, 52, 55, 57, 90, 97, 101–2, 105, 108–10, 127, 140–42, 152, 172, 175–76, 178, 184 metaphysics, 29, 30, 32, 37, 51–53, 56–57, 83, 87–88, 90–92, 94, 103, 106–9, 111–12, 140–42, 172, 190 modernity, 9, 20, 22, 28, 30, 33, 35, 76–77, 79, 91, 107, 112, 124, 170 moral, 1, 4, 28, 47, 49, 53, 68, 81, 125, 133, 190, 193 morality, 37, 51, 53, 56, 60, 65–66, 68 Muslim, 92, 147 mystery, 29, 89–93, 96, 106–8, 115, 117, 127, 152, 156, 161, 164, 170–72, 175, 179–80 narcissism, 10, 71, 194 natural theology, 2, 172, 176, 185 negative theology, 81, 87, 93, 101–2 neighbor, 39, 41–43, 45–51, 55–56, 58–60, 93, 96, 167–68, 172, 192–94 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 6, 11, 31, 33, 37, 40, 61–69, 70–71, 73–75, 77, 79,

83, 87, 92–93, 103, 109, 152, 164, 166, 169–71, 183–84, 185–86, 197 ontology, 7, 51–53, 55, 57–58, 79, 81, 90, 92, 94, 107, 140–44, 147, 149, 170 original sin, 11, 152 orthodoxy 12, 96, 125 Other, 21, 51, 53–55. 58, 80–81, 191, 193–94; the other, 11–12, 17, 24, 26, 30, 32, 36, 40, 42, 44, 46, 49–51, 53–54, 56–61, 69–73, 79–82, 90, 93, 96, 98, 150–54, 156–57, 159–61, 164–65, 168–69, 180, 191 Otherness, 21, 57, 59, 159, 189, 201 otherwise, 78, 89, 90, 92–93, 96, 99 pantheism, 27–28, 30, 93–94, 98, 180 parable, 56, 67, 135 paradox, 84, 125–27, 139, 167, 192 Pascal, Blaise, 55–56 passion 16, 21, 57, 121, 125, 136, 144, 151–52 Paul the Apostle, 5–6, 10, 63, 67–68, 83, 171, 183, 186 Pauline, 6–10, 79, 89–90, 164, 187 Pelagian, 12, 188 perspectivism 7, 63, 164 Pharisee, 15, 67, 70, 83–84, 169, 171 phenomenology, 2–3, 64, 118, 139, 141–44, 146, 149, 160, 164, 169, 185, 202 philosophical theology, 1, 39, 87 philosophy of religion, 2–11, 15–16, 18–19, 22, 28, 37, 39, 86–88, 91–92, 101, 110, 139, 163, 180, 185, 187, 203 pity, 61–62, 66, 68, 70, 73 Platonic, 7, 90, 131 plundering the Egyptians, 63–65, 169 pluralism, 7, 199 poet, 6, 9, 82, 118, 120, 124, 126–27, 129, 130–33, 136–38, 170, 177 poetry, 69, 117–21, 124–25, 127–28, 130, 132–34, 177 political, 3, 7, 28, 30, 35, 37–39, 43, 45,

76, 88, 90, 136, 150, 166, 170, 176, 187, 205 postmodern, 7–9, 15, 20, 22, 32–33, 39, 74, 76–77, 86, 88, 90–95, 99, 101, 108, 151, 170, 181, 184, 189, 196–200, 204 postmodernism, 8–9, 102, 111, 183, 189, 195–99, 204 power, 5, 11, 13, 15, 17, 21, 35, 40, 57, 68, 70, 85, 88, 90, 95, 108–109, 114, 131–32, 135, 142–43, 148, 154, 183–85, 196, 198, 201, 205 praise, 39, 68, 77, 91, 93–94, 97, 106, 126, 176, 201 premodern 108, 112 presence 7, 52–54, 56–58, 74, 81, 139, 143, 148, 156, 196 promise 14, 80, 113–15, 137–40, 144, 149, 157, 162, 171 prophet, 3, 13, 15, 17–18, 37, 185–86 prophetic, 2–11, 13–15, 18–19, 37, 79, 82, 139, 141, 169, 185–87, 204 Protestant, 90–91, 139, 141–42, 147, 149, 164, 178, 189, 199, 201 Pseudo-Dionysius, 91, 174–75 rabbi, 82, 84–85, 145 Rahner, Karl, 91, 93, 100, 108, 117 rationality, 10, 77, 79, 152 reason, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 13, 15–16, 27, 29–31, 37–38, 41, 72–73, 86, 88–89, 92, 97, 104–107, 131, 152, 161, 171–72, 175–76, 179, 200–201, 204 reconciliation, 31–32, 76, 81, 171 redeemer, 88, 92, 94–96, 99, 168, 173, 189 redemption, 99, 117, 128, 151, 162, 168, 188, 190 religion, 2–12, 14–19, 22, 26–33, 37, 39, 46–47, 50, 62–65, 69–71, 74–76, 81–83, 86–89, 91–92, 95–97, 99, 101, 110–12, 119, 122, 131, 136, 139, 141, 148–49, 163–64, 168–69, 171, 173, 177, 180, 185, 187, 198, 202–204; religion without religion, 89, 95 religious, 81, 97, 99, 101, 103, 177 Index

241

Religiousness B, 36, 167, 191 Religiousness C, 36, 167, 191 repentance, 6, 13, 19, 76, 81–82, 121, 169, 171 resentment, 65–66, 111, 170 responsibility 16, 52–55, 59, 80, 190, 193 ressentiment, 61–62, 65–66, 79 revelation, 18, 27, 29, 36, 54, 74, 78, 83, 90, 93, 116, 122, 133, 139, 164, 171–73, 176, 178–79 revenge, 65–69, 71, 73, 79, 170 Ricoeur, Paul, 4–6, 9, 100, 139, 141, 164, 178, 183 sacrament, 117, 133, 143, 168, 176–77, 179 sacramental 117, 139, 141–43, 145–47, 149, 178 sacred, 12, 75, 87, 130, 133, 142, 146, 160 sacrifice, 12, 38, 58, 69, 118, 136 salvation, 47, 50, 113, 133, 167 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 81, 123, 143 saturated phenomenon, 89–90, 94, 96, 146 scholastic, 53, 172 scholasticism, 149, 168 Schrag, Calvin O., 86, 88–90 science, 2–3, 15, 37, 77–78, 103, 111, 164, 183 scientific, 2–3, 37, 78, 163 scripture, 5–6, 59, 62, 116, 168, 171, 178–79, 191, 205 secret, 44, 75, 113, 115, 117 secular, 11, 30, 40, 77, 102, 107, 110, 130, 133, 174–75, 183–85, 186, 189, 197, 200, 203, 204 self-transcendence, 13, 26, 89, 99, 112, 116–18, 136, 138, 176–77, 193–94 self-transformation, 93, 95–96, 116, 135 sign, 50, 54, 84, 98, 117–18, 123, 138, 148–49, 176 sin, 9–12, 78, 81, 152, 186–87, 194 Sittlichkeit, 35, 38, 192 society, 30, 35–41, 44, 132, 156 Socrates, 10, 185 Socratic, 54, 155, 185 Southwell, Robert, 119–22, 128, 132–36 242

Index

space, 23, 28, 94–95, 102, 143, 149, 151, 153–54, 157, 160, 162, 182 Spinoza, B., 27–29, 96, 102, 107, 112, 166, 204 spirit, 12, 26–27, 30–32, 34, 39, 56, 65, 79, 92, 109–10, 147, 151, 172, 176–77 spiritual 18, 23, 31, 33, 35–36, 56, 90, 96–98, 122, 125, 128–29, 144, 153, 156, 158, 176, 182 subjectivity, 38, 50, 52, 127, 138, 156, 160 suffering, 13, 36, 66, 70, 73, 97, 125, 133, 148, 159, 191 suspicion, 4–6, 10–15, 17, 19, 32–33, 38, 61–62, 67, 73–75, 79, 83–85, 88, 93–94, 109, 111, 118, 142, 166, 169, 171–72, 182–83, 186–88, 195, 197, 204 Talmud, 84, 91 Tenebrae, 117, 129, 133 Tertullian, 69, 77, 86 theology, 1–2, 7, 11, 13, 29, 31, 39, 52, 61, 63, 77–79, 81, 87–93, 95–96, 101–103, 106, 108–11, 113, 116–19, 131, 136, 138, 165, 170, 172–77, 182, 185, 191, 195–96, 202–203 third, 47–49, 51–55, 58, 60, 154, 156–57 Tillich, Paul, 22, 30, 81, 88–89, 195 Torah, 46, 84 totality, 4, 8, 53, 57, 166, 171, 184 touch, 73, 158, 160, 162, 180 trace, 53–55, 59–60, 82, 168 tradition 3, 7–8, 10, 15–19, 28, 37, 64, 69, 74–75, 87, 91, 101–102, 106–107, 128, 140–42, 149, 151–52, 161, 164, 180, 183, 185 transcendence, 4, 13, 23, 26–27, 29–31, 48, 52–54, 57, 86, 89–93, 95, 99, 102–103, 106, 112, 116–18, 120, 126, 128–29, 138, 145, 155, 158, 161, 176–77 transcendent, 30, 36, 96, 102, 112, 121, 125, 139, 152, 184 transcendental, 2, 7, 9–13, 94, 114, 117, 142–43, 152, 154–56, 176, 187, 195

transubstantiation, 63, 144, 146–48 transvaluation, 88, 90, 157 truth, 1–5, 7–20, 26, 29, 61, 68, 79, 94, 110, 118, 128, 135, 160, 166, 178, 181–84, 197–98, 201 undecidability, 87, 94–97, 99, 171 values, 30, 65–66, 68, 88, 90, 145 vengeance 69–70, 79 violence, 64–65, 112, 162, 166, 169, 173

virtue 19, 32, 36, 47, 66, 89 wisdom, 1–2, 9, 14–19, 29, 57, 84, 92–93, 124, 146, 150–51, 164–65, 167, 179 word, xii, 6, 9, 12–13, 16–18, 24, 32, 53, 55–56, 59, 62, 92, 95, 100, 103–104, 106, 108, 113–14, 124–25, 128, 132, 134, 138, 141, 146–48, 152, 156, 161, 163, 176, 178–79, 181, 191, 205

Index

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Perspectives in Continental Philosophy Series John D. Caputo, series editor

John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard—From Irony to Edification. Michael D. Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality. James Swindal, Reflection Revisited: Ju¨rgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern. Second edition. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation—Essays on Late Existentialism. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Today. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology. Trish Glazebrook, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science. Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology, and Philosophy. Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. Second edition. Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Franc¸ois Courtine, Jean-Louis Chre´tien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricœur, Phenomenology and the ‘‘Theological Turn’’: The French Debate. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt. Introduction by Joseph W. Koterski, S.J.

Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Translated with an introduction by Thomas A. Carlson. Jeffrey Dudiak, The Intrigue of Ethics: A Reading of the Idea of Discourse in the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Robyn Horner, Rethinking God as Gift: Marion, Derrida, and the Limits of Phenomenology. Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Keirkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility. Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith. Edith Wyschogrod, Jean-Joseph Goux, and Eric Boynton, eds., The Enigma of Gift and Sacrifice. Stanislas Breton, The Word and the Cross. Translated with an introduction by Jacquelyn Porter. Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Peter H. Spader, Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: Its Logic, Development, and Promise. Jean-Louis Chre´tien, The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For. Translated by Jeffrey Bloechl. Don Cupitt, Is Nothing Sacred? The Non-Realist Philosophy of Religion: Selected Essays. Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Translated by Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. Phillip Goodchild, Rethinking Philosophy of Religion: Approaches from Continental Philosophy. William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Martin Heidegger and the Problem of Historical Meaning. Jean-Louis Chre´tien, Hand to Hand: Listening to the Work of Art. Translated by Stephen E. Lewis. Jean-Louis Chre´tien, The Call and the Response. Translated with an introduction by Anne Davenport. D. C. Schindler, Han Urs von Balthasar and the Dramatic Structure of Truth: A Philosophical Investigation. Julian Wolfreys, ed., Thinking Difference: Critics in Conversation. Allen Scult, Being Jewish/Reading Heidegger: An Ontological Encounter. Richard Kearney, Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers. Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, Heidegger, Ho¨lderlin, and the Subject of Poetic Language: Towards a New Poetics of Dasein. Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kirkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible. Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man. Translated by Mark Raftery-Skehan. Charles P. Bigger, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood. Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology ‘‘Wide Open’’: After the French Debate. Translated by Charles N. Cabral. Ian Leask and Eoin Cassidy, eds., Givenness and God: Questions of Jean-Luc Marion.

Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba, eds., The Phenomoenology of Prayer. S. Clark Buckner and Matthew Statler, eds., Styles of Piety: Practicing Philosophy after the Death of God. Kevin Hart and Barbara Wall, eds., The Experience of God: A Postmodern Response. John Panteleimon Manoussakis, After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy. John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image. Edith Wyschogrod, Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others. Gerald Bruns, On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly. Brian Treanor, Aspects of Alterity: Levinas, Marcel, and the Contemporary Debate. Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life. Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory. Bettina Bergo, Joseph Cohen, and Raphael Zagury-Orly, eds., Judeities: Questions for Jacques Derrida. Translated by Bettina Bergo and Michael B. Smith. Jean-Luc Marion, On the Ego and on God: Further Cartesian Questions. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner. Jean-Luc Nancy, Philosophical Chronicles. Translated by Franson Manjali. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity. Translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith. Andrea Hurst, Derrida Vis-a`-vis Lacan: Interweaving Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis. Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body. Translated by Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed. Translated by Christina M. Gschwandtner and others. Michel Henry, Material Phenomenology. Translated by Scott Davidson. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus. Translated by Richard A. Rand. Joshua Kates, Fielding Derrida. Michael Naas, Derrida From Now On. Shannon Sullivan and Dennis J. Schmidt, eds., Difficulties of Ethical Life. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? Translated by Sebastian Rand, Introduction by Marc Jeannerod. Claude Romano, Event and World. Translated by Shane Mackinlay. Vanessa Lemm, Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being.