Philosophies of Christianity: At the Crossroads of Contemporary Problems (Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, 31) 303022631X, 9783030226312

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Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31

Balázs M. Mezei Matthew Z. Vale Editors

Philosophies of Christianity At the Crossroads of Contemporary Problems

Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures Volume 31

Series Editors Editor-in-Chief Purushottama Bilimoria, The University of Melbourne, Australia University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA Co-Editors Andrew B. Irvine, Maryville College, Maryville, TN, USA Christian Coseru, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC, USA Associate Editors Jay Garfield, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Editorial Assistants Sherah Bloor, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA Amy Rayner, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Peter Yih Jiun Wong, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia Editorial Board Balbinder Bhogal, Hofstra University, Hempstead, USA Christopher Chapple, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, USA Vrinda Dalmiya, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, USA Gavin Flood, Oxford University, Oxford, UK Jessica Frazier, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK Kathleen Higgins, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA Patrick Hutchings, Deakin University, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Australia Morny Joy, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada Carool Kersten, King’s College London, London, UK Richard King, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK Arvind-Pal Maindair, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA Rekha Nath, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA Parimal Patil, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA Laurie Patton, Duke University, Durham, USA Stephen Phillips, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA Joseph Prabhu, California State University, Los Angeles, USA Annupama Rao, Columbia University, New York, USA Anand J. Vaidya, San Jose State University, San Jose, USA

The Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures focuses on the broader aspects of philosophy and traditional intellectual patterns of religion and cultures. The series encompasses global traditions, and critical treatments that draw from cognate disciplines, inclusive of feminist, postmodern, and postcolonial approaches. By global traditions we mean religions and cultures that go from Asia to the Middle East to Africa and the Americas, including indigenous traditions in places such as Oceania. Of course this does not leave out good and suitable work in Western traditions where the analytical or conceptual treatment engages Continental (European) or Cross-cultural traditions in addition to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The book series invites innovative scholarship that takes up newer challenges and makes original contributions to the field of knowledge in areas that have hitherto not received such dedicated treatment. For example, rather than rehearsing the same old Ontological Argument in the conventional way, the series would be interested in innovative ways of conceiving the erstwhile concerns while also bringing new sets of questions and responses, methodologically also from more imaginative and critical sources of thinking. Work going on in the forefront of the frontiers of science and religion beaconing a well-nuanced philosophical response that may even extend its boundaries beyond the confines of this debate in the West  – e.g. from the perspective of the ‘Third World’ and the impact of this interface (or clash) on other cultures, their economy, sociality, and ecological challenges facing them – will be highly valued by readers of this series. All books to be published in this Series will be fully peer-reviewed before final acceptance. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8880

Balázs M. Mezei  •  Matthew Z. Vale Editors

Philosophies of Christianity At the Crossroads of Contemporary Problems

Editors Balázs M. Mezei Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest, Hungary

Matthew Z. Vale University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN, USA

ISSN 2211-1107     ISSN 2211-1115 (electronic) Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures ISBN 978-3-030-22631-2    ISBN 978-3-030-22632-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 Balázs M. Mezei 2 God and Religion�������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   13 Miklós Vetö 3 On Saturated Phenomena and the Hyperboles of Being����������������������   25 William Desmond 4 From Philosophical Theology to Philosophy of Religion: An Illocutionary Turning Point��������������������������������������������������������������   55 Savina Raynaud 5 The Limits of Univocity in Interreligious Relationality ����������������������   67 Richard Schenk 6 Religion, Theology, and Philosophy in Heidegger’s Thought��������������   97 István M. Fehér 7 Apocalyptic Phenomenology: A Radical Philosophical Theology of Revelation����������������������������������������������������������������������������  109 Balázs M. Mezei 8 Žižek and the Theological Foundation of the Secular��������������������������  123 Cyril O’Regan 9 The ‘Chosisme’ of Étienne Gilson and Marie-Dominique Chenu ����������������������������������������������������������������  153 Francesca Aran Murphy 10 Christian Metaphysics: Between East and West ����������������������������������  169 John Betz

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11 Appropriation and Polemics: Karl Jaspers’ Criticism of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Religion ����������������������������������  195 István Czakó 12 The Paradoxes of Love: Some Theological Remarks on the Work of Harry Frankfurt������������������������������������������������������������  217 Kenneth Oakes 13 Loving Being: Erich Przywara’s Engagement with Max Scheler��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  237 Matthew Z. Vale Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  277

About the Authors

John BETZ is Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). He specializes in systematic and philosophical theology, with a particular interest in German philosophy and theology from the eighteenth century to the present. Within this period, he has been concerned chiefly with two figures: the eighteenth-­century Lutheran author, Johann Georg Hamann, and the twentieth-­century Jesuit theologian Erich Przywara. His most recent publications include After Enlightenment: The Post-Secular Vision of J.  G. Hamann (Oxford: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2008); and ‘Metaphysics and Theology: An Introduction to Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis’, in Analogia Entis: Metaphysics by Erich Przywara (Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2014), pp.  1–115. Together with David Bentley Hart he translated Przywara’s Analogia entis into English (Eerdmans, 2014). CZAKÓ István  is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary. He specializes in German Idealism, Existentialism, and Philosophy of Religion. He holds a degree in philosophy from the Pontifical Gregorian University, a Ph.D. in theology from Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and a habilitation in philosophy from the University of Szeged. He has published a number of articles in the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook and Acta Kierkegaardiana as well as in the series Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, and in Danish Golden Age Studies. His recent books are Geist und Unsterblichkeit: Grundprobleme der Religionsphilosophie und Eschatologie im Denken Søren Kierkegaards (Berlin-München-Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014) and Paradoxes of Existence: Contributions to Kierkegaard Research (Budapest-Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016).

Hungarian names are normally written in this order: family name first, and given names second. We keep this order here, while capitalizing family names in order to avoid misunderstanding. vii

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About the Authors

William DESMOND is David Cook Chair in Philosophy at Villanova University, and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the Institute of Philosophy, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. His work is primarily in metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of many books, including the ­ground-­breaking trilogy Being and the Between (1995), Ethics and the Between (2001), and God and the Between (2008). Being and the Between was winner of both the prestigious Prix Cardinal Mercier and the J. N. Findlay Award for best book in metaphysics. Other books include Art and the Absolute (1986); Desire Dialectic and Otherness: An Essay on Origins (1987; 2nd edition 2014); Philosophy and Its Others: Ways of Being and Mind (1990); Beyond Hegel and Dialectic (1992); Perplexity and Ultimacy (1995); Hegel’s God (2003); Art, Origins, Otherness: Between Art and Philosophy (2003); as well as Is There a Sabbath for Thought?: Between Religion and Philosophy (2005). He has also edited five books and published more than 100 articles and book chapters. His book The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic appeared in 2012, the same year in which the William Desmond Reader also appeared. His new book, The Intimate Universal: The Hidden Porosity among Religion, Art, Philosophy and Politics appeared with Columbia University Press in 2016. He is Past President of the Hegel Society of America, the Metaphysical Society of America, and the American Catholic Philosophical Association. FEHÉR M. István is Professor of philosophy at ELTE University, Budapest, and at Andrássy Deutschsprachige Universität, Budapest. He has received grants and fellowships from the Benedetto Croce Foundation (Naples, 1983–84), the German Academic Exchange Board (1986), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (1987–88), as well as by the American Council of Learned Societies (University of Virginia, 1992–93). He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Boards of several scholarly societies and international journals, including the Internationale Schelling-­ Gesellschaft (Leonberg, Germany), Heidegger Studies, Heidegger-Jahrbuch, L’uomo un segno (Milan, Italy), Österreichische Gesellschaft für Daseinsanalyse (ÖGDA), Österreichisches Daseinsanalytisches Institut für Psychotherapie, Psychosomatik und Grundlagenforschung (ÖDAI), International Society for Hermeneutics and Science, Itinerari filosofici (Italy), Mesotes (Zeitschrift für philosophischen Ost-West-Dialog), and Schelling Studien: Internationale Zeitschrift zur klassischen deutschen Philosophie. His publications include Martin Heidegger (Budapest, 1984; 2nd enlarged edition 1992); and Schelling—Humboldt: Idealismus und Universität. Mit Ausblicken auf Heidegger und die Hermeneutik (Frankfurt/ Main—Berlin—New York: Peter Lang, 2007). He has also edited Wege und Irrwege des neueren Umganges mit Heideggers Werk (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991); Kunst, Hermeneutik, Philosophie: Das Denken Hans-Georg Gadamers im Zusammenhang des 20. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 2003); and Philosophie und Gestalt der europäischen Universität as co-editor with Peter L. Oesterreich (Stuttgart—Bad Cannstatt: Frommann–Holzboog, 2008). He has published widely on the history of modern and contemporary philosophy, Popper, Lukács, the Frankfurt School, Heidegger, Sartre, Gadamer, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and German Idealism.

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MEZEI Balázs M.  is Professor of philosophy at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Hungary. He has published more than 30 books and 150 scholarly articles on philosophy of religion, phenomenology, and political and literary criticism. He has organized master and doctoral programs at his home university and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, Georgetown University, Loyola University in Maryland, the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, the Husserl Archives in Leuven, the Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal, and other institutions. He is vice-president of the Hungarian Society for the Study of Religion, and was a Senior Fulbright Fellow at the University of Notre Dame in 2015. He has published Religion and Revelation after Auschwitz (Bloomsbury, 2013), and authored Illuminating Faith and Christian Wisdom Meets Modernity (both with Francesca A.  Murphy and Kenneth Oakes, 2015 and 2016). His Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach was published by Bloomsbury in 2017. He is editor-in-­ chief of The Oxford Handbook of Divine Revelation. Francesca Aran MURPHY is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana). She was formerly Professor of Christian Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, where she taught from 1995 until 2010. Her major interest is theological aesthetics. She has written books such as Christ the Form of Beauty: A Study in Theology and Literature (Bloomsbury, 1995), The Comedy of Revelation: Paradise Lost and Regained (Bloomsbury, 2001), Art and Intellect in the Philosophy of Étienne Gilson (University of Missouri Press, 2004), and God is not a Story: Realism Revisited (Oxford, 2009). Her most recent book is Gnosis and the Theocrats from Mars (Bloomsbury, forthcoming). She has also edited several volumes, including The Providence of God: Deus Habet Consilium (Continuum, 2009) and The Oxford Handbook to Christology (Oxford, 2015). Professor Murphy has translated four books. Kenneth OAKES  is Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Notre Dame (Indiana). He has a PhD from University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His publications include Illuminating Faith: An Invitation to Theology (with Francesca A.  Murphy and Balázs Mezei, New  York: Bloomsbury, 2015); Karl Barth on Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Reading Karl Barth: A Companion to Karl Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (Eugene, Ore.: Cascade Books, 2011). He edited two volumes of essays and published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. He also translated works by Gottlieb Söhngen, Benjamin Dahlke, and Gilbert Narcisse. He is editor of the series Illuminating Modernity (together with F. Murphy and B. Mezei) at Bloosmbury T&T Clark. Cyril O’REGAN  is Huisking Professor of Theology, Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame (Indiana). He earned his Ph. D from Yale in 1989 in Philosophy of Religion. He has taught at Yale (1990–1999) and the University of Notre Dame (1999–). His fields of research and teaching include Philosophical, Historical, and Systematic Theology; Philosophy of Religion; Continental Philosophy; Mysticism; and Religion and Literature. His primary publications are

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The Heterodox Hegel (1994); Gnostic Return in Modernity (2001); Gnostic Apocalypse (2002); Theology and the Spaces of Apocalyptic (2009); Anatomy of Misremembering: Balthasar and Philosophical Modernity. Vol. 1: Hegel (2014); Anatomy of Misremembering: Balthasar and Philosophical Modernity. Vol. 2: Heidegger (forthcoming); German Idealism and its Gnostic Limit (forthcoming); and Metaxological Metaphysics and the Prospects for Theology (forthcoming). Savina RAYNAUD graduated in Philosophy in 1978. She was a researcher at the Institute for General Linguistics at the Sacred Heart Catholic University (Brescia) from 1984 to 1994. She has been Ordinary Professor of Philosophy of Language since 1994. She was invited to University of Calabria in 1994/95 and to Catholic University of S. Cuore (Milan) in 1995/96. She is member of the Italian Philosophical Society and since 2013 has been president of the Lombard Section of the Society of Philosophy of Language. Between 2004 and 2008 she was president of the Italian Society of Linguistics. She is also member of the Société d’Histoire et d’Epistémologie des Sciences du Langage, the Association of Sciences of the Langage of Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas. In October 2006 she was elected an international member of the Prague Language Circle. In 2010 she founded the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Computerization of Signs of Expression (CIRCSE: http://centridiricerca.unicatt.it/circse), for which Dr. Marco Passarotti coordinates research towards the realization of the Thomisticus Treebank Index (ITTB), a syntactic and tectogrammatical analytical annotation of the Latin texts of Saint Thomas Aquinas according to the methods of the Prague School of Computational Language (UFAL). In 2014 she initiated a collaborative effort among Italian societies working on historiographical projects in linguistic-­ philosophical, historical, theoretical, philological and semiotic fields within the language sciences, which led to the establishment of CISPELS, Intersociety Coordination for the History of Thought in Linguistic and Semiotics (Coordinamento Intersocietario per la Storia del Pensiero Linguistico e Semiotico). Richard SCHENK  is a Roman Catholic priest of the Ordo Praedicatorum (Dominicans). After initial studies in California, USA, he completed his doctorate in dogmatic theology in 1986 under the direction of Leo Scheffczyk at the Ludwig-­ Maximilians-­Universität. At the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Munich, he prepared a critical edition of the thirteenth century theology of non-Christian religions by Robert Kilwardby, O.P. He taught as a professor in faculties of philosophy and of theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley from 1990–2011. He also taught in Washington, D.C. as well as in Hannover and Eichstätt, Germany. He served in these years as director of two research centers, the Hannover Institute of Philosophical Research (1991–2000) and the Intercultural Forum for Studies in Faith and Culture (Washington, D.C.: 2000–2006). In 2004 he received from the Dominican Order the title Master of Sacred Theology. 2007–2008 he served as the founding president of the Academy of Catholic Theology. He was president of the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt between 2011–2014. He has been a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts since 1991. Since November

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2016 he has been working in the chaplaincy to the University of Freiburg im Breisgau. Prof. Schenk has published extensively on questions of theological and philosophical anthropology and the history of Christian theologies of non-Christian religions. His works include Die Gnade vollendeter Endlichkeit. Zur transzendentaltheologischen Auslegung der thomanischen Anthropologie (1989); Die Deutung vorchristlicher Riten im Frühwerk des Albertus Magnus (Lectio Albertina 15, 2014); and Soundings in the History of a Hope. New Studies in Thomas Aquinas (2016). He has edited a number of interdisciplinary studies on religion and culture, such as Robert Kilwardby, Quaestiones in librum quartum Sententiarum (1990); Zur Theorie des Opfers (1995); Kontinuität der Person. Zum Versprechen und Vertrauen (1998); (with R. Löw) Natur in der Krise. Philosophische Essays zur Naturtheorie und Bioethik (1994); (with Thomas Freyer) Emmanuel Levinas  – Fragen an die Moderne (1996); (with Wolfgang Vögele) Apokalypse. Vortragsreihe zum Ende des Jahrtausends (2000); and (with Wolfgang Palaver) Mimetic Theory and World Religions (2017). He is currently preparing a commentary for the German translation of Thomas Aquinas’s treatise on religion in the Summa theologiae (Deutsche Thomas-Ausgabe, Vol. 19) and a collection of originally German-language essays in English translation, Revelations of Humanity (2018). Among his essays are ‘The Progress and End of History, Life after Death, and the Resurrection of the Human Person in the World Religions: An Attempt at a Synthesis from a Christian Perspective’, in The Progress, Apocalypse, and Completion of History and Life after Death of the Human Person in the World Religions, edited by Peter Koslowski (2002), pp. 104–120; and ‘Maritain and the Possibilities for Cooperation in a Still Divided World’, in Engaging the Times: The Witness of Thomism, edited by Joshua Schulz (2017). Matthew Z. VALE  is a doctoral student in Systematic Theology and World Religions and World Church at the University of Notre Dame (Indiana), where he is a Richard and Peggy Notebaert Premier Fellow. His work focuses on Christian theological engagement with Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as on a range of topics in Christian systematic theology. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Religious Studies and English Literature at Rice University (Houston, Texas). He lives in South Bend with his wife, Beáta, and son, Elias. VETÖ Miklós was born in Budapest, Hungary. Because of his participation in the anti-soviet revolution of 1956, he had to flee his native Hungary. He studied Law at the University of Szeged (1954–1956), and Philosophy at the Sorbonne (1957– 1960). He received his PhD from the University of Oxford under Iris Murdoch, a Doctorat ès lettres with Paul Ricœur at the University of Nanterre in 1974, and a Doctorat ès lettres (Catholic Theology) at Strasbourg in 1984. His academic postings have included Marquette University (Milwaukee), Yale University, University of Abidjan (Ivory Coast), University of Rennes, and the University of Poitiers (retired in 2005). He has been a Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry, Princeton University, as well as Visiting Professor of Christian Philosophy at Villanova University, Visiting Professor at Laval University, Québec, and Honorary

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Professor at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne. He has received honorary doctorates from Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest-Piliscsaba and the University of Szeged. He is an external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and a member of the Académie Catholique de France. His major publications include La métaphysique religieuse de Simone Weil (3 eds., with translations into English, Italian, Japanese, Hungarian), Le fondement selon Schelling (2 eds.), La pensée de Jonathan Edwards (2 eds.; English translation in print), De Kant à Schelling vols. 1–2 (German translation in preparation), La naissance de la volonté (Portuguese translation), and L’élargissement de la métaphysique (English translation in print).

Chapter 1

Introduction Balázs M. Mezei

The present volume is the result of a maintained cooperation between Catholic and non-Catholic Universities in Europe and the United States. In particular, the texts presented here are gathered from conferences we organized in Budapest, Hungary, at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2015. The aim of these conferences has been to offer novel approaches to some of the central problems in philosophy of Christian-Catholic provenience. We have attempted to articulate various new approaches from philosophers who have been active for a long time and are known for their contributions to philosophy, theology, or philosophical theology. As common platforms, the conferences helped us understand each other’s work in a setting both personally inspiring and academically stimulating. As a result of these meetings, we came also better to understand the necessity of continuing our efforts to reach a new kind of thinking which may help, as Classical philosophy did for many centuries, to understand the central tenets of Christianity in a new light. Philosophy was considered for a long time as the preamble to theology. As philosophy came to be seen as the realm of the sciences in modernity, especially the discipline to clarify methodology, the long story of the isolation of theology from philosophy and the sciences began. The rise of new philosophical endeavors in modernity, such as rationalism, deism and idealism, could not reestablish the role of philosophy as an introduction to theology in scholarship and research. Instead, philosophy appeared in many ways as the rival of theology, either in the form of entering and reshaping, or denying the validity of, the theological realm. This situation changed after the publication of the papal encyclical Aeterni Patris, which attempted to reestablish traditional philosophy on the one hand, and to renew its role as an introduction to theology on the other hand. It seems that, more than a century after the first philosophical encyclical, the situation had not substantially changed. In the B. M. Mezei (*) Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_1

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second philosophical encyclical issued by a pope, Saint John Paul II’s Faith and Reason, philosophy appears not only as the servant of theology, but also as the discipline assisting the human mind in its endeavor of discovering new terrains and finding new interpretations of perennial doctrines. With Faith and Reason, then, the traditional relationship between philosophy and theology fundamentally changed and philosophy was acknowledged to be an important actor in the interpretation of reality—indeed, an actor possessing some role in the drama of theology as well. One of the key sentences in Faith and Reason is the call ‘to prompt, promote and encourage philosophical enquiry.’1 This prompting receives a longer explanation in the following way: … I cannot but encourage philosophers—be they Christian or not—to trust in the power of human reason and not to set themselves goals that are too modest in their philosophizing. The lesson of history in this millennium now drawing to a close shows that this is the path to follow: it is necessary not to abandon the passion for ultimate truth, the eagerness to search for it or the audacity to forge new paths in the search. It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly to run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith thus becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason.2

Philosophy’s daring endeavor to discover ultimate truth is thus encouraged in emphatic words. We can ask: what kind of philosophy is meant by the author of Faith and Reason? The answer appears to be obvious: there is no single, determinate kind of philosophizing urged by the encyclical. It is rather the passion to discover ultimate truth that is placed at the center. This passion may take various forms, and the important thing is not to follow some convenient path but rather to go out and find new ways of philosophy’s ‘audacity’ to search for truth. The encyclical also rightly emphasizes the importance of the self-criticism of philosophy: philosophy is not only the courageous way to discover new interpretations, but also a critical way, i.e., the way of critique and self-critique. In the present volume, the reader will find such courageous, critical and even self-critical attempts at finding and articulating the truth with respect to some fundamental tenets of Christianity. During the two decades after the publication of Faith and Reason, several such philosophical attempts have been formulated. Many of them are ingenious endeavors to create a new form of philosophy, most often a philosophy of religion, in which Christianity’s main tenets are either presupposed or investigated—or sometimes even further developed, in a certain sense.3 While it is advisable to have a 1  Pope John Paul II, Encyclical Letter FIDES ET RATIO of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship between Faith and Reason. Rome: 1998, § 51. 2  Ibid., § 56. 3  See my summary in Balázs M.  Mezei, ‘Renewing Christian Philosophy: An Outline’, in Christian Wisdom Meets Modernity, ed. Kenneth Oakes, Illuminating Modernity Series (New York; London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016), pp.  203–2033. Cf. also Mezei, ‘Catholic Philosophy in the New Millennium’, in Mezei, Religion and Revelation after Auschwitz (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp.  297–317. For an overall criticism of the presuppositions of Christian thinking, cf. Mezei, ‘Demythologizing Christian Philosophy: An Outline’, Logos i ethos 1, no. 34 (2013): pp.  109–146. As for the criticism of the presuppositions of traditional Christian philosophy, see Mezei, ‘Realist Phenomenology and Philosophy of Religion: A Critical Reflection’, Logos i ethos 44, no. 1 (2017): pp. 47–70.

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c­ ritical perspective on such endeavors, it is also important to encourage philosophers to find new ways of philosophizing. This encouragement, in harmony with the words of the encyclical quoted above, is an organic part of the Christian and Catholic tradition beginning with Saint Augustine, through the rich scholastic legacy of the Middle Ages, up to the important endeavors of rationalistic, idealistic and even phenomenological, existentialist and hermeneutical philosophies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In our time, such courageous philosophies, as it were, may be classified into five groups: 1. Histories of philosophy with a vast output on the work of various authors, schools, ages, and traditions; 2. Contemporary continental philosophy, especially phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics and post-modern thought; 3. Contemporary analytic philosophy, especially the various branches of philosophy of religion; 4. New paradigms in philosophical theology with a critical potential vis-à-vis some modern philosophical developments; 5. Certain schools in the theory of science with a strong interest in the reinterpretation of Christianity in harmony with recent scientific advancements. The importance of these developments lies in the fact that the eternal truth of Christianity, with its focus on the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, may be better assessed and newly understood—inasmuch as understanding here is possible—on the basis of intellectual efforts rooted in the best results of contemporary research. We need to be attentive to such developments so that the intellectual situation of our time may become clearer, and the meaning of the truth of Christianity may be better grasped and expressed through the new methodologies, problems and terminologies provided by contemporary scholarship. Let me thus briefly point out the advantages and disadvantages each of the above factors entail with respect to the better understanding we aim at. Ad (1): The historical study of philosophy, and especially of Christianity-oriented thought, has a central importance in any relevant research. The study of the philosophical background of Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas, Pascal or Fénelon has an immense significance in understanding the age and the person in question—and thus also in the understanding of the developments rooted in these ages and persons, developments which shaped the conceptual and logical framework of subsequent works in philosophy and theology. However, the danger in specific historical studies is at least twofold. On the one hand, even in historical studies a certain philosophical understanding is presupposed which is not made explicit and thus may determine the thought of a researcher in a negative way. Such research must avoid a certain self-evident attitude on the part of the historian, which remains blind to the presuppositions entailed in historical studies which are themselves in need of more thorough investigation. For instance, the notion of personhood shows a characteristic difference in the works of Thomas Aquinas and Immanuel Kant. This difference must be taken into consideration, first, in any analysis of personhood in the two

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authors respectively. Secondly, and more importantly, the continuous development of the meaning of this term is in need of overall reflection. By presupposing a common notion of personhood which is not verifiable in the work of a given author—in spite of the use of the corresponding expression in a given language—one distorts the thought of that author and opens the way to an interpretation detrimental to the true understanding of the work and the age of the author. Ad (2): Contemporary continental philosophy has various sources, namely phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, structuralism, post-structuralist and post-modern thought. Almost all these developments have included the work of authors with a relevant interest in philosophical theology. In phenomenology, such authors make a long list, beginning with Franz Brentano, through Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger, to Karl Jaspers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, William Desmond or Josef Seifert. In hermeneutics, structuralism, and post-modern thought, some form of a theological interest comes to the fore in the work of such authors as Paul Ricœur, Michel Henry, Jacques Derrida, John Caputo, Gianni Vattimo, or most recently, Slavoj Žižek. The work, or even simply the proposals, of these authors and other thinkers amply demonstrates the array of research realized in search of a better form of philosophy capable of interpreting, introducing, perhaps even assisting, the theological realm in its own way. Let me mention as a characteristic example the case of Merleau-Ponty. Only a few readers of this ingenious French philosopher realize that the driving force behind his work was, indeed, the author’s desire to understand the difference and unity of faith and reason, as he explains it in In Praise of Philosophy in 1953. A similar phenomenon is observable in the work of authors otherwise in many ways uninterested in the problems of Christianity. These efforts make it probable that the problem of theology, especially of Christian theology, has never really disappeared from the scope of philosophy, and that the silence we perceive in certain decades and in the work of certain authors only introduces the revival of a renewed interest. This revival and renewal also makes it probable that the theological interest of philosophy will lead to new ways forward and new proposals which deserve the attention of the theologian. What may be seen as the negative side of all these developments is their often strange interpretations of fundamental Christian doctrines, interpretations which open the way to full-fledged misunderstandings. Here the critical perspective is urgently needed, and reflection of this sort can help the philosophers themselves, as well as their readers, to develop a more sophisticated and less one-sided understanding of the nature of the divine. However, as Étienne Gilson put it, [w]e may wholly disagree with Hegel or with Comte, but nobody can read their encyclopedias without finding there an inexhaustible source of partial truths and of acute observations.4

4  Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1950), p. 301.

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Gilson’s judgment may be read as confirmation of the encouragement offered by Faith and Reason. However, the encyclical—corresponding to our intellectual situation today—puts a stronger emphasis on support and assistance of philosophies which may become ‘inexhaustible source[s] of partial truths and acute observations.’ Ad (3): A similarly rich development can be observed in Anglo-American philosophy. In spite of the skeptical thought widespread during the 1930s and 40s in the various forms of positivism, renewed interest in theological questions effected its return already in the work of A. N. Whitehead, F. Copleston, and others. Whitehead’s theological philosophy has created its own school and inspired a number of important philosophers through its logical precision and metaphysical openness. After 1945, the two most important philosophers of religion, both inspired by the possibility of connecting rigorous scientific thinking with theological interests, have been Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga. These authors are too well-known to explain their significance here, even if this significance is very different in their respective cases. Swinburne’s main line of thought originates in a sharp interpretation of philosophy of science, while Plantinga’s work is based on an innovative logical analysis. These authors have instigated a wave of tremendous interest in philosophy of religion, an interest expressed in renewed atheistic proposals as well as novel forms of philosophical theologies. One cannot say that out of these efforts the grand new philosophy, as a new introduction to theology, has already been born, but we certainly see a swarm of philosophies attempting the reinterpretation of theological doctrines in new ways and new forms. It is part and parcel of these attempts that thorough-going analytical works have been produced with the intention to make use of the Thomistic tradition in the contemporary understanding of Christianity. As a disadvantage of this rise of analytic philosophies of religion, and especially of Christianity, we might mention their relative indifference to the mystical dimensions of religion. Indeed, the strong emphasis on methodology, logic, and rigorous reasoning makes it difficult, though not at all impossible, to reflect on mystery. Some authors of the same circles, such as William Alston or Nelson Pike, have demonstrated the applicability of analytical thinking even in an understanding of the mystical side of religion. It is, at the same time, important to note that, by discussing mystery in a language strongly non-mysterious, the mystery-character of mystery may be eclipsed. A conformist attitude to language—which tends to skip the effort of an inspired reading—may also have the negative impact on the reception of the mystical dimension into analytical philosophy. Ad (4): Some of the developments in Anglo-American thought belong to the circle of new paradigms in philosophical theology with a critical potential vis-à-vis some modern philosophical developments. Such is the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement, which offers a strong criticism of those atheistic post-modern theories which, especially in line with Marxist developments, tried to discard any relevance of religious thought, especially Christian theology. This school often appears as a new kind of apologetics, and thus it often cooperates with other schools of an apologetic character in both continental and Anglo-American thought, such as those schools issuing from the work of Jean-Luc Marion or Cyril O’Regan. These authors may be very far

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from one another in a number of ways, yet their thought serves a better understanding of Christianity in the framework of a philosophical theology in our age. Similarly, the ‘non-standard radical philosophical theology’, as presented in one of the essays in the present volume, aims at a renewed understanding of the fundamental tenets of Christianity through a new method, and in the framework of a peculiar approach to theological themes. All these philosophies contain a certain criticism of the modern development of ideas, although they differ in their interpretation of the importance of certain evolutions in modernity. While German philosophy is crucially important for such authors as Miklós Vetö, for others, this philosophy contains not only the seed, but even the full fruit of Gnostic views in many ways reminiscent of the heretical schools at the beginning of Christian history. As a disadvantage of this rich harvest of philosophical thought we might point precisely to their methodological and conceptual heterogeneity. While some of these systems, such as that of Josef Seifert, are highly developed methodologically, other approaches lack such an awareness, and thus their conceptual structure is less developed. An additional problem appears in the strong difference present among methodologically and conceptually well-formed attempts, such as the thought of Marion and Seifert. They both derive many of their tools and insights from the tradition of phenomenology, but while the background for Marion is French philosophy, especially Lévinas, for Josef Seifert it is the tradition of realist phenomenology with its analytical tools of investigation originating in the work of Franz Brentano and Dietrich von Hildebrand. It is difficult to build bridges among such authors and their schools, even as it may become possible at some points, given some of the notional and methodological convergences in these works.5 Ad (5): Finally, let me mention the various scientific theories which attempt to develop a reinterpretation, and often also the verification, of Christian doctrines. Debates concerning the right interpretation of modern and contemporary scientific developments with respect to traditional Christian views have been widespread from the beginning of modernity. However, the scientific revolutions during the twentieth century revived some of the old debates. Alister McGrath and some other authors in his school have proposed a scientific underpinning of basic Christian doctrines. Keith Ward developed a reinterpretation of Christian theism in light of contemporary science. Ervin László and his followers have tried to develop the grand theory of human knowledge with an emphatically spiritual dimension close to some of the central Christian doctrines. The list can be continued, but it is more important to note that contemporary science is very far from offering a plain refutation of the teachings of Christianity. Rather, it seems, some interpretations of science help us understand better these teachings and interpret them as important points in a new metaphysics in the making.6 I do not want to say that such a ­metaphysics, if the use of this word is appropriate here, is a necessity, but I suggest 5  I have attempted a comparative approach in my ‘Catholic Philosophy in the New Millennium’, cited above. 6  Cf. Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003).

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that the variety and richness of all these approaches to the meaning of Christian doctrines on the basis of contemporary science have the clear promise of a maintained revival of philosophies interpreting these doctrines and helping to reach a deeper understanding of our traditions. As a disadvantage of these scientific endeavors we may mention again that the fundamental Christian tenets are mysteries, and thus their theories must contain the character of mystery, if not in the form of style, then certainly in content. Ervin László’s grand new theory, for instance, offers an ambitious interpretation of quantum theory but it appears to be insensitive to the differences various religions and traditions outline in their understanding of the spiritual realm. It is indeed very important to connect, on the theoretical level, near death experiences and similar phenomena with scientific results and religious doctrines. However, it shows some lack of theological sophistication to presuppose, as László does, that the spiritual background of all religions is the same in a fundamental sense, while this sense is not explained in terms of relevant expertise. Indeed, the aim of the present volume is to offer a contribution to these efforts in the field of philosophical theology, that is to say, in philosophy open to theological problems. In this sense, the volume stands indeed at the crossroads of contemporary problems. Miklós Vetö summarizes his philosophical understanding of God on the basis of his long and rich career as a philosopher and a historian of philosophy. God is the totally other who expresses himself in love for the created world. The world as created necessarily presupposes its creator and the distinction between the world and its creator makes the freedom of the creation possible. While Vetö is connected to some of the most important developments in contemporary French philosophy, such as Lévinas and Marion, his way relies on an interpretation of Kant and Classical German philosophy with an additional interest in the tradition of mysticism. In fact, Vetö’s work takes into consideration the fact that mystery is such that rational thinking cannot exhaust it fully. William Desmond offers a sophisticated discussion of Jean-Luc Marion’s understanding of the saturated phenomenon and presents his own idea of, as he puts it, the porosity of being, namely the ‘hyperboles of being’. There are four hyperboles, the idiocy of being, the aesthetics of happening, the erotics of selving, and the agapeics of community. These hyperboles define the peaks of immanence in which transcendence communicates itself. Professor Desmond’s fine essay shows not only the fruitful effects of Marion’s thought but also the merits of a careful, sensitive and experience-laden philosophical-theological thinking well-seated in the heart of the continental tradition and expressed in a language both philosophical and poetic. This kind of philosophy imbues the interpretation of the basic Christian doctrines in a way both natural and open to the presence of transcendence. Savina Raynaud offers an excellent linguistic analysis of the problem of the naming of God by raising the problem of the expression ‘God’. The question is, more precisely, whether ‘god’ is a proper or a common name. Without offering an easy solution to this problem, Professor Raynaud escorts the reader through the difficult terrain of linguistics, showing the various models describing the mechanisms of reference in human language. She also invokes some biblical verses to demonstrate

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that calling God by name has never been a simple task. Finally, she puts the problematic into the context of Italian philosophy of language of the past century. In his text entitled ‘The Limits of Univocity in Interreligious Relationality’, Richard Schenk describes the difficulties of interreligious discussions with respect to various proposals that have surfaced during the past centuries, especially the theory of John Hick and his followers. Professor Schenk thoroughly analyzes the logical possibilities of interreligious dialogue with a special emphasis on the distinction between exclusivist and pluralist theories. He carefully points out, especially on the basis of Raimundo Panikkar’s work, the difficulties of univocal pluralistic theories which argue for the overall relativity of religious forms and the impossibility of an exclusive position with respect to one religion. Richard Schenk’s solution is a threefold procedure involving the acknowledgment of ambivalence of religious expressions, the respect for each other’s convictions and traditions, and thirdly the learning process of self-reflection based on rereading and reinterpreting our own fundamental texts. In his essay, István M.  Fehér discusses the mutual influence of theology and philosophy in Martin Heidegger’s work. Professor Fehér analyses various periods of the author and emphasizes the theological openness of a philosophy which was originally construed in purely philosophical terms. However, behind the pure philosophy, both the life of Heidegger and the influences he received prove the importance of the theological dimension in his work. Since Heidegger’s work is the greatest influential factor behind almost every sort of continental philosophy of religion, this piece of Professor Fehér helps the reader to have a clear grasp of the reasons for Heidegger’s impact. Balázs M.  Mezei’s essay describes the outlines of the so-called non-standard radical philosophical theology, a newly developed philosophical approach to the problem of divine revelation. As Professor Mezei points out, the notion of revelation is merely presupposed but not properly conceived in theology, because theology considers revelation as its axiom and focuses on content-type analysis. In contrast, a radical philosophical theology raises the question ‘what is revelation?’ in its entirety and offers a description along the lines of philosophical and theological reflection. In this way, it outlines a philosophical theology which is termed ‘apocalyptic,’ not because of the popular and misleading meaning of ‘apocalypse’, but because its subject matter is revelation—in Greek, apocalypsis. It is a phenomenological approach to the problem, because its framework is the self-communicating fact of revelation. In this apocalyptic phenomenology, as the title of the essay suggests, a new form of philosophical reflection on Christianity becomes possible. Cyril O’Regan’s text, entitled ‘Žižek and the Theological Foundation of the Secular’, focuses on the work of one of our influential contemporaries, the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The connection between the work of Professor O’Regan and Žižek is given in the latter’s work on the philosophy of Hegel, the basis of his kind of Marxism. While Žižek develops Marxism along the lines of some ­contemporary French commentators, he remains open to a certain evaluation of Christianity and theology. This evaluation originates in Hegel’s assessments of Christianity and has led to his co-authoring the popular work The Monstrosity of

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Christ with the theologian John Milbank. Professor O’Regan shows how this theological interpretation is decisive in Žižek’s work and points out the intriguing presence of a certain theological interest, even a tendency to ‘re-mythologize’ in a self-confessed radically secularist philosopher. Francesca Aran Murphy shows in her text, entitled ‘Étienne Gilson and Marie-­ Dominique Chenu: “Chosisme”’, that Gilson’s peculiar sort of Thomism was not a popular option at the time of its first presentation. On the contrary, Gilson needed time and the assistance of influential friends to emerge as one of the main interpreters of the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas. In the period between the two World Wars, Gilson’s scholarly work and the influence of nouvelle théologie signaled the emergence of new approaches that led, after 1945, to important changes of emphasis in the theological and philosophical fields. Gilson played a decisive role in these changes and developed a certain philosophical interpretation which facilitated a better and more up-to-date understanding of the importance of Thomas’s theological work. This rich essay also shows the importance of Gilson even in our day, and the possibility of philosophical scholarship influencing the theological realm in a positive way. John Betz’s ‘Christian Metaphysics: Between East and West’ offers a comparative investigation of the notion of the analogia entis, developed in a new form in the last century especially by Erich Przywara, with respect to three distinct problems. First, Professor Betz explains the reason why Karl Barth’s critique of the classical notion of analogy is mistaken. Second, he shows the relevance of the notion of analogy to the understanding of human beings from the theological point of view. Finally, he develops this analogical anthropology on the basis of the sophiology of Eastern Orthodox authors, especially the works of Florovsky, Solovyov, Florensky, and Bulgakov. In John Betz’s understanding, the notion of analogia entis provides us with a most useful, and theologically as well as philosophically enlightening, understanding of reality, which shows the common truth of various traditions, the traditions of the Christian East and the Christian West. István Czakó’s ‘Appropriation and Polemics: Karl Jaspers’ Criticism of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Religion’ investigates the character of Kierkegaard’s writing and points out the difficulty in describing the Danish author as a philosopher of religion. On the other hand, Kierkegaard may not have reached the popularity he gained during the twentieth century without the thorough-going reception of Karl Jaspers. Jaspers’ discussions of Kierkegaard’s thought from the early 1920s introduced him into the debates which are often seen as the matrix of emerging existential philosophy. However, Jaspers’ appropriation of Kierkegaard’s philosophy was one-sided and emphasized more the later period of the writer. On a more balanced view, Jaspers’ interpretations offer only an aspect of the rich work of the Danish author. As Professor Czakó explains, however, even a more balanced reception, and a less sharp criticism by Jaspers, would still have led to the influence Kierkegaard enjoys today among philosophers of religion. In his intriguing article on Harry Frankfurt, Kenneth Oakes introduces his readers to the rich work of Frankfurt, mainly known from his popular writing On Bullshit. As it turns out, even On Bullshit points to a deep and thorough-going theory of truth, because it establishes a category beyond the division of telling the truth/

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telling a lie. Bullshit is avoiding both and thus it makes problematic a traditional conception of truth as opposed to lying. Professor Oakes explains that Frankfurt’s lesser known essay, On Truth, develops a complex theory. However, Frankfurt has an even more interesting proposal important for philosophers as well as theologians, contained in his work, The Reasons of Love. In this work, Frankfurt explains the peculiar character of human love in a way which strikes the readers with its originality. Most importantly, love is the creation of the lover on the basis of the beloved in such a way that the content of love cannot be described as an objective state of affairs. Love is love just because it is created and practiced freely by the lover with respect to the beloved. In his essay, Matthew Z. Vale investigates Erich Przywara’s interpretation of the philosophical work of Max Scheler. The chapter traces some of Przywara’s judgments provoked by Scheler, and it does so by closely tracing Przywara’s critical engagement with Scheler’s ‘primacy of love’—his notion of phenomenology as a reduction to a being-less horizon of the person, who is a kind of pre- or extraontological love-act. Przywara’s main response is that Scheler’s talk of the love-act ‘before’ or ‘without’ being is really only speaking of being by other means; rather than a metaphysics of being as being, Scheler holds a metaphysics of being as loveact. This analysis helps the reader to gain an insight into the intricate debates between the emerging phenomenologies of religion during the first half of the twentieth century and the self-critically changing approach of Thomistic and NeoThomistic thought of the same period. The debate gains a special importance in view of the fact that both impulses played an important role in the thought of John Paul II, which can be detected in his encyclical letter Fides et ratio. As to the coherence of the themes covered in this volume, let me refer to the ‘theology of the people’ often cited as the intellectual background of Pope Francis.7 The ‘sensus populi’ is mainly interpreted in terms of the sensitivity of the socially disadvantaged. However, we may also talk about a sort of ‘sensus populi’ of academic researchers trying to discover uncommon dimensions in contemporary discussions. The reader who goes through the chapters of this volume will see that among the many topics and authors covered are ones often disregarded in academic circles. Gilson, Jaspers, Przywara, Žižek and others have been neglected by many influential authors, as have been a number of the subjects covered here, such as interreligious dialogue, the hyperboles of being, or various aspects of phenomenological theology. In this way, the contributors have followed the parable in the Gospel of Luke: ‘Or what woman, having ten silver coins, if she loses one coin, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?’ (Luke 15:8). Indeed, all the authors in this volume have lit a light and made their attempt to find a lost coin in the house of our philosophical and theological traditions. I offer this volume to the interested reader as part and parcel of our common work towards the appropriate awareness of the importance of Christianity in philosophy both historical and systematic. As it seems, the advancing of philosophy is dependent on the knowledge of our sources and developments, just as it is depen Cf. Rafael Luciani, Pope Francis and the Theology of the People (New York: Orbis Books), 2017.

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dent on continuing dialogue with the philosophical results of non-Christian cultures. This dialogue has become not only possible, but also necessary in the context of globalization—indeed, in the context of a historical development of the original matrix of Christianity. If today we often face a denial of the fact of the basic importance of Christianity in philosophy, that is only the sign of the importance, concealed or express, of the basic tenets of Christianity in the self-interpretation of philosophy. For the denial of a fact can actually equal its confirmation—i.e., the confirmation of the subliminal presence and importance of that fact. The future of philosophy is dependent on the open acknowledgment of this importance, and it is dependent on the work we carry out on the appropriation of our traditions—in a critical, even in a polemical way. This work is, as our underlying conviction suggests, the prerequisite of the renewal of the theological dimension of our culture.

Bibliography Barr, Stephen M. 2003. Modern Physics and Ancient Faith. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Gilson, Étienne. 1950. The Unity of Philosophical Experience. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. John Paul II. 1998. Encyclical Letter FIDES ET RATIO of the Supreme Pontiff John Paul II to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Relationship between Faith and Reason. Rome. http:// w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_14091998_fideset-ratio.html. Accessed 19 July 2017. László, Ervin. 2016. What Is Reality? The New Map of Cosmos and Consciousness. New York: Select Books. Luciani, Rafael. 2017. Pope Francis and the Theology of the People. New York: Orbis Books. Mezei, Balázs M. 2013a. Catholic Philosophy in the New Millennium. In Religion and Revelation After Auschwitz, ed. Balázs M. Mezei, 297–317. New York: Bloomsbury. ———. 2013b. Demythologizing Christian Philosophy: An Outline. Logos i ethos 1 (34): 109–146. ———. 2017. Realist Phenomenology and Philosophy of Religion: A Critical Reflection. Logos i ethos 44 (1): 47–70. ———. 2016. Renewing Christian Philosophy: An Outline. In Christian Wisdom Meets Modernity, Illuminating Modernity Series, ed. Kenneth Oakes, 203–233. New York/London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Chapter 2

God and Religion Miklós Vetö

2.1  Introduction In our Christian or post-Christian universe, these two names, these two notions in our title—if you will, these two themes—are naturally linked, and difficult to dissociate. Nonetheless, this apparent indissociability is, strictly speaking, really only peculiar to the biblical, post-biblical, and Islamic cultural sphere. In these last centuries, even from within this same milieu, these two notions have come to seem detachable from one another, each pretending to a legitimacy of its own, in fact and in practice. These two notions can be conjugated in three ways: God without religion, religion without God, and God with religion. ‘God without religion’ characterizes above all Protestant orthodoxy, where the sovereignty of the Word and the exclusivity of revelation in relation to every natural or conventional structure leaves hardly any place for religion. At the other end of the spectrum, we find the great multiplicity of doctrines, organizations, and religious rites which, it seems, are only so many forms and moments of natural religion—not in the sense of Enlightenment rationalism’s ‘within the boundaries of reason alone’, stripped of rites and dogmas, but rather in the sense of the various translations and expressions of social and individual immanence. It is this religion that has been described and deduced by the philosophies and sociologies of the last two centuries. The last variation is that one, finally, which combines the two notions, and which Islam, Judaism, and above all, Catholic and Orthodox Christianities, make manifest and live out. The aim of this paper is to explain and to establish conceptually the necessary and mutual belonging-together of these two themes. One has to recognize that religion naturally calls out to God, and that its eidetic structures reflect the eidos English translation from the French original by Matthew Z. Vale. M. Vetö (*) University of Poitiers, Emeritus, Poitiers, France © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_2

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of God. In my view—and this is my principal affirmation—even if we know that ‘God is love’, He first appears to human consciousness as ‘Other’, and religion is that method by which humans articulate the presence of this absent one, this Other. I begin from the epistemological fact that there is, within the human mind and heart, a place for this Other. And from there—cognizant though I am of the paradox inherent in any form of deducing the Other from out of the depths of that which is not the Other—I will attempt to elaborate an eidetic metaphysics of religion, culminating in an eidetic metaphysics of the Christian religion. But this Christian metaphysics is best constructed over against the backdrop of these two other possibilities, these two other conceptions of religion. The first is the quasi-impossibility of religion under the crushing weight of transcendence. The second is religion’s rich and exuberant immanent unfolding, which would render religion quasi-independent of any true transcendence.

2.2  T  he Transcendence of God and the Immanence of Religion The philosophical or theological thesis of God without religion has been prescribed and professed by Protestant orthodoxy. The Reformers denounced the semi-­ superstitious customs of the Catholic Church and the survival of pagan elements— those rites and sacraments which seemed to enchain God and subject Him to the necessities and the logics of the world. With implacable rigidity the Reformers indicted the religion of their Catholic adversaries, and by way of indicting their religion, finally indicted religion itself. In religion, man appeals to mediators between himself and the Most High. Yet this mediation infringes upon divine Sovereignty; it fails to respect its radical transcendence. For lack of any better options, religion did have a role to play before revelation, in the ages before any true communication between God and the world. But the advent of revelation signals a return to the ‘suppression of religion’.1 Religion has lost all utility, even curdled into something transgressive and occult, yet very real. The Gospel—Luther railed—has no enemies more pernicious than ‘pious’ men.2 Religious piety—Barth will teach— is the final entrenchment of the natural man, who wishes, from out of himself and by his own powers, to come to meet God.3 Doubtless, this intransigent view has its grandeur; it remains a living source of inspiration and action. But strictly speaking, it cannot, as such, be maintained. It is hardly possible in practice and indefensible 1  Karl Barth, Die kirchliche Dogmatik, vol. I/2, Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes (Zürich: Zollikon, 1948), p. 304. 2  Martin Luther, D.  Martin Luthers Werke, Abteilung Schriften, vol. LII, Hauspostille (Weimar, 1915), p. 71. 3  Karl Barth, Römerbrief (München: 1933), p. 229. For Brunner, ‘religion is in itself the most indefensible of all human enterprises.’ Heinz Zahrnt, Aux prises avec Dieu. La théologie protestante au XXè siècle, trans. A. Liefooghe (Paris: 1969), p. 52.

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in theory. On the one hand, one cannot but speak about God and to God, and even the strictest Biblicism is obliged to accommodate itself to ecclesial structures, liturgical rites, and doctrinal formulae. On the other hand, the exclusion of mediation is a metaphysical hapax. Man—as we will see below—possesses, inscribed in his very essence, the aspiration, or at least the reference, towards transcendence. And transcendence—or more precisely, the Transcendent One—desires to place itself within the range and capacity of the creature. The second possible relation between these two notions—God and religion—is the negative one: to conceive of religion without God. For those situated within the tradition of theist cultures, this conception appears rather absurd. Yet the notion grows more and more plausible to our contemporaries, who are ultimately undertaking nothing other than a revival of the antique tradition of paganism, as well as of the Hinduism and Buddhism of our day.4 These sorts of religions know of a profusion of gods, heroes, and demons, yet their essential aspect is not their polytheism, but rather the absence of a transcendent God overarching the multifarious pantheons.5 These religions do nothing but reflect and articulate the natural sphere in which humans live, and the society of which they form a part. And there is certainly no lack of philosophical and sociological theories which generalize and formalize these sorts of immanent belief systems. Philosophy of religion believes itself capable of recovering, at the core of this plurality of deities and rituals, a common originary principle: the sacred, or numinous. From a properly philosophical point of view, the sacred and the numinous have a status one might call hybrid. Both are situated within the world (within nature, or society), yet both stand with one foot partially outside the world. Plato’s description of human beings—those plants with roots in the heavens—seems to apply also to these two primal principles of religion.6 Yet the resemblance does not go very far. The feeling of fear and reverence, the intuition of something surpassing us on every side, does not yet mean the discovery of an authentic transcendence. Indeed, herein one finds the best of Schleiermacher’s philosophy of religion, to this day the most potent attempt at conceptually grounding a religion of immanence, a religion without God. Schleiermacher addressed his Speeches on Religion to its ‘cultured despisers’, and his apology unfolds by abandoning all reference to transcendence. The Speeches dissociate religion from morality and metaphysics. They assign religion to its own ‘province’, yet this proper ‘province’ is none other than the ‘feeling of absolute dependence with regard to the universe’.7 To be religious is to return to the experience of this sui generis and original feeling of dependence; consequently, the intentional object of the feeling is merely the world, that is to say, a sphere of radical immanence. This  To the same point, one could equally cite the various ecologisms of our time.  Popular Buddhism acknowledges a multitude of gods and demons which are extinguished by their purified, enlightened forms. However, this atheistic Buddhism finally reverts to a radical immanentism. 6  Plato, Timaeus 90b. 7  Cf. Miklós Vetö, De Kant à Schelling. Les deux voies de l’idéalisme allemand, vol. II (Grenoble: 2000), p. 442. 4 5

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doctrine could admit of a God, but it neither requires nor implies one.8 However, the conundrum is precisely that the category of ‘the religious’ lies within a sphere of immanence, even while holiness and divinity only receive their eidetic and metaphysical sense from a return to transcendence, to the Other.

2.3  God as the Other Religion is founded upon transcendence. It only is, and only is what it is, in its return to transcendence. And its truth, its validity is a function of the authenticity of the moment of transcendence it is supposed to manifest. Religions of nature transact in natural structures, natural forces, and natural beings, and very often these structures are amazing, and these forces sublimely powerful. In essence, the religion of nature effects a return to the amazing and the powerful. The amazing and the powerful can impress and even fascinate, yet for all that, they are not in themselves proper to religion. On the contrary, they only impress and fascinate insofar as they conjure up a reality entirely different from immanent realities—differing in power, in intensity, and in its manner of presenting itself and exerting itself upon the world. The things of religion belong to a region entirely different from the quotidian and the rote, a region different, in short, from all the gradations of the immanent. Nonetheless, difference still does not on its own equate with transcendence. In a certain sense, ‘the different’ remains in continuity with the thing from which it differs. Certainly, our intuition presents it to us as being situated elsewhere in respect to our place, but always from within a horizontal and analogous dimension. And furthermore, ‘the different’ is devoid of any personal quality which eo ipso could render it effectively elsewhere from, and otherwise than, our world. God is the principle and the animating impulse for all the aspirations towards transcendence which, metaphysically, characterize religion. But how ought we describe the concept of God? God is, of course, the ultimate horizon of the real in its entirety, yet ‘God’ is not a metaphysical concept. The classical philosophies of the West attempted to transcribe Him within the terms that come closest to His perfection and transcendence. And so philosophy spoke of being. Yet being is the principle and root, the origin and term of beings, and as such—regardless of what Heidegger says—does not stand in radical discontinuity with them. Philosophy speaks equally of eternity, omnipotence, omnipresence. However, in each case, God is defined as the maximum in relation to that which He is not. He is that which is beyond all time, all potency, and all presence, yet in the end He is understood by taking time, power, and place as the points of departure. The discourse would then have to be radicalized and adopt the attitude of negative theology. Henceforward God is no longer a quantitative exemplum of a quality; on the contrary, He is irreducibly opposed to all quality. God is now defined not by that which is less, by that 8  As a Baudelaire will declare: ‘even were God not to exist, yet would religion be holy, divine’; in J.-F. Marquet, Le vitrail et l’énigme. Dialogue avec Philippe Soual (Paris: 2013), p. 117.

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which is weaker than He or limited by Him; He is now defined by that which He is not. This procedure has an authentic radicality to it, yet it still falls short of the alterity proper to the transcendent. There thus remains for us only the unique category of the Other to designate God. Contrary to the different, the Other harbours a personal quality and everywhere appears as a non-referential notion. Since the Sophist, the Other has been thought in relation to the same. The same, however, is finally a synthetic concept, constituted by returning upon the self, upon oneself, while the Other imposes itself immediately and directly. As Lévinas writes, the alterity of the Other does not result from His identity, but constitutes it.9 The Other is not conceived of against the backdrop of some opposite; rather, it is on the basis of its metaphysical condition of ‘other’ that its identity is affirmed. Incidentally, this non-referentiality, or non-relativity, is not exclusive to the Other. There is an abundance of realities whose excellence and grandeur come into view as such without reference to a dialectical counterpart. Some say it is against the backdrop of one being’s ugliness that we better see the beauty of another. Nevertheless, the beautiful would be beautiful even in the absence of every non-beautiful entity.10 Were someone to visit an art gallery and be short of time, he could choose only to look at the most beautiful canvases. But one could just as easily imagine visiting and exhibition in which all the paintings were beautiful in themselves, and not in reference to others. The case of unreal comparisons furnishes further analogous examples that refuse dialectic. Merleau-Ponty made the profound observation that we often avail ourselves of terms like ‘enormous’ or ‘far away’ without the implication of any comparison at all.11 One can have an intuition of an effort as ‘enormous’ without thereby comparing it to a ‘limited’ or ‘moderate’ effort that would be concealing itself, so to speak, in the background of the intuition. One could just as equally perceive a stand of trees on the hillside opposite the river, without by that token consciously or unconsciously referring oneself to a copse that lies only 20 m away. As for God, He constitutes the prime exemplum of these higher concepts which refuse all comparison,12 and which obtain and signify in and of themselves. That is, He is the Other without any reference whatsoever to that which He is not.

2.4  Religion: The Eidetics of the Other God is the Other, the Other properly speaking—or rather, the single true Other. He is that transcendence which in no way implies any immanence; the beyond which is to be conceived without thinking any ‘this-side’. On the other hand, immanence has  Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infinité (La Haye: 1968), p. 229.  Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Liturgie cosmique. Maxime le Confesseur, trans. L. Lhaumet and H.-A. Prentout (Paris: Aubier, 1947), p. 83. 11  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception (Gallimard: Paris, 1945), p. 308. 12  Cf. Isaiah 40:25; 46:5, etc. 9

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inscribed transcendence within itself; or more precisely, it has inscribed within itself the trace or reflection of transcendence. Here we have arrived at a notion not far from the very ancient and commonly encountered teaching on the finite’s necessarily returning to the infinite. Nonetheless, our intention here is to bracket the ontological implications of this intuition in order to limit our analysis to religion. Our thesis is that religion pertains to that which one could rightly call the essence of human being. Religion is in fact the form par excellence of the beyond’s return to itself which is the principal characteristic, if you will, the formal difference, of this essence. A great spiritual writer of the seventeenth century has written that ‘the nature of man was not created to remain within the terms of its nature’; it is summoned to go beyond itself.13 Quite unlike the various beings which exist only under the aspect of the actualization of their immanent potentialities—and who are thereby satisfied—man is not satisfied. He can and he must surpass himself. He may realize this surpassing of self in various ways: in physical effort, artistic creation, in the moral acts which can lead all the way to self-sacrifice. Nevertheless, these acts of self-surpassing which manifest man’s condition as insufficient in himself only find their eidetic—and eventually, metaphysical—consummation in religion, which, so to speak, thematizes and makes explicit this turning towards the Other. God is the Other—‘the Other’ properly speaking—and religion is the sphere in which He is reflected, or rather, the sphere where are located the eidē which indicate His trace, and which make it possible to think of Him, to invoke Him, and to turn oneself towards Him. Religion would appear to have three major registers: social organization, doctrine, and cult. Undoubtedly, liturgy implies both social and doctrinal orders; but strictly speaking, it is the cult which constitutes and determines the religious sphere. This religious sphere is the repository of these reflections of the Other and its presence, a presence indirect, of course, yet discernible and recognizable. The religious sphere spells out these reflections, unveils and explicates them; it applies itself in turning towards the Other, in attempting its ascent (or assent) to the Other. Religion reflects the other in a myriad of ways and across an infinity of modalities, yet all these approaches fall into two major types. According to the first, the Other appears by taking immanence, and not itself, as the point of departure. In the second, the possibility seems to arise of uncovering traces of the Other in the very heart of immanence. Cultic life, along with the various other rules of life of religious man, belongs to the categories of the different and the separate. Certainly, the different does not manifest the Other, but at the very least it prepares for the expression of the Other. From the beginning, human beings have derived satisfaction from interrupting the monotony, that disordered succession of events that otherwise comprises life. The most primitive form of this interruption is the introduction of difference. There now appear some days, some hours, that are different than others—days and hours in which founding moments, moments of importance, are recalled. And there are places different than the places where the everyday unfolds, places where one might search out once more the shadow or the trace of the Other. In the same way, too, 13

 Pierre de Bérulle, Oeuvres Complètes, vol. 4, Oeuvres de piété 204 (Paris: Cerf, 1996), p. 85

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there are vestments one wears to mark out a difference from the ordinary dress of work and home life. And finally there are beings, men and women, identified as different from others, in whom one might discover a reflection of the Other, and through whom one hopes to secure access to Him. These instances of difference might be recognized fortuitously, but they can also impose themselves upon man simply by virtue of the structures of nature and the recollection of history. The difference which searches for, and finally institutes, religion is very often marked out and discerned almost instinctively, without any particular effort—and as a result, it tends to take root and perdure. But its advent may also come at the end of an explicit act of separation. Separation is an intentional act which consecrates the different that has been set aside. It transposes the act or the gesture, even the habit of demarcating difference itself, into a delimitation: a delimitation which from the beginning has only ever been performed upon the indistinct body of the everyday, but which, through the act of separation, takes what was simply neutrally different and establishes it within a sui generis difference. Practitioners of the history of religions (and not only they) distinguish between the profane and the sacred. Originally, the sacred seems to have carried the sense of ‘separated’. In that case, the sacred would denote that domain of human existence in particular, and of the world in general, which is as if separated off to one side in order to serve as the context, the instrument, the environment, or even the springboard of perceptions and of actions where man attempts to wrest himself free of the given, and even of immanence itself, in order to launch himself towards the Other. The different as well as the separated both belong to an interior movement of the immanent—and if they truly do tend towards transcendence, they do so only indirectly, by mediation. This method of taking aim at the Other is, finally, ambiguous. The sacred carries the meaning of ‘separated’—that is, originating out of an interior action of the immanent—but it also receives its own content, not subjected to immanence. Quite to the contrary, this content constitutes a reference to the transcendent. Unlike the different and the separated—both of which are set aside arbitrarily, without regard for their eidetic attributes which would call out to the Other—the very essence and attributes of the sacred are in relation with the Other. The sacred is that content which stands eidetically in affinity with the Other, even as it is inscribed in the world. It refers to the Other, it represents the Other, and finally returns to the Other. We can conceive of it as a trace the Other has left behind in the world, and which makes it possible to reach the Other. Nature is the sphere of immanence par excellence—yet the sacred penetrates nature, punctures it. Nature is the totality, the system, if you will, of physical and biological entities existing and subsisting according to their own interior, intrinsic order. And yet there are beings, forces, places, and times which destruct the grand homogeneity, breaking its seal and opening it towards the Other. These realities which are eidetically competent to function as a memento of the Other are hierophanies, that is, moments and figures in which the sacred manifests and articulates itself.14 The sacred is the representative, the

14

 Cf. Mircea Eliade, Traité d’histoire des religions (Paris: 1953), p. 20.

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locum tenens of the Other, while hierophanies represent so many sites of extraterritoriality where resides in the happy milieu of this world below the Other. Religion is carried out above all in cult, and cult avails itself of hierophanies. Hierophanies constitute its milieu, its instruments; it is hierophanies which permit cult to operate according to a logic which, though issuing from elsewhere, is nonetheless well-disposed to embrace the servitude and the exigencies of immanence. Hierophanies exemplify that paradox in which the eidetic contents of realities belonging to the metaphysical domain of immanence reflect transcendence, insofar as they ‘naturalize’ it in the process. The paradigmatic example—and the most ‘successful’ of these reflection-traces of the Other within immanence—is the phenomenon of height. The heights have always been recognized as the place of the divine in the world.15 Revelations take place most often on mountains and hilltops. Height is as if naturally assimilated into the divine. It lies far from the beings of the world, and not only by distance, but also and above all by passing beyond them, even treading them underfoot. And this fact makes manifest a disproportion not only according to the physical order and its sense, but also in a ‘moral’ register. Height has a natural affinity with respectability (or in religious terms, majesty), a manifestation particularly suggestive of alterity as an elite eidos. On the other hand, height is just as capable of exercising a negative influence—a negative hold, so to speak—on knowledge. Whoever is on high is less visible; he could begin to disappear among the clouds, and finally escape the viewer’s grasp entirely. In short, the one who belongs to the heights is as if predestined to partake of the mysterious, one of the principal eidetic moments of the Other. Verticality appears in this way as a paradigmatic dimension of the sacred. However, the sacred can also be discerned at the heart of horizontality, or rather, apart from any spatial dimension. There exist certain beings—animals and plants, and even certain places or natural phenomena— which seem naturally to pick up and concentrate a reflection of otherness, and are thereby predisposed to be regarded as its appointed representatives, and venerated as such. And on the margins of the societal and the natural (or rather, at the blurry region of their confluence), are those professions and vocations and functions and roles which religions understand as the practitioners and illustrators of the natural logic of the sacred.

2.5  The Christian Religion Human religions appear as representations of the sacred as a reflection and expression of God, the Other. This conception expresses the highest form of religion—the highest manifestation of otherness within immanence. Still on this conception, alterity remains thoroughly confined within the depths of immanence. That is, even despite God’s maximal presence in man, one is always dealing with a presence which ultimately only belongs to the eidetic order, and not the ontological. Biblical 15

 Cf. Miklós Vetö, La hauteur de Dieu. Philosophie et Religion (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), p. 75.

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religion, or more specifically, its consummation in the Christian religion, cannot content itself with this immanent alterity and instead subverts the order of the sacred even as it subsumes it. It proclaims loud and clear the abolition of the imperfect, ambiguous, antiquated, decaying structures of the sacred, even as it attempts—consciously or unconsciously, implicitly or explicitly—to retain of them whatever might be preserved. Biblical religion, however, would undertake far more than simply reinterpreting and rearticulating the ancient structures of religion. It proceeds instead to institute a new logic of the sacred, a new logic of the numinous in which the core natural eidetics of reflections and traces of the Other yields place to a system of eidē emerging from renewed intuition, renewed knowledge, of the Other. Christianity marks humanity’s passage from an intuition-conception of God (the Other) secreted by nature, to an intuition-conception engendered by history: the history of salvation, the economy of redemption accomplished by Christ. As a result, the system of hierophanies is transposed into a system of theophanies, or more precisely, christophanies.16 Whereas the system of eidē making up natural religion and the whole structure of the sacred are constituted on the basis of hierophanies, the eidetic moments of the Christian religion are christophanies. Christ has entered into history and now infiltrates the structures of human existence. The Son of God Incarnate has, so to speak, taken these structures into His charge. The magisterium teaches by setting forth from what Christ said and lived. The liturgy exists to re-present and re-speak the various moments of His life. The sacraments have been instituted as so many efficacious reflections of His action. At this point, Protestant theologians could perhaps protest against a domestication of the Most High, and a naturalization of the transcendent, reduced by all appearances to a kind of super-eidos. But christophany is not merely an expression of Christ’s formal causality; above all, it is also the result of His efficient causality. The Son of God has entered into history, and this entrance represented a rupture in the natural order. The eidē of the Christian sacred do not represent simply a gradated articulation of the Word Incarnate; they are instances of His effective action. They present the Other according to its alterity at the heart of the immanence of this world. The truth of the Christian religion depends upon its being set into motion by the divine alterity. This alterity is preserved in two ways. First of all, the incarnate Christ who freely operates throughout the natural and historical structures of the world remains God—remains the Other. And secondly, the most central christophany, the Eucharist, openly places itself in radical opposition to the natural. Even incarnate, the Son remains at the right hand of the Father where, in His Ascension, He has returned ‘for good’. In fact, the radical alterity of God the Redeemer is confirmed most brilliantly precisely by those theologoumena which seem most strongly to compromise His free transcendence. Catholic dogmaticians have taught that the sacraments are valid and efficacious in themselves, ex opere operato. Without doubt, one can and must reinterpret with nuance this theological 16  Cf. Miklós Vetö, De l’hiérophanie jusqu’à la christophanie. Philosophie et religion (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), pp. 89–121.

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naturalism, which seems to condemn the Most High to having been definitively alienated in the world, subjected to the arbitrary will of His creatures. This objectifying naturalism can culminate in the magnificent vision of a Bernanos, or a Graham Greene—but it may just as equally lead to contempt, or to an excessively mechanistic vision of the sacraments and of the Christian life, or to superstitious, even part-­ magical practices.17 However, understood according to their original, profound kernel, all the variations and gradations of the ex opere operato theory have no other function than to express the radical power and efficacy of the action of Him who has descended from His eternal Elsewhere to come to His creatures’ aid. The whole of these eidē which constitute the Christian religion must be conceived of as instituted by the sovereign action of God. How important this is: that this founding action, these foundational acts, should be understood as a kind of continual act of creation—as a perpetual efficacy which both establishes and guarantees the validity and the power of religious structures. In essence, that which has been established by these foundational acts continues, by virtue of God’s unaffected alterity, to exercise His merciful action at the very heart of human immanence. The continual efficacy of the merciful divine action is the simplest and most direct way to preserve divine alterity within the immanent universe of religion. Now, what we have up to now considered in terms of efficient causality (that is, in the ontological register), find their completion in a return to the very heart of eidetic immanence. Nearly two thousand years of apologetic theology has endeavored to demonstrate the truths of the Christian religion on the basis of acknowledging the natural principles within its structures, and highlighting those elements. After all, grace does nothing but perfect nature! So much is certainly the case. Yet when all has been said and all the proofs have been paraded by, the founding alterity of religion—the folly peculiar to the Christian religion—remains. And to comprehend it, one can—one must—pass from demonstration to monstration. This monstration of alterity which founds the Christian religion takes place in the very depths of immanence. Christophanies attempt as far as possible to plant themselves within hierophanies, to recuperate and make use of the natural sacred, and all of the traces and analogies of divinity found in our world. Yet this venerable and legitimate enterprise comes up against its limits—if you will, its critique—with the primal christophany of the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the principal eidos of the Christian religion. It represents the site par excellence of the real presence of the Other become immanent, finite, of this world below. And the eucharistic host is nothing but a piece of bread from which is absent every trace of the natural sacred. As Simone Weil puts it, ‘[t]here is nothing in a piece of bread to which God could attach himself. In this way the ordinary character of the divine presence is made evident.’18

 All of this has been profoundly summed up by a great atheistic philosopher: ‘Black masses, the profanations of hosts … represent so many efforts to confer the character of an object upon the absolute Subject.’ See Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 350. Italics are mine. 18  Simone Weil, Œuvres Complètes, vol. IV.1, Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), p. 319. 17

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The entirely ordinary character of this foundational eidos of the Christian religion seems to testify that in the absence of any resemblance, any analogy, or any natural vestige of alterity, God can call upon any mundane entity to announce His efficacious presence. In the end, the God of Israel is sufficiently powerful to raise up children of Abraham from the stones at our feet (Matthew 3:9)! More precisely though, this omnipotence is exercised not in raising up any human being whatsoever, but rather in raising up children of Abraham—that is, children of the Covenant. That is to say, the radical sovereignty of the action that founds Christianity’s religious structures still does not indicate any untrammeled, arbitrary voluntas. No natural reality whatsoever is capable of reflecting divine alterity, and no cosmic structure is of its own resources capable of effecting the return to the Other. Still, the absolute discontinuity between the Other and everything else does not lead to the rule of irrational contingency. Certainly, natural realities fail to constitute an eidetics of the Christian religion. Nonetheless, God, who has entered into history—or rather, has initiated a history—also establishes a new eidetics which, operating entirely according to its own sui generis logic, continually depends both in its essence and its existence upon Him. And if the Christian religion is to constitute a coherent and autonomous universe, then this history cannot be conceived of without the efficacious presence within it of the God who remains the transcendent Other.

Bibliography Barth, Karl. 1933. Römerbrief. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag. ———. 1948. Die kirchliche Dogmatik. Vol. I/2, Die Lehre vom Wort Gottes. Zürich: Zollikon. de Bérulle, Pierre. 1996. Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. 4, Oeuvres de piété 204. Paris: Cerf. Eliade, Mircea. 1953. Traité d’histoire des religions. Paris: Payot. Lévinas, Emmanuel. 1961. Totalité et Infini. La Haye: Libraire générale française. Luther, Martin. 1915. D.  Martin Luthers Werke, Abteilung Schriften. Vol. LII, Hauspostille. Weimar. Marquet, Jean-François. 2013. Le vitrail et l’énigme. Dialogue avec Philippe Soual. Paris: Les Petites Platons. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1945. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1943. L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. 2001. Über die Religion, Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: de Gruyter. Vetö, Miklós. 2000. De Kant à Schelling. Les deux voies de l’idéalisme allemand. 2 vols. Grenoble: Jérome Millon. ———. 2006a. De l’hiérophante jusqu’à la christophanie. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 2006b. La hauteur de Dieu. Philosophie et Religion. Paris: L’Harmattan. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. 1947. Liturgie cosmique. Maxime le Confesseur. Trans. L. Lhaumet and H.-A. Prentout. Paris: Prentout. Weil, Simone. 2008. Œuvres Complètes. Vol. IV. 1, Formes de l’amour implicite de Dieu. Paris: Gallimard. Zahrnt, Heinz. 1969. Aux prises avec Dieu. La théologie protestante au XXè siècle. Trans. A. Liefooghe. Paris: Cerf.

Chapter 3

On Saturated Phenomena and the Hyperboles of Being William Desmond

3.1  Metaphysics: Not Quite a Has-Been I want to offer a study in contrast between Jean-Luc Marion’s saturated phenomenon and what I call the hyperboles of being. There are significant overlaps between these, and some striking convergences, but at the outset there is a crucial divergence worth mentioning about the status of metaphysics. Given that Marion’s work is saturated with the rhetoric of post-metaphysical philosophy, represented paradigmatically in his version of phenomenology, some brief remarks on how I understand metaphysics are appropriate. One is cognizant of the prevalence of contemporary claims about the overcoming (Überwindung) of metaphysics (Heidegger), or the destruction (Destruktion) of the history of metaphysics (Heidegger again), or the scientistic repudiation of metaphysics (positivism, overt or covert), the deconstruction of metaphysics (Derrida), or post-metaphysical thinking (Habermas, for instance). Aristotle offers to many an inaugural definition of the nature of metaphysics in terms of a threefold task, namely,  as first philosophy (protē philosophia) treating of first causes (aitiai) or principles (archai), as the science of being qua being, and as the science of the highest being, ho theos, the divine. Then there is the later more scholastic systematization

Some of the material in this essay has appeared in a different form in my book, The Voiding of Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2019). Used with permission. W. Desmond (*) Villanova University, Villanova, PA, USA Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Emeritus, Leuven, Belgium e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_3

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of metaphysics in terms of metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis, the first dealing with being as ens commune, the second dealing with God, the soul and the world. This definition of scholastic rationalism is at work in Kant’s critique of metaphysics, and also in Hegel’s post-Kantian science of logic (his ‘objective logic’, he claims, takes the place of metaphysica generalis or ‘ontology’).1 My point is not any display of erudite references but because such references form the context of Marion’s claim that phenomenology now replaces metaphysics as first philosophy.2 It may well be that both the Aristotelian and scholastic-­ rationalist definitions and practices of metaphysics do not fully answer thought, perhaps even the unavoidable questions they themselves pose. That said, I would argue that they do not exhaust the possible plurality of practices of metaphysical thinking, even within the so-called ‘tradition of metaphysics’ itself. If I were to settle on a canonical saying of Aristotle which still has the power to release us to this plurality, it would be less his statement on the threefold task, as his saying that being is said in many senses: to on legetai pollachōs.3 The significance of this I develop in the direction of a metaxological metaphysics.4 Given this emphasis, I think there is no overcoming of metaphysics as such for there is no univocal essence of metaphysics to be overcome. In fact, there are many practices of metaphysics: Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, rationalistic, transcendental, realistic, and so on. Metaphysical thinking is monstrous and not a little unlike a hydra—chop off one head and another grows. And this is not a criticism— for the very act of chopping off heads is itself a head of this incorrigible hydra. It too is ‘metaphysics’. Best to get one’s head straight, so to say, and do good metaphysics. To address this plurality as if it were some univocal essence is too reductive. One worries about a secret univocalization at work in much rhetoric about our being ‘post-metaphysical’, even as that same rhetoric often also scourges the univocity of ‘metaphysics’.

1  See G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 63–64. Worth asking is whether one might look at both continental and analytic philosophy as two forms of a new scholasticism; see my ‘Are we all Scholastics Now? On Analytic, Dialectical and Post-Dialectical Thinking’, in Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society (2010–2011): pp. 1–24. 2  See Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, trans. R. Horner and V. Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), chapter 1, ‘On Phenomenology of Givenness and First Philosophy’; also, Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, trans. C.M. Gschwandtner et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), chapter 3, ‘Metaphysics and Phenomenology: A Relief for Theology’. 3  See, e.g. Aristotle, Metaphysics 1003b5, 1028a10. 4  On this different take on metaphysics, see especially William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). See also Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics after Dialectic (Washington: Catholic University of American Press, 2012). See also the essay by Desmond, ‘The Metaphysics of Modernity’, chapter 25 in Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). The original and better title of this essay was ‘The Voiding of Being: The Doing/Undoing of Metaphysics in Modernity’.

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One might speak of metaphysics as first philosophy (protē philosophia) in so far as it involves mindful reflection of the meaning of the ‘to be’—on the plurivocity of meanings of the ‘to be’. Hence my invocation of the Aristotelian adage. I am less worried about the different tasks assigned by Aristotle to metaphysics: while these tasks are absolutely fundamental, in an important way they are secondary to the many senses of the ‘to be’, and will be addressed differently if, for instance, a univocal sense is to the fore, or an equivocal. Nor do I think we ought to take as canonical the rationalist scholastic scheme of general and special metaphysics. True, it has hugely defined what the practice of metaphysical thinking and its rationalistic systematization has meant for many centuries, but it does not exhaust the originating sources, nor the plurivocity of practices of metaphysical thinking. All of our efforts to be true, all our stabs at the intelligibility of beings and processes, are subtended by different senses of being, though mostly we are unmindful of these as such. We need to be awoken to these senses and their wide-ranging significance. Those who claim to be post-metaphysical are as much in the debt of these senses as the metaphysicians they claim to overcome. From this point of view there is no overcoming of metaphysics—overcoming metaphysics is itself metaphysics. The issue here is both historical and systematic, but the systematic point is crucial. While human beings can think and live intelligently and in openness to the intelligibility of things without an explicit metaphysics, to be a philosopher who engages with first philosophy, one must search for some more explicit mindfulness, attentive to the enabling sources of such intelligence and intelligibility. This means more explicitly to bring a developed habit of mindfulness to bear on what is at play in being, first with regard to the many senses of the ‘to be’, and then especially with regard to the basic presuppositions, sources, and orientations toward the ‘to be’ that mark our being in the midst of things. Each being, every process or becoming, every event, every action, even every possibility (for a possibility is not nothing) participates in one way or other in the sourcing powers of the ‘to be’. We human beings exist as more or less mindful, and this is not only because we exist from these sources but because we are enabled to think about and possibly comprehend something of their enabling powers. To be enabled to such mindfulness, to be called to it, makes the human being the animale metaphysicum (as Schopenhauer put it). Even when we claim to be post-metaphysicians we are this animale metaphysicum. Post-metaphysicians may not be the best of metaphysicians, but willy-nilly some implicit metaphysics, or some set of metaphysical presuppositions, is at work. This is not to say that metaphysics is everything, for we can understand things without reflection about the enabling sources of being and minding. But trying to be mindful of these sources is essential to the task of first philosophy. This does not make metaphysics a first grounding science on the foundation of which other sciences are then built. This is not a good way to put the point. In fact, metaphysics as first philosophy is always secondary, in the sense that it presupposes the enabling of these sources, either in an ontological or epistemic sense. We wake up in the midst of things and this enabling is already effective, and it is only when our waking up turns in a certain direction to what is at play in the between that metaphysics as a

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more reflective mindfulness begins to take shape. This is not a matter of a priori dictation to the between but of a certain fidelity to it, to the wording of the between.5 Metaphysical presuppositions about the ‘to be’ are at play mostly unacknowledged, in common sense, in politics, in ethics, in art, in science, in religion, in philosophy, indeed in ‘post-metaphysical’ philosophy itself. We are called to fidelity, to be true in understanding what is thus at play in the wording of the between. Perhaps certain ways of doing metaphysics may have to be criticized, and perhaps this is part of what being ‘post-metaphysical’ implies. This might be a version of Platonism, especially in the Nietzschean cartoon. It might also be a kind of scholastic rationalism with its effort to systematize logically the perplexities at stake, and so to domesticate the metaphysical astonishment that gives rise to the perplexities in the first place. But Platonism, Aristotelianism, scholastic rationalism, you name it, none of these exhaust the possible practices of metaphysical thinking. The post-metaphysicians often present their point in epochal terms: ancient, medieval, modern, postmodern. And then, almost like postmodern Comtean priests, they announce the arrival of the new era of the post-metaphysical. But if the question is more crucially systematic than historical, then the issue is more elemental than epochal. The perplexities are ancient, and yet not ancient: they are archaic in bearing on what originates all determinate questions, and so they abide with us, and are as new as the day after tomorrow—always behind us, always before us, perhaps because always deeper than us, and always above us too. Indeed, in relation to the archaic perplexities—and Plato and Aristotle already gave admirable expression to them—there is never an absolutely final settlement, as if these perplexities were determinate problems that could be solved once and for all, and so dissolved and put behind us. This point holds for the premodern, the modern, or the postmodern. ‘Post-metaphysical’ thinking hinders rather than helps us if it prevents the living memory of these archaic perplexities. There is, for us, no univocal final settlement of the deepest metaphysical questions. They arise from primal astonishment, itself elemental rather than epochal. They give expression to perplexities beyond any one determinate settlement, perplexities that belong to no epoch, but mark us as what we are: mindful beings astonishingly awoken to the intimate strangeness of being. These perplexities return to us again and again, and again and again we must turn to them. Post-metaphysicians turn away from the return, and miss the turn again and again. What I call metaxological metaphysics has some characteristics of the ‘step back’ out of metaphysics enjoined by Heidegger, though in a sense not intended by him. The step back is from ‘metaphysics’ understood as a determinate practice of metaphysical thinking, in this way or that. Like the many senses of being, there are many more or less determinate practices of metaphysics, and not all of them stay true to their own originating sources. Some practices of metaphysical thinking betray their enabling sources in the act of claiming to complete or realize them. I

5  See William Desmond, ‘Wording the Between’, in The William Desmond Reader, ed. Christopher Simpson (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), pp. 195–227.

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make a similar point with respect to ethics, and the potencies of the ethical.6 We need to ‘step back’ out of different, determinate ethical systems to understand the ethos of being as hospitable, or not, the good, as manifesting, or not, the good of the ‘to be’. Understanding the different ethical potencies allows us to understand better the enabling powers of being ethical, different minglings of which, or particular dominances of which, go into the formation of determinate ethical outlooks, such as Platonism or Christianity, or Kantianism or Nietzscheanism, to name an important few. Analogously, there are ontological-metaphysical potencies which enable the practices of a determinate form of metaphysics and which can enter into a plurality of formations with each other, but which are never exhausted by any particular practice. These ontological potencies enable us to configure the primal ethos of being, and we live in the reconfigured ethos, forgetting the more primally given ethos of being. Part of the task of the ‘step back’ is to come to some mindfulness of this primal ethos, and the already operative potencies of being at work there, and enabling the different determinate formations of our thinking. The ‘step back’ is no step outside the between—for to speak of the between is a way of trying to name the primal ethos and its enabling potencies. We are determined out of it and enabled to be relatively self-determining, but we participate in it as more than all determinations and our self-determination. In it, we cross through it, pass along it, we come to it again by passage in and through the determinate and the self-determining, and through the informing senses of the ‘to be’, through univocity, equivocity, dialectic, and metaxology. The primal ethos and the enabling potencies cannot be deconstructed because they enable both construction and deconstruction and are beyond both. They are operative even when we claim to be post-metaphysical, which is never post-­ metaphysical in fact, but more or less sleeping to what enables it as a determinate practice of anti-metaphysical thinking. So even to be anti-metaphysical is again to be metaphysical.

3.2  G  eneral Contrast of Saturated Phenomena and the Hyperboles of Being I turn now to the contrast of the saturated phenomenon and the hyperboles of being. I will first offer a general contrast, and then in succeeding sections address the particular hyperboles in their relevance to Marion’s reflections. The hyperboles are happenings within immanence that yet cannot be entirely determined in the terms of immanence. Finite immanence, I suggest, is best described as a metaxu, articulated by a creative pluralization of happenings, beings and processes, held together and sustained in differentiations by proliferating networks of relation, and yet impossible to close into one single totality, since within  See William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), Introduction.

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the between of finite immanence the boundaries we encounter again and again prove porous. The between itself is porous to what is itself impossible to finitize fully. I would say our being religious is the most intimate and ultimate testimony to this constitutive porosity, always and everywhere on the verge of mystery beyond finitization, even when communicated in finitude. This is one reason why figurative communication is crucial on just this issue. I have spoken of metaphor, analogy, and symbol, as well as hyperbole.7 Passages in the between, and not least its religious crossing, are witnessed in the watchwords of each of these figures: the ‘is’ of metaphor, the ‘as’ of analogy, the ‘with’ of symbol, the ‘above’ of hyperbole. The passages of these figures go in, go out, go down, go up. The passages are a ‘trans’—a going beyond, even in going in, or out, or down or up. The very word hyperbole catches something of this passing, here this ‘throwing above’, or ‘being thrown above’: hyper-ballein in the Greek. In the between we are thrown down, but also thrown above, being thrown above the between. Hence the suggestion that the hyperboles communicate more than the terms of immanence can circumscribe. And given the figurative dimension, if philosophy is to have any hope, it has to be porous to its most significant others—art and religion. If its practice is only insistent on self-determining thinking, then this enabling porosity is inevitably disabled. The hyperboles reveal certain threshold happenings, and again not least in opening the intimation of mystery in relation to the divine. In living they witness to happenings of opening to ultimate transcendence as Other to the immanent between. Philosophy apart, we live these hyperboles, live in and out of them. Rarely do we comprehend their significance, and often in our lives we betray their promise. Without genuine metaphysical mindfulness of the primal ethos of being it is hard to do them justice in philosophical thought. Marion’s account of the saturated phenomena has an intensive side in terms of the inherent structure of the matter at issue and an extensive side in terms of the range of phenomena to which our attention is drawn. First on the intensive side, we see a complex exposition and development within phenomenology itself, in which Marion sees himself as inheriting and extending the essential insights of Husserl and Heidegger. If Husserl offers a first reduction to objecthood, Heidegger a second reduction to the being of beings, Marion proposes a third reduction to givenness. The terms inherited from Husserl do shape his account. Generally, in Husserlian terms, the meaning of phenomena is understood in terms of a conditioning horizon, in terms of intention and intuition, and the fulfillment of the intention in the intuition of givenness.8 However, in the case of the saturated phenomena, the conditioning  William Desmond, God and the Between (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), passim, but chapter 6 especially. 8  I will draw especially from the important essay, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Marion, The Visible and the Revealed. Thus he says that he wants to envision ‘a type of phenomenon that would reverse the condition of a horizon (by surpassing it, instead of being inscribed within it) and that would reverse the reduction (by leading the I back to itself, instead of being reduced to the I).’ Further, this is ‘not a question here of envisaging a phenomenology without any I or horizon,’ but ‘of taking seriously the claim that since the formulation of the “principle of all principles”, “pos7

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horizon seems to give way and the phenomenon is said to be unconditioned. Moreover, there is an excess of intuition to intention: something exceeding intentionality, one might say, a ‘too muchness’, an overdeterminacy that yet is given. Among other things this seems to lead to a reversal of what we take to be the normal priority of the transcendental ego relative to which the phenomenon is defined—as for us. Now it is for us, in a kind of reversal of intentionality, to be for what shows itself—we are the interloqué, the addressed.9 There is also something about the saturated phenomenon that exceeds all the concepts we might bring to bear on it. Marion points out that there are weak or banal phenomena—such as everyday perception, or mathematical form—where the intuition is relatively empty, hence phenomena where it is easier for intention and intuition to be adequate to each other. In the saturated phenomenon, by contrast, it is the inadequacy or inequality between intention and intuition that tilts in the direction of the excess—the excess that yet qua phenomenon is given.10 These observations bear on the intricate structure of the saturated phenomenon, but what of the extensive range of such phenomena? Here Marion cites a number of instances from the history of philosophy, including Descartes’s idea of the infinite and Kant’s idea of the sublime.11 This extensive range includes for him the painting as spectacle (idol), as well as a particular face I love (icon). Finally, the religious threshold is reached when he suggests that the theophany is connected with the saturated phenomenon. ‘The theophany’, as he puts it, is ‘where the excess of intuition leads to the paradox that an invisible gaze visibly envisages me and loves me. And it is here that the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of religion would be posed.’ Further: ‘In any case, recognizing saturated phenomena comes down to thinking seriously ‘that which none greater can be conceived [aliquid quo majus cogitari nequit]—which means thinking it as a final possibility of phenomenology.’12 sibility stands higher than actuality”, and of envisaging this possibility radically’ (p. 18). Obviously at work here is Marion’s furthering the Heideggerian reversal of the priority of actuality to possibility in Aristotle. 9  Ibid., p. 44: ‘… the I experiences itself as constituted by it. ... The I loses its anteriority and finds itself, so to speak, deprived of its duties of constitution, and is thus itself constituted: it becomes a me rather than an I …. [O]ne meets here what I have thematized elsewhere under the name of the subject at its last appeal: the interloqué.’ ‘This reversal leaves it interlocuted (interloqué), essentially surprised by the more original event that detaches it from itself.’ ‘As a constituted witness, the subject remains the worker of truth, but is no longer its producer.’ On the interloqué see also Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Final Appeal of the Subject’, in Deconstructive Subjectivities, eds. Simon Critchley and Peter Dews (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1996), chapter 5. 10  Ibid., p. 37: ‘Finitude is experienced (and proved) [s’éprouve (et se prouve)] less in the shortage of the given before our gaze than in that this gaze sometimes no longer measures the amplitude of givenness. Or rather, measuring itself against that givenness, the gaze experiences it, sometimes in the suffering of an essential passivity, as having no measure with itself. Finitude is experienced as much through excess as through lack—indeed, more through excess than through lack.’ 11  Ibid., p. 46: ‘And I insist that here it is purely and simply a matter of the phenomenon taken in its fullest meaning.’ 12  See ibid., pp. 47–48 where Marion offers a recapitulation and classification of phenomena. Pure historical events need a hermeneutics. Of revelation he says: ‘I here intend a strictly phenomeno-

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Before turning more fully to the hyperboles of being, I remark briefly on how one’s understanding of ‘metaphysics’ has relevance for the matter under consideration. Phenomenology as addressing saturated phenomena or being ­ addressed by them is not ‘metaphysics’, nor is it metaxological metaphysics as open to a wording of the between in which the hyperboles of being are communicated. I note that Marion defines phenomenon in relation to Kant and Husserl. I would say my own (metaxological) thinking is more a response to Hegel, and this is relevant to how we understand the nature of phenomena. For one thing, apropos of the transcendental nature of the Kantian approach, there is a significant working through of some of its difficulties in classical German philosophy, with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel not least. In relation to that ‘working through’, I see a metaxological metaphysics as post-dialectical or trans-dialectical, and hence post-transcendental in a complicated sense in which an effort is made to take the measure of Hegel. Worth recalling with Hegel is his critique of the emptiness of the thing in itself as we find it in Kant. There is here a dialectical critique of the idea of phenomena as such. It is impossible to rest with a dualism of phenomenon and noumenon—the essence appears. If the essence did not appear we could say nothing of it, and not even say we know nothing of it. One might say that Hegel is trying to turn the screw on an equivocity said to mark the Kantian dualism in which the phenomenon is never an empty appearing, since the essence, so to say, fills itself, fulfills itself in coming to articulated appearance.13 Of course, there is no excess finally to what appears in Hegel’s claim to have fully unfolded the essential possibilities of the manifestation logical concept: an appearance that is purely of itself and starting from itself, that does not subject its possibility to any preliminary determination.’ He goes on to specify three domains, already noted: first, the painting as spectacle (idol); second, a particular face I love (icon); finally, the theophany. I find it interesting that he singles out Anselm’s characterization of God, and I would say that the so-called ‘ontological argument’ has much to do with the issue of the hyperbolic in immanence. On this see, God and the Between, pp. 143–44 and 152–153. 13  When Marion discusses being and appearing in Husserl and Heidegger some of his remarks sound almost Hegelian: ‘As much appearing, so much being’ (The Visible and the Revealed, p. 6). Hegel’s phenomenology is a preparation for his logic, when knowing no longer needs to go beyond itself, and thought can think itself. If there is a phenomenology in my approach, it cannot be separated from metaphysics; and there is less Hegel’s absolute knowing as metaxological mindfulness which renews itself in a poverty of thinking all but the opposite of Hegel’s absolute knowing. And yet metaxological mindfulness in its own way can be absolved—released into the fertile poverty of the between, where there is a point to logic but in the sense of a logos of the metaxu. In the transdialectical metaxu, logos is not a matter of thought thinking itself but thought thinking the other to thought thinking itself, thought indeed singing the other, released to agapeic mindfulness, a release itself agapeic. If there is a logos here, there is no complete separation of phenomenology and metaphysics—beyond dualism, beyond dialectic, there is a logos of the metaxu. Phenomenology moves from the natural attitude to a more transcendental standpoint; Hegel moves from natural consciousness to philosophy as absolute knowing. Metaxological philosophy witnesses a different attitude to the natural attitude and philosophy. Both the latter are in the between, both are ways of wondering, out in the world, in the midst, astonished and perplexed there. Much has to do with recollection in thought of the porosity, with the stress of resultant thought, with the emphasis, the direction, of thought. The between is not approached in a dyadic way, nor in a dialectical way: there is a fluidity of interplay between the so-called natural and the philosophical attitudes that is closer to the Socratic-Platonic practice of dialectic.

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of the absolute. The immanent consummation of the essential, without excess or mysterious remainder or transcendence, is clearly a point of divergence with Marion’s saturated phenomenon and my own sense of the hyperbolic in being. It is the nature of this excess or overdeterminacy that is at issue, and the articulation of our being in relation to it, or its being in relation to us, beyond all reductive relationality, beyond even mutually symmetrical relationality. The point is not quite to charge Marion’s phenomenology with keeping bad company with Kantian dualism, but rather to suggest that the stress on the transcendental, as point of departure to attain givenness by different reductions, does raise questions about its truth to the between. There is the tilt in transcendental philosophy to prioritize the transcendental ego. Clearly Marion is interested in undoing this within the context of phenomenology itself. I would say there are practices of dialectic which point to this undoing of dualism, or to the undoing of the priority of transcendental subjectivity. One might see Hegel and what happened in German philosophy after Kant to be the first serious coming to terms with instabilities within transcendental philosophy. By contrast, one might find in twentieth-century phenomenology a second sustained effort, and sometimes even something of a doppelgänger of this first effort. To note only one or two points, one might recall the move from transcendental subjectivity to historicity in the case of Heidegger. One might also recall the haunting of philosophy by recalcitrant othernesses, of which Schelling, in the earlier ‘working through’, was particularly conscious, something central to recent developments in continental philosophy, even to the not-surprising resurgence of interest in Schelling in some post-modern circles. In any case, I do think the Hegelian dialectic has to be acknowledged and answered and not necessarily in the direction of Kant, but in terms of something about the otherness of the thing in itself as not a mere privative indeterminacy. There is something of surplus otherness, so to say, appearing in the phenomena. Am I right in taking the work of Marion as pointing in some such direction, though not in the terms of an explicitly post-Hegelian thought, but in terms of an immanent exploration of what phenomena as such mean? Of course, in Hegel being is voided.14 It is a mere indeterminacy, the emptiest of the categories. This is not at all what I intend by being and would rather speak once more of overdeterminacy. This again means an intimate strangeness in surplus otherness. The overriding dialectic in Hegel does not do justice to this. One might even talk about the shine on things. In ancient philosophy one might point to the eidos as the look of the things, but not a look that we impose on the thing by our look. Its look looks thus and thus to our looking. That is to say, the look communicates something of this intimate strangeness in surplus otherness. It is intimate in the sense of calling us into a participative relation and communication. It is strange, not in the sense of an estranging other but a mysterious strangeness that always eludes the domesticating grasp of our determinability and self-determination.

14

 See ‘The Metaphysics of Modernity’ (original title, ‘The Voiding of Being’) mentioned above.

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Hegel’s dialectic, I think, is not fully true to this. I have indeed spoken of the saturated surface, of philosophy being on the surface of things.15 There is a surplus immediacy that is not to be described in terms of the empty indeterminacy of Hegel.16 This sense of surplus immediacy is taken up with respect to the claims made by Hegel about sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit: there we find a drive towards the universal which is not attentive to the saturated phenomenon in Marion’s sense. I also refer to art and religious praying as ultimate happenings in which this surplus immediacy is crucial, and again Hegel’s account of art and religion does not do justice to them as significant happenings of surplus immediacy. There is a drive onwards towards absolute knowing, conceived in philosophical terms, where the goal is said to be reached when ‘knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself’, where ‘appearance becomes identical with essence.’17 There is no more intimate strangeness in surplus otherness. There is nothing surplus any more. (Is this analogous to the adequacy of intention and intuition in phenomenology?) By contrast to Hegel, I would say that the more ‘absolute’ standpoint is when knowing knows that more than anything else it must go beyond itself—beyond being at home with itself—beyond its determinability and self-determination—in a poverty of philosophy which just in its poverty is rich in communicative openness to this surplus otherness. This poverty is closer to the richest sense of being true. It is not an ignorance, nor yet again the resurrection of inquisitive curiosity set once more on determination and determinability. Nor yet is it the self-determination of cognition that would master being as Other, and also its own otherness. This poverty is on the threshold of the overdeterminacy, where its being true knows it does not know, and where a new ontological reverence for the mystery of being as intimately strange comes home to us again. One can sense a familial intimacy here with what Marion is trying to communicate with the idea of the saturated phenomenon. There is an exodus into a bright darkness in which one is almost nothing, and yet the nothing is not nothing. One can be strangely full of emptiness, where there is a fulfillment in being emptied. One is emptied of false fixations, and of false absolutizations of autonomous knowing. To be full of emptiness is to be filled in emptiness by the passage of mindfulness in the porosity of being. This is a form of mindfulness that itself is more primally porous to what is communicated in the between. I think also of the interloqué, the inter-­ locuted: being in an inter-locution, addressed before responding in a passio essendi (passion to be) more primal and porous than our conatus essendi (endeavor to be). The interlocuted as respondent interlocutor yet participates in wording the between: locuting the inter. To go to school philosophically: a paideia in eu-locution—well-­ wording the between.

 William Desmond, ‘On the Surface of Things: Transient Life and Beauty in Passing’, in Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 1, nos. 1 & 2 (August 2012): pp. 20–54. 16  On this see William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being, chapter 3, ‘Surplus Immediacy, Metaphysical Thinking, and the Defect(ion) of Hegel’s Concept’. 17  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§80 and 89. 15

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At issue with this poverty of knowing is recollection of an original porosity of being, neither objective nor subjective, but enabling both, while being more than both, where there is no fixation of the difference of minding and things, where our mindfulness wakes to itself by being woken up by the communication of being in its emphatic otherness. Before we reflectively come to ourselves, in the original porosity of being there is the more primal opening in astonishment, opened to what communicates to it from beyond itself. We do not open ourselves; being opened, we are as an opening. The opening is not indeterminate, not determinate, not self-­ determining. There is something overdeterminate about it. To understand it, it is important to attend to differences between wonder in the modalities of astonishment, perplexity and curiosity.18 All determinate knowing is made possible by it, but it is not yet determinate knowing. The porosity is not a vector of intentionality that goes from subject to object. It is not determined by a univocally fixed objectivity stamping its determinacies on a tabula rasa. If it is not determinate objectivity, neither is it indeterminate or self-determining subjectivity. The porosity is prior to univocal objectivity and it is prior to intentionality. In and through it we are given to be in a patience of being more primal than any cognitive or pragmatic endeavour to be. (Once again I sense analogies sympathetic with what is involved with Marion’s saturated phenomenon.) This patience entails our being awoken in a not yet determinate minding that is not full with itself or fulfilled with objects but filled with an openness to what is beyond itself. The porosity suggests what looks like such a paradoxical conjunction of fullness and emptiness: being filled with openness, hence being empty and yet being full. I would underscore the ontological/metaphysical character of this. The porosity of being is like a no-thing. It is not an indeterminate nothing from which nothing could come to be. It is not determinate negation, for this presupposes beings as already in being and in process of becoming. If I were to call it an overdeterminate nothing it would be to invoke the paradoxical conjunction of fullness and emptiness. In its irreducibility to indeterminacy, determination, or self-determination, such a no-thing is inseparable from surplus creative power out of which beings come to be beings. In their coming to be, there is a patience in their being received into being, yet they are relatively for themselves, and as such embody a conjunction of the passion to be (passio essendi) and the endeavour to be (conatus essendi). In the twinning of patience and striving, we are the porosity of being become mindful, become willing.

 On this, see William Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being, chapter 10, ‘Ways of Wondering: Beyond the Barbarism of Reflection’.

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3.3  The Idiocy of Being and Vanity I now want to offer a contrast of the four hyperboles of being and the saturated phenomenon. I will first offer a brief description of the particular hyperbole and then proceed to engage with cognate concepts in Marion’s thought. The first hyperbole I call the idiocy of being. There is something idiotic about given finite being as given to be, that exceeds all our efforts at the finitization of its determinate thereness and intelligibility. In its given overdeterminacy it manifests a surplus immediacy of being. It shows a sheer ‘that it is’ which shines with an intimate strangeness. The idiocy is this intimate strangeness of its ontological concreteness as exceeding our determination of it in terms of our abstract universals. Finite being happens to be without inherent necessity, and while it might seem to be absurd, I think it should be called rather a surplus surd. To describe this surplus surd as the absurd would not be right, for it makes all finite intelligibilities possible. Presupposed by all finite intelligibility, it is not itself a finite intelligibility. The surplus of given being stuns us into mindfulness about what gives it to be at all, since there is no necessity to its being there at all, nor does it explain itself. The ontological patience of finite being makes mindfulness porous to what exceeds finite determination. To be as finite exceeds the terms of finitude itself. In being received as being, finitude is not simply thrown down in the between, but as hyperbolic it is thrown above itself. There are those who limit, even reject the principle of sufficient reason. (Heidegger has a bone to pick with Leibniz.) One can understand why the idiocy might suggest this limitation, even rejection. The idiocy as this primal ontological givenness is not the outcome of that principle, nor is it possible to make the givenness qua given more intelligibly determinate with respect to it. However, this need not mean the rejection of intelligibility. Rather determinate intelligibility comes to be out of this more original givenness, this inconvertible being given to be of what is. When I say there is an intimate strangeness to it, this is not a mere empty indeterminacy. The rose is without a ‘why’, it will be said, and yes, it must be said; but what is the nature of the ‘why’ at stake here? Clearly it is not a determinate ‘why’ we can specify, or a ‘why’ subject to our self-determining reason. Yes, but givenness qua givenness can be responded to in a plurality of ways, not all of which put the ‘why’ completely out of play. There is a ‘why’ of wondering beyond the ‘why’ of determinate curiosity. This latter might seem more faithfully to serve the principle of sufficient reason but the former as surplus to determinacy opens to the ‘why’ of the overdeterminate givenness as such. This ‘why it is’ is in the hyperbolic dimension. It wonders not about a determinate cause, but about the be-cause: the be-cause in the sense of the cause of the ‘to be’: why being at all? Where are some of the places in Marion’s work which seem relevant here? I wonder if his exploration of vanity is connected with the idiocy of being.19 One  See Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A.  Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. 108–138, where Marion also has his sights on agape in reflecting on vanity.

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might say yes, though vanity expresses the matter in the mode of the deprivation of wonder, close to boredom. Vanity is when the marvel vanishes from the things as given, perhaps through weary over-familiarization. The things are just there, idiotic but empty, and we are just there too, oppressed by the idiocy, for the charge of the surplus of the overdeterminate seems now either to have evaporated or become an unbearable burden. But vanity is only vanity because something more affirmative was once promised—indeed, offered—and is still secretly anticipated; but its coming is withheld, or its arrival has been thwarted, and so we are disappointed. Perhaps we have related to the given in such a way that we remake it as a void idiocy—not a mysterious idiocy on the verge of the sacred. Indeed relative to the latter, one might connect it with the idiocy of the divine in the event of mystic intimacy.20 If the idiocy is not determinate, it is also not indeterminate; it is overdeterminate, in excess of the determinate and our self-determination. Nevertheless, it is enabling of determinacy and self-determination. One asks again if this surd character about the givenness qua given is simply absurd. I would say our response depends on what ontological attunement marks us as between-beings, marking also what rejoinder we bring to bear on the given. There is an original astonishment in which the surd is communicated as not at all absurd, but as  an excess of mystery moving all our efforts to surpass the absurd as such. Amazement is porous to its idiotic marvel. If we bring an attunement only of opposing doubt, or a priori suspicion, or an orientation of demand that being meet our measure, we have set ourselves up in advance for disappointment. In one extreme of estrangement we will treat it as the nauseous (Sartre) rather than as an intimate strangeness. It is then a surd that is absurd, if not repulsive. The ‘Es gibt’ of Heidegger is not to be numbered with this attunement,21 but there is something about the il y a (‘there is’) of Lévinas which is in the same family. I do not deny that we can be struck into the sinking feeling that there is something horrifying about being at all. It is and will be always too much. But horror and marvel are cousins. The surd is a blank idiocy and we blanch. Why do I think of the blank Leviathan, Moby Dick, monster of the deep, and creature of deathless mystery? The monstrous de-monstrates the idiocy of the sacred. What I want to say is that there is a surd not absurd, but saturated with qualitative worth, and it is communicated in the intimacy of being. All being has this intimacy (true artists have a feel for this), a kind of mute interiority, one might even say. There  William Desmond, God and the Between, chapter 13.  See Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 5, where the author generalizes from the rose to all phenomena as being without ‘why’. I think with Heidegger and other self-proclaimed philosophers of finitude, there is at work what I call a ‘postulatory finitism’, where finitude is considered as the ‘absolute’ horizon in a world said to be without absolutes. Such finitude is that greater than which none can be conceived, taking over the role of God as defined by Anselm and foregrounded by Marion right at the end of his discussion of the saturated phenomenon. If I am not mistaken, a true thinking through of the meaning of the saturated phenomenon would mean we would have to give up postulatory finitism and again traverse in thought the threshold between finitude and infinity—a metaxological traversal. On postulatory finitism, see William Desmond, Is there a Sabbath for Thought? Between Philosophy and Religion (New York: Fordham University Press, 2003), chapter 1.

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are no neutral objects. Nausea is revolt fallen from an original astonishment whose porosity is reassembled in the form of visceral defiance. This is not simply a matter of the positive versus the negative. The too-muchness of the overdeterminacy can be heavy with presence, pregnant with a weight we find hard to bear. A touch of it is felt on hearing a song like ‘Sunday in Savannah’:22 the sulky boredom of a long soundless Sunday afternoon, with the humid air hardly stirring, everything resting in quiet, and nothing happening—but when nothing happens, suddenly one looks up and is lifted by a startling dawning that all this is—recalcitrant, massive, dreadful— and yet marvelous and hovering lightly on the threshold of an immense mystery. This is the idiocy of being too. Always already given, and we grow in it, and as it dawns on us, it crushes us, empties us, releases us.23 The idiocy of the intimate comes forth into the desire of the worthy more explicitly with the erotics of selving, but there is a secret love in the idiotic. Love of the worthy is there in the aesthetics of happening also. I return to the aesthetics and erotics below. There is a silent ‘yes’, silent but not autistic, more like the silence out of which communication and the music of the word comes, a deep secret intimate ontological affirmation that holds us in being. It offers and receives us in being. And this ‘yes’ is not first our ‘yes’. We are affirmed before we affirm—‘yessed’ before we say ‘yes’. The first ontological ‘yes’ idiotically lives us. It is the communication of the overdeterminate prior to our determinate being as ourselves and prior to our becoming as self-determining. This first ‘yes’ we can ‘yes’ again in our second ‘yes’, in our redoubled ‘yes’, again and again. We can also mutilate this radically intimate love of being. Do we need a (phenomenological) reduction to help us approach the significance of this ‘yes’? The hyperbole indicates a being carried up to it. We often ask ‘What’s up?’ and thereby ask about what is going on, about ongoingness in a broad sense and in a more special sense where our particular interest is vested. See ‘What’s up’ as referring us to arising as such—arising as being and into being. It comes up, and hence we ask ‘What’s up?’ We come to ourselves as being in this arising, in this something ‘being up’ as arising. ‘What’s up’ is not neutral being, it is not nauseous, it is not an abstract universal, not even the concrete universal. It participates in the intimate universal. We are on the threshold of the mystery of the overdeterminate.

3.4  The Aesthetics of Happening, Icons, Idols The second hyperbole of being I call the aesthetics of happening. This opens up to the replete sensuousness of given being. One might say that our astonishment becomes ontological appreciation of the incarnate glory of the manifest creation which, showing itself sensuously, exceeds finitization. We are native to the material world, and our nativity brims over with ambiguity so rich in suggestion that it is 22 23

 See William Desmond, Is there a Sabbath for Thought?, pp. 313–337.  See Desmond, The Intimate Strangeness of Being.

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resistant to our soon intervening conceptual domestications. Appreciation of immanence passes a threshold of immanence into mysterious love of transience that exceeds transience. There is an aesthetic overdeterminacy to finitude, we find ourselves porous on the boundary of finitude and there is communicated a transport before the beauty of things. As if we are moved by a music in things, we are transported into another space of mindfulness hyperbolic to anything we can fix determinately in immanence. This second hyperbole finds many analogues in Marion’s diverse occupation with art and the aesthetic. His important distinction between the icon and the idol is clearly one that is resonant with the hyperbolics of aesthetic happening. Clearly also the sense of the aesthetic here is permeable to sacred significance: it is not merely aesthetic and can never be.24 The idol takes shape when the looker, in and through the aesthetic spectacle, is returned to himself. One might be dazzled, yes, by what is aesthetically happening, but there is a circle of self-relation that is traversed. And while one might seem to exceed oneself towards what is other, the idolatrous other is the mirror in which we are really just returned to ourselves. The self-exceeding is no self-exceeding. The icon, by contrast, is the event where there is no closure to a circle of self-relation but the awakening to find oneself breached by being beheld. I do not behold but am beheld. I like to speak of a ‘beholding from’—in beholding, we are beholden to, and we behold from what is other to us. The look is not just our looking but the look communicates to and with us. I would say that the happening cannot be described in terms of a self-transcending alone, since rather something other communicates with us. If it is self-transcending, the transcending is beyond self because there is an other beyond self that communicates. The happening is more at the level of the passio essendi, and its intimacy with the porosity, than at the level of a conatus essendi that endeavors for itself in its thrust beyond itself. In one sense, there is a reversal of the intentionality of self-transcending; in another sense not just a reversal, but the opening up in us of something prior to self-transcending. In the language I use, the intentionality of the endeavor to be is shown to be subtended by our passio essendi and our porosity. And this becomes a receiving welcome for what exceeds itself towards us. There is a sense too in which the communicating other itself becomes porous. Hence there is no mirroring in an idolatrous sense because the Other to which we are related, or which is related to us, cannot be thus held for the purposes of a closed circling back to ourselves. We are on thresholds of passing—passages of a between that is not just between us and ourselves. There is an agape of the aesthetic, as Aristotle seems to suggest (he tōn aisthēseon agapesis) when speaking of astonishment (thaumazein).25 I think there is a generalized sense of iconic aesthetics which points in this direction. I recall Plato in the Timaeus: pasa anankē tonde ton kosmos eikona tines einai: it is  In addition to Jean-Luc Marion’s The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), see also his In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena, chapters 3 and 5; as well as The Crossing of the Visible, trans. James K.A.  Smith (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). 25  Aristotle, Metaphysics 980a23. 24

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altogether necessary that the cosmos be a certain eikon.26 This is a statement where aesthetics and metaphysics also pass over into each other. Truly looked at, all being is iconic. Our beholding from the aesthetics of happening participates in being truly looked at, and truly looking. Again there is the fertile doubleness here of fullness and emptiness. The significance of ‘cosmos’, for instance, draws our attention to the well-balanced harmony of the whole, but the beauty of the whole is no self-enclosed totality. It not only points beyond itself, but as an ‘open whole’ there is communication to it from beyond itself in terms of the origin of its being thus beautifully an open whole at all. The whole seems to close on itself on a boundary. But an open whole is full for itself but not full of itself. It is paradoxically full as an open between, and hence as porous to what is more than it and its own self-fulfillment. In that sense, it is full with what it cannot contain, and hence is not full but an open space of receiving from what is beyond itself. We catch a glimmer of this in great works of art which have this dense inexhaustibility, and yet at the same time a paradoxical poverty, in which the ‘too-­ muchness’ and the ‘almost-nothing’ of the aesthetic happening are twinned together. To return to a perhaps more familiar sense of the aesthetics of happening: there is here a determinacy but it is of such a richness and surplus that it shows the determinate as exceeding itself in its sensuous being there and its becoming. The determinate is more than determinate, and we come to the intimation of this ‘more’ by mindful attention of what is determinately there. There is nothing static, obviously, about this opening of the determinate to what enables determining. And it is thus not just our self-determination. One might be tempted in such a direction by thinking that the otherness is again a place where we come to ourselves. Is not this somewhat like the idol in Marion? It would then be what Kant calls a subreption (Erschleichung). I remark briefly on the sublime since it is mentioned (as I noted above) by Marion in connection with Kant and suggested by him as connected with the saturated phenomenon. For me, the equivocity of Kant is plain, leading to something that I cannot accept. In Kant the sublime is, as he puts it, a subreption (Critique of Judgement, §27), attributing to the object what properly is of the subject. In the end this means there is no sublime object or other as such. There is no true sublimity as genuinely other. The whole process by which we are brought low and elevated in the experience of the sublime comes, in the end, to our being elevated to ourselves in terms of our superior destiny as moral beings. The essential truth of sublimity is our moral superiority to everything in nature. The entire process wends circuitously around to our moral sublimity—supreme and more than all of nature. I do not think that this is entirely wrong, since there is something sublime about us; but it is not right, however, relative to what is at play, and what it keeps out of play. Most of all, it underestimates the threshold nature of the happening that is between the aesthetic/ethical and the religious/sacred. Kant moralizes the sublime, and this moralization both weakens the aesthetic power of the happening and interrupts the rupture of the sacred. It is unable or unwilling to grant the breakthrough of the equivocal communication of the sacred. 26

 Plato, Timaeus 29B.

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One of the areas which is fruitful here in connection with both the saturated phenomenon and the hyperboles of beings is certainly the discussion of aesthetic ideas in Kant. Marion draws our attention to the importance of these.27 Ideas for Kant have to do with the unconditional, the maximum. Aesthetic ideas rouse our search after the unconditional—they are representations of imagination that occasion much thought without any determinate thought being adequate to them. They function as setting our seeking in motion in a more than conceptually determinable way. I would note that Kant predominantly puts the issue from the side of our being impelled to seek in determinacy beyond determinacy for the finally indeterminable. The otherness of the unconditional as finally indeterminable remains regulative, and Kant frames all this transcendentally. This is one-sided from the point of view of the metaxu and the metaphysics of the between. We need a different thinking of the regulative and constitutive ideal (this we see in relation to being truthful). With Kant the very otherness qua other is folded back into what it is for us through the circuit of the sublime subreption. A metaxological sense of the sublime is stretched differently between aesthetic finitude and infinity, and least of all is the otherness of the sublime a subreptive detour back to our own confirmed powers of self-determination.28 To speak in the language of determination, the aesthetic idea represents the arousing of indeterminable thinking at the edge of determinablity, a thinking which might be considered suggestive of the overdeterminate, though this latter insight is not one that Kant voices. Perhaps one reason Kant lacks this insight follows from his sense of infinity as always just heuristic and regulative, and hence as defined predominantly in terms of indeterminacy and the anticipation of the totality of complete determinations of the unconditional (as he understands this). By contrast, the sublime also rouses something indeterminable beyond fixed and finite determinacy, but the indeterminable otherness is brought back to the autonomous self-­ determination of the self as moral subject; and hence here too the threshold that passes to the overdeterminate is not understood, much less passed through, by Kant. If I am not mistaken, Marion’s saturated phenomenon removes us from the space of (aesthetic) subreption in Kant’s sense. In that respect it is close to a metaxological sense of the hyperbole of aesthetic happening. One could ask of Kant something he never asked himself: Is there an agape of the things of aesthesis?  Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, pp. 32–33.  Being true to mystery, in relation to the aesthetics of happening, do we need something like John Keats’s ‘negative capability’, ‘which Shakespeare possessed so enormously’? Here is the famous definition: ‘Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ See ‘Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 Dec. 1817’, in Elizabeth Cook, ed., John Keats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.  370. ‘Negative capability’ is somewhere between original astonishment and perplexity, suspended in first wonder and touched with the troubled perplexity of doubts and uncertainties; and not yet overtaken by determinating curiosity which brings obsession with univocal fact and reason. The perplexity of the poet calls secretly on a wonder before art and more primal, a prior porosity opening a metaxological mindfulness that is not hostile to reason or fact but is not univocalizing of them.

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3.5  The Erotics of Selving and the Erotic Phenomenon Our being moved to seek after the maximum, central to Kant’s aesthetic idea, brings us to what I call the third hyperbole of being—the erotics of selving. We awaken to ourselves as intimately hyperbolic, for we know ourselves as both finite and yet infinitely self-surpassing. We are endowed with transcending power, and yet at the same time we come to realize we do not simply endow ourselves with this power. One could say that the immeasurable passion of our being is self-exceeding, and yet the self-exceeding exceeds also the selving that we are. It might be put this way: the erotics of our selving is hyperbolic to a conatus essendi that drives itself to its own most complete self-determination in immanence. Our erotics witnesses to a passio essendi that is marked by a primal porosity to what exceeds all determination and finally our own self-determination. In some ways I hesitate to speak just about ‘self’. I wonder why there is ‘soul music’ but not ‘self music’. Perhaps ‘soul’ is closer than ‘self’ to the passio essendi, the intimate idiocy, and the porosity. Perhaps one might even think of ‘erotic souling’ as a longing that belongs in the mystery of the enigmatic porosity. After all, not a little of ‘soul music’ is bound up with the agony and enchantment of eros. Could one see the selving as a crystalizing of (en)souling, itself undergone as the animating principle of life? The erotics of selving shows the soul emerging in the body in articulated form(ing). In this emergence there is a pointing of the selving back to the poros and the penia, even as, simultaneously, the secret sources of our intimate being emerge more with the carrying energy of the conatus. Hence the reference to being engendered and engendering in co-natus. That is, in the endeavor to be, there is endeavor to enable being beyond itself, for co-natus is a being ‘born with’, or ‘birthing with’. In erotic generation, there is what comes to one from beyond oneself, and there is the lure towards the beyond of selving, through the lover or the beloved to the children of future time. We think of ‘self’ as connected with the human self, but I would speak of selving rather than self, and this is not confined just to human beings. There is an erotics of being not exclusive to its humanized form. All things selve. I quote from the marvelous poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire, Dragonflies Draw Flame’: Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

If erotics is more than our selving, nevertheless our selving shows it most intimately and most extensively. In the poem, what is foremost is the outering, the uttering of selving in the between. Nevertheless, the selving that outers itself goes infinitely deep, like the well that is bottomless, even though it resounds when stones fall in it and make a strike beyond the rim. Somewhat differently put, in the finite being there is an infinite restlessness. In the immanent, there is something more that is not to be contained in immanence.

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This again is how I invoke the hyperboles of being: happenings in immanence that are not possible fully to determine in terms of immanence. They are thresholds in the immanent between that tell of a porous boundary between the immanent and something that is more than it. Thus in our erotic selving, we are asked to pay attention to a certain doubleness. As already indicated, we naturally think of eros as self-­ surpassing, but there is also a mysterious being given to oneself in self-surpassing, and indeed before and beyond self-surpassing. This is not a matter of giving oneself to oneself. It is not a matter of the endeavor to be coming into its own sole s­ overeignty. Rather all of this is a matter of endowed enabling, of being endowed as enabled to be. Something other than self-enabling enables self-enabling. At the same time that there can be a coming to self in a fuller and fulfilled way, this coming to oneself is in and through the other. There is possible reciprocity here, yes; but this doubleness now here, as between selving and othering, can also tilt towards dangerous equivocity. The self-surpassing endeavor can become intoxicated with its own coming to itself and play down, pay little or no attention to, or repress even, the way the other gives one to oneself, being thus an enabling other involved, in its own way, in allowing one’s coming to self. Though the selving is never through itself alone, its self-affirmation can come to think of itself as primarily through itself alone. Our being given to be through the gift of the loving other is crucial. Forget it, reject it, mutilate it and a mutation occurs in erotic selving. I think here of the way the Greeks recognized this essential temptation of eros in distinguishing eros ouranios and eros turannos. The tyrannical eros flies high on the energy that comes to uttering in one, that takes one out in an exhilaration that can become bewitched with itself. It becomes love loving loving, tempted to close the double intermediation of self and other into a sovereign and singular self-mediation of the original endowed energy of enabled and enabling ‘to be’. One of the ways I try to address this matter is to recall, and reinterpret in terms of the porosity, the story told in the Symposium by Socrates/Diotima of the double parentage of eros in terms of poros/penia. Often it is eros as lacking, as penia, and as seeking fulfillment and completion, that is foregrounded. But the parentage of eros in poros is just as important. If nothing else, the origin of eros hearkens back to feast of the gods. As we know from this telling, the gods are celebrating the birthday of Apollo, and however it happens, penia manages to couple with poros drunk with divine nectar and eros is born of their union. (Was this original coupling already not erotic, then—eros before eros, before our eros …?) What is intimated by the parentage of poros? I take this to open the suggestion that there is a more original porosity in eros, prior to the self-surpassing endeavor to be we associate with the conatus. There is a patience of being, perhaps suggested by the metaphor of sleep at the divine feast. The feast is working its way in us, through us, when we are erotically awakened, aroused. Eros has something to do with a divine festivity waking up in the flesh, waking up to itself in the flesh, waking the flesh up to itself as flesh and more. I see here a certain promise of agape (by contrast with any dualism of eros and agape). At the origins of eros, erotic seeking cannot be disjointed from the surplus festivity of the gods, even if in the scrabble of scarce life we often lose sight of this. Worth noting is that one might think of the poverty too as partaking of a kind of

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porosity—being nothing, poverty is ready for all things other to itself. Again this readiness, as being nothing, can mutate, carried by the conatus, into a power of negation, which in eros turannos issues in a taking of all things other. Its indigence, as energized to go beyond itself as indigence, then becomes a grasping at what it would have for itself. In the extreme, it is like a greedy person at the feast of life who takes too much, more than he or she needs, even for herself. In this taking, the festivity of life is turned to spoils. ‘Being nothing’ curdles into a negativity that ever runs the risk of spoiling, despoiling the feast of life. The surplus is no longer of generosity, but the usurping surplus of pleonexia—wanting more and more, more than enough, beyond all satis-faction. This usurping surplus is testimony to the infinite restlessness of erotic selving, though in the counterfeit form of tyrannical willing of itself. It parodies origination by endlessly making itself anew as a form of always overtaking eros, greedy because at bottom ungrateful eros. Marion, one recalls, in discussing the saturated phenomenon, mentions ‘a particular face I love’ and refers it to the icon.29 And of course he has written strikingly of the erotic phenomenon.30 There are many admirable analyses in his reflection. One might ask: Does the possibility of an agapeic reduction make sense? And if not, why not? Is the recurrence to the agapeics of the porosity, in the erotics of selving, to be described as an agapeic phenomenon? Is the language of the phenomenon true to the agapeics of being? I hesitate about the language indebted to phenomenology which suggests breaking with the natural attitude, in the interests of the reduction. Eros is a metaxu, as Plato said. It lifts us up, charges, and even transfigures the so-­ called natural attitude; but we come to be charged by eros not through the precise steps of a phenomenological method, but by the upsurge of an energy beyond method and reduction. Every method and reduction, qua the moving of thinking, is itself moved by an erotic energy. There is an erotics of philosophy, prior to and beyond method, prior to and beyond reduction. There is an erotics of reason.31 I understand that philosophers do not now frequently speak of love or eros. While Marion is not wrong about this, his claim is much truer of modern rationalists. It is not true of the longer tradition, certainly not the Platonic—and indeed its transformation in Christianity. There is also the fact that philia is hugely present in premodern thought. It is somewhat recessed in modernity, for reasons I try to address elsewhere.32 And there is almost complete silence in the philosophical tradition about love as agape. I have spoken about it, and Marion has been one of the few to raise it for philosophical consideration. I will return to this below. I find somewhat odd the way Marion begins with the question: Who loves me? This might be understandable in a heartless world, in an ethos neutralized, objectivized, and under the dominion of serviceable disposability. It is understandable also  Jean-Luc Marion, The Visible and the Revealed, p. 47.  Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E.  Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 31  See Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Reduction, p. 209, where he concurs on this important point. 32  William Desmond, ‘Tyranny and the Recess of Friendship’, in Thomas Kelly, Philipp Rosemann, eds., Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship (Leuven: Peeters, 2004), pp. 99–125. 29 30

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in terms of the ego-centric position that is strongly present in our modern orientation to things and others. One recalls the mocking refrain of the detective Kojek: ‘Who loves you baby?’ Of course, the point is to work through towards something other. I can understand one might offer an archeology of self-affirming love, passing into and through the conatus, attaining a mindfulness of the passio, arriving at the open space of the primal porosity. One might discover these to be enabled in, enacted by the happening of self-affirming love, in erotics, philia, and agapeics. One might discover all of these to reveal the between-being of all forms of being in love, a between-being which carries with it a fearful equivocity that opens the different forms of love to betrayals and mutilations. If I compare the matter to Augustine, there is the working of, and then the mindfulness of, the restless heart, and erotics is very much bound up with this restlessness. In all of this there is the matter of the dead ends to which equivocal eros brings us again and again, to existential and religious aporiai beyond which we cannot pass on our own power. Then too there is the circling around itself of love in love with love, the collapse in us of the doubleness of love (as between selving and other) into the single self-circling auto-erotic closure. There is the purgation of the tyrannical eros which is idolatrous, for idolatry is the self-absolutizing of eros which absolves itself from the absolute as Other and circles around itself, even when it circles in the company of others, even the divine Other. The mutation of eros into self-circling will to power involves a certain univocal logic of being number one. I would hold to a certain plurivocal sense of erotics. This is enacted in Plato’s Symposium in the plurality of speeches of which none is entirely excluded from having something true to say, even though some are more true to eros than others. I cannot agree with the univocal conception of eros at the end of the Erotic Reduction.33 Am I mistaken that Marion wants to eroticize agape?34 — whereas I want to recollect the promise of agape in eros. If I demur concerning a dualism of the two, I demur also with a univocalizing, and again plead for a metaxology beyond self-mediating dialectic. In the many forms of love, it is the different forms of relativity between self and other that are at issue—from self-affirming love, to philia, to eros, to agape.35 There is also the infinite restlessness: here you have the intimate emergence of the overdeterminate in the human being; or perhaps better put, the mingling of the overdeterminate and the indeterminate. Erotics brings us back to mystery as enacted on the threshold beyond determination and self-­ determination. Indeterminate: an openness that cannot be confined to any one determination or set of determinations, the openness of the indeterminate to determination and self-determination. Overdeterminate: more than the indeterminate, since it is not lack that surpasses itself, or seeks beyond itself, but the given energy of being as 33  Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 217: ‘Love is said and is given in only one, strictly univocal way.’ On the plurivocity of eros Plato’s Symposium has hardly been surpassed. Someone like Freud is not in the same class. 34  See ibid., pp. 220–221. 35  On the forms of relativity of different loves and their mutation into different hatreds, see William Desmond, Is there a Sabbath for Thought?, chapter 9, ‘Enemies: On Hatred’.

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surplus that, though knowing its lack, is energized to seek what, as other, will enable it to be more than lacking. Erotic selving is already more than lacking in itself in order to be able to address the sense of lacking that emerges in its finitude. While not the absolutely overdeterminate, it participates in this overdeterminacy, in this surplus of affirming being. This surplus is both self-affirming and affirming what is other. The surplus affirming is first affirming in us, before we affirm that already given affirmation of being, and become open to affirming the other whose affirming of us has allowed us to come to ourselves more truly. This means that the infinite in us is not just in the striving to be, in the conatus essendi, unless we do justice to the ‘con-’ of conatus, insofar as this recalls us to the source of ‘being with’ in the event of being born to being all. We need again to recall the passio first, and even more, the secret working of the infinite in the porosity— not determinate, not self-determining, but more than all determinations and allowing determination and self-determination. The double parentage of eros in the Symposium is also a reminder of the unavoidability of paradoxical language, bordering on the contradictory, certainly beyond univocity, and enmeshed in ambiguities that court equivocity. Penia and poros: all but nothing and yet somehow full; a fertile void, or a fertility that makes void to enable fructifying—a loving that makes a way (as positive), but that makes way to make a way (and so seems almost nothing). It is for reasons like these that I believe there is a promise of the agapeic in the erotic. As I put it above, it is after drinking deep at the feast of the gods that poros is approached by penia: divine intoxication asleep in the coming to be of eros; a divine agape—the sleeping promise of the intoxicated agape in the generation of the erotic. The feasting of the gods, the secret agapeics of the erotic comes forth in the impulse of erotics not only towards engendering but towards immortalizing: to be beyond death. (Miguel Unamuno had a passionate appreciation of this; whether he made full philosophical sense of this passionate appreciation is another thing.) For Marion too: ‘Love demands eternity because it can never finish telling itself the excess within it of intuition over signification.’36 I am not sure I would quite put it in those terms. The hyperbolics of selving shows erotics to be self-surpassing but also passing on of self-passing. We see this in generation, this energy of passing, the transience of erotics—and much of the appeal of beauty is bound up with this. But beyond engendering, there is also passing on, and the enigma of death, as well as our perplexity about passing beyond death, struck as we sometimes are by the intimation of the beyond of death—the deathless. Thus erotics is bound up with art and immortalizing. This is not only a matter of leaving something worthy behind one when one is gone, gone into death. There is sought something of a deathlessness in the work itself. Great works destroy our conceit but there is also a promise of eternal rejuvenation—a promise of resurrection. It is no doubt with the beloved other that we know the lovable that we would were saved from death. Gabriel Marcel has words to the effect that our love of the beloved other entails our desire and hope: you will not die. Love appeals for eternity for the beloved. Saul Bellows ends his book,

36

 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 210.

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Ravelstein, memorializing, celebrating, his friend: ‘You don’t easily give up a creature like Ravelstein to death.’37 It is in and through religion that the immortalizing of erotics is most universally distributed. Being religious reveals the intimate universality out of which the passion of erotics emerges, and towards which the endeavor of erotics tends; for the divine is there at the origin and at the end. Erotics, then, spans the extremes. Thus, on one side, we are drawn to the archeological mythos of primordial origin—in illo tempore—fadó, fadó, long long ago, beyond time. Mythic and immemorial, in memory beyond memory, the beyond of time communicates in the ‘time’ of the origin. Then also, on the other side, there are the eschatological myths of a justice beyond the normal distinction we draw between life and death. One recalls the myth of Er. We call to mind the suffering, death and resurrection of Christ, where creation, fall, and recreation converge on the hope of resurrection and flesh beyond death. I invoked earlier the selving so dear to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and now this comes back in the double form of poverty and surplus, almost nothing and more than all things, in his poem ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection’. Too much and almost nothing: … Million-fuelèd, | nature’s bonfire burns on. But quench her bonniest, dearest | to her, her clearest-selvèd spark Man, how fast his firedint, | his mark on mind, is gone! Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark Drowned. O pity and indig | nation! Manshape that shone Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out …

Nothing and then enough; more than enough, too much, more than too much: … Enough! the Resurrection … Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; | world’s wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, | since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, | patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond.

3.6  T  he Agapeics of Community: Does Marion Redeem the Promise? Finally, I turn to the fourth hyperbole, which I call the agapeics of community. Here is a compact statement of some salient features. The hyperbole concerns what one might term the beyond of selving, selving beyond selving, which is rather an othering or being other that reveals our relations to others as traversing the metaxu in generous receiving and giving. The agapeics manifests the overdeterminacy of a 37

 Saul Bellow, Ravelstein (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 233.

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surplus generosity, beyond determinacy, indeterminacy and self-determination. The surplus is not only in being receptive to the gift of the other but in freeing us to give beyond ourselves to others. This is a giving again which consists in the passing on of goodness itself. Indeed, giving on generously is the agapeic good of the ‘to be’. Once again, beyond determinacy, indeterminacy and self-determinacy, in the finiteness of our lives together, there is the promise of an overdeterminate generosity beyond finite reckoning. Here we come on the sense of sacred mystery which calls on our being truthful. In the agapeics of community there passes (on) a surplus good that makes itself available in an absolute porosity. One might speak of an absolved porosity of the passio essendi that ethically communicates itself as a compassio essendi. This communication takes us to the limit of self-determining ethical life, for in its wording of the between it reveals the overdeterminate incarnation of the holy. Again I draw attention to a certain doubleness in the agapeics of community as most fully answering to the communion of surplus and emptying that allows the passage of love to circle between many. Surplus: this clearly refers to the overdeterminacy in the hyperbolic dimension, a going beyond in a living sense—a beyond with reference to our every effort to pin it to this determinacy or that, or to define it exhaustively in terms of our autonomous self-determination. Though in excess of determinacy and self-determination, it is not merely indeterminate qua the living communication of surplus generosity, superplus generosity. Emptying: this refers to the manner in which the surplus opens a space of porosity for what is other to itself to come to be, and to become itself. The emptying makes a way (poros) that is there as making way. As making way, it seems not to be there; but it is there as not there to enable the being there of all that is other to itself. The doubleness of this togetherness of surplus and emptying seems like an equivocity, but if so it is a saturated equivocity that calls for metaxological intermediation. It is dialectical in one sense, as reminding us of the fact that ultimate significance often must invoke the dual language of opposites, bordering on paradox—a coincidentia oppositorum in Nicolas of Cusa’s terms. But it is trans-dialectical, in so far as dialectic is tempted to treat the union of opposites as really a way of describing a single, unitary process, an essentially self-mediating, self-determining process. The agapeics is not that—since it most superbly communicates the between and communicates in the between, with all the irreducibility of selving and othering to one inclusive totality. Agapeic communication is a more radical release of communication than a matter of self-communication. Eros is generally the preferred philosophical focus in the long tradition stretching back to the Greeks. Agape is hugely inflected in the Christian configuration of the ethos of being, and in our understanding of the between; but it is rarely the focus of thematic reflection by philosophers.38 To put the stress on agapeic being, being  Philosophers have not often addressed themselves to the agapeic. One does think of figures such as St Augustine, St Bonaventure, St Thomas Aquinas, and Pascal and the order of charity. One thinks of missed opportunities, such as Nietzsche’s bowdlerized version of Christian love. Nor have philosophers always been good witnesses of the holy. Who would one name? I exclude from serious consideration Vattimo’s miracle of transubstantiating Nietzschean nihilism into Christian

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agapeic, need not be just to trespass into the sanctum of theology, and break the protocols of academic divisions. Agapeic being, or being agapeic, reveals the richest sense of communication of the ‘to be’. To allow that to be woven into the texture of philosophical reflection entirely transforms the meaning of mindfulness, and certainly requires a deep porosity of philosophy itself to religion. In other words, it requires much that the modern ideal of autonomous thinking simply cannot meet— because the boundary has already been sealed, or a spiritual apartheid has been enforced, or perhaps a bargain of collusion has been concluded between theologians and philosophers that keep each apart, alone in their designated homelands. No roaming is allowed beyond the borders so defined in the spiritual/academic concordat. However, this collusion or concordat cannot hold indefinitely; not only because we are thinkers in the very passage between zones, but because on whichever side of borders we are, there is a surplus always already at work—and this has to do with the agape of being. This is the surplus of the mysterious overdetermination. This is an ontological/metaphysical mystery that is not retracted into itself and for itself but that primally and ultimately communicates itself—it communicates to us of the creative generosity of the good. The communication of this surplus gives being to be, and to be as good. We live our participation in the goodness of being in our own native love of our own ‘to be’, and in our secret love of the ‘to be’ in a more communicative sense than is singularized in our own unique ‘to be’. Regarding Marion and agape, he outlines a task in God Without Being, but does not entirely carry it out, to my knowledge. He seeks to go beyond Heidegger from being to God—Heidegger whom he accuses of a second idolatry, though his own discourse on being is shaped by Heidegger’s terms. Marion points to agape as beyond being; and beyond what he describes as the double idolatry of Heidegger, he describes the task: ‘To think God, therefore, outside of ontological difference, outside the question of Being …. [w]hat name, what concept, and what sign nevertheless remains feasible? A single one, no doubt, love.’39 Thinking God as agape: ‘This task, immense and, in a sense, still untouched, requires working love conceptually (and hence, in return, working the concept through love), to the point that its full speculative power can be deployed.’40 One is heartened by the stress on the agapeic. What if metaxologically the task is to be mindful of the promise of agapeic being? We must think what it means to be agapeic. I add that this task he proposes not only reflects some of the aims of my work, but also permeates the thinking from the outset; it is not grafted on as if from outside (a ‘grafting’ of theology onto philosophy attributed to Marion by some of his critics). Without a resurrected sense of the agapeics of communication, how venture to think the agapeic being of God? If ‘God without Being’ were to mutate into ‘Being without God’, the hyperboles of being caritas. Deleuze talked of Spinoza as the Christ of the philosophers, but this is taking the name of Christ in vain. Can one think of Christ, like Spinoza, throwing flies to spiders for cruel fun, for recreation? Re-creation? Glee in death, rather. Spinoza’s fun reminds one of the wanton gods of Lear. Christ is not just the promise of the agape but the realized incarnation of the promise. 39  Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, pp. 46–47. 40  Ibid., p. 47.

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would lose meaning, and one worries about being left with the devalued—indeed, void—being of modern nihilism rather than the agapeics of being in communication. Being without God sounds less like the gift of creation, in its saturated idiocy and the glory of the aesthetic happening, as a dark gnostic double. How indeed talk of God’s being as agapeic? I wondered above if Marion in The Erotic Phenomenon, with its univocal understanding of love, is trying to eroticize agape (and indeed friendship), while in a metaxology of the hyperboles of being the point would be more the discernment of the promise of the agapeic in self-affirming love, philia and eros, and all of this without any univocalization of love—with a plurivocalization rather. While there is, of course, Marion’s Prolegomena to Charity, this is indeed prolegomenary, hence preparatory. In the final pages of this book, he sketches ‘some of the features of charity’.41 In the penultimate section IV, he offers a characterization of charity in terms reminiscent of the way a metaxological metaphysics asks us to put it; namely, as surplus generosity making a way by making way.42 But in the ultimate section V, he claims ‘it is above all important not to suffer the influence of what metaphysics has thought about love. For today, in this tradition, love and charity have suffered similar devaluation. Love is reduced to “making love”, charity to “doing charity”.’43 Needless to say, what I mean by metaxological metaphysics cannot be recognized or recognize itself in this claim about ‘metaphysics’. Quite to the contrary, it seeks the signs of the agapeic in the happening of being as the between. Interestingly, Marion cites the ‘hyperbole’ from Saint Paul about ‘knowing the charity of Christ which surpasses all knowledge’ (Ephesians 3:19). Why could not a metaxological metaphysics listen well to Saint Paul’s great hymn to agape (ἀγάπη), along whose hyperbolic way (ὑπερβολὴν ὁδὸν; 1 Corinthians 12:31) we are enjoined to go, beyond the best of other great gifts, though now, in the sometimes dreadful equivocity of immanent finitude, we see things in enigma (ἐν αἰνίγματι; 13:12)? The more fully worked out view of eros recently in his The Erotic Phenomenon has garnered most attention. To repeat a question: Could one, should one, speak of The Agapeic Phenomenon? Would that be the right way to talk about agape? Concerning the divine love, I find myself again uneasy with the claim in The Erotic Phenomenon about the univocity of love: the love of God is the same as our love.44 Marion astonishingly claims: ‘God practices the logic of the erotic reduction as we do, with us, according to the same rite and following the same rhythm as us, to the point where we can even ask ourselves if we do not learn it from him, and no one else. God loves in the same way as we do.’45 The love by which God loves me is the same love by which I love God—Marion does not quite put it this way. But this way of putting it reveals a kind of dialectical univocity that transposes Eckhart’s famous  Jean-Luc Marion, Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen E.  Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 164–169. 42  Ibid., pp. 164–168. 43  Ibid., p. 168. 44  Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 221. 45  Ibid., p. 222. 41

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claim: the eye by which I see God is the eye by which God sees me; they are one and the same. The same idea is transposed into thought by Hegel: my understanding of God is God’s own self-understanding in me. Needless to say, in my own work such a claim to univocity is troublingly equivocal—and suspect of shortchanging the essential dissimilitude which is always greater than the similitude when it comes to things divine. In the plurivocity of love (self-affirming, erotic, philial, agapeic), it is crucial to keep in mind different forms of relativity between self and other at work in the different loves, for these differences are significant in how we approach the divine mystery. Without this, we risk producing an idol of thought rather than ­placing ourselves in readiness for an iconic communication of the divine. It is just Hegel’s lack of finesse in discriminating between these different forms of relativity that leads to a counterfeit double of God. If there is a kind of unity of love—or better put, comm-unity—I have tried to explore this in terms of the promise of the agape in all the different forms of love—including self-affirming self-love. The agape of being is already at work in our own love of our own being. This goes deeper than the self-insistent endeavor to be; and when we are pointed back to the passio essendi and the primal porosity, we come to realize we are loved—indeed, created—by a love surplus to our ontological self-love, always beyond it, and yet also always radically intimate: we are at all in virtue of this love. Whether we go out, or go in, whether we go down or go up, the surplus mystery of the agape of being meets us. For it is the most radically intimate companioning mystery out of which we live when we believe we have dissolved all mystery. We have not been true to ourselves, then. We have not been true to being other than ourselves; we have not been true to mystery. There is, in my view, a secret reserve of surplus promise in all the hyperboles of being, hence also in all the forms of love. In self-affirming love, in philia, in eros, the promise of the agapeic is given. If there is a plurivocity here, it is not a dualism, nor an equivocity that disseminates a merely unrelated and dissolving diversity. There is community; there is communivocity. It will not do to say that agape (or eros as Marion seems to suggest) is the one love that runs through all, as if that were a vindication for univocity. Not at all; for once the nature of agape is understood in relation to the surplus generosity of the overdetermination, it is the releasing plurivocity of its broadcast that is closer to the truth of the matter. This plurivocity reveals the inappropriateness of the univocal insistence. Agapeic love insists thus on nothing, and hence is open and ready for all, with a porosity that is no mere lack but the creative readiness to make a way by making way—making way to allow what is other to come into its own being for itself—as well as its own promise of being agapeic. Being true to the agapeics of being brings us to the overfull mystery. It is so full, it is as if there were nothing there; so full that we are nonplussed by it, superplus as it is to all determinate expectations and self-determining projections. The way of agape is to make a way, and to make a way (poros) by making way. The way of mystery opens before us as if there were nothing there; but the divine overdeterminacy is there, just as opening and enabling a passage of communication, a communicative passing. Communicative passage is not just this or that determinacy, not

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just what our self-determination determines to be there, not also an indeterminacy as lacking of determinacy, but the overdeterminate as surplus fullness itself as making a way, a porosity, a passage. Seeming nothing and more than all, one thinks of a ravishing music that is in its passing, that comes to sound and to pass by, to sound and resound, and to be full of the most heart-touching intimacy when it passes into us, into us as the porosity it newly opens again, that we listen enchanted; and sometimes we do not know if we heard the music or dreamed it, and then it seems hardly to matter whether we dreamed it or were woken by it to a mystery that is as passing into us, passing through us, passing beyond us. We wake to quotidian consciousness with the glow of an enigmatic gratitude. Finally, in relation to the hyperbole of agapeics, there is a being true to mystery on the threshold of the holy, a being true to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The holy shakes us on a threshold we cannot absolutely determine and that goes beyond our self-determination. Being true fills us with dread about our own defection from the agape of the holy. Yet we are filled with a longing for intimate redemption by the holy. We are as nothing; we are as an opening and our bones are as water. Being nothing there is a passage of amazement in the idiotic porosity. Being exposed and unsheltered, there is an appeal for the shelter of forgiving goodness, a sanctum for the naked. Reverent wonder and dread go together; there is a kind of holy idiocy, a sacred stupor, whenever the unapproachable is nigh. There is the solicitation that we let ourselves be consecrated as a shelter of love in the unarmed porosity of being.

Bibliography Adams, Nicholas, George Pattison, and Graham Ward, eds. 2013. Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bellow, Saul. 2000. Ravelstein. New York: Penguin Books. Cook, Elizabeth, ed. 1990. John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Critchley, Simon, and Peter Dews, eds. 1996. Deconstructive Subjectivities. Albany: SUNY Press. Desmond, William. 1995. Being and the Between. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2001. Ethics and the Between. Albany: SUNY Press. ———. 2003. Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Philosophy and Religion. New  York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2008. God and the Between. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing. ———. 2010–2011. Are we all Scholastics Now? On Analytic, Dialectical and Post-Dialectical Thinking. Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society, 1–24. ———. 2012a. On the Surface of Things: Transient Life and Beauty in Passing. Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 1(1 & 2): 20–54. ———. 2012b. The Intimate Strangeness of Being: Metaphysics After Dialectic. Washington: Catholic University of American Press. Hegel, G.W.F. 1969. Science of Logic. Trans. A.V. Miller. New York: Humanities Press. Kelly, Thomas, and Philipp Rosemann, eds. 2004. Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that Is Friendship. Leuven: Peeters. Marion, Jean-Luc. 1991. God Without Being. Trans. Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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———. 2001. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Trans. Thomas A.  Carlson. New  York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2002a. In Excess: Studies of Saturated Phenomena. Trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2002b. Prolegomena to Charity. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. 2004. The Crossing of the Visible. Trans. James K.A. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2007. The Erotic Phenomenon. Trans. Stephen E. Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2008. The Visible and the Revealed. Trans. C.M. Gschwandtner and others. New York: Fordham University Press. Simpson, Christopher, ed. 2012. The William Desmond Reader. Albany: SUNY Press.

Chapter 4

From Philosophical Theology to Philosophy of Religion: An Illocutionary Turning Point Savina Raynaud

4.1  Introduction When I answered the kind invitation to contribute to this volume, I had in mind the subject matter that had been given some months before: ‘Christian Philosophy in a Secularized World’. Proceeding from this, in my first abstract I had meticulously evaluated and commented on the choice of the noun phrases to outline our common train of thought, in order to meet the sought-after contribution that could emerge. In the meantime, the general title of our volume has been changed to ‘Philosophies of Christianity’. A few words can make a significant difference. This is so true that I had to alter my claim. I will try to explain what has intervened and why I attribute the cause of a different formulation of my argument to the different wording of our suggested inquiry. Initially, I had dwelt upon the context which was suggested as surrounding our philosophical investigations: a secularized world. In order to understand the meaning, a disambiguation could occur, by connecting ‘secularized’ to its possible nominal correspondences: ‘secularization’ or ‘secularism’. Nobody will miss the difference: a sort of descriptive, rather neutral or even positive attribution, versus a rather critical, negatively evaluative one. If we consider the substantial change in the title—from ‘Christian Philosophy’ to ‘Philosophies of Christianity’—I am pleased to say that this second wording seems to me much more preferable. I cannot help but recall the claim I expressed in 2014 at a previous conference hosted by Pázmány Péter Catholic University: I would refuse to use the noun phrase ‘Christian philosophy’, because it sounds to me like a rather elliptic—if not misleading—expression. I would rather interpret it as ‘the philosophy cultivated by Christians and proposed by them as Christians’ …. The notion can be S. Raynaud (*) Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Milano, Italy e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_4

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S. Raynaud expressed more clearly if we try to explain better the relationships between noun and adjective, or rather between the noun phrase and the reference it picks up. It is not only a matter of avoiding contradictions, but rather of choosing relevant properties. If what is proper to philosophers is their search for truth (and/or wisdom) through intellectual questing, and if we do not ascribe (properly and exclusively) our faith to our intellectual skills, then it cannot be the right approach to combine these two different roots of thought.

Going back to the present call I must say that, in my view, if we want to be impartial in our inquiries into the problems of religion, we should be particularly free from prejudice and unjustified opinions. I would then prefer leaving aside the title ‘Christian Philosophy in a Secularized World’ and opt for the present title. The main topic of our volume, even without any special contextualization, shows what I also expressed in the above quotation. What in fact happened while passing from Christian Philosophy to Philosophies of Christianity? We changed ‘philosophy’ from one to many, from singular to plural1; we passed from a so-called subjective genitive to an objective one.2 That is, we changed from Christian as a property of philosophers to Christianity as an object of philosophical investigation, from a subset within the set of philosophers (just the Christian ones) to the whole class of philosophers, restricting, on the other hand, the object of their investigations from any possible area worth considering from a philosophical viewpoint to a well circumscribed area, that of philosophy of religion, or rather, to a more specific one—the philosophy of Christian religion. However, are we sure that Christianity means Christian religion? In Italian, we have Cristianità and Cristianesimo, in German Christenheit and Christentum, or in English Christianity and Christendom. If it is not a waste of time to attempt to grasp the different meanings made possible by this variety of suffixes, let us try once again to identify what can be distinguished: ‘Christianity’, with its suffix shared by many other abstract nouns (identity, beauty, laity, activity, etc.), usually derived from adjectives which on their own can be derived from verbs, is intended to refer to the concrete way in which, in a given historical period, Christian religion displays itself as a social, structural, and institutional phenomenon. ‘Christian religion’ is therefore the historical way of life of Christians, their assemblies and forms of life in determined cultural contexts: the apostolic Church of the first generation after Christ; the Church of persecutions and martyrs; and the Church of monasticism, of the Reformation, of a secularized, globalized world … Christian religion, in other words, is what makes Christianity and its historical development possible, because it is the origin of this history and always transcends its stages and creations. Since one of the topics at hand is the question as to what religion, and our Christian religion, is, I merely refer to our common discourse and its immense background. I point out that one of the classical goals of philosophical research is to

1  I interpret this plural in our present context especially to mean ‘the philosophies developed by Christians and/or acknowledged by them as suitable to their framework’. 2  In the expression ‘the love of the patriot’, the genitive can be of the object of love (objective genitive, love is directed to the patriot, which is its goal) or alternatively the genitive can be of the subject (subjective genitive, the patriot is the subject or the agent of the action of love).

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answer (or at least to try to answer) the question: ‘What is it?’ Generally speaking, the more precise the goal of our research, the less vague or ambiguous it becomes, the better the result should be. To philosophize, eventually, means to understand, to think of, to look for truth, to develop an attitude of wisdom towards what is explored—in our case, either the Christian religion as such, or the way in which it is lived in a given time and place, or both. So, here we have the two main terms of the relationship we are going to focus on: philosophy on one hand, and ‘Christianity’ on the other. What kind of relationship are we going to discern between the two of them, and how shall we ever articulate the multiple strata of what ‘Christianity’ stands for? In answering this question, a further premise is called for. My field of work is philosophy of language, not philosophy of religion, and taking for granted that it is wiser not to act (to extemporize) as a specialist while not being one, I will do a couple of things: Firstly, I will describe the path from philosophy of language to philosophy of religion—or rather, of Christian religion—in this way: from ‘god’ as a common noun (and even earlier from its co-referential noun phrases, such as first cause, summum bonum, pure act, etc.) to the proper noun of our God, the God of Jesus Christ, the One and Triune God. Secondly, I will discuss what I have learned from the author of a recently published article (‘Half a Century of Philosophy of Religious Language in Italy’), which appeared in a special issue of Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (RIFL) devoted to philosophy of language in Italy.3 I hope, while doing so, to strengthen our mutual bonds, through an identification of what characterizes each of us, and the traditions we belong to.

4.2  F  rom Common to Proper Nouns, from the 3rd to the 2nd Person I start by recalling a difficult translation of a wonderful expression which has reached us from long ago, from classical Greek: logos. In this expression, thought and linguistic expression are intertwined into a synthetic, condensed word, the semantic equivalent of which has rarely been coined in other idioms. Unfortunately enough, in Latin logos often became ratio, leaving aside the semantic component related to a verbum dicendi completely. As an alternative, we will try not to omit this semantic component while outlining the kind of relationship between humankind and the human condition as such on the one hand, and divinity on the other, as a sort of inter-human communication (not only an intra-human one), and sometimes even as a human-divine one, at least as an 3  Marco Damonte, ‘Mezzo secolo di filosofia del linguaggio religioso in Italia’, Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 9, no. 1 (2015): pp. 59–72, DOI https://doi.org/10.4396/201506ITA05

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attempt to make contact with each other (on both sides), although regrettably not always with mutual satisfaction.

4.2.1  On Referring What can then join a religious approach to Christian religion to a philosophical one is therefore, in my view, the possibility of considering a kind of ascent—in a gradual, non-discontinuous and yet up and down perspective—from the lonely, human search for God to both a human and divine colloquium in the context of a personal belief, a religious alliance, and a divine-human friendship. I will then start from a well-known semantic model—the so-called semiotic triangle—in order to show its strengths and weaknesses, and then go on to a further model for human communication, inspired by the resolve to leave behind all manifestations of solipsism: Bühler’s Organon-Modell. Let us begin with the semiotic triangle, from a bi-dimensional semantics, with intension and extension, or sense and reference:

∗ TE ) UA ns EQ s to atio AD fer rel Re sal au rc

he

SYMBOL

(ot

CO RR S (a ca ymb ECT us oli ∗ al se re s lat ion )

THOUGHT OR REFERENCE

Stands for (an imputed relation) ∗ TRUE

REFERENT

It would be impossible to expect perfect accuracy regarding the involved terminology and the historical and epistemological reconstruction of all theoretical developments. We have to be brief and the story is a long one: from Aristotle to Charles Sanders Peirce, from Gottlob Frege to Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards and beyond, the triangle remains a useful model. I, too, consider it a useful model—all the more so in certain special instances. What happens, however, when you are just halfway there, i.e. when you feel sure (or are inclined to think) that there is somebody or something that has some property and deserves to be named that way, but that such a candidate is not available or not acknowledged as such (Situation 4)?

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Here we experience the suspension of the closure of the geometric figure (the triangle), the adventure of thought which does not readily drive the thinker to safe harbour, yet still assures him that that very thought does not have to be conceived as a goal, but simply as a means in a quest for its end: from a scholastic perspective, id quo, instead of id quod.

If we now specify our inquiry, linking it to the religious quest, then all kinds of personal, existential situations can be envisaged via such a model: from the very beginning of religious research, with its multiplicity of questions, lack of definiteness, or vagueness, to the intimate relationship of a life-long story of fidelity, in words and deeds. Throughout such an itinerary, many different devices can mark, step by step, the mode of ‘referring’ adopted to bridge the gap between creatures and divinity: interrogatives, indefinites, and then tentative descriptions—indefinite versus definite, indexicals versus indexical descriptions—all the way up to proper nouns. Let us refer to a classical text and an emblematic quotation. The opening of the third article of the second question of Aquinas’ Summa theologiae reads as follows: ‘It seems that God does not exist.’4 As it results from the text that follows, the  ‘Videtur quod Deus non sit. Quia si unum contrariorum fuerit infinitum, totaliter destruetur aliud. Sed hoc intelligitur in hoc nomine Deus, scilicet quod sit quoddam bonum infinitum. Si ergo Deus esset, nullum malum inveniretur. Invenitur autem malum in mundo. Ergo Deus non est. Praeterea, quod potest compleri per pauciora principia, non fit per plura. Sed videtur quod omnia quae apparent in mundo, possunt compleri per alia principia, supposito quod Deus non sit, quia ea. quae sunt naturalia, reducuntur in principium quod est natura; ea. vero quae sunt a proposito, reducuntur in principium quod est ratio humana vel voluntas. Nulla igitur necessitas est ponere Deum esse. Sed contra est quod dicitur Exodi III, ex persona Dei, ego sum qui sum. Respondeo dicendum quod Deum esse quinque viis probari potest’ (emphasis added) (‘It seems that God does not exist; 4

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p­ redication of existence concerning what is named as God finds different propositional attitudes: negative assertions, counterfactual conditional sentences, indexicals as token-reflexive devices, and existential propositions as objects of modal assertive sentences. In short, we can understand the meaning of what is said without consenting to its existence and without gradually identifying properties and relations of its referent. By mentioning some further and apparently distant examples we may ask: What was the semantic value of Einstein’s (and Poincaré’s) ‘gravitational waves’ (1916 and 1905 respectively), until they were ‘observed’? They wanted to name something they had not yet seen before. Scientists as theorists go indeed further than empirical evidence. Certainly, they do not underestimate empirical evidence. They rather look for empirical confirmation or disconfirmation and even try to reach further experiences through new experiments. When their reports succeed in getting at some intersubjective, mutual understanding, then picking up referents becomes easier for everybody. We can say the same about inferences concerning astronomical calculations and telescopic observations. What about the existence of the planet Neptune, for instance, mathematically predicted before its actual observation? ‘In François Arago’s apt phrase, Le Verrier had discovered a planet “with the point of his pen”.’5 We could and should consider this climax and its presence in many different panoramas: the history of religions, the history of philosophy, and the history of Christian religion and faith. Here, I will just briefly outline some of the extremes of these scales: from tremendum et numinosum up to the various polytheisms and monotheisms, from the pre-Socratic arché to the figure of the demiurge, and beyond that to the causa prima, finis ultimus, summum bonum, id quo maius cogitari nequit, and so on.

because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word “God” means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist. Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence. On the contrary, it is said in the person of God: “I am Who am” [Exodus 3:14]. I answer that the existence of God can be proved in five ways.’). Cf. Summa theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3, in The Summa Theologiæ of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. The Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benzinger: 1947), http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/ 5  Eric S. Swanson, Science and Society: Understanding Scientific Methodology, Energy, Climate, and Sustainability (New York: Springer, 2016), p. 12 footnote 9.

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4.2.2  On Co-referring The first question to be asked here is, what kind of relationships do we place among these sets of ‘names’? How do we conceive of the possible co-reference between the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus and the Creator in Genesis or vice versa? How distinctly, with no overlap, can we think of the πρῶτον κινοῦν ἀκίνητον (Metaphysics 1071b3-22) and of ὁ λόγος σάρξ ἐγένετο (John 1:1)—with all the connected and delicate questions of translation: And the Word was made flesh … —the Word for ὁ λόγος, Verbum?— was made (factum est) for ἐγένετο? I do think that here we face a great opportunity and a serious challenge: Can we compare the referential objective of so many expressions and arrange so many different tools according to well-expressed criteria, without disregarding their diverse epistemic values, and their diverse environments and contexts (speculative, religious, revealed or not)? It would already be helpful to consider the name of the two sources from which the Old Testament stems, the Jahwist and the Elohist, to recognize the role of proper nouns and alternatively (substitutively) that of the titles through which the human relationship to God is shaped and shapes itself. Some scholars have also highlighted that what often happened was the gradual transformation of a common noun referring to god into a proper one, of a plural into a singular, or of an adjective into a substantive: from god(s) to God, from adonis (Phoenician for ‘my lord’) to Adonai (Lord), and from kyrios/dominus to Kyrios/ Dominus.6 How did this happen and what does this mean to us? Firstly, at least in our alphabetic tradition, this turning point is marked by the birth of the capital letter. Now, what does it mean that a common noun becomes a proper one? It means that it has only one candidate (at least in a given context) to be taken as its object, and that it does not require any more to work as a motivated signifying label, because it is intended as a directly referring tool, imposed by someone entitled to do that naming and afterwards received and re-applied by a whole community. This change of the naming function can be described by the collapse of the aforementioned triangle and is therefore substituted by a horizontal line, suggesting that the mediating connection through name and named is a decision, an act of will, rather than comprehension, an act of intellect. This way of dealing with the question has caused the subversion of the classical Fregean semantic paradigm (the semiotic triangle) by the so-called Direct Reference Model, usually ascribed to Kripke and Putnam.

Proper Noun ® Referent

6  See Leonardo Lugaresi, ‘Politeismo, monoteismo, relazione trinitaria. Appunti su linguaggio religioso e natura divina in Giustino, Origene e Gregorio Nazianzeno’, Annali di scienze religiose 8 (2003): pp. 153–178.

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A great debate should open up here: I will just briefly recall the systematic contribution of a colleague of mine at the Catholic University of Milan, Aldo Frigerio, who has devoted two monographs to singular and plural reference,7 respectively, collecting and comparing all the linguistic devices and language structures (phrases) apt to refer to different kinds of entities. Professor Frigerio also analyses their different ways of performing their function. Finally, we may consider the Scriptures, from the very beginning of Genesis to the Apocalypse. We begin with the silent co-presence of God and Adam with Eve in Eden, disrupted by the divine appeal: ‘Ubi es?’ and Adam’s response: ‘Vocem tuam audivi in paradiso et timui …’ (Genesis 3:9–10).8 Before going on, I wish to describe a glimmer of the underlying Hebrew that filters through from the interpretive decisions of Bible translators: Vocem tuam audivi, or I heard the sound of you in the garden,9 or Ho udito i tuoi passi [your steps] nel giardino. If we go back to the Hebrew text, we find qolekâ: voice, noise, what is audible while someone is passing by. I could not hope for a better opening towards a crucial passage, the passage from a semantic model to a pragmatic, or rather, a sympractical one.

4.2.3  F  rom Referring and Co-referring to Appealing and Listening I simply quote Bühler: The adult human being is of course a speaking being, but not quite so loquacious, not to such a degree a homo loquax as the ellipticians seem tacitly to assume. To what end should one speak if one gets on just as well or better in practical life without speaking? When a diacritical word sign is integrated in the action it often has no need of an entourage of further language signs around it. Instead of being surrounded by the signs that stand in for [stellvertretend] something, it is surrounded by precisely what would otherwise be stood in for and can rely on that … The relevant surrounding field in which it has its place is practice 7  Aldo Frigerio, Il riferimento singolare. Strumentazioni linguistiche (Milano: Vita e Pensiero, 2003); id., Quantificazione e riferimento plurale. La semantica dei sintagmi nominali (Roma: Carocci, 2008); Filosofia del linguaggio (Milano: Apogeo, 2011). 8  In Hebrew we read ᾽ayyêkâ ‘where you’ (tacit ‘are’) and ‘I heard your voice/your noise [qolekâ] in the garden’. The Septuaginta adds ‘while you were walking in the garden’, ἤκουσα περιπατοῦντος ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ. I thank Anna Passoni Dell’Acqua for this information and explanation. 9  New International Version: ‘He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”’New Living Translation: ‘He replied, “I heard you walking in the garden, so I hid. I was afraid because I was naked.”’English Standard Version: ‘And he said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”’ New American Standard Bible: ‘He said, “I heard the sound of You in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.”’ King James Bible: ‘And he said, I heard thy voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.’

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in this case; we therefore also say (for the sake of homophony) that it is encountered in sympractical integration.10

What is the relevant praxis in the quoted passage? God is in the garden. His presence can be felt even without hearing his voice, just by acknowledging his steps. But his appeal follows: ‘Ubi es?’ This turn-taking in starting a dialogue can eventually involve his creatures11: What makes the difference between Dominus and Domine? Between Kyrios and Kyrie—that Kyrie that occurs while invoking Kyrie, eleison (Lord, have mercy), for instance? Technically speaking, we may answer: not only the morphology, but also the illocutionary force changes, from nominative to vocative, from expositive to directive, from the third to the second person … and which person! In the meantime, a radical change has intervened: from speaking of, to speaking to; from talking to listening; from hearing the steps (not necessarily the voice), to the willingness, the boldness, to address a familiar, yet mysterious presence, even if to beg its pardon. Timeo Dominum transeuntem, we can say with Saint Augustine. Here you have Bühler’s Organon-Modell:

The fundamental turning point here is the one which displaces the same ‘item’, the same entity, the same presence from the pole of ‘Objects and States of Affairs’

 Karl Bühler, Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language, trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin in collaboration with Achim Eschbach, John Benjamins (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011 [1990]), p. 179. 11  Even without forgetting the wonderful Augustinian theme (Confessiones X, 38): ‘Sero te amavi, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova, sero te amavi! Et ecce intus eras et ego foris et ibi te quaerebam et in ista formosa quae fecisti, deformis irruebam. Mecum eras, et tecum non eram. Ea me tenebant longe a te, quae si in te non essent, non essent. Vocasti et clamasti et rupisti sorditatem meam, coruscasti splenduisti et fugasti caecitatem meam, fragrasti, et duxi spiritum et anhelo tibi, gustavi et esurio et sitio, tetegisti me, et exarsi in pacem tuam.’ 10

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to ‘Receiver’: only living beings, and not any living being, can become a receiver instead of being an ‘object’. The whole field of spiritual theology is disclosed here. Divine Revelation is such a history, the history of salvation. Sender and receiver alike need to identify themselves, a process which can require a long time, or rather, a whole lifetime. We can listen to the Gospel, pausing on some key dialogues. Venit autem Iesus in partem Caesareae Philippi: et interrogabat discipulos suos, dicens: ‘Quem dicunt homines esse Filium hominis?’12 (Matthew 16:13–16; Mark 8:29; Luke 9:20)

We can trace this dialogue straight to the final exchange of promise and acceptance: Etiam venio cito: Amen. Veni Domine Iesu. (Revelation 22:20b)

4.2.4  Silence and Talk, Silence Against Talk I have mentioned the Bühler-type sympractical use of language signs, as a mere integration, as a diacritic to something mute, a meaningful behaviour. We will just mention the third commandment: ‘Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain’ (Exodus 20:7). Immediately after the dialogue, as mentioned shortly before—Who do you say I am? (Mark 8:30)—the text adds: ‘Peter answereth and saith unto him, Thou art the Christ. And he charged them that they should tell no man of him.’ The entire trail from God’s ineffability to the messianic secret unfolds before our sight. Another silence, a different dismissal of talk, is instead the one which can be brought back to the uncompleted drawing of our semiotic triangle: when no candidate is found, when the intellectual quest does not meet with any religious proposal or experience that comes from history, from human praxis and inner life, or from a superior source, then no proper noun can substitute the tentative description. In addition, those who call God by name are not acknowledged as being oriented along the same referential arrow. It is a matter of meaningfulness, or meaninglessness, or mutual, though partial, intercomprehension.

 ‘“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”’ (Matthew 16:15–16).

12

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4.3  H  alf a Century of Philosophy of Religious Language in Italy The same dilemma, between these two opposite poles, has affected the publications in the philosophy of religious language, both in Italy and abroad, which Damonte’s recent article takes into consideration.13 Italian contributions have as their background the debate in analytic philosophy. This was started by A.  J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (1936) with its claim of meaninglessness, and completed by David Soskice in Metaphor and Religious Language (1985), arguing in favor of meaningfulness. The Italian debate began in the 1960s, thanks to articles by three scholars, two of them neo-scholastics: Battista Mondin (1961), Antonio Capizzi (1966), and Sofia Vanni Rovighi (1968). Logical positivism and the dichotomy between facts and values are biased against the possibility of admitting religious language as meaningful. This difficulty would be overcome only thanks to a new opening to metaphysical realism and to mastering long-standing reductionisms. A further step is translation: from 1967 to 1975, three major works became accessible in Italian: Bochenski’s The Logic of Religion, Ramsey’s Religious Language and Christian Discourse, and Ferré’s Language, Logic and God. Eventually, at the beginning of the 1970s, both Mario Micheletti and Dario Antiseri published two monographs, one concerning analytic philosophy and the theological problem, and the other concerning analytic philosophy and the semantics of religious language. What about the present? Marco Damonte would be positively astounded by the following trends ‘under construction’: biblical studies, pragmatic research on prayer, formal logic and ontology for metaphysics and theology. Nevertheless, the authors mentioned in Sect. 4.3 above would also admit that the inadequate reception of the translations of the main sources was quite probably due to the modest propensity of Italian philosophers of religion towards the philosophy of language and, complementarily, to the scanty interest of Italian analytic philosophers in religious topics. Propensity and interest are extra-theoretical attitudes. If the reader has followed the argument up to now, then he or she might see in these developments an encouragement to persist in adopting language and illocutions as a proper foundation from which to construct a solid philosophy of religion.

13

 Marco Damonte, ‘Mezzo secolo di filosofia del linguaggio religioso in Italia’, cited above.

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Bibliography Thomas Aquinas. The Summa Theologiæ of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Second and Revised Edition [1920]. Literally translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Online Edition Copyright 2017 by Kevin Knight at http://www.newadvent.org/summa/index.html. Accessed 09/02/2018. Bühler, Karl. 2011 [1990]. Theory of Language: The Representational Function of Language. Trans. Donald Fraser Goodwin, Achim Eschbach, and John Benjamins. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Damonte, Marco. 2015. Mezzo secolo di filosofia del linguaggio religioso in Italia. Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio 1: 59–72. Frigerio, Aldo. 2003. Il riferimento singolare. Strumentazioni linguistiche. Milano: Vita e Pensiero. ———. 2008. Quantificazione e riferimento plurale. La semantica dei sintagmi nominali. Roma: Carocci. ———. 2011. Filosofia del linguaggio. Milano: Apogeo. Lugaresi, Leonardo. 2003. Politeismo, monoteismo, relazione trinitaria. Appunti su linguaggio religioso e natura divina in Giustino, Origene e Gregorio Nazianzeno. Annali di scienze religiose 8: 153–178. Swanson, Eric S. 2016. Science and Society: Understanding Scientific Methodology, Energy, Climate, and Sustainability. New York: Springer.

Chapter 5

The Limits of Univocity in Interreligious Relationality Richard Schenk

5.1  The Plurality of Disciplines in the Study of Religions It was the widespread conviction of medieval theologians that, after the fall, graced existence was possible, but not as a return to innocence. As Robert Kilwardby (†1279) put it: Once human beings have turned toward good or evil, there is no more state of innocence, but rather the human nature in every person then always relates immediately to grace or to guilt. Even though that state would have existed in the very beginnings of created nature, afterwards it was no longer.1

Our research conference and this collection have as their topic ‘Philosophies of Christianity: New Ways in the Philosophy of Religion.’ The mediating methodological position that philosophies of religion occupy between sciences of religion and theologies of religion has long ceased to be an innocent one. ‘The conflict of the faculties’ in their diverse relationships to religion is neither new nor obsolete. Decisions about the shape and content of the philosophy of religion impact the institutional future of theological and scientific studies of religion. This basic methodological issue is not the topic of this paper, but it is implicitly a vital question of  Robert Kilwardby, Quaestiones in librum IV Sententiarum, q. 22; see edition by Richard Schenk, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für die Herausgabe ungedruckter Texte aus der mittelalterlichen Geisteswelt 17 (Munich: Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1993), p.  89.l, and pp. 143–147. ‘Et contra hoc … dici potest quod postquam semel homo convertit se ad bonum vel ad malum, non fuit status innocentiae, sed immediate se habuit semper humana natura in omni persona ad gratiam vel culpam. Unde quamvis fuerit ille status forte in primordio naturae institutae, deinceps tamen non fuit.’

1

R. Schenk (*) Albert-Ludwigs-University, Honorary Professor, Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_5

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its hermeneutical context.2 There are models of science, of philosophy, and of theology that call for or militate against the vigorous presence of the other two families of disciplines.3 To illustrate that context by one current example: In many regions, even at ecclesial institutions of higher learning, ‘[t]he point of contention is whether theology should be conceived as normatively guided cultural studies of Christianity or as a science of divinity with claims to dogmatic normativity’—so the leading governmental advisory board for scientific management in Germany, the ‘Wissenschaftsrat’, founded in 1957, in its 2010 ‘Recommendations on the Advancement of Theologies and Sciences concerned with Religions at German Universities’.4 Once theology is re-envisioned as a cultural science, there follow ‘urgent pleadings’ for the reassignment (‘Umbau’) of resources from classical theological fields to the science of religion and allied cultural disciplines.5 While the driving motive expressed here, to ‘resist any fundamentalist interpretation of the traditional beliefs’,6 rightly implies that the theology of religions keep open the place for the sciences and philosophies of religion, the concern is often underdeveloped for the kind of philosophical work that could encourage the science and theology of religion. The hermeneutical pre-understanding of the following reflections is that the measure of success in philosophies of religion can be gauged in part by the degree to which they facilitate the two other sets of disciplines. The paper will argue that the logical categories developed in the 1980s to describe types of interreligious claims—exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism—taken along with strategies of negation, while not providing any single criterion needed to distinguish among entire religions in their interreligious intentionality, do prove helpful in characterizing the lines of argument out of which religions develop ambiguous relationships towards other religions.

2  For an earlier and longer version of this paper, set in the context of the relations between the science, philosophy, and theology of religions, cf. R. Schenk, ‘Debatable Ambiguity: Paradigms of Truth as a Measure of the Differences among Christian Theologies of Religion’, in Richard Schenk, Vittorio Hösle, Peter Koslowski, eds., Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover, vol. 11 (Vienna: Passagen, 2000), pp. 53–85. 3  For an example of a philosophy of religion that programatically respects the place of the sciences and the theology of religions, cf. the work of Richard Schaeffler, Religionsphilosophie, Studienausgabe, 2nd ed. (Freiburg: Alber, 2010); as well as Philosophische Einübung in der Theologie, Studienausgabe, 3 Bände (Freiburg: Alber, 2008). 4  Der Wissenschaftsrat (ed.), Recommendations on the Advancement of Theologies and Sciences concerned with Religions at German Universities (Köln: Sutorius, 2010), p. 51, http://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/9678-10_engl.pdf 5  Cf. Recommendations, p. 56: The position-paper ‘… urgently pleads in favor of demand-based adjustments [Umbau] to the Christian theologies …’ 6  Recommendations, p. 51.

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5.2  P  lurality in the Structure of Ambivalent Theories of Religion Perhaps due to its own memories of the movement of German thought from Lessing to Hegel and to the rise and decline of Religious History School, German-language publications were, by comparison to the English-speaking academic world, slow and more openly reluctant to embrace the pluralistic philosophy and theology of religions, even during the some twenty years when it was most fashionable elsewhere. But in a spirited essay from 1993, Perry Schmidt-Leukel did much to introduce to the German academy the threefold division of the various models of a philosophical theology of religion into exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism: a threefold distinction which since 1983 had been developed notably by the circle of academicians (including Alan Race and Gavin D’Costa) working with the English religious pluralist, John Hick (†2012). The triadic schema had won for a time general acceptance especially in the broader Anglophone discussion, notably among self-identifying ‘pluralists’.7 Schmidt-Leukel (Münster) has himself since become one of the best known representatives of a pluralistic philosophical theology of religions in the German-­ speaking world.8 Using models drawn from George Cantor’s set-theory, in particular the point that there can be no set of all sets, the essay attempted to prove that this threefold typology for defining how any one religion views its relationship to one or more other religions is ‘comprehensive or exhaustive’ (umfassend) of all possible relations and ‘unavoidable’ (unausweichlich) in its logical aspect9; in other words, every possible statement about the relations between two or more religions must be described by one and only one of the three models, exclusivism, inclusivism, or pluralism. In addition, the essay attempts to prove that this threefold typology is theologically ‘adequate’.10 This third argumentative goal, the theological adequacy of the alternatives, forces the essay to face a controversial challenge by Reinhold Bernhardt,11 whose position Schmidt-Leukel considers all too reserved as regards  But cf. also Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Zur Klassifikation religionstheologischer Modelle’, Catholica 47 (1993): pp. 163–183. He points to the development of the triadic scheme especially by two of John Hick’s students, Alan Race and Gavin D’Costa (p. 165). See D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic theology of Religions (New York: Maryknoll, 1990). On the subsequent and longer study, in which the Christological implications of a pluralistic theology of religions are openly discussed from a sympathiser’s point of view (pp. 493–575), cf. SchmidtLeukel, Theologie der Religionen. Probleme, Optionen, Argumente (Neuried: Ars Una, 1997). Cf. R.  Schenk, ‘In universum mundum. Das Zeugnis des Evangeliums im Zeitalter pluralistischer Religionstheorien’, in W.  Schreer, G.  Steins, eds., Auf neue Art Kirche sein. WirklichkeitenHerausforderungen- Wandlungen (Festschrift Josef Homeyer) (Munich: Don Bosco Verlag, 1999), pp. 507–523. 8  Cf. U.  Ruh, ‘Selbstrelativierung kein Ausweg. Ansatz und Probleme einer pluralistischen Religionstheologie’, Herder Korrespondenz 48 (1994): pp. 576–580. 9  ‘Zur Klassifikation’, p. 163 and 172. 10  ‘Zur Klassifikation’, pp. 163 and 178. 11  Bernhardt, Der Absolutheitsanspruch des Christentums. Von der Aufklärung bis zur 7

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the comprehensiveness, the either-or necessity, and especially the adequacy of this triadic typology. Schmidt-Leukel attempts to dispel Bernhardt’s ‘fear that the threefold schema could hardly do justice to the differentiated character of religious and theological theories as they have really been put forward and would thus lead to inappropriate simplifications.’12 The advantage that the threefold typology not be considered simply as helpful (the claim of its early English-speaking proponents), but even as ‘comprehensive, unavoidable and adequate’, is said by its German advocate to rest in the fact that every theological definition of the relationship between religions could then be ‘forced’ to choose just one of the three types of typology offered in this schema: ‘It provides a means of forcing each position to make an unavoidable commitment to one of the models, and this allows in turn a criteriologically controllable discussion about which of the logically possible options should be chosen.’13 The hope is expressed that, if exclusivism and inclusivism can be shown to be inadequate, pluralism—as the last remaining theological model—will have to be accepted by a process of elimination as the only remaining theological option. The possibility that all three theological models are inadequate for describing entire relational theories is not considered seriously as a possibly valid theological position. There are many aspects of this position which would deserve closer philosophical and theological analysis. Here just four features will be discussed which seem especially important for the problem of ambivalence about and the ambiguity in theories of religions. First of all, Schmidt-Leukel admits that there is a further logical possibility of saying that ‘the knowledge of God—or rather, revelation—authentic liturgy, salvific connection with God, and so forth’14 might be found (fully?) in no religion at all; but he considers this possible statement to be atheistic and therefore theologically irrelevant. As understandable as this exclusion might seem at first, it passes too quickly over one aspect of the problem which is often a burden for the discussion. There are three closely related questions: What does it mean to be salvific? Where is truth to be found? When is it a matter of a revelation? Arguably, these questions are identified here too quickly with one other. Similarly, the objects of these questions, namely salvation, truth, and revelation, are identified too hastily with religion itself. Melting the questions about salvation, truth and revelation all together in the context of today’s theology of religions is made easier, but not necessary clearer, by a widely accepted expansion and reduction in content of the analogous concepts of truths and revelation.15 Referring to salvation ‘in’ religions is not yet an appropriate way of Pluralistischen Religionstheologie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1990). 12  Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Zur Klassifikation’, p. 174. 13  ‘Zur Klassifikation’, p. 179. 14  ‘Zur Klassifikation’, p. 175. 15  Cf. E.  Herms, ‘Offenbarung und Glaube als Gegenstand des ökumenischen Dialogs’, in P. Koslowski and R. Schenk, eds., Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover 7 (Vienna: Bernward, 1995), pp. 251–286; and P. Eicher, Offenbarung. Prinzip neuzeitlicher Theologie (Munich: Kösel, 1977).

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posing the question as to the comparative truth of their statements. Max Seckler’s polemical references to the ‘nonsense about salvific ways’ (Heilswegunfug) prevalent in many discussions is meant as a warning in this direction.16 One might well say that ‘salvation is grasped in faith’ and that, therefore, ‘this salvific faith must have cognitive implications’;17 but this is true not only for religions, but also for every kind of morality aiming at a final fulfillment which it seeks to help realize in a way that has cognitive implications. In both cases the cognitive element involved might be seen as minimal and quite unthematic, without needing to deny the finality of the action aimed at acquiring salvation or truth. One might well concede that there is an openness to salvation implicit in every kind of moral behavior and every kind of religiosity, but that does not demand that the thematic knowledge involved is especially dominant or developed; nor that the level of morality is matched by the level of cognitive reflection or literal truth claimed by the moral agent. The question of who might be saved needs to be distinguished from the question of the truth explicit in this or that person’s moral or religious opinions; morality is not reserved to the religious or the reflective. Even when religions claim or even hope (e.g. within Druze traditions) to have exclusive access to salvation, they can be quite willing to admit that they know in their faith only that which is necessary for salvation; they can easily remain open to other religions in questions of truth not considered necessary for salvation. They can readily admit that they might indeed be at a disadvantage over and against a particular truth claim of another religious or cultural teaching. Similar cases can be observed in a differentiating comparison between faith and knowledge; e.g., not every theory about apokatastasis means in fact to standardize all claims to truth in the same way in which it standardizes the question of who is saved: even those who most largely lack truth will be saved. The distinction between final truths and a morally constructive way of life has been proposed by religions themselves about themselves, as was suggested by the Christian medieval use of the term religio (in its sense of religious practice), which was considered as a merely moral virtue and thus a secondary matter, needing to steer a moderate course between too much and too little.18 Otherwise than in matters more akin to charity, we can in this medieval view easily have too much religion. Connected to this view was the claim that, even after the beginning of the lex nova and the new covenant, the newly obligating words and deeds of the Christian religion remain secondary over and against the less identifiable movements of the Spirit. In this sense of the word, religion is not immediately ordered to the final goal of salvation or to the fullness of truth, but rather it is associated only indirectly with the final goal of humankind.19 The question of what religions might not know and might not be able to accomplish (and perhaps will not even attempt to accomplish)  M. Seckler, ‘Wohin driftet man in der Theologie der Religionen? Kritische Beobachtungen zu einer Dokumentation’, Theologische Quartalsschrift 172 (1992): pp. 126–130. 17  Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Zur Klassifikation’, p. 183, footnote 45. 18  Cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 81. 19  Thomas, Summa theologiae, II-II, q. 81, a. 5: ‘Et ideo religio non est virtus theologica cuius obiectum est ultimus finis, sed virtus moralis cuius est esse circa ea. quae sunt ad finem.’ 16

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should not be considered as one without significance for our proper question. It belongs to the self-understanding of many religions, including the Christian religion, that the salvation for which they hope is not primarily given in the religion itself and is not primarily produced by the religion. Like all human actions, religions are reflections of the offer of salvation, without themselves incorporating the full truth or salvation which they seek. Secondly: By its very structure, a mathematical scheme of comparison using set-­ theory does not allow us to take into consideration the historical context, especially as, in this case, no conditional sentences of the type, ‘if and when, then …’ have been included. Admittedly there must always be supra-temporal standards of measurement by which we can define the historical change from one state to another. In most classical theories of religion, however, historical conditions play a more central role than do any under consideration here. For example, John Henry Newman expresses the view that ‘pagans’ are closer to the gospel than are ‘heretics’, although many of the expressed statements of the latter are identical with those of the ‘orthodox’ tradition and explicit in their orientation to Christ; their greater distance from the latter stems from the denial of central principles enunciated or implied even earlier.20 Through the denial of a seeming ‘detail’ which historically had been accepted as revelation, people can distance themselves from the tradition of the gospel with greater clarity than someone who never has had occasion to raise the point in question. The exclusion of what had been considered in a tradition as an issue central to the principle of revelation can prove to be more pivotal in such cases than the extensive identity remaining on diverse and sundry points of doctrine. Another classical consideration of historicality can be seen in the connection which Augustine and others suggest between the promulgatio evangelii and the cessatio legalium. Despite the many problematic aspects of the idea of cessatio, rightly seen as the crux of the religious problematic for the near future, there is little doubt that subjective and intersubjective historicality cannot be ignored when asking what is thought to be true or false about a religion; this is one of the main arenas where religions change over time. As is clear from any study in the development of doctrine, the confessions of a religion which have been handed down change especially by new denials and oppositions. Affirmation and denial are of different weight; the former is less definitive than the latter. When judging about religions and their developments, historically sensitive theories must consider religions in their uniquely temporal character and ask about their intentions in denying certain novel statements. In such cases, theories can take an ambivalent stand on the historical development of a religion, viewing it at once in its older substance and its younger development, so that it is no longer possible for the theories to be assigned by set­ theory to simply one of the possible categories into which theories can be grouped. Even when a particular interpretation of historical matter seems dubious, the  John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, Part II, Chapter V, Section 2, § 3 (New York, NY: Garden City, 1960), p. 185. ‘Pagans may have, heretics cannot have, the same principle as Catholics; if the latter have the same, they are not real heretics, but in ignorance. Principle is a better test of heresy than doctrine.’

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q­ uestion remains how a mathematical schema could take into account religious ambivalence stemming from historical development. A third aspect of the problem: In set-theory, with its mathematical schema for dividing up types of theories, variations between truths of different weight remain hidden with respect to their differences in type and intensity. The insight into the possible ‘hierarchy of truths’, which since the Second Vatican Council has played a major role in inner-Christian ecumenical discussions, needs to be applied to inter­ religious dialogue as well. The relative weight or hierarchy of truths demands that we pay greater attention to the question of which truths are considered to be more basic and whether, despite many surface differences, there might be a deeper and more significant unity of agreement on issues deemed more important. This depends significantly on the distinction and connection of truths regarding God and those regarding the world as well as the truths of a theoretical and those of practical kind. The closeness and distance of two religions need not be identical at all levels. This widely shared insight names another source of possible ambivalence, which, however, will not be taken into account where the relationship between religions must be forced into one and only one of the possible groups allowed by the mathematical model. The fourth aspect: The greatest weakness of the attempt to force whole religious theories to choose globally between alternative mathematical schemata is a deficiency which was already suggested by the previously mentioned weaknesses. It is the weakness implied by the claim that the threefold schema is ‘unavoidable’. The most dubious part of the attempt to apply set-theory here is to be seen where such an inevitability of belonging to one and just one category is demanded from whole theories. Indeed, it is admitted here once as an aside that the basic modes for relating claims to significance cannot be applied globally to judge whole systems of religions, but must be applied to individual phenomena and convictions within the religions.21

However, even here, the claim that it is unavoidable to choose one of the schema’s three options is indeed applied to whole theories, so as to exclude the possibility that the theory would not settle as a whole for a claim to exclusive, inclusive or equal significance with regard to each comparable individual phenomenon and in regard to entire religions considered as monolithic wholes.22

 Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Zur Klassifikation’, p. 174, with reference to Bernhardt, p. 224.  In his most recent works, Schmidt-Leukel has proposed alternatives to his earlier binding, threefold classification of entire religions and theories of interreligious relationality; cf. especially Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Religious Pluralism and Interreligious Theology. The Gifford Lectures  – An Extended Edition (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2017). These alternatives address more intentionally the complex structure of similarities and dissimilarities of religious forms. The analysis of the earlier approach remains important due both to the influence it has exercised on the philosophy of religions since the 1980s and to the abiding contribution it can offer for analysing simpler entities like arguments, themes and symbols, within complex wholes with heterogeneous elements, differing interpretations and uneven histories.

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‘To be forced to settle for one kind of comparison’ is applied then in an exemplary manner to the analysis of the theory of religion proposed by Hans Küng,23 whose position is described as one which can only be considered free of self­ contradiction if it were to accept the label of ‘moderate pluralism’. This conclusion is drawn from the fact that Küng himself excluded the other two options of exclusivism and inclusivism as well as (radical) pluralism. Küng’s reservations over and against a (consistently radical) pluralism had already led Paul Knitter to charge Küng with the hidden return to a formerly popular model of inclusivism or superiorism, which, given the antithetical options of set-theory, can only be seen as self-­ contradiction or, more plausibly, as a merely rhetorical or tactical statement which could and should be clarified. ‘It must be left to Hans Küng himself to establish a sense of clarity here.’24 Yet even the ambiguity of the word ‘moderate’ must appear to set-theory as a lack of logical rigor, once the proposed standard of measurement demands that the proponent choose from just one of the three genera of theories. Such insistence eliminates the chance of asking whether, in fact, such theoretical ambiguity might not possibly be the most appropriate approach to a reality which itself exists on many levels. This attempt to pressure theories into a clarity which ignores these many levels of comparison is put forward here without intended irony in the name of pluralism. Not just Hans Küng might want to respond to such compulsion by pointing out that the principle of the unavoidability of an either/or decision for one of the three categories can be logically and soundly prevented by the admission that there is a well-­ founded ambivalence in the thing to be judged or in the subject of this judgement. In defense of this atypical ‘pluralism’ of either-or, Schmidt Leukel offered the following elucidation: Additionally, there is also the possibility that theologians are sometimes too ambiguous or inconsistent in their statements, so that for this reason a clear classification of their position is not possible. This, of course, would not be the fault of the typology but of the respective theologians.25

The course of the controversy within pluralism about the position advanced by Hans Küng has at least made clear that such ambivalence cannot be described adequately simply by adding subdivisions such as ‘radical’, ‘undecided’, and ‘moderate’ exclusivism; or ‘inclusive’ and ‘non-inclusive’ superiority; or again ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ pluralism. Such subdivisions betray some of the weaknesses of the claim to make the threefold schema comprehensive, unavoidable, and adequate for all types of theories, now grouped neatly into tidy compartments. Not only does the classification fail to describe de facto relationalities, but when intended as n­ ormative  Hans Küng, ‘Zu einer ökumenischen Theologie der Religionen’, Concilium 22 (1986): pp. 76–80.  Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Zur Klassifikation’, p. 181, note 4. 25  Schmidt-Leukel, ‘Exclusivism, Inclusivism, Pluralism. The Tripolar Typology—Clarified and Reaffirmed’, in Paul F. Knitter, ed., The Myth of Religous Superiority. Multifaith Explorations of Religious Pluralism (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2005), pp. 13–27; here, p. 25. Schmidt-Leukel assigns no merit here to any of the recent criticisms, even by former proponents of the adequacy, comprehensiveness and inevitability of the typology and its pluralistic aim. 23 24

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compulsion the system proves inadequate. The subdivisions suggested cannot reestablish the claims of adequacy, comprehensiveness and inevitability, since the ‘species’ of the three genera can logically and de facto often do have much in common with species of other genera. What moderates moderate pluralism can easily be an element central to exclusivism or inclusivism. However, if Hans Küng’s theory might finally be defined in terms of the three types of theories offered, much would be won were the threefold schema applied first and foremost to the individual lines of argument and only then to theories as a whole, named now for their most pre­ dominant line of argument. The question can be put aside for the time being whether this classification as it regards the individual types of argument is comprehensive, unavoidable, and adequate; in any case, it will prove helpful. The threefold schema allows us then to define more closely where the ambivalent identity of a theory and the ambiguity of its positions are to be found. The distinction between exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism is less globalizing when applied to individual lines of argument than when applied to whole theories; in the latter case, the identification of the theories actually suggested is often rendered impossible by such globalization, since the alternative lines of their arguments must remain hidden for the sake of an opposing label. It turns out that, apart from the differences of opinion within each of the basic genera, there also are several intersections at different levels between the three models of relationality. For example, there are theoretical elements which appear exclusivistic in many of what are rightly called pluralistic theories of religion—elements which distinguish these from other pluralistic theories—just as there are pluralistic dimensions in many of the exclusivistic positions which set them apart from other largely exclusivistic options. That holds true, for example, for the dominant late patristic and medieval model, veritas-figurae, according to which there were many anticipations of Christological, ecclesiological or eschatological truths to be found already in pre­Christian religions, truths which, however, were widely thought to lose their anticipatory character once these common truths became more explicit; inclusivist and exclusivist dimensions of the model exist side by side. Inclusivistic theories can be viewed either in their self-critical dimension (‘the transcendent reality can never be adequately stated by categorical sentences, not even by those of one’s own religion’) or they can be viewed more in the dimension of affirming the ultimate truth (‘the transcendent reality is most adequately expressed in the categorical statements of one religion’). An example is the intentionally dialectical character of Karl Rahner’s theology with its twofold possibility of stressing at one time the self-critical and at another time the more the self-affirming dimension made possible by the largely inclusivistic scheme.26 In this prototype of recent inclusivistic theologies, namely in the theory of ‘anonymous Christianity’, it holds true that all categorical statements  Cf. N. Schwerdtfeger, Gnade und Welt. Zum Grundgefüge Karl Rahners Theorie des ‘anonymen Christen’, Freiburger theologische Studien 123 (Freiburg: Herder, 1982); and R.  Schenk, Die Gnade vollendeter Endlichkeit. Zur transzendentaltheologischen Auslegung der thomanischen Anthropologie, Freiburger theologische Studien 135 (Freiburg: Herder, 1986).

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and aspirations, be they of a secular or a religious nature, be they about Christian or non-Christian themes, can both attain and miss the transcendental reality. Rahner’s interpretation of the unity of the love of God and of neighbor maintains that the service of one’s neighbor can have a closer relationship to God than prayer does, because it has the greater categorical concreteness, though admittedly a less explicitly thematic relation to the divine. The boundary here between inclusivism and exclusivism, on the one edge of Rahner’s theory, or between inclusivism and pluralism, on the other, is more porous than a simple insistence on choosing one category for the whole we attempt to define. The broadly inclusivistic explanation which Pope John Paul II later provided for his invitation to many representatives of non-­ Christian religions to meet at Assisi for a common day of prayer excludes neither pluralistic nor moderately exclusivistic interpretations of his words: The meeting among religions at Assisi wanted to underscore my conviction that every authentic prayer is called forth by the Holy Spirit, who is present in mysterious ways in the heart of every human being.27

Likewise there is an ambivalence which is clear in a Lutheran study which defines sacrifice as ‘the mysterious center of all religions’, of its essence self-­ sacrifice, which allows our life to be a success,28 while also presenting sacrifice and all of that which can be described as sacral as being the very opposite of the true discovery of a gracious God.29 Where, for the sake of pursuing the laudable goal of logical and mathematical clarity, the threefold schema abstracts from the heterogeneity of individual arguments within a given theory and insists on forcing each theory into just one of the groups, there is a tendency for this categorization to tempt us to judge other types of theories simply by their greater or lesser apparent distance from the dominant type of theoretical position we want to recommend. Individual arguments tend to get lost among the broader labels, drawn with facile rapidity pars pro toto and without due attention to the tensions between two strands of argument within a single theory. Predominately inclusivistic and pluralistic authors have tended to exclude older Latin theologies of religions without further distinction as having been simply exclusivistic rejections of all non-Christian religions; where proof of the claim is even still felt to be necessary, isolated arguments are abstracted from the broader argumentative context which had included counter-arguments. Individual lines of argument, such as the phrases, unica vera religio or extra ecclesiam nulla salus, are cited to place whole theories into one of the three genera allowed by the schema.30  John Paul II, Redemptoris missio, 29, in Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz, ed., Verlautbarungen des Apostolischen Stuhls 100 (Bonn: Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz, 1990), p. 32. 28  Vorstand der Amoldsheimer Konferenz/Kirchenleitung der Velkd, eds., Religionen, Religiosität und christlicher Glaube. Eine Studie (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1991), pp. 16, 71, 126. 29  Religionen, Religiosität, p. 126. 30  Compare the exclusion of the older Christian tradition on the basis of general judgements, by P. F. Knitter, No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1985), p. 6. See also the far more complicated historical data presented 27

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The ambivalence towards other religions and the ambiguity of the descriptions offered by most older theories, as well as the heterogeneity of the individual lines of their arguments, remain largely unknown.31 This leads to a blindness both about the once controversial diversity of opinions between theories and about the ambivalence within each of the theories themselves; it is precisely these tensions, however, which demand our greatest attention.32 This is most apparently significant for the study of that ambivalence of the veritas-figurae-model found already in key texts of the New Testament which then led, in the decree of the Second Vatican Council on religious freedom, to more moderate, partially inclusivistic variations of the formula unica vera religio, which sounded so radically exclusivistic.33 Pre-Christian religions are said to have shared in a truth, but also merely to have shared in a truth, in ways different from Christianity. These religions were related merely as the figure of a truth which remained foreign to them, to be revealed in literal fashion only in the future.34 A similar ambiguity is to be found in the widely discussed phrase, ecclesia ab Abel, which implies that Christian truths and Christian faith existed in Jewish and pagan religions before the name or practice of Christianity, but in such a form that, when the gospel would become well-known, the preliminary or merely figurative form would become antiquated and would be surpassed by a form with a greater by Y. Congar, Außer der Kirche kein Heil. Wahrheit und Dimensionen des Heils (Essen: Driewer, 1961), pp.  107–171; M.  Seckler, Instinkt und Glaubenswille nach Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1961), pp. 232–270; and W. Kern, Außerhalb der Kirche kein Heil? (Freiburg: Herder, 1979). 31  Cf. R.  Schenk, Die Deutung vorchristlicher Riten im Frühwerk des Albertus Magnus, Lectio Alberti 15 (Münster: Aschendorff, 2014). 32  As an example for such ambivalence cf. Kilwardby, Quaestiones in librum quartum Sententiarum, q. 37 (in Schenk, p. 160, lin. 187–197), where in reference to Luke 20:17 (Psalm 117:22) and to the ‘Glossa’ on Ephesians 2:14, it is said: ‘Ex his satis patet, quod, sicut duo parietes uniuntur in uno angulo, sic duo populi gentium et Iudaeorum in Christo per conformitatem sacramentorum et morum. Et hoc congruum est, quod tempus gratiae sit tempus unitatis in cultu Dei et tempus praecedens multitudinis, quia ad unam civitatem per multas vias tenditur, sic ad civitatem Christianae religionis quae est finis et complementum omnis religionis in via. Item, primo sunt partes domus segregatae ab invicem et diversas formas habent, donec in unam formam unius domus copulentur, sic in proposito: quia religio Christiana est domus inhabitationis Dei, ad quam sumuntur gentes ex omni ritu quae prius erant in modo venerandi Deum segregatae, sed sub fide catholica in uno modo catholico uniuntur’. Cf. also the introduction to the cited edition, pp. 67–71. 33  Cf. Sacrosanctum Oecumenicum Concilium Vaticanum II, Declaratio de libertate religiosa (Dignitatis humanae), no. 1, Secretaria generalis Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II, ed., (Vatican City: 1966), p. 512; referred to by the Katechismus der katholischen Kirche (Munich: 1993), nos. 2104–2109, p. 542; and J. Hamer, Y. Congar, eds., Die Konzilserklärung über die Religionsfreiheit, Konfessionskundliche und kontroverstheologische Studien 20 (Paderborn: 1967). 34  On the diversity and controversies between Christian medieval theologies of religions, their ambivalent evaluations of religions, and their ambiguous arguments on the relations between them, cf. R. Schenk, ‘Covenant Initiation. Robert Kilwardby and Thomas Aquinas on the Sacrament of Circumcision’, in J.-C. Pinto de Oliveira, ed., Ordo sapientiae et amoris (Fribourg-Paris: Éditions universitaires, 1993), pp. 555–594; and R. Schenk, ‘Opfer und Opferkritik aus der Sicht römischkatholischer Theologie’, in R.  Schenk, ed., Zur Theorie des Opfers (Stuttgart-Bad-Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1994), pp. 193–250.

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relative completeness.35 In this picture of the ‘church since Abel’ there are thus at least inclusivistic and exclusivistic lines of arguments which coexist with one another. Where someone like Robert Kilwardby acknowledged the greater importance of the pre-Christian sacraments in their own right, prior to their secondary function as prophetic intuitions of later Christian mysteries, the figure of the church since Abel can even have a pluralistic potentiality.36 The doctrine of the necessity of faith for good actions and a fortiori for salvation was usually accepted alongside the contrary (not necessarily contradictory) axiom, facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam.37 The opinio communis accepted both of these statements at once. The ambiguity was not done away with; more often than not, the two expressions co-existed within one and the same theory. Where scepticism about one statement developed, the role of the other statement within the theory was affected as well. Fully non-ambivalent clarity was not reached by dissolving the tension implicit between statements about the salvific necessity of the church and seemingly contrary sentences, equally widespread, that non-members of the empirical church had in fact attained salvation; not even the theologians most critical of non-Christian religions tended to deny the latter thesis. Those who accepted the one statement accepted on the whole the other as well. Thomas Aquinas uses the veritas-figurae model alongside his opinion that the wiser human beings in all epochs affirmed that which we rightly and not merely figuratively call God. A non-metaphorical and explicit belief in God and in God’s providence is claimed by Thomas and most of his contemporaries to have been given in every age. Thomas presupposes that God infuses sanctifying grace into non-Christians and that this event causes at least implicit faith in Christ; at the same time, this faith was always mediated by something like an experience of the cross, usually in the sense of some religious cult: ‘It was therefore necessary that in each age something be given to human beings which represented the suffering of Christ.’38 Such a representation of the hope for salvation in the midst of the experience of harm presupposes for Thomas an explicit and literal faith in God and in God’s providence. These statements do not provide any final solution of the problems of religions, but they are positions which are too unbalanced to be adequately defined by simply one of the labels, ‘exclusivistic’ or ‘inclusivistic’. A too univocal description of a whole theory which in fact has been woven out of many opposing lines of argument  Cf. Y. Congar, ‘Ecclesia ab Abel’, in M. Reding, ed., Abhandlungen über Theologie und Kirche. Festschrift für Karl Adam (Düsseldorf: Patmos-Verlag, 1952), pp. 79–108; and R. Schenk, ‘Die Suche nach dem Bruder Abel. Zum Streit um das analoge Sakramentsverständnis’, in P. Koslowski, R. Löw, and R. Schenk, eds., Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover 5 (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1993), pp. 69–87. 36  Cf. R.  Schenk, ‘Divina simulatio irae et dissimulatio pietatis. Divine Providence and Natural Religion in Robert Kilwardby’s Quaestiones in librum IV Sententiarum’, in A. Zimmermann, ed., Mensch und Natur im Mittelalter, Miscellanea Mediaevalia, vol. 21/2 (Berlin-New York: De Gruyter, 1991), pp. 431–455. 37  ‘To the one doing what is in himself God does not deny grace.’ 38  ‘Et ideo oportuit omni tempore apud homines esse aliquod repraesentativum Dominicae passionis’ (Summa theologiae III, q. 73, a. 5). 35

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and which seeks to address many divergent dimensions of the religions discussed would be historically inaccurate. This loss of ambivalence would also be systematically inadequate for today’s task of finding a theory which can do justice to the complex reality under discussion. Despite the danger of this simplification which falls behind the reality, whenever whole theories of religions are forced into one of the three genera of models, the three options do help express the available choices when they are applied to the analysis of individual lines of argument. In this application their alternative characters can bring new clarity in analyzing the relationship between often contrary (not necessarily contradictory) arguments within a theory or between theories dominated by and named for one general type of argument. Here they display the potential advantage of a concept of truth which is capable of being contradicted and debated. This concept of debatable truth is valuable not only for analyzing the theories of religion but for describing the religions themselves in their relationships to one another. A loss of this tool of potential clarification would be a loss to religions themselves. The basic thesis behind the following considerations is the following: No one of the three genera of models describes the optimal theory of religions, and no one of the three genera is without some partial justification. We need, therefore, to look for the possibility of combining these three genera of arguments within a single theory which can apply different standards of judgements to different phenomena of any given religion. For example, the appropriate judgement about a cultic sacrifice of animals today could be achieved neither by pure exclusivism, damning every element of animal sacrifice and its practician’s religion; nor by a simple inclusivism, seeing in such sacrifice a desirable approximation to what is generally Christian or generally the final sense of civil self-restraint for the sake of distributive justice; nor again, by a pluralism of claiming for animal sacrifice a legitimacy equal to the ideal Christian worship, despite the tendency for sublimated sacrifice to slip into pale indifference. The most appropriate judgement would seek to combine elements of all three models.39 The continuation of animal sacrifice is to be rejected (an exclusivist statement) but without demonizing or degrading the religious vitality of those who continue to practice animal sacrifice today (the pluralist dimension) and without denying the symbolism of animal sacrifices pre-supposed by the New Testament (inclusivism). Rather, there must be a kind of higher dialogue among the three genera of relational models which must themselves be brought into a relationship capable of argumentative discussion, where they might each be justified in regards to different phenomena and considerations. Reflection on the fact that many of those who practice animal sacrifice today are also Catholic, or on the possibility that sacrifice has been badly sublimated by industrialized, nominally Christian societies in some areas of their lives, or all too fully repressed in others, can lead to a self-­ critique of factical Christianity (an argumentative style too quickly dismissed by our set-theory as atheistic and irrelevant). Where the three, or even four, kinds of relational models contradict each other with regard to the individual arguments i­ nvolving 39

 Cf. Schenk, ‘Opfer und Opferkritik’.

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the same dimension of the other religions studied, as in the present example in relation to the question as to whether in fact animal sacrifice is to be recommended today or not, or more basically in the question of whether all salvation will be found eschatologically in Jesus Christ, we must look for criteria by which the alternative claims to truth behind the various genera of relational models can be identified and measured. One of the criteria for determining the ability of a theory to contribute to a perception of interreligious deficiency is its ability to formulate criticism, including self-criticism, in view of the plurality of religions: its ability to be capable of debate and contradiction. The very ability of a religion to admit the uncertainty of its own content of faith and the non-absolute character of belief without pretending to possess a knowledge which it does not have,40 while at the same time not reducing its faith to the level of what can be documented invincibly in common experience, is a necessary but not yet sufficient mark of religious superiority. The possibility of being false is the condition of the possibility of saying something true that goes beyond the scope of what is self-evident.41 Something quite similar holds true for admitting the possibility that another religion also has the possibility of maintaining what is false and that it knows of this danger. Over and against a popular opinion, the recognition of what can be criticized is not necessarily the sign of a lack of respect but can witness to an even higher level of respect. To a remarkable degree, the necessary dialogue among the three or four basic types of argumentation has been taking place within largely pluralistic discussions of religion with regard to the differences between the diverse theories of a predominately pluralistic type. This broader dialogue is taking place especially there where pluralistic theories are beginning to thematize their own remaining problems after an initial phase in which they simply distinguished themselves as different from and superior to exclusivistic and inclusivistic theories, popularizing themselves with little sign of self-doubt. Pluralism is growing out of its initial phase of being something self-evident; and it is also becoming more impressive as it increases its sense of the problem.

 Cf. 1 Corinthians 13:8–13; Hebrews 11:1.  Jeremiah’s accusation of ‘false prophecy’ is directed not against, say, the pagan neighbors, but against prophets in the school of Isaiah, whose deceptive trust in the invincible status of Jerusalem was so disastrous only because it could call upon a genuine trust in God; cf. T. W. Overholt, The Threat of Falsehood. A Study in the Theology of the Book of Jeremiah, Studies in Biblical Theology U/16 (Naperville, Illinois: Allenson-Breckinridge Books, 1970).

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5.3  The Ambivalence of Pluralistic Theories of Religion42 While the application of set-theory to the description of exclusivism is willing to identify in the exclusivist genus three subdivisions—the ‘radical’, ‘undecided’ and ‘moderate’ forms of exclusivism—it distinguishes within pluralist theories just two subgroups: the moderate and radical forms of the genus. At the same time, it was said that radical pluralism was a merely logical possibility with no real advocates; in actuality, pluralistic theories were always moderately pluralistic. Despite its claim to be theologically adequate, the schema offered no subdivision of actual pluralistic theories. An investigation of the paradigms of truth which are presupposed by pluralistic theories of religion could point, here, too, as with exclusivism, to a possible threefold subdivision as one which could be more helpful, as long as it keeps open the possibility of composite argumentation. Here, too, the lines of argument often run in different directions, some of which are opposed to their own predominant option for a pluralistic paradigm of truth. The use of the term ‘paradigm’ here need not appropriate the entirety of Thomas Kuhn’s theory of the role played by a change in paradigm43 but can be used simply to note that among pluralists there are at least three different, prominent notions in which the possibility of truth has been thematized by their proponents: truth as univocal and singular (behind John Hick’s pluralism of cultural relativism and its ultimate convergence); truth, and in fact reality, both essentially plural, as fundamentally equivocal (behind the more radical and thorough-going forms of pluralism); and another, ‘undecided’, or aporetic, view, drawn toward both sides. This third variation of the paradigm of truth, which at times is evident in David Tracy’s revival of the concept of analogy, has advantages in its sense of seeing the problems posed by pluralism: advantages which are well-suited to contradict the other two forms of pluralism in a way which can advance the discussion beyond the innocent days of triumphalistic pluralism.

 On the forms and the recent transformations of the pluralistic theology of religions cf. R. Schenk, ‘Keine unica vera religio? Die Wahrheitsproblematik der pluralistischen Religionstheologien’, in  T.  Eggensperger and  U.  Engel, eds., Wahrheit. Recherchen zwischen Hochscholastik und Postmoderne, Walberberger Studien, Philosophische Reihe, Band 9 (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald, 1995), pp. 167–185. 43  For the pluralistic approach to a theological application of T. S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 2, cf. the following: L. Gilkey, ‘Der Paradigmenwechsel in der Theologie’, in H. Küng and D. Tracy, eds., Das neue Paradigma von Theologie. Strukturen und Dimensionen, Ökumenische Theologie 13 (Gütersloh: Benziger, 1986), pp.  29–143; as well as H.  Küng, ‘Paradigmenwechsel in der Theologie. Versuch einer Grundlagenerklärung’, in H.  Küng, D.  Tracy, eds., Theologie—Wohin? Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Paradigma, Ökumenische Theologie 11 (Zürich-Cologne: Gutersloher Verlaghaus, 1984), pp. 37–75; D. Tracy, ‘Hermeneutische Überlegungen im neuen Paradigma’, ibid., pp. 76–102; and M. Marty, ‘Paradigma im Übergang von der Moderne zur Postmoderne’, ibid., pp. 204–230. The title of the German translation of Tracy’s Plurality and Ambiguity. Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope underscores this dimension: Theologie als Gespräch. Eine postmoderne Hermeneutik (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag, 1993). 42

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These three paradigms of truth correspond roughly to the three ‘bridges’ to pluralism which Paul Knitter describes in his preface to the book edited by himself and John Hick: The Myth of Christian Uniqueness.44 Knitter attempts to show that all forms of pluralism share the explicit renunciation of the confession that Christ is the necessary mediator of salvation. This soteriological departure from solus Christus is presented here as the decisive, well-founded, and unitive moment of all pluralistic theories of religion.45 The renunciation of the universal mediation of eschatological salvation through Christ is, in Knitter’s words, the ‘Rubicon’ which must be crossed or bridged by all forms of pluralism, a variation on the ancient declaration of war. In order to differentiate itself from even the most tolerant forms of exclusivism or inclusivism, both in the past and in the present, Knitter distinguishes three ‘bridges’ or reasons by which pluralisms cross over the Rubicon of Christ: the historical-­ cultural bridge of relativity; the theological-mystical bridge of mystery; and the practical-ethical bridge of justice. Corresponding to Knitter’s three bridges into the genus of pluralism, three subdivisions of pluralism could be identified as well.

5.3.1  T  he Tendency Towards Univocity of Pluralistic Relativism Typical for the first bridgehead across the mediation of Christ into the genus of pluralistic theories is the proposal made by John Hick. His ‘relativizing’ every possibility of judging any one empirical religion over and against others has ultimately to do with ‘relativism’ only in a restricted and conditional sense; his position recalls more immediately the Enlightenment prior to Kant. In spite of its somewhat contrived and trivializing use of Kantian terminology, Hick’s position more often bears the markings of a crass realism. Hick builds his arguments around the central thesis that all religions share a common insight into the one, singular, really existent Absolute, which, to avoid favoring personal imagery, he names God-or-the­highest-­ Reality: ‘Reality’ is always capitalized to add a gravity and mystique borrowed from theism to designate this transcendent dimension vis-à-vis a broader reality. All human beings are on the road towards this one, common Reality, and salvation always depends upon a similar conversion from ego-centricity to Reality­centricity. In this position, Hick affirms the idea of ‘true religion’ in a threefold sense: In the full meaning of the word, true religion will be found, first of all, only in a t­ ranscendent  ‘Preface’, in J.  Hick and P.  F. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. Toward a Pluralistic Theology Religions (New York: Maryknoll, 1987), p. vii­xii. 45  ln light of this conception of pluralism, R. Bernhardt would need to be asked if his attempt at making sense of the claim to an absolute status at least in the sense of a ‘Spirit-Christology’ (Bernhardt, Der Absolutheitsanspruch) with its restriction of the formula solus Christus to Christians of a non-theoretical doxology does not in fact also already cross the Rubicon to pluralism; cf. Bernhardt, ‘Deabsolutierung der Christologie?’ in Reinhold Bernhardt, Michael von Brück and Jürgen Werbick, eds., Der einzige Weg zum Heil?, Quaestiones Disputatae 143 (Freiburg: Herder, 1993), pp. 144–200, especially p. 196. 44

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life of perfected Reality-centeredness, a state which is definitely expected by Hick with no worry about the antinomies of hope and possible illusion. One is reminded of the singularly true ‘natural religion’, behind which all empirical, all earthly, religions must remain, as postulated by Lessing in his early writings.46 According to Hick, all religions share this singular point of conversion: it alone is fully ‘real’, but it is never to be achieved in this life. Hick argues that it is likely that after death the members of the different religions will go through a gradual process of purification from what is particular in their particular religious imaginations, until they have become fully one with one another in their orientation toward their singular unique and final Reality.47 Hick also sees a ‘truth of religion’ already in this life in the advantages which all religions have over and against secularism, which Hick decisively defines as less perfective and which he rejects as being less converting, even though the quasi-­ Kantian arguments he otherwise offers hardly support his certainty that religiosity is truer than secularism. While it is never made clear why all religions can be said to be moving towards their one, singular goal in a way superior to the path taken by non-religious persons of seemingly good moral intent towards what must surely be described, then, as that very same Reality, it is difficult even for the exclusive area of religions to see how such a massive assertion of the existence of any singularly ultimate reality can be maintained alongside the supposedly sceptical epistemology which Hick often suggests. Finally, there are recognisable advantages in the truths of those individual phenomena of the religions that seem obviously more suited to effecting self-­conversion than are other individual practices. Hick speaks here of a justifiable kind of grading to rank the truth-claims of individual phenomena of religion. Just as it is often thought that we can judge individual actions but not the entire life of any human as a hidden process of ever possible conversion towards a common final destination and judgement, so too, Hick says that religions are systems of moral functionality which cannot be judged as true or false as a whole. They cannot be graded as a whole, although their parts can be graded as more or less approximate to true religion. Without trying to prove his contention, Hicks simply maintains that, as far as we know, all widely accepted religions contribute equally to the process of changing oneself for the better.48 The reader is surprised at how little is left here of his  Cf. H. Thielicke, Offenbarung, Vernunft und Existenz. Studien zur Religionsphilosophie Lessings (Gütersloh: C.  Bertelsmann, 1957); and Lehmann, ‘Absolutheit des Christentums als philosophisches und theologisches Problem’, in Walter Kasper, ed., Absolutheit des Christentums, Quaestiones Disputatae 79 (Freiburg: Herder, 1977), pp. 13–38, especially pp. 15–20. 47  Cf. Hick, ‘On Grading Religions’, Religious Studies 17 (1982), cited here according to The John Hick Reader, Paul Badham, ed. (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2011), pp. 178–198; Hick, Problems of Religious Pluralism (Houndmills, UK: Macmillian, 1985), pp.  110–128; Hick, ‘A Possible Conception of Life After Death’, in S.  Davis, ed., Death and Afterlife, cited here according to J.  Hick, Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 183–196. 48  ‘On Grading Religions’, p. 197: ‘As far as we can tell, they are equally productive of that transition from self to Reality which we see in the saints of all traditions’; cf. Hick, ‘On Conflicting 46

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e­ pistemological scepticism, which might have said that we just do not know whether they are equal or not. Despite their definably differing grades for individual phenomena, here too, Hick’s assertion of approximate equality between whole systems of religions in the sum of their strengths and weaknesses reveals a very different epistemology than the one explicitly claimed. No argument is proposed for the hypothesis that each religion has an unconditional and unique dignity similar to the unconditional dignity which the Jewish-Christian tradition claims for each and every human person. It seems more akin to a (very non-Kantian) claim that all actions are equal in their blend of merit and guilt. Given this general judgement about the equality of all widespread religions (ignoring the distinction between what is and what ought to be, but rather identifying pragmatic success and the ideal), Hick relativizes the possibility of absolute knowledge with the help of the rhetoric of historicized, quasi-Kantian arguments. Nevertheless, the spontaneity of knowledge is betrayed by this non-Kantian presupposition of ‘The Real’ more as a drawback to knowledge than as the condition of its possibility. In his use of the idea of ‘true religion’ (as in his assessment of continuity amidst historical change), Hick remains close to the paradigm of univocal truth: a truth, however, which is reached by moralizing, standardizing, functionalizing and homogenizing religions. Only in this sense does Hick finally come close to what could be described as ‘relativism’ with regard to their empirical claims to truth. Their ‘relativity’ is simply the reverse side of the univocity of the singular full truth of transcendent reality. The univocal character of Hick’s leading paradigm of truth shows itself not only in the fundamental denial of the possibility of an absolute claim by particular confessions, but also concretely in the denial of a conceptual continuity conceivable for the development of Christological doctrine. Wherever the scriptures or traditions speak of Jesus in a way other than in what can be supposed to have been the self-­ understanding of Jesus of Nazareth himself, Hick claims that there has been a breach. The idea of the genuine and continuous development of a truth which was at first implicit is made impossible for Hick by the univocity of truth as a whole. Hick claims that the widespread departure today from that Christological development which culminated in Chalcedon is a major reason for the growing, if perhaps somewhat unwilling, widening of the acceptance of pluralism in Europe today,49 where the tendency, he says, has been to relativize Christ but not Christianity. Whatever the truth of that analysis, Hick is surely right to say that, on principle, you cannot have it both ways. In this bridge to pluralism, however, there is an obvious line of exclusivistic argumentation, an either/or form of argument proper to the univocal concept of truth behind this highly mitigated form of pluralism. Religious Truth-Claims’, Religious Studies 10 (1983): reprinted in Problems, pp. 88–95. 49  Cf. Hick, The Metaphor of God lncarnate. Christology in a Pluralistic Age (WestminsterLouisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), pp. 1–14.

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5.3.2  T  he Tendency Towards Equivocation in Mystically Oriented Pluralism The second bridge across the soteriological Rubicon leading into the genus of pluralist theories is said to be the mystical one. This bridge is characterized by the mysteriousness of religions. Here the uniformity and identity of all religions is denied. The pluralist John B. Cobb, Jr. stresses this rejection of John Hick’s form of pluralism.50 Beyond the denial of the uniformity of religions, there is also a denial of the possibility of univocal truth. Leonard Swidler,51 for example, denies the very idea and the metaphysical possibility of a uniform final truth or final reality. He rejects the so-called ‘exclusivist’ or ‘Aristotelian’ concept of truth which would take its cue from the principle of non-contradiction and an either/or structure of thought.52 Swidler sees here the basic flaw of the leading inclusivistic models of relationality as well. He draws the consequence out of this rejection of univocal truth for his program of a comprehensive ‘deabsolutizing’, not only of Christianity but of the concept of truth itself. Truth today appears necessarily ‘deabsolutized’ in view of the convictions of historicism, contextual intentionality, sociological-cultural conditioning, linguistically understood regionality, subjective hermeneutics and genuine dialogue along with their diverse horizons of understanding. Truths must today be (everywhere and absolutely for everybody?) relational, contextual, perspectivistic, interpretative, and dialogical.53 Paul Knitter,54 too, who at first found himself close to John Hick’s variant of pluralism with its unified theocentric (or its Reality-centered) vision common to all religions (rather than a Christocentric basis of Christian superiority), later moved in a second phase of his pluralistic thinking to the model of complementarity with its

 J.  B. Cobb, ‘Beyond “Pluralism”’, in G.  D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, pp. 81–95. 51  Leonard Swidler, ed., Towards a Universal Theology of Religion (New York: Orbis Books, 1987); as well as L.  Swidler: ‘A Dialogue on Dialogue’, in L.  Swidler et  al., eds. Death or Dialogue? From the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue (London-Philadelphia, 1990), pp.  56–78; and L.  Swidler, After the Absolute. The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection (Minneapolis: 1990). Cf. the concern for ‘Rationality, Irrationality, and Other­Rationality’, in D. J. Krieger, The New Universalism. Foundations for a Global Theology (New York: Wipf and Stock, 1991). 52  Swidler, After the Absolute, p. 7; P. F. Knitter, No Other Name?, p. 217. 53  Swidler, After the Absolute; cf. D. Lochhead, The Dialogical lmperative. A Christian Reflection on Interfaith Encounter (London: Wipf and Stock, 1988). 54  P. F. Knitter, No Other Name?; P. F. Knitter, ‘Nochmals die Absolutheitsfrage’, Evangelische Theologie 49 (1989): pp. 505–516; P. F. Knitter, ‘Interreligious Dialogue: What? Why? How?’, in Swidler et  al., eds., Death or Dialogue?, pp.  19–44; P.  F. Knitter, ‘Suche nach Einheit in Unterschiedenheit. Jüngste Ansichten zum Religiösen Pluralismus’, Dialog der Religionen I (1991): pp. 230–237. 50

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more equivocal paradigm of multiple truths, noting in particular how the (post-­ Trinitarian?) concept of God is related to plurality: The Godhood is not one but many. God is many. If that is true for God ad intra, so too, it is true in relation to God’s reality and creation ad extra. God needs plurality in order to be God. Plurality is the essence of all reality from atoms to religions.55

Like Swidler, Knitter appeals to anti-foundationalists, such as Richard Rorty, Richard J. Bernstein, and David Tracy. He introduces over and against Hick a newer philosophical dimension with the question of postmodernity in order to deny the univocal comparison of religions and the uniformity needed to carry it out.56 There is a paradigm-change to a ‘postmodern’ concept of truth in the sense of a new distance from either/or structures of argument. The most consistent thinker of note in this direction seems to be Raimundo Panikkar (†2010), who suggested a radically complementary model which he named, in comprehensive if admittedly horizontal (unintentionally univocal?) fashion, the the anthropocosmic vision.57 It is not a question of the ‘Copernican revolution’ and then the corresponding epistemology of the eighteen century, as Hick supposed; rather, it is a matter of the theory of relativity of the twentieth century which is said to be paradigmatic. Each solar system has its own center, and every galaxy turns reciprocally around the other. There is no absolute center. Reality itself is concentric inasmuch as each being (each tradition) is the center of the universe—of its own universe to begin with. The anthropocosmic insight (which sees the unity between the divine-human-cosmic) suggests a sort of trinitarian dynamism in which all is implied in all.58

This new form of pluralism, a multicultural pluralism and at the same time a more religious pluralism (symbolized by the river Ganges) has passed well beyond both the older exclusivism (signified by the Jordan for the period between approximately 1200 BC until 410/430 AD) as well as the intermediate inclusivism (symbolized by the Tiber for the time between 410 and 1492, but also for the epoch of colonial missionizing from 1492 to 1945). Panikkar is consistent enough to avoid suggesting a new normativity for his form of pluralism. His suggestions claim to be less imperative than indicative. In distinction from alternate forms of pluralism, but consistent with his premises, Panikkar wanted to describe what was happening more than prescribing what should happen. The overcoming of confessional alternatives within Christianity and the removal of interreligious alternatives between dogmatically defined religions is less a matter, as is said, of what should be than simply a matter of what is actually going on. This new form of thought is often a  P. F. Knitter, ‘Nochmals die Absolutheitsfrage’, p. 510. Cf. the critique by P. Knitter of J. Hick’s alledged ‘dualism’ in Knitter’s review of J.  Hick, ‘An Interpretation of Religion’, Dialog der Religionen 1 (1991): pp. 225–227. 56  P. F. Knitter, ‘Interreligious Dialogue: What? Why? How?’, p. 20. 57  Cf. Raimundo Panikkar, ‘The Jordan, the Tiber, and the Ganges. Three Kairological Moments of Christic Self-Consciousness’, in J. Hick and P. F. Knitter, eds., The Mvth of Christian Uniqueness, pp. 89–116. 58  Ibid., p. 109. 55

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certain kind of christianness but no longer Christendom or of any specific faith content proper to Christianity. Religions are in no way uniform or even comparable, as Hick was thinking; rather, their individual phenomena no longer exclude each other. Everything is complementary. The paradigm of truth suggested by Panikkar consists in the fundamental primacy of ‘being’ before ‘truth’, which will never be able to bring being entirely into the light of knowledge; truth is truth when it knows of its secondary status.59 Every individual statement of religion can say something about the whole, but the whole will never be reached by the sum of all the individual statements; it will not even be reached by the divine Logos: Pluralism affirms neither that the truth is one nor that it is many … Pluralism adopts a nondualistic, advaitic, attitude that defends the pluralism of truth because reality itself is pluralistic, that is, incommensurable with either unity or plurality.60

In thoughts which recall the Joachimites of the thirteenth century, the epoch of a non­definable spirit has overtaken the epoch of the logos. In Panikkar’s model of ambivalence, immune as it is to contradiction and debate and wary of moral imperatives of any kind, a form of programmatic ambiguity which tries to avoid every new exclusivism or inclusivism, Panikkar is more consistent than most of the representatives of this pluralistic alternative; more so, for example, than the founding director of the dialogue-program of the World Council of Churches, Stanley J. Samartha.61 As a consequence of the fundamental relativizing of all truths expressed in sentences and with a programmatical self-restriction to an ecclesiology based on extending the idea of kenosis found in Philippians 2, this author also affirms that there are no necessary contradictions between religions. However, he sees the place for conflict in the morally necessary debate with confessions which are not convinced of this lack of contradiction. Those who affirm contradiction must be contradicted. With the stress on a general truth which supercedes individual truths and even with the stress on mysteriousness, there still remains an exclusivistic, more than any inclusive or inclusivistic, strain in this argument, despite its Hinduistically-colored model: This Mystery, the Truth of the Truth (Satyasya Satyam), is the transcendent Center that remains always beyond and greater than apprehensions of it or even the sum total of those apprehensions. It is beyond cognitive knowledge (tarka) but it is open to vision (dristi) and intuition (anubhava).62

The ideal of ‘mysteriousness’, the truth of all truth, is meant to liberate from the necessity of the principle of non-contradiction in the dialogue between the ­religions63  Ibid., p. 103.  Ibid., p. 109. 61  Cf. S. J. Samartha, ‘The Cross and the Rainbow. Christ in a Multireligious Culture’, in J. Hick and P. F. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, pp. 69–88. 62  Samartha, ‘The Cross and the Rainbow’, p. 75. 63  ‘On what ground can it be claimed that the trinitarian formula offers a “truer” insight into the nature of the Mystery than does sat-cit-ananda? At best, the two formulations can only be symbolic, pointing to the Mystery, affirming the meaning disclosed, but retaining the residual depth’ 59 60

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and even in the discussion between theism and atheism,64 even though conflicts are still needed and meaningful in order to enforce this principal denial of every higher truthfulness behind the sentences. With this fundamental pluralism of perspectives and this general form of pluralism based on ‘mystery’, a form in which at least the dominant lines of argument are logically of a pluralistic type, this kind of theology of religions, though motivated by and oriented towards religious dialogue, soon reaches the beginnings of an incapacity to dialogue; where ‘no’ can no longer be said, even a ‘yes’ does not mean all that much. The pluralistic theology of religions has tried from many new perspectives to escape this fatal alternative. The attempts of pluralism to no longer be absolute or exclusivist, but without having to be relativistic, deserve our highest respect and the most critical examination, an examination in the spirit of critical sympathy …65

Recently there have been many new attempts by another subgroup within the pluralistic theology of religions to set another emphasis meant to make possible an escape from relativism and thus an escape, too, from a new form of elitist isolation.

5.3.3  P  atterns of Analogy and Differentiated Participation in Social Justice-Pluralism Over and against the incapacity of this form of ‘pure’ or relatively consistent pluralism for contradiction and critique, objections have been formulated in relation to concerns for justice, peace, and the conservation of creation. These objections have led to a restriction of the model of pluralistic dialogue based on purely complementary exchange. Knitter sees here the foundation of a third type of pluralism which is woven less out of purely pluralistic lines of argument; the bridge crossed here is the common search for justice. As Jürgen Moltmann points out: ‘In the forum of an endangered world, dialogue takes on the form of dispute and debate aimed at decision and change.’66 Knitter, too, has increasingly put soteria at the center of his considerations; but now, in opposition to Hick, this moral concern does not regard (Samartha, ‘The Cross and the Rainbow’, p. 76). 64  ‘Mystery lies beyond the theistic/nontheistic debate’ (Samartha, ‘The Cross and the Rainbow’, p.  75). Cf. the same text after p.  73 where, however, religions are treated as superior to secularism. 65  Werbick, ‘Heil durch Jesus Christus allein? Die “Pluralistische Theologie” und ihr Plädoyer für einen Pluralismus der Heilswege’, in Werbick et al., eds., Der einzige Weg zum Heil?, pp. 11–61; here, p. 51. 66   Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Dient die “pluralistische Theologie” dem Dialog der Religionen?’ Evangelische Theologie 49 (1989): pp. 528–536; here, p. 536. This piece appears slightly reworked and translated as ‘Is “Pluralistic Theology” Useful for the Dialogue of World Religions?’, in G. D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness, pp. 149–156.

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primarily the interior conversion to the eschaton67 and to transcendent Reality. In a further turn within his own inner-pluralist journey, Knitter has moved ideas from liberation theology into the foreground of his thought, ideas which are oriented toward the protection of the dignity of the human and of nature. The gradual upgrading of the question of political praxis slows the tendency towards consistent relativism with its programmatic affirmation of all major religious claims. Not every praxis can be considered liberating to an equal degree. Werbick is certainly right to point out: The pragmatic reorientation of pluralism toward being centered on soteria and orthopraxis takes away from the problem of pluralism its theoretical and its religious edge, but it also takes away much of its substance.68

This blunting the point of the pluralistic problematic is a development that has been experienced by a number of its proponents as anything but a source of relief. Langdon Gilkey (†2004) speaks here of dilemma and paradox: ‘That puzzle revealed itself as the apparent contradiction between the requirement within political action for some fixed or absolute center and an equally unavoidable relativism.’69 Even his own model of a ‘relative Absolute’ is something from which he expects at best partial help. ‘What to reflection is a contradiction, to praxis is a workable dialectic, a momentary but creative paradox.’70 Gilkey illuminates the ‘dilemma’ of, on the one hand, declaring that alternative convictions about absolute universal finality are of equal rank and value, without, on the other hand, having to destroy their absoluteness by precisely such relativizing: How can one relativize an absolute starting point? Can there be such a combination of relativity and absoluteness? … As is evident, this new situation represents a genuine puzzle. Let me suggest, however, that difficult as it is to think one’s way out of it, still there are times when we act our way out of it, when what cannot be resolved in theory is nevertheless resolved in practice.71

His position could be compared to the practical solution of antinomies proposed by Kant in his second Critique. At other times, Gilkey goes so far as to admit that even that praxis of an exemplary striving for justice which is rooted in the convinced faith of different religions is hard to reconcile with the relativism of a consistent theory of dialogical pluralism.72 By maintaining a paradox which is perhaps at present unavoidable but finally not one which can satisfy us in the conflict between the  Knitter, ‘Toward a Liberation Theology of Religions’ in Knitter and Hick, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, pp. 178–202. P. F. Knitter, ‘Religionen und Befreiung. Soteriozentrismus als Antwort an die Kritiker’, in Reinhold Bernhardt, ed., Horizontüberschreitung. Die Pluralistische Theologie der Religionen (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1991), pp. 203–219. 68  Werbick, in Der einzige Weg zum Heil?, p. 28. 69  L. Gilkey, ‘Plurality and Its Theological Implications’, in J. Hick and P. Knitter, eds., The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, pp. 37–50; here, p. 46. 70  The Myth of Christian Uniqueness, p. 47. 71  L.  Gilkey, Through the Tempest. Theological Voyages in a Pluralistic Culture (Minneapolis: Wipf and Stock, 1991), p. 31. 72  Gilkey, Through the Tempest, pp. 191–193. 67

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relative and the absolute, Gilkey points to a new model of ambivalence, capable of contradiction and discussion, a model which has been missing until recently. Even in areas other than the political arena, a pure pluralism threatens to undermine the dialogue it first sought to promote. The quick distancing from historical and institutional forms of traditional religions tends quickly to render obsolete one’s own participation in the dialogue, unless perhaps the claim to a new superioristic form of religion is expressly admitted.73 Interreligious dialogue is only possible on the basis of a meeting of the religions themselves.74 At the same time, the suggestion made by Hans Küng in light of this recognition to simply withdraw in the future to positions of the provisional ‘standpoints’ offered by the different religious traditions for the start of religious dialogue hardly seems capable of maintaining a less relativistic position.75 Mere standpoints hardly offer a viable way to rescue the capacity for dialogue from the dangers which the cultivation of dialogue has enhanced. The postcolonial motivation of the purer variant of pluralism which demanded an end to all claims of superiority for the sake of preventing ‘cultural imperalism’ flounders on similar problems. The suspicion cannot be avoided that the Western world, which is threatened by its own cultural bankruptcy, is looking for compensations for the process of uniform functionalization of the world for which it is itself responsible. It is looking for a ‘religion for the market place’, for colourful but cheap imports—cheap because without commitment: a process which, despite many worries, will not lead to foreign infiltration of the West, because the West itself and the West alone possesses the technology to transform these imports into the consumer product of noncommittal perspectivism, religious dialogue as a branch of the tourist industry. ‘Pluralism is indeed the truth of the market’,76 but this market, like many others, is firmly in Western hands. With reference to this new aporia of pluralism, Paul Knitter refers to the work of David Tracy. In his book, Plurality and Ambiguity, Tracy proposes the concept of  On this aporia from the practice of pluralism, cf. H. Küng, ‘Dialogfähigkeit und Standfestigkeit. Über zwei komplementäre Tugenden’, Evangelische Theologie 49 (1989), pp.  492–504; and H. Küng, ‘Gibt es eine wahre Religion? Versuch einer ökumenischen Kriteriologie’, in H. Küng, Theologie im Aufbruch. Eine ökumenische Grundlegung (Munich-Zürich: Piper, 1987), pp. 274–306. 74  Cf. M.  K. Hellwig, ‘Christology in the Wider Ecumenism’, in G.  D’Costa, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, pp. 107–116. 75  On the notion of metaphysical and ideological ‘standpoints’, cf. the remark, directed in good part against Nicolai Hartmann, by Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit12 (Tübingen, 1972), § 6, p.  21. Understanding traditions as standpoints ‘… entwurzelt die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins so weit, daß es sich nur noch im Interesse an der Vielgestaltigkeit möglicher Typen, Richtungen, Standpunkte des Philosophierens in den entlegensten und fremdesten Kulturen bewegt und mit diesem Interesse die eigene Bodenlosigkeit zu verhüllen sucht.’ 76  J. Werbick, in Der einzige Weg zum Heil?, p. 12. Cf. Paul Knitter’s plea for the cultivation of a future commonality of praxis between irreducibly other religious (which he compares to Levinas’ sense of the face of the other) to be sought in concerted action for justice, a model of friendship rooted in a novel acknowledgement of religious alterity: Paul Knitter, ‘Is the Pluralist Model a Western Imposition? A Response in Five Voices’, in Paul F. Knitter, ed., The Myth of Religous Superiority, pp. 28–42. 73

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‘conversation’ as a middle path between modernity and postmodernity, between neo-Kantian universalism and neo-Hegelian communitarianism, between a discourse capable of little more than critical contradiction and a hermeneutics which could offer little more than a tool for the self-understood and non-debatable expression of oneself.77 Tracy appeals for his part to Paul Ricœur’s arguments for the mutual conditioning of a hermeneutic of suspicion and a hermeneutic of making sense out of a text. Such an ambivalence, Tracy maintains, is not the end of reason; rather it is founded on the multifaceted reality which reason seeks to grasp. This view corresponds to a paradigm of truth which Tracy had pursued since his earlier work, The Analogical Imagination.78 Analogy has been considered since the thirteenth century as a statement of similarity within still greater dissimilarity, thus here as comparability and also as possible contradiction within a still greater acknowledgement of sheer dissimilarity and otherness. Where Tracy sees ambivalence above all in the tension between discourse and self-interpretation, another task remains of developing standards for well-founded and studied ambiguity within discourse itself. Whether Tracy’s model is sufficiently concrete to be more than a pious wish for making us capable of critical thinking and debatable contradiction has yet to be firmly established. Only time will tell whether this opening, proposed by Gilkey, Tracy and the more recent work of Knitter, will lead to a new and vital form of ambivalence sought here, one capable of contradiction and discussion, but also of friendship and non-rivalrous action. And yet even now three things are obvious: First: ambivalence arising from the obvious difference between the values and the disservices of religions, along with ambiguity in the lines of argument for theories allowing us to set different religions in multiple and quite differing relations to one another, must contain a moment of the involuntary, of being avoidable only at too great a cost. It will be important for interreligious dialogue to remember that the best use of analogy builds on a desire for univocity and insight into its unavoidable limits, a search for as much univocity as possible and only as much equivocity as is necessary to do justice to the uniqueness of what or who is encountered. Such necessary ambivalence and ambiguity must be carried by the cautious regulative ideal of reaching univocal positions, both theoretical and practical. Where ambivalence is founded on the basis of the better discussion of the complex reality of interreligious comparisons, then there must be a hope to overcome the deficits of the religions and theologies involved. Ambivalence can be justified by the finitude of the subject, including the finitude of intersubjectivity and the historical community (as was the case with Cusanus’s coincidentia oppositorum), by the insistence of John Henry Newman upon the necessarily mysterious character of the dogma, and by the classical analysis of the necessity of analogy, with its dialectic between the perfectiones  Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope (Toronto: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 78  David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1981). Cf. David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology (New York: University of Chicago Press, 1975). 77

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significatae of which we are recognizably capable and the modus significandi marking the acknowledged limit of our capacities.79 Wherever possible, we must work by a fides quaerens intellectum for the reduction and finally the reversal of such a narrowing of perspectives based on our limited subjectivity alone; the limits imposed by our irradicably finite modus significandi must be ones merely tolerated as unavoidable, not ones sought as desirable in their own right. The ambivalence of Christian faith over and against non-Christian religions, however, will likely continue to include argumentative ambiguities of both kinds: those reflecting our valid insights into the mixed phenomena of religions and those reflecting merely the provisional limits of our insights. Second: Successful dialogue must include—along with elements of the readiness to learn, of respect, and of tolerance—the possibility of accusation as well, including the self-accusation of not fulfilling one’s own call to the good: the accusation that tolerance has been sorrowfully lacking, but also the accusation which reads texts in the hope of regaining truth and providing justice to those who have been robbed of it. Along with pluralistic arguments, there must also be included argumentative strains of an exclusivist and an inclusivist nature. One of the goals of interreligious dialogue is self-critique and self-correction, but this must be open to the critique of the others as well. Third: Successful dialogue must make us capable of reading again our own texts in discussion with others. This will be a form of reading which does not presuppose that it involves matters which now can be brought into a unified vision, but rather reading texts as if they were ‘radical boulders’: imposing and massive yet not self-­ identical in all their great height and breath and depth, but rather consisting in themselves of heterogeneous parts which might well have broken apart; in no way infinitely divisible or malleable and moldable, but rather in historically predefined shapes and full of obvious and hidden fissures. The most convincing forms of pluralism, which first began by separating itself from earlier texts of a largely exclusivist or inclusivist character, have led to a relativization between these distinctions of more recent and older theories, because most of the theories, both of yesterday and today, are composed of arguments of all three basic options. What we need for our own future is the best kind of combination of these heterogeneous types of argument. John Courtney Murray is said to have quipped: ‘Disagreement is not an easy thing to reach.’80 The experience with pluralism shows that disagreement is indeed necessary—and perhaps even possible.

 For the locus classicus cf. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 13, aa. 1–12.  J. B. Elshtain, Democracy on Trial (New York: Basic Books, 1995), p. xi

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Bibliography Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologiae. http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/. Accessed 07/07/2017. Bernhardt, Reinhold. 1990. Der Absolutheitsanspruch des Christentums. Von der Aufklärung bis zur Pluralistischen Religionstheologie. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn. ———, ed. 1991. Horizontüberschreitung. Die Pluralistische Theologie der Religionen. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Bernhardt, Reinhold, Michael von Brück, and Jürgen Werbick, eds. 1993. Der einzige Weg zum Heil? Quaestiones Disputatae 143. Freiburg: Herder. Congar, Yves. 1961. Außer der Kirche kein Heil. Wahrheit und Dimensionen des Heils. Essen: Driewer. D’Costa, Gavin. 1990. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions. New York: Maryknoll. Eggensperger, Thomas, and Ulrich Engel. 1995. Wahrheit. Recherchen zwischen Hochscholastik und Postmoderne. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag. Eicher, Peter. 1977. Offenbarung. Prinzip neuzeitlicher Theologie. Munich: Kösel. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1995. Democracy on Trial. New York: Basic Books. Gilkey, Langdon. 1991. Through the Tempest. Theological Voyages in a Pluralistic Culture. Minneapolis: Wipf and Stock. Hamer, Jerome, and Yves Congar. 1967. Die Konzilserklärung über die Religionsfreiheit, Konfessionskundliche und kontroverstheologische Studien 20. Paderborn: Bonifatius-Druckerei. Hick, John. 1991. An Interpretation of Religion. Dialog der Religionen 1: 225–227. ———. 1993a. Disputed Questions in Theology and the Philosophy of Religion. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 1993b. The Metaphor of God Lncarnate. Christology in a Pluralistic Age. Westminster/ Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press. Hick, John, and Paul F. Knitter, eds. 1987. The Myth of Christian Uniqueness. Toward a Pluralistic Theology Religions. New York: Maryknoll. Hösle, Vittorio, and Peter Koslowski, eds. 2000. Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover. Vol. 11. Vienna: Passagen. John Paul, I.I. 1990. Redemptoris missio. In Verlautbarungen des Apostolischen Stuhls, ed. Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz, 100. Bonn: Sekretariat der Deutschen Bischofskonferenz. Kasper, Walter, ed. 1977. Absolutheit des Christentums, Quaestiones Disputatae 79. Freiburg: Mohr. Kern, Walter. 1979. Außerhalb der Kirche kein Heil? Freiburg: Herder. Kilwardby, Robert. 1992. Quaestiones in librum IV Sententiarum, Q. 22, ed. Richard Schenk. Munich: Bayerische Akademie. ———. 1993. Quaestiones in librum quartum Sententiarum. In Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für die Herausgabe ungedruckter Texte aus der mittelalterlichen Geisteswelt 17, ed. Richard Schenk. Munich: Verlag der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Knitter, Paul F. 1985. No Other Name? A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. ———. 1991. Suche nach Einheit in Unterschiedenheit. Jüngste Ansichten zum Religiösen Pluralismus. Dialog der Religionen I: 230–237. ———., ed. 2005. The Myth of Religous Superiority. Multifaith Explorations of Religious Pluralism. Maryknoll: Orbis.

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Koslowski, Peter, Reinhard Löw, and Richard Schenk, eds. 1993. Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover 5. Vienna: Passagen Verlag. Koslowski, Peter, and Richard Schenk, eds. 1995. Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover 7. Vienna: Bernward. Krieger, David J. 1991. The New Universalism. Foundations for a Global Theology. New York: Wipf and Stock. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Küng, Hans. 1986. Zu einer ökumenischen Theologie der Religionen. Concilium 22: 76–80. ———. 1987. Theologie im Aufbruch. Eine ökumenische Grundlegung. Munich/Zürich: Piper. ———. 1989. Dialogfähigkeit und Standfestigkeit Über zwei komplementäre Tugenden. Evangelische Theologie 49: 492–504. Küng, Hans, and David Tracy. 1984. eds. Theologie—Wohin? Auf dem Weg zu einem neuen Paradigma, Ökumenische Theologie 11. Zürich/Cologne: Gutersloher Verlaghaus. ———. 1986. Das neue Paradigma von Theologie. Strukturen und Dimensionen, Ökumenische Theologie 13. Gütersloh: Benziger. Moltmann, Jürgen. 1989. Dient die “pluralistische Theologie” dem Dialog der Religionen? Evangelische Theologie 49: 528–536. Newman, John Henry. 1960. An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. New  York: Garden City. Overholt, Thomas W. 1970. The Threat of Falsehood. A Study in the Theology of the Book of Jeremiah. Naperville: Allenson-Breckinridge Books. Pinto de Oliveira, Carlos-Josaphat, ed. 1993. Ordo sapientiae et amoris. Fribourg/Paris: Éditions universitaires. Reding, Marcel, ed. 1952. Abhandlungen über Theologie und Kirche. Festschrift für Karl Adam. Düsseldorf: Patmos/Verlag. Ruh, Ulrich. 1994. Selbstrelativierung kein Ausweg. Ansatz und Probleme einer pluralistischen Religionstheologie. Herder Korrespondenz 48: 576–580. Sacrosanctum Oecumenicum Concilium Vaticanum II. 1966. Declaratio de libertate religiosa (Dignitatis humanae). No. I, ed. Secretaria generalis Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II. Vatican City. Schaeffler, Richard. 2008. Philosophische Einübung in der Theologie. Studienausgabe. 3 Bände. Freiburg: Alber. ———. 2010. Religionsphilosophie. Studenausgabe. 2nd ed. Freiburg: Alber. Schenk, Richard. 1986. Die Gnade vollendeter Endlichkeit. Zur transzendentaltheologischen Auslegung der thomanischen Anthropologie. Freiburg: Herder. ———, ed. 1994. Zur Theorie des Opfers. Stuttgart-Bad-Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. ———. 2014. Die Deutung vorchristlicher Riten im Frühwerk des Albertus Magnus, Lectio Alberti 15. Münster: Aschendorff. Schmidt-Leukel, Perry. 1993. Zur Klassifikation religionstheologischer Modelle. Catholica 47: 163–183. ———. 1997. Theologie der Religionen. Probleme, Optionen, Argumente. Neuried: Ars Una. Schreer, Werner, and Georg Steins. 1999. eds. Auf neue Art Kirche sein. Wirklichkeiten— Herausforderungen—Wandlungen. Festschrift für Bischof Dr. Josef Homeyer. Munich: Don Bosco Verlag. Schwerdtfeger, Nicolaus. 1982. Gnade und Welt. Zum Grundgefüge Karl Rahners Theorie des ‘anonymen Christen. Freiburg: Herder. Seckler, Max. 1961. Instinkt und Glaubenswille nach Thomas von Aquin. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag. ———. 1992. Wohin driftet man in der Theologie der Religionen? Kritische Beobachtungen zu einer Dokumentation. Theologische Quartalsschrift 172: 126–130. Swidler, Leonard, ed. 1987. Towards a Universal Theology of Religion. New York: Orbis Books.

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———. 1990. After the Absolute. The Dialogical Future of Religious Reflection. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Swidler, Leonard, et al., eds. 1990. Death or Dialogue? From the Age of Monologue to the Age of Dialogue. London/Philadelphia: SCM Press and Trinity Press International. Thielicke, Helmut. 1957. Offenbarung, Vernunft und Existenz. Studien zur Religionsphilosophie Lessings. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann. Tracy, David. 1975. Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology. New York: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1981. The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. ———. 1987. Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope. Toronto: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1993. Theologie als Gespräch. Eine postmoderne Hermeneutik. Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald-Verlag. Vorstand der Amoldsheimer Konferenz/Kirchenleitung der Velkd, ed. 1991. Religionen, Religiosität und christlicher Glaube. Eine Studie. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus. Wissenschaftsrat, Der, ed. 2010. Recommendations on the Advancement of Theologies and Sciences concerned with Religions at German Universities. Köln: Sutorius. http://www.wissenschaftsrat.de/download/archiv/9678-10_engl.pdf. Zimmermann, Albert, ed. 1991. Mensch und Natur im Mittelalter, Miscellanea Medievalia 21/2. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter.

Chapter 6

Religion, Theology, and Philosophy in Heidegger’s Thought István M. Fehér

Martin Heidegger’s thinking has had a durable and powerful influence not only upon the philosophy of the twentieth century, but upon a number of disciplines within the humanities as well. One of the disciplines that Heidegger influenced most was undoubtedly theology—both Catholic and Protestant. Indeed, we have reason to say that this was the discipline that Heidegger’s thinking affected most.1 The relevance of Heidegger’s thought for theology is shown by the fact that both Catholic and Protestant thinkers have been able to find dimensions of his thought fitting to their world-view and to be adopted or drawn upon in several important respects. Those dimensions have of course been different according to confessional commitments and interests as these have taken shape, and come to be traditionally developed, during the past centuries. While Protestant theologians have tended to draw upon the early Heidegger’s analysis of human existence, and in turning to the later Heidegger have been fascinated by the philosopher of the language-event, Catholic theologians, or theologically interested Catholic philosophers, have primarily been attracted by Heidegger’s coupling of the ontological approach with the transcendental-philosophical method and his incessant pursual of the Being-question.2 1  ‘Surely, theology was the discipline’, wrote Otto Pöggeler in the 1980s, ‘in which the impulses coming from Heidegger proved to have the most decisive effects.’ Otto Pöggeler, Heidegger und die hermeneutische Philosophie (Freiburg/München: Alber, 1983), p. 414. 2  See Richard Schaeffler, Frömmigkeit des Denkens? Martin Heidegger und die katholische Theologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1978), p. x; Alfred Jäger, Gott. Nochmals Martin Heidegger (Tübingen: Mohr, 1978), p. 84. See also John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), p. 95: ‘Rahner, Lotz, and Coreth have all attempted to develop a transcendental Thomism which

I. M. Fehér (*) Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Andrássy Gyula German-Language University, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_6

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It is important to realize however that there is a reciprocal influence operating here: the question of how Heidegger’s thought influenced theology should be integrated by the reverse issue concerning the decisive import of theology for Heidegger’s philosophical beginnings and his whole path of thinking. The latter point was openly acknowledged by Heidegger himself later in the 1950s in a dialogue in Unterwegs zur Sprache. In a retrospective remark he stated here quite clearly that without his theological origins he would never have come onto the path of thought—that is, philosophy3—a remark which we see cropping up in an autobiographical passage already in the second part of the 1930s (GA 66, 415). But even earlier, in a letter to Karl Löwith on August 19, 1921, Heidegger made reference to his ‘intellectual and wholly factic origin’ in terms of being a ‘Christian theologian.’4 His theological origins might then be, on a first approach, the reason for (and the cause of) Heidegger’s subsequent impact on theology. In the above-mentioned dialogue Heidegger made a further point which is equally important for the present purposes. He mentioned that it was also in the course of his early theological studies that he first came across and grew familiar with the term ‘hermeneutics’—a term he found somewhat later in Dilthey too, who, in like manner as he himself did, derived it from his own theological studies, especially out of his concern with the work of Schleiermacher.5 Heidegger’s theological origins are then relevant not only for his becoming a philosopher in general, but also, more especially, for the specific kind of hermeneutical attitude he was to adopt in philosophy and to develop in detail. Seen in the perspective suggested by the confessionally specified Christian theological influences, the provisional endpoint of his youthful itinerary, Being and Time, might even be claimed to attempt to bring together the Catholic and the Protestant goes back not only to Kant but specifically to Being and Time … They have tried to root St Thomas’ notion of esse in an inherent dynamism of the intellect.’ Caputo called to mind that ‘[i]n a brief but quite illuminating study of Heidegger’s “existential philosophy”, written in 1940, Karl Rahner argues, in keeping with Heidegger, for the importance of taking up the question of Being from a transcendental standpoint’, the reason being that ‘an access to Being through the human subject must first be established.’ See further Caputo, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles Guignon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 274, 279, 284. 3  Unterwegs zur Sprache, 7th ed. (Pfullingen: Neske, 1982), p. 96. (Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe will be cited as GA followed by volume and page numbers, other works will be cited with full bibliographical data at their first occurrence. If there are references to both the original German text and the corresponding English translation, the German pagination and the English pagination are separated by a slash. For example, in ‘GA 24, 31/23’, the number before the slash indicates the German edition, the one after the slash the English edition. Other abbreviations: WS = Wintersemester; SS = Sommersemester.) 4  See ‘Drei Briefe Martin Heideggers an Karl Löwith’, ed. Hartmut Tietjen, in Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, Dietrich Papenfuss and Otto Pöggeler, eds., vol. 2: Im Gespräch der Zeit (Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 1990), p. 29. 5  As it turns out, Heidegger was registered as a participant in a course of Gottfried Hoberg’s on ‘Hermeneutik mit Geschichte der Exegese’ during the summer semester of 1910; see HeideggerJahrbuch, vol. 1: Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens, eds. Alfred Denker, Hans-Helmuth Gander, Holger Zaborowski (Freiburg/München: Alber, 2004), p. 14.

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t­raditions. While the former suggests the ontological perspective characteristic of neo-­scholasticism and dating back to Heidegger’s early reading of Brentano’s dissertation, On the manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle (Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles) as well as of Carl Braig’s Vom Sein: Abriß der Ontologie, the latter, extremely critical of scholasticism, shifts the focus from an ontological perspective upon the divine order and harmony of the world on to the individual believer’s living or enacting his or her faith, thereby drawing heavily on Luther’s critique of Aristotle and taking up motives in Saint Paul, Augustine, Pascal, Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and Dilthey. Indeed, the explicit program of Being and Time—the elaboration of a fundamental ontology in terms of an existential analytic of the human being in an effort to retrieve and work out the Being-­ question—may even be construed as making an attempt to unite and fuse both traditions. Roughly, fundamental ontology as the discipline destined to elaborate the Being-question may be seen to be of Catholic origin, whereas the existential analytic, as a continuation and radicalization of the early hermeneutics of facticity, may be traced back to (and seen to take up and radicalize in a specifically formalized and de-theologized manner) the Luther-Kierkegaardian sort of Protestant tradition centering around subjectivity and the believer’s existential enactment of faith. My aim here is to show the strict connection between philosophy and theology in Heidegger’s thought and the impulses which may be derived from this connection for conceiving new ways in the philosophies of Christianity. Specifically, I will argue that it was with an eye to, and drawing upon, his previous understanding of religion and religious life, as well as of the relation between faith and theology, that Heidegger was to conceive of philosophy and its relation to human existence in Being and Time. Heidegger re-examined thereby the whole Western tradition of both philosophy and theology, subjecting their world-view and conceptuality to a severe and thorough-going criticism. Heidegger’s thinking can therefore be characterized both as philosophy and theology in spite of, or following from, his devastating criticisms of both. In 1927, Heidegger’s ideas, writes Joseph Kockelmans, must have been unacceptable for almost any Christian, whether Lutheran or Catholic … For what Heidegger’s remarks point to is a radical criticism of almost all forms of theology which have been developed on the basis of the paradigm suggested by St. Augustine. Heidegger’s criticism of these forms of theology runs parallel to his equally radical criticism of all philosophical views developed in the West from Plato to Nietzsche.6

Just as Heidegger asks everyone interested in philosophy to turn to the ‘Sache des Denkens’, that is, to the genuine subject matter of thought—namely, Being—so he invites all theologians at last to turn to the ‘Sache der Theologie’—namely, faith. Heidegger’s radical criticism was developed in two directions, Gadamer writes. What Heidegger put into question was the genuinely Christian character of Christian theology on the one hand, and the genuinely scientific character of Western philosophy on the other. The extent to which Heidegger views philosophy and theology in 6  Joseph J. Kockelmans, ‘Heidegger on Theology’, in Thinking About Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought, eds. R.  W. Shahan and J.N.  Mohanty (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984), pp. 85–108; here, p. 106.

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proximity of, and as mutually permeating, one another is characteristically shown by his urge, in his course on the Phenomenology of Religion, to submit both of them to his central operation of destruction; in connection with the interpretation of Paul’s letters he speaks about elaborating the standards for ‘the destruction of Christian theology and Western philosophy.’7 Let us first recall some basic biographical facts—the fact that before going to study philosophy, Heidegger had studied theology for four semesters at the University of Freiburg; that he had done so at the time of the modernism debate; that in the person of Carl Braig he had come across a mentor and a teacher particularly concerned to bring Catholic theology and philosophy into a mutual relationship; that in his Habilitation work, which he dedicated to a text of medieval philosophy, Heidegger was confronted for the first time with problems pertaining to the philosophy of language subsequently to play a great role in his later thinking; and that he had come across the whole problematic from a perspective shaped by eminently theological experiences and questions. This was followed by teaching Catholic philosophy for three semesters under the protection of the theologian Engelbert Krebs—a period to be interrupted by the war service.8 Especially important for my purposes is an anecdote Gadamer tells us. This is of biographical character, but has an equally important theoretical relevance. Shortly after Heidegger had accepted the call to Marburg, Gadamer recalls a remark Heidegger made during an evening discussion: ‘In order to come back to itself, it is the veritable task of theology’—Gadamer reports Heidegger as saying—‘to look for the word capable of calling one to faith and of preserving one in it.’ This formulation sounded, for Gadamer, like a real assignment for theology. Gadamer thinks that the real questions that were stirring in Heidegger from the very beginning were theological questions.9 Thereby Heidegger revised and reformulated the task of theology itself, in terms of its possible service for faith. The plausibility of Gadamer’s anecdote may be confirmed by the conception Heidegger was to put forward in his lecture on ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ a couple of years later—a point I shall immediately come back to.

 GA 60, p. 135: ‘... Destruktion der christlichen Theologie und der abendländischen Philosophie.’  Ibid. Heidegger came to know Hegel and Schelling through Braig (see Zur Sache des Denkens, 2. unveränd. Aufl. [Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1976], p. 82; GA 1, p. 57). On the importance of Braig and the Tübingen school of speculative theology for Heidegger, see Franco Volpi, ‘Alle origini della concezione heideggeriana dell’esssere. Il trattato Vom Sein di Carl Braig’, Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 34, no. 2 (1980): pp. 183–194, esp. p. 188; as well as John D. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982), pp.  45. Caputo in particular shows several important anticipations of subsequent Heideggerian positions—such as, e.g., the ontological difference—in Braig’s work. On the Catholic Tübingen School, see Thomas F. O’Meara O. P., Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (London and Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), esp. p. 138. For more secondary literature on Braig and the Tübingen School, see Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas, pp. 58. 9  H.-G. Gadamer, ‘Die Marburger Theologie’, in Gadamer, Neuere Philosophie. I. Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, vol. 3 of Gesammelte Werke (Tübingen: Mohr, 1987), pp. 197, 199. 7 8

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In his previously cited letter to Karl Löwith on August 19, 1921, Heidegger claimed to be, rather than a philosopher, a ‘Christian theologian.’ It is precisely Gadamer’s story that may provide us with a key to understand the peculiar italicization. In fact, it should be taken to mean someone searching for the proper logos, that is, word, of the Christian message. I think that Gadamer’s recollection concerning Heidegger’s understanding of the ‘task of theology’ in terms of ‘looking for the word capable of calling one to faith and of preserving one in it’ is highly creditable and is, indeed, a fairly precise formulation. As a further consideration I propose to show this by a short interpretive reconstruction of how Heidegger came to view the relation of religion, faith, and theology and of how these are related to philosophy and hermeneutics. Against the background of his distancing himself from neo-scholasticism and of his assimilation of decisive motives of life-philosophy and historicism, inclusive of his overall attack against the theoretical,10 Heidegger came to view theology no longer in terms of an objective theoretical science destined to provide a conceptual elaboration for religion by occasionally borrowing its conceptuality from philosophy. Theology is not a scientifically neutral and ahistorical theory of Christianity; what has been developed and come to be known as theology during the centuries is a reified mixture of dead formulae of the most heterogeneous origins, alienated from what it once belonged to and incapable of containing in itself and conveying living religiosity. The comportment it originates from is theoretical, rather than religious. Theoretical comportment, in its turn, goes back to the Greeks. Primal Christianity was thus fused with and indeed distorted by the conceptuality of Greek philosophy,11 and that is how what we know in terms of theology today had come into being. Thereby Heidegger seems to subscribe to and join in with the then widespread thesis concerning the fateful hellenization of Christianity, suggested, e.g., by Adolf von Harnack and maintained decisively by Franz Overbeck.12 What is needed  See GA 56–57, p. 59. For more on this point and on Heidegger’s philosophical development after World War I, see I. M. Fehér, ‘Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Lebensphilosophie: Heidegger’s Confrontation with Husserl, Dilthey, and Jaspers’, Reading Heidegger from the Start. Essays in His Earliest Thought, Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren, eds. (Albany, NY: State University of New  York Press, 1994), pp.  73–89; Fehér, ‘Heidegger’s Postwar Turn: The Emergence of the Hermeneutic Viewpoint of His Philosophy and the Idea of “Destruktion” on the Way to Being and Time’, in Phenomenology and Beyond, Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol. 21, eds. John D. Caputo, L. Langsdorf, Philosophy Today 40, no. 1, Spring (1996): pp. 9–35. 11  See GA 59, p. 91. 12   See Adolf von Harnack, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3 vols, 4th ed. [1909/10] (Reprographischer Nachdruck. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1983), vol. 1, p.  20: ‘Das Dogma ist in seiner Conception und in seinem Ausbau ein Werk des griechischen Geistes auf dem Boden des Evangeliums.’ Heidegger refers to Harnack in GA 60, p. 72, claiming it is precisely the seemingly secondary problem of ‘expression’, of ‘religious explication’, that is of decisive importance, for the ‘explication’ goes hand in hand with the religious experience. This is much in line with Gadamer’s interpretation that theology has, for Heidegger, primarily to do with finding the adequate ‘word’, i.e., conceptuality, to express faith. Heidegger’s own subsequent formulation of what dogma is shows Harnack’s obvious influence. See GA 60, p. 112: ‘Das Dogma 10

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is a theology liberated from the conceptual schemes of Greek philosophy.13 Therefore, Heidegger urges in his course on the Phenomenology of Religion ‘to sharply distinguish the problem of theology from that of religion.’14 What it comes down to is to find a proper logos, a conceptuality adequate to, and conforming to, the ‘object’—that is, genuine religious experience and faith as a living enactment. We find an important follow-up observation in Being and Time. Theology, Heidegger claims, ‘is slowly beginning to understand once more Luther’s insight, that the “foundation” on which its system of dogma rests has not arisen from an inquiry in which faith is primary, and that conceptually this “foundation” not only is inadequate for the problematic of theology, but conceals and distorts it’ (SZ, 10/BT, 30; see GA 20, pp. 6, 4.). In his lecture ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, held in the same year of the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger interprets theology, much in the same vein, as the ‘science of faith’,15 where faith is conceived of in terms of a specific way of being of Dasein (GA 9, p. 52) encompassing, as it were, the whole domain, or horizon, within which alone, the specific ‘objects’ of faith, for example, God, can appear. Faith is thus prior to God, and it would be a serious mistake or a vulgarization to define theology, naively, as the ‘science of God’, or the ‘speculative knowledge of God’ (GA 9, p. 59)—wherein God would be an object of the respective science in the same way as the animals are the objects of zoology (ibid.). Theology originates from faith (GA 9, p. 55), has its roots in faith, and, in general, makes sense only for faith (GA 9, p. 61), i.e., the believer. In this sense, faith anticipates and founds theology (GA 9, p. 60). The sufficient motives of theology, as well as its justification, may lie only in faith itself (GA 9, pp. 54, 55), and in faith’s attempt at a conceptual interpretation of itself (‘begriffliche Auslegung’ [GA 9, p. 54], ‘begriffliche Selbstinterpretation der gläubigen Existenz’ [GA 9, p. 56]). The believing comportment (Gläubigkeit) can never originate from theology, but als abgelöster Lehrgehalt in objektiv-erkenntnismäßiger Abhebung kann niemals leitend für die christliche Religiosität gewesen sein, sondern umgekehrt, die Genesis des Dogmas ist nur verständlich aus dem Vollzug der christlichen Lebenserfahrung.’ See also Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften, p. 258 (‘So war die Entwicklung dieses Gehaltes im Dogma zugleich seine Veräußerlichung’), p.  274 (‘… hat sich die Entwicklung der Formeln, welche die religiöse Erfahrung in einer Verknüpfung von Vorstellungen abgrenzen und gegen andere Formeln innerhalb derselben Religion wie gegen andere Religionen rechtfertigen sollten, nicht folgerecht aus der im Christentum gegebenen Selbstgewißheit innerer Erfahrung vollzogen.’) The thesis of the unhappy connection of Christianity with Greek philosophy was far from being unknown to the previous generation of liberal theology, e.g., to Ritschl; on this point, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Problemgeschichte der neueren evangelischen Theologie in Deutschland. Von Schleiermacher bis zu Barth und Tillich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), p.  123. As to Overbeck, Heidegger refers to him in the Preface to his Phenomenology and Theology. 13  See GA 59, p. 91. 14  GA 60, p. 310: ‘Scharf zu trennen: das Problem der Theologie und das der Religiosität.’ And he adds significantly: ‘Die Theologie hat bis jetzt keine originäre theoretische Grundhaltung der Ursprünglichkeit des Gegenstandes entsprechend gefunden.’ 15  GA 9, p. 55. The following numbers in parentheses in the body of the text refer to this edition (GA 9, pp.  45–77). For a detailed reconstruction of this lecture, see Kockelmans, ‘Heidegger on Theology’, in Thinking About Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought, pp. 85–108.

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only through faith itself (GA 9, p. 56). Now, the task of theology is to find a conceptuality adequate to faith (GA 9, p. 60), the believing comportment and existence, and to contribute to developing and strengthening this attitude (GA 9, pp. 55, 61)—a formulation which confirms and justifies to a great extent Gadamer’s interpretive recollection of Heidegger’s contribution to the discussion on theology in the postwar years.16 In the light of Heidegger’s subsequent characterization of the relation between understanding and interpretation in Being and Time (§ 32), we may state things as follows: only what is understood can be interpreted; understanding constitutes the fundament and the starting point of every interpretation. In this sense, faith is the fundament of theology, and the latter is but a conceptual articulation of the former, erecting itself upon and remaining forever grounded in it. Theological knowledge must arise from faith and return to it. The way theology relates itself to faith exhibits structural analogies to the way philosophy relates itself to facticity. Both theology and philosophy offer a conceptual elaboration of something previously enacted or lived (a sort of having-been), and, in doing so, are at the same time meant to refer back to and reinforce what they grow out of—faith or factical life. Given this strict correlation, it is no wonder that we find in Heidegger’s texts similarities between his characterization of theology and philosophy. The well-known definition of philosophy in Being and Time goes like this: ‘Philosophie ist universale phänomenologische Ontologie, ausgehend von der Hermeneutik des Daseins, die … das Ende des Leitfadens dort festgemacht hat, woraus es entspringt und wohin es zurückschlägt’ (SZ, p. 38: ‘Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has secured the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns’); while ‘Phenomenology and Theology’ characterizes theology as follows: ‘Alle theologische Erkenntnis ist … auf den Glauben selbst gegründet, sie entspringt aus ihm und springt in ihn zurück’ (GA 9, p. 61; see English translation, p. 50: ‘The substantive legitimacy of all theological knowledge is grounded in faith itself, originates out of faith, and leaps back into faith).17 ‘… woraus es entspringt und wohin es zurückschlägt’ and ‘… entspringt aus ihm und springt in ihn zurück’ show obvious parallels both conceptually and with regard to the matter itself. Both are Dasein’s ways of being, and both move in a hermeneutic circle. They are a re-enacting accompaniment of what they grow out of—factical life or rebirth by faith—helping to interpretively illuminate, that is, appropriate and re-appropriate, that from which they originate. And the bond that links philosophy’s and theology’s self-­interpretation

 See also Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Theologie im Denken Martin Heideggers (Freiburg—München: Alber, 1974), p. 36: ‘… religion requires a way of treatment adequate to its logos.’ 17  Heidegger, ‘Phenomenology and Theology’, trans. James G.  Hart and John C.  Maraldo, in Heidegger, Pathways, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 16

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together is a hermeneutical one: an always already having understood of what one has become as a starting point for a subsequent interpretation.18 It may be of interest to note that in the Phenomenology of Religion course we find an important anticipation of this definition: Up to now philosophers have been striving to neglect nothing less than factical life experience with reference to its being self-evident, while it is precisely factical life experience from which philosophy arises and to which—following an essential conversion—it returns (Bisher waren die Philosophen bemüht, gerade die faktische Lebenserfahrung als selbstverständliche Nebensächlichkeit abzutun, obwohl doch aus ihr gerade das Philosophieren entspringt, und in einer … Umkehr wieder in sie zurückspringt.)19

This is an important early anticipation of what Heidegger will come to develop in 1927, which I take to be a further illustration of my thesis that Heidegger’s understanding of philosophy is permeated by, and emerges as a radicalization of, theological motives (whereby theology becomes re-interpreted too). Philosophy’s self-interpretation that Heidegger provides in his main work may be regarded as relying for its emergence on the self-interpretation of theological comportment as a model. Heidegger, as it were, transposes the self-interpretation of the theological comportment onto the level of philosophy in a specifically modified and formalized form. Revelation is, Heidegger says, not just a matter of delivering or collecting positive knowledge about real occurrences, past or future, but is a matter of participation, that is, taking part, in the content of what the revelation is about. In this participation, that is, faith, Dasein gets placed in front of God, and his existence, affected by the revelation, becomes aware of itself, reveals itself to itself, in a state of forgottenness of God (‘Gottvergessenheit’ [GA 9, p. 53]). In precisely the same manner, Dasein, effecting the passage from the inauthentic to the authentic, gains awareness of itself for the first time and it does so in terms of existing always already in an inauthentic way. By way of summary, I say that the understanding of philosophy Heidegger has worked out is interwoven with theological motives, while (parallel with it) he embarks on an overall re-examination of theology too, including its task, function, and relation to religion. The self-interpretation and self-identification as a philosopher, which he has come to adopt, is conditional upon an understanding of philosophy which is permeated by theological motives, or, may even be said to emerge owing to the radicalization of theological or religious motives. The other side of this process is that Heidegger puts into question the traditional self-understanding of theology too, inclusive of its relation to philosophy. It is the latter point, Heidegger’s putting into question of the traditional self-understanding of theology, that may be of relevance for the purposes of this conference too. One possible consequence of what has been said may be the urge to reflect upon the fundaments of theology, its relation to faith and religion, and to reflect upon the understanding of philosophy we always already set into motion when pursuing not only theology, but any kind of

 See GA 60, p. 336: ‘Die Analyse, d. h. die Hermeneutik, arbeitet im historischen Ich.’ ‘... in allem ist die spezifische Sinnbestimmtheit herauszuhören.’ 19  GA 60, p. 15 (italics added); see GA 8, p. 124. 18

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philosophy of religion as well. Thereby we should bear in mind what Heidegger said about the ‘metaphysical’ God, God as causa sui, in the fifties: God conceived of in terms of causes, God ‘as causa sui’ is ‘the right name’ for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this god. The god-­ less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.20

Theology, based upon and infected by onto-theo-logic has to a great extent become independent of religion, that is, independent of the religious life enacted by believers. Under these circumstances it may be a legitimate task of philosophical thinking of the phenomenological-hermeneutic sort that Heidegger represented to warn theology against its alienation from faith, indeed against its becoming autonomous, gaining a rather dubious autonomy from the believer’s factical life or from human existence altogether, becoming as it does a sophisticated play of the intellect. Heidegger’s main objection to the theology of his day lay in the observation that although it may contain sharp and sophisticated arguments, what it certainly misses, what is assuredly absent from it, is nothing less than faith. Theology linked to faith is, by contrast, at the service of faith, in no way independent from it; its primary concern is to nurture an adequate conceptuality and linguisticality for its self-­ understanding, for preserving one in faith and possibly reinforcing it. ‘Theology is’, for Heidegger, as Caputo writes, ‘the work of bringing the existential rebirth that comes by faith to conceptual form. Theology is a science of faith, of existing faith-fully, of existing historically as a Christian. It does not make faith easier, but harder, because it does not give faith a rational grounding but shows rather that that is exactly what theology cannot do.’21 Here we come upon a further and final point of convergence between philosophy and theology in Heidegger’s thought, for Heidegger had numerous times formulated the claim that philosophy makes things never easier but harder.22 I think we may be entitled to interpret these remarks in the sense that philosophy gives things their proper weight back, whereby their weight is also their dignity. In this lies then the greatness of both—philosophy and theology.  Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. with an introduction by Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 72. 21  John D. Caputo, ‘Heidegger and Theology’, p. 278. 22  See, e.g., GA 61, p. 245: ‘Gegenbewegung gegen die Verfallstendenz des Lebens’. See further GA 61, p. 108; SZ, §27, p. 128: ‘Tendenz zum Leichtnehmen und Leichtmachen’; GA 62, p. 349: ‘Das faktische Leben hat den Seinscharakter, daß es an sich selbst schwer trägt. Die untrüglichste Bekundung davon ist die Tendenz des faktischen Lebens zum Sichsleichtmachen. In diesem an sich selbst schwer Tragen ist das Leben dem Grundsinne seines Seins nach, nicht im Sinne einer zufälligen Eigenschaft, schwierig. Wenn es eigentlich ist, was es ist, in diesem Schwer- und Schwierigsein, dann wird die genuin angemessene Zugangsweise zu ihm und die Verwahrungsweise seiner nur in einem Schwermachen bestehen können.’ See also GA 3, p. 291; Einführung in die Metaphysik (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1966), p.  9: ‘Die Philosophie macht ihrem Wesen nach die Dinge nie leichter, sondern nur schwerer … Erschwerung des geschichtlichen Daseins … ist … der echte Leistungssinn der Philosophie. Erschwerung gibt den Dingen, dem Seienden, das Gewicht zurück (das Sein).’ With regard to theology, see GA 60, pp. 107, 121. 20

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Bibliography Texts of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Vittorio Klostermann) are referenced in the above essay according to the volume number. Listed below are the respective titles, editors, and dates of publication for each referenced volume number. GA 1: Frühe Schriften. Edited by F.-W. von Herrmann. 1978. GA 3: Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Edited by F.-W. von Herrmann. 5th ed. 1991. GA 9: Wegmarken. Edited by F.-W. von Herrmann. 2004. GA 20: Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs. SS 1925. Edited by Petra Jaeger. 1979. /History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena. Translated by Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1985. GA 56/57: Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie. Kriegsnotsemester 1919 und SS 1919. Edited by Bernd Heimbüchel. 1999. GA 59: Phänomenologie der Anschauung und des Ausdrucks. Theorie der philosophischen Begriffsbildung. SS 1920. Edited by Claudius Strube. 2007. GA 60: Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Edited by Matthias Jung, Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube. 1995. GA 61: Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. WS 1921/22. Edited by W. Bröcker and K. Bröcker-Oltmanns. 1985. GA 62: Phänomenologische Interpretation ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zu Ontologie und Logik. Edited by Günther Neumann. 2005.

Other Abbreviations SZ = Sein und Zeit. 15th ed. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979. /BT = Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962).

Further Works Caputo, John D. 1982. Heidegger and Aquinas. An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press. Denker, Alfred, Hans-Helmuth Gander, and Holger Zaborowski, eds. 2004. Heidegger-Jahrbuch, vol. 1: Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens. Freiburg/München: Alber. Fehér, István M. 1996. ‘Heidegger’s Postwar Turn: The Emergence of the Hermeneutic Viewpoint of His Philosophy and the Idea of “Destruktion” on the Way to Being and Time.’ In Phenomenology and Beyond, ed. John D and Lenore Langsdorf. Selected Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, vol. 21, 9–35. Appeared as Philosophy Today 40(1), Spring. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1987. Neuere Philosophie I.  Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger. Vol. 3 of Gesammelte Werke. Tübingen: Mohr. Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie. 1974. Das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Theologie im Denken Martin Heideggers. Freiburg/München: Alber. Guignon, Charles, ed. 1993. The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1969. Identity and Difference. Trans. and with an Introduction by Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row. ———. 1976. Zur Sache des Denkens. 2. unveränderte Auflage. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

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———. 1982. Unterwegs zur Sprache. 7th ed. Pfullingen: Neske. ———. 1998. Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jäger, Alfred. 1978. Gott. Nochmals Martin Heidegger. Tübingen: Mohr. Kisiel, Theodore, and John van Buren, eds. 1994. Reading Heidegger from the Start. Essays in His Earliest Thought. Albany/New York: State University of New York Press. O’Meara, Thomas F.O.P. 1982. Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism. Schelling and the Theologians. London/Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Pannenberg, Wolfhart. 1997. Problemgeschichte der neueren evangelischen Theologie in Deutschland. Von Schleiermacher bis zu Barth und Tillich. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Papenfuss, Dietrich, and Otto Pöggeler, eds. 1990. Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers. vol. 2: Im Gespräch der Zeit. Frankfurt—Main: Klostermann. Pöggeler, Otto. 1983. Heidegger und die hermeneutische Philosophie. Freiburg/München: Alber. Schaeffler, Richard. 1978. Frömmigkeit des Denkens? Martin Heidegger und die katholische Theologie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Shahan, R.W., and J.N.  Mohanty, eds. 1984. Thinking About Being: Aspects of Heidegger’s Thought. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Volpi, Franco. 1980. Alle origini della concezione heideggeriana dell’esssere. Il trattato Vom Sein di Carl Braig. Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia 34 (2): 183–194. von Harnack, Adolf. 1983. Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 3 vols, 4th ed. [1909/10]. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Chapter 7

Apocalyptic Phenomenology: A Radical Philosophical Theology of Revelation Balázs M. Mezei

7.1  Introduction A philosophy of revelation can be understood on various levels and in the matrix of various methodologies. In the historical context, we see a slow development of the philosophical understanding of revelation from the works of Kant and Fichte, through Schelling’s Offenbarungsphilosophie, up to the emergence of the conceptual tools of phenomenology at the end of the nineteenth century. It is far from being an unverifiable statement to say that the most important developments in continental philosophy can be rigorously connected to the philosophical problem of revelation. These developments are expressed not only in the work of Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger, but even in the works of subsequent phenomenologists, such as Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion. At the same time, Anglo-American thought has found its way to the same subject matter in an original way in the works of Thomas Altizer. Today the tension between Altizerian ‘radical’ theology, the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ movement, and continental phenomenology determine the context in which the problems of a philosophy of revelation can be meaningfully defined and developed. However, the meaning of revelation remains often unclarified. On the one hand, many authors refer to it as a well-defined body of doctrine emphasizing the noun character of the expression ‘revelation’. Yet behind the noun character we find the verb ‘to reveal’ which expresses the ongoing—and absolutely incessant—activity of the divine expressing itself in various forms. When we use the term ‘apocalyptic’ we often refer to end-of-time visions or speculations. But the original meaning of the Greek apocalypsis is simply removal, i.e., the removal of the veil from the mysteries of God’s reality. As it has been explained variously, the Greek term itself was B. M. Mezei (*) Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_7

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the translation of the Hebrew gala, which appeared in the prophetic books of the Tanakh and was developed into an independent literary genre around the beginning of our epoch. The Book of Revelation in the New Testament is the most complex example of the genre of gala, although it was composed already in the Hellenistic culture of syncretism under the title of apocalypsis. The Latin revelatio (i.e. ‘removal of the veil’) literally translated the Greek term and led to the emergence of the noun and the verb, as I noted. The theological-philosophical problem of revelation is thus not really the problem of the end of the world, but rather the problem of divine reality as communication, disclosure, or revelation. In some sense, the divine is absolutely revelational, because not only its various modes of self-expression can be termed revelation— either in the divine itself or outside of it—but even the silence of God, as it were, is in a sense revelation. As I put it in Radical Revelation, ‘revelatio est quodammodo omnia’—revelation is in some sense everything, including the divinity itself.1 As a starter, take Hans Urs von Balthasar’s groundbreaking work, published originally in 1937–39, Apocalypse der deutschen Seele. Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen. Already the title of this important work of the young Balthasar is telling: on the one hand, it considers the history of German thought—and not only the modern developments—as an history of apocalyptic thinking, a thinking related to the end of all things. On the other hand, the subtitle defines apocalyptic thinking as existential: in terms of ‘letzte Haltungen’ or ultimate attitudes characteristic of human beings. Balthasar, however, uses the expressions of ‘apocalypse’ and ‘eschatology’ almost as synonyms. As he writes, We can define eschatology as the doctrine on the relationship of the soul to its eternal destiny, the realization (fulfillment or possession) of which is its own apocalypse.2

The name of the doctrine dealing with the ultimate attitudes is eschatology and the fulfillment of these attitudes is apocalypse. Apocalypse is fulfillment or consummation; the authors Balthasar deals with are authors of the final fulfillment, both subjective and objective, psychological and historical. In this fulfillment, ‘the revelation of the soul’ and ‘the revelation of God’ are united in a ‘Funkensprung’, that is, in the Platonic notion of ‘light flashing forth’.3 In other words, while Balthasar emphatically deploys the notion of apocalypse as referring to an ultimate fulfilment, he is also aware of the mystical dimension of the term and thus the revelational character of any apocalypse. His understanding of apocalypse is at the same time an historical, psychological and mystical fulfillment realized in the special context of German philosophy and theology.

1  What is presented in this paper is based on my work entitled Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach (New York: T&T Clark-Bloomsbury, 2017). 2  Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag, 1998), vol. 1, p. 4. 3  Letter VII, 341c. In Plato, The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), p. 1659.

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Nevertheless, Balthasar’s evaluation of the German apocalypse is far from univocally positive. Following nineteenth-century criticisms, such as those of Ferdinand Christian Baur, Balthasar points out the ‘Gnostic’ character of some of the apocalyptic theories of German thinkers. This point has been further developed by Eric Voegelin and, in our day, by Cyril O’Regan.4 This line of interpretation of German apocalypticism is of a unique value. Balthasar himself offers a very complex approach to the entire subject matter and never follows the temptation of a philosophical or theological simplification. It is characteristic of his approach that he always finds positive elements in the work of the philosophers and praises their methodology, thematic richness, or valuable insights. We have, thus, a complex thematic field related to the philosophical problem of revelation; we have an history of reception and an emerging terminology. We possess thorough-going criticisms of some of the authors, which again show the importance of the problem.

7.2  The Problem of Revelation The problem of revelation is the problem of the ultimate in every important aspect of reality. The ultimate is at the same time the beginning and the end, the source and the fulfilment, and in this way the very context in which we perceive ourselves and the world in its totality. Revelation is the form in which we have access to the ultimate; and this is not a form of epistemology in the first place, but rather the inner form of the ultimate itself by which it expresses itself to itself and makes it possible for it to be perceived. This meaning of revelation suggests an enlargement of the traditional notion in such a way that we recognize its hidden structures, i.e., its core meaning and significance in the context of reality. If revelation is a fact, it is an ultimate fact and as such it is the fact by which the ultimate becomes reflected and expressed, first of all in itself, and secondly in all its relations. This understanding of revelation is close to what Aristotle suggests concerning the activity of divine thinking, namely, that the divine is the thinking of thinking, or the thinking of itself (noēseōs noēsis).5 Revelation is thus not only about epistemology, but also ontology; and it is not only about history, but also psychology. Revelation is both metaphysical and religious, but even more importantly it is about itself: revelation is an autonomous and overarching subject matter. Revelation appears as pure givenness, as saturated phenomenon, as auto-donation, or as—to use Husserl’s word—the Endstiftung, that is, the ultimate fulfilment of reality. Yet revelation is most fundamentally a fact: it is not  Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); and The Anatomy of Misremembering: von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity (Chestnut Ridge, New York: Crossroad, 2014). 5  Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1074b. McKeon’s translation is ‘a thinking on thinking’, in Basic Works, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 885. 4

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merely an intentional object but an object beyond the intentional; and it is not just an object out of a number of other objects but rather the ultimate object in its relation to subjectivity. If reality is a fact, as it is, revelation is the ultimate, underlying and overarching fact which defines reality in its fullness. As the ultimate fact, revelation cannot be reduced to anything else beyond itself. Every aspect of our mind and world is related to it in a fundamental way; revelation ultimately is ‘the revelation of revelation’.6 Just as the revelation of revelation, revelation also shows a double aspect: on the one hand, it is ultimately factual self-containedness, a revelation of itself to itself; on the other hand, revelation is shared beyond itself. Behind the surface of revelation as a one-sided opening of reality we find the deeper structure of revelation as correlation—a thought clearly recognized as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century by Sebastian von Drey.7 Indeed, revelation is by definition such that it is revealed, shared, and communicated; and it involves by definition the proportionate structures of communication. Revelation is, in a sense, everything, i.e., there is nothing behind revelation; ‘nothing’ is involved in revelation as its own self-­ withdrawal, yet even this kenotic self-withdrawal is such that it fits in with the structures of the universal correlation. In this sense, the fundamental fact of revelation is correlational. The ultimate fact of revelation is the ultimate fact of correlation of the ad intra and ad extra dimensions of revelation, i.e., of revelation as correlation. This correlational fact is certainly related to Edmund Husserl’s idea of the a priori of universal correlation.8 For Husserl, this a priori is above all the ultimate presupposition of any mental activity with reference to the basic structure of reality. In my case, revelation as correlation describes the ultimate structure of reality in the perspective of the traditional problem of revelation with the appropriate interpretation of the scope and importance of this problem. As an a priori, this ultimate correlation cannot be hypothetical; it is an ultimate fact, an a priori fact (in the sense of the fact of a priori entities) that determines any other fact and any thought related to facts. We may also misunderstand this correlation if we think that there is a logical or mechanical necessity defining it. As the genuinely ultimate, revelation is not defined by anything and it is not determined by 6  Michel Henry uses the same expression which shows the depth of his understanding of revelation. Yet I must maintain a critical distance from his views for a reason I will mention below: In his understanding, revelation is not defined by freedom and thus is in a fundamental sense spontaneous, i. e. non-revelational. 7  The principle of correlation between the divine and the human, as the core of revelation, was exceptionally grasped and explained by Johann Sebastian von Drey in his Apologetik als wissenschaftliche Nachweisung der Göttlichkeit des Christentums in seiner Erscheinung, vol. 2 (Florian Kupferberg: Mainz, 1844). See for instance p. 251–2 where he describes the interaction between the divine and the human in a deep way. This text will be published in Balázs M. Mezei, Francesca A.  Murphy, and Kenneth Oakes, Downhill all the Way: Religious Narrations of Unbelief in Modernity, Illuminating Modernity Series (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming). 8  Cf. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), pp. 161–3.

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any kind of necessity; revelation is absolute freedom and its intrinsic correlation is based on freedom in all relevant senses. To put it in simple terms, revelation is freely given and freely received, and the mutuality of freedom constitutes its genuine structure. This also means that a theory of revelation has to consider the same double aspect: on the one hand, revelation is the ultimate fact and it is self-contained; yet it is ultimately and freely shared. These two aspects, however, constitute the whole of revelation, that is revelation as the ultimate fact. There is no logical theory of revelation with respect to these fundamental aspects; if there is a theory, it is a theory of freedom based on the free character of the universal correlation discovered in revelation. While the notion of revelation can be likened to the lotus flower, or Padma, of the Indian religions, the fundamental difference between the ancient symbolism and the modern notion of revelation lies in the latter’s absolute freedom: it is not bound to logical or natural necessity and it realizes freedom in itself and in its correlations. The two aspects of revelation in itself and in its communication are thus not isolated from one another, neither can they be confounded with each other. As soon as the notion of revelation appears in our thinking, we realize that revelation is an ultimate fact (as a matter of course, the ultimate fact) and, at the same time, we understand that this ultimate fact is such that it is communicated. This communication takes place already in our understanding of the fact of revelation, but also in the content of this understanding to the effect that revelation is such that it possesses its inner form of communication in such a way that it can be factually communicated in itself, in our understanding, in various events, in history, in the entire creation—in anything and everything. For, ‘revelatio est quodammodo omnia’ and, on the other hand, ‘omnia sunt quodammodo revelatio.’9

7.3  Radical Revelation ‘Radical revelation’ is the expression I apply with reference to the fundamental and ultimate character of revelation as self-revelation. The notion of self-revelation was latently presupposed throughout the centuries by various authors, but it was not before the eighteenth century that the expression became grammatically possible on the one hand, and determined the focus of such authors as Schelling and Hegel. The grammatical presuppositions of the notion were the emergence of ‘Selbst’ as a prefix in the German language, and the creation of various expressions with a broadly reflexive meaning, such as Selbstbeherrschung—self-rule. However, Selbsbeherrschung very clearly shows that the prefix Selbst can be either the subject of Beherrschung, rule, or the object of it. If Selbst is the subject, Selbstbeherrschung expresses the rule of the ruler as fully permeating the act of ruling. However, if 9  I.e., not only can we say that ‘revelation is, in a sense, everything’, but conversely we can also say that ‘everything is, in a sense, revelation.’

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Selbst is understood as the object of the verb, the meaning of the expression is rather ‘rule over the self, self-control’. The first meaning expresses the autonomy of the activity, while the second meaning refers emphatically to the reflexive dimension of the activity.10 In the expression Selbstoffenbarung, both meanings are implied to some extent. Schelling and Hegel understood the term as the self-disclosing of the divine in itself and in history—in the perspective of the consummation of history, a view they interpreted differently. Revelation is fundamentally self-revelation, because it discloses the divine. If this self-disclosing is seen as full, as for instance Hegel seems to suggest, the notion refers to the subjective sense in which revelation is the revelation of revelation itself. If the self-disclosing is rather about Selbst as an object, revelation is understood as partial divine self-disclosure. In this latter sense, the divine remains a mystery and this mystery is disclosed in self-revelation—an approach close to the views of the later Schelling. In either case, however, the notion of self-revelation proves to be a radical interpretation of the notion of revelation, an interpretation in which the ad intra and ad extra dimensions of the divine are understood in terms of an a priori correlation. I have already mentioned how the radical character of revelation has been gradually discovered throughout the history of the development of the notion of revelation in Christianity. In short, the realization of revelation as an historical process prepared the way to the understanding of revelation as the genuine yet absolutely free activity of the divine. Both aspects are fundamental to Christianity: the notion of the history of salvation and the dynamic and mysterious understanding of the Trinity are the most important contexts in which the complex nature of revelation can be realized. Revelation is Trinitarian and this gives the specificity and mysterious value of our notion of revelation. The Christian revelation is fundamentally distinct from the notions of revelation in Judaism and Islam and certainly different from analogous forms in the history of religions. At the same time, we find Trinitarian conceptions of revelation which call for philosophical and theological caution. Schelling’s understanding of divine revelation as the process of divine self-realization grasped in the history of mythology, or Hegel’s understanding of the Trinitarian structure of history which is at the same time the eternal realization of the Trinity itself, are important notions which need to be properly evaluated. As von Balthasar writes with respect to Husserl, metaphysics must be deeply grateful for Husserl for the rediscovery of the realm of the essences.11 In a similar way, we must be grateful for these philosophers for their discovery of the intricate structures of revelation as self-revelation. If in many ways both philosophers tend to fall into a kind of theosophy (or Gnosticism) in their wording and perhaps even in their ideas, it is due to the enormous difficulties inherent in the work they initiated and accomplished to a certain extent.

10 11

 Cf. Mezei, Radical Revelation, chapter 3, section 2.  Balthasar, Apokalypse, vol. III, p. 125.

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7.4  A Radical Philosophical Theology My use of the adjective ‘radical’ in the expression ‘radical philosophical theology’ is significantly different from other uses we find in the related literature. Both the ‘radical theology’ movement of the last decades of the twentieth century and the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ school, as a reaction to the former, have applied ‘radical’ in a non-philosophical sense. In the philosophical sense, the term goes back to the early use of radicalis with the meaning of ‘original’. Thus, Augustine used the term ‘radicalis Christiana societas’ in the meaning of ‘the original Christian society.’ Applied to human knowledge ‘radicalis’, referred to the depth of thought reaching back to the origin, historical or transcendent, of mental reality. The modern philosophical use of the term was defined most importantly by Kant’s notion of ‘radical evil’ (‘das radikal Böse’) where ‘radical’—consistent with its earlier use—referred to the origin of evil. At the same time, the term expressed in this way the full reality of evil as opposed to the various aspects in which it is displayed. After Kant, philosophy and theology soon enlarged and even ‘radicalized’ the meaning of radical in a sense which is far from the philosophical understanding. Today, the term suggests something extreme or even outrageous. Many authors mistakenly attribute the later meaning of ‘radical’ to Kant’s notion of evil, a shift of meaning which eludes even the attention of some experts. My understanding of ‘radical’ applies the meaning offered by Kant and refers to the original fullness, that is, the radical or original reality of revelation. At the same time, my use of ‘radical’ is still connected to the main principles of the movements I mentioned. Radical theology, especially the work of Thomas Altizer, proposed an overall reinterpretation of Christian doctrines, a reinterpretation which has challenged contemporary philosophy and theology in fruitful ways. I term this challenge fruitful not because I can endorse its conclusions; they are fruitful because they offered views inseminating important developments in contemporary thought and making many of us aware of the significance of the rethinking of our traditions. As to the conclusions, I believe that there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of reinterpretation in Altizer’s work. On the one hand, any reinterpretation is dependent on the subject matter it intends to reinterpret. Thus a ‘radically’ new interpretation is just the expression of one of the original possibilities. A ‘radical break’ with the tradition remains part and parcel of that tradition. On the other hand, the basic principle of Altizer’s work, the notion of ‘coincidentia oppositorum’, seems to be a one-sided view of the original idea of Nicolas of Cusa. The ‘coincidentia’ for Nicolas does not mean a simple sum of A and B, but a conjunction and thus a higher unity, C, of opposing poles. In this unity, the poles are synthesized into a whole which cannot be reduced to its simple constituents. Inasmuch as we find an insufficient understanding of this important principle in Altizer’s work, his thought may be seen as resting on a critical simplification. Despite its non-philosophical use of the term ‘radical’, the Radical Orthodoxy movement offers an understanding I can accept more easily as standing close to

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what I propose. Radical Orthodoxy rightly criticized the seemingly radical character of secular theories on religion and theology and offered a reconsideration of the old doctrines and even the acceptance of traditional theological paradigms, such as the analogy of being. On the other hand, in the works of the Radical Orthodoxy school the important developments of modernity are not understood sufficiently for a proper reconstruction of our history. There are undeniable results of this history which need to be taken into consideration both in themselves and in their theoretical frameworks, such as the development of the dignity of personhood. The overall notion of revelation is one of the important results of a similar development, and the expression of ‘radical revelation’ signifies the discovery of this meaningful evolution. We have gained uniquely important insights as the result of the debates in and around modernity, insights we find natural today. In many of its outputs, Radical Orthodoxy does not seem to recognize such an importance properly and uses thereby the adjective ‘radical’ in a philosophically deficient sense. Michel Henry also uses the adjective ‘radical’ in a number of contexts, most importantly as ‘radical phenomenology’. In his understanding, ‘radical’ refers to the ultimate root of a phenomenon or the making use of the ultimate possibilities of being. Radical phenomenology is presented as the discovery of the absolute realm of being interpreted as the self-affection of life. That is, Henry understands ‘radical’ as absolute; his radical phenomenology of life is about the absoluteness of life. The original meaning of ‘radical’ is thus preserved in this context and is understood in a way close to the simple philosophical sense I have applied. Talking about radical revelation in the appropriate sense, we need to talk about the corresponding theory as well. This theory must be accordingly radical and thus fit in with the nature of radical revelation. My point in a nutshell is the following: it is not theology properly speaking that is capable of dealing with the problem of revelation, because theology as a discipline already presupposes the notion and the fact of revelation. It is not simple philosophy either that can realize the task of a suitable theory of revelation, because philosophy tends to restrict itself to the realm of the natural. However, in virtue of its universal openness, an appropriate philosophical understanding may be able to become the theory we need here; and I term this theory the radical philosophical theology of revelation. This radical philosophical theology is radical in the sense I clarified; it is philosophical, because it suspends all prejudices and realizes full openness to reality; and it is theological, because it is in the history of theology that we have gained the notion of revelation. More particularly, the radical philosophical theology of revelation is the free, yet certainly assisted, realization of the universal a priori correlation of revelation. It is the embodiment of the subjective pole of this correlation in the theoretical form characteristic of methodological thinking. In a bottom-to-top development of method, one has to emphasize the correlational character of perception; that is, an empirically based theory of intentionality is needed, and the work of Edmund Husserl is of fundamental importance in this respect. In a broader sense, the notion of intentionality leads us to genetic phenomenology, and genetic phenomenology to the phenomenology of the ultimate structures of correlation. It is in this correlation that the fact of revelation can be recognized as the very source, structure and activity

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in which everything is constituted. In a top-to-down procedure, a similar structure of method can be followed and used to show the presence of ultimate structures of revelation even in our everyday perceptions. In this double methodology it is actually apocalyptic phenomenology that is born. The ‘apocalyptic’ character of this phenomenology does not refer to a non-philosophical feature but rather to the original meaning of apocalypsis as revelation.

7.5  A Phenomenology of Revelation An overall phenomenology of revelation, that is, apocalyptic phenomenology, cannot stop at the methodological questions. It certainly needs an elaborate methodology, but beside that it needs an historical and a theoretical understanding as well. The historical framework can follow the path of Balthasar, since he has already offered the context in which the notion of revelation can be applied to the most important authors of phenomenology. This approach can be enlarged, because, as we know, ‘the theological turn’ of phenomenology—as Dominique Janicaud termed it—contributed importantly to the possibilities of a radical philosophical theology of revelation’s consideration of the notion of revelation in the context of contemporary phenomenology. In this respect it is Michel Henry’s work that appears to be profoundly relevant. For Henry, revelation is the central subject matter of his phenomenology in more than one way. Life is self-affection and self-affection is manifestation; God is self-manifestation or self-revelation in the form of truth. As he writes, What manifests itself is manifestation itself. What reveals itself is revelation itself: it is a revelation of revelation, a self-revelation in its original and immediate effulgence … God is that pure revelation that reveals nothing other than itself.12

Henry defines the ‘essence of manifestation’ as the revelation of transcendence in immanence. This immanence is that of life, while ‘life’, for Henry, is fundamentally connected to incarnation or corporeity: life is physical in a broad sense and the self-­affection of life cannot be detached from corporeity. Henry understands revelation as the central point in phenomenology and views phenomenology as fundamentally about the problem of revelation. Nonetheless, Henry’s notion of revelation, especially the ‘self-revelation of life’, lacks the dimension of freedom, and thus the articulated distinction between the revealer and the receiver of revelation. In this way, while Henry emphasizes revelation, the eschatological dimension of revelation is not decisive in his work. His notion of revelation remains on a natural level, as it were, and does not advance to the level of freedom where all the important differences between the creator and the created, the transcendent and the immanent, God and man are ultimately rooted and construe a meaningful relationship. 12  Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 25.

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Beyond Michel Henry, it is the work of Jean-Luc Marion that must be considered in the present context. Until recently, Marion did not propose a thematically focused work on the very problem of divine revelation, but his entire discovery of the saturated phenomenon—that which points beyond itself to the ultimate source of self-­ donation—touches upon the problem of revelation. The notion of givenness, of donation, and especially self-donation, is at the core of Marion’s thought and thus, in a clandestine fashion, he deals with the problem of revelation in many of his writings. In his book, Givenness and Revelation, Marion engages a number of questions partly similar to the ones I have raised here. Thus, he belongs to the few authors today who have realized the paramount importance of the notion of revelation. In this volume, just as in his many other works, Marion displays an exceptional accuracy and richness of historical and theoretical analysis. For instance, his investigations concerning the notion of revelation in late scholasticism are indeed remarkable and fit in with his general criticism of modern philosophy before and after the rise of contemporary phenomenology. Moreover, his analysis of the Trinitarian dimension of revelation will make it necessary to continue the work of a philosophical trinitology. On the other hand, Marion considers the notion of revelation in the context of his well-formed idea of a saturated phenomenon, an idea developed in the context of appraisal and criticism of the results of Husserl’s phenomenology. Inasmuch as Marion’s emphasis is put on the notion of a saturated phenomenon, his work significantly differs from the perspective I outline here. In spite of some thematic similarities, my approach emphasizes the ultimate fact of revelation. However, the conceptual deduction of revelation from phenomena in general and saturated phenomena in particular raises the difficult question of the primacy of the ultimate reality of revelation. The reality of revelation is challenged even more strongly if saturated phenomena are considered under a number of various forms, while the unity of these forms seems to be more or less neglected. It seems to me that when dealing with the problem of revelation we have no external access to the content of this notion except revelation itself. It is the fact of revelation that makes possible the realization of this fact, as well as the understanding of the universal presence of revelation in its infinitely many forms, including absence. A radical philosophical theology of revelation, or apocalyptic phenomenology as I termed it, cannot have a general starting point for the—surely nonproportional—understanding of revelation. My approach is termed radical because it is radically revelational—dependent on revelation—and because it does not and cannot follow an inductive method beginning with general phenomena, going over to saturated phenomena, and arriving ultimately at the identification of the absolutely saturated phenomena with divine revelation in itself. This identification of the saturated phenomena with revelation necessarily presupposes an a priori understanding of the fact of revelation. Thereby such a procedure presupposes a prior theory of revelation on the basis of which such an identity can be recognized. Apocalyptic phenomenology in the sense I apply this term here is precisely the prior theory: the radical philosophical theology of revelation.

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7.6  The Notion of Apocalyptics Nevertheless, a phenomenology of revelation is a task which needs to be carried out systematically. In this way, it is able to give the raison d’être of the history of phenomenology. Properly understood, the history of phenomenology points to the problem of revelation and thus to the phenomenology of revelation, i.e., apocalyptic phenomenology. This is indeed a crucial point: while phenomenology produced a number of influential thinkers from Husserl to Lévinas, Henry, and Marion, phenomenology is not simply the concatenation of important philosophers. As already Husserl expressed it, phenomenology is rather a universal process of understanding and an epochal development of the notion of the a priori of universal correlation. The phenomenology of revelation is part and parcel of this task and contributes importantly to the furthering of phenomenology so that we can realize its historical telos. After some hesitation, I chose the name ‘apocalyptics’ to describe the field of general phenomenology of revelation as the realization of a radical philosophical theology.13 Apocalyptics is the full-fledged form of apocalyptic phenomenology in such a way that it is not bound to a particular development in the history of recent thought, but rather points to a more general and systematic understanding of theory. Names are not crucial here; yet the project of apocalyptics appears to be promising for a number of reasons. First, it offers an overall perspective in which the meaningful history of philosophy and theology can be properly addressed. Second, it defines the problematic of this history in the context of the notion of revelation. It is important to stress that by emphasizing the central problematic we do not eliminate the complex development of related problems and their particular relevance. We do not reduce philosophy to an apocalyptic discipline, as it were, and we do not impoverish its historical and thematic richness. Yet we are able to point out the center of this history and show its gradual emergence in the works of a great many ingenious authors. Finally, we do not only grasp an historical trajectory or the evolution of a problematic, but also the field of the subject matter itself. This subject matter can be elaborated in a radical way in itself, and can be put into the context of both historical development and future possibilities. Revelation is indeed the ultimate subject matter we need to deal with in philosophy, beginning with Socrates’s manteia to the notion of Ereignis—but most importantly in itself as itself, with revelation as the revelation of revelation.

 The term ‘apocalyptics’ is formed along the lines of ‘metaphysics’. Just as we have the term metaphysics from τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ [βιβλία]—‘the books that come after the [books on] physics’—I propose the use of ‘apocalyptics’ based on ἀποκαλυπτικά with the meaning: ‘the study of things belonging to disclosure or apocalypse’. In the nineteenth century, the term ‘Biblical apocalyptics’ was already in use to denote the Biblical teaching on revelation, for instance in Terry Milton Spenser, Biblical Apocalyptics. A Study of the Most Notable Revelations of God and Christ in the Canonical Scriptures (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1898).

13

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A systematic structure of apocalyptics, as proposed in my work Radical Revelation, is as follows: An outline of the study of apocalyptics Structural fields ► Content fields ▼ Contexts of logic

Methodological apocalyptics

Theoretical apocalyptics

Logical problems of Logical problems of method theory Contexts of Philosophical Philosophical problems philosophy problems of method of theory Contexts of Theological problems Theological problems theology of method of theory Contexts of Phenomenological Phenomenological phenomenology problems of method problems of theory Contexts of Problems of method in Problems of theory in religious studies religious studies religious studies Problems of method in Problems of theory in Contexts of the investigating the sciences investigating the sciences sciences Contexts of the arts Problems of method in Problems of theory in investigating the arts investigating the arts Contexts of Relevance for apocalyptic personhood personhood

Historical apocalyptics

Logical problems of history Philosophical problems of history Theological problems of history Phenomenological problems of history Problems of history in religious studies Problems of history in investigating the sciences Problems of history in investigating the arts

As can be seen, the focus of all the approaches to apocalyptics culminates in the crucial dimension of apocalyptic personhood. As explained, apocalyptic personhood is personhood informed by the ultimate fact of radical revelation; it is indeed the product of radical revelation on the side of the receiver of revelation. Apocalyptic personhood refers above all to the personal dimension of the fact of revelation, that is, Trinitarian reality. However, it also refers to the economy of revelation, i.e., to historical human persons informed by divine revelation in a radical way. These personalities appear in the course of history as reflections of the primal apocalyptic personhood in ad intra revelation. These personalities may be known to us, or may simply be unknown for the majority of interested people; yet they in fact realize radical revelation in themselves in such a fashion that the radical character of apocalypsis becomes incarnate in their person, life, and work. By their life and work they add their own apocalyptic personhood to the infinite richness of radical revelation in such a way that revelation becomes an additional factor of radicality. Since revelation is infinite in itself, such an addition does not change the fact of revelation; yet it is still an addition and an enrichment of the infinite fact. As an illustration, consider how holy people take part in the holiness of the Trinity. Or else, consider how great scientists are seen as representing the power of science in their particular-historical form. Or again, consider how great poets and composers express in their own way, in a given language, in a given cultural context,

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the sublime power of art. The realm of music is presupposed by the great composers as an open possibility in which their work can be realized. Holiness is presupposed by the saint as an open possibility—of a factual character, however—which is realized in a particular and real form in the concrete person of the saint. These examples help us to understand the way in which apocalyptic personhood is presupposed in the life and work of exceptional personalities in all walks of life—in their concrete personal form yet with respect to the reality in which apocalyptic personhood is prima facie exemplified. Apocalyptics as a discipline points to the characteristic emergence of apocalyptic personhood in all its fields of analysis. Thereby we can say that apocalyptic phenomenology turns out to be a phenomenology of personhood, especially apocalyptic personhood, which is the core of radical revelation.

Bibliography Altizer, Thomas J.J. 2012a. The Apocalyptic Trinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2012b. The Call to Radical Theology, ed. and with an introduction by Lissa McCullough; foreword by David E. Klemm. Albany: State University of New York Press. Aristotle. 1941. Basic Works, ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House. Henry, Michel. 2003. I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity. Trans. Susan Emmanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1976. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie. Vol. 6 of Gesammelte Werke. Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Janicaud, Dominique, Jean-Luc Marion, et al. 2000. Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’. New York: Fordham University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2009. Religion Within the Bounds of Bare Reason. Trans. Werner S.  Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2016. Givenness and Revelation. Trans. Stephens E.  Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mezei, Balázs M. 2017. Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach, Illuminating Modernity Series. New York: Bloomsbury. Mezei, Balázs M., Francesca Aran Murphy, and Kenneth Oakes. forthcoming. Downhill All the Way: Religious Narrations of Unbelief in Modernity, Illuminating Modernity Series. New York: Bloomsbury. O’Regan, Cyril. 1994. The Heterodox Hegel. With a foreword by Louis Dupré. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 2014. The Anatomy of Misremembering: von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity, Chestnut Ridge. New York: Crossroad. Plato. 1997. The Complete Works, ed. John M.  Cooper. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Spenser, Terry Milton. 1898. Biblical Apocalyptics. A Study of the Most Notable Revelations of God and Christ in the Canonical Scriptures. New York: Eaton and Mains. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. 1998. Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen. Freiburg: Johannes Verlag. von Drey, Johann Sebastian. 1844. Apologetik als wissenschaftliche Nachweisung der Göttlichkeit des Christentums in seiner Erscheinung. 3 vols. Mainz: Florian Kupferberg.

Chapter 8

Žižek and the Theological Foundation of the Secular Cyril O’Regan

8.1  Introduction It remains a question as to whether Žižek is worthy of philosophical attention, and perhaps even more of theological attention. Ambiguity and ambivalence are the natural defaults, given Žižek’s penchant for irony and mask, his flaunting of Marxist credentials while mischievously scoring its pieties, his absolute conviction in the Marxist-Leninist revolution and his self-construction as a commodity generated in and by Capitalism. Charlatan or intellectual of real range and conceptual heft? Serious thinker or self-conscious jokester? An engaging cultural critic of Hollywood movies and pulp fiction or a thinker of Marx, Hegel, and Lacan? A shallow modern or post-modern atheist or postmodern thinker who has made the ‘religious turn’ and justified it on Marxist, Hegelian, and Lacanian grounds? In any event, Žižek is a willfully protean thinker, and also one whose productivity is as out of control as the hypertrophy of capitalism and/or sex. The above signifiers and what they signify give good reason not to attempt to conceptually contain Žižek, and encourage the interpreter to leave him in the borderlands or boundary lands or what Jean-Luc Marion would call a démarche. Žižek is a phenomenon to note, a kind of strange animal, obviously hybridic, possibly monstrous, of whom we should be afraid, but in the way we are of spooks, goblins, shapes in the attic, or liminal realities at the bottom of the stairs. That is, he is a monster or monstrosity that is ultimately comic or ludic; he is the terrible that can be summoned to make us laugh, while also the clown who by contagion makes us sad. I judge that this strategy of coping to be not only cowardly, but also to be premature. Despite the endless productivity, in fact Žižek’s continuous recycling of material suggests that his body of work is quite finite, and not as it appears to be, that is, C. O’Regan (*) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_8

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the textual equivalent of the ‘bad infinite’ (die schlechte Unendlichkeit) so abjured by Hegel.1 In addition, there are manifest differences in the theoretical level of Žižek’s production, and even noticeable differences in the claims that Žižek makes for his own texts, even if these claims are always themselves subject to irony and erasure. For example, Žižek has been declarative that his over thousand-page effort on Hegel with the Badiou-kind of title of Less than Nothing (2012) is his masterpiece,2 and stands out from and against the ephemera of his cultural studies production on films, seen and unseen, and pulp fiction, read or not read. The public confession of having written on the unseen film or unread novel, however, cannot, of course, be regarded as either a moment of religious or Rousseauesque sincerity. Nor can it be figured as an act of repentance. Like much else in Žižek, it should be thought of a symptom of late Capitalism that exposes Truth with a capital T to be fiction, and discloses through the play of signs how institutions and practices (legal and extra-­ juridical) form subjectivities ordered to live the lie.

8.2  Conceptual Architecture Establishing that there is something like a conceptual architecture in Žižek’s work is a condition of the possibility of assessing his views on any major topic, including the topic of the nature of secularity and its genetic conditions, which is my specific task. Although there are a number of different axes of expression in Žižek, any and all discussion on theory, practices, cultural phenomena or social events supposes a synthesis of the theoretical apparatuses of Marx, Hegel, and Lacan, as that synthesis is filtered through conversation and argument with the reflections of Marxists such as Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou. Far and away Žižek’s fullest statement is to be found in Less than Nothing, which text can be supplemented by other texts with a high degree of theory such as Tarrying with the Negative (1993), The Indivisible Remainder (1996),3 1  The ‘bad infinite’ comes into play as early as the Differenzschrift in which Hegel critiques the third proposition of Wissenschaftslehre in which Fichte suggests that the union between A and not-A is a task rather than a reality, something that ought to be (sollen) rather than an actual synthesis. It is a prominent category in Hegel’s logical works. See the Encyclopedia I, §§93–5, in Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 137–141. 2  Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012). 3  Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). Chapter 4 on Hegel’s Logic of Essence provides Žižek’s most substantial philosophical contribution. See also The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Other Matters (London: Verso, 1996). Although this book is purportedly on Schelling, and especially the ‘middle Schelling’ of Die Weltalter (1815), throughout there is appeal to Lacan as translating the best insights of Schelling. There is also insistence on the internal rather than external relation between Hegel and Schelling, his supposed critic. Neither in this book, nor anywhere else, does Schelling displace Hegel as the philosopher. One may also add to the above two texts the foreword to For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), pp. x–cvi.

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and his dissertation, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan (1982), which is truly foundational for all of his work.4 Although Žižek has written more about Hegel and Lacan than about Marx, there can be no doubt that he considers Marxism to provide the overall conceptual frame for his thought, and that Hegel and Lacan function to theoretically augment and buttress dialectical materialism. It is noticeable in Less than Nothing that Žižek refuses to replace—as most Western Marxists have done—the concept of ‘dialectical materialism’ by ‘historical materialism’. There are a number of reasons for the refusal. These range from Žižek’s penchant as a provocateur willing to associate with hard-­ line Soviet-style Marxism by thinking of Engels and Lenin as authentic interpreters of Marx, to his conviction that dialectical materialism more nearly captures Marx’s commitment to the real across history. This is not to say, of course, that Žižek is not also an historical materialist. His supplying of a ‘dialectical’ horizon for historical materialism is intended to outbid Western European humanist and constructivist readings of Marx in which human being is an autonomous subject who directs history rather than being its effect.5 Although it is far from clear that Žižek accepts Althusser’s notion of décalage between the pre-1845 humanist Marx and the post-­ 1845 Marx of the Grundrisse and Kapital,6 he shares Althusser’s aversion to Western European constructions that would allow Marx’s early writings to determine interpretation of his theoretical and practical contribution.7 Importantly, however, Žižek disconnects the issue of the relation between Hegel and Marx from the relation between Marx’s pre-1845 and post-1845 texts, where the early texts of Marx are supposed to be at once Hegelian and humanist and the later texts non-Hegelian and non-humanist. Žižek follows the lead of Lenin in thinking the mature Marx has to be supplemented theoretically by a reading of Hegel. In this respect he uses Althusser’s own work on Lenin as an expositor of Hegel against him.8 At the same 4  The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan (Malden, MA: Polity, 2014). This book is divided into two parts, the first on the relation between Lacan and Hegel, the second on Marx’s construction of ideology, as this is illuminated both by Hegel, Lacan, and their relation. 5  I am thinking here in particular of Habermas. See Less than Nothing, pp. 224, 238–39. See also Interrogating the Real (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 175–76, 222–23. Considering Habermas’ stature as a social thinker, the references to him are few in Žižek’s sprawling work. 6  The French, pro-Stalinist Marxist Louis Althusser argued for a rupture (décalage) between the early ‘humanist’ Marx (purportedly under the influence of Hegel) and a later mature Marx who left his earlier humanism aside and constructed a science of society, change, and ideology. Much of Althusser’s best work dates from the 1960s, for example, For Marx (1965; English translation, 1969); Reading Capital (with Étienne Balibar) (1965; English translation, 1970); Lenin and Ideological State Apparatuses (1968; English translation, 1971). 7  Žižek agrees with Althusser that, understood properly from a Marxist perspective, there is no clear separation of theory from praxis: praxis is always already latent with theory, and correspondingly theory is a form of praxis. 8  In Lenin and Ideological State Apparatuses, Athusser had argued that Lenin had supplemented Marx by thinking how it was possible for a revolution to happen without the highest development of Capitalism and thus the highest level contradiction between the forces of production and relations of production. Lenin’s contribution is summed up by his thinking of the ‘weakest link’, which Althusser adapts to his notion ‘over-determination’ which suggests that the energy for a revolution can come from outside the economy.

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time, however, he accompanies Badiou,9 who arrived at the conviction that Hegel is the theoretical supplement of supplements to Marx without which one cannot articulate, pace Althusser, Marx’s dialectical materialism. That Hegel provides the theoretical supplement to Marx means nothing less than that Hegel is the crucial interpretive lens in and through which to interpret Marxism. This means also, however, that a Hegelian intellectual apparatus, at once logical, metaphysical, and socio-political, is obliged to sustain and explain the crucial facets of dialectical materialism, which include a materialist concept of history in which subjects are effects of complex social processes (economic and non-economic) and their interaction, and the conviction that ideology is at once ‘false-consciousness’ but also to a certain extent irradicable, given that individuals come into social-­ political worlds articulated by ideas and images that to a large extent produce subjectivity. These basic convictions once again are in line with an Althusserian construction. Žižek holds the basic Marxist conviction that the problem of problems in history—whether avoidable or not—is Capitalism, and consequently he is committed to the view that contradiction between forces of production and relations of production provide its motor. Yet, although he only occasionally gives explicit notice of Althusser’s notion of ‘over-determination’,10 that is, that the economy is not univocally determinative of all culture, institutions, and political forms, but only in the last instance, this can be read off the literally thousands of pages of cultural analysis that make up the bulk of Žižek’s literary production.11 Importantly, while in one sense the commitment to dialectical materialism in Žižek’s work represents a commitment to some form of historicism, it makes a difference whether the form of historicism is construed to be open or closed or is understood to come under the logic of freedom or necessity. Typically, Western 9  Of modern French philosophers, especially those of Marxist persuasion, Žižek is most influenced by Alain Badiou, who, like Althusser before him, does attempt a synthesis of Lacan and Marx. More important, however, for Žižek is that Badiou’s philosophical mainstay throughout his copious work is Hegel, who in his view—one shared by Žižek—corrects Marx. Almost all of Badiou’s copious oeuvre is important for Žižek, including Badiou’s articulation of a materialist higher mathematics and set-theory. Arguably, privileged, however, are Badiou’s reflection on the event (1984, 2006), his view of the subject (1982) in which Lacan plays a prominent role as well as Hegel, and his view of Saint Paul and universalism (1997). For English translations of these texts, see the following, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2005); Logic of Worlds: Being and Event, vol. 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009); Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009). 10  See, for example, They Know Not What They Do, p. 131. 11  Žižek is committed to the view that institutions and cultural production, while in some sense products of the economy and in particular contradictions in the economy, also have a measure of autonomy such that they play a role in historical outcomes. Of course, this is the view of critical theory from which Žižek usually distinguishes himself. Žižek is worried that critical theory is not sufficiently materialist and fails to take the economy seriously enough. Nonetheless, he recognizes that this is an old debate in Soviet Marxism, with the hard-liners insisting on univocal determination by the economic base, and others, for example, a figure such as Plekhanov, arguing for some measure of independence. For a good account of Marx, which reads him as allowing some measure of independence, see Louis Dupré, Marx’s Social Critique of Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

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European advocates of Marx embrace an open form of historicism often connected with freedom understood as autonomy. In contrast, Soviet-style Marxism favors the closed model—the more utopian model—whose interim is the dictatorship of the proletariat focused in the politburo, and is committed to the invariant laws of history. Although the provocateur Žižek invokes the latter to torment the bourgeois forms of Marxism, strictly speaking he is committed to neither. Utopia is not ruled out. Yet it is a promise at once for the most part deferred and at best realized partially. In addition, utopia necessarily has to be read in a deflationary mode as meaning neither the abolition of ideology nor suffering. In fact, in practice the lynchpin of dialectical materialism seems to amount to the exercise of the critical capacity to a see through ideology and to accept suffering. Nor does Žižek feel inclined to accept straightforwardly a view of logical or ontological necessity in historical production. After Badiou, he thinks that history is simply what happens, the play of contingency. History is the scene of freedom, then, if and only if freedom and contingency can be regarded as interchangeable. For Žižek, in line with Badiou, they cannot. The truly theoretical problem for both is not how freedom and necessity go together, but rather how contingency and necessity go together. Žižek’s solution is the one provided by Badiou, who essentially enacts a revisionist interpretation of the relation between categories in Hegel’s logic, that is, necessity in history is a function of a retrospective look,12 whereby what happens is divested of the quality of mere happenstance: as a particular result, every event has conditions, even if an adequate presentation of these conditions is an infinite task. To construct something of a shorthand, we might say that, for Žižek, as an operative concept within the complex of dialectical materialism, ‘necessity’ is stipulative. Hegel, then, is a major means in and through which a truly viable form of dialectical materialism is conceptually possible. Equally, however, Hegel functions in Žižek’s work as something of an independent variable and not simply as a coefficient of Marx by being a mere supplement to him. It is Hegel rather than Marx who productively troubles the binary between theism and atheism, as well as the binary between religion and non-religion, and thus can be used, on the one hand, to correct Soviet-style communism’s view of the incompatibility of religion with the scientific materialist view of the world, and on the other, to help provide context for Marx’s own asseverations about religion—especially Christianity—where religion functions as a symptomology. While, as already stated, Žižek in general has trouble with Western European revisionism regarding Marx—with the possible exception of Lukács—on the whole he seems favorably disposed to Ernst Bloch’s mode of  The technical term is ‘retrospective positing of presuppositions’. See Less than Nothing, pp. 227, 467–69, 471; also pp. 92, 213, 464. See also Tarrying with the Negative, p. 126; and For they Know Not What They Do, pp. 61–3, 130–31. In the last-named text, Žižek provides the clearest account of what he means: ‘The core of Hegel’s “positing the presupposition” consists precisely in this retroactive conversion of contingency into necessity, in this conferring of a form of necessity on the contingent circumstances’ (p. 131). Outside of this Badiou-Žižek trajectory I have drawn attention to the phenomenon in Hegel’s thought of positing presuppositions. See Cyril O’Regan, ‘Hegel and the Folds of Discourse’, in International Philosophical Quarterly 39, no. 154 (1999): pp. 173–93.

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h­ istorical materialism which grants religion in general, Christianity in particular, not only a measure of relative autonomy, but also a generativity in its prophetic calls for justice and equality. Certainly, throughout his voluminous work Bloch gives ample evidence that he does not despise the links drawn either between the biblical prophets and Marx, or Joachim de Fiore and Hegel, and through Hegel with Marx.13 One can think of the last connection suggested by Bloch—one ironically repeated also by Catholic thinkers such as de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar14—as being especially important in Žižek’s own fairly recent turn to ‘religion’, which I deal with later in the text by considering his view of Christianity’s role in founding or legitimating the secular. There is, perhaps, one further feature of Hegel’s discourse which gives it a functional priority over the discourse of Marx, even if the latter repeats and contains it. This is Hegel’s notion of ‘desire’, as articulated in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Of course, the overall context of desire is the struggle between master and slave, whose immediate resolution is the world of work as the imprint of desire. In this respect, Marxist-Hegelian thinkers such as Alexandre Kojève and Jean Hyppolite were correct in seeing the closest possible connection between Hegel and Marx, with Hegel sketching a theory of work and Marx completing it. Nonetheless, Žižek does not think that ‘desire’ can be so teleologically contained and opens up vistas that the standard reading of the Marx-Hegel relationship closes. Lacan is the third intellectual core element of Žižek’s discourse. There is nothing either belated or faddish about Žižek’s embrace of Lacan. It is not belated in that Lacan is an intellectual object and subject of appropriation from the very beginning of Žižek’s career: Žižek’s dissertation (1982) is essentially a Lacanian interpretation of Hegel, and with due qualification Žižek’s magnum opus remains within this interpretive orbit laid down in his dissertation. Žižek is a notable interpreter of Lacan, and thus has status in the riven community of Lacan studies obsessed with the proper interpretation of the major and minor concepts and changes made throughout the career of the heterodox psychoanalyst. More important for our purposes, however, are the ways in which Žižek and others see how Lacan can complement and/or supplement a Marxist analysis of modernity in general and social  The two texts that stand out are Das Prinzip Hoffnung (3 vols.; 1938–1947); and Atheismus im Christentum (1968). Bloch’s approval of Joachim is most to the fore in Das Prinzip Hoffnung. Žižek’s relation to Bloch is complicated: Bloch provides an incalculable contribution in his projection of hopes and his exposure of the recessed apocalyptic dimension of Christianity. At the same time, Žižek does not think that Bloch has managed to truly plumb the depth of Hegel and Marx in a way that later thinkers such as Badiou have. See Peter Thompson and Slavoj Žižek, eds., The Privatization of Hope: Ernst Bloch and the Future of Utopia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 14  See de Lubac’s classic text La postérité spirituelle de Joachim de Flore, 2 vols (Paris: Lethielleux, 1979–1981). Balthasar’s sense of the influence (largely indirect) of Joachim on modern religious and even political thought is high throughout the trilogy, especially Theodramatik and Theologik. The foundation, however, is provided by one of his earliest texts, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre von letzen Haltungen, 3 vols (Salzburg, Austria: Pustet, 1937–1939). The third volume is crucial. De Lubac’s own reflection on modern Joachimism was heavily influenced by this text. See also my discussion of the relation between Hegel and Joachim in The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), pp. 265–79. 13

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processes and production in particular. Lacanian notions of desire, intercalation, and the triad of the Real-Symbolic-Imaginary can help us not only to understand ourselves as individuals, but also the regnant ideological apparatuses and their restrictive and debilitating effects—thus Žižek’s penchant for Lacan rather than the historical Hegel or the historical Marx when it comes to cultural studies. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that in Žižek’s oeuvre Lacanian psychoanalysis is the mediating discourse of ideology analysis and critique. If the intrinsic merits of Lacan’s psychoanalysis are the first and most basic reason for Žižek’s deployment of it, a second reason is that there is good French precedent for linking Lacan and Marx in the service of a revolutionary program, in which theory can be regarded as a form of praxis and praxis regarded as a form of theory. Gilles Deleuze provides an example of the combination, even if the combination is not constitutive of his work. The combination is, however, constitutive of the work of both Althusser and Badiou. Moreover, Badiou intermediates the relationship between Marx and Lacan in and through a searching analysis of Hegel. Conversely, it is important for Žižek that Lacan not be reducible to either Hegel or Marx or both and that he enjoy a relative autonomy, even as light is shed differentially on him by Marx and Hegel (and also vice versa). It is important for Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan in Less than Nothing, and also for the prospect of throwing light on the constitution of the secular modern world, that Lacan’s well-known prohibition against Hegel, on the one hand, and his prohibition against religion, on the other, receive appropriate qualification. Žižek argues that evidence is supplied in the Seminars and elsewhere that suggests an easing of both prohibitions. And he argumentatively lightens the challenges of relating Lacan with Hegel by reading the German philosopher in such a way that he cannot be identified as Derrida does so blithely with absolute knowledge.15 Similarly with regard to religion. Lacan may very well be substantively as well as methodologically atheistic, yet this does not mean that he does not take religion seriously: at the very least religion clearly reveals the punitive operations of the ‘Big Other’ who can migrate from the Judeo-­ Christian complex and take up residence in society in the form of conscience, general or local conventions, family etc.16 These new forms are all the more pernicious because more invisible, and all the more harmful since guilt enters more deeply into subjectivity. In addition, however, to this disclosive function, religion also suggests something of an overcoming of God, indeed, God’s own pronouncing of himself as dead. Žižek continually draws attention to the point in his more recent work. The following passage from Less than Nothing is illustrative: In his seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan opposes to the thesis of the death of God, the claim that God is dead from the beginning, it is just that he does not know it; in Christianity he finally hears it—on the cross. The death of Christ is thus not an actual death, but rather a becoming aware of what is already here.17  Žižek, Less than Nothing, pp. 470–71. See also They Know Not What They Do, p. 70–5; and Interrogating the Real, pp. 201, 316–18. 16  Žižek, Less than Nothing, p. 105. 17  Žižek, Less than Nothing, p. 102. 15

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I want to suggest, therefore, the presence of a dynamic theoretical core of three discourses, which are relatively autonomous, and yet mutually open to each other and mutually interpreting of each other. At any particular point in a theoretical elaboration, one or other is in ascendancy—although there is always some reference to the others. This dynamic core—itself overdetermined in that there is no stable hierarchical relation—or particular elements of this dynamic core is what gets deployed in concentrated or less concentrated forms in Žižek’s cultural analysis. They are theoretical applications, even as they come across as improvisations, five-finger exercises on cultural phenomena that constitute the backdrop and spectacle of social life. On might add by way of gloss that there is a fourth figure of significant intellectual weight who can be thought to orbit closely around these three. This is Schelling, especially the Schelling of the middle period, that is, the Schelling of the Freiheit essay (1809) and the The Ages of the World (1815).18 This is a Schelling, whose insistence on the recalcitrant real makes impossible absolute knowledge. The famous Ungrund functions as a surd that resists conceptual assimilation. Žižek thinks of this Schelling, who forces the issue between positive and negative philosophy, as a supplement to Hegel. He also makes it clear that this Schelling encourages the construction of a form of Hegelianism which acknowledges what cannot be thought or conceptualized, admits to that which cannot be made transparent, admits to waste or remains, or in uncensored language admits to the ontology or meontology of ‘shit’.19 The resistance of the real is a constitutive element of dialectical materialism however much Hegel’s theoretical apparatus is necessary to justify it. This ground idea brings Schelling close to the historical Marx, and it has the collateral benefit also of redeeming Engels’s laudation of Schelling. In the end, however, it is the proximity of Schelling to Lacan that is most noticeable. In different registers they seem to qualify Hegel in exactly the same way, precisely that way calculated to yield a sophisticated theoretical apparatus attuned to the real perhaps in ways that the historical Marx himself failed to realize, and to humble theory such that the theory can neither command origins or ends, become a protology or an eschatology.

 Žižek, Less than Nothing, pp. 11–3. Žižek’s most extensive commentary on Schelling is to be found in The Indivisible Remainder, Part 1, 1–186. See also Žižek’s Introduction to The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 19  Žižek thinks that one of the major contributions of Schelling is to insist that dialectic is unable to master all contingency and history, that in effect that there is something that can neither be elevated nor sublated. One can speak of this as under the umbrella of ‘excrement’. See The Indivisible Remainder, p. 33. Even as Žižek insists on Schelling being a supplement to Hegel, however, he indicates that properly understood—as mediated through Lacan and Badiou—Hegel integrates this thought. See in particular Žižek’s essay, ‘Hegel and Shitting: The Idea’s Constipation’, in Slavoj Žižek and Creston Davis, eds., Hegel’s Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 221–32. 18

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8.3  Žižek’s Theory of Secularity Despite or perhaps because of his dialectical materialism, and the historical materialism it enfolds, Žižek preponderantly explores the images, codes, practices, relations of power that constitute it in the modern age, and the desires and fears that feed it or which, denied and finding no place, construct a utopia or no-place. For Žižek, in line with Hegel,20 the secular is the everywhere and nowhere, and forms the horizon of the visible and the invisible, what is available to understanding about the world, social world in particular, and what is not available.21 The secular functions magisterially to legitimate or delegitimate everything and anything, whether forms of government, forms of economic relation, laws and contracts, social, moral, legal, and religious thought and behavior. The secular also shapes and forms subjectivities, while also making available therapies to ameliorate if necessary the trauma and suffering that is a byproduct of socio-cultural formation. Žižek follows Althusser and others in thinking that the most basic form of transcendence human subjectivity takes with regard to the ruling ideology of the secular sphere is insight into its historicity and contingency. This form of reflexivity, however, cannot be regarded as freedom in the full sense. In any event, no more than the later Althusser, influenced by Lacan, or in Lacan himself, does Žižek think that we can live a completely examined life: the plane of the visible—whether it is associated with desire or not—is a projection from the presupposed and supposed that we only notice when they become spectacle. Usually there must be an overwhelming interest or trauma for such seeing to occur. However, if a Marxist concept of utopia is going to function, it cannot be a once and for all reality, nor can it be immune to backsliding. There is no transcendence of the history in which we are always already ideologically inflected  and infected. What is true of our age, enveloped in and by the secular sphere, is presumably true also of previous ages whose governing ideologies are different and whose basic milieu was otherwise. If we put in parenthesis for the moment, then, Žižek’s reflections on religion, and especially his reflections on Hegel and Chesterton in the The Monstrosity of Christ,22 we can say that Žižek offers a phenomenology—perhaps interpretive—of secularity, and perhaps also of its complications and arguments with itself that make it a layered reality. In his work we do not find the affirmation of the secular age that we find in the work of Habermas, who though he is convinced that the Enlightenment can do with some dis-enlightening, does not go as far as Adorno or Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment.23 Žižek is in far greater proximity to the former, shown 20  See Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.  V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 488–591. For ubiquity, see pp. 544 and 331–33. 21  This also happens to be Althusser’s Marxist definition of ideology throughout his work. It is especially to the fore in his Reading Capital. 22  Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), pp. 24–109; esp. pp. 43–54; also pp. 25–6, 73–4. 23  Žižek, ‘On Radical Evil and Other Matters’, in Tarrying with the Negative, pp.  83–124, esp. pp. 95–101.

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not least in his association of Kant and de Sade.24 Nor do we find the same high-­ order problematization of secularity, and especially of its genesis, that we find in Hans Blumenberg’s The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.25 Nor do we find anything comparable to the incredibly copious history of the radical enlightenment of a Jonathan Israel. Nor again is there anything in Žižek that really resembles the kind of sustained genetic account of a Charles Taylor’s The Secular Age.26 Strictly speaking, however, none of these accounts are justifiable on Marxist principles. While, for example, Israel explores the broad dissemination of radical ideas in the wake of Spinoza over two huge volumes, and speaks to very minor figures indeed, his work still largely belongs to the history of ideas, even if there is occasional referral to social processes which radical enlightenment ideas reflect and/or echo. And while it is true that Taylor goes beyond the interpretation of particular thinkers in the modern age and speaks to the ‘social imaginary’, the latter seems to function largely as a remainder concept. Specifically, the concept of the ‘social imaginary’ is an abstraction of a newly emergent consensus, which privileges certain positions and disadvantages others. Methodologically, Blumenberg’s work is furthest from Žižek’s in that it offers an account of dialectical mechanisms in and through which the modern came into being precisely as a break with the pre-modern past. There is no equivalent account in Žižek’s non-religious work. At the same time, however, in his classic text, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, Blumenberg problematizes the very concept of secularization,27 the many versions of which can ultimately be traced back to Hegel’s account of the generation of the modern age, which, if focused in the Enlightenment and its ideological precursors, also has deep roots in Christianity. As we shall see shortly, what Blumenberg denies is very much what Žižek affirms. Lastly, while Žižek’s account formally bears a positive relation to Habermas’s integration of Marxism and the Enlightenment—we should not despise Žižek’s own commitment to modernity’s ‘unbearable lightness of being’ and the refusal of nostalgia28—his Marx is as different from Habermas’s quintessential Western European construction as his view of the Enlightenment is considerably darker.29  Žižek makes it clear that his own reflection on Kant and de Sade is inspired by Lacan’s essay ‘Kant avec Sade’. 25  Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 26  Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); also Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 27  For a critical discussion of Blumenberg’s genealogical account, see Cyril O’Regan, Gnostic Return in Modernity (Albany, New York: SUNY Press, 2001), ch. 2.1. 28  I am evoking the book by the Czech author, Milan Kundera. See his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Harper & Row, 1984). See also The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: Penguin, 1981). The relation between Žižek and Kundera is a topic that has been very much under-explored. 29  It is also true of Habermas that early on he attempted—similar to Žižek—a synthesis of Marxism and Psychoanalysis. See Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). The German edition appeared 4 years earlier. 24

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In this context it can only be regarded as ironic that Žižek provides his most sustained reflection on the genesis of the modern secular sphere in his argument with the Anglican theologian, John Milbank, in The Monstrosity of Christ: Dialectic or Paradox. It is interesting that by and large Žižek depends almost exclusively on Hegel in articulating his view, although the appeals to Badiou throughout not only help to clarify and fill out Hegel’s articulation of the secular sphere,30 but perhaps also to insinuate the recessed presence of the apparently infinitely interpretable Marx and Lacan respectively. Throughout his oeuvre Hegel provides a number of different highly schematic options from which Žižek can choose, that is, political, philosophical, generically historical, and religious. What is astonishing is that Žižek chooses the religious option, and insists on the generativity of Christianity with respect to the emergence and ultimate dominance of the secular sphere. What specifically motivates the ‘religious turn’ in philosophy—which formally Žižek shares with Derrida and Nancy, among others—is a matter of speculation, and I will address it briefly at the end of the essay. Žižek’s debts to Hegel are manifold, and range from the most abstruse of reflections in Hegel’s Logic on the relation of the categories of ‘being’ and ‘nothing’ and ‘necessity’ and ‘contingency’, to reflections on civil society in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Right, which the historical Marx deeply engaged. In The Monstrosity of Christ,31 however, Žižek’s genealogical sophistications depend almost exclusively on a general historical account elaborated by Hegel in Lectures on the Philosophy of History concerning the crucial role played by Protestant Christianity in the emergence of the secular sphere, an account which in turn is aided and abetted by Hegelian reflection in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion concerning the historical epochs of Christianity, and also how Christian symbols such as ‘the death of God’ and ‘kenosis’ suggest that Christianity provides the rationale for its own self-immolation and metamorphosis into an apparent other.32 Briefly put, although Žižek takes Hegel’s particular views concerning the emergence of the full scope of knowledge and freedom in the Reformation under advisement, he agrees with him that Protestant Christianity represents the realization or actualization of Christianity. In keeping with Žižek’s reservations about the return to origin, thought properly, the true meaning of the Reformation, it turns out, is not as the Protestant Reformers thought: in line with Hegel’s account it is not about the acceptance of sola scriptura and sola gratia, but about both the universal access to and the particular qualities of freedom and knowledge. Precisely as the ideological warrant of the maximal realization of freedom and reason, Christianity is the foun The Monstrosity of Christ, pp. 91, 94, 97; also pp. 238–39, 254, 257, 476, inter alia. See also ‘Thinking Backward: Predestination and Apocalypse’, in John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, and Creston Davis, with Catherine Pickstock, eds., Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2010), pp.  185–210, esp. pp. 174–79. 31  Žižek-Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, pp. 28–33. 32  Žižek-Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, pp.  256–61; see also Žižek, Less than Nothing, pp. 232–33; and Interrogating the Real, pp. 43, 206. 30

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dation of the modern secular sphere. The secular sphere is in turn the full practical realization of the fully clarified vision of Christianity in society and is manifest in the battery of modern institutions and in modern culture more broadly. Although it is not absolutely necessary for his adoption of Hegel’s genealogical view of modernity, Žižek does seem to accept Hegel’s view that Protestantism is not simply a happy historical improvisation on Christianity, but rather an explicitation of original Christianity. How this organic-teleological construal of Christianity squares with Žižek’s general commitment to historical contingency is not made clear in The Monstrosity of Christ, although the constant references to Badiou throughout suggest that Žižek is more than a little aware of Badiou’s view of the harmony between the commitment to contingency and the construct of retroactive necessity. In any event, one way to think of Žižek’s current turn to Paul—which is more explicitly argued in other texts—is, again following closely Badiou, to underscore Žižek’s felt need to insist that the Protestant form of Christianity is alone of the historical forms of expression of Christianity truly ‘authentic’. As is often the case with Žižek, it is what is not referred to in his enactment of an infinite conversation that proves crucial. One would think that going down this line with Hegel would necessarily involve Žižek in some discussion—even with a view to critical discrimination of his own position—of Weber’s view of secularism, which similarly supposes the ‘Protestant principle’ as a foundation for a secularity whose appearances sometimes seem to contradict it. There is no trace of such a sociologically oriented discussion, but rather of a highly abstract—almost mythological—view of the Hegelian death of God to be found in a thinker such as Altizer.33 Thus far, Žižek can be said to repeat Hegel without much emendation or improvisation. A closer look, however, reveals that changes have been rung on the Hegelian cord. The most conspicuous one concerns the very schematization of the history of Christianity. In general Hegel’s account of the historical movement of Christianity is from primitive Christianity through Catholicism to Protestant Christianity. While the scheme repeats in essential respects the historical mapping of the Reformers, it differs from theirs insofar as ‘primitive Christianity’ is already a fall into fetishism and into parochialism which runs against the basic message of Christianity expressed in the Gospels about the kingdom of God. Of course, Catholic Christianity is scene of betrayal, at once vilely cosmopolitan and worldly, while encouraging relationships to the beyond. Comfortably in line with Protestant polemics, Hegel asserts that this superstition-riddled and authoritarian-addled betrayal of Christianity in Catholicism is rectified in Protestant Christianity. Žižek, however, introduces an interesting substitution. Instead of primitive Christianity, he puts Eastern Orthodox Christianity. Žižek does so without comment and thus without offering an argument, which probably would have to be based on Hegel’s brief

 Žižek-Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, pp. 255–61. Žižek also allies himself with the version of ‘death of God’ theology sponsored by Gianni Vattimo, which has a shared background in Heidegger and Hegel.

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reflections on the Byzantine empire in Lectures on the Philosophy of History.34 In a sense, substituting for primitive Christianity makes sense on Hegelian grounds: ‘primitive Christianity’ is a relatively vague signifier for Christianity which Hegel seems to think takes social form with identifiable practices and forms of life. Without attempting to supply an argument that Žižek himself does not supply, one can hypothesize that Žižek would like to show off the authentic ‘Protestant’ form of Christianity not only against Catholic Christianity, but any other major Christian rivals. Given Žižek’s own social situation, it would make sense that he would take Eastern Orthodox Christianity into account. So while historically the schema is now Eastern Orthodox Christianity—Roman Catholicism—Protestant Christianity, when he is thinking of the content of the first, Žižek is most likely thinking of theocratic forms of Russian and Greek Orthodoxy as his exemplum, as these are part of the social and political fabric in Russia and a number of Eastern European countries. Thus for Žižek, Eastern Orthodox Christianity is as inauthentic a form of Christianity as Catholicism, and thus a retardation to a viable politics, which is always revolutionary and encouraging of the scrupulous and sly questioning demanded by dialectical materialism. Žižek’s revised schematization is not without consequence on a number of fronts. One particularly interesting consequence is that Žižek is able to ameliorate the functional anti-Judaism of Hegel’s general account of religion in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion.35 For Hegel, ‘primitive Christianity’ is de trop because it is unable to overcome its Jewish origins whose constitutive problem is the commitment to divine transcendence and its consequent alienating effect on human subjectivity. This is a view articulated in Hegel’s early theological-political or politico-theological texts (1795–1799), and is reiterated in the section on ‘unhappy consciousness’ (unglückliche Bewusstsein) in the Phenomenology, in which a form of alienating transcendence relocates itself in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Albeit in a more measured way, Hegel makes a similar point in the various lecture series in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion in which Hegel judges that the constitutive fault of Christianity is to reinscribe alterity in the figure of Jesus and thereby to reintroduce the associated heteronomy and humbling of the intellect. In Marxist terms the excessive focus on Christ in terms of function and person represents a fetishization. Hegel’s view of the Jewishly poisoned roots of ‘primitive Christianity’ is almost entirely consistent across his entire career with the possible exception of the 1827 Lectures.36 On Hegel’s account this new form of historical transcendence 34  G.  W. F.  Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J.  Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 336–40. 35  For a compendious account of Hegel’s consistent anti-Judaism, see O’Regan, ‘Hegel and AntiJudaism: Narrative and the Inner Circulation of the Kabbalah’, Owl of Minerva 28, no. 2 (Spring 1997): pp. 141–82. 36  There is a manifest difference between the 1827 Lectures and the 1821 and 1824 Lectures. When in the prior lectures Hegel speaks to Judaism as a religion of absolute transcendence or sublimity, he is very much in line with the way he has previously cast Judaism. Now Judaism no longer appears to be oriented towards transcendence without remainder, and its God a divine without any relation to the world. Specifically, the Jewish divine is reason in the world that gives it its teleological

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is carried over and forward by Catholic forms of Christianity. The association between Judaism and Catholicism with regard to transcendence—albeit they are committed to different modes—in turn explains how and why the negative remarks on Judaism and Catholicism scattered throughout Hegel’s oeuvre seem so similar. In his later work, and especially in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, we are talking about an amelioration rather than a fundamental revision of Hegel’s earlier savage views of Judaism. Judaism—and latterly Islam—provide the paradigmatic representation of God as transcendent and sovereign. Žižek follows Hegel scholastically here. Traditional Judaism provides the script—he is a student of psychoanalysis—both for totalitarian rule and self-evacuation. And Islam is the belated and perhaps consummate example of the script.37 As with Hegel, for Žižek Christianity is the supreme religion as much because of the vices it avoids as the virtues it displays. Historically, Christianity shows plenty of evidence that it has the capacity to incorporate forms of transcendence and sovereignty that repress, oppress, and wound subjectivity and/or make it well nigh impossible. Christianity, however, is distinguished from all other religions, and especially from monotheistic world religions, by the fact that such incorporation is a misrepresentation or misinterpretation that is accidental to it. This is Žižek’s as well as Hegel’s view. Of course, it comes at a price that it is not clear that Žižek pays or is willing to pay, that is, that there is something like an essence of Christianity which has authentic and inauthentic forms and that we have the criteria to determine the difference. Perhaps it is also worth pointing out that Žižek’s emendation of Hegel’s schematic of the development of Christianity in effect repeats exactly the historical schema of the development of Christianity provided by the liberal Protestant theologian Adolf von Harnack in Das Wesen des Christentums (1900). While one cannot rule out the possibility that Žižek has read Harnack—and, indeed, there is a remarkable similarity in their respective lambasting of the dogmatic and theocratic constitution of Eastern Orthodoxy—it is unnecessary to suppose that one is dealing with anything like a direct borrowing. A lover of Hegel, Žižek hardly has deep problems with the influence of philosophy on Christian faith—provided it is good philosophy. There are inbuilt constraints in his theoretical construction—as with Hegel—against subscribing, for example, to the ‘Hellenization of Christianity’ thesis. Yet the schematic overlap is telling, and it should be reminded that the ethico-political considerations played a significant role in Harnack’s schematization, particularly as they were invested in an argument concerning the kingdom of God. Harnack objected both to the authoritarianism of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox modes of Christianity as well the claim that in a significant sense the kingdom of God is realized in the form. What appears to have happened is that instead of thinking of the God of Judaism after the manner of depiction in the Hebrew Scriptures, Hegel is now thinking of the God of Judaism as if it were represented by Philo of Alexandria. See Cyril O’Regan, ‘Hegel’s Retrieval of Philo and the Constitution of a Christian Heretic’, Studia Philonica Annual 20 (2008): pp. 33–59. 37  For Žižek’s reflection on Hegel and Islam, ‘A Glance into the Archive of Islam’, in Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević, God in Pain (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), pp. 103–26. Despite the fact that Gunjević, the co-author of the book, is Eastern Orthodox, there is no conversation between Žižek and him on Eastern Orthodoxy.

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Byzantine and Catholic churches respectively. However far Žižek is from Kant, whose views of the construction of the ethical-political society are so determining of Harnack’s discourse, he is unable to prevent himself repeating Harnack’s critical assessments. Of course, Harnack’s own judgments repeat Hegel’s with the exception that Harnack is more interested in de-legitimating Eastern Orthodox forms of Christianity. So far I have considered the way in which Žižek takes up and emends Hegel’s historical schematization of Christianity in which Christianity realizes itself fully in Protestant Christianity, which in turn serves as the foundation for the secular realm. Žižek follows Hegel with almost scholastic precision in supplementing the generic historical discussion with considerations of how and why Christianity is not fully realized as a religion and that effectively it achieves its universalization beyond itself in the non-sacred realm of the modern de-divinized world and society. Obviously, this speaks eloquently both to Christianity being essentially an incarnational religion and also to philosophy being the proper discursive site for teasing out the social and political consequences of Christian ideation. Žižek, however, does not simply follow Hegel’s incarnational logic; he takes Hegel’s symbol of the ‘death of God’ in which the release of God into the secular is dramatically enacted. As is well-known, this symbol first comes into view in an early text of Hegel, that is, Glauben und Wissen (1802), and reappears in a number of venues, thereafter, for example, in Hegel’s discussion of the figure of Christ in section 7 of the Phenomenology and in a similar context in the various lecture series that make up Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The first instance is regulative. Hegel avails of the Lutheran locution only to change its intent. The phrase ‘Gott ist todt’, which is taken from a famous seventeenth-century Lutheran hymn, points to the marvel of what God has done in Christ to effect our salvation. In contrast to what we find in the historical Luther, in Glauben und Wissen the accent is not on God’s salvific action, but rather on our modern experience of the disappearance or absence of God from our lives.38 The question that Hegel is setting at the end of a book, which is one of the launching pads of his philosophical career, is whether there is something philosophically productive about the loss from a social-historical and ultimately philosophical point of view. It is only in later texts, such as the Phenomenology (1807) and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1821, 1824, 1827), that Hegel will also ask the question whether there is not also something religiously productive about a loss which after all is only a loss of a reified or fetished divine transcendence, and not necessarily of all modes of transcendence, divinity, or even holiness.39 Hegel’s discussion of the symbol of the death of God in these texts establishes the basic parameters for Žižek’s discussion, which possibly also presupposes  For the particular passage, see G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. M. Harris (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977), p. 211. 39  See my full discussion of Hegel’s ‘death of God’ ruminations in all the parameters in O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel, pp.  189–234. For Žižek’s reflections, see Less than Nothing, pp.  85–6, 96–112. 38

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c­ onsiderable French discussion since Roger Garaudy.40 It almost certainly involves acquaintance with Catherine Malabou’s rendering in The Future of Hegel,41 which has the virtue and convenience of rehearsing the French and German critical discussions concerning Hegel’s peculiar version of the death of God. Given his love-affair with the thought of Badiou, Žižek is mindful of the French philosopher’s variation on the theme, which seems to be more patient with Hegel’s earliest avowals and impatient with the detour through a thicker Christianity which demonstrates Christianity’s own interest in an obsolescence that is coincident with its universalization. Žižek does not stray too far from the basic structure of Hegel’s analysis provided in and by the idealist philosopher’s more mature accounts in the Phenomenology and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The death of God intimated by the cross is merely the overcoming of the reification of transcendence in a discrete particular which is resistant to conceptualization. Here the Son can be fetishized after the manner of the Father. For the Slovenian philosopher, Christianity is essentially a logic, an incarnational logic that finds its full realization in the cross, where in death there is the letting go of particularity. Thereby transcendence is no longer transcendence from the world but transcendence into the world, understood to be constituted by nature and finite human being. In addition, Žižek’s readings in psychoanalysis in general and Lacan in particular make him sensitive to the transhistorical possibility of introjections which takes different religious and non-religious forms in different historical periods. Only Christianity fully understands, and shows itself fully able to embrace the logic of the death of God. So far, however, we have left unaccounted for a number of important features necessary for bringing out the richness of Hegel’s discussion which is followed closely, but not slavishly, by Žižek. Three features especially come to mind: (i) the role of the Spirit as a vehicle for the transferring of transcendence onto the human community, (ii) the contradiction at the heart of reality between infinitude and finitude, and (iii) the speculative reframing of kenosis. I begin with the role of the Spirit (i). Žižek understands that from a theoretical point of view Hegel has to posit a vehicle for the universalization of transcendence. This vehicle is the Holy Spirit, which is best understood as an operation rather than a particular act of a particular operator who happens to be identified as a divine person. One arrives at the true concreteness of the elevated or elevating human community by thinking that the cross supplies the meaning of what it is to be an authentic subjectivity. This is to state the case positively. Negatively put, Spirit is the solvent that prevents obsession with the figure on the cross or alternatively the figure who is absent from the tomb and above whom rumors swirl about theft or ­resurrection. As indicated earlier, Žižek is inspired by the work of Ernst Bloch, even  See Roger Garaudy, Dieu est mort: Étude sur Hegel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). 41  Catherine Malabou, L’Avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 1996). For the English translation, see The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, trans. Lizbeth During (New York: Routledge, 2004). Žižek’s debt to Malabou is acknowledged at the very beginning of Less than Nothing, p. 17, and Žižek avails of Malabou as providing as near a proper interpretation of Hegel as is possible throughout The Monstrosity of Christ. 40

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if Bloch is excluded from playing a major role in the construction of his Marxist theoretical apparatus. Bloch’s emphasis on the assimilation of the meaning and promise of Christ and the kingdom of God throughout his writings (but especially The Principle of Hope), and his historical identification of the assimilation with Spirit is congenial to Žižek. It helps enormously that the two of the most prominent precursors of Marx who underscore the activity of Spirit are Hegel and Joachim de Fiore. Gianni Vattimo’s underscoring of Spirit in general and Joachim in particular gives point to Žižek’s dialogue with the Italian philosopher who otherwise is so different from him in his elective affinities to a postmodernity more in line with the assimilation of Nietzsche and Heidegger than with the assimilation and emendation of Hegel and Marx.42 (ii) Žižek grasps Hegel’s fundamental point about the contradiction exposed on the cross between infinitude and finitude, which turns out to be a contradiction between a vacuous but sovereign infinitude and a reality which has so perfectly appropriated the conditions of finitude that we want to say ecce deus as well as ecce homo. In The Monstrosity of Christ one can witness Žižek essentially remythologizing the contradiction illustrated on the cross in two different ways, both of which involve appeals to literary figurations, and both of which read the dialectic of infinitude and finitude as a contest of God within himself and with himself. One of these ways is to evoke the Romantic trope given plenary expression by Goethe: Nothing contradicts God, except God himself (Nihil contra Deum nisi Deus ipse).43 Of course, as Hans Blumenberg has pointed out,44 when this formulation is linked to Goethe’s famous poem Prometheus (1776), which essentially involves the contest between the authentically divine Prometheus against the spuriously divine Zeus, it reveals that contradiction within God is an argument between an illegitimate God and a legitimate because human God or godly humanity. Žižek may or may not know of Blumenberg’s discussion in which the German historian-philosopher is  Vattimo articulates a view of the ‘death of God’ that is genealogical through and through, that is, focused entirely upon the birth of a modernity that forsakes the standard forms of Christian transcendence. Both the transcendence of God and of Christ were placeholders and educational tools for us to arrive at a grasp and a living of immanence that is inevitable and as inevitable is true. Vattimo essentially synthesizes Hegel’s version of the death of God with that of Nietzsche (also Heidegger’s emendation). Among Vattimo’s many texts, arguably the most important for his genealogical thesis are The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-Modern Culture, trans. John R.  Snyder (New York: Polity Press, 1991); After the Death of God (with John D.  Caputo), ed. Jeffrey W.  Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); and After Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001). After Christianity is the work of Vattimo’s in which Joachim is most prominent, and thus the text in which by proxy Hegel’s genealogical account and especially the movement from Christ to Spirit is crucial. Žižek is more attracted to this connection than to the Nietzschean/Heideggerian side of Vattimo’s thought while, nonetheless, not objecting to it. For a work of commentary that brings Vattimo and Žižek into dialogue, see Frederick Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Bloomsbury, 2008). 43  See Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 530. This is quoted from a letter Goethe wrote in 1811. 44  See Blumenberg, Work on Myth, pp. 431–64; pp. 523–57.

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anxious to show how authority is siphoned off the transcendent divine to humanity by construing humanity itself as the alternative and true divine. Yet he certainly knows of the early Marx’s fascination with this ancient contest and his famous echoing of Aeschylus’s Prometheus: I hate all gods. Now, the second site of Žižekian remythologization or perhaps remythicization is suggested in his appropriation of G. K. Chesterton, more specifically the English Catholic apologist’s reflections on Job and his novel, The Man Who Was Thursday.45 Leaving in parenthesis that Žižek’s reading of Chesterton is a stunning act of eisegesis intended to embarrass John Milbank, who elevates Chesterton as a precursor to his own venture in radical orthodoxy,46 it is interesting to note that Žižek interprets Chesterton’s elevation of dialectic into God as effectively the contest between an immoral God of the past and the just about to be released moral God of the future, who essentially will be us according to our best instincts. If Chesterton, then, is not a latent Marx, he most certainly is a latent Feuerbach, who over-against the objections of an ‘orthodox’ Marxist such as Althusser, is rehabilitated. (iii) In the context of Hegel’s own work, the ‘death of God’ trope is connected with the trope of kenosis. In the Phenomenology as well as the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel thinks that the death of God is the plenary example of divine self-emptying.47 To get to the point at which he wishes to arrive, that is, transcendence as realized as world and the humanum, Hegel must necessarily depart from the meaning of kenosis as deployed in Philippians 2:6–11. Divine self-­ emptying is not simply a change of form, here the change of form from divine ruler to that of slave, but a fundamental change both in terms of the subjects who are divine and also the relevant predicates. The subject is now the common human subject not the divine particular, and the attributes of sovereignty, non-relationality, non-reciprocity, immutability, and impassibility no longer apply. Indeed, precisely the opposite set of predicates specify the new subject of divinity. Among other things, this means that while divine self-emptying effects a humanization of the divine, it also effects improvement. Not only is there no divine-like gift, there is no giver. As I have argued elsewhere, kenosis is a form of plerosis, emptying and/or self-emptying is a form of gaining, self-gaining.48 One might with Bataille and Derrida in mind49 worry about Hegel’s use of self-emptying drawing a profit, that is,  Žižek-Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, pp. 43–50. See also Žižek’s interpretation of Job on pp. 52–4, where Job is at once a kind of Christ and Prometheus figure, the one because the other. This is also an old Romantic trope that Milbank rightly argues that Chesterton avoids. 46  For Milbank’s riposte to Žižek’s misreading of Chesterton, see The Monstrosity of Christ, pp. 113–14 where the English theologian dissociates Chesterton and Hegel. 47  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 770. See Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, ed. Peter C.  Hodgson and trans. R.  F. Brown, P.  C. Hodgson, and J.  M. Steward (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 124–25 (1821 MS), pp. 325–26 (1827 Lectures). 48  See O’Regan, The Anatomy of Misremembering: Von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity. Volume 1. Hegel (New York: Crossroad, 2014), pp. 168–69, 175, 306, 358. 49  The crucial piece of writing is Derrida’s reflection on Bataille’s concept of gift in ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 251–77. Derrida’s assumption is that 45

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ultimately worry about the model of capitalist exchange. Žižek does not in fact pay attention to this peculiar economy and does not appear to give any particular sanction to the an-economy of the gift, even if the logic of his position is a logic whereby capitalism has to be voided. For a thinker schooled in Hegel, it is nigh impossible not to think of the philosopher’s reflection on the speculative proposition in the Phenomenology as the correlative of his non-standard rendering of kenosis as plerosis.50 If God is the grammatical subject of the speculative proposition, ‘God is Love’, God is not the real subject: the real subject is love, which is the predicate of the proposition. A fortiori, this would be true of the proposition, ‘God is Spirit’, which brings out just as well as Love that for Hegel the ultimate is not a divine subject or hypokeimenon, but rather a complex web of logical/ontological and social relations.

8.4  Critique of Žižek’s Marxist Theoretical Apparatus and Model of Secularity The first two sections are largely descriptive in that they aim to provide a taxonomy of the theoretical apparatus of Žižek and his view of secularization. At the same time, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge that throughout there are implied criticisms. In this third and final section of the essay I wish to make some of these criticisms explicit. Although my focal interest is Žižek’s view of secularization, I begin with some brief critical remarks concerning Žižek’s Hegelian theoretical apparatus, which funds his Hegelian account of secularization. There are three main problems with Žižek’s conceptual scheme: (i) inordinate complexity, (ii) relative instability, and (iii) tendency towards totalization. Beginning with the issue of complexity (i), it can be granted Žižek that his conceptual apparatus is as consistent across time as it is sophisticated in its outline. There is a fine line, however, between sophisticated and sophistical, and between requisite and inordinate complexity. Hegelianism is not only not regarded as being surpassed by Marx’s dialectical materialism, but elevated to the point that it is Hegel rather than Marx who is put forward as dialectical materialism’s best representative. This is to deny the common interpretative tradition in which Marx represents—for better or worse—a materialist correction of Hegel’s Idealism, and also to demur in particular from the view of Louis Althusser, whose thought Žižek deeply engages. Žižek can be hyperbolic on this point: not only is Hegel a materialist rather than an

Bataille shows a way beyond Hegel’s dialectic in which all metaphysical and epistemic lack is overcome. Throughout his writing Žižek denies Derrida’s interpretation. See Less than Nothing, pp. 449–50; and The Indivisible Remainder, p. 125. 50  See Hegel, Phenomenology, 63. Žižek more or less takes for granted the centrality of the speculative proposition in the French interpretation of Hegel which has been a mainstay since the work of Jean Hyppolite. See The Indivisible Remainder, p. 35.

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idealist, he is more materialist than Marx himself.51 But it is not simply that Žižek gives us a Hegelian Marx and a dialectical materialist Hegel, he also insists on dialectical materialism being open to emendation from both Lacan and Schelling. For Žižek the fact that Lacan largely ignores Hegel, and that Schelling is a total critic, does not stand in the way of his availing of both as emending without compromising Hegel’s dialectical materialism, which emendation, in his view, generates a remainder which is the genius of both to have recognized in different ways. However, even as Žižek endorses the correction of Hegelianism, he insists that Hegelianism has the inbuilt capacity for such correction, or otherwise put, the correction is internal to Hegelian dialectical materialism itself. Finally, there is the issue of the role Alain Badiou has in inflecting rather than emending dialectical materialism. Badiou’s theoretical discourse is not on the same level as the discourses of Hegel, Marx, Lacan, and Schelling in that, prior to Žižek, it is already a discourse that integrates the others with the exception of Schelling. Badiou’s theoretical discourse is, then, synthetic, and Žižek’s theoretical task is to improve upon the synthesis. It is not hard to conclude that a theoretical model in which Hegelianism modified by Marx—and correlatively a Marx modified by Hegel—emended by Lacan and Schelling and inflected by Badiou is inordinately complex and for that reason suspect. Second, and correlatively, there exists a significant amount of tension between the elements of Žižek’s general theory or meta-theory (ii). Given Marx’s own view that he had transcended Hegel in a materialist direction, and the general sanction of this view in subsequent Marxist theory, Žižek’s elaboration of dialectical materialism seems incredibly imbalanced in Hegel’s favor and threatens to eclipse the contribution of Marx. To be fair, Žižek retains Marx’s diagnosis of capitalism being the motor of the modern world and responsible for it being off the rails, and adopts Marx’s view of ideology which, following Althusser, he takes not only to have the pathological sense of ‘false consciousness’ which invites critique, but also the non-­ pathological sense of a network of assumption without which it is impossible to navigate a social world at all. Still, even with these contributions of Marx being ineliminable, theoretically, Hegel does most of the theoretical heavy lifting. Moreover, the primacy of the economic, which is axiomatic in classical Marxism, seems to be relativized in Žižek’s work. Now, while this has precedence in the would-be orthodox Marxism of Althusser, the relative autonomy of culture to which Žižek seems committed is basically Hegelian. Moreover, there is the double ambiguity of Žižek’s appropriation of the thought of Badiou. Given his synthesis of Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, which favors Hegelianism as the integrating discourse, does not Badiou before Žižek risk devaluing the non-Hegelian discourses? And again, in very general terms does not Badiou’s synthesis, which provides the proximate template for Žižek’s complex theory, threaten to make Žižek’s own view redundant, if essentially all he adds is a certain Schelling who emends Hegel but in ways that, on the one hand, overlap with Lacan and, on the other, are capable of being internalized by a dialectic materialism characterized by ‘plasticity’, to use Malabou’s term? In any event, it is evident that Žižek owes to Badiou some of his 51

 Hegel more materialist; Marx more idealist.

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more conspicuous innovations within the theoretical field of dialectical materialism. Of the utmost importance is the appropriation of Badiou’s concept of retroactive necessity, which ‘logically’ unites necessity with chance in the way that Hegel refuses, and also the correlative concept of revolution which is tied closely to the concept of retroactive necessity: just as what happened can be limned with necessity, what seems necessary (as having happened) can be dissolved into mere possibility in a network of other possibilities, one or more of which can be actualized in the present or future as the real future. One of the achievements in the debate between Žižek and Milbank, in which both routinely talk past each other, is that Milbank grasps the theoretical importance of Badiou in Žižek’s discourse.52 Arguably, Milbank tries too hard to interpret Badiou in a way that would not be favorable to Žižek and fails to see the real issue: if Badiou contributes as much as he is supposed to Žižek’s discourse of dialectical materialism, is the Slovenian philosopher not in real danger of being redundant from a theoretical point of view? The third and final weakness of Žižek’s articulation of his general theory is the tendency towards totalization (iii). This is evident in just about all the theoretical texts that were objects of analysis in the first two sections, and supremely in Less than Nothing, whose ambition is to present a theoretical apparatus that comprehends everything including nothing. This is the cause for the anomalous appeal to both Lacan and Schelling to supplement the largely Hegelian theoretical apparatus. Both insist on givens that are ineluctably outside and thus beyond the capacity of any conceptual adoption or adaptation, however flexible, whether this goes under the name of ‘the real’ in the case of Lacan, or the unground or even nothing in the case of Schelling. Žižek cavalierly ignores the prohibition and proves that that neither truly escape the web of Hegelian dialectical materialism. Both the real and the nothing are effects of Hegelian dialectical materialism, since, as we indicated in the first section, they are nothing more or less than presuppositions that are constructed by the dialectical system itself. Žižek’s tendency towards a totalizing discourse, is, arguably, nowhere more loudly declared as in a statement that seems to move towards the condition of a formula in Žižek’s magnum opus53: the aim of his form of dialectical materialism is to articulate the whole plus of its symptoms, that is, both what the whole straightforwardly accounts for, and for what it does not, but which is, nonetheless, intimated. Given its invocation of the whole, which recalls the famous passage in the preface of the Phenomenology about truth being the whole, it is clear that the historical Hegel, against whom Kierkegaard as well as Schelling inveighed, functions as a base for a form of dialectical materialism sufficiently plastic to include what might refute it.54 Here one can see the irony—maybe double irony—of the relation between Žižek’s and Derrida’s interpretation of Hegel. Žižek’s reading of Hegel instantiates perfectly Derrida’s view of the supplement in that the supplements turn out to have as much—if not more—intellectual authority  See Žižek-Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, pp. 118–19, 154–56.  Žižek, Less than Nothing, p.  523. Žižek explicitly recalls Hegel’s phrase Das Ganze ist das Wahre. 54  See Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 23. 52 53

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than the would-be original/historical Hegel. In contrast, the Hegel of Derrida’s Glas is,55 despite Derrida’s view of the supplement, the original/historical Hegel who aims at totalization, which—it turns out—is impossible given the recalcitrance of the particularity and singularity of reality, whether this recalcitrance goes under the name of a thing, woman, or Jew. If Žižek does not acknowledge that he engages Derrida’s masterpiece on Hegel, which has a great deal of Lacan and a good deal of de Sade in it,56 he definitely engages Derrida’s less than positive view of Hegel. As we saw earlier, Žižek takes exception to the view articulated in Derrida’s famous denunciation of Hegel’s restricted economy, in which the particular is sacrificed before the altar of the universal. From a Derridian point of view, a Žižekian emendation of Hegelian dialectic such that it can account completely for what is outside as within its matrix, suggests nothing less than the nightmare of thought intolerant of finitude. Structural flaws are also to be observed in Žižek’s specific articulation of the secularization thesis. The two main flaws are the dogmaticism and abstractness of Žižek’s account, although the latter is ramified in that it is specified in Žižek’s Hegelian schematics of Christianity and his tropic use of Christian symbols such as the ‘death of God’ and ‘kenosis’. The dogmatism of Žižek’s view lies in its utter certitude regarding the rightness of its Hegelian account of secularization which at the same time is its account of the onset of modernity. The certitude seems to echo the certitude evinced by Hegel, whose account of secularization is treated as gospel. There is nothing in Žižek’s treatment of the secularization thesis, for example, in either Less than Nothing or The Monstrosity of Christ, that modifies the historical Hegel in the way that one finds in his general theory of dialectic materialism. Nor does Žižek enter into critical discussion regarding the kind of alternative proposals which I gestured to in the first section. While Habermas and critical theory are interlocutors for Žižek, he does not comprehensively engage either when it comes to a genealogy of modernity. While it is true that his view of a complex modernity that has to proceed under the joint auspices of Kant and de Sade could conceivably owe something to critical theory’s divagations on the dialectic of Enlightenment, for the most part Žižek remains impressively aloof. Again, while Žižek calls on the name of Habermas quite a few times, there is little or no substantive discussion of his work. Perhaps the closest thing to treating Habermas as a rival genealogist is to be found in a critical remark he makes in Less than Nothing on the latter-day Habermas’s acknowledgment of the perdurance of religion and having to adjust his genealogy of modernity in light of this discovery.57 As indicated previously, oddly there is no recall of Blumenberg, despite the fact that Žižek’s discussion of Chesterton in The Monstrosity of Christ as authorizing a split within God is the focal point of  Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. J. Leavy Jr. and Richard Rand (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990). The original French text dates from 1974. 56  See Cyril O’Regan, ‘Hegel, de Sade, and Gnostic Infinities’, in Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics 1, no. 3 (2013): pp. 383–425. 57  Žižek, Less than Nothing, p. 224. Žižek could hardly be more scathing and accuses Habermas of vampirism. 55

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Blumenberg’s discussion in On Myth of dynamic of god against god typical of German Romanticism and Goethe in particular. Žižek’s genealogical account, as elaborated in his theoretical texts, suffers from a significant level of abstraction. It lacks precisely the specificity and thick description that Marx called for and illustrated in his own accounts of social structures and institutions, and leaves aside entirely any attempt to explain the relation of the economy to culture. Arguably, Žižek’s account even falls behind the level of a bourgeois Western Marxist thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre who insist that thick description of the social world and thinking the relation of the economy to culture through intermediating institutions is a sine qua non from an explanatory point of view.58 The abstractness of Žižek’s account is specified in and by the incredibly schematic presentation of religion in general and Christianity in particular, which presentation is central to his secularization account. Žižek does not go beyond the level of a Hegel apologist. Hegel is taken to be right in thinking that religion is important and has something to say to philosophy, on the proviso, of course, that philosophy is properly understood. Žižek also accepts Hegel’s dialectical model of the evolution of religions. Here Christianity is regarded as the absolute religion because in Christianity can be found the ‘monstrous’ coincidence of the finite and infinite, which if it is not fully realized in other religions is, nonetheless, their basic aim. Žižek follows the Phenomenology and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion scholastically on the overall trajectory of religion. He never once raises the question regarding the validity of Hegel’s claim of the superiority of Christianity over Greek religion or Judaism, or question Hegel’s basic criterion for religion. The farthest Žižek goes in dissenting from Hegel is in his insistence on the superiority of Judaism over Greek religion. Even this, however, is not a genuine deviation from Hegel. It is true that the Phenomenology and the Encyclopaedia supports the hierarchical order of Judaism—Greek religion—Christianity. It is also true that this in general is the order espoused by Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. In the latter case, however, it is not the only order. In the 1827 Lectures, for example, the order is Greek religion—Judaism—Christianity. A deviation from a Hegelian discourse on the religions in which the deviation can be found in Hegel’s own texts is hardly a deviation in the strict sense. Something similar can be said about the relation between Žižek and Hegel when the Slovenian philosopher takes account of religions that emerged subsequent to Christianity and plausibly emerged dialectically from it. Here, obviously, Islam is crucial. Hegel does not discuss Islam either in the Phenomenology, the Encyclopaedia, or Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. He does discuss Islam briefly in Lectures on the Philosophy of History,59 a discussion of which Žižek makes an incredible deal. In his reflections, Žižek, on the one hand, wishes to recognize the world-historical importance of Islam in a way that Hegel did not, or  See Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). A second volume was published in 1985. 59  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), p. 256. 58

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p­ ossibly could not. So he is not inclined automatically to reduce the monotheism of Islam to that of Judaism, which Christianity has overcome in its Trinitarian view of the Godhead. On the other hand, it is also the case that Islam represents a genuine synthesis of monotheism and trinitarianism which leads to a higher, more complicated form of monotheism. Still, despite this concession, no more than Hegel is Žižek prepared to valorize Islam over Christianity due to the fact that it comes later and supposes Christianity. In line with Hegel Christianity is not the absolute religion simply because it is the last in a series, but because it is unsurpassable. It is unsurpassable because it and it alone satisfies the criterion for what is truly valuable, because truly disclosive, in religion—that is, the coincidence of the finite and the infinite. At no point throughout his voluminous work does Žižek question Hegel’s criterion. In The Monstrosity of Christ, wherein we find Žižek’s most sustained reflection on the development of Christianity, the Slovenian philosopher is equally schematic and equally scholastically Hegelian as he is in his presentation of the trajectory of religions. On Žižek’s account, Christianity reaches its apogee as a religion in Protestantism, in which freedom and reason receive the kind of emphasis not possible in early Christianity or Catholicism, or for that matter in Eastern Orthodoxy. Needless to say, the criteria of freedom and reason are hardly those of the Reformation, and Žižek blithely looks beyond the self-interpretation of the Reformers whose aim was to make the Christian subject obedient to God at whose good pleasure the subject is saved. In his account of Protestantism, Žižek, following Hegel, casually also bypasses scripture, even if elsewhere—and following Badiou— he recognizes Paul to be important.60 Žižek also has Hegelian sang-froid regarding the continued existence of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. On his account, the existence of these forms of Christianity is anachronistic: they are not real (wirklich) in the way Protestantism is, that is, truly pertinent in the modern world as the modern world. Not only are Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy earlier forms of Christianity and likely more primitive, but both are  insistent on their reality and combative when it comes to proposals of their dissolution. The only minor deviation from scholastic Hegelianism comes in the form of a concession that these forms of religion can survive as specters. Even if both Althusser and Derrida are in the background when it comes to the notion of specter,61 it is obvious that Marx’s memorable  Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). For Žižek’s reflections on Paul, see ‘Thinking Backward: Predestination and Apocalypse’, in Paul’s New Moment, pp. 185–210; also ‘The Necessity of a Dead Bird’, in Paul and the Philosophers, ed. Ward Blanton and Hent De Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp.  175–85. See also Roland Boer, ‘Paul and Materialist Grace: Slavoj Žižek’s Reformation’, in Paul and the Philosophers, pp. 186–209. In neither of Žižek’s essays does he bring out his dependence on Badiou. Boer’s essay is masterful in bringing out the evidence. 61  Less than Nothing, p.  464. Unlike Marx, for whom these ghosts were of the past, for Žižek, largely because of the possibility of changing the past, specters can be embraced. Specters are alternative versions of the past constitutive of the ‘ontological openness’ of the historical process. Although Žižek’s interpretation of specter is his own, he is to some extent anticipated by Althusser who wished to insist on exigent presence of Hegel while he is supposed to be past, and even Derrida who points out the insistence of the thought of Marx even as this thought has been pointed 60

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words in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte about the past haunting the present are very much in Žižek’s consciousness. It is Žižek’s Hegelian commitment to the inexorability of history which would make discussion between him and the likes of Benedict XVI fruitless. Whereas Benedict would argue that it is a mere historical fact that Protestantism displaced and replaced Catholic Christianity (and clearly not entirely), in line with Hegel Žižek wants to claim that this is an historical necessity. Is and ought are one, validity and fact are one, and no more than Eastern Orthodoxy does Catholicism have the right to argue its surpassing. Žižek’s offers no argument, and his position holds if and only if one accepts the authority of Hegel’s developmental schematics which, as is evident in Hegel’s own texts, is also not argued. For Žižek, as for Hegel, Protestant Christianity is more important as a point of departure than a terminus. Protestant Christianity is that form of Christianity primed to give birth to the secular domain. Indeed, this is what is essential to it, not sola scriptura or sola gratia; not whatever residual dogmatics it holds on to. As for Hegel, on Žižek’s understanding, Protestantism is the transit site to the secular world and also the point of the giving up of substantive theological discourse, which can only remain as metaphors carrying thought across to conceptual discourse proper. Žižek seems to acknowledge both Ricœur’s and Derrida’s description of the process of meta-pherein in Hegel’s thought,62 but does not see it as a problem. One can observe this hollowing out in Žižek’s use of the Christian symbols of the ‘death of God’ and ‘kenosis’. Following Hegel, Žižek reduces them both to tropes, largely genealogical tropes. With regard to the ‘death of God’, Žižek fairly slavishly follows Hegel, who transformed Luther’s Christological exclamation into a genealogical counter in which the belief in a transcendent God gives way to the sense of divine presence in the world and human being. Similarly with regard to the biblical symbol of kenosis, which throughout the Christian tradition has been a mainstay in substantive theological reflection on Christ. Since ‘kenosis’ connoted the emptying of form, its main theological use was to guarantee a unified divine subject while also emphasizing the humanity of Christ. In the case of Hegel’s deployment, however, kenosis is the emptying of divine subject and thus a displacement/replacement of the divine subject by the world as subject and the human as subject. While Luther was anxious to underscore the humanity of Christ, this was not what he intended. Even less does Žižek demur from Hegel’s generalization, which is the point at which kenosis gets troped. What happens regarding the singularity of Christ can and should be understood as the more general movement from the transcendent to the immanent sphere. Kenosis is a dynamic movement in which the world and humanity is elevated and accorded their true value. out to be dead. See Althusser (with Francois Matheron), The Specter of Hegel: Early Writings, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 1997); and Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning & the New International (New York: Routledge, 2006). 62  For Derrida, see ‘White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp.  207–71, esp. pp.  225–26, 268–71. See also Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny et  al. (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1977), section 7.

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8.5  Concluding Remarks Slavoj Žižek is a protean thinker and a prolific writer whose claim to the attention of philosophy is a matter of controversy, and whose claim to the attention of theology is very much an open question. The purpose of this essay is not so much to bring in a definitive verdict in either or both cases. While the intent is undoubtedly critical, as a preliminary, what is demanded is (a) excavation of the complex theoretical nucleus of what Žižek claims to be dialectical materialism and (b) a demonstration of the thoroughgoing Hegelianism of his view of secularity with respect to which Christianity is a crucial agent. In a sense, the essay represents a referendum on Žižek’s commitment to Hegel, which takes very different forms depending on whether Žižek is unfolding his theoretical apparatus or providing an account of modernity. In the former case, that is, in his elaboration of dialectical materialism, there is the issue of whether the so-called Hegelian fundament gets buried under not only Marx, but Lacan, Schelling, and ultimately Badiou. In the latter case, it is a question of whether there is too much Hegel rather than too little, or more specifically whether Žižek adds anything at all to Hegel. In criticizing Žižek’s form of dialectical materialism, I concentrated especially on the way the supplements to Hegel’s thought tend to displace/replace Hegel’s thought and, rather than make Hegelian thought less totalizing, made it more so. In the case of Žižek’s account of secularity, I argued that it repeats Hegel exactly: Žižek fails to emend Hegel in any significant way or attend to the alternative accounts of the generation of the secular. To a significant extent then we are dealing with a double dogmatism, for Hegel’s views on (a) Protestantism as the realization of the essence of Christianity, and (b) Protestantism as agent in the generation of secular, function as dogmatic assertions in Hegel’s texts no less than in those of Žižek. In neither of these two venues is Christian discourse or theological discourse respected as such. In constructing his theoretical apparatus, it is evident that Christian and theological discourse is marginal for the Slovenian philosopher. Certainly, Žižek does not deny the Christian and theological references in the work of the ‘middle’ Schelling, but it is also evident that the real intent of these texts is the excavation of philosophemes through an analysis of the mythemes.63 In this sense, Žižek’s interpretive strategy is not too different from that exhibited by Heidegger.64 Christianity and even theology are much more important in Žižek’s account of the genesis of modernity. Yet this makes the relativization of Christian discourse in general, and of theological constructs, whether Trinitarian or Christological, even more apparent. Perhaps even more than

 Žižek does not despise the mythemes operative in Schelling’s work any more than he despises the theosophy of Boehme, which he makes clear in The Monstrosity of Christ, pp. 37and 41–2. 64  Heidegger favored Schelling’s Freiheit essay above all of his works and lectured on it in the 1930s. A translation of his major seminar is available in English. See Schelling’s Treatise: On Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1985). Throughout, Heidegger reads Schelling as if much of his language is not borrowed from the theosophical speculations of Jacob Boehme. 63

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Hegel, perhaps more of the order of Feuerbach’s transformational criticism,65 Žižek thinks of Christian symbols and constructs as vehicle rather than message. In a postmodern world in which Christianity is scoffed at and ridiculed, it is a relief to find a dialectical materialist scoff at the decriers of religion and seeming to embrace the view that Christianity is not simply a set of symptoms but actually says something about and to the human condition. In the end, however, neither the free-­ standingness of Christianity, nor any of its claims are sustained or even regarded as sustainable. In Žižek’s work they function as way-stations in a Hegelian matrix, variously emended or pure, in which Christianity is a both an historical and symbolic way-station to its obsolescence on the one hand, and its relativization on the other. As is true of Hegel’s discourse, so also with Žižek’s: while not combative with Christian discourse and assumption, it is ultimately unrelenting in its liquefying of Christianity and thus its ultimate liquidation.66

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———. 2005. Interrogating the Real. New York: Continuum. ———. 2010. In Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology, ed. Creston Davis and Catherine Pickstock. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press. ———. 2012. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. ———. 2014. The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan. Malden: Polity. Žižek, Slavoj, and Creston Davis, eds. 2011. Hegel’s Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic. New York: Columbia University Press. Žižek, Slavoj, and Boris Gunjević. 2012. God in Pain. New York: Seven Stories Press. Žižek, Slavoj, and John Milbank. 2009. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic, ed. Creston Davis. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Chapter 9

The ‘Chosisme’ of Étienne Gilson and Marie-Dominique Chenu Francesca Aran Murphy

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the historical study of Saint Thomas Aquinas was in its infancy. That meant that ‘Thomism’ had a great plasticity, and could be used for many purposes, ecclesiological, political, ideological, and even sometimes philosophical. Thomas’s writings were drawn into ideological service in the late nineteenth century, when a group of innovative Italian Jesuits invented an ideology they called ‘Thomism’. They used this ideology as a platform from which to criticise the subjectivism of ‘modern’ philosophy.1 With the condemnation of modernists such as Alfred Loisy in 1908, ‘Thomism’ was put into service against heresy. Loisy was excommunicated for subjectivism, historicism, and fideism. The agenda in early twentieth-century Thomism was to prevent fideism, Christianity without rational credibility. Thomas’s thought was described as having two separate halves, philosophy and theology. From 1906, the Louvain historian Maurice de Wulf began writing an history of ‘scholastic thought’. De Wulf’s ‘scholastic synthesis’ combined all of the minds of the medievals into a collective intellect, which thought in a purely reasonable way. Thomism was to become an ‘authoritarian weapon against modernism’.2 Between the two ‘great wars’ of the twentieth century, scholars like Étienne Gilson and Marie-Dominique Chenu created the scientific study of medieval texts. 1  The most prolonged and detailed description of the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Neo-Thomism is Georges Van Riet, Thomistic Epistemology: Studies Concerning the Problem of Cognition in the Contemporary Thomistic School, 2 vols., trans. Gabriel Franks, Donald G. McCarthy and George E. Hertrich (St Louis: B. Herder Books, 1963–1964; French 1946). 2  Marie-Dominique Chenu, ‘L’interprète de Saint Thomas d’Aquin’, in Étienne Gilson et nous: la philosophie et son histoire, ed., Monique Couratier (Paris: J. Vrin, 1980), p. 44.

F. A. Murphy (*) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_9

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Their correspondence shows their deep immersion in medieval texts. Gilson wrote his first book on Thomas in 1914 and claimed that the phobia for contaminating reason by faith felt by some of his interpreters was not experienced by Thomas himself.3 Chenu would likewise claim that ‘[t]his disciple of Aristotle was first of all a son of Saint Dominic.’4 As a professor in the Dominican studium of Le Saulchoir, Chenu had a second case to argue: what sort of initiation to Dominican life should novices have? Chenu’s little book, Le Saulchoir: Une école de théologie claimed the Summa should be taught in a way which enabled people to share in Thomas’s spirituality. The book was put on the Index in 1942. On hearing the news, Gilson told his friend, Instead of correcting the evils and faults which the Reformers rightly noted, one can espouse their errors (Jansenism) or justify the faults. It is against this sclerotic notion of ‘theology’ that you protest with reason and force.5

Gilson had a down-to-earth sense that the Church’s defence of reason was not very reasonable, and often achieved only an indefensible rationalism. He remarked to his friend that Thomas and Aristotle had said that no one should study metaphysics before the age of 50; Gilson did concede that ‘[i]t could be that young people today are more intelligent than they were in the thirteenth century.’6 Reason was all too often distorted into rationalism by its Neo-Thomist proponents. Gilson and Chenu painted a portrait of Saint Thomas as a Christian Doctor whose thinking is shaped by his theology.7 The story of this portrait begins with their apprenticeship in the art of medieval historiography. Gilson’s family were cloth merchants. His father cut cloth and his mother was a fine seamstress: Gilson grew up watching deft hands making things. He felt he was showing symptoms of the ‘malady of chosisme’ by the time he was 15, in 1901. ‘Chosisme’ is ‘thingism’, a predilection for facts.8 In his last year at the Lycée Henri IV, Gilson attended the Sorbonne lectures of the empirically-minded sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He 3  Étienne Gilson, Introduction au système de S. Thomas D’Aquin (Strasbourg: A Vix, 1919), p. 24. Gilson’s first book on Aquinas was delivered as lectures in the University of Lille, in 1913; half of them had been published in the Revue des cours et conférences, in 1914, before the Great War put an end to such academic ventures. After the war, the whole text was published at Strasbourg, where Gilson was then teaching. 4  Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., Aquinas and His Role in Theology, trans. Paul Philibert O.P. (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2002), p.  45; French, Thomas d’Aquin et la théologie, Maîtres Spirituels (Paris: Seuil, 1959). 5  Gilson to Marie-Dominique Chenu, 27 February 1942, in the Saulchoir archives, Saint-Jacques, Paris. ‘Une Sélection des Lettres entre Marie-Dominique Chenu et Étienne Gilson’, edited and annotated by Francesca Aran Murphy, Revue Thomiste 105 (Janvier-Mars 2005): pp. 25–86; here, pp. 50–51. 6  Étienne Gilson, ‘Note sur un texte de S.  Thomas’, Revue Thomiste 54 (1954): pp.  148–152; reprinted in Autour de saint Thomas, ed. Jean-Francois Courtine (Paris: J. Vrin, 1983), pp. 35–40; here, p. 39. 7  Étienne Gilson, Le thomisme: introduction au système de saint Thomas d’Aquin, 3rd ed., revised and augmented (Paris: J. Vrin, 1927), p. 39. 8  Étienne Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie (Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard, 1960), p. 23.

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spent his national service years devouring Lévy-Bruhl’s Ethics and Moral Science, a book which argues that social facts produce morals. At the Sorbonne, between 1903 and 1905, Henri Bergson taught his students what philosophy is, by practical example. Chenu’s parents were of the Republican breed of instituteurs, and maybe he inherited his pedagogical bent from them. Chenu visited Le Saulchoir for a friend’s ‘clothing’ in 1913, loved the liturgy, and stayed.9 The Dominican studium had been shifted to Belgium when the religious orders were expelled from France, in 1904. Its Regent, Père Ambrose Gardeil called it a ‘medieval research laboratory’, making novices do their own experiments on the texts.10 Ambrose Gardeil was something of a ‘chosiste’. He spelt out his theology in Le Donné révélé et la théologie, which Chenu called ‘the breviary of the Le Saulchoir theological method’.11 When Le Donné révélé was published in 1909, people usually stressed that theology is founded in dogmatic formulae. Gardeil shifted the weight away from propositions, arguing that theology works on revealed data, the givens of revelation. Gilson and Chenu learned a similar lesson from their teachers. Lévy-Bruhl argued that it is not ethical theories but social life which makes for morality, and Gardeil centred theology not on verbal formulations but on things given. Given things are the basis, not reasoning or propositions. Round 1904, Gilson glanced into Sebastien Reinstadler’s Elementa philosophiae scholasticae. Gilson felt the author could have just called himself an Aristotelian, but that would have stricken him with polytheism and no life after death: ‘to avoid this inconvenience’, Reinstadler preferred ‘to teach the body of Aristotle’s philosophy, covered with Christian conclusions.’12 The ‘scholastic philosophy’ struck the Sorbonne student not as philosophy but as a list of conclusions, disconnected from any underlying thought processes. Between 1914 and 1920, Chenu was taught scholastic philosophy in Rome by Cardinal Billot, the mind behind the ‘twenty-four theses’. The ‘theses’ were two dozen Thomistic philosophical truths: the Holy Office made acceptance of the list a requirement for gaining a doctorate in theology. In 1903, the Dominican Edward Hugon published a teaching manual. The Cursus philosophiae thomisticae begins with philosophy of nature, taxies on from there to metaphysics, ethics, and finally takes lift off for God, or ‘theodicy’, in volume six. Hugon taught Thomism like this because he considered it ‘the natural order’, one in which the ‘concrete and sensible’ is known before the ‘abstract and invisible’.13

9  Marie Dominique Chenu, Jacques Duquesne interroge le père Chenu: Un théologien en liberté (Paris: Le Centurion, 1975), p. 27. 10  Ibid., p. 44. 11  Marie Dominique Chenu, Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir (1937; reprint, edited by Giuseppe Alberigo [Paris: éditions du Cerf, 1985]), p. 119. 12  Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie, p. 54. 13  Géry Prouvost, ‘Les relations entre philosophie et théologie chez E. Gilson et les thomistes contemporains’, Revue Thomiste 94, no. 3 (July–September 1994): pp. 413–430; here, p. 418.

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Others, like Joseph Grendt, in his Elementa philosophiae aristotelico-thomisticae, started with logic and made logic the schema for laying Thomas out. Grendt drew his pedagogical practice from the nineteenth-century Thomist, Gaetano Sanseverino. Sanseverino used a set of logical axioms as the building blocks for his ‘Thomist philosophy’. He refines Thomism into a theory, in which Thomas is made to propose that, ‘A is A, from which results the second [principle], A is not not-A.’14 When Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877–1964) launched an attack on Bergson’s philosophy in 1909, his principal piece of artillery was non-­ contradiction.15 Garrigou paraphrased Thomas’s speech into the language of logic. He did not see what was lost in translation. To enter Garrigou’s world is not to make the imaginative step back into the Middle Ages, but to beam up into a perfect, possible world, in which syllogisms run on unhindered by contact with facts. Garrigou is said to have remarked that, ‘facts are for cretins.’16 Chenu records another of his doctoral supervisor’s flights of fancy: ‘After all’, Garrigou mused, ‘the Incarnation is just a fact.’ Chenu remarks, ‘[t]he Incarnation was an obstacle to him, because one cannot metaphysically deduce it beginning from God.’17 Gilson’s 1914 book on Aquinas called forth an objection from a Toulouse Dominican: Gilson wrote about ‘the philosophy’ of Aquinas, as if it were unique to him; whereas in fact, all the scholastics shared the same, Aristotelian philosophy. Gilson attributed this misconception to the Neo-Thomists’s projecting their practice of unwiring philosophy from theology onto the medievals. But if one compared Thomas’s theology to Bonaventure’s, one might find that different theological standpoints had created different philosophies.18 So Gilson next wrote a book on Bonaventure. It describes Bonaventure’s philosophy as an expression of Franciscan spirituality.19 The Neo-Thomists had structured Thomas’s thought in what seemed to them the logical or ‘natural’ order. Lévy-Bruhl hadn’t read Sanseverino or Garrigou-­Lagrange,  Étienne Gilson quotes Sanseverino saying this in ‘Les principes et les causes’, Revue Thomiste 52 (1952): pp. 39–63; revised version published as Chapter II of the posthumous Constantes philosophiques de l’être (Paris: Vrin, 1984), pp. 53–84; see p. 59. 15  For a general statement, see Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, God: His Existence and His Nature. A Thomistic Solution of Certain Agnostic Antinomies, trans. from the fifth French edition by Dom Bede Rose, O.S.B. (French, 1914; English, St Louis, Mo.: B. Herder, 1939), pp. 117–118. Much of God: His Nature and Existence is reproduced verbatim from Garrigou’s Le sens commun: le philosophe de l’être et les formules dogmatiques (Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1909, 1922). For the specific critique of Bergson, see Le sens commun, chapter one, section three: ‘Conséquences du nominalisme bergsonien: Négation de la raison et de la valeur objective du principe de noncontradiction’. The tone of Garrigou’s Thomism is of course unique to his era; one may wonder, however, whether the persistent interest of analytic philosophy of religion, including analytic Thomism, in logic and ‘possible worlds theory’ constitutes any advance or change on Baroque scholasticism. 16  Étienne Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté: La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II: 1914–1926 (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1988), p. 51 17  Chenu, in Jacques Duquesne interroge le père Chenu, p. 38. 18  Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie, pp. 102–103. 19  Étienne Gilson, La philosophie de saint Bonaventure (Paris: J. Vrin, 1924), p. 69. 14

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but he knew the ethics of Descartes, Kant, Leibniz. His Ethics and Moral Science contended that science is the study of facts, what is, and that theoretical ethics can’t be a science because it is the definition of the empty possible world of what ought to be. Deflating Leibniz’ hope of a mathematical science of ethics, Lévy-Bruhl argued that ‘[t]here can be no question of “decreeing” in the name of a theory the rules of ethical practice.’20 ‘Practical ethics’, concrete behaviour patterns, really do exist, and it is this which sociology should study. Gilson was perhaps the only Catholic of his generation who thought it a terrific book.21 Lévy-Bruhl was developing the sociological reductionism of Emile Durkheim. Gilson admired the way Durkheim ‘conceived social facts like things’. He found in Durkheim the ‘spirit of Leviticus’: ‘You don’t eat the eagle, the bearded vulture or the osprey’, not because you can justify this diet rationally, but because Yahweh says so. The precepts and interdictions of Leviticus are social facts. Gilson saw no reason why a sociology should not be inspired by Leviticus.22 Gilson described Lévy-Bruhl, his doctoral supervisor, as having a ‘gift for seeing facts in an … objective light, just as they were. As soon as I had attended his course of lectures in Hume, I realized that, to me, to understand any philosophy would always mean to approach it as I had seen Lucien Lévy-Bruhl approach that of Hume.’23 Lévy-Bruhl thought that study of the social organization of any given society would explain the individual ‘conscience’ of its members.24 The place where Lévy-Bruhl’s influence exerts itself is that Gilson sees the Summa as having a given order, which can’t be remodeled on an ideal schema without altering what Thomas is actually saying. Gilson’s book on Thomas’s philosophy went through six editions between 1914 and 1965, tripling in size, adding new touches, and undergoing a complete recolouring job in 1942. The constant feature is the description of the theological architecture of the two Summae. Gilson sees the plan of the Summae as working in two directions. The first direction is the order of reality which the Summae are set in. A philosophical order is one which looks up to God through the prism of creaturely things. A theological ordering of reality is the picture of reality as God would paint it, which we see in the light of faith. For Gilson, Thomas’s order is theological: the spectacle conveyed by the Summae is achieved by the writer’s considering reality as God does. The second direction is how Thomas goes about demonstrating his conclusions: now he works the other way, through Aristotelian, sense-based arguments. Gilson is distinguishing the order of exposition of the Summae, which he takes to be 20  L. Lévy-Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science, trans. Elizabeth Lee (French: 1903; English, London: Archibald Constable & Co. Ltd., 1905), p. 80. 21  According to Lawrence Shook, Gilson called La morale et la science des moeurs an ‘almost incredible book’: Laurence K.  Shook C.S.B., Étienne Gilson (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1984), p. 11. At its publication, in 1903, the Louvain Thomist Simon Deploige began a campaign against the book, which Maritain was still pushing on with in 1923. 22  Gilson, Le philosophe et la théologie, pp. 31–33. 23  Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941, 1955), p. xiii. 24  Lévy-Bruhl, Ethics and Moral Science, p. 21.

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theological, from their principles of demonstration, which he thinks are ­philosophical. The argument which goes through all six editions is that Thomas scales his bottom-up arguments to fit a top-down order. Gilson offended the sensibilities of ideological neo-Thomists by beginning his book on Thomas with God, rather than beginning with cosmology or logic. And he stuck to it, despite a stern admonition from a Thomist journal that he would do better to present Saint Thomas the other way up. That came from the Dominican Pierre Mandonnet, who thought that, since the book begins with God, Gilson must be deducing the world of the senses from God.25 Mandonnet had moved to Le Saulchoir after the Great War. He developed Gardeil’s methodology, teaching his students to relate Thomas’s work to its historical context, the era of the rise of the cities.26 Two journals were now founded at the Belgian studium—the Bulletin Thomiste and the Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques. It was the Bulletin Thomiste which carried this negative review of Gilson’s Le Thomisme. Mandonnet defended the philosophical exposition of the Summae on the grounds that Thomas conceived it as ‘natural’ for human knowledge to progress from ‘posterior analytics’ to sense knowledge, to ethics and to the metaphysical.27 Chenu sent his first letter to Gilson from Le Saulchoir in 1923. It is an offer to put him in touch with an English translator for Le Thomisme—Edward Bullough, whom Chenu had lately met in Cambridge.28 His second missive hatched in the publication details, and a friendship was born. But, his review of the third, 1927 edition of Le Thomisme shows that Chenu was not won around. It claimed that Gilson’s distinction between theological order and philosophical demonstrations was specious. The Saulchoir Dominicans were not authoritarian anti-modernists, fearsome of the pollution of reason by faith. But they were determined to safeguard ‘nature’. Chenu argued that Thomas composed a ‘pure philosophy’, ‘autonomous’ from faith.29 Chenu was Mandonnet’s disciple in the historical understanding of the Summae: both of them were standing up for Thomas’s humanism. In the early 1930s, Gilson became embroiled in a public debate about whether there is such a thing as Christian philosophy. Gilson defended the principle that faith can influence philosophy. The opponents of Christian philosophy included both secularist philosophers and continental Thomists. The Thomists feared losing the tactical advantage of being able to do apologetics on a purely rational basis. They thought that calling themselves ‘Christian philosophers’ or being seen as proponents of something called ‘Christian philosophy’ would limit them to conversation with other believers, and that this would restrict the scope of their apologetics.  Pierre Mandonnet, O.P., ‘Le Thomisme: Introduction au système de S. Thomas d’Aquin par É. Gilson, 1923’, Le Saulchoir, Bulletin Thomiste I (1924–6): pp. 132–136; see, p. 136. 26  Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté, pp. 127–128. 27  Mandonnet, Le Thomisme, p. 135. 28  Chenu to Étienne Gilson, 5 November, 1923, in the Saulchoir Archives, Saint Jacques, Paris, filed under Correspondence: Étienne Gilson à M.-D. Chenu / Chenu à Gilson. 29  Marie-Dominique Chenu, ‘É. Gilson, Le Thomisme. Introduction au système de S.  Thomas d’Aquin’, Bulletin Thomiste 2 (January 1928), pp. 242–245; p. 244. 25

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Chenu remained, with his Saulchoir confrères, a staunch opponent of Christian ­philosophy, until September 1933.30 Then, at the last ‘Christian philosophy’ debate, Chenu and Yves Congar literally sat down alongside Gilson.31 Gilson may have earned his friend’s alliance with his opening lecture as professor of medieval thought at the Sorbonne—delivered in April 1932. The lecture is called ‘The Middle Ages and the Naturalism of the Ancients’. Gilson began by saluting his Sorbonne teachers, Lévy-Bruhl and Henri Bergson. The sociologist made him a textual scholar who could pick out the individuality of the medievals. But Bergson taught him to look beyond a thinker’s now dead words and formulae to the still-living act of thinking which engendered the texts. Gilson sets up a triptych, a threefold study in contrasting attitudes to ‘nature’. On the left panel, there is Luther, representing the rejection of nature, in favour of grace alone. In the centre, Gilson places the medievals, believers in the healing, rather than the replacement, of nature by grace. The right hand panel depicts Erasmus. Gilson is making Erasmus and Luther mirror one another. Few Dominicans wanted to see themselves as a mirror image of Luther, certainly not Chenu. Gilson creates the Luther-Erasmus mirroring by claiming that the Middle Ages had their own humanism, and contrasting it with Erasmus’s. Erasmian humanism consisted in studying texts as dead, closed, finished: that’s why it tore away the glosses and commentaries, to get back at the ‘original sources’. Conversely, the humanism of the medievals was their assumption that the ancient Greeks and Romans were living partners in a dialogue with themselves. The Medieval humanists’s Aristotle was sufficiently alive and kicking to be taken to the baptismal font. Chenu will quote a page of the lecture at the beginning of his Toward Understanding Saint Thomas: What Albert the Great or Saint Thomas asked of these Ancients was not so much to tell them what they had formerly been in Greece or in Rome, but rather what … they … would have become, if they had lived in Christian territory in the thirteenth century … The historian who meets them in those surroundings is … torn between the admiration of the depth with which the thinkers of the Middle Ages understand them … and … the disquietude that an archaeologist might feel were the bas relief he was studying suddenly to turn into a living and changing thing.32

 So, for instance, in reference to the defence of ‘Christian philosophy’, in Gilson’s The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (1932), Chenu pointed out that this phrase only came into existence in 1535–8, when it was first used by Javelli. See Marie-Dominique Chenu, ‘Note pour l’histoire de la notion de philosophie chrétienne’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1932, vol. 21), pp. 231–5. Chenu would later call The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, ‘Gilson’s most beautiful book’: See Chenu’s ‘L’interprète de Saint Thomas d’Aquin’, p. 45. The Spirit is, I think, the work of Gilson’s to which Chenu refers the most often, and the most affectionately. 31  Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté, p. 153. 32  Marie Dominique Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, trans. A.-M. Landry, O.P. and D. Hughes, O.P. (English: Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1963); French: Introduction à l’étude de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 1950), citing É. Gilson, ‘Le Moyen Age et le naturalisme antique’, leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire de la philosophie au Moyen Age, au Collège de France, in Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, VII (1932), pp. 5–37; here, p. 35. The whole lecture is accessible as an appendix to Gilson’s Héloise et Abélard (Paris: J. Vrin, 1938). 30

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Gilson succeeded in changing Chenu’s mind by holding him down to a test to which he actually subscribed. Gilson’s lecture may have made his friend see that the current Saulchoirist conceptions of history and humanism were inherited from Erasmus, not the medievals. The gauntlet Gilson threw down to Le Saulchoir was to look at what happened to the medievals’s Greek sources once they got inside the minds of Christian theologians. Thomas didn’t read Aristotle in the way that Erasmus or Lévy-Bruhl would do. Once inside Thomas’s mind, Aristotle or ‘nature’ were not static, fossilised essences but a living spirit, capable of creative evolution. An idea is not a dead thing like a stone which can be held indifferently by a pre-­Christian pagan, or a medieval Catholic, or a twentieth-century medievalist! Ideas are living, and the ‘idea’ of nature goes through some sea changes inside the mind of a Christian theologian. Chenu quoted Gilson’s paper repeatedly. He refers to it in his article of 1935, ‘Position de la théologie’: ‘“Christian humanism” is the lucid acceptance of [the] … coherence of faith and reason, on the very ground of faith … This exaltation of reason in theological work is the supreme consecration of nature in grace. This is why Luther simultaneously abominated theology and humanism. This is what we have to hold on to, because their fate is bound together.’33 Chenu’s article argues that Christian faith positions theological reason so that it faces historical facts. Chenu describes the principles of faith, the light in which it works, as historical: ‘the theologian works on an history. His “given” is not in the nature of things, it is events … [T]he real world is here, and not [in] the philosophical abstraction.’34 Chenu contrasts the timeless axioms on which the Roman Thomists built their anti-modernist objectivism with what he takes to be the authentic locus of realism, the historical facts which faith makes us attend to. Gilson told Chenu to look for the word ‘fact’ in Christianisme et philosophie, since his use of it came from Chenu’s ‘Position’ paper.35 Gilson’s most aggressive book, Réalisme thomiste (1939), which takes on every variety of Thomism, from the Roman-logical through the transcendental to the ‘critical-realist’, develops Chenu’s point, that one can’t get ‘realism’ out of axioms, only from facts. Chenu argued that Saint Thomas … took the contingent history of Christ as the determining theme of the Incarnation … and resisted the temptation to situate the God-man at the summit of an ideally achieved world order … ‘The incarnation, after all, is only a fact’, the witty remark of a theologian wholly dedicated to the treatise De Deo. A witty remark … which candidly unveils the powerlessness of theology before a fact, which cannot be grasped by science.36

 Marie-Dominique Chenu, ‘Position de la théologie’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques (1935); reprinted in Chenu, La parole de Dieu: La foi dans l’intelligence (Paris: Cerf, 1964), pp. 115–137; here, pp. 134–135, citing Gilson, ‘Le Moyen Age et le naturalisme antique’. 34  Chenu, ‘Position de la théologie’, p. 128. 35  Gilson to Marie-Dominique Chenu, 29 April 1936, in the Saulchoir archives, Saint Jacques, Paris. This is the same letter in which he asks for an ‘imprimatur’. 36  Chenu, ‘Position de la théologie’, p. 129. 33

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In 1932, Chenu was made Regent of Le Saulchoir. It was as Regent, in 1937, that he gave the sermon for the Feast of Saint Thomas. This became Le Saulchoir: Une école de théologie, the text in which Chenu describes formation at Le Saulchoir. The first chapter is on the history of Dominican teaching in France, including, of course, Saint Thomas, Chenu’s erstwhile predecessor as regent of the French studium. The second chapter, ‘Spirit and Methods’, depicts the purpose of students’ ‘exegesis’ of the Summa at Le Saulchoir as achieving direct contact with the working mind of Saint Thomas … enter[ing] into the movement of his thought, of his ‘disputed questions’, following right down to his verbal progress the creative effort of his thought, and thus to attain beyond his reasonings and conclusions, the postulates which secretly command them, unveiling his ‘intellectual stimulus’.37

The message is in the lay-out, and the third chapter, on theology, comes before the chapter on philosophy. Chenu speaks of the revealed basis of theology as having two faces. One is the timeless Word of God: The knowledge of God in me … put[s] me in dialogue and direct commerce with Him, the mysterious presence to which the “new man” has access … faith is the operation which renders us “contemporaries” of Christ.38

But the ‘Son of God is an historical personage’, and the other side of revelation is the historical, relative, propositions in which the history is told. The two faces of revelation are like the two natures of Christ, divine and human.39 Next to revelation, or Christ, with his two aspects, Chenu puts the theologian, making Thomas and his heirs alteri Christi. The ‘theologian is he who dares to speak humanly the Word of God.’40 The theologian also has ‘two natures’: on the human side, which is time-­ bound, his ‘system’, and, on the divine side, the side in communion with God, his spirituality. Chenu is thinking of a theologian’s spirituality as the creative stimulus, which engenders a system. The passage which exercised a generation of Dominican provincials was this: That which is definitive in theological systems is only their expression of spiritualities … The greatness and the truth of Bonaventurian … is entirely in the spiritual experience of saint Francis which becomes the soul of his sons; the grandeur and the truth of Molinism are in the spiritual experience of Saint Ignatius’s Exercises … A theology worthy of the name is a spirituality which finds the rational instruments adequate to its religious experience. It is not by an accident of history that Saint Thomas has entered the order of saint Dominic … The institution and the doctrine are closely allied with one another … in the contemplation which … guarantees the fervour, the method … and the freedom of their spirit … There could be no worse disgrace for Thomism, whose whole native effort is to justify the status of human intelligence within Christianity, than to be treated as an “orthodoxy”.41  Chenu, Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir, p. 124.  Chenu, ibid., p. 136. 39  This theme in Chenu’s theology is brought to the fore by Christophe Potworowski, in Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). 40  Chenu, Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir, p. 144. 41  Ibid., pp. 148–9. 37 38

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The discussion of philosophy begins before the chapter given to it. Chenu claims that a theologian can truly ‘call himself an Aristotelian’, if he takes those steps in psychology or metaphysics, ‘but he is so only under the auspices of a spiritual assumption outside the format of Aristotelianism’:42 when the theologian uses a philosophy, nature is assumed into grace. The philosophy chapter discusses how ‘modern scholasticism’ adopted a false ‘ideal of intelligibility’, ‘under the patronage of Leibniz’. The chapter is a series of undisguised sideswipes at ‘the philosophy of the clerical functionaries of Joseph II’43: Gilson will go and do likewise in Réalisme thomiste. Chenu’s pamphlet was not well received in Rome. Within a year, Chenu had been summoned to Rome to sign Ten Propositions, one of which states that Thomas’s doctrine is orthodox.44 Gilson wrote to Père Gillet on his behalf, but achieved only a stay of execution. Writing to his friend a few days after the pamphlet was put on the Index, in February 1942, Gilson observed, ‘we are once again suffering an attack of anti-Protestantism.’45 Chenu lost his post as Regent at Le Saulchoir, and was forbidden to teach for over a decade. He had de-absolutized Thomas’s system, as a system, and allowed for a plurality of spiritualities. To Garrigou, Gillet, and Browne, this was out and out fideism.46 In 1936, Gilson asked Chenu for his personal ‘imprimatur’ on his latest book, Christianisme et philosophie. Gilson wondered if he himself had succumbed to fideism in this book. Thomas states that it is impossible to hold a proposition by faith and by reason simultaneously. This exercised Gilson’s imagination. The problem was that he wanted to say that Thomas’s philosophical idea of God was conditioned and qualified by his revealed, faith-given sense of what God is like. Gilson remembered what Lévy-Bruhl had to say about Leibniz’ ‘natural ethics’, and about Voltaire’s ‘natural religion’, with which it has close affinities.47 According to Lévy-­Bruhl, ‘natural religion’ ‘was only the European monotheism of the preceding centuries, reduced to the shadowy and abstract form of a rational-

 Ibid., p. 148.  Ibid., pp. 153 and 157. 44  The ten propositions which Chenu was required to sign in 1938 are set out in R. Guelluy, ‘Les Antécédents de l’Encyclique Humani Generis dans les sanctions romaines de 1942: Chenu, Charlier, Draguet’, Revue D’histoire Ecclesiastique, vol. 81 (1986): pp. 421–497; see pp. 461– 462. There is also a facsimile in Chenu’s Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir, p. 35. This 1985 reprint of Une école contains a number of helpful historical essays about the pamphlet, by Giuseppe Alberigo, Étienne Gouilloux, Jean Ladrière and Jean-Pierre Joshua. 45  Gilson to Marie-Dominique Chenu, 27 February 1942, in ‘Une Sélection des Lettres’, pp. 50–51. On receiving the news from Chenu, Gilson wrote to him twice in two days; this is the second one, written after he had re-read Une école. Both Gilson and Maritain made sustained efforts to get the ban on Chenu’s teaching lifted; these were unsuccessful. 46  Yves Congar records his 1954 discussion of the passage with Browne in Journal d’un théologien: 1946–1956 (Paris: Cerf, 2000), pp. 330–331. 47  L. Lévy-Bruhl Ethics and Moral Science, p. 161. 42 43

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ist deism.’48 As Gilson puts it in 1940, in God and Philosophy, ‘As an object of religious worship … the God of the Deists was but the wraith of the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’49 Gilson believed that in God and Philosophy he had finally figured out how to interpret Aquinas. He told Chenu, ‘No doubt they will say I interpret Saint Thomas in the light of Kierkegaard.’50 He argues that the God of the philosophers is a static, conceptual essence. Essences are definable—essences in reality correspond to concepts in our minds. Existence is more concretely given to us than any conceptual essence. But existence is indefinable: it is obvious that we exist, but we can’t put a name to the face. At the Exodus, God tells Moses his name—I am that I am. Because Thomas’s God is the concretely-named Biblical God, Thomas recognised that God is existence. It took revelation for Thomas to touch on this bedrock—God is pure existing. God and Philosophy describes the history of philosophy as oscillating between the conceptualists, defining God as an essence, and the mystics, who preach an unknowable God. Gilson told Chenu in 1942, Saint Thomas appears to me as a perfect equilibrium, but a concealed mystery is part of that equilibrium, and, as we conceptualize whatever we can, the danger will always be … to break that equilibrium in conceptualizing his mystery, that is to say, in evacuating it.

Something in Aquinas must escape the pedagogue who wants to press him into wordy apologetics. Gilson’s letter concludes, ‘This is why one cannot teach Saint Thomas.’51 A few weeks before his expulsion from Le Saulchoir, Chenu wrote to thank Gilson for his copy of the new edition of Le Thomisme. He remarks that the ‘axis has been recreated: “Haec sublimis veritas”!’52 The ‘sublime truth’ is God’s revealed name, ‘I am’. Gilson observes that, ‘because we have forgotten’ that Thomas ‘always speaks concretely about the concrete … we have … changed into a logic of pure essences a doctrine which its author had conceived as an explanation of facts.’53 Speaking ‘concretely about the concrete’ means that the God of Moses casts his enchantment on the God of the philosophers; the conceptual bones are given life by

 Ibid., p. 162.  Gilson, God and Philosophy, p. 107. I owe my noticing this quotation to Paul Molnar’s reference to it, in Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology (London/New York: T&T Clark / Continuum, 2002). 50  Gilson to Marie-Dominique Chenu, 5 February 1942, in the Saulchoir archives, Saint Jacques, Paris. 51  Ibid. 52  Chenu to Étienne Gilson, 4 February, 1942, in the Saulchoir archives, Saint Jacques, Paris. 53  Gilson is remarking adversely on Cajetan’s adage, semper formalissime loquitur Divus Thomas; see Le Thomisme: Introduction à la philosophie de saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1942, 1944, fifth edition); English, The Christian Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Lawrence K Shook (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961), p. 11. Chenu comments in the same vein on Cajetan’s formula, in Towards Understanding Saint Thomas, pp. 117–121: ‘With his formaliter, Cajetan gave us only one side of Saint Thomas’ (p. 121). 48 49

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divine existence. It was about this time that Gilson began to speak of a ‘metaphysics of the Exodus’, a philosophy inspired by revelation.54 It required some ecclesiastical negotiations, including a letter from Gilson to the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, for Chenu to publish Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, in 1950. Gilson objected to the monochrome essentialism of Neo-­ Thomism. What Chenu rejected in Thomist seminary pedagogy was that it made Thomas speak in a syllogistic monotone. He wanted to point students to the diversity of Thomas’s discourse. His book introduces readers to Thomas by explaining the ‘literary forms’ which he used. The reason why the way Thomas spoke can’t be separated out from his ideas is that, for the scholastics ‘[t]hinking was a “craft,” the governing principles of which were fixed down to the last detail.’55 Chenu presents Thomas as a theologian craftsman, a worker-priest, as it were. Thomas made different kinds of books, so Chenu’s portrait is a series of scenes, showing Thomas at work constructing the Aristotle and Dionysius commentaries, the Bible commentaries, the commentaries on Lombard and Boethius, disputed questions—theology for theologians—the Summa Contra Gentiles, and finally the Summa theologiae, which is theology for students. Chenu shows the material and the tools which the craftsman used: the lectio, or the reading, the quaestio and the dialectic—theology at work, ‘build[ing] itself up out of the expression of mysteries by way of problems.’56 Once one has brought oneself to recognize the diversity in the Summa, how is one to pull it all together? The figures in Byzantine religious pictures, and also in Renaissance paintings are organized within a circle. Chenu argues that the Summa theologiae is modeled on a circle: in the first part, we see God, and reality emanating from him; the second part journeys through humanity’s return toward God; the Christology of the third part closes the circle by showing the means by which humanity is deified. Painters frame their figures in a circle so that they won’t be standing about awkwardly all over the canvas. According to Chenu, Thomas puts the facts he is presenting in a circle to show their intelligibility: the rounded structure of theology reflects the divine science, the way God knows himself. He says, ‘The oneness of theology is really the oneness of the mystery at its heart.’57 Some critics think that when Chenu gave the Summa a circular structure, he showed himself a true disciple of Garrigou after all—a rationalist, who funked the irregular contingencies of history and slid the Incarnation off into a blind corner of

 Gilson’s 1931–1932 Gifford lectures, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, which is not a history book but an historical defence of the principle that Christian philosophy can and does exist, begin to articulate this theme. But I think the first use of the phrase ‘metaphysics of the Exodus’ is in Gilson’s L’être et l’essence (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948), p. 291. 55  Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, p. 60. 56  Ibid., p. 99. 57  Ibid., p. 309. 54

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Thomas’s theology.58 Chenu wavered to none in his humanism, but he would find that criticism anthropocentric. Chenu believed that ‘the object of theology is not properly and primarily the economy, by which man is the recipient of faith and grace through Christ, but rather it is God in his very reality.’59 God is the object of Thomas’s theology, because he does not only use demonstration —arguing to God, but also resolution—arguing from God’s being. The cosmos gets its unity from the diverse ways its elements imitate God.60 Behind Thomas’s toughest demonstrations, there is a religious feeling for the cosmos as being ‘like the divine artist’. Chenu wants to show that the Summa is diverse but unified, by analogy, as is the cosmos in relation to God; that the figures in the three parts of the Summa are doing different but analogous things. Thomas’s use of metaphysical concepts is analogous to his use of revealed ones: ‘the analogia entis does its work at the heart of an analogia fidei.’61 So one can’t pull out any one topic or kind of argument or section, and say it’s the only part Thomas cared for; all the parts are organically inter-related. The tool which the scholastic craftsman always has to hand is dialectic. Chenu shows that this brush comes in many sizes. Thomas’s demonstrations have varied ‘tonalities’.62 He sometimes proves conclusions from effects, and sometimes takes the proof back to the cause of the effects: ‘The dialectics of beatitude … unfolds from starting points and with overtones differing greatly from the … steps from which the five proofs of God’s existence take their departure.’63 Different again are the ‘suitabilities’ Thomas uses to etch in his ‘modest and dialectical solution[s]’ to the problems raised by the mystery of the Trinity and Incarnation. Chenu wanted to see a single pattern running through the syllogisms, demonstrations from cause, and loose Trinitarian suitabilities. Thomas, the master-craftsman, is not making a set of disparate pictures when he paints the scenes with his different brush strokes. Thomas’s sequence of sacred mysteries are analogous to each other. Chenu speaks of Thomas travelling toward God not ‘on the routes of the philosophy of nature’ but through a path marked by the ‘logic of the analogous’. This journey has a ‘religious atmosphere’64: it is governed by the sense of ‘that sublime truth’ of the dependence of created being on God’s existence. The structure of the Summa is presented as showing that everything comes around to God.

 Potworowski, Contemplation and Incarnation, pp. 207–213 and 229, citing numerous critiques of Chenu on this point. In my recollection, Hans Urs von Balthasar also levels the same accusation. 59  Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, p. 307. 60  Ibid., pp. 188–191; Chenu, Aquinas’ Role in Theology, pp. 85–89. 61  Chenu, Toward Understanding Saint Thomas, p. 165. 62  Ibid., p. 178. 63  Ibid., p. 179. 64  Ibid, p. 165. 58

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Bibliography Chenu, Marie Dominique. 1975. Jacques Duquesne interroge le père Chenu: Un théologien en liberté. Paris: Le Centurion. ———. 1963. Toward Understanding Saint Thomas. Trans. A.-M.  Landry OP and D.  Hughes OP.  Chicago: Henry Regnery Co (French: Introduction à l’étude de Saint Thomas d’Aquin, 1950). ———. 1980. L’interprète de Saint Thomas d’Aquin. In Étienne Gilson et nous: la philosophie et son histoire, ed. Monique Couratier. Paris: J. Vrin. ———. 1985. Une école de théologie: le Saulchoir (1st ed. 1937), ed. Giuseppe Alberigo. Paris: Éditions du Cerf. ———. 2002. Aquinas and His Role in Theology. Trans. Paul Philibert, OP. Collegeville: Liturgical Press (French: Thomas d’Aquin et la théologie, Paris: Seuil, Maîtres Spirituels, 1959). Congar, Yves. 2000. Journal d’un théologien: 1946–1956. Paris: Cerf. Fouilloux, Étienne. 1988. Une Église en quête de liberté: La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II: 1914–1926. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer. Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald. 1939. God: His Existence and His Nature. A Thomistic Solution of Certain Agnostic Antinomies. Translated from the fifth French edition by Dom Bede Rose, O.S.B. St Louis, Mo.: B. Herder (French: Dieu, son existence et sa nature. Solution thomiste des antinomies agnostiques, 1st ed. 1914). ———. 1909, 1922. Le sens commun: le philosophe de l’être et les formules dogmatiques. Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale. Gilson, Étienne. 1919. Introduction au système de S. Thomas D’Aquin. Strasbourg: A Vix. ———. 1924. La philosophie de Saint Bonaventure. Paris: J. Vrin. ———. 1927. Le thomisme: introduction au système de saint Thomas d’Aquin. 3rd ed., revised and augmented. Paris: J. Vrin. ———. 1932. ‘Le Moyen Age et le naturalisme antique’, leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire de la philosophie au Moyen Age, au Collège de France. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge VII: pp. 5–37. ———. 1960. Le philosophe et la théologie. Paris: Librarie Arthème Fayard. ———. 1961. The Christian Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas. Trans. Lawrence K Shook. London: Victor Gollancz (French: Le Thomisme: Introduction à la philosophie de saint Thomas d’Aquin. Paris: Vrin, 1942, fifth edition 1944). ———. 1954. Note sur un texte de S. Thomas. Revue Thomiste 54: 148–152. Reprinted in Autour de saint Thomas, ed. Jean-Francois Courtine, pp. 35–40. Paris: J. Vrin, 1983. ———. 1952. Les principes et les causes. Revue Thomiste 52: 39–63. Revised version published as Chapter II of Gilson’s posthumous Constantes philosophiques de l’être, pp. 53–84. Paris: Vrin, 1984. Guelluy, Robert. 1986. Les Antecedants de l’Encylique Humani Generis dans les sanctions romaines de 1942: Chenu, Charlier, Draguet. Revue D’histoire Ecclesiastique 81: 421–497. Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. 1905. Ethics and Moral Science. Trans. Elizabeth Lee. London: Archibald Constable & Co Ltd (French: 1903). Molnar, Paul. 2002. Divine Freedom and the Doctrine of the Immanent Trinity: In Dialogue with Karl Barth and Contemporary Theology. London/New York: T&T Clark/Continuum. Murphy, Francesca Aran, ed. 2005. Une Sélection des Lettres entre Marie-Dominique Chenu et Étienne Gilson’. Revue Thomiste 105 (Janvier-Mars 2005): 25–86. Potworski, Christophe. 2001. Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of Marie-Dominique Chenu. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

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Prouvost, Géry. 1994. Les relations entre philosophie et théologie chez É. Gilson et les thomistes contemporains. Revue Thomiste 94 (3): 413–430. Shook, Laurence K. 1984. C.S.B., Étienne Gilson. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto. Van Riet, Georges. 1963–1964. Thomistic Epistemology: Studies Concerning the Problem of Cognition in the Contemporary Thomistic School, 2 vols. Trans. Gabriel Franks, Donald G. McCarthy and George E Hertrich. St Louis: B. Herder Books (French 1946).

Chapter 10

Christian Metaphysics: Between East and West John Betz

γένοι᾽ οἷος ἐσσὶ μαθών (‘Learn and become who you are’. Pindar, Second Pythian Ode, verse 72, in The Odes of Pindar, trans. Diane Arnson Svarlien (Yale University Press, 1991). Accessed via Perseus Project 1.0.)

10.1  Introduction Roughly 75 years ago, in an effort to distill the basic elements of the Christian faith, C. S. Lewis delivered a series of radio talks for the BBC, which became what we now know as Mere Christianity. What I mean here is something similar. I mean something like the ‘mere metaphysics’, the common metaphysics, which is to say, the basic metaphysics of the Christian faith. Admittedly, for many, metaphysics can no longer be taken for granted—not, at least, after Heidegger and, more recently, Jean-Luc Marion, to name only some of the more prominent examples of anti-­ metaphysical philosophies in the tradition of phenomenology. For that matter, there are clearly many kinds of metaphysics that are incongruent with the Christian faith. My purpose here, however, is not to defend metaphysics per se. Rather, I wish to propose only one particular kind, namely, an analogical metaphysics: firstly, because I take this kind of metaphysics to be the only metaphysics implied by the Christian faith and suited to the task of Christian theology; and, secondly, because I

This material has also appeared in another form in a 2019 Modern Theology article entitled, ‘Mere Metaphysics: an Ecumenical Proposal’. J. Betz (*) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_10

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take it to be shared, when all is said and done, by the Christian East and the Christian West.1 This is not to deny significant confessional differences in other matters. Nevertheless, it is hoped that this essay can contribute in some small way to ecumenical dialogue, and so to the unity-in-difference of the churches, by showing that their metaphysical visions are fundamentally similar and that their material metaphysical differences are ultimately complementary within a single, universal Christian metaphysics of creation and deification. Needless to say, this is no modest proposal, which is why this is an essay, an attempt, and nothing more. It is also a proposal that stands to be rejected a limine by at least two groups: on the one hand, by Christians and non-Christians alike for whom the age of metaphysics is over; on the other hand, by Christians of the East and West, respectively, who define themselves largely by opposition (e.g., Catholics are not Orthodox, and Orthodox are not Catholics, and so forth), and who will invariably judge it to be too ecumenical. And yet, in response to the first group, it is a proposal that for the sake of apologetics, ecumenism, and the very intellectus fidei must be made—not because faith requires metaphysics for its justification, but for the sake of understanding what faith itself, once given, already implies (in the way that a person working on a puzzle labors to see the logos that is already in the pieces). Indeed, in this sense, far from being alien to the faith, Christian metaphysics is simply the natural explication of it.2 As Rowan Williams has put it, ‘metaphysics is not extrinsic to the task. It is not an extra hurriedly brought in to provide justifications for commitments; it might better be called the underlying intelligible structure of the commitments themselves, what constitutes them as more than arbitrarily willed options.’3 Accordingly, I would argue with Williams, one should not eschew metaphysics under the sway of an ‘anti-metaphysical rhetoric of sacrificial faith that is ultimately sentimental’, but ‘labour at its substance’ in order to explicate from the standpoint of faith the logos of faith itself.4 And again, I suggest, the  By East and West I mean here, chiefly, the ancient churches of Rome and the Orthodox East, though it is my contention that the metaphysics here proposed, inasmuch as it is commended by Scripture, is also the implicit metaphysics of the Protestant tradition. Indeed, it is precisely Anglicans, such as Rowan Williams and John Milbank, who are at the forefront of the ecumenical conversation between the East and the West. For an important volume in this direction, with contributions from Williams and Milbank, see Adrian Pabst and Christoph Schneider, eds., Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World through the Word (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 2  I follow John Milbank in this regard. See, for example, ‘Between Purgation and Illumination’, in Kenneth Surin, ed., Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.  189; Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy, p. 18. 3  My emphasis. See Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, ed. Mike Higton (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007), p. 56. 4  Wrestling with Angels, p. 73. To some, admittedly, such a task may still sound too Hegelian. For in the very task of explicating the faith in philosophical terms is one not perhaps surreptitiously or at least unconsciously reconfiguring it in philosophical terms? Is one not turning wine back into water? In other words, when faith and reason meet, which is being turned into which? Certainly, in view of Hegel one must be on guard lest what thought brings to faith serves not its glorification but, however inadvertently, its corruption. But there is also the danger to which our agnostic age seems 1

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result will not be any old metaphysics, but precisely an analogical metaphysics, because it is this metaphysics, as opposed to other possible contenders—a metaphysics predicated on a qualified relation rather than on univocity or equivocity— that I take the Christian faith to imply. But what, then, of the concerns of the second group? Can one say that all Christians share the same understanding of the God-world relation? Admittedly, here things get trickier, especially between Catholics and Protestants concerning the effects of original sin on the secondary causality of creatures.5 But however important these differences may be, which can arguably be reduced, following Otto Hermann Pesch’s landmark ecumenical comparison of Thomas and Luther,6 to differences between essential and existential, or sapiential and prophetic, standpoints, it would be absurd to say that the Christian East and the Christian West—which believe in the same God, worship the same Lord, share the same baptism, and have received of the same Spirit (1 Corinthians 12)—had toto caelo different visions of reality. And the similarities are even more striking, I would suggest, if we compare the analogical metaphysics of the West and the sophiological metaphysics of the East—these being, I would argue, the most distinctive contributions to Christian metaphysics, respectively, of the East and the West. What makes the method of the present proposal different from Lewis’s method in Mere Christianity, however, is that here differences also matter. Indeed, it is precisely the differences between the East and the West that show the final metaphysics to be a genuinely analogical especially prone, namely, out of false humility failing to think what revelation shows us, as though revelation were either not given to be thought, nor worthy of it—as though the Logos did not call reason, too, to himself. Could it really be that the Logos did not invite his disciples to participate— with all their heart, soul, strength, and mind—in himself in whom ‘are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge’ (Colossians 2:2)? Or are we to say that even such knowledge as has been given to us is forbidden to us? Surely not, if, as Paul says, ‘we have the mind of Christ’ (1 Corinthians 2:16) and are to be ‘enriched in him … with all knowledge’ (1 Corinthians 1:5). 5  For example, does original sin abolish the analogy between primary and secondary causality, such that, with regard to salvation, creatures cannot even freely respond to the offer of grace in Christ? Does it mean that the world has no relation to God except through Christ? If so, then it is hard indeed to speak any longer of a common metaphysics. But there is also a prophetic point to such questions, which rings through in Barth’s legitimate concerns about the analogia entis. For if all confessions affirm that the world is created through Christ and saved only through Christ, who is the beginning and the end, the Alpha and Omega, of creation, what point is there, Barth provocatively asks, in speaking of a metaphysical relation on purely philosophical grounds? And so the question really comes down to the following: (1) whether, granted a fallen state, one can still speak of a vitiated analogia entis, i.e., whether there remains in humanity an imago Dei, however deeply entombed by sin, which Christ came to redeem and call forth like Lazarus—in short, whether the analogia entis retains a provisional validity even in a state of extreme alienation introduced by sin; or whether the ontological bonds were totally broken, so much so that the creature in an alienated state is no longer a creature, and the prodigal is no longer, in any sense, a prodigal son; and (2) whether the metaphysical order, constituted by the relation between primary and secondary causality, is, however damaged by original sin, and absent any immaculate conception, still operative enough to allow for a creature to respond freely to Christ under the promptings of the grace of Christ. 6  See Otto Hermann Pesch, Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas von Aquin (Mainz: Matthias Grünewald Verlag, 1967). The ecumenical implications of this great study have perhaps not yet reached their full potential.

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metaphysics in which mutually enriching differences are preserved. And so the present task is to see what this final metaphysics, as the formal basis of a ‘mere metaphysics’, might look like. But here, too, we immediately encounter difficulties. For, as is well known, sophiology is as contested in the East (by Lossky and Florovsky et al.) as the analogia entis is contested in the West (by Barth et al.).7 Indeed, many Orthodox, following Florovsky, consider Solovyov, Florensky, and Bulgakov, arguably the three greatest representatives of the Russian metaphysical tradition, no better or even worse than Augustine and Thomas, whom in the East it is almost de rigueur to impugn. And, to make matters worse, there are many in the East who, following John Romanides, consider the analogia entis (or whatever they understand by it) as opprobrious as sophiology. All of which would seem to doom any prospect of an ecumenical metaphysics from the start. But this would be tragic if it can be shown that the Christian East and the Christian West essentially share the same metaphysics on the basis of the same revelation in Christ, but misunderstanding, absurd caricatures, and mutual recriminations have kept either side from seeing it. And so the task of clearing away obstacles remains. And it remains, above all, I would argue, because the Church cannot do without metaphysics—not simply because of its apologetic importance, which will always be of secondary importance to the preaching of the Cross, but because the Church itself does not live by orthodoxy and orthopraxy, correct belief and correct practice, alone, but also by an imaginative vision of cosmic reality that is in some ways a beautiful bond connecting the former to the latter, propositions (concerning truth) to actions (concerning the good). To the end, therefore, of this mere metaphysics let us first consider what analogical and sophiological metaphysics, respectively, have to offer, specifically in terms of a metaphysical grammar of creation and deification. Then we may be able to see how these metaphysical traditions could perhaps complement one another and even help to correct one another: how sophiology can help to fill out the fairly bare and abstract doctrine of the analogia entis, and how the austere sobriety of the analogia entis can, in turn, temper sophiology with regard to its doctrine of creation.

10.2  Analogical Metaphysics Let us begin, then, with the analogia entis, which I take to be the most important contribution to Christian metaphysics in the West, and indeed a synthesis of the particular metaphysical genius of the West. Immediately, though, we run into various objections to it, for instance, that it is about construing some sort of likeness between God and creatures in rational terms prior to revelation and apart from Christ—the effect of which is that it ostensibly denies God’s absolute otherness, 7  For a masterful overview of the Russian context and, more particularly, of Florovsky’s critique of Bulgakov, see Paul Gavrilyuk, Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 114–131.

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makes a metaphysical theory the presupposition of the incarnation, and bridges the incommensurable difference between God and a sinful creation in some other way than through faith in Christ. In other words, according to the standard narrative, which stems from Barth,8 allowing for more or less subtle interpretations on the part of his disciples,9 the analogia entis is a form of conceptual Prometheanism and in the name of revelation must therefore be rejected.

 While Barth’s famous rejection of the analogia entis is found in the preface to the Church Dogmatics, where he declares the analogia entis to be the real sticking point between the confessions, the clearest account of his reason for rejecting it can be found in the following passage from Church Dogmatics II/2, p.  530. ‘This presupposition of the Roman Catholic construction is in every respect unacceptable. Strong opposition must be made to the idea that the metaphysics of being, the starting-point of this line of thought, is the place from which we can do the work of Christian theology, from which we can see and describe grace and nature, revelation and reason, God and man, both as they are in themselves and in their mutual relationship. The harmony in which they are coordinated within this system is surreptitious. For what has that metaphysics of being to do with the God who is the basis and Lord of the Church? If this God is He who in Jesus Christ became man, revealing Himself and reconciling the world with Himself, it follows that the relationship between Him and man consists in the event in which God accepted man out of pure, free compassion, in which He drew him to Himself out of pure kindness, but first and last in the eternal decree of the covenant of grace, in God’s eternal predestination. It is not with the theory of the relationship between creaturely and creative being, but with the theory of this divine praxis, with the consideration and conception of this divine act, of its eternal decree and its temporal execution, that theology … must deal. But since it has to deal with this theory, preoccupation with the relationship between creaturely and creative being, the doctrine of the “analogy” subsisting between the two, has necessarily to be condemned as a perilous distraction.’ For all citations to the Church Dogmatics, see the T&T Clark edition (Edinburgh: 1957–1975). 9  For a standard Barthian account, see George Hunsinger, Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2015). Given the unfortunate spectacle of the rabies theologorum throughout history, one cannot help but sympathize with Hunsinger’s suggestion about reading Barth (and in the past I myself could have been more charitable), but one would hope that such charity would also be extended to Barth’s opponents, such as Przywara, who are not infrequently dismissed by Barth and his disciples without a proper hearing. Hunsinger’s remarkably brief appendix, entitled ‘Analogia Entis in Balthasar and Barth’, is a case in point. This is not to say that these readings of Barth are not an otherwise wonderful and reliable guide, but his reading of the analogia entis (like Barth’s own) is unfortunately a grotesque caricature, which perpetuates the myth that for Balthasar (and, presumably, for Przywara as well), God is a kind of ‘being’ related to the creature by a ‘common scale’. This is nonsense. Firstly, for Catholic theology, God is not ‘a being’, or even the highest being, but Being Itself (Ipsum Esse subsistens), compared to whom, as Thomas says in De potentia q. 1., a. 1, the being of creatures, being a gift, is esse completum et simplex sed non subsistens. For this reason alone, there is no common scale. On the contrary, the maior dissimilitudo of Lateran IV (for both Przywara and Balthasar) rests upon a radical and ultimate incommensurability between God—who is a se—and creaturely being, which is utterly relative. In no sense, therefore, does Catholic theology fail to honor God’s transcendence or aseity. This is a canard that simulates ecumenical differences where, in fact, there are none, and obscures the truth of the Catholic faith. Furthermore, the notion that Barth’s actualism is somehow an alternative to Balthasar’s (and Przywara’s) metaphysics belies the fact that the term actualism is itself a quintessentially metaphysical, Aristotelian term. In this respect Barth’s theology is the mirror image of Heidegger’s philosophy: Heidegger borrows from theology and pretends to be doing pure philosophy; Barth borrows from philosophy and pretends to be doing pure theology—as in, just for starters, his metaphysical preference for the term ‘modes of being’ (Seinsweisen) for the Trinitarian persons. 8

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Now it may be that Barth’s rejection of the analogia entis was (at best) shortsighted and based upon a caricature of Catholic theology, which led Balthasar to engage Barth in correspondence, then in a series of articles, and, finally, in his famous book, Karl Barth.10 But the basic concerns of the Reformed theologian are nevertheless legitimate, because they turn on the fundamental question of which discourse, philosophical or theological, is ultimately in control: whether a philosophical metaphysics is dictating the terms for revelation, or vice versa. In other words, the entire debate about the analogia entis boils down to the basic question of how faith and reason, grace and nature, God and world, are related in Christian theology.11 So, before proceeding, let us first be clear about the basic confessional differences. For Barth reason can have no propaedeutic role whatsoever, which means that for him all apologetic attempts are methodologically ruled out from the start. Likewise, there can be no ordering of reason to faith, or of nature to grace, according to the ontic or noetic versions of the Thomistic principle gratia (fides) non destruit, sed supponit et perficit naturam (rationem).12 Indeed, not only is nature not ordered to grace, for Barth nature of itself does not even have any capacity to receive it. Thus, just as one cannot speak of any natural desire for God, one cannot speak of any potentia oboedientialis—not even as something that can be elicited and rehabilitated by grace. For, according to Barth, as a consequence of the Fall, the imago Dei is not just ‘destroyed apart from a few relics’, which was the position of Emil Brunner, but ‘totally annihilated’.13 In other words, as a result of the Fall, the human being has not suffered a mortal wound that, in the absence of a physician will lead  As Balthasar put it in 1940, ‘As a Catholic theologian I was not in every respect satisfied by your contesting of the analogia entis, since it seemed to me that you were not always confronting definitive, but only preliminary Catholic positions …’ See Manfred Lochbrunner, Hans Urs von Balthasar und seine Theologen-Kollegen (Würzburg: Echter Verlag, 2009), p. 267. See also p. 270, where, in a subsequent letter, written after their first personal encounter, Balthasar laments that Barth had taken aim at relatively minor Catholic theologians—Bartmann, Diekamp, Fehr et al.—instead of wrestling more honestly and more respectably with a major theologian like Przywara. Had Barth done so, Balthasar suggests, his main reservations about the analogia entis would have been allayed. For the articles that led to his book on Barth, see Balthasar, ‘Analogie und Dialektik. Zur Klärung der theologischen Prinzipienlehre Karl Barths’, Divus Thomas 22 (1944): pp. 171–216; ‘Analogie und Natur. Zur Klärung der theologischen Prinzipienlehre Karl Barths’, Divus Thomas 23 (1945): pp. 3–56; The Theology of Karl Barth, trans. E. Oakes (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1992). 11  In sum, Barth objects to the analogia entis on the interrelated grounds that (1) it coordinates God and creation in terms of a metaphysics of being, and not (at least at first) in terms of faith in Christ; (2) that it coordinates God and creation by means of a human theory, one of a given state of affairs, and not in terms of divine praxis and the unforeseeable event of divine revelation; and (3) that it is an attempt to think the reality of the God-world relation on the basis of creaturely being prior to and—so it would seem—independently of God’s self-revelation and self-gift in Christ, which can be the only real ground of any relation between God and the world in the first place. 12  For Przywara’s later formulation of this maxim, see ‘Der Grundsatz, “Gratia non destruit sed supponit et perficit naturam”. Eine ideengeschichtliche Interpretation’, Scholastik 17 (1942). 13  Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §6, p.  238; ‘No matter how it may be with his humanity and personality, man has completely lost the capacity for God. Hence we fail to see how there comes into view here any common basis of discussion for philosophical and theological anthropology, any occasion for the common exhibition of at least the possibility of enquiring about God’ (ibid.). 10

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to death, but is in fact already dead, and so there can be no question of any interplay or cooperation between God and human beings in the matter of salvation. ‘We could not, therefore, regard the event of revelation as an interplay between God and man, between grace and nature. On the contrary … this event represents a self-enclosed circle. Not only the objective but also the subjective element in revelation, not only its actuality but also its potentiality, is the being and action of the self-revealing God alone.’14 From such a dialectical position—admitting of no Anknüpfungspunkt— whose formal stringency is not mitigated by Barth’s later adoption of an analogia fidei, as Bruce McCormack has conclusively shown,15 it almost goes without saying that any analogy between God and the world that could be established by reason merely on the basis of creation—any analogia entis—is ruled out. The same is true as regards faith: faith is not a bright illumination of what fallen reason only dimly perceives in twilight, as it were, but an in-breaking from above, like lightning into pitch darkness.16 It is a miracle in the strictest sense: it is not worked by God through reason and its evidences (according to a Thomistic understanding of primary and secondary causality), which in and of themselves are feeble and insufficient for faith, but without them.17 Accordingly, Barth concludes, in a striking recapitulation of the Reformed-Lutheran teaching on justification, only now applied to theological epistemology, that it is by faith alone that we can have any concept of God.18 And so we are confronted once again with the same sola (only now in the matter of theological epistemology) that was at issue for Luther—and all the confessional troubles that this entails, unless perhaps one is able to see it as at times rhetorically (but not theologically) necessary. For Przywara, on the other hand, the most important modern expositor and creative deployer of the analogia entis, it is at least possible to demonstrate the relativity of creaturely being with regard to the absolute being of God, and therewith a basic analogy of being. Therein lies reason’s minimal service: in showing that  Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §17, p. 280.  See Bruce McCormack, Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 16  Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, § 15, p. 188.: ‘And this human nature, the only one we know and the only one there actually is, has of itself no capacity for being adopted by God’s Word into unity with Himself, i.e., into personal unity with God. Upon this human nature a mystery must be wrought in order that this may be made possible. And this mystery must consist in its receiving the capacity for God which it does not possess’; cf. p. 199: ‘God Himself creates a possibility, a power, a capacity, and assigns it to man, where otherwise there would be sheer impossibility.’ Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics I/1, §6, p. 277. 17  Ibid, p. 247: ‘Man must be set aside and God himself presented as the original subject, as the primary power, as the creator of the possibility of knowledge of God’s word.’ Cf. the epistemology of Newman, who, in various analogues of his ‘illative sense’, which he elaborates in his Grammar of Assent, speaks of a ‘collection of weak evidences’ and of a ‘cable’ made up of various strands, each of which, in and of itself, is weak and can be broken, but together are strong. See Ian Ker, The Achievement of John Henry Newman (London: T&T Clark, 2001), p. 50. 18   See Karl Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum. Anselms Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms, eds. Eberhard Jüngel and Ingolf U.  Dalferth (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), p. 28. 14 15

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reason cannot ground itself—neither in the minimalist version of Kant, nor in the maximalist versions of Hegel—but points inexorably beyond itself to a region of mystery. The worry that reason has somehow gained the upper hand over faith is therefore misplaced—as is the worry that Christ is subordinated to a metaphysics of being. For all Christians confess the ontological and cosmological priority of Christ, through whom all things are made (John 1:3). The difference is simply methodological, a matter of possible starting points, following from different conceptions of the relationship between nature and grace, reason and faith. Whereas for Barth one is obliged to begin with dogmatics and forsake apologetics, for Catholic theology it is at least possible to engage in apologetics, as Paul did in Athens (Acts 17:16–34), in order to show that faith in Christ is not unreasonable. One could even argue that it is a matter of charity to do so, to provide an Ariadne’s thread that leads through the labyrinth of fallen reason to the portal of faith, which is what Przywara’s Analogia Entis (as an exercise in philosophical rather than dogmatic theology) was intended to do: to show how thought leads with a certain inexorability from phenomenology by way of philosophical metaphysics to theological metaphysics. But Catholic metaphysics, including Przywara’s Analogia Entis, can also be conducted in a way that Barth would presumably allow, namely, as an exercise in the intellectus fidei—not, that is, for explicitly apologetic purposes, but simply in order to elaborate what Barth himself meant by the pulchritudo fidei.19 According to this model, metaphysics would not be a prolegomenon to revelation but a postlegomenon that follows from revelation (and dogmatics). It would be, to use Barth’s quasi-­ Hegelian term, a Nachdenken of revelation: an attempt to render intelligible (not exhaustively comprehensible) what is already believed on the basis of Scripture and Tradition.20 We are thus presented with two basic models and uses of metaphysics: metaphysics as apologetics (reason ➔ faith) and metaphysics under the aegis of ­dogmatics as an exercise in the intellectus fidei (faith ➔ understanding). And in order to avoid misunderstanding between the confessions it is imperative that these be distinguished, lest all metaphysics be seen as a rationalist-foundationalist enterprise (as is the tendency among Barth’s disciples).

 It is therefore highly debatable that Anselm, the author not only of the Proslogion, but of the more obviously apologetic, if not downright rationalistic, Monologion, can be pressed into Barth’s service as a model for this kind of theology. 20  This is not to deny that one can retrospectively engage in the task of natural theology, or that the task of natural theology does not have a certain, albeit limited, apologetic value. It is simply to say that a Christian metaphysics is ultimately conducted from the standpoint of faith as a service to the faith, and not as something that would somehow, independent of it, have priority over it or dictate its terms as Barth feared. See in this regard Balthasar’s letter to Barth (May 4, 1940), in which he denies that the metaphysics of the analogia entis is a purely philosophical metaphysics: ‘In concreto, therefore, the analogia is in no sense a philosophical but rather a purely theological principle, within which one may nevertheless (retrospectively) sketch out a sphere of nature … Such knowledge is not idle speculation, forbidden, as it were, by the existential character of revelation, but rather an indispensable moment within the full understanding of what the concrete relation to God is.’ Quoted in Lochbrunner, Hans Urs von Balthasar und seine Theologen-Kollegen, p. 275. 19

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But, having distinguished these models, neither should one have to choose between them in the manner of an either-or, as though the integrity of the Church itself were at stake. For even in Anselm the lines are blurred, as is evident from the fact that he could inspire not only the fideistic Barth, but also the arch-rationalist Hegel. They are also blurred in Thomas, which explains why Thomas has been appropriated by neo-scholastics and language-game fideists.21 But this much should be conceded in light of Barth’s concerns: of the two uses, the latter must have ultimate priority over and cannot be contradicted by the former. For what is reasonable to a person informed and enlightened by the Logos will not necessarily be reasonable to a person lacking his light. Given such qualifications, one might dare to hope that even the most anti-Catholic of Barthians could be assuaged22—when it is understood that the analogia entis emerged from within the context of faith as an attempt to understand the faith, specifically, as we shall presently see, in the attempt to clarify theological doctrine regarding supernatural participation in the divine nature. So let us now return to the analogy of being as formulated in the light of faith, firstly, as an attempt to do justice to the doctrine of creation as creatio ex nihilo. At its simplest, the analogy of being is a concise way of affirming two things essential to the Christian doctrine of creation—two things that, presumably, all Christian confessions would affirm: on the one hand, the sheer novelty and radical gratuity of creation, and so the ‘ex nihilo’ in ‘creatio ex nihilo’ (cf. 2 Maccabees 7:28); on the other hand, the fact that creation is God’s creation and proceeds ‘ex Deo’ as a manifestation of God’s glory: ‘The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork’ (Psalm 19:1). In other words, it is a way of affirming the double mystery of divine immanence and transcendence, or, in Przywara’s idiomatic shorthand, the mystery that God is at once ‘in-and-beyond’ creation. By the same token, stated negatively, it is a way of avoiding the Scylla of dualism (insofar as creation, however fallen, remains God’s creation and God is still in some sense ‘in’ it), and the Charybdis of monism or pantheism (insofar as creation is God’s free creation and God is therefore ‘beyond’ it). Certainly, one might dispute 21  There are indeed, as Fergus Kerr has keenly noted, many versions of Thomas. See Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), p. 210: ‘Thomas’ thought, perhaps over a range of issues, contains within itself the Janus-like ambiguities that generate the competing interpretations which can never be reconciled.’ Przywara noted this ambiguity as well and credited it to the greatness of Thomas, whom he considered more of an ‘aporetic thinker’, aware of the abiding tensions of creaturely thought and being (and so of the analogia entis), than a founder of a single school. Cf. Przywara, ‘Thomas von Aquin als Problematiker’, Stimmen der Zeit 109 (June 1925): pp. 188–99, reprinted in Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2 (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1929), pp. 906–929; and Przywara, Humanitas: Der Mensch Gestern und Morgen (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1952), p. 741. 22  The closest Barth comes to a conciliatory position is in his favorable reception of Söhngen’s two articles on the subject (Curch Dogmatics II/1, pp. 81–82); in the end, however, Barth is consistent: if there is to be an analogia entis then it can have no purchase outside of an analogia fidei; that is, any analogia entis that could be elaborated in terms of the first model is ruled out. For two of the best discussions of this subject, see Keith Johnson, Karl Barth and the Analogia Entis (London: T&T Clark, 2010); Benjamin Dahlke, Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal, and Vatican II (London: T&T Clark, 2012), p. 80.

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the extent to which the analogia entis, as a formal relation between God and creation, can be known apart from faith. From the perspective of faith, however, it is simply a way of affirming what revelation itself implies and what all the doctors of the Church have in one or another way confirmed: on the one hand, the radical transcendence of God, who is exterior omni re (Augustine), extra omne genus (Aquinas), and in the words of Vatican I, ‘In reality and in his nature distinct from the world’;23 on the other hand, the radical immanence of God, who is not just interior omni re but, more personally, interior intimo meo (Augustine) as the king dwelling in the innermost mansion of the soul (Teresa of Avila). To be sure, as with Augustine, one may not at first be aware of God’s radical immanence, like a fish unaware of the water in which it swims; but this does not change the fact that ‘in him we live and move and have our being’ (Acts 17:28). As Thomas puts it, summarizing both aspects, Deus est supra omnia per excellentiam suae naturae, et tamen est in omnibus rebus ut causans omnium esse.24 At its simplest, the metaphysics of the analogia entis is thus nothing more than a way of formulating the Catholic concept of God as it is derived from revelation: a God who is at once hyper-transcendent, dwelling beyond the world in unapproachable light (1 Timothy 6:16), and yet ‘near’ (Philippians 4:5), indeed, nearer to us than we are to ourselves. Hence, for Przywara, following Augustine, the proper disposition of the Catholic soul is simultaneously one of love for the God who is so lovingly near in Christ (John 1:18; 14:9; 20–23) through the gift of the Spirit who ‘dwells in you’ (Romans 8:9–11; 1 Corinthians 3:16) and reverence for the same God who ‘dwells on high’ (Isaiah 33:5), ‘enthroned on the Cherubim’ (Psalms 80:1), whom no one has ever seen or can see (1 Timothy 6:16).25 It should now be obvious that the analogia entis is not—or certainly not only—a matter of rational speculation about the God-world relation, but follows from Scripture itself, and that to reject it is to reject not only a principle of philosophical metaphysics, but also a principle that revelation itself implies. Moreover, as  Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith, c. 1 (April 24, 1870).  ‘God is above all things by the excellence of his nature, but is in all things as the cause of their being.’ See Summa theologiae I, q. 8, a. 1, ad 1. Cf. Augustine, De potentia, q. 3, a. 7, corp.; De veritate q. 8, a. 16, ad 12. 25  ‘[Since] God reveals himself as at once a God of blessed, mystical intimacy and a God of the coolest distance, the fundamental disposition of the believing soul should be one of “fearing love and loving fear”—a fear that springs from love inasmuch as love fears to lose the beloved; and a love that through fear maintains a holy sobriety and a tender reverence’ (Przywara, Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2, p. 543). Cf. Schriften, vol. 2, p. 22: ‘God in creatures, and therefore love; God above and beyond creatures, and therefore fear: “loving fear and fearing love”.’ Cf. Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 188, sermo 22, no. 6. Cf. John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 1 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1907), p. 322: ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; till you see him to be a consuming fire, and approach him with reverence and godly fear, as being sinners, you are not even in sight of the strait gate. I do not wish you to be able to point to any particular time when you renounced the world (as it is called), and were converted; this is a deceit. Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day.’ Przywara also formulates this in terms of the combination of intimate trust (Vertrauen) and reverence (Ehrfurcht). See ‘Grundhaltungen der Seele 2. Ehrfurcht’, in Seele. Monatschrift im Dienste christlicher Lebensgestaltung 6 (1924): pp. 299–303. 23 24

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Przywara repeatedly points out,26 it is to reject a principle with a dogmatic basis in the Fourth Lateran Council, which in 1215 censured Joachim de Fiore essentially for failing to observe it.27 Against the otherwise holy abbot, the Council declared that, however great a similarity one might observe between God and creatures, one must always observe a greater dissimilarity between them: inter creatorem et creaturam non potest tanta similitudo notari, quin inter eos maior dissimilitudo notanda.28 That is to say, according to Przywara’s reading of the Council, one must always observe the analogy between God and creatures, ever mindful of the greater dissimilarity even in the midst of the greatest similarity between them—indeed, even within that mystical union with God in the beatific vision that is the creature’s supernatural end. For even in mystical union (unio caritatis in gratia), God is God, and the deified creature, however deified and perfected, is still a creature. We have thus shown that the analogia entis has a scriptural and dogmatic basis. But we can still be more precise as to why the maior dissimilitudo obtains as a kind of inviolable rule within every similitudo (whether the similarity be affirmed on the basis of nature or grace). And for this let us now turn to Aquinas, whom Przywara regards as the teacher of the analogia entis—even if the exact term is not found in Thomas’s corpus29—by virtue of (1) the distinction Thomas draws between primary and secondary causality,30 and (2) by virtue of the fundamental distinction he draws between essence and existence in creatures, commonly known among Thomists as the ‘real distinction’ (distinctio realis), which is not to say real separation, to ­distinguish it from Scotus’ distinctio modalis and Suárez’s distinctio rationis cum fundamento in re.31  See, especially, his 1940 essay, ‘The Scope of Analogy as a Fundamental Catholic Form’, in Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. David Bentley Hart and John Betz (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), pp. 348–99. 27  At issue, specifically, was the difference between God’s natural unity as Trinity and the spiritual unity of believers through grace, which Joachim perhaps inadvertently threatened to elide (as though the Trinity were just like a relation of human persons), along with the difference between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity (as though the Trinity could be identified with the stages of an historical process culminating in an ‘age of the Spirit’). 28  See Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 43rd ed., ed. Peter Hünermann (San Francisco, Ignatius Press, 2012), no. 806 (p. 269). 29  For an obvious foundation for the doctrine in Thomas, see Summa theologiae I, q. 4, a. 3; De potentia q. 7, a. 5 ad 7; Scriptum super sententiis I, d. 8, q. 1, a. 3, sed contra 1; II, d. 4, q. 1, a. 1, corp. Thanks to Richard Cross for the latter references. 30  See Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2, pp. 909–10. The importance of this distinction, which has tremendous implications for how we understand creation, is that it registers both the secondary agency of creatures, who possess a certain autonomy relative to God, and the primary agency of God who is sovereign within secondary causes, conducting them toward final end. It is the mystery, in short, of divine providence and sovereignty in the midst of creaturely freedom. 31  See Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 2, pp. 926–7. See also Kant Heute: Eine Sichtung (München: Oldenbourg, 1930), p. 7, where Przywara suggests that the Thomists as well as Scotists depart from the true position of Thomas himself: whereas the Thomists tend to separate essence and existence, the Scotists tend to collapse them. The position of Thomas, he holds, and which he regards as a true middle (between Thomists and Scotists), is not that of a ‘real separation’ (Realgeschiedenheit), but that of a ‘real distinction’ (Realverschiedenheit) or ‘real tension’ (Real-Spannung). 26

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The first form of the analogy may be stated as follows: God as Causa Prima is at once in-and-beyond secondary causes (causae secundae), such that God is transcendently at work in creation. Thus, our use of the word ‘cause’ as it applies in the created world of space-time is only analogous to what causation means in God. (Indeed, for all we know, it may mean something more like charitably to give or to let be.) But because God is the cause of creaturely perfections by virtue of the analogy of intrinsic attribution, which makes God the ‘one’ to whom they point, it is nevertheless not in the analogy between divine and creaturely causality that we find the deepest difference between God and creatures. On the contrary, it is precisely the analogy of attribution that underwrites the similarity of creatures to God insofar as God causes their perfections and likens them by grace to himself. And so, in order to do justice to the maior dissimilitudo of the analogia entis, we have to leave the realm of aetiology, however analogical (analogia causalitatis), and turn to the second distinction, the ontological difference between God and creatures, and to the radically different proportionality (analogia proportionalitatis) between God as Being and being in creatures, which excludes any possibility of a direct relation between them. For here it is not a matter of inferring that God is the cause of creaturely perfections. Rather, here there is only a proportion of diverse proportions, i.e., a relation of mutual alterity (ἄλλο πρὸς ἄλλο), between what it means for God to be and what it means for creatures to be.32 Nor is ‘being’ a tertium comparationis, as so many critics of the analogia entis commonly assume, since, following Thomas’s reading of Exodus 3:14, God is Being itself (Ipsum Esse subsistens), apart from whom no copula, no predication, no meaning, is possible. For apart from God there is no ‘is’. In stark contrast, creaturely being is, in Augustine’s words, a ‘cascading torrent’ (torrens … colligitur, redundat, perstrepit, currit et currendo decurrit) that only ‘was’ or ‘will be,’ but never ‘is’ (antequam sint non sunt, et cum sunt fugiunt, et cum fugerint non erunt).33 The analogy of being is thus not between two kinds of being, and most certainly not between two kinds of ‘beings’ but rather between Being as such and becoming, between the one who IS, whose essence is his existence (sua igitur essentia est suum esse), and whose essence is nothing but his being, and the creature which, in Augustine’s words, both is and is not (est non est).34 Indeed, as if to underscore the difference between them, Thomas says in the first article of De potentia that creaturely being has no subsistence (non subsistens)35—as Gregory of  Aristotle, Metaphysics V.6, 1016b.  See Analogia Entis, p. 265, quoting Expositions on the Psalms 109, no. 20: ‘A torrent … is gathered, overflows, thunders, runs and in running runs off’; and De libero arbitrio III, 7, 21: ‘Before they might be they are not, and when they are they are fleeing away, and when they have fled they no longer are.’ May it never be said that Heidegger was the first thinker of temporality or understood better than Augustine what it meant to exist. See Cyril O’Regan, ‘Answering Back: Augustine’s Critique of Heidegger’, in Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty, ed. Fran O’Rourke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012), pp. 134–184. 34  Summa theologiae I, q. 3, a. 4, corp.; Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 121, no. 12; and Confessions XII, 6. See Przywara, Analogia Entis, p. 190. 35  Augustine, De potentia, q. 1, a. 1 corp. ‘… esse significat aliquid completum et simplex sed non subsistens…’ 32 33

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Nyssa also says in The Life of Moses,36 and as Augustine says, commenting with unrivaled existential acuity on the words of the Psalmist: ‘“And my substance is as nothing in your sight”. In your sight, Lord, it is as nothing.’37 Thus, properly understood, the real distinction ultimately emphasizes the disproportion between God and creatures, and so the in-and-beyond of God (as Being) with regard to creatures that are strictly in becoming (in fieri). And this final stress of the formula carries its own existential significance. It means that creaturely being is never unqualifiedly its own, something over which one could claim independent rights, as it were, but is ever and always a gift—to come back to that important term in Marion’s vocabulary, but, nota bene, now from the perspective of metaphysics. It means, furthermore, following Augustine, who in turn follows the Psalmist, that we are to seek God’s face evermore (Psalm 105:4): ‘Ut inveniendus quaeratur, occultus est; ut inventus quaeratur, immensus est. Unde alibi dicitur, “Quaerite faciem ejus semper.”’38 The same is true for Gregory of Nyssa: to see the infinite God is to see, like Moses, that he is ever to be followed. And for Przywara, picking up on Augustine and the ‘Magis’ of his own order, it means that God is reverenced properly only when it is understood that he is semper maior39—not as an abstract infinity, but as the ‘unsearchable depths’ of an infinite love, in response to whom the proper disposition of the believing soul is one of ‘reverent trust and trusting reverence’.40 We have now seen how the first difference between essence and existence (first, that is, in the ordo cognoscendi) opens out meta-physically into a second difference, which one might call, pace Heidegger, the real ontological difference, between Being and becoming, that is, between God and creatures.41 But now we need to elaborate this first difference and, along with it, the metaphysical structure of becoming. For creaturely being is not explained simply by saying that creatures are constituted by a non-identity of essence and existence. If it were, we would need no development of analogical metaphysics beyond the teaching of Thomas in De ente et essentia. But, according to Przywara, we do, and in order to do this well we need to draw upon all the resources of the Catholic tradition—not opposing one school to  If one wishes to look for the analogia entis in the Christian East one needs to look no further than §23 of The Life of Moses. Thus, if one rejects the analogia entis one is rejecting something that Gregory of Nyssa also taught. 37  Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 38, no. 6. 38  Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 65, no. 1. 39  See Augustine, Expositions on the Psalms 62, no. 16. Deus semper maior I–III (Freiburg: Herder, 1938–9). 40  See again ‘Grundhaltungen der Seele 2. Ehrfurcht’. 41  For all of Heidegger’s talk of openness and ‘the open’, his ontology actually forecloses this difference, along with the very question of God, who enters into his thought at the end of the day (i.e., in his late 1966 interview with Der Spiegel) only as a mythological ‘god’ on the horizon of Being, which is metaphysically prior and ultimate. As for Heidegger’s distinction between Being and beings, it is already implied in the real distinction and the gratuity of existence in every being— though, admittedly, when the real distinction is reduced to a formula it can easily lose its existential import, and to this extent Heidegger has a point. A proper understanding of the real distinction should therefore require that one first appreciate the full mystery of being before explaining it away. 36

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another, in the way Thomas and Scotus are typically opposed, but synthesizing their varied insights.42 And, on Przywara’s view, we need especially to supplement Thomas with Augustine: we need to bring together the more classical architectonic thinker whose sapiential, endlessly balanced fugue-like thought already intimates the all-in-all of the universe in God (the perfectio universi), and the more Romantic existential thinker, who was familiar with the struggles, contradictions, and perplexities of existence, for whom the creature is a restless, surging sea vis-à-vis God in whom essence and existence, movement and rest, are one.43 If the one is a Bach, the other is a Beethoven. But both are for good reason canonical. So, following Przywara, from whom (as Balthasar and Rahner both insisted) we have much yet to learn, let us now go back to the real distinction and specify it in a way that allows us to hear the existential dynamic latent within it, and therewith the deeper Augustinian resonances in the analogy of being. To this end let us first note that the relation between essence and existence is itself an analogy (ἄλλο πρὸς ἄλλο), a kind of unity-in-difference, and only as such, and not directly by virtue of essence or existence alone, an analogy that refers transcendentally to God.44 And if it helps let us think of it in terms of another, more concrete analogy: the unity-in-difference of the imago Dei understood as male and female, which together constitute the full imago Dei. And let us then formulate the analogy between essence and existence in Przywara’s preferred idiom as a ‘unity-­ in-­tension’ (Spannungseinheit). But what more precisely accounts for the tension here? It is the fact that whatever exists is informed by its essence, which makes it what it is, but that this essence is not exhausted therein, because it transcends its given instantiation. The analogia entis thus resonates with all the philosophical and historical tension between Plato and Aristotle, specifically, between the transcendent Platonic eidos and the immanent Aristotelian morphē. For whereas the Aristotelian morphē inheres in a given substance, making it to be a substance, the Platonic eidos is beyond whatever participates in it. Accordingly, the analogia entis implies yet another ‘in-and-beyond’, only here it is not God who is in-and-beyond  In this regard it is notable that Przywara, following the important but overlooked work of Parthenius Minges, ‘Beitrag zur Lehre des Duns Scotus über die Univokation des Seinsbegriffs’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 20 (1907): pp.  306–323; and his ‘Zur Unterscheidung zwischen Wesenheit und Dasein in den Geschöpfen’, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 29 (1916): pp. 51–62, esp. 61, does not problematize Soctus’ doctrine of the univocity of being insofar as this is a conceptual univocity—a matter of logic, rather than ontology. For even if Scotus’ conceptual univocity opened the door to a univocal ontology, which would eventually be embraced by so anti-Christian a thinker as Deleuze, this was clearly not his intention, which was simply to avoid the conceptual equivocation he took Henry of Ghent’s position to entail. For Przywara’s appreciation of Scotus, especially regarding individuation, see his Schriften, vol. 2, passim. 43  Confessions I, 4. See Przywara, Schriften, vol. 1, 367: ‘God is a God who unites the greatest surging of life with the greatest tranquility, who is Activity and Rest, as Augustine says. Thus you will become aware of him in that tranquility that is the unmoved depth of the surging of love.’ 44  Herein lies the all-important difference between Przywara’s understanding of the analogia entis and every attempt to infer God directly from, say, the mere existence of the world or any essential creaturely perfection. For Przywara every direct analogy from existence or essence is by the very terms of the analogia entis eo ipso excluded.

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creation (Gott in-über Geschöpf), but the creaturely essence that is, so to speak, ‘in-­ and-­beyond’ existence (Sosein in-über Dasein).45 We thus have an analogy of an analogy. And, in fact, for Przywara, the analogia entis is at the end of the day an analogy between two analogies: as God is in-and-beyond creation, so by analogy the creature’s essence is in-and-beyond creaturely its existence. And in a final, mystical step, one could say that the more the creature becomes what it is by transcending itself, by going beyond itself in Christ (Matthew 16:25), the more God is in-and-beyond creation, indwelling it as his holy temple (2 Corinthians 6,16), and the more creation reaches the end, the perfection, for which it was made. Admittedly, all of this is highly abstract and needs to be worked out, but once one unpacks all that that the analogia entis implies, the significance of Przywara’s innovation of the Thomistic tradition is considerable. For what was hitherto a scholastic technicality is now a pithy expression not only for the God-cosmos relation, including the dynamic of creaturely becoming within this relation, but even for the rhythmic structure of the history of ideas—for all the essentialisms and existentialisms, all the idealisms and realisms, all the rationalisms and empiricisms, in short, for the whole dynamic range of human thought, which is in turn (whether consciously appreciated or not) a result of and a response to the dynamic nature of creaturely being. Indeed, even the tensions between the analytic and continental philosophical traditions—the one tending toward logical and essential determinations, the other toward hermeneutical questions of socially embodied existence—are prefigured in its span. For present purposes, however, Przywara’s most important innovation is to have synthesized Thomas with Augustine, the thinker of the real distinction with the thinker of the cor inquietum. Accordingly, for Przywara, to say analogia entis is to say that the human being is precisely—as mutatis mutandis for Nietzsche—a being-­in-­transition, ‘a tension (that defies conceptual mastery) between a being that is “such” [so] and “there” [da], yet whose “such” in fact always remains “to be attained”, so that in its purity it is never really “there”.’46 We thus have here a  Admittedly, this is where Przywara’s teutonic vocabulary can get a little arcane—and pithy to the point of unintelligibility. It begins to make more sense, though, in light of Aristotle’s term en-telechy, according to which the telic form or shape (morphē), which is ‘in’ a substance making it what it is, is also that to which the substance, in dynamic self-transcendence, is underway (as in the oakness of the oak tree that is at once ‘in’ and ‘beyond’ the existing acorn). But it implies still more: it implies not just the tensions between Plato and Aristotle, but the whole range of dynamic and dramatic tension between the ideal and the real, between the a priori and the a posteriori, between the immutable and the mutable, between Truth (with a capital T) and history in all its relativity and flux: between, to put it in figurative terms, Parmenides and Heraclitus. The key concept of von Balthasar’s Theo-Drama is arguably the drama between divine and creaturely freedom. But the analogia entis is its metaphysical presupposition and possibility: the metaphysical scaffolding of the creaturely stage. And this is why, at the end of the day, the analogia entis had to be defended against Barth as a non-negotiable: because it is precisely here that we see, in metaphysical terms, that the creaturely can tragically fail to be what it is. 46  See Przywara, ‘Die Problematik der Neuscholastik’, Kant-Studien 33 (1928): p. 81. Nietzsche’s case presents an ironic analogy: while he abjures divine transcendence, he nevertheless longs, like few others, for human transcendence, speaking himself of the human being as a being-in-transition, as an Übergang. See Also Sprach Zarathustra, Preface, §4. 45

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metaphysics every bit as existential as Heidegger’s phenomenology of being-inthe-­world as being-towards-death.47 This is not to say that we have no enduring self-identity over time or that self-identity is an illusion; Heraclitus and his postmodern heirs do not win out entirely over Parmenides. It is, though, to say that human identity is an identity in change, and that our very selfhood is in some sense, constituted by the différance—to borrow Derrida’s term—between essence and existence. In other words, our essence is not just different from our existence, but given as deferred, such that, mysteriously, we are underway to what we are. For, being ever only an analogy, human being is never totally self-identical, which can be said of God alone; rather, it is a being-in-deferral, an existing in view of an apocalyptic definition: ‘Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is’ (1 John 3:2). In the meantime, living in time, the human being is precisely a ‘stretch’, an epektasis, to speak with Paul and Gregory of Nyssa (cf. Philippians 3:13), a stretching in response to an ‘upward call’ (Philippians 3:14) between what it is and what it will be. And so with this fuller understanding of the creaturely dynamic that it implies, we can now, finally, specify the analogia entis by saying that whereas God is Being Itself (Ipsum Esse subsistens), creaturely being is being-in-becoming (ens in fieri), that whereas God is who God is, the ‘I am who I am’ of Exodus 3:14, creatures are forever becoming who they are. And this requires patience. But for Paul, all of this is surely accomplished in due time by the Spirit: ‘And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit’ (2 Corinthians 3:18).

10.3  ‘Become What You Are’: The Ontology of Selfhood As odd as this notion of becoming oneself might be—am I not already myself?—it is well established in the western tradition. It can be found in the subtitle of Nietzsche’s Ecce homo, for example; but it can be traced back much earlier to Pindar, who in his second Pythian Ode exhorts Hieron, the tyrant of Syracuse, ‘to become what he is’. (Needless to say, the poet was not encouraging Hieron to be a tyrant, by which we tend to remember him, but to be what a king should be, namely, a virtuous king.) It is implied, furthermore, in the notion—common to Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics—that an ‘ought’ follows from an ‘is’, and that the human being as a rational animal should act accordingly, and not be driven like an animal simply by instinct or passing desire. Indeed, it is a common trope all the way up to the Renaissance (as in Pico’s famous oration), and lives on in the Enlightenment, as,

47  For Przywara’s engagement with Heidegger precisely on this score, see his Crucis Mysterium. Das christliche Heute (Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh-Paderborn, 1939).

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for example, in Kant’s slogan sapere aude!—dare to think!—which is to say, dare to be what you are as a rational agent. To be sure, beginning with Descartes, the self, and so the notion of becoming oneself, also becomes questionable, and it does so a fortiori with Hume, who is something of a Buddhist among the western philosophers. But the effect, arguably, is only to draw out the temporal and existential implications of selfhood. Thus, in post-Cartesian philosophy, instead of being immediately given, self-evident, and equated with thought as with Descartes’s cogito, the self gradually comes to be understood as something dynamically constituted over time. In other words, it is no longer a noun, a given thing, a res cogitans, but a gerund, something to be realized. Nor is it something that is realized passively as a matter of course, but is given as a task—as we see in Kierkegaard’s existential understanding of the self as that which ‘relates itself to itself’,48 and in Heidegger’s call of Dasein to Eigentlichkeit, that is, to authentic, ‘proper’ selfhood.49 We also see this, mutatis mutandis, in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricœur, for whom the self is constituted by two kinds of identity— by what he calls selfhood-identity (or ipse-identity), i.e., ‘who I am’ as a person capable of action, and sameness-identity (or idem-identity), i.e. ‘what I am’ as someone possessing an identifiable character over time.50 And at a popular level we see it in the everyday adage, made famous by Shakespeare’s Polonius, ‘To thine own self be true’ (Hamlet, Act 1, scene 3)—as though one could fail to be oneself. The notion of ‘becoming oneself’, though prima facie odd, is thus very much part of our tradition and, I would argue, fundamental to what it means to be a human being. But what does it mean? Granting that some kind of correspondence theory of truth must be true, what does it mean to correspond with oneself? To answer this question adequately we would, minimally, have to answer the question of who or what the self is. Indeed, we would have to decide whether there is a real, unitary self or whether this seemingly unitary ‘self’ is an illusion and nothing more than a fleeting succession of thoughts, sensations, and desires. (And, needless to say, this is no small difficulty, since answers to this question vary considerably: for some, in the mold of Parmenides, the self is a fixed, unchanging identity; for others, in the mold of Heraclitus, there is no self or essential human nature at all, but rather all, including any human identity, is flux.) We would need, additionally, an anthropology that took into account the various powers of the soul (sensitive, rational etc.), and we would need to decide whether there is in fact a hierarchy of value here: whether, when conflict arises, it is nobler to act in accordance with reason than with one’s feelings and desires. We would need to ask, furthermore, whether as for Paul (1 Thessalonians 5:23) and the author of Hebrews (4:12), there is a further, subtler  Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, trans. and eds. Edward V.  Hong and Edna H.  Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 13. 49  To be sure, in the case of Heidegger, the call is no longer to live according to reason, as for the ancients, or of reason to itself (as for Kant), but the formal nature of the imperative, and the formal coordination of ethics and ontology, remains the same. 50  See Paul Ricouer’s Gifford Lectures, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Thanks to Oliver Davies for a helpful discussion in this regard. 48

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distinction to be drawn between soul and spirit on which everything really depends; whether in the spirit, as the apex mentis or the Seelengrund, there is a point of contact with the Logos; and whether one becomes oneself, i.e., a mature son or daughter of God, to the extent that one is awakened to the voice of the Logos (John 10:4) and to the promptings of the Spirit (Romans 8:14) in the depths of the spirit, whereby one becomes in Irenaeus’s words a ‘perfect man’.51 And we would have to explain, finally, the connection between human nature and personhood, or hypostatic existence, and how the relation of human persons to their natures relates to the divine persons and their nature—all of which, it goes without saying, is much more than can be elaborated here. For present purposes, therefore, I mean simply to indicate, in the barest of outlines, a possible metaphysical grammar for a theological anthropology—again, I hasten to add, not as something imposed on revelation, but as an articulation of that which revelation itself implies. Building on Przywara’s account of creaturely being, an analogical account of selfhood as being-in-transition, or, more precisely, as essence in-and-beyond existence, has the advantage of being able to incorporate the particula veri of each of the extreme positions we noted above, whose prototypes are Parmenides, the essentialist philosopher of static identity, and Heraclitus, the existentialist philosopher of difference and dynamic flux—in short, of being and becoming. For here, according to an analogical account, the essential selfhood, which is proper to the human being, let us call it hypostatic existence, is constituted through change—and constituted to the extent that the self relates itself (as existing) to itself in its essence, and so becomes what it is. In other words, we become the hypostatic, uniquely existing persons that we are to the extent that our existence is united with our essence. But what, we then have to ask, is this essence to which human existence is ordered? To what is the human being qua human being underway? In short, how does a human being become himself or herself? Since any theological answer derives from revelation, let us go back to the first creation account. According to Genesis 1:26, human beings are said to be made ‘in God’s image, according to his likeness’. But what does this mean? While many scholars and translators have come to the conclusion that ‘likeness’ is a pleonasm that adds nothing to the meaning of ‘image’, there is nevertheless good reason to believe that the two are not equivalent.52 Following the standard Orthodox reading, for example, one would do well to understand the image as the potential and the likeness as its realization.53 For what tends to get lost in modern translations and commentaries is the notion that the human being is created precisely not fixed like a stone or the other animals (in 51  See Adversus Haereses V, 6. For an important discussion, see Henri de Lubac, Theology in History (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1996), pp. 117–136, esp. pp. 130–136. 52  Many thanks to Avi Winitzer for helpful conversations about the meaning of the Hebrew, particularly, about the more concrete sense of ‘image’ (selem), with its roots in the royal statuary of ancient Mesopotamia, as opposed to the more abstract sense of ‘likeness’ (from the feminine noun demuth). Fortuitously, this accords precisely with a personalist metaphysics of essence in-andbeyond existence, which one could render here more concretely and biblically as ‘likeness in-andbeyond image’. 53  See, for example, Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1995), p. 51.

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which we find no tension between essence and existence), but with a dynamic vocation to be what he or she is, i.e., to realize the divine likeness—i.e., the human essence—in a concrete form. In this regard Jerome’s translation presents a striking contrast. Following the Septuagint (κατ᾽ εἰκόνα ἡμετέραν καὶ καθ᾽ ὁμοίωσιν), he renders the verse as ad imaginem et similitudinem nostram (as the Douay-Rheims translation also has it). The difference consists not only in the presence of the ‘and’, which more clearly distinguishes the two terms, but in the use of ad, which suggests movement and that the human being is created, literally, ‘to’ the image and likeness. And this, in fact, is how Augustine also understood it: ‘From this it is clear that the image of God will achieve its full likeness of him when it attains to the full vision of him.’54 Though it is impossible to decide here which translation is best—since it is quite possible that the Septuagint may have been working from a more original Hebrew text than the Masoretic edition—Jerome’s translation is unquestionably the more dynamic and evocative. It also accords better with New Testament paraenesis—as when Paul tells the Romans and the Galatians to ‘put on Christ’ (Romans 13:14; Galatians 3:27), reminding them to live in a way that accords with who they are by virtue of their baptism (baptism enabling them to return to their true natures, i.e., who they were created to be in Christ); or when he reminds the Corinthians that they are the temple of the Holy Spirit and so to live accordingly (1 Corinthians 6:19); or when he tells the Ephesians to put on the ‘new self, which is created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’ (Ephesians 4:24). In all of these cases the paraenesis is formally the same: ‘become what you are.’ And the matter is no different for the Church fathers of the East and the West, who speak in the same realistic idiom. Thus, for Gregory of Nyssa and Macarius the Great, the Christian life consists in becoming what one is by virtue of baptism, namely, a G ­ od-­bearer.55 And we find the same logic in Augustine, who famously tells his congregation that they should ‘be what they are’, namely, the body of Christ, so that their own lives might correspond with the one they receive in the Eucharist: ‘Be what you can see,’ he says, ‘and receive what you are.’56 The point, then, of human existence is not just to live according to the logos of the philosophers and realize one’s rational nature, but through the Spirit to become still more profoundly what one is: to find oneself as an imago in conformity to Christ, the Logos and Image of God (Hebrews 1:3). Now, to return to the real distinction at the heart of the analogy of being, if the human being is uniquely created among all living things as a ‘gerund’, so to speak, with the vocation to be what it is, the image of God, and if this image can be fulfilled only when conformed by the Spirit to the image, which is Christ, we can better appreciate the spiritual import of Przywara’s dynamic, analogical formulation of the  Augustine, De Trinitate XIV, 17, 24; in The Trinity, trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991), p. 392. Augustine is referring here to 1 John 3:2. 55  See Theo Kobusch, ‘Metaphysik als Lebensform’, in Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Beatitudes. An English Version with commentary and Supporting Studies. Proceedings of the Eighth International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (Paderborn, 14–18 September, 1998), eds. Hubertus R. Drobner and Albert Viciano (Leiden: Brill, 2000), pp. 467–485. 56  Augustine, Sermo 272. 54

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real distinction as ‘essence in-and-beyond existence’.57 For we can now see how it is that, metaphysically speaking, we exist in a state of tension between our essence (nature) as it now exists in us and the transcendence of our essence,58 which is found in its archetypal fullness only in Christ, the Logos; and we can see why Przywara liked to hear resonances of the adverb ἄνω—upwards—in the analogy of being, signaling thereby that the human being has a transcendent vocation, which Paul called an ‘upward call’ in Christ (Philippians 3:13). Indeed, we can now see in what sense we are only analogies of Being, how we paradoxically are and are not yet what we are, that is, how we are, but do not yet fulfill the meaning of, the image of God. For, again, ‘what we will be has not yet been revealed’ (1 John 3:2). But in the interim, as we wait for the parousia in which our being will be revealed (1 John 3:3), we have hope that what the Spirit did in Christ, he will do with us (Romans 8:11). For the same Spirit who is the eternal bond of love between the Father and the Son is also the Spirit who hovers over the creaturely abyss between essence and existence, which was opened at the moment of creation, and who broods over the world with ‘ah! bright wings’ in order to analogize it to God in conforming it to Christ.59

10.4  Sophiological Metaphysics Now what does any of this have to do with Russian sophiology? Needless to say, I cannot hope to give an adequate picture of this rich tradition of speculative Russian thought—especially since, if Judith Kornblatt is right, ‘there can be no single definition of Sophia, but only a pastiche of possibilities put into historical, literary, and theological context.’60 Nor can I hope to assuage legitimate concerns among many Orthodox theologians (and some in the West as well) that sophiology involves a heterodox refiguration and categorical metalepsis of the Christian tradition.61 Indeed, from what he knew of it, Przywara himself was very wary of Russian speculative theology, which he saw as tending toward ‘theopanism’, i.e., toward a ‘dissolution of the creaturely’ into God, and a blurring of the very distinction that the analogia entis (based upon Lateran IV) strictly maintains.62 But even if everything  I hasten to add that this formulation is so comprehensive as to pertain not only to individuals, but also to the Church, whose essence (to be the bride of Christ) is given and deferred, like the kingdom, which is ‘already’ and ‘not yet’. 58  See Jan van Ruusbroec, Werken III, Een Spieghel der Eeuwigher Salicheit, ed. L. Reypens, (Tielt: Lannoo, 1947), p. 167. 59  Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’. 60  Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), p. 93. 61  For Balthasar’s appreciative but qualified appropriation, see Jennifer Newsome Martin, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015). 62  For Pryzwara’s reading of Berdyaev’s The Meaning of History, see Ringen der Gegenwart, vol. 1, pp. 342–373, esp. pp. 349–351; for passing references to Bulgakov, see ‘The Scope of Analogy as a Fundamental Catholic Form’, in Analogia Entis, p. 360. 57

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in Solovyov, Florensky, and Bulgakov cannot be redeemed to the satisfaction of all parties, it is still possible to redeem those aspects of their thought that correspond to what (following Przywara) I have called analogical metaphysics, and so lend themselves to a common metaphysics—a ‘mere metaphysics’—of creation and deification. To this end let us first consider who or what this tradition understands by Sophia, beginning with the Wisdom literature that inspired it, and in particular with the central passage from Proverbs 8:22–30, in which Wisdom (Sophia) speaks in the first person as a kind of hypostasis, created by God in the beginning: The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old. Ages ago I was set up, at the first, before the beginning of the earth. When there were no depths I was brought forth, when there were no springs abounding with water. Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth; before he had made the earth with its fields, or the first of the dust of the world. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master workman; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always. rejoicing in his inhabited world. and delighting in the sons of men.

Since Sophia appears in the form of a primordial figure through whom God made the world, patristic and medieval theologians naturally tended to interpret Sophia as a reference to the second person of the Trinity, the Logos of John’s prologue, ‘through whom all things were made’ (John 1:3)—as is also repeated in the Nicene Creed. But while exegetically understandable, it is also highly problematic for the obvious reason that in v. 22 Sophia is said to be created (qānāh), which has created a headache for any number of exegetes, from the Cappadocians to Aquinas, who have had to bend over backwards to avoid the Arian implication of suggesting that the eternal Logos is created. All of which would seem to argue for a sophiological interpretation of this passage; indeed, orthodoxy itself would seem to suggest as much. But if Sophia is not the Logos, who is she? Is she a ‘fourth hypostasis’ in God as many fear? For his part, given that his formulations were less guarded than Florensky and Bulgakov, Solovyov is not free of blame for having generated this suspicion, as when he says in his lectures on Divine Humanity that Sophia is ‘the eternal body of God and the eternal soul of the world’. On a charitable reading, however, what Solovyov is trying to say is not inconsistent with orthodoxy. For, as he puts it in Lecture seven, Sophia is the ‘idea which God has before Him in His [work] of creation, and which he, consequently, realizes.’63 Understood thus, Sophia  Solovyov, Lectures on Godmanhood, trans. Peter Zouboff (San Rafael: Semantron, 2007), p. 155.

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represents either the totality of the ordo essentiarium, the world of essences as eternally imagined by God, or that which God realizes through the economy of salvation. In either case, however, we are not far from what the Greek and Latin fathers would have understand by rationes seminales (logoi spermatikoi): one figure representing both the eternal origin of the world in the mind of God and the historical realization of this order through Christ.64 Thus, rightly understood, Sophia is the name for creation in its protological and eschatological beauty—a beauty it possesses by virtue of its nuptial relationship with the Logos, who came to redeem it from the bondage of sin and restore it to himself. As Florensky put it, ‘Sophia is the beginning and center of redeemed creation, the Body of the Lord Jesus Christ.’65 Granting this basic understanding of Sophia, let us now turn to Bulgakov to see more concretely how a sophiological metaphysics maps onto the analogical metaphysics I outlined above. According to Bulgakov, the ontological law of the world, as established on the basis of Sophia, is ‘to become Sophia’.66 In other words, for Bulgakov there is a distinction to be drawn between what the world in its sophianic essence is, eternally reposing, as it were, in the mind of God as the causa finalis of creation, and the world in the process of becoming what it is—between what Bulgakov calls the ‘divine or heavenly Sophia’ and the ‘creaturely Sophia’, which is struggling in a fallen world to become what it is and to be restored to its original beauty.67 We thus have here a metaphysics remarkably congruent with the analogical metaphysics outlined above. There the emphasis was upon the individual human being who is made ad imaginem, and, as such, called to become what he or she is in Christ; here the emphasis is upon the whole of creation, which through union with Christ (the Lamb of God) is ‘to become Sophia’ (the Bride of the Lamb). Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest that, notwithstanding their different emphases, the analogical metaphysics of the West and the sophiological metaphysics of the East are formally identical. If the formula of analogical metaphysics was ‘essence in-­ and-­beyond existence’, here it is ‘Sophia in-and-beyond creation’. But even if sophiology has a more cosmic emphasis on what creation as a whole is meant to become, for Bulgakov this cosmic process is also played out at the level of individuals who are called to realize their given vocation. As he puts it in The Bride of the Lamb, ‘Every element of creation has from God its own theme or

 As Rowan Williams puts it in Sergii Bulgakov: Toward a Russian Political Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1999), p. 119: ‘Sophia is the concrete presence of the ideal world—primarily in the mind or purpose of God, derivatively therefore in the created order itself.’ 65  Florensky, The Pillar and Ground of Truth, trans. Boris Jakim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 253. 66  Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, trans. Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), p. 161. 67  In the words of the symbolist poet, A. K. Tolstoy (1817–1875), recalled with slight inaccuracy by Solovyov, ‘And I understood with a prophetic heart/ That all that is born from the Word, /Pouring out the rays of love, /Thirsts to return to him again. / And every stream of life, /Submissive to the law of love, /Rushes irrepressibly to God’s loins/With all the strength of being. / And sound and light are everywhere, /And there is only one principle for all the worlds, /And there is nothing in nature/That would not breathe with love.’ Quoted in Kornblatt, Divine Sophia, p. 89. 64

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character [and] is eternally given … as a task to itself.’68 Indeed, Bulgakov does not hesitate to use precisely the language we used above. On the one hand, he speaks of the creature’s essence as rooted in eternity: ‘the roots of a person’s being are submerged in the bottomless ocean of divine life.’69 On the other hand, he says that the human person ‘lives in time, in which he becomes himself’—in a becoming that ‘embraces both the meta-empirical and empirical world.’70 For Bulgakov, too, therefore, the human being exists in a state of tension between its ideality and reality, between its essence and existence, until the human being finds himself or herself in Christ—which is to say, loses himself or herself for Christ’s sake (Matthew 10:39). At which point ideality and reality, hitherto separate, begin to coincide in Christ—in the One in whom the ideal and the real world are one, in whom the essential ideality of the world really exists, and in whom the sophianic splendor of the world, which was lost in Adam, again begins to shine.

10.5  Conclusion The point of the foregoing has been to show, in the barest of outlines, a formal compatibility between the analogical metaphysics of the West and the sophiological metaphysics of the Christian East—in order tentatively to suggest that, at the end of the day, there is such a thing as a common Christian metaphysics, notwithstanding its various manifestations and accentuations. In the language of the Christian West, it is a metaphysics for which creation is originally an analogy, which Christ came to redeem. In the language of the Christian East (and the book of Proverbs), it is that Sophia who was ‘brought forth when there were no depths, no mountains, and no hills’ as the original beauty of the world—a beauty that faded with sin, but glimmers again in the saints and is all-luminous in Christ and the Mother of God. But as important as it is to see how much the Christian East and West have in common, especially at a time when the world is desperate to see a united witness to a single Truth, the differing emphases of each tradition should not be lost. Indeed, I would argue that, if there really is one basic metaphysics of creation and deification, it appears in its fullness only when each tradition makes a gift of what it has to the other, offering to the other the insights it has received from the Holy Spirit, which one might venture to summarize as follows: whereas sophiology helps one to appreciate the full aesthetic register of the all-too-abstract lines of the analogia entis, the analogia entis, in turn, with its sober emphasis on the maior dissimilitudo between God and creatures, can help to allay fears that sophiology, in speaking of the eternity of the world, blurs the difference between God and creation.

 Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb, p. 56.  Ibid., p. 87. 70  Ibid., p. 97. 68 69

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Bibliography Barth, Karl. 1956–1975. Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. ———. 1981. Fides quaerens intellectum: Anselms Beweis der Existens Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms, ed. Eberhard Jüngel and Ingolf U. Dalfterth. Theologischer Verlag: Zürich. Bulgakov, Sergius. 2008. The Bride of the Lamb. Trans. Boris Jakim. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Dahlke, Benjamin. 2012. Karl Barth, Catholic Renewal, and Vatican II. London: T&T Clark. de Lubac, Henri. 1996. Theology in History. Trans. Anne Englund Nash. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Denzinger, Heinrich. 2012. In Enchiridion Symbolorum, ed. Peter Hünermann, 43rd ed. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Florensky, Pavel. 1997. The Pillar and Ground of Truth. Trans. Boris Jakim. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Gavrilyuk, Paul. 2014. Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hunsinger, George. 2015. Reading Barth with Charity: A Hermeneutical Proposal. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic. Johnson, Keith. 2010. Karl Barth and the ‘Analogia Entis. London: T&T Clark. Ker, Ian. 2001. The Achievement of John Henry Newman. London: T&T Clark. Kerr, Fergus. 2002. After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism. Oxford: Blackwell. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983. The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. Kierkegaard’s Writings, Vol 19. Trans. and ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kobusch, Theo. 2000. Metaphysik als Lebensform. In Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Beatitudes. An English Version with Commentary and Supporting Studies, eds Hubertus R. Drobner and Albert Viciano. Proceedings of the Eighth International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa, Paderborn, 14–18 September, 1998. Leiden: Brill. Kornblatt, Judith Deutsch. 2009. Divine Sophia: The Wisdom Writings of Vladimir Solovyov. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lochbrunner, Manfred. 2009. Hans Urs von Balthasar und seine Theologen-Kollegen. Würzburg: Echter Verlag. Martin, Jennifer Newsome. 2015. Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. McCormack, Bruce. 1995. Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development: 1909–1936. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Milbank, John. 1989. Between Purgation and Illumination. In Christ, Ethics, and Tragedy: Essays in Honour of Donald MacKinnon, ed. Kenneth Surin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minges, Parethenius. 1907. Beitrag zur Lehre des Duns Scotus über die Univokation des Seinsbegriffs. Philosophisches Jahrbuch 20: 306–323. Minges, Parthenius. 1916. Zur Unterscheidung zwischen Wesenheit und Dasein in den Geschöpfen. Philosophisches Jahrbuch 29: 51–62. O’Regan, Cyril. Answering Back: Augustine’s Critique of Heidegger. In Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty, ed. Fran O’Rourke, 134–184. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Pabst, Adrian, and Christoph Schneider, eds. 2009. Eastern Orthodoxy and Radical Orthodoxy: Transfiguring the World Through the Word. Farnham: Ashgate. Pesch, Otto H. 1967. Die Theologie der Rechtfertigung bei Martin Luther und Thomas von Aquin. Mainz: Verlag. Przywara, Erich. 1925. Thomas von Aquin als Problematiker. Stimmen der Zeit 109 (June): 188–199. ———. 1928. Die Problematik der Neuscholastik. Kant-Studien 33: 73–98.

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———. 1929. Ringen der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsätze 1922–1927, 2 vols. Augsburg: Benno Filser-Verlag. ———. 1939. Crucis Mysterium. Das christliche Heute. Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh-Paderborn. ———. 1942. Der Grundsatz. Gratia non destruit sed supposit et perficit naturam. Scholastik 17: 178–186. ———. 1952. Humanitas: Der Mensch Gestern und Morgen. Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz. ———. 2014. Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Trans. and ed. John Betz and David Bentley Hart. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. Ricœur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Solovyov, Vladimir. 2007. Lectures on Godmanhood. Trans. Peter Zouboff. San Rafael: Semantron. van Ruusbroec, Jan. 1947. Een Spieghel der Eeuwigher Salicheit. Vol. 3 of Werken, ed. L. Reypens. Tielt: Lannoo. von Balthasar, Hans Urs. 1944. Analogie und Dialektik. Zur Klärung der theologischen Prinzipienlehre Karl Barths. Divus Thomas 22: 171–216. ———. 1945. Analogie und Natur. Zur Klärung der theologischen Prinzipienlehre Karl Barths. Divus Thomas 23: 3–56. ———. 1992. The Theology of Karl Barth. Trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. Ware, Kallistos. 1995. The Orthodox Way. Crestwood: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Williams, Rowan. 1999. Sergii Bulgakov: Toward a Russian Political Theology. Edinburgh: T&T Clark. ———. 2007. Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Chapter 11

Appropriation and Polemics: Karl Jaspers’ Criticism of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Religion István Czakó

11.1  Introduction Karl Jaspers is widely known as one of the most eminent interpreters of Søren Kierkegaard’s thinking in the early period of German reception. Although his relation to the Danish thinker is often characterized as an uncritical approval, this receptive relationship was in fact rather ambiguous in certain respects. In my article I wish to focus on the central topic of the religiously motivated negation of the world (religiöse Weltverneinung). This attitude is certainly present in the late thinking of Kierkegaard and Jaspers’ sharp criticism of it is remarkable. I wish to argue, however, that this criticism is still one-sided and simplifying since it is based almost exclusively on the polemical writings of the late period (Kirchenkampf) and fails to consider the overall formation and development of Kierkegaard’s concept of religion. I will also briefly discuss whether Kierkegaard’s thinking can be adequately dealt with within the framework of a systematic philosophy of religion, as well as in what sense his and Jaspers’ positions represented truly new ways in religious philosophy in their historical contexts.

The present study was carried out with the generous support of the Bolyai János Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. I. Czakó (*) Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_11

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11.2  P  hilosophy and Religion in the Thinking of a ‘Religious Writer’ (Religieus Forfatter) Although in the history of reception Kierkegaard has been treated by many authors in the specific context of philosophy of religion already from the early period1 till the most recent studies,2 nevertheless it seems suitable to begin with a short overview of the issue to be treated.3 It is namely by no means evident that Kierkegaard actually could be characterized without qualification as a ‘philosopher of religion.’4 First of all, it can be objected that he never defined himself as a ‘philosopher’ and even less as a ‘philosopher of religion’. Indeed, this latter concept would have been for him in fact a simple contradictio in terminis. One of his pseudonyms, Assessor Wilhelm, explicitly claims in a letter to his young friend in Either/Or II: ‘As you know, I have never passed myself off as a philosopher, least of all when I am conversing with you.’5 Moreover, in the history of reception it was Martin Heidegger who—in his famous study, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead”’ (1943)—also claimed, that ‘Kierkegaard is not a thinker but a religious writer.’6 Although the 1  Lev Shestov, ‘Sören Kierkegaard philosophe religieux’, five radio talks printed in Les Cahiers de Radio-Paris 12 (1937): pp.  1214–42. Reidar Thomte, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1949. 2  Günter Figal, ‘Søren Kierkegaard’, in Klassiker der Religionsphilosophie. Von Platon bis Kierkegaard, ed. Friedrich Niewöhner (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995), pp. 319–331.; D. Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin, eds., Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2000); Louis Pojman, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1984); J. Heywood Thomas, Philosophy of Religion in Kierkegaard’s Writings, Studies in the History of Philosophy, vol. 30 (Lewiston—Queenston—Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1994); Michael Tilley, ‘Kierkegaard and Recent Continental Philosophy of Religion’, Philosophy Compass 8/4 (2013): pp. 400–408. 3  As for this issue, see István Czakó, ‘Rethinking Religion Existentially: New Approaches to Classical Problems of Religious Philosophy in Kierkegaard’, in Jon Stewart, ed., A Companion to Kierkegaard, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), pp. 281–294. 4  Figal’s opening sentence to his study on Kierkegaard’s philosophy of religion is certainly well grounded: ‘Søren Kierkegaard wäre gewiß nicht einverstanden gewesen, wenn man ihn einen Religionsphilosophen genannt hätte.’ Figal, ‘Søren Kierkegaard’, Klassiker der Religionsphilosophie, p. 319. 5  Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (henceforth abbreviated as SKS), 55 vols. (SKS 1–28, K 1–K27), eds. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et  al. (Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegard Research Centre, G.  E. C.  Gad Publishers, 1997–2013), vol. 3, p. 166; Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 2 vols. (henceforth abbreviated as E/O I–II), trans. Howard Hong et al. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 170. See also the claim of the pseudonymous author Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling: ‘The present author is by no means a philosopher. He has not understood the system, whether there is one, whether it is completed ... He is poetice et eleganter a supplementary clerk ...’ (SKS 4, p. 103); Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling; Repetition (henceforth abbreviated as FT), trans. Howard Hong et al. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), p. 7. 6  Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead”’, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), pp.  53–112; here, p.  94. As for Heidegger’s view of Kierkegaard as a ‘religious writer’ see

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specific context of Heidegger’s statement is the history of metaphysics, and so can be discussed in many respects,7 the question inevitably rises: quo jure can we deal with the Danish thinker as a philosopher, moreover, as one of religion? It might seem, at least at first glance, that the effort to discuss Kierkegaard as a philosopher of religion inevitably leads to a text-immanent contradiction, and it is also disputable from the point of view of history of reception. Regarding the text-immanent contradiction: first of all it can be pointed out that Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous Assessor Wilhelm’s argumentation against philosophy in Either/Or II has in itself a striking philosophical character, moreover it is directed against a specific kind of philosophical thinking. Roughly speaking this was the—at that time dominating—Hegelian system, or rather its infiltrated forms in Danish intellectual life.8 These forms all considered philosophy as a kind of a priori science of reason (Vernunftwissenschaft) which is based on the logical and metaphysical category of mediation (Vermittlung). Assessor Wilhelm characterizes the difference between this form of philosophy and his own as follows: Philosophy turns toward the past, toward the totality of experienced world history; it shows how the discursive elements come together in a higher unity; it mediates and mediates. It seems to me, however, that it does not answer the question I am asking, for I am asking about the future.9

Through Kierkegaard’s resolute ‘asking about the future’—i. e. about the structure of human existence which cannot be conceptually grasped—there appeared a new way of philosophizing which undoubtedly had its relevance also in the field of religious philosophy. There is a striking difference, however, between this approach and Hegel’s academic philosophy of religion.10 Whereas for Hegel ‘the content, the need, and the Thonhauser, Gerhard, Ein rätselhaftes Zeichen. Zum Verhältnis von Martin Heidegger und Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, vol. 33 (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), pp.  426–454. See also Vincent McCarthy, ‘Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and in Full View’, in Jon Stewart, ed., Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, vol. 9 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 95–125. 7  ‘One wonders how Heidegger can possibly have taken Kierkegaard to be only a “religious thinker” with no ontological concerns. One wonders how he could have written the ontology of “temporality”, which constitutes the meaning of the Being of Dasein in Being and Time, without so much as acknowledging Kierkegaard, when the whole analysis, in my view, derives in its main lines from Kierkegaard!’ See John Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics (Bloomington: Indiana Univesity Press, 1987), p. 16. 8  See Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 9  SKS 3, p. 167 / E/O II, p. 170. 10  As regards the fundamental difference between the philosophy of religion of Hegel and that of Kierkegaard, Stewart rightly points out: ‘Hegel consistently claims that religion is a form of knowing and to this extent is continuous with philosophy ... By contrast, Kierkegaard, working with an entirely different set of presuppositions, goes to great lengths to separate religion or specifically Christianity from all forms of knowledge.’ Jon Stewart, ‘Kierkegaard and Hegel on Faith and Knowledge’, in A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur (Oxford: Wiley-

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interest of philosophy represent something which it has in common with religion’,11—i.e. there is a substantial identity between philosophy and religion12— Kierkegaard claims already in one of his early journals that ‘[p]hilosophy and Christianity can never be united.’13 This principle is apparently one of the most important keys of his understanding of religion and its relation to philosophy. Considering that in Kierkegaard’s time the term ‘philosophy of religion’ was already widely accepted in the academic philosophy and it was certainly known to Kierkegaard,14 it might be prima facie somewhat surprising that he uses this term very rarely in his writings (interestingly enough he uses different ways of writing like ‘Religions-Philosophie’,15 ‘Religionsphilosophie’,16 and ‘Religions Philosophien’17) and he never applies it to his own thinking. One of the reasons for Kierkegaard’s reserved attitude towards this term may lie in the fact that he, unlike academic religious philosophy, never asks what religion is in itself or even Christianity conceptually. The objective thinking, which is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence, is simply unable to deal with the problems of Christianity. The scope of Kierkegaard’s philosophical approach to Blackwell, 2011), pp. 501–518; here, p. 501. 11  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Together with a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God, 3 vols., trans. E. B. Speirs B. D. and J. Burdon Sanderson (London: Kegan Paul—Trench—Trübner, 1895,) p. 19. 12  As for Hegel’s philosophy of religion, see Robert R.  Williams, ‘Love, Recognition, Spirit: Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion’, in A Companion to Hegel, pp. 387–413. 13  SKS 17, p. 30. AA:13; Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks (henceforth abbreviated as KJN) 11 vols., eds. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); see vol. 1, p. 25. As for the interpretation of this crucial statement of the young Kierkegaard, see Hermann Deuser, ‘“Philosophie und Christentum lassen sich doch niemals vereinen”. Kierkegaards theologische Ambivalenzen im Journale AA/BB (1835–1837)’, Kierkegaard Studies. Yearbook, eds. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Hermann Deuser and Jon Stewart (Berlin and New  York: Walter de Gruyter, 2003), pp. 1–29; Gerhard Schreiber, Apriorische Gewissheit. Das Glaubensverständnis des jungen Kierkegaards und seine philosophisch-theologischen Voraussetzungen (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), pp.  58–61; Jon Stewart, ‘Kierkegaard’s Claim About the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity in the Journal AA’, Kierkegaard and Christianity, Roman Králik et al., eds. (Toronto–Šal’a: Kierkegaard Circle, Trinity College-Kierkegaard Society in Slovakia, 2008), pp. 35–58. 14  See e. g. the following works in his library: Johann Gustav Friedrich Billroth, Vorlesungen über Religionsphilosophie, ed. Johann Eduard Erdmann (Leipzig: Contant, 1837); Johann Eduard Erdmann, Vorlesungen über Glauben und Wissen als Einleitung in die Dogmatik und Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1837); G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, second revised edition, ed. Philipp Marheineke (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1840); Henrich Steffens, Christliche Religionsphilosophie, 2 vols. (Breslau: Josef Mar and Komp., 1839). For these volumes, see The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library, Katalin Nun, Gerhard Schreiber, and Jon Stewart, eds. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), entries 428, 479, 564–565, 797–798. 15  SKS 18, p. 375 / KK:11. I am indebted to Heiko Schulz and Gerhard Schreiber for having called my attention to this aspect of Kierkegaard’s writings. 16  SKS 19, p. 56 / Not 1:7; SKS 19, p. 145 / Not 4:13; SKS 19, p. 162 / Not 4:40; SKS 17, p. 219 / DD:10; SKS 27, p. 40 / Papir 9:1; SKS 20, p. 249 / NB 3:12; SKS 20, p. 229 / NB 2:235. 17  SKS 19, p. 15 / Not 1:3.

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Christianity is a quite different, existential one, which is formulated by one of his pseudonyms as follows: I, Johannes Climacus, born and bred in this city and now thirty years old, an ordinary human being like most folk, assume that a highest good, called an eternal happiness, awaits me just as it awaits a housemaid and a professor. I have heard that Christianity is one’s prerequisite for this good. I now ask how I may enter into relation to this doctrine.18

In other words: the question is not what Christianity is essentially or what the cognitive content of this religion is, but rather: how can I, as an existing individual, become a Christian? This position is in close connection with Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes Climacus’s subjective-existential conception of truth: When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual’s relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.19

In Climacus’s approach the issue is neither about the objective justification of the truth of Christianity, nor about its interpretation within the framework of a philosophical system, but rather ‘about the concern of the infinitely interested individual with regard to his own relation to such a doctrine.’20 Religion, like existence, cannot be grasped objectively but only in the framework of subjectivity and passionate inwardness. Whereas in Hegel philosophy of religion was an integral part of his philosophical system, Climacus claims: ‘(a) a logical system can be given; (b) but a system of existence [Tilværelsens system] cannot be given.’21 Since existence cannot be understood as a moment of a philosophical system, and since religious faith is a form of existence, a systematic religious philosophy would be for Kierkegaard a multiple conceptual contradiction. However, if we take a closer look at the œuvre, we find that despite the decided polemics against the System and especially against the Hegelian interpretations of Christianity, one of Kierkegaard’s central issues is undoubtedly the problems of religious existence. Albeit human existence cannot be grasped in an abstract-­ conceptual way, it can serve as a target of a subjective thinking and existential self-­ understanding of individual. By developing genuine existential categories, Kierkegaard certainly opened a new horizon for rethinking religion from the perspective of the ontological structure of human existence. Therefore, even if he remained an outsider in his own time, it is beyond question that he represents a completely new way of thinking which had a significant influence not only on continental theology, but also on philosophy and religious philosophy.

 SKS 7, p. 25 / Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2 vols. (henceforth abbreviated as CUP 1, 2), trans. Howard Hong et al. (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 15. 19  SKS 7, p. 182 / CUP 1, p. 199. 20  SKS 7, p. 24. / CUP 1, p. 15. 21  SKS 7, p. 105 / CUP 1, p. 109. 18

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11.3  A  ppropriation and Polemics: Outlines of an Ambivalent Reception Whereas Heidegger, as we have seen, characterized Kierkegaard as ‘not a thinker but a religious writer’, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) considered him explicitly to be ‘the most important thinker of our post-Kantian age’.22 Jaspers’ prominent contribution to the philosophical interpretation and dissemination of Kierkegaard’s thinking at a very early stage of reception is indisputable.23 The influence of the Danish thinker on him can hardly be overestimated24; his whole work can also be seen, as Michael Theunissen remarks, ‘as a unique Kierkegaard commentary’.25 Jaspers’ main philosophical aim fully coincided with that of Kierkegaard; namely, to read ‘the original text (Urschrift) of individual, human existential relations’.26 Since Jaspers’ basic concern was to transcend the lifeless formalism of neo-Kantianism, and to grasp and illuminate the philosophical problems of factual life, the discovery of Kierkegaard’s thought stroke him as a

 Karl Jaspers, The Disturbers: Descartes, Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche—Philosophers in Other Realms: Einstein, Weber, Marx, vol. 4 of The Great Philosophers, 4 vols., eds. Michael Ermath and Leonard H. Ehrlich (New York—San Diego—London: Harcourt Brace, 1994), p. 191. The second part of this article is substantially based on my work Paradoxes of Existence. Contributions to Kierkegaard Research (Budapest and Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016), pp. 157–168. 23  The canonization of Kierkegaard’s thought in the academic philosophical scene is closely connected with Jaspers’ resolute work. As he remarks, the Danish thinker was at the time of his early lectures in effect unknown as a philosopher: ‘In meinen Vorlesungen war er [i.e., Kierkegaard] eine der großen Gestalten der Vergangenheit (ich war erstaunt, daß er im Bereich der Universitätsphilosophie nicht existiere, und daß in den Lehrbüchern der Philosophiegeschichte nicht einmal sein Name vorkam).’ Karl Jaspers, ‘Nachwort (1955) zu meiner Philosophie’, in Philosophische Weltorientierung, vol. 1 of Philosophie, 3 vols., 4th ed. (Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer, 1973 [1932]), p. xx. 24  ‘The discovery of the concept of Existenz itself, and the emphasis and importance Jaspers attributed to it throughout an entire writing life, cannot but be derived from an attentive reading of Kierkegaard, where the concept of existence is foregrounded in so many works.’ Roger Poole, ‘The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions’, Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 51. Jaspers himself claims in his late autobiographical retrospect: ‘Kierkegaard verdanke ich den Begriff der “Existenz”, der mir seit 1916 maßgebend wurde, um das zu fassen, worum ich mich bis dahin in Unruhe bemüht hatte.’ Karl Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, Erweiterte Neuausgabe (Munich: Piper, 1977), p. 125. 25  ‘In der Tat kann man das Werk von Jaspers als einen einzigen Kommentar zu Kierkegaard lesen.’ See Michael Theunissen, Wilfried Greve, eds., Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), p. 62. 26  Karl Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz. Fünf Vorlesungen gehalten vom 25. bis 29. März (Groningen—Batavia: J.B.  Wolters’ Uitgevers-Maatschappij, 1935), pp.  1–27; here, p.  8 (in English as Reason and Existenz. Five Lectures by Karl Jaspers, trans. William Earle [Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997], pp. 19–50; here, p. 27). See also SKS 7, p. 573 / CUP 1, p. 630. 22

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‘revelation’ (Offenbarung).27 In the deep cultural and intellectual crisis of the world wars, Kierkegaard’s exceptional figure (Ausnahme) was perceived by Jaspers as a ‘storm-bird’ (Sturmvogel)28 presaging the oncoming catastrophe without providing any positive doctrine. Kierkegaard’s criticism of the age and his demand for honesty (Redlichkeit) were for Jaspers of peculiar importance. This is the reason why his interpretation of Kierkegaard’s life and thought never lacked a close investigation into Kierkegaard’s late polemical writings. Beyond Kierkegaard’s genuine reading of the ‘original text’ (Urschrift) of Existenz, Jaspers mostly appreciated his way of thinking and the highly sophisticated method of ‘indirect communication’ (indirekte Mitteilung). This method was productively assimilated in Jaspers’ basic concept of ‘illumination of Existenz’ (Existenzerhellung), which signifies for him the only way of authentic philosophizing. Jaspers, however, did not assimilate Kierkegaard’s thought without reserve and ambivalence. He was in fact one of the sharpest critics of some aspects of Kierkegaard’s concept of Christianity. He not only claimed that he was never a ‘follower’ (Anhänger) of the Danish thinker, but he also empasized: ‘Kierkegaard’s Christianity kept me intact … His conception of Christian faith … meant the end of historical Christianity as well as the end of every philosophical life.’29 From this aversion follows in Jaspers not only a negative attitude but also a methodological principle, namely to omit ‘all “Christian” matter’30 from the interpretation of Kierkegaard. This rather selective methodology of Jaspers’ theistic philosophy leads at the end to the ignorance of integral parts of Kierkegaard’s corpus. As one of the leading commentators, Leonard Ehrlich remarks: Although the first part of The Sickness unto Death was of substantive importance to Jaspers’ thinking, he never referred to the second part. Similarly, he placed the greatest value on Kierkegaard’s philosophical pseudonyms, especially Climacus, and on his Journals, but never on the Edifying and Christian Discourses. Of the Christian writings Jaspers valued only the Attack upon Christendom.31

 In the ‘Preface’ to the fourth edition of Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, Jaspers expressly stresses: ‘Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes, dann vor allem Kierkegaard, den ich seit 1914 studierte, in zweiter Linie Nietzsche, waren wie Offenbarungen.’ See Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 4. ed. (Berlin—Göttingen—Heidelberg: Springer, 1954), p. x. 28  See Karl Jaspers, Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner (München: Piper, 1968), pp. 309, 327. See also SKS 18, p. 271, JJ:391 / KJN 2, p. 143. 29  Karl Jaspers, ‘Nachwort (1955) zu meiner Philosophie’, p. xx. 30  Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer, 1919), p. 370 (in English as ‘Reading Kierkegaard 1: Becoming Manifest’, trans. Edith Ehrlich, in Joseph W.  Koterski, Raymond J.  Langley, eds., Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003), pp. 243–257; here, p. 245). 31  Leonard H. Ehrlich, ‘Editorial Note’, in Koterski, Langley, eds., Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy, p. 244. 27

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This methodology, which serves Jaspers’ own philosophical aim, is rather problematic not only in itself but also in that it disagrees with Heidegger’s well-known claim that ‘more is to be learned philosophically from his [i.e. Kiekegaard’s] “edifying” writings than from his theoretical work.’32 Thus, we can undoubtedly state that Jaspers’ reception of Kierkegaard was by far not an uncritical assimilation but was actually permeated by an ambivalent attitude. In what follows an attempt will be made to outline the topic of religious acosmism, that is, the religious negation of the world, which seems to constitute the very core of Jaspers’ criticism of Kierkegaard. Firstly, the concept of ‘acosmism’ will be briefly outlined, then Jaspers’ existential concept of world as well as its religious negation will be discussed with special reference to Kierkegaard’s work. I wish to argue that although Jaspers’ criticism is certainly relevant regarding the late period of Kierkegaard’s authorship, it is still somewhat simplifying and reductive considering the historical development of Kierkegaard’s position.

11.3.1  Jaspers’ Concept of Religious Acosmism According to Hans-Walter Schütte,33 the acosmism has never appeared as a separate philosophical position. Rather, it served to save some philosophical systems against the charge of atheism. Accordingly, it was used by Johann Gottlieb Fichte in the atheism debate in Jena (1798–1800). In one of his written defenses, Fichte asks of his critic: ‘Find a new naming, call me [i. e. Fichte] perhaps an acosmist, but not an atheist, for what I negate lies in something totally different than you think.’34 The concept of acosmism acquired a specific normativity in the pantheism and atheism debates concerning the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza initiated by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. It was the Leipzig philosopher Ernst Platner who claimed, first of all, that ‘what Spinoza negates is in fact not the existence of God but that of the world.’35 In his posthumously published Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Hegel similarly claims that Spinozism is acosmism rather than pantheism … The accusers of Spinozism are unable to liberate themselves from the finite; hence they declare that for Spinozism everything is God, because it is precisely the aggregate of finitudes … that has there disappeared.36 32  Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 407. 33  Hans-Walter Schütte, ‘Akosmismus’, in Joachim Ritter, ed., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel—Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1971), vol. 1, p. 128. 34  Johann Gottlieb Fichte, ‘J.  G. Fichte’s als Verfassers des ersten angeklagten Aufsatzes und Mitherausgebers des phil. Journals Verantwortungsschrift’, in Immanuel Hermann Fichte, ed., Fichtes Werke, vol. 5, Zur Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971), p. 269. 35  Ernst Platner, Philosophische Aphorismen. Nebst einigen Anleitungen zur philosophischen Geschichte, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Schwickertscher Verlag, 1776), p. 353. 36  G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, Introduction and the Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 377.

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In order to be able to grasp the core of Jaspers’ criticism of religious acosmism we have, firstly, to outline his concept of the world as reflected in his works Philosophy (1932) and The Philosophical Faith (1946). In the chapter entitled ‘World’ of the first volume of Philosophy (Philosophische Weltorientierung), Jaspers elaborates on his existential concept of the world.37 Although his conception is less radical than Heidegger’s phenomenological concept of In-der-Welt-Sein as the ontological basic structure of Dasein, Jaspers clearly emphasizes the inseparability of subjective being-there (which is called Dasein by Jaspers) and objective reality: neither of them constitutes in itself the unity of the world. In the section ‘World and Transcendence’, Jaspers distinguishes between two types of world concepts: whereas the first one considers the world in itself, without anything else, the second one treats it as a phenomenon (Erscheinung), in the relation between Existenz and transcendence. From the point of view of pure world-orientation, the world manifests itself as the ‘permanently stable’ (das dauernd Bestehende). It has neither beginning nor end and is immutable, and everything has its beginning as well as its end in it. It is the enduring universe which rests in itself. From the point of view of transcending, however, this world is a mere being-there (Dasein) and a phenomenon (Erscheinung). The human being is a possible Existenz inasmuch as he or she does not constitute a mere part of the world, but is free to be him- or herself. For the possible Existenz opens the transcendence in the world. The possible Existenz relates himself to Transcendence together with other Existenzen through the world. In his post-war lecture series The Philosophical Faith Jaspers highlights the following thesis among the contents of philosophical faith: ‘The reality of the world is evanescent [hat ein verschwindendes Dasein] between God and Existenz.’38 This claim expresses the phenomenal character of the world which can never be given for us as an object in its totality. God is Deus absconditus, absolutely transcendent in his relation to the world; at the same time, however, he is also immensely close to us in the absolute historicity of every individual situation. God manifests himself in the world always in form of chiffres, to whom an unambigous meaning can never be attributed. According to Jaspers, we do not have an immediate knowledge of God and Existenz. The only way for us to gain knowledge is the investigation of the world, and the only way to actualize our Existenz is the actualization of the world. In worldlessness (Weltlosigkeit) we will lose ourselves, too.39 Jaspers treats the concept of religious negation of the world in the second volume of his Philosophy: Existenzerhellung.40 The context of the discussion is the manifestation of unconditionality (Unbedingtheit) of Existenz in the human activity.

37  Karl Jaspers, Philosophie, vol. 1, Philosophische Weltorientierung (Berlin—Heidelberg—New York: Springer, 1973), pp. 61–85. 38  Karl Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube (Munich: Piper, 1948), p. 32. 39  Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube, p. 33. 40  Karl Jaspers, Philosopie, vol. 2, Existenzerhellung, 4th ed. (Berlin—Heidelberg—New York: Springer, 1973), pp. 318–320.

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Jaspers distinguishes between two forms of unconditional activities: the one is suicide, and the other religious activity, especially religious world-negation. According to Jaspers, the consequence of unconditional religious activities is to grasp genuine Being (eigentliches Sein) exclusively in itself. By grasping genuine Being in the religious act absolutely, the religious person negates everything else which falls outside of this act. Whereas in magic, superstition, and mythology one tries to constrain the deity by means of sacrifices and asceticism in order to reach world-immanent goals, in the Far-Eastern and Western religions there appears the phenomenon of total ascetism and world-negation. In its pure form, world-negation is a negative decision of the individual: one does not identify oneself either with any objectivity of worldly being, or with any subjectivity, but instead relates oneself exclusively to Transcendence. Thus, one negates everything worldlessly (weltlos) for the sake of Transcendence, albeit that this negation is in the world essentially ambivalent, since it is impossible to leave the world within the world itself. Existenz, while negating the world, is in a permanent strife with itself. The individual relates him- or herself to Transcendence in an irresolvable solitude. If this kind of Existenz appears as the true one, which ought to be followed, then it will be a deceptive fen fire (Irrlicht). However, if it draws attention to the fundamental questionability of every being, then it will become really true. The fact that there lived in every era individuals who sought this worldlessness (Weltlosigkeit), is a permanent indication of possible Existenz in the world. According to Jaspers, world-negation as a purely negative decision arises from an incomprehensible unconditionality. The world-negating individual is essentially an exception (Ausnahme), who can never become an exemplar to be followed. In Jaspers’ view, it was Kierkegaard who clearly contrasted the individual’s positive and the negative decisions regarding the world: whereas the positive decision obtains the world, the negative one remains in an existential floating (Schweben). Whereas the positive decision provides security, the negative one remains uncertain and ambigous. Finally, whereas the positive decision gives stability, the negative one needs to be maintaimed. The individual making the negative decision wants eternity but he or she is unable to grasp it in its hiddenness. This individual can neither stay firmly in the world nor can he or she be at home in eternity. The negative decision is analogous to committing suicide. However, no one may dare to brand this decision entirely false. According to Jaspers, the heroes of negativity remain on the border of human possibilities and sacrifice themselves. Their awful solitude reveals the basic experience of world-negating individuals who undermine the tranquillity secured by the world. This negative decision is necessarily self-contradictory since it does not negate a concrete, world-immanent fact but rather negates the worldliness (Weltlichkeit) of the individual in order to grasp Transcendence directly and absolutely outside the world. Nevertheless, Jaspers regards the negative, i.e. world-negating attitude as a heroic act by means of which the individual becomes a disturbing exception (Ausnahme).

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11.3.2  T  he Problems of Religious Acosmism in Jaspers’ Reception of Kierkegaard As we have seen, Jaspers, while explicating the problems of religious acosmism in the second volume of his Philosophy, directly connects the exposition of the issue with the treatment of Kierkegaard’s own conception. It should be pointed out that world-negation is treated here as a heroic act and the world-negating individual is presented as the hero of negativity, as an exception drawing attention to the floating of existence as well as to the original questionableness of it. Considering Jaspers’ own terminology it is should be noted that the term ‘religious acosmism’ (religiöser Akosmismus) does not appear in his published works. Instead, he largely uses the expression ‘religious negation of the world’ (religiöse Weltverneinung), which entirely corresponds to the former term. On this point, we can refer to a remarkable parallelism between Jaspers’ position and Martin Buber’s concept of ‘acosmic relation to God’ (akosmische Beziehung zu Gott). This later concept has a rather critical function in Buber’s thinking and it plays a decisive role in his interpretation of Kierkegaard.41 Buber assigns a great hermeneutical importance to Kierkegaard’s claim: ‘Everyone should be chary about having to do with “the others”, and should essentially speak only with God and with himself.’42 According to Buber, ‘the essential relation to God, which Kierkegaard means, presupposes … a renunciation of every essential relation to anything else, to the world, to community, to the individual man.’43 Due to the absolute exclusivity of the God-­ relation, intersubjectivity becomes devaluated or even dissolved (e.g. Kierkegaard’s relation to marriage and public life): through the decision of faith the individual becomes isolated and closed in himself in a solipsistic way. Instead of negating the reality of the world, Kierkegaard’s acosmism negates its existential relevance for the individual (Danish: Enkelte). For believers, everything that falls outside of their absolute relation to the absolute is ultimately nonexistent. It seems to me that on this point Jaspers’ reading and criticism of Kierkegaard fully coincides with that of Buber. In what follows, I will try to show what significance the problems of acosmism in Jaspers’ reception of Kierkegaard have from an historical point of view. As regards the development of Jaspers’ thinking, it is remarkable that although he  As for Buber’s critical reception of Kierkegaard, see Peter Šajda, ‘No-One Can So Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself’, in Kierkegaard and Existentialism, ed. Jon Stewart (Aldershot: Ashgate), 2011, pp. 33–62. I am particularly indebted to Peter Šajda for having called my attention to the problems of acosmism in Jaspers’ reception of Kierkegaard. 42  SKS 16, p. 86 / Søren Kierkegaard, ‘“The Single Individual:” Two Notes Concerning My Work as an Author’, in The Point of View, including On My Work as an Author, The Point of View for My Work as an Author, and Armed Neutrality, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 101–126; here, p. 106. 43  Martin Buber, ‘What is Man?’, in his Between Man and Man (London: Kegan Paul, 1947), p. 179. 41

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reflects on the problems of acosmism or religious negation of the world very early, this concept did not have any critical or normative function for him in this period. Rather it had a constative and descriptive role without any pretension of a normative evaluation. Moreover, in the second volume of Philosophy, Jaspers explicitly formulates a methodological requirement to abstain from any critical evaluation in this field. In the later works, however, this attitude changes remarkably. In the Basel period (1948–1969), especially in his Philosophical Faith and Revelation (1962), the use of the concept ‘religious world negation’ becomes explicitely critical and Jaspers stresses here the destructive character of Kierkegaard’s conception of faith. Although this change is striking enough, it seems to me that it would be somewhat rash to conclude from this phenomenon to a conceptional turn in Jaspers’ position. Changes of this kind are absolutely not characteristic of his many decades long, intensive reception of Kierkegaard.44 It seems to me that instead of a conceptual turn there lies a transposition of the thematic emphasis of Jaspers’ approach. Although the German philosopher dealt with the problems of philosophical and Christian faith already in his lectures of 1947 in Basel, nonetheless a systematic exposition of this topic took place only after his resettlement in Basel (1948). Especially in this period he had an intensive experience with the thought of his colleague, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886–1968), whose early, dialectical period was also influenced by Kierkegaard. Remarkably enough, Jaspers became aware of the acosmic character of Kierkegaard’s philosophy already in his early work Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919). In the context of the analysis of existential limit-­ situations (Grenzsituationen), he treats Kierkegaard’s concept of guilt (Sünde) and he critically claims that Kierkegaard ‘says nothing about the very experience of world-views themselves. He merely hints that such powers are wholly beyond the world: they are alone with God … It is a reflective, solitary religiosity of thought.’45 Later, in the third volume of his Philosophy (1932), Jaspers emphasizes that contrary to Kierkegaard’s solipsistic, acosmic faith the very field of our relation to Transcendence is the unity of the world and history: ‘Worldless love is love of nothing, an unfounded bliss. I really love Transcendence only as my love transfigures the world [liebende Weltverklärung].’46 Also, in his Groningen lectures Reason and Existenz (1935), Jaspers highlights the negative-acosmic character of Kierkegaard’s conception of faith. Jaspers outlines it as ‘an otherworldly Christianity which is like Nothingness and shows itself only in negation (the absurd, martyrdom) and in

 Leonard H.  Ehrlich, ‘Jaspers Reading Kierkegaard: An Instance of the Double Helix’, in Koterski, Langley, eds., Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy, p. 239. 45  Jaspers, ‘Reading Kierkegaard: Guilt: The Fundamental Limit Situation’, in Koterski, Langley, eds., Karl Jaspers, p. 256. 46  Karl Jaspers, Philosophie, vol. 3, Metaphysik, 4. ed. (Berlin—Heidelberg—New York: Springer, 1973), p. 167. 44

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negative resolution’.47 ‘Kierkegaard leaped to a Christianity which was concieved as an absurd paradox, as decision for utter world-negation and martyrdom.’48 It is ­characteristic that absurdity and martyrdom appear consistently in Jaspers’ writings as concrete forms of religious world negation. In his Basel lectures, The Philosophical Faith (1947), Jaspers claims that God is absolutly transcendent; he is Deus absconditus.49 This position would have been certainly accepted by all of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. Yet, athough the two thinkers agree in the absolute otherness and cognitive incomprehensibility of transcendence, they totally disagree in the possible forms of the relationship to it. Wheras the worldliness (Weltlichkeit) of Existenz is for Jaspers a condition of possibility of this relation, Kierkegaard, on the contrary, conceives the same worldliness as an obstacle to relating oneself to the transcendence. This is the conceptional background of Kierkegaard’s concept of absurd faith which is characterised by Jaspers as follows: ‘no one needs to choose a profession, no one needs to get married; it is only martyrdom in which authentic Christianity consists.’50 The problem of religious acosmism also plays a central role in Jaspers’ late comprehensive work Philosophical Faith and Revelation (1962). In this opus, however, the critical attitude becomes predominant. Here Jaspers deals with Kierkegaard very extensively,51 but he focuses on only one crucial problem, namely on Kierkegaard’s late, serious conflict with the Danish established Church (Kirchenkampf, 1854–55). The German philosopher assigns to this conflict a definitive significance, and he believes that the Kirchenkampf was an inevitable consequence of Kierkegaard’s basic concept of absurd faith. He claims that Kierkegaard’s ‘fight was not a late aberration of his, but the outcome of an irresistibly maturing insight. It resulted from the poetic construction of Christianity he had derived from theological dialectics’.52 It would be, however, a mistake to believe that the Danish thinker criticized the established Church from the standpoint of authentic Christianity. What Kierkegaard really wanted and demanded, was, according to Jaspers, not authentic Christianity but simply and solely ‘honesty’ (Redlichkeit).53 This attitude manifests itself most clearly in one of Kierkegaard’s late articles published in the journal Fædrelandet with the title of ‘What Do I Want?’ the first sentence of which reads:

 Jaspers, Reason and Existenz, p. 25.  Ibid., p. 36. 49  Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube, p. 33. 50  Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube, p. 128. 51  Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, trans. E.  B. Ashton (London: Collins, 1967), pp. 346–356. 52  Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 346. 53  ‘Kierkegaard is not fighting here as a Christian, for Christianity, but as a human being, for veracity. “Quite simple: I want honesty. I am neither clemency nor rigour—I am human honesty.”’ Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 347. 47 48

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‘I want—honesty.’54 Later on he formulates it even more strongly: ‘I am neither leniency nor stringency—I am human honesty.’55 The significance of this sentence can hardly be overestimated. The demand for honesty was, namely, the leading tone of the philosophical tendencies appearing in the period of the dissolution of German Idealism. Whereas Schopenhauer apostrophizes the German Idealists as dishonest charlatans, and Nietzsche announces the demand of intellectual honesty, Kierkegaard reveals the fundamental inauthenticity of established Christianity. The radicality of Kierkegaard’s criticism is based even on the principle of honesty with which he identifies himself. According to Jaspers, the truth of Kierkegaard lies in the unconditionality of his will to honesty, which can be certainly compared to Nietzsche’s famous saying: ‘I am no man—I am dynamite.’56 Nevertheless, Jaspers apparently here formulates his sharpest criticism of Kierkegaard’s conception of Christianity: ‘Having made my choice, I may express my opinion that the way shown by Kierkegaard under the pseudonyms of Climacus and Anticlimacus—the way to a faith on the strength of absurdity, by an ingenious and seductively conceived categorial edifice and a construcion of following Christ in the unequivocal sense of total world-denial—would lead astray.’57 In his Nachlass Jaspers describes the paradox of faith as a ‘world-less transcendence of the isolated soul with God’.58 The negativity of religious acosmism destroys interpersonal relations as well as the religious community itself. According to Jaspers, if Kierkegaard were right, it would mean the end of Christianity in the world. If the Christian faith is what he construed it to be, probably no one can believe it anymore—and Kierkegaard, though passionately eager to believe, never claimed to be doing so in person.59

That is, if Kierkegaard were right, Christianity could not exist at all. In the Nachlass Jaspers explicitly claims: ‘If Kierkegaard’s Christianity is the one and only one, then his thinking would spell the end of Christianity brought about by Christian thinking itself.’60 As a result we do not have to follow the Danish religious writer but only take his will to honesty seriously. For Jaspers, Kierkegaard does not represent a standpoint, but rather a ‘way of thinking’61 which cannot be surpassed. Still, the negativity of this way of thinking implies that

 SKS 14, p. 179 / Søren Kierkegaard, The Moment and Late Writings, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 46. 55  Ibid. 56  Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce homo, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici, in The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, vol. 17 (New York: MacMillan, 1911), p. 131. 57  Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 348. 58  Karl Jaspers, Die grossen Philosophen. Nachlass, 2 vols., ed. Hans Saner (Munich-Zurich: Piper, 1981), vol. 2, p. 817. 59  Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 349. 60  Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, vol. 4, p. 285. 61  Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 351. 54

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a Christian faith that uses Kierkegaard’s theological construct to comprehend itself as incomprehensible, as necessarily absurd—thus justifying itself, so to speak, in a modern world—would be as apt to mean the end of this Christianity and this church as would Kierkegaard’s exposure of ecclesiasticism.62

Jaspers’ criticism of Kierkegaard’s acosmistic conception is apparently based on an implicit reductio ad absurdum: namely, as we have seen, if Kierkegaard were right, then Christianity could not exist. Since, however, the existence of Christianity is an undeniable historical fact, Kierkegaard’s position is in itself quite dubious. But Kierkegaard, on the other hand, could simply reply that Jaspers’ conclusion does not follow from his premises, because Christianity does not exist at all. What exists is only an appearance, or even worse, it is a caricature, a distortion and betrayal of Christianity. This contradiction, however, is only apparent: whereas Jaspers stresses the factical and historical existence of Christianity, Kierkegaard’s criticism lies on his fundamental and polemical distinction between authentic Christianity (Christendom) and its alienated, mediocre form (Christenhed). Thus Jaspers considers the existence of Christianity evident, and he sharply criticizes Kierkegaard’s acosmic conception. Even though this conception has genuine Christian origins, paradoxically enough it is the negation of the religion itself, and it is constructed in the final analysis on a faith in God—without religion. In spite of all these sharp polemics, Jaspers does not conclude that Kierkegaard’s position would be entirely erroneous. According to Jaspers, the Danish thinker is as an ‘exception’ (Ausnahme), as a ‘great awakener’ (großer Erwecker), as a dialectician of negativity, as a prophet of negativity indispensable for any existential self-­ understanding, even though to follow him is neither necessary nor possible. It is certainly not surprising that on Jaspers’ views the best element in Kierkegaard’s thinking is not the world-negating Christianity which is based on the negative decision of the individual: Kierkegaard’s greatness can hardly be derived from his interpretation of Christian faith, which, on the contrary, he formulates in a manner that strikes us as the self-destruction of this faith. It is an artful dialectic of unsolved contradictions that discovers in them the truth of God’s actuality.63

11.4  Concluding Remarks First, it is striking that Jaspers read Kierkegaard ‘backwards’ in the sense that he first got acquainted with the late, polemical writings of the Danish thinker from the period of the controversy with the Danish Church. Moreover, Jaspers assigned a decisive significance to this writings with respect to the interpretation of the whole textual corpus. The German philosopher considered these texts to be the proper 62 63

 Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 350.  Jaspers, Die grossen Philosophen, vol. 2, p. 845.

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hermeneutical keys to Kierkegaard’s entire work. Jaspers’ basic argument here is that Kierkegaard’s late conflict with the Danish Church was not an accident but a necessary consequence of his concept of absurd faith.64 No doubt, in the early period of German reception, the late polemical writings were strongly present and they had a significant effect. It is similarly certain that the basic conception of these writings can be correctly explained by means of some negative concepts, such as acosmism and religious world-negation: the authentic Christian existence constitutes itself in the negative choice and it culminates in martyrdom. Still, it seems to me by far not evident that this short characterization would be entirely appropriate for Kierkegaard’s thinking in its integrity. I believe that Jaspers’ methodology, to expand Kierkegaard’s late conception of religion to the whole œuvre, is rather doubtful. In the following I would like to highlight just a few examples to show that Kierkegaard’s own position itself was by far not historically immutable but underwent significant changes, and therefore it cannot be described in a reductionist and simplified way. At the same time, the question dealt with here is not only a particular and isolated problem of history of reception but it is also relevant as a genuine form of reconsidering the fundamental problems of religion and Christianity. Even a brief investigation into Kierkegaard’s writings will reveal a significant turn in his concept of religion. Whereas in the early writings the category of hidden ‘inwardness’ (Inderlighed) played a central role in his understandig of religion and faith, after the writing of his work Practice in Christianity (1850) the open break with the established Church and ‘world,’ as well as the concept of martyrdom became predominant. In the famous early work Fear and Trembling (1843), Abraham, the father of faith, fulfills the movement of ‘infinite resignation’,65 which is undoubtedly a negative decision, yet this negativity is at the same time ‘sublated’ in his movement of faith (Tro), which is essentially repetition, regaining, turning back to finite reality—to the ‘world.’ Further, if we recall Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms Johannes Climacus’s criticism of the monastic movement of the Middle Ages in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), we find that he is criticising this movement (rightly or wrongly) just because of the inadequacy of its world-­ negation. According to Kierkegaard/Climacus, the monastic movement expresses the world-negation as an external moment of the absolute and pathetic relation of the individual to the absolute telos, whereas this relation must be essentially an

 ‘This fight was not a late aberration of his [i.e. Kierkegaard’s], but the outcome of an irresistibly maturing insight. It resulted from the poetic construction of Christianity he had derived from theological dialectics and communicated mainly under the pseudonyms of ‘Climacus’ and ‘AntiClimacus’. Hardly ever has an entrance into the public arena been so slowly, so thoughtfully, so hesitantly prepared for as was this step of Kierkegaard’s. Once his mind was made up, however, he followed through with matchless vehemence, in supreme consciousness, in line with the situation and with the historic moment.’ See Jaspers, Philosophical Faith and Revelation, p. 346. 65  ‘This is the peak on which Abraham stands. The last stage to pass from his view is the stage of infinite resignation. He actually goes further and comes to faith’ (SKS 4, p. 132 / FT, p. 37). 64

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inner one.66 The relation of the individual to the absolute telos is in the Postscript by far not an acosmic negation of the external, objective, material relations, it is not an exodus from the empirical world, but it is substantially incognito, a becoming inward and subjective of the existing individual. Consequently, although Jaspers’ claim that Kierkegaard’s concept of religion in its integrity would be acosmic and world-negating is not entirely groundless, it is undoubtedly simplistic and one-sided. Jaspers’ effort in his main work Philosophy to distinguish between religion and philosophy on the grounds of world-negation seems to be also questionable, since there could hardly be a more acosmic ­philosophical position than that of Schopenhauer. As it is well known, in the fourth, ethical part of his opus magnum Schopenhauer explains that the mortification of the will to live (Lebenswille) in the ethical action of asceticism is at the same time also a pure negation of the world as a will-in-itself and also as a phenomenon: ‘to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky-ways—is nothing.’67 Even though it is indisputable that this conception was strongly influenced by Hindu thinking, in particular Buddhism, the genuine philosophical character and relevance of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will is clearly beyond question. Jaspers’ interpretation of the category of the absurd in the context of negative decision and world-negation is not any less simplistic than his criticism of Kierkegaard’s conception of religion and Christianity. The absurd is by no means a mere negation of reason, although some of Kierkegaard’s well-known texts certainly could make this impression. In fact, however, in his main work, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, he cleary distinguishes between nonsense and the absurd68; moreover in one of his Notebooks he characterizes the relation between faith and reason similarly to Leibniz: What I usually express by saying that Christianity consists of paradox, philosophy in mediation, Leibniz expresses by distinguishing what is above reason and what is against reason. Faith is above reason. By reason he understands, as he says in many places, a linking together of truths, a conclusion from causes. Faith therefore cannot be proved, demonstrated, comprehended, for the link which makes a linking together possible is missing, and what else does this say than that it is a paradox. This, precisely, is the irregularity in the paradox, continuity is lacking, or at any rate it has continuity only in reverse, that is, at the beginning it does not manifest itself as continuity.69  ‘The monastic movement wants to express interiority by an outwardness that is supposed to be interiority. Herein lies the contradiction, because to be a monk is just as much something outward as being councilor of justice. Mediation abolishes the absolute τέλος’ (SKS 7, 372 / CUP 1, p. 409). 67  Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R. Haldane and J. Kemp, 7th edition (London: Keagan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1909), p. 532. 68  SKS 7, pp. 505–518 / CUP 1, pp. 555–570. 69  SKS 19, 390. (Not13: 23) / Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 6 vols, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–78) (henceforth abbreviated as JP), vol. 3, entry 3073. 66

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Whereas in those texts of Kierkegaard’s in which the author approaches faith from the position of a nonbeliever faith manifests itself as paradox and absurd, in the late, Christian texts, this problem entirely vanishes. In one of his later notebook entries Kierkegaard explicitly claims: When the believer has faith, the absurd is not the absurd—faith transforms it, but in every weak moment it is again more or less absurd to him. The passion of faith is the only thing that masters the absurd—if not, then faith is not faith in the strictest sense, but a kind of knowledge.70

Of course this claim does not disprove Jaspers’ interpretation of Kierkegaard’s concept of religion, but it reveals the one-sidedness and selectivity of the interpreter’s methodology. However, notwithstanding all his critical remarks it must be emphasized that Jaspers has been the leading figure of German philosophical reception of Kierkegaard for many decades. Do Jaspers and Kierkegaard represent in fact new pathways for philosophy of religion? As we have seen, their relevance for continental philosophy of religion is unquestionable, although it is somewhat problematic to characterize the Danish thinker as a philosopher of religion. In any case, by rethinking religion and Christianity existentially in the postidealist period Kierkegaard certainly made a significant impact on different later schools of philosophy and theology—not least due to Karl Jaspers’ intensive appropriation of and not less intense polemics with him. How should religion be related to the world? What is the relation between faith and reason? These fundamental questions of religious philosophy were leading problems for both thinkers, albeit their responses differ in many respects. These differences and polemics, however, must not be seen as a negativity which should be eliminated. On the contrary: it is a vital sign of philosophy itself.

Bibliography Billroth, Johann Gustav Friedrich. 1837. Vorlesungen über Religionsphilosophie, ed. Johann Eduard Erdmann. Leipzig: Contant. Buber, Martin. 1947. Between Man and Man. London: Kegan Paul. Caputo, John. 1987. Radical Hermeneutics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Czakó, István. 2015. Rethinking Religion Existentially: New Approaches to Classical Problems of Religious Philosophy in Kierkegaard. In A Companion to Kierkegaard, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, ed. Jon Stewart, 281–294. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 2016. Paradoxes of Existence. Contributions to Kierkegaard Research. Budapest/Paris: L’Harmattan. Deuser, Hermann. 2003. “Philosophie und Christentum lassen sich doch niemals vereinen.” Kierkegaards theologische Ambivalenzen im Journale AA/BB (1835–1837). Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1–29.

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Ehrlich, Leonard H. 2003a. Editorial Note. In Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy, ed. Joseph W. Koterski and Raymond J. Langley, 243–244. Amherst: Humanity Books. ———. 2003b. Jaspers Reading Kierkegaard: An Instance of the Double Helix. In Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy, ed. Joseph W.  Koterski and Raymond J. Langley, 236–242. Amherst: Humanity Books. Erdmann, Johann Eduard. 1837. Vorlesungen über Glauben und Wissen als Einleitung in die Dogmatik und Religionsphilosophie. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Evans, Stephen C. 1989. Is Kierkegaard an Irrationalist? Reason, Paradon, and Faith. Religious Studies 25: 347–362. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb. 1971. J. G. Fichte’s als Verfassers des ersten angeklagten Aufsatzes und Mitherausgebers des phil. Journals Verantwortungsschrift. In Immanuel Hermann Fichte. Vol. 5, Zur Religionsphilosophie, ed. Fichtes Werke, 242–301. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Figal, Günter. ‘Søren Kierkegaard’. In Klassiker der Religionsphilosophie. Von Platon bis Kierkegaard, Friedrich Niewöhner, pp. 319–331. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1995. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1840. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, 2nd rev. edn., Ed. Philipp Markeineke. Berlin: Duncker and Humblot. ———. 1895. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Together with a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God. 3 vols. Trans. E.B. Speirs and J. Burdon Sanderson. London: Kegan P ­ aul/ Trench/Trübner. ———. 2007. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. Vol. 1, Introduction and the Concept of Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1977a. The Question Concerning Technology. Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1977b. The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead.” In idem, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt, 53–112. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 1996. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Heywood, Thomas J.  1994. Philosophy of Religion in Kierkegaard’s Writings, Studies in the History of Philosophy. Vol. 30. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press. Jaspers, Karl. 1948. Der philosophische Glaube. Munich: Piper. ———. 1954. Psychologie der Weltanschauungen. 4th ed. Berlin/Göttingen/Heidelberg: Springer. ———. 1967. Philosophical Faith and Revelation. Trans. E.B. Ashton. London: Collins. ———. 1968. Aneignung und Polemik. Gesammelte Reden und Aufsätze zur Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. Hans Saner. München: Piper. ———. 1973a. Nachwort (1955) zu meiner Philosophie. In idem, Philosophische Weltorientierung, xv–lv, Vol. 1 of Philosophie, 3 vols, 4th ed. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer. ———. 1973b. Philosophie. Vol. 1: Philosophische Weltorientierung. 4th ed. Berlin/Heidelberg/ New York: Springer. ———. 1973c. Philosophie. Vol. 2: Existenzerhellung. 4th ed. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer. ———. 1973d. Philosophie. Vol. 3: Metaphysik. 4th ed. Berlin/Heidelberg/New York: Springer. ———. 1977. Philosophische Autobiographie. Erweiterte Neuausgabe. Munich: Piper. ———. 1981. Die grossen Philosophen. Nachlass. 2 vols, ed. Hans Saner. Munich/Zurich: Piper. ———. 1994. The Great Philosophers. 4 vols. Vol. 4, The Disturbers: Descartes, Pascal, Lessing, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche—Philosophers in Other Realms: Einstein, Weber, Marx, ed. Michael Ermath and Leonard H. Ehrlich. New York/San Diego/London: Harcourt Brace. ———. 1997. Vernunft und Existenz. Fünf Vorlesungen gehalten vom 25. bis 29. März. Groningen—Batavia: J.B.  Wolters’ Uitgevers—Maatschappij, 1935, 1–27. In English as Reason and Existenz. Five Lectures by, ed. Karl Jaspers, 19–50. Trans. William Earle. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press.

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———. 2003a. Reading Kierkegaard 1: Becoming Manifest. Trans. Edith Ehrlich. In Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy, ed. Joseph W.  Koterski and Raymond J. Langley, 243–257. Amherst: Humanity Books. ———. 2003b. Reading Kierkegaard: Guilt: The Fundamental Limit Situation. Trans. Edith Ehrlich. In Karl Jaspers on Philosophy of History and History of Philosophy, ed. Joseph W. Koterski and Raymond J. Langley, 252–257. Amherst: Humanity Books. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983. Fear and Trembling; Repetition. Trans. Howard Hong et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1987. Either/Or. 2 vols. Trans. Howard Hong et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2 vols. Trans. Howard Hong et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998a. The Moment and Late Writings. Trans. Howard V.  Hong and Edna H.  Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 1998b. “The Single Individual”: Two “Notes” Concerning My Work as an Author. In The Point of View. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, 101–126. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2007. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, 11 vols, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McCarthy, Vincent. 2001. Martin Heidegger: Kierkegaard’s Influence Hidden and in Full View. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 95–125. Farnham: Ashgate. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1911. Ecce homo. Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici. Vol. 17, of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Macmillan. Nun, Katalin. 2015. In The Auction Catalogue of Kierkegaard’s Library, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Gerhard Schreiber and Jon Stewart, vol. 20. Aldershot: Ashgate. Phillips, D.Z., and Timothy Tessin, eds. 2000. Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. New York: St Martin’s Press. Platner, Ernst. 1776. Philosophische Aphorismen. Nebst einigen Anleitungen zur philosophischen Geschichte. Vol. 1. Leipzig: Schwickertscher Verlag. Pojman, Louis. 1984. The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion. Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Poole, Roger. 1999. The Unknown Kierkegaard: Twentieth-Century Receptions. In The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino, 48–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Šajda, Peter. 2011. No-One Can So Refute Kierkegaard as Kierkegaard Himself. In Kierkegaard and Existentialism, Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources, ed. Jon Stewart, vol. 9, 33–62. Aldershot: Ashgate. Schopenhauer, Arthur. 1909. The World as Will and Idea. Trans. R. Haldane and J. Kemp, 7th ed. London: Keagan Paul/Trench/Trübner. Schreiber, Gerhard, and Apriorische Gewissheit. 2014. Das Glaubensverständnis des jungen Kierkegaards und seine philosophisch-theologischen Voraussetzungen, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 30. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Schütte, Hans-Walter. 1971. Akosmismus. In Vol. 1 of Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter, 128. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe. Shestov, Lev. 1937. Sören Kierkegaard philosophe religieux. Five radio talks. Printed in Les Cahiers de Radio-Paris, vol. 12, 1214–1242. 1967–78. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers. 6 vols. Ed. and Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H.  Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press. 1997–2013. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. 55 vols. Ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn et al. Copenhagen: Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre—G. E. C. Gad Publishers. Steffens, Henrich. 1839. Christliche Religionsphilosophie. 2 vols. Breslau: Josef Mar-Komp.

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Stewart, Jon. 2003. Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2008. Kierkegaard’s Claim About the Relation between Philosophy and Christianity in the Journal AA. In Kierkegaard and Christianity, ed. Roman Králik et al., 35–58. Toronto/Šal’a: Kierkegaard Circle, Trinity College/Kierkegaard Society in Slovakia. ———. 2011. Kierkegaard and Hegel on Faith and Knowledge. In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 501–518. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Theunissen, Michael, and Wilfried Greve, eds. 1979. Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am Main. Thomte, Reidar. 1949. Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Thonhauser, Gerhard. 2016. Ein rätselhaftes Zeichen. Zum Verhältnis von Martin Heidegger und Søren Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series. Vol. 33. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Tilley, Michael. 2013. Kierkegaard and Recent Continental Philosophy of Religion. Philosophy Compass 8 (4): 400–408. Williams, Robert R. 2011. Love, Recognition, Spirit: Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion. In A Companion to Hegel, ed. Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 387–413. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Chapter 12

The Paradoxes of Love: Some Theological Remarks on the Work of Harry Frankfurt Kenneth Oakes

The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it. (Martin Luther (Thesis 28 of Martin Luther’s 1518 Heidelberg Disputation; Martin Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, in Timothy F. Lull, ed., Martin’s Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 30–49; here p. 32)) It is not necessarily as a result of recognizing their value and of being captivated by it that we love things. Rather, what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it. The lover does invariably and necessarily perceive the beloved as valuable, but the value he sees it to possess is a value that derives from and depends upon his love. (Harry Frankfurt (Harry G. Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 38–39. See also Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘Response to Susan Wolf’, in Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt, eds. Sarah Buss and Lee Overton (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 245–52, especially p. 250))

12.1  Introduction The title of this chapter offers a spin on Harry Frankfurt’s The Reasons of Love, which would probably gain little appreciation from Frankfurt himself, given his occasional dismissals of paradoxes or the counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, it seems that love, even on Frankfurt’s own account, not only has its own ‘reasons’ in the K. Oakes (*) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_12

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sense that love generates a powerful source of motivation for actions, but also its paradoxes. The three paradoxes in Frankfurt’s portrayal of love are that (1) love frees the lover insofar as it delimits and binds the lover’s will; (2) self-love is the highest form of love and yet is always ‘indirect’; and (3) love creates value and worth in the beloved rather than finding it. Each of these paradoxes of love has their ready equivalent and counterpart within religious and theological discourses concerning love, and they are thus worth interrogating from a theological standpoint. The focus of our questioning of Frankfurt will be on the third paradox, but what this interrogation will uncover more generally is that Frankfurt’s account of love and care is compelling in its stark portrayal of the ‘whylessness’ of love and overlaps with a certain understanding of Christian agape, but finally remains inadequate as a Christian account of love. That Frankfurt, who cut his philosophical teeth on René Descartes, who was made popular by his writings on ‘bullshit’, and who inspired a wave of commentary from ethicists by his ‘Frankfurt Cases’, now tills soil long cultivated practically and theoretically by different religions and theologies is no accident. In the preface to a collection of essays called Necessity, Volition, and Love (1999), Frankfurt explains his decision to write about care and love in this way: I think that philosophers need to pay more attention to issues belonging to a domain that is partially occupied by certain types of religious thought—issues that have to do with what people are to care about, with their commitments to ideals, and with the protean role in our lives of the various modes of love.1

In fact, this move to reflection upon ‘cares’, ‘commitments’, and ‘modes of love’, each of which involves volition, is less surprising for a scholar of Descartes than may first appear. As a salutary and necessary backdrop to the three paradoxes of love mentioned above, we will first outline some anticipations of love’s paradoxes in Frankfurt’s reading of Descartes and his writings on bullshit and truth.

12.2  Frankfurt on Descartes, Bullshit, and Truth In his earliest work, entitled Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen (1970),2 Frankfurt deals with Descartes’ defense of reason in his Meditations. Late in this monograph, Frankfurt discusses some of the peculiarities and privileges Descartes affords to clear and distinct ideas. What Frankfurt finds most interesting about clear and distinct ideas is Descartes’ introduction of the notions of assent and doxastic irresistibility, and thus the invocation of the will. In his Fifth Meditation, Descartes notes that ‘I am of such a nature that as long as I understand anything very clearly and

 Harry G. Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. x. 2  Harry G.  Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). 1

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distinctly, I am naturally impelled to believe it to be true.’3 Likewise, in a letter to Henricus Regius, Descartes observes that the truth of clear and distinct ideas is self-­ evident ‘as long as they are clearly and distinctly understood, because our mind is of such a nature as to be unable not to assent to what is clearly understood’.4 Or again in his Principles of First Philosophy, Descartes notes: ‘And even if this were not proved by any reasoning, it is impressed by nature upon the minds of all; so that whenever we clearly perceive something, we spontaneously assent to it and cannot in any way doubt that it is true.’5 ‘Naturally impelled’, ‘cannot refuse to assent’, ‘cannot in any way doubt’ are all statements which involve the will and a necessity placed upon it.6 For Descartes, the constraint and compulsion of clear and distinct ideas overcome his worry that the expanse and ability of the will so far outpaces those of the understanding. The class of things which are doxastically irresistible for Descartes includes God, that I am a thinking thing, extension, number, duration, mathematical principles, and is thus a much smaller and more particular set than what David Hume’s remarks would imply in the Appendix to his Treatise of Human Nature.7 The irresistibility of clear and distinct ideas and the subsequent compulsion of the understanding and will is not a threat to the freedom of the understanding and the will, but the condition of possibility for their freedom. In his Fourth Meditation, for instance, Descartes argues that the indifference I experience ‘when I am not swayed to one side rather than to the other by lack of reason, is the lowest grade of liberty.’8 The indifference of ambivalence is a kind of liberty but a highly deficient one. It ‘evinces a lack or negation in my knowledge [rather] than a perfection of will’, Descartes claims, for ‘if I always recognized clearly what was true and good, I should never have trouble in deliberating as to what judgment of choice I should make, and then I should be entirely free without ever being indifferent.’9 Clearly recognizing the true and good, and the irresistibility of judgment that follows, 3  René Descartes, ‘Meditation V’, in René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy: In Focus, ed. Stanley Tweyman (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 84. 4  Letter CXC, ‘Descartes à Regius’, 24 May 1640, Œuvres de Descartes, Correspondance, vol. III, Janvier 1640—Juin 1643, eds. Charles Adam and Paul Tanner (Paris: Vrin, 1971), p. 64. 5  René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P.  Miller (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic, 1991), I, xliii, pp. 19–20. 6  Some 28  years after his book on Descartes, Frankfurt summarizes his thesis in these ways: ‘Descartes’ theory of knowledge is grounded in his recognition that we simply cannot help believing what we clearly and distinctly perceive. For him, the mode of necessity that is most fundamental to the enterprise of reason is not logical but volitional—a necessitation of the will’ (Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, Love, pp. ix–x); ‘The mode of necessity that is most fundamental to the enterprise of reason is not logical but volitional’ (ibid., p. x). 7  Hume famously concludes ‘that belief consists merely in a certain feeling or sentiment; in something that depends not on the will, but must arise from certain determinate causes and principles, of which we are not masters.’ David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), p. 624. 8  Descartes, ‘Meditation IV’, Meditations, p. 76. 9  Ibid.

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allows one to be ‘entirely free without ever being indifferent.’10 Frankfurt is aware of the venerable tradition in which these ideas stand, observing that ‘there is a rather obvious analogy between Descartes’s notion that the will is constrained by clear and distinct perception and the doctrine of some classical philosophers that desire is constrained by perception of the good.’11 What we have here seems to be stronger than an ‘obvious analogy’ and something more akin to complete coincidence. Descartes is clear that recognition of the true and the good means that one is free from the tumult of further deliberation and indifference, and that being free from such ambivalence, being irresistibly compelled by the true and good, is integral to perfect freedom. One of the surprising aspects of this reading of Descartes is the implication that ‘clear and distinct perception’ has such immense instrumental value for the perceiver in terms of both cognition and volition.12 The surprising instrumental value of a related notion, that of truth, is further developed in Frankfurt’s short book On Truth (2006b).13 Frankfurt describes this book as ‘a sort of sequel to On Bullshit,14 or as an inquiry to which that work might serve as a prolegomenon—the practical and theoretical importance that truth actually enjoys.’15 ‘Bullshit’, we might recall, is a familiar and ubiquitous rhetorical trope. It is found in the patriotic speeches of politicians, the shiny advertisements with which we are bombarded each day, the suave words of the pick-up artist, and the public relations campaigns that follow corporate mishaps and misdeeds. Bullshit is an attempt to deceive, an attempt to form in one’s audience specific ideas and feelings about who one is and what one is doing which bears no relationship to truth or falsehood. It is different from lying, however, in that lying still enjoys some type of connection to truth. As a privative and parasitic notion, lying nonetheless acknowledges that there is truth and tacitly acknowledges what this truth is. Bullshit, however, enjoys no such relation to truth or to the facts of the situation, and in this way is arguably ‘a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.’16 In his short analysis of bullshit Frankfurt details its prevalence and its potential sources but sidelines in the process the undeniable and profitable instrumental value of bullshit for its peddlers (perhaps because this value is so obvious). Frankfurt’s On Truth, by contrast, is dedicated to the sizeable practical importance and instrumental value of truth. Without truth, he argues, we have no anchor in reality, no clear vision of who we are, no sense of what it is we are doing or what  Ibid.  Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, pp. 164–65. 12  For Frankfurt’s interest in the instrumental value of final ends, see his ‘On the Usefulness of Final Ends’, in Necessity, Volition, and Love, pp. 82–94. 13  Harry G. Frankfurt, On Truth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 14  Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Harry G. Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit’, in Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 117–33. 15  Frankfurt, On Truth, p. 7. 16  Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit’, p. 132. 10 11

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we should do, and no sense of whether we are ‘getting it right’. In close connection with his study of Descartes from some 36 years earlier, Frankfurt notes that one of the practical consequences and benefits of truth, whether it be of a practical or theoretical nature, is that it banishes ambivalence and uncertainty: A rigorous demonstration [of a fact or proof] unequivocally resolves all reasonable uncertainty concerning the proposition’s truth; hence, naturally, all resistance to accepting the proposition vanishes. This is liberating and refreshing. It frees us from the anxieties and inhibitions of doubt, and it enables us to stop worrying about what to believe. Our minds become more settled, finally relaxed and confident.17

Frankfurt even employs the famous Cartesian couplet for describing this experience of truth: seeing ‘clearly and distinctly’18 that something has been proved is both irresistible and liberating. This seemingly deep and natural kinship between Frankfurt and Descartes appears in a brief biographical passage in On Truth: When I was a child I often felt oppressed by the chaotic jumble of implausible notions and beliefs that I felt various adults were attempting to foist on me. My own dedication to truth originated, so far as I am able to recall, in the liberating conviction that once I grasped the truth I would no longer be distracted or disturbed by anyone’s (including my own) speculations, hunches or hopes.19

Whether intentional or not, Frankfurt’s self-description of his childhood seems to recapitulate the opening of Descartes’ First Meditation. As entertaining as these biographical remarks are, what is significant for our purposes is Frankfurt’s early and rather consistent attention to some of the paradoxical aspects surrounding truth, understanding, and the will. Clear and distinct ideas, just as truth does later, both necessitate and liberate, irresistibly compel and make one free. Frankfurt’s interest in the nature and peculiarities of ‘volitional necessitation’ or ‘volitional necessity’ will spread throughout his subsequent writings and provides a deep link between his writings on autonomy, freedom, moral responsibility, coercion, and wholeheartedness. Yet Frankfurt’s preoccupation with the sometimes surprising aspects of volitional necessity truly came home to roost in his writings on care and love. When we care about something, or love someone, we are also subject to necessities and forces beyond our immediate cognitive, affective, or volitional control. With care and love we once again are in the realm of compulsion and irresistibility,20 and on a path long trod by religion and theology, a fact of which Frankfurt himself was well aware when writing about Descartes and of which he is well aware when writing on love.

 Frankfurt, On Truth, pp. 11–12.  Ibid., p. 13. 19  Ibid., pp. 55–56. 20  It is thus no accident that Frankfurt has a collection of essays entitled Necessity, Volition, and Love. 17 18

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12.3  Frankfurt on Care and Love Frankfurt’s notions of care and love have been some time in the making, developing from his 1982 essay ‘The Importance of What We Care About’ to his 2004 The Reasons of Love and 2006a Taking Ourselves Seriously: Getting it Right.21 In The Reasons of Love Frankfurt identifies ‘four main conceptually necessary features’22 of love from which arise three paradoxes of love. First, love is a ‘disinterested’ or ‘nonutilitarian’ ‘concern for the well-being and flourishing of the person who is loved.’23 Love has no other agenda, no other goal, no other motive than the good of the beloved. As such love is not ‘infatuation, lust, obsession, possessiveness, and dependency’, nor is it to be identified with all the ‘vividly distracting elements’24 which can be mistaken for love or mistakenly mixed in with love in cases of romantic or sexual relationships. In each of these cases the flourishing of the beloved is not sought for its own sake but has become subordinate to other impulses and ends. As disinterested concern for another, love is not primarily affective or cognitive. Although it may not seem very romantic of a definition, Frankfurt describes love as a stable ‘configuration of the will’.25 Love is ‘a configuration of the will that consists in a practical concern for what is good for the beloved.’26 This definition has the distinctive advantage that love is not placed solely within the realm of the psychological (indeed, commentators on Frankfurt’s work sometimes write as if he were offering us a kind of psychology). Just as with other forms of caring, the heart of the matter is neither affective nor cognitive. Love is a matter of the will, a stable volitional configuration which aims at the well-being of the beloved. Secondly, love is ineluctably personal and particular; it is ‘rigidly focused’.27 Frankfurt describes this aspect of love in terms of love allowing no substitutions, which contrasts with general benevolence or charity.28 What is loved could be a ‘concrete individual’, such as a person, institution, country, or even an ideal. Yet love is always love for a single, specific individual for whom there is no immediate substitution. Thirdly, in love the lover adopts the beloved’s interests as their own. The lover becomes invested in and identified with the interests and fortunes of the beloved. In

 For a helpful account of Frankfurt’s development on these matters, see Alan Soble, ‘Love and Value, Yet Again’, in Love, Reason, and Will: Kierkegaard After Frankfurt, eds. Anthony Rudd and John Davenport (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 25–46, especially pp. 33–38. 22  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 79. 23  Ibid.; Harry G.  Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right, ed. Debra Staz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), p. 40. 24  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 43. 25  Ibid., p. 87. 26  Ibid., p. 43. 27  Frankfurt, Taking Ourselves Seriously, p. 40. 28  For a criticism of this equivalence, see Soble, ‘Love and Value, Yet Again’, p. 35. 21

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this way the interests and well-being of what is loved shapes the lover’s cares and provides the lover with a rich source of ready-made reasons for action. Fourthly, love ‘is not under our direct and immediate voluntary control.’29 What is loved and what we come to love is not always a matter of choice. It may be possible for us to shift and mold what we love and care about. What we love and care about may change over time, and we may even spend a great deal of energy to love something more or to love it less. Yet the common and often lamentable realization that there are things we should love or care about and in fact do not, and the also lamentable fact that we love and care about things that we know bring us pain or harm, readily show us that what we love and care about is not entirely a matter of one’s decision and choice. Our love and care may be ones we desire and with which we identify, or they may be ones with which we do not, but they provide us with volitional constraints, necessities, and reasons for action.

12.4  Three Paradoxes Arise from These Four Aspects 12.4.1  Love Frees Just as It Binds the Will The first paradox is that love simultaneously binds and frees the will. Frankfurt himself notes that it is a ‘superficially paradoxical but nonetheless authentic circumstance that the necessities with which love binds the will are themselves liberating.’30 In close connection with his remarks on Descartes and on truth, the reason for this experience of liberation through a binding of the will is that volitional and rational necessity ‘eliminates uncertainty’ and ‘relaxes the inhibitions and hesitancies of self-doubt.’31 Both logic and love, then, necessitate the will and by doing so give the will a determinate shape and course. Additionally, love liberates us from having no proximate or final ends for our action, and thus from ‘indifference’ and ‘unsettled ambivalence’, and from being drawn in different directions.32 The necessities of love and logic also liberate us ‘by freeing us from ourselves’,33 as they ‘equally entail selflessness.’34 The necessities of love and logic show that constraints to one’s will can be experienced as liberating, and even as liberating one from oneself. As Frankfurt notes elsewhere, ‘The suggestion that a person may be in some sense liberated through acceding to a power which is not subject to his immediate voluntary control is among the most ancient and persistent themes of our moral and

 Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 44.  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p.  64. Cf. also, Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 89–91. 31  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 65. 32  Ibid., p. 66. 33  Ibid. 34  Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, p. 90. 29 30

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religious tradition.’35 Frankfurt himself even seems to be aware of the paradoxical element of this aspect of love: How are we to understand the paradox that a person may be enhanced and liberated through being seized, made captive, and overcome? Why is it that we find ourselves to be most fully realized, and consider that we are at our best when—through reason or through love—we have lost or escaped from ourselves?36

One can begin to resolve this conundrum through consideration of the instrumental value of love. Frankfurt notes that ‘[t]he apparent conflict between selflessness and self-interest disappears once it is understood that what serves the self-interest of the lover is, precisely, his selflessness.’37 The paradox here is that one’s own ‘self-­ interest’ is best served by being wholly dedicated to one’s loves and cares. This observation brings us to the second paradox of love.

12.4.2  The Indirectness of Self-Love The second paradox involves the indirectness and necessity of self-love. In his Ethics Spinoza states that ‘self-contentment is indeed the highest thing we can hope for.’38 Frankfurt glosses Spinoza’s ‘self-contentment’ as ‘self-love’ and is then in complete agreement: ‘coming to love oneself is the deepest and most essential … achievement of a serious and successful life.’39 Self-love is even ‘the purest of all forms of love.’40 The notion of self-love, of course, has been a complicated one in Christianity. Augustine’s scattered and conflicting remarks on self-love here can be taken as representative of a whole tradition.41 Frankfurt, however, thinks he has Scripture on his side for this claim in its injunction ‘to love your neighbors as yourself’.42 The commandment is not, Frankfurt points out, love your neighbor instead of yourself, but rather that love of self can be a guide to how one should love others. What, then, is self-love? Here Frankfurt applies the same four aspects of love presented above. First, self-love is ‘rigidly focused’ and particular, for the beloved is oneself and so the object of love is unsubstitutable.43 Second, self-love is a disinterested concern for the well-being of the beloved. Although it may seem a strange  Ibid., p. 89.  Ibid., p. 89. 37  Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, Love, p. 174. 38  Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. G.  H. R.  Parkinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4p52s, p. 264; Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 97. 39  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 68. 40  Ibid., p. 80. 41  See, for instance, Oliver O’Donovan, The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980). 42  Leviticus 19:17; Mark 12:31; Matthew 22:39; Luke 10:27; Romans 13:9; and Galatians 5:14. 43  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 79. 35 36

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thing to say, the flourishing of the beloved, oneself, is sought entirely for its own sake. As for whether such a love is self-less, Frankfurt clarifies: ‘Perhaps it would flirt too egregiously with the absurd to suggest that self-love may be selfless. It is entirely apposite, however, to characterize it as disinterested.’44 Third, in self-love the lover invests in and identifies with the interests and cares of the beloved. Fourth, self-love is not entirely under one’s voluntary control.45 The degree to which one is able to love oneself is conditioned by many factors beyond one’s own self-will. An odd conclusion arises when these four aspects of love are applied to case of self-love: ‘a person’s self-love is simply, at its core, a disinterested concern for whatever it is that the person loves.’46 The implication, then, is that self-love is necessarily indirect. Self-love occurs inasmuch as people love and care for individuals and things which are not themselves. Frankfurt himself grasps the indirect quality of self-love when noting, ‘[a] person cannot love himself except insofar as he loves other things.’47 Self-love is thus not primarily a matter of one’s evaluation or view of oneself, but of actively pursuing one’s flourishing and well-being by pursuing one’s loves and cares. Loving oneself means being led out into the people, activities, ideals, and things that one loves, and it is in being led out of oneself that one best serves one’s own self-interest. A variety of potential obstacles to self-love arise at this point, but the one which most worries Frankfurt is that of ambivalence, which is taken as an indication of ‘volitional fragmentation’ or ‘volitional disunity’. One may, for instance, be unsure or deceived about the things or people that one cares about. One may also not be really devoted to what one loves at all. If one is ambivalent or uncertain about what one loves or cares about, then one has no stable direction, no fixed final or proximate ends, no constant shaping of one’s will, no deep source of reasons for action, and very little chance of being able to love oneself at all. When we take full cognizance of how deeply and extensively our loves and cares orient and give meaning to our lives and action, then we can begin to realize the difficulties ambivalence creates for us. Frankfurt is keenly aware of this and his response is that wholeheartedness is a necessary condition for self-love. To be wholehearted is to be fully devoted to what one loves and cares about. Kierkegaard famously stated that ‘purity of heart is to will one thing’, which Frankfurt takes to mean that ‘the pure heart is the heart of someone who is volitionally unified, and who is thus fully intact. Purity lies, as Kierkegaard doubtless intended to convey, in wholeheartedness.’48 The importance of wholeheartedness for Frankfurt is that it dispels ambivalence and uncertainty and  Ibid., p. 82.  Ibid., p. 80. 46  Ibid., p. 85. 47  Ibid., p. 86. 48  Ibid., p. 96. Cf. Søren Kierkegaard, ‘On the Occasion of a Confession: Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing,’ in Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 7–154. Frankfurt’s modulation of Kierkegaard renders the point of his ‘upbuilding discourse’, that purity of heart is to will the good in truth by both acting and suffering, rather too formal. 44 45

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thus returns meaning, reason, and motivation to us. There seems to be, then, a great deal of continuity between Frankfurt’s view of wholeheartedness, his reading of Descartes, and his understanding of why truth is important. Wholeheartedness, then, is a condition of self-love, or a meta-good inasmuch as it ensures that one is certain about and committed to one’s loves and cares. Yet wholeheartedness is no more under our control than are our cares and loves. We cannot always control what we care about and we cannot always control our degree of wholeheartedness. Despite our best efforts we may nevertheless remain volitionally fragmented. When discussing volitional disunity Frankfurt typically invokes Augustine. In his Confessions, Augustine writes, in good Pauline fashion, that ‘it is … no strange phenomenon partly to will to do something and partly to will not to do it. It is a disease of the mind … So there are two wills in us, because neither by itself is the whole will, and each possesses what the other lacks.’49 This division of the will ‘lies in the secret punishment of man and in the penitence which casts a deep shadow on the sons of Adam.’50 In less dramatic terms, Frankfurt notes that ‘wholeheartedness is difficult to come by’,51 and muses: My own observation is that certain people tend by nature to be wholehearted, while others tend not to be; and I suspect that whether someone achieves any substantial degree of wholeheartedness rather heavily depends upon genetic and other modes of luck. Perhaps this is not actually so different from what Saint Augustine had in mind when he supposed that it is a matter of divine fiat.52

To be wholehearted, then, is the primary condition of the possibility of loving oneself, for it provides constancy and determination in one’s loves which then allows one to love oneself.

12.4.3  Love Creates Rather Than Finds Worth in the Beloved The third paradox is, strictly speaking, more counter-intuitive than paradoxical: love creates rather than finds worth in the beloved. Love is, on Frankfurt’s account, remarkably generative: it creates meaning, reasons for living and acting, and volitional stability and texture. More controversially, Frankfurt also holds that love is generative of values and worth. What one loves acquires and has value for oneself simply because one loves it. As Frankfurt puts it, the value or worth of the beloved is not a ‘formative or grounding condition of the love’,53 but instead ‘what we love

 Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love, p.  94, citing Augustine, Confessions, 8.9. See also Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 94. 50  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 94, citing Augustine, Confessions, 8.9. 51  Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, p. 99. 52  Ibid. 53  Ibid., p. 38. 49

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necessarily acquires value because we love it.’54 The beloved necessarily has value and is valuable by the lover, but this perceived value is generated by the lover’s love. Indeed, the world as such has value and meaning for us inasmuch as we have objects and a horizon of objects to love and care about: ‘It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance.’55 The standard example to which Frankfurt appeals at this point is the love of parents for a child. As attested anecdotally, some parents can offer liberal praise of the achievements and wonders of their child regardless of the nature, significance, or genuine success of their child’s actual achievements and wonders. Ideally, however, their love for their child does not depend on these achievements and wonders, but merely comes from the fact that the parents love their child, that their love is whyless. To say that love creates rather than finds worth is to say that parental love comes to the child as unconditional, wholly spontaneous, and independent of anything the child is, has done, or can do. Frankfurt thinks that the dynamics operative in the case of parental love can be generalized: love always creates rather than finds value.

12.5  Questioning Frankfurt In the introduction to this chapter I stated that one of the most compelling aspects of Frankfurt’s portrayal of love and care is that there is a deep and implicit ‘whylessness’ of love. In this final section we will focus on the whylessness of love, a presupposition most clearly present in the third paradox: that love creates rather than finds value. Implied in the third paradox is that love is generative of reasons, value, and worthiness, that it spontaneously and mysteriously arises in human beings, that any object is a potential object for love and care, and that, fundamentally, love enjoys a wild type of whylessness. As should be clear from the two epigraphs from Martin Luther and Frankfurt which open this chapter, there is precedent for this counter-intuitive claim within Christian thought,56 and Frankfurt himself seems aware of this. That Frankfurt is aware of some type of precedent for his position can be found in two longer passages in which he compares divine love and human love as types of thought experiments. The first one contrasts divine love and human love in an idiom which resembles Christian claims regarding God and creation. Care and love, in Frankfurt’s view, are inherently good activities and not entirely under one’s own control, but this does not mean that one can or should love and care about everything  Ibid., p. 39.  Ibid., p. 23. 56  The several times when Luther does appear in Frankfurt’s writing it is typically in reference to Luther’s fabled ‘Here I stand; I can do no other’ as an example of the ‘unthinkable’. See Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love, p. 80. 54 55

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and anything. Any type of care or love entails risks, as one becomes deeply vulnerable to frustration, sorrow, anxiety, and loss. It is in this context of concern for the possible objects of one’s love that Frankfurt notes: For an infinite being, secure in its omnipotence, even the most indiscriminate promiscuity would be safe. God need not, out of prudence, cautiously forgo certain opportunities for enjoying the goodness of loving. On some accounts, God’s creative activity is aroused and guided by an entirely uninhibited and inexhaustible love that desires an altogether unconstricted plenitude in which every possible object of love is included. What God loves is simply Being of any kind. This divinely uninhibited creative love of Being is entirely indiscriminate, and hence it is incompatible with any goal other than limitless expansion of the varieties of existence. To the extent that God’s love is indiscriminate, His creation can have no motive or purpose beyond an utterly promiscuous urge to love without boundary or constraint. Curiously, it would seem that, insofar as God is love, the universe has no point other than simply to be.57

Doctrinally speaking, here Frankfurt seems to be invoking something akin to caritas diffusiva sui. Divine creative love can be indiscriminate, can ‘love without boundary or constraint’, and can love any being inasmuch as God, as infinite being, is ‘secure in its omnipotence’. There is no motive or purpose to the divine love besides the very activity of loving. The corollary is that creation has no purpose other than simply to be and to receive the divine love. The whylessness of the divine love is thus mirrored by the whylessness of creation. The point of this small thought experiment, however, is to establish a contrast. As finite creatures, ‘we cannot be— as God may be—recklessly indiscriminate in what we love’,58 for love also exposes us to harm and loss. The second passage in which Frankfurt discusses a theological precedent for his view falls more within a doctrine of election or justification, particularly when elaborated with characteristically Protestant emphases. In a similar discussion regarding the evaluation of potential objects for one’s further care and investment, Frankfurt states: According to one theological doctrine, divine love is in fact bestowed without regard to the character or antecedent value of its object. It is God’s nature to love, on this view, and He therefore loves everything regardless of any considerations extrinsic to himself. His love is entirely arbitrary and unmotivated—absolutely sovereign, and in no way conditioned by the worthiness of its objects. Perhaps it is only possible for an omnipotent being—to whom nothing is antecedently important—to love altogether freely and without conditions or restrictions of any kind.59

Once again Frankfurt invokes a God who can love indiscriminately and unrestrictedly, but here the focus is upon the claim that the divine love ‘is in no way conditioned by the worthiness of its objects.’ God’s love is ‘entirely arbitrary and unmotivated’. In distinction to the divine love; however, human beings can and  Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love, p. 173.  Ibid. 59  Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, p. 94. There is a very different account of God in the essay ‘On God’s Creation’. Frankfurt, ‘On God’s Creation’ in Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, and Love, pp. 117–28. 57 58

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should recognize and evaluate the importance they give to an object, and in this way hope to guide at least partially their cares and loves. Despite this difference between divine and human love, Frankfurt points out a resemblance: When a person makes something important to himself, accordingly, the situation resembles an instance of divine agape at least in a certain respect. The person does not care about the object because its worthiness commands that he do so. On the other hand, the worthiness of the activity of caring commands that he choose an object which he will be able to care about.60

It is not the inherent value or ‘worthiness’ of the object which commands that one care for this object (the similarity of human love to divine love), but it is the inherent value and worthiness of the activity of caring itself which commands that one care about something that one is actually able to care about (the dissimilarity). In this second passage Frankfurt includes a footnote which references, without any discussion, two sets of pages from Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros.61 In the first set of pages from Agape and Eros we find Nygren discussing four features of the Christian idea of divine love as agape. The first is that ‘Agape is spontaneous and “unmotivated”.’62 Divine love is ‘groundless’ in that there are no external reasons for God’s love. In contrast to ‘motivated’ human love, the divine love is poured forth without any consideration of its object. The second is that ‘Agape is “indifferent to value”.’63 In some ways this second aspect is a restatement of the first. Jesus does not simply institute a new set of values, but instead reveals that ‘any thought of valuation whatsoever is out of place in connection with fellowship with God.’64 The third aspect is that ‘Agape is creative’.65 In Nygren’s own words: Agape does not recognize value, but creates it. Agape loves, and imparts value by loving. The man who is loved by God has no value in himself; what gives him value is precisely the fact that God loves him. Agape is a value-creating principle.66

The fourth and final aspect is that ‘Agape is the initiator of fellowship with God.’67 That God and humanity are in fellowship is wholly due to divine love and forgiveness. It is God who establishes communion between himself and his creatures and the way in which he does this is through agape. In the second set of pages which Frankfurt references, Nygren switches gears and discusses humanity’s love for God. ‘God’s Agape is the criterion of Christian love. Nothing but that which bears the impress of Agape has the right to be called  Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, p. 94.  Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, p. 94. The footnote is to Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), pp. 75–81, and 91–95. 62  Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros, trans. Philip S. Watson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 75. 63  Ibid., p. 77. 64  Ibid. 65  Ibid., p. 78. 66  Ibid. 67  Ibid., p. 80. 60 61

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Christian love.’68 Or again, ‘Christian love is something other than ordinary human love. But what gives it its special character is precisely the fact that it is patterned on God’s love.’69 Humanity’s love for God is a being possessed by God and consists in a spontaneous and free surrender to God which is ‘unmotivated’ in that it seeks to gain nothing from God through this love. The similarity between Nygren’s characterization of the divine love as spontaneous, unmotivated, creative, even creative of value and indifferent to any type of antecedent ‘worth’ and Frankfurt’s portrayal of human love is striking. In both of these passages Frankfurt’s ostensible point is to compare and contrast divine and human love, but it should be clear that in Frankfurt’s view human love bears a deep resemblance to divine love, at least as he characterizes it, despite their differences. Indeed, the primary difference seems only to be that divine love can be radically promiscuous in a way human love should not because of God’s infinity and invulnerability. There is, however, a critical addendum that a Christian account of agape might want to add to Frankfurt’s account of love. In fact, such a supplement can be found in the pages of Nygren which directly follow those which Frankfurt references. In the very next section Nygren also compares and contrasts divine love and human love. He argues that while Christian love of neighbor is qualitatively different from divine love, it is still supposed to be a ‘reflection of God’s love; this is its prototype and its ultimate ground.’70 ‘Christian love is spontaneous and unmotivated’,71 and it is also creative: love of one’s neighbor ‘is not merely a reflection of the attitude of the person who is its object, but has creative power to establish a new fellowship between men.’72 To summarize, Christian love for neighbor is unmotivated, spontaneous, and creative of fellowship between human beings. A different key begins to be sounded, however, when Nygren describes the final aspect of neighbourly love: ‘love for one’s enemies’.73 He explains, If love for one’s neighbors is to be real Agape it must above all be spontaneous and unmotivated. But where does it show itself more spontaneous and unmotivated than when it is directed to enemies, whose behavior would most reasonably and naturally provoke the precise opposite of love?74

With this rhetorical question from Nygren we can begin to detect a gap between Frankfurt’s account of love and a Christian account of love. For both Frankfurt and Nygren love is unmotivated, spontaneous, creative, and indifferent to perceived value. For Frankfurt such a portrayal of love is descriptive of human love in general. For Nygren, by contrast, such love is a distinctively Christian love. Nygren thinks  Ibid., p. 92.  Ibid., p. 93. 70  Ibid., p. 97. 71  Ibid., p. 97. 72  Ibid., p. 96. 73  Ibid., p. 101. 74  Ibid. 68 69

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that an ethics of sympathy, or general altruism, is certainly possible for anyone and everyone. There is, however, the foreboding sense that ‘natural’ human love, or love which takes places after the devastation of the Fall, will be ‘motivated’, ‘interested’, and ‘only a form of natural self-love, which extends its scope to embrace also benefactors of the self.’75 Nygren’s derogation of self-love also places his distinctive account of love in conflict with Frankfurt’s. What makes Christian love Christian for Nygren is that it has its source and pattern in the divine love, and more specifically in the divine love which seeks out and establishes communion with the sinner, the lost, and the unloved. Here we can turn to Luther, one of Nygren’s own predecessors and main influences, and his defense of the Twenty-Eighth Thesis of the Heidelberg Disputation which forms one of the epigraphs to this chapter: The first part [the love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it] is clear because the love of God which lives in man loves sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive. For this reason the love of man avoids sinners and evil persons. Thus Christ says: ‘For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners’ (Matthew 9:13). This is the love of the cross, born of the cross, which turns in the direction where it does not find good which it may enjoy, but where it may confer good upon the bad and needy person. ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive’ (Acts 20:35), says the Apostle.76

These brief remarks on Nygren should not be taken as an agreement with his account of agape or his contrast between agape and eros, but stem from the fact that Frankfurt himself references Nygren as a theological precedent or analogy for his own views on love.77 What they show us, however, is a potential difference between a Christian account of love and that of Frankfurt. For instance, what Nygren and Luther raise, and Augustine long before them, is a suspicion regarding our apparently ‘spontaneous’ and ‘unmotivated’ loves and cares. This suspicion can be raised inasmuch as for Augustine, Luther, and Nygren there is a difference between ‘natural’ and Christian love, given the ubiquitous, corrupting, and not always perceptible effects of sin upon human life and community. This raises the question, then, of whether Frankfurt’s account also allows for suspicions regarding what we love and care about. Even if not couched directly in terms of sin, are there grounds for suspicion in terms of the deep influence of different ideologies, inherited prejudices, profitable manipulations, or sheer constitutional selfishness and pathology? Perhaps. While this is not a pressing question for Frankfurt in the way it is for Augustine, Luther, and Nygren, he notes that it is common for us to experience powerful forces, such as jealousy or addiction, which we  Ibid., p. 97.  Luther, ‘Heidelberg Disputation’, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, p. 48. 77  For some helpful background, see William Werpehowski, ‘Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros’, in Gilbert Meilaender and William Werpehowski, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Theological Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 433–48; cf. also John Burnaby, Amor Dei: A Study of the Religion of St Augustine (Eugene, Or: Wipf and Stock, 2007); and Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 75 76

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might regard as ‘alien to ourselves’,78 and make efforts to eradicate, lessen, or manage at least. Thus we could potentially extend Frankfurt’s account and argue that care for the origins, nature, and wider impact of one’s care is certainly possible for someone to care about. What about other elements of Christian love, such as love of enemy, for the downcast, the troubled, and the unrighteous, or more generally, for the unlovable? Looking to Frankfurt’s ‘The Importance of What We Care About’ and the argument that ‘it may still be possible to distinguish between things that are worth caring about to one degree or another and things that are not’,79 Alan Soble argues, ‘Christian love includes caring about the “unlovable”, that which it is ordinarily not possible for us to care about, or is difficult for us to care about, or we have to force ourselves to barely care about: the physically offensive (repellent, nauseating), homeless, panhandling, conniving drug addict—the Kierkegaardian unlovable ugly.’80 Soble suspects that what we will decide to care about will be what is ‘easy to love’ and that in this decision process the independent value or worthiness of the object is tacitly smuggled in: ‘If we are to select, as the things to care about, those things that we find lovable (i.e., that which it is possible for us to love), the love is, after all, a response to the perceived value of its object.’81 Frankfurt has, according to Soble, granted ‘everything to Plato’s horn of the dilemma, according to which we love those whom we find beautiful—independently of loving them.’82 The force and peculiarity of Frankfurt’s account of the whylessness of love, however, means that by definition nothing is inherently unlovable, and that everything is potentially lovable given the creative and spontaneous nature of love. Soble to right to suspect that from sheer inertia or concern for comfort and ease, that when deciding from among the objects we care about which cares to identify with and pursue we may indeed choose what we find easy to care about. Here again, though, on Frankfurt’s account one may care about expanding one’s love towards those objects and people which it is difficult to care about. Additionally, Frankfurt does not seem to run so readily into Plato’s arms in the way that Soble argues inasmuch as when deciding which of our cares to further, we will presumably be using criteria which one already cares about (whether or not this is realized or acknowledged) such that once again we are deliberating about objects and potential cares from within the set of things we already care about. The issues surrounding an object’s worthiness for being loved, and Frankfurt’s silence regarding of any kind of objectivity in moral and aesthetic reflection, are well explored by Susan Wolf. In a conference dedicated to Frankfurt’s work she asks: ‘Ought we to care that the things we care about are worth caring about—that they meet some standard of objective value?’83 Wolf answers in the affirmative and  Frankfurt, Necessity, Volition, Love, p. 136.  Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, p. 91. 80  Soble, ‘Love and Value, Yet Again’, p. 32. 81  Ibid., p. 33. 82  Ibid. 83  Susan Wolf, ‘The True, the Good, and the Lovable: Frankfurt’s Avoidance of Objectivity’, in Buss and Overton, eds., Contours of Agency, pp. 227–44; here p. 235. 78 79

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argues that truth (for we do not want to live in a fantasy world of our own making or be deceived regarding our loves) and a correspondence or ‘affinity’ between ‘subjective attraction’ and ‘objective attractiveness’ are desiderata for considering what one should or ought to care about.84 In his response to Wolf, Frankfurt presses his view that [s]ince loving as such is valuable, it is reasonable to desire it for its own sake. It follows quite strictly that loving something is necessarily—given the customary assumption that other things being equal—better than not loving it and, of course, better than loving nothing.85

Inasmuch as loving and caring are goods in and of themselves, ‘loving is in itself is preferable (other things being equal) to not loving’.86 Or again, ‘The mere possibility of loving something is invariably a reason for loving it.’87 The consequence of this view is that there is at least a prima facie reason for loving what one is able to love, as once one loves something it is already imbued with value and worth, even if only for the individual. But Frankfurt notes that other concerns may quickly outweigh this prima facie reason.88 He also admits that there are many and venerable traditions which claim that ‘only a moral life can be good to live … My guess is that it is not true, and that the goal of making it genuinely convincing is a will-o’-the-­ wisp.’89 Only if one cares about being moral does being moral add anything to one’s life. Being immoral in Frankfurt’s view is not an inherent violation of rationality or any objective moral law.90 Instead, being immoral is only unreasonable ‘just because, for many of us, it tends to make our lives worse by its effects on things we care about.’91 As for Wolf’s concern for truth, Frankfurt quips, ‘if we do care about truth, we would do better to resist our tendency to suppose that what we love must be good.’92 As for her proposal for an ‘affinity’ between love and value, Frankfurt  Wolf, ‘The True, the Good, and the Lovable, p. 237.  Frankfurt, ‘Reply to Susan Wolf’, in Buss and Overton, eds., Contours of Agency, p. 245. 86  Ibid. 87  Ibid., p. 246. 88  Ibid. 89  Ibid., p. 248. 90  Frankfurt himself is quick enough to find examples of trivial cares and loves. There is the example of someone who is utterly devoted to not stepping on cracks and David Hume’s man who would rather destroy the world than suffer a paper cut. Frankfurt would say that we could call such a person ‘crazy’, but only volitionally, and not logically. Cf. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, pp. 184–190. 91  Frankfurt, ‘Reply to Susan Wolf’, p. 249. 92  Ibid. Frankfurt’s reply to this point leaves something to be desired, especially given these closing remarks from On Bullshit: ‘Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself … Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit’ (Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit’, p. 133). 84 85

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repeats his fundamental idea: ‘An enthusiastically meaningful life need not be connected to anything that is objectively valuable, nor need it include any thought that the things to which it is devoted are good. Meaning in life is created by loving. Devoting oneself to what one loves suffices to make one’s life meaningful, regardless of the inherent or objective character of the objects that are loved.’93 While there is indeed a surprising prima facie overlap between Frankfurt’s account of the whylessness of love and a Christian account of love, the divergence between the two should now be clearer from these remarks. There would be many other differences to identify, but I would like to close by mentioning just one, but a fundamental one at that, which comes from 1 John: ‘We love because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). Frankfurt’s favorite illustration of the whylessness of love, which also functions for him as a normative description of love, is the unconditional love of a parent for a child. Few would argue that parental love is or should be based upon the abilities, worth, or ‘value’ of the child. In this regard Frankfurt’s account of love seems correct, and yet it also seems partial. For example, what of the child in his illustration of the parent-child relationship? There is now a host of philosophical and theological reflections on the child and childhood which we cannot cover here,94 but one of the questions that these reflections seek to answer is what is it that the figure of the child fundamentally shows us about love, being loved, and loving in turn. How is parental love generative and creative not only for the parent, but also for the child, who one day will love in turn and might even become a parent? This question leads us to a broader one: what of the beloved in general? The tale of love’s generative and creative nature can and should also be told from the side of the object, from the side of the beloved, from the side of a love elicited and birthed into being. This side of the tale of love’s generative, spontaneous, and creative nature is not an addendum to the story of the child, but its beginning and its ground. All of this is to ask Frankfurt a simple question: where is first being loved in this account? We can agree with Frankfurt and say that the world always and already has meaning for us because of our cares and loves, and that hopefully we have the ability to enlarge and expand these and love and care for them wholeheartedly; but it is also a world which is meaningful and cared for by others, and in which I am loved and cared for before I am able to do so in return. In a Christian account of love, it is even the case that the world itself is loved long before it becomes the horizon and condition for the possibility of our loves.  Frankfurt, ‘Reply to Susan Wolf’, p. 250.  The literature on the child is quickly growing in theology and philosophy. See, amongst many others, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas, trans. W. Hastie (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890); Karl Rahner, ‘Ideas for a Theology of Childhood’, in Rahner, Theological Investigations, vol. XIII (London/New York: Darton, Longman & Todd/ Herder and Herder, 1971), pp. 33–50; Jürgen Moltmann, ‘Child and Childhood as Metaphors of Hope’, Theology Today 56:4 (2000): pp.  592–603; Martin E.  Marty, The Mystery of the Child (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2007); Edmund Newey, Children of God: The Child as Source of Theological Anthropology (New York: Routledge, 2016); David H. Jensen, Graced Vulnerability: A Theology of Childhood (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005); Gustav Siewerth, Metaphysik der Kindheit (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962); and Ferdinand Ulrich, Der Mensch als Anfang: Zur philosophischen Anthropologie der Kindheit (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1970).

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12.6  Conclusion There is, to conclude, much to admire, surprise, and provoke in Frankfurt’s account of love, and a much fuller response to his paradoxes of love would surely be possible, especially given his occasional references to Augustine and Kierkegaard. It seems to be the case, however, that there is a rich tapestry of practices and concepts embedded in the Christian view of love—asking and receiving forgiveness, confession, mercy, love of neighbor and enemy, the fruits of the Spirit, etc.—which can help better maintain both love’s gracious whylessness and its creative and spontaneous nature in ways which would avoid Frankfurt’s naturalism and soft Prometheanism.

Bibliography Buss, Sarah, and Lee Overton, eds. 2002. Contours of Agency: Essays on Themes from Harry Frankfurt. Cambridge/London: The MIT Press. Descartes, René. 1971. In Œuvres de Descartes, Correspondance. Vol. III, Janvier 1640—Juin 1643, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tanner. Paris: Vrin. ———. 1991. Principles of Philosophy. Trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P.  Miller. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic. ———. 1993. René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. In Focus, ed. Stanley Tweyman. London/New York: Routledge. Frankfurt, Harry G. 1970. Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations. New York: Bobbs-Merrill. ———. 1988. The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006a. The Reasons of Love. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. 2006b. On Truth. New York: Knopf. ———. 2006c. Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hume, David. 1992. Treatise of Human Nature. Buffalo: Prometheus Books. Luther, Martin. 1989. Heidelberg Disputation. In Martin’s Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull, 30–49. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Nygren, Anders. 1982. Agape and Eros. Trans. Philip S. Watson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Soble, Alan. 2015. Love and Value, Yet Again. In Love, Reason, and Will: Kierkegaard After Frankfurt, ed. Anthony Rudd and John Davenport, 25–46. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Spinoza. 2000. Ethics. Ed. and Trans. G.H.R. Parkinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 13

Loving Being: Erich Przywara’s Engagement with Max Scheler Matthew Z. Vale

13.1  Historical and Thematic Orientation The aim of this essay is to lay out Erich Przywara’s engagement with Max Scheler and make clear its significance for fundamental themes in his early (pre-Analogia entis) thought. There is a practical and systematic rationale for mostly leaving Przywara’s 1932 opus out of the discussion. Systematically, most of Przywara’s Aug in Aug with Scheler was carried out in the early 1920s, before Heidegger emerged as the new giant of phenomenology, and so pushed Przywara’s reception of phenomenology into new terrain.1 Practically, the Analogia entis is now available to English 1  The principle texts for Przywara’s engagement with Scheler are Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler  – J.H.  Newman (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1923), abbreviated here as RB; Gottgeheimnis der Welt (1923), collected in Schriften, vol. II: Religionsphilosophische Schriften (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962), pp. 123–242; Gott: Fünf Vorträge über das religionsphilosophische Problem (1925), in Schriften II, pp. 243–372; Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (1927) in Schriften II, pp. 374–512, abbreviated here as RkTh. Likewise important are the essays, ‘Tragische Welt?’ (1926) in Ringen der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsätze 1922–1927, vol. 1 (Augsburg: Benno Filser Verlag, 1929), and ‘Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie’, Stimmen der Zeit 115 (1928): 252–264. The translated volume, Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. David Bentley Hart and John Betz (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), collects the essay, ‘Phenomenology, Realogy, and Relationology’ (1957), which contains an important, though later, treatment of Scheler. I abbreviate citations to this volume as AE I and II, referring to the two parts of the work. For overviews of Przywara’s engagement with Scheler and early phenomenology, see Martha Zechmeister, Gottes-Nacht. Erich Przywaras Weg negativer Theologie (Münster: Lit, 1997), pp. 94–107; and Bernhard Gertz, Glaubenswelt als Analogie. Die theologische Analogie-Lehre Erich Przywaras und ihr Ort in der Auseindersetzung um die

M. Z. Vale (*) University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_13

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readers, and so drawing out themes from the mostly untranslated early works seems a more useful contribution to the English-speaking conversation on Przywara. Przywara’s most significant systematic developments of the analogia entis, in Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (1927) and Analogia entis (1932), issue from a phenomenological sensibility. Both works begin from an ineluctable ‘correlation’ (Zueinander) of meta-ontics and meta-noetics, a correlation which Przywara develops out of a form of intentionality analysis. For Przywara, all possible metaphysics of religion and the God-creature relation spring out of this fundamental tension of thought, the tension between the interior infinity of consciousness’s immanence, and the exterior infinity of world.2 The metaphysics of the analogia entis is phenomenological inasmuch as its entire scope can be developed from out of the ‘formality of movement towards an object’ which is constitutive of the cogito.3 It is no surprise, then, that Przywara credits the encounter with Scheler as having first compelled him ‘towards the explicit problematic of the analogia entis.’ He recounts in the preface to Analogia entis: From Nietzsche the path led directly to the collected essays of Max Scheler … But it was his On the Eternal in Man that first led to an actual engagement (Religionsbegründung, 1923). My work is indebted to Scheler on two counts: for providing me with a vibrant connection to the phenomenological method and for compelling me (through Scheler’s “immediacy of the religious”) towards the explicit problematic of the analogia entis … From the beginning my writings have been associated with the idea of the analogia entis, even though my first formulation of it arose out of my engagement with Max Scheler (late in 1922).4

Scheler, for Przywara, held great promise for Catholic thought in the 1920s. The lectures Przywara delivered in August 1923 before the fall conference of the Verband der Vereine Katholischer Akademiker in Ulm (now collected as Gottgeheimnis der Welt) are full of both hope and a kind of fraternal concern for the burgeoning ‘phenomenological movement’.5 Phenomenology is a ‘will for the object’, analogia fidei (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1969), pp. 152–161. There is an out-of-print English translation of RkTh, but it was not available to me while writing this essay. See Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion, trans. Alan Coates Bouquet (London: Oxford UP, 1935). 2  In RkTh’s terminology, the tension of subject-object is constitutive of consciousness as such, and the entire scheme of all possible metaphysics of religion issues from it, as different ‘moments’ or ‘postures’ within that tension are conjugated both with each other, as well as with the polar tensions of concrete human existence (the polarities of body-spirit and individual-community). An analysis of the fundamental tension of consciousness towards world, or truth, or the infinite—i.e., towards a possible transcendent ‘exterior infinity’—implicitly contains a complete metaphysics, including a religious metaphysics of the creature-God relation, and a corresponding religiosity (RkTh, pp.  405–6). Likewise, in AE, the ineluctable interpenetration of meta-ontics and metanoetics (AE I, §1) is ab initio indwelt, in a relationship of ‘in-and-beyond’, by the problem of theology in-and-beyond philosophy, and ultimately by the analogical relation of ‘God beyond-and-in the creature’ as its ultimate ‘formal ground’ (AE I, §4.1). 3  AE I, §8.2, p. 312. 4  AE, preface to the 1932 edition, pp. xxi–xxii. 5  For a succinct account of Przywara’s vision in Gottgeheimnis, and its context within the German Catholic intellectual movements of the teens and 20s, see Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, ‘Die Newman-Rezeption in den 20er Jahren in Deutschland: Edith Stein im Umkreis von Maria

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a ‘will for essence’, and a ‘will for God’—a youthful but ‘impetuous longing’ to burst ‘out of … Cartesian-Kantian narrowing, into … the Catholic wide-open.’6 In its ‘primacy of the object’, and in the ‘intentional realism’ Przywara sees in Scheler, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and others, phenomenology promises a return to the objectivity of the philosophia perennis of the Catholic tradition.7 Przywara hoped phenomenology would join with the Catholic youth movement and the Liturgical Movement to bring about a ‘holy spring’ in Catholic thought and culture. Scheler as daring public Catholic intellectual seemed poised to lead the way.8 Scheler’s value-philosophy (though partially beholden to a regrettable ‘Kantian residue’, in Przywara’s view) held the potential of overcoming the Kantian opposition of analytical thought and ‘emotionality’, as well as the ‘almost six-hundred-­ year-long’ metaphysical dualism of being and value underwriting it.9 He likewise seemed to offer direction to the contemporary intellectual and cultural longing to reconcile ‘form’ and ‘person’, and to develop an authentic ontology of the individual person.10 ‘Scheler signifies, with his doctrine of the apprehension of objective values, modern philosophy’s greatest approach to the fundamental objectivism of traditional Christian philosophy, and from this … trajectory it is clear how [his value doctrine] has, to an astonishing degree, become a “leader into the Church”.’11 Even the later Przywara could call Scheler ‘the master of the definitive overcoming of modern philosophy’.12 Yet Przywara worries about Scheler’s claims for ‘immediate knowledge of God’, and his rejection of ‘the cool distancing of the scholastic doctrine of abstraction’. The intuitionism of Wesensschau, though it begins as a childlike openness to the world, is poised to collapse into the bitterness of a gaze which exhausts the essence of the object, and renounces any need to return to the exterior ‘fullness of the world’.13 The ‘storming homesickness’ of phenomenology for Christian truths suffers from all the ‘holy blindness of first love’—and the responsibility of Catholic thought is to offer salutary guidance ‘out of fraternal love’ for those turning homeward.14 Przywara’s treatment of Scheler in Religionsbegründung (1923) thus bears all the marks of charitable dialogue. Its project is to develop Scheler’s phenomenology in the direction of a ‘philosophy of subjective religion’ grounded in the philosophy Knoepfler, Romano Guardini und Erich Przywara’, in ‘Herz spricht zum Herzen.’ John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in seiner Bedeutung für das deutsche Christentum, Hanna-Barbara GerlFalkovitz, ed. (Annweiler: Plöger, 2002), especially pp. 51–3 and 59–70. 6  Gottgeheimnis, p. 125; pp. 131–2, 137. 7  See Gott, p. 248; RB, pp. 15–18; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 128, 218. 8  Gottgeheimnis, p. 137. 9  RB, pp. 133–4, 162. 10  Gottgeheimnis, pp. 138–156. 11  RB, p. 9–10. 12  Przywara, In und Gegen. Stellungnahmen zur Zeit (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1955), p. 47. 13  Gottgeheimnis, pp. 132–3; 218–21. 14  Ibid., pp. 131–2, 137.

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of the analogia entis, and so to arrive at a personalism which would answer the longings of modern, subject-oriented philosophy, yet also stand in continuity with the patristic-scholastic philosophia perennis.15 Religionsbegründung attempts ‘a clarification’ of Scheler’s phenomenology ‘through the scholastic doctrine of value and Newman’s “implicit reasoning”’.16 Its task is to reveal that the ‘true core’ of Scheler is in fact an ‘ur-Catholic’ account of subjective religion fully compatible in some of its deepest commitments with Newman’s; any absolutizing tendencies Scheler evinces can be cleansed without dismantling the essential achievements of his religiosity. Przywara’s hope was to rescue Scheler and phenomenology from being wholly discredited by the ‘contemporary confusion’ which reduced phenomenology to subjectivism, and instead to make clear phenomenology’s compatibility with Catholic thought.17 Yet right in the midst of Przywara’s focused engagement, ‘Max Scheler collapse[d]’ from atop the ‘height of his vision’; December 1922 marked Scheler’s final rupture in worldview and public break with Christian theism. The break marked many Catholics, including Przywara, with deep disappointment: We can hardly grasp today how catastrophic Scheler’s abrupt swing from being a true Christian phenomenologist to becoming an equally authentic Gnostic was for German intellectual life between the First and Second World Wars.18

Przywara and others reeled in ‘the scarcely believable rift’ that opened in Scheler’s thought between Materiale Wertethik (1913–16) and Vom Ewigen im Menschen (1921) on the one hand, and Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (1926) on the other.19 In what follows, I will trace Przywara’s fraternal but critical engagement with Scheler’s notion of the ‘primacy of love’ (Liebesprimat)—his notion of phenomenology as a reduction to a being-less horizon of the person (geistige Person), who is a kind of pre- or extra-ontological love-act. In short, Przywara gives a referendum

15  RB, pp. 35, 222–4. Religionsbegründung, then, is ‘a furthering’ of Przywara’s ‘reconstruction of the patristic, and especially, Augustinian foundation of ethical-religious life in … Himmelreich der Seele (1922–3),’ a patristic-scholastic vision which is finds its modern culmination in Newman’s philosophy of religion and subjective life (p. x). 16  RB, p. 95. Przywara’s word here (Klärung) means both ‘clarification’ and ‘cleansing’. 17  In und Gegen, p. 51; RB, p. 242. 18  In und Gegen, p. 54. In December 1923, Scheler wrote: ‘At no time of his life and development could the author call himself a “believing Catholic” according to the strict standards of the theology of the Roman Church’. Cited in Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Kluwer, 1982), p. 303, footnote 14. 19  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p.  257. Late in life, Przywara sorrowfully remarked that the ‘embittered’ attacks on Scheler from Catholic thinkers around 1922–3 (above all ‘the miserably bitter Josef Geyser’) only ‘drove the great religious philosopher of Christianity out of the Church. When, in 1923, I published my Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler – J. H. Newman and sent it to him, only a few wistful lines came back in reply. Geyser’s book on Scheler had already dealt the last blow’ (In und Gegen, p. 54). Przywara’s treatment in In und Gegen shows real sorrow for ‘the personal tragedy’ of ‘Scheler’s catastrophe’ (pp. 53–4).

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on Scheler’s idea of ‘love without being’.20 Przywara’s response is that a ­phenomenology of personality and love, far from being ‘before’ or ‘without’ metaphysics, is already an important moment within the wide sweep of a creaturely metaphysics—however much this important moment ought not be over-emphasized or made absolute. The Liebesprimat, correctly interpreted, Przywara thinks, says simply that the creature is related to God within the interval of being understood as analogy, as a rhythm in which the creature’s likeness and nearness to God is configured within an always ‘ever greater’ distance and unlikeness. Przywara’s concern with Scheler’s philosophy of love ‘before’ being is that it makes of consciousness a kind of self-­deifying affective enclosure. The pure immanence of the Ich in its loving becomes the dithyramb of an absolute life or personality. For Scheler, this ‘worldless’ or ‘being-less’ person is understood as an ‘immediate co-enactment of the divine love-­act’. In the later Scheler, this absolute personality becomes the source for a dubious speculative ontology and cosmology. The result, Przywara thinks, is not a personalism which is ever ‘before’ or ‘without’ being, but a speculative metaphysics in which ‘love-act’ comes to mean something like ‘(primordial or authentic or personal) being’, and stands in a dark, Manichaean suspicion overagainst other forms of thingly and servile ‘being’. Przywara insists in reply that the loving gaze is not the gaze that forsakes, or in Scheler’s words, ‘shuts off’, being, but the gaze which, for the first time, ‘sees being’, and loves being.21 To love is to  The idea has a significantly different meaning for Scheler than it has for Jean-Luc Marion, who develops it in The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 6, 71–2, 87–88. Marion does say ‘love without being’ is ‘univocal’, said in only ‘one way’, but adds that ‘God loves in the same way we do. Except for an infinite difference’ (Erotic Phenomenon, pp. 215–222; cf. p. 5; I thank Prof. William Desmond for pointing me to these passages). Love is finally, in a formulation which shows affinity with Przywara’s metaphysics, ‘receiving the unthinkable, as the sign and the seal of the measureless origin of the distance that gives us our measure.’ See his The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham UP, 2001), p. 155; cited in R. Horner, ‘The Weight of Love’, in CounterExperiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion, ed. Kevin Hart (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), pp. 237–8. One can hear some resonance with Przywara, for whom the creature’s analogical relation to God is a ‘self-ordering within a being-ordered’ by an ‘above that orders’ (AE §1.5, pp.  195–7). See also Claude Romano’s reading, where what Marion finally means by love’s univocity is something like love’s analogicity or equivocity (Romano, ‘Love in its Concept’, in Counter-Experiences, pp. 320–327). In view of the resonances, we might say with Joachim Negel that the core Christian experience for both Przywara and Marion is Deus interior intimo meo et superior summo meo, the ‘experience of ever greater distance within ever greater nearness’: ‘Here we see that the classical conception of being in the sense of the analogia entis, and iconoclastic phenomenology as above all the early Marion pursued it, not only need not mutually exclude one another, but can each fill one another out superbly.’ Przywara’s approach is similar: by engaging Scheler closely, he intended to show that phenomenology and metaphysics mutually enlarge and ground one another. See Negel, Welt als Gabe. Hermeneutische Grenzgänge zwischen Theologie und Phänomenologie (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2013), p. 147, footnote 125. My thanks to John Betz for this citation. 21  David Bentley Hart remarks that the disadvantage of Marion’s philosophy of idol and icon lies in ‘mak[ing] it sound as if the icon contravenes being itself, rather than our idolatrous ontologies …  When fallen vision—the victim of despair, anger, envy, anxiety, rapacity, avarice—ascends from these inessential moods to the perspicacity of charity’s oculus simplex, it sees being’. See his 20

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love being, to love the goodness of being as being’s expression and realization. Being is not sundered into Manichaean realms of personal, divine ‘act-being’ (which is loved) and sub-­personal, tragic ‘thing-being’ (which is known). Being wherever it is being is radiant, personal unity whose fullness the creature knows in loving and loves in knowing. The creature lovingly traverses this inexhaustible fullness of being in an endless becoming into God, in a creaturely posture of humility, openness to the world, loving service, and reverent fear. Creaturely religiosity is not a co-enactment of God, but the ‘endless striving’ of love which ‘patiently’ and ‘peacefully’ suffers God to be God, and creature to be creature in the passio of its finitude. Przywara’s religiosity of the analogia entis is the confession ‘Tu solus!’— ‘You alone are God.’22 I begin with a précis of the relevant themes in Scheler’s thought, and then turn to Przywara’s engagement.

13.2  S  cheler: The Person and Phenomenology in the Horizon of Love (and Value) Alone23 13.2.1  The Primacy of ‘Feeling Value’ Before ‘Knowing Being’ Scheler’s Formalism espouses an ‘emotional apriorism’ which corresponds to his anthropology. Before I know the being of the world, I feel its value: ‘feeling of value’ (Wertfühlen) precedes all rational ‘knowing of being’. Feeling, however, is enabled by the spontaneous movement of love as the person’s most originary contact with the world. Loving and hating comprise the most originary site of the emotional ‘opening up’ of the world: Ultimately, the apriorism of loving and hating is the irreducible foundation of all other apriorisms … and thereby also the foundation both of a priori knowledge of being [Seinserkennens] as well as a priori willing of contents.24 The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), pp. 237–41, here p. 239–40. Amidst appreciation of Marion, he laments Marion’s ‘surrendering being to Heideggerian poverty, stripping it of its infinitely actual splendor and power and grace … [and so] failing to see that love is in fact ontological’ (pp. 240–1). 22  Gottgeheimnis der Welt, pp. 229–30. 23  I sometimes capitalize ‘Person’ when referring to  Scheler’s geistige Person to  underscore the absoluteness Scheler attributes to it. 24  Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus (1913/16), in Gesammelte Werke (GW) II, p.83. I abbreviate Formalismus as F. Scheler posits as a ‘fundamental law of mental acts’ (Aktfundierungsgesetz) that value-apprehension always and necessarily precedes any knowledge, ‘that originarily no existing being [Daseiendes] can be knowable by any consciousness (whether through intuition or thought), unless it has first been intended as a value-object of determinate value-quality in interest-taking acts (whether it be loved or hated), according to the sequence of acts that bring [phenomena] into givenness [der gebenden Akte].’ See Vom Ewigen im Menschen

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‘Always and everywhere the “lover” goes before the “knower”.’25 The geistige Person is, phenomenologically speaking, a being-less Person who lives and loves in a being-less sphere of value. Scheler insists that the person who feels does not simply feel a world already known as being. The ‘spontaneous’ act of love rather brings the world into appearance as a value-world, and it does so a priori to all feeling and knowledge. Emphatically, ‘[l]ove and hate are not among the knowledge-acts. They represent a peculiar relation to value-objects which certainly is no mere knowledge function.’ Love and hate ‘are entirely originary and immediate forms of emotional relation to value-content itself’, with no mediation of knowledge, and so with no mediation of the object-being which is susceptible to knowledge.26 That is, in intentional acts of feeling, values are not simply ‘given along with’ value-indifferent being, as if our most fundamental openness to the world were in knowledge of substances, with values being given as mere attributes or qualities of substances, known ‘along with’ substances. Values are rather ‘originary’ and are ‘always given before [stets vorgegebenen]’ all ‘value-indifferent being’.27 Again, as Scheler stresses in Formalism, in intentional feeling (the most originary moment of which is love), ‘the very world of objects itself “opens itself up” to us, but only in its value-aspect [von ihrer Wertseite]’, and not in its aspect as knowable being.28 The ‘primacy of the givenness of value before the givenness of being [Primat der Wertgegebenheit vor der Seinsgegebenheit]’ is ‘a strict law of the essential architecture not only of higher “mental” [geistigen] acts, but also of the lower “functions” of our Geist.’29 Before the world is for us, we feel it immediately as value: ‘We can grasp nothing (in the sense of knowledge of being) which has not originally been given as a value-unity.’30 The most a priori ‘root’ of the person, then, is in this primordial emotional openness to the world in love: ‘But since love and hate are the most originary act-forms, encompassing and founding all the other kinds of acts within the group of emotional (1921), in GW V (henceforward, E), pp. 306–7; and p. 219. For E and F in English translation, see On the Eternal in Man, Bernard Noble, trans. (London: SCM Press, 1960); and Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism, trans. Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk (Evantson, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). The translations of Scheler in this paper are my own, though I have occasionally consulted Noble’s, and Frings’ and Funk’s translations. 25  E, p. 81. 26  Wesen und Formen der Sympathie – Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart (2nd ed., 1923), in GW VII (henceforward, Sy), pp. 151; cf. E, p. 79. ‘I have attempted [in Formalism] … to demonstrate the fact of true and originary intentional feelings—intentional, as opposed to mere feelings conditioned by presentation. There, I refuted the theory that in these intentional feelings it is thingly, ideative knowledge of beings [eine sachliche Ideenerkentnis des Daseienden] which reveals itself to us in a “dark” or “confused” way’ (Sy, p. 68). 27  E, pp. 79–80. 28  F, pp. 265–6; emphasis added. 29  E, pp. 82, 80; cf. 306–7. 30  E, p.  220 (‘Und da wir Nichts seinserkennend erfassen können, was nicht ursprünglich als Werteinheit gegeben war …’).

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acts … they also form the common roots’ of all mental and personal life, within this sphere of the givenness of pure value, in which being is not yet given.31 ‘Knowledge of value founds knowledge of being’, such that objective knowledge (whether of being or of value) is subsequent to and dependent on originary feeling of value.32 The ‘primacy of love and hate’ cannot be reduced to any other primacy of acts of striving or willing, nor to any primacy of acts which know being. Value cannot be derived from ontology; it is not a ‘gradient of being’ in any sense.33 To identify the summum bonum with the highest, most perfect being, as Greek and Christian philosophy have done, is, for Scheler, erroneously to collapse value into being. It is a rationalist denial of value as an autonomous, objective, and a priori realm of givenness not derived from being. Were value derived from being, the value of a thing would be a mere measurement of its metaphysical perfection, and feeling-acts would represent merely a ‘“dark” and “confused”’ form of rational metaphysical knowledge.34 What I feel in love could then be ‘clarified’ without remainder into metaphysical propositions. Value is instead a material, ‘originary, a priori content’ which is essentially correlated with emotional acts alone, and which emotional life ‘does not borrow from “thinking”’, or from mere ‘object-oriented knowing and thinking in the sense of knowledge of being’.35 In comparison with rational knowledge, feeling is equally originary, equally independent of the vital organism, and equally governed by ideal laws. Yet it is (1) not knowledge of being, (2) remains ‘entirely independent from logic’, and (3) is not accessible to ‘value-blind’ knowledge acts. The realm of material, a priori values accessible to feeling is a realm entirely autonomous from the being which corresponds to knowledge acts. Scheler intends to secure the autonomy of value by insisting that at the highest level of phenomenological apriority (in love-­ acts), value is severed from, and irreducible to, being.36  E, p. 83.  E, p. 259. For more texts supporting this analysis, see Przywara, RB, p. 163. 33  E, pp. 78–9; F, pp. 176–177. 34  F, pp.  267–8. Przywara thinks Scheler has misunderstood scholastic thought on this matter: ‘Scholasticism does not, as Scheler argues, in any sense analytically derive the essence of moral goods, nor of the goods of salvation, nor (most importantly) of the bonum as such from the essence of being ... “Value” is … in no sense merely a “gradient of being”’ (RB, pp. 83, 91; cf. pp. 87–95). 35  F, pp. 82–4. 36  As I note below, the irony of Scheler’s anti-Kantianism, in Przywara’s view, is that it is ferociously Kantian. Scheler, in an anti-Kantian move, claims that Fühlen has a kind of noetic value (albeit a non-intellectual one) which is as a priori and objective as rational knowledge. Valuefeeling has all the dignity of an objective organ for perceiving reality, and therewith Scheler’s work represents a watershed moment in overcoming the Kantian syndrome which ‘assigns the ethical and religious to the emotional sphere (in the broad sense)’ and opposes it to thought, which is ‘restricted to purely mathematical-analytic and reflexive’ thinking (RB, p. 9). On the other hand, by insisting (against Kant) that the ‘noetic’ value of feeling is absolutely irreducible to rational knowledge, he ultimately radicalizes the opposition between practical and theoretical reason, between feeling and intellect. In Przywara’s analysis, this basic ‘Kantian remainder’ in Scheler’s thought betrays a metaphysical severance of being from value, and laid the groundwork for Scheler’s catastrophic fall into ‘the old gnostic’ dualism (RB, pp.  25, 159; ‘Tragische Welt’, in 31 32

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Likewise, metaphysics and religion are two distinct intentional acts, with two distinct intentional objects. Knowledge of being culminates in the metaphysical act, which intends the valueless ens a se. Feeling of value culminates in the religious act, which intends the most exalted value, the Holy: the infinite, personal love-act which is the summum bonum, the Absolute intended as pure person-value, not as being. Insofar as the religious act ‘feels’ this summum bonum as subsistent, it feels it to be subsistent as an act-value, or person-value, not as the mere thing-substance which would be accessible to the knowledge acts of metaphysics.37 To be sure, Scheler wishes to maintain the real unity of being and value. Though phenomenologically there are two entia intentionalia (ens a se and summum bonum) there is ‘a priori’ only a single extramental ens reale.38 In the real order of things, value always ‘inheres’ in being. ‘[T]o every value-quality … there “belongs” a subsistent being in which it inheres …. Value … has, with respect to subsistent being, only an attributive significance.’39 Yet Scheler has limited phenomenological grounds for positing that this ‘real unity’, or ‘inherence’, is itself a priori to the severance of being and value, since at the highest level of phenomenological apriority (in love and hate), value alone is given, severed from being.40 A real unity of being and value has, for Scheler, to remain mere metaphysical speculation, and cannot ascend to the status of a phenomenological ‘fact’ (Tatsache) which could fulfill the truth of the proposition.41 Although Scheler stipulates the real unity of being and value, by his own phenomenological principles the stipulation is meaningless, since only the severance of being and value, and the primacy of value before being (and never their unity) is given to phenomenological experience. The most primary and originary act of the human being is to love the world in its value-­ aspect, long before contacting its ‘being’ in knowledge. Being can only be known once it has, so to speak, been processed and ‘co-determined’ by the primordial love-­ act which grasps the world before all knowledge of it as being.42 The overwhelming trajectory of Scheler’s thought sees the inmost essence of Ringen der Gegenwart I, p. 354). Scheler’s thought is not an actual overcoming of the ‘post-scholastic either/or between analytical-mathematical thinking and emotionality’, but simply one extreme pole within the same either/or. Still, Scheler’s attempt had, in Przywara’s 1923 appraisal, come ‘the closest’ of all (RB, p. 133). 37  Sy, pp. 165–6. 38  E, pp. 135–6. 39  E, pp. 82–3. 40  To anticipate one of Przywara’s arguments: Przywara counters that if Scheler wishes to found a ‘real unity’ of being and value, then he must also allow that value gives itself to us as an expression of being. He must affirm the (in Przywara’s view) authentic scholastic doctrine of value, where the value of a being is an expression of the degree of actuality of its nature—the degree to which a real nature has made actual its own ‘immanent ideal’ (RB, p. 133; cf. pp. 83–95). Value is ontological, inseparable from being, yet not in such a way that value is simply identical with a ‘degree of being’, as if a being’s placement on the hierarchy of being determined its value (the view Scheler attributes to ‘scholasticism’, and rejects). 41  F, pp. 69–70. 42  E, p. 307.

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things as value (which Scheler ultimately identifies with act-being and ­person-­being), and the being of metaphysics as something derivative and inauthentic. The ‘most immediate participation’ in the primordial essence (Urwesen) of the world is not participation in its being, but in its act (Akt). Act functions in Scheler’s system as an anti-metaphysical, anti-intellectualist construal of the inmost being of things. Because the divine Urwesen is ‘not object-being, but rather act-being’ (‘an infinite act of creating and merciful love’), knowledge is a deficient form of participation. Only ‘an originary co-loving with this All-lovingness’ in the ‘moral upsurge’ (der moralische Aufschwung) achieves participation in the innermost essence of God.43 The true God, who is person, is the loved and loving summum bonum, not the dead thing (ens a se) of metaphysics.44

13.2.2  An ‘Absolute’ Philosophie des Lebens. A Dualist Anthropology. The ‘Worldlessness’ of the Person45 Corresponding to the ‘primacy of value before being’, Scheler’s person is a ‘value Person’: an ‘absolute’ act-center—a ‘co-experienced love-center’—which is non-­ empirical, non-real, and non-essential.46 The Person is self-constituted in a ‘spontaneous’ act of love towards the divine which transcends every possible psychophysical organism, and all vitalistic values.47 There is, then, no knowable nature of the 43  E, pp. 70–72. Scheler’s view here, if divested of its voluntarist tendency, could clearly be understood in a way compatible with much of Catholic spirituality and metaphysics, ‘since,’ as Thomas writes, ‘loving God is something greater than knowing God’ (quia dilectio Dei est maius aliquid quam eius cognitio) (Summa theologiae II-II, q. 27, a. 4, ad 2). 44  See E, pp. 219–221. For Scheler, the ‘being’ of God is primary only qua unknowable love-act (i.e., qua act-being / value-being), not qua intelligible being. 45  See John Crosby, ‘The Individuality of  Human Persons: A  Study in  the  Ethical Personalism of  Max Scheler’, The Review of  Metaphysics 52:1 (1998): pp.  34–5, where Crosby notes how ‘Balthasar [in Apokalypse der Deutschen Seele, vol. III] speaks again and  again of  a  certain “worldlessness” (Weltlosigkeit) of  the  Schelerian person’, a  result of  Scheler’s ‘excessively separat[ing] vital life and spiritual person.’ 46  ‘[T]he Person must never be considered a thing or a substance with faculties and powers, among which the ‘faculty’ or ‘power’ of reason, etc., is one’ (F, p. 371). Nor can this Person be an object of any knowledge- or feeling-act. The Person is, rather, ‘the immediately co-experienced unity of experiencing [die unmittelbar miterlebte Einheit des Er-lebens]; the Person is not a merely thought thing behind and outside what is immediately experienced ... [T]he Person only enacts [vollzieht] his existence in the experiencing of his possible experiences’ (F, p.  371; p.  385; cf. pp.  379, 382–386). 47  Haskamp’s study, Spekulativer und phänomenologischer Personalismus: Einflüsse J.G. Fichtes und Rudolf Euckens auf Max Schelers Philosophie der Person (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1966), amply documents the sources of Scheler’s doctrine of the Person in Fichte’s ‘idealism of the act’ (Tatidealismus), which Scheler first imbibed through his Jena Doktorvater, Rudolf Eucken. Scheler still wished to reject the anti-personalist ‘Logonomie’ of the Fichtean absolutes Ich (F, 372). Haskamp shows that the Fichtean elements of Scheler’s thought, however, are fundamental commitments, not simple holdovers from his early idealist stage under Eucken. Scheler shares in the

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Person, whether empirical or essential, since in the dualism inherited from Fichte, whatever is knowable belongs to the lower world of object-being. In Reinhold Haskamp’s analysis, Scheler’s assertion that the act is originary goes back to Fichte. Fichte attempted to derive object-being [gegenständliches Sein] from out of act-being, or bring it into essential dependence upon act-being … The act-center which is in its essence bound up with value [i.e., the person] is, according to Scheler, more than being. The person is not ‘being’. Rather, as actbeing, she pushes beyond the world, beyond the finite and into the divine. In this tendency, then, the fundamental idea of Fichte manifests itself once more: that authentic [eigentliches] being is act-being, over-against which there stands static being, or object-­being, as inauthentic. Or more exactly: insofar as something is knowable, it belongs, for Scheler, to object-being. Act-being can, for him, not be known, but only co-enacted [mitvollzogen].48

Personality is simply the appearance of the divine which erupts out of the coursing, vitalistic-biologistic ‘life’ thematized by Nietzschean and Bergsonian Lebensphilosophie: All previous philosophies of the human being have failed in seeking to insert between ‘God’ and ‘[vital-biological] life’ some fixed position, something definable as an essence: ‘human being’. But this fixed point does not exist, and it is precisely indefinability which belongs to the essence of the human being. He is nothing but a ‘between’, a ‘border’, a ‘passing over’—an ‘appearance of God’ in the torrent of life, and an eternal ‘passage beyond’ of life over itself.49

The ‘spiritual kernel’ of the human is, understood correctly, nothing but the movement, the tendency, the passage into the divine. He is the bodily creature that intends God; he is the breakthrough point of the Kingdom of God, in whose acts the being and value of the world is first constituted … He is the thing [Ding] that transcends itself, its life, and all life. The core of his essence—prescinding from all particular [biological] organizations—is simply this movement, this spiritual [geistige] act of self-transcending!50

Fichtean dualism of act-being / object-being (Aktussein / Gegenstandsein or gegenstandfähiges Sein), where personal being is act-being (Haskamp, p. 165; cf. E, pp. 70–71). This metaphysical dualism founds Scheler’s anthropological dualism, which defines the Geistperson as the ‘spontaneous’, self-constituting love-act (Haskamp, p. 76). The ‘mere human organism’ belongs to the vitalistic realm of object-being, and has nothing to do with the Person. Przywara also sees a Fichtean lineage in Scheler (RkTh, pp. 383–4). 48  Haskamp, pp. 176–7. 49  Scheler, ‘Zur Idee des Menschen’ (1914), in Vom Umsturz der Werte (GW III), p. 186. ‘“The human being” [Mensch] in this entirely new sense is the intention and the gesture of “transcendence” itself, the being that prays and seeks God. It is not, however, that “the human being prays;” rather, he is the prayer of Life passing above and beyond itself. It is not that “he seeks God” [as one act among others]; the human being is the living X that seeks God!’ (ibid., p. 186; see pp. 189). 50  ‘Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen’, in Vom Umsturz der Werte (GW III), pp. 90–1; F, p. 293. See Sy, p. 169: ‘All values which inhere in the thing-body [Körper], the lived-body [Leib], or the soul can be given to us as objects … Not so with pure Person-values, that is, the value of the Person himself. Whenever we in some way “objectivize” a human being, his Person slips out of our hand, and only his mere husk [i.e., the values of his body and soul which can be given as objects of an act] remains.’

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For Scheler, our bodily and psychological organism in no sense belongs to our Person. These elements of the human being belong in toto to the vital surging of blind, sub-personal nature. Scheler instead insists upon the total ‘biological indefinability of the human being … [T]here is no essential biological concept “human”.’51 Scheler sees the empirically definable human as distinguished from animals only by degree; there is nothing essentially ‘personal’ or ‘human’ about our bodies (or psyches). The Person is not the spiritual animal, but the spirit which has nothing essentially to do with its accidental animality. Wesen und Formen der Sympathie rejects the substantial unity of ‘Thomistic scholasticism’ which would integrate the whole human being, and posits instead a dualism between the ‘vital center’ and the ‘personal center’, with ‘no substantial … bond of unity … between Geist and body, Person and vital center.’52 The Person, then, is completely ‘indifferent’ with respect to ‘all possible psychophysical organizations’; if a ‘parrot’ demonstrated the essential person-act of ‘transcend[ing] all possible vital values’, we would have more reason to call it ‘a “human”’ than ‘the member of a primitive people who lacked this act of transcendence’, despite the parrot’s non-human body. The empirical human being is, ‘in his essence’, simply ‘the living X’ which allows the Person to realize herself in this act of transcending the vital sphere. Personality could be realized in an infinite number of other bodily-psychological structures. Whatever the ‘factual, earthly’ body and psychological make-up of the human being happens to be, psychophysical human nature must be seen simply as a ‘fully variable … [and] infinite field of play’ within which personality can realize itself53: In any event, there is no strict essential boundary between human and animal, insofar as we consider the problem biologically … We, however, conclude: since there is no essential biological concept ‘human’, then the one and only essential boundary, and the one and only relevant value-boundary among living, earthly beings, absolutely does not lie between human and animal (which much more represent a continuous systemic and genetic transition), but rather between Person and organism, between spiritual being and bodily being [Person und Organismus … Geistwesen und Lebewesen].54

It is not between human and animal, but between organism (of any kind) and Personality, that the true ‘chasm’ (Spalte) in cosmic history opens. The chasm opens down the middle of the human being herself—between the mindless, valueless animal-­organism, and the non-vitalistic Person who brings values into appearance and feels them in her intentional acts.55  F, p. 294.  Sy, p. 86; Crosby, ‘The Individuality of Human Persons’, pp. 30–36. 53  F, pp. 292–296; cf. Haskamp, p. 185. 54  F, p. 294. 55  F, p. 293; cf. ‘Zur Idee des Menschen’, pp. 189–90. For Scheler, this human-as-animal / humanas-Geistperson division is identical to the division between fallen ‘natural man’ and divine ‘child of God’ or ‘member of the Kingdom of Heaven’. That is, the absolute value-Person in her ‘spiritual kernel’ is identical to supernature, to human-as-divine (Gottmensch und Übermensch [‘Zur Idee’, 190]). And nature is identical with fallen humanity, in a sense Scheler associates with Luther (‘Das Ressentiment’, p. 110): ‘Everything points to the fact that ... there is a division within humankind 51 52

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That is, the ‘human’ is ‘the highest of beings’ not as the actual bodily-and-spiritual being, homo sapiens, but rather only ‘insofar as he is the bearer of acts which are independent of his biological organization, insofar as he sees and realizes values which correspond to these acts.’56

Just as Nietzsche and Bergson, Scheler, too, had sought an anti-rationalist, anti-­ Kantian critique of metaphysics and Weltanschauung, one founded upon the immediate experience of life (Er-leben). In that sense, much of Scheler’s thought belongs more within the lineage of Lebensphilosophie than Husserlian phenomenology.57 And yet, although Scheler agreed that philosophy could only be founded upon the immediate experience of life (Er-leben), he refused the entrenched biologism of Nietzsche and Bergson, and vigorously rejected their reduction of Geist and values to vital drives (Triebe) or biologistic élan vital.58 Much of the appeal of phenomenology for Scheler was that it afforded him the techniques to distinguish an absolute noetic sphere of a priori values, acts, and essences which are not ‘relative to life’, nor to mechanical-biological bodies.59 Scheler is convinced that if—contrary to reductive, evolutionary naturalism—spiritual values are to exist at all, then these which is infinitely greater than that between human and animal in the naturalistic sense. For this division is, next to the strict continuity between human and animal in blood and organization always arbitrary ... Between the “born again” and the “old Adam”, between the “child of God” and the maker of tools and machines (“homo faber”) exists an unbridgeable division of essence; between animals and homo faber there exists a division of degree’ (‘Zur Idee’, pp. 190–1; cf. ‘Das Ressentiment’, pp. 108–9). (Biological) nature as such is un-spiritual, valueless, and identical with fallen humanity. See Przywara, RB, pp. 172–3. 56  Ibid. See Haskamp, pp. 61, 181–6, 14, 77, etc. Scheler’s texts are rife with phrases like ‘Person’ vs. ‘organism’ (F, p. 294), ‘spiritual being’ vs. ‘bodily being’ (Geistwesen / Lebewesen; ibid.), ‘mere human’ vs. ‘God-man’/‘Super-man’ (bloßer Mensch vs. ‘Gottmensch’ / ‘Übermensch;’ ‘Zur Idee’, p.  190), ‘human as natural species’ (Mensch als Naturgattung; see ‘Absolutsphäre und Realsetzung der Gottesidee’, in GW X, p. 233), or ‘human animal’ (ibid.) to distinguish the psychophysical organism from the Person—the act-center which transcends the vital sphere and intends the Divine. 57  From the beginning, Scheler was attracted to phenomenology and the reduction primarily as a ‘mental technique’ (geistige Technik) that could be coopted for the reconstruction of European Weltanschauung: ‘I subordinate the specific problems [of phenomenology] to the question of Weltanschauung’ (Spiegelberg, p. 271; cf. ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens’, in GW III, p. 339). The early Scheler of the Abhandlungen und Aufsätze found the promise of phenomenology not in its application to Husserlian problems of pure logic, but precisely in its potential to make ‘full use of the great impulses which Nietzsche, Dilthey, and Bergson’ had imparted to his thought (ibid., p.  339). For this reading of Scheler primarily as practitioner of an absolutized Lebensphilosophie under inspiration from Bergson and Nietzsche, rather than primarily as Husserlian phenomenologist, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele, vol. III (Salzburg: Anton Pustet Verlag, 1937–39), pp. 84–85, 100–105, and 126. 58  Scheler’s ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens’ announces ‘a philosophy setting out from the experience [Er-leben] of the essential content of the world’ (‘Versuche’, p.  339). For Scheler’s rejection of Nietzschean-Bergsonian biologism, see Eugen Kelly, ‘Vom Ursprung des Menschen bei Max Scheler’, in Person und Wert: Schelers ‘Formalismus’—Perspektiven und Wirkungen, ed. Christian Bermes, Wolfhart Henckmann, and Heinz Leonardy (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2000), pp. 254–5. 59  Sy, pp. 85–6; cf. F, pp. 113; and ‘Zur Idee’, 185–6.

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values must exist in absolute independence from any vital world or psychophysical organism.60 In the person and his emotional life, Scheler claims to discover a surging Leben, yet one that is absolute—or as he puts it, ‘daseins-absolut’, as opposed to ‘daseins-relativ’. Acts, objects, or experiences which are daseins-relativ are those whose existence or quality is dependent upon the factual existence (Dasein) of an empirical world or vital organism. To say that the Person and his value-World are daseins-absolut is to say that they are entirely independent of all really existing worlds and psychophysical organisms. Thus Scheler’s reduction takes, in Balthasar’s analysis, the Bergsonian-­ Nietzschean form of the ‘ascetical self-exposure of the ground of life’ in ‘life turning against itself’: ‘turning against the stream of [biological-practical] life’ to bring absolute Life into appearance.61 The absolute sphere of value, Person, and love is, as such, hostile to biological-empirical life.62 Thus Scheler’s philosophy aims at not a materialistic-vitalistic, but an absolute, a priori Philosophie des Lebens. Scheler’s vision of phenomenology as absolute Lebensphilosophie is reflected clearly in his formulations of the reduction. The middle-to-late forms of Scheler’s reduction envision not simply a ‘bracketing’ of factual existence in the Husserlian mode, but a more radical operation (the ‘moral upsurge’) which suppresses the

 For all his anti-Kantianism, Scheler agreed with Kant’s critique of material ethics that any ethics which defines goods as empirical things (Dinge / Güter) or states of affairs is at base either a crude hedonism aimed at fulfilling biological drives, or else a historical relativism (where what are presented as unchanging ‘values’ are actually the historically contingent values of a particular community). In any event, an ethics which presumes the existence of an empirical-sensual Dingwelt of really existing (wirklich) goods will fail to arrive at a priori, unchanging values (F, pp. 39–45). Scheler differs from Kant simply in affirming the existence of material value-content which is a priori and absolute, where Kant presumes that the only apriorism is formalism (F, pp.  44–5). Material, a priori values are non-empirical, apprehended in total independence of their empirical bearers, and in total abstraction ‘from the reality or unreality of the objects’ of intention, as well of any world (F, pp.  39–40, 380–381; cf. p.  265–6; see Henckmann, Max Scheler [München: C.H. Beck, 1998], pp. 43–4). Contra Kant, there do exist for Scheler a class of a priori emotional acts, which like rational acts are ‘equally independent from the psychophysical organization of our human species’, and equally ‘governed by eternal and absolute laws’ (F, pp.  259–260; cf. 259–66). 61  Balthasar, Apokalypse III, p. 101. Scheler deeply internalized Nietzsche’s critique of Christian/ bourgeois pseudo-values, which portrayed themselves as absolute, but were only strategies of ressentiment motivated by biological drives. For Scheler, if there were to be absolute values and essences, they must be of an order entirely unrelated to, and transcendent of, the human being as mere organism (as the mere ‘sick animal’, or ‘tool-animal’), an order that thus remains untouched by the Nietzschean critique of biological pseudo-values (‘Zur Idee’, pp. 185–6; ‘Das Ressentiment’, 109, 90–1; cf. F, pp. 289–90). 62  ‘Love’ for Scheler is the absolute form of ‘life’ which comes to appearance only in ‘giving up one’s life, indeed, offering up as sacrifice life in its essential existence itself (not merely individual life for collective life, one’s own life for another’s, lower life for higher life).’ Only in renouncing and immolating life itself, and all life as such, does the absolute value-realm of ‘the Kingdom of God, whose mystical bond and spiritual current is love, experience growth in value’ (‘Das Ressentiment’, pp. 90–1; cf. pp. 75–77.). 60

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vitalistic dimension of human being.63 Only once the personal love-center has been extricated from these Triebimpulse can the true World of essences and personal-­ emotional life emerge in its pristine apriority.64 The very definition of a priori, phenomenological experience for Scheler is that it has been purified of all mediation through the empirical vital organism.65 Our vital organism has nothing essentially to do with perceiving the world of essences. To use the verbiage of Scheler’s later philosophy, the reduction is a ‘shutting off’ (Ausschaltung) of the psychophysical organism I experience empirically. This ‘shutting off’ allows the absolute value-­ Person to manifest.66 Yet the ‘shutting off’ is not merely ‘some abstract-theoretical act of “disregarding,” or merely “not attending to”’ the vital organism. One must rather attempt ‘factually to release the act-center of one’s own Geist from out of one’s psycho-physical and human-biological context.’67 This act of ‘shutting-off’ is the heart of what Scheler had planned to develop into a systematic ‘voluntative realism’, in which the ‘moral upsurge’ operates as the ‘moral precondition’ for the appearance of the absolute world.68 The moral upsurge, as a ‘Person-act “of the entire human Person”, consists in love, humility, and self-mastery.’ It ‘remove[s] those bonds’ which bind Geist and its objects to their daseins-relativity ‘to life … to vitality itself, and therefore necessarily to any particular bodily-sensual instinctual system’: Love towards absolute value and being breaks apart, at its source within man, his ontological relativity to all environment-being [Seinsrelativität alles Umwelt-seins]. Self-humbling breaks down … the factual entanglement of the knowledge-act in the vital economy of the psychophysical organism.69

 Vom Ewigen im Menschen references this Husserlian epoche (this ‘“Absehen”, resp. “Dahingestelltseinlassen”, “Eingeklammertwerden” der Daseinsmodi’) as insufficiently radical. Scheler says it is subsequent to, and itself dependent upon, the moral upsurge (E, p. 86, footnote 1) 64  As Balthasar summarizes, ‘what is abolished in the reduction is not, as for Husserl, the world as such, but rather the biological environment [nicht ... die Welt überhaupt, sondern die biologische Umwelt]. This reduction is the indispensable precondition which allows “the world as such” to emerge as the objective space of the person [geistigen Person], just as the environment corresponds to the biological, bodily creature’ (Apokalypse III, p. 129). Cf. Scheler, Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, in GW VIII, p. 362. 65  See F, p. 71: ‘The contrast between the a priori and a posteriori is concerned ... with two kinds of experience: pure and immediate experience, and experience conditioned and mediated by positing the natural organization of a real bearer of acts.’ 66  Henckmann, Max Scheler, p. 51. 67  E, pp. 86–87. Emphasis added. 68  The essay towards the beginning of Vom Ewigen im Menschen, ‘Vom Wesen der Philosophie und der moralischen Bedingung des philosophischen Erkennens’ (E, pp. 61–99), was intended as the introduction to a never-finished volume with the title Phänomenologische Reduktion und voluntativer Realismus—eine Einleitung in die Theorie der Erkenntnis (see Henckmann, Max Scheler, pp. 29–30). 69  E, p. 90 (partially following Noble’s translation, p. 95). 63

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13.2.3  P  erson as ‘Divine’ Person: ‘Amare mundum in Deo’/‘amare Deum in Deo’ In the moral upsurge which is the innermost love-act of the Person, Scheler envisions an act which uproots the Person, so far as possible, from involvement in his organic and vital life, and reinstalls his personal act-center within ‘the Person of Persons’—the divine—to love, to will, and to know the world in God, as a co-­ enactment of the divine love-act.70 The moral upsurge thus culminates in ‘love in God, that is, actively reinstalling our spiritual Person-center into the heart of the divine All-Person, and co-loving all things with the love of God.’71 Ultimately, all Christian love of neighbor is not a human, or a creaturely love, but is ‘amare mundum in Deo’. Likewise, there is no creaturely love to God. God himself, as God, is infinite love-act, and for this reason alone, contemplative-mystical God-love to God as to the highest good must, by essential necessity, lead to co-enactment and imitative enactment of the infinite love-act of God to himself and to his creatures … and so be mystically-contemplatively perfected in an amare Deum in Deo.72

There is, then, not much of an operative category of integral creaturely nature in Scheler’s Person. The Person is the passage of nature beyond itself—the passage of the creature beyond itself and into a co-enactment of the divine. The person is only Person qua ‘divine’.

13.2.4  The Late Anthropology The gnostic-theopanistic tendencies of Scheler’s thought manifest in the late anthropology, exemplified in Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft (1926), Philosophische Weltanschauung (1928), and Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928). Scheler’s phenomenological period already begins to identify the essences of things and the divine itself with the immanent surging of the Person’s love-act. The late anthropological writings complete this tendency: the human being’s inner dialectic of Trieb (drive) and Geist (spirit) is identified with the absolute world-­ process, which is the site of God’s self-deification in and through the human being. Scheler now posits a ‘double reduction’, in which there emerges not only the purified realm of ‘ideas’ and ‘essences’ corresponding to Geist, but also the absolute, naturalistic ‘torrent of drives, urges, powers’ which correspond to an ‘equally originary’, absolute ‘urge-force’.73 The vital ‘pictorial’ contents of subjectivity  Sy, pp. 137, 166, 169–70; F, pp. 395–6.  E, p. 220. 72  Ibid. 73  Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft, in GW VIII, p.  362 and p.  111; Philosophische Weltanschauung, in GW IX, pp. 78–9, 82–4. 70 71

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which the middle Scheler had consigned to the biological sphere and eliminated in the reduction instead bear witness to ‘an unspiritual drive principle in us’—‘an originary urge-phantasy of the all-Life’, which is ‘the other principle of the Ur-­ ground [of reality] which is knowable for us’, alongside Geist.74 Just as, for the early and middle Scheler, our Geist as act-being had been immediately rooted in the divine Geist, now too ‘the human being as drive- and bodily-being … is equally originarily rooted in the divine surging [Drange] of “nature” in God.’ The lower drives of human beings have been absolutized and enshrined within the divinity. We experience this unity of the human being’s rootedness … in the divine surging in the great movements of sympathy, love, and all forms of cosmic feelings of oneness. Such is the ‘Dionysian’ way to God.

For ‘modern metaphysics is no longer cosmology and metaphysics of objects [Gegenstandsmetaphysik], but rather meta-anthropology and act-metaphysics’: the purified act-forces of Spirit and Drive that are the ground of the Person (as act-­ center) are a transparent manifestation of the act-forces of the divine ground of the world. [F]or this reason, the highest ground of the ‘big world’, the macro-cosmos, can be studied in the human being. And therefore the being of the human as micro-theos is also the first entryway into God.75

As in Scheler’s phenomenological period, the absolute act-ground of the world can be immediately participated by the Person’s co-enactment of that divine actground. Here,  there is finally no Creator-creature difference distinguishing the affective and intuitive ground of the created person, and the divine ground of absolute Geist and Trieb: The human being is the only place in whom and through whom the primordial being not only apprehends and recognizes itself; rather, he is also the being in whose free decision God is capable of actualizing his mere essence. The decision [Bestimmung] of the human is more than as mere ‘servant’ and obedient attendant; it is also more than being a mere “child” of a God who in itself is completed and perfect. In his being-human … the human bears the higher dignity of a co-fighter, indeed, co-actor of God, [and the human] is to be the first to bear before all things, in the storming of the world, the banner of Godhead, of the Deitas which realizes itself for the first time with the world-process.76

The created person is the site of the self-deification of God ‘in homine et per hominem’: in the human being, the Geist-creature and drive-creature, Geist and Drang strive through the eons towards ‘an increasing interpenetration’ and ‘reconciliation’ which would increasingly realize the absolute divinity in the becoming of the world, and above all, of human history.77 Human and God are finally collapsed  Die Wissensformen, p. 360.  Philosophische Weltanschauung, pp. 82–3. The phrase ‘“nature” in God’ comes from Schelling. See Philosophische  Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände, in Sämmtliche Werke, erste Abteilung, vol. 7 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860), pp. 357–8. 76  Ibid., pp. 83–4. 77  Ibid., p. 81; Die Wissensformen, pp. 359–60; Henckmann, Max Scheler, pp. 32–8. 74 75

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into a ‘mutual’ ‘identity in act’ and in ‘becoming’ (akhafte … Identität/werdende Identität).78 The single point of access to God is thus not theoretical (that is, objectivizing contemplation), but the human being’s personally and actively putting himself in for God, and for the becoming of his self-realization; a co-enactment of the eternal act—of both the spiritual activity which constructs ideas [i.e., Geist], as well as of the Drang-force which we feel in our drive-life.79

13.3  P  rzywara: Love and Personhood Within Being-as-Analogy 13.3.1  T  he Analysis of Scheler in Religionsphilosophie Katholischer Theologie: ‘Immanentistic Transcendentality’ Przywara rejects Scheler’s ‘primacy of love’ on the grounds that the God-creature distinction cannot be maintained if one takes love (or value), rather than being understood as analogy, to be the ultimate horizon of creaturely personhood. Scheler’s texts corroborate the argument, insofar as Scheler’s doctrine of the Person-as-love-­ act finally identifies personality with the self-deification of God. The problem Przywara identifies is that to set God and created person in relation within the medium of act-being (and hence within a scheme of ‘co-enactment’) is ultimately to identify the divine act-ground with the innermost act-ground of the person. As Scheler insists, ‘the Person’, divine and human, ‘is no substantial thing, and not a being of the form of object’; Person is formless and unconstrained by mere objectivizable essence, and can only be known in an immediate co-enactment of his acts.80 To conceive of divine and human persons this way misunderstands the distance of God and the integrity of the creature, and makes divine personality out to be the act-principle that indwells the human Person qua loving (i.e., qua Person). To understand Przywara’s diagnosis, I will begin with Przywara’s treatment of Scheler in Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (1927). There, Scheler offers for Przywara an exemplum of the religious-metaphysical type of ‘transcendentality’ (to be explained below), the type which becomes the protagonist of the text. The religious and epistemological posture proper to the creature within the analogia entis is also a form of transcendentality—yet a Thomistic-Augustinian one which has been ‘redeemed’ from the theopanistic tragicism which bedevils Scheler. Przywara’s analysis of the metaphysical problem of religion springs from phenomenological, or intentional, analysis. The problem of religion is the problem of  Die Wissensformen, p. 360.  Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83. 80  Ibid., p. 83. 78 79

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the ‘fundamental orientations [Grundrichtungen] of consciousness’, which have as ‘their ultimate ground … the tension of consciousness between enclosure-within-­ itself (in immanence) and pointing-beyond-itself (in transcendence).’81 From the subject-object tension, the constitutive tension of consciousness as such, there emerge three ‘fundamental extensions’ (Grunderstreckungen) of consciousness, which are the three possible conjugations of the subject-object tension: (1) immanence, (2) transcendence, and (3) transcendentality. (1) Corresponding to the pole of consciousness’ ‘enclosure-within-itself’, the trajectory of immanence makes of subject and object an internal unity, so that the ‘exterior’ infinities of object, truth, and world are in fact made a function of consciousness itself, or of the infinite depths of the I. In immanence, ‘consciousness experiences itself as ultimate “unity of fullness” of the content and processes of its experiences, as sea of “inner infinity”, heaving within itself.’ God, truth, infinity, the real—all are the ‘self-objectification’ of the inexhaustible, ideal Ur-Gefühl (primordial feeling) ‘circl[ing] within itself’ and experiencing itself as its own ground and unity. The trajectory of immanence is ‘the absolutization’ of consciousness as a self-enclosed ‘state’: the ‘state [Zuständlichkeit] of the infinity of feeling’.82 (2) Corresponding to the pole of consciousness’ ‘pointing-beyond-itself’, the orientation of transcendence dualistically distances object from subject. It locates the infinite ‘fullness of being’ exteriorly, and so conceives the God-creature relation as ‘separate reality to separate reality’. For reasons that need not detain us here, transcendence ‘swings abruptly’ (umschlägt) into the opposing pole of immanence, and so sets off a violent dialectic between transcendence and immanence.83 (3) Transcendentality, as the third fundamental orientation of consciousness attempts to mediate between the extremes of immanence and transcendence, and resolve the polarity into an intracreaturely ‘infinity of striving’. Transcendentality is distinct from the first two in that knows of no ‘given’ [gegebene] interior or exterior ‘unity of fullness’, and no ‘given’ interior or exterior ‘infinity’, but only one that is ‘imposed’ [aufgegebene] [i.e., ‘imposed’ as an ethical or ontological ideal]; that is, a ‘unity of fullness’ which never ‘is’, but is only ever the goal or meaning or unfolding of a ‘striving’—and likewise, an ‘infinity’ which is not the infinity of ‘being’, but rather of ‘striving’.84

 RkTh, p. 377.  For immanence, see RkTh, pp. 377–80. 83  For the transcendence type, see RkTh, pp. 377–381, 391–2, 409, 413. 84  Thus Przywara—in a compelling world-play—designates immanence, transcendence, and transcendentality as absolutized (1) Zuständlichkeit, (2) Gegenständlichkeit, and (3) Tatständlichkeit, respectively. Zuständlichkeit: here, the inner ‘state / condition’ (Zustand) of consciousness—its resting in its own infinite interiority-feeling—is absolutized; Gegenständlichkeit: here, the radically transcendent ‘object’ (Gegenstand) of consciousness is absolutized; Tatständlichkeit: here, finally, the striving of consciousness itself is absolutized. In Tatständlichkeit, consciousness’ relation to the infinite unity of being is given ‘in that essential “in-between” of the “act” [Tat] which springs from a “condition” [Zustand] and is ordered towards an “object” [Gegenstand]’. The problematic of religion thus oscillates between an absolutization of immanent state, transcendent object, or immanent principle of striving towards transcendent object: the ‘infinity of feeling’, the ‘knowledge of infinity’, or the ‘infinity of striving’ (RkTh, pp. 386–7). 81 82

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Transcendentality shares with transcendence the notion of a goal transcendent to its striving to which it is non-identical. Yet it oscillates towards immanence insofar as the inexhaustible fullness of reality is fullness-as-striving: infinite ground and fullness of reality as act (Tat).85 Moreover, the ‘transcendent’ goal is no independently existing infinity of being, but is above all the immanent principle of the striving itself. The immanent principle of creaturely incompletion and ‘endless progress’ itself is established as the Absolute. ‘This “striving” and “struggling” bears within itself is own “meaning” and “end”’: For it is essential with ‘striving into the infinite’ that it never reaches its goal. Despite every apparent ‘transcendence’, God is, finally, only something like the ‘religious formula’ of the immanent enclosure of ‘endless striving’ within itself. God stands in relation to the creature as the ‘ideal’ of striving to the ‘process’ of striving. He is ‘transcendent’ as ‘transcendental’.86

God is transcendent merely as the potential for self-deification immanent to the ‘unending progress’ of creaturely-striving-as-Absolute. Transcendentality issues in the Neo-Kantian religiosity of Hermann Cohen as its purest type: the Absolute not as any transcendent goal, but as the transcendental ‘Sollen’ (ought) of asymptotic striving, beinglessly suspended in itself, in ‘the sole divinity of “pure method”.’87 The religious metaphysics of transcendentality is essentially ‘ethical’ and ‘voluntaristic’: ‘ethical religiosity of the “Sollen”.’88 Transcendentality, then, does not overcome the polar ‘swing’ (Umschlag) between transcendence and immanence, since it itself is loaded towards a collapse into immanence: it conceives of ‘God as the “essence” of the struggling existence of creation’—and so again, God is reduced to a region of creaturely being (God is the essence of the creature).89 ‘Because God was, in the immanence type, “the depths of  From the survey of Scheler above, which identified Scheler’s significant inheritance from Fichte’s Tatidealismus, it is not surprising that Przywara will assign Scheler (along with Fichte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Nicolai Hartmann, and Bergson) to the type of transcendentality, in which consciousness-as-Tat is absolutized. 86  RkTh, pp. 382–3. Here Przywara indicates the difference between an overemphasized transcendentality, and the creaturely nature of genuine metaphysics: ‘Indeed, true metaphysics believes in an “essence”, and determination of the “essence” is its goal. Yet this is not a goal that we are forever only seeking after purely asymptotically, but rather one which we step-by-step realize [verwirklichen], even if we never fully realize it, since fundamentally only the all-penetrating eye of God measures the depths of the creature’ (Gottgeheimnis der Welt, p. 224). 87  RkTh, p. 397. For this appraisal of Cohen and Marburg Kantianism, see Gott, in Schriften II, p. 337. Przywara often speaks of the Kantian transcendental subject and the Sollen as ‘beingless’ (seinslos) and beinglessly ‘suspended within itself’. E.g., ‘Kantischer und katholischer Geistestypus’, in Ringen der Gegenwart II, pp. 734–6. 88  For these passages on the ‘transcendentality type’, see RkTh, pp. 388, 377–383, 397. One can already make out the ‘transcendental’ tilt of Scheler, who sees himself primarily as an ‘ethically’ oriented—and in some phases, ‘voluntaristic’—thinker. See the reference to ‘voluntative realism’ above. 89  RkTh, p. 407. ‘For the type of the “infinity of striving”, to which there corresponds, in the philosophy of religion, the transcendentalism of the “God-idea”, God is the essence of creation, which its existence ceaselessly struggles upward to attain’ (ibid., p. 387). 85

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the I”, in the transcendentality type, God becomes the inner end of the striving (the human being [is] interiorly endowed to become God [innerlich darauf angelegt, Gott zu werden]).’90 Transcendentality represents, finally, the attempt to arrive at an intracreaturely resolution of the irresolvable tension and oscillation between immanence and transcendence which is intrinsic to creaturely being—an attempt at sealing the ‘vertical openness’ and incompletion of the creature into a self-sufficient totality, and so deifying the creature.91 Transcendentality attempts to resolve the immanence-transcendence tension into false identity (‘unity in the identity-of-­ contradictions [Widerspruch-Identitäteinheit]’), ‘that is, [into] a unity which is … intrinsically set up for “explosion”’: the explosive collapse into a far more aggressive immanence, one in which the oscillation of transcendence-immanence itself has been absolutized. ‘Unity-in-contradiction’ (Widerspruchseinheit) establishes the creature as a simulacrum of divine self-identity, a coincidentia oppositorum identical with everything. Here, the principle of pure contradiction secretly functions as the principle of identity to secure for the creature an unconditioned self-­ identity (self-identity in and as absolute contradiction).92 Transcendentality is pure ‘explosive tension’, ‘the pure “site” of this constant lurching of both types into one another: it is, as we have said, their “explosive unity”.’93 Whence the core insight of Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie, that what appeared to be an oscillation between the philosophical types of God-as-­ immanent, God-as-transcendent, and God-as-transcendental, is secretly the cramped Tragik of an oscillation within immanence. Transcendentality does not transcend the convulsive polarity between transcendence and immanence, but merely attempts to establish ‘the inner oneness of immanence-transcendence’ within ‘infinite progress’ as a new divine region immanent to the subject.94 In other words, ‘all three  RkTh, p. 420.  RkTh, pp. 408–9. 92  RkTh, p. 388; pp. 392–4. Przywara gives the formal basis of this argument in AE II, §5–6, esp. §5.3 (pp. 194–5) and §6.3 (pp. 201–3). Hegel and Heidegger are the primary cases in point. In Przywara’s terms, to negate pure logic (grounded in the principle of identity) into pure dialectic is merely to transmute dialectic into a ‘yet more unconditional’ form of the pure logic of the principle of identity (p. 195). The creaturely metaphysics of the analogia entis, on the other hand, flows from the principle of non-contradiction. And when this principium contradictionis is ‘decommissioned’ and replaced with the principle of dialectic (the absolute ‘contradiction-identity’ which is equivalent to identity) ‘the ground of God is usurped’ (p. 202). The principle of non-contradiction gives both the ‘minimum’ and the ‘maximum of the (ontic-noetic) “ground” of the creature’: because the creature is defined within finite, determinate limits (creature A cannot be φ and ~φ at one and the same time), the transcendence of God who alone is the self-identity of ‘I am who am’ is preserved (p. 202). To define the creature as pure indeterminacy, or ‘absolute contradiction’ is covertly to define the creature as a potential self-identity with the entirety of its essence and with all things. For a discussion of Przywara’s deployment of the principle of non-contradiction in this section of AE, including what is in my view a salutary critique, see Ragnar M.  Bergem, ‘Transgressions: Erich Przywara, G.W.F. Hegel and the Principle of Non-Contradiction’, Forum Philosophicum 21:1 (Spring 2016). 93  RkTh, p. 408. 94  RkTh, p. 420. 90 91

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philosophies of religion which issue from the three fundamental orientations of consciousness ultimately make God into a function of consciousness. In these philosophies, God is not the Absolute, but rather something relative which has been absolutized.’95 ‘[T]he decisive, primal disposition of all philosophy which is not a philosophy of the analogia entis’ is, ‘ultimately, establishing God and the subject as one [einer letzten Einssetzung von Gott und Ich]’—‘immanentism’.96 Within this schema, Przywara designates Scheler as the mixed type of ‘immanentistic transcendentality’: a governing orientation of transcendentality (3) which ‘oscillates’ into immanence (1) and away from it.97 [This sub-type] dissolves the quality of transcendence [usually native to transcendentality] in that it establishes the ‘divine’ no longer as an ‘ideal’ ‘transcendent’ to striving qua striving, but rather in the process of striving itself. God becomes the Ur-will of the willing itself, whether it be (as in Fichtean religiosity) the Ur-freedom of freedom, or (as in Schopenhauer and Hartmann’s religiosity) the Ur-tragic of the tragic of struggling, or (as in Nietzschean religiosity) the Ur-power of the will to power, or finally (as with Scheler) the Ur-love of love.98

The oscillation of immanentistic transcendentality is also the ‘structural law’ which underlies ‘the factual, intellectual-historical interrelations between the aesthetic Romantic philosophy of religion [i.e., a form of immanence] … and the subjective-­dynamic voluntarism [i.e., transcendentality] in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Fichte to Nietzsche, Bergson, and Scheler.’99 Formally and historically, then, Scheler represents a ‘voluntaristic’ transcendentality which oscillates towards and away from the immanence-type of God-as-absolute-Urgefühl.100 Scheler’s late anthropology aptly demonstrates the collapse of his fundamental transcendentality into an immanentistic transcendentality which ‘confuses God with the deification of the human being’—confuses God with a human act of progressive self-­absolutizing.101 The religious posture of Scheler’s transcendentality is a ‘­transcendentality as God’: the surging religious act of the creature is itself the divine principle.102  RkTh, p. 408. These philosophies have no genuine conception of God, but merely give the name ‘God’ to an absolutized facet of human consciousness. 96  RkTh, p. 409. 97  Correspondingly, there also exist the ‘structural laws’ of oscillation ‘towards and away from’ transcendence, and oscillation ‘towards and away from’ transcendentality (RkTh, pp. 384–5). 98  RkTh, p. 383. 99  RkTh, p. 384. Or, as in RB, Przywara sees Scheler as a blending of the Schopenhauer-NietzscheBergson lineage (transcendentality) with the ‘platonizing lineage of Brentano-Eucken-Husserl’ (immanence) (RB, p. 53). 100  Scheler often denies that his ‘primacy of love and feeling’ is a ‘voluntarism’, since he distinguishes loving and feeling from willing (Wollen). Przywara, though, is intending ‘voluntarism’ more generally to mean a philosophy which takes a non-intellectual force (be it willing, loving, feeling, struggling, suffering, etc.) as the ground of reality. Scheler is unquestionably voluntarist in this sense. 101  ‘Drei Richtungen in Phänomenologie’, p. 258. 102  RkTh, p. 482. 95

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This, in Przywara’s view, is the methodological side of the ‘inner problematic’ with Scheler. For Scheler, the divine is finally given as the inner ground of the creature’s affective surging, whether that surging be ‘the great movements’ of value-­ feeling, ‘sympathy, love, all forms of cosmic feelings of oneness’, or even the throb of the creature’s baser urges, in the ‘godlike Drive [Drang] of “nature” in God’ (in Scheler’s words).103 The divine act-being which grounds the ideal objectivity of the world becomes more or less identical the immanent affective surging of the subject, since, as Scheler emphasizes from 1926 onwards, person is immediate participation in the self-deification of God.104 In the same way, all our objective knowing or feeling of the world can, for Scheler, only be objective as an immediate co-enactment of the divine act, so much so that ‘all amare, contemplare, cogitare, velle is thus intentionally joined to the one concrete world, the macrocosm, only as an amare, contemplare, cogitare, and velle “in Deo”.’105 Creaturely knowing (or feeling, or loving, or thinking), insofar as valid, is divine knowing (or feeling, etc.). Despite Scheler’s fiercely anti-idealist period, the result is similar: God is delivered over into the cramped confines of the subject. God is effectively reduced (in the early to middle Scheler) to the innermost act-ground of the subject, and (in the later Scheler) redefined as the subject’s own inner dialectic of Drive and Spirit.106 ‘The audacity of unconditionally standing open’ to the exterior world, which Przywara had hailed as the prophetic promise of phenomenology, grimly ‘becomes the glimpse into the human being as he breaks apart—breaks apart into the demonic play between the all-powerfulness of Drive and the powerlessness of Spirit.’107 Even Scheler’s early thought, as a kind of ‘absolute’ Philosophie des Lebens, seems loaded with this ‘explosive tension’ which seeks to ground everything in the subject and its acts. In the first place, Scheler’s phenomenological thought identifies the sphere of absolute validity (Welt) with the sphere of personality.108 At the same  Scheler, Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83.  Ibid., p. 82. Cf. Przywara, In und Gegen, p. 53. 105  Scheler, F, 396. See Przywara, RB, pp. 43–4, 53–4, 99. Ultimately, Scheler conceives of ‘an essentially personalistic world’, which, as personal, can only be known in the ‘love-acts ... which are thus ‘founded’ in the ‘amare Deum in Deo’, that is, in the spiritual co-enactment of the uncreated love-act (RB, p. 99). ‘In this way, then … the objectivity of our knowledge in its entire scope (knowledge of being and knowledge of value) is given through participation in the source from which objective things have flowed out, that is, the ‘love’ which God is. And for that reason, all things become illuminated in their actual essence only in love as the co-enactment of that love which God is’ (ibid., p. 54). ‘Scheler first arrives at the unity of the “world” through “God”, so that “God” is almost its “immanent” unity’ (ibid., p. 173). See Scheler, Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83; and Die Wissensformen, pp. 359–60. 106  Scheler projects this creaturely dialectic upwards into God, and enshrines the rhythms of nature as an intradivine dynamic (‘the godlike Drive of “nature” in God’ [Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 83]). 107  Emphasis added. This is the summation of Martha Zechmeister, quoting Przywara in Humanitas. Der Mensch gestern und morgen (Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1952), p. 30; and Augustinus. Die Gestalt als Gefüge (Leipzig: Hegner, 1934), p. 81. See Zechmeister, Gottes-Nacht, p. 105. 108  The important passages on ‘world’ (Welt) in Formalism are indicative (F, pp. 392–395). The 103 104

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time, Scheler holds that this personal, ‘daseins-absolute … realm of the things in themselves’ comes into appearance only with the ‘moral upsurge’, in which the human Geist attempts ‘to divinize itself’ by dissolving all bonds to the vital sphere and reestablishing itself within the divine act-center. In the moral upsurge, the Geistperson is able ‘to glimpse the being of all things both from out of this [divine] act-center, and, at the same time, “within” its power.’109 The divine gaze is functionally identified with the innermost loving gaze of the Person in the moral upsurge. In Przywara’s view, these moves make the ideal order of the world dependent upon the ur-act of the subject, as if ideality were an outflow from the Dionysian ‘movement’ of subjective life.110 With these Schelerian principles in mind, the collapse towards an immanentistic subjectivism seems ‘retrospectively to have been ordained from the beginning in the particular way the Abhandlungen und Aufsätze (1915) presents its objectivism not so much as an act of bowing before this objectivity, but rather as the rich, almost divinely shimmering Leben’—that Nietzschean ‘dithyramb of life’ whose ecstatic richness is the immanent source of its own fullness.111 The surging of life in and through the subject becomes itself the ground of objectivity. The ‘openness to the world’ which had seemed, in the young Scheler, to be openness to real-­ concrete life, unmasks itself as an immersion in ‘pure Life’, in the pure kinesis of subjectivity. The philosophy and religiosity of the analogia entis instead insists that no region of creaturely being, and no creaturely act, is self-identical with a pure, ‘immediate’ manifestation of being. Creaturely being is itself incompletion, a Spannungseinheit (a unity-in-tension) of analogical polarities lacking any absolute grounding within itself. Likewise, the polarity of transcendence-immanence within creaturely consciousness cannot find any ‘fixed point’ of resolution anywhere within itself, nor anywhere within created being. ‘world’ is only objective and absolute precisely as the world ‘of’ a person, as the realm of the essential interrelations immediately self-given ‘for the pure and formless act of the person’ (F, p. 393). All other forms of objectivity or ‘universal validity’ (Allgemeingültigkeit) which could exist without being given in the formless, spontaneous acts of the person, ‘must either be falsehood or merely truth about daseins-relative objects’ (ibid.). Phenomenological (i.e., absolute) validity is ‘personal validity’. Likewise, the ‘realm of the things themselves [der Sache an sich]’ is such insofar as it belongs to ‘the world in which [the person] experiences herself’—so much so that ‘absolute being’ is person and world in their essential conjunction. Likewise, ‘absolute truth can only be personal [truth]’, just as ‘the absolute good’ can only be ‘a personal good’ (F, pp. 392– 394). Cf. Philosophische Weltanschauung, p. 84. 109  E, pp. 86–7. 110  Chief among these moves, for Przywara, is Scheler’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a rational, metaphysical (as opposed to a phenomenological-affective) account of the God-creature difference. 111  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 257. Wolfhart Henckmann’s commentary speaks of Scheler’s ‘value-theory’ (Werttheorie) as ultimately a ‘valuation-theory’ (Wertungtheorie), in which the objectivity of values is not conceived of in terms of the independent existence of values, but rather on the basis of ‘valuation-feelings’ (Wertungsgefühle). See Wolfhart Henckmann, ‘Person und Wert. Zur Genesis einer Problemstellung’, in Person und Wert: Schelers ‘Formalismus’—Perspektiven und Wirkungen, Christian Bermes et al. (Verlag Karl Alber: Freiburg, 2000), pp. 16–21.

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Creaturely consciousness is emphatically not a ‘unity-in-contradiction’ of transcendence and immanence (in the ‘striving’ of the love-act), which would resolve into its own absolute ground: ‘Not within itself does creaturely consciousness possess any sort of “absolute fixed point” in which its essential “tension of opposites [Gegensatzspannung]” might hang suspended. Rather, the particular effect of the analogia entis for creaturely consciousness is that it is “in” its tension of opposites that it becomes aware of its “absolute fixed point” in God, a fixed point which is essentially beyond all creatures. Creaturely consciousness experiences the “absolute fixed point” of its unity beyond and above itself.’112 ‘The philosophy of religion of the analogia entis for this reason does not see in any single one of the three fundamental orientations of consciousness, nor in their totality, any kind of enclosed unity. The three fundamental orientations in their totality are, from the perspective of the analogia entis, merely the pregnant expression of the essential “being-­ vertically-­broken-open” of creaturely consciousness’: ‘for [Catholic philosophy of religion], God is neither the absolutization [Absolutsetzung] of any single creaturely element—neither the spiritual, nor the “All”, nor the faculty of willing or thinking, nor the personal or ideative aspect—nor is He the ideal “oneness” of the oppositions of these “aspects” of the creature. He is absolutely beyond; He is, as Thomas Aquinas says, tamquam ignotus, beyond all graspable contents.’ The analogia entis means that it is precisely in the creatureliness of the creature—in the ‘never “closed”’ and ‘unclose-able “openness” of its tensions’—that God appears as genuinely ‘beyond’.113

13.3.2  T  he ‘Gnostic’114 Fall into Naturalistic Lebensphilosophie Just as Scheler’s avowed objectivism unravels towards a subjectivism, so too does his extreme anti-naturalism break down into a final naturalism. At the heart of Scheler’s project is the conceit that there exists some region of immanent, creaturely life—be it loving, hating, living, experiencing, etc.—which admits of absolutization. Scheler’s anti-naturalism attempts to isolate from out of the vitalistic regions of life this longed-for absolute region, which he calls the Person, and her acts of intentional feeling and loving. Yet this project falsifies creaturely consciousness. For Przywara, the nature of creaturely consciousness as an irresolvable ‘unity-in-­ tension’ means precisely that no such absolute region exists. Our integral unity as body-soul, unum ens is the central expression of our creaturely irresolvability; there exists no ‘purely mental’ sphere not leavened by embodiment, and no knowledge-­ act which is not somehow dependent upon—and so relativized by—sense  RkTh, pp. 408–9.  RkTh, pp. 409, 400–1. 114  For Przywara’s evaluation of  Scheler’s late anthropology as  ‘gnostic’, see ‘Tragische Welt’, p. 354 and In und Gegen, p. 53. 112 113

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experience and abstraction. The scholastic dictum is, in Przywara’s view, the cornerstone of creaturely metaphysics: nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu (nothing is in the intellect which was not in the senses).115 Whatever human act, however sublime, one might mark as ‘absolute’ is intrinsically, because creaturely, bound up with empirical, bodily life. To absolutize any human act is unavoidably to absolutize the bodily realities actively determining the act. Precisely for this reason, Scheler’s extreme anti-naturalism begins by attempting to extricate the personal center completely from all bodily drives, and collapses into a dark, ‘naturalistic Lebensphilosophie’ which instead absolutizes those drives into a divine principle of Drang: ‘The region of empirical “life” irrupts’ into the illusory ‘purity’ of Scheler’s person, and brings about a ‘precipitous fall [Absturz] out of objectivity into naturalistic subjectivity—as a dreadful, crude version of Husserl’s turn from the emphasis on noema to the emphasis on noesis.’116 What began as Scheler’s insistence upon a godlike ‘gazing upon essences’ (Wesensschau) ‘slides over into an intuitive Weltanschauung-philosophy’ which crudely essentializes empirical life into an absolute sphere.117 The case of Scheler demonstrates a problem endemic to phenomenology, in Przywara’s view. Insofar as phenomenology roots its objectivity in the immanent structures of intentional acts rather than in the being of objects, it operates under an idealist tendency, one which tends to reduce being to thought, to subjective acts.118 This idealist tendency in phenomenology is ‘the step-by-step development of a metaphysics of a self-enclosed Leben-being’, in which what is identified as objective ‘being’ or ‘objective givens’ is in reality the objectivation of the acts (or the  RB, pp. 7–8. Przywara often emphasizes the central place in a creaturely metaphysics of the Thomistic doctrine ‘of body and spirit as unum ens’, and the essentially creaturely theory of knowledge as abstraction per sensibilium which issues from it (RkTh, pp. 479–80). Scheler’s antinaturalism is irreconcilable with this empirical sensibility. Phenomenology’s immediate, intuitive Wesensschau, which usually rejects any notion of ‘scholastic abstraction’ from the senses, is, in Przywara’s view, ‘the way that leads to the usurpation of the divine gaze [des göttlichen Schauens]’ (‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 262). 116  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 257. Haskamp observes: ‘Scheler alternately names love, preferring, and feeling in one complex so that it remains unclear whether he intends to transfer to all, or only to certain mental-spiritual “functions”, the character of spontaneity’ (Haskamp, p. 75). Henckmann, too, notes that in the phenomenological and post-phenomenological period, Scheler leaves it unclear ‘in how far love and hate are still to be understood as feeling-states [Gefühle]’ (Henckmann, ‘Person und Wert’, p. 17). There is, then, both an attempt to mark out certain feelings as belonging to the absolute, personal sphere (Fühlen), as well as an equivocation between this absolutized region and the lower, psychophysical ‘feeling-states’ (Gefühle / Gefühlszustände). 117  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 257. Far from a science of essences, ‘[i]nterpretation of life (Nietzsche), interpretation of history (Eucken), [and] interpretation of society (Weber) are, in reality, the concrete form of the Schelerian “pure gaze”’ (ibid.). 118  In Przywara’s view, Scheler’s category of ‘value-being’ accomplishes just this reduction of being to intentionality, since value-being functions as a kind of being-as-not-being (see Haskamp, pp. 176–7). Przywara especially sees the Parmenidian ‘identity of thinking and being’ operative in Husserl, insofar as intentional consciousness itself becomes ‘the highest form of being’ (Gottgeheimnis, pp.  163–5). Despite Scheler’s pushing beyond Husserl in key respects, he too lapses into this Parmenidian identity (Gott, p. 248). 115

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movement of Leben) of the subject.119 What is portrayed as the external being-­ sphere is in large part the objectivation of the subject’s Leben-sphere. Put another way: phenomenology’s insistence on the ‘immediacy’ and the ‘immanence’ of objects to the act—despite its anti-idealist function—also has the idealist effect of beginning to identify the essence of the object with the immanent ground of the act.120 In Scheler’s case, since the objectivity and the validity of values are grounded in the act of the Person (in the self-immanence of ‘the richness of life’, in the ‘moral upsurge’ which brings values into appearance), what Scheler claims as ‘objective’ values are the self-‘objectivation’ ‘of the feeling and willing subject’.121 This idealist tilt is all the more rueful for Przywara, who in the early 1920s looked on with optimism as the self-enclosed consciousness of Husserlian thought seemed to be ‘transfigured under the hands of Max Scheler into a phenomenology of “openness” for the world of objects in which life receives more emphasis, a phenomenology of “reception of objects” in place of the Kantian “creation of objects”.’ Przywara goes on: ‘With Scheler, the living, singular individual, who remains for Husserl relentlessly “bracketed out”, steps into the place of logical “noesis”; therewith the Husserlian “intentional” directedness towards objects inchoately becomes the directedness towards reality [Wirklichkeit].’122 In that sense, Scheler, Nicolai Hartmann, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius all represented for Przywara a salutary ‘intentional realism’.123 Yet even in 1925 Przywara argues that despite Scheler’s ‘openness to the world’, he too, like Husserl, remains a kind of ‘transcendental idealism of the object’, whose ‘transcendent value-being world’ represents ‘a culmination of the Baden school’.124 Scheler’s value-world is not an objective world of Wirklichkeit, but is merely the ‘objectivation’ of a ‘feeling and willing’—rather than a thinking—transcendental subject. Poignantly, it is Scheler’s greater emphasis on life which seals his philosophy against concrete reality.  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 262. This identification is easily visible in Scheler. The true essences of things and persons are ideas in God. God is pure ‘act-being’, or pure ‘love-act’. Apprehension of those essences comes about through my immediate co-enactment of the divine act which knows or loves them. The essences of things are thus immediately immanent to my act of knowing and loving them as the participated (divine) principle of my love- or knowledge-act. The being of objects is thus in large measure reduced to the innermost principle of my acts. 120  For Przywara, this core problem reveals ‘the whole unresolved, liminal, transitional character [of phenomenology]: at once the high point of I-enclosed “objectivation”, and simultaneously the root of the opened-up I of “objectivity”—both in one.’ For Przywara, the Husserl-Scheler division in phenomenology is, then, is an oscillation within ‘the essential dialectic of the systematic Kant— admittedly within this [phenomenological] orientation so distant from the Kantian standpoint, and thereby so close to actual “objectivity” (as opposed to ... “objectivation”)’ (Gott, p.  259). The phenomenological attitudes which herald a breaking out of the subjective stance also stand in danger of sealing philosophy within a final subjectivism. 121  Przywara, Gott, p. 258. 122  Gott, p. 248. 123  Ibid. As noted above: cf. RB, pp. 15–18; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 128, 218. 124  Gott, p. 259. 119

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13.3.3  S  cheler’s Doctrine of Value and Love: A Theopanistic ‘Tragicism’ For Przywara, the root of this identification of God with an absolute creaturely life (in the love- and feeling-act) is Scheler’s metaphysical dualism of being and value. Already in Religionsbegründung (1923), Przywara contended that Scheler’s doctrine of ‘the primacy of value before being’ and of ‘feeling of value before knowledge of being’ was the most portentous tendency in his thought; by 1928, Przywara could write that ‘Scheler’s philosophy actually did break apart against this point.’125 And in 1925, Przywara maintained that it was because of ‘his ultimate dualism of being and value’ that ‘even Max Scheler … remains … still stuck in the place of the subject.’126 Why does this dualism, in Przywara’s view, underlie the collapse into a subjectivism of the act? Under the ‘primacy of value’, Scheler removes personhood, religion, and essential apprehension of God and the world from out of a notion of being (understood as being). He founds it instead in a value-world in which ‘love is … the metaphysical center.’127 In this ‘primacy of value before being’ and of ‘feeling value before knowing being’, Scheler sees the pure value-being (or act-being) which is apprehended in love as the more authentic being. Ultimately, then, the metaphysical matrix in which God and person are in primal relation is not being, but love.128 Such is ‘the sharp divide which stands between [Scheler] and scholastic thought: the dynamism of love in place of the principle of being.’129 Scholastic thought sees God and creatures related within the rhythmic horizon of the analogia entis, where being is understood as the Creator’s immediacy-within-distance. Scheler eschews ‘being’ as the lower realm of mediation and thingly, objectifying thought, and instead installs God and creatures within a matrix of being as pure immediacy and participation (i.e., the love-act). Scheler’s love-metaphysics roots the being of the person immediately in the divine love-act, with no mediation of a creaturely nature which would resist melting into the divine love-act. The Person ‘as love is at once a “piece of God”.’130 In Przywara’s well-known dualism of theopanism and pantheism, Scheler begins as a supernaturalist theopanism: theopanistic, because created personality is merely the site of divine manifestation; supernaturalist, because the religious act is purely ‘the act of God’ flowing through the powerless Person. It is an extreme ‘Christian-­ Platonic’ Augustinianism. Created nature is submerged (versenkt) ‘into the all-­ suffusing Truth-Love-Light of the Creator’, so much that the creature itself becomes  RB, pp. 25–6. ‘Drei Richtungen’, footnote to p. 258: ‘An diesem Punkte [des Kongruenzsystems zwischen Wert und Sein (Leben)] ist denn auch die Philosophie Schelers zusammengebrochen.’ 126  Gott, p. 258. 127  RB, p. 65; cf. pp. 219, 182. 128  Again, see RB, pp. 65, 219. 129  RB, p. 133. 130  RB, p. 105. 125

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simply ‘the being and activity of the Creator’.131 Yet every supernaturalism and every theopanism dialectically collapses into rationalism (religion as pure human act) and pantheism (‘the human being qua human being [is] divine’) since, as Przywara is wont to remark, once one has claimed either that ‘all is God’ or ‘the creature is all’, what does it matter whether one calls this ‘one’ divine thing God or creature? For Przywara, then, Scheler’s attempt to remove the creature’s relation to God from out of a horizon of being (understood as analogy) and into a pre- or non-­ ontological horizon is not an innocent transposition, but a rejection of ‘mediatedness’ as constitutive of creaturely being, and an (illusory) attempt to develop a vision of being as univocity, rather than as analogy. ‘Value’, ‘act-being’, and ‘love’ are only so many Schelerian names for being-as-univocity. So long as the ‘objective nexus’ and ‘medium’ of relation between created persons and God is love, and not being, the God-creature relation is measurable only in terms of greater or lesser likeness and intimacy, with no analogical interruption of unlikeness, distance, mediation.132 The subjective religious attitude vis-à-vis God becomes one of pure love with no ‘reverent fear’ (Ehrfurcht) of distance—an all-too-intimate love which collapses into Scheler’s vicious dialectic of man-as-God oscillating into God-as-­ demonic-man.133 Scheler’s theopanistic ‘immediacy’ of the divine passes into the unholy pantheistic marriage of ‘humanitarianism and tragicism’, which at once deifies the human, and ‘tear[s] down God into the misery of the world’: the deified humanity which seems to be a humanistic triumph is little more than the ‘masking of [humanity’s] abyssal tragedy [Tragik]’ of a ‘despairing, powerless’, all-too-­human god.134 Scheler’s transcendentality is transcendentality as ‘tragedy’— the despairing self-deification of the fallen god.135 The creaturely person has been torn asunder into the ‘grim contradiction …  RkTh, p. 483.  RB, p. 65. 133  See ‘Tragische Welt’, p. 353: Scheler’s thought is the union of two aspects, ‘[the] tragicistic (world and man as the Fall of God) and [the] humanistic (world and man as God)’—two aspects which are ‘not a contradiction, but a unity. Both are grounded in “man as the meaning [Sinn] of God”. Since God is the inmost essence of man, the concrete human being is necessarily the Fall of God. Tragicism is only the other side of humanitarianism ... Certainly the Abhandlungen und Aufsätze of Max Scheler already betray that his vision of the human being somehow bears divine traits. And if we inquire into the ultimate ground of why, in his investigations into ressentiment, the positive type appears almost as a self-lowering God, and the negative type as a personified Satan, surely his clear and final teaching on the human being as the site of encounter between an absolute good and an absolute evil furnishes the answer: the good-evil rift [Zwiespalt] of God torn asunder in the human being and asymptotically resolved through the human being: Deus in homine et per hominem [Scheler, Die Wissensformen, pp. 359–60].’ 134  Zechmeister, p. 105. 135  See ‘Philosophies of Essence and Existence’, AE II §1, pp. 333–347, where Przywara develops further the fundamental difference separating ‘originally-sinful tragedy’ (erbsündige Tragik) from ‘Christian tragedy’—which is, ultimately, the spirituality of ‘fearing love and loving fear’ discussed below. 131 132

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between the impotent sublimity of value (the Geist-sphere) and the omnipotent baseness [Niedrigkeit] of being (the drive-sphere).’136 For his ‘gnostic’ metaphysical anthropology, constitutive aspects of our creatureliness—the material body, and its mediated, gradual, incomplete knowledge of essences through sense experience and abstraction—are assigned to the lower sphere of ‘being’. Scheler in turn rejects this horizon of ‘being’; the true Person is divine act-being, or value-being. At base, then, Przywara sees Scheler’s despising of ‘being’ as a despising of creatureliness. The creature’s non-identity with God receives in Scheler’s system a purely negative interpretation: the God-creature difference is ‘not good’.137

13.3.4  F  rom Tragic Transcendentality to Creaturely Transcendentality. A Creaturely Epistemology of ‘Progressus in Infinitum’ If Scheler’s theopanism is a kind of extreme Platonic-Augustinian illuminationism, then it only demonstrates the central framework of Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie: that all Christian philosophy can be exhaustively typologized as so many oscillations between the fundamental types of ‘Christian-Aristotelian’ Thomism and ‘Christian-Platonic’ Augustinianism. Neither pole is stable on its own; only the coinherence and oscillation of these two styles (of both the Augustinian ‘Gott alles!’ and the Thomistic ‘ownness of the creature’) allow the full ‘“rhythmization” of the one analogia entis’ to unfold, collapsing neither into theopanism, nor pantheism.138 Scheler’s system, then, needs the corrective influence of a ‘Christian-Aristotelian’ Thomism, which would insist upon the integrity of creatures.139 Where an unchecked Christian Platonism tends toward identifying the essence of the creature with its divine Idea (thus subsuming the creature in God), for Thomas’ Aristotelian view, the creature has its own positive otherness and intelligibility: ‘the all-suffusing Truth-­Love-­Light of the Creator is the “cause” of the creation’s very own, creaturely truth-­love-­light.’140 Whereas Scheler’s immanentistic transcendentality had conceived of ‘God as the essence of the creature’, and so inaugurated an unholy religiosity of ‘[creaturely] striving as God’, the Augustinian-Thomistic religiosity of the analogia entis represents creaturely ‘striving before the face of God’. This vision— which Przywara calls ‘the Catholic liberation of unending striving’—is the culmination of Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie: a vision of creaturely  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 258.  It ‘ought not be’. See RkTh, pp. 223–4, below. 138  RkTh, pp. 483–4. 139  RB, p. 220. As Przywara says, his final ‘clarification’ of Scheler requires that ‘the concept of Platonic participation [be] filled out by the Aristotelian concept of a true inner being of things.’ 140  RkTh, p. 483. 136 137

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transcendentality not as the ‘tragicism’ of the creature’s self-deification, but as the essential expression of creaturely humility: By virtue of the same analogia entis, the true similarity between God and creature is simultaneously dissimilarity, and moreover, not a dissimilarity which ‘ought not be’ (as we find it in non-Catholic notions of transcendentality [e.g., Scheler]), but one which, as essential for the creature qua creature ‘ought to be’. It is the dissimilarity philosophically expressed most clearly in Thomas’ fundamental law of the causae secundae: the creature, despite its innermost dependence upon God, is endowed with its own essence and own existence; God All-Reality, and yet the creature with its own reality [eigenwirklich]; God All-Efficacious, and yet the creature with its own efficacy [eigenwirksam]; God as All-Value and yet the creature possessed of its own value [Eigenwert]. From this perspective, God is only the ideal of the creature insofar as the creature’s own essence, and thereby its own ideal, is ultimately rooted in Him as the Ur-ground of all being, and so tends toward Him. God is thus not the formal ideal of the creature—nor of pure spirit [Geist] … Again, this relation of this … dissimilarity (and the creature’s own ordering and efficacy which results) is not a relation directly between the essence of God and the essence of the creature, nor between the existence of God and the existence of the creature. Rather, by virtue of the essential nature of the analogia entis, it lies between the essence-existence essential-identity of God and the essence-existence unity-in-tension of the creature. Therewith, however, the ‘endless striving to God’ is interiorly crossed through by the posture of an ‘endless striving before the face of God [vor Gott]’.141

Where Scheler’s ‘tragic’ system feverishly sought the creature’s existential identity with God in the absolutized love-act, this Catholic vision instead rests ‘patiently’ in a metaphysics of the creature in its integrity, ‘endowed with’ its own creaturely complex of ‘essence in-and-beyond existence’. This Spannungseinheit, this ineradicable non-identity of the creature’s essence with its existence, can never be resolved into its own immanent grounding. Neither can the creature be reduced into any essential identity with the divine essence, nor into any existential identity with the divine existence. Creatureliness, distance, mediation are never dissolved, even into the vita aeterna: This is the mystery of the definitive polarity of God’s all-reality and the creature’s own-­ reality, God’s all-efficacy and the creature’s own-efficacy: that around the ‘God in us’ there hangs the veil of the creaturely—the veil of the Temple—which can never be torn asunder and never pressed through.142

The unity of God and created person in love is always a unity within distance, an immediacy within mediation. Here, with being understood as the analogia entis, the distance and the ­‘mediatedness’ of created being—and so the epistemic and moral ‘striving’ of the creature towards God—receives a positive interpretation. The indirection and the mediacy of sense knowledge and abstractive reasoning is now no longer (as it is for Scheler) a mark of something sub-personal or tragic, but is emblematic of the goodness of the creature’s otherness from God. Once we affirm our creatureliness as  RkTh, pp. 423–4; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 227–8 develops this principle in relation to ‘the misleading immediacy doctrine of Scheler (or better, of Scheler’s disciples)’. 142  Gottgeheimnis, p. 228; Gott, pp. 335–6; cf. Ringen I, p. 256. For ‘essence in-and-beyond existence’, see RkTh, p. 403. 141

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‘good’, as something which ‘ought to be’, we are spiritually and philosophically free to be humble before God: ‘In this attitude, the cramped titanism of “endless striving” is decisively dissolved and redeemed [gelöst und erlöst] in a twofold humility: firstly, the humility of renouncing the “eritis sicut dii” of equality with God ([which is renounced] by virtue of the creature’s possessing its own essence); and secondly, the humility of refusing to dissolve the fundamental tension of creatureliness itself (by virtue of the essence-existence tension of the creature’s ownreality qua creaturely).’143 Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie thus culminates in the explication of a ‘redeemed’ transcendentality as the religious and epistemological form of the analogia entis: the rhythmic ‘double-type of … Augustine’s transcendentality and Thomas Aquinas’ transcendentality’. This double-type is the ‘unity-in-tension of “endless striving to God”’ on the one hand, and “endless striving before the face of God”’ on the other. The first aspect corresponds to the creature’s ‘likeness to God’, and the second to its ‘unlikeness to God’—its ineradicable creatureliness.144 What is the shape of this ‘endless’ and ‘humble’ striving? Firstly, it is an epistemic posture. Creaturely knowing is a ‘processus in infinitum’, a gradual, and even communal, task of unceasingly flowing back and forth, from the subject out towards the object, and from the object back to the subject; the flowing of the community of conscious creatures towards one another, the illumination of the ocean of objective-ontological community that washes over us.145

Creaturely knowledge is progressive and constitutively incomplete; there can be no Wesensschau which exhausts the ‘(relative) infinity [Eigenunendlichkeit] of the object of knowledge’. Thought must constantly return to exteriority and sense experience, for essences only disclose themselves to us gradually and aesthetically.146 Likewise, no intentional act manifests the fullness of objective being immediately— it requires a ‘communion’ (Gemeinschaft) of beings and minds to know the ‘richness’ of reality.147 Such is Przywara’s objection to phenomenological Wesensschau:  RkTh, p. 426.  RkTh, pp. 484–6. 145  Gottgeheimnis, pp. 218, 223. 146  Gottgeheimnis, pp. 218–220. 147  Gottgeheimnis, p. 218. ‘And such is the blessed, little known communal mystery of knowing [Gemeinschaftsmysterium des Erkennens], that the world of objects offers itself in greater breadth and height and depth to every form of loving communal thinking and communal living [Miteinanderdenken und Miteinanderleben], because it is no longer the single, solitary subject that gazes on “his” world through the eyes of his enclosed, personal solitude, but rather the oneness of love, which fuses two souls—as much as the abyss between human being and human being allows—into one seeing. With the growth of the personal life of subjects, so also grows the fullness and depth of the world. And if something like a knowing-together of all humanity were possible— only to this glimpse would the true inexhaustible “in itself” of the world in some small measure disclose itself’ (ibid., p. 220–1). In a passage like this we see the profound and beautiful influence Scheler’s personalism had on Przywara’s early thought—especially those Schelerian notions of humanity’s spiritual solidarity, and the world’s truly disclosing itself only to the loving eyes of deep personal life. 143 144

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when Scheler categorically rejects ‘scholasticism’—that is, any epistemology of abstracting knowledge from sense experience—he is rejecting our finite, embodied constitution.148 In that sense, an intemperate Wesensschau belies an attempt at ‘the usurpation of the divine gaze’.149 Although in an ultimate sense it is true that for the classical and scholastic tradition the perfection of knowledge is simple intuition (simplex intuitus),150 our embodied finitude demands that we commit to the plodding, mediated ‘imperfection’ of induction per sensibilium as the ‘specifically … creaturely-human’ form of our knowledge.151 Creaturely knowing, then, is an infinite questing, constitutively irresolvable, and shot through with ‘the indissoluble dualism of subject and object’ and ‘being and becoming’.152 This ‘back-and-forth’ refuses intentionality’s tendency towards self-­ enclosure. We come to know creatures and God by ceaselessly plunging into the inexhaustible ‘exterior fullness’ of sense experience and empirical reasoning, only to plunge again into the infinity of our own and others’ interiority—a plunging into communion with being and beings that is falsified by the self-deifying enclosure of absolutized intentionality. Creaturely knowledge is not an immediate co-enactment which accomplishes a full identification with the object of knowledge. It is instead an unending ‘back and forth’ which expresses the ‘the formal never finished “in infinitum”’ of created being.153 The analogy of being thus initiates a ‘rhythmic’, creaturely epistemology, not only of intimate love and reverent distance to God, but also to the community of all creatures, since they, too, disclose themselves in analogical mystery. ‘God all in all! When are we finished with this unending progress of gazing on God, and of God’s gazing out, in all things?’154 ‘Comprehension of incomprehensibility’ [Augustine] … [T]he knowledge of God in adoring love and reverence [is] the quintessence of blessedness: Tu Solus! You, so unendingly great, that You alone, Infinity, exhaust Your infinity—and yet so exhaust Your infinity, that

 See RB, p. 73 and passim for Scheler’s rejection of this scholastic-Aristotelian epistemology.  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 262. 150  See Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2009), pp. 28. 151  ‘Drei Richtungen’, p. 263; cf. RB, pp. 12–13. For this reason, Przywara’s central project in RB is to modify Schelerian phenomenology until it becomes fruitfully compatible with scholastic (Aristotelian-empirical) metaphysics, with its focus on exteriority and sense knowledge. To that end, RB puts Scheler’s personalism into dialogue with Newman’s, a Catholic personalism of feeling and love Przywara sees as compatible with scholastic metaphysics. For this NewmanianAugustinian reshaping of Scheler’s system, see esp. RB, 33–5, 61–7, 92–5, 130–7, 149–68, 217–24. 152  Gottgeheimnis, pp. 218. 153  AE I, §8.2, p. 312. On this basis, Przywara argues throughout RB for the compatibility of ‘scholastic’ metaphysics and phenomenology as but two rhythmic moments in the same and single creaturely (‘back-and-forth’) science of being. 154  It is difficult to capture the German here: ‘Wann sind wir fertig mit diesem unendlichen Progreß des Schauens und Ausschauens Gottes in allen Dingen?’ 148 149

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this pouring forth155 has neither beginning nor end, but is, rather, itself Eternal Life: life as eternity and eternity as life! Doesn’t it demand an unending journeying through the depths of one’s own and others’ souls, through the spiritual depths of all peoples and races, throughout all the depths of the world in its transformation and alteration from the dawn of the world to the final glow of world’s evening—and so again an unending journeying through all beauties of the coming ‘new heaven and new earth’, through all the never-­ ending heaving waves of the vita venturi saeculi of the life of eternal blessedness? Isn’t this what is demanded in order, in some measure, to experience with these thousands upon thousands of innumerable eyes what this is?—God! Deus infinitus et immensus! The Unending, the Uncircumscribable, the Inexhaustible! God, who is ever ‘greater’, ever ‘more’, than we comprehend! … Is this not the true, unspeakable, wondrous revelation of God, that in this unending progressus itself—in this swinging back and forth of seeing, and yet not seeing, this swinging back and forth of deepest nearness and yet, again, infinite distance—that it is in this essential polarity of our creaturely nearness to God and our creaturely knowledge of God itself that we partake of the most intimate nearness, and the highest knowledge of God?156

13.3.5  C  oda. ‘Loving Fear and Fearing Love’: The Religious Act Within Being-as-Analogy But if this is the structure of the creature’s relation to God, if the God who is within us in knowledge is at once the unfathomable God beyond us, then the ‘Augustinian-­ Thomistic religiosity of the analogia entis’ can be nothing but the essential unity-­ in-­tension of ‘“fearing love and loving fear”: God beyond us—and thus fearful reverence; God within us—and thus love.’157 This Augustinian formula, beloved by Newman under the title ‘opposite virtues’, is the essential posture of creaturely knowing.158 It lies at the heart of Przywara’s writings of the 1920s, and of Religionsbegründung’s critique of Scheler. In fearing love and loving fear, what might have been ‘the dualism’ of God’s reality and our reality opens instead into a  The German auschöpfen means both ‘to exhaust’, and ‘to pour out’, and is related to schöpfen (to create; to ladle out; to draw forth). 156  Gottgeheimnis, pp. 231–2. 157  RkTh, p. 406; Gottgeheimnis, p. 232; RB, p. 220. 158  RkTh, p. 463 cites Enarrationes in Psalmos on Psalm 118 (sermo 22, no. 6) as the source of this all-important Augustinian formula. See, for example, RB, pp.  220, 61–2; ‘Der Newmansche Seelentypus’ in Ringen der Gegenwart II, pp.  860–1; RkTh, pp.  406, 412, 467–8, 480, 485–7; Gottgeheimnis, pp. 193, 154; The Heart of Newman: A Synthesis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010), pp. 91, 184–5, 234, 236; and J.H. Kardinal Newman. Christenum: Ein Aufbau, vol. 4, Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk (Freiburg: Herder, 1922), pp. 14, 79–80. See John Henry Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1997), p.  206: ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom; till you see Him to be a consuming fire, and approach Him with reverence and godly fear, as being sinners, you are not even in sight of the strait gate. I do not wish you to be able to point to any particular time when you renounced the world (as it is called), and were converted; this is a deceit. Fear and love must go together; always fear, always love, to your dying day.’ For a discussion of ‘loving fear and fearing love’, see Kenneth R.  Oakes, ‘Three Themes in Przywara’s Early Theology’, The Thomist 74.2 (2010): pp. 283–4, 302–08; as well as Przywara, ‘Weg zu Gott’, in Schriften II, p. 22 (cited in Oakes, p. 283). 155

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peaceful ‘unity in two-ness, of a nearness in the alternation of nearness and distance’—‘an anticipatory peace of fulfillment’, which comes home to us in ‘flowing back and forth in this rhythm’ of the ontological polarity of ‘God in and beyond us’.159 The instability of Scheler’s overemphasis upon immediacy in love is stabilized by its polarization into loving fear and fearing love, thus returning Scheler to his own ‘ur-Catholic’ core.160 Thus the free expanse of being as the analogia entis heals Scheler’s ‘ur-­ religiosity’ of ‘identity-in-contradiction’—which had been the kind of explosive dialectic between ‘absolute love-immanence of God (the subject as God) and absolute distance-transcendence (the “pure subject” as God).’161 Scheler’s religiosity had been the ‘language of submersion’—the swallowing up of the creature into God (in other words, ‘religiosity “as” God’—identity with God in the religious act). But this religiosity of ‘fearing love and loving fear’ is instead the true ‘language of prayer’: ‘religiosity “before God” [“vor” Gott]’, in the ‘unity-in-tension’ of becoming.162 Once Scheler’s ‘transcendentality as God’, is re-naturalized into a ‘transcendentality before the face of God’, the primal religious and epistemological posture of the creature becomes instead its humble, loving, reverent growth ‘towards’ and ‘into’ the infinite heights of God.163 The finite creature’s site of relation and likeness to the infinite God is not any self-enclosed absolute act, but is precisely her incompletion. The creature is like God only in the upwardly open ‘breaking off’ of her being in her becoming: her ‘becoming into the Infinite [Werden ins Unendliche]’.164 The creature’s unending ‘changing’ (Wandlung) is his growth ‘into God, who is the Unchangeable [Unwandelbare] from eternity to eternity’: ‘As God is eternally the  Gottgehimenis, p. 232.  Przywara remarks that there always was a ‘true kernel of the misleading immediacy doctrine of Scheler—or better, of his disciples’ (Gottgeheimnis, pp. 227–8). RB insists that Scheler’s phenomenology of religious experience is already implicitly an experience of the analogia entis, despite Scheler’s insistence on ‘immediacy’. Scheler’s phenomenological immediacy of God is in reality the ‘mediatedness’—the distance—of God as that distance gives itself ‘immediately’ to consciousness (RB, p. 25). Authentic phenomenology accepts this fact, which, Przywara underscores, is not a fact borrowed from or imposed by metaphysics, but one internal to phenomenological experience (RB, 109). As Przywara later wrote of the middle Scheler, ‘Indwelling this brilliant schematic— unbeknowst to Scheler—was the ur-Catholic element of the transcendent-immanent God, the “God beyond us and God in us”, the God of the analogia entis’ (In und Gegen, p. 51). 161  RkTh, p. 406. 162  Ibid. 163  ‘Transzendentalität vor Gott’: RkTh, p.  482. As the early Scheler himself says, knowledge requires a posture of ‘humility’: ‘a true transformation under the eye of the Lord’ (RB, p. 64; quoting Scheler, ‘Zur Rehabilitierung der Tugend’, in GW III, pp. 20–1. 164  True creaturely becoming is, however not a ‘pure’, boundless becoming (which would resolve into an intra-creaturely absolute ground), but an irresolvable tension of being in-and-beyond becoming (RkTh, p. 403). Creaturely becoming images the creator only in this irresolvability (this ‘being vertically open’): the Catholic faith believes in ‘an infinite God, who reveals himself in the “becoming into infinity” of the creature, and who therefore does not (as in a platonic-mystical-Reformation ethos) condemn this becoming, but who precisely in this becoming allows His infinity to be felt’ (‘Paul Natorp—Clemens Bäumker’, in Ringen I, p. 256; emphasis added. Cf. RkTh, p.  409; and ‘Der Newmansche Seelentypus in der Kontinuität katholischer Aszese und Mystik’, in Ringen II, pp. 858–9). 159 160

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same, therefore the human being grows, growing in Him, ever higher into Him [Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. IV.xi.2].’165 The likeness between God and creature is submerged within the ‘semper maior’ of a surpassing dissimilarity; the creature is like Him, the Unchangeable, only in its eternal changing. Newman’s famous prayer is, then, the spiritual posture proper to the analogia entis: ‘I know, O my God, I must change, if I am to see Thy face! … Oh, support me, as I proceed in this great, awful, happy change, with the grace of Thy unchangeableness. My unchangeableness here below is perseverance in changing.’166 Renouncing the eritis sicut dii of ‘religiosity “as” God’, the creature humbly accepts his being changed into God by God.167 It is not incidental that the late Scheler explicitly rejected a spirituality of humble distance. In response to objections to his late anthropology, which abandons the fallen god to the dialectic of Spirit and Drive, he responded: ‘In the place of the relation of distance—the result of childlike thinking and weakness, as it is construed in the objectifying and hence evasive relationships of contemplation, adoration, and the prayer of entreaty—we for our part put the elemental act by which man engages himself for the Deity.’168 One cannot but see in Scheler the danger Newman’s spirituality warns of: ‘The grave danger … of confusing oneself with God, of identifying the heaving [waves] of one’s own soul as the heaving [waves] of God [das Wogen der eigenen Seele in Wogen Gottes umzunennen]’—a danger which can only be ‘overcome’ in ‘the sobriety and tenderness of reverent fear before the infinite and incomprehensible God.169 The spirituality of the analogia entis is, then, precisely the Ignatian-Newmanian spirituality of service Scheler rejects, in which the creature’s union with God comes not in a luciferian attempt at absolute identity, but rather in a ‘servant-like identity’ (dienstliche Identität) with the humility of the divine Word, ‘who emptied himself, taking the form of a servant’ (Philippians 2: 7). ‘The posture proper to the creature as such’ is ‘service as distance’, where the creature assents to being ‘patient to’ the philanthropic ‘patience of God’: the patience to be a creature, undergoing the passio of our ‘eternal changing’ (Wandlung) ‘before the face of’ the ever-greater God.170 And quite unlike Scheler’s anguished dialectic of ‘being torn asunder’ (Zerissenheit), which ‘tragically’ rages after identity with God, in the unrestricted horizon of being-­as-­analogy, ‘there is, decidedly, the earthly,

 Himmelreich der Seele, pp. 48, 43; cf. 53, 79. I have translated Przywara’s German, rather than citing an English translation of this passage in Irenaeus. 166  Newman’s famous words appear more than once in Przywara’s writings: in the epigraph to Wandlung: ein Christenweg, in Schriften I, p. 381; in Gott, p. 336; and in The Heart of Newman, pp. 217–18. 167  RkTh, p. 422. 168  Spiegelberg, pp.  299–30 (citing Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos, in GW IX, 71). See Philosophische Weltanschauung, pp. 83–4, cited above. 169  ‘Der Newmansche Seelentypus’, in Ringen II, p. 861. 170  AE II §1, pp.  346–7. For the Ignatian dimension of Przywara’s spiritual works, see Brian P. Dunkle, S.J., ‘Service in the Analogia Entis and Spiritual Works of Erich Przywara’, Theological Studies 73.2 (2012): pp. 339–362. 165

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peaceful, positive distance of this patience’, which allows God to be God, and creature to be creature.171

Bibliography Abbreviations and Texts from Scheler’s Gesammelte Werke (Bern and München: Francke Verlag, 1954–1982. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1986–1997): GW II: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. Neuer Versuch der Grundlegung eines ethischen Personalismus [1913/1916]. Edited by Maria Scheler. 5th ed. 1954 [abbreviated F]. GW III: ‘Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen’ [1912], ‘Zur Idee des Menschen’ [1914], and ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens. Nietzsche-Dilthey-Bergson’ [1913]. In Vom Umsturz der Werte. Abhandlungen und Aufsätze. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1955 [abbr. U]. GW V: Vom Ewigen im Menschen [1921]. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1955 [abbr. E]. GW VII: Wesen und Formen der Sympathie – Die deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart [2nd ed.: 1923]. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. 1973 [abbr. Sy]. GW VIII: Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft [1926]. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1960. GW IX: Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos [1928] and Philosophische Weltanschauung [1928]. In Späte Schriften. Edited by Manfred S. Frings. 1979. GW X: ‘Absolutsphäre und Realsetzung der Gottesidee’ [1915–1916]. In Schriften aus dem Nachlass, vol. 1. Edited by Maria Scheler. 1957.

Texts Cited from Pryzwara, Schriften, vols. I–III (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1962): In Schriften I, Frühe Religiöse Schriften: Wandlung. Ein Christenweg [1925]. In Schriften II, Religionsphilosophische Schriften: Gottgeheimnis der Welt. Drei Vorträge über die geistige Krise der Gegenwart [1923]; Gott. Fünf Vorträge über das religionsphilosophische Problem [1925]; Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie [1927; abbr. RkTh] / Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion. Translated by Alan Coates Bouquet. London: Oxford UP, 1935 [not referenced or consulted here]. Schriften III,  Analogia entis  [part I, 1932; part II, 1939–1959]  / Analogia Entis. Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. Translated by David Bentley Hart and John Betz. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014 [abbr. AE I and II].

 AE II §1, p. 339. This creaturely vision of love within servant-like becoming is what Przywara in the passage above called ‘the Catholic liberation of unending striving’ (RkTh, pp.  423–4). Perhaps this ‘patient’ striving is the theological fulfillment of what William Desmond calls ‘the twinning of patience and striving’ in our mindfulness to the porosity of being; see his essay above, sec. 2.

171

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Other Writings of Przywara Religionsbegründung: Max Scheler  – J.H.  Newman. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1923 [abbr. RB]. Ringen der Gegenwart. Gesammelte Aufsätze 1922–1927. 2 vols. Augsburg: Benno Filser Verlag, 1929. Augustinus. Die Gestalt als Gefüge. Leipzig: Hegner, 1934. In und Gegen. Stellungnahmen zur Zeit. Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1955. Humanitas. Der Mensch gestern und morgen. Nürnberg: Glock und Lutz, 1952. Einführung in Newmans Wesen und Werk. Vol. 4 of J.H.  Kardinal Newman. Christentum: Ein Aufbau. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1922. Published in English (yet with Przywara’s commentary and all of vol. 4 excised) as The Heart of Newman: A Synthesis.  San Francisco: Ignatius, 2010. Drei Richtungen der Phänomenologie. Stimmen der Zeit 115 (July 1928): 252–264.

Other Authors Bergem, Ragnar M.  Transgressions: Erich Przywara, G.W.F.  Hegel and the Principle of Non-­ Contradiction. Forum Philosophicum 21(1) (Spring 2016). Bermes, Christian, and Wolfhart Henckmann, eds. 2000. Person und Wert: Schelers ‘Formalismus’— Perspektiven und Wirkungen. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber. Crosby, John. 1998. The Individuality of Human Persons: A Study in the Ethical Personalism of Max Scheler. The Review of Metaphysics 52 (1): 21–50. Dunkle, Brian P. 2012. Service in the Analogia Entis and Spiritual Works of Erich Przywara. Theological Studies 73 (2): 339–362. Gerl-Falkovitz, Hanna-Barbara. 2002. Die Newman-Rezeption in den 20er Jahren in Deutschland: Edith Stein im Umkreis von Maria Knoepfler, Romano Guardini und Erich Przywara. In ‘Herz spricht zum Herzen.’ John Henry Newman (1801–1890) in seiner Bedeutung für das deutsche Christentum, ed. Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz, 51–70. Annweiler: Plöger. Gertz, Bernhard. 1969. Glaubenswelt als Analogie. Die theologische Analogie-Lehre Erich Przywaras und ihr Ort in der Auseindersetzung um die analogia fidei. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag. Hart, David Bentley. 2003. The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Haskamp, Reinhold. 1966. Spekulativer und phänomenologischer Personalismus: Einflüsse J.G. Fichtes und Rudolf Euckens auf Max Schelers Philosophie der Person. Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber. Henckmann, Wolfhart. 1998. Max Scheler. München: Verlag C.H. Beck. Marion, Jean-Luc. 2007. The Erotic Phenomenon. Trans. Stephen Lewis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2001. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies. Trans. Thomas A.  Carlson. New  York: Fordham UP. Negel, Joachim. 2013. Welt als Gabe. Hermeneutische Grenzgänge zwischen Theologie und Phänomenologie. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag. Newman, John Henry. 1997. Parochial and Plain Sermons. San Francisco: Ignatius. Oakes, Kenneth R. Three Themes in Przywara’s Early Theology The Thomist 74, no. 2 (2010): pp. 283–310. Pieper, Joseph. 2009. Leisure: The Basis of Culture. Trans. Alexander Dru. San Francisco: Ignatius. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. 1860. Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände. In Sämmtliche Werke, erste Abteilung, vol. 7. Stuttgart: Cotta.

13  Loving Being: Erich Przywara’s Engagement with Max Scheler

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Spiegelberg, Herbert. 1982. The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction. 3rd ed. The Hague: Kluwer. Von Balthasar, Hans Urs. Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. 3 vols, 1937–1939. Salzburg: Anton Pustet Verlag. Zechmeister, Martha. 1997. Gottes-Nacht. Erich Przywaras Weg negativer Theologie. Münster: Lit.

Index

A Abraham, 210 Acosmism, 202–210 Adorno, Theodor, 131 Aesthetics art, 39–40, 120–121, 165 beauty (see Beauty) music, 38, 51–52, 120–121 in radical philosophical theology of revelation, 118, 119 the sublime, 40–41 Aeterni Patris (papal encyclical), 1 Agape, see Love Alston, William, 5 Alterity as distinct from ‘the different’, 16–17 and the Kantian sublime, 41 opening to, 35 and transcendence, 7, 14–23 Altizer, Thomas, 109, 115 Althusser, Louis, 124–126, 129, 131, 140–142, 146–147 Analogia entis (notion), 116, 172–180, 182–184, 187–189, 237–240, 260–261, 266–272 and the analogia fidei, 165, 172–180 in Augustine, 177–178, 180–183, 187, 254, 266, 269 and Christian revelation, 172–179 and creation, 175–177 as form of ‘transcendentality’, 254, 266, 268 and Fourth Lateran Council, 173, 178–179, 188

Karl Barth on, 171–176 and phenomenology, 240–241 plurivocal meanings of ‘to be’ in Aristotle, 25–28 and Russian sophiology, 188–191 in Thomas, 165, 177–183, 261, 266–268 vs. univocal notion of being, 26–27, 29, 260–261, 267–272 Analogia entis (work), see Przywara, Erich Analogy, 81, 91 See also Analogia entis (notion) Analytic philosophy history of, 5 of religion, 3, 5, 156 Anthropology anthropological dualism in Max Scheler, 242–251, 258–260 theological anthropology, 186–187 Anti-foundationalism, 86 Apocalyptic, 109–110, 117, 119–121 Biblical apocalyptic, 119 See also Revelation Apologetics, 5 Aquinas, see Thomas Aquinas Arianism (early Christological heresy), 189 Aristotle Aristotelianism, 28, 155–157, 162, 266–267 doctrine of morphē and analogia entis, 182–183 and noēseōs noēsis, 111 and semantic triangle, 58 view of metaphysics, 25–27, 154 Asceticism, 204, 211, 250

© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 B. M. Mezei, M. Z. Vale (eds.), Philosophies of Christianity, Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures 31, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9

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278 Augustine (saint), 63, 115 on agape (charity), 48–49, 230, 231 and the analogia entis, 177–178, 180–183, 187, 254, 266, 270 Augustinianism, 264, 266 on the economy of salvation, 72 on the Eucharist, 187 on the fragmented will, 226 on incomprehensibility of God, 269 as influence on Harry Frankfurt, 224, 226, 231–232, 235 as influence on Heidegger, 99 and likeness to God, 186–187 in Orthodox theology, 172 and the restless heart, 45 on self-love, 224 B Badiou, Alain role in the thought of Slavoj Žižek, 124–127, 129, 133–134, 138, 142–143, 146, 148 Baptism, see Sacraments Barth, Karl on analogia entis, 171–176 on faith and natural reason, 174–176 on the imago Dei after the fall, 171, 174 influence on Karl Jaspers, 201 metaphysical actualism of, 173 on nature and grace, 173–176 on religious piety, 14 Baudelaire, Charles, 16 Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 111 Beatific vision, see Vision of God Beauty restoration of primal beauty of creation, 190–191 Being as agapeic, 49–52 being and becoming (essence and existence), 163–164, 179–187, 239, 267 created being, 173, 257, 260, 264–270 and personality, 241 Benedict XVI (pope), 147 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 188 Bergson, Henri Erich Przywara on, 254, 258 and Étienne Gilson, 153, 154, 156 and Max Scheler’s Lebensphilosophie, 239, 244, 246

Index Bernanos, Georges, 22 Bernhardt, Reinhold, 69–70, 82 Bernstein, Richard J., 86 Between, the, see Metaxu Bible Abraham, 210 Biblical apocalyptic, 119 creation in, 175–176, 188 God in the Pentateuch, 160, 181 imago Dei in, 182–183 Levitical law, 157 on naming God and praying to God, 59–62 New Testament, 79, 110 Prophetic Books, 110, 128 sanctification, deification, and indwelling of the Trinity according to, 179, 183 Sophia (wisdom) in, 188–189 the Temple, 267 transcendence and immanence of God according to, 177–178 Billot, Louis, 155 Bloch, Ernst, 127–128, 138–139 Blumenberg, Hans, 131–132, 139 Bonaventure (saint), 48 Braig, Carl, 99, 100 Brentano, Franz, 4, 6, 99 Buber, Martin, 205 Buddhism, 15, 211 Bühler, Karl, 58, 62–63 Bulgakov, Sergei, 172, 189–190 C Cantor, George, 69 Catholicism (Catholic theology) Catholic thinkers on Joachim of Fiore, 128 dialogue with Protestantism and Orthodoxy, 170–172 God and being in Catholic theology, 173, 176 Hegel and Žižek on, 134–136, 146–147 influence of Heidegger on Catholic theology, 97–99 and intellectus fidei (understanding of the faith), 176 Reformers on, 14 view of religion in, 13 view of sacraments in, 21 von Harnack on, 136–137 Capitalism, 123–124, 126 Caputo, John, 4, 105 Charity, see Love

Index Chenu, Marie-Dominique, 153–165 ecclesiastical silencing of, 153, 164 and the facts of Christian revelation, 155, 161 on the historical Thomas, 153 on ordering of theology in Thomas, 164–165 on relation of faith and reason (theology and philosophy), 153, 158–162, 164–165 and scientific historical study of medieval texts, 153–154 Chesterton, G.K., 131, 140, 144 Childhood, 221, 234 Christianity Catholic (see Catholicism) doctrines, 4, 6–7, 14–15, 72, 84 and Greek philosophy, 101–102 and Islam, 114 and Judaism, 77, 114 liturgy, 21, 70 and natural religion, 13–14, 20–21 and non-Christian religions, 67–92 Orthodox (see Orthodoxy) and philosophy, 1–11, 55–56 Protestant (see Protestantism) relationship to history, 22–23 and science, 3, 6–7 ‘Christian philosophy’ debates (France), see Modernist Controversy Cobb, John B. Jr., 85 Cohen, Hermann, 256 Common nouns, see Reference Communion (community), 47–52, 91, 138, 201, 205, 227–228, 262–264 Comte, Auguste, 4, 28 Congar, Yves, 159 Conrad-Martius, Hedwig, 239, 263 Continental philosophy of religion, 3–5, 195–212 Copleston, Frederick, 5 Creation creatio ex nihilo, 177–178 God’s continual act of, 22 God’s love as creative, 228 metaphysics of creation and deification, 169, 172–184 primary causality (of God) and secondary causality (of creatures), 171, 173, 175, 177, 261 and resurrection, 47 Creatures, see Being, created being; Creation

279 D D’Costa, Gavin, 69 Death, 46–47, 49, 83 de Bérulle, Pierre, 18 de Lubac, Henri, 128 Derrida, Jacques, 4 critique of metaphysics, 25–26 and différance, 184 as example of the ‘religious turn’ in philosophy, 133 on Hegel, 129, 140–141, 143, 144, 147 Descartes, Renée on doxastic irresistibility, 218–221 on God, 219 in Harry Frankfurt’s thought, 218–221, 223, 226 in Jean-Luc Marion’s thought, 31 and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, 156–157 on the self, 185 Desmond, William, 4 metaxu (the between)/metaxological metaphysics (see Metaxu) Deification, 170, 172, 189, 191, 258 Deism, 1, 162–163 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 129, 182 de Wulf, Maurice, 153 Dialogue ecumenical, 170–172 interreligious, 73, 90–92 Difference (distance), 260, 264–266 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 98, 99, 102 Dominic (saint), 154 Durkheim, Emile, 157 E Eckhart (Meister), 50 Economy of salvation (salvation history), 20–23, 64, 71, 78–80 Ecumenism, see Dialogue Eliade, Mircea, 19 Engels, Friedrich, 125, 130 Enlightenment, 13, 82, 131–132, 144, 184 Epistemology, 83–86, 111–112, 175, 266–270 Eros, see Love Eschatology, 47, 75, 80, 82, 110, 130, 190 Equivocity, 45–46, 50–51, 91 Ethics, 48, 71, 82, 88, 154–155 Eucharist, see Sacraments Eucken, Rudolf, 246, 258, 262

280 Existentialism, 3, 180–182 existentialist construal of Christian theology in Heidegger, 98–103 Existenz and transcendence, 203 Kierkegaard on human existence, 197 F Faith and absurdity in Kierkegaard, 207–210 and reason, 2–5, 154, 158–160, 162, 174–176 and salvation of non-Christians, 70–72, 78 Fall (of human beings), 67, 94, 171, 227, 249, 254 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb as acosmist, 202 and the Atheismusstreit (Atheism Controversy), 202 and development of philosophical understanding of revelation, 109 dualism of act-being vs. object-being as influence on Max Scheler, 246–247, 255 Erich Przywara on, 247, 256, 258–259 Hegel’s critique of, 124 and Kantian transcendental thought, 32 Fideism, 153, 162, 183 See also Rationalism Finitude, 36, 37, 46, 242 Flesh, 43, 47 Florensky, Pavel, 172, 189 Florovsky, Georges, 172 Francis (pope), 10 Frankfurt, Harry and Augustine, 224, 226, 231, 235 on bullshit, 9, 218, 220, 233 on Descartes, 217–221, 223, 226 and Kierkegaard, 225, 235 on love, 217–235 and Luther, 217, 227 on paradox, 217 See also Love Frankfurt School, see Adorno, Theodor; Habermas, Jürgen; Horkheimer, Max Freedom and love (see Love) secondary causality and freedom of creatures, 179 Frigerio, Aldo, 62 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 99–101, 103 Garaudy, Roger, 138

Index Gardeil, Ambrose, 155, 158 Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald, 156 Geyser, Josef, 240 Gilkey, Langdon, 89–91 Gilson, Étienne, 153–160, 162–164 and Bergson (see Bergson, Henri) and chosisme, 154, 156–157, 162 on existence, 163–164 and Lévy-Bruhl (see Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien) on medieval humanism, 158–160 on relation of faith and reason (theology and philosophy), 5, 153, 156–160, 162–164 and scientific historical study of medieval texts, 153, 155 Gnosticism, 6, 50, 111, 114, 240, 252, 266 God as absolutely revelational, 110 and being, 173 as causa sui (in ontotheology), 105 and creation (God-world relation), 117, 174–175, 182, 184, 191, 202–203, 205–208, 238, 241–242, 251–253, 259, 264–265, 270–271 death of, 129, 133–134, 137–140, 144, 196 dialectic within, 139, 252, 259 and existence, 163–164 the Father, 21, 138 God’s philanthropia, 272 and history, 114, 203, 253, 258 in human consciousness, 255–256 infinity of God, 266, 268–270 name of God (I am Who am), 60, 160, 176, 181 in pluralist theologies, 81 referring to, naming God, 59, 61 and religion, 13–23, 205 and secondary causality of creatures, 171, 175, 178–181, 268 the Son (see Jesus Christ) the Spirit (see Spirit, Holy) Goodness (the good), 49, 199, 242 Grace after the fall, 67, 174–175 and deification, 172 Erasmus on grace and nature, 159–160 Luther on grace and nature, 159–160 medieval humanism on grace and nature, 159 and mystical union, 179 and nature, 22, 155–156, 173 and salvation of non-Christians, 76 Greene, Graham, 22 Gregory of Nyssa (saint), 181, 184

Index H Habermas, Jürgen and genealogy of secularity, 8–9, 144 as humanist reader of Marx, 125 as post-metaphysical thinker, 25 Hamlet (play), 185 Hart, David Bentley, 241 Hartmann, Nicolai, 90, 256, 263 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich communitarianism, 91 critique of Kantian transcendental philosophy, 32–33 dialectic and absolute standpoint, 34 Étienne Gilson on, 4 on God, 50 Heidegger’s study of, 100 on historical role of Christianity, 133–139, 149 and the incarnation, 137, 138 on Islam, 135, 146 on Judaism, 135 on kenosis, 140–141 Kierkegaard on religious philosophy of, 197–198 Phenomenology of Spirit, 34 and rationality in Christian theology, 169, 173 role in the thought of Slavoj Žižek, 123–149 science of logic, 26, 124, 127 and self-revelation (Selbstoffenbarung), 114 on Spinoza, 202 and the Trinitarian structure of history, 114 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 30, 49 on Augustine, 180 critique of metaphysics, 26, 32, 165 critique of Western theology and philosophy, 99–100, 125 on death of God, 134, 139 dismissive reading of Kierkegaard, 198, 200, 205 and Ereignis, 119 in Erich Przywara’s thought, 237 the es gibt, 37 existential hermeneutic of Being and Time, 90, 97–99, 183, 185, 205 on faith, 98–103 on God, 104–105, 181 influence on Christian theology, 97 and ontotheology, 105 and philosophical use of Christianity, 148, 174 and principle of sufficient reason, 36

281 on relation of philosophy to theology, 100–105 and revelation, 104 and scholasticism, 99 and standpoints, 90 theological education and confessional background of, 98 view of ontological difference, 180 Hierophanies, 19 Henry, Michel, 4 and absolute life, 116, 118 and phenomenology of revelation, 109, 111, 117–119 and radical phenomenology, 116 Henry of Ghent, 182 Heraclitus, 184 Hermeneutics, 3, 67, 91, 98, 103 Hick, John, 69, 81–83, 93 Hieron (tyrant), 184 Hinduism, 15, 87, 211 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 43, 47 Horkheimer, Max, 131 Hugon, Edward, 155 Humanism Hume, David, 157, 185, 219 Husserl, Edmund and essences, 114 in Jean-Luc Marion, 118 on phenomenological reduction, 30, 38 and phenomenology of revelation, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115 Hyppolite, Jean, 128 I Idealism, 1, 187, 212, 246, 256, 263 Imago Dei (image of God), 171, 174, 182, 187 Immanence, 15–22, 43 Intelligibility, 27, 36 ideality (in sophiology), 188–192 Islam, 13 Israel, Jonathan, 132 Irenaeus (saint), 186, 272 J Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 202 Janicaud, Dominique, 117 Jaspers, Karl critique of religious acosmism, 202–204 on Existenz, world, and God (transcendence), 203–204 Karl Barth as influence on, 206 reception of Kierkegaard, 196, 197, 200, 202, 205–209

282 Jesus Christ being conformed to, 102, 187, 188 christophanies, 21–22 the cross, 231 incarnation, 21, 48, 137, 138, 156, 160, 164–165, 173 life, suffering, and death of, 21–22, 47, 130, 131 the Logos (Word), 186, 187, 190, 271 and New Testament, 79 resurrection of, 47, 138 salvation through, 82 in sophiology, 188–191 See also Kenosis Joachim of Fiore, 87, 128, 139, 179 John Paul II (Pope) encyclical letter Fides et ratio, 1–2, 5 and religious pluralism, 74 Judaism and Christianity, 44, 77 Hegel on, 137–138 view of religion in, 8 Justice, see Ethics K Kant, Immanuel, 3, 115 critique of metaphysics, 26 Kantianism, 29, 32–33, 82–84, 239, 249, 256, 263 and philosophical understanding of revelation, 109 on the sublime, 40–41 and transcendental Thomism, 97, 160 Kenosis (self-emptying), 87, 133, 138, 140–141, 144, 147 Kierkegaard, Søren, 99, 163, 185 on Christian existence (polemic against systematic philosophy), 209–210 critique of Hegel (Hegelian philosophy of religion), 144, 197 on faith and absurdity (vs. knowledge), 207 in Harry Frankfurt’s thought, 224, 232 Heidegger’s dismissive treatment of, 196, 200, 202 on honesty, 207–208 on paradox, 208–209 as philosophy of religion (or not), 195–196 on purity of heart, 225 Kilwardby, Richard, 67, 78 Knitter, Paul, 74, 82, 85

Index Knowledge creaturely knowledge of being, 266–268 and faith, 203 and love, 242 through the senses, 262, 266, 268–269 Kojève, Alexandre, 128 Kuhn, Thomas, 81 Küng, Hans, 74–75, 90 L Lacan, Jacques role in the thought of Slavoj Žižek, 124, 128–131, 133, 142, 143, 148 László, Ervin, 7 Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy), 101, 247, 249, 250 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 36, 156, 162, 211 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 83 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 6, 17 and the face, 90 the il y a, 37 and phenomenology of revelation, 109, 118 Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien, 155–157, 159, 160, 162 Lewis, C.S., 169 Liturgical Movement (20th century), 239 Logic, 5, 120, 156, 158 Loisy, Alfred, 153 Love agape (caritas), 41, 47–52, 218, 229–231, 241 of being, 49 and caring, 218, 223, 227, 229, 231, 234 eros, 42, 229 eros in relation to agape, 43–46, 48–51, 229 and freedom (love as the binding of the will), 213–217, 221 God is, 14, 50, 228 God’s loving, 228–231, 252 and knowledge, 219, 243 paradoxes of self-love, 51, 218, 224–226 parental love, 227, 234 parental love, love of a particular other, 31, 44, 224 philia, 44, 51 and reverent fear, 265, 272 and value (does love create value, or find it?), 217, 226–230, 232–234 as ‘whyless’, 218, 227–228 ‘without being’, 241, 260 Löwith, Karl, 98, 101

Index Luther, Martin ecumenical comparison of Luther and Thomas, 171 in Heidegger’s thought, 99, 102 and hymn, ‘Gott ist todt’ (God is dead), 137 on knowledge of God, 175 on the love of God making sinners good (justification), 217, 227 231 Max Scheler’s use of, 248 on natural vs. Christian love, 231 on religious piety, 14 view of nature and grace vs. medieval humanist view, 159 Lukács, György, 127 M Macarius the Great, 187 Malabou, Catherine, 138 Mandonnet, Pierre, 158 Marcel, Gabriel, 46 Marion, Jean-Luc, 123 and the analogia entis, 241 in comparison with William Desmond’s hyperboles of being, 29–35 and continental philosophy of religion, 3, 4 and critique of metaphysics, 169, 184 on eros and agape, 44–45, 50–51 on the gift, 181 and Heidegger, 49 on the idol and the icon, 38–41, 241 on love as ‘univocal’, 45, 50, 51, 241 on ‘love without being’, 241 and phenomenology of revelation, 109, 119 in relation to Kant and Hegel, 31–33 saturated phenomena, 30–35, 111, 118 vanity, 36 view of phenomenology as first philosophy, 26 Martyrdom, 56, 206–207, 210 Marxism, 5, 125 dialectical materialism, 125 and religion, 127–128 Soviet-style vs. Western European, 125 in the thought of Slavoj Žižek, 126–129, 131, 133–134, 136, 137, 142–147 Marx, Karl, see Marxism Mary (the Virgin, Mother of Christ), 191 McGrath, Alister, 6 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 17

283 Metaphysics and analogy, 30, 171–191 and Christian faith, 169–178 of creation and deification, 172, 189–191 and critique of metaphysics and post-­ metaphysical thought, 25–30, 99, 169 as first philosophy, 25–29 and knowledge through the senses, 261, 266, 267 metaphysics of religion, 14, 16–17, 238, 256 metaxological (see Metaxu) as mindfulness to being, 27–32, 34–39 ontology, 111 plurality in metaphysical thinking, 26–27 Metaxu and community, 47–52 and eros, 43 as the ground and source of metaphysics, 28 as opening to transcendence, 28 as the original porosity of being, 34 wording the between, 28, 32, 34 Middle Ages medieval philosophy, 100 medieval theologies of grace, 67 Kierkegaard on medieval monasticism, 210 scientific historical study of medieval texts, 153 Milbank, John controversy with Slavoj Žižek, 8, 132, 136–137, 140, 144 and ecumenism, 170 on relation of metaphysics to Christian faith, 170 Modernist Controversy ‘Christian philosophy’ debates (France), 159 and notion of pure philosophy, 158 and Thomism (see Thomism) See also Rationalism; Fideism Modernity critique of modern philosophy, 118, 153, 239 genealogy of, 6, 116, 131–137, 144–148 Moltmann, Jürgen, 88, 234 Monism, 177 Mystery, 5, 7, 38, 45, 51, 87, 267–269 N Nature, see Grace Neo-Kantianism, 91, 200, 256, 263 Newman, John Henry, 72, 91 Nicene Creed, 189

284 Nicolas of Cusa, 48, 91, 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 29, 99, 196 and Christian love, 48 critique of metaphysics, 27 and critique of values, 250 on death of God, 196 Erich Przywara on, 207, 237, 259, 261, 262 on human being as becoming, 183, 184 and Kierkegaard on honesty, 207 on loving fear and fearing love, 178, 270–273 and Max Scheler’s Lebensphilosophie, 247, 249–250, 262 in the thought of Karl Jaspers, 201 in the thought of Slavoj Žižek, 138 Nygren, Anders, 229–231 O Objectivity in early phenomenology, 239 in Heidegger, 203 in Kierkegaard, 204 in Max Scheler, 258–260, 263–264 O’Regan, Cyril, 5, 111 Orthodoxy (Orthodox theology) dialogue with Catholicism and Protestantism, 170 Hegel and Žižek on, 134, 135, 147 and sophiology, 188 view of religion in, 13 Other, the, see Alterity P Panikkar, Raimundo, 86 Pantheism, 177, 226, 264 accusation of Spinoza’s philosophy as form of, 202 Parable of the Lost Coin (Luke 15), 10 Parmenides, 184, 185, 262 Pascal, Blaise, 99 Paul (apostle) on agape, 51 as influence on Heidegger, 98–99 in the thought of Slavoj Žižek, 126 Personalism and being, 241 Max Scheler’s, 237–271 Personhood apocalyptic personhood, 119–121 created persons, 253 eschatological personhood, 186, 190 historical conceptions of, 3, 115

Index human being, selfhood, as becoming oneself, 184–188 human being, selfhood, as self-­transcendence, 18, 41, 248 self-identity, 184 See also Personalism; Anthropology Pesch, Otto Hermann, 171 Phenomenology anti-metaphysical forms of, 169 apocalyptic phenomenology, 117–118 and continental philosophy of religion, 3 intentionality, 31, 35, 112, 116 reduction, 30 ‘theological turn’ within, 117 Philosophy history of, 3 openness to religion and theology, 48 relation to Christian theology, 1–11, 101–105 relation to theology in modernity, 1, 48, 101–105 self-criticism of, 2 Philosophy of language analytic philosophy of, 5, 65 in relation to philosophy of religion, 56, 65 Philosophy of religion and Kierkegaard’s thought, 195–202 in relation to genuine transcendence, 15 in relation to theology of religions and religious studies, 65 Pike, Nelson, 5 Pindar, 184 Plantinga, Alvin, 5 Platner, Ernst, 202 Plato, 28, 99 doctrine of eidos and analogia entis, 237 on love and beauty, 231 Platonisms, 26, 28, 110, 258, 266 Sophist, 17 Symposium, 43–44, 46 Timaeus, 39, 61 Pluralism, religious, see Theology of religions Plurivocity, 27, 51 Post-modernity, 3, 5 view of human being as becoming, 187 Proper nouns, see Reference Protestantism (Protestant theology) and Catholic anti-modernism, 153, 160 and doctrine of election and justification, 228 and ecumenical dialogue with Orthodoxy, 170 and the fall, 171 Hegel’s and Žižek’s view of, 132–134, 136, 145, 147

Index and Heidegger 97, 99 one view of religion in, 13 one view of sacraments in, 21 and relation of Christian faith and metaphysics, 170–171 and secondary causality of creatures, 171 Protology, 130 Przywara, Erich Analogia entis (work), 237–238, 257 on consciousness and intentionality (meta-ontics and meta-noetics), 238, 241, 254–261 on contradiction, 257, 261 on creaturely knowledge of being as progressus in infinitum, 266–270 on creaturely posture vis-a-vis God (trust, humility, service), 175, 180–181, 242, 270–271 engagement with Max Scheler, 237–273 on essentialisms and existentialisms, 183 on Hegel, 257 on Heidegger, 257, 386 on human being (creaturely being) as being-in-and-beyond-becoming, 180, 186, 270–273 on John Henry Newman, 240, 269, 270, 272 on love and reverent fear, 267–268 and the magis of Ignatius of Loyola, 179 on Nietzsche, 208, 258, 260, 262 notion of rhythm, 183, 241, 264, 266, 268, 269, 271 notion of tragedy (tragicism), 242, 254, 257–258, 264, 265, 266–267, 272 on pantheism and theopanism, 188, 252, 254, 264 on phenomenology, 237–241, 259, 263, 269 on ‘philosophy of subjective religion’, 240 Religionsphilosophie katholischer Theologie (work), 254–261 view of scholasticism, 239–240, 264, 269 Psychology, 111 R Race, Alan, 69 Radical Orthodoxy (school), 3, 109, 115–116 Rahner, Karl, 75, 98, 182, 234 Rationalism, 3 Enlightenment rationalism, 13, 184 Erich Przywara on, 257 neo-scholastic and anti-modernist forms of, 153, 158, 160, 162, 164 Realism, 239, 263

285 Reinstadler, Sebastien, 155 Religion history of religions, 19 Indian religions, 113 Karl Barth’s and Luther’s critique of, 14 Kierkegaard’s critique of, 204–212 in medieval and classical sense of religio, 71 natural religion, 13–16, 20–23, 162 notion of true religion, 81–83 plurality of religions (see Theology of religions) as presence and efficacious activity of the Other, 18 Protestant orthodoxy’s view of, 13–14 religious act, 20, 199, 254, 258 social, doctrinal and cultic forms of, 18, 228 view of in Islam, Judaism, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, 13 Religious studies in a radical theological philosophy of revelation, 118 in relation to theology of religions and philosophy of religion, 67–68 Reference with common nouns, 57 in context of practices, 62 intension and extension, 58 with proper nouns, 61 referring to God, 61 semiotic triangle, 58, 64 with unknown objects, 59, 60 Reformation, 14 Relativism, 81–82, 250 Resurrection, 46–47 Revelation, 72, 104, 109–121, 170 Christian revelation as revealed facts, 155, 162 the divine as revelational in itself, 110 God of revelation vs. God of philosophy, 162–163, 172–178 historical development in notion of, 114–115, 117, 119–120 knowledge of God with or without, 175 in relation to eschatology, 110 systematic structure of philosophical theology of revelation, 119 theology and theological metaphysics as thinking through of, 169–171, 176 176 as ultimate and autonomous philosophical problem, 111, 125 Romanides, John, 172 Rorty, Richard, 86

286 S Sacraments Augustine on Eucharist, 118 baptism, 159, 171, 187 Eucharist, 21, 24 as incarnate Son’s effective action throughout history, 21 Protestant view of rites and sacraments, 14 Saints, 121, 191 See also Deification Salvation, 70–72, 78, 82 Sanseverino, Gaetano, 156 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 22, 37, 145 Saulchoir, le (Dominican studium), 154, 155, 158–163 Scheler, Max on act-being vs. thing-being, 246–247 anthropological dualism of, 246–251, 258 anti-naturalism of, 261 dualism of being and value, 239, 244, 263–265 on the geistige Person (spiritual person), 240, 243 God’s self-deification in the human being, 252, 266–267 on immediate knowledge of and participation in God, 239, 246, 251, 259, 266, 271 influence of Bergson’s and Nietzsche’s Lebensphilosophie (life philosophy) on, 247, 249, 250 on intentional feeling, 239, 243, 259, 262 and Kantianism, 250 on Liebesprimat (primacy of love), 239, 240, 258 and philosophical understanding of revelation, 109 rejection of ‘scholasticism’, 269 relation to Husserlian phenomenology, 249–251, 262, 263 view of metaphysics and being, 241, 244–246, 262, 264–266 on Wesensschau (intuition of essences), 239, 262, 269 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph and Hegel, 130 and Heidegger, 100 and philosophy of revelation (Offenbarungsphilosophie), 109, 114 role in the thought of Slavoj Žižek, 128, 130, 146 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 15, 98, 99, 234 Schmidt-Leukel, Perry, 69–70

Index Scholasticism on being, 264 later scholasticism’s view of metaphysics (division into metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis), 26 notion of abstraction in, 239, 266, 269 notion of revelation in later scholasticism, 118 as part of philosophia perennis, 239, 240 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 27, 211, 258 Scotus, Duns, 179, 182 Scripture, see Bible Second Vatican Council, 73, 77 Secularity, 55, 56, 131–141 Seifert, Josef, 4, 6 Siewerth, Gustav, 234 Socrates, 119 Solovyov, Vladimir, 172, 189 Sophia (sophiology), 172 in Bulgakov, 189–180 and Christ, 190 creaturely Sophia and divine Sophia, 189 as eternal body of God, 189 in Florensky, 189 heterodoxy or orthodoxy of, 172, 189 identity with analogical metaphysics of the West, 190 in Proverbs 8, 189, 191 Przywara on, 188 in Solovyov, 189 and Trinity, 189 Soul anthropological account of (powers of the soul), 186 distinction between soul (psychē) and spirit (pneuma), 186 in Max Scheler’s dualistic anthropology, 198 in metaphysica specialis, 26 in relation to ‘self’ and ‘selving’, 42 the revelation of the soul, 110 Sophia as soul of the world, 189 the soul and God, 472 the souls of others, 270 Spinoza, Baruch and the Atheismusstreit (Atheism Controversy), 202 as ‘Christ of the philosophers’, 48 Hegel on, 202 Spirit, Holy, 71, 76, 82, 138, 171, 178, 184, 186, 191, 235 Stoics, 184 Suárez, Francisco, 179

Index Subjectivity (the subject) in Heidegger, 203 in Kierkegaard, 199 in Max Scheler, 258–263 Swidler, Leonard, 85, 86 Swinburne, Richard, 5 T Taylor, Charles, 132 Tetragrammaton, see God, name of God (I am Who am) Theology reason in, 170, 174–177 relation of theology and philosophy, 1–2, 4–5, 153, 156–160, 162–3, 174–177 Theology of religions ambiguities in pluralist theories of, 69–80 and ecclesiology, 75–78 in patristic theology, 75 and relativism, 82–91 and salvation, 70–72, 78–80, 82, 114 and set theory, 69–70, 72–75, 79 and social justice, 88–92 and theology of sacrifice, 76, 79–80 threefold typology as pluralist, inclusivist, exclusivist, 69–92 view of pre-and non-Christian religions in Latin theology, 75–77 Thomas Aquinas analogia entis in, 165, 177–180, 182–184, 254, 261, 267, 268 on deification, 170 differing genres and modes of argumentation of, 164–165 on essence and existence, 179–181 Étienne Gilson and Marie Dominique Chenu on, 153–165 on Exod 3:14 (I am Who am), 163–164, 180–181 on faith and reason, 176 on God and being, 173, 180, 184 God as tamquam ignotus (as if unknown), 261 historical study of, 1532 on loving God vs. knowing God, 246 on the ordering of theology, 156–158, 160 on the order of charity, 48 on primary and secondary causality, 175, 179, 180 on referring to (naming) God, 59–60 and salvation of non-Christians, 78 on signification, 91

287 spirituality and pedagogy of, 154, 161–162 view of metaphysics, 154, 162 Thomism, 9, 98, 153 neo-Thomism, 153–156, 158–9, 160–162, 164 on real distinction, 179 transcendental Thomism, 97 Tracy, David, 81, 86, 90–91 Tragedy, see Przywara, Erich Transcendence, 14–23, 173, 203, 254–261 Trinity, 3 Hegel on, 114, 138, 146, 148–149 Joachim of Fiore on, 179 Karl Barth on, 173 and notion of revelation, 114, 118, 120 in pluralist theologies, 85, 87 Sophia and, 189–190 and theological anthropology, 188 Thomas on, 165 Žižek on, 148–149 Truth and bullshit, 9–10, 218, 220, 233 exposed as fiction in late capitalism, 124 immutable truth and mutable history, 183 Kierkegaard on existential truth and untruth, 198–199 notion of truth as plural, 81, 85–88 notion of truth as singular and univocal, 81–85 and plurality of religions, 70–71, 75–77 search for, 2, 191 U Ulrich, Ferdinand, 234 Univocity, 51, 82, 265 V Value, values dualism of value and being, 239, 242–245, 264 hierarchy of values, 185 love as creative of value, 217, 226–234 objectivity of value, 232–234, 238 unity of value and being, 241–242 Vattimo, Gianni, 4, 48–49, 134, 139 Vetö, Miklós, 6 Vision of God in Augustine, 187 in Przywara, 179, 266–270

288 Voegelin, Eric, 111 Voltaire, 162 Voluntarism, 23, 251, 256, 258 von Balthasar, Hans Urs analogia entis in, 174–176, 182, 183 on apocalyptic (Apokalypse der deutschen Seele), 109–111, 117, 128 on beauty, 17 engagement with Karl Barth, 174–176 on Husserl, 114 on Joachim of Fiore and Hegel, 128 on Marie Dominique Chenu, 165 on Max Scheler’s phenomenology, 246, 249, 250 and Russian sophiology, 188 von Drey, Sebastian, 112 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 139 von Harnack, Adolf, 101–102, 136 von Hildebrand, Dietrich, 6

Index W Ward, Keith, 6 Weber, Max, 134 Weil, Simone, 22 Whitehead, Alfred North, 5 Will, 44 Williams, Rowan, 170 Wonder (including perplexity, curiosity, astonishment, dread), 28, 32, 34, 36–38, 40, 41, 46, 51, 269 World negation of world and world-values (worldlessness), 202–206, 241 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 123–149 central conceptual architecture of his thought consisting of Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Schelling, 124–130, 141–143 on secularity, 131–149