In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology 9781935790631, 9781888570595

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In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

Contemporary Religious Thought Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins, Series Editors This series publishes original works dealing with cutting-edge theoretical ideas in the field of religious studies and theology. A focused, interdisciplinary approach to religion is encouraged, an approach that will develop concepts and images in transformative ways, through engagement with disciplines and approaches such as Continental philosophy, semiotics, cultural studies, feminism, anthropology, psychology, sociology, political science, and the media. Manuscript submissions are invited that are distinguished by their originality and creativity, rigorous scholarship, and an ability to communicate complex concepts with clarity and expressiveness. Younger scholars, especially, are encouraged to submit their work to this series. Proposals should be directed to Clayton Crockett, Series Editor, The Davies Group Publishers, PO Box 440140, Aurora, Colorado, 80044-0140. Carl A. Raschke, The End of Theology Theresa Sanders, Body and Belief Gabriel Vahanian, Anonymous God Charles E. Winquist, The Surface of the Deep Jeffrey W. Robbins, In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Tillich and the New Religious Paradigm

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology Jeffrey W. Robbins

A volume in the series Contemporary Religious Thought Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey W. Robbins, Series Editors

The Davies Group, Publishers

Aurora, Colorado

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology ©2003, Jeffrey W. Robbins All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced, stored in an information retrieval system, or transcribed, in any form or by any means — electronic, mechanical, digital, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the express written permission of the publisher, and the holder of copyright. Submit all inquiries and requests to the publisher. Address all requests to: The Davies Group, Publishers PO Box 440140 Aurora CO 80044-0140 USA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Robbins, Jeffrey W., 1972In search of a non-dogmatic theology / Jeffrey W. Robbins.-- 1st ed. p. cm. -- (Contemporary religious thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-888570-59-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophical theology. I. Title. II. Series. BT40.R55 2004 230’.01--dc22 2003015689

Cover by Delynne Lorentzen ([email protected]).

Printed in the United States of America Published 2003. The Davies Group Publishers, Aurora CO 80044-0140 1234567890

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[I]t can be said…that a certain Kant and a certain Hegel, Kierkegaard of course…Heidegger also, belong to this tradition that consists of proposing a nondogmatic doublet of dogma, a philosophical and metaphysical doublet, in any case a thinking that “repeats” the possibility of religion without religion. — Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death Only within this framework [the dissolution of metaphysics] is it possible to realize that there are no strong reasons for atheism and to open thought to the possibility of religious experience. However, what is recovered has nothing to do with the hard discipline and strict antimodernism of dogmatic religion, which is expressed in varied forms of fundamentalism…The recovery of religion is not a return to metaphysics but an outcome of metaphysics’ dissolution. — Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity

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For my parents

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

xiii

Part One: Re-Placing Theology Chapter One: The Return of Religion Chapter Two: Theology in the Ruins Chapter Three: Theology without Religion?

3 21 41

Part Two: The Step Back Chapter Four: Heidegger’s Step Back Chapter Five: Ontotheology: Complications Chapter Six: The Theological Turn

57 71 87

Part Three: Theology at the Margins Chapter Seven: The Enlightenment at the Margins Chapter Eight: The Ethics of Ethics Chapter Nine: The Law of Religion

107 129 147

Conclusion

163

Endnotes

175

Index

203

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Acknowledgments

This book began as a conversation with my mentor and friend, Charles Winquist, who died before seeing its completion. His incessant questions, however, live as the urgent imperative of this text. For me at least, Winquist’s questions essentially boil down to two: What does theological thinking mean for us today? And how might our thinking best ask questions that are real and important? I can only hope that the pages that follow do justice to the integrity of spirit and mind that lives in those questions. Consider this work my thanksgiving for having known such a generous man and thinker. Of course, my debt of gratitude does not end there. I owe much thanks to Clayton Crockett, my partner in this book series on Contemporary Religious Thought. He has been a constant source of encouragement and empowerment since we first met. His vision for what the study of religion might become and his model of intellectual and professional integrity are an inspiration. He was the first and last to do the dirty work of reading drafts of this manuscript. His early support, enthusiasm, and critique proved a great benefit; likewise with his late care as an editor. Other readers of parts or all of this manuscript include Heath Atchley, Gregg Lambert, Andrew Saldino, and Chad Snyder. Undoubtedly, you have each strengthened this work immeasurably, and I thank you all for the honor you have bestowed upon me by the care with which you have attended to my words. Though much of the work on this book was completed before I began my tenure in the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Lebanon Valley College, I cannot help but feel a deep sense of gratitude to my colleagues there all the same. The hospitality with which you have received me has been an unexpected (and certainly unmerited) joy. The value of the search expressed in — ix —

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these pages has been confirmed and reinforced by the spirit of enfranchisement I have witnessed as the direct result of your own teaching and thinking about many of the same subjects treated here. Therefore, to Eric Bain-Selbo, Donald Byrne, John Heffner, and Noel Hubler, thank you for your collegiality toward me and with one another. I consider myself fortunate to be among your ranks and to be engaged in our common purpose and shared vision of education. Both Delynne Lorentzen and Keith Davies deserve special credit for the final design and look of the book itself—Delynne for the cover design and illustration, and Keith for his integrity as a publisher and for his great belief in his authors. To my wife, Noëlle Vahanian, as always, without your love for me and your confidence in me, I would be without a voice to speak. And as I reflect upon the time during which these pages were written, I must remember as well the simultaneous effort with which you too were engaged. The depth of humanity and shocking clarity of your writing set the mark toward which I strive. Finally, to my parents, for whom this work is dedicated, it is thanks to the support and security which you so faithfully provided for me that I ever felt the freedom to search for a more meaningful and relevant theology. This book, therefore, is a tribute to your faith and conviction.

Earlier drafts of many of these chapters have been previously presented in other formats and forums. Parts of the Introduction and Conclusion were first published in Cross Currents (Summer 2003), under the title, “In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology.” It is reprinted here with the permission of the journal. A variation of Chapter Two, “Theology in the Ruins,” was first published in the CSSR Bulletin (Spring 2000), under the title, “Re-Placing Theology: Theologizing the Study of Religion.” That article prompted a critical response by Johannes Wolfart —x—

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that was subsequently published along with my own rejoinder in the April 2000 issue of the Bulletin. Chapter Three, “Theology without Religion?” was first presented as part of a panel at the Eastern International Regional Conference of the American Academy of Religion (AAR), held at Syracuse University in the Spring of 2000. A previous version of Chapter Five, “Ontotheology: Complications,” was published in The Heythrop Journal (April 2002) under the title, “The Problem of Ontotheology: Complicating the Divide between Philosophy and Theology.” It is reprinted here with the permission from the journal. Chapter Six, “The Theological Turn,” is an expansion of a review article written for the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (April 2001). A previous version of Chapter Eight, “The Ethics of Ethics” was first presented in a meeting of the Kierkegaard society at the Annual Meeting of the AAR in Nashville, Tennessee in the Fall of 2000, under the title of “Passion and Responsibility: The Question of Ethics in Kierkegaard and Levinas.” Chapter Nine, “The Law of Religion” was first presented at the International Congress of Hermeneutics, which was held at St. Bonaventure University in May 2002. The proceedings from that conference are published under the title, Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics (The Hermeneutics Press, 2002).

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Introduction

Is theology only possible today as a purely anachronistic enterprise, or only taken seriously by our most reactionary movements, or our most conservative thinkers? — Thomas J. J. Altizer, The New Gospel of Christian Atheism In another respect, it is our epoch which has discovered theology. One no longer needs to believe in God. We seek rather the “structure,” that is, the form which may be filled with beliefs, but the structure has no need to be filled in order to be called “theological.” Theology is now the science of nonexisting entities, the manner in which these entities — divine or anti-divine, Christ or Antichrist — animate language and make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions. — Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

This book is a search, a book in search of a non-dogmatic theology, a search for a way of thinking that is both concrete and critical, that is both historically rooted and responsibly engaged with the contemporary issues and currents in religious and philosophical thought. This book is a search for a more ecumenical theology that speaks from and to the multiple faiths and contesting values that constitute our all-too-human identities as selves-in-community and communities-in-conflict. It is a search for a more pragmatic theology that lives in response to the realities of cultural and religious pluralism. It is a seeking out of horizons, a stammering towards a language, an engendering of a dialogue. Finally, it is an admission that a relevant theology must be one that rethinks itself according to an altered and always altering epochal consciousness in which genuine theological thinking is ever more marginalized, displaced, and faced with the urgency of its own legitimization. — xiii —

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This search takes its lead from two simultaneous sources that together raise serious questions about the viability and value of theology in the contemporary world. These sources are both theoretical and methodological in nature, or more precisely, both transcendental and pragmatic. Concerning the viability of theology, which is the more theoretical/transcendental issue, there are many who have argued for the “end of theology,”1 making the claim that theological thinking belongs to a past age of religious unity and authority, and that the death of God renders theological thinking anachronistic. Whether this perspective has its beginnings in Nietzsche’s actual proclamation of God’s death, in Kant’s identification of the modern mind with the daring to know, or in Luther’s successful stand before the emperor and pope alike, this suspicion of dogma, spirit of critique, and resistance to authority have not only reconfigured the root conditions of theological possibility, but have, even more significantly, raised the issue of whether theological thinking is even possible at all. The question, therefore, is not only whether theological thinking is anachronistic, but also whether it is an oxymoron, as Heidegger seems to suggest when he likens Christian philosophy to a square circle. This is the question that is raised by the problem of ontotheology, and it will figure as one of the two main streams of thought in this present search. The second stream of thought, which is more methodological/pragmatic in nature and that at least partially constitutes the contemporary conditions of theological possibility, concerns the perceived ideological underpinnings that drive and determine the study of the theological tradition. Critics have rightly pointed out that theological thinking is intrinsically value-laden, and thus, that the study of this tradition is unavoidably a political act. Theological study and politics are deeply intertwined and form a complex web that reflects not only back onto the particular religious tradition under scrutiny as intended, but also on its perception of other religious tradi— xiv —

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tions, values, and convictions with which it might have much or little in common. A theology of world religions, for instance, would reflect not so much the actual “theology” of the world’s religious traditions, as much as it would reflect the perceived similarities and differences of a given religion in relation to the given theology of the theologian in question. This is to say nothing of the relative adequacy or inadequacy of a theological lens of inquiry for certain religions that may eschew the kind of rationalization of beliefs and practices that is more characteristic of an orthodoxic religious sensibility than an orthopraxic one. After all, are not questions concerning the “meaning” of the Zen koan already a misguided appropriation, if not an outright betrayal, of the koan itself? This concern with the ideological underpinnings of theology is only compounded when one realizes that the larger field of Religious Studies emerged historically out of a theological origin, and thus, much of the current field is still largely determined by the prototype of Christian theology. Has this “theological residue” to the academic study of religion left its taint on the field such that the supposed dispassionate study of a diversity of religious phenomena and traditions is in fact a cloak for the ideological reentrenchment of a particular theological perspective? 2 Must the field of Religious Studies rid itself altogether of theological study if it is to be granted a legitimate place within the academic community? When the historian of religion, Sam Gill, argues that Religious Studies “requires the profanation of the religious,”3 does this necessarily preclude theological study? Or might theology still have value even in the midst of the current (and perhaps belated) pluralistic milieu? Furthermore, there is the important though often overlooked difference between the study of theology and what might be termed theological study. The former treats the theological tradition as data to be learned, absorbed, and comprehended; the latter actually thinks theologically, which, borrowing the — xv —

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description from Charles Winquist, means to think with the desire for a thinking that does not disappoint, to think in extremis, to ask what is real and important.4 To study theology, one might assume the role of the historian, literary critic, anthropologist, sociologist, etc. To study theologically, on the other hand, the horizon of thought, by definition, is unrestricted and unregulated, and thereby, one discovers in the course of history, in the canons of literature, in the convergences and divergences of cultures both ancient and modern, and in the shifts and trends of this and any given society, data that might be theologically rendered. Thus, by pondering the value of theology to the academic study of religion, it is not only a question of what sort of theology might be enfranchised, but also, and perhaps more importantly, what sort of thinking and whether the study of theology might become theological. It is within the swirl of these questions and concerns that the contemporary study of theology must carve out its own place and defend its value. The driving conviction of this work is that a genuine theology, whether religious or secular, will prove both its viability and value. By genuine, I mean that the theology in question must be genuinely reflective, not only as a (quasi-)transcendental critique in the sense that it reflects back on its own conditions of (im)possibility, but also as a kind of pragmatism in the sense that it bounces back and forth in between thought and the experience of reality, where the one is responsible for the other, and vice versa unto infinity. It is like the mirror in the barber-shop, in which there is a deliberate juxtaposition so that one reflection reflects another until finally the viewer is able to see from all directions simultaneously. Is this not, after all, the original, if not final, allure of theology, that one can somehow attain a God’s eye view; or, if not so ambitious, at least the recognition of where and how one falls short? Somewhere along the line, however, this original theological desire turns to a more critical approach where theology is made into a tool, where it is the interrogative rather — xvi —

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than the descriptive task of theology that is decisive. In Tillichian fashion, theology might be seen as an instrument of cultural analysis in which questions of ultimacy reveal the depth dimensions of a culture.5 In the spirit of Bonhoeffer and the death-of-God theologians who followed in his wake, theology might be considered a spur for moral awakening in which a people are called to action by a theological reading of the signs of the times, in which a people are called to bear the responsibilities of their faith and doubt.6 Or, borrowing the terminology of contemporary religious theorists, theological thinking might be described in terms of the “erring” of Mark C. Taylor,7 the “jouissance” of Julia Kristeva,8 the “pure pleasure” of Jean-Luc Marion,9 and the “love” of John Caputo.10 These are just some of the ways that a theology deconstructed by the death of God puts itself back together again — or better yet, discovers the distinctive promise of a broken-apart theology for an always fragmented world. So, in answer to the questions of whether theology is still viable and valuable — whether it is still fit for living and whether it makes any difference at all — the answer must be that it depends. It depends on whether the theologian understands what s/he is up against. We live in a mixed-up world in which people are still killing and loving one another in the name of God, in which there are believers and unbelievers alike who are still longing for a religion in which they can believe, in which scholars of religion are talking about religion’s end and its return simultaneously. It depends on what one means by theology, on whether theology can be both theological and non-dogmatic. It also depends on a certain level of theological complexity. When the French theorist, Gilles Deleuze, writes that “it is our epoch that has discovered theology,”11 what does he mean, after all? It must mean more than Nietzsche’s reversal of Platonism, for, according to Deleuze, Nietzsche’s own reversal must somehow be overturned or, better yet, dispersed, because in the end — xvii —

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Nietzsche simply replaced heights with depths and thus left the duality still standing. Perhaps, therefore, the newly discovered power of theology lies in its equivocation. What does Deleuze mean when he follows up this assertion with another, saying “One no longer needs to believe in God?”12 A theology with or without God? A God with or without being? A religion with or without the historical faiths? How does one make sense of these seeming absurdities? Following Deleuze even further, one might ask whether there even is a theo-logic of sense. When the absolute claims of God have been rendered relative by the ever-growing awareness of the increasingly variegated worlds of religion, what sense is there to be made of the theological language of heights or depths, when what we are really speaking of, when all we really know, is an apparent infinite array and dispersal along the surface? What does one mean by still speaking of the Word of God in the face of contrasting scriptures? What logic is there to sense after the discovery that sense is only made, not discovered, that our words and concepts are phantasms and simulacra, that “Theology is now the science of non-existing entities?”13 In other words, this book in search of a non-dogmatic theology is a curious one indeed. It is caught in the cross-fire of infinitely reflecting images, and it knows no alternative but to chase them all one at a time. The words live and breathe by their inadequacy, for they only propel the search for a more sufficiently complex language befitting a violently intense world. Theological thinking remains viable and valuable because the world in which we live still makes a claim on us, and demands our best and most thoughtful response. An ecumenical and more pragmatic theology for the world in which we live would be one that thinks non-dogmatically, for dogmatism, whether politically or religiously motivated, has proven time and again unable to deliver on its promises of unification and clarification, and even more, it has often been used as a tool of authoritarianism and totalitarianism.14 Thus, after the ‘end’ of this — xviii —

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certain kind of theology, in the midst of a culture that we now know is both more secular and more religious than we once imagined, there is the possibility for a more relevant and more effective kind of theological thinking, one that affirms the interrogative value of a tradition that thinks in and through formulations of extremity, one that desires and demands meaning in the face of both its absence and excess, and finally, one that enables the reflective and reflexive capabilities of religious discourse to the point that even the language of secularity is exposed to its own theological striving.

It is precisely this theological striving that this search for a non-dogmatic theology hopes and intends to make more explicit in the chapters that follow. Part One, entitled “Re-Placing Theology,” lays out the cultural, theoretical, and methodological considerations that together set the contemporary conditions of theological possibility. Chapter One briefly traces the history of religious fragmentation and renewal that stands on the one hand as the history behind the academic study of religion, and on the other as the backdrop to the contemporary ‘return of the religious’. Chapter Two borrows from Bill Readings’ The University in Ruins in order to analyze the recent developments and trends within the field of Religious Studies, to argue for the importance of theological thinking for the study of religion, and to sketch a program for meaningful and relevant theological study. Chapter Three continues along this stream of thought by its suggestion of the potential autonomy of theological thinking as evidenced by the respective theological critiques of religion from the Protestant theologians, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Using Heidegger’s ‘Step Back’ as a model, Part Two steps back from contemporary theology to ontotheology as its philosophical ground and condition. Heidegger not only provides the model, he is also the central figure in the first two of these — xix —

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three chapters. Chapter Four critically examines the trajectory within the later writings of Heidegger as he successively steps back from thought, to language, and finally to difference, and thereby helps to mark and inaugurate a new paradigm of philosophical thought. Chapter Five steps back into Heidegger’s own critique of ontotheology and then demonstrates how Heidegger’s analysis of the problem of ontotheology has delineated two distinct paths of thought that his successors have unwittingly followed. Chapter Six builds on the analysis of contemporary philosophical and religious thought that was begun in Chapter Five with a specific focus on a discussion that took place between Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion on the nature of apophatic discourse. Derrida and Marion might be seen as representatives of two denominations of postmodern religion as they match wits in practicing the fine art of ‘taking back what is said.’ In the process, they help to shift the terms of our own search for a non-dogmatic theology from the level of predication to that of pragmatics, and thereby prove the possibility that a theology might be both theological and non-dogmatic simultaneously. Part Three, entitled “Theology at the Margins,” is more dialogical in its structure, as it expands its scope from the worlds of philosophy and theology to history, literature, ethics, and psychology. It begins with an examination of what has been termed the counter-Enlightenment, specifically the work of William Blake and Giambattista Vico. Blake and Vico represent the perennial effort to think otherwise, and by their alternative vision of the meaning of modernity, they also offer unchartered paths in our search for a non-dogmatic theology. Chapter Eight reads the nineteenth century religious thinker, Søren Kierkegaard, in light of the postmodern ‘ethical turn’ effected by the thinking of the Jewish philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. By raising the question of the ethics of ethics, both Kierkegaard and Levinas can be seen as the ironic exemplars of what John Caputo has termed an ethics “against ethics.” Chapter Nine — xx —

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provides a psychoanalytic reading of the Law, specifically as it functions in the structure of the world’s great monotheistic faith traditions. This chapter draws primarily on the work of Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek. Both Kristeva and Žižek are working out of a primarily psychoanalytical perspective that has not always looked favorably upon the mandates of the Law. But as their portrait of the function of the Law in many ways parallels Barth and Bonhoeffer’s theological critique of religion, Kierkegaard and Levinas’ ethical critique of ethics, and indeed, Freud’s own critique of civilization,15 it contributes yet another avenue of thought in the search for a non-dogmatic theology.

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Part One Re-Placing Theology

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Chapter One The Return of Religion

The theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. — William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience We are inescapably caught in a world of conflicting visions of historical destiny. This is not the same as saying that we are caught in a world of conflicting religions. But understanding this world means beating the secularist prejudices out of our minds every day. — David Brooks, “Kicking the Secularist Habit”

Once, when speaking of herself as a regional writer, the Southern Catholic novelist and short story writer Flannery O’Connor, admitted that to be a “regional writer,” was “to declare a limitation, but one which, like all limitations, is a gateway to reality.”1 As both a Southerner and a Catholic living in a time of cultural and religious upheaval with the gathering momentum of the civil rights movement together with the internal Church reforms of Vatican II, as a Southern Catholic living in the Protestant American Bible Belt, and as a prolific intellectual woman suffering from the debilitating struggle with lupus that would cause her untimely death in 1964, O’Connor had a special eye for the disjunctive, for the non-coincident, for those moments that disturb and pressure one’s expectations for reality inasmuch as they reveal them. It should be no surprise, therefore, that she was the writer of “grotesque fiction,” which she defines as a search for “one image that will connect or combine or embody two points; one is a point in the concrete, and the other is a point not visible to the naked eye, but believed in by him firmly, just as real — 3 —

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to him, really, as the one that everybody sees.” Hers is a fiction that “is going to be wild,” that “is almost of necessity going to be violent and comic, because of the discrepancies that it seeks to combine.”2 It is stories of freaks and fanatics intended to shock readers into their sensibilities, the horrific through which we might finally see ourselves. As O’Connor writes: Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South, the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.3 Theological, which is not necessarily to say religious, and by which O’Connor means to suggest the difference between the American South being a “Christ-centered” culture (which it is not), and the South being a “Christ-haunted” culture (which she believes that it is). It is precisely this ghost of Christ, which haunts the South, that provides for O’Connor the requisite tool for intervention, a commonly accepted theological vision that, when reflected back onto the actual practices of a people, reveals a vast discrepancy. This is the concrete limitation for O’Connor that becomes the very gateway for reality. In what follows, I would like to suggest that the task of nondogmatic theology is analogous to the sort of regional writing O’Connor describes. This might seem counter-intuitive at first, for one might mistake the search for a non-dogmatic theology with the denial of dogma altogether, or more generally, as an attempt to do away with the differences that exist between one religious orientation and another. Further, given the important constitutive role religious diversity plays in both framing and driving this search for a non-dogmatic theology, one might confuse the non-dogmatic theologian with those champions of religious pluralism who finally proclaim the structural unity and identity of the world’s religions in spite of their superficial (or is — 4 —

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it, concrete?) differences. Let it be clear that this false universality is not what I intend for this search. On the contrary, I begin at a very specific point — namely, the concrete fact of religious differences, and by searching for a more non-dogmatic theology I am seeking out an appropriately complex conceptual language that might do justice to the many differences that pull, draw, and tug us in a multitude of directions simultaneously. So, like the regional writer, the non-dogmatic theologian speaks from a particular perspective, one that owns up to its regional specificity. Part of this process necessarily involves admitting to the patchwork nature of this endeavor, an admission that the problem we are facing is not the lack of religion, but more a case of a religious contest (or as Brooks writes in the second epigraph to this chapter, “We are inescapably caught in a world of conflicting visions of historical destiny” — a religious contest which is not necessarily to say “a world of conflicting religions.”). Or, put otherwise, this is the cultural condition of religious diversity that makes heretics of us all and that makes any religious perspective the work of theological bricolage.4 And what makes it specifically theological, is that it not only describes this condition, but it also attempts to do something with it, to set it in motion, to shock and provoke — non-dogmatic theology as a constructive activity of the mind, an arrangement of thought that helps in the ongoing process of the reconfiguration of ultimate meaning. The search for a non-dogmatic theology is an admission that there has been a profound shift in the current cultural religious sensibility. A cultural crisis, if you will, that necessitates a changed theological structure. As the sociologist of religion, Steve Bruce, argues, the processes and consequences of modernization have made the ‘Church’ form of religion impossible.5 This is not to say that people in the modern world no longer attend church, or that the self-understanding of various religious institutional bodies do not consider themselves in terms of an ecclesiastical authority, but rather that such claims to self-sufficiency and unique legitimization have been relativized by the — 5 —

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cultural condition of religious diversity. The once dominant Church, which simultaneously rested on and reinforced cultural homogeneity, has de facto been transformed into either sect, denomination, or cult, depending on the one hand, its external conception (that is, whether it is seen by outsiders as being “respectable” or “deviant”), and on the other, its internal conception (that is, whether it sees itself as being “uniquely legitimate” or “pluralistic legitimate”). In other words, we no longer can presume religious unity and our theologies must not proceed as though they were simply a straightforward explication of a given and unified faith, a faith issuing from and authorized by a single religious institution. We now stand in need of a different kind of theological reflection that can speak from and to the diverging strands that together constitute and confuse our present state of religiosity. I. Fragmentations The state of religion and religious studies is a circumscribed one. Using O’Connor as a model, we can only hope that this circumscribed condition proves to be a gateway to reality. By saying that the state of religion and religious studies is circumscribed, this does not only mean that one needs to be careful with what one says about religion, but even more careful about what one does or does not presume to know. At least since the onset of modernity, religious commentators have predicted the end of religion. Indeed, perhaps it was this very conviction that was the spark that began what would become known as the Age of Reason, as Descartes sought a new, more trustworthy ground for philosophy in the self-evidence of the thinking self. This paradigmatic shift to a modern philosophy of consciousness is seen by many to be a response to the religious factionalism and theological dogmatism that plagued Western Europe in the wake of the Reformation. Descartes’ search for a universally accessible and indubitable philosophical ground promised a more peaceful — 6 —

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means of conflict resolution than religious violence. By following the path of reason, it sought a way beyond the entrenched truths that divided one people, region, and religion from another. It took hold of the cultural imagination not simply because it adopted the guise of mathematical certainty and dispassionate objectivity, but also because the more traditional sources of authority had failed to resolve the conflict that they themselves had generated. Whether it was the Roman Catholic insistence on tradition mediated by the Church, or the Protestant reliance on ‘scripture alone,’ authority of both sorts had revealed their excesses and their potential for corruption, and thus found themselves in disrepute and in need of an alternative. In his study of the origins of modern thought, the moral philosopher, Jeffrey Stout, calls this the “crisis of authority.”6 It was in this crisis of authority, according to Stout, that modern thought was born and from which it sought an escape. The modern autonomous self, therefore, substituted the place of the ancient role of religion. Each self, as a reasonable and self-aware individual, had the capacity to discern right from wrong, and religious truth from superstition. And though Descartes’ initial metaphysics was sympathetic toward traditional Christian theology, it was not long before his epistemological revolution would turn against the sort of truth and conviction purveyed in and through religious belief, to the point that modernity became simultaneous with the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment thinker — the so-called philosophe — was judged by the degree of independence and autonomy he had achieved from the once standard tutelage of religious authority. Like Stout, Steve Bruce is also concerned with the altered religious sensibility that resulted from the ‘crisis’ of modernity. As Bruce argues, and as was intimated above, “The basic elements of what we conveniently refer to as ‘modernization’ fundamentally altered the place and nature of religious beliefs, practices, and organizations so as to reduce their relevance to the lives of nation-states, social groups, and individuals, in roughly that — 7 —

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order.”7 The Protestant Reformation provides the turning point according to Bruce’s analysis. For instance, the pre-Reformation religiosity of Western Europe was a split, though all-encompassing one. Ordinary people were expected to behave morally, to attend church on the great feast days, and to finance the professionals who did the serious religious work on behalf of the community and the nation. The Christian Church most closely touched lives through its administration of rituals which sanctified such crucial transitions in the lives of the community and its members as birth, marriage, and death; through the social standing of its clergy and their communities; and through the magic which it did not encourage but which it happily condoned. Bruce continues: “It is a simplification, of course, but what one sees in pre-Reformation religious life is a sophisticated complex organization of formal religion laid over a mass of popular superstition, with the two worlds bridged by the complete and uncritical acceptance of a few simple Christian beliefs.”8 After the Reformation, however, not only did the institutional form of religion change, but the very structure of belief was altered as the center of religious authority shifted. The legacy of the religious innovations of Luther, Calvin, and the other reformers strengthened and hastened a variety of social changes which we can understand under the general heading of individualism and which we can see in changes to styles of worship and religious music…. Power shifted from religious professionals to the laity…. Believing the right things came to be more important than making the right ritual actions, and whereas right ritual could be delegated to others, right belief could not.9 But, as suggested before, the fragmentation of religious authority is accompanied by the crisis of modernity, and it is in this — 8 —

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

fragmentation that Bruce sees the key sociological import and religious legacy of the Reformation: For many people in the parts of Europe most affected by the Reformation, a rather shallow and conformist adherence to the single Church and a widespread but diffuse supernaturalism were replaced by enthusiastic commitment to one of a range of competing sects. Yet this flowering spread the seeds of its own decline. The fragmentation of religious culture was, in time, to see the widespread, taken-for-granted, and unexamined Christianity of the pre-Reformation period replaced by an equally widespread, taken-for-granted, and unexamined indifference to religion.10 According to Bruce, therefore, the history of religion in the modern world is a story of transition from cathedrals to cults, from conformity (even if only superficial), to enthusiasm (if not fanaticism), and finally to indifference. Yet, though religion was transformed through the process of modernization, a certain theological legacy survived the indifference, some might even say it thrived as the internal reformation, begun in protest, continued as Western Christian thought adopted a more self-reflexive and responsive theology, a religion internalized and universalized by the piety of Friedrich Schleiermacher, and one radicalized by the existentialism of Søren Kierkegaard. Far from putting an end to theology, the Enlightenment functioned instead more like the wake-up call Immanuel Kant received through his study of David Hume, a self-purging of the dogmatism that had grown over a living tradition of critical and constructive thought. Of course, this was not the only theological legacy of the Enlightenment. While representative figures such as Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard took on the challenge of modernity and defended the value of religion to its ‘cultured despisers,’ there were other offshoots, other post-Enlightenment lines of flight that gave birth to a transformed theological sensibility as reli— 9 —

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gious thinkers not only responded to the internal critiques that historically arose from within a particular family of faith, but now found it necessary to respond also to the external critiques that questioned the very structure of religious truth. Now, it was no longer a particular interpretation of Christianity that was scrutinized, but religion itself as Christianity became relativized by a conflation of historical factors. It was no longer a case of the self-purging or reforming of Christianity, the rationalization of belief as in such movements as Deism, or the defense of the reasonableness of Christianity as were the efforts of the empiricist, John Locke. As the historian Owen Chadwick describes, what was at stake was the more radical and fundamental “secularization of the European mind,” a process of secularization that might be considered as both the popularization and transformation of the Enlightenment. In Chadwick’s words, “the problem of secularization is not the same as the problem of enlightenment. Enlightenment was of the few. Secularization was of the many.”11 By extension, we might add that the Enlightenment was an essentially conservative movement that, while indeed critical of religion, still advanced the cause or spirit of religion as a means of social organization and continuity; while the post-Enlightenment period was more radically secular by questioning whether the very heart of religion was perhaps anti-humanistic. It was during this post-Enlightenment period that the tradition of ‘higher criticism’ was born in biblical scholarship in which historians and literary scholars began treating the Bible as any other literary text, applying the same rigid methodologies, and thereby, perhaps for the first time in Christian history, began taking stock of the inconsistencies and occasional contradictions of the Bible. What has become known as the first search for the historical Jesus was launched, and in the process, even Jesus himself came to be seen as historically and culturally conditioned.12 Cross-cultural anthropology was pursued, in which an increased probing into the foreign, exotic, and alien religious other translated into a reappraisal of the uniqueness of — 10 —

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

the Christian tradition. And finally, there was the hermeneutics of suspicion, through which figures such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud launched a full frontal attack on religion, extending the Enlightenment critique by uprooting the very foundation of religion as a lie and detriment to the full development of society.13 It is this backdrop that, at least partially, sets the historical context for the academic study of religion,14 and, I should add, it is why a non-dogmatic theology is so urgently needed. It is a history that demonstrates a religious sensibility undergoing a series of fundamental transformations, beginning with the fragmentation of religious unity and the consequent dispersal of authority wrought by the Reformation, continuing through the interiorization and objectification of religion during the Enlightenment, the displacement of religion during the post-Enlightenment, and now, extending through the further dispersal and pluralization of religion in today’s complex and increasingly interdependent world. This heightens the urgency for a non-dogmatic theology because it is a non-dogmatic theology that, while still following the basic Anselmian theological formula of ‘faith seeking understanding,’ takes flight from a multiplicity of faiths, and that seeks a more fluid understanding — a faith seeking fluidity in dialogue with other faiths; a fluid, dialogical understanding pressuring the dogmatisms of any single faith. A non-dogmatic theology begins in faith because one has no choice but to begin wherever one happens to stand, and like it or not, in spite of our best Cartesian-like efforts, our very experience rests in a certain faith for its intelligibility; whether it is religious or secular, scientific or superstitious, our various faiths set the matrix in which the disjointed is made meaningful, and the non-coincident a sign of a reality revealed. Put simply, it is through our various faiths that we connect the dots of experience — this, it seems to me, has always been the perennial task of theology, and what makes it non-dogmatic is the realization, indeed, the insistence, that the lines of connection and the picture rendered might al— 11 —

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ways be otherwise, an intrinsic iconoclasm befitting a religiously diverse world. Or, in the words of the British novelist, Russell Hoban, through his character Pilgermann: We assume always too much, we assume what cannot be assumed. We see dots so we connect them with lines and we claim to know what the lines and dots signify. In the case of Hoban’s Pilgermann, the dots include his identity as a medieval Jewish pilgrim who was made a eunuch along his journey to Jerusalem and who now finds himself waiting to die in Antioch by the hands of crusaders as a friend to the Turks. He continues: There is a marching, there is a galloping, there is a hissing of arrows, a clashing of swords; or it may be that there is simply a stretching forth of the neck to the sword, there is a wrapping in the Torah scroll, there is a burning alive and we assume (always the assumptions) that these things are happening to different people. We assume that the Frank is distinct from the Jew who is distinct from the Turk but I cannot now think of it as being like that. It seems to me now that that busy line, that motion in the circuitry, did not leap from one dot to another: from the leap of its original impulse its being continued on its way to flash into Christian, Jew, Muslim, fortresses, rivers, dawns, full moons, battles, crows, the wind in the trees, anything you like. What is it that caused Pilgermann’s change of heart and altered assumptions? Why, once the dots have become a line, even if that line has become a “busy line,” does it fall back into a series of discontinuities, the flash of memories, and the passings of identities one into the other? Pilgermann concludes: Mountains in the dawn; the shock of the Thing-in-Itself, the enormity of Now. So it is that although my being is in one way or another continuous I cannot present to — 12 —

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you Pilgermann as continuous, only flashes here and there.15 And so, a non-dogmatic theology would be but a flash of continuity and coherence, a momentary picture rendered. Fragmentation, dispersal, and pluralization — such is the circumscribed condition of contemporary religious thought. II. The Age of Credulity If this is the historical context for the academic study of religion, there is also another equally important context to consider as we set the stage for our search for a non-dogmatic theology — namely, the contemporary cultural, and the strange paradox one finds there when it comes to religion. On the one hand, European intellectuals such as Gianni Vattimo and Jacques Derrida have spoken of the “return of the religious,” and of the renewed importance of religion for the contemporary philosophical understanding. They admit that this return of religion, which they also refer to as the “religious revival,” is taking place “more in parliaments, terrorism and the media than in the churches, which continue to empty,” yet nevertheless, the increase in religious rhetoric even if not in religious loyalty, is an unexpected outcome to an age and a culture that has boldly proclaimed the death of God.16 In an article for The New York Times Magazine, Pulitzer-prize winning author, Jack Miles, writes of this unexpected, if not contradictory, religious revival with the specifics of the United States cultural scene in mind: Is America in the grip of a religious revival? Hundreds of thousands of Christian Promise Keepers rally in Washington, and hundreds of thousands of black men gather, at a Muslim’s call, to make “atonement.” Religion comes to life on television in series like “Seventh Heaven,” “Touched by an Angel,” and “Nothing Sacred.” — 13 —

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Religious books, once ghettoized by the publishing trade, are promoted by the biggest chains, reviewed in major newspapers and monitored closely by Publishers Weekly. The Pope, of all people, writes a runaway best seller. Time and Newsweek seem virtually obsessed with religion: everything from the Infant Jesus to the Baby Dalai Lama. All the major cultural indexes, it would seem, indicate a widespread religious interest, an interest capitalized on not only by religious organizations like the Promise Keepers and the Nation of Islam in their various marches and stadium-filled gatherings, but also by the mainstream media outlets such as network television, major publishing houses, and the weekly news magazine trade. Yet, for each of these positive signs of religious revival, there seems to be an equal number of contra-indications. As Miles continues: Or is religion continuing the slow fade perennially lamented by religious leaders? Jews worry about the high rate of intermarriage. Catholics worry that too few young people seem willing to serve as nuns or priests. Mainstream Protestants worry that parish roles are shrinking, with national budgets shrinking apace. And then there is unbelief, the ever-popular default option. On a head count of pure honesty, would not these unbelievers constitute the biggest “church” in America?17 Using Miles’ terminology, this “comeback” of religion, is therefore a deeply ambivalent one, indicating not so much a return to a past form of religiosity as much as a skepticism about religious skepticism, a doubt about the doubts about God, a “secular loss of faith” that Miles, citing Mexican poet-philosopher Octavio Paz, identifies as a “loss of faith in the viability of Western society without religion.” Miles continues: If Americans of some indeterminate number are finding themselves where Paz finds himself, we should not — 14 —

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

wonder that a religious revival might be under way. These would be Americans who, like Paz, have looked at what their society has become and recoiled, who are weary of being hermits, who want to place some collective check on their relentless competitiveness. Like Paz, these Americans have not so much recovered their faith in religion as lost their faith in the alternatives.18 Similar to Miles, David Brooks, in a recent editorial for The Atlantic Monthly, writes of himself as a “recovering secularist,” and urges a corrective to the secularistic mindset that has proven to be “yesterday’s incorrect vision of the future.” As Brooks writes: It’s now clear that the secularization theory is untrue. The human race does not necessarily get less religious as it grows richer and better educated. We are living through one of the great periods of scientific progress and the creation of wealth. At the same time, we are in the midst of a religious boom. “Moreover,” Brooks continues, “it is the denominations that refuse to adapt to secularism that are growing the fastest, while those that try to be ‘modern’ and ‘relevant’ are withering.”19 So, somewhere between this apparent religious revival and either, as Vattimo and Derrida put it, the death of God, or as Miles puts it, widespread unbelief, lies the cultural condition for our search. What is plain is that no simple definition of religion will do, for it might be in either case a religion without God or a religion without belief — in other words, a religious revival stripped of what were once the defining features of religion. In each case, what is decisive in this fumbling for a theological language is the grappling with a changed and always changing cultural context, one that seems especially ambivalent toward religion in the present day. Perhaps this apparent ambivalence is because we do not know quite what to do with religion, or what to make of it. Or perhaps it is the reverse, that we are not quite sure what religion has to do with us, or more to the point, what it — 15 —

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makes of us — whether sinners or saints, terrorists or martyrs, the self-deluded or “apostles for the impossible.” And perhaps as well, we do not quite know how to describe this culture, in which on the one hand, religion thrives in its widespread diversification and dispersal, and on the other, is seemingly undone by its simultaneous relativization. Are we truly living in a secular age whereby the primary modes of intelligibility and assessment are more scientific than religious, and wherein our hope lies more in politics than in the belief that God will somehow save us from ourselves? What if this form of secularity is itself the product of a particular religious sensibility?20 This would mean that the United States’ constitutional disestablishment of religion is, in fact, the entrenchment of a specific theological perspective and that globalism is only the most recent attempt at worldwide evangelization. This would mean, as Vattimo writes in After Christianity, that secularization, “as a constitutive aspect of the history of being,” is “our way of living the return of religion,” that it “is not a term in contrast with the essence of the [Christian] message, but rather is constitutive of it. Jesus’ incarnation (the kenosis, the self-lowering of God), as an event both salvific and hermeneutical, is already indeed an archetypical occurrence of secularization.”21 What if the presumed divide between the scientific and the religious was an artificial one? Indeed, what if scientific inquiry itself was fueled and made possible by and within a certain religious orientation to reality, one that speaks of humanity as either steward of, or master over, the environment, one that conveys a divine imperative to populate and take dominion over the world?22 And what if even our most secularized politics is still driven by a certain religious passion — if not a desire for a God that will save us, at least a desire that we might save ourselves and thereby confirm our hope in God? Finally, I have already cited the contemporary cultural fact of religious diversity and have suggested that it is a motivating factor in this search for a non-dogmatic theology. A few points need to be made on this matter before proceeding. First, we — 16 —

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should be clear that when speaking of religious diversity we are clearly not speaking of something that is new. The matter of diverging religions and contesting gods can be traced throughout the history of civilizations.23 What is new, however, is the awareness we have and the attention we bring to this ancient cultural fact. Also what is new is the unknown reliances and dependencies we have as a consequence of an increasingly interdependent world. Like never before, we have been impressed with religious diversity, meaning that it is an unavoidable fact of the contemporary world, that it is ignored at our own peril, and that even the most secluded and relatively self-sufficient religious enclave discovers itself dependent upon the resources and cooperation of others.24 This is the imposition of the “secular and democratic universe” that the French philosopher, Luc Ferry, argues is ultimately “linked to the erosion” of “every form of traditional religiousness.”25 As both a metaphor and a warning, consider the global assembly line, a recent device of the transnational corporation, and the unknown underside to the global market. As Barry Lynn explains in his essay, “Unmade in America:” The global assembly lines that manufacturers such as Dell, Ford, Motorola, and Intel have so expertly engineered these last few years — in which, say, a single semi-conductor might be cut from a wafer in Taiwan, assembled in the Philippines, tested in China, fit into a subcomponent in Malaysia, plugged into a component in Brazil, and loaded with a program designed in India — are just as audaciously complicated as any of Enron’s financial schemes. Yet because manufactured goods are so much less fungible than money, these systems are vastly more vulnerable to the mysterious mutterings of God or the deliberate hand of man and state. We now live in a world where a single earthquake, or terrorist attack, or embargo, could in a moment bring our economy to a halt and, if played right by some smart state, might well threaten the very fundaments of our national wealth and power.26 — 17 —

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Vulnerability, in other words, is the theme of interdependence; thus, it should be no surprise that a theology in response to religious diversity is a changed one, and just as individuals respond differently to vulnerability, so too do theologies. For instance, as Martin Marty and Scott Appleby observe, one of the defining features of religious fundamentalism is the perceived threat fundamentalists see in the secularism, tolerance, and individualism of the modern (Western) world, a threat that inspires their militant religious reaction.23 At the other end of the spectrum, are those such as the Christian theologian John Hick, the Tibetan Buddhist leader Dalai Lama, and the religious scholar James Wiggins, all of whom argue for the positive ramifications of multiculturalism in the realization of what the Dalai Lama terms “spiritual potential.”24 Or there is the sociologist of religion, Peter Berger, who suggests “a middle ground between the ‘progressive’ surrender to the age and the fundamentalist denial of it. The first only ‘reads,’ the latter only ‘writes.’ Or, to change the image, the one listens but has nothing to say, the other speaks without having ever listened.”25 For Berger, the issue that religious diversity presents is not either the lack or relativization of belief, but more directly, its pluralization, and thus, he describes the present age as an “Age of Credulity.” In other words, there are so many of us related in such intimate and complex ways, each with his or her own beliefs, such that the contemporary matter at hand is still, as it has always been, deciding right from wrong, discerning one belief from the other. And thus, a sociology of religious pluralism leads into a theology of desire or again in Berger’s words, “the quest for faith.” So, along with Berger, we might begin this search for a non-dogmatic theology with the following confession, a confession born out of a certain history of religious transformation and a certain culture of religious pluralism: “While I know all too well how difficult it is to make any religious affirmation with a measure of confidence, I’m also not prepared to give up the effort.”26 — 18 —

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

What Berger has articulated is a desire for a theology, for a way of thinking that does justice to an age of credulity — perhaps a paradoxical outgrowth of the modern processes of secularization and religious diversification and fragmentation, perhaps even a reversal of the modern penchant for a more scientifically objective and philosophically agnostic approach to religious studies. If correct, then Berger, as a sociologist of religion, has touched on a process and a state of mind that belongs not only within the sociological field, but a similar trajectory toward the theological can be discerned in the burgeoning field of continental philosophy of religion, in the later works of cultural theorists and historians such as Vattimo, Foucault, Derrida, and others, and in what has been described as the “theological turn” of phenomenology.27 The irony is that this newfound openness to theological thinking is taking place outside the established and authorized theological arenas. It is the philosophers, phenomenologists, cultural theorists, and/or sociologists (and all too often not the theologians) who are asking and addressing the most interesting theological questions; it is they who are pressing up against the very boundaries of their respective discourses, raising questions of adequacy, legitimacy, and ultimacy. In short, theology has been re-placed, but — as long as we live in an age of credulity, and as long as we still have a desire to understand the beliefs that define our age — never undone. This “replaced theology” will be the subject of the following chapter, specifically as it relates to the academic study of religion, which, unfortunately, as a field has been slow to realize the import of this changing cultural tide toward the religious and theological, and perhaps that is because it still does not understand the possibilities for a non-dogmatic theology.

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Chapter Two Theology in the Ruins

Those who have concerned themselves with method all their lives have written a lot of books in the place of the more interesting books which they did not write. — Emmanuel Levinas The question posed to the University is thus not how to turn the institution into a haven for Thought but how to think in an institution whose development tends to make Thought more and more difficult, less and less necessary. — Bill Readings, The University in Ruins … for I despise nothing in religion as much as numbers. — Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion

This chapter begins where the previous chapter leaves off. In Chapter One, the issue of our present culture’s ambivalence toward religion was raised. The comment was made that not only do we not know what to make of religion in the present day, but even more, we are not sure what religion makes of us — whether our will to faith and our desire for theology should or should not be embraced as a positive cultural intervention. This chapter examines a similar ambivalence at the heart of Religious Studies, specifically with regard to the proper role of theology in the academic study of religion. As will be shown, theology has become an increasingly marginalized discourse as the field of Religious Studies has developed according to a more social scientific model of learning and knowledge production. While marginal, I argue that it is no less essential for the responsible treatment of — 21 —

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religion as subject of inquiry, and that by better understanding the implications of theology’s displaced status within the university, theological thinking might better fulfill its historic and distinct promise. I. The Theological Residue That theology and the academic study of religion are divided has been a topic of much attention in recent years.1 As it currently stands theology finds itself under threat by the broader field of Religious Studies. But what threatens theology more than those who openly question its rightful place within the academy is the tendency of religious scholars unknowingly to leave unquestioned the notion of theology itself, at least as it has been historically understood in all its variety of purposes and expressions. The theological tradition can trace its history at least as far back as Aristotle, who, in his Metaphysics, identified theology with the natural human desire to know.2 For over two millennia this desire has been manifested in a number of different ways and aimed toward different ends. It is true that some theologies have been in service of the institution of religion, and that the seminary model of religious education has cast a long and persistent shadow over the developing field of Religious Studies. It is true that supposedly value-neutral studies of the religions of the world have unwittingly adopted a determinatively Christian theological framework, and that too often as a result, differences have been read as either deviances or deficiencies. It is also true, as the historian of religion, Sam Gill, argues, that the academic legitimization of Religious Studies “requires the profanation of the religious,” but (and this is the key that the critics of theology fail to understand) making religion profane is not the same as ridding Religious Studies of theology. In fact, it might be the case that a certain kind of theological thinking — specifically a nondogmatic theology rooted in a religiously diverse, if not secular — 22 —

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world — is best suited for the act of profanation that Religious Studies requires. In addition, the fact that it might accomplish this act while not abandoning the equally important and more fundamental question of value, makes theological thinking not only justified, but absolutely essential for the legitimization of Religious Studies. It is concerns such as these that make up Walter Capps’ book, entitled, Religious Studies: The Making of a Discipline. Capps’ aim in this work is ambitious by its breadth and bold by its own assertion. In the opening sentences to the preface, he writes: This book is guided by an assertion that the academic study of religion has been inspired and shaped by a single argument, the development and articulation of which can be approached and traced as a continuous narrative. This assertion has been influenced by recognition that religion is coterminous with human life, while understanding of religion is of rather recent origin. (p. xi) Religion, for Capps, is a subject inviting study, most appropriately through a variety of perspectives. Accordingly, Religious Studies as a field employs multiple methodologies. What unites what otherwise would be a cacophony of voices into a single field of study are the fundamental questions that orient and give impulse to specific areas of interest and particular modes of inquiry. The questions themselves are derivative, just as are all attempts to define the subject under question. But it is these questions pertaining to this subject that set the field of Religious Studies apart. Religious Studies, therefore, at its most basic, is a history of a specially trained group of scholars’ responses to that which is at the very origins of human life. It is a making intelligible of that which precedes intelligibility. It is the story of the strategies and tactics used to uncover the universal phenomenon of religion, at least as that phenomenon has been approached by those who would seek to understand. — 23 —

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Capps’ questions themselves are basic: (1) What is religion? (2) How did religion come into being? (3) How shall religion be described? and (4) What is the function or purpose of religion (Capps, p. xvii)? Notice here what is left out from the questions that are considered fundamental to the study of religion — namely, the question regarding the reliability, transparency, and usefulness of the concept of religion. In other words, the possibility of the intelligibility of religion is presupposed. Religious Studies speaks of ‘religion’ as if it knows what ‘religion’ means, or it least as if it would recognize ‘religion’ if it saw it.3 For all its analytical rigor, what remains unquestioned in Capps’ description of the study of religion is that there is something unquestionably religious to study, that there is religion apart from religions,4 and religions apart from Religious Studies.5 It is no surprise, then, that when Capps comes to the end of his first chapter on “The Essence of Religion,” and finds that those who seek to define religion by identifying its nature and substance are prevented by the elusiveness of the subject, he places the blame on the theological underpinnings that shaped the field of Religious Studies in its beginnings. According to Capps, because theology is linked with the desire to know, the quest to know the essence of religion is theological by nature, and thus, mirrors the theological desire to know God. He summarizes his position as follows: It is virtually impossible to distinguish the two endeavors; that is, religious studies, as a distinguishable subject-field, has not yet emerged or broken free. Although the writers we have surveyed claim that their essays consist of analyses of the nature of religion, the products of their inquiries belong first to the history of theological reflection in the Western world and, to lesser extents, to philosophy of religion. (pp. 50-51) And later, he continues:

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In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

The sine qua non approach is not activated from an objective, neutral, or unprivileged vantage point in spite of all of the claims made that the evaluative criteria employed are reflective or critical judgment itself. When sine qua non is the driving intellectual force, the findings belong as much to theology as they do to embryonic or prolegomena religious studies. (p. 51) What remains undone, therefore, in the making of Religious Studies as a discipline of its own, is for it to rid itself of its theological origins. The “theological residue” is that which insists on the fundamental inaccessibility of the subject of religion. Religion belongs to the beyond that positively overflows into our most immediate mediations, at least that is what the theologians would have us think. Therefore, for Religious Studies to emancipate itself from this theological impasse, it must first move beyond this insistence on the beyond of religion. In other words, for Religious Studies to have a subject of study, the subject must be made accessible and intelligible. And to the extent that Religious Studies accomplishes this task, theology finds itself cut off, calling for a return to an origin too ancient for remembering and too early for accounting. The remainder of Capps’ book tells the story of the success of Religious Studies’ emancipation from theology.6 It is a story that proceeds from the unity that theology seeks in essences to the plurality of the more descriptive phenomenological and quantitative approaches to the study or religion. It is a gradual turning away from the speculative excesses of philosophy to the more grounded and careful analyses of the function religion plays within society and culture, from religion as normative to religion as descriptive. This shift towards a more empirically based orientation in the field reaches its heights, according to Capps, in Gerhard Lenski and his most widely recognized work, The Religious Factor (1961). This work chronicles Lenski’s sociological study on religious identity and social organization, from which, “he was able to document that — 25 —

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religion was indeed ‘constantly influencing the daily lives of the masses of men and women in the modern American metropolis’” (Capps, p. 199). What makes this work stand out in spite of its rather matter of fact conclusion is that it gave the religious scholars the tools necessary to predict human behavior according to religious orientation. Lenski had been successful in employing the “empirical methods of quantitative research” (p. 200). And while the conclusion is subject to revision depending on various sociological factors, the method had a lasting value for “gathering arresting information” that was “transferable to other research projects” (p. 200). In other words, it was not the conclusions of Lenski that mattered, but the usefulness of his method. Capps summarizes the importance of this as follows: “The implications are twofold: First, all such changes [ideological] have now become measurable analytically, by quantitative research methods. Second, quantitative research has become an instrument by means of which both to critique and to confirm prevailing theories of large generalizations” (pp. 200-201). The emancipation of Religious Studies from theology had been made complete. Now, religion as a subject had been made not only intelligible, but predictable, transferable, and measurable. The study of the subject of religion could now be successfully wielded as a tool holding others to account. Capps’ chronicling of the history of Religious Studies and the disregard he shows towards theology are merely symptomatic of a larger problem within the field. His description of the making of Religious Studies as a discipline through its emancipation from theology betrays the bias against the academic legitimacy and value of theological thinking, not to mention the misperception of theology as a unilateral tradition. As such, the accuracy of his survey of the academic study of religion is neither of primary concern nor is it in question.7 The question this chapter asks, instead, is the question of the place of theology, and through Capps, we see that its place within the field is at least in question if not under threat. The problem is clearly not — 26 —

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that different disciplines engage in different pursuits. In fact, this is a hallmark of Religious Studies, and one in which Capps himself is pleased to be a part.8 With this in mind it is strange that theology is perceived as such a threat, that is, until we remember that the nature of theology is the recognition of lack together with the persistence of desire. And it is this lacking and desiring nature of theology that points to the actual disharmony within the field. More succinctly, Capps and others have simply misplaced the problem. It is not as they would have us believe — namely, that the difference between theology and Religious Studies is that the former is marred by its biases and institutional affiliations while the latter is legitimated by its objectivity and intellectual freedom.9 Instead, the problem is theology’s insistence that knowledge is fundamentally limited by the gap between the known and the real, while at the same time driven by the desire to think the unthinkable and speak the unspeakable. Or, in language more conversant with Capps, theology calls into question, even while demanding, the possibility of intelligibility. And to compound the problem, the presupposition of the intelligibility of religion lies at the heart of Religious Studies’ demand for accountability. Therefore, when theology speaks of the infinite overflow that makes any measure incomplete, this is perceived within the field as the height of arrogance and as a complete disavowal of responsibility. What is incumbent for theology, therefore, as it rearticulates itself in accordance to its replaced locale, is for it to make plain how its task is central to the common quest for truth in justice, and for it to give account of how its seeming irresponsibility is in fact the taking on of a responsibility that is beyond measure. This element of beyond does not mean here that it issues from elsewhere, from a transcendent that guarantees apodictic certainty, but rather that the call of the Other issues forth here and now in such an absolute singularity that no measure does justice that accounts for itself otherwise than by the particularity — 27 —

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of the Other. The Other cannot be reduced to the same without discounting the immeasurable value that remains by the absolute distance that distinguishes the inseparable domains of thought and action. II. The University in Ruins This brings us from theology and Religious Studies to Religious Studies and its place in the University. As theology does not stand alone in the solitude of a private discourse, neither does the field of Religious Studies make sense apart from its setting within the University. More specifically, the demand that a subject be made intelligible and held accountable is not confined to Religious Studies alone. This characteristic of the University at large is the subject of the late Bill Readings’ study, The University in Ruins.10 For Readings, the changing paradigm of the University, which has led to the demand that schools and disciplines give full account for themselves, is given sense by understanding the changing nature of accountability itself. No longer in service to the nation-state and its analog in the ideology of culture, the University has given way to the bureaucratization of transnational corporations. Culture has given way to productivity and the ideology of excellence. In short, the University is becoming a different kind of institution, one that is no longer linked to the destiny of the nation-state by virtue of its role as producer, protector, and inculcator of an idea of national culture. The process of economic globalization brings with it the relative decline of the nation-state as the prime instance of the reproduction of capital around the world. For its part, the University is becoming a transnational bureaucratic corporation, either tied to transnational instances of government such as the European Union or functioning independently, by analogy with a transnational corporation. (p. 3)

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This shift in the function and self-understanding of the University can be told from another vantage point historically as the demise of the modern University, itself a product of Enlightenment sensibilities, and the dawning of a post-Enlightenment institution.11 “The historical project of culture” that was the legacy of modernity, and “the historical project for humanity” (p. 5) that belonged to the modern University, have given way to questions that demand the perpetual legitimization of knowledge and justification of ends by means other than the self-authenticating appeals to the inherent good of education in and of itself. What has come to an end at the close of modernity, according to Readings, is “that the autonomy of knowledge as an end in itself is threatened, because there is no longer a subject that might incarnate this principle” (p. 7). Culture no longer functions as an organizing center, and in its place is the “reconception of the University as a corporation” (pp. 10-11). In the process, the content of knowledge matters less and less in comparison to the manner in which it is taught or researched. Readings calls this the “ideology of excellence” in which “Excellence is like the cashnexus in that it has no content; it is hence neither true nor false, neither ignorant nor self-conscious” (p. 13). By now, the parallels between the transformation of the University and the developing field of Religious Studies should be apparent. We have said that theology finds itself pulled in two directions at once: on the one hand, the obligation to think to the Other which is a task that is never completed; on the other, the necessity to give voice to what is by nature always tentative though no less urgent. Theology insists on the inexhaustibility of the understanding, especially when it pertains to the religious. That is to say, religion is a subject that can never be made fully intelligible because its intelligibility hides its inexhaustibility. Religion, at least according to theology, is a subject always lacking a nature independent of whatever thoughts are given to it. Religion, therefore, is a subject of study that by nature lacks objectivity, because as a subject it — 29 —

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is an empty formulation independent of being subjected by a semiotic network of signs. This stands in marked contrast to the ideal of Religious Studies as held out by Capps. For Capps, Religious Studies is the discipline of making the subject of religion intelligible and accessible. At its best, it adheres to a methodology that ensures the predictability of human behavior, the measurability of religious ideology, and the transferability of the method itself across disciplines and subjects. The University as corporation, as Readings describes, smiles on these developments within the field of Religious Studies. The University is about the business of legitimizing knowledge. Its production is research where content is immaterial and method is all that matters. What is troubling for the replaced theologian in this model is that there is little place for theology’s stubborn insistence on the questions that have always eluded even the most persistent and insightful thinkers. When theology must give full account of itself as though its output belonged on a production line, as though the exchange of its goods were simply translatable, then Religious Studies would indeed be emancipated by the emaciation of theology. This problem is put in even greater focus by Readings’ insightful analysis of the role of the concept of culture in the history of the University. According to Readings, Cultural Studies, similar to theology’s insistence in regard to religion, arises from a lack. He writes, “Once the notion of national identity loses its political relevance, the notion of culture becomes effectively unthinkable. The admission that there is nothing to be said about culture as such is evident in the institutional rise of Cultural Studies in the 1990s” (pp. 89-90). Readings continues, “It seems to me that the idea of Cultural Studies arises at the point when the notion of culture ceases to mean anything vital for the University as a whole. The human sciences can do what they like with culture, can do Cultural Studies, because culture no longer matters as an idea for the institution” (p. 91). The significance of this is that culture, which was once the justification of the uni— 30 —

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versity, has become simply another object of study, “a discipline rather than a metadisciplinary idea” (p. 92). Cultural Studies, as Readings puts it, is the “refusal of all disciplinary specificity,” where the subject is merely assumed rather than defined (pp. 98-99). Everything falls under the gaze of Cultural Studies because there can be no agreement on any essential definition of what culture is. Without a content of its own, culture, like a tool, becomes what one makes of it, and Cultural Studies becomes a method of analysis in service to the University of excellence. As Readings is quick to point out, this method is not without its place and value.12 The point is not nostalgia — that is, the wish to return to a more pure past when culture was the regulative ideal upon which all could agree. For as history has shown, this agreement is not without its price. Instead, the point is to become more self-conscious of the changing nature of thinking according to the shifting confines and possibilities of the University. When the center has lost its hold, the question is not one of return, but of value and the ongoing obligation to thought even when it seems thought has become nothing but method, and value only that which can be measured. Theology’s place in relation to Religious Studies can be seen as the preservation of this question of value beyond measure. Again, to restate the difference between the two, theology insists on an immeasurable value, while Religious Studies legitimates itself on its success in measuring the religious effect in society and culture. While neither privileges some a priori notion of the religious, theology still allows itself to be determined by the indeterminate, while Religious Studies is determined to determine religion by its allegiance to a method that forces religion to give account. Theology belongs within the field of Religious Studies precisely because of this contrary nature which exposes the field to its forgotten beginnings in the factually unknown and structurally unknowable. Religious Studies can no more rid itself of its theological residue than Cultural Studies can separate itself from its history in a University in service of culture, — 31 —

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though neither religion nor culture are native terms with any essential meaning per se. Both, in the language of J. Z. Smith, are “solely the creation of the scholar’s study.”13 What remains, therefore, is for theology to give a theological account of itself, an accounting that from the start admits the limits of accounting and the measureless expanse of the theological measure. III. The Re-Placed Theology How is theology theological without betraying its lacking nature? How does theology think to the Other without eclipsing the otherness at its own root? How does theology think differently of and in a tradition that constitutes the nature of its discourse? And finally, how does the theological rendering of method escape the reductive tendencies of Religious Studies’ preoccupation with methodology? Beginning with the final question of methodology, this is where twentieth century theological thought began in the work of the Swiss Protestant theologian, Karl Barth. With the publication of his revised commentary on The Epistle to the Romans (1922) modern theology had come to a great divide. The previous path set out by Friedrich Schleiermacher and liberal Protestant thought had, at least in Barth’s mind, failed the challenge of modernity and had proved itself inadequate to the crisis of theology. At the outbreak of World War I, Barth watched in horror as his teachers and the leaders within the German theological establishment aligned themselves with the war policies of Germany. In a personal correspondence, he wrote that “it was like the twilight of the gods”14 when he saw the response of the once revered figures to the crisis of the times. And later, he would write, “To me they seemed to have been hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war,” and that their “ethical failure” demonstrated that “their exegetical and dogmatic presuppositions could not be in order.”15 What was needed was a “wholly other theological foundation,”16 a radi— 32 —

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cally different method for theology that would begin not from the standpoint of human experience but rather from divine revelation. Therefore, it should be no surprise that when theology began anew by “the strange new world within the Bible”17 it was said to be “like a bomb on the playground of the theologians.”18 But beyond even the event of his landmark publication, what Barth helped reinvigorate was a sustained discussion on theological method. His dialectical theology was soon the organizing center of a new crop of young theologians, who engaged in what they called a “theology of crisis.” Among them were such figureheads as Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Rudolf Bultmann. And while each of them would eventually formulate their own distinctive methodologies, what remained formative was the question of method. For Barth, it was first the dialectical method, but after the outbreak of the Nazi threat and through his study of Anselm, he determined the need for a more definitive word in defiance of Hitler and those who would identify National Socialism with the Church. Thus, he came to the method of analogy giving primacy to the revealed word of God in scripture, which eventuated in his Church Dogmatics. Emil Brunner would revive a Thomistic notion of natural theology infused with the personalist philosophy of Martin Buber. Paul Tillich was made famous by his method of correlation, which allowed the diverse strands of his thinking to come together as an apologetic theology deeply informed by both culture and existentialist philosophy simultaneously. And lastly, Rudolf Bultmann, greatly influenced by the work of Martin Heidegger, would transform Biblical scholarship through his form criticism and method of demythologizing. While questions of method were formative, they were never intended as the final word. What mattered ultimately for these thinkers was not that the method be transferable and predictable in its application, but the contrary, that it served the end of theology’s task of thinking to the Other, a task always in process and ever tentative, a task before beginning and without end. Whether it be the ‘wholly other’, the ‘eternal Thou’, the ‘ground — 33 —

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of being’ or simply the ‘kerygma’, what mattered was that which was beyond measure and other than methodology. That is to say, theology’s interest in method, at its best, is as a radical selfquestioning that opens itself up to an unexpected strangeness. Or in the language of the contemporary British theologian, John Milbank, theology is a “redeeming estrangement,” a recognition that it is a study that “has no object of study.”19 Thus to return to the original question, what is the how of theology that makes theology theological? First and foremost, it is a question of method that questions the legitimacy of any and all methodologies, necessarily including its own. It is a discourse of discomfort by its making strange the tradition of its discourse. It is a thinking that thinks to the Other and that knows its obligation to speak and its desire to know, even with the knowledge that speech subsumes and treats estrangements as though they are the same. Theology is an overcoming, but an overcoming that never finally overcomes the tradition of itself. It is the other purpose of Religious Studies because it resists the definitive answer as to how the subject should be studied, even as it knows itself overwhelmed by the success of the field. Theology risks silence when it waits for assurances. Thus it speaks from and in the midst of its uncertainty. The question of the proper theological method, therefore, remains decidedly undecided. The question arises: Is a study with no proper object and a questioning methodology confined to merely a formal discipline? More succinctly, is theology a thinking that matters? If so, what is the substance of its matter? What is the content of theology? This is the difficult terrain that locates transcendence, that gives names to the Other, and that identifies with a specific tradition. Thus, it is here that the threat of dogmatism becomes especially problematic, for by defining what makes theological thinking specifically theological, there is the risk that the theologian might overstate the case. The theologian must remember, therefore, that theology might go by other names. This is not — 34 —

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to propose a type of “anonymous theology” analogous to Karl Rahner’s “anonymous Christianity.” Rather, it is the recognition that theology has no proper domain, no stable place, and no determinative object, except the Other which remains otherwise. It lives as a parasite on others. But such is the fate of a discourse called into thought by the call of the Other. Here thinkers as varied as Plato and Aristotle, Anselm and Levinas, Schleiermacher and Barth, Kristeva, Heidegger, and Whitehead form a single tradition that tells the legacy of transcendence. As Derrida writes in The Gift of Death, it is a discourse “without reference to religion as institutional dogma,” a thinking “of the essence of the religions that doesn’t amount to an article of faith,” or “a thinking that ‘repeats’ the possibility of religion without religion.”20 But while the tradition might be united, there can be no uniformity by virtue of the nature of transcendence, always deferred, always different. The theological insistence on transcendence, in other words, neither necessitates nor implies a transcendent that would fix meaning, assure certainty, or end interpretation. Transcendence has nothing necessarily to do with a transcendental signified. In other words, transcendence spells transcendence, a trace of a nonoriginary origin, an otherness that is even otherwise than the God who is wholly other, a wholly other who is every other into infinity. Here transcendence is transgressive. Put in ethical terms, it figures as an ethics as first philosophy, one that founds the very freedom philosophy enjoys, a calling that is before thought and action as a relation that elicits its very own responsibility. Philosophically, it is like the question of being that knows the absolute singularity of the being in question. It concerns the being that gives itself to be thought, but as the sheer indeterminate and irreducible givenness of being otherwise, or of identity and difference. Aesthetically, it is like the encounter with the sublime, which transcends reason by the imagination. The sublime is imagined as the experience of infinity, which brings about a radical discontinuity between the subject and object, — 35 —

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the real and reason. Psychologically, it is like the positing of the dynamic unconscious, which is known only as an effect on the surface of consciousness. It is the hypothesis that behavior is meaningful though never fully, and that causation is universal but not uniform. And finally, for theology proper, it is the language for God, the difference between iconoclasm and idolatry, the infinity of thought that traces itself in and through the complexities of the mundane. These are each theological moments that, regardless of their disciplinary identity, ensure the content of theology as long as the trace of transcendence remains, which need not mean a realm above, below, before, or after, but rather the inexplicable excess of thought and its remainder. ‘That than which nothing greater can be conceived’ is the challenge posed by theology. The what of its content is left open by the tradition that knows thought to be the never-ending task of thinking otherwise. If the what of theology is transcendence and the how is undecided, then it should be no surprise that the where of theology finds theology already replaced and threatened by displacement. Fully belonging neither to institutional religion nor the Academy, neither the voice of popular piety and spirituality nor of fundamentalisms, neither philosophy, ethics, nor even religion — the replaced theology stands alone in a field proud of its difference, yet too different to find a place that is secure. And to compound the problem, what stands for theology in many university settings is an outdated thinking that thinks it belongs to an age that is past, a lesson in history, or a Church dogmatics. A theology replaced, however, as I have suggested from the beginning, is a thinking that takes responsibility for knowing its place, even better than those who set its boundaries, even when the place is not its own, even when its place is no place at all except like that of the outsider who lives in the remains or the excess, the forgotten traces of an otherness that persists. Thus the replaced theology studies the field it inhabits. It watches as that field develops and molds itself in a pattern established by — 36 —

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forces more intricate and complex than a single discipline could imagine. The replaced theology stands back as Religious Studies comes to its method, which then ensures the accessibility and intelligibility of what stands for religion, and which also guarantees the productivity of the field. All the while, theology remains, if not in departments of Religion, then wherever the call of the Other is heard. It is found in developing philosophies that know that “the world is all that is the case”21 but that are not so naive to presume that the case is any closer to being cracked. It is in the thinking that announces that “nothing is outside the text” yet still thinks for the purpose of opening a discourse to an otherness that hides within. It is in the poetry that creates unsafe places of images and wordplays that haunt the reader with a reality that betrays the very freedom of poetic creation. It is in the Sunday morning liturgy that proclaims Christ’s presence when everyone present sees only one another. It is in the sitting meditation of the Buddhist monk, the exegesis of the Muslim scholar, the aimless wanderings of the restless soul, and even in the scandalous confessions of daytime talk television. In other words, theology belongs to humanity. Its place is the no-place of utopia; its home is always already replaced and forever under threat of displacement. Finally, we come to the why of theology’s purpose. Should the theologian be a scholar of religion? a public intellectual? a preacher? a critic? Should the production of knowledge be his or her aim? Should theology be accessible? accountable? predictable? Or should it even ask such normative questions? Is theology confined to description? Should it be? We come to theology’s why and the question of should persists, even insists on itself. In contrast to the self-portrait of the field of Religious Studies, theology is not satisfied with mere description. Theology unabashedly cares about value. Better yet, theology is invested in the value of the Other, from the start (as the call that gives voice to the responsive and responsible think— 37 —

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ing to the other), and to the end (as the trace of difference, the legacy of transcendence, the infinite hunger that feeds on its own nourishment as the opening to Desire). If theology holds out a promise, it is not redemption, but its possibility forever deferred, it is not the apocalypse, but the end forestalled, it is not enlightenment, but knowledge dethroned, and it is not union, but alterity exposed. Theology remains a promise, however, a promise already but not yet fulfilled. Already by its expression of Desire, its realization of an infinite longing, and the re-valuation of the cry of the Other. The already of theology is the historic expression of a coming community. But what speaks from the past as a transcendent future are those voices in the present who are never fully present, whose words mark an absence, a lack, a legacy of transcendence, evoking a responsibility that is beyond measure, that is unaccountable and unpredictable. The value of theology that answers its why is already in the theological address that speaks to, in the direction of, and as a solicitation for the silent and invisible Other. But such a value remains outstanding, never yet realized except as longing. Theology’s promise is unfulfilled; it is a perpetual game of hide-and-seek as it simultaneously raises its hopes and exposes its lack. It is a self-consciousness that refuses itself because it knows the games the unconscious can play. It is a discourse that deconstructs itself because no language speaks the language of God. It is an invocation that rests on the measureless distance between the other and itself, a calling that is a confession, a confession that is a betrayal, a responsibility that only deepens one’s guilt.22 Religious Studies has little room for such a counter-productive promise, such an ambiguous value. But theology is not to blame for the nature of religion, a nature that, as we have seen, has no nature that is uncontested, no essence that has not been imagined, no religion not manufactured. Religion is lacking. Thus, when theology speaks of religion, the field of Religious Studies is probably right to alert its critical ear, for — 38 —

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theology knows not of what it speaks. Yet, what also must be known is that this knowledge of lack, this lacking knowledge, is in fact a responsibility, a responsibility theology takes on as its own. Theology, in and through language, is the taking on of the infinite responsibility of that which is beyond measure. Even more, it is being held responsible by the Other. Its value lies in its transvaluation of the study of religion. In the replaced theology, therefore, the Other reverses the order of accountability and thus holds Religious Studies to account. A theological account of accountability is according to the measure of the Other. In other words, when the value is the Other, the measure is immeasurable and theology remains otherwise than Religious Studies. Such is the hope, anyway, of the replaced theology. A hope that hopes to find a place without losing its value in the field of Religious Studies.

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Chapter Three Theology Without Religion

The inability of contemporary theology to talk meaningfully of God in the language of secularity suggests that we cannot dispense with religious language without a loss of vitality. — Charles E. Winquist, The Communion of Possibility I have never read any theologian who claims that God is particularly interested in religion, anyway. — Annie Dillard, For the Time Being Suddenly there comes a point where religion is laughable. Then you decide that you are nevertheless religious. — Thomas Merton

In the previous chapter, the relationship between theology and Religious Studies was evaluated. The replaced theology was defined as the Other purpose of Religious Studies, meaning that while the academic study of religion burrows into a predictable and transferable methodology of dispassionate measure and quantitative analysis, theological thinking is determined by the immeasurable and the incalculable. So long as theology strives to speak the voice of the other, it is destined to fail, but it is precisely in that failure that theology finds its urgency. The question of theology’s relationship to religion is another matter. For instance, it is generally assumed that there might be such a thing as a religion without theology. Here, the experience of religion is given priority, and stands in contrast to the abstraction and speculation of theology. Religion is thought of as a par-

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ticipatory, ritualized activity that stands in marked contrast to the theological insistence on making mystery meaningful. Even within the Christian tradition, there is a healthy dose of skepticism regarding the usefulness of theological thinking. Theology is thought to be reserved for the select few, the experts standing apart from a community as witnesses to a quality of reflection, those who are called to reflect on the Church’s language for God so that others might have a meaningful and authentic experience of worship. What this chapter has in mind, however, is something else, something less naïve with regard to the category of religion.1 Something like Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology, where the suggestion is made that there is a different kind of thinking at stake between what can be termed religious and what can be termed theological (see Chapter Five). According to Heidegger, “We understand one another better when each speaks in his own language.”2 To religion belongs the language that is philosophical, poetic, and meditative. To theology belongs the language of dogma, science, and calculation. For religion there is the courage to face the indeterminate; for theology there is the comfort of the assured. Robert Gall, author of Beyond Theism and Atheism: Heidegger’s Significance for Religious Thinking, extends this argument even further. According to Gall, Heidegger’s philosophical and religious thought is not only distinguishable from theology, but in fact, raises serious questions concerning the possibility of theological thinking at all. He writes, “Heidegger, when ‘properly’ understood on such matters as truth, God (and gods), and ‘faith’, presents us with a unique voice and vision that cannot be co-opted into any sort of theology — be it negative, existential, dialectical or Thomistic — and indeed seriously challenges the viability of any ‘theology.’”3 Later in the work, Gall clarifies his argument: We now have to ask whether theologians have attended to, or even can attend to, the matter at stake in Hei-

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degger’s thinking and remain theologians. For first and foremost, the matter of concern for theology would seem to be faith…. Theology is the ‘science’ of faith, i.e., it gives systematic coherence and conceptual clarity to what is disclosed through faith.4 And later, he continues: “What this means is that theology, Christian theology, embodies the very thinking that Heidegger, following Nietzsche, finds questionable and is attempting to overcome.”5 According to Gall’s interpretation, it is precisely the turning away from theology that gives Heidegger’s thinking its religious quality. In other words, thinking religiously renders theological thinking an impossibility. At present, my concern is not with the accuracy or inaccuracy of Gall’s interpretation of the theological significance of Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology and the legacy it has wrought will be dealt with more fully in Part Two of this book. For now, it is enough to read Gall as evidence of a broader trend within the field of Religious Studies — namely, the notion that religion might be understood independently from theology, or stronger still, what makes thinking distinctively religious is its resistance of the theological impulse. Other examples of this trend include Caputo’s reading of Derrida, in which Caputo suggests a private religious passion as the driving force of Derrida’s work, while the theological appellation is consistently denied. As Caputo writes: While Derrida is willing to associate himself with “religion” and “prayer” and “passion,” the word “theology” tends to have a strictly onto-theological sense for him, signifying something objectifying, totalizing, dogmatic, and awash in ominous institutional power so that his is a religion without theology, a life of prayer and passion without theology’s God.6 Likewise, there are the repeated denials from the Jewish philosopher and ethicist, Emmanuel Levinas, when asked whether — 43 —

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he was a theologian. “My point of departure is absolutely nontheological,” Levinas writes. “This is very important to me; it is not theology which I do, but philosophy.”7 The reason Levinas gives is that “theology impedes transcendence,” that it makes God the absolute referent of an infinite desire; whereas Levinas’ chief concern is “to perceive God who has not become spoiled by Being.”8 Theology, according to Levinas, is the bankruptcy of transcendence: “a theology that thematizes the transcending in the logos, assigns a term to the passing of transcendence, congeals it into a ‘world behind the scenes.’”9 Meanwhile, religion transcends: I do not wish to talk in terms of belief or nonbelief. Believe is not a verb to be employed in the first person singular. Nobody can really say I believe — or I do not believe for that matter — that God exists. The existence of God is not a question of an individual soul’s uttering logical syllogisms. It cannot be proved. The existence of God, the Sein Gottes, is sacred history itself, the sacredness of man’s relation to man through which God may pass.10 “The realm of religion, then,” Levinas continues, “is neither belief, nor dogmatics, but event, passion, and intense activity.”11 And finally there are those who depict the academic study of religion as a self-distancing from theology. Here, figures as different as Walter Capps12 and Donald Wiebe13 anticipate for the field of Religious Studies the eventual triumph of the objective social sciences over the overtly subjective and value-laden theological tradition. I. The Theological Critique of Religion Of course, if religion can be dissociated from theology, this leaves theology free from the need of answering to, or for, religion. This suggests the possibility of a secular theology, or

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at least a theological reevaluation of the meaning of religion. This latter possibility — that is, the theological interrogation of religion — in turn, clarifies the task of theology in a postmodern age. Take for instance Derrida’s article on religion entitled, “Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” which opens with the question “How ‘to talk religion’?”14 The term religion, both in the title and throughout the text, is marked off with quotation marks, reminding the reader that the word stands as reference. As Derrida writes: We act as though we had some common sense of what ‘religion’ means through the languages that we believe…we know how to speak. We believe in the minimal trustworthiness of this word. Like Heidegger, concerning what he calls the Faktum of the vocabulary of being (at the beginning of Sein und Zeit), we believe…we pre-understand the meaning of this word, if only able to question and in order to interrogate ourselves on this subject. Well…nothing is less pre-assured than such a Faktum (in both cases, precisely) and the entire question of religion comes down, perhaps, to this lack of assurance.15 This reminder from Derrida recalls other texts from recent works in Religious Studies which also question the utility, reliability, and meaningfulness of the term religion — e.g., the article by the historian of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith, “‘Religion’ and ‘Religious Studies’: No Difference at All,”16 the book by the theorist of religion, Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion,17 or finally, the collection of essays by one of the originators of postmodern theology, Mark C. Taylor, About Religion.18 All agree that the term ‘religion’ is not self-evident, and that both the experience and thinking we call ‘religious’ can be distinguished but never completely isolated from the more ordinary, mundane ways of being and knowing in the world. Thinking matters, and it matters that theological thinking continues even after the death of God, even after theology is no longer beholden to the institutions or ‘experience’ of religion. Thus the possibility — 45 —

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exists of a theological thinking with or without religion, of a theology beyond religion, or a theology in spite of religion’s absence or return. The awareness of theological possibility without religion was the legacy of the radical theologies of the 1960s in such works as John Robinson’s, Honest to God,19 Richard Rubenstein’s After Auschwitz,20 and the whole corpus of the death of God theologies.21 With or without God and the false trappings of religion, these collections of works seek out meaning in a time desperately aware of its loss and its horror. History pointed to the failure of a certain kind of religion and the isolation of humanity from its God. Nevertheless, there remained the desire for an intensity, complexity, and extremity of thought that was identified as theological, a beckoning to a tradition with resources for reflexivity and renewal. This is the “desiring theology” that Charles Winquist describes as the “desire for a thinking which does not disappoint,” a theology “without absolutes,” and a desire for “a complex association of meanings that are weighted with a sense of being real and important.”22 In a similar observation from Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva remarks that there are moments within thought that gesture beyond religion.23 These moments rest on the profound realization of the abject within history; they are symbolic configurations that admit the futility of self-preservation. That is to say, they allow an expressivity to the abject which can be described as a kind of “sublimation without consecration.”24 According to Kristeva, these moments are most common within contemporary literature. But I would argue that theology, when thought not in terms of content or dogma, but as a way of thinking, or as a discursive strategy of interrogation, is equally responsive and expressive, and no less aware of the powers of horror. The radical theologies of the 1960s could be an example of this kind of theological thinking as thinkers such as Robinson and Rubenstein, and death-of-God theologians such as Altizer, Hamilton, and Vahanian each in his own way attempted to grap— 46 —

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ple with the failures of modern theology, and together helped express and inaugurate a new theological paradigm and religious sensibility. Historically, however, it is important to note that they were only continuing a movement begun a generation before by a group of theologians committed to the power and relevancy of the particularity of the Christian message. Karl Barth was the forerunner, and it was he who first articulated the contemporary theological critique of religion in his epoch making commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In this work — first written in 1918 in response to what he termed the moral bankruptcy of modern theology, and then significantly revised for its reissue in 1921 — Barth contrasts theological thinking with history, ethics, philosophy, and religion. Religion, according to Barth, falls short of the theological demand because it sets boundaries on the radical transcendence of God. Like history is made relative by the standard of eternity, religion, in contrast to faith, is thought of as a strictly human possibility. Unlike history, however, religion is the highest human possibility, and consequently, the most dangerous. In Barth’s words, “The religious man above all others is not what he is intended to be.” 25 The religious life “is nothing but romantic unbelief.”26 Its danger is its propensity towards self-deception. Barth’s theological rendering of religion, therefore, is the rendering of religious truth as a lie by exposing its knowledge to the unfathomable truth of the Word of God. Barth’s bluntness, then, should come as no surprise when he writes, “Religion must die. In God we are rid of it.” 27 And elsewhere he writes, “Jesus simply has nothing to do with religion. The meaning of his life is the actuality of that which is not actually present in my religion — the actuality of the unapproachable, the unreachable, the incomprehensible, the realization of the possibility, which is not a matter of speculation.”28 Even though never fully developed, Barth’s critique of religion was significantly provocative to inspire Dietrich Bonhoeffer to continue this theological critique to the extent that this question of the relation of theology to religion would become the chief point — 47 —

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of difference between Bonhoeffer and Barth. This means that as Barth moved from dialectical to dogmatic theology, Bonhoeffer moved from dialectics to the world. As Bonhoeffer tells it: Barth was the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion, and that remains his really great merit; but he put in its place a positivist doctrine of revelation which says, in effect, ‘Like it or lump it.’… The positivism of revelation makes it too easy for itself, by setting up, as it does in the last analysis, a law of faith…. In the place of religion there now stands the church — that is in itself biblical — but the world is in some degree made to depend on itself and left to its own devices, and that’s the mistake.29 Charles Marsh offers the following interpretation of Bonhoeffer’s critique of Barth: “I take Bonhoeffer to mean that Barth’s critique of religion…gives way to the development of an ecclesial-architectonic that has the effect of collapsing world history into salvation history and sociopolitical struggle into church struggle. The distance between Word and world is resolved on the side of the Word — and this is the overwhelming of world by Word.”30 The world is completely overwhelmed by God’s Word, for which Barth makes no apologies; as he writes, “Indeed, grace is all-embracing, totalitarian.”31 Bonhoeffer, on the other hand, concentrated his efforts not strictly on the clarification of a theological language, but instead committed himself to a life of resistance by actively opposing the Nazi regime, which eventually led to his arrest, imprisonment, and execution. In the process, Bonhoeffer furthered Barth’s critique and came to regard religion as an historical construct; in his words, religion was “a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression,” which depended on “temporally conditioned presuppositions.”32 The intelligibility of religion was the result of its coherency and utility as a modern sociological category. To Bonhoeffer’s mind, however, in typical neo-orthodox fashion, the explanatory power of religion was best explained by — 48 —

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its reduction of the dynamics of faith to an historical, cultural construct that stripped God of God’s freedom and left humanity with no more autonomy than a cog in a wheel. Those who spoke of religion, therefore, were confused on two fronts. First, there was the confusion of faith with metaphysics by the religious portrayal of God as a “stopgap” filling in the holes of human knowledge. The ‘God’ that exists for religion, Bonhoeffer wrote, “exists as a moral, political…philosophical, and religious working hypothesis.”33 Second, when not confused with metaphysics, religion was presented as a hyper-expression of individualism, as pertaining only to the “private sphere,” or the “Chamber-servant secrets.” In other words, religion was nothing more than a cultural artifact that existed on the boundaries of philosophical, theological, and personal consciousness, which was the result of modernity’s penchant for categorization and encyclopedic knowledge. Such a ‘religion’ was easily used as a tool by the Nazis, or any ideologues of any era. In its place, Bonhoeffer proposed a radical form of social responsibility that included not only obedience, but also an acknowledgment of personal freedom and a demand for careful consideration. According to Bonhoeffer, therefore, the age of religion as “metaphysics” and “inwardness” was over, because in an age of social and political upheaval, the antagonism of faith and science, and the questions of personal salvation were eclipsed by the realization of life in the world and its incumbent social responsibility. Bonhoeffer argued that the category of religion obstructed theology in its chief task, which was to offer a Christian, non-religious interpretation of the world. Bonhoeffer’s articulation of a religionless Christianity, therefore, was the rediscovery of a theology in service to the world. And what makes Bonhoeffer still a distinctive theological voice is that this awareness of the end of religion and the beginning of secularism was theological cause for celebration, not regret; as William Hamilton puts it, Bonhoeffer viewed secularization as “the necessary business of Christianity.”34 — 49 —

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Bonhoeffer’s was a theological orthodoxy that spelled the release from religion and the critique of ideology. Its promises were few except for an ongoing commitment to life in the world, and a willingness to act and to be without fear of sin, a willingness to involve oneself politically even when one’s involvements are a horror to oneself, and a participation that leaves one’s burden of responsibility even greater than it was before. A kind of act and being that does not relieve the self; on the contrary, it is the very origin of the subject with its capacity to think, the birth of the responsible self with no one to blame but oneself. The very opposite of someone like Adolf Eichmann, the chief German officer in charge of transporting the Jews under the Nazi regime, who, if Hannah Arendt was correct, was too thoughtless to understand his guilt in spite of the fact that he did his bureaucratic best to follow the law.35 Responsibility exceeds intentionality such that one has no choice but that of discerning the measure of justice, of feeling compassion, and of accepting responsibility for the tragic even if it lies beyond all accounts of comprehension. That is to say, mindlessness is a stance one chooses. As Bonhoeffer wrote, “Folly is a more dangerous enemy to the good than evil,” because folly is a moral defect incapable of thought. The fool becomes nothing more than a cliché: “One feels in fact, when talking with him, that one is dealing, not with the man himself, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like, which have taken hold of him. He is under a spell, he is blinded, his very nature is being misused and exploited. Having thus become a passive instrument, the fool will be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil.”36 Bonhoeffer’s theology without religion was a thinking of probing insight that scaled the surface of the world by asking the unanswerable questions that again demonstrates the irreducible truth that the self is a thing that thinks, even when the thinking is, as in the case of the fool, nothing other than creative ways of denying thought, evading responsibility, remaining pure and unscathed by a politics of inaction, a religion of ideology, and a theology of dogma. — 50 —

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Bonhoeffer’s theology accepts the responsibility to speak for God in God’s absence, to act when the world seems all but abandoned, to be when one is all alone with the burden of freedom that comes with one’s ontological constitution as a being-with-others. Thus, in his final letter to his friend, Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer writes a prophetic message reminiscent of Nietzsche: Jesus calls men, not to a new religion, but to life. But what does this life look like, this participation in the powerlessness of God in the world? I will write about that next time, I hope. Just one more point for today. When we speak of God in a ‘non-religious’ way, we must speak of him in such a way that the godlessness of the world is not in some way concealed, but rather revealed, and thus exposed to an unexpected light. The world that has come of age is more godless, and perhaps for that very reason nearer to God, than the world before its coming of age.37 These echoes of Nietzsche are emblematic of Bonhoeffer’s affirmative theology, of a theological striving more fundamental than resentiment: “God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him…. Before God and with God we live without God.”38 As William Hamilton tells us, Bonhoeffer’s positive valuation of secularity means that theology belongs fully to the world. Or as Bethge writes, “Bonhoeffer liberates the Christians so that they can listen to Feuerbach and Nietzsche and give them their honest share for their contribution…. It had not been heard before with this emphasis that Christ’s Lordship corresponds to secularity, discipleship participating in this worldliness.”39 This form of theology without religion, then, would be a theology that exposes the godlessness of the world; but even more, it would be a celebration of life that thrusts one into the flux of one’s times. It would be an acceptance of one’s moral obligations to think, to act, and to be in such a way that the false trappings — 51 —

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of religion are dismantled. But still, that is not enough. It would be a commitment that wills one’s loss of innocence, an involvement that knows that purity is always already passed — and lest we forget, this includes the ideal of a purity of discourse that thinks it knows the quality of religion, theology, philosophy, or the like. Finally, it would be a theology that spells the end of theology, at least as we know it. A transformation to a thinking without privilege, without appeal, and without justification; a thinking entirely committed to its being-subjected to the Other — which means a thinking unidentifiable, impure, and completely and utterly implicated. II. For the Sake of Vitality In other words, more important than identifying a thinking that is theological, is a (theological? religious?) kind of thinking that realizes its responsibility. Perhaps the matter at stake between religion and theology is semantically indistinguishable. One of the implications of this semantic indistinguishablity, it would seem, would be that both the religious critique of theology and the theological critique of religion seek openings to a different kind of thinking that is neither dogmatic nor essentializing, and thus the dualities between religion/theology, experience/thought, and orthopraxy/orthodoxy deconstruct themselves when understood within the context of the larger revolt against the totalizing tendencies of Western thought and culture. Both contrast the thinking of which the main object is knowledge with the thinking that is a kind of thoughtfulness or concern. Thus, what does matter is the manner in which one thinks, and speaks, and lives. With that in mind, our history has taught us that there is little to be gained in a posture more interested in self-preservation and clarification than in the call of the Other. For one, such posturing rarely succeeds by encouraging a stagnation against the flux of history. Two, when acting at all, it eventuates in a form of outgroup aggression that secures one identity at the cost of another. — 52 —

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To return to Kristeva (and to the point first made in the introduction regarding the difference between the study of theology and studying theologically), perhaps this means that the contemporary literary author can be read theologically, that literature’s uncompromising gaze, and even more, its unrelenting style give expression to the extremities of contemporary life in both its horror and desire, in both its banality and sensationalism. But not only literature, but also a culture that somehow can absorb both religion’s absence and return simultaneously. Somehow, a culture that manifests its thorough-going secularity40 and proliferation of credulity at one and the same time demands a critical theological response — not necessarily for the sake of clarity and certainly not for the sake of indoctrination. Perhaps instead — to reverse the observation of Winquist’s with which we began — simply because the loss of theology might spell the loss of religious vitality, and the ‘return of the religious’ must find its accompaniment in the theological desire for an intensity of life and a responsibility of thought. In other words, religion needs theology as much as theology needs religion. To conclude, what is to be gained by such a theological reading, especially when the term theology has undergone such a dramatic transformation that it can hardly be identified as theology at all? Perhaps nothing more than the reminder of a tradition. In this way, the history of that tradition opens itself up to a reappraisal of its task, while simultaneously, that same tradition exerts a pressure on a thinking caught in its own present, thus reminding the thinker that one does not think alone and that one’s responsibility forever exceeds one’s grasp. To think theologically at all is to know that one’s words are only strivings. To strive for theology is to love the world one can only hope to understand. To have one’s hope in the world, in spite of the world, for the sake of the world — this is the legacy of a genuine theology with or without religion.

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Part Two The Step Back

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Chapter Four

Heidegger’s Step Back

Everything depends on the step back. — Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”

To write a contemporary theology, one must first read Martin Heidegger, even if it is only to write a theology against the grain of Heidegger, for it is Heidegger, more than any other contemporary philosopher, who has set the conditions for theological possibility. Heidegger has accomplished this in both a direct and unintended fashion, which means that when reading Heidegger, one must do one’s best both to read Heidegger as he might have read himself, and, just as importantly, to read what Heidegger left unthought, or, as John Caputo puts it, to read Heidegger against himself, to “demythologize Heidegger.”1 What necessitates this dual reading is the fact that on the one hand Heidegger gave certain prescriptions for the theologian that if followed would eventuate in a theology without being (e.g., Jean-Luc Marion), and on the other, the logic of Heidegger’s thought would suggest that theological thought was an utter absurdity akin to a round square (e.g., Robert Gall). The question is whether one can still think and write theologically after Heidegger, and if so, whether this would mean a departure from, or an extension of, the actual thought of Heidegger himself. Perhaps one implication of this sort of questioning is that a certain kind of reading of philosophy might be deemed theological. This might be the case regardless of whether the name of God is ever even mentioned. It is theological in the sense that — 57 —

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Deleuze suggests in The Logic of Sense when he speaks of theology as the “science of non-existing entities.” It is theological in the sense that it attends to singularities, to the “bottlenecks” of thought from which thinking takes its various and diverging lines of flight.2 It is theological because it shifts the very conditions of our thought to what Paul Tillich would call the “ground of being,” the “God above God” that is to be found only within the concrete world of finite values and meanings.3 Finally, it is theological because it is thinking in extremis, always pushing the boundaries of what is known and even knowable about a text, a thinker, and a tradition of thought. It is with this notion of theological reading in mind that this chapter experiments in a dual reading of Heidegger by reading and writing in the spirit of Heidegger in conjunction with commentators and critics of Heidegger. This simultaneous reading with and against Heidegger is yet another model of thought in our search for a non-dogmatic theology. I. The End of Thought Imagine an end to thought. Or, perhaps more modestly, a thinking that aims to attain an end. Now think of the end not only as a stopping point, but also and even more, a point of completion. Thought’s attainment of an end, then, would be thought’s completion or the complete thought. Accordingly, the aim of thought would be comprehension and thought’s nature would be conceived as that which is comprehensive. A thinking with such an end would know its end by the point of its beginning and, therefore, the point of its ending would be pointless. A pointless end, however, is no end at all, but rather an infinite deferral. A thought that knows its end does not need thought to think. Thought, therefore, thinks otherwise than by necessity. But if thought proceeds by other means than by necessity, if its end is perpetually deferred, then perhaps our end is not yet known by the beginning. Perhaps even our imagined aim of thought at— 58 —

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taining its end is an impossibility. Perhaps even our imagination is trapped in a thinking that seeks to secure that which remains forever elusive. If that indeed is the case, then the aim of thought would no longer be the attainment of anything, much less an end, and instead, would find itself always and forever along a path and never quite sure of the destination. Such thinking would preserve a place for thought even while insisting on the pervasive and expansive realm of the unthought. Thought’s gift, then, would be the unthought, the unthinkable thought that thinking knows no end. For Heidegger, as this chapter will demonstrate, thought’s essence is thinking with difference, which is a different way of thinking identity. Thinking with Heidegger, we may assert that this thinking of difference is precisely his gift to the history of thought, a history that preserves difference by its remainder of the unthought. As Heidegger himself writes, “The unthought is the greatest gift that thinking can bestow.”4 The thought-provoking essence of thought is that we are not yet thinking, that the unthought persists, and it is its persistence that calls forth thought. So given, the greater the thought, the more the unthought enters into the clearing and the greater that clearing expands. Thus, thinking the unthought aims not to close the gap of the un/thought, but to direct thought towards it, to clear its expanse and also to expand its clearing. Thought’s task, then, would be to think its origination, to think what it is that gives rise to thought, to step back from thought to thought’s essence. In other words, we can rest assured that our thought is never original, though that which is original is always that which gives forth thought. And though not original, at least thinking the unthought points us in the direction of originality. For Heidegger it is only by the step back that we can venture forward, and inversely, we must also continually step back from our venturing forth. If such a program of thought seems futile, this is only compounded by the Heideggerian “leap”, which is — 59 —

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spoken of as the leap into where we already are: “A curious, indeed unearthly thing that we must first leap onto the soil on which we really stand.”5 Futile, curious, and unearthly, perhaps, but also, non-dogmatic, as Heidegger’s thinking charts an undisclosed path, and as such, he provides a still viable resource for contemporary theological thinking even beyond the limitations of his own bias against, or delimitation of, theological possibility. II. From Metaphysics to Thought Richard Rorty, like another reader of Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, thinks of Heidegger’s step back as a form of nostalgia.6 According to Rorty, Heidegger conceives of the history of Western philosophy as a “downward escalator”, proceeding from principles to pragmatics.7 This is a degeneration of thought through which thinking has entered into a destitute time. Once thought has arrived at this lowly status, the task for thinking is to think back and up to theory. According to this characterization, Heidegger aims not to think the unthought, but to think again that which was thought originally. Philosophy is to think of its origins. This is done best by returning to the beginning. What Rorty neglects in this reading of Heidegger is that the beginning is not the end, that what was thought in the beginning already carried with it the unthought. Thus, Rorty’s notion of Heidegger’s “downward escalator” is not the realization that the history of thought “had now been fully told,” as argued by Rorty.8 Instead, history shows the play of ontological difference, the history of the forgetfulness of Being. Thus, if Heidegger’s philosophy is accurately described as being historical, it is a revisionist history enlightened by Being. By looking to Heidegger’s essay, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” we can learn what is at stake in this revised history. In this essay, first published in 1946, Heidegger shows that even when metaphysics comes to completion and attains its end, beings — 60 —

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remain oblivious to Being by being caught in a web of selfproduction and self-consumption.9 The truth of metaphysics is that its end (read, goal or telos) — objectivity and certainty — hides its aim (read, desire) — namely, Being. The irony of the history of philosophy is that when that history comes to its end and realizes itself, truth is lost and what has become correct is that which is absolutely untrue. Metaphysics, therefore, is one striving realized through objectification. But this realization comes at the expense of Being and difference. Eventually, the will to will, which is characteristic of metaphysical thinking and being, renders everything unconditional and uniform in an effort to guarantee itself. This is the unconditional rule of calculating reason. Calculation ensures certainty but lacks reflection. By this lack it is blind to itself — that is, powerless to know its essence. To put it plainly, metaphysics hides the gap between the un/thought by aiming to fill the gap of need through planning and calculation. And to make matters worse, it is its success that masks the absence, distance, and abandonment of Being. Finally, metaphysics is a rationality that blends difference into absolute uniformity without qualification. It is mistaking unqualified beings for Being itself, and, in effect, all value but the value of calculation, production, and consumption is lost. To return to Rorty, we see that it is not that Heidegger naively thought that the history of thought was “fully told,” but rather that by the completion of metaphysics, thinking was now made possible. Two examples in support of this reading of Heidegger: The first comes from the title of the essay itself, “Overcoming Metaphysics.” In the footnote to this title, the translator, Joan Stambaugh, notes that “overcoming”, in this case, the German word, Überwindung, should not be understood as defeating or leaving behind, but rather as an incorporation. In this sense, “to overcome metaphysics would mean to incorporate metaphysics, perhaps with the hope, but not with the certainty, of elevating it to a new reality.”10 Or, as Heidegger himself writes: — 61 —

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We may not presume to stand outside of metaphysics because we surmise the ending of metaphysics. For metaphysics overcome in this way does not disappear. It returns transformed, and remains in dominance as the continuing difference of Being and beings.11 And Heidegger continues, “The decline of the truth of being means: The openness of beings and only [italics his] beings lose the previous uniqueness of their authoritative claim.”12 We remain in metaphysics even as we overcome it. The attempt to stand outside of the history of philosophy would only betray the stubborn refusal to think philosophy differently. The challenge Heidegger presents is how to think metaphysics with difference — that is, how to think through metaphysics to its end in what is left unthought? The second example of this particular reading of Heidegger is found in his discussion of Nietzsche from this same essay. For Heidegger, metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities with Nietzsche. With Nietzsche metaphysics has been completed. While this completion is an end of a certain sort, it is an end that must be incorporated into thought for thought to think differently. With this in mind, Heidegger offers the image of metaphysics as the scaffolding that grounds philosophy on its own foundation. From this foundation, the end of philosophy is seen as the transition to the beginning of thought.13 Thought thinks differently from the history of philosophy only by being built from the scaffolding metaphysics’ end has left behind, in other words, only by thinking what the history of philosophy left unthought. To return to Rorty once again, key to his critique is his understanding of Heidegger’s defined task of ‘overcoming.’ For Rorty, this overcoming is understood: as looking back on metaphysics [and] seeing it as a limited, rounded-off whole — and thus as something we might hope to put behind us. The old Heidegger’s final vision was of the West was a single gift of Being, a single

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Ereignis, a chalice with one handle labeled ‘Plato’ and the other ‘Nietzsche,’ complete and perfect in itself — and therefore, perhaps, capable of being set to one side.14 The image I would offer instead of Rorty’s chalice is one with only a slight difference: Heidegger’s overcoming metaphysics is not a chalice as a thing which can be set aside and thus done away with, but rather the wine within the chalice awaiting a transubstantiation. We can never will away the history of Western philosophy as if setting a chalice to the side. Instead, we must drink it down to its last drop. Only now, the expectation of transubstantiation makes the drinking of it different. The overcoming of metaphysics is an overcoming as incorporation with hope; it is a history as a scaffolding that becomes a new beginning of thought. III. From Thought to Language Heidegger’s step back does not end with the new beginning of thought. As we shall see, it is only one step of many. But as a first step in our examination, it establishes a pattern for future steps. One question that this raises is whether the stepping back will eventually effect a disestablishment of the pattern itself? By stepping back from metaphysics to thought, thought, together with its unthought, remains, and so too does a remainder from which to step. The final step seems to be into that place where either no remainder remains or nothing but remainder remains. At this point, it is still unclear whether we will reach such an end by following in the steps of Heidegger. After stepping back from metaphysics, we arrive at that which comes before representational thinking. This thought is more original than metaphysics. It is also less secure and less calculative. By entering into thought by our backwards step, we have transgressed the limits of ego autonomy. We have arrived at that which is before philosophy, which is nonphilosophy, and which is arrived at only by bringing philosophy to its point of

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fulfillment, by thinking it to its end. In other words, by thinking the end of philosophy, we have arrived at the task of thinking. Here, as John Sallis writes, thinking is no longer the subject of thought, but now is made subject: “Thinking is not the subject of, but rather is subject to, the clearing…. The same must be said, finally, of questioning: it can break into the clearing only at the cost of submitting itself…to the clearing, only by relinquishing its claim to autonomy.”15 Through overcoming metaphysics, metaphysics was abandoned to itself and ended in a relinquishment of itself to thought. Likewise with thought: it too must take itself to its end before being abandoned to its own other. For Sallis, this abandonment is to an originary thinking that effects a sacrifice of understanding. This sacrifice, like the step back from metaphysics, is no simple elimination, defeat, or dismissal of thought, but rather its incorporation, which finally overcomes through difference. It is an overcoming of thought in which thought remains in play.16 The realm of play is that space between thought and language. Language plays with thought as it speaks humanity. This notion of the playfulness of language is explored by Heidegger in his essay of 1950, simply entitled, “Language.” Here, Heidegger begins with what he himself designates as an empty tautology, “Language itself is language.”17 Like the Heidegerrian leap, this tautology does not get us anywhere with our thinking. “But,” Heidegger writes, “we do not want to get anywhere. We would like only, for once, to get to just where we are already.”18 And where are we already but with language. At our most basic as humans, we speak, but how do we account for the origins of language, or more precisely, for our origins in language? How we answer this question depends greatly on how we conceive of the relation between speech and language. That is to say, which comes first? Into what are we stepping back? For Heidegger, speech, as an ontic reality, is more manageable than language. He names three views of speech that — 64 —

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inform our thinking. First is speaking as expression, in which something internal, perhaps a thought, externalizes itself. The second is speaking as an activity of humanity in which humans speak language and thus humans remain autonomous. The third is speaking as presentation and representation in which the real and the unreal are made present through words.19 Each of these views speak correctly of speaking, but they all fail to bring us to the essence of language as language. Heidegger’s response, which again is a seeming tautology, is that the essence of language is that language speaks.20 Speaking is language’s essence, and thus is a predicate of language. That is to say, language comes first. It is language that is given to both speaking and thinking. As we step back, then, we find ourselves always already in language. When humans speak, they speak in response to the speaking of language. When humans speak, they speak out of a listening to what comes before.21 In Heidegger’s essay, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” written one year after “Language,” he writes, “Man [sic] acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man…. For strictly, it is language that speaks. Man first speaks when, and only when, he responds to language by listening to its appeal.”22 This brings us again to Sallis as we now can better understand how thinking is made subject by the “echo” of language. That language is more original than originary thinking and that language remains even after the sacrifice of understanding, renders all thought as an after-thought and all speaking as a response to listening. Sallis writes, “Human speech is the afterword that breaks the silence by sounding what language has bespoken. Human speech is the echo of language.”23 The metaphorics of the echo is especially illuminative. As Sallis describes, the echo can be the displacement of speech from its origin (in language) and thereby be thought of as nothing more than empty repetition. The echo can be the dispersal and dissemination of speech, and as such, become a sheltered, masked, — 65 —

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or displaced form of speech. It can also be divergent speech in which the original sound is resounded through the voice of nature and thereby becomes renewed once again. And finally, the echo can be a transported speech in which speaking is released into the open.24 The determining factor for each is not what is spoken, but where. The truth is that laanguage speaks wherever we listen. We listen by stepping back from thinking and speaking into the realm of language. IV. From Language to Difference If we are always already in language, if it is by language that we are spoken into existence, then, from language, where does the backward step lead? The answers to this question are various, even by Heidegger himself. One recurring thought he offers is that of poetic speaking. In fact, Heidegger writes that “Language itself is poetry in the essential sense.”25 If we step back from language into its essence, we find that language is poetry and poetry is the original language. Poetry sets itself into that space between language and thought, that space between world and earth, that space between the extraordinary and ordinary, and that space between the “nearness and remoteness of the gods.”26 As such, it establishes or “founds” humanity as that which it already is. Poetry is the before, then, because it allows language to speak humanity into its essence in the between; it gives names to what already is, and by naming, it draws forth what lies concealed. Yet, as poetry speaks names, it remains a pointing towards a region. This region we have designated as an in-between space. And according to Heidegger’s analysis, it is from this in-between space that poetry springs. Which means that we must step back before language, and even before language’s origin in poetry, into that in-between space before philosophy, thought, and language. Philosophy, thought, and language must be abandoned to their own respective ends, and thus their limits might be — 66 —

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transgressed. Jean-Luc Marion speaks of the paradoxical possibility of such a transgression: “For one does not overcome a true thinking [and speaking] by refuting it, but rather by repeating it, or even by borrowing from it the means to think [and speak] with it beyond it. Then even failure succeeds.”27 Heidegger’s step back is precisely this: that if we think a thinking to its end, we come to know its limits and thus its failure to deliver on its promise. But by this knowledge, the failure creates an opening through which the possibility of promise is renewed. The promise is the gift forever unfulfilled by our philosophy, thinking, and language, yet the gift of promise remains by the enduring persistence of the unthought region of difference. It is to this region of gift, promise, and difference that we now turn. Difference was with Heidegger from the beginning in Being and Time. But here, ontological difference hides pure difference by being subject to Dasein. Dasein accomplishes its task of placing beings in time and thus begins a trajectory away from philosophies of consciousness towards a philosophy that desubjectivizes and de-objectivizes thinking and speaking. Where we began our investigation, however, is already a step back from this early aim of Heidegger’s. But, “a questioning to the very end,” as Marion points out, is “a questioning that returns to the beginning.”28 The thinking back from metaphysics to thought is already a thinking back from consciousness to what comes before. And through language, we have seen how thinking itself is made subject. Where we stand now is before ontological difference in reference to Dasein, that region that comes before as origin, that unthought gift of difference as difference. Nowhere is that gift of difference more explicitly engaged as in Heidegger’s work of 1957, Identity and Difference. It begins with an essay, entitled “The Principle of Identity.” This principle, which, according to Heidegger, has informed all of Western thought, is simply, A = A. As metaphysical thought has understood it, it means that “every A is itself the same with itself.”29 The key to this understanding, according to Heidegger, is the — 67 —

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“with” which is understood as “the unification into a unity.”30 Identity, then, is understood as unity: “To every being as such there belongs identity, the unity with itself.”31 Identity as unity grounds the whole subsequent history of Western thought. Throughout this examination of Heidegger, we have seen where this beginning to history ends. Our program, together with Heidegger, is to step back from that ending to a more original beginning. If we step back from the principle of identity as unity, we come to a beginning of Western thought that speaks with a difference: “Different things, thinking and Being, are here thought of as the Same.”32 Sameness is understood now as a “belonging together,” in which the together of unity is determined by the difference of belonging. Heidegger writes, “The same is not the merely identical. In the merely identical, the difference disappears. In the same, the difference appears, and appears all the more pressingly, the more resolutely thinking is concerned with the same matter in the same way.”33 Now, through thinking the same with difference, humanity, in its essence, belongs to Being, and Being is the presence that makes its claim on humanity. That is to say, humanity is determined by being claimed by Being even as Being needs humanity to come to its essence in presence. Humanity and Being belong together. This is a step back that is understood as a spring that “leaps away” from Being as ground: “The spring is the abrupt entry into the realm from which man [sic] and Being have already reached each other in their active nature, since both are mutually appropriated, extended as a gift, one to the other.”34 How do we enter into the spring that leaps away into where we already are? According to Heidegger, at least, this is done by entering into the “event of appropriation”: “The event of appropriation is that realm, vibrating within itself, through which man and Being reach other in their nature, achieve their active nature by losing those qualities with which metaphysics has endowed them.”35 Through the spring that leaps away from the end of metaphysics, we have returned to another beginning to the — 68 —

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principle of identity. Now, rather than identity as unity which hides difference, it instead has: the characteristics of a spring that departs from Being as the ground of beings, and thus springs into the abyss…. ‘Principle of identity’ means now: a spring demanded by the essence of identity because it needs that spring if the belonging [italics his] together of man and Being is to attain the essential light of the appropriation.36 Our task is to think identity as belonging with difference. This is begun by thinking the same with Hegel, only now with a difference. First, Heidegger distinguishes his thinking from Hegel’s by the matter of his thinking, which is “difference as difference.”37 Further, unlike Hegel, Heidegger writes, “We…do not seek that force [of earlier thinking] in what has already been thought: we seek it in something that has not been thought, and from which what has been thought receives its essential space.”38 Further still, “For us, the character of the conversation with the history of thinking is no longer Aufhebung (elevation), but the step back.”39 Difference, the unthought, and the step back, each distinguish Heidegger from the history of philosophy, thought, and language. They each draw us into that more original realm: “The step back points to the realm which until now has been skipped over, and from which the essence of truth becomes first of all worthy of thought.”40 Heidegger’s step back is not a one-time event, but rather, it gives a direction to our thought. As such, it is an infinite regress. Heidegger testifies to this when he writes, “The step back out of metaphysics into its essential nature requires a duration and an endurance whose dimensions we do not know.”41 This, then, approaches an answer to our earlier question regarding whether the step back eventuates into the disestablishment altogether of directionality of thought — that is, whether or not we will finally come to a point when the stepping back is no longer needed, when either no remainder remains or nothing — 69 —

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but remainder remains? By each step back, which is our way of venturing forward, we enter into the infinity that “requires a duration and an endurance” that we do not know. Thus, by asking of its end, we betray the step back that does not know its end by a stepping out that seeks to secure. What, then, do we know by admitting through the step back what we do not know? Heidegger answers, “Only this much is clear, that when we deal with the Being of beings and with the beings of Being, we deal in each case with a difference.”42 The difference is the unthought that remains as the gift to thought. Difference as the unthought gift is that which comes before all that has come after in the history of thought. Therefore, in the end of our backward journey, we assert what we know as first, the priority of givenness. Marion, thinking beyond Heidegger by thinking his failure as success, writes, “Givenness alone is absolute, free, without condition, precisely because it gives.”43 This givenness, according to Marion, comes before — before nothing, before signification, before intention and intuition — and as an unconditional gift, it issues forth in the pure form of the call. The call originates the wonder that gives birth to the self who knows itself always already in language and thought — that is, always already called, through difference, by difference, and as difference. The identity of the one who enters into thought by stepping back from philosophy into its essence, knows itself, finally, as called by the unthought gift of thought as difference. It is an end, though final, that knows no end. One, therefore, that calls for an infinite duration and endurance. But if one takes the step towards this end, then one finally steps into the essence of one’s existence. It is an essence that is infinitely deferred and different,44 yet still one which calls us unto where we already are. As such, it is only through the step back that remains a venturing forth, that we might once and for all step into and beyond ourselves.

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Chapter Five

Ontotheology: Complications

In a well-known passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant writes, “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”1 So much for the supposed Enlightenment optimism which thought reason made autonomous would supplant the superstition and dogmatism of religion. With Kant, reason again must answer to religion, it must give way to religion — in other words, when reason knows its limits, it effectively transcends itself in the discovery of religion. Or does it? In another, later work by Kant, religion remains within the limits of reason alone. Here, reason does not give way to religion; rather, religion is discovered through, and is the outworking of, reason. Religion is thoroughly reasonable. And reason proper (or proper reason) is religious.2 This seeming reversal from Kant with regard to the relation between reason and faith bequeaths a complex legacy of modern religious thought, a legacy that will continue throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the problem of ontotheology. The question is one of priority, and whether philosophy or religion should be given the place of privilege in defining and establishing the proper fundaments of intelligibility. In other words, is God rightly understood in terms of being, or is being the gift of God? If God is understood in terms of being, does this not make God into just another being among beings, and thus restrict the radical transcendence implied by the being of God as God? And if being is understood as the gift of God, then by what language might this gift be described apart from the language of being itself? It seems that whether one begins from a philosophi— 71 —

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cal or theological point of origin, the one is inevitably implicated in and by the other. The problem of ontotheology, therefore, as Kant’s own ambiguity with regard to the relationship between knowledge and faith might suggest, is an irresolvable problem, but one which is nevertheless taken up anew by each successive generation. In an early lecture by Heidegger entitled, “Phenomenology and Theology,” (1927) Heidegger, like Kant before him, asserts a radical divide between knowledge and faith, only here, the distinction Heidegger makes is between philosophy and theology. He writes, “Our thesis, then, is that theology is a positive science, and as such, therefore, is absolutely different from philosophy.”3 Elsewhere he writes, “We understand one another better when each speaks in his own language;”4 and that “Faith and thinking cannot be made to coincide.”5 The reason Heidegger gives for this strict separation is that philosophy is defined according to its concern with the question of Being; it is ontological by nature. As such, it is a thinking of an indeterminate origin and end, factually unknown and structurally unknowable. Theology, on the other hand, is defined as the scientific explication of faith. Theology gives thought to faith. However, thought full of faith is not faithful to thinking and the indeterminacy implied therein, but rather answers to a God who is the name of limit, a limit that encloses thought in a circle of the same by knowing from the start both its beginning and end. It is in this context, therefore, that Heidegger likens philosophical theology to a “square circle”,6 and it is the reason why he would later state that if a “proper theology” were to be written, the word “being” would not appear.7 Or would it? 8 Religion, on the other hand, is another matter. Heidegger preserves the possibility of thinking religion, albeit a religion unthought by theology. For Heidegger, thinking religion is reserved to a kind of thinking that thinks meditatively rather than calculatively. The religion thought by thinking is a religion determined by the radically indeterminate and indeterminable. — 72 —

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Unlike theology, it is not an ontic or positive science, but rather a way of being. If Heidegger is correct, then theology is not philosophy, just as faith is not knowledge. However, thinking religion remains a distinct possibility as long as the problem of ontotheology is overcome. The question, therefore, is whether it is even possible to overcome ontotheology; and if not, what this suggests about the continuing viability of theological thought. This chapter will chart three possible responses to this problem in order to show that the problem of ontotheology is more complicated than it might appear, and that the various attempts at overcoming this problem, in fact, further reinscribe the very duality of thought upon which the problem rests. An appreciation of the problem of ontotheology is central to the search for a nondogmatic theology, because an analysis of the problem reveals ontotheology as a fundamental condition of thought, whether philosophical or theological. Furthermore, the attempts at overcoming ontotheology rest on a certain dogmatism of their own in that they lack the requisite reflexivity that might actually lead beyond the strategies and patterns of thought that further entrench ontotheology as a problem, and further cover over the more basic understanding of ontotheology as the very condition of thought. I. Heidegger and the Problem of Ontotheology The problem of ontotheology is that religion is forgotten, cutoff, or held captive by a thinking that thinks it knows. It is not as Mark C. Taylor writes, that the ontotheological tradition is brought to a close when “modern philosophy comes to an end in Hegel’s System,”9 because the problem of ontotheology is that ontotheology is always already a “closed” system, knowing its beginning and end before it ever begins the task of thinking. In other words, the ontotheological tradition is an ongoing and necessary threat, which is never eliminated simply by the passing — 73 —

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of an historical epoch. Ontotheology is totalizing, irrespective of thought’s bounds, reason’s limits, or the proper domains belonging to philosophy and theology. Like the problem of metaphysics — after all, as Heidegger states, “metaphysics is onto-theology”10 — ontotheology hides a lack, even organizes it so that the greatest need is hidden and forgotten by the knowledge that thinks itself self-sufficient. By extension, the argument that the ontotheological tradition has come to an end only betrays the actual depths of the ontotheological condition of thought. The logic of ontotheology proceeds from a known origin to a known end, from the first cause to the highest being, or vice versa from God to certainty. It is a logic that might best be described as an ontotheological circle, which is like the “hermeneutic circle” Heidegger speaks of in Being and Time, except that hermeneutics knows itself encircled and thus realizes its trap and seeks to find interest and meaning rather than perpetuating the circle of the same.11 Ontotheology, on the other hand, thinks its circle is enough, infinite in its scope and eternal in its duration. From Heidegger’s perspective, this self-encircled nature of ontotheology should make us question the nature of ontotheological thought itself, namely, whether ontotheology is truly capable of being thoughtful at all. This is the beginning insight that will eventually lead to Heidegger’s attempt at overcoming ontotheology. This is the first step in the recognition of ontotheology as a problem. And it is this recognition that leads Heidegger into his reading with and against Hegel, ontotheologian par excellence. “For Hegel,” Heidegger writes, “the matter of thinking is: Thinking as such.”12 More precisely, it is “Being, with respect to beings having been thought in absolute thinking, and as absolute thinking” (ID, p. 47). Heidegger is likewise concerned with the Being of thought, but not, as in Hegel, as various instances in the unfolding of Absolute Thought. Heidegger is concerned with Being in respect to the ontological difference. For Hegel, beings are thought of as processes in the development and progression — 74 —

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of the self-same thinking of Absolute Spirit, whereas for Heidegger, Being is thought of as difference, and a difference not to be synthesized finally into a unity, but instead, “difference as difference” (ID, p. 47). This is the “mistake” of ontotheology, for as it builds towards the Absolute, it discovers the end was there from the beginning. Thought builds on thought to the point where thought thinks it knows the all from beginning to end. The thinking Heidegger recommends, as was examined in the previous chapter, proceeds not by elevating thought, but through the step back. It is an overcoming that is not a “defeating or a leaving behind,” but rather an “incorporation.”13 Rather than thought thinking the All, thought knows that the greater the thinking, the more the unthought enters into the clearing. In this case, the matter of thinking is not determined by the object being thought, but instead, by the quality or “the manner in which thinking moves” (ID, p. 50). The mistake of ontotheology is, thus, the mistake that thinks itself complete, when, as Heidegger writes, “Only one thing is clear: the step back calls for a preparation which must be ventured here and now” (ID, p. 51) — a preparation, which is also a clearing, and which shares with religion the quality of humility. This is finally Heidegger’s alternative to ontotheology, an alternative predicated on the possibility of differences “belonging together.” As in the thinking of Kant with which we begin, there is a fundamental ambiguity present in Heidegger’s thought with respect to the ontotheological problem: On the one hand, Heidegger prescribes for the theologian a thinking “without Being,” which would presumably be a theology freed from the problem of ontotheology, a pure theological discourse uncontaminated by philosophy. Like Kant, this would be a form of religious thought that is defined by its fundamental denial of the philosophical impulse, a denial of knowledge in order to make room for faith. On the other hand, Heidegger’s analysis of the ontotheological problem suggests the impossibility of such an escape, for onto— 75 —

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theology is ultimately seen not so much as a problem to be overcome, as it is the inevitable condition of both philosophical and theological thought. Here, both philosophy and theology find themselves circumscribed within the ontotheological condition. For the former, the task of thought is that of purification; for the latter, it might be described as a complication, as identity is discovered in and through difference. Finally, then, when speaking of Heidegger and the ontotheological problem, we must admit that there are not one, but two, strategies of thought discerned, which together dictate much of the future of contemporary religious reflection. II. A Legacy of Overcoming It is Heidegger who set the horizon for the questioning of ontotheology by his assertion of the radical divide between philosophy and theology and his insistence that philosophical theology is a logical impossibility. For the most part, those who have come after Heidegger have left this initial assertion unquestioned. Thus, there is the thinking that thinks “religiously” while disavowing theology,14 the theology that thinks faith and God “without being,” and the perversion and contamination of such clearminded thinking. The first two of these options follow the initial strategy of thought articulated by Heidegger, and thus, might be described as thinking as purification. The third, however, like the second strategy discerned in Heidegger, begins with the recognition of the circumscribed nature of thought within the ontotheological condition. In what follows, I will briefly introduce each position in its turn. 1.

Thinking Religiously (without religion)

One response to the problem of ontotheology is the thinking of “religion without religion.” Such thinking is thoroughly critical and predominantly negative, while remaining impas— 76 —

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sioned by religion. Its clearest contemporary exponent is John Caputo, who, in his aptly entitled study, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion, sets forth the possibility for a thinking of religion uncorrupted by (onto)theology. Taking off from a statement by Derrida, this work by Caputo is driven by the idea that Derrida has been understood less and less well because readers have failed to detect the “religious” dimension to his thinking and writing (Prayers and Tears, p. xvii). Caputo’s task, therefore, is to overturn this oversight by making explicit what implicitly prevails throughout the entire corpus of Derrida as a religious passion. As such, deconstruction is read as messianic expectation, only without the messiah. Derrida’s thoroughgoing critical posturing is read through the lens of the Jewish prophetic tradition. And Derrida’s more recent focus on the gift is thought of as a passion for the impossible, as a longing for the inbreaking of the other. It is to Caputo’s credit that his reading of Derrida has not only reinvigorated, but also helped to engineer an almost entirely new style of postmodern religious thought. Previously, those engaging Derrida and deconstructive philosophy with religion fell into one of two camps. On the one side were those who read Derrida in the tradition of the radical death of God theologies, and thus, as Mark Taylor argued in Erring, deconstruction was seen as “the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God.”15 On the other side were those who saw in Derrida and in the free play of signifiers that his deconstructive philosophy suggests a great skeptic and detractor of religion, and thus, a threat to authentic religious belief and action.16 After Caputo, however, such an either-or reading of Derrida could no longer be maintained. Caputo calls this the “armed neutrality” of différance, and “the two-edged sword of undecidability” (Prayers and Tears, pp. 11-12). For our purposes, we may see in Caputo’s portrait of Derrida as a religious thinker, a natural antidote to any and all dogmatisms. As Caputo explains:

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The effect of allowing différance its two cents is disturbing and subversive, for monotheists, atheists, and pantheists, for believers as well as unbelievers, for scientists as well as philologists, for Seinsdenkers as well as psychoanalysts. For différance makes — or should make; this is part of the ethics of deconstruction — the theist worry about what we affirm when we affirm our God, even as it makes the atheist worry about what is denied when God is being denied. For there are idols of belief and of unbelief, graven images being affirmed and denied every day. If the affirmation of God is liable to the surgings of resentment or fear, the denial of God is liable to denial pure and simple, the denial of something that is not God and that is well denied. (Prayers and Tears, pp. 13-14) Dogmatism, in other words, goes by many names and assumes a vast array of guises — not only religious, but also secular; not only defined by the excesses of belief, but by unbelief as well. It is in this same context that Caputo then chides Taylor for not following through on his stated attempt of writing “in the difference between theism and atheism,” for not staying on the slash of his self designated a/theology. “The problem with Erring,” Caputo writes, “is that it is insufficiently aporetic, that it allows itself to be led straight down the path (poreia ) inerrantly I would say, of the death of God…. According to this tall tale, the transcendent God of Christianity pitches his tent under the immanent Spirit of Hegel, which becomes in turn the divine Man of Feuerbach, which releases the First Age of the deathof-God.” And again, according to Caputo, “That version of deconstruction is undone by deconstruction itself, which refuses such closure, such exclusions and such clean sweeps” (Prayers and Tears, p. 14). This is a powerful corrective to what had been the previously dominant theological reading of Derrida. Yet might Caputo himself be guilty of a similar sort of inconsistency? Might Derrida’s — 78 —

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deconstruction also undo Caputo’s reading of Derrida’s religion without religion? After all, while arguing for the positive, affirmative religious desire that drives the method of deconstruction and that impassions Derrida, Caputo never declares what positive implications this reading might have for theological thinking. On the contrary, theology is seen exclusively through the prism of ontotheology: While Derrida is willing to associate himself with ‘religion’ and ‘prayer’ and ‘passion,’ the word ‘theology’ tends to have a strictly onto-theological sense for him, signifying something objectifying, totalizing, dogmatic, and awash in ominous institutional power so that his is a religion without theology, a life of prayer and passion without theology’s God…. God is not an object but an addressee, not a matter for theological clarification but the other end of a prayer, given not to cognition but to passion, neither him nor her nor it, but ‘you.’ (Prayers and Tears, p. 289) According to Caputo, what makes Derrida’s religion positively deconstructive, and what makes his deconstruction positively religious, is that it is not (onto)theological. And further, Derrida’s religious passion is severed from the violence inherent to the historic faiths. In other words (and it is not clear whether this is a deliberate attempt at irony or not on the part of Caputo), it is a religious passion made safe by deconstruction. A religion, therefore, purified of both religion and theology. And thereby, is it not also a reinscription of the initial Heideggerian divide? Caputo’s basic agreement with this Heideggerian divide becomes most glaring in the concluding section, which is entitled “Confession.” Here, Derrida’s Circomfession is read as a postmodern rearticulation of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. Here, Augustine’s question, “What do I love when I love my God?” becomes most important. The question, according to Caputo, manifests the ever-present temptation of religion by ontotheol-

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ogy. It also displays the passion which exceeds and renders suspect any determinative and premature answer. For Caputo, it is here in Derrida’s own grappling with this most fundamental of Augustine’s questions, that Derrida most embodies the private language of religion, a language ever-present but always inarticulate. Derrida’s Circomfessions becomes a language of the spirit. This is the voice which talks “without saying anything,” the God who “is given only in praying and weeping,” and the “religious experience” that is “the passion for the impossible” (Prayers and Tears, pp. 288-289). The problem, however, and this is what Caputo neglects to explore, is that Augustine’s question is fundamentally a theological question, not simply a prayer. The pure, private, and passionate language of prayer gives way and is implicated by a certain sort of theological reflection, a certain desire to know the nature and character of the God of one’s desire. If such is the case, and if Augustine’s question really becomes Derrida’s own, then not only must deconstruction be read as a religious passion, but might it not also be seen as the very product of a theological desire? Therefore, what we have in Caputo’s depiction of Derrida’s thinking of religion, is a thinking not that far from the thinking of Kant with which we began this chapter — namely, the denial of knowledge to make room for faith. As Caputo writes, “Je ne sais pas: [Derrida] has found it necessary to delimit truth and knowledge…not of course as if this were something he does, but to let them delimit themselves…” And he continues, “Il faut croire. In order to make room for faith, which means: not only to see that seeing is structured by blindness, by hypotheses and assumptions that structure sight, by writing and textuality, but also… to see that testimony and witnessing, that philosophy and science, money and daily communications depend upon a certain blind faith (Prayers and Tears, p. 328). But just as this was not Kant’s final or only word on the subject, neither is it Derrida’s. Deconstruction, as Caputo has taught us well, must be more than denial, and it is at this point where there — 80 —

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is not only room made for faith, but also a pondering about the specific content of that faith, the “What?” of the nature and character of the God of one’s desire, that religion becomes more than simply a private passion and gives way to a certain kind of theology — non-dogmatic perhaps, but nevertheless still circumscribed within the ontotheological condition. 2. Thinking Theologically (without Being) Another response to the problem of ontotheology is the theology that thinks faith and God “without being.” Again, this is consistent with Heidegger’s assertion of a radical divide between philosophy and theology by its attempt to write a theology uncontaminated by the thought of being. Like Caputo’s religion without religion, a theology without being is respectful of its proper domain, only here the priority is given to theological rather than philosophical thought in the effort to overcome the ever-present threat of ontotheology. This trajectory of theology takes off from the thinking of Emmanuel Levinas, whose two major works, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being,17 perhaps embody the most profound critique and reversal of Heidegger’s philosophy of being. For Levinas, ethics is first philosophy. That is to say, being only discovers itself by its being called by the call of the other. Thus, before being comes responsibility, which implies a more originary origin than being itself. Of course, as suggested above, while this is indeed a reversal of Heidegger’s privileging of the question of being, the thinking of Levinas is still very much determined by the initial horizon established by Heidegger early on in his thinking. That is to say, there remain proper domains to different qualities or manners of thought. To philosophy belongs being. To theology, there is faith, revelation, God — in other words, that which is otherwise than being.18 Jean-Luc Marion, in his book God without Being, is the clearest and most forthright exponent of this kind of theology, — 81 —

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the kind that allows itself to be utterly determined by the indeterminable “otherwise than being,” and that thereby seeks an overcoming to ontotheology. From the start, Marion is clear about the privilege he is granting theology over and beyond philosophy, when he writes, “At issue here is not the possibility of God’s attaining Being, but, quite the opposite, the possibility of Being’s attaining to God.”19 God stands above and beyond all idolatry as the trace of infinity. Accordingly, theology is an impossibility because the object of its inquiry is wholly other. If such is the case, then why even engage in theology? Marion responds, “To try one’s hand at theology requires no other justification than the extreme pleasure of writing” (GWB, p. 1). Pleasurable, but also hypocritical, as Marion writes, “Theology renders its author hypocritical in at least two ways: Hypocritical, in the common sense: in pretending to speak of holy things…he cannot but find himself, to the point of vertigo, unworthy, impure — in a word, vile.” Marion continues, “He remains hypocritical in another, more paradoxical sense: if authenticity…consists in speaking of oneself, and in saying only that for which one can answer, no one, in a theological discourse, can, or should, pretend to it. For theology consists precisely in saying that for which only another can answer — the Other above all” (GWB, pp. 2-3). What might this self-aware theology reveal that might provide an opening beyond the problem of ontotheology? First and foremost, it delimits the horizon of being, stripping being of its absolute and singular status by putting it in relation to the thinking of God which stands beyond and before ontology. In relation to such talk of God, absolute ontology is exposed as an idol, or a false attachment that places restrictions on the absolute unlimited nature of God. As one thinks the God beyond idolatry, one is compelled to think beyond ontology, beyond ontotheology, even beyond ontological difference itself to the God who is absolutely unthinkable (GWB, p. 44-45). According to Marion, the thought of God radically undermines and disrupts — 82 —

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thinking altogether, which itself is a product of ontology, such that even the theological thinking which had this effect is disestablished and rendered insufficient to the infinite overflow of the givenness of God. The God without being is therefore experienced not through cognition but as a love that desires to be thought (GWB, p. 49). The theology that outthinks ontotheology, therefore, is understood as a radical passivity which allows its speech to be the word of the wholly other. As the speech of an-other, the path is indeterminate and indeterminable. The path marked off by being finds its limit and its limitations, while theology follows the trace to an infinite giving origin that is without beginning and without end. Pleasurable, hypocritical, and finally, at least according to Marion’s own understanding of theology, infinitely free: “We are infinitely free in theology: we find all already given, gained, available. It only remains to understand, to say, and to celebrate. So much freedom frightens us, deservedly” (GWB, p. 158). Once the order of being has been evacuated by a thoroughgoing iconoclastic theology, once the being of God has been crossed out by the all-surpassing love of Agapē, it is as though the theologian now has the free rein of an infinite and unregulated expanse. It is as though the problem of ontotheology was only a minor stumbling block or hurdle along the way, and that once it has been safely bypassed, it is no longer a threat. But there are two problems, or at least curiosities, to this theological program as articulated by Marion. First, the freedom Marion is speaking of is one that has been prescripted by a distinctively philosophical perspective. Heidegger, the philosopher, instructs the theologian to write a theology without being, and if the theologian complies, then both the philosopher and theologian alike will grant immunity from the ordinary problems of representation that any public discourse must face. Ontotheology is overcome, and theology, which has passed through the death of God, can speak again of God without fear of idolatry. Second, this is a strange freedom that unapologeti— 83 —

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cally asserts the authority of the bishop, a theological freedom confined only to a select few, a purportedly infinite freedom that paradoxically affirms and is authorized by a structure of institutional power.20 3. Complications Jacques Derrida figures prominently in both the work of Caputo and Marion. It is Caputo who has drawn our attention to what might be characterized as the fundamentally affirmative religious passion that drives Derrida’s deconstructive philosophy. It is Marion who has taken postmodern deconstructive theology beyond mere deconstruction to a positively and determinatively Christian theological vision. Derrida himself has also entered into this fray with his two incisive and important works on the relation of his thinking to religion: “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” (1992) and “Faith and Knowledge: Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the limits of Reason Alone” (1998). By reading these two works in conjunction with one another, it becomes clear that Derrida complicates the separation between philosophy and theology that Heidegger and many who have followed him merely take for granted, and thus Derrida assumes Heidegger’s own counter-voice that he began as he moved beyond the attempt at the purification of thought and towards the understanding of the ontotheological condition of thought. In “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” Derrida ends a rather straightforward essay on why the method of deconstruction should not be confused with negative theology with a provocative comment on Heidegger and his relation to theology: “With and without the word being, [Heidegger] wrote a theology with and without God. He did what he said it would be necessary to avoid doing. He said, wrote, and allowed to be written exactly what he said he wanted to avoid. He was not there without leaving a trace of all these folds” (Denials, p. 128). This comment is in reference to the earlier cited comment by Heidegger that if — 84 —

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a proper theology were to be written, the word being would not appear. Heidegger never wrote a theology, yet by his philosophy a new trajectory of theological thinking was begun. How should we understand this strange relation of distance? Derrida answers with two suggestions: (1) Theology is indeed rigorously excluded in the philosophy of Heidegger: “In short, neither faith nor science, as such, thinks or has thinking as its task” (Denials, p. 130). (2) Heidegger’s avoidance of theology betrays a profound respect for prayer: “If there were a purely pure experience of prayer, would one need religion and affirmative and negative theologies? Would one need a supplement of prayer” (Denials, p. 131)? So Derrida asks, and so he leaves unanswered. Which brings us from “How to Avoid Speaking” to “Faith and Knowledge,” the essay that begins tellingly, at least in reference to first essay we just examined, with the following: “How “to talk religion? ” (Faith and Knowledge, p. 1). The first essay asks how to avoid speaking and finishes with the suggestion that perhaps there might be an experience of religion, a “purely pure experience of prayer” that is not in need of language, that would not “need a supplement of prayer.” The second begins with a seemingly contradictory impulse, how to talk? Two distinct moments in what might be considered Derrida’s emerging theology — the first, that of critique and iconoclasm, the second, a reemergence into, and renewal of a distinctively theological discourse, albeit, a pluralistic and thus non-dogmatic one. The first preserves the possibility of the purity of the Heideggerian divide by its suggestion of the possibility of pure religion unscathed and independent of the affirmative and negative theologies. The second is concerned from start to finish with the duplicitous, contaminated, even defiled source of “Religion.” Here, there is no longer even the suggestion that there might be a “purely pure experience of prayer,” or that religion might be an irreducible, unrelated to being or thought or even theology. Religion, here, is at the same time both faith and knowledge, both belief and the experience of the holy, and both private passion and political re— 85 —

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ality. It has the abstract, general structure of the messianic and the chora. Religion, so understood, is always in the plural, never pure, never alone: “there are at least two families, two strata or sources that overlap, mingle, contaminate each another without ever merging; and just in case things are still too simple, one of the two is precisely the drive to remain unscathed, on the part of that which is allergic to contamination, save by itself, auto-immunely” (Faith and Knowledge, p. 25). For Derrida, then, the problem with Heidegger’s and subsequent critiques of ontotheology, is that they thought the problem in the singular. Heidegger’s critique was limited only to that which pertains to belief or faith, while he sought to affirm the pure experience of the sacred (Faith and Knowledge, p. 62). What the critique amounted to was a simple “sacredness without belief” (Faith and Knowledge, p. 64). The critique first articulated by Levinas was along the opposite spectrum, “a faith in a holiness without sacredness” (Faith and Knowledge, p. 64). In conclusion, Derrida asks, “Why should there have to be more than one source? There would not have to be two sources of religion. There would be faith and religion, faith or religion, because there are at least two. Because there are, for the best and for the worst, division and iterability of the source. This supplement introduces the incalculable at the heart of the calculable” (Faith and Knowledge, p. 65). What Derrida has effectively done is contaminated religion and complicated the problem of ontotheology. It is a thinking that is effective because it rethinks the problem from the unquestioned origin of its analysis. It redraws the divide such that all those who thought themselves in the most profound disagreements discover the persistence of the problem and the futility of an absolute overcoming. If Derrida is correct, then the answer lies not in the simplification of the problem which seeks an out through the recourse to an unproblematized notion of philosophy or theology, but rather through the realization that contamination is the condition for thought and that overcoming is a never-ending complication. — 86 —

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Chapter Six

The Theological Turn

Part Two of this search for a non-dogmatic theology has thus far centered around the work of Martin Heidegger. Not only was it Heidegger who established the direction of much of contemporary philosophical and theological thought by his own distinctive (ontological) implementation of the method of phenomenological reduction, but also it was Heidegger who most directly identified the ontotheological problem as the crisis of the contemporary mind, and it was his efforts at overcoming ontotheology that, as Derrida implies, suggest that Heidegger might rightly pass for a theologian himself, in spite of his protestations to the contrary. But if Heidegger was a theologian, and if he can be read theologically, then it is certainly not a dogmatic theology that he is pursuing as he insists on the factually unknown and the structurally unknowable. In one sense, Heidegger succeeds in breaking free of the ontotheological circle because his thinking does not proceed from a known and certain faith to an authorized conclusion; on the contrary, it is a thinking that provides its own legitimization as it mines the fundaments of known or presumed intelligibilities in order to disclose the unknown and unknowable. In another sense, however, it is Heidegger who proves the impossibility of breaking free from the ontotheological circle, for as he analyzes the conditions of the ontotheological problem, he is drawn into two simultaneous discourses — he plays a dual role, both of the philosopher who prescribes the proper task and domain of theology, and of the theologian who writes in the masked language of the philosopher. To repeat the observation of Derrida’s: “With and without the word being, [Heidegger] wrote a theology with and without God. He did what — 87 —

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he said it would be necessary to avoid doing. He said, wrote, and allowed to be written exactly what he said he wanted to avoid.”1 Heidegger, the reluctant theologian, who unwittingly gives birth to a genuinely contemporary philosophical theology. And in the wake of Heidegger, enter two other reluctant (or if not reluctant, at least belated) theologians who together have helped shape at least two denominations of a genuinely postmodern religion — Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion. In 1997, at a conference on religion and postmodernism held at Villanova University, these two French thinkers publicly discussed their respective understandings of the nature of apophatic discourse. In the course of their discussion, a number of ironies became apparent, not the least of which was the affirmation from both that theological thinking functions on the “purely pragmatic” level — as if either pragmatism or theology could ever be “purely pure,” and as though these two almost prototypical French thinkers had somehow either appropriated or been converted to the distinctively American “evasion of philosophy.”2 Ironies notwithstanding, what will become apparent through their exchange is that the differences between Marion and Derrida do not represent choices either for or against religion respectively, but rather, two distinct denominations of religion in the spirit of postmodernism. Also, in terms of our search for a non-dogmatic theology, they help direct us to a future for theology in which the regulative principles that constitute the conditions of contemporary theological thinking is not that of predication, but rather a theological pragmatics. I. Phenomenology and Transcendence Before turning directly to the dialogue between Derrida and Marion, a brief discussion of what has been termed the “theological turn” of contemporary phenomenology is in order. The French phenomenologist, Dominque Janicaud, is credited with first raising the issue in his essay from 1991, entitled,”La tour— 88 —

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nant théologique de la phénoméologie française.”3 For Janicaud, the phenomenological “turn toward the theological” is a turning away from phenomenology, for “phenomenology and theology make two.” As stated by Bernard Prusak, the English translator of Janicaud’s essay, the essay should be read, therefore, as “a critique of and a polemic against what he [Janicaud] takes to be perversions of the phenomenological method for explicit or implicit theological ends.”4 Janicaud is deeply critical of thinkers such as Levinas, Marion, and Michel Henry, all representatives of the “second generation” of French phenomenology, and all of whom Janicaud accuses of co-opting phenomenology for theological ends and interests. Their shared quest for the “essence of phenomenality” is, again in the words of Prusak, “a violation of both the letter and the spirit of the phenomenological method,” for which Janicaud accuses them of “treason” against the phenomenological reduction.5 For instance, in explaining the “radical divergence” between Merleau-Ponty and Levinas with respect to the phenomenological method, Janicaud praises Merleau-Ponty for presupposing “nothing other than an untiring desire for elucidation of that which most hides itself away in experience,” while Levinas is criticized for supposing “a nonphenomenological, metaphysical desire.” Of Merleau-Ponty’s “intertwining” phenomenology, Janicaud writes, “Phenomenological, it remains so passionately, in that it seeks to think phenomenality intimately, the better to inhabit it. Intertwining excludes nothing, but opens our regard to the depth of the world.” This is in distinction from Levinas’ “aplomb,” which: supposes a metaphysico-theological montage, prior to philosophical writing. The dice are loaded and choices are made; faith rises majestically in the background…. All is acquired and imposed from the outset, and this all is no little thing: nothing less than the God of the biblical tradition. Strict treason of the reduction that handed over the transcendental I to its nudity, here theology is restored with its parade of capital letters.6

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In many ways, Janicaud’s critique hearkens back to Heidegger’s initial distinction between philosophy and theology in which his early strategy for overcoming ontotheology might first be discerned. As was discussed in the previous chapter, at this still early stage of Heidegger’s thinking, he asserts in his essay on “Phenomenology and Theology,” that “Our thesis, then, is that theology is a positive science, and as such, therefore, is absolutely different from philosophy.” As Janicaud would later say regarding phenomenology, here philosophy and theology make two, and as strictly a positive science, theology is beholden to the ontotheological problem in a way that philosophy is not. But recall also from the previous chapter the fundamental ambiguity that Heidegger’s thinking reveals about the ontotheological problem, and the fact that there is not a single, but at least a dual strategy for overcoming that may be discerned. In the first, thinking is described as a process of purification; and the task of both philosophy and theology is that they should remain distinct from one another. In the second, both philosophy and theology realize themselves to be circumscribed within the ontotheological condition, with the result that the task for thinking is no longer thought of as a process of purification, rather thinking is an ongoing complication through which identity is discovered in and through differences belonging together. The question this poses for Janicaud, then, is whether the pure identity that he ascribes to the phenomenological tradition is even a realistic or viable option. By tracing the trajectory of Heidegger’s thought, the answer to this question would seem to be no, as both the phenomenological and theological discourses are equally conditioned by, and complicit in, the ontotheological problem. Not only is this the conclusion we come to with Heidegger, but also with Husserl, the father of phenomenology and the original architect of phenomenology as a “rigorous science.” If anyone would support Janicaud’s contention that “phenomenology and theology make two” it would seem to be Husserl, who himself was extremely wary of Heidegger’s ontologizing of the — 90 —

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phenomenological method and the broader morphing of phenomenology into the school of existentialist philosophy. Yet what we see when tracing the development of Husserl’s thought is that the phenomenological reduction, when most thoroughgoing and effective, eventually moves through and beyond the purely apparent, through and beyond the things themselves to the very ground and condition of their appearance. This form of transcendental phenomenology is only one stage in the maturation of the phenomenological method, after which it is plagued by an even deeper crisis of the life-world, wherein the ideals and aims of phenomenology as a strict science come crashing in by the sheer weight of history and the historicity of meaning. Thus, by the time of Husserl’s Crisis writings, we hear even him say that “the dream is over,” by which he means the dream of a clear and distinct identity for phenomenological philosophy.7 Phenomenology has become historical, and thereby, the conditions for the “theological turn” have been set. Finally, one further point that seems lost on Janicaud and others who would still wish for the strict separation of phenomenology and theology, which suggests that their argument against the “theological turn” is largely misplaced. It is not, as Janicaud suggests, that God has somehow been smuggled into phenomenology (as Prusak writes, “[Janicaud] indicts Levinas et al. for corrupting the future of French philosophy by introducing into phenomenology a god — the biblical God — who does not belong there.”8 ), but rather that phenomenology has become theological. Not theological in the dogmatic or confessional sense, but, theological in the sense I have described previously, as a way of thinking in extremis; this is the “discovery” of theology that Deleuze speaks of as the “science of nonexisting entities,” the empty structure that does not require any commitment in advance, the purely formal theology that may, or may not, be filled with any specific beliefs (as Deleuze writes, “the form which may be filled with beliefs, but the structure has no need to be filled in order to be called ‘theological’”). This is the cumulative effect — 91 —

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of the phenomenological tradition, which has taught us that the hypothesis of God is unnecessary in order to think transcendence. Two points in support of this argument: (1) The vertical plane of thought, which was once the domain of theology and which once guaranteed the other in and of thought, has been reconfigured as a ‘plane of immanence’. This process of the reconfiguration or rearrangement of transcendence is described by the French philosopher, Luc Ferry, in his book entitled Man Made God, in which he analyzes modernity as a dual and intersecting process that he describes as “the humanization of the divine and the divinization of the human.”9 For Ferry, modern secularity, or more precisely, the secularization of the modern world, should not be understood somehow as the rejection, turning away, or moving beyond religion and theology. Instead, what Ferry describes is rather a process of displacement, through which the religious and the theological function in a no less decisive manner, even though now belated or deferred as the afterthought of a reflected meaning. For instance, in answering the question of what role remains for religion in the modern world, Ferry writes, “Here is what, I believe, the decisive significance of this ‘religious revolution’ comes down to: Without disappearing, the contents of Christian theology no longer come before ethics, to ground its truth, but come after it, to give it meaning. Human beings therefore no longer have to appeal to God in order to understand that they should respect others, should treat them as ends and not just means. Atheism and morality can in this way be reconciled.”10 What he is describing is a thoroughly secular worldview and a thoroughly humanistic ethic that still remains nevertheless somehow theological: “Even though apparently freed of any theological reference, they [modern secular moralities] nonetheless maintained an element of religiousness: the sacred and intangible character of duty, the idea of a radical dependence of human existence with regard to certain transcendent norms remained theological in essence, even when secularized.”11 For Ferry, it is essentially — 92 —

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theological because it is still concerned with transcendence, only now, a “transcendence in immanence,” a “transcendence within the limits of humanism,” or, to return to the language of Janicaud, a purely descriptive transcendence that belongs to and is ready made for the phenomenological method — a thoroughly reconfigured transcendence that no longer relies on, and that even can do utterly without, the God who once functioned as the transcendental signified. This is a transcendence without a transcendent. Again in Ferry’s words: Modernity is not so much rejecting transcendence as rearranging it to fit conditions stemming from the principle of refusing any argument from authority. Concern for otherness, so strongly affirmed in contemporary philosophy, thus also tends to take the form of a “religion of the other.” This sacralization of the human as such presupposes the move from what we could call a “vertical transcendence” (of things external to and higher than individuals, situated so to speak above them) to a “horizontal transcendence” (that of other human beings in relation to me).12 Ferry’s discussion of this ‘horizontal transcendence’ is similar to Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of what they term the ‘plane of immanence’, about which they write borrowing a traditionally theological formulation, “THE plane of immanence is, at the same time, that which must be thought and that which cannot be thought.”13 This plane of immanence “moves infinitely in itself;” it “envelops infinite movements that pass back and forth through it.” It is the image of thought in which thought finds its bearings and from which concepts, “like multiple waves, rising and falling,” are marked along the surface of the deep. Such a plane of immanence allows us to speak of transcendence without the anachronistic language of heights and depths — the plane of immanence as infinite dispersal, and thereby, even an exclusively immanent phenomenology has suffered what I am arguing is this theological becoming. — 93 —

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(2) The God who is ‘wholly other’ has been reconfigured as each and every other, and thus, the theo-logic and theo-rhetoric that once belonged to theology proper has been adopted by contemporary ethicists and philosophers alike in their attempt to account for the alterity that is common to ordinary human relationships. In at least one fashion, this is nothing more than the phenomenological principle of intentionality, which states that to be conscious, one must be conscious of something. Thus, even the supposed immediacy of self-consciousness implies an antecedent alterity. Borrowing language from Levinas as he discusses this principle in reference to Husserl, “every perception is perception of a perceived, every judgment is judgment of a state of affairs judged, every desire is a desire for a desired. This is not a correlation of words, but a description of phenomena.” Levinas continues, “Intentionality is the way for thought to contain ideally something other than itself.”14 This ‘other–than-itself’, which is the experience of alterity, means that the phenomenologist, even when confined to a strictly descriptive phenomenology, will evidence a structural parallel to that of the theologian. This does not mean, however, that the phenomenologist has become a theologian, though (and this is the argument that I mean to make) it might suggest an alternative understanding of a culturally credible and philosophically intelligible form of theological thinking. That is to say, as the phenomenological tradition endeavors to make claims of objective human experience, the analysis of transcendence as alterity provides the ‘empty structure’ that Deleuze speaks of, an ‘empty structure’ that is not yet, though may become theological in the dogmatic sense that worries those like Janicaud who are concerned with the integrity of the phenomenological method, and that is already a ‘purely formal’ theology that may or may not be filled with the determinative beliefs of a positive faith tradition. This theological becoming of phenomenology, therefore, far from a turning away, is more the consequence of the success of phenomenology in the reconfiguration of the theological — 94 —

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conceptual repertoire. In many ways, it could be said that phenomenology has actually won the day in deciding what is both theologically credible and intelligible, and thus, a relevant and meaningful contemporary theology will be one that lives in consequence of phenomenology.15 To reiterate, therefore, rather than speaking of a ‘theological turn’ within phenomenology, it might make better sense to talk of a theological becoming in the sense that much of contemporary phenomenology lives at the very point of its own limitation, actively seeks out the enlargement of its own tradition, and thereby, turns on (and to) the question of (and from) the Other. II. Theology and Pragmatism It is with this theological becoming in mind that we may now turn back to the dialogue between Derrida and Marion on the nature and function of apophatic discourse. It is interesting that the differences between Derrida and Marion have so often been pitted in the form of a contest, or as a matter of agreement and disagreement — as if the two could even care less. Even more so when one considers the matter of dispute — namely, that of “negative theology,” on whether there is such a thing, and if so, how it might be best named, which is certainly not to say most understood. For with “negative theology,” as both Derrida and Marion will attest, perhaps belatedly but no less assuredly, one passes beyond all forms of predication, whether in the affirmative or negative, and instead, passes into a form of discourse that is “purely pragmatic.”16 Such a pragmatic discourse, according to Marion, operates with “no ground, no essence, no presence.”17 Therefore, if such is the case, it follows that there is little or no ground for correction, but rather a constant negotiation of tastes refined and confirmed, of the metaphorics of prayer and praise, and, most importantly in this case, of a theo-logic which is neither apologetic, dogmatic, nor skeptical. A purely pragmatic discourse, — 95 —

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in other words, which offers no assurances. But with nothing stable and secure, it makes deciphering differences especially difficult. Such indecipherability, I might add, leaves the lengthy and highly specialized conversation between the one (Derrida), who as Caputo reminds us, “rightly passes for an atheist,”18 and the other (Marion), who is most certainly the most radical of all orthodox theologians, especially in need of clarification. As for the source of this needed clarification, the credit lies first with Caputo, who was the orchestrator and chief moderator of the 1997 Villanova conference. By bringing these two thinkers together, Caputo helped to specify and highlight the differences between them. This is accomplished first by the continued effort of Caputo’s, which began most prominently in his work, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida to counteract the prevailing myth of Derrida — which is, specifically, that as the progenitor of deconstruction, Derrida must therefore be against religion. Caputo makes the case, in contrast, that Derrida is in fact impassioned by religion, and that it is precisely this religious passion that is the neglected secret that has caused Derrida to be read less and less well throughout the years. To the extent that Caputo is correct in his reading of Derrida, this forces a reevaluation of the differences between Derrida and Marion. Put simply, it is not that the one is the enemy and the other the defender of religion. On the contrary, it might instead be the case that the severest critique is, and always has been, in service to faith, and that a faith that begins too sure of itself is left open to a critique it cannot withstand. Thus, because the matter is not a choice between religion or not (because both are ‘religious’, each in his own way), the matter is left open as to whom — Derrida, Marion, or someone entirely different — might best be suited to speak of and for religion in the spirit of postmodernism. Second, Caputo circles in on what he considers to be the most significant point of disagreement between the two thinkers, which traces back to the basic distinction from Husserl — 96 —

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“between ‘intention’ (meaning, signification) and ‘fulfillment’ (givenness).”19 Both Derrida and Marion agree that there is an intractable wedge between the one and the other, and that this wedge is the key to understanding Husserl’s inability to deliver on his dream of achieving phenomenology as a rigorous science. With Derrida, what this wedge means, or at least that to which he gives the most emphasis, is that in the play of language, there is intention without fulfillment. Thus, according to Derrida’s interpretation, thought is freed to think the impossible. With Marion, on the other hand, there is an overflow if givenness, which means that intention cannot contain fulfillment, or that there is fulfillment without intention. Thus, it is not that one thinks the impossible, but rather that the impossible gives rise to thought. In other words, between Derrida and Marion the order of exchange is reversed. Derrida moves from an epistemological statement of fact (e.g., the epistemological structure of unknowing, the structure of différance itself) to an ontological expectancy — a messianism without the messiah. With Marion, he moves from the ontological priority of the gift to an epistemological indeterminacy — theology as iconoclasm. Indeed, Caputo makes a compelling case that both are rightly considered “apostles of the impossible,” but it makes a difference how the impossible is imagined, whether as a striving or as the ground of impossibility. Caputo writes: Is the impossible lodged in a givenness that can never be intended or in an intention that can never be given. Depending on the answer, the transgression of the old Enlightenment, the movement beyond the constraints imposed by modernity’s conditions of possibility, the apology for the impossible, will take either of two very different forms which bear the proper names Marion and Derrida.20

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III. Apostles of the Impossible Thus we move from Caputo’s description of Marion and Derrida, to Marion and Derrida themselves, both of whom take advantage of the forum given to them to rehash and clarify their differences. Marion takes the lead by his analysis of what he considers to be Derrida’s mistaken presentation of “negative theology” in his 1980 essay, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.”21 This critical analysis comes in several different guises. Speaking as both logician and as historical exegete, Marion reminds the reader that the terms “negative theology” and “metaphysics of presence” should be read more as problems to be overcome than as descriptive concepts to be trusted. He explains: For neither the Alexandrian nor Cappadocian Fathers, nor Irenaeus nor Augustine, nor Bernard, Bonaventure, nor Thomas Aquinas — all of whom resort to negations when naming God and build a theory of this apophasis — none of them use the formula “negative theology.” As a result, it can reasonably be supposed that this formula is nothing but modern. Consequently, we will from now on no longer consider the phrases “metaphysics of presence” and “negative theology,” if by chance we have had to use them, as anything but conceptual imprecisions to be overcome or as questions awaiting answers — never as secure bases.22 Next, Marion takes on the role of the psychoanalyst, asking why, if nowhere present in the primary texts themselves, would Derrida take up “negative theology” as a theme to distinguish from deconstruction. Marion’s answer is that it is because “negative theology” presents deconstruction with its first and foremost rival. Thus, “for deconstruction, what is at issue in ‘negative theology’ is not first of all ‘negative theology’, but deconstruction itself, its originality and its final pre-eminence.”23 This, according to Marion, explains the need of deconstruction to deconstruct the claims of “negative theology,” even to the — 98 —

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point of employing a misnomer that purportedly distinguishes the ancient rival from that which is new to the scene. Derrida’s deconstruction of “negative theology,” in other words, is in fact a form of self-defense, which in archetypal fashion, replays the Oedipal complex with its own tragic consequences. It is in the explication of these consequences that Marion takes on his third and most urgent role, that of the Christian theologian. The issue at hand is whether what Derrida improperly refers to as “negative theology” remains a viable option. Having already questioned both the accuracy and justification of Derrida’s account, Marion next approaches his theme from a less defensive position, which gives him the needed space to develop a more proper understanding of Christian theology on its own terms, rather than those prescribed by the critic. “In short,” Marion asks, “can Christian theology as a theology evoked by Revelation remove itself in principle, if not in actual accomplishment, from the ‘metaphysics of presence’ — or is it, in the final analysis, reducible to this metaphysics? Which amounts to asking: Is Christian theology subject to deconstruction, or not?”24 Key to Marion’s answer to this all-important question is that apophasis is a part of a larger strategy “that includes not two but three elements…. The game is therefore not played out between two terms, affirmation and negation, but between three, different from and irreducible to each other.”25 It is for this reason that the term “negative theology” is a problem to be overcome, for “negative theology” is not strictly negative, but neither is it fundamentally affirmative. Such predicative terms simply do not apply. It is not a matter of saying or un-saying, or naming or un-naming. In Marion’s words, “It is solely a matter of de-nominating.”26 Such de-nomination does not fix the divine essence, because it “does not name him properly or essentially, but…marks his absence, anonymity, and withdrawal…. In this sense, praise in mystical theology would in the case of divine proper names only reproduce an aporia that is already unavoidable in the proper names of the finite world.”27 Finally, as a — 99 —

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“purely pragmatic” discourse, “it is no longer a matter of naming or attributing something to something, but of aiming in the direction of…, of relating to…, of comporting oneself towards…, of reckoning with… — in short, of dealing with…”28 Notice here that Marion’s description of Christian theology is working on two fronts simultaneously. Not only is he offering a corrective to what he considers to be Derrida’s misreading, but he is also offering a subtle challenge to those who would wish for theology a self-confidence of which it is not capable. What I have in mind here is John Milbank’s critique of Marion, in which he accuses Marion, finally, of a radical indeterminacy which leaves Christian theology with no essential presence to be felt, or, as Marion himself voices this critique: “goodness remains undetermined and, in any case, without essential impact.”29 For Marion, however, this is how it should be when one considers Christian theology as purely pragmatic discourse. That is because “it is no longer a matter of saying something about something, but of a pragmatics of speech, more subtle, risky, and complex. . . . It is no doubt no longer a matter of saying but of hearing, since according to the conventional etymology that Dionysius takes from Plato, bountiful beauty bids.”30 Therefore, what Marion offers is a theological check against both radical skepticism, which he sees in Derrida, and radical orthodoxy, which is the perspective that stands behind Milbank’s critique. Neither gives proper articulation to what Marion considers as a whole tradition of a theology of absence.31 In this way, Derrida’s critique of “negative theology” — namely, that it is an effort to save the name of God — is misplaced, because if Marion is correct, “the theologian’s job is to silence the Name and in this way let it give us one.”32 The name of God is not at issue, except to the extent that the idolatrous namings of God by those who confuse theology with metaphysics bars one from the encounter with the God who is without being, and without even a proper name we could call his own. So too is Milbank’s critique off the mark, because God is not in need of human in— 100 —

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tervention. In fact, Marion suggests the relationship is precisely reversed, which is to say that humans stand as the recipients of that which cannot be named, but instead, only de-nominated. Such de-nomination, furthermore, leads to the purely pragmatic speeches of prayer and praise, which is the third way beyond either affirmation or negation. Recall that it was earlier stated that the differences between Derrida and Marion should not be posed as matters of agreement or disagreement. This is crucial in appreciating Derrida’s response to Marion’s critique, which is essentially one of agreement on virtually all points of contention. For instance, like Marion, Derrida agrees that “negative theology” is more a problem to be treated than a reference to a unified field of discourse. Like Marion, Derrida agrees with the importance of the third way, which evidences the purely pragmatic function of language. Derrida also agrees with Marion’s point about de-nomination, by which Derrida means “the question of the name and of the name of God, as the proper name which is never proper.”33 Furthermore, Derrida repeatedly points back to his own texts in which he has shown sympathy, and dare I say, even understanding, of these various dimensions to both religious discourse and the theological tradition. With such apparent good will, agreement, and regard from Derrida, the reader might be fooled into thinking Derrida had nothing either to add or to take away from Marion’s account of apophasis. Such is not the case, however. On the contrary, while there might be general agreement on the meanings of terms and the problems to be considered, even structural agreement on the nature and telos of the strategy of apophasis, on the purely pragmatic level — which, recall, both Marion and Derrida have agreed is the true gist of the matter — they are more like ships passing in the night. Pragmatics, for Marion, means a concrete, embodied, and incarnate discourse that emerges from a specific paradigm of ritualized activity, liturgical language, and/or ecclesiastical structure of authority. In God Without Being, for in— 101 —

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stance, the very heart of the work is a chapter on the “eucharistic site of theology,” in which the conclusion is drawn that “only the bishop merits, in the full sense, the title of theologian.” (italics Marion’s) 34 And from the present critical essay being considered, Derrida detects repeated references made by Marion to baptism as the (proper?) paradigm for understanding the structure of what Marion means by de-nomination. According to Derrida’s tastes, this structure lacks the universality or formality that he would desire. Perhaps one way of understanding Derrida’s distaste would be that he considers Marion’s pragmatics, at its best, only conditional. This conditional pragmatics, then, would stand in marked contrast to the purely pragmatic discourse that both Marion and Derrida ‘agree’ is the desideratum. Marion’s response confirms this point of difference. He expresses gratitude for Derrida’s “general agreement,” and admits that they are working within a shared problematic. Nevertheless, according to Marion’s tastes which are born out through his reading of Christian theological texts, the matters of agreement are too formal and they lack the specificity required of a truly pragmatic discourse. By definition, in other words, pragmatics must be incarnated, which, from a Christian perspective, would mean not only fully conditional, but also paradoxically, fully universal. A scandal no less than the stumbling block which first divided the Jewish hope from the Christian conviction. Finally, then, what remains from this conversation on denominating the name of God, are at least two denominations of postmodern religion and theology. The one follows the structure of religion as faith, driven by a hope and expectation by that which is not yet come. By its universality, it attests to a common need and desire for a justice still lacking. If rightly called a denomination at all, it is a wandering and diasporic one, which has felt the brunt of violence and rests unsettled in any given homeland of its own. The other follows the structure of religion as fulfillment, culmination, and conviction. By its universality, it attests to a surplus of meaning, which cannot be contained — 102 —

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by any single denomination, nor properly named by any single term. It is an overflowing denomination, full of great paradoxes and internal flexibility, in the world, but not of it, concrete, and thereby, also universal. The first is an indeterminate (non-dogmatic) phenomenological theology — a purely descriptive phenomenology that eventually exposes the ultimate incapacity of pure description to describe the conditions of its own possibility, and thus gives way to a searching, malleable, and hoping form of theological pragmatism. The second is also a phenomenological theology, but one that is already determined by a concrete historical tradition — a phenomenological theology of revelation that simultaneously describes a need left vacant by the evacuation of being and the death of God, and announces that need always already met by the over-abundant, infinitely self-giving love of God. And so too is contemporary philosophical theology left divided between an emerging secular theology and a return to orthodoxy

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Part Three

Theology at the Margins

Jeffrey W. Robbins

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Chapter Seven

The Enlightenment at the Margins

Opposition is true Friendship — William Blake

In searching for a non-dogmatic theology, we are also exploring the contemporaneous. In the Introduction, the contemporary milieu was described in terms of a series of tensions, with perhaps the most obvious being a global increase in religious militancy together with a growing appreciation of religious diversity and secularity. Scholars within the field of Religious Studies have described this both in terms of the ‘return’ or ‘end’ of religion, and have developed elaborate theories of fundamentalism, pluralism, and secularism that would presumably describe to ourselves the current state that we are in. A similar effort has driven much of contemporary cultural theory, with the most pressing questions centering around the legacy of the Enlightenment and its shaping of the modern and postmodern worlds. This chapter will step back into the period of the Enlightenment in order to better understand the spirit of critique, which not only can be discerned in the most prominent thinkers of the age, but also in those who stood in the margins of the Enlightenment, those who are not easy to assimilate into the dominant Enlightenment paradigm, the radical visionaries who provide for us an alternative version of modernity. This sketch of the Enlightenment at the margins, therefore, will provide a more ecumenical reading of the modern roots of our present age, and thereby, will also serve our effort of rethinking the conditions and possibilities of contemporary theological thought. — 107 —

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I. What is Enlightenment? What is Enlightenment? At the end of the age of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant was asked this question. His answer: enlightenment is the release from self-imposed tutelage; it is the release that comes through the daring to know.1 Enlightenment as release, however, as Kant knew well, is different from an enlightened age, or even for that matter, from an age of Enlightenment. The enlightenment of which Kant speaks centers on the individual and his or her ability to transcend the circumstances of history. It is an historical transcendence that is also a self-transcendence and that paradoxically discovers the self as free only as there is the simultaneous discovery of the self as historically conditioned and morally obligated. For Kant, therefore, the answer to the question of enlightenment comes through the reflection on the present and the freedom the individual discovers once situated in the fundamental contingency of existence. In a response to Kant’s essay on the Enlightenment, Michel Foucault argues that Kant’s rallying cry, “Dare to know!” is the emblematic phrase of the Enlightenment as an attitude that is not confined to an historical period. Enlightenment, Foucault writes, “has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibilities of going beyond them.”2 For Foucault, then, enlightenment is a critical attitude that is both an historical analysis and a transgressive experiment. This critical attitude, Foucault argues, while not confined to a particular historical epoch, is nevertheless the singular achievement of eighteenth-century thought. The “dare to know,” therefore, is an age that is even more an attitude that culminates in the radicality of a pervasive criticism turned back on itself. From science, to religion, to politics, and beyond, no form of institutional or intellectual life was left unchallenged. — 108 —

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Yet what becomes of a movement that ends with an attitude that subjects its revolutionary beginnings to questions? One response, suggested by Foucault, is that the end of the Enlightenment is not its end, that as long as questions persist, together with the longing they embody, the age of Enlightenment, which remains only an anticipation of an enlightened age, perseveres as the ghost of the contemporary consciousness. Like Raschke’s description of the “end of theology” as a redefinition of the conditions of possibility for theology, the Enlightenment also continually ends with a reconsideration of its beginning, a rethinking of its present, and by that daring attitude envisions a more promising future. It is surely with this spirit in mind that even Jacques Derrida, the progenitor of deconstruction and the one whom many consider to be the father of postmodernism, proclaims himself still to be an enlightenment thinker.3 In this way, postmodernism can be seen not as a rejection of modernity, but rather its extension and complexification, and the critique of the Enlightenment as betraying a more fundamental commitment to the critical attitude that is, at least according to Foucault, the Enlightenment. Thus the enduring legacy of the Enlightenment, along with the inescapable constraint it imposes for all future thought. Even in the criticisms lodged by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, their hermeneutics of suspicion might still be seen as the last efforts of those committed to the Enlightenment paradigm of philosophies of consciousness. So perhaps the only way to get beyond is to go before, to look back to the overlooked ‘counter’ figures from this same period, those early critics who suspected their contemporaries of being swept away by the rhetoric and enthusiasm of modernity, its myth of progress, its overconfidence in reason, its reliance on technology, etc. Two such counter-Enlightenment figures are the English poet, artist, and engraver, William Blake (1757-1827), and the Italian rhetorician and philosopher, Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). The visionary Blake looked towards the future by fashioning a radically new — 109 —

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mythology through which he was able to voice and envision an alternative present of his own making. Vico, on the other hand, reconstructed a history, which rendered the taken-for-granted present as a contingent after-effect of structural possibilities. In Foucault’s terms, Blake is the transgressive experimentalist looking forward to the world as possibility, while Vico is the historical analyst looking backward in the search for origins. 1. William Blake: The Transgressive Experimentalist William Blake does not fit the expected profile of an Enlightenment thinker. For much of his life he lived in poverty. He survived on the money he earned not as a writer or an artist, but as a tradesman. He was self-taught. And at the time of his marriage, his wife could neither read nor write. Blake’s poetry did not enjoy a wide readership during his lifetime. He lived in relative obscurity in a city that had grown strange to him by the spread of industry. But more than any thing else, Blake’s existence was one of isolation, an isolation that Alfred Kazin describes as “absolute.” “It was the isolation of a mind that sought to make the best of heaven and earth, in the image of neither. It was isolation of a totally different kind of human vision; of an unappeasable longing for the integration of man, in his total nature, with the universe.” Kazin continues: Blake was a lyric poet interested chiefly in ideas, and a painter who did not believe in nature. He was a commercial artist who was a genius in poetry, painting, and religion. He was a libertarian obsessed with God; a mystic who reversed the mystical pattern, for he sought man [sic] as the end of his search. He was a Christian who hated the churches; a revolutionary who abhorred the materialism of the radicals. He was a drudge, sometimes living on a dollar a week, who called himself ‘a mental prince’; and was one.4

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In genuine Blakean fashion, Kazin focuses on the inner man of Blake, his imagination, his vision, which set him apart, and which secluded him in an absolute isolation of his own making. While isolated, indeed, Blake was never completely cut off, for the particular world, culture, and city in which he lived would prove to have an indelible effect on his life and thought.5 That city was London during the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The culture was at the peak of the Age of Reason, the most radical of times when the Enlightenment attitude had come into its own and given birth to a revolutionary spirit that shook the very social and political foundations of the Western world. Blake’s world was described by Dickens in the famous opening line of The Tale of Two Cities as the best and worst of times. It was a time of great economic prosperity, the growth of industry and the wealth of nations. Art flourished with the musical genius of Beethoven, the creation of the novel, and monumental works in philosophy. Simultaneously, people were uprooted from their homes and moved to the great cities were jobs were scarce, housing inadequate, and disease and poverty rampant. The spread of industry had transformed the landscape right before Blake’s eyes. Blake lived in a time and in a city that was at the center of it all. Thus, while his isolation was due in great part to his unique imaginative vision, his experience in that particular world and culture funded his mind with the images and ideas that could not help but to inform his life and work.6 Blake was in the world but not of it, and his art and poetry betray a longing for a vision that would make this world his home. That longing found expression in at least three ways. First, Blake saw poetry as that which gives expression to the prophetic, the expansive, and the true. Poetry is creative; it speaks the truth of the infinite desire of the inner life of the human. It is not bound by experience, but instead, through its vision, it renders experience infinite. Poetry speaks the direct truth of humanity, but it is a truth from which the human is cut off and bound by — 111 —

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the self-imposed limits of the senses, by the particular dogmatisms of rationalism and empiricism that had infected and constricted the age with their shared strictly scientific mindset. In the work entitled, “There is no Natural Religion,” Blake writes, “If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character the Philosophic and Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things, and stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again.”7 But as Blake’s poetic vision testifies, the world of experience is not confined to the same again and again, because there is a perception that is “more than sense…can discover.”8 This more than sense is the measure of poetry. It is that which continues to cry “More! More!” — hoping for satisfaction, giving name to desire, layering name upon name in an ever-expanding accumulation that finally bears forth the truth that “less than All cannot satisfy Man.”9 For Blake, poetry sees the infinite and the poetic vision allows humanity to see itself. Poetry, then, is a creation that is also a revealing of the inner sense hid by a world more and more determined by industry. Poetry is creation that is prophetic because it speaks the truth of the unlimited human longing for the infinite. This poetry is also a philosophy of life as it sets itself up in juxtaposition to what Blake perceived as the life-denying practices and thought patterns of the modern world Second, Blake’s longing for a world that would be his home is expressed by his attempt at achieving a unity of creation. It is a unity that joins word and image, image and color, and creation and craftsmanship. In fact, more than anything else, it is this achievement of Blake that sets him against the stream of the Enlightenment. As Jean Hagstrum makes this point: Blake’s rejection of enlightened Europe is expressed in poem, design, fiery epigram, and angry comments on the margins of books…. Though it is nowhere reasoned out, it is not therefore intellectually despicable. Quite the contrary, Blake’s position has living nerve and muscle, that bind all its members together in organic unity… — 112 —

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

But though Blake’s rejection of the Enlightenment is conceptually firm and consistent, it is his artistic embodiment of meaning that ought to command the attention of the twentieth century. For even though we may reject Blake’s rejection on philosophical grounds, his achievement as poet-painter is inescapable.10 What Blake achieved in the unity of his creation was the embodiment of his highly stylized, richly textured vision. As has already been said, Blake’s poetic words were creative and revelatory at once, and not by chance but by intention, an intentionality that was only reinforced by the prints that housed the words on pages of rich colors, concrete images, and elaborate, intricate, and imaginative designs, apart from which the words would be incomplete. As Kazin writes, “Blake was artist and poet; he designed his poems to form a single picture.”11 We have, then, poem as picture, together with creation and revelation. In Blake’s poems, that were also images that were designed by himself and products of his own craftsmanship, there is a longing for a unity that, like the isolation of a man set apart from his time, was absolute. The beauty of his creation lies in the unity achieved between poem and craft. This unity expresses Blake’s longing for completion, his peculiarly theological desire for the infinite. Like name layered on name, image is piled on image, page after page, until finally even the most stubborn reader is forced to acknowledge that something other, something more, is going on in Blake’s works. The unity of the other of word and image, art and craft, genius and skill, is the more of the senses that recalls us again to that inner sense which exposes humanity to its infinite longing for nothing more or less than the all. The pages of Blake’s books are each distinctive components in the creation of a world. In this world of Blake’s creation, there is a profound inner-relatedness that builds upon itself to the point of its completion. But this unity of creation that strives for completion was not for its own sake, but rather windows that opened up one’s vision to the world. In Blake, therefore, worlds — 113 —

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were created as windows, but only for the sake of the world. “He wrote and drew,” Kazin writes, “as he lived, from a fathomless inner window, in an effort to make what was deepest and most invisible capturable by the mind of man. Then he used the thing created — the poem, the picture, joined in their double vision — as a window in itself, through which to look to what was still beyond. ‘I look through the eye,’ he said, ‘not with it.’”12 Blake fashioned both poetry and craft, and more specifically the unity achieved between the two, as a heuristic device, as a tool for both critique and enchantment, as they give voice to both a specific longing and a certain harmony already achieved. Third, like the unity of his creation, Blake also perceived the unity of the religious. Blake sees religion as the meeting ground of innocence and experience, good and evil, reason and energy, and God as well as the devil. Religion is that which incorporates this disparity into a unity while maintaining the distinctiveness of each particular. It is the tension of the concrete that can never be resolved by a sublation, an erasure, or a privileging of any sort. As Harold Bloom describes: His doctrine of image of contraries is his own, and the analogues in Heraclitus or in Blake’s own contemporary, Hegel, are chiefly interesting as contrasts. For Heraclitus, Good and Evil were one; for Blake they were not the inseparable halves of the same thing, but merely born together, as Milton had believed. For Hegel, opposites were raised to a higher power when they were transcended by synthesis; for Blake, opposites remained creative only so long as each remained immanent.13 Religion is the marriage between Heaven and Hell, a marriage, like any marriage, that is not without strife. As Blake notes, “Jesus Christ did not wish to unite, but to separate them, as in the Parable of sheep and goats! and he says: ‘I came not to send Peace, but a Sword.’”14 By Blake’s vision of religion, we find ourselves situated in the space between God and the devil, in

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between the pull and drag of good and evil, where neither reason nor passion is given the final say. Where we stand now, the Devil speaks and we listen, because “energy is eternal delight.”15 But so too does God, and we listen, and respond. That response itself is a creation by its creative refashioning of a world that has grown strange by the confines of a culture that makes a single way the ratio of all. The religious vision of Blake is the unity of extremes, the forward looking progression of contraries so that opposites may find their place. Blake’s religious vision can be seen as an anticipation of our current age of pluralism in which the critical theological issue is not the straightforward matter of the scientific explication of faith, a simple matter of making plain what is already known or at least believed without question, as if belief could ever be so clear and certain as to translate into dogmatism, but rather the much more difficult issue of negotiation amongst competing claims and convictions, the urgency of co-existence. Perhaps Blake can even be read as a precursor to deconstruction, by transcending and negating the root of his self-constructed antinomies. Blake’s is a richly textual and densely material world, a world in which the dogmatism of his own age does not measure up to the full weight of his exhaustingly concrete vision. And it is a world in which religion is most especially suited to be the one (“tho’ infinitely various”) true receptacle of this poetic genius. 2. Giambattista Vico: The Historical Analyst Almost all Vichian scholars would agree that at the time of Vico’s death his efforts to engage and redirect the intellectual currents of his time had, in the words of Mark Lilla, “ended in bitter, embarrassing failure.”16 Lilla continues, “He died at home in poverty and obscurity, a provincial curiosity having left no apparent trace on the European thought of his time.”17 But between the time of Vico’s death and now, many of his ideas that at the time might have appeared patently extravagant, if not ut— 115 —

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terly counter-intuitive, have since become commonplace. His life and fate, therefore, as Isaiah Berlin describes: provide perhaps the best of all known examples of what is too often dismissed as a romantic fiction — the story of a man of original genius, born before his time, forced to struggle in poverty and illness, misunderstood and largely neglected in his lifetime and…all but totally forgotten after his death. Finally, when after many years he is at last exhumed and acclaimed by an astonished nation as one of its greatest thinkers, it is only to be widely misrepresented and misinterpreted, and even today to be accorded less than his due, because the anagnorisis has come too late, and during the century that followed his death ideas similar to his were better expressed by others, while he is best remembered for the least original and valuable of his doctrines.18 Among his accomplishments are innovations in the realms of natural law and jurisprudence, aesthetics, and the philosophy of mathematics. “More than this,” Berlin writes, “Vico virtually invented a new field of social knowledge, which embraces social anthropology, the comparative and historical studies of philology, linguistics, ethnology, jurisprudence, literature, mythology, in effect the history of civilization in the broadest sense.”19 He has been credited as a forerunner to Dilthey, Herder, Hegel, Durkheim, Weber, and Freud, among many others. He was among the first to engage in a comparative mythology, and his New Science, which is the crowning achievement of his life’s work, can be and is still read as a contemporary philosophy of language.20 With such a rich, varied, and so often neglected and confused legacy, there might be, as Berlin points out, “a permanent temptation to read too much into him, especially to sense intimations, perceive embryonic forms and prefigured contours of notions dear to the interpreter himself.”21 John Milbank voices a similar concern, stating that “one can perceive another pair of — 116 —

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opposite dangers in Vico-interpretation. The first is to see him simply as an ‘interesting’ precursor of various later intellectual trends. The second, reacting against this, is to reduce Vico’s thought to the problematic contexts from whence it emerged.”22 Milbank’s own way through this impasse is by reading Vico as providing “an alternative version of modernity,” one that is both pre-modern and post-modern simultaneously, and one in which its “coherence might place in question our ideas about what counts as coherent.”23 This final point is the chief value in reading Vico according to Milbank’s perspective, for by understanding the coherency of Vico’s alternative version of modernity, we, like Vico, might overcome the polar extremes of skepticism and dogmatism that emerge out of the Enlightenment. Let it be made clear, therefore, that our search for a nondogmatic theology is not to be confused with Vico’s efforts to formulate a new science that would counteract the modern dogma of rationalism. For Vico, his eventual primary target was Descartes, specifically Descartes’ assimilation of all knowledge to mathematical and physical models. Similar to the effect of Hume on Kant’s development of a transcendental philosophy, Vico at first accepted Cartesian rationalism as liberation from scholastic philosophy and theology; it was his own awakening from a certain ‘dogmatic slumber’. But eventually this acceptance turned to rebellion and revolt to the point that, by the time of the writing of the New Science, Descartes was seen, again in the words of Berlin, as “the great deceiver, whose emphasis on knowledge of the external world as the paradigm of all knowledge [had] set philosophy on a false path.”24 The task Vico set for himself, therefore, was the recovery of a more historical ground of truth, a ground of truth obscured though still contained within all “vulgar” traditions, truth that had been “preserved by entire peoples over long periods of time.”25 Learning from Vico’s own effort at recovery, therefore, my hope is that we can perhaps use Vico as a model in our own effort to recover the ground of theological truth from what might be described as its “vulgar” dogmatism. — 117 —

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In the analysis of Vico that follows, we will focus on three insights that find expression in Vico’s New Science: (1) Like Blake, Vico’s New Science places a special emphasis on poetry. In the case of both Blake and Vico, this represents a counter-trend to the Enlightenment’s valorization of reason. Unlike Blake, Vico himself is not a poet, but rather a historian who sees in poetry a hermeneutical key that allows for understanding in the search for origins. (2) Like Blake, Vico understands that, in order for the understanding to be complete, it must incorporate what Blake calls the ‘more of sense.’ Again, this runs counter to the Enlightenment and its trust in the sciences. And in distinction from Blake, while Blake stresses the unity of understanding through the unity of his creation, Vico stresses the unity of the understanding through the unity of interpretation that incorporates the vast array of forms of cultural and institutional life. (3) Like Blake, Vico gives priority to the importance of religion. While many during the period of the Enlightenment were attacking religion as the purveyor of superstition and dogmatism, both Blake and Vico understood it as fundamental in the creation of meaning. In fact, both could be said to use religion as a tool against the specific dogmatism and superstition that plagued the modern age, which was, namely, the Enlightenment faith in Reason. The first issue, therefore, is the question of Vico and poetry, which is wrapped up in the broader category of Vico and language, which itself is tied to Vico’s understanding of the periods of human history. For Vico, and this is why he might still be read as a contemporary philosopher of language, language is historical. It is made in history even as it carries with it the history of its own making. According to Vico’s schematism of human history, which he borrows from the ancient Egyptians, history is divided into three distinct periods: (1) the age of Gods, (2) the age of heroes, and (3) the age of humanity. With each period of history, there is a corresponding language: (1) the mute language of signs and physical objects, (2) the language of similitudes, com— 118 —

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parisons, images, and metaphors, and (3) the ordinary language of public discourse.26 By utilizing this periodization of history and its corresponding understanding of language, Vico has already complicated the task of the interpretation of historical texts. Now what is required for the particular understanding of a given text is the more general understanding of the historical period in which it was written and to which it was addressed. In other words, Vico has raised the question of hermeneutics and has anticipated the post-Enlightenment concern with the circular nature of history and interpretation. By this rather sophisticated understanding of history as hermeneutics, Vico brings the reader to the controlling methodology of his new science — namely, “Doctrines must take their beginning from that of the matters of which they treat.”27 This methodology itself rests on an even more basic understanding of the nature of reality, which Vico asserts when he writes, “Things do not settle or endure out of their natural state.”28 To the extent that this principle shares with modern philosophy a common effort to determine the all-important starting point, which for Vico means the natural beginnings of language, history and humanity, he can still be understood as a thinker reflecting the spirit of his times, but where he differs is his particular use and understanding of the ‘natural state’. For Vico, nature tells the story of its origins, and thus, the ‘natural state’ is a perpetual becoming. As a search for origins, therefore, Vico’s new science is a search that traces back through the history of language to the origins out of which language and humanity first came to be. This is a material history and a historical language that also tells the story of the whole history of human relations and that includes the reflection on the “public moral institutions or civil customs, by which the nations have come into being and maintain themselves in the world.”29 Where, then, does language, and by implication, all of human history, begin? The first language corresponding to the age of the gods was the mute, hieroglyphic language that was — 119 —

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communicated exclusively by the exchange of physical objects and the signs of bodies in relation with one another. The original language, then, was no language at all if one understands by language the possibility of verbal communication. What the original language did accomplish was to situate bodies of people together; it began the creation of the world of human institutions, and also set in motion the making of the human. Interestingly, according to Vico, before language as verbal communication there were nations, conceived of as bodies of people mutually dependent upon one another through the structures of institutions. Language as words comes only after the founding of nations. As Vico says, there are laws before there are letters,30 and “the order of ideas must follow the order of institutions.”31 Language is not only historical, but it is also material, indicating a pre-originary form of communication heavy with the weight of concrete, historical bodies struggling for survival. Vico’s philosophy of language is a reading of human history against the grain of logocentrism. What follows the birth of the nations is the birth of the spoken language, now tranformed by its different means of communication. Language is no longer mute, but finds verbal expression in similitudes, comparisons, images, and metaphors. Language is now symbolic and finds its beginning in poetry. That poetry was the original spoken language is the hermeneutical key that opened the door for understanding in Vico’s search for origins. He writes of its importance: We find that the principle of these origins both of languages and of letters lies in the fact that the first gentile peoples, by a demonstrated necessity of nature, were poets who spoke in poetic characters. This discovery, which is the master key of this Science, has cost us the persistent research of almost all our literary life, because with our civilized natures we [moderns] cannot at all imagine and can understand only by great toil the poetic nature of these first men.32

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When reading Vico on the importance of understanding the poetic nature, one is reminded of Blake and his implicit critique of the limited and limiting empiricism of the modern age. For both Vico and Blake, the poetic word is marked by the vitality of the power of creation. It is poetry that expands the strictly empirical notion of sense, which breaks free from the ordinary and points to possibilities otherwise unimagined. The difference between Vico and Blake on this point is that Vico situates the poetic word at the beginning of human history, but a beginning that has never left and never ended. For Vico, poetry is a perpetual becoming that testifies to the original inspiration of our common human origins. The importance of poetry for Vico is that the appreciation of the poetic nature of human origins lends understanding to the continuity of history and provides the possibility of finding a common ground in spite of the diversity of languages, cultures, and institutions. And by attending to the poetry that is carried forward even in our contemporary discourse, we acknowledge that that which is known does not exhaust that which is possible, nor even does it fully explain that which came before, and that which has since been forgotten or obscured. Like Blake, Vico seeks to expand human understanding and, to a certain extent, this effort necessitates a transgression of the confines of an Enlightenment epistemology. For Blake, this transgression comes in the form of the unity of his creation — that is, the bringing together of word and image in the pages of the books put together by his own craftsmanship. For Vico, there is a unity and bringing together of a different sort, one that challenges the most fundamental notion of the philosophies of the Enlightenment — namely, the thinking self as self-evident.33 Beginning with Descartes, philosophy had taken on a new trajectory, from philosophies of being to philosophies of consciousness. Through Descartes’ method of doubt, all knowledge was rendered questionable except for the knowledge of the self, — 121 —

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which Descartes described as a thing that thinks. After Descartes, the thinking self becomes the arbiter of reality and the foundation from which knowledge of any sort is even possible. Epistemology becomes the central and prevailing concern of Enlightenment philosophies and the quest for a philosophical ground that is stable and secure shapes all that follows. Vico, however, is alert to the dominance of this line of thinking, as he is also equally alert to the self-contradiction it entails. In his autobiography he writes of Descartes, “The rule and criterion of truth is to have made it. Hence the clear and distinct idea of the mind not only cannot be the criterion of other truths, but it cannot be the criterion of that of the mind itself; for while the mind apprehends itself, it does not make itself, and because it does not make itself it is ignorant of the form or mode by which it apprehends itself.”34 To put Vico’s point in language more consistent with the New Science, if the self as mind is the arbiter of reality, what becomes of the self — and by extension, reality — when the human is conceived of not only as maker, but also as being made by his or her participation in the forms of institutional life? Vico describes his project as a search for origins, as the determination of things in their natural state. Also, he states again and again the importance the beginning plays in the nature of things. That the beginning of human beings reveals a becoming of humanity shows the fundamental inadequacy of a Cartesian anthropology by rendering the philosophical ground once thought stable, secure, and indubitable as an after-thought of the whole of human history. The historical character of humanity is that it is in history that humans find their origin and through history that humans participate in the fashioning of the world. In the words of Patrick Hutton: “History is our lot, not our way to salvation. To put it another way, our destiny is to strive to be reconciled to our history. While we cannot free ourselves from the struggles in which we are historically immersed, history gives us the freedom to cre— 122 —

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ate a human world in the process. Thus, Vico reaffirmed the historical character of the human condition.”35 What Vico has accomplished is the resituating of the human within a complex web of human relationships. He has demonstrated the truth of the human as both the maker and product of history. And he has shown that the reason the human is, is because nature is always becoming natural as humanity interacts with the forms of its institutional and cultural life that originally gave it birth. Finally, we have come to the question of Vico and religion. Like Blake, Vico has neither a simple notion of religion as morality, nor a conception of God uncomplicated by the vicissitudes of history. For Vico, religion is that which remains at the end of his backward search for origins. Religion was the first of the three human institutions.36 The religious language of fables and myths was the original language of poetry. Religion is humanity’s immediate nature by its proximity to human origins. Religion, like poetry, is formed by the passions and comes before philosophical reflection. Religion, through the poetic word, gives sense to the human race, without which human existence would simply be meaningless.37 And finally, it is “religion alone [that] has the power to make us practice virtue…. And piety sprang from religion, which properly is fear of divinity.”38 Why is it that religion is given this privileged status in Vico’s New Science? Because for Vico, only religion can account for the uniformity of human history. Indeed, for Vico, his concept of God “is naught else than eternal order.”39 Vico has chronicled a diversity of human origins, and yet still claims a common ground that unites them all, a common ground that must be of divine ordering. The proof of such an ordering is in the structure of human history that continually reoccurs in spite of the variances and particularities of a given history: for a divine argument which embraces all human institutions, no sublimer proofs can be desired than the

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[three] just mentioned: the naturalness [of the means], the [unfolding institutive] order [in which they are employed], and the end [thereby served], which is the preservation of the human race.40 This common ground, this universal structure, is what he calls religion. The importance of religion is the importance of its place in the beginnings of humanity. It brings us again to the controlling methodology with which we began our study of Vico — namely, that doctrines must begin where the matters they treat begin. The matter of Vico’s New Science is the becoming of human beings, thus the search for human origins through a history as hermeneutics. The end result of such a method is the practice of wisdom, “since wisdom,” Vico writes, “in its broad sense is nothing but the science of making use of things as their nature dictates.”41 Religion dictates human nature by its being the original sense of a humanity always becoming. II. Towards a Modern Non-Dogmatic Theology We have said that the Enlightenment is an attitude that critically reflects on the present through the means of transgressive experimentation and historical analysis. William Blake and Giambattista Vico are two figures during the age of the Enlightenment that do not quite fit the dominant sensibility. Yet both demonstrated not only the dare to know, but even more, the dare to create, the dare to fashion and refashion the world in which they were situated. Blake’s creation was through poetry, art, and craft. He transgressed the Enlightenment divide between empiricism and rationalism by giving body to his words through image and color. There was unity to his work that exposed a longing for a more complete accounting of the human condition, one free from, among other things, the confines of industrialization and urbanization. That longing also found expression in Blake’s fashioning of a mythology

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through which one finds images of a world more hospitable to an isolated genius. Vico’s creation was achieved in his search for origins by the means of his hermeneutics of history. Through this hermeneutics, Vico discovered the origins of humanity in institutions and cultures, and thus paved the way for a renewed appreciation of the historical character of humanity. Key to this discovery was the realization that poetry was the original spoken language, and that the ancient poetry gives expression to the beginnings of humanity in religion. For Vico, the beginning of a thing determines its nature, because the beginning is an ongoing becoming. That the nature of the Enlightenment is best expressed in its daring attitude reminds us of its possibility continually to recreate itself as it anticipates alternative futures and refashions the making of its past. That Blake and Vico run counter to much of what one expects when one thinks of the Enlightenment, only recalls us again to question the nature of the Enlightenment’s beginning. That Vico renders Descartes beginning as an afterthought of historical possibilities points to the possibility of a different future for the Enlightenment, a future, perhaps, that might give those like Blake and Vico a home, and that might provide a less dogmatic and more creative and historical ground to modern theology. Thus, while both Blake and Vico are historically situated in the period of the Enlightenment, each in his own way questions the unified spirit of the age, and by questioning the Enlightenment, each also provides a resource for rethinking contemporary theology. For instance, in his study of the radical Christian vision of Blake, the death-of-God theologian Thomas Altizer writes that Blake “created a whole new form of vision embodying a modern radical and spiritual expression of Christianity, and that an understanding of his revolutionary work demands a new form of theological understanding.” Further, Altizer writes, “To enter the world of Blake’s vision is to be initiated into a new and radical form of faith, a paradoxical but deeply modern faith — 125 —

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which is both sacred and profane, both mystical and contemporary at once.”42 The radical orthodox theologian John Milbank makes a similar point with regard to Vico when he writes that “to recognize Vico’s coherence might place in question our ideas about what counts as coherent.”43 It is precisely this demand placed on the readers of Blake and Vico, the interrogative function their texts play, that is of contemporary theological interest and value. It is also, not surprisingly, the chief difficulty, for to read Blake and Vico theologically is also a case of thinking otherwise about theology. Neither thinker withstands a dogmatic reading, they are too involved in the active creation of concepts, producing altered lenses of vision, negating and transcending their history. Theirs is a critical and creative theology, certainly not the simple or straightforward explication of a pregiven or predetermined faith. As Altizer notes, “A major source of confusion in the study of Blake is the repeated attempt to discover an exact conceptual or mythical system in his vision, with the underlying assumption that the center of his vision is capable of being translated into a precise and fully coherent scheme.”44 Put otherwise, readers of Blake are incapable of reading vision, and, Altizer continues, “we can comprehend [Blake’s] meaning only to the extent that we ourselves become open to ‘Vision.’ We must be prepared to enter a world of total vision, a vision intending to embrace all reality whatever, and calling up its participant to engage all his faculties in a new and unified mode of vision.”45 Not only vision, we must also be able to read Blake’s heterodoxy as a genuine expression of faith. “It is as though the theological mind cannot comprehend deep heterodoxy as an expression of faith, even if a truly blasphemous faith, and if only for this reason our theological world is alienated from Blake.”46 Milbank sees Vico as exerting a counter pressure to the contemporary lenses of intelligibility by his claim that modern secular philosophy is unable to assimilate or comprehend the specifically catholic character to Vico’s thought. “The single key — 126 —

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to the elusive ‘coherence’ to Vico’s writings,” Milbank states, “is to understand him as a Baroque, Catholic, humanist.”47 Like Blake, Vico is a radical critic of modernity; his critique, in fact, functions more like a metacritique by its “insistence on purely aesthetic and language-relative criteria for knowledge.” According to Milbank, however, Vico’s metacritique is saved from the skepticism of postmodernism “through a conjoining with a theological metaphysics of the word.”48 Thus, at the margins of the Enlightenment we find two distinctive theological voices, both of which are equally radical, and both of which question the orthodoxy or standard dogmatisms of the modern age. This theological reading might even somehow sidestep the current theological divide between the radically secular and the radical orthodox in the unlikely paring of both Altizer and Milbank as they each independently evoke a composite reading of the Enlightenment at the margins as a radically new/alternative vision/version of modernity. United in opposition, Blake and Vico/Altizer and Milbank, together disrupt the modern making of theology as a dogmatism, and thus suggest, even in their opposition, a more open, critical, and creative future for theological thought.

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Chapter Eight

The Ethics of Ethics

I would say that we are in a fix, except that even to say “we” is to get into a still deeper fix. We are in the fix that we cannot say “we.” — John D. Caputo, Against Ethics Should we, then, not dare to speak about Abraham? I surely think we can. If I were to speak about him, I would first of all describe the pain of the ordeal. To that end, I would, like a leech, suck all the anxiety and distress and torment out of a father’s suffering in order to describe what Abraham suffered, although under it all he had faith. — Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

As was suggested in the previous chapter, the adjustment of the historical frame renders at least an altered focus, if not a different history altogether. If one follows the predominant reading of modernity as the Age of Reason, then Jean-François Lyotard’s description of the postmodern condition as an epistemological crisis that results from the collapse of, or the incredulity toward, metanarratives would not only cohere, but more importantly, generate an alternative path of thought. But when speaking of the postmodern condition, we must supplement Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives with at least two other shifts in the modes and meaning of intelligibility. The first, as described by Jürgen Habarmas, is the shift from philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language.1 This shift corresponds to the end of modernity and the paradigmatic Cartesian search for self-certain foundations. It marks a moment of crisis in which the modern confidence in reason is — 129 —

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dismantled through a hermeneutics of suspicion, led by such figures as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. The consequence of this first shift is that the self is no longer deemed the final arbiter of reality, and thus, the intractable dualism between self/object that results from thinking of thought strictly in terms of a representation gives way to a more originary condition. As Heidegger tells us, it is not so much that the human subject speaks language, as it is that language speaks humanity. The master trope of foundations has been replaced by the chain of semiotics in which there is the constant play of différance. The self is not stable and secure; instead, in and through language, it is in a constant state of becoming — in the words of Julia Kristeva, the self is “in process/on trial.” In addition to this linguistic turn, there is another shift from epistemology to ethics. This ethical turn can be seen in Levinas’ claim that ethics is first philosophy. As Levinas tells it, before the ‘I think, I am,’ comes the prior condition of the ethical relation, which is founded in the ‘Thou shalt not…’ As Edith Wyschogrod writes, however, this postmodern turn toward the ethical is not a simple matter; rather, it is more a series of questions: A postmodern ethics? Is this not a contradiction in terms? If postmodernism is a critical expression describing the subversion of philosophical language, a “mutant of Western humanism”, then how can one hope for an ethics when the conditions for meaning are themselves under attack? But is not this paradox — the paradox of a postmodern ethic — just what is required if an ethic is to be postmodern? Does not the term postmodern so qualify the term ethics that the idea of ethics, the stipulation of what is to count as lawful conduct, is subverted? A series of questions that leads to the following beginning challenge: “The relation between ‘ethics’ and ‘postmodern’ is complex and requires a radical rethinking of the syntactic and semiotic possibilities of each.” This radical rethinking that re— 130 —

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sults in a revisioned moral philosophy is provided by Wyschogrod, at least, in the specificity of saintly life narratives, stories of those who have, and continue to, “put themselves totally at the disposal of the Other.”2 John Caputo would agree with Wyschogrod, that the postmodern ethical turn is not a simple matter, that it must first be articulated as a series of questions, which might then provide the semblance of a possibility for a revisioned moral philosophy — but the irony, at least according to Caputo’s understanding, is that this postmodern ethical turn that leads to a revisioned moral philosophy announces itself, in Caputo’s own words, “against ethics.” As he writes satirically in the opening lines to the book by that same title: I have for some time now entertained certain opinions that I have been reluctant to make public. But I have at length concluded that the time has com to air my views, clearly and without apology, and to suffer whatever consequences come my way. I am against ethics. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.3 Against ethics to save ethics, or at least to save ethical obligation as “a kind of skandalon for ethics…. Ethics contains obligation, but that is its undoing (deconstruction). Ethics harbors within itself what it cannot maintain, what it must expel, expectorate, exclude. Ethics, one might say, cannot contain what it contains” — obligation as deconstruction, and epistemological undecidability, which is part and parcel of deconstruction, as the urgency for a genuinely postmodern ethic. “Do not be mistaken,” Caputo writes, “Deconstruction offers no excuse not to act…. Undecidability does not detract from the urgency of decision; it simply underlines the difficulty.”4 Both shifts have important ramifications in our search for a non-dogmatic theology. In the first instance, correlative to the critique of representational thinking is the realization of the in— 131 —

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adequacy of a strictly dogmatic theology. In the second, the turn towards ethics requires a rethinking of theology not in terms of its first principles, but rather in terms of its first relations, which, while not eliminating the pragmatic value of God-talk as a formulation of extremity, does nevertheless have the effect of secularizing — or perhaps more accurately, humanizing — our theological discourse. In other words, the wholly other is rendered as each and every other, as transcendence is reimagined as an infinite dispersal along the surface. In what follows, this chapter will ask the question of ethics, specifically with reference to the work of Levinas and Søren Kierkegaard, with the reminder that this is also a theological question as it strives for a new language and new concepts for a non-dogmatic theology. Speaking of Ethics To situate the question of ethics in Levinas and Kierkegaard I begin with the allure of silence. Think here of the closing lines of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”5 Or of a like sentiment expressed by Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols: “Our true experiences are not garrulous. They could not communicate themselves if they wanted to, they lack words. We have already grown beyond what we have words for.”6 The problem with such seemingly self-justified declarations are that there remains ample provocation to speak. After all, if language stopped where knowledge ends, then upon what grounds would it ever begin again? Even more, after the hermeneutics of suspicion, would there any longer be any justification for speech at all? Let alone the kind of speech that endeavors towards the unspeakable and the unthinkable — that is to say, the language of religion. Confined to silence, what possibility at all would there even be for such things as religion, ethics, or theology? And if these remain forever an impossibility, then what of value at all might ever be said? — 132 —

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There is another path besides silence. It too, however, is ripe with danger — namely, the danger of investing too much value in words and concepts. It is the danger that confuses justice rendered with justice done, or that somehow thinks that any ethical system can measure up to the never-ending ethical challenge of existence. The most obvious example of which would be the various fundamentalisms — whether religious or secular, whether theistic or atheistic, whether learned or ignorant. With respect to this danger, silence sometimes seems the appropriate, critical course of action. Think here of the silence of the mystics, a stance freely chosen, a self-withdrawal that is in fact a critical engagement with the world on different terms from which it is accustomed. This is Thomas Merton’s claim that the monk stands to society like the poet, forever marginal, but for precisely this reason, absolutely central to the conviction and hope that life could be otherwise.7 Might there still be yet another possibility? One through which language is made valuable, but not idolatrous. One through which the critical task of assessment and judgment is not made vacuous, but rather is driven by an originary, positive imperative that does not isolate or exclude. Neither the silence of the sacred nor the chatter of the self-assured believer, this would be a language always bordering on the ethical, always hoping for a justice that is still to come, and always impelled by a religion that goes by no single and absolute name. 1. Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics Beyond Ethics Which brings me, therefore, to the thinking of Levinas, a thinker for whom the question of ethics comes first, and through whom, the priority of ethics has been given prominence in contemporary continental thought. Yet to say that Levinas’ thinking begins with ethics is not quite accurate, because in fact it has a more immediate, or perhaps better, a more concrete, beginning. As Levinas writes in his brief, ten-page intellectual biography, in — 133 —

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a single-sentence set apart from and concluding the introduction to the history of his own intellectual development: “It is dominated by the presentiment and the memory of the Nazi horror.”8 Levinas’ thinking dominated by horror? Levinas shocked and dismayed that the history of the West culminated in the moral bankruptcy of Hitler’s attempt to eliminate, destroy, and forget the Jewish people? Levinas’ terrifying realization that perhaps it was not the irrationality of an isolated monster that was responsible for the violence in the heart of Europe, but Western thought and rationality itself — the same Western thought and rationality in which Levinas himself was so deeply invested. Could it be that the course of history is a legacy of violence? Could it be that the freedom of philosophy is founded on its denial of its moral responsibility? Such questions will become the impetus for Levinas’ theoretical break from and reversal of Western philosophy. First, then, the question of whether Western rationality is itself a kind of violence, a question to which Levinas unambiguously answers in the affirmative. Herein lies the key to Levinas’ critique of Martin Heidegger. First, it should be noted that Levinas never forgets the debt of gratitude that he owes to Heidegger, albeit a “regrettable debt.”9 As Levinas responded in an interview when asked about the importance of Heidegger: “a man who undertakes to philosophize in the twentieth century cannot not have gone through Heidegger’s philosophy, even to escape it. This thought is a great event of our century.”10 Levinas also affirmed the “absolute novelty” of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Such novelty, in fact, that it absolutely redirected Levinas’ own interest in Husserl, and more broadly, the contribution that Levinas would make to the phenomenological tradition.11 Levinas admits that it was Heidegger’s description of the factical — being-in-the-world — that transformed phenomenology from a strict methodology to a living philosophy. Finally, it was Heidegger who pointed the way to a thinking that precedes objectifying knowledge and representation, even if Heidegger himself failed to follow through on this fundamental insight. — 134 —

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With this recognition in mind, however, the differences between Levinas and Heidegger, at least as Levinas views the matter, are profound, and work on at least two different levels: (1) Heidegger’s redirecting of philosophy according to ontology only scratches the surface of a truth that Heidegger himself persistently fails to recognize. As Derrida argues in “Violence and Metaphysics,” Levinas “neither refuted nor criticized” the “layer of traditional truth” disclosed within Heidegger’s thinking. Instead, it could be said that Levinas endeavored to push Heidegger even further or deeper beneath the truth of ontology. Thus, as Levinas makes the distinction between metaphysics and ontology, he is drawing on a truth that precedes comprehension — which Levinas defines as “a way of approaching the known being such that its alterity with regard to the knowing being vanishes,” or that “which reduces the other to the same.”12 (2) Heidegger’s failure to follow the truth of ontology to its ‘deeper’ or more radical insights means for Levinas that Heidegger maintains the thought of being, and thus, de facto, establishes a system of thought that is totalizing by its essential egocentricity. To borrow a phrase from Adriaan Peperzak, Heidegger’s “panoramic universe” is simply too simple to account phenomenologically for the case of the self as a beingwith-others.13 This is why he places such a high premium on the trace, because the trace testifies to the instability, fluidity, or intermixing of identity, to a responsibility beyond intentionality, a responsibility that extends even beyond the self that is intending. The fact that there are no pure actions, but only traces, and no pure intending subject, but only a subject already involved, already implicated, translates for Levinas into a suspicion of an ontology that is fundamentally passive, which proclaims its innocence by its taking on the apparently benign posture of simply “letting be.” It is what such a posture implicitly presupposes that Levinas explicitly rejects — namely, that there is a pure generosity to being, or that the horizon of being does not play — 135 —

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favorites to the forces of rationality that places some within the mainstream, and others outside. For Levinas, the more accurate trope for describing the subject’s entrance into thought is not that of letting be, but rather that of being called.14 As he states in his essay, “Is Ontology Fundamental?”: is to ask whether the relation with the Other is in fact a matter of letting be? Is not the independence of the Other accomplished in the role of being called? Is the person to whom one speaks understood from the first in his or her being? Not at all. The Other is not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second. The two relations are intertwined. In other words, the comprehension of the Other is inseparable from his or her invocation.15 Thought, therefore, begins with interruption, or through the disruption of the Other. And comprehension, by way of rationality, is the attempt to silence such disruptive presences, to bring a unity to thinking, which, in fact, belies a violence of origins and a dark indeterminacy to being.16 This violent, disruptive origin to thought is what establishes the priority of ethics in Levinas’ thinking. Thus, his claim that ethics is first philosophy, is his passionate plea for a kind of philosophy that acknowledges its ethical stance — which is different from a thinking that is willing to take a stand, for the latter thinks there is a choice, while Levinas’ claim is that such stands are the very conditions of thinking itself. The one considers ethics in strictly prescriptive terms, while the other asks the more fundamental question of the ethics of ethics. The one preserves the centrality of the ego, while the other upsets the balance by reversing the constituting order of exchange — not the self willing responsibility, but an infinite responsibility collapsing the careful divisions between self and other. This argument for the priority of ethics is a descriptive, quasi-transcendental argument that absolutely reconfigures the nature of ethical inquiry

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in the sense that its primary concern is not with what should or should not be done, but rather, what is always already being done by the coming to birth of the subject. It is not that the subject should place itself as a hostage to the other, but that it is the nature of the subject to be a hostage, to be beholden and bound in a complex web of interrelation that is beyond and before the capacity to reckon. In Levinas’ words, “The self is a sub-jectum; it is under the weight of the universe, responsible for everything.”17 What is ethics then? Certainly not simply a morality, nor more complexly, a hierarchical system of values. Ethics, instead, is that force of thought that breaks open and through the totality of thought. Ethics appears as the immediate and urgent call for justice from the voice of the Other. Ethics is the taking on of the infinite responsibility, which precedes and exceeds the self’s limited and finite capabilities. Or, as Jacques Derrida has stated in his address at the funeral of Levinas in December of 1995, “Yes, ethics before and beyond ontology, the State, or politics, but also ethics beyond ethics.”18 And later, in that same address, Derrida refers to a conversation he once had with Levinas in which Levinas said, “You know, one often speaks of ethics to describe what I do, but what really interests me in the end is not ethics, not ethics alone, but the holy, the holiness of the holy.”19 One can see then a trajectory, from the freedom of philosophy to its beyond in that which comes before it, which is the responsibility of ethics. But not purely ethics, at least not ethics alone, but the ethics of ethics — that is, the transcendence of ethics in the holy, but not the holy that can be thematized, but the holiness of the holy, the transcendence of transcendence, the idea of the infinite, or, even more, quite simply, God. Which is where Levinas’ essay of 1975, “God and Philosophy,” begins with its radical rethinking and reversal of the very origins of modern Western thought. Here, Levinas revisits Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy and reopens the question — 137 —

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of the origins of consciousness which, with Descartes, began the paradigmatic shift in philosophy from philosophies of Being to philosophies of consciousness. What Levinas demonstrates in this essay is that Descartes’ notion that the self is a “thing that thinks” is not so autonomous, so foundational, and/or so self-evident as once thought. For the fact that the self is a thinking thing is not the full story, because Descartes himself thinks more than he thinks. That is to say, in Descartes’ Meditations, he thinks not only of the self and the foundation of knowledge in consciousness, but also and even more, he thinks “the idea of the infinite.” This idea of that which is beyond one’s capacity to think or thematize, according to Levinas, is “the inordinate intrigue that breaks up the unity of the ‘I think.’”20 Yet, if the self is a unity with itself, how is it possible that it can possibly “think more than it thinks?” Because, answers Levinas, there is an “antecedent to being,”21 an “otherwise than being,” which shows or gives itself to be thought, and even more, which provides the condition by which the self as a subjectivity can even become conscious of its consciousness in the first place. This is the realization that the self is created and dependent, that its thoughts of itself through consciousness are after the fact of its being otherwise than consciousness as a subjectivity subject to the infinite overflow of the idea of God. It is the very “breakup of consciousness,” which “breaks up the thought, which is an investment, a synopsis, and a synthesis, and can only enclose in a presence, re-present, reduce to presence or let be.”22 In other words, for Levinas, there is an infinite paradox at the origins of consciousness. He writes, “The infinite affects thought by devastating it and at the same time calls upon it; in a ‘putting it back in its place’ it puts thought in place. It awakens it.”23 The idea of the infinite “devastates” even as it “awakens” thought. It “hollows out a desire which cannot be filled, nourishes itself with its very augmentation, and is exalted as a desire, withdraws from its satisfaction in the measure that it approaches the desirable. It is a desire that is beyond satisfaction, and, unlike — 138 —

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a need, does not identify a term or an end.”24 Transcendence, then, is the reversal that is also the breakup of the unity of the course of history in the West. It is a possibility that speaks of a wholly other order from the order of the same. It is an ethics and a subjectivity, which is not to say an ethics built on and determined by consciousness. It is a responsibility which “does not allow me to constitute myself into an I think, substantial like a stone, or, like a heart of stone, existing in and for oneself. It ends in substitution for the other, in the condition — or the unconditionality — of being a hostage.”25 And finally, it is an obedience, which does not depend on a prior understanding: “Ethical signification signifies not for a consciousness which thematizes, but to a subjectivity, wholly in obedience, obeying with an obedience that precedes understanding.”26 2. Søren Kierkegaard: Passion and Responsibility Before, though in a like manner to Levinas, Kierkegaard accomplished a decided shift in the style and tone of philosophical writing. Not persuaded of the virtue intrinsic to the philosophical tradition, Kierkegaard, rather than setting out to secure objective knowledge, saw his task of thinking and writing in a different light. While his philosophical predecessors sought to prove, demonstrate, or ground truth, Kierkegaard, like Socrates before him,27 sought to prick and disrupt in order to evoke an awareness of the persistence of doubt and incomprehensibility. Kierkegaard made use of irony, pseudonymous authorship, and literary artistry all as means to a larger end. As his larger end, “Kierkegaard’s decentering texts,” writes David Gouwens, “drive the reader to a self-irony that may lead to a decisiveness that affirms ‘an undeconstructible bedrock of authenticated truth’ in the choice of a way of life, be it aesthetic or ethical or religious existence.”28 While his predecessors concerned themselves with the what of content, Kierkegaard thought it most important to show the how of arriving at the truth as subjectivity: “The objec— 139 —

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tive accent falls on WHAT is said, the subjective accent on HOW it is said.”29 Furthermore, he asked, of what value is it to explain the truth of the universe, when one still does not know what it means to be an existing individual. Put into the framework of the present chapter’s concern: what value is there to thinking ethics if, in turn, one does not also become responsible? What follows will be an exploration of one narrative of religious becoming that Kierkegaard articulates in his vast and varied work, Stages on Life’s Way. This work is broken up into four sections, each depicting a particular sphere of existence. Most significant for our present purpose of demonstrating the ‘How’ of religious becoming will be the third section, which Kierkegaard entitles, “Guilty? Not Guilty?” Of this section, the first part of which is designated as “Quidam’s Diary,” Kierkegaard himself writes that it is “the richest of all I have written, but it is difficult to understand.”30 Others have assessed its worth differently. For example, Robert Brutal writes that he finds the book “(especially the interminable ‘Quidam’s Diary’) on the whole rather dull.”31 While it might be difficult, interminable, and even dull, what Kierkegaard brings to life in this section is a fully textured character who is “in the direction of the religious — that is, tending toward it.”32 This “tending toward” is a hint provided by Kierkegaard of what might be described as a Kierkegaardian ethic, an ethic distinct from Kierkegaard’s description of ethics and key to Kierkegaard’s questioning of the ethics of ethics. A Kierkegaardian ethic is not unlike the experience of psychotherapy in that it is a task that is also never-ending. Kierkegaard, like the psychotherapist, aims gently, patiently, yet persistently to bring to consciousness the truth of our existence. It is a truth that resists, disguises, and distorts its own awareness. As such, Kierkegaard’s method of indirect communication is an artful means of shocking readers into their sensibilities, deceiving them into the truth. On this strategy, Kierkegaard writes: — 140 —

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First and foremost, no impatience. If he [the reader] becomes impatient, he will rush headlong against it and accomplish nothing. A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is what a direct attack achieves, and it implies moreover the presumption of requiring a man to make to another person, or in his presence, an admission which he can make most profitably to himself privately. This is what is achieved by the indirect method, which, loving and serving the truth, arranges everything dialectically for the prospective captive, and then shyly withdraws…so as not to witness the admission he makes to himself alone before God — that he has lived hitherto in an illusion .33 Kierkegaard may be read as a psychotherapist and Quidam’s diary as a kind of therapy through which both Quidam and the reader are led into greater self-awareness, and that will ultimately transcend the self by its existential knowledge of God. Like Levinas, Kierkegaard places the self in question and under obligation. As a result, a Kierkegaardian ethic would have less to do with systems, approaches, and/or schools of thought, and more to do with a kind of questioning that thrusts one again and again towards the origins, possibilities, and conditions of thinking itself. Not only asking the question of the ethics of ethics, but, as John Caputo writes, actually championing the cause “against ethics.” While this might at first hearing sound hopelessly abstract and not the least ethical, it is, in fact, the most personal, having to do with the deepest interiority, and involving the thinker in an impassioned plea for meaningfulness. That is because this kind of questioning involves the thinker in a conscious doing, peeling away the layers of self-illusion and deception. Kierkegaard, for instance, is well aware that there is a kind of thinking that poses as indifferent and that makes its aim objectivity for the sake of knowledge, but this is not his de— 141 —

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sire, nor should it be the final desire for the religiously or philosophically minded thinker. This is the “mortal wound” he hopes to inflict upon the System.34 And it is precisely this prescriptive claim that allows us the justification for reading Kierkegaard’s description of ethics as only provisional, as only a means by which his true ethical imperative is given to articulation. For Kierkegaard’s description of ethics (again, not to be confused with a Kierkegaardian ethic, if there is such a thing) I turn to Part II of his Stages on Life’s Way, which comes in the guise of a married man’s reflections on marriage. Kierkegaard’s Stages move from the aesthetic to the ethical to the religious. The passages through one stage to the next are marked by grades of commitment, with the commitment actually altering the ontological status of the subject. Of all the stages and of all the various persons depicted, the representative of the ethical is the happiest, even if the least passionate, a happiness doubled over through resolution. Of course, this begs the question of the value or meaningfulness of such a happiness, and why, when happiness is presented as a choice or a resolution, would some choose differently apparently to his or her own despair? To these particular questions, as might be expected, Kierkegaard does not give the reader a direct answer. However, by the structure of the work, it is suggested that there is a higher passion that drives us beyond the comforts and assurances of the ethical sphere,35 to a much less certain, more risky, leap of faith. As for the ethical itself, it is defined here as the synthesis of immediacy and resolution, with marriage serving as its most apt metaphor. Marriage, then, is described as a love sustained and made happy by the will. To will one thing, to be undivided, to harness passion to last for the long haul, these are the secrets to the ethical life. And, but for a single comment made at the very end of the married man’s defense of the institution of marriage, they also appear as the apparent recipe for an unquestioned, even an unquestionable, happiness. He writes, “What I do know definitely, however — something that shrewdness no more than — 142 —

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mockery, no more than the terror of these deliberations, can wrench from me — is the happiness of my marriage, or, more correctly, my conviction of the happiness of marriage.” He then continues to explain that he writes in order to “convince the whole world of the validity of marriage.”36 It is comments such as these that are the genius of Kierkegaard’s literary imagination, and that give such a haunting force to his writings on the ethico-religious spheres of existence. After all, we have no choice but to take these words for real, meaning that the married man certainly seems convinced by his own happiness. Or, put otherwise, for all he knows, he is happy, and he has given us a complete articulation of the ethical life. Why, then, do these closing comments ring of insecurity? Why does such an apparently undivided will still seem so tenuous, so guarded, and so very fragile? Perhaps Kierkegaard means to suggest it is because it is founded upon such an incomplete notion of the self. Surely Kierkegaard is not such a contemporary of our own age that he would have us believe that the object of one’s will is immaterial. Such relativism simply does not ring true for a writer who throughout his works displays such strong convictions on the truth of Christianity. It is certainly the case that Kierkegaard, along with Nietzsche, was a forerunner in announcing the subjective quality of truth, allowing for the realization of a kind of perspectivalism. However, this is not to be confused with relativism, at least not the kind of self-contradictory relativism that extends beyond its own limits of understanding by proclaiming the absolute truth of relativism. Kierkegaard’s position is much more modest. He is simply reiterating the basic Kantian epistemological point that knowledge begins with experience. One obvious conclusion of this point is that self-knowledge begins with the concrete, particular experiences of the self, that the truth the self knows as true is an experiential truth, one from which the self cannot escape and by which the self is indelibly marked. If taken seriously, this most basic of — 143 —

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existentialism’s insight has profound implications for both our understanding of the self and of the truth. For the self, it could be said, as Heidegger indeed would say, that there is an alwaysunfinished quality to the self as a being-towards-death.37 This means that the ethical self that wills one thing might very well succeed in happiness and in achieving a certain stability and meaning to life. However, this still does not answer the question concerning the ethics of such a supposed ethical stance. For how would one respond to those whose object of their single-minded will was that which is anathema? Furthermore, the conviction of happiness might be premature, and if not premature, it most certainly is a foreclosure of future possibility. As for truth, who can say? What we can say is that the truth to which we stand in relation makes a difference in how we live our lives. For this reason alone, we have an ethical obligation to discern the truth of our convictions, to remain open to correction, and to hope for disclosure. This means as well that we participate in the efforts for justice so that all might have the freedom and resources by which they might pursue this imperative. And if this proclamation sounds too sure of itself, I remind you of the epistemic undecidability from which it stems. Finally, if not relativism, then what? My tentative answer, arrived at through this admittedly partial reading of Levinas and Kierkegaard, would be passion and responsibility. But neither an ordinary passion nor a finite responsibility. Instead, a passion for the infinite which can never be satisfied, and an infinite responsibility that exceeds our finite capabilities. As for the choice between silence and speech, both Levinas and Kierkegaard seem to suggest that we have no choice. Being is an invocation, thinking is a responsibility, and speech is a passion for that which draws us ever deeper into the complexities of relationality — not an immaterial object of the will, but a living hope by which the ethical gives way to passion and passion is made responsible. Therefore, with Kierkegaard, there is the movement from immediacy to resolution, and finally, to — 144 —

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passion. And one’s passion, properly understood, is a response to the origins of the self in God — an origin not to be resolved by any system of thought. Instead, an infinite origin, a complex demand, neither to be spoken of lightly, nor to be eschewed.

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Chapter Nine

The Law of Religion

Anyone…compelled to act continually in accordance with precepts which are not the expression of his instinctual inclinations is living, psychologically speaking, beyond his [moral] means, and may objectively be described as a hypocrite, whether he is clearly aware of the incongruity or not. — Sigmund Freud You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the LORD. — Leviticus 19:18

Somewhere in between the objective hypocrisy Freud describes and the love that the LORD commands lies the meaning of the law, which, especially when drawing from the biblical tradition, must also go by the name of torah, and might just as well mean teaching or truth as it does the compulsion to act against one’s instinctual inclinations. But it is precisely this compulsion that is my interest in this chapter. For at least since the time of Jesus’ attacks against the Pharisees, such hypocrisy has been given a bad name, when it is, I would suggest, the very means of our survival as a civilization. Of course, Jesus was correct to point out that the law without love was a betrayal of the covenant. In its place, however, was not a lawless love without compulsion, for such a love is equally dangerous by its miscalculation of the human condition. As human beings we both love and hate, we create and we destroy, and while we yearn for the hard-won securities and tranquility that comes with civilization, as Freud — 147 —

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explains, this is also the source of our discontent.1 And the solution is not, as some falsely ascribe to Rousseau, the return to some noble state of nature before the veneer of civilization in its cultured arts and sciences alienated us from our true selves. So whether with Freud, whose analysis of civilization highlights the psychology of discontentment, or with Rousseau, the supposed champion of the ‘noble savage’ whose analysis of the social contract provides insight into the state of nature as the very becoming of civilization; whether with Jesus or with the pharisaical tradition with which he shared so much in common, the meaning revealed is that the state of nature versus the state of civilization is not an either-or choice, and neither is the choice between authenticity and hypocrisy. In both cases, in fact, it is the latter that provides the condition for the former, as the look back to the origins of civilization and to the beginnings of psycho-social development in the law of religion tells us at least as much about our hope for a better future as it does about the actual history of our making. In the analysis of the law of religion that follows, Julia Kristeva and Slavoj Žižek will be our guides, not so much by any particular defense of the law or justification of hypocrisy per se, but rather through their honest and thorough-going appraisals of the inevitable constraints in being human. It is in the appreciation of these constraints that my case for hypocrisy is made. Also, by drawing on Kristeva and Žižek, the broader argument regarding the re-placed theology at the margins will be given yet another model. In this case, Kristeva and Žižek stand as two cultural theorists, known more for their interest in psychoanalysis and semiotics than theology, that help complete this admittedly partial search for a non-dogmatic theology. In The Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva speaks of the “semiotics of biblical abomination,” which is expressed through the divine injunction of holiness, and of the elaborate code of law that specifies it.2 This law, which is also a taxonomy that first distinguishes the pure from the impure, is, in Kristeva’s terms, — 148 —

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an ancient religious “attempt to throttle murder,” “to curtail sacrifice,” and to “restrain the desire to kill.”3 Set in the context of the atrocities of the twentieth century, however, this ancient though still perduring injunction takes on a different meaning, one which tells not of the eventual triumph over violence, but rather of its self-perpetuation, and of its control through acts of coversion and sublimation. “Checked,” Kristeva writes, the desire to kill “becomes displaced and builds a logic. If abomination is the lining of my symbolic being, ‘I’ am therefore heterogeneous, pure and impure, and as such always potentially condemnable. I am from the very beginning subject to persecution as well as revenge.”4 From Kristeva’s perspective, therefore, the law is seen as a double-edged sword, no more and no less than a fragile means of survival, a code upon which a civilized people might assure the minimal safety of its people: An unshakeable adherence to Prohibition and Law is necessary if that perverse interspace of abjection is to be hemmed in and thrust aside. Religion, Morality, Law. Obviously always arbitrary, more or less; unfailingly oppressive, rather more than less; laboriously prevailing, more and more so.5 Kristeva tells us that the law, while perhaps necessary, is arbitrary and oppressive, yet still more and more prevalent. The law is a double-edged sword because it assumes for itself the impossible though no less necessary task of “purifying the abject.”6 The biblical tradition shares this ambivalence with regard to the law, in what Jacques Lacan refers to in his “Names-ofthe-Father Seminar” as “a kind of co-conformity…of Law and desire, stemming from the fact that both are born together.”7 Born together in the sense that “the first laws are rooted in the doctrine of the covenant,” and in the sense that “the true climax” of the early biblical narrative “is the giving of the law.”8 — 149 —

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On the one hand, the law is consummate with the consecration of life, to the point that it is the very means by which life is consecrated, and apart from which both life’s meaning and a community’s future remains fundamentally uncertain. As told in the Torah, God’s command to be holy marks a turning point in God’s covenantal relationship with His people, making the original promise of blessing conditioned by the now more clearly demarcated law of obedience. The God who speaks to Moses as the great I am, is the same as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, though with Moses he will be more fully known by virtue of his more complete and undivided commitment to his people — the God of promise becomes the God who does battle on behalf of Israel. On the other hand, the law curtails human freedom even as it helps to fulfill God’s promise of blessing. The law is imposed. It bespeaks of traumatic origins and of a founding transgression, but it is nevertheless welcomed, at least in the case of the Hebrews and of all those who have followed in their footsteps, because its apparent alternatives are either a return to enslavement or continued wilderness wandering. Slavoj Žižek writes of this founding transgression in The Fragile Absolute, as “the paradox of Judaism.” He explains: “this ‘repressed’ status of the Event is what gives Judaism its unprecedented vitality; it is what enabled the Jews to persist and survive for thousands of years without land or a common institutional tradition. In short, the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up their ghost, to cut off the link to their secret, disavowed tradition.”9 Kristeva, Žižek, and the biblical tradition all agree, therefore, that the law, far from overcoming violence, instead functions as a muted form of violence as it domesticates the instinctual urges that might destroy. In Kristeva’s terms, this muted form of violence achieves its consecration through sublimation, and this will become the basic pattern of not only Judaism, but of Christianity and Islam as well, as they all emerge out of this archetypal story of God’s covenantal relationship with human— 150 —

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kind. 10 This process of consecration through sublimation is, in fact, the very secret that explains the history of religions, and, which Kristeva explains, “is destined to survive the collapse of the historical forms of religion.”11 Take the story of Christian redemption, for instance. Its focus is on the traumatic death and resurrection of Christ, which is then ritually reenacted, even celebrated as the very means of reconciliation between God and humanity. The traumatic nature of this founding Event is unquestionable, even if one follows René Girard in his claim that the true significance of the death of Christ is precisely its “nonsacrificial” or “nonviolent nature.”12 If Girard is correct, then Jesus’ sacrifice was inevitable, though not necessary to God’s efforts to redeem creation. Nevertheless, it is still an act of violence that once and for all puts an end to violence. Like Judaism, there is still the fact of a tradition disavowed. Likewise with Islam and its attestation of the Koran as the ‘standing miracle,’ the founding Event. The entire logic of Islam requires this prerequisite leap of faith, the claim that the Koran is the direct Word of God, unadulterated by history, culture, and language. As one Islamic scholar puts it: The Qur’an is unique. It embodies the Word of God — unchanged, unabridged and uncompromised. It does not contain any element that is a product of a human mind. Its contents and its arrangement are from God. It is the unmixed Word of God…. The Qur’an is unique in almost every respect, in its Divine Origin, its style and methodology, its chronological descent, its textual arrangement, and its approach to the problems of man and society. It constitutes a divinely-opened window on Reality.13 If one grants Islam this one miracle, then indeed, religion becomes a rather straightforward matter of submission and obedience, a religion utterly demystified. But it is still a miracle that once and for all puts an end to miracles; the violence, so to — 151 —

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speak, has already been done, and is what allows the perpetuation of the same. Both Kristeva and Žižek are working out of a psychoanalytic tradition that has not always looked favorably upon the mandates of law. On the contrary, the law breeds discontent, the law fosters repression, and the law disguises a more fundamental lawlessness that underpins and maintains the status quo. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the law, most especially the first and most basic law to love one’s neighbor, which is admittedly the foundation of “the morality of civilized society,” is fundamentally immoral and unhealthy. Žižek explains: What many people find problematic…is that it seems to superegotize love, conceiving it in an almost Kantian way — not as a spontaneous overflow of generosity, not as a self-assertive stance, but as a self-suppressing duty to love neighbors and care for them, as hard work, as something to be accomplished through the strenuous effort of fighting and inhibiting one’s spontaneous ‘pathological’ inclinations. As such, agape is opposed to eros, which designates not so much carnal lust as, rather, the kindness and care that are part of one’s nature, and whose accomplishment delivers its own satisfaction.14 Or, as Freud delineates in Civilization and Its Discontents, this law of love is problematic not only because it imposes an impossible standard, not only because it disavows the special care and devotion that we owe to those with whom we are closest and to whom we owe a special obligation of care, not only because it ignores the evidence that not all our neighbors are deserving of love, and not only because it actually encourages out-group hostility, but most importantly and perhaps most obviously, because it has proven to be a tremendous source of unhappiness to those who most earnestly attempt to be faithful to its demands.15 This is the dilemma of the Law — it is at once both necessary and also seemingly inevitably flawed. Or, to return to the quota— 152 —

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tion from Freud with whom I began, objectively speaking, the Law makes hypocrites of us all. It should be no surprise, therefore, that when it comes to religion, Freud and many of those who followed after him, were avowed atheists and deeply critical of religion. “Yet,” as James DiCenso argues, referring specifically to Freud: this atheistic and generally critical orientation does not mean that his analyses do not yield constructive insights. This argument does not involve positing that Freud was secretly religious. Rather, the point is that Freud’s writings inquiring into the psycho-cultural dimensions of religion are not fully governable by his manifest intentional stance. These writings are, on some levels, critical and pathologizing, but they disclose much more about religion and culture than symptomological and postivivistic models allow. In fact, DiCenso continues, “One might further argue that Freud’s atheism, combined as it is with a spirit of critical scientific inquiry, acts like a creative catalyst as much as it forms a restrictive prejudgement.”16 This argument is akin to Kant’s testimonial with reference to Hume which was discussed in Chapter One — namely, that Hume’s skepticism awoke Kant from his “dogmatic slumbers.” It is also the implicit argument that runs throughout this search for a non-dogmatic theology — namely, that what at first glance might appear as being purely critical might also be read constructively, that a non-dogmatic theology is not the rejection of dogmatism, but its deconstruction, which means an interpretation that is qualified, overturned, and opened up by the elements within its own tradition, a strategy of reading against the grain that alters the very status of a discourse. As demonstrated in the preceding chapters, as theology is increasingly marginalized both within contemporary academic discourse and within an increasingly diverse, if not secular, culture at large, this makes possible the renewal and reinvigoration of the “re-placed theol— 153 —

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ogy” of desire (see Part One). As Heidegger makes the argument for the oxymoronic status of theological thinking, this might be read literally as the actual end of theology (a la Gall), or, more constructively, as altering the modes of theological intelligibility and thereby inaugurating a new era and style of a distinctively postmodern theology (a la the “theological turn” of phenomenology). And here also with the law of religion, the psychoanalytic critique can and should be read constructively. In fact, one might even argue that this constructive critique is authorized and mandated by the biblical tradition itself. For within the canon of Scripture, there is kind of self-critique that warns against putting too much faith in law and order. Three points might be made in this respect, three points that must condition our reading of the Law: (1) It is not the Law that is given priority in either the Jewish Scriptures or the Christian New Testament. On the contrary, God’s promise comes first, and it is only within the light of that promise that the Law makes sense. It is this first point that has been especially difficult for Christian theology, specifically with regard to Christ’s relation to the Law. The question is whether the Christian conviction that Jesus is the Christ spells the end, fulfillment, or radicalization of the Law (cf., Romans 10:4, 13:10). Does Jesus’ message announce the heightening of an already impossible standard, or the release from the Law’s burdens? As one New Testament scholar struggles to define this paradoxical relationship between Jesus and the law: “Jesus affirms the law but also negates it by replacing its mediatorial office.” And to continue, “While Jesus negates the mediatoriship of the law, he affirms the law in the judgment on sin that his forgiveness implies.”17 The Gospel of Matthew’s portrayal of Jesus as the giver of a new law of higher righteousness hearkens back to the story of Moses, who, of course, according to the Exodus story, was a deliverer first and law-giver second. (2) There is also the archetypal story of Job, which reminds us that suffering is not always caused by disobedience, and that — 154 —

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those who are too quick to identify the source of evil are not only misguided, but might actually be in fundamental opposition to the inscrutable will of God. Based upon this story of Job, we might conclude that there are some events, most especially the experience of suffering, which, at least from our human perspective, lie outside the scope of the Law. Faithfulness does not always ensure harmony, and holiness does not always guarantee blessing. (3) There is also the tradition of feminist hermeneutics, which reminds us that the Law, like almost the entirety of the biblical tradition, represents an androcentric bias and a patriarchal structure of power. From this respect, we must rightfully become critics of the Law if the Law is ever to fulfill its promise of blessing. This threefold condition of the Law — the Law conditioned by the promise, the Law conditioned by suffering, and the Law conditioned by oppression/resistance — provides a framework for a discussion of a hermeneutics of the Law. One should not confuse this framework, however, with some arbitrary apparatus for rendering the Law transparent. On the contrary, just as there is no “symbolic language without hermeneutics,”18 so too does the Law bind a people in some fashion to an active interpretative response. The Law and its conditions for receptivity are simultaneous. Yet, while simultaneous, based on a hermeneutical understanding, there still remains an apparent order of simultaneity, which is analogous to Ricoeur’s understanding of hermeneutics as indicated by his claim that the “symbol gives rise to thought.”19 Thus, while hermeneutics is simultaneous with the text, it is also distinguished from the text, as the text gives rise to interpretation, just as the Law comes to us as if descended from on high, as if imposed by God himself, while it also confirms what it is that we already knew — the Law as confirmation, authorization, transformation, and/or civilization; in a word, the Law is an Event that becomes our common human fate, and our — 155 —

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mutual discontent. As Žižek writes, the Law is “experienced as externally imposed, contingent and traumatic — in short, as an impossible/real Thing.”20 This tension, then, between the impossible and the real, becomes the constitutive base upon which civilization is founded. Indeed, as Žižek goes on to explain, there is an “inherent transgression” that is built in and generated within the Law itself. This is more than simply a negative reading of, and rebellion against, the Law; rather, it is deconstructive, for not only is the Law undermined as it transgresses itself, but it also somehow manages to fulfill itself by making possible the possibility of transgression. Outside the Law there is no critique, there is no justification, but only blind stabs in the dark like the Israelites impatient worship of the golden calf at the precise moment when their deliverer/law-giver arrives with the inscribed Word of God. Or, as in the case of the early Christian church, there is its shift in identity from being characterized by its expectation of the imminent return of Christ, to its establishment as an ecclesiastical institutional body adjusting its expectations and identity in light of the delay of the parousia. In both cases, the acts were justified, for the Israelites did not know, nor could they have known, what had become of their leader during the forty days and forty nights of his commune with God on Mount Sinai (Exodus 32: 1-24). And with the early Church, the generation of followers that knew Jesus and who could testify to his promise that he would return, was passing away. After all, what is the operative law when in a state of limbo, between one age and the next, between the already and the not yet, between the impossible and the real? And as Lacan points out, the God who reveals Himself to Abraham, the God who enters into a covenant with Israel and who issues the promise of blessing which is the story of the Bible, is not almighty (Lacan: “I could show you a thousand demonstrations of it in the Bible”); rather, the God of Abraham is “he who chooses, he who promises, who causes a certain covenant — which is transmissible in only one way, through the paternal — 156 —

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barachah — to pass through his name. He is also he who makes wait, who makes a son be awaited for up to ninety years, who makes one wait for may another thing more.”21 The promise, then, that is also a deferral. The deferral that is the “special value” that the Hebrews accord to the “gap separating desire and fulfillment.”22 The promise that is necessarily transposed and distorted in the (deferred) act of becoming fulfilled. This is a gap not unlike that which Ricoeur describes in his study of Freud with regard to the gap between consciousness and the dynamic unconscious: “the process of becoming conscious [is] a transgression, a crossing of a barrier; to become conscious is to penetrate into, to be unconscious is the keep apart from consciousness.”23 Epistemologically speaking, it is the promise, analogous to the unconscious, that remains forever unknown in and of itself, that remains unrealized — the expectation that is also a disappointment, the Law that is also desire. To continue the comparison further, the promise, like the dynamic unconscious, is the accomplishment of the “epoché in reverse,” “something we assume and reconstruct from signs derived from consciousness.”24 In this case, the biblical story of promise is a retrospective one, an indication of a future hope grounded in a story of past deliverance. And as a retrospective, it is also a construct, but this is not to diminish its actual power in the construction of meaning and the making of sense. In fact, we might think of it as the actual root of meaning and logic of sense. What really matters, or “what alone count” as Ricoeur tells us, “are the relations of psychical acts to instincts and instinctual aims, in accord with their interconnections and the particular psychical system to which they belong.”25 This, after all, is the theological challenge that Karl Barth issued to his contemporaries when speaking of the “strange new world within the Bible,” by which he meant the need for the theologian to suspend his/her disbelief in order to enter into the peculiar, self-referential, and aesthetic logic of the biblical narrative. And — 157 —

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by so doing, revelation takes priority as the Word of God speaks in its own terms in and through the words of scripture. This is simultaneously both a conservative and radical position that Barth takes — conservative because it still allows the Bible to set the terms and conditions of theological intelligibility, and radical because it also admits that this theological intelligibility requires something like a leap of faith, for strictly speaking, the words of scripture are not to be confused with the Word of God. Instead, we might say that the Word of God is always and only a theological becoming, an event in the making, a transposition — like the deferred promise that is already though never completely fulfilled. To return to Kristeva, this transposition of the real, this process of becoming conscious, requires an act of transverse negativity, which is an actual revolution through which the logic of sense is exposed to, and disrupted by, its antecedent. Like the very flux of its nature, Kristeva calls this pre-logical space by a variety of names, beginning with the “semiotic chora” in Revolution in Poetic Language. Not only pre-logical, but also prespatial, as Kristeva explains, “The chora is not yet a position that represents something for someone…; nor is it a position that represents someone for another position…; it is, however, generated in order to attain to this signifying position.” The chora is a “rhythmic space,” or a “modality of significance in which the linguistic sign is not yet articulated.”26 In Powers of Horror, this pre-logical space, which like the semiotic chora is no real space at all, but rather a force or modality, is called the “abject.” The abject, Kristeva explains, is a “revolt of being,” that which “cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries and fascinates desire.” It is not, “properly speaking, a definable object,” though it does share qualities of the object. Like the object, the abject is opposed to the I. It is “Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaningless, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me.”27 — 158 —

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Which brings us back to the nature of the law as a doubleedged sword. Recall that Kristeva attributes the necessity of the Law to the “reality” of abjection, and that for Žižek, the experience of the law is as an “impossible/real Thing.” With these analyses in mind, we might ask ourselves, what is at stake in our (modern? e.g., Kant: Enlightenment defined as the release from self-incurred tutelage; post-modern? e.g., Lyotard: Postmodernity defined as the incredulity towards metanarratives.) resistance to the law? Does it expose our secret fascination with the “powers of horror,” as Kristeva’s analysis might suggest? A fascination with an undefined and indefinable object symptomatic of the irresolvability between the semiotic and symbolic, between the impossible and the real, or between freedom and the law. Cast in more ethical terms, this would be a flirtation with evil, if for no other reason than the fact that evil asserts its brute and irresistible reality, a reality which, for some, might even be mistaken as a palliative for the anxiety of being. A reality-check, if you will, for the hypocrisy intrinsic to civilization. But what if the real is also the impossible, no more and no less than an imaginary (re)construct? What then becomes of the self-assertion of evil and the inevitable disappointment that follows? Would this require even greater, more systematic, and thorough “checks of reality?” Evil generating evil in the throes of our own disappointment with ourselves, and reality necessitating a dismissal or rejection of the law for its compulsion to act against the very real force of our instinctual inclinations? To conclude, therefore, I assert that the affirmation of the law requires as a first step the rejection of this self-generating cycle of evil. This rejection of evil, however, does not imply our distance from it. On the contrary, this rejection of evil requires the very height of hypocrisy as we reject that which is the very embodiment of many of our strongest desires. Such hypocrisy, however, is the price of civilization, and perhaps also, a beginning to the understanding of the contemporary return of the religious. For this affirmation of the law is simultaneously an — 159 —

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admission of the conditionality and relativity of the law. While it might function as if apodictic, with the Babel-like pluralism of the postmodern age, we know that it is not. What then, is to save us from complete moral equivocation? One pattern that seems to be emerging across the globe is the remythologization that both authorizes and legitimates fundamentalism as the meaningful alternative to — or as Vattimo argues, the shadow of — postmodern pluralism. “Once we acknowledge this paradox,” Vattimo writes: We should ask whether the death of the moral-metaphysical God must necessarily lead us to the rebirth of the religious fundamentalism and of the ethnic-religious or religious-communitarian fundamentalism that are spreading around us. The same question, albeit slightly modified, can be raised at the philosophical level, too. It would seem paradoxical that the effect of the overcoming of metaphysics…is the pure and simple legitimation of relativism and its shadow, fundamentalism, and communitarianism, its democratic version. Judging from the many signs, this is precisely what is happening.28 In its return and renewal, religion adopts the post-critical form of a pure faith, and thereby grafts itself onto a public arena that at least purports to grant equal access to all. But by its exclusive claims to ultimacy and by its guise of purity, the return of religion within the public sphere might also be considered a subversion of the very process that originally gave it voice. Again, in Vattimo’s words, “the renewal of religion configures itself necessarily as the claim to an ultimate truth, which is indeed an object of faith rather than rational demonstration but which in the end tends to exclude the very pluralism of world pictures that has made it possible.”29 The question that Vattimo poses is whether the return of the religious, which more often than not is a fundamentalist form of religion, is the necessary product of the postmodern condition.

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A non-dogmatic theology, informed by and in conversation with the psychoanalytic tradition can offer the following. First, it can and should point out the false pretenses of any and all claims to purity. Second, it can allow for a more authentic embrace of the fundamentally hypocritical quality of religion. And third, it can move in an through the fundamentalist claim to ultimacy and set it within the context of a historical tradition, not simply for the purpose of relativizing that tradition, as much as enlightening it so that it may more fully live up to its own distinct promise. The non-dogmatic theology, therefore, may function as the check against the natural desire for purity, and thereby, provide for both a more authentic affirmation of the homo religiosus and a more peaceful return of religion.

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Conclusion

…no truths, no knowledge, no reality, no morality, no judgments, no objectivity — and if postmodernists are saying that, they are not so much dangerous as silly. — Stanley Fish The strength of knowledge lies not in its degree of verity but rather in its age, the extent of its incorporations, its character as a condition of life. — Friedrich Nietzsche

There is a certain stubborn confusion with regard to the meaningfulness and possibility of a non-dogmatic theology. It is not unlike the confusion surrounding the term ‘postmodern.’ When the cultural theorist, Jean-Fançois Lyotard, announced ‘Postmodernism’ as a cultural condition, he was making an epistemological point about the contemporary state of knowledge — namely, that knowledge had been de-legitimized and was left in search of new criteria of assessment and a new rationale for assent. Lyotard is famous for his description of the postmodern condition by its “incredulity toward metanarratives,”1 its suspicion of any founding or overarching story that provides the rationale by which a particular worldview, perspective, or value system is given absolute credence and legitimization. This postmodern incredulity has been notably and persistently directed at the operative metanarrative of the Enlightenment, in which the story is told of inevitable and unlimited social progress through the exercise of reason and the practice of private virtue. The postmodern unraveling of this story of progress — its expose into the potential tyranny of reason, its relativizing of objective scientific truth — has also led to what many believe to be a crisis — 163 —

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in confidence, the suspicion that there is no truth and that all values, because they are relative, are presumed equal. Such suspicion is to be expected when undergoing such a fundamental shift in the modes and meaning of intelligibility. For our purposes however, in conclusion of our search for a non-dogmatic theology, we might look through this fear to the profound shift in our cultural consciousness that is taking place, and then ask ourselves what this means for the continuing viability and value of theological thinking. The shift has to do with our comportment in relation to truth: no longer is the primary concern the meaning of truth (as if one was already in possession of the truth or as though truth itself was static and unchanging), but rather, the primary concern is with the conditions that make possible the meaningfulness of a certain truth, and the reasons for a particular truth’s compelling value (which is to say, that due to the cultural realization of diversity and the accompanying epistemological realization that no single perspective gives full expression to truth writ large, then each truth must in turn justify itself in accordance with its either pragmatic or ethical rationale). In a Levinasian sense, truth must be made accountable, which is the meaning of his claim for “ethics as first philosophy.” A crisis in confidence indeed, but incredulity need not translate into unbelief, and most certainly not into inaction.2 One must be clear about what is and what is not being said by this cultural analysis of the postmodern condition. It is true that in accordance with the postmodern condition truth is pluralistic and made relative by the acknowledged diversity of truths. But that is not to say that there is no truth. The former is an epistemological point in that it is making a case for what can and cannot be known, and how; the latter is an overextension of its epistemological jurisdiction, and more often than not, is a mistake made by those with an insufficient appreciation of true nature of the epistemological problematic. Likewise with belief: from a postmodern perspective, belief is founded and made pos— 164 —

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sible by doubt and the epistemological reality of uncertainty. Belief is not knowledge, though it does make knowledge possible. And the incredulity toward metanarratives that Lyotard describes does not invalidate belief; far from it, for it is precisely such incredulity that heightens the awareness of the role stories play in the making of meaning and the logic of sense; paradoxically, the incredulity toward metanarratives is the proliferation, not the end, of stories, such that no single story carries absolute, foundational status. As Vattimo explains: This is the main paradox of Nietzsche’s philosophy: his announcement of the death of God, really the announcement of the end of all metanarratives, does not preclude the possibility that many gods might be born. Perhaps we have not mediated sufficiently on the explicit assertion by Nietzsche that “it is the moral God who is denied,” that is, God as ground, the pure act in Aristotle, the supreme watchmaker and architect of the universe in Enlightenment rationalism.3 Finally, this epistemological uncertainty that is being described need not suggest absolute moral equivalency; on the contrary, by raising the question of truth and the conditions that make truth not only possible, but also compelling, one has begun the transvaluation of values through which genuine ethical inquiry begins. Put otherwise, the issue with postmodernism is not the absence of truth, as some mistakenly presume, but rather the plain fact of multiple truths, and the inability, or at least the difficulty apart from various forms of coercion, to resolve the clash of incommensurates. Similarly with a non-dogmatic theology, its desideratum is not the dismantling of belief or the discrediting of religion, but rather the critical reflection on a whole multitude of beliefs and the plurality of religions, all of which do not necessarily cohere, and may even conflict. It still follows the basic Anselmian theological formula of “faith seeking understanding,”

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only it is fissured by a post-critical faith, which means a pluralistic, multiform faith, a theological recognition akin to psychology’s insight into the divided self. As a consequence, the theological reflection on a multiform faith cannot be the straightforward explication of a simple truth. It must be both more and less than that. More in the sense of its expansiveness, its attempt to account for the more of sense, the saying behind the said, the meaning of the meant. More in the sense of doing justice to the intrinsic mystery, complexity, and ambiguity of faith, the openness to what might be, the hope for justice, the passion for the impossible. But less in the sense of caution against saying too much, of confusing knowledge with belief, of making an idol out of God, and of reducing theology to its dogmatic content. It is by being both more and less that a non-dogmatic theology might be both non-dogmatic and theological simultaneously. Two points of reference in order to illuminate this understanding: First, the postmodern Christian theologian, Merold Westphal, distinguishes between “thin” and “thick” theologies. By a thin theology, he means the more formal, transcendental theology that that has been emptied of, or has filtered out, the “positive substance of particular [religious] traditions,” what Caputo has described as a “religion without religion.” This thin theology is the sort of religious reflection one finds in the work of Heidegger and Derrida, as their thinking follows the general structure of theology and their thematics take on an overtly religious character. However, the point of their reflections is not the advancement of any particular belief; it is more the case that they set beliefs in motion and thus play theology against itself. By a thick theology, Westphal means the kind of thinking that begins from “the theistic affirmation of God as a personal creator;” it is “robustly theistic and faithfully biblical.”4 Westphal is not disparaging to either one or the other, though his concern primarily is with the ramifications of a thick theology’s appropriation of a radical hermeneutic, specifically, whether it might then still serve its theistic and biblical interests. — 166 —

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While not disparaging, neither does Westphal acknowledge the effect an appropriation of a radical hermeneutic would have on a traditional thick theology; in fact (and this is the problem) it is as though both the thick theology, and the belief upon which it is predicated, remains utterly unchanged. On one level, one might ask what the point of such an appropriation is, whether it is in fact confirmation or simply redundant? On another, more sinister level, one might wonder whether there is any real difference between appropriation and exploitation, and, so long as theology only borrows from hermeneutics the means to say what it already believes, whether it is even an honest dialogue partner at all? And this is the point of a non-dogmatic theology’s attempt to be both more and less, for, like Westphal, it acknowledges the differences between kinds of theological thinking, but unlike Westphal, it is not content to settle between either–or; it instead at least strives to speak honestly from the plurality of its beliefs, and by so doing, the “robustly theistic” takes on the more formal question of its own possibility, which eventuates not with oppositional atheism, but the still more complex cultural condition of religious pluralism. Put otherwise, in order for theological thinking to matter, it must be responsive to the actuality of belief, and religious belief, even, and perhaps especially, when “robustly theistic and faithfully biblical,” is always already plural, dialogical — in short, in play, and theology must think accordingly. The line between the thin and thick theologies Westphal describes has been blurred, and there is no going back to a uniform faith. As Vattimo writes: …the Babel-like pluralism of late-modern society have made the thought of a unified world order impossible to conceive. Now, all the metanarratives — to use Lyotard’s well-taken expression — that claimed to mirror the objective structure of being have been discredited…It [the end of metaphysics] is above all associated with a series of events that have transformed our existence, of which — 167 —

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post-metaphysical philosophy gives an interpretation rather than an objective description.5 According to Vattimo’s interpretation, as our thinking has changed in response to the postmodern condition, so too is our existence transformed. Thinking matters, such that the theological appropriation of a radical hermeneutic cannot but help transform the very faith from which it originally sprung. Which brings us to our second example from Stanley Fish, in his article entitled, “Postmodern Warfare.” The title itself is significant, indicating the fundamental duplicity of warfare in a postmodern age — on the one hand, the war he has in mind is the United States’ declared “War on Terrorism;” on the other, it is the undeclared, pre-existing, and ongoing Culture Wars, for which the terrorists attacks on September 11, 2001 was but an event that would become ammunition for “our warrior intellectuals.” Fish cites a slew of cultural commentators and pundits who simultaneously pronounced the end of postmodernism in the wake of 9/11, and conflate postmodernism with establishing the cultural conditions in which terrorism thrives and goes unpunished. But as Fish explains, postmodernism, as a cultural condition, is not a political conviction, and one might just as well be a postmodern war-hawk as a postmodern cultural relativist. “After all,” Fish writes, “postmodernism is a series of arguments, not a way of life or a recipe for action. Your belief or disbelief in postmodern tenets is independent of your beliefs and commitments in any other area of your life. You may believe that objectivity of an absolute kind is possible or you may believe that it is not, but when you have to decide whether a particular thing is true or false, neither belief will hinder or help you. What will help you are archives, exemplary achievements, revered authorities, official bodies of evidence, relevant analogies, suggestive metaphors — all available to all persons independently of their philosophical convictions, or of the fact that they do or do not have any.”6 — 168 —

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But of more immediate interests to our concerns is Fish’s commentary on the nature of the U.S. declared war effort as a “religious war,” notwithstanding official protestations to the contrary. And for Fish, it is here that the declared postmodernist is at a distinct advantage in accurately assessing the situation at hand, for it is the postmodernist who insists on localized standards of intelligibility, and who therefore is attendant to the clash between the insider and the outsider, especially in matters of religion.7 As Fish explains, “The problem is not that there is no universal — the universal, the absolutely true, exists, and I know what it is. The problem is that you know, too, and that we know different things, which puts us right back where we were a few sentences ago, armed with universal judgments that are irreconcilable, all dressed up and nowhere to go for an authoritative adjudication.” Therefore, Fish continues: The question, “Is this a religious war?” is not a question about the war; it is the question that is the war. For the question makes assumptions Al Qaeda members are bound to reject and indeed are warring against: that it is possible to distinguish between religious and non-religious acts from a perspective uninflected by any religion or ideology; or, to put it another way, that there is a perspective detached from and above all religions, from the vantage point of which objective judgments about what is and is not properly religious could be handed down…8 It is the difference between political strategy and religious reflection, and unfortunately, many if not most religious scholars have simply fallen in line with the official national policy, while never acknowledging the vast internal discrepancy not only with Islam itself, but for all religions. After all, Islam, like the category of religion, is a construct, a second-order abstraction, an umbrella term useful for cataloguing and comparison, but lacking in actual descriptive power. There is no such thing as Islam, per se, just as there is no such thing as religion, but only religions.9 This is the point made by — 169 —

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Edward Said in such works as Orientalism and Covering Islam. As he writes in the introduction to the latter: One of the points I make here and in Orientalism is that the term “Islam” as it is used today seems to mean one simple thing but in fact is part fiction, part ideological label, part minimal designation of a religion called Islam. In no really significant way is there a direct correspondence between the “Islam” in common Western usage and the enormously varied life that goes on within the world of Islam, with its more than 800,000,000 people, its millions of square miles of territory principally in Africa and Asia, its dozens of societies, states, histories, geographies, cultures. Said also articulates the dangers of this theoretical naïveté: In many instances, “Islam” has licensed not only patent inaccuracy but also expressions of unrestrained ethnocentrism, cultural and even racial hatred, deep yet paradoxically free-floating hostility. All this has taken place as part of what is presumed to be fair, balanced, responsible coverage of Islam…. There is an unquestioned assumption that Islam can be characterized limitlessly by means of a handful of recklessly general and repeatedly deployed clichés. And always it supposed that the “Islam” being talked about is some real and stable object out there where ‘our’ oil supplies happen to be found.”10 Yet still, outsiders to the worlds of Islam continue to distinguish between “true” and “false” Islam, repeating President Bush’s famous formulation from soon after the September 11 attacks, that the terrorists have “hijacked” the religion of Islam, that the U.S. war is not with Islam but with the perverters of Islam, and thereby avoiding the messy implications that even authentic religious convictions sometimes lead to abhorrent behavior. Therefore, when Andrew Sullivan describes Islam as a “great religion that is nonetheless extremely inexperienced in the toleration of other ascendant and more powerful faiths,”11 Fish is — 170 —

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right to point out that when Sullivan says “great” he actually means “potentially great,” and its true potential, at least according to Sullivan’s line of argument, lies in its possibility to be Westernized, which, in this case, means secularized and privatized.12 And when Jane Eisner decries Islam for failing to “master modernity,” she presumes a truly modern religion would be a “nonsectarian belief in the freedom of the individual to think, speak, and act in his or her best interests.”13 Fish’s rejoinder to Eisner is that “She is not, as she would have it, defending all beliefs against an intolerant exclusionism but attacking belief in general, at least as it commits you to the truth of a conviction or the imperative of an action. The only good belief is the belief you can wear lightly and shrug off when you leave home and stride into the public sphere.”14 In this analysis of our current global political conflict, which carries with it, and is perhaps driven by, an overtly religious agenda, Fish echoes a sentiment from two centuries ago, voiced by the one many consider to be the founder of modern religious thought, Friedrich Schleiermacher, in his speeches to the “cultured despisers” of religion. For Schleiermacher, the generalized religious abstraction of natural religion revealed the “meager and lean religion” of modern culture, a religiosity that was in fact in contrast to the animating spirit of religion which Schleiermacher found still pulsing through the determinate, positive religions.15 It is why, in his first speech, that his defense of religion began with a challenge to the “cultured despisers” for them to be even more thoroughgoing in their contempt for religion; for if they were, they would discover the “voluntary ignorance” for which they were guilty, and recognize that the religion that they abhor was not religious at all, at least not as Schleiermacher variously defined it as a desire for the infinite, as an intuition of the universe, and as the recognition or the feeling of one’s absolute dependency. And in the fifth and final speech, they would realize that the natural religion that they championed as the antidote to religious fanaticism and dogmatism was also a be— 171 —

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trayal of religion by seeking a source outside itself to understand itself (in the case of natural religion, the outside source was the principle of reason). As Schleiermacher explains, religion must be understood from the “inside out,” “only through itself.” So given, it must constantly be alert for “two hostile principles that have sought to distort and conceal the spirit of each religion everywhere:” In all places there have soon been those who have circumscribed its [the religious] spirit in individual dogmas and wanted to exclude from religion whatever was not yet formed in accord with this circumscribed spirit; and there have been such people who, whether from hatred of polemics or to make religion more agreeable to the irreligious, whether from misunderstanding and ignorance of the matter or from lack of sense, decry everything unique as dead letters in order to set off toward the indeterminate. Guard yourselves against both; you will find the spirit of a religion, not among rigid systematizers or superficial indifferentists, but among those who live in it as their element and move ever further in it without nurturing the illusion that they are able to embrace it completely.16 All of which leaves us with one final question, or one final challenge if you will: Is the search for a non-dogmatic theology any different from Sullivan and Eisner’s championing of a “nonsectarian belief,” or from the cultured despisers affirmation of a natural religion. My answer to this all-important question, which I have sought to convey throughout the pages of this book, is that yes, there is a difference, and that it is this difference that makes all the difference in addressing the two prior questions with which this study began — namely, is theological thinking still viable and valuable in the contemporary world, and if so, how? The difference is the third way between denial and affirmation, the desire to be both more and less than theologies of the past, or in Schleiermacher’s words, to guard against both

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the “rigid systematizers” and the “superficial indifferentists.” So in contrast to Sullivan who claims that we must deny “the ultimate claims of religion” in order to “preserve true religion itself,” a non-dogmatic theology affirms the ultimate, is drawn in by its peculiar internal logic, is swept up by its vision of promise, but even while being drawn in and swept up by that encounter, the non-dogmatic theologian is still firmly implanted in this world where still other claims of ultimacy lie, a pluralistic world of competing and irreconcilable truths wherein a religion may be true, but still diverse, still internally variegated, and therefore still and forever indeterminate. The irony then is that one approaches a non-dogmatic theology not by rejecting dogmatism or denying belief, not by abstracting from the positive religions that which is most common or most palatable. Instead, a non-dogmatic theology begins to emerge only in the openness to belief, in the wonder and awe-inspiring fear of the mystery of religion, whereby dogma is deconstructed. In that process, the ultimate is still allowed its absolute status through which it impresses its peculiar brand of truth on the believer (for if not, its truth could never be understood), but simultaneously, the ultimate is also made relative by still other theo-logics. It is this double, if not duplicitous, nature that allows for understanding with or without agreement, for sympathetic judgment, and for discernment in the midst of ambiguity. It is what allows the thinker to see, and perhaps even sympathize with, the logic, despair and conviction of the suicide bomber, even while rejecting it as an acceptable mode of conduct. It is important to note that this is to say nothing of its truth or falsity; both saints and villains might be truthfully and authentically religious, and the difference between the one and the other cannot be settled simply through appeals to universal reason. It is less a matter of truth than it is a matter of pragmatics, of the actions that happen to an idea and the ethical evaluations that follow. This is the consequence of the paradigmatic shift that has taken place from philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language. This — 173 —

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is the ethical turn that in many ways defines the postmodern. And this is why even a thick theology, by its genuine engagement with the world, must think differently, which means that it must ask the reflexive question of its own nature and possibility, and thereby, the distinction between the thin and the thick theology is dissolved such that even a dogmatic theology might become non-dogmatic. Which is to say that there is a positive, affirmative value to theological reflection and critique, and that the search for a nondogmatic theology proceeds only in and through the varieties of religious (un)belief. But in the theological process, beliefs are inevitably changed and perspectives altered. This is the challenge and the hope that anyone endeavoring along this path accepts. This is the promise of a non-dogmatic theology for this age of postmoderm pluralism — a promise that is already, but not yet, and never fully, satisfied.

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Endnotes

Introduction 1.

2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Those arguing for the “end of theology” might, in fact, be either sympathizers with or detractors from the viability and value of theology. As for those who might speak of theology’s end, while remaining sympathetic to the critical and creative possibilities of theological thinking, I refer the reader to Carl Raschke, The End of Theology (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2000). Raschke writes, “By the ‘end’ of theology, we should warn here, we do not necessarily mean simply the termination, or even the actual demise, of the kind of reflective habit that has been plied by theologians in the Occident for centuries…. Theologians will continue to theologize, even though the genuine impetus for theological work has dampened. The end of theology refers not to the cessation of theological work, but to the onset of a fundamental question of the raison d’etre for what historically has been known as ‘theology’” (p. 96). In this sense, the end of theology on the one hand compels a transcendental critique into the theological conditions of possibility, and on the other, suggests the realization of the very essence of theological thought. As for the detractors, their argument concerning the end of theology is much less a philosophical argument and more of an ideological critique. For instance, see Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies: the Continuing Conflict with Theology in the Academy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), and Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: the Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). See Walter Capps, Religious Studies: the Making of a Discipline (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). See Sam Gill, “Territory,” in Critical Terms for Religious Study, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 306. See Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). For instance, see Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1971), Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: the Culture of Our — 175 —

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

Post-Christian Era (New York: George Braziller, 1961), John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963), and Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (New York: Bobbs Merrill, 1966). See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: a Postmodern A/Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: a Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). See Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001). Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 281. Ibid. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 281. For example, consider the early Christian church’s first efforts to define its beliefs. Rather than successfully reuniting the fragmented Roman empire as the Emperor Constantine wished, it led instead to a prolonged period of argument, violence and bloodshed that saw the identity of the Christian movement transformed from that of being the persecuted to being the persecutor. For a vivid account of this history, see Richard E. Rubenstein, When Jesus Became God: the Struggle to Define Christianity During the Last Days of Rome (New York: Harcourt, 1999). Or, as Thomas Altizer writes of this transformation of Christianity into an imperial religion, “Christian orthodoxy only fully or actually realized itself while Christianity was undergoing an ultimate transformation by becoming an imperial religion, and if now Church and State are truly united, this occurs in the first truly totalitarian imperium, for it is the first to realize an imperium that is internal and external at once. Christian orthodoxy was finally realized by that imperium, and just as it was Constantine the Great who introduced the orthodox formula of homoousios into the Nicene Council, it was the emperors who were the ultimate arbiters of Christian dogma, for Christian dogma became a fundamental instrument of imperial order. Thereby a Christendom was created in which political orthodoxy is inseparable from theological orthodoxy. If Heidegger can know ‘Latinization’ as the passage of a uniquely Greek truth or aletheia into a Roman imperium, wherein the domination of command passes into the very essence of ecclesiastical dogma (Parmenides #3), this — 176 —

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is not only the most dogmatic dogma in the world, but also the most commanding and purely authoritative dogma, and as such the expression of a truly new imperial and hierarchical Church. Christendom is the most intolerant and authoritarian of all pre-twentieth century historical worlds. Its very authority is inseparable from the authority of theological orthodoxy, and above all the absolute authority of an absolutely sovereign and absolute transcendent God. Now it is truly remarkable that not even Protestantism can escape this orthodoxy, or not an orthodox as opposed to a radical Protestantism. Just as the dogma of the Trinity is the very center of Christian orthodoxy, it is the dogma of the Trinity that is the most orthodox of all dogmas, just as it is that dogma that is most resistant to any possible interior, or imaginative, or conceptual appropriation.” In The New Gospel of Christian Atheism (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2002), pp. 80-81. 15. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961). Chapter One 1.

Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, eds. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: The Noonday Press, 1962), p. 54. 2. Ibid., pp. 42-43. 3. Ibid., p. 44. 4. For instance, see Peter Berger, The Heretical Imperative (New York: Doubleday, 1979). 5. As Bruce writes, “Modernization makes the church form of religion impossible. The church requires either cultural homogeneity or an elite sufficiently powerful to enforce conformity.” In “Cathedrals to Cults: the evolving forms of the religious life”, Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity, ed. Paul Heelas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 23. 6. See Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). 7. Steve Bruce, Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 1. 8. Ibid., p. 2, 3. 9. Ibid., p. 3. 10. Ibid., p. 4. 11. Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 9. — 177 —

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12. This first search for the historical Jesus ended in the culminating summary work of Albert Schweitzer’s, Quest for the Historical Jesus. And as Huston Smith explains, the only conclusions drawn were reduced to two points: “We know almost nothing about him [the Jesus of history]; and of the little we know, what is most certain is that he was wrong — this last referred to his putative belief that the world would quickly come to an end.” In Huston Smith, The World’s Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991), p. 318. For Schweitzer, the paltry nature of these historical conclusions only proved the inadequacy of the strictly historical for a theological methodology, but for others, it would contribute to the growing disenchantment with the seeming naïveté of religious conviction. 13. While there is much to unite these various figures, especially in their critical if not outright antagonistic approach to religion, there is also a danger within the academic community of conflating these classic hermeneuts of suspicion, as if the hermenetucs of suspicion was a uniform school of thought, which it was not, nor has it ever been. Perhaps the most effective way of distinguishing between them, therefore, as suggested by Tyler Roberts in his excellent study on the place of religion in Neitzsche’s thought, is by attending to the specific revaluation of religion that each accomplishes — or, put otherwise, by attending to the source of faith and the object of hope in each. As Roberts writes, “Nietzsche exhibits affinities with other modern unmaskers of religious illusion, such as Marx and Freud. But these affinities are limited by a crucial difference. Marx and Freud sought to guide human beings to a more rational conduct of life by enlightening them about their irrationality. What makes them distinctively modern is that they sought to ground their unmaskings ‘scientifically,’ by isolating the material codes or mechanisms by which human society or the human psyche works…. Nietzsche, however, was more ambivalent than either with respect to the modern project of enlightenment. He did not reject the value of enlightenment, but he insisted on its limits, and on the value of cultivating attention to these limits and to that which lies beyond them. As such, Nietzsche was as suspicious of the modern idealization of rationality, and its humanistic faith in enlightenment, as he was of metaphysical values, religion, and morality.” In Roberts, Contesting Spirit: Nietzsche, Affirmation, Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 12-13. For similar readings of Freud’s and Feuerbach’s respective cri— 178 —

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14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

tiques and revaluations of religion, see James J. DiCenso, The Other Freud: Religion, Culture and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1999) and Van A. Harvey, Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). The historian of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith, and others, have successfully argued that not only religious studies as an academic — or more precisely, an encyclopedic — endeavor, but even the very concept of ‘religion’ is a product of an Enlightenment sensibility. See J. Z. Smith, “’Religion’ and ‘Religious Studies’: No Difference at All,” in Soundings, Vol. LXXI, No. 2-3 (Summer/Fall 1988), pp. 231-244, and Charles E. Winquist, “Thinking Religion”, in The Surface of the Deep, (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group, 2003), pp. 181-190. And if Stout is correct that this modern Enlightenment sensibility takes “flight from” religious authority, then there is an irony to the historical origins of the academic study of religion, for it is precisely when Western culture turned away from religion, at least as its primary source of authority, that it began treating ‘religion’ as an object of academic study. For a similar argument on the historical origins of mythology, see Marcel Detienne, The Creation of Mythology, trans. Margaret Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). Russell Hoban, Pilgermann (New York: Washington Square Press, 1983), p. 100. See Religion, eds, Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). Jack Miles, “Religion Makes a Comeback (Belief to Follow),” in The New York Times Magazine (December 7, 1997), p. 56. Ibid., p. 58. David Brooks, “Kicking the Secularist Habit: a Six-Step Program,” The Atlantic Monthly (March 2003), p. 26. While I am sympathetic to Brooks’ efforts and grateful for this (belated) realization of the continuing role that religion plays in public life, I am not so ready to give up entirely on the secularization theory. On the whole, theorists who have advanced variations of the secularization theory have not equated secularization simply with the absence of religion. On the contrary, as Peter Berger and Steve Bruce suggest, the cultural processes of secularization might be just as operative in the midst of a religious climate, even in the midst of widespread “religious revival.” In such a case, what secularization means and what the secularization theory is meant to explain is an altered mode of intelligibility, such as when a particular denomination’s — 179 —

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own self-articulation of its identity might become secularized, demythologized or relativized. For a fuller description of how this understanding of the secularization theory might still be relevant, see Bruce, Religion in the Modern World, pp. 25-68. 20. This question has its modern origins with the sociological study of Max Weber’s, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. But it is also an ancient theological point reminding us of the necessary interrelationship between the secular and the religious, the saeculum as the true and only site of religion. As Gabriel Vahanian writes, “‘Secular’ — no other word has been so pried loose of its semantic context as has this word. Made to bear all by itself the brunt of the Death of God, a cultural phenomenon the size of an epochal ‘continental divide’ for which it has been both acclaimed and vilified, it has become the unwilling syndrome of a metastatic evolution, so irrevocable that we forget it was brought about less by the rise of the secular itself than by the self-inflicted demise of Christianity. And yet ‘secular’ was only the antonym of ‘religious,’ not its antithesis: they formed a pair, never to be cleaved one from the other. Together, they belonged to one and the same worldview, and belonged with one another.” In “Theology and the Secular,” Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 10. 21. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 25, 67. 22. As it is written in the book of Genesis 1:26-30, “Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over ever creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’ God said, ‘See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.’ And it was so.” See also, Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (London: Faber and Faber, — 180 —

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23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

1969), where he argues that the rationality of the West can be traced to the religious culture of ancient Israel. For instance, consider Peter Berger’s reflections on the social context of the Pauline Epistles. Berger writes, “Very often passages of the Bible come to us from distant times and places that are difficult to imagine, let alone identify with. This difficulty is much less in the case of the Pauline Epistles. The late Hellenistic world out of which they come and to which they are addressed has a rather modernistic feel. This was a world of sophisticated cities — affluent, cosmopolitan, pluralistic, and more than a little libertine. Cornith, I suspect, would appear quite familiar if we were transported there by time machine: A port city, a provincial capital, bustling with commerce, with an ethnically heterogeneous population of diverse religious affiliations, endowed (among other things) with a flourishing sex industry.” In A Far Glory: The Quest for Faith in the Age of Credulity (New York: Anchor Books, 1992), p. 4. I write this in the heart of the Pennsylvania Dutch territory of the eastern United States surrounded by Amish farms and Mennonite communities. A recent story in the local newspaper relayed the particular struggle of one local Amish community in their efforts to co-exist peacefully with their neighbors and in accordance with state law while still maintaining the integrity of their religious convictions. It seems that state law demands that a protective triangle reflector be placed at the rear of all horse-driven buggies that are driven on state and federal highways. The triangular shape of the reflector, however, is prohibited to be displayed by this particular Amish community. Tickets have been issued and licenses have been revoked, while the community members have made the case that this is an issue of religious liberty. The case is currently under federal review. See Luc Ferry, Man Made God: The Meaning of Life, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Barry Lynn, “Unmade in America: The true cost of a global assembly line,” in Harper’s Magazine (June 2002), p. 34. See Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., Fundamentalisms Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. vii-x. For instance, see John Hick, “The Non-Absoluteness of Christianity,” in The Myth of Christian Uniqueness: Toward a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, eds., John Hick and Paul F. Knitter (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987); Dalai Lama, Ethics for the New Millennium (New York: Riverhead Books, 1999); and — 181 —

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James B. Wiggins, In Praise of Religious Diversity (New York: Routledge, 1996). 29. Berger, A Far Glory, p. 16. 30. Ibid., p. 20. 31. For instance, see Dominique Janicaud, Jean-François Courtine, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, and Paul Ricoeur, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). Chapter Two 1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

For instance, see Charlotte Allen, “Is Nothing Sacred: Casting out the Gods from Religious Studies,” in Lingua Franca (November 1996), pp. 30-40. On the place of theology in the universal pursuit of knowledge, Aristotle writes, “It is clear, therefore, that there are three kinds of theoretical sciences: natural, mathematical, and divine [theologica ]. The theoretical kind of science is best, and of these the best is the last mentioned, for it deals with the most honored things, and each science is called better or worse according to its subject matter.” In Metaphysics, p. 235. On this point, Derrida writes, “We act as though we had some common sense of what ‘religion’ means through the languages that we believe…we know how to speak. We believe in the minimal trustworthiness of this word. Like Heidegger, concerning what he calls the Faktum of the vocabulary of being (at the beginning of Sein und Zeit), we believe…we pre-understand the meaning of this word, if only to be able to question and in order to interrogate ourselves on this subject. Well…nothing is less pre-assured than such a Faktum (in both these cases, precisely) and the entire question of religion comes down, perhaps, to this lack of assurance.” In “Faith and Knowledge,” Religion, p. 3. For instance, in tracing the shift from phenomenology’s ‘description’ of religion to sociology’s analysis of the ‘function’ of religion, Capps notes the sociologist’s focus on religions in distinction to religion, yet still, the notion of religion itself is still held out as a meaningful term on its own: “It is difficult to talk about religion per se from this [functional approach] vantage point, since it is more appropriate to talk about the religions” (Capps, p. 158). See Smith, “’Religion’ and ‘Religious Studies’: No Difference at All.” It should be noted that there is an irony to Capps’ “continuous narrative” in that it is, on the one hand, a story of Religious — 182 —

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Studies’ emancipation from theology, while, on the other, the story ends with the “theological residue” still in place. For Capps’ narrative ends with the sub-discipline of the comparison of religions, which he sees essentially as varying approaches to inter-faith dialogue. As Capps comes to the close of his study, then, there is the unconscious return of the repressed within the field of religion as theology remains as the persistent residue. 7. For a contrasting account of the trajectory of the field, see, for example, Donald Wiebe, who argues that the academic study of religion has lost its nerve by not maintaining the rigid, scientific approach of its origins. For Wiebe, then, the making of the discipline of religion is not rightly characterized as Religious Studies’ emancipation from theology, but rather, Religious Studies’ betrayal of its beginnings, which he sees as a quest for making the academic study of religion properly objective and scientific. 8. For instance, already in the introduction Capps writes, “The large variety of interests, methods, intentions, convictions, materials, subjects, issues, and skills…should indicate that religious studies is a dynamic subject-field within which selected topics are approached by means of numerous disciplines under the influence of multiple attitudes and methodological sets of interest” (p. xxi ). And one paragraph later, he continues, “In other words, religious studies is composed of a collection of intellectual interests. It is characterized by a variety of useful endeavors that draw upon a large number of disciplines while involving a multiplicity of subjects” (p. xxi). 9. For instance, towards the end of the work, Capps writes, “The suspicion remains that theological studies are not conducted with the same analytical rigor, or dispassionate scholarly attention, that is the prerequisite for analysis and interpretation in the field of religious studies” (p. 326). 10. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). 11. As Readings writes, “The question of the postmodern is a question posed to the University as much as in the University” (p. 6). 12. Readings writes, “Rather than denouncing this process in the name of hidden or yet-to-be-realized identities, we need to rethink the question of agency, to ask what can be the kinds of agency that can arise among relays or roles rather than selfidentical subjects. And lest I seem to be denouncing Cultural Studies, let me make clear that work in Cultural Studies is — 183 —

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13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

structured by this tension: by a general tendency to engage in ideology-critique while realizing its limitation” (p. 117). Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: from Babylon to Jamestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xi. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), p. 81. Ibid. Ibid., p. 97. A title of a lecture Barth gave on February 6, 1917. In it he described the theological discovery of a “new world” in which “not the right human thoughts about God but the right divine thoughts about men” prevailed (Busch, p. 101). A famous quotation from the Catholic theologian, Karl Adam, on the event of the publication of Barth’s commentary on Romans. John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 1, 3. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 49. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 5. As Levinas writes, “The infinity of responsibility denotes not its actual immensity, but a responsibility increasing in the measure it is assumed…. The more I am just, the more guilty I am.” In Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1990), p. 244. Also, in an essay entitled, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” he tells us of the responsibility that is beyond intentionality: “The comedy begins with the simplest of our movements, carrying with them every inevitable awkwardness. In putting out my hand to approach a chair, I have creased the sleeve of my jacket, I have scratched the floor, I have dropped the ash from my cigarette. In doing that which I wanted to do, I have done so many things I did not want to do. The act has not been pure for I have left some traces. In wiping out these traces, I have left others.” In Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, eds. Adriaan Peperzak and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 4.

Chapter Three 1.

For instance, Mark C. Taylor raises questions regarding even the existence of religion, let alone that of religious experience. — 184 —

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2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

See Mark C. Taylor, “Introduction,” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Martin Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking, trans. James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 21. Robert Gall, Beyond Theism and Atheism: Heidegger’s Significance for Religious Thinking (Kluwer, 1987), p. ix. Ibid., p. 26. Ibid. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 289. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), p. 210. Ibid., pp. 224-225. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), p. 5. Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. xxiv. Ibid., p. xxviii. For instance, see Capps, who offers a comprehensive narrative of the academic study of Religion as a purging of the “theological residue.” For instance, Donald Wiebe writes, “If the academic study of religion wishes to be taken seriously as a contributor of knowledge about our world, it will have to concede the boundaries set by the ideal of scientific knowledge that characterizes the university. It will have to recognize the limits of explanation and theory and be content to explain the subject-matter — and nothing more — rather than show itself a form of political or religious behavior (or an injunction to such action).” In The Politics of Religious Studies, p. xiii. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge”, p. 1. Ibid., p. 3. Smith, “‘Religion’ and ‘Religious Studies’: No Difference at All.” McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion. Mark C. Taylor, About Religion. John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963). Richard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz: Radical Theology and Contemporary Judaism (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). — 185 —

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21. See, for instance, Vahanian, The Death of God, and Altizer and Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God. 22. See Winquist, Desiring Theology, pp. ix-x. 23. Kristeva’s specific reference for this remark is found in her discussion on the Christian concept of sin — namely, that sin is “requisite for the beautiful.” In Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), p. 123. 24. Ibid., p. 26. 25. Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 231. 26. Ibid., p. 60. 27. Ibid., p. 238. This strictly negative appraisal of religion will be tamed as Barth’s theology shifts from dialectics to dogmatics. See especially his discussion of “True Religion,” in Church Dogmatics I/2, §17, trans. G. T. Thomas and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1956), pp. 325-361. 28. Barth, “Biblical Questions, Insights and Vistas,” in Eberhard Jüngel, ed., Karl Barth: A Theological Legacy (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1986), pp. 59-60. 29. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 286. 30. Charles Marsh, Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 21. 31. Barth as quoted in Marsh, p. 24. 32. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 280. 33. Ibid., p. 360. 34. William Hamilton, “A Secular Theology for a World Come of Age,” Theology Today, XVIII/4 (January 1962), p. 452. 35. See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1977). 36. Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, 9. 37. Ibid., 280. 38. Ibid., p. 360. 39. As quoted by Hamilton, p. 458. 40. What I mean by the secularity of contemporary culture can be discerned through Steve Bruce’s excellent sociological analysis of religion in the modern world. Bruce writes, “Belief in the supernatural has not disappeared. Rather the forms in which it is expressed have become so idiosyncratic and so diffuse that there are few specific social consequences.” In Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 234.

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Chapter Four 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

See John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 281. For instance, see Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), p. 186 Heidegger, “What are Poets For?” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 91. Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray and Fred D. Wieck (New York: Harper Collins, 1972), p. 41. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Other: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 52. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” The End of Philosophy, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 91. Translator’s note, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” p. 84. Heidegger, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” p. 85. Ibid., p. 85-86. Ibid., p. 96-97. Rorty, p. 51. John Sallis, Echoes: After Heidegger (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 35. For a related point on the play of saying and unsaying, Sallis writes, “One may follow the way in such a way that the unsaying remains in play, that is, in such a way that it will always be necessary to continue unsaying, in face of the same, the difference that saying opens, the difference between, on the one hand, what would be originary…and everything nonoriginary to which the saying of the originary cannot return” (S 74). Heidegger, “Language,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), p. 190. Ibid. Ibid., p. 192. Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 209. Heidegger, “…Poetically Man Dwells…,” On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), pp. 215-16. Sallis, p. 207. Ibid., pp. 5-6. — 187 —

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25. Heidegger, “The Origin of the Art Work,” Poetry, Language, Thought, p. 74. 26. Ibid. 27. Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 3. 28. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, p 64. 29. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 25. 30. Ibid., p. 25. 31. Ibid., p. 26. 32. Ibid., p. 27. 33. Ibid., p. 45. 34. Ibid., p. 33. 35. Ibid., p. 37. 36. Ibid., p. 39. 37. Ibid., p. 47. 38. Ibid., p. 48. 39. Ibid., p. 49. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 51. 42. Ibid., p. 62. 43. Marion, Reduction and Givenness, p. 33. 44. See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 1-2. Chapter Five 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 26. See Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960). Heidegger, Piety of Thinking, p. 6. Ibid., p. 21. For instance, see Heidegger Piety of Thinking, pp. 59-71, where he makes this proclamation in a conversation with German Protestant theologians. See Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,’ in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 128-129, where Derrida questions whether or not Heidegger did not in fact write a theology with and without the word being. This deliberately — 188 —

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

provocative question by Derrida will be discussed again in greater detail in the close of this chapter. Heidegger, Piety of Thinking, p. 65. Ibid., p. 67. Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. xxvi. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 54. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), p. 143. Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 3. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Richard Hope (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1952), p. 235. For a contemporary proponent of this position, see Milbank, The Word Made Strange, pp. 49-50. Taylor, Erring, 6. [italics his] The school of radical orthodoxy is perhaps best seen as a later development of this critical reaction against Derrida. According to most radical orthodox thinkers, with Graham Ward being the possible exception, postmodernism in general, and Derrida in particular (in spite of his own disavowals of the term ‘postmodern’), are fundamentally nihilistic and, thus, antithetical to religion. They seek a recovery of a radically orthodox Christian vision of the world in which the modern and postmodern preoccupations with epistemology is supplanted by a pre-modern conviction of the essential harmony between faith and being. Emmanuel Levinas, “The Temptation of Temptation,” in Nine Talmudic Readings, pp. 30-50. Brian D. Ingraffia, Postmodern Theory and Biblical Theology: Vanquishing God’s Shadow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Heidegger, Identity and Difference, p. 42. As Marion writes on this subject in God without Being: “If, first, theology as theology attempts the hermeneutic of the words in view, hence also, from the point of view of the Word, if the Eucharist offers the only correct hermeneutic site where the Word can be said in person in the blessing, if finally only the celebrant receives authority to go beyond the words as far as the Word, because he alone finds himself invested by the persona Christi, then one must conclude that only the bishop merits, in the full sense, the title of theologian.” (Marion, p. 153).

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Chapter Six 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”, p. 128. This is a phrase borrowed from the landmark study of the genealogy of American pragmatism by Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). For an alternative reading of the genealogy of American pragmatism, see the Pulitzer Prize winning work by Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: a Story of Ideas in American (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001). Translated as “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” trans. Bernard G. Prusak, in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: the French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). Bernard G. Prusak, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn,” p. 3. Ibid., p. 5. Janicaud, “The Theological Turn of French Phenomenology,” p. 26-27. For my more complete discussion of this trajectory within Husserl’s thought, see Robbins, Between Faith and Thought: an Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), especially Chapter Three, pp. 67-94. Prusak, p. 4. Ferry, Man Made God, p. 143. Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 69. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 59. Compare to Barth’s famous challenge to Christian ministers, “As ministers, we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give God the glory.” In Barth, The Word of God and the Task of Ministry, trans. Douglas Horton (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1978), p. 186. Emmanuel Levinas, Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), pp. 58, 60. See my argument for this reading of Marion, Between Faith and Thought, p. 122. — 190 —

In Search of a Non-Dogmatic Theology

16. This is a term first offered into the dialogue by Marion, specifically in reference to the pragmatic function of language, most especially the liturgical languages of prayer and praise. It is then picked up by Derrida as “one of the points on which I feel very close to him [Marion].” In John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, (eds) God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 45. 17. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, p. 37. 18. Ibid., p. 1. 19. Ibid., p. 6. 20. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, pp. 7-8. 21. Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials.” 22. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, p. 21. 23. Ibid., 22. 24. Ibid., p. 23. 25. Ibid., p. 24. 26. Ibid., p. 28. 27. Ibid., p. 29. 28. Ibid., p. 30. This description of Christian theology is reminiscent of Karl Barth’s fondness for Matthias Grünewald’s painting of the crucifixion, in which John the Baptist stands at the foot of the cross, pointing with an elongated finger at the crucified Christ, which also brings to mind David Tracy’s insightful introduction to Marion’s God Without Being. Tracy situates Marion as one who stands in the tradition of Christian theological thought that begins from the standpoint of revelation, a tradition that was pronounced and made prominent in the Twentieth century by Barth. As Tracy writes, “Marion has clearly forged a new and brilliant postmodern version of the other great alternative for theology: a revelation-centered, noncorrelational, postmetaphysical theology. Like his great predecessor in Catholic theology, Hans Urs Balthasar, and like his natural ally in Protestant theology, Karl Barth, Marion has developed a rigorous and coherent theological strategy focused on the reality of God’s revelation as pure gift, indeed as excess.” In God Without Being, p. xii. 29. Ibid., p. 32. See Milbank, “Only Theology Overcomes Metaphysics,” in Theology, Language, Culture, pp. 36-54. 30. Ibid., pp. 32, 33. 31. Marion explains, “By theology of absence…we mean not the non-presence of God, but the fact that the name God is given, the name which gives God, which is given as God…serves to shield God from presence…and offers him precisely as an exception to presence” (p. 37). 32. God, the Gift, and Postmodernism, p. 39. — 191 —

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33. Ibid., p. 45. 34. Marion, God Without Being, pp. 139-160, 153. Chapter Seven 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8.

See Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 1. Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow. (New York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 50. See Jacques Derrida, “On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy,” in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Immanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter D. Fenves (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp. 117-172; and, as John Caputo writes of Derrida’s relationship to the Enlightenment, “Derrida’s ‘On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy’ is a provocative delimitation of his relationship to the Enlightenment, an unsettling of accounts with modernity, a kind of Derridean counterpart to the Foucaldian tract on Kant’s “What is Enlightenment?” This is an essay on what could have been called ‘postmodernism’, that is, of how to work one’s way through modernity (not around it), how to work with it (not jettison it), had not this word suffered the ill-fortune of being ground into senselessness by overuse, by a wild circulation that is ‘postmodern’ in the very worst sense.” In The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, p. 88-89. Alfred Kazin, “Introduction,” in The Portable Blake, ed. Alfred Kazin (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), pp. 2-3. As Jean H. Hagstrum writes, “Blake must never be regarded as a cultural orphan, living out his days in solitary anger, hostile to the society in which he was bred. He was deeply involved in what he rejected. The man who mounted the fiercest, longest, and most effective attack on the neoclassical and enlightenment establishment ever made always revealed the mark of his origin in the age of Johnson.” In Jean H Hagstrum, “William Blake Rejects the Enlightenment.” Critical Essays on William Blake, ed. Hazard Adams (Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1991), p. 67. For an extended reading of Blake’s writings as a response to and informed by his contemporary situation, see the landmark work by David V. Erdman, Prophet against Empire: A Poet’s Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. Portable Blake, p. 77. Ibid., p. 78. — 192 —

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

Ibid. Hagstrum, p. 76. Portable Blake, pp. 16-17. Ibid., p. 21. Bloom, p. 76. Portable Blake, p. 259. Ibid., p. 251. Mark Lilla, “G. B. Vico: The Antimodernist” The Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 27 (Summer 1993), p. 32. Ibid., p. 32-33. Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 21. Ibid., p. 22. For example, Berlin writes, “Much of his [Vico’s] genetic etymology and philology is clearly faulty or naïve or fantastic. But it is equally clear that he was, so far as I know, the first to grasp the seminal and revolutionary truth that linguistic forms are one of the keys to the mind of those who use words, and indeed to the entire mental, social and cultural life of societies. He saw much more clearly than anyone before him . . . that a particular type of locution, the use and structure of language, has a necessary ‘organic’ connection with particular types of political and social structure, of religion, of law, of economic life, of morality, of theology, of military organization and so on” (p. 72). Or, as John Milbank writes, “The radicalism of Vico’s metacritique appears especially in this social and intellectual role that he ascribes to metaphor. . . Vico is even more radical than a modern phenomenologist like Paul Ricoeur who is able to expound the role of metaphor in continuously shaking up the received constitution of the categories, but nevertheless sees this role as finally ‘validated’ by speculative discourse, which is able to grasp in a ‘clear’ fashion the new genera, and their dynamic analogical inter-relation. For Ricoeur, interpretation is concluded in philosophic discourse, whereas for Vico this is merely a stage in the metaphoric process which does indeed have specific gnoseological value in so far as it contemplates, directly, the general and generative loci of understanding, but whose task is also to encourage a return to the poetic efforts of ingenium.” In Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), pp. 334-335. Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p. 22. Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, p. 4. — 193 —

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23. Ibid., p. 5. 24. Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment, p. 45. 25. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of “Practic of the New Science”, Trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 149, 150. 26. Ibid., pp. 20-21. 27. Ibid., p. 92. 28. Ibid., p. 62. 29. Ibid., p. 5. 30. Ibid., p. 39. 31. Ibid., p. 78. 32. Ibid., pp. 21-22. 33. Isaiah Berlin has identified seven “time-defying notions” that Vico articulated as alternatives to this fundamental notion of Enlightenment philosophy. Mark Lilla expresses them as follows: “that human nature is changeable, and that humans themselves contribute to this change; that man only knows what he creates; that therefore the human sciences are distinct from and superior to the natural sciences; that cultures are wholes, that cultures are created essentially through self-expression; that art is a major form of such expression; and that we may come to understand the expressions of other cultures, in the present or the past, through the exercise of reconstructive imagination” (p. 35). 34. Vico, New Science, p. 136. 35. Patrick H. Hutton, “Vico and the End of History,” in Historical Reflections, Vol. 22 (Fall 1996), p. 556. 36. Vico, New Science, p. 97. 37. Ibid., pp. 109-110. 38. Ibid., p. 176. 39. Ibid., p. 214. 40. Ibid., pp. 102-103. 41. Ibid., p. 94. 42. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (Aurora: The Davies Group, 2000), p. vi. 43. John Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, p. 5. 44. Altizer, The New Apocalypse, pp. xv-xvi. 45. Ibid., p. xvii. 46. Ibid., p. 203. 47. Milbank, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Vico, p. 2. — 194 —

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48. Ibid. Chapter Eight 1.

See Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking: Philosophical Essays, trans. William Mark Hohengarten (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 12-18. 2. Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. xiii, xiv. 3. John D. Caputo, Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 1. 4. Ibid., pp. 4-5. 5. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 74. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 92. 7. See, for example, Michael Mott, who writes in his biography of Merton, “Merton was coming to see the necessity for a certain kind of alienation. Monks and poets were ‘marginal men’; both their vision and their integrity of vocation depended on realizing and accepting this. They saw more clearly because they stood apart.” In Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993), p. 413. 8. Emmanuel Levinas, “Signature,” In Research in Phenomenology, Vol. VIII (1978), p. 177. 9. Jacques Derrida, Adieu: to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 13. 10. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), p. 39. 11. See Jacques Derrida, “Violence and Metaphysics: an Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). For instance, referring to Levinas’ own eventual critique of Husserl, Derrida writes, “In 1930 Levinas turns toward Heidegger against Husserl. Sein und Zeit is published, and Heidegger’s teaching begins to spread. Everything which overflows the commentary and ‘letter’ of Husserl’s text moves toward ‘ontology,’ ‘in the very special sense Heidegger gives to the term’”. In his critique of Husserl, Levinas retains two Heideggerean themes: (1) despite ‘the idea, so profound, that in the ontological order the world of science is posterior to the concrete and vague world of perception, and depends upon it,’ — 195 —

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12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

Husserl ‘perhaps was wrong to see in this concrete world, a world of perceived objects above all’… (2) if Husserl was right in his opposition to historicism and naturalistic history, he neglected ‘the historical situation of man…understood in another sense.’ There exist a historicity and a temporality of man that are not only predicates but ‘the very substantiality of his substance.’ It is ‘this structure…which occupies such an important place in Heidegger’s thought’” (p. 87). Or as Adriaan Peperzak writes, “Husserl started the revolution in philosophy called ‘phenomenology’; Heidegger exploited hidden possibilities of phenomenology and transformed it into a new ontology; Levinas developed and tried to overcome phenomenological ontology by a radical renewal of ‘metaphysics,’ rehabilitating the existent…by a thought ‘beyond being’…” In Beyond: The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 38. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, p. 42. Adriaan Peperzak, To the Other: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1993), p. 17. As Levinas writes, “Our response [to Heidegger] is to ask whether the relation with the Other is in fact a matter of letting be? Is not the independence of the Other accomplished in the role of being called? Is the person to whom one speaks understood from the first in his or her being? Not at all. The Other is not an object of comprehension first and an interlocutor second. The two relations are intertwined. In other words, the comprehension of the Other is inseparable from his or her invocation.” In “Is Ontology Fundamental?” pp. 124-125. Levinas, “Is Ontology Fundamental?” p. 122. Ibid., pp. 124-125. Levinas, “Signature,” p. 181. Levinas, Otherwise then Being, p. 116. Derrida, Adieu, p. 4. Ibid. Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” p. 135. Ibid., p. 131. Ibid., p. 136. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 139. Ibid., p. 143. Ibid., p. 148. As M. Holmes Hartshorne writes, “Our Western history has given us two great ironists: Socrates and Plato.” In Harts— 196 —

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29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

horne, Kierkegaard: Godly Deceiver: The Nature and Meaning His Pseudonmymous Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. xv. David Gouwens, Kierkegaard as Religious Thinker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 7. In A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed by Robert Bretall. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 213.. Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way: Studies by Various Persons, trans by Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), p. xvii. Kierkegaard Anthology, p. viii. In Stages on Life’s Way, p. 398. Kierkegaard, The Point of View, trans by Walter Lowrie. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 89. For a related point from the psychotherapeutic tradition, see Sigmund Freud, “Observations on ‘Wild’ Analysis.” In Therapy and Technique (New York: Collier Books, 1963), pp. 89-95. In the epilogue to The Point of View For My Work as an Author, for instance, Kierkegaard writes, “…the ‘turning point,’ as I have called it, of the whole authorship, which states the ‘Problem’ and at the same time, by indirect attack and Socratic dialectic, inflicts upon the System a mortal wound — from behind, fighting the System and Speculation in order to show that ‘the way’ is not from the simple to the System and Speculation, bur from the System and Speculation back again to the simple thing of becoming a Christian, fighting for this cause and vigorously slashing through to find the way back.” In A Kierkegaard Anthology, ed by Robert Bretall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 337. Regarding the comforts and assurances of the ethical, Kierkegaard writes, “The ethical is so incorruptible that if our Lord himself had been obliged to allow himself a little irregularity in creating the world, ethics would not let itself be disturbed, although heaven and earth and everything found therein is nevertheless a quite fine masterpiece.” In Stages on Life’s Way, p. 155. Ibid., p. 183. See Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 219-246.

Chapter Nine 1. 2. 3.

See Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents. Kristeva, The Powers of Horror, pp. 90-112. Ibid., pp. 91, 112. — 197 —

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. Jacques Lacan, “The Names-of-the-Father Seminar,” in The Postmodern Bible Reader, eds. David Jobling, Tina Pippin, and Ronald Schleifer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 110. In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged, ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: William Be. Eerdmans, 1992), p. 648. Slavoj Žižek , The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 97. This shared religious pattern of “consecration through sublimation” does not diminish the significant differences between these three religions. For instance, Kristeva distinguishes Christianity from Judaism by the former’s subjective interiorization of abjection, as opposed to the latter’s predication of abjection via the logic of separation. See Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 107. Ibid., p. 17. Girard explains: “So Jesus is the only man who achieves the goal God has set for all mankind, the only man who has nothing to do with violence and its works…. If the fulfillment, on earth, passes inevitably through the death of Jesus, this is not because the Father demands this death, for strange sacrificial motives. Neither the son nor the Father should be questioned about the cause of this event, but all mankind, and mankind alone. The very fact that mankind has never really managed to understand what is involved reveals clearly that the misunderstanding of the founding murder is still being perpetuated, as is our inability to hear the Word of God.” In René Girard, The Girard Reader, edited by James G. Williams (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), p. 186. Thomas Ballantine Irving, Khursid Ahmad, and Muhammad Manazir Ahsan, The Qur-an: Basic Teachings (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1979), p. 9. Žižek , The Fragile Absolute, p. 100. This reading of Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents is drawn from Ernest Wallwork’s excellent study, entitled, Psychoanalysis and Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991). See especially Chapter 9, “On Modifying Normative Standards: The Case of the Love Commandment,” pp. 193207. DiCenso, The Other Freud, p. 13. Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, p. 651. — 198 —

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18. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 350. 19. See Ricoeur’s conclusion, entitled, “The Symbol Gives Rise to Thought,” pp. 347-357. 20. Žižek , The Fragile Absolute, p. 109. 21. Lacan, “The Names-of-the-Father Seminar”, pp. 113-114. 22. Ibid., p. 115. See also Jack Miles, who argues that the battle between God and humankind over human fertility is the key to understanding the Abrahamic narrative in Genesis 12-50. As Miles writes of the deferred promised child to Abraham and Sarah, “It is the Lord who will give the fertility; it is he who will govern the multiplication. Abram’s fertility will become such a byword that others will wish one another well by wishing likeness to him…. The inference, however, is that, lacking comparable divine assistance, none will match Abram in fertility. In context, the Lord is taking back from mankind a large measure of the gift of life. But does he realize this about himself?” In God: a Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 48. 23. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: an essay on interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1970), p. 118. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., p. 120. 26. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, p. 26. 27. Ibid., pp. 2-3. 28. Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 19. 29. Ibid. Conclusion 1. 2.

Jean-Fançois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). David Hume makes a similar point about “the proper sphere” of skepticism. On the one hand, Hume praises skepticism as the “one species of philosophy which seems little liable to this inconvenience,” by which he means the philosophers’ tendency to “reason [themselves] out of all virtue as well as social enjoyment.” For with skepticism, Hume insists, every passion is mortified “except the love of truth; and that passion never is, nor can be, carried to too high a degree.” On the other hand, though Hume is proudly a sceptic himself, he also recognizes the need for his philosophical skepticism to be mitigated by what he calls the “doctrine of necessity.” Otherwise, even skep— 199 —

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3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

ticism, which is by definition a caution against excessive passion, might become excessive: “For here is the chief and most confounding objection to excessive skepticism, that no durable good can ever result from it; while it remains in its full force and vigour. We need only ask such a sceptic, What meaning is? And what he proposes by all these curious researches? He is immediately at a loss, and knows not what to answer…. When he awakes from his dream, he will be the first to join in the laugh against himself, and to confess, that all his objections are mere amusement, and can have no other tendency than to show the whimsical condition of mankind, who must act and reason and believe; though they are not able, by their most diligent enquiry, to satisfy themselves concerning the foundation of these operations, or to remove the objections, which may be raised against them.” In Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Chicago: Open Court, 1988), p.84-85, 190-191. Vattimo, After Christianity, pp. 86-87. Merold Westphal, “Hermeneutical Finitude from Schleiermacher to Derrida,” in Between the Human and the Divine: Philosophical and Theological Hermeneutics, ed. Andrzej Wiercinski (Toronto: The Hermeneutics Press, 2002), p. 64-65. Vattimo, Against Christianity, p. 15. Stanley Fish, “Postmodern Warfare: The Ignorance of our Warrior Intellectuals,” in Harper’s Magazine (July 2002), p. 34. As Fish writes, “Although it might not at first be obvious, the substitution for real religions of a religion drained of particulars is of a piece with the desire to exorcise postmodernism. In both instances, what is feared is the absence of a public space or common ground in relation to which judgments and determinations of value can be made with no reference to the religious, ethnic, racial, or national identities of the persons to whom they apply,” p. 37. Ibid., p. 37, 35. This point has been made most persuasively by the historian of religion, J.Z. Smith, who writes, “While there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another as religious — there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy.” In Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. xi. — 200 —

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10. Edward W. Said, Covering Islam: How the Media and Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), pp. x, xi. 11. As quoted in Fish, p. 36. 12. Fish’s rejoinder: “Privatization and secularization are not goals that Islam has yet to achieve; they are specters that Islam (or some versions of it) pushes away as one would push away death,” p. 36. 13. As quoted in Fish, p. 37. 14. Ibid. 15. It is perhaps needless to say that Schleiermacher’s contempt for natural religion was at least equal to the ‘cultured despisers’ contempt for the positive religions. As Schleiermacher explains, “the essence of natural religion actually consists wholly in the negation of everything positive and characteristic in religion and in the most violent polemic against it. Thus natural religion is also the worthy product of an age whose hobbyhorse was a lamentable generality and an empty sobriety, which, more than everything else, works against true cultivation in all things.” In On Religion, Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 110. 16. Ibid., p. 113.

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— 202 —

Index Altizer, Thomas, xiii, 126-127, 176 n14 Augustine, 80 Authority, xiv; authoritarianism, xviii; crisis of, 7 Barth, Karl, 32-33, 47-48, 186 n27, 190-191 n13, n28 Berger, Peter, 18-19 Bible, 10, 158 Blake, William, 107, 109-115, 118, 121, 123, 124-127 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, xvii, 4752, 175-176 n6 Brooks, David, 3, 5, 15, 179180 n19 Bruce, Steve, 5-9, 186-187 n40 Brunner, Emil, 33 Bultmann, Rudolf, 33 Capps, Walter, 23-27, 44, 30, 57, 182 n4, 183 n6 Caputo, John, xvii, 43, 77-81, 84, 96-97, 129, 131, 141, 192 n3 Credulity, Age of, 13-19 Death of God, xiv, xvii, 13, 15, 46, 77, 78, 125 Deconstruction, 77-79, 80, 9899, 115, 131, 153, 173 Deleuze, Gilles, xiii, xvii-xviii, 58, 91, 93, 94 Derrida, Jacques, 13, 15, 19, 35, 43, 45, 77-81, 84-888, 95-103, 137, 166, 182 n3, 189 n6, n16, 191 n16, 192 n3, 195-196 n11 Descartes, René, 6-7, 117, 121122, 138

Desire, xvi, 16, 19, 21, 22, 46, 53, 138 Dialogue, 11, 167; dialogical, 167 Diversity, 17, 19, 107, 164 Dogma, xiv, 4, 172, 177 n14; dogmatism, xviii, 6, 34, 77, 115, 117, 177 n14; dogmatic, 36, 44, 166 Ecumenical, xiii, xviii, 107 End of Theology, xiv, xviii-xix, 52, 175 n1 Enlightenment, 7, 11, 107-127, 159, 163, 192 n3; postEnlightenment, 9-11 Ethics, 35, 47, 129-145 Ferry, Luc, 17, 92-93 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 11, 78 Fish, Stanley, 163, 168-172 Foucault, Michel, 107-108 Fragmentation, 8, 11, 13 Freud, Sigmund, 11, 109, 147148, 152-153, 157, 197 n35 Fundamentalism, 18, 133, 160-161 Gall, Robert, 42-43, 57 Gill, Sam, xv, 22 Habermas, Jürgen, 129 Hegel, G. W. F., 69, 73, 74, 78 Heidegger, Martin, xiv, 33, 42, 57-70, 72-76, 79, 81, 87, 90, 130, 134-135, 144, 154, 166, 189 n6, 195-196 n11, n14; Being and Time, 67, 74; Identity and Difference, 67-70, 74-75; “Language,”

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Jeffrey W. Robbins

64-66; “Overcoming Metaphysics,” 60-63, 64; “Phenomenology and Theology,” 72, 90 Hermeneutics of Suspicion, 11, 130, 132, 178 n13 James, William, 3 Janicaud, Dominique, 88-84; see also, Theological Turn. Jesus, 10, 16, 147-148, 154, 178 n12, 198 n12 Kant, Immanuel, xiv, 71, 75, 80, 107, 143, 153, 159 Kierkegaard, Søren, 9, 129, 139-145, 197 n36, n37 Kristeva, Julia, xvii, 46, 53, 130, 148-152, 158-159, 186 n27, 198 n10 Lacan, Jacques, 149, 156-157 Law, 147-161 Levinas, Emmanuel, 21, 43-44, 81, 89, 130, 133-139, 141, 164, 184 n22, 195-196 n11, n14 Luther, Martin, xiv Lyotard, Jean-François, 129, 159, 163, 165; see also, Metanarrative. Marion, Jean-Luc, xvii, 57, 67, 70, 81-84, 88, 95-103, 189190 n20, 191 n16, n28 Marx, Karl, 11, 109 Metanarrative, 129, 163, 165, 167 Miles, Jack, 13-15, 199 n22 Milbank, John, 34, 100, 126127, 193-194 n20 Modernity, 6-7, 9, 107, 129, 177 n5; modernization, 7, 9; crisis of, 7-8, 129

Negative Theology, 95-101 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, xviixviii, 51, 62, 109, 132, 163, 165 Non-dogmatic, xiii, xvii, xviii, 4-5, 11, 13, 16, 19, 22, 73, 81, 87, 107, 117, 131, 153, 164-166, 172-174 O’Connor, Flannery, 3-4, 6 Ontotheology, xiv, 71-86, 87 Poetry, 37, 66, 111-115, 118121, 123, 124 Politics, xiv; political, xiv, 169 Postmodern, 45, 107, 129, 131, 159, 160, 163, 164, 168-174, 183 n11 Pluralism, xiii, 4, 18, 107, 115, 160, 167, 174; pluralistic, xv, 164; pluralization, 11, 13, 18 Pragmatic, xiii, xiv, xviii, 9596, 100-102, 132, 173, 191 n16; pragmatism, xvi, 103, 190 n2 Raschke, Carl, 175 n1 Readings, Bill, 21, 28-32 Reformation, 6, 8-9, 11 Relativism, 143, 144; relativized, 10; relativization, 16, 18; relativizing, 163 Religious Studies, xv, 6, 11, 2139, 41, 43, 45, 107 Re-Placed Theology, 32-39 Responsibility, 35, 38-39, 5051, 136-137, 139, 144, 184 n22 Return of Religion/Return of the Religious, 13-19, 46, 53, 107, 160-161 Roberts, Tyler, 178-179 n13 Rorty, Richard, 60-63

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Said, Edward, 170 Sallis, John, 64-66 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 9, 21, 32, 171-172, 201 n15 Secular, xvi, xix, 16, 17, 180 n20; secularity, xix, 16, 51, 53, 186-187 n40; secularization, 10, 19, 179180 n19; secularism, 17, 107; secular theology, 44 Smith, Jonathan Z., 32, 45, 179 n14, 201 n9 Stout, Jeffrey, 7 Taylor, Mark C., xvii, 45, 73, 77-78, 185 n1 Theological Turn, 19, 88-95, 154, 182 n31; see also, Janicaud. Tillich, Paul, xvii, 35, 58 Totalitarian, 176 n14; totalitarianism, xviii; totalizing, 74, 135 Transcendental, xiv, xvi Westphal, Merold, 166-167 Winquist, Charles, xvi, 41, 46, 53 Word of God, xviii, 158 Vattimo, Gianni, 13, 15, 16, 19, 160-161, 165, 167-168 Vico, Giambattista, 109-110, 115-127 Žižek, Slavoj, 149-150, 152, 156

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