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6 Phenomenality and Christianity   Ibegin by considering three propositions, each of which summarizes a complex position: (1) there cannot be a phenomenology of Christianity; (2) there can be a phenomenology of Christianity; and (3) Christianity is already a phenomenology. I shall discuss them one at a time in the order given. The first proposition makes a significant concession to objections leveled against the phenomenology of religion as developed in the first half of the twentieth century. For it speaks of Christianity, not religion, thereby admitting that religion is too diverse a field to have an eidos that can be discerned and varied imaginatively. An entire literature by and centered on Mircea Eliade is therefore put to one side.Even so,the proposition remains combative. We might wonder about the status of Martin Heidegger’s course“Augustine and Neo-Platonism”(1921), his notes for “The Philosophical Foundations of Medieval Mysticism” (1918–1919), and his lectures“The Problem of Sin in Luther”(1924) and“Phenomenology and Theology” (1927), the last of which argues that theology’s proper object is faith, not God.1 These, surely, are evidence of very early interest in the phenomenology of Christianity and, more obliquely, evi dence of the relations between phenomenology and theology, and they can be bolstered by pointing to Max Scheler’s On the Eternal in Man 153 (1921), Otto Gründler’s Elemente zu einer Religionsphilosophie auf phänomenologischer Grundlage (1922),Kurt Stavenhagen’s Absolute Stellungnahme (1925),and Jean Hering’s Phénoménologie et philosophie religieuse (1926).2 Other works that do not circle around Edmund Husserl, even at a distance, could readily be cited, for the phenomenology of religion precedes phenomenology as classically proposed in the Logical Investigations (1900–1901), The Idea of Phenomenology (1907), and Ideas 1 (1913).3 Works of concrete or reconstructive phenomenology are not of immediate interest here, my concern being with essential phenomenology in its various forms, extensions, and revisions.4 Against proposition (1) one might say that there is nothing in the philosophy of disclosure, as conceived and endlessly refined by Husserl , to prevent core Christian practices and experiences from being reduced to pure phenomena. Robert Sokolowski considers the modes of disclosure in the Eucharist, for example, without any special pleading as to procedure or vocabulary; and, from another perspective, Jean-Yves Lacoste does the same, although for him liturgical life, life before God, is essentially marked by nonexperience rather than experience.5 Our life with God is not characterized by presence but by absence, by our openness to God rather than by any feeling of His closeness, he thinks. Yet absence has its own modes of phenomenality, that is, the manners of self-showing, the angles of coming forward, of the structure of appearance ; and these modes are recognized and registered and may be analyzed.6 How someone or something is absent is not always the same. Not all phenomenologists have placed their emphases as Lacoste has done, however. Paul Ricoeur offers a phenomenology of confession, and then—braiding hermeneutics and phenomenology—attends to the sacred and scriptural testimony.7 And in a still more mediated manner, sometimes at the very edge of phenomenology, Jean-Louis Chrétien describes prayer and the dynamic of divine call and human response.8 Yet when one attempts to bring God directly into the field of study, a difficulty arises, one seen less as a problem than as a stark impossibility. Husserl identifies it in paragraph 58 of Ideas 1 with the pithy heading “The Transcendency, God, Excluded.”9 Only those transcendent entities that can be led back to pure consciousness can be objects of study, and God’s self-revelation, it is said,“in its very essence is, and remains, con154 Kevin Hart cealed.”10 For Husserl, even if God is immanent in consciousness, he is there in a manner other than as a mental process, and so cannot be a part of phenomenological investigation. To seek the“absolute monad” requires us to go along other paths to which phenomenology can perhaps lead us but which Husserl did not finally discern.11 If Christianity is figured by way of faith, ritual, and encounters with the holy, then it can be submitted to intentional analysis. But if it requires a necessary reference to the God of Jesus of Nazareth, and therefore involves an appeal to religious transcendence, there can be no phenomenology of Christianity, for the Christian God is irreducible. The second proposition contests the conclusion drawn...

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