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182 13 Is Theology Possible After Hamann? Katie Terezakis If theology is writing about God, Gods, or religion, or about the sacred texts of a religion, then Hamann’s writings are theological. If theology is a study of religion undertaken by one of its members from the standpoint of an insider, then likewise, Hamann can be said to be engaged in a theological project. Yet for all of the God-talk and the scriptural testimonials , Hamann denies that he is doing theology and refuses the very designation as hubris, avowing it a conceit of human reason to think it can speak knowingly of divine being or divine attributes, and indicating that the production of a reasonable account of divinity is a contradiction in terms, rendering “theology” an oxymoron. But if Hamann doesn’t consider his own project theological, does it remain open for theological appropriation? That is, for those who recognize in Hamann a kindred spirit or who take his work to be an incentive for their own, is the pursuit of theology in a Hamannian vein possible? For in fact, much of the literature that addresses Hamann does so with operative assumptions about the theological consequence of his work. In what follows, I would like to consider the most basic conditions for any theological enterprise, and to juxtapose these with the most critical features of Hamann’s thought. This should allow for an evaluation of the degree to which Hamann is amenable to theological appropriation in general and an assessment of any such appropriation accordingly. First a review of the key elements of Hamann’s thought. The whole of Hamann’s enterprise is animated by his recognition of the notion of divine Herunterlassung, God’s condescension or self-limitation in creation . Rather than a sign or consequence of God’s abundance, Being, such as we can know of it or be of it, results from a godly self-reduction which we can neither account for nor prevail over. As in the sixteenthcentury Kabbalistic articulation of tzimtzum, God’s self-contraction is the conceptual condition for our modes of understanding and the apparent independence of the world; God’s inexplicable self-negation 183 I S T H E O L O G Y P O S S I B L E A F T E R H A M A N N ? “makes way” or “makes space” for tangible and finite beings and for our world.1 Divine kenosis and atonement, the abandonment of the world and its fallenness—these are not new concepts, neither for Luther nor Hamann; but what is characteristic of Hamann is the will to take the concept of divine condescension seriously as an epistemological starting point. If what can be known of the preconditions for the whole assembly of human discursive activities is described as divine self-limitation, then this limitation necessarily establishes the threshold of human reason: our form of knowing cannot be comprehensive, for it begins with and extends out of a condition of constraint. Though we can say something about the limitation of our knowledge, we can say nothing meaningful about what motivates it or exists before it.2 As Hamann puts it in a personal letter, “Since Adam’s fall, all gnosis is suspicious to me, like a forbidden fruit” (ZH 5:272).3 In other words, Hamann is prompted by a theological proposal to make a metacritical demand: his demand is that we ascertain whether and how our epistemological principles—and thus any of our claims to knowledge—can be coherently established. Hamann does not merely challenge his readers to incorporate more epistemological competence into their discourses about God or religion; rather, he challenges the ground of any theory of knowledge. Following from the notion of divine condescension, Hamann finds that our cognitive activities cannot be secured by any transcendent or objective foundation. His Metacritique of the Purism of Reason, while aimed initially at Kant, is presented as an evaluation of any metaphysical system equivocal about its own grounding conditions. There, Hamann asserts that the very idea of epistemic procedures or rules requires justification, and that the need to ground such rules in an objective and authoritative manner immediately returns to the problem of a stable criterion, or the foundation on which any viable theory of knowledge is based. This is what Hegel identifies as Hamann’s most powerful blow to the traditions of theology as well as philosophy, and what he therefore, by following Hamann’s lead, designs his...

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