After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy

Enabling God

Enabling God R I C H A R D K E A R N E Y You, God, who live next door— If at times, through the long night, I trouble you With my urgent knocking— This is why: I hear you breathe so seldom. I know you’re all alone in that room. If you should be thirsty, there’s no one To set you a glass of water. I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign! I’m right here. As it happens, the wall between us Is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry From one of us Break it down? It would crumble Easily, It would barely make a sound (Rilke, Book of Hours: Love Poems to God) The title of this essay—‘‘Enabling God’’—can be read both ways. God enabling us, us enabling God. As such, it affirms the freedom that characterizes our relationship to the divine as a mutual act of giving. So doing, it challenges traditional concepts of God as omnipotence . The notion of an all-powerful, autonomous, and self-sufficient deity has a long history ranging from the self-thinking-thought of Aristotelian ontology to the self-subsisting-act (ipsum esse subsistens) or 39 self-causing-cause (ens causa sui) of medieval scholasticism and modern rationalism (Spinoza, Leibniz). It is a powerful lineage pertaining to a powerful concept of a powerful God. It will not be whisked away by wishful thinking or willful fiat. And even when we may think it has been deconstructed in recent phenomenological ‘‘overcomings ’’—Marion, Von Balthasar, Henri—it often resurfaces in drag. All too often the Omnipotence of Cause comes back in through the back door disguised as an Omnipotence of Love, or Beauty, or SelfAffection . Marion’s cogent essay ‘‘God: The Impossible’’ is a good case in point. The omni-God of the philosophers (qua cause, substance , conceptual idol, logical proof ) is indeed surpassed; but the God of Love who replaces it is, in important respects, just as overwhelming and invasive. One could say it is a God who gives up its ‘‘ways of making us talk’’ in favor of more subtle but no less coercive ‘‘ways of making us love.’’ As Marion puts it in his reading of the Gospel scene of the Annunciation (where what is impossible to us is made possible by God), Mary’s conception of Jesus is a matter of ‘‘when’’ (lorsque) rather than ‘‘if’’(si). Marion does not consider the possibility of Mary saying ‘‘no’’ to the call by the Angel. And this for me profoundly modifies the ‘‘free’’ character of her ‘‘yes.’’ In this very small textual point I see the reemergence of a very large intellectual presumption—that God’s love is all-powerful, all-pervasive, allknowing , regardless of how we act, think, or love in response. The gleaming back of the great white whale breaks the surface for a moment —reminding us of the ineluctable beast that continues to glide beneath: divine omnipotence. By contrast, I want to propose in this essay a God who needs and desires us, who dwells in the room next door, as Rilke so daringly puts it in ‘‘Du, Nachbar Gott,’’ cited above, waiting for our signs, just as we wait in turn. Here is another kind of God—one who cannot come or come back, who cannot be conceived or become incarnate, until we knock, until we open the door, until we give the cup of cold water, until we share the bread, until we cry, ‘‘I am here. Where are you? Who are you? Why don’t you come?’’ The wall between us is very thin after all. Rilke is surely right. And the signs that break it down are infinitely small and quotidian. As thin and as small as the voice that spoke in Elijah’s cave, as the word that announced itself in Mary’s room, as the loving hand that healed the withered hand, as the mustard seed that blooms into the kingdom . A million miles away from omnipotence. In what follows here I propose to explore a hermeneutics of the possible God by moving through three concentric circles— 40 Richard Kearney scriptural, testimonial, and literary. Traversing this threefold ‘‘variation of imagination,’’ I hope to identify some key characteristics of the God-who-may-be as it reveals itself to us poetically. So doing, I seek the immunity of...