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On the God of the Possible S T A N I S L A S B R E T O N Under a title that captures our attention and puts a question that will not go away, Richard Kearney offers a conception of the divine and of divinity that immediately strikes the reader by its extraordinary youthfulness. For youth, not only in its most current sense, but in its most philosophical as well, could be defined precisely by the two words in his title that open the new perspective to which he summons us: may be. How should we translate—in a way that allows us to dream, as if finding ourselves on Celtic ground—the ‘‘potency to be’’ indicated by this expression, which is a common one in our different Western languages? At the simplest level, the possible at once calls up various paths of thought. In the first place, it suggests the lightness of taking wing or exceeding the speed limit, so as to leave behind both the finished matters of the past and the actuality of the present. Thus understood, the possible breaks the bounds imposed by memory , with its often burdensome weight, and by attention, with its sometimes fixated rigor. While not denying memory and attention, the possible in its youthfulness is essentially the theme of a creative imagination that has no concern with reproducing things or jealously possessing them. A second path of thought is suggested if we take the possible in the adverbial form of the perhaps. In French at least, the perhaps (peut-être) invests the possible with a connotation of doubt that cools its fervor. But it is a peculiarity of this word that it can also carry 167 connotations of eager hope, or of a courageous hope against hope, as in the sentence attributed to Rabelais: ‘‘I make my way to the great perhaps.’’ Here hope of the impossible is shadowed by fears that the best of what ought to be and could be (in Latin, posset) will in the end fail to be. Yet the desire that it be so, an aspiration carrying all the force of Eros, seems to overcome these fears of a negative end result. Kearney offered a first phenomenology of these poetic and existential overtones of the idea of the possible in Poétique du Possible. Now, in The God Who May Be, he continues to explore the transfigurative dynamics of the possible, with the focus on its religious dimension. In order to bring out the originality of what he is proposing, I should like to clarify, under the heading of ‘‘preliminaries,’’ a number of presuppositions , or what may be called a quasi axiomatics, shaping the climate and texture of his thinking. Preliminaries First of all, I think it will be found helpful if we begin by ruling out senses of the possible with which Kearney is not concerned. When I hear the word ‘‘possible,’’ I spontaneously tend to give it the meaning conferred on it by logicians. Perhaps this reflects my age. In logic the possible figures among the alethic modalities, under two forms: ‘‘possibly the case’’ and ‘‘possibly not.’’ These are related, in a square of opposition, with the necessary and the impossible. Needless to say, this is not what is in question in Kearney’s usage. Though he does keep up a discourse of the impossible, there is no place in his inquiry, if I am not mistaken, for the idea of the necessary in its rigorous logical or scientific sense. This means that what Pascal calls the spirit of geometry will be of little help to us in our attempt to bring into focus the transfiguration that haloes God and the person set in relation to this God. Instead, we must draw on the other term of the Pascalian antithesis, the spirit of finesse. Also very remote from Kearney’s concerns is the account of the possible worked out by Bergson, a quite original, even revolutionary, one in its own way. Bergson saw the possible not as the opening of a future but as the bitter product of a retrospect that would palliate the scandalous novelty of the present by finding it already inscribed, as possible, in the past. For such a projection of the present into the past there would be a twofold motivation: on one side, the need, when confronted with some major rupture, to recall the conditions that must have prepared the event...

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