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

Questions to and from a Tradition in Disarray

Questions to and from a Tradition in Disarray J O S E P H S . O ’ L E A R Y ‘‘Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension , encompassed with most difficulty, and borne in upon our minds with most power’’ (Newman, Apologia, chap. 5). The biblical idea of God as Judge and Redeemer is borne in on our minds by moral experience , our sense of sin and desire of forgiveness, and also by religious experience. But the old sturdy confidence in the reality of God as creator of heaven and earth, attested by cosmic order and the very movement of the rational mind, has been depleted. If God cannot be spoken of in a way that chimes convincingly and powerfully with contemporary cosmology, then the notion of God has to be rethought . Some have proposed that God is just another name for ‘‘cosmic serendipity’’ or ‘‘creativity.’’ Others invoke a kenotic vision of a God without sovereignty, power, or presence. Others see God language as but one among the conventional paths of traditional discourse that can serve as traces of an ineffable ultimate. Others, in reaction, give up on any effort to think of God apart from the data of biblical revelation, to be received in faith. Since the 1960s, students of theology have acclimatized themselves to a meltdown in talk of God, notoriously exemplified in Thomas Altizer’s ‘‘death of God theology ’’ and Don Cupitt’s ‘‘taking leave of God.’’ Now, with the theological turn in French phenomenology, philosophers are venturing where theological angels fear to tread. Unconstrained by exegesis or critical history of dogma, some of these have indulged a hybrid gno185 sis, best represented by Michel Henry, which has been prejudicial to the integrity of both disciplines. Meanwhile, in the camp of Radical Orthodoxy, theologians have rewritten the history of philosophy with comparable results. In view of these postmodern phenomena, many lay the blame on those of us who have followed Heidegger in calling for an ‘‘overcoming of metaphysics’’ in theology. This overcoming was variously pursued by Luther, Melanchthon, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, and Harnack , long before the young Heidegger, who—under a strong influence of Luther and Harnack—undertook the ‘‘destruction’’ of metaphysics within philosophy itself in order to recover the integral phenomenality of human existence and of Being. All of these thinkers have sometimes been unjust and contemptuous in their attitude to classical metaphysics. But their project is not necessarily linked to such disrespect, and can, I believe, be retrieved as a ‘‘countermetaphysical ’’ rather than antimetaphysical tradition of thought. The diagnosis they share is that metaphysical thinking has overshadowed a more primary kind of thinking, and that the latter needs to be restored to its due prominence. It need not mean that metaphysical theology rested on a mistake. Taking the first forty-three questions of the Summa as the ripest expression of the Christian metaphysical determination of God, the product of a thousand years of disciplined thought, there is no ‘‘step back’’ from metaphysics that could consign this achievement to the dustbin of history. A firm determination of the nature of God, culminating in the Trinity, seems to be a necessity of Christian thought. It is tempting to rest content with the apophasis of Gregory of Nyssa: ‘‘It is before all beginning; it provides no tokens of its own nature, but is known only in the impossibility of comprehending it. For this is its most characteristic mark, that its nature is superior to every concept’’ (Against Eunomius, I, 373), which chimes so well with a Buddhist sense of ultimate signless emptiness. But pushed too far, this apophasis makes God indistinguishable from a khora of pure indeterminacy of which nothing whatever can be said. The dogmatic tradition, luminously clarified by Aquinas, gives God a profile and anchors talk of God in firm propositions. Hegelians and process thinkers offer an alternative theistic metaphysics, and the intrametaphysical argument can be extended to the dialogue with Islam or Vedanta. But no more than the overcoming of metaphysics can this intrametaphysical debate lead to a radical delegitimization of the orthodox Christian metaphysical determination of the divine. 186 Joseph S. O’Leary We can come to a keener awareness of the concrete historical embeddedness of Christian theistic metaphysics, as ‘‘a product of the Greek mind on the soil of the Gospel’’ (Harnack), and we can regard it...