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

Introduction

Introduction J O H N P A N T E L E I M O N M A N O U S S A K I S Moses desires to see the ‘‘glory’’ (Ex. 33:18) or the ‘‘face’’ (Ex. 33:22) of God, but he is refused and receives a vision of God ‘‘only from behind,’’ after God, on going by, had pressed him with his hand into the crack in the rock. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of God, VI, p. 38 So here we are, like Moses, after God. All the texts in this volume share, in one way or another, the adverbial ambiguity of after. The God they seek—the God they are after—is a God who can be seen ‘‘only from behind,’’ that is, without being seen, in the blindness of vision, at the limits of the phenomenological horizon. This is a God who, for several of our contributors, can be known only through the dark cloud of not-knowing. A God who can be named only through the paradox of a name that refers back to itself, without name. A God without God, without sovereignty , power, and presence. Who or what comes, then, after God? Such was the question that befell philosophy following the proclamation of the ‘‘death of God.’’ In the wake of God, as the last fifty years of philosophy have shown, God comes back again, otherwise: Heidegger’s last God, Levinas’s God of Infinity, Derrida’s and Caputo’s tout autre, Marion’s God without Being, Kearney’s God who may be. xv The stakes in this debate could not, in my view, be higher or more topical; the questioning of God has taken on a new urgency and pertinence in this time of religious and cultural conflict. This return to religion became dramatically visible in all its complexity on September 11. The event itself assumed religious dimensions in its sublimity as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans. It was immediately registered in terms of two religious idioms: Islamic fanaticism, which ‘‘provoked’’ and ‘‘justified’’ it, and Christian fundamentalism, which proclaimed that the West was under attack and vowed to protect it. As the name of God was invoked by politicians and common people alike, as ‘‘ground zero’’ became more and more a hallowed ground with interfaith services and memorials, gradually September 11 became less exclusively a political case, simply because such an impossible event could not be fully appropriated by political language. It called, in time, for a more philosophical discourse, as epitomized by Kearney’s essay ‘‘On Terror’’ in his Strangers, Gods, and Monsters. The present volume on Kearney, I believe, elaborates and expands on such a discourse , by presenting us with a divinity at last free from the threeheaded monster of metaphysics—the Omni-God of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence—and the ‘‘triumphalist teleologies and ideologies of power’’ that it has provoked. In the Continental tradition, religion and the question of God have always been an integral part of philosophy. Whether theistic or atheistic , intellectual movements such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, structuralism, and poststructuralism have all engaged in various ways with questions of ultimacy, transcendence, and alterity . Two of the foremost thinkers in this dialogue are Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger. Kierkegaard emphasized faith over reason, while Heidegger gave precedence to thought over faith. Both, however, draw from a common Pauline tradition, although they interpret it differently. With the advent of phenomenology, normative questions about theistic claims—for example, the debate about the existence of God—are often bracketed (a method known as the phenomenological epoche) for the sake of a different and arguably more meaningful set of questions: Could God be given to consciousness as a phenomenon? What kind of phenomena are religious experiences? What sort of phenomenological method is needed in order to describe them? In recent years, this questioning of God has assumed such acute and arresting proportions as to prompt some scholars to speak of a ‘‘theological turn’’ in philosophy. Kearney’s xvi John Panteleimon Manoussakis work signals one of the most compelling and challenging engagements with this turn. Following Kierkegaard and Levinas, the Continental philosophy of religion embraces Pascal’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, giving precedence to the latter over the former. Such a gesture indicates a move away from metaphysics and toward a God...