Partakers of the Divine: Contemplation and the Practice of Philosophy

1. Between Theory and Theoria

1 Between Theory and Theoria Theoria Philosophy, Contemplation, and Participation The partaker partakes of that which changes him. –—Wallace Stevens1 By the middle of the twentieth century, philosophy of religion appeared almost extinct within most philosophy departments—a few dinosaurs notwithstanding—while across the campus one could find philosophical theologians facing similar odds within their own divinity faculties. Philosophical naturalists, on the one hand, and broadly neo-orthodox theologians, on the other, seemed to collude in finally ridding philosophy and theology from centuries of entanglement. Or so the story went. By the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the situation appeared dramatically different. The subdiscipline of philosophy of religion had by this time entered into what many felt compelled to speak of as a renaissance in philosophy of religion, what others referred to as a kind of religious turn within both analytic and continental philosophy.2 So disconcerting were these developments that the naturalist philosopher Quentin Smith felt compelled to sound an alarm about an encroaching desecularization of 1. “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction iv,” in Wallace Stevens, COLLECTED POEMS, 1st collected ed. (New York: Vintage, 1990), 392. 2. A more detailed account of the renaissance in philosophy of religion can be found in ch. 5 of this book. 39 academia being led by philosophy departments, and especially by the multiplying ranks of philosophers of religion. “God is not ‘dead’ in academia,” wrote Smith. “[H]e returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”3 I do not share Smith’s philosophical naturalism. Where he is concerned that the renewal of philosophical and theological questions has gone too far, I wonder whether we haven’t yet gone far enough. In this book, I propose that the surprising twentieth-century recovery of philosophy of religion and philosophical theology may be brought to a still fuller term through a creative retrieval, not just of neglected theological sources, but of the contemplative dimension that originally brought to birth and continually sustained the greatest achievements of the classical traditions of Christian philosophy and theology. First, however, we need a sense of how the question stands today. Accordingly, this chapter begins the argument by considering the insights and shortcomings of four prominent contemporary philosophical approaches to the question of contemplation, approaches that differ widely enough and are representative enough to provide an overview of how the question is currently treated in the academy. Rather than endorsing any one of these accounts, I will argue instead for what I call a “participatory approach” to the problem of contemplation and philosophy. It is participatory in that it has explicit recourse to metaphysical theories of participation but also in that it entails a necessarily self-implicating and transformative rendering of the philosophical and theological project. I propose, in other words, not simply another philosophy of contemplation or mysticism but a renewal of contemplative philosophy. When philosophical theory is separated from contemplative theoria, contemplation too often becomes merely the pious ornament of a beautiful soul, sentimental and subjective, while philosophy for its part is made banal, desacralized, and alien from the wonder that is its raison d’être.4 This book argues, by contrast, for the creative expansion of philosophy of religion through a thick engagement with the Christian contemplative tradition, contending that the two remain aboriginally entwined, mutually enriching, and increasingly vital to the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual challenges of aging modernity. It is true that philosophy of religion has recently begun to consider questions of contemplation and mysticism with a vigor that has not been 3. Quentin Smith, “The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy 4, no. 2 (2001): 196. 4. Cf. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). 40 | Partakers of the Divine seen for centuries, but nearly all of these recent studies treat contemplation as something alien to the intellectual life itself, an other perhaps capable of providing support to cumulative case arguments for the existence of God, on the one hand, or revealing the phenomenological limits of intentional horizons, on the other, but rarely treating contemplation as an already intelligible tradition capable of challenging and shaping our very practice of philosophy. I want to try to chart a different course...