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1 Editor’s Introduction Jeffrey Bloechl I The authors contributing to the present collection share a conviction that religious thinking cannot afford to disengage from the challenges of modern European philosophy, and more specifically from the strand running from Kant to Husserl and Heidegger before fraying into the diverse lines visible today. Until the late twentieth century, most philosophy of religion drawing on that tradition tended to rely heavily on either the transcendental methods of Kant or Husserl, or else the more hermeneutical and narrative phenomenologies inspired by early Heidegger. As different as they are, what those two approaches evidently share is a commitment to some conception of subjectivity , selfhood, or if one insists, Dasein, as the irreducible locus of everything capable of becoming a theme for investigation. The common heritage is of course Cartesian, at least if the philosophy of Descartes can be made to stand simply for a style of thinking that insists on correlating every concrete datum given to experience with a formal basis in individual consciousness. The status of the subjective pole of this intentional relation has, for better or worse, preoccupied much of continental European philosophy ever since then. And its persistence, seeming to command the conclusion that individual conscious- Jeffrey Bloechl 2 ness is the horizon for all meaning, provides modern philosophy of religion with much of its present ferment. The essence of the matter can be found already in Descartes’s Third Meditation, where a rational defense of the existence of God takes its bearings from an experience of our human condition as being fallen into error, so that the task of thinking about God is immediately defined by an effort to trust and welcome that which transcends all error. Where it has avoided sheer reductivism, modern philosophy of religion has not departed from this basic sensibility, even while the esteem of modern rationality has risen and fallen any number of times. The difficulty of welcoming God into reason may be construed as a call to reinstate harmony between a mode of living and thinking fallen from God and therefore prone to error, and a mode of living and thinking in which fallenness and error have been transcended. Historically, this construal was elaborated first by Augustine, who thought that the distinction itself must indicate the hidden presence of some normative standard (veritas redarguens) that could only have been infused from beyond the limitations of human error.1 Descartes has revived this thought,2 but now in the considerably different context of a theory of knowledge centered, as we have just noted, on discerning the formal basis of meaning in individual consciousness. The importance of this difference for philosophy of religion comes into view in the metaphysics which preserves a distinction between thinking-being, res cogitans, which has been determined immune from hyperbolic doubt, and thought-being, res cogitatum, which thus depends on thinking-being for its foundation. Among scholars of Descartes, Jean-Luc Marion has been most effective in showing precisely how this makes philosophy into ‘‘onto-theology’’—a theory whereby all things are ontologically dependent on a single one of them. This is specifically a matter of Descartes’s definition of self as ‘‘substance,’’ which is to say as the particular form of being that, among all beings, thinks—and thus founds, by providing the formal basis of its meaning—everything else. According to Marion, such a theory is not merely a reduction of all things that may be thought to ultimate dependence on the one thing that can think, but the enclosure of all beings in a circle of mutual foundation: ‘‘being-as-thought [res cogitatum] grounds the being-par-excellence [res cogitans, that being which knows itself as thinking being], which in turn produces the thinking of each thought.’’3 The mutual foundation of the totality of beings and a single one of them renders the closure of metaphysics consistent with the exclusion of a properly transcendent God. Perhaps, as some have urged, it is possible to exploit other elements of Descartes’s work to contest this onto-theological position,4 but the latter has nonetheless persisted wherever modern thought, distinguishing itself from everything that had come before, argues for the existence of God as the essential foundation of knowledge. This would appear to be the case above all in the philosophy of Leibniz, who developed the final implication of his ‘‘principle of sufficient reason’’ whereby it is asserted simply that there is a...

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