From Theology to Theological Thinking

1. Theōria, vita philosophica, and Christian Experience

To give honor where honor is due, let the philosopher be the first to come on stage: after all, those whom we name “theologians” only adopted this label very late and, in the first centuries of Christianity, simply considered themselves philosophers . To make the gross distinction between “philosopher” and “theologian” is to be mistaken about the meaning of “philosophy ” in the Greek and Greco-Roman world.1 The first task imposed by the essence of the philosophical, or at least on any attempt to reach it, is to perplex the reader. Philosophy is not clearly defined, or better not defined at all. Yet a body of texts exists, which everyone agrees to call philosophical. (Similarly, it is universally agreed that certain others, the Corpus Hermeticum , for example, are not philosophical.) There were indeed some men whom everybody calls philosophers. But did they all play the same game? Was Socrates a philosopher in the same way as Plato or Aristotle after him? The perplexity promises to begin here. In order to express it, we are required to pass from one language to another and to wonder, not about what “theory” and “science” signify in our languages, but about what theōria and epistēmē mean in Greek. Philosophy began before Socrates, and we should stop calling “pre-Socratic” those who were philosophers in their own right and not mere precursors. We suggest that philosophy begins with the attempt to give an account of being [l’étant] in its totality—with theorizing about one R Theōria, vita philosophica, and Christian Experience 2 from theology to theological thinking being in its totality. And theōria is not “theory” nor is epistēmē “science.” There are certainly Heraclitean or Parmenidean theses , and many others. It would be ruinous, though, to conceive of them in light of the modern concept of theory. These theses speak of the totality of being, signified by words like einai, phusis, noein, etc. Yet they speak about it independently of all experimentation . And it should be observed that they are conceived a long time before a mathematization of the real is possible. At its dawn, philosophy seeks knowledge without being what we call science, or, more prudently, without sharing in the logic of what we call science. To speak of theōria, in Greek, whether in the “pre-Socratics” or after, is to name the contemplation of the real in its unfolding or budding forth. Assuredly, contemplation does not exclude conceptual knowledge: there is no philosophy without a proclivity for the concept. The phusis with which philosophy is occupied is not the natura rerum: reality as completed, accomplished, and at our disposal is unknown to it. The real which faces the philosopher appears to him in its bursting forth; his ambition is to perceive the subterranean reasons which preside over this bursting forth that he is unable to master. And it is quite possible that we still have something to learn from the (always salubrious) critique of the “nature of things” by phusis. Here we meet the Socratic moment in the history of philosophy , or, more precisely, the Socratic moment of philosophy . Socrates, who wrote nothing, and whom we know from the written traces of his words, has imparted to us some philosophemes and/or some philosophical lessons. About the nature of things, however, he says nothing: only the being that we are matters to him. And if we admit that there is no philosophy without a philosopher, which we are authorized to do here, even if the philosophical text, when there is one, matters incomparably more than its author (after all, it happens that we often have to read anonymous or pseudonymous texts . . . ), it would be necessary to admit that Socrates figures first, or nearly first, in theōria, vita philosophica, and christian experience 3 making the work of philosophy (and all its dialectical exigencies) and the life of the philosopher coincide. Long after Socrates, Heidegger will say that the only biography of the philosopher is the list of his written works. Husserl, for his part, considered the philosopher to be a “Functionary of Mankind.”2 Socratic experience cannot accommodate itself to these two positions. Socrates is a practitioner of theōria, though restricted to a contemplation of man and not things (his work is therefore less ambitious than the “theoretical praxis” which Husserl talks about occasionally, and which seeks to turn its attention to the...