“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, ch. 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 sixties, 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 an impure hybrid gnosis, best represented by Michel Henry, which has been catastrophic for the integrity of both disciplines. Meanwhile, in the camp of Radical Orthodoxy, theologians have rewritten the history of philosophy with comparable results.
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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 – 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 “counter-metaphysical” rather than anti-metaphysical 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.
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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 khôra 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 intra-metaphysical argument can be extended to the dialogue with Islam or Vedanta. But no more than the overcoming of metaphysics can this metaphysical debate lead to a radical delegitimization of the orthodox Christian metaphysical determination of the divine.
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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 as a cultivation of the field of “conventional truth” rather than the ineffable “truth of ultimate meaning,” according to the Buddhist theory of the twofold truth. Nonetheless its robust rationality is very well defended both against any challenge on its own terms and against any simple escape from it by a gesture of stepping back to the primary existential phenomena. Metaphysics, as Heidegger well understood, clings to us and will not let us go. Biblical language has considerable counter-metaphysical potential. The “I am who I am” of Exodus 3.14, for example, positively repels the classical Platonizing reading that found in it to eternity, the truly existent, etc. The biblical God is primarily one who comes, a saving presence, and consigns metaphysical definitions to a clumsy, secondary role. Yet a purely biblicist language about God would become rigid and sterile, as happens even in Karl Barth. Metaphysical thought provides a reservoir of critical awareness that is useful when, in response to new situations and encounters, we reinterpret or give an altered accent to biblical language about God. It serves as a guard-rail against inspired arbitrariness and allows religious innovation to negotiate a responsible continuity with the tradition it disrupts.
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When Newman talked of the idea of God as “encompassed with difficulty” he registered the mismatch between the biblical and classical picture of God and contemporary experience, a gulf between the fideistic enclave of the churches and the godless world outside. Intellectual objections increase this malaise, suggesting that the very notion of God in any traditional sense is an impossibility. Apart from the problem of evil, or problems arising from the relation of God to finite beings, the very idea of an eternal, simple, immutable being is difficult to sustain. The riddles introduced by the doctrine of the Trinity are of little account beside the basic riddle of divine simplicity, which allows almost nothing to be said of God and which seems incompatible with most of what we do in fact say of God. Divine simplicity was defended by Eleanor Stump in a memorable paper at the 2002 Castelli colloquium on Negative Theology. Though her defence of Aquinas’s logic met a chorus of Heideggerian objections, on reading her text in the proceedings (Archivio di Filosofia, vol. 70) one has the sense that the austere claims of Aquinas do far more justice to the mystery of God than any of Heidegger’s evocations of the divine.
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The crisis of classical metaphysical theism can be handled in two ways – by a revisionist metaphysics that attempts to do more justice to the nature of reality as apprehended in contemporary science, or by an existential phenomenology nourished by a hermeneutic of religious traditions. Richard Kearney’s discourse is primarily of the latter kind, and like that of his fellow-Ricoeurian, Jean Greisch, it has been progressively drawn to the realm of philosophy of religion, a discipline that enjoys a rather amphibolous status between theology and pure philosophy. There is another amphiboly in Kearney’s thought insofar as its existential hermeneutics spills over into metaphysical speculation, notably in his ontology of the possible, without the status of the resulting discourse being adequately clarified.
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Existential phenomenology offers to ‘save’ God by highlighting certain phenomena which anchor God in human experience – the phenomena of the sacred, of givenness, of the face of the other. But if allowed to unfold on their own terms, without theological interference, these phenomena do not necessarily point to the God of Scripture. Phenomenology places us in contact with a network of numinous phenomena and relations, which may partially confirm and accord with the languages of various religious traditions, but which do not assure any prominence to the idea of God. The space which the plurality of religious languages opens up is what appeals most to phenomenological awareness, and language about God need not have a hegemonic role within that space. There can be religions without God, or with a diffused conception of divinity, or with a virtual God that one can reach out to without affirming as truly existent.
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Phenomenology tends to a certain immanentism, “bracketing” any reality that goes beyond the phenomenal, reducing Being to phenomenality, to givenness. The theology it favors is one of event rather than substance, and its God is an existential presence rather than the author of the cosmos. Its “reductions” may be methodological necessities, but they also carry the negative overtone of reductionism. Curiously, the word “reduction” is nowadays used to mean bringing the phenomenon into view in the integrity of its phenomenality; thus Marion’s ‘erotic reduction,’ signifies the authentic emergence of love between two people. Kearney desiderates what could be called a Zen reduction, whereby one comes in touch with ultimacy by attending to the least of things in its ‘thusness.’ I use the word ‘Zen’ here in a non-sectarian sense, to indicate a universal possibility of perception, in the sense in which R. H. Blyth was able to discover Zen in the poetry of Blake and Wordsworth. Heidegger himself, on reading D. T. Suzuki, claimed that his own thought aimed at the same goal. In the humblest of things, Being comes into play. The Christian will add that in the humblest of things, viewed in its derivation, as a creature, and in its goal, as striving forward to the eschaton, the divine comes into play, creatively and redeemingly. But whether this Christian perspective has a non-sectarian, purely philosophical equivalent is unclear. A “reduction” in the Husserlian sense is a founding gesture of “first philosophy” and as such it must be an autonomous philosophical procedure, and cannot draw on extraneous sources, such as the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. Moreover, a reduction requires rigorous methodolical grounding, such as Jean-Luc Marion supplied for his reduction to givenness in his two major works, Reduction and Givenness and Being Given. Religious vision, whether Buddhist or Christian, may offer an integral view of phenomena that philosophy as such cannot attain. Hegel and Schelling (in his 1809 work On the Essence of Human Freedom if not in his 1841-2 lectures on The Philosophy of Revelation) confiscated religious vision lock, stock and barrel for the cause of philosophy, but the methodological justification of this, both philosophically and theologically, remains controversial. A dialogal relation between philosophy and religious tradition, which constantly marks the distances between them, as in Ricoeur and Marion, is still the most promising way forward.
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Khôra
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Kearney has well identified the major threat to theistic belief today in what postmodern thinkers call the khôra. This notion, derived from Plato’s Timaeus, has become the emblem of the postmodern vision, or lack of vision. It represents a world of indeterminacy, with no room for a founding archê or an ultimate telos. It does not allow, either, a Zen emergence of phenomena in their thusness, much less a Christian vision of phenomena from their origin in divine creation or in their straining toward the eschatological Kingdom. ‘God’ figures in such a world only as the uncanny other or the monstrous. If the khôra is “after God,” it is also “after strange gods.” The postmodern sublime is closely associated with the breakdown of meaning. Even when postmodernism becomes pious, the virtual God is reaches out to is not an abundance of possibility, but the Impossible. What the postmodernist means by hope is less a trust in the possible than a wistful fascination with the impossible.
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Khôra is a catch-all expression that evokes such realities as the following: the nocturnal unconscious explored in texts such as Finnegans Wake; Derrida’s “archi-writing” in which all efforts to formulate truth are reabsorbed in a milieu of inescapable indeterminacy and undecidability; the Lacanian Real that is repressed by the constructions of the Symbolic order; but that always threatens to re-emerge as a blank, mute denial of meaning; the desert of melancholy and ennui. This unmasterable pluralism of associations does not weaken the impact of the notion, but conveys the sense of a convergence of forces, all resulting in a primal landscape that is radically a-theological.
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Khôra is redolent of the ashes of the Holocaust, conceived as a Holocaust of the very idea of God. Some religious thinkers want to cling to a gracious ultimacy, conceived perhaps as “Holy Nothingness” (Richard L. Rubenstein), but feel that after Auschwitz this can be thought only as an elusive possibility, withdrawing as soon as it is glimpsed. They prompt us to ask if all religions were not born of such glimpses of ultimacy, taking a false step when they built doctrines on this basis. The ultimate was borne in on the mind with power, but the step to the noumenal God thought to lie behind this encounter led to a barren realm encompassed with thorny difficulties. Philosophers reviewing the Jewish and Christian religious tradition may feel that what they are left with are the ashes of God, a God who cannot be blatantly, brutally affirmed, but who cannot be denied either.
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For Julia Kristeva, as Kearney explains in Strangers, Gods and Monsters, khôra infuses the signifying process of language with “instability”; it threatens to return the conscious ego back to “its source in the abominable limits from which, in order to be, the ego has broken away” (quoted, SGM 195) – namely, the non-ego realm of archaic drive. Perhaps the threat of such regression has a salutary role, and perhaps even the regression itself could have a regenerative function. But basically, the God of Scripture comes into view as confronting this realm, under the appearance of the Law of the Father, and as sustaining the ego (or rather the subject a divine call summons into being) in its escape from the dominance of drives.
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Slavoj Zizek claims that it was the great breakthrough of German Idealism to outline the precise contours of this pre-ontological domain of the “spectral Real”: a domain which preexists and evades the ontological constitution of reality. While Kant identified this as the blind, uncanny X which preconditions the transcendental construction of our world, it was Schelling, ghosting Hegel, who took the dilemma by the horns, identifying the khôra-zone as the “divine madness” of the Ground of Existence itself, of that which “in God himself is not yet God.” One could put an edifying gloss on this by supposing that this creative indeterminacy within God, the reserve of possibility that is sublated in his actuality, can allow God to be present to the primal chaos, less now as the Law of the Father than as the Spirit “brooding on the vast abyss.” God does not treat this realm as abject but reveals an affinity with it insofar as it throbs with creative promise. Joyce’s descent to that realm in Finnegans Wake could then be seen as a dark path to God.
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But Milton’s lines continue with the words: “and mad’st it pregnant.” It is the Spirit that draws out the creative potential of chaos, which otherwise lies waste. Khôra, writes Kearney, “is neither identical with God nor incompatible with God but marks an open site where the divine may dwell, illuminate, and heal.” In the midst of khôra, God, whether conceived as actual, or virtual, or actual precisely because virtual, is insistently present in the voice of conscience, in the eschatological call of the Kingdom, present as an enabling, empowering May-be.
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This affirmation is rather modest, as if tailored to the world of khôra. Yet it is likely to meet resistance:
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“K“Khôra is a-theological and a-donational. It eschews the contemporary retrievals of transcendence and mystery – be it the Levinasian idea of infinity (otherwise than being), the Marionesque gesture of donation (God without being), or the Heideggerian principle of event (the gift of being). It is not even a third kind (genos) beyond the alternatives of being and non–being. No, it is not a ‘kind’ at all, but a radical singularity of which one might say – what is your name? But then again khôra cannot even possess a proper name. It is unnamable and unspeakable. And yet, both Derrida and Caputo keep repeating, it is the very impossibility of speaking about khôra that is also the necessity of speaking about it!” (SGM 200)
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That sounds rather grim, yet all the writers about khôra convey the message that the descent to khôra, like Faust’s descent to “the mothers,” is a creative process. There is something refreshing and rejuvenating about the encounter with ateleological drives, the raw material of the cosmos, scandalous as they are to all one’s conceptions of order and purpose, of articulation and phenomenal presence. Is khôra not palpable in erotic experience, in dream, in anxiety, and are not all of these domains matrices of creativity? These corners of our existence offer access to a subversive freedom that has an obscure affinity with the highest realms of spiritual freedom, as though one cannot be open to the heights without a proportionate openness to the depths. That is why Derrida, for all his concentration on a–theological khôra, comes across as a religious thinker, and why he feels an affinity with Eckhart and Angelus Silesius, both of whom had mystical transcendence chime with what is closest to hand, with the ebullition of life and desire. For Kearney the issue is one of hermeneutics: “the theistic leap construes our experience in the desert as ‘a dark night of the soul’ on the way towards God,” while the despairing postmodernist “sees it as a night without end, a place where religious prayer, promise and praise are not applicable” (SGM 203). But the leap of faith must surely be based on recognition of a firmly identified divine dimension that overcomes khôra. Otherwise it is only a vague reaching after a virtuality, easily reabsorbed in khôra. Faith may be traversed by moments of doubt where we rejoin the khôra in its most desolate aspect. Faith, as a perpetual overcoming of doubt, is a perpetual graced decision to view the khôra as the place where the Spirit of God is at work, a decision confirmed and substantiated by experience of the Spirit’s calming and illuminating presence. Some biblical poems delight in evoking the untamed sea–monsters writhing about in the primordial dark, in order to celebrate the power of the divine word to bind them.
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Kearney refuses to disjoin the life of faith from the “pre–religious and atheistic” experience of the dweller in khôra. But perhaps a consciousness of khôra always already entails a certain religious stirring. Religion at its most primordial tunes into such consciousness, sometimes with the use of dreams, drugs, stupefying noises, and erotic images. One could argue that even the most fearful khôra experience – when murderous drives are allowed to run their course in genocide and other atrocities – is atheistic only in interpretative choice. Certainly, atheism may seem to impose itself, as the fall of a black curtain. But the rhetoric of apocalyptic that evokes the anger of God, the withdrawal of God, God veiling his face, the hour of the powers of darkness, suggests that the total breakdown of meaning can carry a religious overtone. The numbing “banality of evil” resists religious interpretation more sturdily, but it equally resists the abyss of khôra as “that pre–original abyss each of us encounters in fear and trembling when faced with the bottomless void of our existence” (SGM 204).
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Exploration of this realm, seen as corresponding to Lacan’s Real, keeps religious thinking from complacent immurement in the Symbolic. Surely there is truth in the suspicion that Aquinas or even Augustine were “victims of some kind of ecclesiastical closure” as Caputo suggests. That closure was the condition of their powerful role; in deconstructing it today we may release buried virtualities of their thought. However, Derrida seems to resist any such ultimately edifying economy of the relations between khôra and the vision of faith: “On one side, on one way, a profound and abyssal eternity, fundamental but accessible to the messianism in general, to the teleo-eschatological narrative and to a certain experience or historical (or historial) revelation; on the other side, on the other way, the nontemporality of an abyss without bottom or surface, an absolute impassibility (neither life nor death) that gives rise to everything that it is not” (Derrida, On the Name, 76-7). Kearney comments: “What we have here, in sum, is nothing less than the abyss of God facing off against the abyss of khôra” (SGM 210). Derrida, however, delights in foiling attempts to lure him into such face–offs. Any choice he would make is immediately stymied by scrupulous remembrance of its apparent alternative. He is open to some aspects of the first way, in that he harbors a certain spirit of Messianic expectancy. But he believes that this cannot be sustained authentically without constant reference to the second way. His “messianicity without messianism” is “a form of vigilant openness to the incoming events of all our experiences.” He “refrains from responding one way or another to any particular God–claim. He speaks of the ‘spectral’ rather than ‘revealed’ structure of such incoming” (The God Who May Be, 98). It is hard to deny that language about God has become spectral today. It has lost its rocklike status as revealed word or metaphysical fundament and become something that hovers suggestively, sending out resonances in every direction. This spectrality could be read as the contemporary mode of presence of the Spirit. Yet faith scans the spectrum more fruitfully than a neutral vigilance can, tracing in it a new economy of revelation that goes beyond traditional closures without dissolving the truth those closures preserved.
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Phenomenological Aspects
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(a) God, the future
Deconstruction wants to be a dynamic radical opening up of futurity, as if the future were the temporal dimension that best matched its notions of radical undecidability. But if one’s present and past coordinates have been thoroughly scrambled, one has no frame of reference within which to interpret the future as a source of novelty or surprise. Teleo–eschatological aspirations are unarmed against the pull of a non–temporal abyss, in which by forsaking the delusions of temporal construction one lives each moment in a perpetual now, savoring the uninterpretable thereness of things as they arise and pass away. This could be mysticism, but could also be mere vacancy and paralysis. Derrida wants to think the future not as a space of abstract possibilities, but as the arising of a concrete ethical challenge, which is at every moment something individual and unprecedented. But like Heideggerian resolve, this attitude is too formal, and what gives it concrete content, e.g., hospitality to the other, seems arbitrary.
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For Kearney, the future is the call of the possible as concretized in the face, or the persona, of the other human being, with the aura of future destiny, the promise of transfiguration that it bears. Behind this lies the call of a gracious ultimate, the God who holds open the realm of the possible and promises transfiguration (GMB, ch. 1). Kearney’s attempt to re–imagine God as the Possible appeals to the divine self–designation in Exodus 3.14: “I am who am” (Ehyeh asher ehyeh). This echoes ehyeh chimmak, “I will be with you” (Exod. 3.12), and can be read as a refusal to give the name Moses demands, providing instead the redoubled assurance, “I will be as I will be,” where “be” has the overtone “be with you.” The words “Ehyeh has sent me to you” (3.14b) transform the refusal of the name into a name in its own right, suggesting on the part of redactor of the biblical text an (implausible) interpretation of the name Yhwh, prominent in the following verse, as the third person of the same imperfective tense of the verb hayah, ‘to be’ (see H. Cazelles, in Dieu et l’être, Paris, 1978, 31, 42–4). If ‘being’ retains throughout this conjugation the overtone ‘being with you,’ then both the so–called nomen essentiae, ehyeh, and the Tetragrammaton itself would here be nomina misericordiae like the name that immediately follows: “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Exod. 3.15).
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Eschatology was one of the best–studied topics in twentieth century theology. The palette of biblical conceptions was thoroughly investigated, and the existential, social, and –– to a lesser extent –– cosmic significance of biblical eschatology for contemporary Christians was exhaustively discussed. Nothing seemed better to lend definition to the idea of God in the sixties than talk of “God, the future of man” (Schillebeeckx). A certain eschatological fatigue has befallen the Christian churches of late, confirmed by the regressive hype about the third millennium. Jewish thinkers have imported the structures of messianism, apocalyptic, eschatology and the principle of hope into philosophy, but here too these themes seem to have grown stale. The eschatological imagination now seems to flourish only in fundamentalist sects. To reground eschatology in the face of the other, in the tender hopes a father invests in the promise of his child’s future, could be a fruitful way of renewing this tradition. God’s eschatological designs could be rethought from this humble, human point of departure. The divine fidelity, “I shall be with you,” takes its sense from our fidelity to one another as we strive toward the future.
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(b) The advent of grace
I would like to venture a further step, in the spirit of such biblically inspired reflection and of the discipline of phenomenology as well, by suggesting that the phenomenon of God is indiscernable from the phenomenon of grace. God does not settle into a fixed figure of being, but is the unobjectifiable power of grace present as creative possibility in each moment. The withdrawal of God as being opens up a space of emptiness, of possibility, which empowers and frees our actions. In Moses and Aaron, Arnold Schöenberg consigns to a choir the words God speaks to Moses from the burning bush, as if to consume rigid, substantial conceptions of divine identity and to free the divine as Spirit, which moves where it wills and cannot be defined or confined. What mystical writers suggest is that opening up to the presence of the divine, far from bringing an ever tighter grip on God’s identity and on one’s own, entails relinquishing the securities based on conceptual mastery in order to enter into the immediacy of life, wherein it may seem equally valid to say with the Vedantists: “Atman is Brahman” and to say with the Buddhists: “No Atman, No Brahman.” Here the divine simplicity is not a metaphysical conundrum but a phenomenological evidence. Metaphysical definitions of God are a hedge of negative prescriptions set about this encounter. Necessary as they are, they do not close in on the phenomenality of God as grace.
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Kearney sights the phenomenon of grace in dialectical terms: “the eschatological May–be unfolds... less as a power of immanent potency driving toward fulfillment than as a power of the powerless which bids us remain open to the possible divinity whose gratuitous coming –– already, now, and not yet –– is always a surprise and never without grace” (GMB 100). The sense of God as one who calls God’s people to action and makes that action possible, underpinned by the phenomenology of persona (GMB 9-19) and desire (GMB 53–79), brings God into focus as enabling grace. The focus is sharpened by the biblical paradox that God’s strength is manifest in human weakness. “For God everything is possible” (Mk 10.27) is interpreted as follows: “when our finite human powers –– of doing, thinking, saying –– reach their ultimate limit, an infinite dunamis takes over, transfiguring our very incapacity into a new kind of capacity” (GMB 81). Perhaps the best New Testament account of this phenomenon is found in 2 Corinthians: “We have this treasure in earthen vessels, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed... always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies” (4.7-8, 10). God “empowers our human powerlessness by giving away his power, by possibilizing us and our good actions –– so that we may supplement and co–accomplish creation” (GMB 108).
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This idea takes on a tragic hue in Etty Hillesum: “You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling place inside us to the last” (quoted, ib.). God’s grace works through the freedom of the creatures, never interrupting or suspending it. God’s powerlessness is itself enabling, empowering grace (see 1 Cor. 1.25). The message that “God depends on you” can be an encouraging and empowering one, but if it is misstated it can conflict with the biblical proclamation of the sovereignty of God. To suggest that God will triumph at the Eschaton only if we do our part is to undermine the divine promises and lay a crushing burden on humanity. Levinas hails the idea that since God wishes to be dependent on humans “I am responsible for the universe... The world is, not because it persists in being... but because by the mediation of the human it can be justified in its being” (quoted, GMB 135). This way of talking no doubt inculcates a deep sense of responsibility. But is it really empowering and liberating? There is tranquility at the heart of the life of believers, precisely because they know they do not carry the whole weight of the world on their shoulders. Despite its gloomy history, the doctrine of predestination (especially as rethought by Barth in Church Dogmatics II/2) offers powerful reassurance that God’s plans cannot miss their fulfillment: “Those whom he predestined he also called; and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also glorified” (Romans 8.30).
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Augustine’s writings against the Pelagians have made theologians acutely conscious of the dangers of any turns of speech that might suggest that justification and salvation are a matter of human effort rather than divine grace. Even the statement that evil is purely our responsibility would be viewed askance by Augustinians as underestimating the bondage of the will to sin and the need of grace to be released therefrom. A synergy between humans and God is not excluded in Augustinian and Lutheran theology, but there is no synergy in loco justificationis. Co–operation in God’s saving work is a blessing consequent on the free gift of justification. (That the strictures of the Tridentine Decree on Justification do not signify major discord on this point is confirmed by the 1999 Catholic–Lutheran agreement, whatever its theological merits.) Proverbs such as “God made the sea, we make the ship” (GMB 4) could easily lead one to the Pelagianism of that says: “Christ has done his part, now you do yours!” or, even more depressingly, “Christ cannot do his part unless you do yours!”
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Defining grace has been a matter of life and death for Christian theology, for without a clear and telling account of how God is present as a saving God the entire Christian discourse flounder in impotent indeterminacy. The Lutheran dialectic of divine judgement and mercy gave a powerful account of how God works in our lives, and the Tridentine system also established a concrete profile of the operation of grace in Roman Catholicism. We lack any comparable concrete understanding of grace at present.The idea of an empowering God, who works through weakness, could be extended to embrace the course of evolution and the tragedies of history, bringing the confidence that at every moment humans face the divinely sustained horizon of the Possible, and can find therein resources of strength to tackle their co–creative task anew.
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(c) The quiet power of the possible
Kearney seeks to accord the “power of God” with the Heideggerian idea, expressed in the third paragraph of the Letter on Humanism, that Being is to be thought of as the “quiet power of the possible,” which is higher than actuality. This loving potency is that whereby beings are able to be. “From this loving, being has the capacity of thought. The former makes the latter possible.” (Aus diesem Mögen vermag das Sein das Denken. Jenes ermöglicht dieses). Heidegger explains that “to be capable of something” (etwas vermögen) means to produce it in its essence, that is, to allow it to be. It is being that allows thought to be, and only when it abides in being does thought attain its essence. Whereas Heidegger stresses thought’s dependence on being, Kearney asserts a reciprocal dependence of being on thought: “to love–possibilize Being in return by thinking things and selves in their authentic essence” (GMB 92). Heidegger talks of a double genitive, the thinking of being, as referring to the fact that being owns thought and that thought thinks being, as it accords itself to that to which it belongs. Kearney’s double genitive introduces an inflection that goes beyond Heidegger: “The possibilizing of being... refers both to Being’s loving–possibilizing of thought and thought’s loving–possibilizing of Being... Being possibilizes thought which possibilizes Being” (GMB 92). This mutual dependence is less disturbing than in the case of the biblical God, since the phenomenon of being cannot become manifest unless there are thinkers to apprehend it. Nonetheless, while the idea of a reciprocity between being and human Dasein, as with the idea of a reciprocity between God and humankind, is attractive, in both cases one should not gloss over the asymmetry of the relationship, the primacy of being over thought, and of divine initiative over human response.
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In Heidegger, the graciousness of being as what enables the essence of humanity needs to be recognized if we are to think worthily of the gods or of the supreme God when they make their appearance. All philosophers who deal with religion formulate imperatives and criteria, which they claim that religion and theology must meet, be they rational, ethical, or in this case phenomenological. The gracious givenness of being is a phenomenon recognized by poets such as Hölderlin and Wordsworth and by Zen meditators (who often express themselves in poetry or painting). It does not preempt or forestall the biblical God’s eschatological call. There is nothing pagan or idolatrous in Heidegger’s insistence that this is a reality that any religious vision must respect, and which will help assure the integrity of religious vision. What is unacceptable, and justifies Marion’s Barthian strictures, is the edict that God cannot be known until the sacred emerges, and that this emergence requires a long preparation in which we learn to experience being in its truth. While I do not think that Heidegger sacralizes being as such, in “a sacred–sounding liturgy of love and grace” (GMB 92), or “equates the essence of Being with the ‘sacred’ and the ‘divine.’” (GMB 93), there is an interference of the ontological and the sacral that is deleterious to both. Kearney cites Heidegger’s “analogy of proportionality” between ontology and theology as evidence for the crypto–theological character of his thought, but this is not such a good target, since it is intended to mark the autonomy of the two disciplines: “A is to B as C is to D. As philosophical thinking is related to being, when being speaks to thinking, so faith’s thinking is related to God, when God is revealed in his word” (J. M. Robinson and J. Cobb, The Later Heidegger and Theology, New York, 1963, 43). Heidegger assumes that there must be an analogy of some sort between the quest for Being and the quest for God, as indeed the entire Western tradition does, but he seeks to differentiate the two for the welfare of both. Kearney sees Heidegger as dismissing any idea of a saving God, but in reality when Heidegger speaks of a “last God” who does not “redeem” us (for that would reduce human dignity) but restores us to the authenticity of our being, he remains in dialogue with Christianity, calling on it to formulate its doctrines in a manner more respectful of the texture of human existence and of Being as his philosophical thinking apprehends it.
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(d) The open
It should be possible to give a phenomenological account of the mode of God’s presence in human existence and in history, as registered exemplarily in the Bible. Such an account finds a more promising basis in “the quiet power of the possible” or in a Blakean sense of God as “a shout in the street” than in rigid representations of the divine substance or hypostasis. If we empty out the inherited God–languages of all delusory stabilities and identities, then that to which we reach out in using the word “God” becomes a space of potentiating withdrawal. To say that “God deconstructs” (GMB 124, n. 32) means that the ultimate sets off a deconstructive ferment in our thinking and imagining, one in which received notions of God are relativized. In addition, it would suggest that we know God only in the constant deconstruction of our language about God, a deconstruction always already afoot in language itself, for instance in the taut simultaneity of advent and withdrawal in the statement “I will be who I will be.” Much of this mirrors the Buddhist apprehension of reality as an emptiness that leaves the grasping mind no place in which to settle (least of all by fixating on the notion of emptiness itself). Many have seen Buddhist emptiness as coming to the rescue of our tottering Western conceptions of God, and it may be augured that a comprehensive phenomenology of divine presence as a space of possibility will be increasingly informed by Buddhist themes.
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Metaphysical Possibilities
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Although The God Who May Be is an essay in phenomenological hermeneutics, there are many points at which it offers statements on the nature of God that ask to be read as metaphysical. Even the basic thesis of a God who “neither is nor is not but may be” can scarcely be confined to the level of phenomenological observation. Even interpreted as a straightforward metaphysical statement, “God may be” can produce quite a respectable lineage in classical metaphysics, and if we teased out the phenomenological potential of the statement and its analogues in the tradition, we could reconstitute a rich phenomenology of divine possibility that has been quietly brewing over the centuries in classical metaphysical texts, at least since Plato’s meditation on the Good “beyond being.”
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A certain precipitation in Kearney’s essay may limit its power to stimulate such a research project. The subversive potential of Eckhart, Cusanus, and Schelling is not enhanced by denunciations of mainstream metaphysics, as in the claim that the idea of divinity as pure act involves the characterization of evil as “the pre–established will or destiny of God” (GMB 5). A classical metaphysical answer to this objection might begin by pointing out that being is inherently good, and that evil is a mere privation of being. When Augustine defines evil as the privation of good, that is a strictly ontological statement. It does not refer to “a lack or absence of God” who “removes mayhem and misery from the eternal design” (GMB 104). That would be a lack of providence (which is never lacking in Augustine’s world). But neither providence nor the divine omnipresence removes evil. The role of providence is not to eliminate evil, but to order evils to the good. To say that evil “is the absence of God, the lack of divine goodness (privatio boni), the consequence of our refusal to remain open to the transfiguring call of the other persona” (GMB 5) is to read a metaphysical statement as an existential or phenomenological one, in a way that short–circuits the reception of the metaphysical tradition. A question stirring beneath the surface is whether phenomenology is best located within the horizon of metaphysics or whether the realm it opens is intrinsically irrecuperable by metaphysical reason. Perhaps Kearney would make the latter claim, while at the same time calling for a reformed metaphysics that would have a valid secondary role.
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One metaphysical interpretation of the phrase “the God who may be” is the agnostic one: God may be and he may not be, we just don’t know. When Kearney uses Kantian language about the conduct of the ethical life in view of a teleological Good which is only “a postulate of reason” realized in a “possible kingdom of ends” (GMB 85) it looks as if ethical conviction is in inverse proportion to metaphysical certitude, as if one can be truly responsible only if one has no independent assurance that the postulated grounds of one’s responsibility have or will have any solid existence. However, the manner in which the notion of God presents itself in Kearney’s thought excludes simple agnosticism. When he says that God “may be” he is not using the expression in the way one would use it of an ordinary thing (“there may be a scissors in the drawer”) or even of such things as ghosts, life on other planets, black holes, or subatomic particles in regard to which the category ‘really exist’ may begin to wobble slightly. Rather the ‘may’ is intrinsic to divine being as the very mode of its presence as empowering call. In general, the question whether or not God exists is a very unsatisfactory one to anyone who has reflected on the ideas of “necessary being” or “infinite being” or “transcendent ground of being” or “being itself subsisting.” To ask whether such realities exist seems almost a contradiction in terms; such “essences” seem to imply their own “existence.” It is on that unease that the various forms of the ontological argument have thrived. The question of God’s existence changes under our gaze into the question whether these designations of ultimate reality make sense; once we become involved in that question we can never come back to the “yes or no?” mentality of the conventional believer or the village atheist.
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Plotinus can count as a source for a metaphysics of God as posse is we translate the dunamis pantôn of Enneads V 3, 13 as “potency of all”. The supreme power of the One would reside in the fact that it is the possibility of all else. Plotinus might thus agree that “it is divinity’s very potentiality–to–be that is the most divine thing about it” (GMB 2). However, it is unlikely that Plotinus is using the word dunamis in the Aristotelian sense, for this would entail that the One is somehow lacking or incomplete and needs the lower orders of being for its full actualization. If there is a hint of potentiality in the One, it is a potentiality fully realized, for the One is supreme actuality (energeia), albeit an actuality beyond being, a hupostasis without ousia. A Neo–Kantian, such as Paul Natorp, whom Heidegger revered, might say that it is more Sollen than Sein, and that supreme reality is not the crass thereness of the “is” but the dynamic attraction of the “ought.” With some hermeneutic violence, then, one might dragoon Plotinus into the camp of the May–be God.
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Enneads VI 8 is the paradoxical pinnacle of Plotinus’s apophatic thinking, paradoxical in that it offers a positive teaching on the self–relation of the One, characterized as causa sui, a teaching qualified by the recurrent expression hoion (“so to say”). In this tractate, the causa sui is primarily associated with the autarchy of a supremely free agent, but the warrant for this is found in the idea that he is as he wills to be: “If then there is nothing random or by chance... in the things which have their cause in themselves, and all things which come from him do have it, for he is the father of reason and cause and causative substance... he would be the principle and in a way the exemplar of all things which have no part in chance... cause of himself (aition heautou) and himself from himself and through himself” (Enn. VI 8, 14 [35–42]). Though “it is impossible for something to make itself and bring itself into existence” (Enn. VI 8, 7 [25]), nonetheless “it is he himself who makes himself and is master of himself” (Enn. VI 8, 15 [9]); “he gives himself existence (hypostêsas hauton)... he is an actualisation (energêma) of himself. He is not therefore as he happens to be but as he acts (energei)... he as it were makes himself and is not as he chanced to be but as he wills.. he brought himself into existence... he is as he woke himself to be... his being comes by and from himself. He is not therefore as he happened to be, but he is himself as he willed” (Enn. VI 8, 16). In Proclus, the concern with self–grounding becomes systematic to an almost Hegelian degree, but it concerns entities below the One, and Plotinus’s talk of an absolute self–grounding is rejected: “If the Good be self–constituted (authupostaton), producing itself it will lose its unity... The self–constituted must exist, but posterior to the First Principle” (Elements of Theology, prop. 40, trans. Dodds).
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The discourse of the causa sui is an attempt to give some definition to the idea of God. The ineffable, ungraspable One had become a blank space into which the Gnostics could project all sorts of fantasies. Despite the firm rejection of this idea in Christian philosophy – Augustine begins his De Trinitate with an attack on it – it plays a role similar to that played by the Trinity in fixing the identity of God. Both ideas confirm the sovereign self–sufficiency of God. However, it is a mistake to use “self–causing” as a synonym of “self–existent,” as in the reference to “the Aristotelian and scholastic deity” as “a self–causing, self–thinking Act lacking nothing and so possessing no ‘potencies’ which might later be realized in time” (GMB 83). In fact the effort to find a dimension of possibility in God can be aligned with the causa sui tradition, not in its crudest form wherein God is his own efficient cause, but in the sense that God’s essence is the formal cause of his existence, his possibility the precondition of his actuality.
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Kearney sees the metaphysics that banishes potency from the pure act of divine being as sterilizing the idea of God. However, those repelled by the starkness of Aquinas’s thesis: Deus est purus actus non habens aliquid de potentialitate (q. 3, a. 2), may find some comfort in the fact that Aquinas’s discourse on the divine simplicity proceeds under the sign of the negative. “Because we cannot know of God what he is, but what he is not, we cannot consider the manner in which God is, but rather the manner in which he is not” (I q, 3, prologue). Questions 3 to 11 of the Prima Pars offer then not a positive account of divine attributes but a denial of any attributes that would imply lack of simplicity, perfection, goodness, unity in God or the limitations of temporality, location or change. However, Aquinas treads a narrow rope, perhaps falling into self–contradiction, for he rejects Maimonides’ view that the names of God are “devised rather to remove something from God than to posit something in him” (q. 13, a. 2). A biblical retrieval of Aquinas might relocate these philosophical wrestlings within the phenomenology of the individual or collective encounter wherein God is addressed or announces the divine name.
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Reminiscent of Plotinus’s supreme dunamis which is also supreme energeia is the possest of Cusanus, “absolute possibility which includes all that is actual.” The One is the power/possibility of all things just as Cusanus’s God is “all things complicite,” “all things are enfolded (complicari) in the possest” (De Possest [1460] 9 and 16; ed. Steiger). Aristotelian and scholastic tradition forbid Cusanus to call God causa sui, but he captures some of the dynamic of that idea in teaching that God “is what he is able to be” (GMB 37). Every being is first of all a capacity to be, and God’s being is his fully realized capacity to be. Cusanus sees God as the conjunction of opposites: absolute possibility and absolute actuality. Possibility and actuality fully coincide in God, whereas in finite beings actuality is always only a partial realization of possibility. Thus Cusanus can talk of God as the fullness of possibility in a way that does not impugn divine simplicity, but rather supports it, just as Aquinas’s teaching that being and essence are one in God does. Cusanus aimed at nothing less than the creation of a new divine name, which would yield “the most pregnant and packed concept possible to express the image of God, and at the same time the relation to the world and the understanding of being in general” (A. Brüntrup, Können und Sein, Munich, 1973, 15).
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Stronger support for God as posse is found in the final treatise of Cusanus, De Apice Theoriae (1464), which abandons the word “being” and describes God as “the posse itself,” “the posse of all posse.” All actualized beings are now described as mere appearances of the posse, which is the supreme reality: “All beings (entia) are nothing but the various modes of appearance of the posse itself” (De Apice 9). “Nothing can be added to the posse itself since it is the posse of all posse. Therefore the posse itself is not the posse of being or the posse of living or the posse of intellect, or any other posse with some addition... A posse with some addition is an image of the posse itself” (ib., Memoriale I 17; IV 20). Perhaps this version of Cusanus’s thought is better cushioned against the charge of “mystical pantheism” that Kearney brings against the earlier account of God as pre–containing all that exists (GMB 104–5). The absolute possible incommensurably transcends all finite possibles. Neo–Platonic thinking on the One is now seen as foreshadowing this discovery of God as posse: “Those who affirmed that there is only One looked to the posse itself; those who said that there are One and Many looked to the posse itself and to the many modes of being of its appearance” (De Apice 14). This posse beyond being replaces the possest as the supreme name of God. Cusanus reached this position by meditating on the nature of God that he initially determined as possest: “It is within his adumbrations of the notion of God themselves that there comes about the displacement of emphasis from possest, by way of the posse facere [posse as dynamic creativity, in De venatione sapientiae, 1462], to the ipsum posse [the posse of being, in the Compendium, 1463–4], and finally to the posse ipsum” (Brüntrup, 113). Posse is the “absolute presupposition” of everything else: one does not walk unless one can walk, one is not unless one can be. Even radical Cartesian doubt would presuppose that one can doubt (Brüntrup, 117). God is nothing other than the absolute “Can” that grounds every other “can” and that itself needs no ground.
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Descartes revived the notion of causa sui in his first and fourth Responsiones, which Marion sees almost as the charter of modern rationalism. Marion’s teacher, Ferdinand Alquié comments: “The theory of Descartes amounts to subjecting God to causality... The Spinozan conception of a self–caused God, modern conceptions of a God who makes himself, or even of a God who makes himself in the becoming of the world, have here their first source. With something like a presentiment of genius, Arnauld seems to perceive this” (Descartes, Oeuvres philosophiques, Garnier, II 646). That is a somewhat livelier picture of the causa sui than Heidegger presents in Identität und Differenz, where it becomes a death’s head that chills religious sentiment and imprisons the thinking of being. Some of Kearney’s statements, read metaphysically, are close to this modern theory of “a God who makes himself in the becoming of the world”: “there is a free space gaping at the very core of the divinity: the space of the possible... Transfiguring the possible into the actual... is not just something God does for us but also something we do for God... God depends on us to be” (GMB 4). Read phenomenologically, that might mean only that human beings can cooperate with God in making God more fully present in the creation. But references to Schelling and to Whitehead’s idea of God’s consequent nature, “a reservoir of possibilities to be creatively realized as world” (GMB 123), invite a metaphysical reading.
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The following statement is reminiscent of process philosophy: “God may henceforth be recognized as someone who becomes with us, someone as dependent on us as we are on Him” (GMB 29–30). Process philosophers “have revived the Greek idea, shunned in the orthodox tradition, of a developing God. We recall Plato’s words in the Timaeus to the effect that ‘the Creator, in creating the world, creates himself; he is working out his own being. Considered as not creating, he has neither existence nor concrete meaning’... Whitehead could say in his Process and Reality, ‘It is as true to say that God creates the World, as that the World creates God’ (1978 edn, 348)” (Sell, p. 228).
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Kearney calls for a “radical rethink sub specie historiae” (and one might add sub specie evolutionis) of “the orthodox onto–theological categories of omnipotence, omniscience, and self–causality” (GMB 30). But such a rethink might go in the opposite direction to the one that process thinkers feel obliged to take. That is, the adventure of evolution and of historical human freedom, possibilized and teleologized by the attraction of the transcendent ultimate we call God, might be left much more to its own devices, with God acting generally as the dunamis pantôn without regulating and foreknowing in total detail the course of the creative adventure. Rather than “giving away his power” (GMB 108) God may operate in the only way consistent with the nature of a universe in evolution, as Teilhard suggested. At each moment, God remains what God always is, infinitely gracious power, in no way dependent on what comes into being in response to it and in radical dependence on it. One reflection that may make us uneasy with this conception of God is that it seems to belong to an older world in which the changeless stars imaged the divine. Today’s dynamic universe, in which even the stars are in a state of ebullition and flux, is very different from the one in which a supreme immutable could be imaged as “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” (Dante), and it has become a pressing task to rethink God sub specie cosmologiae actualis.
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Where Kearney tends to favor a re–mythologization of philosophical God–language by drawing on biblical sources, I would advocate the equal importance of demythologizing the Bible’s highly charged anthropological language. A cooler philosophical vision of God as a transcendent principle of justice can retain the substance of the biblical vision and allow an enlightened redeployment of biblical rhetoric. The historical struggle for justice would still be a divine matter, and those involved in it would have to be in accord with divine truth and power, a sufficient basis for the biblical notions of the covenant, the chosen people, and the jealous, vulnerable God. As for the New Covenant, one can see it as human attunement to a special depth of the divine justice, manifest as the forgiveness of sins. “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Cor. 5.19) would be less a matter of an anthropomorphically conceived divine initiative than of a threshold in the evolution of religious consciousness, centered on the figure of Jesus, who thus emerges as the divine Word spoken into history not merely as the law of justice but as the fullness of grace and truth (Jn 1.17). The ups and downs of a few thousand years of humankind’s graced efforts to attune to the ineffable ultimate certainly provide precious testimony to the presence and action of the divine, and even what can be called revealed knowledge of God. But the abuse of the divine name by crusaders, inquisitors, and warmongers has made us suspicious of any immediate harmony between the divine and historical forces, even religious ones. Instead the text of history offers us a chiaroscuro flickering with suggestions of divine meaning, a meaning we affirm in trust without being able to read it off. The God who thus hovers and flickers, a gentle breeze blowing where it will, indeed invites a name that is “beyond Being” – the name of the Possible. But perhaps the divine eludes that name too, at least as much as it eludes the name of Being.
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Any contemporary discourse about God is bound to be afflicted with a certain unsteadiness. To navigate our way skillfully, we need to cleave to the spirit of biblical language, while purging it of what has borne evil fruit, and we need to respect the labors of philosophical and theological minds who have sought to draw from that language of faith its full yield of rational intelligibility. These disciplines, however, cannot substitute for a creative renaming of the living God as encountered in a new way in present circumstances. Here the philosopher and theologian must cede to the prophet, and to the community of engaged believers. God does not depend on them in order to be God, but God is named, known, and glorified in them, if they have the tact and courage to “let God be God.” Whatever the strictly philosophical merits of relational and incarnational thinking, it is surely right to think that God is best known when believers create an agapeic culture, enfleshed in the works of love. Such a God need not worry about stealing the limelight or being properly defined. He is “borne in upon our minds with power” by the radiance of the “divine milieu” that the loving and hoping community brings into being, or rather, that makes such a community possible.
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Note on causa sui
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Plotinus met opposition to his notion of the One as self-caused, and he expresses his own qualms about this concept, which seems to defy logic and imperil divine simplicity, much as Descartes was to do later (see J.-M. Narbonne, "Plotin, Descartes, et la notion de causa sui," Archives de Philosophie 56:177-95). The defense of this usage in Enn. VI 8, 20 is reminiscent of Descartes's acrobatics on the same theme. Marion, in reply to Narbonne, unconvincingly equiparates Plotinus’s doubts about the causa sui with the medieval rejection of it (Questions cartésiennes II). This topic has now been magisterially illuminated by Vincent Carraud, Causa sive Ratio: La Raison de la cause de Suarez à Leibniz, Paris, 2002). Strangely, Marion finds a secret sympathy with the causa sui in Suarez, whose metaphysics is so pervaded by discussions of causality and who treats God as part of metaphysics rather than its external principle. Marion quotes J. Whittaker as claiming that self-constitution is only a “philosophical relic” in Proclus. In that case, the influence of Proclean self-constitution on Eriugena and Hegel is a startling demonstration of the power of relics (see Jens Halfwassen, Hegel und der Spätantike Neuplatonismus, Bonn, 1999). That Proclus rejects Plotinus’s application of causa sui to the One is no argument against the similarity between Plotinus and Descartes (pace Marion). Plotinus’s language is perhaps more figurative than that of Descartes, and its upshot is a defense of the freedom of the One rather than an effort to subject it to causal law. Nonetheless, despite Marion's attempts to attenuate this, the causa sui is applied to the one even more clearly than in Descartes in the sense of efficient causality (under erasure). In freeing the One from chance, Plotinus invokes the authority of reason: "that which is in accordance with rational principl e (logos) is not by chance." Yet the One is above reason as its root: “it is like the principle and fundament of a mighty tree living according to rational principle which remains itself by itself but gives to the tree existence according to the rational principle it receives" (Enn. VI 8, 15, ll. 31-2, 34-7). Marion argues that Descartes' use of the causa sui subjects God to a universal principle of causality, anticipating the Leibnizian imperium of the principle of sufficient reason, and providing the target of Heidegger’s comment that the causa sui is the inevitable name of God in onto-theo-logy. Since only with Descartes is God subordinated to metaphysical reason, he claims, medieval thought does not fit under the rubric of onto-theo-logy or metaphysics. This would entail a severe curtailment of Heidegger's questions. If instead we think of Plotinus's discussion of the One as causa sui as belonging to what Heidegger, in Der Satz von Grund, calls the "incubation period of the principle of sufficient reason, then we can pursue the overcoming of metaphysics on a broader front in the ancient texts.
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More concerned than Plotinus with absolute self-grounding, and writing without the shield of the hoion, Marius Victorinus says of God the Father: "sibi causa est ut hoc ipsum sit quod exsistit” (Adversus Arium IV 6, 38)' Perhaps this merely means that the only reason God exists is that God exists. Werner Beierwaltes claims that Victorinus's “highly differentiated trinitarian theory of the Trinity is the immediate – or also mediated (through Porphyry) – effect of Plotinus's idea of the self-causation of the absolute"; he sees this as "an outstanding testimony that without philosophy there cannot be a self-conscious theology reflecting on its conceptual possibilities, and that philosophy can unfold productively in Christian theology without anxiety about Hellenization" (Beierw altes, Das wahre Selbst, Frankfurt, 151-2). But if the urge to found things in a causa sui marks both the most ambitious reach and the most crippling limitation of metaphysics in its in its attempt to think being in a radical fashion, as Heidegger maintains, it can hardly be recommended to theology in its search to think the God of revelation.
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Rejection of the causa sui is a ritual apotropaic gesture among medieval philosophers, as if they were haunted by the traumatic memory of Gnosticism and its self-generating pluriform divinity. Even Eriugena confines the causa sui idea to what comes after the first principle. If deus se ipsum fecit (Periphyseon III, 674A), it is in the sense that God generates or expresses himself in willing creation; "God, by manifesting Himself, is created in a marvellous and ineffable manner in the creature" (678C). Even Eckhart declares that nihil est causa sui ipsius (LW II, 470), following Aquinas (Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 5) and Augustine (De Trinitate I, 1). Nonetheless, Plotinus's daring and problematic idea lingers in the background of the medieval discourse on necessary being and aseity in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian scholasticism. This is perhaps more the case in Islamic and Jewish theology. Avicenna states: “Its existence, which is necessary, is due to itself”; for Gersonides, God “has his existence from himself.”
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Joseph S. O’Leary, in John Manoussakis, ed. After God, Fordham UP, 2006
