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Alltäglichkeit und Letztgültigkeit. Dialektische Umkehrungen bei Hegel und Heidegger und im Buddhismus

[This is the text of a lecture -- my first in German! -- delivered at the Humboldt University in Berlin 30 January 2012 in the context of the Ringvorlesungen organized by the Romano Guardini Stiftung. Corrections are welcomed.]

Es ist eine sehr große Ehre für mich hier zu stehen und ich bin Ihnen sehr dankbar dafür. Besonders muss ich Professor Jean Greisch, meinem hochgeschätzen Freund, danken für seine Einladung und für die sorgfältige Arbeit die er geleistet hat, um den Text dieses Vortrags zu verbessern.

Als ich siebzehn Jahre alt war, las ich zum erstenmal einen deutschen Philosophen. Er hiess Romano Guardini und sein Thema war „Das Ende der Neuzeit“. So war sein Name mir schon bekannt, noch ehe ich von Kant, Hegel oder Schleiermacher gehört hatte. Sehr begeistert von den Ideen und der Stimme dieses Autors, begann ich meinen Mitschülern zu verkündigen: „Wissen Sie es nicht? Wir leben in der Epoche des Massenmenschen!“ Trotz dieser jugendlichen Naivität, hat das Buch etwas in meinem Kopf hinterlassen, nämlich die Einsicht dass das Christentum nicht mehr etwas Selbstverständliches bedeutet in unserer heutigen Kultur, und dass auf das Fragen und der Dialog angewiesen sind.

Im Wintersemester 1937/38, ein Jahr vor der Aufhebung seines Lehrstuhls, hielt Romano Guardini hier an der Berliner Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universität eine öffentliche Vorlesung über das Thema: „Der Tod des Buddha. Die buddhistische Sinndeutung des Daseins und ihre Bedeutung für das Verständnis des Christentums“. Die in diesem Untertitel angezeigte Fragestellung ist heute aktueller als je.

Alltäglichkeit als philosophisches Thema

Was bedeutet „Alltäglichkeit“?

Scheinbar etwas Dürftiges und Banales, das uns scheibchenweise und bruchstückhaft zugeteilt wird, wie in Philip Larkins Gedicht ‘Days’:

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

(Wozu dienen die Tage?

Tage sind, dort wo wir leben.

Sie kommen, sie wecken uns auf,

wieder und wieder.

In ihnen sollte man sein Glück finden:

Denn wo anders sollen wir leben, wenn nicht in Tagen?

Ach, um diese Frage zu lösen

eilen Priester und Ärzte

in ihren langen Röcken herbei,

querfeldein.)

Können wir uns damit begnügen, die kleinen Schubfächer unseres Alltags mit irgendetwas Befriedigendem zu füllen, ja, unser Bestes zu tun um „Tief und tausendfach zu leben“ (Hermann Hesse)?

Wenn einer dieser so gut wie möglich ausgefüllten Tage uns als der letzte in einer langen Reihe erscheint, dürfen wir uns dann schulterzuckend mit dem Gedanken trösten, dass ihre letztendliche Bedeutungslosigkeit uns nicht daran hinderte, die schnell verfließenden Tage voll auszukosten? Ein Epikuräer würde von einer homeopathischen Behandlung der Unzulänglichkeiten unseres Lebens sprechen.

Die christliche Überlieferung bringt diesbezüglich zwei Kategorien ins Spiel: die Idee der Gnade, und das Schema: Tod und Auferstehung.

Jeder Tag wird als Gabe oder als Geschenk des Schöpfers an den Menschen verstanden, als Gnadenerweis, der zum Lob und zur Ehre des Schöpfers gelebt werden soll. Jeder Tag soll aufgeopfert werden durch die Teilnahme an Christi Tod und Auferstehung. Die zwei Einstellungen, Dankbarkeit und Opfer, vereinigen sich in der Eucharistie. Diese zwei sind eins: „Gott loben und ihm dankbar sein“ (weil er das Opfer, das „rechte Osterlamm“ uns selbst dargebracht hat). „Wenn wir wüssten, wie gütig Gott ist“, schrieb der alte, leidende Guardini in seinem Tagebuch, „könnten wir unser Leben lang nur voll Freude sein.“

Die paulinische Dialektik, als eine Kunst aus dem Negativen etwas Positives, aus der menschlichen Schwachheit die Kraft Gottes, entstehen zu lassen ist ein Herzstück der christlichen Lebensweise. Anstatt uns unmittelbar und ausschließlich in dieses Paradox zu vertiefen, wie das Karl Barth in seiner dialektischen Theologie getan hat, sollten wir heute unser christliches Denken in weitere philosophische und interreligiöse Horizonte hineinstellen. Die philosophische Würde des Alltags als besonderes Phänomen und als Gegenstand einer kritischen Reflexion ist insbesondere im Existentialismus und in der Phänomenologie betrieben worden (obgleich bereits Heraklit, einer der ersten Philosophen, in dem von Aristoteles überlieferten Rätselwort: „Auch hier, in meiner Backstube, sind Götter anwesend“ darauf verwiesen hat).

Hegel bezeichnet die Philosophie im Gegensatz zum sensus communis, als die „verkehrte Welt“ (zitiert von Heidegger, GA 9:103). Dieser Umkehrung folgend, könnte der Philosoph versuchen, durch die dialektische Auflösung der oberflächlichen Alltagswirklichkeit ein tieferes Verständnis des Lebens und der Wirklichkeit zu gewinnen.

Den Alltag philosophisch betrachten zu wollen, scheint eine unmögliche Aufgabe zu sein, weil unsere Alltagserfahrung so viele unterschiedliche Gesichter zeigt. Ein Philosoph, der eine Besinnung über das Alltägliche in Gang setzen will, sieht sich genötigt, auf moderne Romanschriftsteller wie Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, James Joyce und Virginia Woolf zurückzugreifen, die ihrerseits, mit denkerischer Radikalität und ganz neuen Sichtweisen, den Alltag in den Blick genommen haben und sich kritisch mit ihm auseinandergesetzt haben. In diesem Zusammenhang kann man auch auf Guardinis Auslegung von Rilkes Duineser Elegien denken. Die Frage nach der „Eigentlichkeit“ des Lebens stellt sich im modernen Roman wie in der Existenzphilosophie, und sie hat einige allgemein anerkannte Antworten zu Tage gefördert: Ein echtes Leben zu führen, heißt unter anderem auch, sich der Angst vor dem Tod nicht zu versperren, und dennoch eine gewisse Gelassenheit zu pflegen; seine Existenz in den Griff zu nehmen in der individuellen Entschlossenheit, ohne doch die Verantwortlichkeit dem Mitmenschen gegenüber zu vergessen. Diesbezüglich gibt es eine große Spannbreite möglicher Antworten, wie ein Vergleich der konkreten Anweisungen, Empfehlungen und Maximen bei Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heidegger und Sartre zeigt!

Der Buddhismus, mehr noch als die abendländischen Philosophen, bietet uns eine allgemeingültige Analyse und Bewertung des alltäglichen Lebens an, weil er den Anspruch erhebt, die unabänderlichen Gesetze des menschlichen Daseins aufgedeckt zu haben. Dort wo der Buddhismus sich kritisch mit der Alltagswirklichkeit auseinandersetzt, bedient er sich nicht nur eines analytischen, sondern auch eines dialektischen Verfahrens, das zu durch und durch negativen Ergebnissen zu führen scheint. Der Weisheit letzter Schluss scheint die reine Leerheit zu sein. Aber diese Leerheit ist das hauptsächliche Kennzeichen der nirvanischen Erlösung; sie trägt so die Züge einer frohen Botschaft. Dies ist zwar ein Paradox, aber kein übernatürliches Wunder, denn die Wirklichkeit der Leere auch wenn sie die Logik übersteigt, ist kein Feind der Logik; sie erweist sich und bestätigt sich mithilfe gründlicher dialektischer Untersuchungen. Auch hier finden wir Ansätze zu einer Rettung des weltlichen Alltags und seiner Konventionen aufgrund einer dialektischen Umkehrung.

Das Christentum, Hegel, die Existenzphilosophie und der Buddhismus, sie alle versuchen das Leiden und das Unbefriedigende zu meistern, indem sie sich auf ein Denken einlassen, dem es gelingt, die negativen Aspekte unseres Daseins radikal zu erfassen. Die Anstrengung des begrifflichen Denkens hat einen Perspektivenwechsel zur Folge, eine Art von „Aufhebung“, die aus der Negativität etwas Positives entstehen lässt. Auch dort wo Heil und Erlösung einer höheren Instanz, Gott oder der Gnade zugeschrieben werden, gibt es viele Gründe zu dialektischen Gedankenbewegungen.

Die Botschaft des Mahāyāna

In diesem Beitrag zur Ringvorlesung über das Verhältnis von Philosophie und Lebensweisheit versuche ich zu erklären wie das buddhistische Denken die Konventionen des alltäglichen Lebens zur Letztgültigkeit des nirvāna in Beziehung setzt. Das Schema der „zweifachen Wahrheit“ schreibt unserem alltäglichen Leben nur eine konventionelle Wirklichkeit zu. Die höchste, unaussprechliche Wahrheit des nirvāna, oder der Leere, scheint zunächst diese alltäglichen Konventionen zu zertrümmern. Doch wir werden sehen, dass eine gewisse dialektische Beziehung zwischen dem Konventionellen und dem Höchsten ein Wesensbestandteil der buddhistischen Wahrheit ist. Die praktische Folge ist, dass wir unseren Alltag in einem bewusst und dialektisch durchgeführten Spiel zwischen dem Konventionellen und Höchsten betrachten und bestehen sollen.

Im Mahāyāna – dem Buddhismus des großen Fahrzeugs, der sich auf neue, am Anfang unserer Zeitrechnung entstandene Sutren stützt – erscheint die Leere, sunyatā, als das erste Grundwort. Im Sutra des Herzens, eine der wichtigsten Schriften des Mahāyāna-Kanons, welche die Botschaft der Sutren der Vollkommenheit der Weisheit knapp zusammenfasst, lesen wir:

„Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva [der bodhisattva des Mitleids, sehr geliebt in Ost-Asian unter den Namen Kuan-yin und Kannon], in tiefste Weisheit versenkt, erkannte, dass die fünf Skandhas leer sind und verwandelte damit alles Leid und allen Schmerz. Sariputra! Form ist nichts anderes als Leere, und Leere ist nichts anderes als Form. Form ist identisch mit Leere und Leere ist identisch mit Form. Und so ist es auch mit Empfindung, Wahrnehmung, geistiger Formkraft und Bewusstsein. [d.h. die andere vier Skandhas] Sariputra! Alle Dinge sind in Wahrheit leer. Nichts entsteht und nichts vergeht. Nichts ist unrein, nichts ist rein. Nichts vermehrt sich und nichts verringert sich. Es gibt in der Leere keine Form, keine Empfindung, Wahrnehmung, geistige Formkraft und kein Bewusstsein, keine Augen, Ohren, Nase, Zunge, Körper oder Geist; es gibt nichts zu sehen, hören, riechen, schmecken, fühlen oder zu denken, keine Unwissenheit und auch kein Ende der Unwissenheit, kein Altern und keinen Tod, noch deren Aufhebung, kein Leiden und keine Ursache des Leidens, kein Auslöschen und keinen Weg der Erlösung, keine Erkenntnis und auch kein Erreichen [d.h. die vier Edlen Wahrheiten des Buddhismus werden selbst als leer erklärt]. Weil es nichts zu erreichen gibt, leben Bodhisattvas die Vollkommenheit der Weisheit und ihr Geist ist unbeschwert und frei von Angst. Befreit von allen Verwirrungen, allen Träumen und Vorstellungen, verwirklichen sie vollständiges Nirvāna.“

Kann man indessen nur in der Flucht vor der Alltagswirklichkeit Befreiung finden? Das zweite Glied des Chiasmus, „Form selbst ist Leere; Leere selbst ist Form“ weist uns in eine andere Richtung, und verspricht eine Wiederherstellung der samsarischen Welt in der Tonalität der Leerheit. Diese dialektische Umkehrung ist das Zentrum der Philosophie des Mahāyāna. Avalokitesvara, der Bodhisattva des Mitleids, lehrt uns die Nichtigkeit, Gebrechlichkeit, Konventionsgebundenheit des Alltags tief zu erfahren, um gerade in ihr die nirvanische Leere zu kosten.

„Die Form selbst ist Leere“: Jede Gegebenheit, auch die handfesteste, deckt bei näherem Zusehen ihre Wesenslosigkeit auf. Eine solche Behauptung mag abstrakt und akademisch klingen; indessen hat sie tiefe Spuren nicht nur im Denken des fernöstlichen Kulturkreises sondern auch in seiner alltäglichen Lebensführung hinterlassen. Die reinste und radikalste Erklärung dieses Wirklichkeitsverständnisses verdanken wir der Madhyamaka-Schule, der sogenannten „zentralen Philosophie des Buddhismus“. Ihr Gründer ist Nāgārjuna (2-3. Jht). Weiterentwickelt wurde sie vom größten seiner Kommentatoren, Candrakirti (7. Jht) und in der komplexen Scholastik der tibetischen Gelugpa-Schule. In den letzten Jahrzehnten hat gerade diese Schule eine unwiderstehliche Anziehungskraft auf westliche philosophische Denker ausgeübt.

Die alte buddhistische Ontologie des abhängigen Entstehens (pratitya samutpāda) wird in der Madhyamaka-Schule noch radikalisiert. Wenn alle Phänomene nur in Abhängigkeit zu anderen entstehen, kann kein Element der Wirklichkeit ein Eigenwesen (svabhāva) besitzen; seine letzte Wirklichkeit kann nur die Leere sein. Die alltägliche Welt, die des samsāra, im Gegensatz zum nirvāna, hat nur eine provisorische und konventionelle Existenz.

Die Auffassung der konventionellen Wirklichkeit (samvrti-satya) ist der vielleicht faszinierendste Aspekt im Denken des Madhyamaka. Um nur seinen epistemologischen Aspekt zu erwähnen: Erkenntnismittel (pramāna) und Erkenntnisobjekt (prameya) bedingen sich gegenseitig, so dass beide unbeständig sind. Wahrnehmung und Schlussfolgern sind die wichtigsten Erkenntnismittel. Doch sie geben uns keinen Zugriff auf die letzte Wirklichkeit. Ihre Geltung bzw. Beständigkeit ist rein konventionell. Auf der Ebene der höchsten Wirklichkeit der Leere oder des Nirvāna haben sie keine Geltung und auch keine Anwendungsmöglichkeit mehr.

Die Argumentationskette der prasangika-Denker des Madhyamaka (die Candrakirti treu bleiben in ihrer Verleugnung aller pramāna, die einen mehr als konventionellen Status beanspruchen) besteht in einer Reihe von reductiones ad absurdum. Sie weisen nach, dass jeder Anspruch auf substantielle Existenz irgendeines Begriffes oder irgendeiner Gegebenheit zu logischen Inkonsequenzen und Antinomien führt. Nur dasjenige, was diese unerbittliche Prüfung besteht kann als letzte Wahrheit oder Wirklichkeit anerkannt werden, und dies ist nur die Leerheit selbst. Man könnte versucht sein, ein solches Denken als einen Skeptizismus, der in einen Nihilismus mündet, zu charakterisieren, und in der Tat wurde es häufig so im Abendland missverstanden. Doch dieser Verdacht wird hinfällig, wenn man die spirituelle Tiefe der buddhistischen Leere anerkennt, die gleichbedeutend mit Erlösung (moksa) ist.

Der wohl interessanteste Aspekt dieses Denkens ist dass es die konventionelle Welt nicht schlechthin transzendiert und hinter sich lässt, sondern sie in einen Ort verwandelt, wo die nirvanische Weisheit der Leere sich verwirklicht. Je tiefer die Einsicht in die Flüchtigkeit und Nichtigkeit des samsarisches Lebens und Denkens, desto näher kommen wir der höchsten Wirklichkeit des Nirvāna als letzte Wahrheit des Samsāra. Unsere konventionelle Alltäglichkeit bleibt die Methode, die uns ans Ziel führt und mittels derer der mitleidvolle Lehrer andere zu diesem Ziel führen möchte: „Bei der Verkündigung des Dharma haben sich die Buddhas auf die zwei Wahrheiten gestützt: Die eine ist die weltliche, ‚verhüllende Wahrheit‘ (samvrtisatya; konventionelle Wahrheit), die andere ist die ‚Wahrheit im höchsten Sinne’ (paramārthasatya). Diejenigen, die den Unterschied der beiden Wahrheiten nicht erkennen, erkennen auch nicht die tiefe Wahrheit (tattva) in der Lehre Buddhas... Ohne sich auf das Konventionelle zu stützen, kann der höchste Sinn nicht gelehrt werden. Ohne dass der höchste Sinn erkannt wurde, kann das nirvāna nicht erlangt werden (Nāgārjuna, Stanzen, 24, 8 und 10). Der höchste Sinn, oder die letztgültige Wirklichkeit ist das Einzige, das die Prüfung der analytischen Kritik bestehen kann. Alle anderen Phänomene oder Vorstellungen erweisen sich als rein konventionell. Sie sind nur brauchbar als geeignete Mittel (upāya) um die Weisheit der Leere mitzuteilen, aber sie sind jeder wesentlich Existenz oder Identität bar.

Für eine Erneuerung der philosophischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Buddhismus

Ich bin davon überzeugt, dass, sofern wir uns wirklich mit diesem Denken auseinandersetzen wollen, wir auf die tiefsten Quellen unseres eigenen abendländischen Denkens zurückgreifen müssen. Aus westlicher Perspektive gesehen, sind Hegel, der Meister des Begriffes, und Heidegger, das Denker des Phänomens, die wohl interessantesten Gesprächspartner für eine solche Auseinandersetzung, weil jeder von ihnen sich bemüht hat, auf seine Weise das Ganze des abendländischen Denkens in den Blick und in den Begriff zu bekommen.

Manche unserer Zeitgenossen suchen im Buddhismus eine Bestätigung für ihre Ansicht, dass die einzige heute noch gangbare Weise des Philosophierens ein auf alle Letzbegründigungsansprüche verzichtendes pensiero debole ist. Eine solche resignierte Auffassung geht an der wirklichen Bereicherung und an der Herausforderung vorbei, die das buddhistische Erbe für die westliche Philosophie bedeutet. Sie verflacht und trivialisiert sowohl den Buddhismus als das westliche Denken.

Die Art und Weise, wie der Zen-Buddhismus die Alltäglichkeit und die letztgültige Wirklichkeit miteinander verbindet, ist ein Thema, das wir uns durch ein kritisches und meditatives Denken, das in die Schule von Husserls und Heideggers Verständnis der Phänomenologie gegangen ist, neu aneignen können. Auch die versteckte begriffliche Untermauerung des Zen-Buddhismus, die wir in den Sutren und Philosophien des indischen Mahāyāna finden können, kann in ihrer ganzen Tiefe nur verstanden werden, wenn wir über ein subtiles analytisches und dialektisches begriffliches Instrumentarium wie das Hegels verfügen.

In meinen eigenen Studien ziehe ich es vor, mich mit den indischen Quellen zu beschäftigen, weil die indo-europäische Sprache und ihre Beherrschung der Logik und der abstrakten Begrifflichkeit eine sichere Brücke zu westlichen Denkweisen darstellen. Der Zen-Buddhismus, der dem Taoismus so vieles verdankt, verlangt, dass man sich im chinesischen Denkraum bewegt. Er ist vielleicht die schönste Frucht der buddhistischen Weisheit, eine dialektische Lebenskunst, in der man im Verhältnis von Sein und Nichts, vom Konventionellen und dem Letztgültigen, eine wachsame Offenheit für das unmittelbar Wirkliche entdeckt. Doch um letzte Klarheit über die „Logik“ dieser Kunst zu gewinnen ist es nötig, zu den indischen Quellen zurückzukehren.

Wir wissen nicht sehr viel über die Lebensführung der indischen Mönche und Laien des indischen Mahāyāna, obgleich wir einige Hinweise aus den fantastischen Erzählungen des Lotus und des Vimalakirti entnehmen können. Jedoch kann die Auseinandersetzung mit ihren Gedanken unseren Alltag verwandeln.

Buddhistische Dialektik

Manche Philosophen, Dichter und insbesondere die Buddhisten entdecken in ihrer Erfassung der Beschaffenheit der alltäglichen Existenz, wie stark das Sein vom Nichtsein infiziert ist.

Eine verdrängte, von Verneinungen durchsetzte Angst hindert uns daran, unser Leben voll und zufriedenstellend auszuleben. Nicht durch Verdrängung unserer Ängste, sondern durch ein tieferes und schärferes Bewusstsein davon gelingt der Gesinnungswandel, der unser Herz zu den echten menschlichen Stimmungen – Mitleid und vertrauensvolle Hingabe – bekehren kann. Die Begegnung mit Alter, Krankheit und Tod, von denen der junge Siddhartha behütet war, erweckte in ihm das Erlösungsbedürfnis. Im Mahāyāna wird diese Befreiung nicht als Flucht vor dem qualvollen Bereich des samsāra verstanden sondern als Einsicht in die Leere des samsāra die schon eine positive Bedeutung beinhaltet.

Deshalb sind die Zen-Meister bestrebt, unsere Ängste zu schüren. Meister Yunmen (864-949) ermahnt seine Jünger unaufhörlich, ihr kurzes Leben nicht zu verträumen: „Beeilt euch! Beeilt euch! Die Zeit wartet auf niemanden, und das Ausatmen gibt noch keine Gewähr dafür, dass ihr auch einatmen werdet! Oder steht euch ein zweiter Leib und ein zweiter Geist zur Verfügung, als dass ihr den einen vergeuden könntet?“.

Dort wo eine solche Lebensweisheit direkt, in der Form eines memento mori, formuliert wird, kann sie langweilig und entmutigend scheinen. Mann kann gut verstehen, dass faule Mönche es nicht eilig hatten, dieser Aufforderung Folge zu leisten. Die versprochene Erweckung schien ihnen bedrohlich und leidvoll, so dass sie nicht nur ihre eigene Fähigkeit, dieses Ziel zu erreichen bezweifelten, sondern auch dessen Wirklichkeit in Frage stellten. Die Panikstimmung angesichts der Flüchtigkeit der Zeit ist eher dazu angetan, uns in Verzweiflung zu stürzen, als dazu, jeden Augenblick als unendlich kostbar zu würdigen, und die Entschlossenheit, ihn voll auszunutzen zu fördern, damit der Tod uns in der günstigsten Verfassung antrifft. Dieselbe Entschlossenheit kann aber auch zu extremen Verhaltensweisen führen, wie die des Milarepa, der seine verschlissenen Kleider noch weiter verschleißen lässt, denn wenn wir heute Abend sterben sollten, ist es weiser zu meditieren anstatt unsere Zeit auf Näharbeiten zu verschwenden.

Die buddhistische Auffassung von der Leere akzeptiert das Nichts im Herzen des Seins und sie entdeckt dabei, dass die Phänomene in ihrer Zerbrechlichkeit und gegenseitigen Abhängigkeit zum Fahrzeug einer neuen Freiheit werden können. Wenn wir uns das samvrti als wesenlosen Schein in einem dualistischen Gegensatz zur wesenhaften Wirklichkeit der Leere vorstellen, übersehen wir die enge gegenseitige Abhängigkeit Alltägliches und Höchstes. Das Alltägliche als rein konventionell zu erkennen bedeutet schon, dessen Leere zu erfassen, und damit zur Weisheit der Leere vorzustoßen. Diese Weisheit entsteht durch eine kritische Reflexion über das Alltägliche, oder die Selbst-Reflexion des Konventionellen. Das positive Ergebnis einer solchen Besinnung ist die Einsicht in die leere tathatā oder „Diesheit“ der Phänomene. Dies kann keine selbstzufriedene Selbst-Behauptung des trügerischen svabhāva sein. Es ist das Sein, das vollständig mit der Leere identifiziert oder ein Moment der Leere wird (wenn wir uns diesen Hegelschen Ausdruck erlauben können). Wir kennen die Leere nur insofern sie sich in den voneinander abhängigen Phänomenen verkörpert, und wir erfassen diese in ihrer Diesheit nur, wenn wir sie als selbst-negierend oder selbst-zerstörend verstehen.

Wenn wir diese Grundeinsicht sowohl phänomenologisch wie begrifflich vertiefen, entdecken wir, dass die brüchige Welt des samsāra, das Reich des Leidens und der Unbeständigkeit, sich nicht vom nirvāna, dem Reich der glückseligen Leere unterscheidet. Dies genau war die Einsicht, in der Nāgārjunas Denken gipfelte: „Es gibt keinen Unterschied zwischen samsāra und nirvāna. Es gibt keinen Unterschied zwischen nirvāna und samsāra. Die Grenze des nirvāna ist die Grenze des samsāra. Man kann zwischen beiden auch nicht den geringsten Abstand finden“ (Stanzen 25:19-20). In seiner Darstellung des Denkens Nāgārjunas ist Jay Westerhoff äußerst gewissenhaft diesen Analysen des illusionären Charakters der Substanz (svabhāva) nachgegangen, aber er hat uns wenig zu sagen über die soteriologischen Konsequenzen dieses Gedankens. Die Entdeckung der Leere selbst ist das glückselige nirvāna, das Zur-Ruhe-kommen aller Verstehensbemühungen und aller Begriffskonstruktionen (25:24).

Die Begrifflichkeit spielt jedoch eine Rolle an der konventionellen Ebene. Wenn die Leerheit eine Disziplin der Enthaltung bedeutet, „ein geistiges Fasten“, wie eine chinesische Formel lautet, zwingt sie Nāgārjuna keineswegs, von jeder Argumentation Abstand zu nehmen. Der Buddha hat sich geweigert, vierzehn metaphysische Fragen zu beantworten. Die buddhistische Scholastik hat indessen gezeigt, dass die metaphysische Neugier des menschlichen Geistes unausrottbar ist. Darum behandelt Nāgārjuna die metaphysische Fragen in einem Stil der dem Verfahren Kants in seiner transzendentalen Dialektik vergleichbar ist. Kant beweist kontradiktorische Thesen um die Grenzen der Vernunft aufzuzeigen, jedoch ohne die Kategorien von Substanz, Raum, Zeit in Frage zu stellen, die in diesen Beweisführungen vorausgesetzt werden. Nāgārjuna dagegen zeigt, dass Kategorien wie Zeit, Raum und Selbst von Anfang an widersprüchlich sind. Auch der Tathāgata beugt sich dieser universellen Substanzlosigkeit, so dass er nicht als „ewig, nicht-ewig, beide, keine“, oder als „ein Ende habend, nicht-habend, beide, keine“ (Nāgārjuna, Stanzen, 22, 12) verstanden werden kann.

Die Angst und das Nichts

Am Anfang seiner kühnen und umstrittenen Vorlesung von 1929: Was ist Metaphysik?, unterstreicht Heidegger, dass das metaphysische Fragen den Einsatz des ganzen Daseins des Fragenden erfordert, so zwar „dass der Fragende – als ein solcher – in der Frage mit da, d.h. in die Frage gestellt ist“ (GA 9:103).

Voltaires Pangloss dagegen, bei seiner Landung in Lissabon zur Zeit des großen Erdbebens lässt sich nicht aus der Fassung bringen und er begnügt sich damit, eine metaphysische Frage zu stellen: „Was mag wohl der zureichende Grund dieses Phänomens sein?“ Es ist der Mangel an existentieller Betroffenheit, der hier den Philosophen lächerlich macht. Heidegger würde vermutlich sagen, dass Pangloss sich viel länger mit dem Phänomen „Erdbeben“ hätte befassen müssen, und auch die damit verbundene Angst an sich herankommen hätte lassen müssen. Aber nicht, wie bei Voltaire, um das Denken in seine Schranken zu verweisen und zu demütigen, sondern weil die Angst der Schlüssel zu einem tieferen Verständnis der Wirklichkeit ist, also ein ontologischer Offenbarungsfaktor ist, eine bisher ungeahnte Dimension des Seins aufdeckt. Wir erfahren und begreifen dass Seiende in ihrer Ganzheit verschwinden können, und dass das Nichts sich uns als das wahre Antlitz des Seins offenbart. Das Nichts, schreibt Heidegger, ist „wesentlich abweisend. Die Abweisung von sich ist aber als solche die entgleitenlassende Verweisung auf das versinkende Seiende im Ganzen“ (GA 9:114).

Anstatt diese Erfahrung zu erleben und zu bedenken, sucht Pangloss nach Gründen für den Zusammenbruch der Seienden, und er klammert sich an der Sicherheitsgürtel eines dürftigen Rationalismus. Er weigert sich, ein Da-sein zu werden, das sich der vollen Wirklichkeit des Seins aussetzt, eine Ausgesetztheit, die in der „Hineingehaltenheit in das Nichts“ (115) besteht. Er zieht es vor, die Phänomene als unbeteiligter Zuschauer zu beobachten und sie mithilfe der begrifflichen Schemata der Theodizee in Kontrolle zu bekommen. Das erste, was Heidegger vermutlich über das alltägliches Leben sagen würde ist, dass es gelebt werden muss.

Heidegger zufolge ist durch die Begegnung mit dem Nichts „das Dasein je schon über das Seiende im Ganzen hinaus“ (GA 9:115). Die Begegnung mit dem Leid (dukkha) im Buddhismus ermöglicht eine analoge Transzendierung der unbeständigen samsāra-Welt, eine Befreiung sowohl von der Anhänglichkeit an das vermeintliche substantielle Wesen als auch von einer nihilistischen Verzweiflung. Das buddhistische Bewusstsein des unbeständigen, leidvollen, nicht-selbsthaften Charakter aller Phänomene stürzt die menschliche Existenz mitten in die Erfahrung des Nichts hinein. Die ganze Welt ist ein brennendes Haus. In buddhistischer Sicht müsste Pangloss das Erdbeben als Beweis der Vergänglichkeit aller Dinge annehmen. Im Gegensatz zum Festklammern am Theoretischen bei Pangloss, würden die Zen-Meister den Fragenden selbst in Frage stellen, indem sie ihn fragen, warum er sich überhaupt eine solche Frage stellt, warum sie ihn umtreibt. Gewiss, es ist nicht leicht die Homologien zwischen dem beweglichen Denken Heideggers und den alten buddhistischen Traditionen auszubeuten. Beide müssen neu gedacht werden, in der Strenge einer disziplinierten phänomenologischen Besinnung.

Die Einstellung Heideggers nach der „Kehre“ scheint sehr weit von der Angstbestimmtheit seines früheren Denkens entfernt zu sein. Doch diese neue Besinnlichkeit neutralisiert nicht das Bewusstsein der Sterblichkeit; sie verschärft es sogar in gewisser Weise: „Der Tod birgt als der Schrein des Nichts das Wesende des Seins in sich. Der Tod ist als der Schrein des Nichts das Gebirg des Seins.“ (7:180), Das „Gebirg“ (dort, wo etwas geborgen wird) lässt das Wort „Gebirge“ anklingen: Erst der Tod offenbart uns die abgründige und majestätische Landschaft des Seins.

Ähnlich wie bei Heidegger das Nichts sich in den „Schleier des Seins“ (GA 9:312) verwandelt, verwandelt sich im Mahāyāna das nichtende Nichts, das alles substantielle Wesen als vergänglich, leidvoll und selbstlos entlarvt, in eine huldvolle Leere. Hin und her geworfen zwischen Sein und Nichts, dieses fürchtend, sich klammernd an jenes, erfahren wir eine Umkehrung, aufgrund derer wir diese Lage transzendieren und uns in der Freiheit der Leere neu verstehen können. „Reduziert“ von der Leere, ohne vom Nichts vernichtet zu sein, können die Menschen nun ihre konventionelle und funktionale Existenz geniessen. Unser ständig wechselndes Sein oder Selbst gehört völlig diesem konventionellen Stoff des samsāra an. Dennoch ist der Alltag der Ort, wo die nirvanische Einsicht stattfindet. Beim späten Heidegger dagegen wird das Thema des Nichts in gewisser Weise domestiziert. Im Licht der als Ereignis verstandenen „Wahrheit des Seyns“ erscheint das Nichts letztendlich nur als Entzug des Seins.

Dialektische Befreiung

Als Philosophen fühlen wir uns verpflichtet, einen ontologischen Grund der Umkehrung zu finden, die sowohl Heidegger wie auch der Buddhismus erlebt haben. Beide entdeckten dass die Wirklichkeit sich als huldvoll erweist. Können wir uns mit der Anerkennung dieser Umkehrung als Gabe, und zwar als Wunder zufrieden geben, nämlich mit dem „Wunder aller Wunder, dass Seiendes ist“ (GA 9:307)? In diesem Fall wäre die Beziehung zwischen Nichts und Sein derjenigen vergleichbar, die Paulus zwischen Sünde und Rechtfertigung herstellt. Das Ringen mit dem Nichts wäre nur dazu da, um die Hindernisse aus dem Weg zu räumen, die uns von der Erfahrung einer unerklärlichen Erlösung fernhalten.

Im Madhymaka-Denken wird die volle Erfahrung der Unbeständigkeit als Pforte zur befreienden Weisheit der Leere verstanden. Anstatt eine unerklärliche Erfahrung zu postulieren, können wir uns fragen, ob diese Umkehrung nicht einer streng dialektischen Notwendigkeit entspricht. Wenn wir uns weigern, hier auf alle dialektisch-begrifflichen Verstehensmethoden zu verzichten, befinden wir uns dann in der lächerlichen Lage eines Pangloss? Es scheint mir dass wir sowohl die Möglichkeiten als die Grenzen eines solchen Denkansatzes klären müssen.

Hegel und Heidegger erstreben einen Durchbruch zu einem freien Verhältnis zum Sein. Die Freiheit des besinnlichen Denkens bei Heidegger, das aufhört, die Phänomene den metaphysischen Gründen und Prinzipien („causa sive ratio“) zu unterwerfen, ist vielleicht nicht so entfernt als es zunächst scheinen mag von der Freiheit des Begriffs, bei Hegel, die ihrerseits die enge Form der „vormaligen Metaphysik“ im Rahmen einer kritischen „Wissenschaft der Logik“ überwindet und auflöst, wie Michael Theunissen überzeugend nachgewiesen hat. Durch seinen „Schritt zurück“ zum Begriff zum ursprünglichen „Andenken“ an die Wahrheit des Seins hat Heidegger vielleicht paradoxerweise einen Raum eröffnet für eine lebendigere wurzelhaftere Entfaltung der Macht des Begriffes.

„Das Nichts ist die Ermöglichung der Offenbarkeit des Seienden als eines solchen für das menschliche Dasein... Im Sein des Seienden geschieht das Nichten des Nichts“ (GA 9:115). Ist in diesem Spiel mit den Begriffen von Sein und Nichts nicht noch ein ferner Nachklang der Hegelschen Dialektik vernehmbar? Die Sprache der existentiellen Phänomenologie hat sich nicht gänzlich gegenüber logische Strukturen immunisiert. Auch Hegels Logik hat einige existentielle Züge. Er schreibt: „Denn Schein nennen wir das Sein, das unmittelbar an ihm selbst ein Nichtsein ist“ (Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hoffmeister, S.110). In Hegels Sprache und in seinem Denken finden sich noch viele andere, Zeugnisse einer solchen gegenseitigen Durchdringung von Sein und Nichts.

Was Heidegger explizit über Hegels Verständnis des Nichts sagt, scheint nur die Identität von Sein und Nichts als leere Vorstellungen am Anfang der Logik zu betreffen. Später deckt Hegel indessen reichere und interessantere Beziehungen zwischen Sein und Nichtsein auf. In der Reflexionslogik wird das Sein, das anfangs als eine unmittelbare Gegebenheit verstanden wurde, als von einer negativen Bewegung der Reflexion Gesetztes entlarvt. Sein subsistiert jetzt nur noch als Schein. Der Schein ist „das Sein nur als Moment, oder das Sein affiziert vom Nichtsein… Der Schein ist ein Nichts – nicht etwas die seine eigene Wirklichkeit hat, sondern nur die Illusion von Sein“ (G. DiGiovanni, Hegel-Studien 8 (1973):146). In diesem Stadium der Logik handelt es sich um eine kritische Darstellung des Phänomenbegriffs im griechischen Skeptizismus und im Idealismus eines Leibniz, Kants und Fichtes. Noch später, im letzten Stadium der Logik, wo Hegel die dynamische Struktur des Begriffes entfaltet, bleibt das Sein durchgedrungen von der negativen Bewegung des Denkens: „Das Wesen ist die erste Negation des Seins, das dadurch zum Schein geworden ist; der Begriff ist die zweite oder die Negation dieser Negation, also das wiederhergestellte Sein, aber als die unendliche Vermittlung und Negativität desselben in sich selbst.“ (Wissenschaft der Logik, Lasson, II, S.235).

Können wir die vielfältigen Beziehungen zwischen dem Sein und dem Nichts in der buddhistischen Dialektik in eine logische Ordnung einfügen, ähnlich derjenigen, die Hegel enthüllt hat? Die Weisheit der Leere mündet in der Erfassung der Diesheit, tathatā, die irgendwie Hegels Wiederherstellung der Unmittelbarkeit des Seins ähnelt. Gewiss ist es nicht leicht, Hegelsche Denkformen zu verwenden, um das Madhyamaka zu erhellen, weil die Macht des Negativen bei Hegel immer konstruktiv bleibt, während im Madhyamaka eine nicht-implikative Negation (pratasja-pratisedha) das Spiel des Gedankens beherrscht. illusorische Anhaftungen und eigensinnige Fixierungen werden abgebaut, ohne dass irgendetwas positiv behauptet würde.

T.R.V. Murti behauptet, dass bei Nāgārjuna die konventionelle Wirklichkeit vom Standpunkt der absoluten Wirklichkeit aus betrachtet durch und durch irrig sei, während Hegels Verständnis der Arbeit des Begriffes die volle Wahrheit des „Scheins“ in seiner Ganzheit bewahrt (The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, London, 1960, S.301-306). Die Dialektik des Madhyamaka vollzieht sich dagegen durch Verneinung der Ansichten, und nicht durch deren Addition. Man kann aber auch Hegels Logik als kritisch-dialektische Dekonstruktion der metaphysischen Denkkategorien verstanden. Die Rolle, die Hegel der Negation in seinem Denken zuweist, bringt ihn in die Nähe buddhistischer Dialektik, in der jedes Ding, jedes Bewusstseinselement, die Negation seiner selbst ist: Die Existenz wird selbst eine negative, sich selbst verzehrende Macht, in einer Weise, die an den Nihilismus grenzt.

Es ist dieser Arbeit der Negation in Bezug auf die logische Determination des Denkens zu verdanken, dass das freie Denken sich in der Form des Begriffs oder der Idee verwirklicht. Im Madhyamaka gehört das Denken überhaupt der konventionellen Ebene an und die höchste Wirklichkeit wird als Auflösung aller begrifflichen Unterschiede vorgestellt. Wie im Fall Heideggers bleibt es meines Erachtens sehr verheißungsvoll, zwischen Hegel und den Buddhismus einen „liebenden Streit um die Sache“ anzufachen.

Anmerkungen zu Heideggers Dialektik

Wenn wir uns bemühen, die ontologische Lage der Menschen nicht nur phänomenologisch, sondern auch begrifflich zu erfassen, bedeutet das notwendigerweise einen Verrat an der Reinheit des phänomenologischen Ansatzes? In Was ist Metaphysik? beginnt auch Heidegger damit, Sein und Nichts zusammenzudenken, als Phänomene, die aufs engste aufeinander bezogen sind. Diese dialektischer Denkbewegung, die Heidegger in die Nachbarschaft Hegels rückt, wird in der späteren ‘Einleitung’ und im ‘Nachwort’ der Antrittsvorlesung fortgesetzt. Auch in späteren Texten Heideggers finden wir quasi-dialektische Denkbewegungen. In Zeit und Sein (1962) erinnert eine sich selbstaufhebende Sprache an die Diktion der negativen Theologie und noch mehr an die des Madhyamaka, des Zen und des Taoismus, besonders in der abschließenden Behauptung: „Ein Hindernis dieser Art bleibt auch das Sagen vom Ereignis in der Weise eines Vortrags. Er har nur in Aussagesätze gesprochen“ (GA 14:30). Auch Nāgārjuna leugnet dass er Sätze darbietet; Sätze können nur dem Bereich konventioneller Wahrheit angehören.

In „Grundsätze des Denkens“ (1957), wo er zeigt, dass die höchsten Denkgesetze, wie die Sätze der Identität, des Nicht-Widerspruches, des ausgeschlossenen Dritten, im deutschen Idealismus dynamisch und beweglich werden, spricht Heidegger sehr wohlwollend über die Hegelsche Dialektik: „Das Denken wird wissentlich dialektisch“ (GA 11:128; GA 79:82), nicht nur bei Fichte, Schelling, und Hegel, sondern auch bei Hölderlin und Novalis. Unsere Gegenwart wird immer noch angesprochen von diesem geschichtlichen Ereignis, „dass das Denken in die Dimension der Dialektik eingegangen ist“ (GA 11:130; GA 79:84). „Durch die Dialektik gewinnt das Denken jenen Bezirk, innerhalb dessen es sich selber vollständig denken kann“ (11:131; 79:85). Das Denken kommt zum ersten Mal zu sich selbst, und setzt „eine gründlichere Maßgabe“ (11:131; 79:86) für die Denkgesetze.

„Wenn das Denken, von einer Sache angesprochen, dieser nachgeht, kann es ihm geschehen, dass es sich unterwegs wandelt“ (GA11:33; 79:115). Diese Bemerkung am Anfang von „Der Satz der Identität“ fasst Heideggers Ringen mit den Axiomen des Denkens zusammen, das mit Der Satz vom Grund anfängt. Nur die „Sache selbst“ hat die Macht, das Denken zu verwandeln. Wie übt sie diese Macht aus? Vielleicht, indem sie das dialektische Potential des Denkens selbst entfaltet. Wiederum gibt es hier gewisse Affinitäten mit dem Hegelianismus. Das Denken sucht „auf den Weg zu achten, weniger auf den Inhalt“ (11:33; 79:115). Inwiefern unterscheidet sich dieses Achten auf den Weg vom Selbstbewusstsein des Denkens im deutschen Idealismus? Für Heidegger kann wissenschaftliches Denken nicht den Platz des Ursprungs der Gesetze des Denkens erreiche; es ist ein Ort, der für uns dunkel ist (GA 11: 137-8). Die glänzende scholastische Selbstevidenz der Gesetze des Denkens ist trügerisch; wir müssen zurückdenken zu ihrem dunklen Grund. „Durch die Dialektik gewinnt das Denken jenen Bezirk, innerhalb dessen es sich selber vollständig Denken kann. Dadurch kommt das Denken erst zu sich selbst.“ (GA 11:131; 79:85). Es kommt in einer noch radikaleren Art und Weise zu sich selbst, wenn es Hegel als Sprungbrett benutzt, um über ihn hinauszuspringen und auf dem Boden des Taoismus zu landen. Was die dunklen Ursprünge des Denkens anbelangt zitiert Heidegger Hölderlin: „Es reiche aber, Des dunkeln Lichtes voll, Mir einer den duftenden Becher“ und anschließend Laozi: „Wer seine Helle kennt, sich in sein Dunkel hüllt“ (138). Dadurch, dass er einen taoistischen Text zitiert, deutet Heidegger an, dass im fernöstlichen Denken ein ähnlich dialektisches Bewusstsein gefunden werden kann wie in seinem eigenen Denken. Der zitierte Text bezieht sich auf die Untrennbarkeit von Ying und Yang, Sein und Nichts, Leben und Tod, nicht so sehr als eine rein logische Dialektik, sondern als gegenseitige Durchdringung aller Pole. Heidegger bietet uns hier eine phänomenologische Wende der „Grundsätze des Denkens“ an, die er nun spielerisch als Sprünge (Sätze) zum dunklen Grund hin präsentiert.

Der für Heideggers Denkstil typische Chiasmus („Das Wesen der Sprache ist die Sprache des Wesens“, usw.) vollzieht solche Umkehrungen ständig. Je mehr man sich in die Sache selbst vertieft, umso mehr vollzieht sich eine Umkehr des Denkens deren literarische Gestalt die des Chiasmus ist. Diese dialektische Drehung wird von einem Denken vollzogen, das sich selbst der metaphysischen Logik entwunden hat und sich vollständig den Phänomenen zugewandt hat. Aber die überraschende Art und Weise, wie Heidegger die Phänomene „meditativ-besinnlich“ betrachtet, enthält immer noch einen Restbestand an logisch-dialektischen Denkbewegungen. Es ist eher eine Einweg-Logik als eine kumulative Dialektik, und in dieser Beziehung kann sie in der Tat mit der Einweg-Logik des Laozi verglichen werden.

In „Das Wesen der Sprache“ bezeichnet Heidegger „Weg“ als „ein Urwort der Sprache, das sich dem sinnenden Menschen zuspricht.’ Heidegger bezieht sich auf das Tao, „das Leitwort im dichtenden Denken des Laotse,“ das die Übersetzer aufgrund ihres oberflächlichen Verständnisses der „Metaphern“ sich nicht trauten mit „Weg“ zu übersetzen und stattdessen Begriffe wie „Vernunft“, „Geist“, „Raison“, „Sinn“ oder „Logos“ bevorzugten. Heidegger zufolge wären wir gut beraten, das Tao eher als „der alles be-wëgende Weg“ zu verstehen. Erst wenn wir uns der Eigentümlichkeit eines solchen „Weges“ bewusst geworden sind, haben wir die richtige Grundlage gewonnen, um über so etwas wie „Grund“, „Logos“ und Sinn zu sprechen, was nur dann gelingt, wenn „wir diese Namen in ihr Ungesprochenes zurückkehren lassen und dieses Lassen vermögen“ (GA 12:187). Das grundlegenden „Gesetz des Denkens“ wäre in diesem Fall dieser ursprüngliche Weg selbst. Wiederum vollzieht sich eine dialektische Umdrehung, und drängt sich ein Chiasmus auf: „Der Weg des Denkens ist das Denken des Weges.“

John May on "Questioning Back"

O’LEARY, Joseph S.  Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition (Minneapolis-Chicago-New York: Winston Press, 1985)

 

Fancy coming across a Jugendwerk of Joe’s in the Melbourne College of Divinity library! He really was a young Turk, laying into the greatest names in theology with bravado, but the title immediately caught my eye: ‘overcoming metaphysics’ – the very question that’s been preying on my mind for a long time. In fact, it took me back to our reading of Leslie Dewart’s The Foundations of Belief and Religion, Language and Truth in the early 70s, though they were dense and turgid compared with Joe’s elegance and daring. I wouldn’t be equipped to take the Heidegger-Derrida route, as he does, but it’s not the only possible one, and more important than the mechanics of deconstruction – which he performs with a light touch – is the basic diagnosis of what’s wrong with Western theological language. It might have been ‘right’ in previous centuries to speak this way (a high degree of philosophical precision was necessary by the time of the great councils, and in the Middle Ages metaphysics provided a lingua franca for Europe-wide debate), but now that its contexts of origin have disappeared, its context of validity is highly questionable, to the detriment of theology itself and public debate. Watching a Questions and Answers last night on religion, it struck me again: both the theists and the atheists were operating on the same wavelength: does ‘he’ exist or doesn’t ‘he’? Show me the evidence, etc. I think it needed familiarity with Buddhism to make this finally clear to me (more so than Dewart’s attempt to give priority to ‘reality’ over being and to philosophise about ‘non-being’), but Joe does a wonderful demolition job on the prevailing mindset quite independently of this, though not without relation to the exigencies of dialogue.

 

Though Joe acknowledges the possibility of narrative theology (2) and notes its Jewish heritage, he also says it is not a panacea (74) – as I have been tending to see it recently – for the problems in which the metaphysical tradition embroils us. Joe rightly says that this needs to be demonstrated with attention to the “concrete textuality” (41) of the tradition, which he carries out impressively on Augustine’s Confessions, with its uneasy to-and-fro between scripture and philosophy, and later brilliantly in a linguistic analysis of the Nicene Creed along the lines I used to practise, sifting out the propositions and determining their status (why hasn’t this been done more often?). All this is evidence for the “premature imposition of a system” (23) which makes ‘being’ an issue of faith, something Heidegger resolutely rejects. “Faith is not the answer to our (Greek) questioning of being, but co-exists with it in dialogical tension” (18). The alternative is suggested rather than worked out in detail: it entails a position “on the brink of the poetic” (29), where metaphor is given full play instead of imposing the conceptual prematurely on scriptural language (72; see 211 on “the unsettling truth which emerges unpredictably in poem or parable”). What really hit me between the eyes was the literary critique carried out under this heading on a round-up of the greats of contemporary theology: Tracy and Ogden, Barth and Rahner, Moltmann and Schillebeeckx; and what Joe discerns is exactly what has made theological language repugnant to me for years: the contorted efforts to fit faith into metaphysical schemas, taking roundabout routes to shore up the ‘ontotheology’ with its “reified abstractions” (83) on which the validity of statements of faith is presumed to depend – even in Barth: “Biblicism pits Scripture against metaphysics, but in the process structures Scripture as an alternative set of (metaphysical) principles” (99). Exactly; even Rahner’s ‘transcendental anthropology’ operates in a void, without reference to art, literature or science (95). Joe even remembers to place Catholic “magisterial fundamentalism” alongside Barthian “positivism of revelation” (108), anticipating by years something I put forward in the aftermath of Dominus Iesus.

 

When he comes to positive proposals, Joe claims that metaphysics is a “problem specific to Western theology” (115, though I would want to examine his passing remark that this also includes Indian thought, 10; here Dewart is more comprehensive in his assertion that Chinese and Arabic lack the copula and hence the ability to thematise ‘being’). He maintains that it was Luther who first pitted faith against philosophy and initiated the ‘faith-to-faith’ hermeneutic (135) that would dehellenise theology (117).Today this would be the equivalent of a critique of ‘Western reason’ (119), something that would have to be handled very carefully even in the light of responsible philosophers of science, not to mention Dawkins & Co. Joe believes Harnack’s historical approach to dogma needs to be followed up (strange that he doesn’t mention Troeltsch, whose characterisation of the ever-renewed ‘essence’ of Christianity would fit perfectly here). And – another key point of convergence for me – this brings us back to that “fear of Judaism and the Jews” (128) which has haunted the Western metaphysical enterprise: “The step back out of metaphysical theology is a step towards the Jewish matrix of all our theology” (128). As I have always insisted, this is the indispensable starting point of re-anchoring faith in history and taking an open stance towards other religion. Here, too, there are some telling observations about the falsity of so much dogmatic language which makes faith into mauvaise foi,forcing faith to be a noetic principle and not allowing it to be sui ipsius interpres (139). Faith as “events of recognition and trustful commitment” (138) would demolish “the usual complacencies of theological diction” (144). Wonderful stuff, and long overdue even now, but it comes with the warning that complete dehellenisation is impossible, given the groundwork laid by the early Fathers and the crucial function assigned to the homoousion (146-7). Well, we’ve yet to see Joe’s account of the birth of metaphysical theology in the Christological controversies, which resulted in the ‘colonising’ of biblical language by metaphysics, and has its counterpoint in the assertions of negative theology (so, Athanasius vs. Gregory of Nyssa – less so, interestingly, the Pseudo-Dionysius, 158; I notice that Joe also consulted John Keenan). The outcome is that faith has become a “theoretical ideology” instead of a “communal vision which is always being reshaped” (177). The exercise of ‘reading Augustine backwards’ yields the fascinating assertion that, though the resulting scriptural-philosophical amalgam is 90 per cent Platonic, there remains an unassimilated 10 per cent biblical residue which keeps disturbing the intended synthesis and could be used to unravel the seamless garment.

 

An important sub-plot in Joe’s story is that this task of deconstruction is unavoidable if we are to prepare for our next challenge: “a full-scale confrontation with the traditions and mentalities of the East. The Christian tradition will not be ready for that adventure unless it enjoys a concrete, demystified historical self-understanding” (207) – starting with the restoration of the links with our Jewish heritage.

 

'Unless this concrete history is now fully accepted Christians will go to meet other faiths carrying a burden of abstractions which have lost both their historical and their contemporary context and which can only generate confusion in dialogue. No doubt the other faiths will have to face their historicity in a similar way.' (207)

 

Not least Buddhism, but that’s another story, though Joe’s parting shot about the applicability of ‘form is emptiness, emptiness is form’ to the ‘phenomenality of Christ’ is suggestive: “this form itself subsists on the basis of the divine emptiness with which it is coterminous” (222; see 220). Against this background Joe’s Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth makes even more sense.

 

In such an audacious essay at such a high literary level there are bound to be soft spots, and two which I identified could be probed further. They centre around the terms ‘biblical’ and ‘phenomenality’ (sometimes used together – “Biblical phenomenality”, 16). ‘Biblical’ was of course a catchcry around the time of Vatican II, and even then I was uneasy about a kind of scriptural romanticism. Joe shows convincingly that even in Augustine cascades of scriptural quotations don’t really allow us to break free from the philosophical matrix. But this still leaves us a long way from seeing what a theology would look like that was ‘truly’ biblical, not ‘positivistic’ like Barth’s, not ‘biblicist’ like today’s evangelicals, but anchored in what Paul Knitter hints at as a ‘poetics of history’ (in fact, a comparison with his Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian would be instructive). The big, big challenge for our contemporaries, especially in the classroom but even in the pulpit, is to bridge the yawning gap between biblical language with its experiential presuppositions and the postmodern, media-driven mentality: never so well informed, never so incapable of historical perspective, not to mention literary discernment. The puzzles surrounding ‘phenomenality’ are closely related to this, and the puzzlement is no doubt my fault for being a non-practitioner, but the reason I’ve kept my distance from Heidegger all these years is this suspicion of arbitrariness in assigning meaning to metaphors and reporting on the results of introspection. At the same time, I concede that if the link could be plausibly made between the phenomena disclosed in John’s Gospel and phenomena experienced and observed in subsequent centuries, right up to today, it would indeed be possible to bypass the metaphysical heritage which continues to generate pointless and irresolvable ‘ecumenical’ problems like real presence, sacramental efficacy and the sanctioning of absolute authority. Three cheers, at any rate, for a daring sally into territory that has been off limits to professional theologians for far too long.

 

3. The Historic Flaw

One might continue forever the soundings of the previous chapter, showing over and over again how Christian thinking is still unsuspectingly entangled in speculation and estranged from its proper theme. But it is time to widen our lens. unless we bring the sweep of history into view, even an “eternal” vigilance against the pitfalls of language will never take us beyond local corrections of the distortions we attribute to metaphysics, and these will be taken as random interferences, uninterpretable static, for only history fully reveals their systematic – Heidegger would say destinal – character. Unless they emerge from a thorough involvement with the whole story of the fusion between the worlds of biblical faith and Greek philosophy, even our positive proposals for the renewal of religious language will remain piecemeal and uncoordinated and their underlying laws cannot be clearly defined. Only when the critique of current language is enlarged to become a full-scale historical hermeneutic can we grasp the extent of the sway of metaphysics within this language and at the same time discern its counter-metaphysical potential, insofar as it continues the movement of resistance to Greek reason which has always been stirring in the texture of Christian discourse. This can be retrieved, or rejoined, when the great texts of the past are so read that their explicit metaphysical meaning is overthrown in light of their deeper, partly repressed, character as confessions of faith. Without this deconstructive confrontation with its past, faith must continue to be haunted by metaphysical ways of talking and thinking which it is unable to contest and must remain cut off from the genuinely quickening resources of its tradition, springs of eloquence too well reined in by the canons of classical reason.

[2008: Faith, of course, is not a monolith, and its varying forms throughout history will embody themselves in a variety of rational accounts engaging with the questions and path of thought of the cultural contexts. It is perhaps excessive to speak of “overthrowing” the Greek and Latin patristic account; rather its limits and vulnerabilities must be interrogated and it must be recontextualized in the broader history. A reaction against Greek reason can be something already programmed by the reason itself. Many of the debates within patristic studies since Harnack fail to win a horizon beyond the old set-ups found within the Patristic world itself; an example if Mark Edwards’s book Origen against Plato, Aldershot, 2002. A critical perspective on classical Greek reason can be found only through study of the later history of philosophy, especially post-Kantian critical thought, and through acquaintance with non-Greek traditions of thought such as those of India and China, or those of Judaism insofar as it resisted hellenization.]

Even the surest instincts of faith cannot fill in for the informed suspicion which history teaches. To use any piece of Christian terminology without knowledge of the historical conditions of its production is to be a blind participant in the semantic play of tradition, powerless to operate strategic innovations. Nor can poetic intuition in handling the language of faith do the work of a historical critique of its elements; even Hopkins, Claudel and Eliot become baroque and cumbersome when they use such words as “Incarnation.” The critique and renewal of religious language is inevitably short-circuited unless it takes the form of an historical hermeneutic. A reconstruction of the origins of dogma in the usual style would not meet this requirement. It is not the battles of Cyril and Nestorius which produced the Chalcedonian formula, but forces lying beneath what appears on the surface of ecclesiastical history. Chalcedon is historically understood only when grasped as the result of the convergence and conflict between the gospel kerygma and the Greek ontotheological project. [2008: Against those, such as J.-L. Marion or O. Boulnois, who claim that onto-theology refers only to post-Scotist or post-Cartesian systematic ontology, I note that Heidegger finds the onto-theological structure in Aristotle. Middle Platonism – the main philosophical milieu of the Fathers – is an onto-theology is that is seeks to discern the universal qualities of being as such and to ground beings as a whole in a supreme principle, archê. Origen’s systematic work, On First Principles, is the first majestic entry into Christian theology of the whole breadth of onto-theology in that he seeks an account of beings as such, in terms of spirit and freedom, and of beings as a whole, in terms of a cosmos grounded in the first principles which are the divine hypostases of Father, Son and Spirit.]

If the Christian tradition is read in depth it becomes possible to subject the language of faith to an historical differentiation carrying real critical force. Replaced in its historical context the current language is lit up as a battlefield on which faith and metaphysics are engaged in the most recent and perhaps the decisive phase of their bimillennial skirmishings. Speaking the language of faith and reflecting theologically on it then become activities fraught with historical significance in which one’s every move signals either an advance towards that freedom in communicating the biblical revelation after which theology has always secretly aspired, or a retreat into the tried and trusted categories on which faith has often been forced to fall back, exhausted. [2008 The battle metaphor can lead to crass simplification. More irenically, one appreciates the classic articulation of faith in classical metaphysical categories, and the more recent metaphysical re-articulations, discerning the limits and flaws of each, and then, with Heidegger, noting the general limits of any articulation of faith that is conceived in too close in dependence on metaphysical rationality whether classical or modern.]

There are many other historical threats besetting the language of faith, and of these too it could be said that their systematic character and the resources for resisting them which the tradition secretes can only be discovered by a historical critique. A socio-political, or a feminist, or a psychoanalytic critique or the tradition might well seem more urgent than the abstract and delicate theme we have chosen. Our theme, however, engages us with what is most directly at issue in the classical texts, the metaphysical articulation of the faith, whereas the other critiques come at these texts from unexpected quarters. [2008: That is, when the Fathers do theology scientifically, their model is metaphysics, whereas today theology is just as likely to be shaped in interaction with one of the modern human sciences.] Their questions are equally applicable to the Bible or to other religious traditions, whereas the question of metaphysics focuses a problem specific to Western theology. Thus it is not surprising that within Western theology the topic of metaphysics has long since become explicitly problematical and that a whole tradition of denouncing the hellenizing of the Gospel and seeking out the lost “essence” of Christianity provides our contemporary questioning with a rich, complex background. In comparison with the other critical approaches just mentioned the critique of metaphysics could be described as a critique from inside, and as such perhaps enjoys a central and indispensable position, guiding the other critiques to their proper targets and correcting the short-circuits to which they might be prone if left to their own devices.

But is it really necessary, it may be objected, to organize the theological overcoming of metaphysics as a historical hermeneutic? Did not Wittgenstein carry out his linguistic therapy of philosophical language by choosing his examples from contemporary discourse? Even if some of his examples came from historical sources, he made no effort to reinsert them in their historical context or to provide their genealogy. Nor did he situate his own critical project in relation to a tradition of criticism of philosophical language. He was as content with a few samples of “language on a holiday” as Cézanne was with his bowl of shrivelled apples. But whatever the methodological virtues of Wittgenstein’s bracketing of history, it is not a helpful model for the critic of the language of faith. Even the simplest element in this language is the product of a complex history from which it cannot be abstracted. When philosophers of religion sketch what they take to be an elementary, universally acceptable concept or representation of “God,” for example, their discourse carries many historical overtones of which they are unaware. To say that God is “all-powerful” or “infinite” is to commemorate some distinct and datable breakthrough in humanity’s understanding of God, and to summon up the shade of Second Isaiah or Gregory of Nyssa or whoever first articulated the attribute in question. Nor can these attributes be dehistoricized as the redness or fragrance of a rose may be. Their meaning depends on the history of their usage and cannot be independently established, either by reduction to empirical perception or by an a priori conceptual analysis. A purely conceptual construction of the notions of “omnipotence” or “infinity” would carry none of the resonance these terms have acquired in the course of their usage by believing communities [2008: none of the destinal weight that has attached to them as namings of the divine; of course some terms lose this weight, and then the abstract philosophical discussions keep them artificially alive – the cadavers of such ideas as ‘foreknowledge’ and ‘predestination’ are much dissected by analytical philosophers of religion].

Furthermore, the basic referents of Christian language are not communicated to us in perception or conception, but in the more puzzling form of historical traditions. We latch on to these, ruminate on them, and wrestle with them in a search for some secure understanding of the gracious mystery they attest. Sometimes the traditions communicate clearly and powerfully, but then a cloud passes and they become blurred, opaque, and inaccessible again. We receive, for example, the message that “God is a loving Father,” and this for a while is illuminating and liberating, and may found a general entente about the upshot of the entire tradition. But then doubts set in. Is this language sexist, anthropomorphic, psychoanalytically unsound? Is it an image from another time for a reality which can no longer be thus expressed? Because tradition never becomes totally transparent, we can maintain contact with the gracious revelation it communicates only across a constant activity of questioning and rethinking its messages. [2008: The ‘unthought’ of Scripture and tradition, the underlying events and living forces, continue to emit quanta of spiritual and intellectual radiation calling on our imaginative understanding and critical retrieval. The cult of a frozen, dead tradition, in biblical and magisterial fundamentalism, is the deepest form of heresy, or idolatry, for it blocks the process of the communication of truth and life which is the heart of tradition.]

Tradition imprisons and blinds if we take at face value its surface clarities and dogmatic certitudes, and liberates its charge of light only when we question back to the challenge of mystery which these clarities and certitudes neither explicate nor dispel. The momentous decisions of the past which have determined the sense of the terminology we use, the religious thinkers who have left their imprint on the texture of our speech, are the ghosts with which one must wrestle in undergoing a therapy of the current language of faith. Thus no discipline, other than historiography, is as necessarily and as thoroughly historical in its concerns and procedures as theology must be. The exorcism of the ghosts which haunt our language is impossible unless we track them down in their historical lair. Conversely, appreciation of the vital elements this language still manages to mediate is impossible without awareness of the historical depth of the words we use. The word “faith” itself, for example, would be very depleted if one forgot that contemporary faith is received from a long line of historical witnesses stretching back to Abraham, so that the word unavoidably names not a purely inward, but a historical achievement.

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The Tradition of the Question

Even the project of overcoming metaphysics in theology has a historical depth peculiarly its own, for it is implicated in the tradition of protest [2008: shades of a false etymology here], originating with Luther, which consciously and explicitly opposed faith to metaphysics, the original Gospel to its hellenization in dogma and patristic Platonism, the God of Abraham to the God of the philosophers. It is fuelled by the pathos of these oppositions, though aware of their hermeneutical limitations as they have become apparent over the centuries. It retrieves and enriches this critical tradition by deploying the passion of faith which sustained it in a more sophisticated way, engaging the texture of metaphysical theology from within, lodging subversively in its text, instead of wasting time on external strictures. It is true that many theologians have tended to view the contrasts between Hebraism and Hellenism, revelation and reason, the “essence of Christianity” and its dogmatic overlay, as tendentious simplifications and see the quest for a dehellenization of Christianity as a romantic tilting at windmills. Nevertheless the problematic explored by the dehellenizing tradition has not gone away. On the contrary, it has continued to ferment and thicken, bursting the simple frameworks in which it was first apprehended, and in more subtle guise it can continue to serve as the chief topic of a hermeneutics of Christian tradition. The old slogans of opposition have lost validity only as fixed theses, but they may still serve as signposts for directions of critical thinking, for lines of inquiry which can be kept sufficiently flexible, inventive and open-ended to match the complexity of the bimillennial interplay between faith and metaphysics. No simple thesis, pro- or anti-metaphysical, can be adequate to the endless questions this history suggests. Instead a method of historical reflection is required which can articulate and develop each of the hunches, misgivings, or queries that come to the surface as we live through the crisis the tradition and prompt us to reassess and reinterpret it. If a hermeneutical method of adequate complexity is developed, the crisis of metaphysical theology will no longer be experienced as a situation of disarray or an occasion for pseudo-prophetic polemic, but as the matrix of a constantly increasing lucidity.

Psychoanalysts compare the psyche to a black box emitting fragmentary messages from one corner. What goes on inside that box remains impenetrably obscure. History too can never be reconstructed; its opacity far outweighs the partial insights it suggests. Yet each major turning of the road opens up intriguing new vistas in the landscape behind us. The turning which the closure of metaphysics brings about in the history of faith implies an overturning of rigid models of what that history has been, a discovery of the questionability of the past. The first two millennia of Christianity come to appear as a great experiment whose failures are as significant and as instructive as its successes. At a religious level this has been translated as a realization of the “sinfulness” of the Church, but at the level of concrete historical self-understanding it is better to use the Heideggerian term “errance” to describe the fateful and unavoidable limitations which the consignment of the Gospel to the cultural milieu of Western metaphysics imposed.

The Christian tradition is coming to terms with its mistakes, insofar as time has made them visible, and this unprecedented reflexive process, though experienced as painful and rather devastating, also returns to us our past as a richer source of instruction than it was ever allowed to be previously. The past is no longer an impediment to new thinking, but a practice ground for the endless task of discerning what is authentically Christian from what turns out to be a deviation or a dead end. Methods of probing analysis must be developed to discover deeper levels of the sense of the messages the black box of history emits. Surface chronicles are rightly regarded as of little theological interest, since only rare fragments of the past discourse of Christianity can engage directly the questions of contemporary faith. The marketing of past luminaries as “relevant” is generally an inept enterprise, and the idea that one can read the answer to present problems in the pages of Gregory of Nyssa or Maximus the Confessor is a willful mystification. But a depth-reading of these authors, as exemplifying both the promise and the failure of metaphysical Christianity, can indeed help contemporary faith find a more adequate articulation of its identity.

I say that the explicitly counter-metaphysical tradition within Christianity originates with Luther, because, despite his precedents in the anti-Aristotelean Augustinian theologians of the preceding centuries and in the German mystics, Luther’s opposition of the Bible and Aristotle has an implicit historical depth that makes it a qualitative leap beyond medieval critiques of metaphysics. His sense of the radical alterity of the Word of God pitted him implicitly against the whole Western tradition in a sharp collision which has no precedent and which does not seem to have been experienced at the same depth by any theologian since. In this century the influence of dialectical theology has caused Lutheran theologians to rediscover the theologia crucis of the Reformer, but very often their interpretation of it has run contrary to his intentions, and they have presented him as proposing a subtler “metaphysics of the cross” to replace faded Aristotelean notions. Moltmann, for instance, attempts to sublate Luther’s utterances into his own speculative kenoticism. This metaphysical complacency is scarcely the key to a deeper understanding of the greatest theological opponent of metaphysics. Instead we should, it seems to me, be ready to substitute the words “Western reason” wherever Luther writes “Aristotle.” Thus we might translate Thesis 29 of the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) – “Qui sine periculo volet in Aristotele Philosophari, necesse est ut ante bene stultificetur in Christo” (WA 1.355) – as saying, “If one wishes to think in terms of Western reason without danger, it is necessary that one first become fully foolish in Christ.” The radical implications of Luther’s thought are even clearer if we translate in these terms Thesis 44 of the Disputation against Scholastic Theology of 1516. “Theologus non fit nisi id fit sine Aristotele” (WA 1.226) then signifies: “One does not become a theologian unless one does so without Western reason,” unless one steps outside the historical limitations of metaphysics.

Luther had a fine ear for the incompatibility of philosophical and biblical diction. In order to bring out the originality and specificity of the Word of God he sometimes toys with a biblical text, telling us first what a scholastic philosophizing theologian would make of it, and then allowing the biblical word to show up this interpretation as “folly.” In discussing Psalm 1:1, “Happy the man..,” Luther presents not only hedonism, but, still more, the philosophical views which root happiness in virtue, as miserable and futile in contrast to the power of the biblical word (Operationes in Psalmos 1518-1521, ad loc., in Archiv zur Weimarer Ausgabe, I). His best argument against metaphysical theology was to replace it with a deeply felt biblical dialectic, a sapientia crucis derived from the prophets and St. Paul. Insofar as he addresses metaphysics directly it is rarely in order to argue with it. Instead he practices a prophetic discernment of the relative unreality and frivolity of metaphysical language when measured against the elemental concerns of the struggle of faith. Metaphysics, for Luther, is not confined to scholasticism. In 1521 he could write “If my soul hates the homoousion and refuses to make use of it, this does not make me a heretic”; “Quod si odit anima mea vocem homousion, et nolim ea uti, non ero haereticus” (WA 8.117). His distaste for metaphysics might have carried him very far in the direction of radicalism. But as in many other areas it was tempered by a retreat to more conservative positions as the years advanced.

  Luther’s vast biblical culture provided him with a rich and secure basis for developing a language of faith independent of metaphysics. After him theologians either fell back into scholastic methods of ordering Christian truth, or protested against metaphysics in the name of other forms of metaphysics rather than on the strength of a comparable encounter with the Word of God. Thus one may suspect that Pascal’s focus on the God of Abraham is a narrow one, shaped by a metaphysics of subjectivity, and his opposition to Descartes implies only a change of texture, from the rational lucidity of the cogito to the existential lucidity of the heart. Both thinkers order the cosmos around the subject. The biblical material which Pascal marshals is rather thin, and is arranged more often than not within the structures of a rationalistic apologetics. Similarly, the pietism and “enthusiasm” of the eighteenth century produced critiques of metaphysical theology which lack a primarily biblical basis. Here the opposition is between an enlightenment of the reason and an illuminism of the emotions. This, too, is an intra-metaphysical opposition. Whatever independent biblical or pneumatic inspiration lies behind it is so shaped by the metaphysical topos of emotion versus reason, intuition versus concept, that its original character is effaced. Thus it appears that Luther was able to recover the authentic language of faith and to free it from metaphysics far more effectively than was possible within the narrow horizons of the following centuries, when the struggle between faith and metaphysics was whittled down to the narrow dimensions of the debate between fideism and rationalism. (The discussion of the rivalry between faith and “insight” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind might be reworked, from a vantage point opposed to Hegel’s, in terms of a theological interpretation of the history of faith.)

Indeed it may be that the vision of Luther was too vast and too original to be fully received by those who came after him, and that even we today are too much prisoners of metaphysical criteria of rationalism and irrationalism to be able to make his language our own. The matter is complicated by the fact that Luther’s own polemical stances only imperfectly express the upheaval that is afoot in his texts, and which only a deconstructive reading can fully retrieve. A theology able to listen to Luther and catch these significant overtones in his writing would need to be just as free from metaphysics as Luther was, just as sensitively immersed in the texture of scriptural thinking, and just as honestly and eloquently in touch with those resources of language and life experience which can give the Gospel a contemporary tongue. Such a theology could claim to understand Luther better than he understood himself, clearing away the residual confusion noted by Kierkegaard when he opined that Luther “is an exceedingly important patient for Christendom, but he is not the physician” (Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, III, ed. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, Indiana UP, 1975, p. 101). The Lutheran volcano is not extinct. Might we not hope that its next eruption will unite the Church, where it first divided it? This volcano is nothing other than the latent power of the biblical word within the texture of Christian discourse. The glib biblicism of our preaching and teaching nowadays is no proof that we have been shaken by the power of that word, may indeed be the most effective of defenses against such a happening. That is why Luther is so important, as the chief of the very few historical figures who were so shaken, who represent breaches in our culture through which the biblical word has been able to penetrate. Such figures are irreplaceable sources for the renovation of our language of faith, which takes place as a continuation of the history they inaugurate, building on their success, and learning from their failures. They facilitate that jolt from outside without which no deconstructive strategy can get underway.

The discipline of church history was born amid the controversies of the Counter-Reformation as the Centuriators of Magdeburg and Cardinal Baronius tried to colonize the past for their respective denominations. The widening of the historical debate to include a questioning of the basic value for faith of the dogmatic work of the early Church seems at first to have occurred only in a marginal and sporadic way. The researches of the Jesuit Denis Pétau inspired the Unitarian Souverain to denounce the Platonism of the Fathers as the source of all the errors enshrined in the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation, but his evidence of subordinationism in the Ante-Nicene Fathers was stolidly “refuted” by the Anglican Bishop George Bull, and whatever discussions it helped to stimulate on the development of doctrine were on the whole, as Owen Chadwick’s entertaining chronicle reveals, rather timid and academic (From Bossuet to Newman, Cambridge UP, 1957).

Only in the nineteenth century did these critical questions about the dogmatic achievements of the early Church leap into life as major theological issues. On the one hand the Romantic cult of interiority and the return to immediate feeling lent a new depth of significance to the quest for the “essence of Christianity” (see H. Wagenhammer, Das Wesen des Christentums, Mainz, 1974). In the work of Schleiermacher in particular an effort is made to see the dogmatic language of the Church as the formalization of a basic religious experience (the feeling of utter dependence, the sense of being redeemed), and to formulate a critique of that language insofar as it objectifies and externalizes the meaning of that experience in an inappropriate way. “The ecclesiastical formulae concerning the Person of Christ need to be subjected to continual criticism. The ecclesiastical formulae are, on the one hand, products of controversy, in that, although the original consciousness was the same in all, yet the thought expressive of it took different forms” (The Christian Faith, New York, 1963, p. 389). “Dogmatic was overloaded with a multitude of definitions, which have absolutely no other relation to the immediate Christian self-consciousness than that indicated by the history of controversy” (p. 390). On the other hand the sense of historicity which emerged after the French Revolution and found consummate expression in Hegel conferred new speculative interest on the data of church history. F. C. Baur presented the early history of dogma as reflecting the dialectical interplay of the Petrine and Pauline (Hebraic and Hellenic) principles, and concepts of an organic development of Christian truth began to take shape on the Catholic side in the work of J.A. Möhler. Clearly what took place in this period was less an overcoming than a rejuvenation of metaphysics, the importation of the grandiose speculative perspectives of idealism into the presentation of the Christian faith and its history.

Yet in theology as in poetry, Romanticism cannot be reduced to its metaphysical dimensions. The Romantic movement was also one of return to phenomenality, however much that return was waylaid by the fascinating abstractions of Love, Life, Beauty, the Absolute, or Nature. In comparison with the eighteenth century theologians, those of the early nineteenth century can be seen as recapturing the mysterious and unique character of faith and revelation. If these thinkers tend to add Faith and Revelation to the list of capitalized abstractions mentioned above, if they do not yet have the more precise sense of their existentiality found in Kierkegaard and Newman, or the critical philosophical and historical grasp of their relationships with Greek metaphysics which Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack first attained, still it is from the new impulse Romanticism gave to theology that the quest for the basic message of Christianity has drawn much of its vitality ever since. Here is another promising terrain for a deconstructive reading, which would also be a salutary deconstruction of whatever Romantic instincts are still lodged in the bosom of theologians today.

If the quest for the essence of Christianity has a fatal attraction for the Romantic “beautiful soul,” one against which the present project must be on guard, nonetheless it may be possible to focus the residue of validity which the quest for the essence of Christianity still retains, despite the realization which became increasingly unavoidable in the subsequent history of the tradition we are examining, namely that there is no such thing as an essence of Christianity which is historically identifiable. Harnack’s attempt to locate it in Jesus’ teaching of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity ran aground on the rediscovery of the eschatological character of Jesus’ preaching by Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, and this seemed much too foreign to modern ears to be presented as the essence of Christianity. Nor has Ernst Käsemann’s effort to establish a Pauline “canon within the canon” any better chances of success, for Paul cannot be ripped out of the historical context of the debate between him and his predecessors and successors (see R. L. Wilken, The Myth of Christian Beginnings, GardenCity, NY, 1971). The claim that any historical individual can incarnate the essence of Christianity, or of anything else, is bound to be an arbitrary imposition. From the start Judaism and Christianity are caught up in a complex self-critique, which is why some see the Bible as “a handbook of religious pathology.” The authentic form of the faith has always been something to be constructed, though the work of construction often proceeded under the sign of recovery. Judaism and Christianity have constantly been reinventing themselves and every effort to establish an eternal essence of either has resulted in a form of idolatry – the idolatry of Law diagnosed by Paul, the idolatry of the “dogmatic system” from which Roman Catholicism is beginning to recover, the possible idolatry of an abstract and disembodied Word of God in dialectical theology. We never securely possess the essence of Christianity, not even as a regulative idea guiding efforts at renewal. Instead of an essence there is the historical sequence of Christian ways of life, bearing a “family resemblance” to one another.

When the vitality of Christian faith is low the Church continues to practice obsolete forms of religious life which are no longer a convincing embodiment of the Gospel. Perhaps idolatry is usually nothing more than a clutching at gods in which we no longer really believe, the worship of stale gods rather than false ones, a failure in imagination, a fidelity which has lost its original motive. If so it may perhaps have been as a perpetual antidote against it that we were given an unfinished Gospel, a sketch to be redrawn again and again rather than the complete and authoritative exposition dogmatic Christianity so long attempted to provide. In contesting metaphysical theology, then, we should not set up one essence against another, as Schleiermacher and Harnack tended to do. Instead we should rather see the metaphysical epoch of Christianity as taking its place in the series of historical inventions of Christianity, as the epoch in which it tried to have an essence, and eventually conducted crusades, pogroms, inquisitions, and religious wars in the effort to establish that essence. The Christianity which interpreted itself as essence we can retrospectively interpret as invention, and thus be freed for our own invention of Christianity. Liberation theology, for instance, is such an invention, though tempted to mistake itself for an essence. There is strong biblical warrant for this theology, but it is not necessary for it to claim to have tapped the essence of the biblical message. Instead it is the strongest interpretation of Scripture for this time, and like all such interpretations it does not hesitate implicitly or explicitly to correct many of the emphases in the biblical text. To correct the letter by the spirit is an essential task of any vital scriptural hermeneutic. In the epoch of metaphysical theology this process was cast in metaphysical form, as the provision of Scripture with its rational foundations, or the elicitation of hints of spiritual reality from its material indications. Now retrospectively we can see this metaphysical hermeneutics too as a form of the reinvention of the biblical message. The sensus plenior of Scripture is not a hidden Platonic essence, but the semantic play it generates when reinterpreted in the Spirit in light of successive historical conjunctures.

Harnack’s History of Dogma is the most mature and richly documented expression of nineteenth century misgivings about the dogmatic tradition, and it still provides the framework for discussion of the problem of hellenization today. We chronicle previous discussions of the topic towards Harnack as their term and trace present discussions back to him as their origin. Newman’s Essay on Development holds an analogous position in regard to the narrower topic of the development of doctrine. It is because they combine constant sobriety of judgment with an overall tendentiousness that both works have exerted a stimulating influence for so long. Newman might be counted as a counter-metaphysical thinker, since his principal concern was to sight certain basic elements of the world of faith, and he systematically avoided a speculative approach in favour of empirical observation and rhetorical argumentation. He had, however, no conception of the critical work to be done on the metaphysical fabric of patristic theology, and whenever he broaches central dogmas, such as that of the Incarnation, the metaphysical texture of his statements about them clashes with the usual suppleness of his prose and cannot be integrated with his usual themes.

Harnack, less conditioned by specifically ecclesiastical concerns, is extremely clearsighted in his grasp of the historical texture of dogma, and surely the most illuminating remark ever made on the subject is that “Dogma, in its conception and development, is a product of the Greek mind on the soil of the Gospel” (History of Dogma, London, 1905, I, p. 17). Unfortunately his proposals for the overcoming of dogma sound like counsels of defeat, tinged with the positivism and skepticism of the period. Similar sentiments, allied with a Schleiermacherian cult of religious experience and an evolutionist ideology, also vitiated the Modernists’ valiant struggle with dogma. A due sense of the rational force of metaphysics and the necessity of the decisions made by the early Church in articulating the Gospel within a metaphysical framework, and a sharper focusing of the texture of biblical faith, insofar as one can oppose it to its hellenization, would enrich and correct Harnack’s project more than any new increment of historical information can.

It may also be the case that the biblical roots of dogma are deeper than Harnack thought, and that dogma can largely be interpreted as the Church’s defense of the Gospel against its radical hellenization at the hands of Modalists, Subordinationists, Monophysites, and others who sought to impose a tighter systematic unity on the Christian message. Catholic apologists have seized on this idea in order to refute Harnack, but to my mind this is to miss deeper bearing of Harnack’s thesis, namely the realization that the categories used by the Church in its battle with heresy would be impossible and incomprehensible in any other than a Greek culture, and that these categories became fused with the gospel truths they were used to defend, with the result that Christianity henceforth presented a new visage to the world, acquiring the character of a dogmatic edifice.

Catholic theologians continue to claim, with Pope Leo I, that the great Councils used technical terms not in a philosophical way, but, like the Apostles, piscatorie – as fishermen – and some would claim that these terms are immediately transparent expressions of the faith, which cannot become obsolete or inaccessible. This view fails to account for the immense difference between the horizon of biblical faith, even that of the Fourth Gospel, so important for patristic and conciliar theology, and the horizon in which divine being is explicated with the aid of the categories of substance and hypostasis. The Bible never defines. Its apparent definitions, e.g., “God is light” (I John 1:5), have nothing to do with the Platonic or Aristotelean notions of logos or horismos, but articulate contemplative or prophetic breakthroughs to a new level of understanding. The Councils in contrast, which took place in an Empire for which definition was not only theoretically but practically important, attempt very earnestly to define the contours of Christian orthodoxy, at first as a practical measure (to exclude heresy and canonize sound teaching) but increasingly as a speculative one too, as the intrinsic dynamics of the language they used forced them on to further clarifications. Here is only one of the many ways in which Harnack’s hellenization-thesis continues to point towards the historical differentiations which must be elaborated if one is to make sense of Christian tradition.

Efforts to spell out the differences between the Greek and Hebrew mentalities may often have been jejune and over-schematic. But critics of these efforts should seek subtler differentiations, instead of dismissing the differences as illusory or unimportant. The direction in which Harnack’s analyses were moving is one which theologians do ill to neglect. Much of the stagnancy of patristic scholarship is due to a harmonious reading of the Fathers which glides over the tensions between their biblical and their Hellenic heritages, tensions which the questioning of contemporary faith enables us to perceive more clearly than ever before. Subsequent scholarship has not gone beyond Harnack in any essential way. It has refuted details, neglecting the main argument. A major contribution like Aloys Grillmeier’s Christ in Christian Tradition (London, 1975), for example, basks in the contemplation of the development of the patristic categories, never querying their philosophical provenance or formulating any fundamental critical questions about their adequacy to the biblical revelation, though admitting that “the demand for a complete reappraisal of the Church’s belief in Christ right up to the present day is an urgent one” (p. 557). Of course, the complexity of the historical material to be disentangled makes it difficult for a scholar to sustain at the same time a critical question to the tradition. The gap this leaves is filled by unscholarly generalizations on the part of the systematic theologians, both those who use Chalcedon as a launching pad for speculation and those who treat it as a disposable christological “model.” Thus the trail that Harnack blazed remains to this day untrodden.

Much of twentieth century theology has been a reaction against liberalism (Barth) or modernism (Neo-scholasticism) and this has implied a blindness to Harnackian insights in the field of history of dogma and a refusal to face up to the critical historical questions to which dogma is exposed. Theories of the development of dogma or of its function in attesting to the Word of God continued to envision dogma as part of the essential structure of the Church rather than as the product of a certain historical epoch, and one which, within that epoch, assumed a pluralistic variety of forms. Where Harnack came close to seeing the finite, human, historical contours of the dogmatic achievement of the Church, twentieth century theologians regressed to an ahistorical viewpoint, thinking away from Harnack’s disturbing questions in the direction of a speculative elaboration of the dogmatic données. That speculative quest was built on foundations of sand, and its failure forces us to think back to the historical questions posed by Harnack and to think deeper into them than he himself was able to do.

After the speculative trinitarian theologies of Barth, Rahner, Lonergan, Mühlen, Moltmann, Jüngel andBourassa, it is a relief and a refreshment to return to the basic questions none of them confront, to a sifting of the very elements of classical trinitarian language with a view to reducing those elements to their experiential foundation. Experiential? Yes, for insofar as the original language of Father, Son, and Spirit was an articulation of the community’s experience of the Risen Christ (and not a set of revealed propositions), it must be possible to recall the later dogmatic language to this foundation in experience, to a language in immediate interplay with experience, a language of naming rather than one of definition. It is at this level that the sense of the terms “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” is lodged and every effort at ulterior definitions will lose that sense unless constantly checked against the original biblical naming. Without the historical insights of Harnack there is no possibility of carrying out this checking. Dogma has established so powerfully its claim to be nothing more and nothing less than the rational foundation of the biblical data that it can be surmounted only by the most searching examination of its birth certificate, one which keeps in mind the Hellenic origin of the very idea of a “rational foundation.” It is only as the bankruptcy of the above-named theologians’ efforts to shore up the rational foundations of revelation becomes apparent that the views of Harnack begin to resume some of their former influence and resonance and the flight from the painful task of a genealogical critique of dogma is once again brought to a halt. Why should the return to elements be so painful and speculation so soothing? For the same reason, no doubt, that revolution is painful, or thinking, or prayer, a fear of vulnerability to the other or to the unknown, a fear of living.

The fear just mentioned has in our metaphysical Christian culture taken the form of a fear of Judaism and Jews. The step back out of metaphysical theology is a step towards the Jewish matrix of all our theology. Even a radically biblical theologian of the stature of Barth shows little openness to this repressed Jewish dimension of Christian theology. That is why his biblicism never escapes the mustiness of an ecclesiastical and academic stylization to recover the Hebraica veritas, and why from this stilted vantage point he can propound such theses as that it was the monotheism of Israel which crucified Jesus and that “like the monotheism of Islam (its later caricature), it is simply the supreme example, the culmination and completion of the disobedience which from the beginning constituted the human side of the dealings of the one and only God with his chosen people” (Church Dogmatics II/1, p. 453). Many such doctrinaire posturings would have been eliminated automatically had Barth kept his thought in subjection to a respectful dialogue with Judaism (and Islam). Ecclesiastical biblicism does not provide the jolt from outside needed to spark off a radical rereading of Christian tradition. The diction in which Luther and Calvin articulated their experience of being struck by the Word of God becomes a screen against any such experience when it is imitated by the ecclesiastical biblicist. The encounter with Judaism, on the other hand, exposes one to the biblical message as carried by a tradition which is independent of all the structures of ecclesiastical culture, and which, negated by them for so long, calls all these structures in question. It is thus perhaps in the renewal of Jewish-Christian dialogue that the counter-metaphysical protest of the last four or five centuries is carried forward most radically today. As long as the Word of God remains merely a text we are unlikely to allow it to unsettle our metaphysical identity in any basic way. But when we open to the call of the other in the give and take of dialogue the defensive character of our metaphysical self-definitions may become apparent and we may see, far more clearly than any text could make us see, what transformation of thinking is needed for us to shed our metaphysical identities and “discern the way” of biblical faith in a more elementary and authentic form (see P. M. Van Buren, Discerning the Way, New York, 1980).

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Faith as Deconstructive Principle

What conclusions can we draw from these centuries of unease with the hellenistic metaphysical form Christianity has taken? It is evident, I think, that the questions raised by this tradition of protest cannot be dismissed, and that it would be a mistake for the Church to confuse the defense of faith with the defense of its metaphysical embodiment. But neither can the questions raised be easily resolved, either through some higher speculative conciliation of biblical and philosophical, or through some simple dismissal of metaphysics. Instead one must raise these questions to a new level of methodological clarity and complexity. This can be done, on the one hand, through drawing on the critical resources of such thinkers as Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger in order to focus more clearly the intrinsic limits and perils of metaphysical language and thus provide a firmer theoretical basis for one’s sense of its inadequation to faith. On the other hand, one can pursue the historical trail backward to the very first appearance of metaphysical Christianity, in order to discover there in a latent form the same discontent with metaphysics which becomes explicit in Luther. Of course that discontent remained at an incubatory stage for many centuries. Only when the full power of metaphysics to rob Christian discourse of its reality had become apparent in late scholasticism could Luther form his clear diagnosis of metaphysics as an alienation. Nonetheless there is from the start a certain conscious or unconscious tension between the language of faith and that of metaphysics; it is by working along the fault lines this tension leaves in the classical Christian texts that we can hope to split the tradition open, allowing its repressed counter-metaphysical potential to emerge. The protest against metaphysical theology comes to fruition in a new way when a subtler philosophical grasp of the functioning of metaphysical language permits this more intimate deconstruction of the tradition, in which faith seeks out its own authentic voice in the texts of the past, overcoming the language of metaphysical reason which forever threatens to stifle it.

In short, both the critique of metaphysical theology stemming from Luther and the crisis of metaphysical reason articulated by philosophers since Kant light up retrospectively an historic flaw running right through the theological tradition, a tug of war between the Greek Logos and the faith of Abraham. That Logos has not become inwardly questionable for the Fathers of the Church as it has for us, nor did they feel, as Luther did, its foreignness to the world of biblical faith. So confident were they in building up their metaphysical account of the faith that their first step was to identify Christ himself with the Logos of philosophy. Despite this optimism, however, the inner difficulties of the project of conquering the empire of metaphysics for the Gospel began to emerge in the form of threatening heresies, and in subtler forms, which our vantage point allows us to interpret more searchingly than was possible for the Fathers themselves.

The history of theology is not a series of contingent failures to articulate faith adequately. Criticism of tradition cannot be satisfied with a series of local corrections – of Justin’s subordinationist Christology, Augustine’s pessimism, Origen’s spiritual elitism, and so on – but must systematically confront the pattern underlying the inadequacy of the language of Christian theology to its theme. This pattern is the predominance of metaphysics in the mental world of the Fathers and their successors, a pattern reinforced by the breakdown of relations between Judaism and Christianity in the early centuries. A deconstructive view of the history of Christian theology need only take as its theme the constant, ever-varying, tension between faith and the metaphysical horizons of thought in which it was forced to find expression, in order to reveal the secret splendor of this history as the history of faith maintaining its identity in exile. If one attends to the thread of faith running through its tapestry one finds that the history of Christian theology witnesses against itself. Tensions and contradictions in the text between the explicit statements and its implicit attitude of faith are what the deconstructionist looks for failles or clefts which allow the apparently monolithic discourse of the classical theologian to be prised open so that two orientations may be differentiated in the text, one tending to construct a metaphysical edifice in which elements of faith lose their original contours under the mighty spell of the Greek Logos, the other representing a biblically inspired resistance to this development. Any Christian theologian who deserves to be called a classic may be expected to show this ancient tension between Athens and Jerusalem in some form, and to show it textually, allowing wider scope for deconstructionist detective work.

The deconstructionist theologian must beware of received interpretations of the classic Christian texts, which invariably mask the original tension of faith seeking expression in a treacherous medium, and petrify the troubled life of the text into a set of stable opinions. Just as the sense of a Platonic dialogue is lost when one reads it in relation to “the philosophy of Plato,” the set of opinions attributed to him, rather than as an enactment of philosophical questioning as a living process, so the sense of a theological work is lost when one focuses on the doctrines and theologoumena it contains (even neglecting the fact that these doctrines, later fixed, may have been in the process of formation at the time of composition) rather than on the movement of faith seeking expression which provides the motivating intention of the text. It is not that the theologian has access to any homogeneous entity called “the intention of faith,” for the component that might be so designated has a different form in each of the great texts, a form which has to be discerned anew in every case. It takes the flair of the philosopher to discern the basic movement of philosophical questioning in the texts of Plato and it takes the flair of a believer to uncover the movement of faith behind the complex procedures of a great theological text. The tension of a contemporary faith which wrestles with the received forms of tradition provides the necessary pre-understanding for grasping an analogous tension of faith in the ancient text and for building a deconstructive interpretation on that tension. The theologian’s ongoing interrogation of the language of his or her own faith is what enables insight into the latent questions in the ancient texts. It is disappointing when scholars undiscriminatingly repeat the questions of the texts they study instead of penetrating the texture of those texts to uncover in them more radical questions which the ancient authors themselves were not able to formulate.

Of course this ambition of understanding the ancient authors better than they understood themselves will encounter objections like that of Paul de Man, who claims that a critic who thinks he or she is demystifying a literary text is in reality being demystified by the text itself (see P. Bové, Destructive Poetics, Columbia UP, 1980). There is some truth in this view, although it underestimates the degree to which the explicitation of the unconscious meaning of the classical texts can be wrested from them only by a violent jolt such as the crises of metaphysics provide. When we cease to treat hallowed theological texts with the devotional or aesthetic complacency of the unquestioning scholar we find that the text itself contains elements of a self-critical awareness which goes half way to meet its critic. The deconstruction of tradition is thus a continuation in more radical style of the critical activity of faith already operative in the tradition itself. The texts of tradition collude with the contemporary believer who would overcome their metaphysical dimension, just as the texts of Scripture collude with the contemporary demythologizer. The theologian’s ally in each case is the specificityof faith insofar as it is beyond both myth and metaphysics. The wound that contemporary crises of understanding inflict on tradition, making it seem remote and useless, is thus convertible into a process of healing wherein tradition comes into its own in a new way, bearing witness in its newly recognized brokenness and finitude to the same spirit of faith which underlies our own more complicated questioning. As the monolith is shattered, the human history behind us emerges in its true contours and allows us to place ourselves as continuators of our quest. The critic of tradition is the true friend of tradition, freeing it from forgetfulness (whether its own or that imposed by its interpreters) of its true theme, revealing again, as its defensive embalmers cannot, that it is at heart a tradition of faith.

A quality of faith which both inspires and is made more clearly manifest by the deconstructive hermeneutics of tradition is its finitude. Faith is always the faith of a mortal human being at a particular time and place in a determinate relation to a concrete historical tradition. The metaphysical structuration of faith causes it to forget its finitude, giving it a discourse for all times and places, rendered autonomous in regard to the community and its praxis. The reduction of dogmatic metaphysical propositions about God to their true status as context-dependent confessions of faith, which have concrete meaning only in relation to the historical tradition which forms, and continually reinterprets them, is an important move in the overcoming of metaphysical theology, one which contradicts the apparent intention of dogmatic formulae to express truth in a purely objective manner. Of course, this metaphysical myth of pure objectivity is partly something retrospectively projected on the formulae of the early church by scholastic theology in the Middle Ages and still more so in the post-Cartesian period. The dogmas of Nicea and Chalcedon are far more “confessional” in texture and intention than ever appears from their use in manuals of theology, gestures of faith born of the tensions of a given historical situation, whose meaning is quite unabstractable from that concrete context. The sense of Nicea and Chalcedon today is the pertinence of the memory of that former finite context to our own finite context. There is no transfinite context in which we can abstract a sense in these Councils which history cannot touch. To realize this is to inject an incalculable element of irony into our dealings with these and other canonized expressions of faith. Massive exercises in an effort at direct communication about an infinite object, these expressions in reality communicate to the contemporary believer only indirectly, opaquely, eliciting a subterranean complicity of faith rather than a straightforward repetition. The formulae are tripped up by the finitude and historicity of their texture, and they can continue to remain effective vehicles of faith, and to refer to the object of faith, only when used by the contemporary community with an ironic awareness that what they intend to say cannot be said in the way they attempt. We have the same ironic relationship to all our inherited religious language, including that of the Psalms. Whether we say “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God” (Ps. 46:9) or “begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father” we know that we are dealing with limited historical gestures from the past which serve only obscurely as icons of our present reaching out in faith. To cultivate such ironic awareness might seem subversive of faith and of the objectivity of the reference of the language of faith. But a realistic examination of the conditions of that language forces one to the opposite conclusion: suppress irony and you have suppressed the true referentiality of the language of faith; enforce the old-style directness of utterance and you have struck faith dumb.

How clearly Christians are able to see the human limits of the religious language of the Koran and the Talmud, or even, when the veil of an allegorical vision is lifted, that of the Hebrew Bible! How readily they will admit that the sense of this language can be fully grasped only from its social context, that the faith it expresses is mediated by a contingent historical system of representations which it would take the skills of an anthropologist to reconstruct! The irreducible pluralism and difference of religious cultures must bring with it an ineluctable deferral of the directness of reference each of these cultures has naively claimed for its language of faith. Christians too are caught in this maze of indirectness, though they are often as slow to see this in their own case as they are quick to see it inthe case of others. Without full realization of the severe historical limits imposed on every religious discourse and a constant humbling awareness of the finite, broken, imperfect, sinful, stumbling, and provisional texture of all religious expression past or present, theology is in danger of becoming bloated and unwholesome, forgetting that it rests on faith and that even the most sacrosanct dogmas and scriptures are no more in their concrete texture than groping, finite, human articulations of that faith. Claims to inspiration and infallibility ring quite false when they mask this.

When theologians think back into the finitude of the tradition of faith, instead of thinking away from it, there occurs a renewal similar to that which is achieved when philosophy reroots itself in its basic attitude of questioning. The true grandeur of tradition as a history of faith comes to light, the grandeur of the struggle of sinful and erring believers for the authenticity of their faith. This battle for fidelity takes a new form in every epoch and is never won by a passive retention of the deposit of faith. Orthodoxy, like art, exists only as a struggle to realize vision. The vision is always revision and lives only as born of struggle. When the struggle ceases the deadness of the museum descends on its products, until an equally energetic interpretative response brings them to a new kind of life in the context of a later struggle. Theological tradition lives only as stirred from within or from without by the essential concerns and questions of faith. If the Spirit moves in tradition, to inspire or to preserve from error, it is plausible to believe that his movement is mediated through these concerns and questions. An indiscriminate hallowing of all the elements of tradition blinds us to the pneumatic stirrings in its texture. These are detected only in the ironic and irreverent play of faith with the languages it has received.

Faith as a critical principle, then, subverts everything in the past that is no longer a viable embodiment of faith. In doing so it may liberate treasures of faith hidden in the past but which had become inaccessible to us because of the screening effect of the metaphysical systems in which these treasures were deposed. If we follow the critical hunches of our contemporary faith with confidence, despite the fact that these hunches often come in the negative form of doubts, we can link up with the hidden theme of the tradition, the secret history of faith, which gives vivid human contours to what otherwise seems a history of alienation. Of course, our faith must itself be sustained by the tradition, and our critique of tradition must always be translatable into the terms of the tradition’s own critique of itself. Otherwise the prophetic hermeneutic of faith degenerates into mere iconoclastic violence. But if faith is the critical agent we need not fear to “theologize with a hammer,” delicately sounding all the hollow spots in the walls of traditional edifices, and occasionally shattering sacred monuments which block the access of faith to its theme.

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Conditions of a Hermeneutic’from Faith to Faith”

The method I have been recommending could be called a hermeneutic “from faith to faith” (Rom. 1:17). It presumes that the classical texts, despite the hold of ontotheology, can best be interpreted as witnesses of faith and that faith is never utterly alienated in its metaphysical form, so that there is always something for the believer to read when she approaches the texts of metaphysical theology with an eye to their meaning for faith. It presumes also that it is the reader’s own faith which lights up the contemporary sense of the ancient texts. All of this may well be regarded as an idealist simplification of the problems of hermeneutics today, so we shall attempt to test it here by reflecting on the conditions it must meet.

First of all, is it linguistically viable to speak of “faith” in the way we have? Are we appealing to some supernatural principle superior to and untouched by the range of historical languages in which the word “faith” occurs? Yet theology clearly has no access to any identification of faith not already couched in one of these languages, nor can it abstract a univocal definition of faith from the plurality of the historical senses of the word. It is a multi-storied word, in the sense that the many narratives to which it belongs (and even scholastic theology can be counted as a narrative in this context) are sedimented one on another to produce a semantic saturation. This makes the word so rich that it must seem to lack the clinical sharpness needed if it is to be used in the task of critical hermeneutics.

Much the same objection could be made against Heidegger’s hermeneutics of the metaphysical tradition in light of the question of being. Heidegger would answer the objection by claiming that the question of being is the central concern which unifies the history of metaphysics. In some sense it should be possible to claim that faith too is a central theme which unifies the history of theology. Why faith? Why not “love” or “Spirit” or “the Word of God” or “the Church”? Could not these have served equally well as leading themes for a deconstruction of theology? But it is Western theology itself which has conferred a special status on the notion of faith as defining its character, as in the best known definition of theology: “faith seeking understanding.” This is because the metaphysical culture in which theology developed emphasized so strongly the noetic aspect of things, that it was necessary for theology to insist on its own unique noetic principle of faith. The importance of orthodoxy and dogma is of a piece with this. Faith in the noetic sense, orthodoxy and dogma are of little importance in the Hebrew scriptures and even in the New Testament it is not the noetic aspect of faith which predominates. The theme of faith unifies the history of Christian theology because it is the badge of Christian identity over against the metaphysical structures which threatened to absorb it. Thus in taking faith as our theme we are espousing the critical, counter-metaphysical resources of classical theology itself insofar as it became increasingly committed to faith as the key to its essential concerns.

In the process, however, the notion of faith itself was grasped in narrowly noetic terms, showing once again how deeply Christianity was influenced by metaphysics even in the methods chosen to oppose it. Faith, orthodoxy and dogma, as traditionally understood, are the bulwarks of biblical revelation against its absorption by the Western Logos. Yet these very bulwarks are constantly mined from within by the degree to which they themselves are shaped by the demands of that Logos. Faith becomes an epistemological principle; orthodoxy tends to equate faith excessively with correctness of opinion; dogma formulates faith in sets of propositions resembling the sets of theses a philosopher might enunciate.

The theme of faith has organized a strategy of resistance to metaphysics within classical and modern theology, despite the plurality of senses in which faith was concretely understood and despite the changeable character of the metaphysical opponent as well. There is only a family resemblance between the “faith” for which Athanasius stands against Arianism or Gregory of Nyssa against Eunomiusin the fourth century and the “faith” which Kirkegaard defends against Hegel in the nineteenth, just as there is only a family resemblance between the metaphysical opponents in each case. Nonetheless the sequence of such situations forms a coherent history, the unfolding of the dilemma of Western theology, caught between Jewand Greek. Hence the schema of faith versus metaphysics, if broken down into the sequence of these concrete struggles, can still provide a deconstructive key to the history of theology.

But if the opposition of faith and metaphysics is itself a metaphysical one, as my remarks about the noetic emphasis in classical theology imply, then how can it serve to deconstruct metaphysical theology? Will a hermeneutic from faith to faith do any more than confirm the noetic emphasis and the oppositions it has classically generated? What strategic innovation can the theme of faith bring about at this late stage? None, it seems, without the aid of a Derridean turn of the screw, which perhaps might take the following form: Our inherited use of the idea of “faith” is shaped by the classical oppositions of faith and reason, orthodoxy and heresy, submission to dogma and speculative understanding. But there is beginning to prevail in our language another sense of the word “faith” which runs counter to this traditional noetic emphasis. “Faith” in this emergent sense resonates more strongly with the biblical models of trust in God and openness to God’s saving intervention than with any of the classical accounts of faith. The latter seem confining, while the biblical confessions of faith are now heard less as dogmatic claims than as events of recognition and trustful commitment, e. g., Peter’s “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). If the spearhead of resistance to metaphysics in classical theology is the emphasis on faith, then the sticking point for a deconstructive reading would seem to be the tension between the two directions in which the notion of faith is pulled, back to its biblical origins and forward into a noetic system of metaphysically shaped dogmas. If we espouse the theme of faith in classical theology, and so dwell in it that its opposition to metaphysics is radicalized through a shifting of emphasis from its noetic to its more fundarnental biblical character of trust and engagement, then we can rehandle the tensions between faith and metaphysics in the classical texts in a more differentiated way. We turn the classical opposition of faith and metaphysics against the classical notion of faith insofar as this is itself metaphysical. Thus the classical language is caught in a permanent contradiction with itself, as its every counter-metaphysical gesture is discovered to be inwardly in partial collusion with what it opposes. The thrust of that language is against the gravitational pull of metaphysical reason, yet it scarcely avoids surrendering to it entirely. Now with the weakening of the force of gravity of metaphysics as far as faith is concerned, we can perhaps carry the counter-metaphysical thrust of the classical languages of faith further in the direction they indicate, perhaps to the point of leaving the solar system of metaphysics altogether behind. Then it will no longer be the sun of the Western Logos which provides the primary illumination and control to theological discourse, but faith will become more autonomously sui ipsius interpres, its own interpreter, and its dialogue with other religious traditions and the human sciences will be governed by the dynamics of its own quest rather than by an overarching metaphysics.

However, in this hermeneutic from faith to faith, from faith imprisoned in metaphysics to faith at last free to find its own articulation, the from and the to are ideal points of departure and arrival. For faith is never totally alienated from itself in the language it uses, however encumbered with myth or metaphysics, nor is it ever totally present to itself in some at last perfectly essential language. Even the language of Scripture is not a perfect vehicle of faith. It had a relative adequacy in its day and continues to enjoy a relative adequacy as long as we struggle to find the spirit the letter conceals. The theological critique of metaphysical language seeks to move from relative oppression of faith to its relative liberation, in full awareness that its attainments can be only provisional. The overcoming of metaphysics is only the current move or set of moves in the perpetual game of renewing the language of faith.

The clarification of the specificity and autonomy of faith over against metaphysics is by no means the final answer to the question about faith’s true identity; it merely frees us to pose that question more radically than was hitherto possible. After the solar system come the vacant interstellar spaces, after the assurance of metaphysics the nakedness of faith left to itself, “as dark as night to the understanding” (St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, tr. E. A Peers, Garden City, NY, 1958, p. 106). Faith is always embodied in a language, and we can never simply oppose it to its “expression.” But one can oppose to the apparent noetic wealth of past languages a new linguistic exercise which insists on articulating the most elemental realities of faith, cutting through all forms of language which do not contribute to this task and treating them as screens against real insight. This quest for the elements will send faith back to the simplest, apparently poorest words of its language and even these will no longer be the carriers of systematic metaphysical insight, for an effort will be made to confine their usage to what befits a pure vocabulary of faith. One can never, of course, establish a pure set of essential names, but this quest for the original poverty of the language of faith can set up a critical ferment which produces a language of faith which in all its utterances is distinctly and consciously counter-metaphysical, a style of speaking which gains its thrust and point from going against the grain of the established ways of articulating faith. There is no simple movement from a metaphysical to a post-metaphysical language of faith, but a change of direction can be brought about if we treat the metaphysical heritage as something of which we must despoil ourselves, rather than build it up further.

If we still use metaphysical terms it will be in such a way as to contradict their traditional function of accumulating systematic insight and to show up instead their poverty as words of faith. Any such usage will imply an artful wrench, displacing the word from its metaphysical context and opening it to the articulation of faith. For instance, the “very peripatetic” definition, “God: a noise in the street,” which occurs in Ulysses, wrenches the word “God” out of its habitual metaphysical contexts. Many lines in Blake achieve similar displacements: “Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.” The language of Luther or Karl Barth also occasionally throws up such counter-metaphysical flashes, inspired by Scripture. But until such displacements infiltrate the entire texture of the theological usage of traditional jargon progress on the liberation of theology from metaphysical habit will be slight.

In setting deconstruction at the service of faith in this way are we not robbing deconstruction of its radical adventurousness, allowing it to be controlled by a single, fixed ideological orientation? But is this a correct account of “faith” as we have sighted it (in opposition to its domesticated presentation in classical theology)? In following this search for the originary language of faith perhaps we may discover that the reference and meaning of that language are every bit as enigmatic as the reference and meaning of the poems of Mallarmé, on which deconstruction thrives. Could the complexities latent in our language of faith be brought to light in any other way? Could any merely literary deconstruction of the language of faith, playing fast and loose with the rhetorical tropes which constitute it, match the much more interesting unstitching of that language which occurs when we contest the habitual rhetoric of faith in the name of faith itself? Could a deconstruction not guided by faith in this sense ever successfully engage with the riddlesome and almost self-contradictory enterprise of a language which can continue to communicate only by overthrowing all its previous forms? Poetic creation is subject to a similar law, of course, but its dynamics are adequately traceable by a literary deconstruction, since its verbal achievements are an end in themselves. The language of faith, however, always has as its context the struggle to maintain or achieve a practical, spiritual way of life, and it is this context which gives that language its peculiar force. The overcoming of former languages of faith could never be fruitful if it did not proceed from the practical effort to live the faith in a more radical way, or from a change in the way of living the faith forced on one by a changing cultural situation. A deconstruction of the language of faith not guided by faith itself would thus not deal with the language as one of faith, but only with the husk which remains when it is considered as a merely literary product. Conversely such a deconstruction might teach us much about the possibilities of language in general, but it could not indicate any concrete possibilities for a contemporary language of faith as such.

These remarks bring us to consider another major condition of the hermeneutic from faith to faith, an unavoidable law which is likely to be discomforting to many academic theologians, namely, that this hermeneutic cannot be carried out except by people who are rooted in a community and praxis of faith. A literary deconstructionist might analyze the texture of classical theological discourse and discover that faith was never quite at home in its metaphysical language, and that many elements in that classical discourse point to a more originary language of faith, which would break with the constraints of metaphysics. But without a practical engagement in the contemporary struggle of faith the deconstructionist would be unable to solicit those more originary elements in a strategic way, for want of a strong position of faith from which to approach the texts. Such a position cannot be found in a theory of faith but only in the fresh discourse born of engagement. Without these existential moorings a hermeneutic of tradition degenerates into a fastidious sifting of words, unable to articulate the “unthought” of the tradition which only a lively contemporary faith can recognize. The theologian who is connected by no channels of constant communication with the community whose faith is the sole material of theology has undoubtedly developed a perverse relation to the subject matter, one which makes it very difficult to focus the data of faith in the horizon of faith. In the horizon of the isolated individual these data tend to become objects of doubt and bewilderment and faith in them a paradoxical exercise. The academic tone is obviously a safer one for a theologian in this situation, for it need never betray the uneasy relation of the believer to the data of faith. The greatness of Kierkegaard is that he masked nothing of his isolation and unease and risked a stance of faith even in the unpropitious conditions that were bound to have, and did have, a distorting effect. A theologian can understand such contemporary forms of alienation from the communal language of faith, but they need not be allowed to define the horizon of the theological hermeneutic.

The sureness of touch that marks the theology of Irenaeus or Athanasius shows their thought to be firmly rooted in an ecclesial existence, and sureness of touch in interpreting them demands an analogous rootedness. When the little faith of the theologian is reinforced by and representative of the faith of the community, then its investment in an intellectual quest becomes part of the Church’s struggle to reform its own language. The weight of centuries of university theology can make it hard for theologians to find the ecclesial context of their work, so that the quest for that context must be resumed again, yet it is just this step from Athens to Jerusalem which has always given Western theology its peculiar tension and vitality. The following paragraph might be rewritten as the program of a church theologian engaged in overcoming the metaphysical elements in church discourse:

 

If it is not to disown the promise and in that way cease to be the Church, the Church is committed to a struggle against the acute chronic diseases from which its proclamation must constantly suffer. But this being the case, its only resource is to seize the weapon of continually listening. But it must listen in such a way that its whole life is put in question. It must listen in such a way that its whole life should be assailed, convulsed, revolutionized and reshaped… The word to which it listens must always be the Word of God. It actually has to go back to its starting-point. It has to show the self-denial and determination to start all over again from that point. Of course, it has to do this as the Church which is marked by all that has existed and occurred in the interval, not in unfaithfulness but in faithfulness, not in ingratitude but in gratitude, not with violence but with regard for the various forms of teaching which have so far been granted to it with more or less human clarity or obscurity, in which and with which it has lived up to the present-yet radically prepared for the fact that today, tomorrow and the day after the whole of its treasure will again have to been enlightened and illuminated, assessed and weighed by the Word of God…. . This is the necessity which dogmatics has to represent. Its task is to summon to an active consideration of this necessity. (Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, p. 804).

 

While theologians shun this demanding role they cannot discover the hermeneutic potential of faith.

Yet having said this, I feel it must be added that the overcoming of metaphysics from the horizon of faith, though it is the only approach that can lead back from the classical formations of Christianity to their hidden theme, is in practice usually preceded or sparked off by a disenchantment with metaphysics born of doubt. There are religious thinkers who cannot make securely their own the vast communal and traditional horizons of ecclesial faith, but are constantly balloted by the misgivings which assail their contemporaries in regard to the Church. Such thinkers practice a theology at degree zero, a “wintry” theology (Rahner), so resolute in its non-compliance with the usual complacencies of theological diction that it almost consigns itself to silence. Such thinkers may be hypersensitive to the “bad faith” palpable in certain too vocal manifestations of faith, in whatever speculative or fideistic style, and may feel that faith is better expressed in a patient confrontation with the problems of its language and in an ever-deeper sense of the provisionality and feebleness of all languages of faith. The wintry theologian’s faith thus takes the form of methodical doubt directed at any and every expression of faith and shows itself in a modesty and restraint in the use of such words as “God,” “grace,” “salvation” which come near to utter invisibility. As the conventional languages of faith die away, the wintry theologian becomes more and more oblique in his allusions to the themes of faith, preferring to communicate by a neti, neti (not this, not that) of doubtful mystical intent, so that even the language of prayer becomes a lamentation for vanished languages of prayer. This wintry figure is a type who surfaces throughout the history of Judaism and Christianity, and even has a minor, but honorable, place in Scripture itself in the person of Qohelet.

For all its indirectness, such a theology of suspicion may still be listening for the Word of God as the something that is communicated by the language of Scripture and tradition even after it has been tested in the crucible of a Beckettian desolation, or as that which is subtly incarnate in secular contexts, the indices of the kingdom to be gleaned in novels, films, or political happenings. This emaciated theology cannot provide the governing perspective for a critical hermeneutic of tradition, which would demand a warmer sympathy with the older languages of faith as well as a more comprehensive vision of what it is given to the Church to live, think, and speak today. But the negative sensitivity it develops should be integrated as a critical factor into all contemporary theology, so that the convincingness of any received language of faith for this age of doubt can be soberly assessed.

In the last analysis the deconstruction of tradition is the effect of a change in the consciousness of the Christian community, a change which it articulates and confirms. It is the reappropriation of the tradition in light of a change in the Church’s self-understanding. This theological enterprise is sustained by a movement afoot in the Church at large and thus has everything to gain from remaining in close contact and dialogue with that movement. The damaging marginality which was the lot of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and the Modernists need not be that of the contemporary theological deconstructionist, for the crisis of metaphysical theology has now become a public one and the Church as a whole is thrown back on the necessity of adopting a prophetic style of teaching and acting. Hence the need to reappropriate the tradition as what in a hidden way it is, a tradition of prophetic witness. Thus as theology busies itself with the emendation of its language – like that ship which must undertake repairs in mid-ocean, with no possibility of a return to dry dock – it is enacting the Church’s growth “from faith to faith” insofar as ecclesia semper reformanda includes the task of lingua semper reformanda. I shall now sketch an outline of how the early stages of the tradition might appear when thus viewed.

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Hellenization

The dehellenization of Christianity is a task which can never be accomplished. The cultural symbiosis of the biblical and Hellenistic worlds from the fourth century BCE. to the fourth century CE (when the classical dogmatic shape of Christianity was securely established) brought about so complex a fusion of Greek and Hebrew elements, at the most fundamental levels of speech, thought, and imagination that, while we may embark on a counter-metaphysical effort to play off the original biblical elements against their later Greek transformation, this direction of thinking, strategi-cally chosen in view of the current needs of faith and opposed to the ascendancy of metaphysical thinking in the past, can never be followed through with complete consequence and transparency. A complete dehellenization of Christianity would have to unwrite the New Testament. Even if we confine our attention to the explicitly metaphysical dimension of hellenistic culture, it is doubtful that the point can ever be reached at which the pure demetaphysicized “essence” of Christianity could be distilled from its original hellenistic articulation.

One of the carriers of metaphysical thinking in the hellenistic world is the imagery of light, which is elaborated at an imaginative, preconceptual level and seems part of the “ordinary language” of religion in the Greek-speaking world. In the fourth century Christianity becomes more logical, conceptual, and dogmatic than before, and the imaginative dynamics of religious discourse are subordinated to this firm logical order. But in the incubatory period of metaphysical theology it is imagination that is dominant; Justin, Clement, and Origen sketch metaphysical systems, but do not treat them as intrinsically more serious than the narrative and symbolic dimensions of their discourse; there is free commerce between the conceptual and the imaginative. The insistence at Nicea on a word which defied imagination, the word homoousion, as the anchor of orthodoxy represents a new seriousness in assuming the rigor of metaphysical logic in Christian discourse. Thus, while the metaphysical shape of the thinking of the post-Nicene authors is relatively easy to identify, there is a greater fluidity and mobility in the dealings of the second and third century Fathers with metaphysics, and our diagnosis must take into account subtle virtualities of language and imagery as well as the bold speculative strokes.

Philo’s metaphysical imagination loved to contemplate “the Absolute, connected with phenomena by His Light-Stream, the Logos or Sophia,” “a Light which was discerned by the Light-Rays that he shot forth” (E. R. Goodenough, By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism, Yale UP, pp. 7, 8). In his case this imagery of light is clearly consubstantial with a metaphysical system, albeit one still encased in mythic representations and reaching only an inchoate conceptual or logical autonomy. But the writings of Gnosticism and the New Testament are also full of this light-imagery, which, while it is not explicitly metaphysical in their case, lends itself easily to the unifying and grounding habits of thought characteristic of metaphysics. In each case the contemporary deconstructionist will attempt to interpret this imagery in a counter-metaphysical direction, thinking back to the underlying phenomenological realities which the image of light threatens to mask by intellectualizing and idealizing them.

In the case of the Gospel of John one might begin by overcoming intellectualizing interpretations of the Gospel, which have held sway in Christian theology from the start, in order to recover the mystical, contemplative texture of the Evangelist’s thought. But a second step is also required. The Johannine notions of Logos or Light may not have been intended in a metaphysical sense by their author, but they lend themselves to metaphysical interpretation because of their place in the hellenistic language and imagination. The Johannine notions themselves must be overcome insofar as they lend themselves to this misinterpretation. The recovery of their counter-metaphysical bearing will be complete only when the stability of these notions themselves is called in question by the phenomenality of that to which they witness, through a deconstructive solicitation of the tensions in John between the system of symbolic themes which structure the vision of the work and the elements which cannot be perfectly integrated into that system. Such an extension of the overcoming of metaphysics in the deconstruction of pre-metaphysical biblical thinking builds a specifically Western road back into the world of biblical theology, one diametrically opposed to the Western metaphysical colonization of Scripture in the past.

In Justin, Clement, and Origen, too, there is a developed imagination of light and Logos (to name only two of many similar themes) which, while it is in collusion with explicitly philosophical methods of thinking, as the New Testament treatment of such themes is not, nevertheless also has a side which cannot be simply and directly classified as metaphysical. Could one, for example, treat Justin’s language about baptism as “illumination” as simply metaphysical? Yet even without speculative intent or conceptual content such religious images can cohere to form an imaginative system which already reveals the lineaments of what will later be precipitated as a full-fledged ontotheology. For instance, a supreme light may be envisioned as the source and foundation of lesser lights, as lighting up the whole cosmos in a universal, unifying way, so that all lives and moves and has its being in this light. A systematic enchainment between the inaccessible light of God, the revealing light of the Logos, the light of truth manifest in the words of Scripture, the light of grace illuminating the pneumatikoi, and the light of reason whereby pagans and heretics are overcome is thus first envisioned imaginatively, and only later hammered out in conceptual terms.

Surely the elements of this metaphysical imagination can be used by a Christian preacher with a certain suspension of their metaphysical dynamic; we cannot say that the tendency of such imagery in an early Christian writing is always metaphysical, for it may quite well be counter-metaphysical, retrieving perhaps some of the Hebrew overtones of the images of light and Logos, as in “He covers himself with light as with a garment” (cf. Ps. 104:2) or in the prophets’ accounts of the power of God’s creative word. In discerning the drift of the Christian imagination in the early centuries we cannot simply judge in advance that such and such a word or image is “hellenistic” and therefore proto-metaphysical, for faith can always insist unexpectedly on its own irreducible identity by breaking with the prevailing habits of thought of hellenistic culture. The points at which such resistance to the implications of hellenistic diction occurs within that diction itself are perhaps the most instructive feature of Ante-Nicene writing in regard to our problematic.

The period extending from the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible to Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius offers scholars and theologians countless occasions to pursue a controversy centered on such questions as the following: To what extent is the thought of Philo, Paul, Justin, Origen based on biblical faith, and to what extent is it a product of hellenistic thinking? Is the hellenistic element used apologetically or does it intrinsically determine the thinking of the author? Has authentic faith been swallowed up in quasi-philosophical speculations? Is the God of this author still the God of Abraham, or has Abraham’s God been replaced by a metaphysical archê?

Usually these controversial questions are never satisfactorily resolved. The reason is that the fusion of Greek and Hebrew in these authors is so deep that it often undercuts the authors’ own explicit declarations that they intend to adopt a purely biblical or a broadly metaphysical approach. To a large extent they are unconscious of the dimensions of the fusion of Greek and Hebrew that is afoot in their language. Furthermore, such authors as Justin and Origen express a complex ambivalence in their statements about the relations of faith and philosophy, and this is increased when we take into account the unconscious ambivalence to which the texture of their writing testifies. Most scholars aim at a positivist accuracy in determining the extent of the biblical and philosophical contributions to the resulting amalgam. But this does not yield insight into the dynamics of the interplay between the two strands in the texts, the complex coming and going between faith and philosophy which in a creative and resourceful writer always reserves surprises for the student. Positivist scholarship cannot enter into the play of the text, seeing it as a mobile interaction of forces, a fermentation set up by the ineluctable convergence of two traditions which could never be perfectly reconciled.

The “hellenistic” and “biblical/ecclesial” readings of Origen, those of H. Koch. E. von Ivanka and F. H. Kettler on the one side, and those of H. de Lubac and H. Crouzel on the other, do become involved in the play of the text, but when they succumb to one-sidedness, either seeing Origen as a philosopher insensitive to the specific concerns of biblical faith, or as a churchman who kept a pure distance from the world of hellenistic philosophical wisdom, they fall victim to the subtlety of Origen’s mind, in which faith and philosophy grow together in a mutual accommodation full of ambivalence. Like the Origenist controversies of the past, the present debate among scholars reenacts the tensions in Origen’s writing; a reading of Origen which would consciously assume these tensions has yet to be practiced. Each of the opposing tendencies in the present debate provides a refreshing corrective to the other and from the tug of war between them a creative deconstructive hermeneutics may be born.

Whether they proclaim the superiority of the Gospel to the folly of philosophy or whether they present Christianity as the true philosophy and the culmination of the partial wisdom of Greece (or whether with significant inconsistency they do both, as Justin seems to do), the Fathers of the Church are united in regarding the Word of Scripture (and the teaching of the Church) as possessing supreme authority, while the findings of philosophy can have a merely auxiliary status in comparison. This simple fact guarantees to patristic theology a powerful counter-metaphysical thrust. But it does not justify the apologetics of those who claim the issue of hellenization is a pseudo-problem. For despite their conviction of the superiority of the biblical revelation the Fathers unavoidably understood that revelation in a metaphysical way. When metaphysics encroached on the integrity of that revelation in a tangible way, they could repel it by a counter-metaphysical appeal to the authority of God’s Word. But many intangible encroachments they scarcely notice at all, and even when they do resist metaphysics it is with the aid of alternative metaphysical models (such as Justin’s personalized and transcendent “sowing Word” opposed to the pantheistic Logos of Stoicism; Origen’s substitution of the Trinity for the supreme principles of Platonism), the metaphysical horizon is the governing horizon of their thought, and the biblical content is fitted into it, with whatever local corrections of metaphysics are required. In this battle of languages metaphysics is a winner just as much as the biblical revelation, and it constantly threatens to colonize the latter, making renewed insistence on the specific character of the biblical revelation necessary.

How thoroughly Origen made his home in the world of Scripture, finding that as he preached from the sacred text, sharing his trouvailles with the community as soon as they were born, “discerning spiritual things for the spiritual,” a more life-size wisdom unfolded than could ever be reached in the technical disputations of the academy. Yet the very texture of the allegorizing mind Origen brought to Scripture is Platonic and philosophical through and through. It is true that his christological or ecclesiological exegesis of the Song of Songs brings the philosophical, spiritualizing method of Philo back to a rich salvation-historical concreteness, nearer to the typology practiced by Paul or the author of Hebrews. Yet that biblical typology itself is one of the elements in the New Testament which most lend themselves to metaphysical misinterpretation, and so need to be overcome in light of the concrete perception of the links between the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christ-event to which they rather clumsily witness. Origen’s use of even such typology is inspired by the speculative desire to crack open the hard places of Scripture and make them transparent to spiritual vision. In his capacious and versatile way he is still a system builder as he woos the text this way and that in order to uncover its spiritual meaning. He accommodates his metaphysical aspirations to the great diversity of the biblical data, postponing the satisfaction of the ultimate integration of all these data into a system, but building assiduously towards that ultimate integration through all the relaxed and digressive commentaries he accumulates. This intention is foreign to Paul and to the author of the Letter to the Hebrews. Typology serves in their case to bring home with force a vision of the salvation wrought by Christ. It does not have the discreetly theoretical bearing Origen never tires of trying to confer on it. Typology in Origen is never merely a spiritual exercise, but always a speculative exercise of faith seeking understanding. This can lead him to indulge in typology for typology’s sake, on the principle that any increment of theoretical insight is to be valued, however feeble its moral or spiritual impact. Thus the metaphysical horizon of thought was too deeply implanted in Origen’s mind, too thoroughly inscribed in his language, for him to be able to overcome it even in constant and exclusive exposure to the biblical text.

If this is true in the case of the most ardently biblical of the Fathers, it is clear that there could be no effective defense against the pervasive presence of metaphysics in the early Church. It lodged in every corner of the Christian mind. Fidelity to the Gospel could not be achieved in independence from metaphysics, but only in a lucid struggle to maintain the essentials of Christian identity in and through an adroit handling of the terms and categories of metaphysics. In the Ante-Nicene period this struggle proceeds in a largely nonreflexive way, for the terms and categories of metaphysical theology had not yet acquired strong definition and tensions between the structure of metaphysical thinking and biblical faith were masked by the free communication of their softened idioms. The Nicene showdown changed all this, and raised the struggle between faith and metaphysics to new levels of lucidity in the discourse of precise dogmatic definition and in negative theology. Neither of these, of course, represents a simple triumph of faith over metaphysics, but they both show a sudden conscious alertness to the dangers of metaphysics among the fourth century theologians.

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The Origin of Dogma

In identifying the biblical God with the God of metaphysics and Jesus Christ (the Johannine Logos) with the Logos of Greek philosophy, mutatis mutandis, the Greek Fathers assumed a homology between Christian and philosophical truth whereby the whole of Greek intellectuality could be taken captive to the truth revealed in Christ. But there is perhaps no such thing as a one-way conquest, and it can be said as well that the Gospel of Christ was taken captive by Greek intellectuality, though not necessarily in a sense implying a real falsification of the Christian faith in those centuries. The threat of such a falsification was, however, a real one, as heresy after heresy tried to push the homology between faith and philosophy too far. To counter this threat the orthodox Church had recourse to increasingly emphatic methods of stressing the specific elements of the message of faith over against efforts to reduce them to philosophical schemes of understanding; hence the emergence of that peculiar type of utterance we call dogmatic. The alliance of faith and philosophy triumphed gloriously over pagan myth and superstition and over the deviations of Gnosticism, and its advantages far outweighed whatever perils it might bring. As the basic principles of philosophy were increasingly redefined in Christian terms – so that cosmology was founded in the biblical doctrine of creation, theology, and theodicy in the doctrine of the Father and his Logos, ethics and psychology in the doctrines of sin and grace – a process of intellectual transfusion occurred whereby Christianity was enabled to replace metaphysics as the supreme intellectual system of the West.

Was this an entirely unambiguous realization of the biblical command: “Go, teach all nations”? or was it, like Constantinism, an experiment which can teach us as much by its failures as by its successes? The creeds and dogmas which were originally forged to defend Christian identity against absorption by Hellenistic currents of thought and religiosity, became after Nicea the instruments of the exclusive establishment of Christianity as the true philosophy abrogating all others. A deconstruction of this development could begin by recovering the defensive sense of dogma and overcoming its constructive aspirations to build a total systematic explication of the real in which the dogmas play the role of first principles. But even defensive dogma insofar as it lends itself to this constructive misuse must itself be overcome in light of the phenomenality of revelation to which it is answerable. Dogma may have been counter-metaphysical insofar as it preserved the identity of faith against metaphysical absorption; but by its emphasis on definition and certitude and its claim to be treated as a first principle dogma betrayed its own purpose and became the instrument of the strongest assumption of a metaphysical identity by the Christian faith.

The first really severe crisis of the alliance between faith and metaphysics is that signaled by the Arian heresy, which, building on the thought of the earlier Fathers, attempted to push the homology between the Christian doctrines of God, the Logos, and creation and the structures of Platonic theology and cosmology to the point of confounding the ontological status of the eternal Son with that of the demiurge who mediates between God and the world in Middle Platonic theory. As a systematic intensification of the subordinationism latent in previous theology, Arianism had both a progressivist and a traditionalist appeal. The metaphysical streamlining of the Christian message which it proposed must have seemed in harmony with the spirit of that Constantinian period in which a hitherto unprecedented harmony between Church and culture had been attained. Had Arianism prevailed the tensions between Christian faith and its metaphysical environment might have ceased forever; but faith itself would then also have ceased.

Much has been written in recent years on the Nicene homoousion as an instance of the Church’s resistance to hellenization in the early centuries. The Fathers of Nicea used this word, it is claimed, as simple pastors warding off a clear and present danger to the integrity of the faith and with a certain suspension of whatever subtle metaphysical overtones might attach to the word ousia (nature, substance, stuff, being) in this context. Though the word sounds philosophical its introduction into the Creed has nothing to do with philosophy but directly expresses a necessity of faith. Athanasius, the great defender of Nicea, is, indeed, one of the least speculative of the Fathers, excelling in the rebuttal of unsound argument and the marshalling of scriptural support for the basic elements of doctrine. He has the strength of an elemental thinker, and as such might serve as a model for anyone wishing to return to the biblical bedrock of the Christian tradition. His task was to lay the foundations of a new period in theology by clearing the ground of every philosophical futility and setting forth in strong relief the set of basic truths in which the Christian message consists.

But in thus limiting the authority and the activities of metaphysical reason, Nicea and Athanasius paradoxically launched the greatest period of metaphysical theology. The refutation of Arianism demanded a new vigilance and logical rigor of theologians. To enter into and dismantle the arguments of the Arians, and still more so of the logic-chopping Neo-Arians (Eunomians), was a task that demanded an unprecedented linguistic and conceptual precision. It also widened the gap between the increasingly rarefied arguments of theology and the scriptural texture of preaching. The extreme concentration of attention on the Son’s eternal procession “from the ousia of the Father,” though sustained by a constant supply of scriptural and soteriological argument, habituated theologians to discussions of the divine essence in abstraction from the horizon of revelation. But it is the more rigorously logical texture of their argumentation which most testifies to the triumph of metaphysics in the Nicene theologians. Athanasius frequently shows that Arian claims would rob the economy of salvation of its necessary grounds, and presents the orthodox teaching as a set of fundamental logical principles undergirding the language of Scripture and worship and far surpassing the alternative Arian hermeneutic in coherence and salvific impact. Chief among these principles is the sharpened differentiation between the being of God and the being of creatures, and the correlative precision in defining the divine and human natures of Christ and their different functions. The connections between cause and effect, ground and grounded, in the system of Christian truth are spelled out with a new insistence – especially the dependence of our salvation and “divinization” on the gracing of human nature through its assumption by one who is truly God. (Even in the conventional apologetic of the De Incarnatione Athanasius justifies the Christian message far more radically than Origen in the Contra Celsum by showing the causes underlying every aspect of the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Christ and conferring logical rationality on what at first seems a far-fetched tale.)

Athanasius can never be content with the verbal surface of the Christian revelation, for this surface has become treacherous, due to the Arian claim that such titles as “Lord” and “God” are only honorifically conferred on Christ. He defends the reference of these titles by tracing them back to their ground in the ontological structures they reflect. Thus despite the elemental nature of his concerns, his exclusive desire to uphold the integrity of the biblical message and to prevent its words from being robbed of their reality, Athanasius follows the methods of metaphysical reasoning more tenaciously than any previous Christian writer, constantly thinking towards the logical ground of the claims of faith. The fact that this thinking is defensive in its intent, and that its highest constructive aim is to provide a viable scriptural hermeneutic, and the fact that it repetitively insists on essentials to the exclusion of the least speculative digression, certainly indicate a wariness of any metaphysical thinking not regulated by the biblical Word. But Athanasius uses metaphysics to fight metaphysics, as he hammers out a set of axioms and reinforces a system of logical connections which will provide the ground plan for a new, more radical metaphysical structuration of the faith. Thus, the counter-metaphysical thrust of the Council of Nicea is rapidly integrated into a reorganized system of metaphysical theology, and what was intended to defend the integrity of biblical revelation in fact generates a systematic, logical presentation of biblical truth, whose capacity to lure the mind away from the horizons of biblical revelation eventually becomes far greater than anything that pre-ceded it.

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Negative Theology

The renewal of negative theology among the Nicene Fathers is asign of their nascent awareness of the dangers of the new style of theologizing. Hilary of Poitiers and Gregory of Nyssa in particular return again and again to the themes of the infinity and incomprehensibility of God, not only in polemic against Arian presumption, but also in a reflexive critique of the status of their own theological language. The themes of the divine incomprehensibility and uncontainability were largely devotional rather than methodological in earlier writers since Philo. [2008: The focus on the God “beyond being” and beyond the grasp of the mind, in dependence on Plato’s epekeina tês ousias, in Philo and Clement is not integrated with a systematic overview of doctrine such as we find in Origen, where the theme of divine transcendence is rather muted.] Now they are integrated fully into the texture of theological argumentation, though not yet developed systematically in the manner of Pseudo-Dionysius [2008: where they again tend to float independent of an integrated doctrinal vision]. This apophatic current is another of the counter-metaphysical thrusts in which Christian faith reveals its autonomous vitality at each point in its history at which it is threatened with absorption by metaphysics. But it too meets the fate of each of these movements of resistance, and is absorbed into a more capacious metaphysical theology, thus confirming the sway of metaphysical reason rather than overthrowing it.

Yet each of these movements testifies to the final irreducibility of faith to metaphysical comprehension. If we retrieve this dimension of their significance, through a critique of what allowed them to be overtaken by the metaphysics they opposed, recovering, for example, the biblical witness of the Nicene homoousion by subordinating it to the scriptural confession of Christ (“My Lord and my God”, John 20:28), to which it has nothing to add, and by dismantling the metaphysical vision the word has carried, then we can espouse faith’s historical resistance to metaphysics with a new; clarity and depth, doing full justice to those dogmatic, apophatic, or biblicist gestures which a speculative theology would emasculate by smoothly integrating them into its texture. The ruggedness and thorniness of the path of Christian thought is no accident, but shows that biblical faith intrinsically frustrates the ontotheological aspirations of those who subscribe to it. Faith can show its strength at times in great displays of logical and causal reasoning and in that soundness of intellect which Athanasius and Thomas Aquinas share despite the worlds that separate them. But a point comes in every case at which the pretentions of logic and causality are curbed, are seen to be “all straw,” and a return to the inexhaustibility of the biblical confession of faith is prescribed.

The tensions which produce negative theology and which continue to inhabit its texture can be most interestingly studied in Gregory of Nyssa, the first master of a theoretical negative theology in the Christian Church. It is still, indeed, a rather elementary theory (the most systematic articulation is found in the second book of the Contra Eunomium), yet by that very fact more illustrative of the motives and bearing of negative theology than the highflown developments of the Pseudo-Dionysius. Negative theology elevates the inherent tensions of metaphysical theology to a new level, without eliminating or overcoming them.

First there is the tension between the explicit, dogmatic formulation of Christian truths and the awareness that these formulations play those truths false – that the words fall short of what the mind can glimpse, and that the mind glimpses how much the incomprehensibility of God exceeds what it may comprehend. The very notion of substance (ousia) is inwardly split by this tension in Gregory: on the one hand it is used with all the logical rigor the Arian controversy had made needful; on the other, ousia becomes a name for the intrinsic incomprehensibility of God’s being, of which Gregory, like Philo, will say that we can know that it is, not what it is, or that we know its activities (in creation and salvation), its energeiai, but not the divine essence itself.

Next is the tension between devotional awareness of the Deus semper maior, rooted in scriptural meditation, and the coldly theoretical exercise of theological polemic. This tension produces on the one hand the devotion to divine infinity, which draws the mind to constant growth and purification, and whose resonances Gregory explored in the late works on the Life of Moses and the Song of Songs, works in which the contemplative methods of Philo and Origen are infused with new electricity as they are systematically referred to this more dynamic account of how the soul rests in God; and, on the other hand, the dry whittling away of Eunomian claims, through a realistic, almost skeptical, insistence on the impossibility of grasping his essence in any name, not even in a scriptural one much less a philosophical innovation like Eunomius’s ingenerate, all words being merely human stammerings.

Divine infinity might be a formula for a hypercritical attitude to religious language, a pure negation, on the one hand, or for a visionary creativeness, a freedom for contemplation, on the other. Excessive movement in either direction (and Gregory is pulled in both) is checked by the obligation of respecting the language of Scripture and dogma, the obligation of a kataphatic positivity. One may plausibly suspect that this restraining force is weakened in Pseudo-Dionysius, whose vaulting paths of negation plunge too readily into the mystical dark. When Pseudo-Dionysius writes:

There the simple, absolved and unchanged mysteries of theology

lie hidden in the darkness beyond light

of the hidden mystical silence,

there, in the greatest darkness,

that beyond all that is most evident

exceedingly illuminates the sightless intellects,

(Myst. Theol. I, 1; trans. J. D. Jones)

 

it is hard to avoid the impression that these “mysteries” have very little to do with the phenomenality of the God of biblical revelation. The delicate equilibrium of an ecclesial theology, like Basil’s or Gregory’s, has snapped, yielding to the ascendancy of a Neo-Platonic pathos.

Negative theology, though originating in a sense of the inadequacy of metaphysical categories, can itself assume a quite imperious ontotheological form, if the ineffability of the One is itself erected into a grounding principle in function of which the language of faith is systematized. Pseudo-Dionysian strategies of cancellation, unlike the modest hoion of Plotinus (Enn. VI, 8), order the various biblical and philosophical names of God towards their suspension in the simplicity of the absolute as mystically apprehended, overriding the elements in the texture of biblical and dogmatic language which resist this schematization. Not a modest sense of the inadequacy of naming, which would preserve all the more jealously the concrete texture of the hard won store of traditional names, but a fluent mastery over names in view of a privileged access to the nameless which grounds them appears to be the dominant instinct of Pseudo-Dionysian thought, an instinct which signifies the reappropriation of negative theology by the ontotheological habit of mind it was designed to resist. The charade of fictive authorship betrays Pseudo- Dionysius’s awareness that his theology could not be that of the real Church, since it practices a stylization of the language of faith which quite unmoors it from concrete ecclesial or biblical contexts. To a deconstructive ear at least, the Dionysian text, with its unbroken tone of enthusiasm, will constantly suggest the suspicion that the prefix “Pseudo” has resonances beyond nomenclature.

Gregory’s apophaticism is also liable to be governed by metaphysical structures of thought, insofar as he conceives of it as a way of going beyond the constituted system of kataphatic utterance to a higher intuition which brings the speculative quest of theology to its fulfillment, rather than as a means of preserving the poverty and modesty of biblical and liturgical language against speculative absorption, that is, as a step behind the constituted system to the data of revelation it attests in a broken and inadequate way. To acclaim negative theology as an “overcoming of metaphysics” is to overlook the fact that the imperative of “Beyond!” which dominates much negative theology is itself a continuation of the grounding movement of ontotheology, even when it takes the paradoxical form of grounding ground in the groundless. Speculation first reaches the lofty concept of the causa sui and then, without querying this concept phenomenologically or critically, pushes beyond, fuelled by the same desire for absolute ground,, to postulate a ground so absolute as to thwart the grasp of all our categories:

 

It is not dark nor light

not error, and not truth

There is universally

neither position nor denial of it. (I, 5)

 

Gregory’s thinking of divine infinity differs from this because it is constantly opposed to the speculative ambition of Eunomius, and functions thus as a counsel of sobriety, and also because it is rooted in a scriptural meditation. At times one fears that “infinity” is going to become another variant of the Neo-Platonic absolute, especially when Gregory proposes a division (diairêsis) of reality into sensible and intelligible rather than into created and uncreated. Even the latter, Nicene and biblical, distinction can become the framework for a Platonic anabasis, which grasps the infinity of God not as his otherness in the biblical sense, but as a “groundless ground” whose grounding force we discover ever more fully as we advance in contemplation, so that it provides unending satisfaction to the aspirations of ontotheology.

In Gregory or in Pseudo-Dionysius the language of “beyond being,” or not-being in a non-privative sense, could be seen as a deepening of this insistence on the primacy of being, not an overcoming of it. Being still serves here as the supreme principle of a metaphysical ordering of reality, although we can only say of this supreme being that it is, not what it is. That very simplification of thought and diction when the summit is attained satisfies metaphysical reason far more than it frustrates it. If negative theology were carried a little farther, if it reacted on its own language (rather than heightening it by further negations of the Pseudo-Dionysian sort), querying even the adequacy of the language of being to form a hedge around the mystery of God, admitting the suspicion that the mystery has already slipped away as soon as this language begins, then negative theology could fulfill its counter-metaphysical vocation. But negative theology could not accept this loss of its hierarchical and ontological bearings, and therefore it is more in the tensions and ambiguities of its project than in its systematic form, more in the unrest it symptomatizes and the critical sensibility it generates than in the stilted theses in which it sums up its claims, that we can find the points at which it opens onto the overcoming of metaphysics.

Negative theology remains metaphysical above all because it initiates a self-critique of theology beginning from above, from the postulate of divine incomprehensibility, a postulate which is constructed by the methods of metaphysical thinking, by an ever more complex play with the structuring oppositions of finite and infinite, created and uncreated, sensible and intelligible, composite and simple. In contrast, the current “dark night” of theology takes the form of a self-critique from below, which instead of waiting until inscrutable mystery emerges in the discourse of theology (in the paradoxes of grace and freedom, Trinity and unity, or in those generated by any of the simple oppositions mentioned above) and then declaring that God transcends our thought and speech, undertakes a more radical ascesis (drawing the lessons of classical negative theology to the fullest extent) by realizing from the start the human and historical limits of the words we find to talk about God.

This critique from below avoids the logical trap whereby negative theology is absorbed again and again into confident speculative systems, namely, the paradox that to know the limits of language or thinking one must already have access to a higher viewpoint beyond those limits. In contrast, to say that one calls God “Father” only as a human, culturally limited, way of denoting one’s sense God’s goodness and care for creatures is to refer one’s language back to the phenomenal level or rather to the infinite play of languages in which phenomenality is manifest. As the privileged status religious expressions always claim for themselves is thus put in question, it becomes less and less possible to accept them as stable premises for speculation. Here is a style of negative theology, then, of which the dynamic is not homologous with the grounding movement of ontotheology, but opposed to it at every moment, refusing to relinquish the least of the words of faith to its systematizing drive.

.

This rapid sketch of some of the main avenues of a deconstructive hermeneutic of the tradition of metaphysical theology is, of course, endlessly modifiable as applied in detail, a task quite beyond the resources of the present work. In the next chapter, however, I shall narrow the focus to a single text, not merely for illustrative purposes, but also to reveal some further twists in the tangled relationship of faith and metaphysics.

 

Questioning Back, Chapter IV

OVERCOMING AUGUSTINE

The deconstruction of tradition acquires flesh and bones only through close work on individual texts, and no essay on the topic, however programmatic in intent, could be adequate if it eschewed the task of showing how deconstruction might proceed in textual practice. A body of work as disciplined, as thoroughly reflected, as sober and vigilant as that of the great Christian theologians is no easy target for this exercise. Nor can a random deconstruction which merely notes the rhetorical tricks the text plays on itself suffice. The exercise must have a theological intent and a theological upshot, like Paul’s deconstruction of Judaism and Luther’s deconstruction of Catholicism. It will be prompted “from the outside” by the remembrance of the scriptural word and the questions of contemporary faith, but it must lodge in the texts it chooses for its operations, opening them up from within. Without such critical immanence there can be no engaged reading of the witnesses of faith, and tradition remains a dead weight to be revered or despised. The following suggestions on how to read Augustine’s Confessions may not yet have attained that strategic point of penetration at which a text yields up a “strong” reading. However, they may prompt others to more effective inroads and they do at least, I hope, raise a question mark against the “respectable” readings of Augustine which continue to abound, one of the best of which is here chosen as a counterfoil.

In an earlier effort at a deconstructive approach to Augustine’s De Trinitate (“Dieu-Esprit et Dieu-Substance chez saint Augustin,” Recherches de science religieuse 69, 1981, 357-391) I opposed Augustine’s experience of God as Spirit to his explicitation of that experience in the language of being, substance, essence, and form which is determinative in various guises throughout that deeply self-divided work. Similar language in the Confessions seemed to me to remain strictly subordinate to an articulation of contemplative experience in which biblical, narrative, and metaphorical elements served to capture contours of reality which elude the grasp of metaphysical reason. A re-tractation of these thoughts at a more fundamental level leads me to suspect that the substance/spirit tension of the De Trinitate is a secondary formation and that it is largely an intra-metaphysical one. It reflects the deeper tension between what I will call the “biblical” and the metaphysical dimensions of Augustine’s thought, and this tension too belongs to a metaphysical landscape which the contemporary language of faith tries to leave behind, first playing off the biblical against the metaphysical, but then transcending both for a more autonomous articulation of “die Sache selbst.” The Bible as opposed to metaphysics is quickly enlisted for a series of roles within the discourse of metaphysics – God as “infinite,” “other,” “Thou” is still represented as a set of principles. Still less does an appeal to contemplative experience provide a foothold for overcoming Augustine, for his own control of every nuance of such an appeal is not to be bettered and, in fact, the language of immediate experience, the language of Spirit, in the Confessions powerfully reinforces Platonic ideals of presence, interiority, certitude, and recollection. (The vision at Ostia, Conf. IX 10, was undoubtedly an immediate experience of great force, yet it is narrated as a double Platonic anabasis – the experience itself and its “recollection in tranquillity” – culminating each time in the image of “touching” the eternal – the supreme Platonic aspiration, here clad in a sumptuous biblical garb.) “In the Confessions Augustine uses a metaphorical and descriptive language to evoke his religious experience. Even when he uses terms like ‘substance’ and’being’in that work, one feels that they are vehicles of a contemplative intuition which transcends the strictly metaphysical sense of these words” (art. cit., 357-8). This is characteristic of the pre-citical language which it is so difficult to avoid when trying to overcome metaphysics. A “religious experience” or “contemplative intuition” accessible to “descriptive language” is in need of a double demystification. First, no language is merely descriptive; language always marshals complex interpretative codes. Second, no experience ever comes uncoded, and the Confessions is a very complex play of codes from which an “original experience” can scarcely be excavated.

The Confessions is Augustine’s triumphant reading of his own life, a Proustian lighting up of the palimpsest, which is as much a work of imagination as a literal report. A novum comes to pass when Augustine’s experiences and reflections, the conflicts he has surmounted and the conflicts that continue, the languages he has outgrown and the languages he still strives to master and reconcile, precipitate the crystallization which brings unprecedented lucidity to bear on his life and the human condition in general. A reading of life, one’s own or everyone’s, is never a literal x-ray. To be at all illuminating it must be a symbolic fiction, eliciting form from a chaos of contingency which admits of a theoretically infinite number of interpretations. Such form is the product not of unaided individual insight, but also of the culture of the period. Augustine’s reading of his life depends heavily, then, on the forms of reading accessible to him, literary, philosophical, and biblical. The textuality of the Confessions bears witness to the extraordinary degree to which its author (or one is tempted to say the text itself) is conscious of the conditions of its composition. For the Confessions is above all a chronicle of readings: its narrator is always reading, always searching for the right reading, and the Confessions itself is that reading which was sought all along. The Confessions humbly lodges in the greater text of Scripture, especially Genesis and the Psalms, regarding its reading as only an increment of the process whereby the whole of life is lit up by the Word of God. The Aeneid, the Hortensius, the Categories, the books of the Manicheans and the Neo-Platonists, the signs presented by dreams, encounters, chance, bereavement, or illness, above all the sequence of narrations relayed from one person to another in Book VIII, culminating in the flash of lightning whereby the passage from Saint Paul deciphers the sense of Augustine’s life and liberates him by that stroke, all of these keep the narrator　incessantly busy with his task of reading. The “thing in itself” behind all these readings, and towards which their genuine or illusory illuminations converge – what is it? What is the truth of Augustine’s experience? It turns out to be nothing else than the document he is writing, the reading in which all previous readings are subsumed. Never again will Augustine be able to read his life so convincingly; from his comment on this text in the Retractations one is tempted to imagine that he consulted it often himself when he wished to read his life, and that he never found a more interesting reading than the one constructed there. Mallarmé’s dictum that everything in the world exists to issue in a book is verified in this case with a vengeance. In producing so powerful a reading of his own life Augustine may have become its prisoner, and made countless others its prisoners, in providing them, too, with a reading of their experience to which they found nothing to add.

The excess of the truth of textuality over the explicit metaphysical statements in the Confessions was grasped in misleading terms when I suggested that the metaphysical expressions are being used as metaphors for contemplative experience in that work. The distinction between literal and metaphorical is itself a metaphysical one. Augustine’s own “metaphors”— e.g, the guiding “hand” of God – can be just as much carriers of the metaphysical orientation of meaning as his literal metaphysical terms. In fact the texture of the Confessions is richer than that of the De Trinitate not because it is more metaphorical but because both its abstract and its figurative language admit a double reading much more readily and rewardingly than the De Trinitate does. One can interpret the image of the “hand” of God metaphysically, as a metaphor for “providence”; butit also invites one to read it “literally” as a biblical naming of the divine presence which cannot be adequately translated into those metaphysical terms. One can interpret the word “being” in the Confessions in a straightforward metaphysical sense, literally, or one can attend to the biblical resonances of the surrounding discourse and reinterpret it accordingly as a “metaphor” for the reality or holiness of God. In the richest passages of the Confessions the possibility of a breakdown of the metaphysical distinction between literal and metaphorical thus begins to emerge. However, Augustine’s explicit metaphysical reflection is often itself so complex and highly reflected that what appears to be an image almost breaking the bounds of metaphysical reason may turn out to be perfectly well-behaved figuration of a complex or paradoxical concept fully worked out elsewhere in the text. (This is best illustrated by Robert J. O’Connell’s investigations of the Plotinian metaphors in the Confessions.)

A double reading of Augustine can play off the biblical overtones of his language against its dominant metaphysical orientation, stressing for instance the biblical overtones of caritas against his tendency to grasp it in terms reminiscent of philosophical notions oferos. The Platonic and biblical codes through which Augustine’s experience was mediated, and which he was able to reactivate and reinterpret in light of his experience, reinforced one another in the single powerful reading constructed in the Confessions. The first step in a deconstruction must be to subvert the dominance of metaphysics by pitting the latent implications of the biblical code against the Platonic ideals of experience to which Augustine keeps them subordinate. But even such oppositions as that of eros and agape are still intra-metaphysical. Indeed, there is no outside of metaphysics. What one can do, however, is to resist the metaphysical orientation of Augustine’s chain of signifiers, the magnetism of God as ground, origin, goal, point of rest, source of certitude and transparent insight, which-inspires so much of his writing, and instead read the text “backwards,” following the not quite suppressed clues of the biblical metaphors, in order to reassert the claims of a God who eludes all metaphysical attempts to fix “his” identity. The rich biblical content of the Confessions thus provides the surest foothold for a counter-metaphysical reading. The goal of such a reading is not, however, a reduction of Augustine’s experience to purely biblical terms. Instead what is aimed at is an opening of both the dominant metaphysical orientation and the residual irrecuperable biblical elements of Augustine’s text to a language which more adequately apprehends the matter of faith in contemporary terms. The biblical elements are used to subvert the metaphysical framework, but the process of deconstruction may react on them in turn, raising questions larger than that of the overcoming of metaphysics.

For instance, the God of Augustine is recognizably the “Thou” of biblical revelation, and as such always threatens to burst the bounds of the metaphysical system wherein Augustine apprehends this “Thou.” Every dimension of the biblical metaphorical and anthropomorphic language about God can be perfectly integrated into a metaphysical order by means of the Origenian method of interpreting this language in a spiritual sense. It is not that this language in its original Jewish context needed to be spiritualized, for the Platonic differentiation of sense and spirit is foreign to the world of the Hebrew Scriptures. In a culture for which the distinction of sense and spirit is axiomatic the force of the biblical anthropomorphic language can be retrieved only by the detour of a spiritualization followed by a metaphorical concretization; the hand of God really means his providence, but one can speak of his providence graphically as his hand, using that expression now in a metaphorical sense. It is to the degree that Augustine’s language in its vivid leaps of imagination partly eludes this Origenian grammar that a flaw in its metaphysical texture can be sighted. In the Confessions metaphysical awareness raises biblical diction to a higher power, while the step back from metaphysical propriety to daringly direct anthropomorphism suddenly invests metaphysical notions with unexpected existential force. Where Origen is pedestrian, Augustine constantly generates dramatic effects of spiritualization and concretization through the interplay of these registers. Thus the God of Augustine is at once a set of metaphysical attributes – subject and will, omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, spirit, being itself, source of all being, and providential orderer of all events – and a “Thou” whose reality is not exhausted in this listing of attributes, but demands dramatic narration. The narration of God’s actions is controlled and deanthropomorphized by the securely established metaphysics of God, yet there is a biblical nakedness in Augustine’s dealings with God which allows him to show himself baffled, like Job, by the inscrutability of this “Thou,” as where Augustine asks “What am I to you, that you command me to love you?” (Conf. I 5). When Augustine steps back from calm metaphysical vision to a direct wrestling with the mystery of God in this way he may be indicating a more primordial layer in his apprehension of the phenomenality of God, one which potentially calls in question the adequacy of the controlling metaphysical topology. For the Fathers the spiritual exegesis of biblical anthropomorphism was felt as a progress in the freedom of the language of faith, a freedom Augustine fully appreciated, for Ambrose’s Origenian sermons on Genesis had freed him from Manichean literalism, effecting the first major breakthrough in the process of his conversion. A further stage in this freedom was the ability to use these anthropomorphisms freely in a higher spiritual sense; Augustine enjoyed this freedom more than any of his predecessors, reveling in its paradoxes (just but merciful, seeking though in need of nothing, angry but calm) and supplementing them with metaphysical paradox. But a further level of freedom in the language of faith is touched when Augustine reverts to a biblical diction which simply calls out to God in faith, without attempting to situate him metaphysically. This level of language is the one to which we must appeal, for we no longer find the metaphysical regime prevalent in the other levels to be capable of effecting progress in the freedom of the language of faith for us. The strategy of our reading is determined by the historical conjuncture, the crisis of metaphysics, which has robbed Augustine’s metaphysical assurance of any major significance for our faith and which throws us back instead on the basic grounds of Augustine’s conviction. To reach these basic grounds we must perform a phenomenological reduction of Augustine’s metaphysical projections or constructions to the basic experience of faith which his text articulates.

But, and here the larger question surfaces, might it not be that even this bedrock biblical level in Augustine’s faith is also largely experienced as alien by contemporary believers? Augustine’s God, even as “Thou,” is largely a metaphysical construct, an apotheosis of the Western ego and will. But even in the basic biblical evocation of God as loving agent, personal presence, object of trust and utter dependence, insofar as it can be abstracted from its metaphysical elaboration, one may be inclined to suspect that somehow Augustine protests too much. His metaphysical preoccupations led him to over-accentuate certain aspects of Scripture, centering everything on the claustrophobic drama between the individual sinner and the will of God in judgment or grace. Contemporary faith must first apprehend Augustine’s testimony to the reality of this experience (which it can do only by overcoming the metaphysical terms in which it is articulated) but then it will be obliged to go a step further and, in dialogue with this Augustinian experience, set about demythologizing these conceptions of God and the self in which the West has invested so heavily. The Bible itself, it may be, provides alternative perspectives which might allow us to take these representations more lightly than the Augustinian tradition does, but a salutary jolt from the outside might also be provided by religious traditions completely independent of Semitic or Hellenic conceptions of divine personality, sin, individuality, or will. To the Taoist seeking a bedrock awareness of reality as an “uncarved block,” Augustine’s assertion of God as supreme will, dominant over all things, must appear as a crude overleaping of the phenomenality of world (see Chang Chung-yuan, Creativity and Taoism, New York, 1963, 19-53); to a Buddhist the sharp distinctions of self, world, creation, and Creator would illustrate a fixated attachment to relative notions (see Jacques Gernet, Chine et christianisme, Paris, 1963, 290-99). Indeed, the narrative and doxological texture of the Bible itself and the nature of the Hebrew tongue never allow any of these notions to become as stabilized as they do when grasped in terms of being by Western thinkers. Thus where a metaphysical mind, even when reaching back to a more primordial biblical language, tends to make the biblical notions more rigid and massive than they need be, a post-metaphysical sensibility recalls all these notions to their experiential foundation and reveals them as the imperfect constructions of a given culture, subject to challenge and questioning in dialogue with other worlds of experience. Thus the overcoming of metaphysics is the first step in the Western journey to an open dialogue with other traditions.

SUFFERING THE TEXT

Many patristic texts can excite a mild historical sympathy, while their literary conventions and philosophical assumptions prevent the contemporary believer from entering fully into the world of their authors. Augustine’s Confessions still largely escapes this cultural obsolescence, continuing to speak “from faith to faith” and to challenge and unsettle its readers. If we wish to come to terms critically with the tradition which has shaped our faith, it is as impossible to avoid a confrontation with this text as with the Councils of Nicea or Chalcedon. Yet, despite its continuing power to question us, the favorite spiritual reading of the West for so many centuries no longer speaks as directly to its contemporary readers. The metaphysical presuppositions Augustine found so satisfying and illuminating, the convictions which strongly girded his universe, now seem the feeblest part of his work, while its power seems to live on in those elements which do not quite fit this metaphysical framework or which strain against it in subtle ways. This paradox makes the Confessions an ideal site for a demonstration of the difference our proposed approach makes in practice to the reading of the Christian classics. As we differentiate “faith” and “metaphysics” in the very texture of Augustine’s writing the programmatic observations of the preceding chapters will acquire a richer complexion and the positive goal of our inquiry, to be sketched in the concluding chapter, will begin to come into view.

It is not perhaps possible to prove that the contemporary reaction to Augustine’s text is what I have stated it to be. For this starting point of a deconstructive reading I must simply appeal to the experience of the reader of Augustine’s text. When, for instance, one reads: “I would not be at all, my God, unless you were in me” (I 2.2.), is one not pulled in two directions, on the one hand drawn into a devotional participation in Augustine’s sense of utter dependence on God, on the other thrown back by the formalization of that devotional stance through a metaphysics of esse? The direct appropriation of Augustine’s words is made problematic once it is seen that they are burdened with a fairly elaborate theory of being. To take another of the countless possible examples, when one reads: “Why, O perverse soul, do you follow your flesh? Let it rather be converted to follow you” (IV 11.l7), one may find that these words resonate with everyone’s awareness of moral alienation and with the thirst for a correct ordering of life, and one may be pleased by their literary elegance, but is it possible to silence the questions so summary an imposition of anthropological dualism on the texture of existence must provoke? At every turn in Augustine’s texts the post-Kantian reader will stumble on such occasions for misgiving.

Even passages which at first seem free of metaphysical formalization, and from which one might hope to spin an Augustinianism of the heart, a spiritual language propelled by a play of images and no longer subject to a governing metaphysical scheme, turn out on closer acquaintance to contain a high quotient of implicit metaphysics. For instance when Augustine writes: “Do not be vain, O my soul, nor allow the ear of your heart to be deafened by the tumult of your vanity” (IV 11.l6), the imaginative vividness of this is largelv the product of a metaphysical scheme. The Origenian notion of the spiritual senses, brilliantly exploited throughout the Confessions, allows Augustine to systematically transfer to the realm of the spiritual the language of the sensible. What seems a flash of imagination has Platonic method in it. The underlying distinction between inner and outer in all its fertile variations is inseparably linked with the Platonic dualism of soul and body. Similarly, Augustine’s reflections on the presence or absence of God to the sinner are controlled by a set of carefully formulated quasi-Plotinian theorems about omnipresence. Above all, the nostalgia for rest and certitude in the divine presence and for transparent self-presence, the ruling desire which fuels Augustine’s eloquence and imagination is itself the product of metaphysical presuppositions: God envisaged as ultimate ground and ultimate goal, the point of rest in a system of relations; the soul’s self-presence seen as a necessary mediation of the return to that ground. Conversion is the basic structure of existence for Augustine and it is grounded in the axiom that “you have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you” (I 1.1). Centuries of readers have made these words too their own in an unproblematic way. But can we? In that phrase “you have made us for yourself” do we not detect a questionable stepping outside the horizon of the given to take a loftier view of God’s ontological and causal relation to the creature? Do we not suspect that this somewhat abstract and privatized evocation of resting in the Lord is a construction conditioned by a metaphysics of creation, and that a wider and fuller sense of what such resting in the Lord might mean could be attained if one left behind this metaphysical perspective in order to espouse the “hints and guesses” of a personal divine presence which real-life occasions suggest? Is Augustine not unduly universalizing and formalizing the particularity of this presence, imposing on it the status of a metaphysical origin?

Pursuing these suspicions we find that the questionability of metaphysics haunts every corner of the text, forbidding us to take anything simply at its face value. There is no doubting the reality of Augustine’s experience of God’s presence and providence; yet metaphysical schemas again and again seem to inhibit his articulation of the concrete modalities of that presence. Augustine’s God is a metaphysical God, but also the living God of the biblical revelation, the former at the expense of the latter. If the metaphysics of God’s presence in the Confessions can nonetheless subserve his witness of biblical faith, it is because this metaphysics is constantly being solicited and inflected by biblical emphases. My claim, therefore, is that we cannot link up with Augustine the witness of faith as long as we take for granted the apparently seamless mutual complementation of the languages of faith and metaphysics in his text. Only by driving a wedge between them, building on indications of tension in the writing itself, can we recover the clues for faith embedded in the text, clues which the prevailing metaphysical discourse tends to misinterpret.

Such a reading demands that we attend to the reactions of dissatisfaction, even the sense of oppression, the text elicits, not writing them off as a distraction, but recognizing them as hermeneutically relevant, as clues to the possibility of a subversive and liberative solicitation of the text. Those who bring an attitude of uniform admiration to Augustine are not necessarily his best readers. If one practices a hermeneutics of “suffering the text,” consciously registering the malaise it induces and seeking the sources of this malaise, one is likely to obtain a more precise and more engaging sense of the contemporary significance of Augustine. Fifteen centuries of Augustine’s influence have made us familiar with the oppressive potential of his thought and as we apply this consciousness to Augustine’s texts we may discover an alternative reading which dismantles his metaphysical formalization of spiritual experience. Indeed we have little chance of recovering the truth of the Christian tradition for today unless we cultivate this consciousness in regard to every corner oi that tradition, questioning after what underlies its possibly overemphatic claims and counterclaims (seven sacraments or two?), its rather dogged repetitions (e.g., the resumption of patristic dogmatic language by Luther and Melanchthon despite their initial resistance), and its networks of moral and doctrinal argument which might seem to constitute again and again a Law which the Gospel would again and again abrogate. It is only through this process of reassessment that the vision these broken instruments defended can be deciphered anew. our dealings with Scripture provide precedents for this approach: in a world mapped out for nuclear extinction we cannot share the Psalms’ cosmic optimism, yet in a paradoxical way we do cling to their imperative of praise, as a protest against the nuclear corruption of nature and our hearts? (see Daniel Berrigan, Uncommon Prayer, New York, 1978). We cannot be awestruck by the quaint miracles in the Acts of the Apostles, but we can take them as betokening the fullness of the Spirit in the early Church; we wince at the anti-Semitic resonances of passages in Matthew and John, yet this reaction is truer to the spirit of the gospel message than a pious complacency would be. No text written by human beings is without its shadow side, which the passage of time may throw into deeper relief. Theology is largely a struggle with these shadows.

To wrestle with the Confessions in this way need not be a purely negative task. Indeed it may be a spiritual exercise in a more authentic sense than a straightforward reading can any longer be, as we continue Augustine’s spiritual quest in opposition to the metaphysics which originally sustained it, but now hinder our participation in it. It might be thought that this counter-metaphysical reading is a timid substitute for what the “masters of suspicion” (Marx, Nietzsche and Freud) might find in Augustine. A Marxist might see the Confessions as powerfully constraining the Gospel within the limits of individual subjectivity and, through its influence on people like Petrarch and Pascal, giving spiritual legitimation to the culture of bourgeois individualism. Nietzsche thought Augustine “lacked distinction in his desires and gestures to an insulting degree” (Werke, ed. Schlechta, II, 614), suggesting that one might query whether one who lived so much in the light of eternal, unchanging forms could remain fully and authentically human. Freudian approaches to the Confessions have not been very illuminating, but it is sure that the powerful affective investments of that work, which have had such an influence on subsequent religious feeling, call for ongoing analysis and assessment. Each of these critiques, however, brings us back to the question of metaphysics. Augustine instituted a thorough metaphysical formalization not only of Christian beliefs, but of Christian experience and language. The doctrinal tenets of the Greek Fathers, translated into the more tightly logical medium of Latin, were assembled in a rather petrified system, in which the margin of vagueness or mystery they retained in Greek was mercilessly lopped away. Dogma became fixed as never before, and henceforth provided the unquestioned basis for every form of “faith seeking understanding” in the Latin West. At the same time, a metaphysical form was imposed on the whole of experience, a systematic geography of love and desire, joy and suffering, sin and virtue. The transmission of that form in the West implied the dominance of a single religious diction, the capacious terminology of Augustine’s Latin, capable of integrating and controlling every stirring of the Spirit in its lucid texture. Thus in whichever direction one pursued either religious experience or theological speculation after Augustine one came up against the all-embracing structures of his groundplan, which seemed the definitive institution of the boundaries of Christian truth. Nor could an escape be found through a return to Scripture, since Scripture was automatically read (even by the Reformers) through Augustinian eyes. If the Church today is vulnerable to the critiques of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche it is largely because of an Augustinianism insufficiently overcome, that is, a metaphysical institutionalization of the Gospel which does not allow it to deploy its liberative challenge in concrete interplay with social and psychological situations, but tries to inscribe its message in a systematic code.

A counter-metaphysical reading is not only a more central approach to the problems of the Augustinian legacy; it is also more practicable than a directly Marxian or Freudian critique. It demands that we read the text backwards, undoing the harmony which the centuries-long symbiosis of faith and metaphysics generated, attending instead to the biblical diction of faith insofar as its absorption by metaphysics remains incomplete, soliciting this troublesome, unintegrated residue so as to bring to light in the text a largely repressed biblical witness of faith. In raising biblical faith to the transparency of the concept Augustine may have augmented the danger latent in all credal statements, the danger that faith becomes a theoretical ideology to which one subscribes, rather than a communal vision which is always being reshaped. As we overcome the transparency and systematic character of his vision, recapturing the opaque texture of the underlying biblical confessions of faith, we discern the human and historical contours of Augustine’s witness as an accommodation of the Gospel message to the intellectual conditions by which he was bound. The metaphysical lucidity of his articulation of the vision of faith is the explicit surface of his finding and defining of Christian identity under the conditions of that time. But if we look at the back of the mirror, through an examination of the textual embodiment of this metaphysical explication of the faith, we find that Augustine has something more to tell us about Christian identity, for his style betrays the resistance of faith to any metaphysical systematization. Explicitly, the biblical and metaphysical elements coexist in harmonious fusion. But the texture of the writing reveals a constant friction between them, which Augustine himself does not reflexively control. Heidegger, in 1921, saw this tension, somewhat simplistically, as one between experience and its conceptual articulation: “The conceptuality taken up by Augustine falsifies the experience to be expressed in it… While Augustine lives and thinks in the unrest which characterizes factical life, he becomes untrue to himself and misses the factical life-experience of original Christianity through the quietism of the fruitio Dei which comes from Neo-Platonism” (summary of Otto Pöggeler, Der Denkweg Martin Heideggers, Pfullingen, 1963, 39). “In the philosophy of Augustine an original and basic religious experience is perverted being conceptualized in terms of uncritically accepted metaphysical ideas” (J. L. Mehta, Martin Heidegger, Honolulu, 1976, 12; for a diametrically opposed line of criticism see Kurt Flasch, Augustin: Einführung in sein Denken, Stuttgart, 1980). This opposition of existence and interpretation needs to be substantiated by a textual study tracing the tension between two languages in Augustine. Such a study would absolve us from the futile effort to reconstruct Augustine’s experience independently of its linguistic inscription, and from the need to solve the historical puzzles his narration of his conversion creates, allowing us to attend instead to the functioning of the text and the possibilities of a new reading which it allows.

ONTOTHEOLOGY OR THEOLOGAL ONTOLOGY?

Deconstructive insight can sometimes be facilitated by a critique of an exemplary standard reading of the target text, and in this case a recent essay of Dominique Dubarle, in which scholarship is laced with an unusual degree of philosophical alertness, provides an ideal foil (“Essai sur l’ontologie théologale de saint Augustin,” Recherches augustiniennes 16, 1981, 197-288). Indeed Dubarle’s essay has been recommended by Goulven Madec (Revue des études augustiniennes 28, 1982, 345-7) as a wholesome corrective to the dangerous views of Augustine’s deconstructors. His study has the warrant of Augustine’s own self-understanding, but misses the insights of those who subject Augustrine to the Heideggerian critique of ontotheology. Dubarle contrasts Augustine’s’ “theologal ontology” with ontotheology, but seems to understand by the latter a rationalistic natural theology in the manner of Christian Wolff, rather than a project intrinsic in various degrees of explicitness to all metaphysics. It is evident that as early as the De Vera Religione (390) and De Libero Arbitrio (395) Augustine is intent on projecting a totalizing systematic grasp of being-as-such and beings-as-a-whole. In his basic ontology he depends largely on Porphyry. His own most energetic thinking on the nature of being-as-such is concerned with the axiom that “whatever is, is good, insofar as it is, and evil is not.” As for beings-as-a-whole, his universe is a hierarchy of participation in being, of which God, the supreme being and source of being, is the summit. The sense of the intrinsic goodness of being-as-such is supplemented by a notion of the intrinsic order and harmony of the universe. The sense of the hierarchical unity under God of beings-as-a-whole is supplemented by variations on the theme of an ascent from the body (mutable and sensible) to the soul (incorporeal but still mutable) to God (spiritual and immutable). Indeed the entire biblical economy provides further supplementation to this ontotheological structure, as we shall see. Thus what Dubarle calls “theologal” or even “Christic” ontology turns out then to be a major triumph of ontotheology, its colonization of the world of faith.

As ontotheology Augustine’s thought falls prey to the Heideggerian critique. If a phenomenological insight underlies Augustine’s axiom of the convertibility of being and goodness, Augustine did not dwell with that insight, but used it to provide metaphysical explanations and grounds for the existence of things. Instead of questioning back to the true phenomenality of being he built speculative accounts of the order and structure of reality. A deconstruction of Augustine along these lines might be possible, building on the tension between his ordering mentality and his inchoate phenomenological perceptions whose development that quest for speculative order frustrated. But this is not the concern of a theological critique of Augustine. Our task is rather to gauge the degree to which Augustine’s discourse succeeds in being what it is principally intended to be, a discourse of faith, and to examine how his ontotheological methods of thinking help or hinder that purpose. Since we are dealing with what is perhaps the most perfect expression of the spirit of faith within the culture of Western metaphysics, it is clear that this task, however inadequately we fulfill it, is a matter of epochal import. Dubarle rushes through an open door when he points out that the richness and coherence of Augustine’s theologal ontology cannot be reduced to the “platitude of the ontology or ‘natural theology’ found in manuals” (200), although there is a certain flatness if we compare Augustine with Plotinus (see Joachim Ritter, Mundus Intelligibilis, Frankfurt, 1937). The very perfection of Augustine’s performance on its own terms calls forth the higher criticism which notes the points at which this system founders on the impossibility of fully capturing – or even correctly placing – the “theologal” or the “Christic” within the structures of a systematic ontology, however modified to accommodate them. Is this merely a question of fashion? Was it natural to explicate the mystery of God and Christ in terms of being and Logos when these were the culturally recognized names for ultimate reality, and do we now drop this language only because the words carry less weight? I think the issue is more basic than this. Augustine obeys the imperative of metaphysical reason in bringing God and Christ into relation with the supreme principles of ontotheology; for him this is a matter of rational necessity, not cultural accommodation. Only with the Reformation did the possible independence, and even the necessary independence, of faith from metaphysics come into view. There is no assured reflexive grasp of such an independence before this, it seems. It is exactly that polyphonic symbiosis of Christian and philosophical culture, so natural and necessary to Augustine, and on which the strength and beauty of his writing depends, which has become basically questionable to us, the heirs of Luther and Kant, so that our entire relationship to Augustine has shifted to another plane.

It is true that Augustine articulates his experiences, or rather the reflexive interpretation of them precipitated in his mind some twenty years after the event, in ontological terms, and that he does this very smoothly and coherently. The metaphysical discourse seems to unfold organically from the contemplative experience he associates with his reading of the books of the Platonists. Previously the narrator had wallowed clumsily in the ontologies of Manicheanism and Stoicism, sensing their inadequacy to the true nature of God and the soul. Now he gains immediate contemplative access to spiritual reality, and begins at once to articulate the content of this vision in ontological terms. Contemplative insight translates into ontotheological coherence without any apparent gap. Augustine knew no better language for the reality he had glimpsed. He quarries from his encounter with the reality of God a vision of being as such: “I saw them neither altogether to be, nor altogether not to be…” (VII 11.17); “And it was revealed to me that the things which are corrupted are good…” (VII 12.18); “And all things are true insofar as they are…” (15.21), and a vision of beings as a whole, grounded and unified in the supreme being, God: “I saw that they owed it to you that they are, and that they are all finite in you, but in another way, not as in a place (as Augustine had previously imagined), but because you are he who holds all things in his hand by truth” (15.21). This contemplative, theologal ontology, like that of Aquinas, appears to be a seamless robe, providing the bedrock foundation of the Christian vision of reality, based on the doctrine of creation, incapable of being surpassed or displaced.

A frontal attack on the truth of this theologal ontological vision would of course be misguided, just as a denial or the doctrines of the Trinity or the Incarnation would be. But in each case a lateral critique of the linguistic and conceptual texture in which these doctrinal convictions are embodied is obligatory, not only because of the exigencies of modern philosophy, but also because many contemporary believers find the classical language unpalatable, although unwilling to surrender belief in the divinity of Christ, the trinitarian nature of God and the dependence of all that exists on a loving creator. A phenomenological critique of Augustine’s language will differentiate distinct strands in it, revealing it to be an amalgam whose elements are bound by a very high valency, but not an absolute one. one might say that in a metaphysical epoch Augustine’s or Aquinas’s vision is the finest expression possible of the truth of the doctrine of creation, the light of reason converging irresistibly with the light of faith, but that with the closure of this epoch the conjunction appears in retrospect as dissoluble, through a reduction of both the philosophical and the theological elements to their phenomenological origins.

If we read Confessions VII 10.16 ff. with a view to this differentiation of strands and to the laying bare of their contrasting phenomenological foundations, we discover that the text lends itself quite well to this operation, though it is inspired by concerns foreign to the conscious intention of its author, concerns possible only to those who have experienced the crises of metaphysics and the correlative crises of traditional formulations of faith. The text colludes with its critic as anatomy colludes with the surgeon’s knife, despite the violence of the incision in both cases. For the historical fault-line sundering faith and metaphysics even in their closest embrace is found to appear whenever biblical language is sensitively used in Christian theology, even when there is no explicit consciousness of its counter-metaphysical thrust. The contemporary critic will solicit that language, accentuating its irreducibility to the surrounding metaphysical categories, thus setting up a ferment of self-contradiction in the text. Metaphysical lucidity is no longer serenely superimposed on the biblical elements, but is seen as straining against them. Conversely, where the biblical elements seem to be merely tagged on to the metaphysical ones, they are no longer seen as innocent appendages but as irremediably compromising the transparency of the concept. Even if biblical elements irreducible to metaphysics are marginalized in the text, they can constitute a quintessential instance of the treacherous margin, calling in question the entire metaphysical order which seeks in vain to integrate them. Augustine generally seeks, unlike the scholastics, to saturate his text with biblical allusions, so that if one can speak of marginality here it is only.in the sense that the biblical strand is tightly bound into place by the governing metaphysical arrangements. The biblical text is massively present, but in an interpretation which is ninety percent metaphysical; it is the ten percent residue of unintegrated biblical diction which provides the margin for our solicitation.

For instance, the opening words of VII 10.16 combine biblical and Plotinian themes in what is almost an exercise in theological punning. Deeply satisfying as this harmony is, it must be noted that while the philosophical themes are transformed through being referred to a personal God and his enabling grace, the. Biblical themes undergo the more radical transformation. “And thence admonished to return to myself”: the books of the Platonists are a providential means whereby God recalls the erring soul, but this idea is mediated through Platonic conceptions of sensible traces of immaterial reality; Augustine returns to himself as the Prodigal Son comes to his senses, but much more as the Plotinian soul recollects itself, withdrawing from its dispersion in sense fantasy. If there is a ten percent of biblical matter here which resists integration into the metaphysical translation, it must be sought in Augustine’s tone of voice, the tone of confession which places the sinner before the God of mercy. The next words, “I entered into my own interiority led by you and I was able to, since you became my helper” (cf. Ps. 56:7), present grace as what mediates the soul’s self-presence or self-transparency, and as so often it is the scriptural allusion which most resists integration into the governing metaphysical scheme. Grace as a principle has been well integrated into the metaphysical structure of Christian theology, but the concrete biblical presentation of God’s favor and saving intervention (the phenomenological origin of all later thematizations of grace) could never satisfactorily be presented as a principle. The trouble is that in trying to do justice to this “unprincipled” character of grace and to the divine freedom, theologians felt obliged to produce auxiliary principles, such as the principle of the gratuity of grace, or the principle of predestination. The metaphysics of grace became the most puzzling corner of theology, and its relation to the revelation of God’s saving favor, for whose defense it had been constructed, became impossible to discern. As the narrative particularity of the present passage cedes in Augustine’s writing to the prevalence of grace as a metaphysical principle this speculative effort to provide the grounds of grace (in the name of defending its groundlessness) is launched, with the catastrophic consequences already apparent in the Saint’s last writings.where the defender of divine freedom in fact appears to be hedging it about with calculations born of a logic of fear.

“I entered and saw with a certain eye of my soul, above that eye of my soul – above my mind – an unchanging light, not the ordinary one all flesh can see, nor anything similar to it though bigger, as if this light were to shine much, much brighter so as to fill all by its size. Not such was that light, but other, quite other, from all these.” The contrast of inner and outer light is entirely Platonic – the parable of the cavern (Republic VII) and Plotinus’s On Beauty (Enneads I 6) – and even the key of interiority into which Augustine translated the conjunction between the mind’s eye and the light above it cannot be presented as a specifically Christian or Pauline importation, since it merely develops the pathos of recollection alreadv present in Platonic or Plotinian anamnesis, aphairesis, and anabasis. This spirituality, greatly as it has prevailed in Christian culture, is not at all biblical. In contrast, Augustine’s sense of himself as an individual “I” addressed by the divine “Thou,” though it too has become ninety percent metaphysics (enriching metaphysics with a new set of themes, refining and sharpening its concepts of the particular), does have a distinctively biblical cast which is never quite submerged in the texture of his metaphysical theology. Note the stylistic jump in the next sentence as the biblical theme of creation emerges along with the evocation of the divine “Thou” and the human “I”: “Nor was it above my mind as oil is above water or the sky above the earth, but it was above me because it made me and I was below it because I was made by it.” The Plotinian texture of the discourse is almost ripped by the twist the words “ipsa fecit me” introduce. Augustine first described his experience as on one of spiritual self-transparency; now it is a discovery of creaturehood. The two accounts are welded together almost by force. We are not concerned with what Augustine “really” experienced at Milan; probably no pure kernel could be extracted from the interpretative schemes which both interpreted and explicated the experience, and it may be that a combination and partial clash of two schemes presided over the original experience; or it may be that the creational scheme was later imposed over the Plotinian one, as seeming to do more justice to the true import of the experience. In any case there is a significant slippage in the text. It recurs in a subtler form in the next sentences: “Who knows truth, knows this light, and who knows this light, knows eternity. Charity knows this light. O eternal truth, and true charity and dear eternity! You are my God; to you I sigh day and night” (cf. Ps. 42:2). In Platonism eros mediates the vision of the forms, and the forms possess self-identical being. Augustine replaces eros with charity, the form of beauty with divine truth and the timelessness of the intelligible world with the eternity of the biblical heaven. But charity, truth, and eternity are just as much metaphysical principles as those they replace. Augustine’s crypto-trinitarian invocation of them is a modulation from the exposition of these metaphysical principles to the undisguised biblical prayer of the final quotation. But that modulation again masks a stylistic leap, and repeated reading confirms the impression that the words “you are my God” almost wrench Augustine’s discourse out of its metaphysical course. Caritas, veritas, aeternitas are the bearers of ontotheological aspiration after a totalizing apprehension of the being of beings; but the implicit system is almost exploded when Augustine turns to address them as “my God.” The God one calls on in prayer and the totalizing principle one constructs in speculation are not as easy to identify as Augustine’s simple “you are” suggests. Can a “you” ever be a principle or set of principles?

These subtle tensions are acerbated when Augustine introduces the Porphyrian language of “esse” into the interpretation of his illumination at Milan: “And when I knew you for the first time, you lifted me up that I might see that that which I wished to see indeed had being but that I who wished to see had not being as yet. You struck the weakness of my gaze, shining powerfully on me so that I trembled in love and dread, and I found myself to be far from you in a region of dissimilitude, as if I were hearing your voice from on high: ‘I am the food of the full-grown: grow and you shall feed on me, nor shall you change me into you as the food of your flesh, but you shall be changed into me.’ And I realized that you punished man for wickedness and that you had caused my soul to dry up like a spider’s web. And I said: ‘Is truth then nothing, since it is not diffused through either finite or infinite space?’And you called from afar: ‘I am who I am’ (Ex. 3:14) and I heard as one hears in the heart, nor was there further room for doubt: I had more easily doubted myself to live than the existence of truth, which is perceived through the consideration of the things that are made.” The quotation of Exodus 3:14 here is the king-pin of the ontological interpretation of the contrast between the reality of God and his own weak state. The “region of dissimilitude” is the Plotinian terminology for the lowest degree of being, verging on non-being (Enn. I 8.13). Augustine has not yet being, cannot yet participate in the fullness of being which is God: this ontological reading underlies the food-image. The hierarchical, participational ontology of the following paragraphs is already present here in nuce, as the concluding allusion to Romans 1:20 makes clear.

But the quotation from Exodus might also be read as indicating a more primordial level in Augustine’s experience, which the prevalent ontological scheme does not perfectly embrace, an encounter, like that of Moses, between the majesty and holiness of God and the sinfulness of the individual. The Platonic imagery of blinding light is yoked together with the biblical “Thou” who “lifts up” Augustine and addresses him in biblical style; the spiritual sense of sight functions Platonically, but the spiritual sense of hearing functions biblically, and is significantly located in the heart rather than in the mind. This presence of a personal and active God dislodges the Platonic elements so that they become illustrative of and subservient to a biblical evocation of God, losing some of their own intrinsic weight. The language of being in this paragraph is no longer an end in itself as it was for Plato or Aristotle. The reality of God is what is of first importance, and the language of being is “used” to express it in what might almost be described as a metaphorical way. The language of-illumination in Augustine is a strange hybrid, because of the deflection imposed on its Platonic terms by reference to a biblical image of God as active, vigilant, personal presence. Yet both the language of being and that of illumination continue to have a metaphysical function of locating God (one might almost say keeping God in place) as the supreme ground of being and knowledge. The personal God of Augustine is thus only partly the God of the Bible. Despite the ultimate irreducibility of the divine “Thou” to metaphysics, Augustine’s God remains nine-tenths a metaphysical construction. To draw out the more primordial biblical sense of God from the prevailing metaphysical discourse about God great attention to the tone and narrative movement of the text is required, for one can easily mistake Augustine’s powerful metaphysical evocations of God’s presence and providence as simply biblical, while it is just as easy to miss the irreducibly non-metaphysical touches in his narration of God’s dealings with him. Utterances like “Thou hast made us for thyself…” or “O true charity and beloved eternity!” might seem utterly in tune with the tenor of biblical language to the unsuspecting reader, who might equally underestimate the degree to which the Platonic substance of “you struck the weakness of my gaze, shining on me violently” is hollowed out and undermined by the presence of the word “you.”

I am trying to show that the Confessions is an inherently troubled and instable composition, as is every text which attempts an original synthesis of faith and metaphysics. Amplify the resonances of the biblical language in such a text and dissonances begin to be heard between it and the metaphysical elements; the converse is true to a lesser extent (amplify the Platonic resonances and their incompatibility with the language of faith appears). Like the themes thrown together at the high point of the Mastersingers overture, faith and metaphysics do not harmonize; it is only the orchestration which keeps them together. Augustine is a master of orchestration, and the attempt to recover the autonomy of faith will take nothing from his art. But in lesser hands the discourse of metaphysical theology abounds in grating dissonances, especially in its contemporary revivals. Augustine resites Porphyrian ontology between the abyssal poles of divine infinity (“Thou”) and the nothing whence creatures (“I”) are drawn, causing the ontotheological notion of God as supreme cause to rhyme richly with the biblical confession of the Lordship of the Creator. But allow any autonomy to the biblical God over against his ontological characterization and a fatal gap appears. If the supreme cause of ontotheology is retained as a secondary description of God it will continue to interfere and clash with the biblical one despite so many apparent reasons for concord; the worst dissonances are between notes very near in pitch. So we find that the discord between the God of Abraham and the God of metaphysics cannot be resolved by compromises, but only by critical overcoming.

Dubarle’s reading of Confessions VII 10.16 ff. provides an instructive contrast. “Saint Augustine describes the perception of a radical difference between the being of God and that of his creature… He speaks of God as being and of divine being, not of the unique One of Plotinus” (209-10). One notes the monochromatically ontological character of this reading. “The ‘dissimilitude’ caused by sin is discerned… only in the light of ontological dissimilitude” (211). Here Dubarle solicits Augustine’s text in such a way as to promote the primacy of the ontological framework over the biblical elements. This seems to me the exact opposite of the procedure required for a creative theological hermeneutic. But Dubarle can also solicit the text in the other direction: “Augustine’s statements (about the non-being of evil, VII 12.18) presuppose a mind raised to a spiritual and intellectual understanding which makes forcefully present to it that light which is the divine truth of the Word… Espousing in some sense the divine gaze on creation, one who lives this act of understanding knows experientially that evil is nothing which subsists” (212). Here Augustine’s metaphysical thinking is quite ‘‘dissolved into the contemplative experience from which it is quarried; the phenomenological content of his vision of the goodness of being is emphasized at the expense of the ontotheological structure of his argument. But even the contemplative vision here is governed intimately by the structures of Platonic metaphysics. This reading overlooks the biblical elements in the text, e.g., “that truly is, which abides immutably. ‘But for me it is good to cling to God’ (cf. Ps. 72:34), because if I do not abide in him, neither can I abide in myself (VII 11.17). The psalm text is in sharp stylistic contrast with what precedes and the language of “abiding” is capable of a double reading, as meaning either the Plotinian soul’s self-presence, dependent on its upward gaze towards the intelligibles, or a biblical trust in God which preserves one in righteousness. Thus Dubarle elevates Augustine’s metaphysics to the spiritual level to counter the charge of ontotheology, but does not raise it to the biblical level, for this would cause it to founder.

One cannot accept without question the equation of Augustine’s ontology with a participation in the divine view of things, nor does the joyful contemplative certitude attaching to the vision guarantee the adequacy of the categories it employs. In “seeing” the structure of being so transparently, Augustine may in fact already be falling away from the real source of his joy and certitude, exchanging a phenomenological or contemplative apprehension for the projection of an objectifying totalization of beings as a whole, a projection which is a theoretical conclusion, not an immediate given of contemplative experience. We must read the explicitly metaphysical utterances of the text backwards, attending to every trace of a more originary sense which they have already begun to rationalize, and especially to the biblical elements insofar as they partly betray that the metaphysical schemes are not entirely adequate to capture this deeper layer of meaning. In all this one must, however, try to avoid the temptation to posit a transcendental signified in the form of an original pure experience, whether one of Eastern-style contemplative illumination or of biblical encounter with the holiness of God. We have no access to the original experience, which exists for us only in the play of textual possibilities in what Augustine wrote so much later; our difficulty in interpreting that textual play, and the variety of readings it can generate, testify to the complexity of Augustine’s own task of articulating and interpreting his experience; all we can do is continue the play, avoiding the danger of replacing the metaphysical interpretation with another claiming the same stability and adequacy. The increasing complication and undecidability of our reading is not gratuitous, but is part of the way the text functions, and a tribute to its power. It is because it involves us in its play and lures us on to investigate its “unthought” implications that this text still claims our attention. Were its meaning utterly straightforward, so that there could be no room for soundings and solicitations which refuse to take it at face value, then we could register Augustine’s views, but scarcely dialogue with them, for there would be nothing in his writing which could respond to our questioning.

At least the argumentative parts of this passage of Confessions VII must be admitted to have a secondary character in relation to the deliveries of contemplative vision, for the logic-chopping about the goodness of what is corruptible (12.18) and the cosmic harmony which makes what appears evil in one respect good in another (13.19) is surely the product of the everyday reflecting mind, drawing on two traditions of homely philosophical argument as it attempts to tease out the implications of the clue, no more than a clue, which contemplation brought. A false materialist metaphysics yields to a true metaphysics of divine spirituality and the goodness of being. It is a contemplative experience that causes the latter to “click” for Augustine, giving him an essential clue for its acceptance. But while this change of languages is an advance in truth for Augustine, it is by no means a gift of an absolutely adequate language and one could even say that it was precisely because he was a contemplative that Augustine continues to betray in his writing the tensions between the biblical and the metaphysical, needing both languages to express the fullness of God and incapable of repressing for the sake of uniformity either of the languages in which his praise found voice.

Augustine also describes his inability to sustain the contemplative vision, due above all to his weakened moral state. He comes back to this more systematically at VII 17.23 where in his ascents from the appreciation of corporeal beauty, through the principles of aesthetic judgment, to the eternal truth enabling this judgment, and from corporeal things, through sensation and the inner sense, to the power of reason and the Light which enlightens it, Augustine clearly locates the divine at the summit of a hierarchy of beings. This hierarchy is not a contemplative datum but a metaphysical scheme used as a launching pad for a contemplative exercise. The exercise reveals explicitly a truth about God which remained implicit in the experience described in VII 10.16, namely “the impossibility of having direct knowledge, assured and penetrating, of that which God properly is” (Dubarle, 218), or the noetic impenetrability of God, which Dubarle correlates with the ontological divine infinity also borne in on Augustine in his contemplative experience. I suspect that Dubarle overemphasizes the noetic-philosophical dimension of this experience of being thrown back by the majesty of God. The “weakness” to which this is ascribed is just as much a concrete condition of sinfulness as an ontological structure of finitude; perhaps here too is an occasion for deconstructive play. It is not only that God is impenetrable because infinite; there is also here a biblical sense of the exalted holiness of God, inspiring a sense of sin now, but admitting a more substantial contemplative enjoyment in the vision at Ostia described in Book IX. Augustine deals with God as both a “Thou” and as the summit of a metaphysical hierarchy and while the two approaches supplement one another they can also leave minor loose ends in the text, loose ends which the deconstructionist can pull on so as to unstitch its fabric. One might solicit Augustine’s sense of the elusiveness of God and ask if it does not react on the Platonic topologies whereby he continues to fix the place of God so confidently, as summit of a hierarchy, summum and ground of the perfections of being, truth, goodness. Is there a dehiscence between these topologies and the activity of the divine “Thou” who both raises Augustine to himself and withdraws from his grasp? Can God be at once the passive object of contemplation and the active subject of self-revelation and self-concealment? Either the anabasis must be taken lightly, as the ladder one throws away having mounted it, or the revelation must be subordinated to its ontotheological structures. Augustine combines anabasis and revelation by avoiding ever having to choose between these two possibilities. If he is a theologal ontologist rather than an ontotheologist it is because he sustains so well this delicate equilibrium. But logically his ontology demands to become ontotheology in the fullest sense, and thus exclude an integral account of the God of revelation, while conversely the biblical element in his thinking strains towards its autonomy, which would throw off the language of metaphysics.

A CHRISTIC ONTOLOGY?

Now we must examine the surprising twist in Dubarle’s interpretation, whereby he presents the ontology of Confessions VII as displaced or sublated in a richer, more specifically Christian formation of thought, which he calls a “Christic ontology.” This I see as a Hegelian, dialectical resolution of the tensions between faith and metaphysics in Augustine’s text. I oppose to it a phenomenological reading which takes the “failles” in the text as indications of the unthought, invitations to deeper questioning. One such fault/flaw is the stylistic heterogeneity of Confessions VII and VIII. As Dubarle remarks: “At first sight it looks as if once the theologal ontology and the encounter between monotheistic faith and the philosophical conception of God have been posited as preliminaries the specifically Christian dimension of existence is deployed according to the order of a religious faith on which the considerations of philosophical ontology have no hold” (221). However, Dubarle resolves this problem by presenting Augustine’s christology and soteriology as completing and enriching the “virtuality of theologal ontology” (222) Augustine shares with Platonism, in a richly unified thinking which transcends the concern with ontological construction or even with “the systematic organization of theological material” (ib.). Undoubtedly this unity exists, and it is more the unity of a contemplative vision than a system. But the disunities it embraces, particularly the gaps between the biblical and metaphysical contributions, the former of which constantly frustrates the latter’s constantly renewed urge towards system, should be closely studied. What I have calculated to be the ten percent resistance of the biblical elements to metaphysical integration effectively prevents the Augustinian world of thought from ever closing in on itself as a fully constituted system. A literary sign of this state of affairs is the mosaic texture of Augustine’s writing, in which lines of argument derived from Scripture are juxtaposed with others depending more on philosophical traditions with little attempt at a textural fusion of the two (e.g., in De Trinitate XIII a philosophical argument about the desire for beatitude leads to a biblical exposition of faith as the means to attain it; as the biblical references enter the philosophical ones leave). “It is the whole of the teaching of the Christian faith, the truth of the God of monotheism and the truth of the incarnate Word, which the ontological understanding (of BookVII) serves in reality to undergird and outline, at least de jure,” writes Dubarle (202), the latter phrase being added because this unity of ontology and soteriology is not explicitly presented in Confessions VII-VIII. The doctrinal unity of Augustine’s views hardly needs to be defended. But the leaps one notices in the text, the leap from the ontological lessons drawn from the Milan experience (VII 10.16-16.22) to the account of the moral quandary into which it plunges Augustine (17.23-21.27) and the narration of his release from this quandary through “putting on the Lord Jesus Christ” in VIII, reflect the great distances between the different cultures Augustine reconciled in his person, the worlds of Plotinus and of Paul. His Plotinus is Christianized, to the point of appearing as a teacher of Christianity without the incarnation and kenosis of the Word, and his Paul is metaphysicized, as the treatment of the themes of Romans 7 in Confessions VIII shows. Nonetheless he could not fully weave the two together in a single texture of argument. The unity of the Confessions is thus in the end the unity of a narrative. Narrative is the only medium in which Plotinus can be surpassed by Paul. To attempt such a surpassing in the medium of metaphysical argument would be to reduce Paul to metaphysical terms and to miss the concrete reality of conversion and grace; to attempt it by completely reducing the Plotinian themes to themes of biblical faith would constitute the overcoming of metaphysics! This is not a possibility for Augustine.

It is true that elsewhere Augustine does unify ontology and christology in a single argument. My claim is that as far as Augustine succeeds in doing this he falls short of the powerful witness of faith achieved in the Confessions. In Confessions VII Augustine indicates the place of Jesus Christ only in relation to the second feature of the Milan experience, his inability to abide in the contemplation of his God, and refrains from the attempt to place him in the ontological framework established in VII 10.16-22; in Confessions VIII the ontological background yields to the dramatic foreground of conversion, and it is through a series of concrete narratives, placed one against another like a series of lenses concentrating light to a single searing point, that Augustine comes to his supreme, remarkably non-intellectual, non-noetic moment of truth. When Augustine integrates christology and ontology more explicitly, it is at the expense of the phenomenological power of Confessions VIII. The volonté de système begins to close in on the biblical message. Where Dubarle finds in the sequence of Confessions VII and VIII the announcement and initiation of “an entire intellectual economy of Christian theology and, in a more hidden way, of ontology itself” (203), I would rather say that this is what the sense of these books becomes when they are interpreted ontotheologically and that the economy thus established is none other than that of metaphysical theology, that is, basically, ontotheology. But there is also to be found in the sequence of these books the possibility of a quite different economy of Christian theology, building on the differentiation of faith from philosophy. Augustine never sought to realize this possibility, yet his texts as we have them call on us to do it for him.

Dubarle speaks of a Christic displacement of the ontology of Confessions VII but in reality he eludes the possibility of a true Christic displacement which, following Augustine himself, would build on the theologal displacement of the God of metaphysics by the biblical “Thou” which we have already glimpsed in Confessions VII. Dubarle’s displacement is in reality a confirmation and the difference the biblical language he invokes makes to the metaphysical structure of Augustine’s thought is minor. In fact any difference it could make is erased in the dialectic of the nomen essentiae (“I am who am,” “He who is”) and the nomen misericordiae (“I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob” – Exodus 3:15; see En. in Ps. 121:5), for the second of these names is neatly subordinated to the first, signifying how the infinite, impenetrable God stoops to the limits of human comprehension. Faith is associated with the nomen misericordiae, which refers to the economy of historical signs; these are systematically subordinated to the eternal signified, mysteriouslv indicated in the nomen essentiae. To abide in the horizon of faith in the God of Abraham is difficult when it is over-arched in advance by the transhistorical naming of God as ipsum esse. Dubarle claims that “the two namings of God cause their respective meanings to be continued and as it were reversed one in the other” (228). Jesus is the fullest expression of the nomen misericordiae yet his own fullest self-expression is a return to the nomen essentiae, the “I am” of the Fourth Gospel. Conversely, “the ontology of the divine substance” always contains implicitly a moment of “Christological mercy” so that “the essential nexus of Augustine’s theology is Christological much rather than ontotheological” (229). The divine name “EST” is not simply ontological in the philosophical sense; for Augustine it includes “a certain connotation of the divine Word… coming to implant in this world the reality of divine filiation” (231). Here again I suspect that the unity of the simplicity of the divine substance and the fullness of the biblical revelation in the word “EST” is a matter of orchestration in which the alterity of metaphysical and biblical is smoothed over. Dubarle sees Augustine as “recovering the unity of the two nominations distinguished in Exodus” (232). What is their unity in the original biblical narrative? It is the unity of the holiness and unapproachable mystery of the Lord on the one hand and his fidelity to Israel on the other, a unity which can　be grasped in contemplation, not in a speculative synthesis but in constant wonder that the Most High has looked down with compassion on his people. The two divine names can be held together in a phenomenological way, as both names lay claim on the believer, and insofar as Augustine holds them together thus his thought moves in a biblical horizon foreign to metaphysics; but insofar as he attempts to hold them together with the bonds of speculative logic, in which “the interior structurations of the divine reality” are united with “an ontology founded in the reasoned perception of the difference between the creature and God the Creator” and a “synergy” is installed between “purely human knowledge and the intelligent reflection and apperception of faith” (ib.), the result is that the duality of biblical names is replaced by a duality of biblical faith seeking metaphysical understanding. Thus Augustine accommodates the truths of faith as best he can to the requirements of rnetaphysical reason by expanding the unifying notion of “being” so as to embrace them comprehensively, locating all the data of Scripture on an ontotheological map. The enlargement of the language of being to embrace the procession of the Word, the Incarnation, and salvation history is continuous with the movement within Neo-Platonism which was generous in using the word “being” to designate the supreme hypostases and the lesser realities depending on them. Even if this movement received a new force from the doctrine of creation, there is nothing in it which intrinsically conflicts with the fundamental orientation of metaphysics. Augustine applies this ontological grid to scriptural as well as to cosmological or psychological data, but it is not here that his radical difference from the philosophers is to be found; for that we must look to the “Thou” to whom the whole construction is referred. Augustine himself tends to integrate the divine “Thou” within metaphysics. Faith, instead of being explicated in terms of a calling on or trusting in God, terms irreducible to any other, becomes an epistemological and ontological principle, which fits us for “seeing in an ineffable way that ineffable being” (De Trinitate I 2.3). Yet Augustine’s direct language of faith is so passionately engaged with the “Thou” of the God of Abraham that the functional and mediating status of faith within the metaphysical scheme of things is often left behind for a style of confession inspired by the Psalms, in which faith dwells entirely in its relation to its object, renouncing any aspiration to situate speculatively either itself or its object. The faith overflowing in such cries as Confessions I 5.5 (“Who shall grant me to rest in thee…”) and throughout the whole of the Confessions insofar as they are regulated by the vivid conviction of the address to the divine “Thou” eludes articulation in the categories of the Platonic via-patria, purgation-vision, temporal-eternal, visible-invisible, belief-knowledge schemes. The object of this faith, like the God of the New Testament (who is Spirit, Love), cannot in the last analysis be named by any metaphysical term. Even though ninety percent of what Augustine says about God and faith represents a superb metaphysical apprehension of these ideas, the remaining ten percent, the part that to the contemporary reader seems to witness most powerfully to the reality of faith and to the reality of God, breaks open the framework of metaphysical names and evokes God in the open-ended “Thou” whom we may name as we will (“Summe, optime, potentissime, omnipotentissime…”Confessions I 4.4) as long as every name is heard as declaring the surpassing greatness of that “Thou” and does not fall back again within the limits of a metaphysical representation. Only in this openness are the divine names “Christic”: Christ opens them up to their fullest resonance. The name “EST” sometimes has this status in Augustine; but insofar as it becomes the key-word of an ontological system, bringing Christ into place in an ontological scheme, it can no longer figure as a fitting name for God in our discourse. Like the word “Absolute” it is too burdened with the historical aspirations of ontotheology to name worthily the God of faith.

AUGUSTINE THE BELIEVER

Augustine is surely “the man to beat.” Few historical figures have imposed their authority as uncontestedly. But in what did this authority consist? Can faith today simply accept. Augustine’s authority unreservedly, or can our faith be nourished by his only across a questioning relationship? No other document exemplifies as convincingly as the Confessions what it means to see with the eyes of faith. Augustine’s mastery of biblical and metaphysical paradox allows him to focus the phenomenality of God as apprehended by faith; the genre of the confession, both prayer and narration, provided a uniquely effective medium for this focusing. But in addition the wide span of his experience and the intensity of his philosophical, ethical and religious meditation on it enabled him to grasp the contours of his own life, and of human life in general, not only with an existential and psychological insight equal to that of any other writer, but with an unwavering theological and metaphysical lucidity which lights up in uncanny detail the byways of sin and grace, human folly and divine providence, firmly establishing the right order of things at every turn. It is not so much that Augustine assumes a divine view from above on human life; in fact he writes in constant awareness of the defective human status of his insights. Rather, his powerful experience of being known and judged by God is what he is chiefly concerned to articulate, and it quite naturally unfolds into a comprehensive examination of the human conscience.

However, if our analysis of the Confessions is correct, it may be that to a contemporary reading they can be seen to suffer the defect of their virtue, namely, an excess of metaphysical lucidity, a too definitive ordering of the world and of life. This defect has two roots: the nature of Augustine’s faith and the metaphysical texture of his thinking. As a metaphysical thinker Augustine works towards a comprehensive and exhaustive ordering of the data of experience; his writing is surely in large part inspired by the will to uncover such total order; the inconclusive, the open-ended, the ambiguous emerge as surds on which this ambition stumbles again and again, but they are never delighted in as pointers to another kind of insight. Augustine is never content to let them be, still less to allow them to subversively unravel the dominant metaphysical texture of his thought. Augustine’s faith is founded on the authority of the Church, an authority whose providential epistemological function he proved in opposition to Neo-Platonist and Manichean presumption. His conversion spelled a total identification with this authority, to the point that he became its living embodiment. To what extent was this act of faith too a metaphysical principle, a ground of certitude and insight on which he could capitalize in his voluminous writings and in the other activities which served to further define and round out the ideal of the orthodox Christian Church? To what extent has the traditional Western conception of the Church’s mode of teaching and acting in the world been a metaphysical construction? Is faith obliged to outgrow this Augustinian model of ecclesial existence, and to find a new one, inspired not only by biblical models (the people of God, the body of Christ), which Augustine’s ecclesiology in any case fully subsumed, but, more essentially, by the necessity for the Church to become a questioning, dialogal community in accord with the wider contemporary horizons of its mission and in accord with the critical turn Western consciousness has taken? Is the Church an institution which masters life in a system of metaphysical insight or is it a community of prophetic faith which relinquishes such pretentions in order to discern what the Lord’s will is for the here and now? To what extent are the Church’s “answers” always subordinate to a deeper life of questioning in faith, of seeking after God? Augustinian faith seeks understanding; but perhaps this dynamic of seeking is best retrieved today if interpreted in terms of a universal human search which is not suspended or even limited by the act of Christian faith (or of any other kind of faith) but continues unceasingly under whatever religious or areligious complexion. Confession of the Church’s faith remains an act of obedience, giving a foothold of certitude, but with such a greatly heightened sense of the historicity of the tradition in which it enables one to share and of the fragility and questionability of the categories which it obliges one to assume, that faith is henceforth much less conscious of “having the answers” than of having gained a locus standi for pursuing the questions at greater depth.

A differentiated reception of Augustine’s faith along these lines would enable us to overcome the oppressive aspect of his legacy, and to overcome it not through skeptical negation but through the affirmation of the deepest implications of that faith. Where Augustine hammers Scripture and metaphysics together in triumphant affirmation, we allow the tensions between them to prompt the formation of a more delicate and questioning language about God. Where Augustine maps human life in the light of eternity, we pursue the method of Augustinian phenomenology more consequently than Augustine himself did and reduce this mapping more strictly to the phenomenological data to which it testifies. Even as “Thou,” Augustine’s God is too massive, even oppressive, a presence, so that we are obliged to question even the most basic and biblical stance of Augustinian faith, opening it up to a sense of the relativity of the indications of God found even in the most privileged experience. The reality of Augustine’s experience is to be retrieved across a critical consciousness of the inadequacies of his language as these have become apparent. This can be done by reinterpreting Augustine in light of a new set of coordinates, those of contemporary faith, admitting the questionability of the metaphysical and even the biblical coordinates which were entirely determinative in his own discourse. Of course what is thus retrieved is no longer the experience of Augustine; that experience is no longer possible for us. But it is a more authentic communication “from faith to faith” than can be reached by fictitious efforts to repeat that experience, whether in the key of metaphysical enlightenment, biblical piety, or existentialist revamping. This differentiated reception of the Confessions should make possible a more decisive overcoming of the later Augustine. As a bishop Augustine enacted on the grandest scale the practical consequences of the excess of metaphysical lucidity and the stylized repertoire of biblical themes which give his faith its peculiar cast. A work like the City of God may in part deserve to be celebrated as a triumph of the vision of faith, but it may also represent the rather summary burial of classical humanity. In ordering all reality according to the will of God, Augustine may have increasingly depleted the phenomena of experience of their intrinsic significance, with the result that the will of God too became an increasingly abstract principle. Thus the career of Augustine, by its very consistency, which despite its strong but narrow biblical basis is primarily a metaphysical consistency, may have inflicted a deep wound on Western consciousness, reinforcing the absolutism of the metaphysical principle of ground with the absolutism of a dogmatic certitude of faith which matched it perfectly. In this career we witness the final convergence of Christianity and metaphysics under the unity of a single principle, the God of the West, a principle which would hold sway even over such critics of metaphysics as Luther, Calvin, and Pascal. It is surely this God – and not the moral God of Kant or some other convenient scapegoat – which is in question when thinkers like Nietzsche diagnose “the death of God”; (one must presume they were sufficiently familiar with their traditions to know what they meant by “God”). If Augustine’s God has died, it may be that the God of the Bible insofar as “he” lends himself to this under-standing is also attainted. By exploiting to the full one virtuality of the biblical legacy Augustine may have shown the dangers of that aspect and made a more differentiated reading of Scripture obligatory for us – one which might seek traces there of Nietzsche’s “God who dances.”

In the study of Augustine we confront in its most characteristic form the religious identity of our Western world, including, it may be suspected, that original sin of our religion, a fanaticism of metaphysical abstraction, to which many subsequent more visible evils might be traced. That study should be a work of healing, a patient dismantling of those decisions, largely determined by the prior developments of metaphysical theology, which continue to block our access to a life of faith today. As this work of healing the Western believing mind proceeds, a transformation of thinking begins to take place, analogous, in the realm of faith, to that which Heidegger and others have mapped elsewhere. The immensity of Augustine’s work and influence and the small success of the explicit efforts which have been made to overcome that influence are but one indication of how long the task of transforming tradition must continue. One must linger for a long time with each of its great monuments before their significance for contemporary faith, both their oppressive significance as metaphysical construction and their liberative significance as witness, can be brought into view. It would be premature to claim that this past has been outgrown and put behind us, and that we can go on to state boldly the meaning of Christian faith for today without further ado. On the other hand, the ongoing task of overcoming tradition need not entirely paralyze the present articulation of faith. In fact without such an effort at articulation the task of overcoming would lack the contemporary coordinates which guide it. Thus we now proceed, in the final chapter, to articulate the essence of Christianity in contemporary terms, though conscious that the ghost of Augustine. and the other ghosts of the past, have not been shaken off or adequately pacified, and that our reflections on this theme must therefore be even more provisional and programmatic than those on the topic of overcoming metaphysics.

                                                         

Questioning Back, Chapter V

THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY

Christian identity has been metaphysical for two millennia. It has been founded on a comprehensive dogmatic vision in which all reality was ordered in function of its first origin and final goal. Within a metaphysical culture the essence of Christianity could be satisfactorily expressed in dogmatic formulations, of which the Nicene Creed was the most central. The emergence in recent centuries of an explicit quest for the essence of Christianity stemmed from a sense that this credal definition of Christian identity was no longer sufficient and that it was necessary to step back behind it to some more fundamental and immediate apprehension of Christian truth. But this quest for the essence of Christianity was itself governed by metaphysics, first of all in its point of departure – it tended to envisage “Christianity” as a united whole, a system whose principles might be laid bare like any other “-ism,” and thus stepped away from the vantage point of faith itself, supplementing the quest intrinsic to faith with a detached philosophical consideration of its essence; second, in its effort to reduce the Christian message to a single explanatory principle – even such a fine phrase as Harnack’s “eternal life in the midst of time” might suggest that Christianity can be explained as the interplay of two abstract principles, the eternal and the temporal, the absolute and the relative; third, in the very ambition to secure an “essence” of Christianity – this implied the desire to step above the stream of the historical manifestations of Christian faith in order to grasp it sub specie aeternitatis; the essence once grasped, all the rest could be mastered as inessential manifestation; fourth, in the realm in which the essence was located, the realm of modern metaphysical ideals of subjectivity and immediate experience. These metaphysical emphases were corrected in dialectical theology which showed that one cannot speak adequately of faith from outside the situation of being addressed by the Word of God; that this Word is “living and active” and refuses to be summarized as a principle or set of principles; that the Word cannot be detached from its historical manifestations – including Scripture, church teaching, and preaching – though it may effect an immanent critique of them, to which theological reflection must be attuned; that the sphere of subjectivity does not ground or regulate the hearing of faith but is rather called in question by it, so that it loses its self-evidence.

However, the quest for the essence of Christianity now survives in a different form, as a concrete question of identity. This question is conditioned by consciousness of several aspects of the historical situation of Christianity which dialectical theology did not sufficiently acknowledge. When the closure of metaphysics and the consequent loss of the traditional Christian metaphysical self-understanding are fully registered; when one is aware of the radical historicity of every aspect of the life of faith, a historicity which can no longer be camouflaged by metaphysical presuppositions; when one traces the reference to a given cultural milieu and to a given praxis or “form of life” inscribed in every discourse of faith; when one realizes that the context-dependent representations of faith are never simply translatable from one historical horizon to another; when one sounds the contingency of the historical forms faith has taken and of the language we have inherited, which is seen to be intrinsically inconclusive, open-ended and infinitely revisable – then the question of the essence of Christianity takes the following shape: “How can Christian identity be expressed realistically and convincingly today, in the clarity of a conscious assumption of its own historicity, and without any uncritical dependence on inherited representations?” The answer cannot take the form of an unending scholarly self-critique, for it must be a declaration of faith, albeit a modest, sober, and questioning one. What are the conditions of a valid contemporary articulation of Christian faith?

THE IMPERATIVE OF SIMPLICITY

Although the quest for essential Christianity has often succumbed to the nostalgia for the primordial simplicity of some immediate experience, and thus fallen under the sway of a metaphysics erecting this primordial ground into a supreme principle of explanation, nevertheless any radical questioning after religious identity is bound to obey an imperative of simplicity, a thirst for firsthand contact with the heart of the matter, such as has been manifest in all the major turning points of the history of religion. On the other hand, a consciousness of historicity indicates the limits by which the realization of this imperative is bound. It is no longer possible, for example, to project the historical myths of recovered origins on which most religious reforms of the past have been based. We see too clearly that in all these efforts the founding figure, Abraham, Jesus, the Buddha, Mahomet, is made the subject of a series of fictions, each intended to free the pure firsthand experience of the faith from secondary accretions of later tradition, but each in fact representing a new creative initiative in the tradition. Nor are these prophetic initiatives ever able to cut through the knots of history as cleanly as they aim to do. The path to the simple is never a simple one. The radical prophetic gesture of a Jeremiah or a Stephen against the temple, of Paul in regard to the law, of Luther in regard to religious externality, is quickly subsumed in a tradition of correction and commentary; it may serve to inspire and guide a complex process of theological and historical unraveling, as theologians “tidy up” after the prophet’s passage, but in this subsequent stocktaking the inspiring gesture itself is relativized in an unending critical reassessment. History thus teaches that definitive access to the simple core of faith is a largely illusory goal. Indeed every attempt to define such a simple core becomes the foundation of a complex tradition against which another prophet must in turn raise the cry for simplification. It is true that any articulation of essential Christianity today must depend either on some practical living out of Christian love in relation to the demands of the times or on some great contemplative enlightenment like that of Augustine, and that such prophetic or contemplative happenings in the Christian community provide the supreme locus theologicus in which theology must dwell in order to trace the emergent shape of Christian identity. It is here that theology encounters the imperative of simplicity in concrete form. But even charity and contemplation are historically embedded; they are not a recovery of the original, or the perennial, offering an escape from history, but represent the work of the Spirit in this particular moment, a work which will be unrepeatable tomorrow. Critical historical awareness can keep the space clear for this work, preventing it from being haunted by those memories of past forms of Christian experience which every Christian has inherited and which can tempt both individual and community to a somnambulistic repetition of the past, either unconsciously or in some proud movement of restoration. Furthermore, historically conscious theology can draw out the full implications of these realizations of Christianity in praxis and contemplation, interpreting them in function of the historical situation in which Christianity, having lost its metaphysical identity, is forced to question back to its origins in a more radical way.

This questioning back is not an escape from history, but rather the full assumption of historicity. It spells, for instance, not an idealization of the New Testament, but a critical sifting of its discourse in view of the subsequent course of the history it founded. In action, contemplation, and theological reflection Christianity today is defining its identity anew, in a creative reprise of the first self-definition of the Christian community in the New Testament. But why is it necessary to redefine Christian identity? Why not be content, as a Wittgensteinian linguistic therapist would be, to let language take care of itself, that is, having overcome its metaphysical elements, to let the great flood of Christian discourse flow on unimpeded in all its richness? The reason is that even in its biblical dimensions this discourse has become involved in a dangerous inflationary career, using too freely words which have been detached from their historical context, or else invoking these words and their context in forgetfulness of the fact that this context is no longer accessible. Such words as “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” and such contexts as those in the New Testament are subject to this inflationary exploitation in any Sunday homily. The inflation can be corrected only by providing a contemporary objective correlate for every word used and by re-evaluating every word in function of its historical significance and its pertinence to the contemporary situation addressed. Such a critique extended to the entire range of Christian discourse amounts to a review of the historical shape of Christian tradition from the New Testament on. The Christian faith must no longer be seen in mystifying terms as something which dropped from heaven, but as historical through and through. If the great intellectual adventure of Christianity in this century has been its exposure to the critical currents of Western thinking (including Marxism), it is probable that the next adventure, which has scarcely begun, will be that of a full-scale confrontation with the traditions and mentalities of the East. The Christian tradition will not be ready for that adventure unless it enjoys a concrete, demystified historical self-understanding. This demands not only the overcoming of metaphysics, but also a reinterpretation of the New Testament witness in a renewed dialogue with Judaism. Christianity carries its “other”‘in its bosom, for Judaism is the rock from which it was hewn. In the metaphysical period the encounter with Judaism was ruled unnecessary; the “Old Testament” was subordinated to the new through the logic of Platonism building on the Messianic typology of the infant Church, which is one of the features of the New Testament that surely demand to be reviewed; the historicity of Israel and of Christianity as deriving from Israel was erased in metaphysical schemata and the way in which Christianity and Judaism are thrown together in an unresolved historical problematic was ignored. Unless this concrete history is now fully accepted Christians will go to meet other faiths carrying a burden of abstractions which have lost both their historical and their contemporary context and which can only generate confusion in dialogue. No doubt the other faiths will have to face their historicity in a similar way.

A concrete historical self-understanding frees Christians for dialogue with other faiths; it also makes possible the focusing and application of Christian energies, for it allows one to experience faith as a specific historical project rather than a set of timeless velleities. The healing effect of this historical reduction may be compared to that of psychoanalysis; and just as one embarking on psychoanalysis expects not total self-knowledge, but a provisional self-understanding adequate for the business of living here and now, so a contemporary grasp of Christian identity is sufficient if it gives the community a critical insight into its tradition and a lucid perspective on the present historical engagements of faith. Insight in both cases is provisional, sufficient for the day. At each turning of the path of faith through history past perspectives are shut off and the stretch of road to be traveled in the present is lit up; this too disappears at the next turning, while the forest itself remains fairly impenetrable. But just as the provisionality of the attainments of psychoanalysis does not lessen the force of the command “Know thyself,” neither does the complexity of history dissolve the imperative of simplicity which urged us towards that provisional breakthrough which makes it possible to live by faith here and now. As theology is conscious both of this imperative and of its provisionality it becomes a functional theology, a therapy of contemporary faith. It relinquishes the aspiration to add speculative gains to faith’s small degree of knowledge of its objects; indeed it may even whittle away this knowledge, hastening the process of its attrition insofar as it is illusory or anachronistic. Instead it aims at precise discernment of the present historical context of faith and of the possibilities granted by that context, fully accepting the limitations of what Ricoeur calls le croyable disponible, but also ready to welcome the scandalous breakthrough of essential Christianity wherever the Spirit produces it, fully accepting the death of the old, so as to be free to welcome the new. This discernment must also overcome those counter-essences which always spring up alongside prophetic recoveries of the essence (as Gnosticism almost strangled Christianity in the cradle, or as the false prophets simulated the true).

For metaphysical Christianity encounter with other traditions is always a secondary affair, classed under the rubric of mission or ecumenism. But today it is the presence of those other traditions which presses Christianity into shape, revealing to it its precise historical identity. “They know naught of Christianity who only Christianity know” (Ninian Smart). For a questioning faith mission is less the promulgation of dogma than a sharing of traditions in the context of a larger questioning after truth; as dialogue becomes increasingly inescapable the texture of Christianity becomes dialogal through and through, and its creeds appear as starting points in a quest which cannot be continued without the assistance of the other. The positivity of the biblical revelation is reinterpreted as that of an incomplete and culturally limited project of faith which depends for its continued realization on the corrections and supplements coming from the religious insight of other cultures (as well as from the secular, “religionless” culture of the West). The scriptural affirmations continue to be fertile and to open the human mind to God only when understood in this open-ended way. The dewesternization of Christianity which the present decentering of the traditional historical role of the West makes necessary goes further than most projects of inculturation (such as those of Joseph Spae), and involves not only the overcoming of metaphysics, but also the relativization of the Semitic and Hellenic cultural forms of Scripture. Thus, the aim of certain Indian theologians to build a bridge directly from the language of Scripture to that of Hinduism, bypassing the metaphysical categories of the West – as well as similar tendencies in Latin American liberation theology – can involve a mystifying, ahistorical appeal to the world of the Bible which also contradicts authentic inculturation.

Viewed in this larger perspective (which in today’s world is the only realistic one) the differences between the Christian churches lose much of their importance, and can be seen as serving chiefly for mutual correction. The dialogue with Judaism already unites Protestants and Catholics, focusing their attention on the basic Christian themes, and the dialogue with Eastern religions, in which the very premises of both Judaism and Christianity become problematic, further radicalizes that task of “discerning the way” which both Judaism and Christianity share. In practice the overcoming of metaphysics is closely associated with this new exposure of Christianity to its Jewish matrix (and of both Judaism and Christianity to a wider field of questions) and it cannot be carried out seriously without this breadth of exposure; a narrowly intra-Christian or intra-denominational tinkering with the language of faith cannot achieve the step back from the sphere of metaphysical Christianity to the “original Christianity” it occludes; this step back can be nothing less than a remembrance of the Jewish matrix of Christian faith and of the historical decisions which founded a separate Christian identity. To focus Christian identity it is not enough to think back from the horizons of the contemporary Christian denominations, all of them shaped by Western metaphysics and culture; one must also think forward from Judaism, re-evaluating the necessity and legitimacy of the Christian innovations and querying their cultural provenance. This dialogue with Judaism can be fruitfully pursued only in the context of a search for a truth which transcends both Judaism and Christianity as historically constituted and in partnership with other participants in that search. This spells a relativization of secondary identities and a transgression of denominational taboos which may indeed bring with it the risk of “religious indifferentism,” but that risk is surely preferable to the misunderstandings and violence generated by the co-existence of mutually contradictory religions which refuse to be questioned and challenged by one another. If Christianity is made conscious in dialogue of its historical and cultural limits its affirmation of God is tempered by a greater sense of mystery, a sense that the identity of God is primarily a theme for questioning, and this empirically induced nescience is perhaps the characteristic contemporary mark of the authentic simplicity of faith.

The contemporary quest for essential Christianity also involves the effort to trace the language and the claims of faith back to a fundamental validating experience. The truth of any religion, it is assumed, is primarily lodged in such a founding experience, and all religions are in more intimate dialogue at this level, if only we can gain access to it, than in their secondary reflexive formulations. Though the goals which such a quest for firsthand experience projects are often illusory, and though there is perhaps no pure religious experience not dependent on the mediation of a tradition of reflection, still the search for the underlying phenomenality of revelation is a legitimate direction of enquiry, even if it is a direction that can never be followed through to its ideal destination. To check and control Christian language it is necessary to attempt to trace it back to the experience from which it is born, or rather to forcibly convert that language back to its equivalents at the level of phenomenality. How this might be done in regard to the christological claims which are the chief distinguishing marks of Christianity I shall attempt to show in the following examination of the Nicene Creed and the Fourth Gospel. Guided by the imperative of recovering the dimension of phenomenality, we may discover that the textuality of tradition opens up approaches to religious truth larger and subtler than the dogmatic, and that through it sounds the question “Who do you say that I am?” in a way that subverts the unity and authority of its explicit doctrinal statements, revealing them as mere pointers to a still outstanding answer. This subversion of the dogmatic letter by the questioning Spirit reveals that the settled truth of dogma is of less importance to faith than the unsettling truth which emerges unpredictably in poem or parable, in the prophetic reading of a situation, in enlightening gestures – Jesus healing on the Sabbath – which transcend every formulable principle or regulated practice. The identity of Christ is constantly being uncovered in such unsettling moments of truth, which show him to be semper maior, as elusive in his final identity as God himself. It is only because beneath all formal affirmations the question “Who do you say that I am?”remains an unmasterable question that the notion of the divinity of Christ can be a credible one. As we attempt to trace the import of that notion at the level of phenomenality, in a “loving strife about the matter itself’ with the great texts which by their dependence on myth or metaphysics partly occlude this level, we will come to see that the figure of Christ as it has been grasped in traditional horizons is but a partial and provisional sketch of the Christ to be discovered in the great learning process thrust upon us by the opening up of larger horizons of questioning today. As tradition is overcome under the pressure of this vaster future upon it, the cross and resurrection of Jesus come into new focus in the travail of difference. The Christ we have known is only a limited historical manifestation of Christ; the Christ whom faith holds to be universal is not yet manifest. The former is the seed which must fall in the ground again and again and die if the full dimensions of the incarnate phenomenality of God are to become apparent. The entire language of pre-existence, resurrection, and exaltation names this hidden dimension of Christ towards which Christian faith is always underway, losing Christ again and again in order to find him in his fullness. Knowledge of Christ “according to the flesh” (2 Cor. 5:16) is always surpassed and relativized in the quest for the Lord who is Spirit (3:17-18). To present any defined concept or representation of Christ as the key to world history can only be a form of metaphysical imperialism. But if one lets the figure of Jesus be a divine question to the world, a question whose full implications – “the breadth and length and height and depth” (Eph. 3:18) – are always unfolding, often canceling former understandings, then the universality of such a question is not offensive, since the question is modified by each new group to which it is addressed, and each such modification undoes old answers.

THE NICENE CREED

How does the question of Christ to this generation alter or undo the classic Christian understanding of Christ expressed in the Nicene Creed? Can the Creed be recited today as an adequate expression of the question of Christ in its universality, or does it confine that question within the limited cultural horizons of Jewish myth and Greek metaphysics? Some contemporary theologians claim that the divinity of Christ is sufficiently acknowledged if he is accepted as God’s word to our Western culture. This view undermines the New Testament claims at a basic level. It stems from a confusion between the authentic Christ of faith, who is semper maior, and the figure of Christ which was absolutized in the West and presented as the “concrete universal” (Hegel) in which all other religious traditions found consummation; in reaction to this the “myth of God incarnate” theorists produce an equally metaphysical account of a culturally limited Christ, an account probably originating in nineteenth century Neo-Hegelian circles. The universal status of Christ in the New Testament, on the other hand (cf. Mt 28:18; Jn 17:2; Heb.1:2; Rev. 1:8, etc.), can no longer be adequately grasped in the traditional mythical and metaphysical expressions of it, such as those of the Nicene Creed, and demands of us, not only the demythologization and dehellenization which our sense of historicity makes mandatory in any case, but a new style of thinking which will permit the question “Who do you say that I am?” to resound both in Western and in other cultures in a more penetrating way, no longer stifled by the prompt metaphysical or mythical answer.

In addition to asking whether the Creed matches the true universality of the Christ of faith, we must also ask if it effectively poses the question of Christ in its historicity. For although the Christ of faith is always greater than the historical manifestations of Christ (including the historical Jesus and all reconstructions or idealizations of him), nonetheless the ongoing revelation of Christ can never be ripped from its historical sheath and can never be apprehended independently of a narration of the story of Jesus of Nazareth. This narration must be raised to a pneumatic level, under pain of idolatry, and this is already accomplished in Paul and John. A contemporary narration would have to take into account the larger history that has opened up for us, enlarging both the “Old Testament” past to which Paul and John referred and the conception of the “Gentiles” which was their measure of the universality of Christ. The concrete historical self-understanding of the Christian community is expressed in such a narrational topography of the revelation of Christ which need not fear to revise and enlarge that of the New Testament. While the Nicene Creed does set the figure of Jesus Christ in a narrational context, within the predominantly metaphysical structure of the Creed that history is frozen and stylized, subordinated to the timeless patterns of the Trinity and of the distinction between Creator and creation. The reciter of the Creed is not drawn into close engagement with the historical texture of the Christ-event; instead such engagement is reduced to anamnesis of Jesus and expectation of his second coming. Just as the Creed confines the universality of Christ within a metaphysical concept of that universality, so it reduces the historicity of Christ to the “essential facts” about the earthly Jesus and the exalted Christ, with no indication that both are being refocused constantly as history unfolds.

As the universality of the question of Christ unfolds, anamnesis of the historical Jesus is correspondingly modified. The historical Jesus may never be erased, but there is truth in the idea that it is the “that” rather than the “what” of his life, teaching, death, and resurrection which matters. If Jesus was a male Jew, the Christ of faith is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female (Gal. 3:28), though  a merely metaphysical notion of this universality has gone hand in hand with anti-Semitism and racism and has not been able to celebrate the Jewishness of “the Christ according to the flesh” (Rom. 9:5). If Jesus was a celibate, the bridegroom of the Canticle could represent a sexual fulfillment which accords eminently with spiritual liberation (here Goethe may correct Augustine or Asia heal Europe). If Jesus died at one place and time, the Christ recognized in the breaking of bread is a gift to all places and times (but how our liturgies confine the gift!).Theological appeals to the humanity of Jesus should always be conditioned by the full breadth of the present form of the question of Christ. Contemporary secularity, for example, allows us to project images of the humanity of Jesus as “the man for others” (Bonhoeffer) or as the one whose existence reveals that life itself is grace (James Mackey). It does not really matter if these portraits solicit the exegetical data, for the Christ of faith has always supplemented and corrected the historical Jesus, and reshaped the memory of Jesus according to its own requirements, nor does a scholarly reconstruction of the historical Jesus offer a yardstick for measuring these developments. (The value of such historical research for faith is indirect, helping to shatter images of the humanity of Jesus which have become unworthy of the Christ of faith and prompting new focusings of that humanity, but never itself presenting an image of Jesus which can be directly assumed by contemporary faith.) Furthermore, the memory of Jesus is never adequately realized unless he is also grasped as “the human face of God.” Any image of Jesus can become an idol, and the iconic status of Christ crucified has to be reconquered again and again in an effort to refocus it as divine revelation. Because the Christ of faith is never definitively apprehended, the figure of Jesus can correspondingly be remembered in an unending variety of ways. Because the universality of the Christian message is never fully manifest (except in premature or illusory metaphysical projections), the historicity of Christianity is correspondingly subject to unending reassessment. It appears that the Nicene Creed forecloses this process of questioning at both ends.

However, the Nicene Creed may still be used as a badge of Christian identity in a way similar to that in which the Marseillaise, despite the disappearance of its Sitz im Leben, serves to express the historical identity of France. Thus recited, the Creed is not a fully direct expression of contemporary faith, but an act of commitment to the tradition of faith, mediated by historical memory of a classical moment in the life of that tradition. A historically conscious recitation of the Creed accepts it as binding on faith, but only across a number of transformations which the language of the Creed itself, when critically sifted, is found to prescribe. In the second article of the creed, for instance, we can differentiate the following layers of language:
(1) The assertive and commissive speech act “I believe in…”which governs all the other statements, ensuring that they are neither simple statements of fact, on the one hand, nor merely devotional or affective utterances on the other;
(2) The confessional naming of “One Lord, Jesus Christ,” which indicates the primary object of this assertion and commitment; the entire second article is an explicitation of what is thus named;
(3) What seems bare statement of fact – “crucified under Pontius Pilate”; the credal context implies a declaration that this fact is religiously significant and not to be forgotten;
(4) More stylized diction in which the credal coloration of fact becomes manifest – “suffered and was buried”;
(5) Quasi-historical statements whose texture is permeated by numinous references – “he came down from heaven, took flesh of the Holy Spirit from the Virgin Mary,” “he rose on the third day… and he ascended into heaven . . . and he will come again in glory.” Here the confession regards historical events in light of their heavenly background with the help of representations which are mythical in texture. When one realizes the obsolescence of the cultural matrices from which such representations are drawn and the impossibility of stepping behind history in order to view it from an eternal vantage point, then one finds that the language of the Creed prescribes a recovery of the phenomenological foundations of such statements. The descent/ascent schema is an archaic and cryptic pointer to the mystery of Christ, which challenges our faith to apprehend it in more accessible terms;
(6) Interpretative clauses which give a theological (chiefly soteriological) reason for the events recalled – “for us men and for our salvation,” “for us,” “according to the Scriptures,” “to judge the living and the dead”;
(7) A statement of the ontological significance of the Incarnation – “and became man.” Perhaps we can convincingly recapture the force of this affirmation only by translating it into the language of a Christology from below;
(8) The historical data are transcended toward their foundations in a more radical way in the narration of a celestial pre-history – “the only-begotten Son of God, born of the Father”;
(9) The celestial post-history, ”he sits at the right hand of the Father,” differs from 5 and is closer to 8 in the boldness of its construction in a mythical space and time quite beyond history. Contemporary faith understands that the ultimate identity of Christ is to be sought in the divine dimensions thus indicated, but cannot make convincing use of the mythical language to point to that dimension. Instead it is challenged to apprehend the phenomenality of the Christ of faith in terms which make it comprehensible why such language was used;
(10) Theological notes appended to ward off heretical misreadingsof the mythic narration – “before all ages” (against Arius); “of his kingdom there will be no end” (against Marcellus of Ancyra; without this polemic intent it would be merely a devotional reminiscence of Luke 1:33, in tension with the economy of credal language);
(11) A second set of theological notes imposing a new logical precision on the mythic narration – “God from God... true God from true God, begotten not made.” This reflexive underlining of the ontological status attaching to the terms of the narrative reveals th e emergence of a logically vigilant doctrinal consciousness. One senses that a metaphysical insistence is beginning to overload and distort the narrative texture;
(12) The doxological supplement “light from light” may be an effort to compensate for this distortion, providing a mythical, narrative equivalent for the daunting bareness of “God from God”;
(13) A second layer of logical clarification using the notion of “substance” – “that is, of the substance of the Father” (Nicea, 325, only), “of one substance with the Father.” These clearly cannot be reintegrated into the narrative context. For the metaphysical culture from which the Creed comes the reduction of the mythic narrative to its logically defined ontological foundations may have been a liberating demythologization. To a contemporary believer these efforts at precision are likely to seem questionable in themselves (can the logic of ousia be at all useful in such a rarefied region of application?) and to increase the questionability of the mythic language they presuppose by revealing the path of increasing abstraction onto which it leads us if we try to sustain it consistently. Again we are referred back to the level of phenomenality, where we must seek the pneumatic Christ who belongs to the same realm as God or the Spirit of God and cannot be thought of in lesser terms;
(14) A phrase from the narrative of creation which serves to define the ontological status of the three divine hypostases in the Creed – “through him all things were made” (cf. “Creator of heaven and earth” and “Lord, giver of life” of Father and Spirit respectively). This location of the being of the triune God in terms of creation is not unproblematic to a contemporary believer either; its　perspective is still that of the celestial pre-history and it attempts to grasp the phenomenon of the world from a point outside it. The　phenomenological foundation of faith in the creative roles of Father, Son, and Spirit needs to be elucidated, and the process of that elucidation might be an unending one, making it very difficult to summarily project the notion of a Creator and to define the ontological status of Creator and creation.

The Creed offers an exhaustive topology of the being and function of Jesus Christ, within a horizon which embraces Creator and creation, the being and manifestation of God, the origin and destiny of the world, eternity and time, past, present, and future. But it seems that this comprehensive horizon is no longer accessible to us, that we are thrown back on the intra-historical phenomenality of revelation, so that our confession of Christ (or of the Father or the Holy Spirit) can spell an opening up to that phenomenality, but not a leap beyond it. The Creed provides the names “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” with an ontological foundation, referring to a divine substance and tracing the being of Christ to his eternal divine generation; the contemporaneous theology of three “hypostases” of one “substance” completes this ontological underpinning. But it seems that our faith is unable to transcend the naming of Father, Son, and Spirit towards its ontological ground. For us they indicate dimensions of the phenomenality of God in revelation; the terms “substance” and “per-son,” and even the language of the divine “relations,” seem an unnecessary redoubling of faith’s naming of God, which distracts from the exploration of the phenomenality of which is thus named. The unity of God is not effectively preserved by the declaration that there is one underlying substance behind the three names, but should be sought instead in the interplay of the three dimensions in the experience of revelation. The Creed fixes the trinitarian names as points of departure for their salvation-historical and ontological explication. But it seems that even these names can be desacralized by a linguistic and historical awareness which sees their formation neither as a divine mandate nor a conceptual necessity, but as a human effort to map the phenomenality of revelation, a creative or poetic achievement influenced by many contributory cultural streams (none of the three names are unique to Judaism or Christianity). It is not particularly surprising that our faith should be left in the lurch by its traditional language when one considers not only the general problem of the transmission of meaning through history, but the peculiar fragility attached to religious expressions by reason of their ambitious metaphorical structure. Paradoxically, the intrinsic fragility of religious diction has not lessened its extreme durability in practice. This paradox is probably to be explained by the sacralization of this diction which made it seem adequate even when it wasn’t and which ensured that endless efforts of reinterpretation and repristination would be made before any element of the sacral diction was abandoned. But we may be moving into a period in which faith will live with a more humble awareness of the fragility of its language. The saying of faith may turn out-to be something qualitatively different from the sonorousness and pathos of religious diction. A faith which constantly sifts and questions its language mav become incapable of exerting the hypnotic fascination characteristic of religion. But that too is part of the price to be paid for a future culture of questioning faiths in dialogue.

The fragility of the Creed is chiefly due to the dependence of the referring power of metaphorical expressions on context and intention. The metaphor “smitten by Eros” might have had a serious meaning and a distinct reference for Sappho, but it is impossible to use it except in a facetious sense today. This impossibility is not a question of taste but of necessity. The cultural coordinates of the original metaphor have not been transmitted; in the course of the tradition Eros has degenerated to a rococo Cupid. The change of context makes it impossible to use the metaphor with the same passionate intentionality as Sappho might have invested in it. Analogously, the power of the metaphor “born of the Father before time began” depends on a cultural and religious context in which the representation of an eternal sonship can have a rich significance and also on the speaker’s intentionality of faith which can effectively refer to the object of faith by means of this metaphor. At the time of Nicea faith in Christ culminated in the recognition of him as God’s eternal Son. It was not realized that this provision of the celestial backdrop to the figure of Jesus was largely a work of imagination rather than a literal and logical definition of the thing in itself. Yet the extension of the word “son” beyond its normal usage clearly betrays the metaphoricity which cannot be ironed out of the credal expressions. Now the use of this image to express faith’s apprehension of the ultimate significance of Jesus Christ has become problematic to the degree that the cultural coordinates of the image have not been transmitted. These coordinates include a mythical concern with origins, a metaphysical concern with grounds and an anthropological valorization of paternity, three attitudes which converge to reinforce the image of eternal sonship. But if these attitudes have become obsolete (for reasons no less numerous and complex than those which established them in the first place) then the intention of faith cannot securely ride on their back. Thus the confession of Christ as eternal Son no longer satisfactorily fulfills the intention of faith, no longer effectively refers to the object of faith. No amount of work on the terms “substance,” “hypostasis,” or “relation” in the theological laboratory can correct this deficiency of the primary metaphor, for theology can only make sense of the biblical metaphor through retrieving the phenomenality it names. If the metaphor of divine sonship no longer opens out onto the ineffable, but reveals cultural limits which make it impossible for faith to rest in it unquestioningly, and if one cannot find the way back to the original context in which that metaphorical name could be meaningfully uttered, then one is obliged to explore the present context of the language of faith and to find those expressions which best express the intention of faith today. If the name “Son” is retained it will be in a sense that allows it to signify a contemporary apprehension of the phenomenality of Christ.

It seems then that as we recite the Creed today we experience the tensions of Christian tradition in a particularly rich way. We affirm the Creed’s witness of faith and consciously stand in continuity with it in the one tradition; in this affirmation all Christians stand united. But on the other hand we are aware that the Creed is assailed at every point by questions arising not only from the exposure of its language to general laws of semantic relativity and semantic obsolescence (and meaning and reference are so closely intertwined that these laws threaten even the basic capacity of the Creed to refer to its intended objects) but also from the present concern of faith to do justice to the phenomenality of Christ, which is felt to be occluded by metaphysical universals or mythic origins. In reciting the Creed, then, we assume our history as an uncompleted task, seeing clearly in retrospect the poverty and provisionality of this past language, and realizing that we must seek new words having the same poverty and provisionality. An experience of this historical depth was not available to previous generations of Christians and it is one which is bound to have a transforming effect on Christian language and Christian self-identity. This experience with the Creed sends us back to Scripture with a double expectation. On the one hand we hope to find there some clues to the phenomenality of Christ which the metaphysical presuppositions of the patristic theologians caused them to miss. On the other hand we expect the language of Scripture too to be inadequate to the contemporary question of Christ, so that our use of this language too can be valid for faith only if we subject it forcibly to the present concerns of faith. Just as Heidegger aimed to understand the Greeks better than they understood themselves, in a certain sense, so we seek to understand the New Testament witness to Christ in opposition to the obsolescent frameworks of understanding in which it is embodied. As the Johannine writings can be regarded as the most highly reflected articulation of the phenomenality of revelation in the New Testament they are the most promising source for the primordial understanding of faith to which the dogmatic, metaphysical tradition has referred us back. The violence of the following sketch will consist merely in reading John exclusively in the key of phenomenality (in opposition, for instance,to the governing descent/ascent structure insofar as it is mythical and insofar as John’s own language does not at times subvert it; opposed also to the highly personalized language of Father, Son, and Spirit, again, insofar as John himself does not relativize this).

THE FOURTH GOSPEL

The fundamental teaching of John is that the phenomenality ofJesus Christ, as apprehended in faith, is one with the phenomenality of God. Only faith can make satisfying sense of the works or signs of Jesus; their significance comes into focus only in the confession which names what they reveal Jesus to be: John 1:49; 2:11; 4:53; 6:69; 9:38; 11:27; 19:35; 20:28. That significance expands throughout the series of confessions, until fully expressed in the post-resurrection “My Lord and my God.” The works of the historical Jesus are apprehended from a post-Paschal perspective throughout the Gospel, although the two halves of the Gospel also mirror the two phases of the existence of Jesus Christ. Thus the works attributed to the historical Jesus are at the same time to be read as accounts of the believers’ ongoing experience of the pneumatic Christ known in faith, who knows their hearts (1:48), changes old into new (2:1-11), dispels inborn blindness (9:1-7), and raises the dead (11:43). He who does these works can be understood in no lesser terms that those of 1:14: “The Logos became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory.” The phenomenality of Jesus is a divine phenomenality; it cannot be named in lesser terms; these are either a lie (stemming from the world’s incomprehension of the signs – 6:26 – or from a direct refusal of the truth – 8:45-46) or a partial apprehension to be subsumed in a fuller one. Truth, spirit, love, light, eternal life – each of these words has a phenomenal bearing, names a dimension of the revelation of God in Jesus. John integrates all these themes into a mythical structure. But a phenomenological retrieval can allow these themes to burst this framework open. Transposing the Buddhist insight “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” one could say that the form of Jesus is correctly apprehended only as divine Logos (the phenomenality of God); and this form itself subsists on the basis of the divine emptiness with which it is coterminous; as our eyes are opened to the form of Jesus they are at the same time being opened to the emptiness of God. God is intrinsically unseen (1:18), yet to see Christ in faith is to see God (8:19, 14:9). One can trace the contours of this contemplative situation without using the language of pre-existent hypostases which was so impressive in a mythical or even in a metaphysical perspective but has now become a liability. The Christ has come in the flesh (cf. I John 4:2; 2:22), that is, the phenomenality of God is manifest in a unique fullness in and through the figure of Jesus (cf. 1:16-17).

The language of Father and Son can be interpreted in these quasi-phenomenological terms. God is manifest as love, of which Jesus is the unique vehicle, incarnation and gift (3:16; I John 4:9) and when that love is brought to its consummation the form of the risen Christ is totally identical with the divine glory. The believers, who live through Christ, will also share this form (I John 3:2); this is not a matter of blind hope but is phenomenologically discernible in the experience of love. It is when he lays down his life and takes it up again (10:18) that the glory of God is fully revealed in Jesus (13:31)and at the same time (euthys 13:32) Jesus is fully absorbed into the divine glory, becoming the pneumatic Christ (“God will glorify him in himself’ 13:32). It is natural to speak of this as Jesus being adopted as God’s Son, or “appointed Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness through the resurrection from the dead”(Rom. 1:4). John goes further and reads the paschal manifestations back into the life of the earthly Jesus. Furthermore, he projects the earthly Jesus back into the realm of pre-existence; “that glory which I had with you before the world came to be” (17:5). The phenomenological ground of this language is the realization that the earthly Jesus has become the pneumatic Christ, one with God’s phenomenality as love, light, and spirit. Since the resurrection that phenomenality is fully manifest to human beings as the Christ of faith; Jesus is henceforth inseparably identified with that Logos; the meaning of his life and death are revealed as the incarnation of the phenomenality of God as love. John images the mode of being of the risen Christ as an intimate personal communion of Father and Son, or a mutual indwelling (10:38; 14:10), in which the believers will share (17:21-23). The phenomenological ground of this language is the experience of God as love, which inevitably calls forth such representations. But one might perhaps equally legitimately use the language of the mutuality of emptiness and form – through love the humanity of Jesus (and of the believers in dependence on it) is shaped into that form which is fully transparent to the emptiness of God.

But this form of the pneumatic Christ can never be fully grasped in this life; John’s Gospel teaches us again and again to discard the forms we have grasped as inadequate and instead to let the Spirit guide us into all truth (clearly a never-ending process). The Spirit might be defined as the immediacy of God, that aspect of God which vitally touches our existence. It is what lights up anew the phenomenality of Christ as the phenomenality of God; without it our memories of Christ would become idols blocking out all sense of God. John also speaks of the Spirit in personal terms, for, phenomenologically, to be touched by the Spirit is to encounter a love and a wisdom which call forth such names as “comforter” or “helper”(14:16). Spirit in its immediacy shatters all forms which fall short of the form of truth – hence the believers are to worship “in spirit and truth” (4:23); only such worship places no idolatrous blocks against the divine emptiness (hence “the Father seeks such worshippers,” 4:23). The form of Jesus is similarly transcended: “If you loved me you would rejoice that I go to the Father, because the Father is greater than I” (14:28); “It is better for you that I go away. If I do not go away, the Spirit cannot come to you, but if I go, I shall send him to you” (16:7). Yet there is no gnostic disregard for the historical origins of revelation (cf. 4:22 “salvation is from the Jews”) and anamnesis of past forms can mediate present insight; the entire Gospel is an exercise in such anamnesis, refocusing the past in light of the form of the pneumatic Christ. “The Spirit blows where it wills” (3:8) constantly reforming our image of Christ (our grasp of the Christic form of all reality – cf. 1:3) so that it accords with the true emptiness of God (knowledge of which is eternal life – 17:1 – cf. Buddhist nirvana).

This phenomenological reduction of the Johannine language of pre-existence and of Father, Son, and  Spirit is a continuation of the reductive movement of the Gospel itself, which so artfully subordinates many quasi-synoptic pieces of tradition to its own more spiritual perspectives and which frequently develops figurative modes of expression only to lead to a statement which abolishes them, as the language of the “good shepherd” culminates in the non-dualist utterances of 10:30, 38 or the images of 14:l-5 prepare the identifications of 14:6-11. A phenomenological reduction would not serve its purpose if it lost the full dimensions of what John names as Father, Son, and Spirit. Talk of the emptiness, phenomenality, and immediacy of God might lead to a colorless, modalist image of God, a danger which the biblical names ward off; but on the other hand, the repetition of these biblical names without a constant effort to realize their meaning at the level of phenomenality can be equally damaging. Two halves of Christianity have disputed for the greater part of their existence the question whether the Spirit proceeds from the Father only or from the Father and the Son; this shameful debate proceeds largely from an oblivion on both sides of the phenomenality of what is named as Father, Son, Spirit. Our makeshift terms, emptiness, phenomenality and immediacy, are only pointers intended to show the kind of questioning to which New Testament language must be subjected when its mythical terms are suspended and it can no longer be subsumed into metaphysical frameworks. Furthermore, the search for such phenomenological formulations might facilitate the dialogue with other religious traditions, whose namings of the divine might be subject to similar reductions, or whose own exercises in discerning the phenomenality of the absolute and its manifestation might reveal an unsuspected proximity to the New Testament thus demythologized. It is clear that this deconstructive reading of the New Testament aims less at a recovery of the phenomenality of revelation as the New Testament communities experienced it (for this is scarcely to be abstracted from the cultural forms which mediated it) than at a realization of the present force of　revelation and a credible contemporary naming of Father, Son, and Spirit.

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This book has attempted to sketch an answer to the question: what does fidelity to the Christian tradition entail today? The reader concerned with such fidelity will have to sift its claims critically in accord with his or her own experience. Many former bulwarks of Christian certitude have become twilight zones today, and those who focus their faith on these metaphysical aspects of the Christian tradition are bound to succumb either to corrosive skepticism or to a defensive traditionalism and fundamentalism. On the other hand the Christ of faith is becoming known in a new way as Christians become more compassionately responsive to the questions of peace, justice, and freedom which press on them so urgently, and more contemplatively aware of the unending mystery of God. As faith builds on these latter foundations it must reshape the meaning of tradition in accord with them, in a counter-metaphysical reading which frees faith from the morose, introspective provincialism characteristic of the metaphysical theology which is still dominant. It does not seem that any less radical approach can represent a faithful continuation of Christian history or effectively bring about the integral liberation of faith from its imprisonment in representations which have become idolatrous.

From: Questioning Back: The Overcoming of Metaphysics in Christian Tradition, Minneapolis: Winston-Seabury, 1985.