Joseph S. O'Leary homepage

Reply to Cyril O'Regan

Thanks to Cyril O’Regan for his detailed and perceptive review article on my book Conventional and Ultimate Truth (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015) in Modern Theology 35 (2019):382-92. I’ll cite the whole review here and insert replies here and there:

“In the long silence since the last of David Tracy’s major volumes, a Catholic correlationist theology that is truly ecumenical and open to other religions, fully embraces the contemporary moment, values religious experience, but also recognizes that experience is necessarily linguistically and symbolically mediated, has lacked a champion. With this book by the Irish theologian, Joseph O’Leary, a correlationist theology has, arguably, found its champion.”

REPLY: I don’t use the word “correlationist.” Of course theology must be in dialogue with culture and with other religions, but “correlation” might suggest some kind of reductive processing of Christianity through a secularizing or relativizing prism.

“Conventional and Ultimate Truth is a disciplined, sophisticated, and eloquent construction of a fundamental theology largely in the phenomenological and hermeneutic key of the early Tracy, and like Tracy convinced of the value of philosophical expertise and the necessity of theological method, and persuaded that a way forward in our contemporary situation must be found for a Christianity whose dogmatism, authoritarianism, and identity anxiety has essentially made it a mausoleum.”

REPLY: An example of the “identity anxiety” at work is the new Oxford Handbook of Catholic Theology, which obsessively parses Vatican documents while shunning that to which those documents intended to point: Scripture, liberation theology, social teaching, pastoral and moral reality.

“The current situation has prerogatives over the past which, if it provides contemporary theologians with something to work with, cannot be uncritically received. Thus, the need of diagnostic tools to see where and when theology has been blocked, original experience covered over, and productive insights repressed. If the scholarly level throughout is extremely high, the erudition impressive but also always pressed into argument, the writing unusually pleasing, what comes through most clearly in the text is its extraordinary level of assurance. Although no cheap polemics mar Conventional and Ultimate Truth, nonetheless it is transparent that propositionalist forms of theology are ruled out from the start.”

REPLY: Maybe my arguments are unconvincing, but I went to great trouble in Religious Pluralism and Truth as well as in the present book to defend objective propositions about the Incarnation and the Trinity, such as those of the Nicene Creed. Contextualizing these propositions goes a long way, but does not abolish their truth. I used the slogan “fides attingit ad rem” to mean “the proposition of faith touches the thing itself.” Aquinas says: “Actus autem credentis non terminatur ad enuntiabile sed ad rem” (The believer’s act of faith does not terminate in the propositions, but in the realities which they express), adding that “We do not form statements except so that we may have apprehension of things through them. As it is in knowledge, so also in faith.”

“And it is definitely the case that O’Leary is not only not on the side of Benedict XVI when it comes to the theology of religions, but that his notion of theology differs toto coelo from Benedict’s ecclesial form. Even more, throughout his text O’Leary indicates that he is not on the side of Patristic-loving Ressourcement theologians such as Henri de Lubac and Hans Urs von Balthasar, especially the latter, who in his view accords scripture and tradition far too much weight and accords far too little to the contemporary situation and the experiential conditions of reception in this particular moment.”

REPLY: Certainly, I deplore the dampening effect of Benedict’s interventions, including the persecution of Jacques Dupuis, SJ. But “theology of religions” has also been rather dampening. Much better is the open-ended practice of comparative theology, interreligious dialogue, or interreligious theology. I am not against Patristic-loving Ressourcement, since I am very Patristic-loving myself; I admire Balthasar on Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus, and the work of Daniélou, Chenu, and Congar. I dislike de Lubac’s glorification of medieval exegesis, since it goes hand in hand with a dulling or even rejection of the entire modern opening up of the full diversity of Scripture and of the Hebraica veritas which shapes all living theology today. But I admire de Lubac on the Supernatural, on the Church, and on Buddhism. I dislike the smothering influence of Balthasar in the Catholic theological world for decades, at the expense of progressive thinkers such as Rahner and Schillebeeckx. I think his trinitarian theology is a mythological fantasy.

“Conventional and Ultimate Truth is an ‘essay,’ by which O’Leary means to suggest that what he presents is (a) more nearly a program than an exhaustive rendering of a fundamental theology, while also being very much a symbol of the whole, and (b) that the fundamental theology presented is an original synthetic act performed by a theologian who wishes to speak persuasively to all Christians and not on behalf of any particular Christian confession. While the author is himself Catholic, the book is self-consciously ‘trans-denominational’ (46) and in consequence can serve as a clearing house for any of the Christian confessions.”

REPLY: Yes, the book does not centre on Catholic positions, but only on the basics that all Christians share. Can a Catholic theologian write from such a general Christian standpoint rather than the specifically Catholic one? Is it licit to touch on Lutheran, Calvinist, Anglican sources of illumination with the same respect as one has for Catholic ones?

“The essay fulfills the requirement of a fully outlined fundamental theology in that it takes on the issue of the sources and resources of theology, thus the questions of the nature and status of scripture and/or revelation, tradition, and experience, and their complex relations, the understanding of reason and faith, and the proper relation between the two, and also the question of whether or how other religions bear on Christian self-understanding. At the same time, this is fundamental theology that refuses to be pure. This is true in the standard sense that in most fundamental theologies of a correlationist bent over the past fifty years — of which this is an up-to-date example — anthropology is foregrounded, even if it is taken to be provisional and to require refiguring on the basis of revelation. But it is also true with this text that, more than most fundamental theologies of a correlationist kind, O’Leary devotes a considerable amount of space to treating Christology (347-68) and Trinity (336-47).”

REPLY: Anthropology is foregrounded in theologians like Rahner and Schillebeeckx, and I follow them by studying modernist literature as an anthropological and theological resource. To cover all the topics listed here would take thousands of pages, and the final discussion of Christology and Trinity probably breaks the frame of a treatise on fundamental theology though it may be permissible in an essay, as an attempt to show how the investments at the level of fundamental theology play out in doctrinal practice.

“If, however, there is a truly distinguishing feature of Conventional and Ultimate Truth, then it is the comparative dimension displayed throughout the text. This should hardly surprise. O’Leary’s expertise in comparative theology is evident in Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (1994), and in this respect this book is very much its companion and successor. In this review essay, I would like to do two things. First, I offer an appreciative reading of a book that offers a sophisticated account of a phenomenological-hermeneutical fundamental theology in the tradition of the early David Tracy. Second, I submit O’Leary’s correlationist model to critique. This critique has a double focus: on the one hand, exhibiting tensions in O’Leary’s account and, on the other, suggesting criticisms from the point of view of Ressourcement theology which is under attack, both directly and indirectly, through O’Leary’s text.”

REPLY: The book is a successor to ones on how Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics and Derrida’s deconstruction can be critically received in theology (as opposed to the uncritical reception of some other theologians and philosophers). Ressourcement theology is not a major targer. Some Ressourcement theologians are a help and some an obstacle to the kind of thinking attempted. The Ressourcement side of Ratzinger and Balthasar is not what is opposed, but the rigid aspect of their hermeneutics.

“1. O’Leary’s Correlationist Fundamental Theology
“Rather than attempt a sequential analysis of O’Leary’s very rich, yet very compact, text, I propose to analyze four of its basic elements: (1) O’Leary’s understanding of the current situation and the task and method of theology (chapters 1-2); (2) the necessity of critical tools to free the Christian tradition from impediments largely of its own making. These tools include Heidegger’s overcoming of metaphysics (chapter 4; also chapter 1), Derridian deconstruction (chapter 4; also chapter 1), Buddhist and Hindu traditions of unsaying, and to a more limited extent the tradition of negative theology (chapter 7). The main target here is the Christian theological tradition (chapter 9); (3) the crucial importance of experience as a source of theology and revelation, as its correlative also comes in for discussion (chapters 5, 6); and finally, (4), O’Leary’s conviction that deep investment in other religions is intrinsic to the self-understanding of, even identity of, Christianity. I will discuss each in turn.

“1.1. Theology as a Dynamic and Adaptive Self-Critical Enterprise

“In the first two chapters of his book, O’Leary sets forth the raison d’être of his elaboration of a fundamental theology as well as presents its basic form. The most basic desideratum of a fundamental theology is that it should take account of the contemporary situation and critically assess what impediments stand in the way of articulating a theology that would be adequate both to the contemporary moment and to Christian faith. Structurally speaking, then, the form of fundamental theology articulated in Conventional and Ultimate Truth is correlationist. There is a heavy emphasis on our contemporary situation and the obligation to take due account of it.”

REPLY: If that’s what correlation means, isn’t it exactlly what Vatican II says theology should be? We must read the signts of the times, and bring the light of the Gospel to bear on them convincingly.

“To be adequate to one’s contemporary situation involves recognizing and accepting the prerogatives of autonomy and critical reason. Epistemically, our situation is irreversibly post-Kantian, even if over the past two centuries freedom has been further refined and critical reason further calibrated (6-15). In addition, in a recall of David Tracy, the contemporary situation is characterized by plurality and ambiguity (5). This in turn means that we are to think of the relativity of our positions as an intrinsic good (33-4). This responsiveness to our situation, however, ensures that the kind of correlationist fundamental theology elaborated by O’Leary will necessarily be interventive and critical. There are pathologies of theological reason to be overcome. These include sectarianism, bureaucratism, and obsession with orthodoxy (15-28), all of which, according to O’Leary, still bedevil the contemporary theological landscape. On the authority of Karen Kilby, Balthasar is named as one such theologian who is obsessed with orthodoxy.”

REPLY: I did accuse Balthasar of slighting and bypassing the method of the Council (28), quoting Kilby’s sharp critique, but my basis was not that book but my observation of the decades-long influence of Balthasar and his Communio theology in its opposition to the Concilium theology. I suppose the showdown Cyril orchestrates is a Communio-Concilium one and he identifies my list of pathologies as typical of the Communio ‘side.’ I hope they reach farther than that, however. I’m loth to be dragged back into a somewhat jaded and outdated discussion.
“Reminding of the liberation theologian Juan Luis Segundo, O’Leary appeals to an open faith, which is critical and which also continually adjusts to new experiences. ‘Judgment’ is central, according to O’Leary, to the theological task. Despite his connecting of judgment with method (39-45), it is Newman who is evoked (32) rather than Lonergan to get a sense of the dynamism of intellect and the open horizon of revisability. Still, one has the sense that both Lonergan’s Insight and Method in Theology are still very much in play in a text that proceeds, in chapter 2, to insist that the best that we can expect with regard to ultimate reality, given our situatedness and our finitude, is asymptotic approximation. Thus the guiding heuristic of conventional and ultimate truth in chapter 2. Both the vocabulary and the meaning of this pair is carried forward in this text from O’Leary’s previous work. Carried forward in particular is the particular binocular way in which O’Leary makes the distinction: examples from the Vedanta and Buddhist epistemology complement Western post-Kantian epistemology. Although O’Leary is, arguably, a bit more comfortable with the language of ‘relativism’ than is helpful (33-9), in his talk of ‘convention’ he is not really favoring the Sophists over Plato. ‘Convention’ is not falsehood; it simply means less than full truth, which is metaphysically impossible for human beings and a dangerous aspiration in a plural and combustible world.”

REPLY: My notion of ‘judgement’ is based on Kant’s reflective judgement (developed in his third Critique), whereas in Lonergan that kind of judgement plays second fiddle to the determinative judgement that has such a crucial role in Insight. The epistemological issues of that book are not really a concern. Perhaps reflective judgement comes up in Method in Theology, but I never found much inspiration in that work.

“1.2. Critical Tools: Reliable and Not So Reliable

“From the Preface to the very last chapter, O’Leary is constructing a fundamental theology that aims to be appropriate to the contemporary period characterized by autonomy and critical reason. As has been the case from the time of his first book, Questioning Back (1985), both Heidegger and Derrida are considered to be solvents with respects to blockages in the metaphysical tradition, but also with regard to the Christian traditions to the extent to which they are given to making propositional and apodictic claims.”

REPLY: They are solvents of blockages, and can be used to liberate theological traditions as well as philosophical ones. “Making propositional and apodictic claims” is not something I oppose.

“O’Leary is persuaded that this has been a default throughout the history of Christianity, but is endemic to Catholicism which, in his view, is riddled by authoritarianism and dogmatism. To these two solvents O’Leary adds Christian negative theology and Buddhist and Vedantist explications of unsaying (chapter 7). As one might expect for someone who has labored in the field of theology of religions for over thirty years, O’Leary is splendid when it comes to the equivalents of apophasis and aphaeresis in Asian religions, and in this respect the text continues the dialogue between religions regarding strategies of negation that are traceable back at least to Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (1994), which may still be O’Leary’s most polished and fully argued text.”

REPLY: The latter book used Derrida to overcome fixations and so on, but it also argued against Derrida’s reductive treatment of the notion of truth.

“This is not to say, however, that the critical ratio of each of these solvents is equal. With respect to the first pair, the advantage has to be given to Heidegger. Chapter 5, in which both Heidegger and Derrida are most in play, takes as its title “overcoming metaphysics.” This suggests that, as the pair functions in O’Leary, Heidegger provides the base of a style of criticism of the Western tradition of philosophical and theological discourse that gains subtlety and amplitude in deconstruction. This is a somewhat more conservative position than that of Caputo who thinks that Heidegger does not go far enough and should be replaced by Derrida, and somewhat less conservative than the likes of Thomas Sheehan and Laurence Hemming, who do not see how Heidegger can be improved on.”

REPLY: Some Derrida scholar called me a “detractor” because I called Derrida a footnote to Heidegger. I came to Derrida via hermeneutics, notably via the first book on Derrida (apart from a Japanese one), Jean Greisch’s Herméneutique et grammatologie (CNRS 1977).

“Not only does O’Leary think that at the very least Heidegger needs to be supplemented by various forms of postmodern thought — for example, Lacan, Foucault, Žižek, and especially Derrida — he is prepared to actually criticize Heidegger from time to time. It might be noted in passing, however, that any rebukes are minor and in any event do not favor the philosophical tradition that Heidegger critiques or Catholicism, which is O’Leary’s main culprit in the misalliance between philosophy and Christianity. In Conventional and Ultimate Truth, although O’Leary has taken on board Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology and professes an allergy to any hint of reifying the ultimate, whatever the philosophical or theological tradition, nonetheless, it does not serve as the key. Rather, this role is served by the early phenomenological-hermeneutical Heidegger who is deployed to unveil religious phenomena covered over and thus covered up by rational superstructures.”
REPLY: No, the Heidegger I am influenced by in my theological hermeneutics is the later Heidegger, who steps back from ontotheology (metaphysics) to approach the phenomena in a new style of thinking. But the early Heidegger was influenced by Luther and Harnack, in their step back from metaphysically shaped theology to hearing the Word anew.

“The difference between the primary level and the secondary level, illustrated in the fundamental theology of Rahner (143-55), a Heidegger student, and Schleiermacher (139-42), a thinker to whom Heidegger was attracted in the years prior to the writing of Being and Time, provides a basic template for O’Leary’s form of criticism. The primary level simply has prerogatives that the second level does not, and it is by forgetting this that theology, as well as philosophy, has gone astray over the centuries, if not over the millennia. In this respect, Luther has significant advantages over Aquinas here, and some advantages over Augustine who, nonetheless, displays more signs of metaphysical infection than a supporter like Marion is prepared to admit.”

REPLY: Marion made some rash claims about Augustine’s alleged indifference to ontology and metaphysics, which have been widely rebutted. Augustine is, after Aquinas, the most significant architect of metaphysically shaped theology, and is the primary object of study in my reflection on “overcoming metaphysics in Christian tradition.”
“In Heidegger and Derrida, and also in Buddhist and Vedantist views of negation, O’Leary is convinced that he has found critical tools up to the task of scouring the Augean stables of propositional forms of theology that are incapable of making transparent the originating experience that gave rise to the need of discourse.”

REPLY: Again, I am not opposed to dogmatic propositions.

“The status, however, of negative theology as a critical tool is, according to O’Leary, far more ambiguous than in the case of Heidegger and Asian religions. O’Leary’s ambivalence with respect to negative theology at least goes back as far as Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (1994) and is coded in his studied preference for Heidegger and Derrida over Marion. Conventional and Ultimate Truth does not prove an exception to the rule. In the longest (90 pages) and singly most rewarding chapter (chapter 7) in the book, O’Leary illustrates his enormous competence in a field which he articulates with theological revisionists such as John Caputo as well as luminaries of another persuasion such as Erich Przywara, Balthasar, and above all Marion. He demonstrates a synoptic grasp of the entire spectrum of the Christian apophatic tradition, shows significant expertise in Augustine, Nyssa, and Pseudo-Dionysius, and displays a keen grasp of the religious epistemological issues involved in the techniques of unsaying. O’Leary is prepared to grant that under certain circumstances negative theology in the Christian tradition can function to chasten theological claims to competence. Nonetheless, on O’Leary’s account, much of the unsaying of negative theology is inscribed in an economy of Neoplatonic metaphysics in which God or Godhead becomes available in language or concept.”

REPLY: Again it’s the metaphysical (ontotheological) shaping of discourse on God, rather than discourse or conceptul labour as such, that I push against.

“For him, negative theology has critical value only to the degree to which — at its best — it helps to rescue Christian thought from metaphysical and logocentric inscription. O’Leary is capable of fine distinctions: if just about all forms of negative theology in the Patristic and medieval periods are infected to some extent by metaphysics and logocentrism, they are not infected to the same extent. In a very interesting discussion, which shows off his facility for close intelligent reading, O’Leary makes a good case that the negative theology of Gregory of Nyssa (226-38) is far less metaphysically inscribed than the equivalent negative theological discourse in Pseudo-Dionysius (245-54). Interestingly, just as Pseudo-Dionysius is elevated by Balthasar and Marion, to the same extent he is downgraded by O’Leary. All unsaying (apophasis) and withdrawal of attribution (aphaeresis) in Pseudo-Dionysius occurs within a metaphysically flush Neoplatonic economy with a superessential unitary Godhead as the top of the pyramid. Not for O’Leary then is Alexander Golitzin’s interpretation of Pseudo-Dionysius as expressing a liturgical rather than a metaphysical sensibility. Given the importance of Pseudo-Dionysius as both something of a summation of the Patristic tradition and the font of the medieval negative theology tradition, O’Leary’s objections have a fairly broad scope: they definitely apply to Aquinas as a reader of Pseudo-Dionysius, probably to Bonaventure, maybe to Nicholas of Cusa, and possibly Meister Eckhart, even if in the latter case to considerably lesser extent. Pseudo-Dionysius is especially objectionable, according to O’Leary, not only because of a highly defined metaphysical enveloping, and thus alienation from grounding experience, but also because of an ontological hierarchy with the potential for an invidious elitism. O’Leary does not underscore the famous Derrida-Marion debate — which he, undoubtedly, is aware of — but he clearly takes Derrida’s side in lodging what are essentially political objections to the Dionysian hierarchy.”

REPLY: I don’t think this political aspect loomed large. I’m more influenced by Luther’s turn against Dionysius, whom he saw as missing the full reality of the Incarnation. A full study of the presence of Proclus in Dionysius could bear this out more fully, along the lines of the critique of Otto Semmelroth, SJ.

“Moreover, he reinforces his alignment to Derrida by demonstrating a studied preference for Eckhart who, despite his henological pre-dilections, opens up the groundless abyss of reality. Still, Eckhart is not the only exception in negative theology to metaphysical infection. In a reading of Nyssa marked by subtlety and nuance, O’Leary demonstrates that the experience of the ultimate comes through the metaphysical enveloping and thereby to a significant extent regulates his mystical discourse. With regard to Nyssa, there may or may not be a measure of dependence on the philosophy of Plotinus. But even if there were, it would not be as noxious as Pseudo-Dionysius’ dependence on Proclus since, for O’Leary, Plotinus is far closer to an original experience of origin and thus less covered over by metaphysics and hierarchy.”

REPLY: Yes, the pristine nature of Plotinus’s thought, which awakened Augustine to the nature of God, gives him a special status. The cumbersome structures of more elaborate Neoplatonist speculation have had a less “original” and more “scholastic” impact.

“1.3. Experience as a Source of Theology

If Luther advocated sola scriptura and the Council of Trent in reaction insisted on scripture and tradition serving as the twin sources of Catholic theology, Liberal Protestant theology — and especially Schleiermacher in his Glaubenslehre — promoted the claims of religious experience. While there are few theologians who would unilaterally repeat Schleiermacher, it is certainly the case that just about all correlationist models in recent decades make a fundamental decision in favor of experience as a source, indeed, to a significant extent the source. O’Leary follows this trajectory, and while he provides intimations that the source is communal and could be found in forms of liberation theology, the register of this source in his book seems to be largely individual. Experience, in turn, has two sites: the original experiential site or site of conversion that served as the crucible for the emergence of Christianity; and the corresponding contemporary site.”

REPLY: “Corresponding,” in what sense? The writers, such as Joyce, Beckett, or Rilke, whom I discuss, put questions to theology and invite theological commentary. But does this mean they pose a question to which theology bring the corresponding answer, or that they project a vision that can be correlated with the gospel vision or that of mystical theologians? I would be misstrustful of such schemas and prefer to talk of dialogue and mutual deconstruction, letting the texts of secular and religious experience speak for themselves and interact freely, let the chips fall where they may.

“Together they can function critically against modes of Christianity becoming sclerotic (186). O’Leary is too much of a hermeneutic philosopher to suppose that experience is entirely unmediated: the experience of ultimacy in Christianity, as in other religions, will necessarily be tied to particular modes of expression from which it cannot be absolutely separated. But, according to O’Leary, this does not mean that it is impossible to make any distinction or that the grounding experience cannot find another and related idiom. This is a point made explicitly by Rahner, for example, in his reflection on the hermeneutics of doctrines, and it has largely been carried forward in the kind of correlationism represented by the early Tracy. O’Leary makes it clear that experience — presumably of the non-thematic kind — has critical purchase over against the theological tradition from the opening pages of Conventional and Ultimate Truth, and he pursues this theme throughout, which pursuit culminates in his account of the necessarily critical appropriation of Nicea and Chalcedon in chapter 9.”

REPLY: “The non-thematic kind” is misleading. I think of experience as “the phenomena” or “the matter itself” (die Sache selbst) that phenomenological hermeneutics wrestles with.The quest for something of comparable centrality in Scripture and theological classics uses methods comparable to those of phenomenology. That “something” should be a quite concrete, historically anchored, phenomeno, and not an abstract non-thematic awareness.

“The immediate issue is whether such doctrines can be anything other than fossils of a previous era of Christian reception, and what are the conditions under which they can speak to us now. For O’Leary the news is not entirely bad: doctrines are not obviously constative, that is, have direct referential function: they contain metaphors to indicate participation rather than full grasp, and fragments of narrative to evoke community identity, and even the propositional statements could be read as rules. In raising this prospect of treating doctrines as rules, O’Leary is —although without attribution — more nearly following Rahner and his distinction between “ontological” and “ontic” senses of doctrine than the post-liberal theologian George Lindbeck, although, arguably, both might plausibly trace the rule sense of doctrine back to Newman’s Development of Doctrine. It is not irrelevant that one of the two doctrines that come under scrutiny is that of the Trinity. Nicea itself is not discounted by O’Leary for the above reasons, although some of the theological constructions which might have lain behind it and many a theological construction that have had it as their theme doubtless are. O’Leary also seems to follow Rahner and his followers in positing salvation history rather than Trinity in se as the correlative of the willing and knowing subject. Given this decision, both the Trinitarian theologies of Augustine (341) and Aquinas (338-40) are found deficient. To focus on the immanent Trinity, as the classical tradition has been wont to do, is not to take due account of the finitude of the subject and to risk metaphysical infection. At the same time, other non-classical forms of Trinitarianism — for instance, those which posit a social Trinity — are similarly discounted (336-37). A reduction, or in O’Leary’s Heideggerianly spiced language, a “step back,” is also advised when it comes to Christological doctrine. Once again Christological doctrine as such — that is, Chalcedon — is not per se mischievous. “The technical language of Chalcedon,” O’Leary writes, “is a major advance of the scholastic spirit in theology” (352). This statement turns out, however, only to be conditionally true. It remains true only as long as Chalcedon is understood to provide a generous frame for the centrality of Christ in salvation history, and it ceases to be true if the focus narrows to the ontological status of Jesus Christ, which narrowing is all too typical in Catholic theology. This is bad metaphysics but, of course, “bad metaphysics” is a pleonasm. If the historical value of the doctrine lies in its overcoming of positions that would separate the humanity and divinity of Christ or confound them, the more probative value of Chalcedon lies in its ability to be received and more especially its ability to be received today (366-67). Reception turns out to be constitutive of validity and to that extent the truth of the doctrine.”

REPLY: I don’t think metaphysics is bad. Like Heidegger I think that ‘metaphysics is true.’ But I do think there is a lot of bad metaphysics in contemporary trinitarian theology, including Process Theology, Moltmannism, Balthasar, etc. Also Christology is liable to frreeze when one approaches it in primarily ontological terms ( see my critique of Rowan Williams’s Christ the Heart of Creation in JThS 70 (2019):928-32).
“When it comes to both theological constructions and doctrine, the reduction to experience is highly mediated. In O’Leary’s series of “step backs” or reductions, the reduction to experience is preceded by the reduction to scripture and in particular its rendering of God’s relation to creation and salvation history. This is a crucial point in chapter 9, although one anticipated in chapter 5 in which we find O’Leary’s express treatment of scripture as a relatively adequate translation of the human response of the opening up the transcendent mediated by Jesus of Nazareth. The separation O’Leary authorizes between revelation and its scriptural encoding is quintessentially Catholic.”

REPLY: It’s also very Barthian, in that Scripture attests but does not embody exhaustively the Word of God.

“Still, chapter 9 makes clear that scripture has critical purchase over both theological construction and doctrine. There is no commendation of Trent’s two-pillar view of scripture and tradition, with tradition favored in the last instance.”

REPLY: It’s for the sake of bringing tradition alive that I would see it expposed to the critical purchase of Scripture. But Scripture in today’s Catholicism is no longer subordinate to tradition.

“Moreover, when it comes to the operations and findings of biblical exegesis, O’Leary is prepared to go well beyond Dei verbum, which although it endorsed historical-critical method, did so with the restriction that this method deepen rather than come into competition with more ecclesial forms of reading. O’Leary makes it clear that not only should we recognize the inherent plurality of the New Testament witness to Jesus Christ, but that we should row against the current of Catholicism’s systemic favoring of John over the Synoptic Gospels.”

REPLY: The same fruitful tension I just mentioned as prevailing between Scipture and Tradition and also be found between the Synoptics and John — for their mutual benefit. The “systemic favoring of John” is often of a metaphysically misinterpreted John, or of a mystical John that misses the grit of the Jewish and historically concrete side of John.

“ Although the profound reflective merits of the Gospel of John cannot be gainsaid, nonetheless, the Synoptic Gospels should be prioritized since they are far closer to the originating event.”

REPLY: I’d see John as contemplative rather than reflective. Certainly it is the deepest vision of Christ that can be found. Still it needs to be set in dialectical interaction with the “historical Jesus” insofar as he emerges from under the monopoly of Johannine vision.

“1.4. Theology of Religions as Constitutive of Christian Self-Understanding and Identity

“The first thing to be said is that O’Leary’s reflections on the necessity for Christianity to engage in religious dialogue is not confined to chapter 8, which is the chapter that deals explicitly with interreligious dialogue as a topic. While the distinction between conventional and ultimate truth elaborated in chapter 2 is from a philosophical point of view a post-Kantian one, the distinction as it plays out in Asian religions in general, and Buddhism in particular, reinforces the philosophical perspective that Christian theology is advised to interiorize. In addition, in the chapter on religious experience (chapter 6), the centrality of religious experience or mysticism in both Vedanta and Buddhistic forms of thought functions therapeutically by reminding Christianity of religious experience as primary, thereby handing it a critical instrument to scour Christianity and rid it of conceptual accretions. Similarly, in the chapter on negative theology (chapter 7) forms of Vedantic and Buddhist negation are not only allowed into the same critical space as Heidegger and Deconstruction, but enjoy supereminence in terms of their resistance to metaphysical coding.
“It is the burden of chapter 8, however, to make the case both for the necessity of religious pluralism, which the classical Christian theology of religions position rejects on the grounds that it has the one and only map (299-301), and also for interreligious dialogue as essential to the shaping or reshaping of Christian identity (303-08). The bulk of the chapter, however, represents an examination of the post-Vatican II attempts in Catholicism to come to terms with religious pluralism. Praised is the repeal of nulla salus extra ecclesiam, and the far greater “hospitality”—in the Levinasian and Derridian sense — of Catholicism towards other religions (311), which shows itself in dialogue rather than proclamation becoming central to the definition of mission (312).”

REPLY: The “repeal” is contested by the SSPX but in fact is presented by the Church not as a repeal but as a positive interpretation: rather than say that all non-Chatholic miss salvation it is now made to mean that they all have access to salvation but throught the mediation of the Church—in short a step from an exclusivist to an inclusivist interpretation, rather than a repeal.

“Dominus Jesus (2000) represents a major setback to what is largely a story of Catholicism’s progressively coming to recognize something like the ‘parity’ of other religions (313-25). O’Leary’s critique is stringent rather than strident. Benedict XVI — or then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the CDF — is the major object of critique, but O’Leary also involves Balthasar whose Christological focus or Christomonism proves singularly unhelpful (323) in times when Christian overclaims have no phenomenological (317) or empirical (322) traction and are a cause of offense. Dominus Jesus is a text produced by a Vatican unreasonably anxious about Christian identity in the modern world and blind to the prospect of richer, more complex forms of identity (317). The positions advanced by Dominus Jesus regarding the Christological specification of the kingdom of God (321), the intrinsic re-lation between the eternal Word or wisdom from Christ (319, 323-24), and the intrinsic relation between Spirit and Christ (319) are summarily dismissed. These are expressions of Christian imperialism vis-à-vis other religions. O’Leary does not spend much time lambasting, as others have done, the reactionary spirit of the document, largely because he thinks it emblematic, as Jacques Dupuis had before him, of Ressourcement theology, which it turns out is the ultimate, if not proximate, target.”

REPLY: Again, I don’t think Ressourcement theology loomed so large as an adversary. In fact I am sympathetic to De Lubac who correlates the Buddhist Dharma-body with the divine Logos and who correlates the glorifies transfiguration or resurection body with the the Buddhist sambhoga or bliss body. I champion a Logos-inclusivism, best expressed in a sentence Dupuis quoted: “The incarnate Logos goes in search of itself in all of history: evangelization or dialogue consists in this encounter of the Logos incarnate in a contingent history with the universal Logos sown in every human heart (which does not imply any separation between Jesus and the Logos)” (La vérité chrétienne à l’âge du pluralism religieux, Cerf, 1994,, 280; quoted in Dupuis, Vers une théologie chrétienne du pluralisme religieux, Cerf, 1997, 499).

“2. To Be or Not to Be A Correlationist

“There is no denying the sophistication of Conventional and Ultimate Truth and the elegance of the writing. Indeed, I have barely done it justice: the voice is superbly confident, the mapping of a coherent correlationist position is as clear as one would want, and the position articulated has a ready-made audience to receive it. The latter is true, even if various modes of political and liberation theology have tended to displace the kind of correlationist model exemplified by the early Tracy, and thus narrowed the space available to O’Leary. O’Leary’s main achievement is to have brought the correlationist model back into circulation and to force the question whether theology should move forward with this update and leave behind the Ressourcement model as an irritating regression in theology and annoying occupation which has happily proved temporary. Given that the author is Catholic and the essay abounds in comments about Vatican II, it is difficult even in the context of a trans-denominational theology to excise the question as to how the Council is to be received. The proposal made by O’Leary is clear in what it refuses as well as what it affirms. O’Leary resolutely opposes Ressourcement theology and its carry-over in the post-Vatican II period, and is prepared entirely to dismiss the concerns of a Benedict, a de Lubac, and a von Balthasar.”

REPLY: I do reject the anxiety of these three theologians in their suspicion of Vatican II, and I think Pope Francis has brought back the more creative hermeneutic that saw Vatican II as an event to be continued in vital openness rather than a set of texts to be retrictively parsed.

“In this part of the review essay, I would like to question back — using the title of O’Leary’s earliest book — and do so in two registers, the first internal, the second external. In the first register I interrogate tensions in O’Leary’s book. In the second, adopting the point of view of non-correlationist Ressourcement theology, I expose a number of serious flaws in O’Leary’s construction of a fundamental theology or at the very least point to misplaced emphases.
“There are a number of internal tensions in Conventional and Ultimate Truth, although to be fair none of them amount to a contradiction. Anxious as he is to oppose non-correlationist modes of theology, and especially those of Ressourcement thinkers, O’Leary seems to consistently let down his critical guard and assume that any enemy of my enemy is necessarily my friend. Among other things, this means that O’Leary pays hardly any attention to the differences between modern secular reason with its emphases on intellectual responsibility, transparency, and the prerogatives of scientific method and the far more radical Heidegger whose entire work is predicated on offering an alternative. In Conventional and Ultimate Truth, Heidegger sits uneasily alongside Kant or Poincare. Again, while it makes sense to enlist Heidegger and Harnack as solvents of “sclerotic” forms of theology, nonetheless, it seems strange to cast them a pair, when in tone and substance Heidegger is as just about as much an apocalyptic thinker as Harnack is not.”

REPLY: Heidegger diligentlly studied Harnack and Kant, and would have been versed in philosophy of science of the sort represented by Poincaré.

“ A fortiori with regard to the joining of Derrida and secular forms of reason, when Derrida’s chastening of secular reasoning as “logocentric” is overall far more conspicuous than his chastening of Christian negative theology. Other conjugations are equally problematic. How does Žižek, who is enlisted against non-correlationist forms of theology, naturally align with Heidegger and for that matter Derrida, whom he abjures?”

REPLY: There is no call on me to correlate the various things those thinkers have said.

“ Relatedly, and against his more refined contextual and particularistic instincts, O’Leary consistently seems to subscribe to something like the ‘Protestant Principle’ such that Heidegger, Bultmann, and Harnack can be thought to repristinate Luther. There are obvious problems with this position. It is true that Heidegger is far more sympathetic to Luther than to medieval Christian thought. Since, however, he does not have a substantive theology, it is not clear what exactly — if anything — is being repeated. And if Heidegger is somehow repeating Luther, perhaps in a covert form, then we have to face the other horn of the dilemma: does this mean that Heidegger is a crypto-theologian and not a philosopher, even though he makes an essentially Kantian cut between them?”

REPLY: The methodological gesture of the step back is inspired by Luther but in an exclusively philosophical application.

“This is not all by way of tension. Left suspended also is the status of the biblical text. On the one hand, O’Leary gives the biblical text extraordinary critical leverage over theological constructions and even over doctrines. But it is not evident that the biblical text is normative: it seems to regulate only to the extent to which it rhymes with the experiences of individuals and communities over time. In form at least this is a very Schleiermachian position. Still, there is some reason to think that O’Leary’s position is more radical than that articulated by the Schleiermacher of the Glaubenslehre. There, if not necessarily in his earliest work, Schleiermacher accepts some version of the incommensurability thesis, that is, the theologian and religious believer is obliged to affirm the Bible’s uniqueness, even in or especially in a complex context in which one feels equally obliged to affirm the value of the discourses of philosophy, science, and literature. O’Leary differs from Schleiermacher in that we find no unambiguous embracing of the thesis of incommensurability. Indeed, there is much in Conventional and Ultimate Truth that counts against it. For instance, in chapter 3 O’Leary elevates the disclosive potential of literature to such a degree that it seems to be on the same level as the biblical text.”

O’Leary’s probing and illuminating readings of Proust and Joyce suggest that literature is a particularly privileged means of exposing a complicated and vertiginous world and a pluralized self that dogmatic and authoritarian forms of Christianity cover over. Obviously, the biblical text has this power also, but it may very well need literature as a charger and refresher of words that have gone stale. If this is in fact O’Leary’s position, then it lifts up for our attention a point that has been a typical feature of correlationist forms of theology from Tillich to Tracy. For the Schleiermacher of the Glaubenslehre, just as the biblical text has no discursive rival, in principle — if not necessarily in fact — experience is not allowed to have critical leverage over it, even if only for the reason that the biblical text is itself cast as a form of experience. O’Leary, however, seems to follow the example of the early Romantic Schleiermacher in imagining a distinction between the biblical text as expression and the funding experience, and though experience and expression are tied together, it is experience that is decisive in the last instance. The challenge to the incommensurability of the biblical text by literature has everything to do with the fact that all great literature is drenched in experience.

REPLY: As an instrument of salvation Scripture is of course incommensurable with secular literature. This does not override the tension between historical and literary study of Scripture in its actual texture and the theological perceptions born of its used in worship and prayer.
“There is just one further tension worth pointing out. Throughout Conventional and Ultimate Truth O’Leary proves to be a major supporter of historical-critical method, while at the same time being a supporter of hermeneutics and deconstruction. These are not obviously compatible interpretive regimes. For example, in his application of general hermeneutics to the biblical text Ricoeur, on whom Tracy depends so much, proves to be no admirer of historical criticism which he thinks deluded in seeking the referent behind the text. And deconstruction is at odds not only with all forms of referentialism, but also with the hermeneutic search for meaning and meaningfulness.”

REPLY: I would see inbuilt tensions here, of the sort that Gadamer brooded on, but I don’t see any crippling problem.
“Despite the fact that correlationist and non-correlationist forms of theology in the post-Vatican II period are united both in their opposition to propositionalist forms of theology, it makes sense that O’Leary would construct Ressourcement theology as his foil. Not only was Ressourcement theology highly influential in the documents of Vatican II, arguably, with the relative eclipse of correlationist forms of theology in the past few decades, Ressourcement-style theology has essentially shared the stage in Catholic theology with liberationist forms of theology.”

REPLY: Again, I do not reject “propositions.” And surely there have been plenty of “correlationist” theologians at work in recent decades, theologians in dialogue with modern culture and philosophy? Claude Geffré is a name that comes to mind.

“It would stand to reason then that a ‘comeback’ of correlation theology would involve displacing it rather than liberation theology with which O’Leary asserts common cause. O’Leary finds just about everything in non-correlationist Ressourcement theology disagreeable. On the substantive front, Conventional and Ultimate Truth refuses to authorize the high Christology of Ressourcement which elevates the Gospel of John, questions the epistemic responsibility of its Trinitarian reflection which conceives the economic Trinity to be grounded on an ontologically vibrant divine, and refuses its high view of the Church. On the more formal level, Ressourcement theology represents a refusal of method and the obligation of critique, and overvalues the theological tradition and Church authority. How might a Ressourcement theology, which is an object of both direct and indirect attack throughout Conventional and Ultimate Truth, reply?”

REPLY: Of course the economic Trinity is grounded on an ontologically vibrant divine; to say otherwise would be the epitome of all heresies. The question is the mode of access to the divine and the limits on an autnomous speculative discourse on the Trinity-in-itself (here Newman is a restraining influence just as Barth and Rahner are). Of course the high Christology of John must be retrieved; but metaphysical misreading of the text must be replaced by contemplative phenomenology; and interaction with Vedanta is helpful in that. The functioning of dogma and authority must be brought into convincing perspective.

“The following are just a few pointers whereby to criticize the critic. The basic differences already pointed to are absolutely fundamental. Advocates of Ressourcement theology would say that correlationalist forms of theology are beset with post-Kantian methodologism which invariably domesticates revelation, and equally invariably will try to justify Christ, Christian belief, and scripture, before the bar of reason or before a jury of hermeneutic and postmodern discourses. While not denying that the theological tradition continually needs to be questioned with regard to its adequacy and that the Church continually needs to examine itself with regard to the carrying out of its mission, it does ask that both be given the benefit of the doubt and that the hermeneutic of suspicion not go all the way down.”

REPLY: I ask that hermeneutic subtlety go all the way down, but not in the guise of a skeptical demand that the data of Revelation justify themselves at the bar of autonomous reason. Modern thought has been at work on the Christian message for three centuries, and has had salutary as well as destructive impacts. But the realities of faith have come through more clearly due to this purgative ideal.

“The gap is equally continental when it comes to the apprehension and comprehension of Christ. Relative to Ressourcement theology, O’Leary’s Christology is low, his marginalization of the Gospel of John problematic, and the prospects of doxology slim.”

REPLY: It’s a Christology from below, but seeks to rejoin John and Chalcedon and finding a language for them today. It’s a critical retrieval of both the Jewish humanity and the divine phenomenality of Christ.

“Even more problematic from a Ressourcement form of theology would be the view of the Church, at once extremely thin and a relentless object of criticism. And with regard to the biblical text Ressourcement theologians would take issue with O’Leary’s lack of commitment to the incommensurability thesis.”

REPLY: I do not discuss ecclesiology, but I assuredly embrace fully the ecclesiology of Lumen gentium.

“ All in all, Ressourcement theologians would regard the updated correlationist model to be as guilty as the previous one in capitulating to modernity and modern reason in particular.”

REPLY: I do find most of the polemic against “modernity” sustained in particular by Radical Orthodoxy very overdone. There are lots of blessings in modern art and thought for which we should cultivate gratitude and appreciation.

“My sympathies lie significantly with Ressourcement theologians such as de Lubac and Balthasar. Still, one must admit that the differences between the correlationist and non-correlationist models of fundamental theology are so fundamental that it is difficult to conceive what would be the criteria to decide between the two frames, since both forms of theology are perfectly capable of generating criteria of adjudication, which would in turn become the subject of argument. I am by no means suggesting that these models are irreconcilable. I am saying that the arguments would be far too complicated to rehearse here, and that the arguments would proceed on different levels.
“Given this, I propose to make some slightly less serious objections to Conventional and Ultimate Truth that might in some sense be regarded as friendly amendments. First, while one has no right to expect O’Leary to take the same critical stance towards the present moment as is the wont of Ressourcement theologians, nonetheless, one might legitimately expect him in the light of the post-modern thinkers he cites to problematize the current ideological dispensation far more than he actually does. Conventional and Ultimate Truth seems to be unfazed by skepticism, relativism, and the evacuation of any and all identity, not simply religious identity.”

REPLY: I attempt to do justice to “identity” as Buddhists do, by restoring to it conventional validity and a salvific expediency.

“
Perhaps even more puzzling is O’Leary’s ignoring of Heidegger’s critique of ‘representation’ and the objectification of reality that is inscribed in it which the German philosopher takes to be absolutely systemic in the scourge that is modernity. Even on Heideggerian grounds, or perhaps especially on Heideggerian grounds, it is not clear that when one calls on modern reason to critique theological and dogmatic renderings of Christian faith we are not dealing with the pot calling the kettle black.”

REPLY: In rejoicing in the blessings of modernity of course I do not overlook the ills of rationalism, materialism, technocracy, and what not, but these are not topics uppermost in my mind. Heidegger the critic of modernity is of less interest to me than Heidegger the subtle hermeneut of the philosophical tradition since Heraclitus and the sensitive reader of great modern poets (who provide modernity’s own remedy for modernity’s ills).

“ In this respect O’Leary’s work, arguably, falls below the level of self-reflexive critique typical of some of the more sophisticated forms of correlationism, where the conceptual grid of criticism itself becomes the object of critique. A second and related problem concerns the inflation of Heidegger with regard to fundamental theology. Heidegger, albeit a Heidegger mediated through Gadamer and Ricoeur, and a Heidegger with a high dose of plasticity capable of emendation by thinkers as different as Derrida and Žižek, plays a huge role in O’Leary’s construction of fundamental theology. While in Ressourcement theology Heidegger is by no means the bête noir that Hegel is, in general he is regarded as a problematic asset. His model of truth as aletheia bears an analogical relation to revelation, and his view of Gelassenheit bears a relation to the mystical attention and receptivity to reality. Still, if Heidegger’s Kant-like separation of philosophy provides one reason for concern, so also does his claim of neutrality for his particular rendition of phenomenology.”

REPLY: Heidegger asks to be read as a phenomenologist and not as an ideologist. I take him at his word and take from his writings only what can be assessed in purely philosophical terms.

“As with Stein and Przywara before him, Balthasar thinks that the neutrality of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is armed. That is, its finitism is constituted by foreclosures regarding what can be experienced — not anything eternal or infinite — and what can be usefully talked about — not God.”

REPLY: Well, he did bring in gods and “the God” in a bid at a phenomenological natural theology. I don’t have much interest in that.

“ For all the differences, then, between Heidegger and Kant, from the perspective of a theologian like Balthasar, Heidegger is caught in the web of the postulatory finitism of the First Critique. In addition, O’Leary never raises as an issue Heidegger’s constitutive anti-Catholicism which, on the basis of the Black Notebooks, seems to be far more constitutive of his thought than anti-Semitism.”

REPLY: I don’t think either are constitutive, and even if they were the valuable aspecsts of his thought can be extracted from them.

“ Nor for that matter does he submit to interrogation Heidegger’s literally fabulous story of philosophy as the history of metaphysics, which one would think is objectionable even on formal grounds as being so monolithic as to be entirely unbelievable.”

REPLY: It’s a history of the question of being, and is not at all fabulous or monolithic or unbelievable, any more than Étienne Gilson’s. I did criticize aspects of it in Questioning Back and in ‘Theological Resonances of Der Satz vom Grund,.’ in C. Macann, ed., Critical Assessments: Martin Heidegger (Routledge, 1992), I, 213-56.


“Certainly, this is not a story that is accepted by Balthasar, and even less by Marion and Lacoste.”

REPLY: I find Heidegger far more solidly based than these critics, or than Habermas. On Marion see ‘Phenomenology and Theology: Respecting the Boundaries.’ Philosophy Today 62:99-118.

“And lastly, there is Heidegger’s post-Kehre ruminations on the Fourfold, which if supposedly phenomenologically validatable, seems to represent a return to myth and outlining an alternative religiosity. This Heidegger seems to be a little too conveniently put in epoché.”

REPLY: Yes, I don’t find the Fourfold particularly convincing, but I read it in light of the more obviously purely phenomenological emphases in neighboring works.

“A final area of concern is the complacent affirmation of multiple religious identities. Leaving aside reservations in Ressourcement theologians concerning the advisability of multiple religious identities, the question emerges for us in the modern period when every form of identity is being evacuated, whether multiple religious identities would in fact be an illusion and that in fact one would be dealing with no identity at all.”

REPLY: The identities I champion are those of religious traditions established over millennia. I believe they are de iure and not merely de facto (and here Pope Francis clearly disagrees with Dominus Iesus). The individual has the privilege of participating in them in various ways, in practice, in philosophical meditation, and even in theological refutation. Ippolito Desideri, SJ (1684-1733) miraculously learned Tibetan language and Tibetan Buddhism in a few years of immersion in the county. He wrote hundreds of pages in Tibetan as well as Italian refuting Buddhism as a diabolical deception, yet he is the founding father of Buddhist-Christian dialogue, acclaimed as ‘a remarkable and very early testament to inter-religious dialogue’ by the Dalai Lama in 2010. The fussing about multiple identity is needless. The Zen practice of Enomiya Lassalle, SJ, or again what Merton wrote to Suuki in 1959: ‘It seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk,” are a kind of solvitur ambulando.

“3. Concluding Remarks

“Conventional and Ultimate Truth is a skillfully wrought and bracing book which confidently proposes an updated version of a correlationist theology relevant to all Christian confessions, but particularly so in the case of Catholicism. Relative to the previous iterations of correlationist forms of fundamental theology, its main strengths lie in its economy of expression, its impressive fluency both with regard to the theological traditions and modern critical idioms, and its deep appreciation and knowledge of Asian religions which enables it to construct a fundamental theology within a comparative perspective. O’Leary clearly thinks that if a correlationist form of theology is to return to prominence, it is a Ressourcement form of theology that it replaces.
“Although sometimes impatient and dismissive of thinkers like Balthasar, O’Leary has his reasons, with the lack of a comparative perspective in Ressourcement being perhaps the most important, but still just one of many.”

REPLY: But De Lubac’s three books on Buddhism are a remarkable comparative exercise by the leading Ressourcement figure. Daniélou also had comparativist sympathies.

“ Moreover, some of these reasons represent decisions that are so fundamental that it leaves very little common ground between his correlationist style theology and the non-correlationist theology of a Balthasar or a Benedict. While lack of common ground is not the same as incommensurability, instead of arguing the case for Ressourcement theology, I point to tensions and weaknesses in Conventional and Ultimate Truth that might need to be shored up before the real battle between correlationist and non-correlationist forms of theology begins or begins again.”

REPLY: I really don’t see the need of such a battle.

Thanks also to Thomas Cattoi for his review in Buddhist-Christian Studies 2019. He thinks that I believe classical metaphysics and the traditional doctrinal formulations… have run their course’ and that I place ‘historical theology—alongside with substantialist metaphysics and traditional doctrinal formulations—in opposition to the event of divine self-disclosure.’ Yet I do defend the formulations of Nicea and Chalcedon, and I urge an ongoing critical retrieval of tradition. I do not disagree that ‘the purpose of classical theology is exactly the articulation of this event—not a hubristic attempt to capture the mystery resorting to univocal speech.’ something I never suggested. ‘If one were merely to abide in the intimations of the divine emerging from the Gospel, thereby foreswearing speculative reflection’ (330)—is not quite my ideal, for of course the hermeneutics of the Gospel is a tremendous effort of reflection, and reflection must extend to critical retrieval of the entire tradition as well. The confinement of theology to speculative deployment of analogy along medieval lines is what causes Cattoi to fear I am risking that we ‘abandon the practice of theology altogether.’ Cattoi imagines that I lack a ‘charitable view of classical doctrines’ and do not believe they have an enduring role to play… once their experiential ground and their analogical character have been discovered and appreciated anew.’ (Cattoi finds the word ‘risible’ on p. 317; but it does not occur there or anywhere in the book.)

The Blessings of Relativism

  (A talk given at the Honan Chapel, University College Cork, at a seminar to mark the opening of the Institute for Japanese Studies, September 12, 2011.)

 

 

      ‘The tyranny of relativism,’ a phrase given currency by the Vatican in recent years, strikes a bell immediately with all who are disturbed by the many forms of relativism sweeping contemporary culture. The most troubling of these for most people is moral relativism, the replacement of clear moral rules by a subtle calculus of results, feelings, or intangible values such as authenticity, sincerity, fulfilment. Close on its heels comes religious relativism, the pervasive sense that all religions are more or less equally valid spiritual paths. Doctrinal relativism is closely linked to this and holds that dogmatic language has no objective content – certainly not one that remains invariant over time – but merely gives expression to religious intuitions. Cultural and historical relativism are the philosophical background of these theological outlooks. All truths and meanings are constructed within a particular cultural and historical horizon and must undergo huge change when transferred from one horizon to another. Interpretation thus becomes a very free art, and its slipperiness is exposed in the most radical way in Foucault’s poststructuralism and Derrida’s deconstruction. The self-refuting movement of philosophical relativism holds that no truth can be stated at all, even the truth that no truth can be stated. All of these movements are laced with a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ that in the wake of Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud queries the genealogy of religious traditions as human inventions whose real motive and function has to be brought to light. Relativism goes hand in hand with secularism and with a naturalist view of religions as ideologies jostling for a place in the market of cultural products.

      However, these movements of thought that converge to produce a tsunami of relativism are not merely an evil doom. They reflect a growth of awareness. Moral relativism, for example, can be seen as reflecting a shift in the anthropological paradigm, the emergence of a subtler understanding of the values involved in sexuality and marriage, birth and death. The human sciences and the ongoing practice of discussion and consultation that is characteristic of a democratic culture have produced an awareness that cannot be done justice to by a stonewalling defence of older positions. But an aprioristic construction of a new paradigm – in the fields of psychology, philosophy, law – needs to be supplemented by cross-cultural study. The late William Lafleur, in Liquid Life, studied traditional Japanese attitudes to miscarriage, abortion and infanticide (sending the baby, regretfully, back to the gods), showing how these human realities can be situated within a moral and spiritual horizon far from that of the Christian West. The study could be extended to suicide (see Maurice Pinguet, La mort volontaire au Japon) and euthanasia. Here the relativization of a paradigm proceeds not by abstract argument but in dialogue with those who live or lived by other paradigms.

      Religious pluralism is often discussed in abstract terms in the discipline known as ‘theology of religions.’ Japan is a good country for grasping this pluralism in a more concrete way. The Japanese can enter into the spirit of different religions – celebrating Christmas or marriage in Christian style, visiting a Shinto shrine in the New Year, arranging funerals with a Buddhist temple, professing atheism outside these religious contexts – in a palette or smoragsbord of religious investments that has no dogmatic framework and is not looking for one. Religions become practical devices, for elevating the occasions of life or for increasing communal or individual energy. Interreligious dialogue does not flourish in such a regime, since the concern with establishing truth  is so secondary.

      The Buddhist sense of the fragility and impermanence of all existents, so appropriate to a country where high seismic activity reminds people that even the ground under their feet offers no solid substantial basis, provides deep philosophical underpinnings for this light approach to religious ideas and practices. In Buddhism these ideas and practices are skilful means for communication and for orientation on the path to ultimate liberation. Buddhism itself is only a raft for carrying one to the other shore. Strong and effective in that function it must be set aside when it has fulfilled its purpose. If Buddhism weans its adherents away from attachment to delusive objects of clinging such as an alleged substantial self, it also teaches them detachment from the doctrines and practices of religion itself. This produces a pervasive conventionalism. A flexible play of conventions is the most appropriate way of articulating religious wisdom. Japanese culture as a whole treasures and cultivates conventions as the precious cement of peaceful and civilized living. No doubt this can be intellectually stifling, in contrast to the relentless trust in logic and dialectic whereby western philosophy and science forge their way to a firm and systematic grasp of truth. A philosopher like Nishida, who feels his way to a sense of how things are, by a kind of osmosis, in impressionistic dialogue with western and Buddhist sources, with very little in the way of sustained rational argument, is a characteristic product of such an intellectual environment.

      Zen dialogues enact the relativizing impact of Buddhist dialectic, according to which ultimate reality neither is, nor is not, not both is and is not, nor neither is nor is not. The all-undercutting tetralemma perhaps provides a logical warrant for dialogues such as the following:

 

     A monk asked Ch’ang Sha: ‘What kind of thing is my mind?’

Ch’ang Sha: ‘The whole universe is your mind.’

The monk: ‘If it is so, I would have no place to put myself in.’

Ch’ang Sha: ‘Quite the contrary: this precisely is the place for you to put yourself in.’

The monk: ‘What, then, is the place for me to put myself in?’

Ch’ang Sha: ‘A boundless ocean! The water is deep, unfathomably deep!’

The monk: ‘That is beyond my comprehension.’

Ch’ang Sha : ‘See the huge fishes and tiny fishes, swimming up and down as they like!’

 

Zen dialogues constantly undercut one’s presuppositions, altering the framework of judgement from line to line. The effect might be compared with a clever detective novel, in which the focus of suspicion shifts from chapter to chapter, or with the Iranian film, A Separation, which shows the relativity of perceptions and judgements conditioned by psychology, prejudices, class tensions, conflicting codes. It does not take a broad experience of historical and cultural pluralism to realize that relativism is part of the texture of everyday human experience. To fixate on an arrested view of things is a formula for blindness and intolerance. The Japanese have a good sense of this relativity and conventionality of moral judgements. Their avoidance of unnecessary conflict is not merely due to a cult of harmony or to political spinelessness but to a sense that issues of dispute have no objective and unalterable nature but are conditioned on a particular situation or relationship, which is constantly changing.

      The Catholic sex abuse scandal has generated many forms of discourse tending to exclude rational analysis or debate, but wiser heads have proposed approaches that relativize the slogans which have often substituted for patient reflection. Cloyne theologian Pat Hannon urges the adoption of Richard McCormick SJ’s nine rules for debate that can unblock a polarized situation such as the abortion controversy in which both sides believe that the case is closed and that there is no room for discussion: ‘he calls on protagonists to attempt to identify areas of agreement, to represent the opposing position accurately and fairly, and to try to identify the core issues at stake’ (‘Child Sexual Abuse: Rules for the Debate;’ in E. McDonagh and V. McNamara, ed. An Irish Reader in Moral Theology,: Columba, 2010, 2:358-64; p. 360). Recognition of the historical, cultural and situational relativity of any position one takes up can further free up the space for rational debate. As Marie Keenan notes: ‘Many of the words used in relation to this problem’s definition, such as sexual abuse, victim, survivor, paedophile, molester, pervert, sexual deviant are rooted in the attitudes of a particular time and each carries its ideological baggage… Different eras have produced different perspectives on child sexual abuse and in each era the prevailing opinion is supported by professional discourses that present what is described as convincing “objective” “empirical” research that is said to represent more advanced thinking than what went before… Each formulation is presented as progressive, claiming that the contemporary beliefs are “true” whereas the previous ones were not’ (‘“Them and Us”: The Clergy Child Sexual Offender as “Other,”’ ib., 381-407; p. 382). The expectation that this historical relativism will be progressively erased and a fully objective picture of such matters firmly established is a lure of rationalism, the kind of rationalism presiding over the DSM classification systems for psychiatric disorders, which can ‘serve as instruments of objectification, measurement and economic gain’ (ib., 386) but which never rejoin the particularity of individual histories. Even within the hard sciences such as mathematics there is ample room for relativism and conventionalism as Henri Poincaré showed long ago. How much more is this the case in the human sciences, where the countless richly textured traditions of interpretation and assessment can never be reduced to a single all-purpose model.

      What does exposure to Japanese culture add to the sophisticated complexity of psychological and moral vision that one can derive from modern literature – from Flaubert, Tolstoy, George Eliot, Proust, James or Joyce? I think that the chief merit of Japan is negative – the breaking of the frames of reference that preside in the West even in modern secularized literature and philosophy, namely the references to philosophy since Plato and to biblical and Christian tradition. Though these western sources have become very influential in Japan too over the last two centuries, it is still possible to reconstitute and connect with a Japanese culture shaped only by native literary and folk traditions and Shinto along with the Sinitic imports, Buddhism and Confucianism. Lafcadio Hearn, who flourished in the USA as a Zolaesque journalist, changed his skin during his last fourteen years, spent in Japan. Set up with a wife, servants and a teaching position, and bearing the new name of Koizumi Yakumo, he rediscovered in Japan the Greek gods of his childhood and ‘lost his identity,’ by his own account. Already thoroughly relativized by his Irish-English-Greek-American background, he was well positioned to become the iconic expatriate Japanophile, the one most warmly embraced in Japanese culture itself, where he is a household name. Hearn had no philosophy and would have made nothing of Nishida. His encounter with Japan took place on a more primordial basis, with the heart, the imagination and the senses. Japan offered not just another way of thinking but another way of feeling and being, a sense-surround environment that altered the body’s way of being in the world and being together with others.

      Neither Japan nor Ireland can any longer maintain the illusion of being an homogeneous monocultural insular society. Multiculturalism pervades daily life in the present and is also exhumed in the past through a recovery of the multiple strands going to make up our languages, traditions and histories. Relativism is the philosophy that enables us to thrive on this situation, constantly moving further away from the initial absolutist self-definitions as Irish or Japanese, Catholic or Buddhist toward the constantly changing and expanding space of intercultural dialogue. To find one’s moral or ideological bearings in this space it is not enough to cling to one’s initial convictions. Rather the mutual enrichment of complementary perspectives allows richer and more nuanced convictions to form and grow.  Japan’s long interest in Ireland, dating back to Hearn and to the first translations of Yeats as early as 1896, is now at last being matched by an Irish fascination with Japan, and understanding between the two radically different cultural and religious universes is growing apace. This is an education in living with relativity and pluralism and the crucible in which a more broadly human and deeply grounded moral and spiritual vision is being forged.

 

 

7. The Empty Christ

In the case of statements about God or about ultimate reality, it is not insuperably difficult to square their historical relativity with their claim to objective truth, since they concern what relativises from the start all efforts to conceive or express it. Even claims that associate the transcendent with particular historical events can be softened and relativised by the thought that the transcendent is revealed more generally in all events. But when a single event is designated as the supreme and definitive locus of revelation, a painful logical alternative seems inescapable: we are forced either to de-absolutise this event, or to insist that all other historical vehicles of revelation are subordinate to it a priori. If the ‘Christ-event’ is the site of full revelation and salvation, then non-Christian traditions may serve as providential avenues of approach to it, or may provide some perspectives for its interpretation, or may even be supplementary channels of its grace, but ultimately their significance is decided asymmetrically by this unique event. Thus Christianity seems to claim to understand the other religions, beginning with Judaism, better than they can understand themselves.

This asymmetry is deeply unsatisfactory. It defines the status of other traditions and the meaning of history prior to any acquaintance and concrete study. It contradicts the other traditions’ sense of their own significance. The more we listen to those others on their own terms, the more the claim that God is fully and definitively revealed only in Christ seems in need of revision. Each religion cuts its distinctive path of truth, creates a distinctive style of approach to ultimate gracious reality. Empirically, the revelation in Christ neither absorbs nor discredits the truth-events centred on the Torah, the Quran, the Vedas or the bodhisattva path. Moreover, the frontiers of Christ’s identity are uncertain. The Word of God – the transcendent revelation event in its undisposability (Barth’s Unverfügbarkeit) – has indeed elected to be named Jesus Christ. But the sense of that name emerges only as we relate Jesus to the other worlds of truth.

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THE ONE SAVIOUR

‘He came to them, walking on the sea’ (Mk 6:48). The encounter with a saviour, who brings the answer to our most unsettling questions – the pardon of sins, the remedy for suffering and mortality – is at the heart of most religious experience. But the saviour’s identity differs from one culture to another, as does the nature of the salvation promised. Krishna’s claims are as universal as those of the Johannine Christ:

"Thou art the Imperishable, the supreme Object of Knowledge; Thou art the ultimate resting-place of this universe;

"Thou art the immortal guardian of the eternal right, Thou art the everlasting Spirit, I hold". (Bhagavad-Gîtâ 11.18, trans. Edgerton)

And the accents are as intimate and as persuasive:

"Further, the highest secret of all, My supreme message, hear.

"Because thou art greatly loved of Me, Therefore I shall tell thee what is good for thee.

"Be Me-minded, devoted to Me; Worshiping Me, revere Me;

"And to Me alone shalt thou go; truly to thee I promise it – (because) thou art dear to Me". (18.64-5)

The promises of Amida Buddha or the other saviour figures of Mahâyâna Buddhism, or those of the gods and goddesses of devotional Hinduism, are equally touching. Nor can one confidently claim that the faith, love, devotion these figures inspire is existentially less real or authentic than that of Christians.

Yet objectively, it might be argued, these saviour-figures are only imaginary personifications, projections in which religious longing fills out the lineaments of its dream, whereas Jesus is a historical human being. They remain docetic amalgams of finite and infinite, whereas he marks the point where finite and infinite meet in their distinctness, not in myth but in mystery. In the higher reaches of religion personal saviours tend to be identified with or dissolved into broader impersonal platforms of salvation: Brahman, Dharma, Buddha-nature, Torah. The apologist will see these as dim participations in the Johannine Logos, which is definitively made known, and decisively related to human, historical reality, only in Jesus Christ.

Some such critique of the claims of other saviours may be an essential component of Christian apologetics. Yet the credibility of the Christian claim depends in turn on honest assessment of what these troubling parallels to it imply. Their continued vigour undermines the self-evidence of the confession of Christ as saviour, making the figure of Jesus enigmatic in an unexpected way. He who is the answer to our existential questions has himself become a question. We go to meet the other religions with the assurance of having a saviour, but also with questions about his place in the interreligious horizon. Moreover, the very notion of salvation has become problematic. Doctrines of salvation seem to reduce the variety of human ills under a single essentialist rubric such as duhkha or sin, in order to provide an equally monolithic antidote to them. In all this we cannot presume to subordinate divine revelation to a more global horizon; rather we must follow the concrete openings towards the other which are inscribed in the revelation itself, both in its transcendent aspect – the illimitable reach of the notion of Logos – and in its empirical aspect – the open-ended, incomplete historical texture of the Christ-event.

The inclusivist claim that whatever salvation seems to come from other traditions in reality comes from Jesus in a hidden or anonymous fashion, or at least converges on him as its fullest embodiment, so that he is the privileged focus of human progress toward divinisation, is suspiciously convenient. Yet it is equally facile to speak of a plurality of saving instances having equal status, or to suppose that the universality of Christianity will emerge in the course of interreligious encounters by a progressive dechristianisation, just as the universality of Western reason is realised as its progressive dewesternisation. We do not know what the slow mutation of Christian identity, in the course of many complex interactions, may bring forth; but the function of Christ, endlessly reinterpreted, must remain central to this identity. As we think more largely of God and of human history, our understanding of Christ is concomitantly released from anachronistic thought-forms, while it remains coterminous with our grasp, or non-grasp, of transcendent reality on the one hand and of historical humanity on the other, as what mediates between them.

It may be objected that this is a wishful predetermination of the outcome, and that it is more likely that Christ will appear in the interreligious horizon as simply one agent of salvation among others, over whom he enjoys no special primacy. Or agnosticism may seem the most honest attitude: we simply do not know whether or not Christ has a primacy as saviour, for we do not understand well enough the upshot of his saving work and its relation to the other kinds of salvation there may be, so that in practice all we can do is to follow the path opened up by the Gospel without worrying about its relation to other paths.

Yet it is not possible to follow Christ without making, explicitly or implicitly, some strong dogmatic claims for him, though one may emphasise these claims more modestly and discreetly than before. Dogma need not be rigid. It develops as an attempt at critical clarification of what faith affirms spontaneously, singling out points which come increasingly to seem crucial while toning down other aspects which had been too naively and massively asserted. No matter what one chooses to believe, agnosticism coexists with the instinct of faith, and assails it with questions to which the answers are never all given together. Yet in regard to the basic conviction of Christ’s status as saviour, the Spirit enables a leap of faith beyond the circle of pressing doubts, and the New Testament witness, however tempered and demythologised in subsequent reflection, firmly sustains these promptings of the Spirit.

Within this conviction, we may seek to distinguish between what faith, led by the Spirit, apprehends as the soteriological primacy of Christ on the one hand, and on the other what is merely a matter of dogged dogmatic assertion or bondage to traditional habit. However, it is hard to mark a clear boundary here. Faith cannot be cleanly differentiated from respect for tradition, or even from an element of indoctrination. Hence any claim to hold something by faith carries a margin of fragility, requiring to be compensated for by the ongoing effort to reground faith-claims in a more existential apprehension of the Christ-event.

Those who respond to the call, ‘Come unto Me’, whether it come from Christ or Krishna or Amida, do indeed find rest unto their souls, grace, peace and joy. If to be devoted is to be duped, to hold back sceptically is a formula for sterility: les non-dupes errent in their refusal of commitment (Lacan). The devotee gravitates to an exclusivist position; the logic of love justifies this investment of absolute trust in a limited human form, this identification of the ultimate in the singularity of a sacred name. Bur a pluralist theology, while respecting such commitment, seeks to open devotion to a wider disinterested questioning which learns from all traditions. Devotion remains an essential strand in the fabric of religion, but blind devotion must be outgrown. And devotion must not idolise itself, but should be constantly interrogated, with a view to clarifying the encounter which is at its core.

An apologetic defence of Christ’s unique status should begin not from the full-blown doctrine of the Incarnation but from a more basic premise: namely, that God was a work in Christ, that the ultimate reality and nothing less or other is encountered across the words and deeds of Jesus and their ongoing interpretation. Here is a bedrock certitude, which has a plausible phenomenological foundation and which involves no immediate tension with the claims of other religions. The foundation in question is not provided by any single experience, however privileged, but by immersion in the entire spectrum of the teachings of Jesus and the Gospel stories, as they are interpreted and lived by Christians today.

At a second stage, one attends to the distinctiveness, in comparative perspective, of this manifestation of the ultimate in the life of Christ. If we recognise comparable encounters with ultimate reality at the core of other religions, then the distinctiveness of Christ may reside less in what he incarnates than in the ‘how’ of that incarnation, less in his divinity than in the mode of the conjunction of that divinity with humanity.

A generous view will see each saving path as a local enactment of a universal process. ‘Salvation’ as an unimaginable, transcendental movement, shading into other such inconceivables as the Good or the True, is not to be read off automatically from the concrete heterogeneous modes of local salvation-traditions, nor resumed in Christ as ‘concrete universal’. The Buddhist and Christian doctrines of salvation attain a very high degree of universality yet each is limited by its distinctive realm of application. Buddhism is as universal as its spiritual analysis is valid for all humans, but the analysis is incomplete, culture-bound, and can be improved on. Christian universality is associated with the decisiveness of the prophetic tradition in its dealing with history the proclamation of God’s saving will at work in history. But this proclamation remains very general and enigmatic. It is given maximum concreteness in the crucified Jesus; yet even the cross is a sign to be interpreted, and its interpreting community the Christian faithful, cannot declare its universal applicability in an automatic way but must seek first to understand empirically its power to save in their own historical struggle.

How does Christ save? Our answer to that question even for ourselves is always shifting, and can be communicated to humanity only to the degree that it acquires concrete lineaments that have a universal power of persuasion. It never in practice acquires an entirely universal form, all that can be done is to present the currently most vital images of Christ as Saviour; and these images too will differ from culture to culture – one that speaks eloquently to Latin America may fall flat in Australia or Japan. Universality thus takes the form of a pluralistic proliferation of Christ-stories.

At a third, more esoteric level of inquiry we attempt to retrieve the truth of the dogmatic claims about the divinity and humanity of Christ. These came first in the past; but this may have been a short-circuit generating intolerance and violence. Now, rather than a first datum, the divinity of Christ becomes a delicate naming of what the story of Jesus ultimately means. Our traditional language has been massive and overwhelming, like similar language about the Buddha in the Mahâyâna sûtras. When such language is recalled to its basis, it is seen as attesting the transcendent scope of the founding events, the impossibility of confining them within the categories of finite existence, an impossibility perhaps better indicated today by the use of negative language.

In what does the distinctiveness, or the primacy, of Christ’s saving role consist? Five possible answers are: his ontological constitution; the fulness of the revelation he brings; his role as the one who reconciles us with God; the event of his resurrection; his eschatological role. Classically, one would say that his ontological status as true God and true man is what grounds all other aspects of his primacy. But one could try to invert these relations. One could found ontology on revelation: Jesus is identified with the Logos insofar as his life bears the imprint of the reality of God and opens a space within human history for the encounter with that reality. Soteriology too could be reduced to revelational terms: it is by revealing the inner nature of death that Christ’s death frees us from it, and his resurrection is the pneumatic revelation of the sense of his existence as opening human life to divine transcendence; we share in this risen life less by a physical causality than by the opening up of vision. Again, Christ’s eschatological role lies in his revealing the meaning which human history has before God. Such a revelational reduction can easily go too far, undermining any objective primacy of Christ. Thus Gordon Kaufman sees Christ as:

that figure from human history who is believed by Christians to reveal or define, on the one hand, who or what God really is, and, on the other hand, what true humanity consists in. The historical figure of Jesus Christ thus gives concreteness and specificity to the understanding of both God and humanity. (in Gavin D’Costa, ed, Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Maryknoll: Orbis, 1990, p. 11)

But a richer concept of revelation could retain the full weight of the ontological claims. If the being of God is light, the revelation of God is conversely a divine event; thus the claim that ‘Jesus is God’ could be rephrased in revelational terms without loss: Jesus is the event of God’s self-revelation’.

Again, one might try to focus the distinctiveness of the Christ-event on the basis of its eschatological character. If one sees the divinity of Christ as residing in the revelational impact of his life, this in turn could be located in the way his life brings into view the eschatological upshot of history: that is, in the historical significance of his life as carrying the Jewish prophetic tradition to its supreme pitch. To speak of his divinity would then be a shorthand for the integral grasp of the conjunction of divine truth and human hope effected through his life. From beginning to end of the Bible God is one who comes to save, who enters history to bring all things to fulfilment. In Christ this process attains a universal sweep, and there is no going back on this; henceforth, God’s eschatological promise is explicitly extended to all humanity, the Messianic invitation has gone forth to the ends to the earth.

Such a reduction of the ‘divinity of Christ’ to its phenomenal base would not necessarily imply a dissolution of classical doctrine. From the basic phenomenon, the Christ-event, there emanate successive layers of christological language, as ever more elusive overtones, up to the loftiest reaches of the Logos-theology. We validate these languages by regrounding them in the event, and invalidate them to the degree that they obscure it. John 1:14,’The Word became flesh’, is a hinge text, representing the high-point of New Testament Christology and the foundation of later dogma. The movement of validation and critique can be roughly divided into two phases: the testing of dogma against the Johannine vision, and the testing of John’s understanding of Christ against the entire New Testament experience which it attempts to encapsulate.

It is only within the context of such ongoing critical sifting that the doctrinal claims can be persuasively enunciated. Since dogma in any case plays the indispensable initial role of pointing back to the phenomenon it defends, and since the phenomenon can never be completely extracted from the dogmatic pre-understanding which brings it into view, the effort to think the Christ-event should never simply undercut the claims of orthodoxy. These claims are best satisfied by identifying those aspects of the meaning of Christ which originally gave rise to them. The doctrinal claims will never succeed in entirely silencing their critics, but imaginative rehearsal of the pre-dogmatic significance of Christ, like a superb performance of some contested piece of music or theatre, is the best strategy for making those claims seem worth defending. But before going any farther, we need to query the fragile and contingent status of any language we use, attending first to the term ‘Logos’ and then to the term ‘flesh’.

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THE STATUS OF ‘LOGOS’

The question of the ontological status of Christ should not emerge prematurely in interreligious dialogue, where the first concern is to focus the significance of Jesus (or of the Buddha or Muhammad) phenomenologically and historically. This lesser emphasis on dogma comes from the fact that the religions present themselves as vital forces, whose impact is a concrete, empirical matter, whereas their dogmatic claims concern invisible realities, scarcely verifiable. Perhaps the concrete aspects that come to the fore on the interreligious plane will react on the internal debate of each religion, reducing their insistence on what they take to be their pillars and allowing them to become more aware of the problematic character of these ancient claims. The question of the ultimate identity of Christ, and matters of comparable import in other religions, will be interpreted more flexibly as attention is concentrated on the task of understanding the phenomenon of Christ’s saving action as more immediately grasped in the language of faith. Dogmatic claims and questions are implicit even in this first-level language, but their explicit discussion must come after a full exploration of what is nearest to hand phenomenologically and historically. One proceeds to the level of doctrinal reflection only with great hesitation and with a sense of the delicate and problematic nature of the language one is now forced to employ.

At this second level of reflection, one may reach the conclusion that only the Johannine vision of the Logos made flesh can provide a firm basis for the conviction of Christ’s primacy. A Christology that falls short of it makes Christ the merely human agent of divine purposes. But the dogmatic claim here is credible only if we can trace its emergence from its phenomenological context. Such regrounding of the Logos-Christology in the Christ-event is favoured by John himself, for more than a metaphysical theory of Christ’s origins, the Johannine doctrine is a quasi-phenomenological lighting up of the full significance of that event. For John, the meaning of Christ cannot be circumscribed by the categories of ordinary human understanding, or even by any of the titles previously conferred on Jesus and which are assigned their place in the Johannine spectrum. Only the notion of the divine Wisdom or Word, also received from a rich anterior tradition, is commensurate with the significance of Jesus’ life. His presence was that of a living, penetrating word of judgement and grace, which came from God and imprinted itself in the hearts of its hearers with a pneumatic immediacy. The scope of this word is unlimitably universal, for it is spoken from the unmasterable divine dimension. It is an epiphany of the divine glory particularly in the hour of the cross. Its authority is not lessened by the limitations of its historical form, for these are overcome by the interpreting Spirit (Jn 14:26; 16:7-14).

It might be claimed that this pneumatic phenomenology no less than later church doctrine is a violent occlusion of ‘Jesus the Jew’ (Geza Vermes). To bridge the gap between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’ the Johannine vision of Jesus as God’s Word needs to be regrounded in the word Jesus actually spoke, the message of the Kingdom. The portraits of Jesus in Matthew and Luke reveal that the Christ of faith can be read into the historical Jesus without scandalous distortion; the light of the resurrection seems rather to bring out new depth and universality in the words of Jesus and to give them a permanent resonance.

In John’s vision, the Word is at work in the world from the beginning. Its enfleshment in the life of Jesus is a novum that classical Christology has hastened to express in ontological terms; but these can be cashed phenomenologically as meaning an unprecedentedly concrete articulation of the divine Word. The truth of God and the truth of humanity are here brought into conjunction across the total reality of a spiritual event, a finite but open-ended and ongoing history, centred on the figure of Jesus; to assert the ontological claim in abstraction from this history is to set up a rival dogmatic event, an idolatrous distraction from the event of revelation. A demythologised retrieval of Johannine contemplation shows up the clumsiness of metaphysical slogans such as ‘Jesus is God’ or ‘God became man’, and replaces such expressions as ‘My Lord and my God’ (Jn 20:28) within an open-ended revelational situation. We should leave the notion of Logos as indeterminate as possible, hewing closely to what this language suggests in John, and seeing it as an upâya to be deployed skilfully in order to do justice first to the phenomenality of the Christ-event. This means that the formulation of some necessary logical consequences – such as the need to mark a distinction between God and God’s Logos without prejudice to the divine status of the Logos or to the unity of God – will not attain the inflated self-sufficient status of trinitarian speculation, but will present no more than a set of modest rules for the usage of a language each of whose terms eludes our grasp.

A definition of this Logos can never be established as an abstract truth outside of time, as has been attempted since the Fathers. That attempt runs aground on the historicity of theological language and the impossibility of constructing a stable account of divine reality (even if with the Fathers one calls it ‘unknowable’ or ‘incomprehensible’). The makeshift nature of mythical and metaphysical languages has become evident. If we translate them into a more existential or subtle language, this too is a clumsy expedient unless it integrates a reflexive awareness of its own historicity and of the fact that religious language has never more than a relative fittingness, in relation to some precise context, as a more or less skilful intervention in the field of the sayable in order to witness to the unsayable. ‘The Son of man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Lk. 9:58): the truth of Christ is mismatched to all historical frameworks – be they Jewish apocalyptic or Greek metaphysics, contemporary existentialism or evolutionism – and it is this very inadequation which witnesses to the non-masterable character of the Logos. The Logos is not captured in our language, nor does it present itself as an objective existence independent of it. It makes itself felt as the yawning gap on which all human speech founders. It is less the total fulness of our speech than that which makes such totality impossible.

To bring Jesus Christ into perspective, or rather to shatter the narrowing perspectives in which he has been imprisoned, one should cultivate insight into the finitude and provisionality of all historical constructions of his significance. As we leave a world in which the horizon of religious truth was determined exclusively by Christianity, we flounder blindly in interreligious space as long as we are content to repeat the christological formulas shaped in the ancient debate with Judaism and Hellenism, and finalised within a narrowly Christian context. The new space imposes an unprecedented awareness of the limits of received historical language. It shows up the idiosyncratic and contingent starus of Johannine Christology and its Nicene and Chalcedonian elaboration. The truth expressed thereby in the past has become archaic and awaits a redescription which will be its dynamic equivalent under present epistemological conditions.

The Logos cannot be spoken of as an object independent of every ‘subjective’ perspective. First, because Christology originates not in the search for intemporal truths but in the conviction of the universal significance of what has taken place in the concrete figure of Jesus; it can never lose sight of its reference to this historical event. If the level of timeless truth is reached, the statements about this level are few in number and of an abstraction that limits their scope. Every construction of God-in-himself is rooted in the phenomenality of God-for-us; in fact it is only the deep structure of God-for-us that we isolate in formulating a description of the Trinity. Father, Logos, Spirit; silence, speech, breath; revealer, revealed, revelation (Barth); divine emptiness, form of this emptiness, immediacy of the two – these efforts to construct a trinitarian topology of the Christ-event have no coherence independent of their rootedness in this event. A Christology from above cannot begin from the Logos-in-itself, but only follow the phenomenological routes from an apprehension of the Logos as fulness of Christ.

Commenting on R. C. Moberly’s question of 1889 – ‘Is it true that he was very God? It is either true or false… If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false’ (Robert Morgan, ed. The Religion of the Incarnation, Bristol Classical Press, 1989) – Rowan Williams remarks:

I take it that part of the force of the doctrine of the hypostatic union is precisely to deny that ‘Incarnation’ is an isolable event in or prior to the biography of Jesus, and that ‘divinity’ is some element in that life… A phrase like ‘The Incarnation as the Basis of Dogma’ begs a fundamental question by assuming that the fact of God’s taking human flesh is the fundamental theological datum, intelligible (at some level) in abstraction from the realities of truthfulness and finality, encounter and judgement, in the presence of the entirery of Jesus’ story which I have been trying to characterise as the source of the pressure towards dogmatic utterance. That the language of God’s taking flesh remains a crucial part of the exposition of the judgement of Jesus’ history needs to be argued, and argued with conscious attention to the particularity of the ‘flesh’ involved… Moberly is right to see dogma as representing the Christian concern with truth; but this concern is less to do with rationality or comprehensive elucidation, more involved with the need to preserve the possibility of the kind of encounter with the truthtelling Christ that stands at the source of the Church’s identity… (p. 88)

Christian truths are the formulation of a personal encounter, and depend for their utterance on a constant reference to this encounter and an existential correspondence to the one who has thus made himself known (Emil Brunner). As the expression of these truths grows away from this context, it loses its precise meaning and its referential efficacity.

It is this non-objectifiability which dooms every theoretical explication of the meaning of Christ – as of that of the Buddha – to a certain frustration. If it could be fully adequate, such an explication would make superfluous the witness of the Christian life, which gives the Gospel its force and intelligibility. Theoretical explication serves to highlight this witness and the figure of Christ himself in overcoming the interpretative frames of a mythology or piety which have become sources of blindness. Like the Buddha, Jesus represents a perfect (but not exclusive or exhaustive) realisation of a spiritual tradition, whence flows at once a great richness and a great simplicity. When theology loses sight of this central clarity, the witness of the saints brings it back to it, demanding of theology a luminous clarification of the meaning of Christ. Today such a clarification is being sought at the crossing of three paths of thought: the exegetical quest for the biblical Christ, reflection on the liberative social implications of the Gospel, and interreligious questioning. The image of Christ which emerges at this crossroads is no longer a stable presence set before us as an object of adoration, but rather a dynamic process inscribed in the very texture of our life. This process destroys every rigid form, making itself felt on each occasion as a new departure. Every form taken by Christianity in history is relativised, but not the process of creative transformation by which Christianity lives and which it knows as the Christ (see J. B. Cobb, in Leroy S. Rouner, ed. Religious Pluralism, University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, p. 175). Christ is not this or that figure that we project, but the entire process of transformation his name evokes. The meaning of Christ consists entirely in his identity with this universal process, and in the exemplarity with which he realises it and carries it to its perfect form.

The impossibility of objectifying the Logos is also apparent when one considers the texture of christological language, of which the basic terms – Son, Logos, Wisdom – are poetic metaphors, drawn from a certain tradition, and cannot be taken as a conceptually transparent description of that to which they obliquely refer. The use of these provisional designations obeys the art of deploying language as a skilful means in the environment of a given culture; as circumstances change, so must this language. Thus it is a mistake to multiply trinitarian statements in the belief that they give a grip on concrete and substantial entities. However refined the procedure by which one sets about stating truths at this level, even in the Johannine prologue or the Nicene creed, they are expressed in a culture-bound language of which the metaphorical character shows the provisional status. Awareness of this situation may rob the great christological conflicts of much of their drama.

The objectivity of the trinitarian statements of the patristic era depends on the topology of revelation of the Hellenistic world; that world having disappeared, this objectivity is itself menaced. To repeat is to betray. To suppose that one can master the biblical and the contemporary horizons starting from a dogmatic structure set up in patristic times is a double obscurantism. This structure, like all historical constructs, is caught in a movement of perpetual alteration. Certain negative constraints remain in force – the prohibition against denying the divine unity or any distinction between Father, Son and Spirit; these rules are necessary to preserve the integrity of the New Testament revelation. But expressions such as hypostasis and ousia have meaning only in an obsolete framework. Representations of the Trinity-in-itself, such as the ‘eternal generation’ of Origen, the ‘procession of the Word’ and the ‘spiration of the Spirit’ as analysed in medieval theology, and above all the currently popular notion of a ‘community of persons’ are illegitimate projections from the biblical experience of the divine as Father, Logos and spirit. In a different cultural context, if the Gospel had emerged in China for example, this experience might have been expressed by other names which would provide no basis for such representations.

The distinction between Father, Son and spirit belongs in the first place to the phenomenality of revelation; it emerges within the ‘divine milieu’ opened by the New Testament as a basic law which assures the meaning of the propositions there enunciated. The quest to formulate the ontological basis for this law, the transcendental conditions of its possibility, moving from the revealed God to an independent discourse on God-in-himself, is not feasible, and even if it were it would involve a distortion of the phenomenality of God as revealed. Certainly, one must maintain that this God really is, and that the trinitarian distinctions have an objective basis in God’s being; but this is less a question of giving metaphysical foundations to the first-order language of faith than of defending the integrity of that language against scepticism. To elaborate a speculative metaphysics is a poor defence of the objectivity of first-order trinitarian language; a more effective one would retain only the essential, and the best formulation of this would be negative: ‘it is false to deny that God exists that the he is one, it is false to say that the distinction between the three aspects of the phenomenality of God disappears at a deeper level of divine being’.

To keep open the perspectives of the New Testament a trinitarian theorv is required, but it should be confined to a minimum and kept in the background. Some theologians see the mission of Jesus Christ as being primarily to disclose the mystery of the Trinity. This creates a distorted perspective on the event of salvation, of which the trinitarian doctrine is only a kind of syntax. ‘When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth’. The truth referred to is the full eschatological manifestation of Christ, ‘the things that are to come’ (Jn 16:13), and not the immanent Trinity, ‘the eminent historicity of God himself’, as Emilio Brito suggests. To talk of a ‘“hermeneutical circle” between the experience of faith and Trinitology as interpreter of revelation’ (Brito, ‘Schleiermacher et la doctrine de la Trinité’, ETL 23 (1992):145-71; p. 167) invites a speculative idolatry of the immanent Trinity. Trinitology should be no more than logical and linguistic clarification o{ the structure of the revealed:

“The rules of language (one essence, two processions, three persons, four relations), perfectly justified as rules of language, have degenerated into the arithmetics of a transcendent ontology… If one wants to preserve the only intelligible and authentic significance of trinitarian doctrine, that which it has from revelation, one must remember again that ‘significance cannot be separated from the access that leads to it’ (Levinas), that ‘the access is part of the significance itself’”. (Bouillard, in E. Castelli, L’analyse du langage théologique, Paris, Aubier, 1969, p. 338)

Even so refreshing a perspective as that of David Nicholls invites similar caution:

“Paul wrote of the risen Christ as ‘interceding for us’ in heaven (Rom. 8:34). In the Epistle to the Hebrews Christ is the eternal high priest, representing the redeemed, and ‘ever lives to make intercession for them’ (Heb. 7:25). For the Johannine writer, ‘we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous’ (1 John 2:1) What sense can these images make unless they assume that there is within the life of the Godhead a conflict between Father and Son. A conflict of principles and interest whose resolution is only possible in the concrete case?” (‘Trinity and Conflict’, Theology 1993:19-27).

The role of the human Christ before the Father certainly gives access to the immanent Trinity, but that access also limits what can be thought or said about the Trinity. Conflict in the Bible is always between humanity and God, never between God and God. The idea that the risen Christ intercedes with the Father simply means that his atoning death reconciles humanity with God. To imagine the divine Logos as such interceding with God is incompatible with the biblical way of imagining God. The saving role of the human Jesus is an incarnation of this Logos, and such activities as pleading and interceding characterise this human incarnation rather than the Logos in its divine nature. A conflictual model of the relation between Jesus and the Father may be valuable, but its transference to the Trinity-in-itself is a needless doubling of the economy. Ascent from the work of the Trinity in the economy to the immanent Trinity should proceed negatively, shedding all models and conceptions based on human relationships, for the Trinity-in-itself is not human.

In the phenomenality of the Christ-event one recognises the God and the Spirit of the Hebrew scriptures, now associated with the one whom God has sent (the ‘Son’) and who gives the Spirit. The life, death, and post-Easter presence of Jesus Christ are an enfleshment in history of the Logos of God. This Logos, like the Spirit, has a long pre-Christian history, and does not entail, any more than the Spirit does, a breach in the divine unity. Once we surmount the tendency to speculate on the Trinity-in-itself, we see that the New Testament adds little to the Jewish understanding of the nature of God; it is but another chapter in what was always a very dynamic history. Its claims have chiefly to do with the divine action in history and with the dimensions of God’s universal, saving will. In the figure of Jesus Christ, the God of Israel reveals himself fully, as his saving will towards all humanity is declared and as he communicates the fulness of his Spirit. But this does not necessarily mean that God hid or only partially revealed his nature in the Old Testament, or that the Trinity is to be thought of as a secret now at last disclosed.

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THE STATUS OF’FLESH’

‘The Word became flesh’ is a statement of the same order as ‘God is Spirit’ or ‘God is light’. As a résumé of the entire Christian vision and experience, it conveys a contemplative insight which one can appropriate only by a continual opening of the mind. Rigid, wooden conceptions of the personal identity between Jesus Christ and the eternal Logos have turned the nondual wisdom of the incarnational vision into a paradox that repels the mind and invites a dangerous investment of blind faith. The ‘true God and true man’ of Chalcedon is a piece of shorthand that risks freezing in a rigid ontological amalgam (Origen’s syntheton ti chrêma’ or ‘God-man’) something that should rather be conceived as a process with delicate and subtle contours. To say that ‘Jesus Christ is God’ is an unskilful expression, unless one understands that ‘is’ in a special sense, integrating layers of reflective mediation. Such reflection will note that’God’ here means not the Father but the Logos. Against the proposals of Arianism, it has to be maintained that the Logos which is manifested in the Christ-event, and which is the inmost truth of that event, is nothing less than God; but it is God in a certain aspect, not as turned to Godself in absolute aseity but as turned to the other as creative Wisdom or Form or ‘Word or Self-Revelation.

Introducing reflective mediations at the level of the ‘flesh’, one might say that the human historical reality centred on the figure of Jesus chimes so well with divine truth that it brings a definitive concretisation of this self-revealing aspect of God for humanity. This could be taken to mean that Jesus marks an evolutionary breakthrough of human reality to the level of Logos; such a breakthrough would be effected not by divine fiat, intervening arbitrarily in history, but as the result of contingent circumstances, a convergence of various factors permitting a quantum leap forward, as in the case of the evolution of the human brain itself. One advantage of thinking in this way is that it envisions the creative power of God as working in the same way in Christ as in all other events of evolution and of history.

If no human being is an island, the Son of man less that any other can be separated from his fellows, as is especially stressed in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Christ emerges from the humanity that we are, and if he is called an incarnation of the divine Logos, this means that the Logos has become incarnate in all human history. The Incarnation cannot be confined to the (non-existent) limits of a single human life. As Rowan Williams puts it:

“That movement of manifold change, the endless variety of imitations of Christ, is where we recognise the divine action as spirit – the same divine action as establishes the form of the incarnate logos, but working now to realise that form in a diversity as wide as the diversity of the human race itself. Thus, in theological terms, human history is the story of the discovery or realization of Jesus Christ in the faces of all women and men. The fulness of Christ is always to be discovered, never there already in a conceptual pattern that explains and predicts everything’ (in Gavin D’Costa, ed. Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered, Maryknoll, Orbis, 1990, p. 8)

Rather than a concord of the human and divine natures at the moment of Jesus’s conception, the Incarnation can be conceived as the dwelling of the Word among us across the entire historical career of Jesus, one of us. His ‘divinity’, like his ‘resurrection’, are better thought of as events or as emergences of meaning than as ontological attributes. Divinity does not attach itself to another thing; it is nor a transferable quantity. The claim that Jesus Christ is ‘true God’ has no clear meaning on its own. Its meaning resides in the entire history in which the figure of Jesus is set.

The ‘flesh’ of John 1:14 is not the physical flesh of a single human being but the entire historical world in which the Logos pitches its tent. This Logos is at work in all history but lodges there in a definitive way through the life, death and resurrection of Christ. The Logos is incarnate in Jesus in the totality of his relationships. Here the distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and the paschal Christ is of crucial import, for it appears that Jesus grows into his role of incarnate Logos and fully assumes it only after Easter (see Rom. 1:3-4; Acts 2:36; Jn 7:39; Heb. 5:8-9):

“The exaltation of the Son of Man, which happens to him because he has glorified God in his own death, is just this: to differ from the Logos no longer but to be the same as the Logos. For if ‘he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’ (1 Cor. 6:17), so that it can no longer be said of him and the Spirit, ‘They are two’, how much more must we say that what of Jesus is human has become one with the Logos.” (Origen, Commentary on John 32.325-6)

The paschal Christ is, even less than the pre-paschal Jesus, an isolated individual. He is ‘a life-giving spirit’ (1 Cor. 15:45), the opening up of a pneumatic mode of existence, which is realised as a communal phenomenon: ‘and dwelt among us… from his fulness have we all received’ (Jn 1:14, 16); ‘that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you may have fellowship with us’ (1 Jn 1:3). The Word is incarnate in a communal movement which extends along historical paths to all humanity and which has already engaged all humanity in principle, by reason of the interdependence of all. All aspects of human life can be ciphers of the divine; Christ emerges at the heart of this universal field of revelation and incarnation, from which he cannot be extracted. This universal revelation is cashed as a patchwork of local and particular revelations, and relates to the Christ-event not by being unilaterally subsumed into it, according to an a priori ontological necessity, but in historical negotiations which are mutually enlightening. Hegel’s effort to link all history, and especially the history of religions, to Christ can be retrieved in more open style as the mapping of connecting-lines in a dialogical network. To ‘take every thought captive to obey Christ’ (2 Cor. 10:5) is then not an imperialistic aim, but the opening up of avenues of communication and communion.

Chalcedon teaches:

“One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only begotten, made known in two natures (which exist) without confusion, without change, without division, without separation; the difference of the natures having been in no wise taken away by reason of the union, but rather the properties of each being preserved, and (both) concurring into one Person (prosopon) and one hypostasis – not parted or divided into two persons”. (Aloys Grillmeier, Christ in Christian Tradition, I, London, Mowbrays, 1975, p. 544)

To respect the unity and distinction of the natures, it should be stressed that Jesus is called God not in direct identification but in virtue of the communicdtio idiomatam. The fact that the divine Logos is revealed across his human life implies an identification between the Logos and that life, which allows the attributes of the Logos to be conferred on him; a principle which has been abused in Catholic and Lutheran theology. As a human being, Jesus is one of us, in no way sheltered from the contingencies of historical existence. But insofar as his life becomes a vehicle of revelation in some definitive, unsurpassable way, it is seen as the Logos made flesh, and its ultimate meaning, the ultimate identity of Jesus, is henceforth to be sought in that dimension.

The Virgin Birth has functioned as a myth of pure origin enframing retrospectively the figure of Jesus. In Luke, by contrast, it can be seen as placing the figure of Jesus in the historical context of the promises made to Israel. To suppose that Jesus had a purer origin, a more autonomous identity than any other human being is to miss the reality of incarnation as a manifestation of the divine in the very element of the contingent, and the non-originary. ‘We can begin to close the abyss between the idealisations of theological history and the contingencies of real history by recalling the notion of Christ’s ontological divinity from his conception to a subtler apprehension of divinity manifested across the entire event of his life. Just as in the Eucharist, the meal-event is ‘transubstantiated’ into a communion in the paschal mystery, so that its basic reality or ‘substance’ now has no independent existence alongside what it has become, so in the case of Christ, his entire historical life in all its extensions is the Logos incarnate, and it has no independent meaning or significance not absorbed in this. A craving for reassurance prompts us to fix precisely the moment at which occur transitions involving the frontiers of our identity: the moment at which God infuses the human soul in evolution or in the foetus, the moment of death. Analogically, the moment of Christ’s conception or of the eucharistic consecration have acquired a fetishistic status in theology. But the element of undecidability attending the attempt to define such moments forces us to a letting-go of identity and an acceptance of open-ended process as the very medium of our existence.

If Jesus could not become the Christ except in a precise cultural context, can he have been Christ, and Word incarnate, from his very conception, as classical christology teaches? Would this not entail that every contingency that might have cut short his activity – e.g. death in childhood – was a priori impossible? Such predestination of an individual’s life cuts into the flow of history and denatures it. The historical life of Jesus would be protected, as no other human life is, from unforeseeable accidents and the common laws of existence. Instead of fulfilling the Messianic hopes and prophecies by a free creative act, he would obey a destiny fixed in advance and of which no circumstance could disturb the unfolding. With the loss of credibility of such a myth of destiny, the docetic character of such conceptions becomes clear. A special providence may have presided over the life of Jesus, shaping even his death (another contingent event that might have been otherwise) into part of his messianic vocation. But if we say that the success of his mission was inevitable, due to the fact that he was from the start on a different ontological plane from other human beings, are we not in the realm of myth?

It is not easy to square the pursuit of such reflections with the claims of orthodoxy. Theology, indeed, seems condemned to this uneasiness, for orthodoxy is never something automatically guaranteed, but a balance to be kept in view as an ideal aim. To strike, or to sustain, the Chalcedonian note means resisting the attractions of adoptionism and Nestorianism while trying to do justice to their reminders of the contingency of the personal development of Jesus. In negotiating a path between opposed distortions we might do well to recall the traditional insistence that the modality of the union between the divine and the human in Jesus Christ is utterly ineffable (see Aquinas, In 3 Sent., d.1, q.1). This apophatic note is not a bar to thinking the incarnation, but it qualifies our constructions of the meaning of Christ as merely provisional clarifications, which adjust currently usable concepts so that doubts and objections are pacified and the presence of Christ in Scripture and Church can communicate itself freely not only to the simple faithful but to questioning intellects.

Joseph Moingt, rejecting the adoptionist temptation, writes: ‘the person of Jesus, at its foundation, acquires its “subsistence” in the word of love whereby God bestows on this person the gift of existing for God alone and whereby God consents to exist in Jesus in communion of Spirit’(Joseph Moingt, L’homme qui venait de Dieu, Paris, Cerf, 1993, p. 528). The person of Jesus is thus from the start brought into being by the divine word, ‘the word which pre-forms his person from the moment of his coming into the world’ (p. 636) – a word which Moingt conceives as a ‘pro-existent project’ directed from eternity to the figure ofJesus.

Insofar as all these constructions remain speculative and metaphysical they are extremely fragile, and one seeks to ground them securely in a phenomenological comprehension of the Christ-event. The reduction of the eternal logos to a time-directed project, a possibility waiting to be realised, is an unsatisfactory way of going behind the scenes of this event, and entails a phenomenologically unconvincing reconstruction of the life of Jesus. The notion that Jesus’s identity is radically determined by the divine Word which calls him into being could be deployed in the following way: all human beings are called into existence by the Word; and are oriented to an ultimate reditio in Deum mediated by the same Word. Jesus corresponds to that divine call into existence, and call to return to God, in so perfect a way that his human life becomes the presence of the Word in the world; he is the man of the Word (homo assumptus). Thus, with Origen (Contra Celsum 6.47-8) and, Karl Rahner we might interpret the hypostatic union as the perfect realisation of the reality of grace, on the model of the moral union described in 1 Corinthians 6:17: ‘he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him’. Though Jesus grows in grace, growlng into his role, there is no duality of subjects: the Word is his ultimate identity and the human subject is perfectly at one wit the Word.

This may recall Piet Schoonenberg’s theory that the Logos is first ‘personalised’ in Jesus; but there is no need to deny a distinct hypostatic identity of the Logos independent of the incarnation; such an identity has little to do with personhood in the human sense and is not a rival to Jesus’s human personality. Thus the union between Jesus’s personhood and the hypostasis of the Logos could be described as enhypostatic (Cyril of Alexandria) and we can even adopt the (allegedly) Neo-Chalcedonian anhypostasia, since Jesus has no ultimate identity independent of the Logos. It is important in any case to develop such hunches phenomenologically, not as abstract metaphysical patterns; and the phenomena are not accessible independently of the communal praxis in which they emerge.

One could compare the manifestation of the eternal Word in the life of Jesus with the attainment of a supreme illumination in the life of the Buddha. An absolute truth breaks through in these lives, in function of cultural conditions. Starting from this breakthrough, narratives are constructed which aim to do justice to the incomparable event which has taken place in these lives, but which risk falsifying everything by a docetic short-circuit: mythologies of the birth of the child Jesus or the child Gautama; an ontology of the pre-existence of Jesus (first as pre-designated eschatological Messiah; then as eternal Logos); fables of the anterior lives of the Buddha, also issuing in ontological theories of a fundamental pre-existent Buddha-essence (adhibuddha, dharmakâya).

Jesus is the man who, carrying to perfection the insights of his tradition, discovered the true relation between God and humanity; this quite contingent evolution obeys the pressure of the divine Logos which seeks to make itself known, and which does so with divine power in the teaching of Jesus. The ontological explanations which were constructed beginning from this event must be recalled to it in order to keep their credibility and avoid distorting what they serve to interpret.

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THE ESCHATOLOGICAL PRIMACY OF CHRIST

If the Logos is not incarnate in the sharply-delimited individual figure of Jesus, but in human history as brought into focus by this figure, does this mean that every particular form Christ takes is dissolved in a universal transformative flux? No, for even if the dimensions of the meaning of Christ exceed our grasp, the encounter with the Crucified anchors our thought about him in a concrete event. Christ is not an abstract emblem or symbol of the salvation afoot everywhere, but rather gives it the concrete and historical character it lacked. Salvation enters history not by an arrest of the movement of history its enclosure within a salvation-history centred on the life of Jesus, but rather through events in which the cause of God is revealed as one with the historical struggle of humanity. The uniqueness of the death of Christ lies in the way in which it manifests the radical identity of these two instances. Every effort to live history religiously and religion historically is henceforth summoned and guided by the figure of the Crucified. Christ’s universality as Word made flesh, or as focus of a universal striving of divine truth towards incarnation, is inseparable from this singularity of the cross.

The crucifixion is also a merely contingent event. It is the way that Jesus’s prophetic insight into the identity of divine will and human liberation was acted out under particular circumstances. Yet, just as in Heidegger care, being-unto-death, and resoluteness concentrate and project forward the authentic essence of human existence, so this uniquely eloquent event concentrates the essence of the human struggle and propels it forward to its final goal. Thus we overcome mythical structures that are no longer credible by founding claims about Christ’s uniqueness and his divinity in his eschatological role, and by founding this in turn in the exemplarity of his living-out of the prophetic insight into the nature of history, a living-out that itself is a distinctive historical event – the only event within history that can take the measure of history itself.

What happened on Calvary derives this unique authority not from its historical and cultural particularity – the tenebrous imbroglio of a vanished world – but from the forces it joins together: divine transcendence and the human struggle against oppression. ‘His bodiliness and his passion are the will of God and the salvation of the world’ (Hilary of Poitiers, Commentary on Matthew 4.14). Christianity consists in nothing other than the maintenance of this conjunction. This is less a stupefying paradox than the reconciliation of two realities destined to meet: divine holiness and human freedom. Note the specific modality of this conjunction: Christ is presented as an executed criminal, not as an enlightened prince. The cutting edge of the Incarnation is seen here, at a point where the logic of prophetic monotheism is taken to its extreme. In the Buddha’s peaceful life every phenomenon is ordered in view of the eternal, but Christ’s prophetic career God is at grips with the particular injustices of historical existence. Buddhist doctrine has no fundamental need of individual Buddhas; the basic structure of bondage and liberation would remain the same even without them. But Christian doctrine cannot be disentangled from the concrete, historical role assumed by Jesus. The prophetic tradition culminates in a single man, chosen by God, while the Buddhas are ultimately numerous, all discreetly retiring behind their teaching. The style of interpretation that the memory of Jesus requires is prophetic and engaged, and always concerns concrete cases, whereas Buddhist wisdom focuses on the essential structures of existence, often unmasking the element of illusion in the apparent urgencies of history.

Paul van Buren, limiting the boundless universality automatically claimed for Christ as saviour, centres his significance in a specific historical event: Jesus opens a new chapter in history by prophetically discerning God’s purpose for the Gentiles. This event is ‘God’s radical new expression of his eternal faithfulness to his creation, whereby he has added to his beloved Israel also his beloved Church in the service of his redemptive purpose’ (A Theology of the Jewish-Christian Reality, Part III – Christ in Context, San Francisco, Harper and Row, 1988, p. 252). The divine Logos is identified as God’s ‘covenantal outgoingness’ revealed in the figure of Jesus:

“He who has looked into the face of this suffering Jew… has seen the Father (John 14:9), not a being of one substance with the Father (Nicea), not a divine creature (Arius), but God the Father of Israel and of Jesus Christ. That is how God makes himself Present to and known by his Church – he addresses them in just this way: they are addressed by that Jew. Consequently their fully appropriate confession, made while looking directly into the face of this crucified Jew, is, ‘My Lord and my God’ (John 20:28)… The move that the Fourth Gospel dares the Church to make is that of risking and trusting the judgment that this man is precisely the way in which the suffering Father of Israel and all creation has chosen to open a radically new chapter in the continuing history of his involvement in human affairs”. (p. 224)

Associating the human Jesus immediately with the eternal God of Israel, van Buren is impatient with the language of the classical trinitarian and christological doctrines. Of the expression ‘the divinity of Christ’ he writes:

“That phrase sounds as if the Church knew something reliable about divinity and so felt it was justified in predicating this of Christ. The fact of the matter, of course, is just the opposite: the Church has learned whatever little it may know about divine matters from the things concerning Jesus of Nazareth. It might well speak of the Christ-likeness of divinity or, more boldly, the Jesusness of God. It has no grounds whatsoever for speaking of the divinity of Christ… The highest possible Christology will be one that sees in the lowly crucified one the very heart of God the Farher… The lowliness of this crucified Jesus is his ‘divinity’, his Godliness, and just this is what is confessed by the Church when it says of this Jew, ‘God of God, Light of Light, true God of true God’”. (pp. 293-4)

The primary phenomenon of the revelation of God in Jesus need not exclude the background implication of the divinity of the Logos, as providing the space in which that primary phenomenon can emerge fully. Instead of telescoping the language of Nicaea onto the figure of the historical Jesus, it is better to respect the distance between the two levels of language, seeing Nicaea as a set of rules for speaking of the Logos. Dogma is not intended as a direct transcription of the New Testament revelation of God in Christ; when it has usurped that role the result has been a forgetfulness not only of the Jewish humanity of Jesus but of the dynamic of revelation in its New Testament forms. That God is from all eternity not only Father, but ‘covenantal outgoingness’ in Word and Spirit, and that this outgoingness of God finds its fullest historical actualisation in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is a version of the classical doctrines that could embrace the language of Nicaea and Chalcedon, with suitable hermeneutical adjustments.

Van Buren never lingers on this eternal Word in any other form than that of its historical manifestations, among which he gives pride of place to the Torah:

“A Church that means to affirm the eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people will have to put the Torah first… The consequence for the Church’s Christology is that the term ‘the Word of God’ will need to be thought through primarily from the perspective of Sinai”. (p. 247)

This reinsertion of Jesus in the Jewish context heals the violent divorce with Judaism created when Jesus is made the absolute and only vehicle of God’s saving presence. Jesus is the occasion of the extension of the covenantal grace at work in Judaism, and it is by this extension that he incarnates God’s outgoingness with a measure of ‘grace and truth’ (Jn 1:17) that is unlimited in principle – ‘it is not by measure that he gives the Spirit’ (Jn 3:34) – though its full realisation remains a matter of eschatological hope. The violent divorce between the Torah-event and the Christ-event is one of the tragic obstacles to the unfolding of grace and truth; another is the violent exclusivism or inclusivism practised by Christians towards the non-Christian religions.

Fuller dimensions of the Incarnation come into view as the calling of the Gentiles is seen to include an opening of the Gospel to the human quest for truth and salvation in its entire reach. As Christians learn from the religious vision of others and from their social and political struggle to create a better world, the Kingdom message of the prophets and of Jesus grows towards the universality that is intrinsic to it. The Kingdom ceases to be a sectarian claim and is seen to be coterminous with the divine Torah or with the divine Logos. Van Buren does expect ‘theological discoveries through interfaith dialogue’ and that ‘the Church will learn better to understand and accept the Lordship of Christ through discovering what Christ’s Spirit has been accomplishing outside the Church’ (p. 271). But the privileged place of covenantal language in his diction might impede the emergence of alternative languages in this dialogue. The ‘Jewish-Christian reality’ may be demystified as it comes into perspective in relation to the other religious paths. Its redescription in an interreligious perspective will not abolish the covenantal character of God (for God cannot contradict himself), but may show the biblical covenant to be but one form of the working of the divine in history – a form that can however claim a certain primacy in virtue of its unsurpassed historical concreteness and eschatological reach. The eschatological dimension of God’s revelation in Torah and Christ cannot be confined to the Jewish or Christian communities, for the revelation is intrinsically destined to all humanity. One might toy with a Joachimite triad: the Jews are the ones through whom God was first made known in history; the Christian community of Jews and Gentiles is based on the fuller explicitation of that knowledge in the life and teaching of Christ; and now the Spirit is leading us to the ultimate all-inclusiveness of the Kingdom community, as we reach out to the entire human family with its traditions, renouncing the sectarian enclosures that have prevailed until now.

Sociologists sometimes caricature Christianity as a religion of pure interiority divorced from political and social reality:

“For his God is so detached from the bonds of this world that it would have no meaning to confront in his name the earthly thrones and dominations. It is in the secret places of the heart that he gives himself, at an infinite distance from what Caesar demands, and which must be rendered to him in the quiet assurance that the true Kingdom is elsewhere. God’s universal omnipotence is not to take shape in a future worldly empire, bur is attested here and now in its radical foreignness to the affairs of this world, a foreignness such that it knows no people but only interior beings who have been elevated to a capacity to understand him by their own detachment from the things of the world”. (Marcel Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde, Paris, Gallimard, 1985, p. 160)

This deformation of the Christian message may correspond to a spiritualistic or gnostic temptation which has accompanied Christianity throughout its history, but it does not match the reality of evangelical charity either in its biblical charter or as effectively practised. Reading the sayings of Jesus against the background of the prophetic tradition, we see that the coming of the Kingdom has nothing to do with individualistic withdrawal; it explodes at the heart of history as a communitarian, political and social event. To think this out fully requires a practical context in which it is enacted. It may well be that even the New Testament praxis is only a primitive or experimental enactment of Christianity, and that its deficiencies leave a residue of abstraction or vagueness in the accounts of what the Kingdom entails; or it may be that the praxis and the accounts were perfectly adapted to that time but have to be elaborated anew for ours.

If rather than reducing the Incarnation to an invisible event of a spiritual and ontological order and treating its concrete historical effects as inessential, we focus instead on these effects, seeking to interpret them as indicative of an eschatological conjunction of the human struggle and God’s saving purpose, then the distinctiveness of Jesus is seen as residing in the new orientation he brings to human history. The cross desacralises salvation by bringing it into accord with fleshly realities – not only individual suffering and death, but also communal challenges of injustice and violence. In the contemporary economy of meaning and value, which refuses to be governed by great doctrinal principles, the christological faith survives as an empirical apprehension (in a broad sense) of the meaning of Christ. As a figure of justice and solidarity at the human level and of God’s eschatological will, Christ crucified reveals to every generation, in varying presentations, the basic truth about God and humanity – a truth which exists only in relationships between God and humanity as a dynamic interchange from which a pure definition of God or of the creature made in God’s image can never be extracted.

Replaced in this context, ‘justification by faith’ signifies that if we are associated with Christ crucified, we are headed for the future willed by God. So we are free in principle from past bondage and put in contact with the deeper vital movement of history made flesh in the life and death of Jesus; this gives meaning (justification) to our activities and ends the futility of an aimless existence. This event of justification takes place between God and humanity and cannot be formulated in an objectified way; hence the immense confusion of the debate on this topic, in which one appreciates the great voices, those of a Luther or a Newman, which speak from the heart of that ‘between’ – ‘everything… is played out in the entre’ (Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 222) – even though when they go on to cast their convictions in metaphysical form they become entangled in antinomies.

The primacy of Christ, then, is less a matter of ontological superiority than a precise and irreplaceable function. It is true that the message of the coming of the Kingdom remains quite indeterminate as far as its content goes. It is the messenger himself who gives it a concrete face, enacting in his life and death the principles of the future prepared by his Father and creating a community which is to live in view of the promised end. All the visible historical acts of Christ and of his community are but an inadequate anticipation of the fulness of the eschatological Christ. Nevertheless, the coherence of the witness they constitute renders credible their claim to light up the orientation of history as God has willed it. The eschatological future is proclaimed in universalist terms, as the accomplishment of the hopes of all humanity and as surpassing all particular forms of historical Christianity – which is itself but a prophetic sign serving to keep open the promise of this future; yet there is nevertheless an indissoluble bond between that promised fulfilment and the historical figure of Jesus Christ.

The figure of the Crucified points toward an unknown future, but it indicates the path of life which is most appropriate to the expectation of this future. Dazzlingly simple, but at the same time unfathomably enigmatic, the gap between this historical figure and the eschatological one that exceeds the resources of the imagination leads to a great variety of interpretations. The foundational event of the Gospel withdraws from our grasp, and its eschatological clarification remains of course utterly unimaginable. So we spell out our series of gospels, using well the interval. We settle down in each of these gospels in turn, only to be dislodged each time by the untamed residue of the Gospel’s prophetic thrust.

The Gospel is a wound which the tradition wants to heal. Christianity can be seen as a system which ‘trans-codes its initial conditions by transforming them into inherent moments of its self-development’, repressing ‘the real of a violence founding the system and none the less disawowed once the system reaches the level of its self-reproduction’ (Slavoj Zizek, For they know not what they do, London, Verso, 1991, p. 214-5). Whenthe authentic figure of Christ emerges anew in history the original wound is reopened, and the historical Jesus is rediscovered under a surprising aspect. At the same time the eschatological hope revives, and one realises afresh that the Christ to come is always greater than what we have thought we understood about him up to now. When the Gospel inspiration is most alive, its judgement on the past is most severe: the prophets, Paul, and Luther are unjust to tradition, for they judge it by eschatological standards or in the name of an impossible step back to ‘the beginning’. This injustice is of the essence of prophetic religion, for it lives by a future opened up in divine promise (the promise inscribed in the heart of the Torah or in the teachings ofJesus), and any received formulation or enactment – even the letter of Scripture itself – will seem an alienation and a betrayal of the original opening.

A historical figure can acquire all his significance from his dedication to an absolute. Thus the meaning of the Buddha is nirvana; he is its contingent, fragile, historical vehicle. Such a life discloses the meaning of every human life, as it enacts our deepest and least acknowledged aspirations. The significance of Jesus Christ is resumed in his mission of announcing the coming of the Kingdom; only this gives the contingencies of his life and death their universal, post-paschal, pneumatic meaning. The Gospel texts exhibit a well-focused grasp of the significance of Jesus in their eschewal of biographical curiosity and subordination of every narrative to the essential theme of the Kingdom. One may detect a similar economy in the Buddhist canon, despite its prolixity. The founder of a religion has only one reason for his existence, which the witnesses seek to extract in its purity. Having rediscovered the eschatological meaning of the life of Christ, we can attempt to rethink all the ontological categories of incarnation and redemption in eschatological terms. We could say that Jesus Christ incarnates the divine Word in living a human life entirely open to the Kingdom, and in sharing this mode of life with others and inviting them to live it. The human may be rendered as transparent to the divine in the Buddha as in Christ, but the eschatological character of Jesus’ message and the paschal mystery gives them an extra dimension, making them the incarnation of the Logos specifically in history.

To be sure, this eschatological language is still a Jewish and Christian construction, a contingent and fragile myth permitting a grasp of what is happening in the Christ-process, and whose function is to go much further than its direct content suggests. When we set the figure of Jesus in a cosmos which is not thousands but thousands of millions of years old, and which is headed not towards an imminent end, as Jesus expected, but towards further billions of years of evolution, what becomes of his eschatological claim? In a million years will a vastly transformed human species be able to make anything of the historical figure of Jesus?

The enlargement and transformation of the memory of Christ and of the eschatological horizon he opened up is a project that will leave much of the biblical matrix behind. Yet the New Testament itself, in its basic thrust, calls for this enlargement, in the course of which its central words are renewed again and again, even if the letter of the text shrivels into ever greater obscurity. The presence of Christ as a life-giving spirit outstrips the limits of first-century Palestine or any given stage in humanity’s evolution, for it is a dynamic orientation to the divine fulfilment of the human project and is coterminous with the illimitable openness of the human spirit. ‘My words will not pass away’ (Mk 13:31) because their ultimate source is not human but divine; because their content – love, truth, justice – is of permanent bearing, however primitive its expression; because they are only a beginning, straining proleptically toward the eschatological goal which fulfils them; and because the Spirit continually reinterprets them in the Christian community so that they bear new fruit from year to year.

There is a pluralism of eschatologies even within the New Testament, and the eschatological focus has wavered throughout history in tandem with the shifting fashions of human hope and desire. The ancient eschatological and apocalyptic schemas will have to be rethought when more light comes from interreligious encounters, Every religious message has to ‘pay the price of its existence’ (W. E. Hocking), and cannot surpass the conditions of its historical contingency. To demythologise eschatology, we could try to redefine it in almost tautological terms: it is that toward which the Christ-event points, the full truth of that which has taken place in Christ. This would allow the notion of eschatology to mean that toward which the whole spiritual quest of humanity points, the full truth of the religions, and all else.

To see Christ as the eschatological prophet, however, risks reducing the Incarnation to a genial intuition of Jesus identifying the divine will with human liberation. The titles conferred on him would then be only a retrospective confirmation of the value of his insights and his fidelity in living them out. As the focusing genius of his religious tradition, who himself drew out its deepest consequences, he might well be acclaimed in mythical language as its Messiah. The danger of such a reductive account need not, however, prevent us from saying that all that we designate by the term ‘the Incarnation’ is mediated by the privileged historical role of Jesus Christ as the one who reveals the concrete significance of Jewish monotheism for human history beyond the frontiers of Israel.

One might risk the following proposition: ‘it is because Jesus was such a man at such a moment in history that he became Son of God’. The inverted form of this proposition – ‘it is because he is Son of God that Jesus became man at that moment in history to reveal this truth’ – can have a certain value on the level of hymnic evocation, but it should not blind us to what is afoot on the scene of history before our eyes, namely, that a man shows forth in his teaching and in his life the unity of divine truth and the truth of human existence, and that from the enactment of this unity flows a charge of pneumatic power, the resurrection. The resurrection-event resides less in the phenomena of the appearances or the empty tomb, which witness to it, than in the pneumatic unfolding of the full meaning of Jesus, now known as Christ, in the hearts and in the lives of the first witnesses to him. This spiritualising interpretation is suggested by the one eye-witness account we have (Gal. 1:16; I Cor. 15:8), for we may take it that Paul’s experience was of the same order as that of the other apostles a few years earlier. If the appearance to more than five hundred brethren (I Cor. 15:6) corresponds to Pentecost, then the nature of the resurrection experience may be less inaccessible than is usually thought. The encounter with the risen one is in continuity with the normal pneumatic life of the Church with its bounty of charisms and spiritual insight.

Are these events intrinsically more mysterious than those of the life of the Buddha, who realised, taught and lived the path to a universal liberation from suffering? Jesus opens history to the power of a God who saves. The Buddha opens human existence to the dissolution of its illusions, and to the vision of reality as it is, in the enjoyment of nirvâna. Both established modes of religious life which remain viable and verifiable. Both were human beings, who became the instruments and revealers of a transcendent reality.

It may be that as one draws near to Jesus, Jesus himself disappears and one is with the God of Jesus, just as when one draws near the Buddha, the Buddha himself disappears and one is on the path to nirvâna. The Christ cult and Christ myth of the early Church are then a penetration of the essence of Jesus, as openness to the Father, not the erection of Christ as a screen against his message. But in the case of Christ one must recognise a non-duality between the instrument and the divine action which takes place by its means: ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10:30); ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9), A unique status: the one who reveals the action of God in human history is also the one through whom God inserts himself in an exemplary way into human history. But need we oppose so rigidly revelation and insertion: is there not also a non-duality between making known the convergence of God and humanity and bringing about this very convergence? The nirvanic transparency of the life of the Buddha has made him a ‘refuge’. Perhaps it is in a similar fashion that the utter obedience to God’s saving will expressed in the life of Jesus makes him saviour and Lord?

It will be objected that the primacy we claim for Christ is merely relative, and the stress on eschatology reflects the bias of a history-oriented culture. The eschatological vision did emerge within such a culture, and it may have to be enlarged greatly for its kernel of universal appeal to become manifest. The enfleshment of the Word is not an abstract lesson in philosophy of history but enactment in human relationships of divine love – the Christmas story with its family comings and goings and its political schemings already shows the Incarnation as steeped in a social and relational web. This fleshly milieu is what we call history, but our present schemes for interpreting the human adventure are as flimsy and provisional as those of any other age or culture. Salvation comes along other paths than this engagement within human historical relationships. If it is measured solely in terms of spiritual liberation, for example, or of upright living or pure worship of God, then one would have to say that there is no reason to claim a primacy of Christian salvation over Buddhist, Jewish or Islamic salvation. But if history can be redeemed, then Christ alone emerges as the historical saviour.

Burton Mack denounces such claims as mythological, pointing out that the myth of pure Christian origins has in reality added to the burden of tragedy in human history: ‘The holocaust was also a gospel event’(A Myth of Innocence, Philadelphia, Fortress, 1988, p. 375). Yet his sociological explanation of the myth seems implausible: we are asked to see Jesus as a Cynic philosopher, his personality in the passion narrative as a product of martyrological narrative convention, the Eucharist as a Hellenistic symposium, Paul as ‘an unstable, authoritarian person’ and his gospel as the production of ‘a brilliant mind’ (p. 98). The Christ of faith was created as a reference for authorising unconventional practice and adjudicating internal conflicts over authority, and his stature (‘the very stupendous claims made for Jesus’) grew through ‘a feedback mechanism whereas once accountability had been transferred to the champion, the champion was there to assume ever greater burden for the new’(353).

A similar account could be given of Buddhist projections back onto the historical Buddha, and it would accord with the constructive, imaginary character of religious conceptions. Yet the founding event in each case has deeper roots than this theory can explain, and it opens up a way of life and a vision of existence which demythologisation of the sources may enhance rather than discredit. The pluralistic texture of the Christ-event, if we can recover it, undermines the destructive myth of innocence, plunging us into a labour of interpretation in which the Jews are our indispensable partners. Even if the figure of Jesus was constructed as a pure logocentric origin, its deconstruction may reveal that in a subtler way something new and powerful did originate within the matrix of the time, in indissoluble connection with the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

It might be objected that eschatology is too murky a topic to allow any firm self-positioning of Christian existence or language. It has always been a field of controversy, full of polarisations – between Church and Kingdom, the hieratic and the prophetic, ideology and utopia, world-affirmation and world-denial, prophetic realism and apocalyptic fantasy, realised and futuristic eschatology, imminent and delayed parousia. All these old polarisations continue in new forms today. But they also indicate the middle way which overcomes them, the incarnate balance between a positive naming of God’s purposes in the present and a sceptical review of this naming in order to prevent any absolutising of human language and insight (see P. D. Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic, Philadelphia, Fortress, 1975, p. 210). The unresolved controversies of the eschatological tradition have at least the merit of keeping us from resting easily in any vision of the meaning of historical existence. Faith in God’s saving will goes hand in hand with questioning of the signs of the times in an ongoing effort to discern that will.

To speak of God’s will and purposes is clumsy anthropomorphism, yet it names what faith senses as the centre and foundation of reality, a truth which attests itself powerfully in Scripture and in conscience as well as in the thrust of cosmic evolution. As opposed to Kaufman’s ‘cosmic serendipity’, such primitive expressions as ‘the will of God’ point to that which transcends any order we can grasp. ‘Thy will be done’ is a prayer that leaps beyond cosmic process and consigns all things to the sovereign disposal of the ultimate good. Eschatology reduces to the belief in such ultimate sovereign goodness, beyond all identifiable worldly orders.

This transcendence may make eschatology a vacuous discourse. The content of eschatological hope is not spelled out in Jewish or New Testament apocalyptic. They fade into dream as if deliberately to frustrate the quest for a concrete vision. Yet on the other hand the core of biblical eschatology is the fact that salvation is indissociably tied to the real history of humanity and takes the form of a promise bearing on its future. Even the most unworldly forms of biblical apocalypse retain this preoccupation with the meaning and goal of history, a theme which has secure theological status. Today the entire scaffolding of the biblical eschatologies – including the ideas of election, Messiah, and salvation-history – has to be restructured in the light of the alternative viewpoints of Eastern traditions, which compensate for their reticence about history by a keener insight into the depth-structure of temporal existence. Furthermore, a revision of all religious traditions in the light of current cosmology and sociobiology could broaden the eschatological problematic to fit the dimensions of the known universe.

Yet none of this restructuring is likely to give the eschatological dimension the well-defined contours characteristic of ideological predictions such as those of Marxism. Its biblical emblem is the cloud: ‘they will see the Son of man coming in clouds’ (Mk 13:26). It muddies our coordinates, arising as a disturbing question in the midst of our life and our history in an always unpredictable way. ‘we are tempted to repress this dimension or to put it in its place so that it can no longer upset us. Even in theology it can be felt to be an irritating topic, a distraction from the task of constructing the system of our thoughts or of reconstructing the historical past. But if we permit our language to show its flaws, the law of Babel inscribed in it, then eschatology, far from seeming foreign to the task of theology, appears as the very milieu in which this task is to be pursued. The task of theology is to maintain the eschatological tension of the language of faith, so as to keep it open to the ever-greater God. The labour of construction or reconstruction is entirely subordinate to this task. Forgetting this, theology loses touch with the basic conditions of its existence.

The eschatological future, in which faith will yield to a vision face to face, is ineffable; when we try to speak of it we fall into flat mythologies of full presence. Yet it may be spoken of obliquely, for it is inscribed en creux in a Christian discourse aware of its imperfection and finitude. Such a discourse remarks its own provisoriness and fragmentariness, measuring the extent of its lack so that it is all the more galvanised by eschatological longing. Its emptiness of substantial attainments points to a God who eludes the grasp of every concept and is revealed as dwelling at the very heart of this emptiness. Indeed, we may suppose that the face to face vision will not fill in this empty space, but free us for a more radical experience of emptiness.

Visionaries may imagine apocalyptic glory but the normal life of faith knows the eschatological only by the gaps in its own performance and language. Love lived under the limitations of time, in daily fidelity, is a fragile sowing in view of an inconceivable harvest. To limit its scope to its visible fruits is a formula for despair; hope keeps open a space of promise always exceeding the provisional closure brought by a temporal achievement. Similarly, the language of faith is never more than a temporary figure of a truth which it can never definitively fix. All is passage, and becomes a cul-de-sac if one tries to fix one’s dwelling there.

Beyond myths of inevitable progress or decline, theological realism takes as base the poverty and the possibilities of the present, as the biblical tradition permits them to be grasped. A language steeped in this present and tempered by a long historical experience can confront the tragic aspects of history while keeping open the horizons of hope. It cultivates a discreet and judicious tone, seeking the words called for by the pressure of the kairos, neither in flights of Utopian imagination (Moltmann) nor in totalising speculations on the meaning of history (Pannenberg). Renouncing the ambition of mastering the past and predicting the future it rediscovers a freedom that this ambition inhibited. Instead of trying to complete historical and sociological insight with a theological hyper-insight, or to the contrary losing itself in a cloud of unknowing, eschatological faith is content with knowing what it can and ought to know, namely the Christian meaning of our present.

‘What secures this eschatological middle path is above all the person of Jesus Christ. The cross gives a sharp historical edge that stems the drift into utopia, while at the same time disrupting all ideological recuperation. The constant refocusing of the figure of Christ, in the light both of the tension-ridden Old Testament background and the equally chequered history of the Christian community, provides a graphic correlative for the shifting emphases of eschatological vision. Confidence in the Saviour takes us a step beyond the investment we may have made in any given style of eschatological hope, and even where there is a radical divergence among Christians about the goal to which they strive, they are at least united in naming it Jesus Christ.

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THE PROBLEM OF PRE-EXISTENCE

The position we have arrived at is close to Bultmann’s view that all claims for Christ derive their truth from the fact that he is the Eschatological Event. Bultmann saw pre-existence as a mythical projection from the authority of the kerygma, ‘an idea of which we no longer have any need’ (quoted in Kuschel, 167). He ‘degnosticises’ Paul’s pre-existence language to reveal its existential core: ‘the person and destiny of Christ do not derive their origin and meaning from the network of innerworldly events but only from the fact that therein God has been at work’ (178)’ John’s pre-existence statements mean that ‘the real legitimisation of Jesus is precisely his earthly unlegitimisability’ (188).

Yet faced with a doctrinal tradition which has not hesitated to step ‘behind’ the Christ-event to its ontological foundations, we can refrain from the traditional ontology of Trinity and Incarnation only at the cost of implicitly affirming some form of unitarianism. Karl-Josef Kuschel proposes a rather full-blooded ontology of the pre-existent Christ, but one that is problematic both in what it affirms (a pre-existence of the humanity of Jesus) and in what it denies (a pre-existent eternal Logos). One can defend the Logos-doctrine as providing the space within which the Christ-event can deploy its significance, while rejecting myths of a pre-existence of the human Jesus. These doctrinal points have a phenomenological function, and are subordinate to the event of revelation, from which they cannot be abstracted. They belong to a secondary level of reflection, as spelling out a negative logic that our statements about Christ should not transgress. Doctrine may shed light on the Christ-event, but since that event is its only source and warrant we are moving within a strict hermeneutical circle which leaves little room for a theology from above.

Kuschel loses something of the specificity of Christian revelation from the moment that he sets the christological problematic in the context of an alleged perpetual human quest for ‘the beginning of all beginnings, the ground of all grounds, the origin of all origins of time, history and cosmos’ (p. 20). He conflates under the rubric of pre-existence such heterogeneous phenomena as Barth’s sense of the sovereignty of God and Hofmannsthal’s poetic vision of an originary state of ‘pure magic’ in which self and world are one, ‘a unity before all temporal and spatial differentiation’ (p. 87). Modern painters and dialectical theologians are seen as sharing a quest for ‘the basic structure of being, the depths of creation, the originary ground of the real, which is God’ (p. 95). This language elides what is specific about the world of Barth and Bultmann, falling back into just the religiose rhetoric that they sought to overcome. Barth at his best focused on a biblical and existential paradox: not a pre-existent eternal invading time, but a divine word confronting us in judgement and grace.

Kuschel, like van Buren, is inspired by the later Barth’s notion of God’s ‘self-determination’ in the covenant. Not content with the pre-existent Logos, Barth projected the flesh-and-blood figure of Jesus back into the realm of pre-existence: ‘In free self-determination, God has from eternity chosen to be the bearer of this name (Jesus)’ (p. 124); ‘Since this Jesus Christ - including his earthly fate - already “exists from eternity in the divine decree”, it was not only fitting and worthy, but even “necessary” for God to be the Creator’ (p. 132). This hysteron proteron undercuts the reality of historical contingency and human freedom. It would be enough to say that God is by nature covenantal; any further effort to predetermine how that covenantal love works itself out in creation and salvation history is a metaphysical construction doubling real history with a shadowy transcendental history that undermines its reality.

The metaphysical obsession with pre-existence which would project the human Jesus back into eternity distracts from the concrete phenomenality of what is revealed in Christ. If instead we confine pre-existence language to the Logos, God’s covenantal outgoingness, to be conceived above all in negative terms as resisting our totalising grasp, then we leave Christ free to give this Logos its historical face. The ungraspable, empty Logos is incarnate in a succession of singular forms and in the dialectical tensions between them, and the figure of Jesus Christ focuses this incarnational process distinctively, eschatologically. When theology gives a face to the pre-existent Logos above and beyond these forms, it creates a rival to them, which by its claim to be their metaphysical ground risks eclipsing them.

Kuschel’s reduction of the pre-existent Logos to a pre-existence of Jesus proceeds from the post-paschal insight that ‘the person of Jesus Christ belongs fully to the definition of the essence of God’ (p. 643). He develops this idea in strained metaphysical argumentation on the notions of eternity and time: ‘Jesus Christ is - as Spirit and in the Spirit – present to all times, contemporary with all times, free in regard to all times. Nothing else is meant when we talk of the pre-existence of Christ’ (p. 644). This language needs to be recalled to its phenomenological basis. The classic Logos-doctrine leaves to Jesus all his historical contingency, furnishing a space in which his revelatory significance can unfold, without any need to inflate his humanity so as to have it share divine eternity ‘from always’, ripping it out of the realm of space, time and contingency. Chalcedon’s teaching that the divine and human natures are ‘unmixed’, prevents mythic conflations between God’s eternal nature and God’s self-manifestation in time. That Jesus gives a human historical face to God’s eternal self-determination does not entail that God determines himself further in becoming incarnate. The incarnation is the Logos of God unfolded in our human world, but it does not require any mythic humanisation of God.

For Kuschel, the notion of pre-existence comes from the reflection that ‘If the risen one has such significance for God, must he not always already have been in God’s thoughts?’ (p. 601). The divinity of Christ means simply that ‘God himself has revealed himself in Jesus and that Jesus himself can be understood at the deepest level only from God’ (p. 604). Somewhere along the trajectory of this approach one might retrieve the contemporary sense of Chalcedon, but as it stands it is reductive. Kuschel is happy with Schillebeeckx’s interpretation of the divinity of Christ:

“According to Christian faith Jesus is (a) the decisive and definitive revelation of God, and (b) he shows us therein at the same time what and who we humans can ultimately be and ought actually to be… We cannot separate God’s nature and his revelation’. Therefore the determination of that which the human Jesus is involves in fact the nature of God”. (quoted, p. 616)

He deplores the complex trinitarian language with which Schillebeeckx elsewhere feels compelled to underpin this biblical vision. It may be that both theologians need to undertake the same critical work on the language of classical doctrine as they have consecrated to Scripture, under pain of falling into abstract and implausible constructions whether metaphysical (Schillebeeckx) or mythical (Kuschel).

According to Kuschel, the resurrection is not, as Pannenberg claims, ‘the revelation of a metaphysical duality of Father and Son “always already” given from all eternity’, but rather means that ‘the entire Jesus-event, the preaching, the passion, the cross and the resurrection of Jesus, is to be understood as a revelation of God for the salvation of humankind’ (p. 527). There is a certain ‘identity of nature between Jesus and God” in the sense that ‘in the event “Jesus Christ” God has manifested historically not just one “aspect” of himself but his entire being and nature’ (p. 528). If God has revealed revealed himself fully in this way there is no call to go behind this phenomenon into the ineffable inner life of the divinity: ‘No speculation about an eternal divine Son independent of the human Jesus!’ (p. 586). Here the words ‘speculation’ and ‘independent’-imply a hasty dismissal of the Logos-doctrine. To call the eternal Logos ‘Son’ is misleading theological shorthand, for it projects the human personality of Jesus onto the divine, suggesting either a monophysite conflation or a Nestorian doubling of the Son’s personhood. ‘Born of the Father before time began’ is then mythological expression, licensed only by the communicatio idiomatum. Kuschel thinks it must mean that the human Jesus was in some sense born of the Father before time began. If instead we stress the temporality of Jesus and the eternity of the Logos – using the words ‘temporality’ and ‘eternity’ as counters indicating rules of speech – then we see Jesus as the one through whom the Logos acquires a human, personal, temporal, historical face, or as the incarnation of God’s covenantal outgoingness. The Logos-in-itself is eternal divine wisdom; it is manifested in all things and nothing is independent of it; what is unique about Jesus is the concreteness with which his life, death and resurrection sets humanity in relation to God, becoming the central Logos-event in human history.

Again the objection will be raised: how can we reconcile our insistence on the Logos-doctrine with what we have said about the contextuality and provisoriness of all dogmatic language, its status as human interpretation and construction, as strategic upâya? We recognise a double ccnstraint at work in the mobility of the tradition: on the one hand, the constraint of fidelity to the phenomena of revelation and to the full vital significance of the Christ-event; on the other, the constraint of reason. even if its classical, metaphysical form no longer seems suited to designate the identity of God and of Christ. Those who reject the doctrine of the Councils without submitting it to a probing historical and philosophical examination have not negotiated these constraints and have thus not correctly identified and linked up with the currents of change in the present transmission of the doctrinal heritage.

Yet in the end the status of this entire tradition, with all its logical and phenomenological constraints, remains contingent. It is an interpretation whose relation to the truth of things in themselves eludes us, even if we say that in revelation the truth is no longer noumenal but is given as a phenomenon to be lived, this life takes a variety of forms, and is enacted as a series of finite occasions. Conceptual and doctrinal constructions come second to this lived reality a secondarity keenly sensed in Heidegger, Zen, and Christian mysticism. Thus the doctrinal tradition is worthy of credence, but it points only obscurely to the experience of the real, and this experience itself is different for each epoch so that even poetic or mystical language has but a limited range of evocation.

In both Buddhism and Christianity a powerful rational interpretation has won out over less convincing and coherent ones, while remaining itself full of inconsistencies and awkwardnesses and subject to possible revolutions in light of new ways of understanding. The labour of logic and the concept produces genuine and necessary clarification and effectively validates the claims of the tradition. Yet logic and concept serve to discern also their own limitations and the ways in which the truth they envisage ultimately slips their grasp. Or again, in both traditions certain canonical experiences have been set on a pedestal, and certain styles of apprehending ultimate reality have been inculcated. But these incursions into the real remain particular cultural attainments, and while they may discipline and guide, they cannot forestall the invention of new modes of life that open to the ultimate in unforeseen ways.

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THE UNKNOWN CHRIST

Traditional theology applied the high ontology of Nicaea – ‘God from God, light from light, true God from true God’ – directly to the human Jesus, helped by a short-circuit in the interpretation of Johannine texts such as ‘I and the Father are one’ (Jn 10:30). This may indeed have involved a form of idolatry: ‘from the beginning Jews, and later Moslems, held that Christians, in their extravagant christological claims, were guilty of idolatry; that is, that in their talk about Christ they seriously confused and compromised the most fundamental of the monotheistic categories, God’ (Gordon Kaufman, In Face of Mystery, Harvard University Press, 1993, p. 84). Indeed, even if indefectible in orthodoxy at some deep level, the Christian community seems to have been spared no form of idolatry: idolatry of narrow conceptions of God, idolatry of Christ, of the Bible, of the Church, of church structures, of sacramental rituals – each of these has distracted faith from its supreme concern and become an end rather than a means.

In response to crisis, theology has always sought a return to the sources: from the prophets’ recall to covenant obedience, to the Pauline centering of the Gospel on Christ crucified and risen, to Augustine’s redi in te, to Luther’s recovery of the Word and Schleiermacher’s regrounding of religion in communal experience. Dialectical theology met the crisis of metaphysics with an equivalent of the phenomenologists’ slogan, Zu den Sachen selbst, and the present crisis of pluralism also sends us back to the basic phenomena or founding-events of Christianity. But this time it may be counter-productive to insist on the ‘essence’ of Christianity. It may be that the urgency of such insistence is just what is blocking our path to a demystified apprehension of the meaning of Christ, and a ‘quiescence of fabrications’ (Nâgârjuna). Perhaps we need instead to let go a little more: to draw sustenance from the readily available sources of spiritual insight our world presents in the sciences, in literature, in the modern experience of human solidarity, in a catholic appreciation of all cultural and religious traditions – and leave the Christian claims to look after themselves. A theology which models its tone and tempo on the discretion of Jesus, who emptied himself and did not cling to his own identity, can allow the figure of Jesus to emerge on the new pluralistic landscape in its quiet power – the ‘quite power of the possible’ (Heidegger). Such releasement best allows the meaning of Christ to emerge beyond the accumulation of doctrinal debate and historical investigation. Presuppositionless Buddhist prajnâ, penetrating discernment, should come before the investment of faith, clearing the ground for a demystified apprehension of the phenomenon of Jesus so that this phenomenon in its ‘thusness’ can draw forth the appropriate response of faith, which may no longer be that of biblical or classical Christian times, but something quieter, subtler, more open-ended.

A non-Christian religion may constitute an autonomous wisdom sufficient to make sense of life and to deal with tragedy. The Christian might call it a share in Logos. Nevertheless the preaching of the Gospel will not necessarily communicate immediately with this non-Christian wisdom. The meaning of Christ can be conveyed only by telling the entire story of a covenant between God and humanity, of how it was broken by sin, and how atonement was required. Even with a complete explanation this story will fall idly on the ears of those to whom its basic presuppositions are foreign. Though the biblical way of constructing the human dilemma is equal in consistency to the Buddhist construction, it is not immediately translatable into a horizon in which the notions of God and sin are far less determinate, if they exist at all. Rather, it is perhaps the governing secular horizon of our world that provides the lingua franca in terms of which both the Gospel and the Buddha’s teaching can be reformulated, with their respective challenges to the self-sufficiency of that secularity. Thus it would be by the detour of an opening to the world that the two ancient religious traditions become able to meet one another.

Here a gap has become apparent between the ideal universality of the Logos incarnate and the historical particularity of how the meaning of Christ has unfolded amid the contingencies of Israel’s history, Jesus’s own life, and the Christian enactment of his message. The Christ-event touches the deepest realities of life and death, humanity and God, and these realities are met everywhere, but this universality in principle is slow to become fully manifest. Historical Christianity cannot claim to have mastered the revelation to which it witnesses, and it leaves ample margins for the work of other religious traditions. It finds itself outstripped on every side, but by that very reality which is at the heart of its preaching and which it clumsily calls the Logos incarnate. Its quest, then, is not only for the unknown God – the Deus semper maior – to which every religion points in a fragile and provisional way, but also for the unknown Christ who awaits us in every religion, and indeed in every human being.

If the life of Jesus is throughout a revelation of ultimate reality. this reality manifests itself always and everywhere (Jn 1:4-5). The revelation in Christ unfolds its sense freely only in relation to the countless other fragmentary breakthroughs of divine truth in history, all contingent, limited and to be transcended. By his body Jesus is rooted in the history of the people of Israel and of the Christian community, his ‘mystical body’; but this particular historical enfleshment is not dissociable from history as a whole. Thus the contingency of incarnation rejoins the universalism, and the necessity of the manifestation of ultimate reality. The Logos incarnate is in search of itself in all history; evangelisation or dialogue consists in this encounter of the Logos incarnate in a contingent history with the universal Logos sown in every human heart.

When the Gospel encounters a foreign religious or philosophic horizon, it recognises there things belonging to its own essence, which provokes a partial jettisoning of its previous forms and a restructuring of its content in the perspective thus opened. In these encounters, the kerygma of the cross is freed from the double danger that haunts it: the danger of being reduced to an abstract schematism whose effective meaning slips through our fingers (justification before God, to die in order to be reborn, redemptive suffering); and the danger of its petrification in an empirical history which is both inaccessible in its archaic aspects (the Messiah, the Kingdom) and disturbing in its present resonances (antisemitism). The kerygma of the cross needs the encounter with other religions to be set in a healing perspective.

The ground is everywhere prepared for the Gospel kerygma, though on both sides rigidity of thought-forms and spiritual inertia limit what is possible in the way of creative transformations. This potential universality of the Gospel furnishes the medium in function of which one can speak of a cosmic Christ. Where the terrain is already occupied by another religious vision, it is natural to seek possible correlations between this vision and the Christian one. For instance, in an encounter with Plotinus, one might find a functional equivalent of the Johannine Logos in the domain of the nous. Simiarly, one will note how Krishna identifies himself as a manifestation of the Logos:

“By Me is pervaded all this Universe, by Me in the form of the unmanifest.

“All beings rest in Me, and I do not rest in them.” (Bhagavad-Gîtâ 9.4)

Again, the Buddhist equivalent of the Logos would be the ‘Dharma body’, which is both a manifestation of the absolute and the ultimate truth of the figure of the Buddha (or Buddhas). Yet one cannot make a synthesis of these different constructions, putting them alongside one another in some speculative space, for they belong to complex traditions from which they are inseparable.

Doctrines about the mediation between the absolute and the world cannot be formulated without a permanent concrete reference to this world. In the case of Christology, this reference has a firm historical rooting: Wisdom chooses to dwell among a particular people; then the Incarnation of the Logos takes place in the life of the one who crystallises and raises to a new level the religious wisdom of this people. Confronting this language with analogous constructions in another religion, one notices affinities which suggest progress toward the same universal fulness of meaning, One may even admit that the universality claimed on both sides is at bottom the same, and that in some ultimate clarification, surpassing what we can at present conceive, the Logos will embrace the whole truth of Buddhism and the universality of the Buddhist message will find its full realisation in the Logos. This regulative idea can inspire speculative anticipations. However, these remain desperately abstract, and are to be seen as incidental fabrications, insignificant side-products of the concrete play of traditions, each carrying the density of its historical flesh.

On the ontological plane, it is interesting to note a partial homology between the doctrine of the triple body of the Buddha and the three states of Christ. First, the eternal Logos corresponds to the ‘Dharma body’ of the Buddha; then the ‘body of fruition’, the form in which the Buddha is manifest to bodhisattvas in the Buddha-lands, invites comparison with the spiritual body of the risen Christ; lastly, the ‘transformation body’ which differs for every historical Buddha could be seen as corresponding to the Jesus of history. Christ and the historical Buddha, entirely distinct at the level of the transformation-body, begin to draw near at the spiritual level of the body of fruition (the risen Christ, the heavenly Buddha-figures), and are basically one at the level of the dharma-body. God, in that case, would be one with the ultimate reality, or emptiness, which Wisdom contemplates. Or should one put God, too, on the side of wisdom and see him as transcended in turn by the absolute of ‘the nothingness beyond God?’ But to pursue such questions is to be lost in baseless speculation. The notion of emptiness, like that of Being in Heidegger, has its field of application only in the phenomenality of our world and cannot be applied to God except to the degree that he reveals himself in beings or their emptiness. To project these categories onto the plane of absolute reality is to fall into onto-theology and logocentrism.

Whatever the ontological background of the primacy of Jesus, this primacy unfolds only in historical encounters, that is, in the element of contingency and of the possible. The encounter of the Christ-event with other great events of history – Socrates, the Buddha, Muhammad – unfolds according to the laws of historical existence. Such encounters do not generate an artificial and arbitrary syncretism, but set off a long-term negotiation of which the tension is broken only in breakthroughs of the true. Jesus Christ is not a revelation of God all on his own, but only in relation with a concrete historical interlocutor on every occasion. The relation is asymmetrical in the case, for example, of the encounter between Christ and philosophy, for the result of this encounter is not a contribution to Western philosophy but a new figure of Christ as saviour. In the relation between Christ and the Buddha, in contrast, this asymmetry yields to a parity of the two figures.

All religious discourses and the play between them, indeed all the forms of the created world, can be seen as manifesting Logos, in that they serve to give form and expression to the absolute and ineffable truth. Within the whole universe of forms, explicitly religious expressions aim to reproduce the Logos directly under the conditions of a human, mortal word. They are ‘incarnations’ of it, but not in the sense of grasping it substantially. Rather as provisional designations they attest Logos in imitation of the poverty of the cross. This vulnerable enterprise succeeds only as sustained by the revealing grace of that Logos itself. Most religious language dies when the moment of grace has passed. Yet sometimes when a cathedral in stone or writing seems to have outlived its time and to be no longer capable of housing the divine glory, or even an illusory idolatrous counterfeit of it, there may occur a surprise of the Spirit: the water may run in dried canals and a dusty terminology become eloquent anew.

The notion of Logos is a poor abstraction, a makeshift designation of what we glimpse across the entire series of expressions and forms in which meaning or intelligibility is manifest in cosmos and history. If all meaning is dependently co-arisen and in consequence empty of self-identity the Logos underlying this process does not end the intertextual drift, but makes itself known as this intertextuality itself, as the space in which all particular discourses can breathe and deploy a meaning. The figure of Christ and the discourses created in memory of him are a specific incarnation of this universal Logos, giving it a more concrete and personal face. However, we must beware of naive amalgamations between the Logos incarnate in Christ and the Logos as glimpsed in Greek or in Buddhist philosophy. John speaks of the Logos in personal terms in order to ward off such identifications which reduce the divine to an abstract cosmic principle.

If in general Logos, meaning, shows itself to be empty of own-being, dissolving back to ultimate emptiness, in the Christ-event this movement from form to emptiness is concretised as the personal return of the Son to the Father, while the converse movement from emptiness to form becomes the sending of the Son from the Father into the world. The Johannine truth-event resonates with the deepest philosophical insights, both Greek and Indian, into how meaning and truth emerge, yet it transcends these by its distinctive personal naming of the God revealed in Christ. The dialogue, begun by John, between the Christ-event and the versions of Logos apprehended elsewhere, is always marked by that excess of the named, personal God over more general approaches to the absolute. This excess prevents the Christ-event from being reabsorbed into a phenomenological or speculative interpretation of the world.

The non-duality of form and emptiness is exhibited in the way Christ’s lack of self-nature, his being as dependently co-arisen, opens on a gap, an emptiness, which is no longer an abstract Logos but the Word of a personal God: ‘He who has seen me has seen the Father’ (Jn 14:9). The Logos, always condemned to the limitations of its temporal presentations, assumes these limitations fully in the mortal flesh of Jesus. At this depth of finitude the human Jesus is one with the Logos, not by inflating himself, but by an obedience that removes all barriers of human self-assertion that prevent the emergence of Logos in human life. Sacrifice, which lives finite existence as a free gift, confers on mortal existence its meaning and intelligibility, impressing on history and its contingencies the mark of their origin and end. It is because finite existence thus attests to the greatness of God, that its contingencies are transformed into a revealing Logos without ceasing to be contingent. In consigning himself to the risks and the opacity of history Jesus is the paradoxical sign of divine transcendence, his entire life ‘a finger pointing to the moon’ in virtue of its accomplishment of a fundamental accord between the reality of God and human reality.

We have tried to show the mobility of the forms the Logos takes, both on the interreligious level and within the Christian tradition. This mobility may suggest Hegelian dialectic, but we do not see the history of religious language as culminating in a finally adequate conceptual grasp; rather its dialectic remains radically open to and incarnate in finitude and contingency. The incarnate finitude of the language of faith is not compensated for by an infinite which integrates the finite in itself, but by the dynamics according to which all Christic forms tend beyond themselves. This eschatological openness is the counterpart of the incarnate condition of Christian language.

Deconstruction shows that mortality is inscribed in our very language. In metaphysics, a projection of transcendental forms guaranteeing the identity and continuity of the self brought about a repression of differences, of yawning gaps. Those who protect Christian language against such gaps, seeing it as controlled by the eidos of Christ, might well recall that this forma Christi is that of the Crucified, a cipher of human finitude and mortality. The language of faith speaks well of this when it reproduces the fragmentedness and tornness of Christ. God, writing straight with crooked lines, manifests himself in the Bible through human beings who show their mortality and sinfulness; the regime of allegorisation long masked this carnality of revelation. Christian language, similarly, is always exposed to obsolescence and an ‘errance’ of which its numerous errors are a painful reminder. It is perpetually embarrassed, though it hide its poverty through flattering associations with philosophical and political systems equally over-assured of their own stability. To repeat dogmas valid for all time no longer immunises against the anxiety of temporal existence, for we know that the language of dogmas also belongs to time, carrying the hue of the age which fashioned it and traces of decay where more recent time has done its work.

However, Christians cannot wallow in the postmodernist masochism which pushes to its last conclusions the idea that ‘God is dead’. One such conclusion is that the laws of logic being merely human constructions, any security to which our thought or language pretend is but a projection of narcissistic desire. To be sure, the laws of logic in their formulation owe much to human culture and invention. Yet how deny the presence in them of a transcendental rational force? Even if logic is not as inexorable as is usually thought, and even if its constraints do not operate in a single uniform way, still the traditions of reason, however elastic they turn out to be, retain a compelling force.

Theology is more vulnerable than logic to the charge of being a human projection, but it has its own coherence. The Christ-event survives the inevitable obsolescence of every local or epochal account of it. Is it a narcissistic defence to insist on this permanence? It would be, if Christ himself did not again and again attest his pneumatic presence to believers in a way that is always surprising. If one persuades oneself that logic is only a subjective projection, one will hardly credit the objectivity of Christ. But, conversely, if Christ resists our narcissism, somewhat as logic resists it, then it may be that the perpetual play of our discourses tends not to abolish faith in him, but to keep us in touch with his mystery by an adroit tact in the deployment of our upâya.

To be sure, religious language contains so large a contribution from the human imagination that wish-fulfilment must play a large part in its composition, and we cannot securely sift out this element. Historical criticism and logical vigilance whittle it down, but when that process goes too far it is resisted by an upsurge of spiritual awareness and the irrepressible instincts of faith and hope. Authentic religious thinking makes its home in this perpetual systole and diastole between too lofty affirmation and too sweeping negation. It is a practice of assessment and querying, fundamentally sustained by faith, but attended at all its margins by an open-ended agnosticism.

The fact that we have kept the notion of ‘tradition’ as what links together the various narrations of Jesus Christ invites the suspicion of logocentrism, despite our insistence that the only Logos we know is incarnate. The very fact of linking the diverse Christian cultures in single history centred on Christ is an interpretation dictated by faith and therefore suspect to historians. All our characterisations of Christian tradition and the meaning of Christ are in fact methods for handling history and finding a sense in it, which cannot be justified by historical reason alone and which are subject to revision. For some, the continuity of tradition is a narcissistic projection, masking the epistemological breaks and the bricolages which make all tradition a hotchpotch of opportunistic arrangements. Is there a real transmission of an identical faith from the time of the apostles to the present? To deny all continuity is to destroy the meaning of the tradition. But that the tradition stays alive only through perpetual invention, that it disseminates itself in formations too heterogeneous to have any unity other that that of the history which has produced them, and that only this creativity testifies to the permanence of the presence of Christ in it, is a thesis which can resist the hermeneutics of suspicion and discontinuity on one side, and break with myths of continuity on the other.

The incarnate condition of Christian discourse puts it on a footing with the other religious languages of humanity equally incarnated in the cultures and practices of historical peoples. If God is revealed in our tradition, no firm frontier cuts revelation off from what is afoot in neighbouring traditions, which have often mixed their riches with ours in the course of time. Christian language, however pure it wishes to be, belongs to the family of religious languages and shares in the immense travail of imagination and articulation by which humanity seeks to reproduce in its idioms the voice of the absolute. To be sure, Christian language, by its excellence, judges many others as unworthy and inferior; but in turn it is often judged by other languages, such as that of Buddhism or even those of Western modernity. The Barthian claim that such mutual critique belongs to mere religion and leaves unaffected the sovereignty of revelation has to suppose that the vast open-ended world of Scripture, so permeable to dialogue with other traditions, enshrines a revelation which has clear and distinct frontiers against any other emergence of transcendent truth. But is this compatible with the logic of incarnation? A logos which incarnates itself sacrifices its immunity against dialogical contamination; it is incarnate not in one tradition only but in the network of relations onto which this tradition opens.

If the universality of Christ is worked out thus in a series of situations of encounter, then it is no longer an arbitrary or imperialist claim. It is not Christianity as it now exists that is universal, but rather the ongoing deployment of the meaning of its founding event. This event is in search of its interpretation, a search that is as long as history itself. The role of other religions is not to furnish the Gospel with cultural orchestration or supplement of contemplative Wisdom. How they will interact with it cannot be determined in advance. From every encounter will emerge the uniqueness of the cross, but always in an unforeseeable way, in which the kerygma is bound to undergo modification and reinterpretation.

The kerygma of the cross is presented as the last word on life and death; to refuse it this status is to denature it. But does it follow that every other religious and cultural expression can claim only the status, at most, of penultimate word? In that case one would say that these second-last words open the perspectives of human hope, and that only the last word brings divine salvation. Humans are powerless to free themselves from sin and death; but no religion has contented itself with making this powerlessness evident. Every religion lives from the conviction that a saving process is underway in it. May one not then say that salvation comes not from the bare kerygma of the cross but from the encounter between this kerygma and its interpretative context, a context in which God is already at work? The version of the good news which is born of an interreligious encounter is the fruit of two religions. In the New Testament itself the cross is an event of encounter between the Jewish and Gentile worlds. This paradigm can be carried over to every other encounter under the sign of the cross.

The intrinsically dialogical character of the cross undoes any imperialism by exclusion or inclusion. Its universality subsists as does that of a great poem, in the echo that it encounters in the diverse experiences of humanity, There is no question of a sudden arrest of the pluralistic opening; the cross rather carries this to a deeper and more concrete level, undoing the fixated self-identity of the believer and enabling a radical opening to integral pluralism, somewhat as confidence in Western reason frees the thinker to appreciate the intelligibility of every other tradition.

A theory according to which the cross, beyond the forms of its explicit annunciation, is present wherever human beings assume their finitude in hope and love, might block the free emergence of the unpredictable effects produced by the meeting of the cross with a concrete tradition touching on life and death. The cross is an open question, to which every situation gives a new and provisional answer. Jean Ansaldi’s way of underlining the particularity of the cross seems to limit the universal scope of this question:

“a theology of the cross founded on the sola fide has no hypothesis to offer about the relation of its God with the non-Christian religions… There is no other site of christological knowledge than the Incarnation. The dimension of the eternal Logos should certainly be postulated, but (against the recourse to a universal Logos spermatikos) it has no other function than to articulate the Incarnation, the advent of Emmanuel… Faced with the problem of the non-Christian religions, theology must affirm the fulness of the manifestation of God in Christ and also the undecidability of the question as to how this God is related to the various claims to know another revelation”. (L’articulation de la foi, de la théologie et de Écritures, Paris, Cerf, 1991, pp. 83-4)

This point of view underestimates the imperative of universality inscribed in the cross. For if ‘there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved’ (Acts 4:12), this name itself demands translation. It is not the logos spermatikos, but the name of Jesus itself which unfolds its universal meaning in the course of its encounters with particular historical contexts. And like the name of God the name of Jesus seals its transcendent irreducibility to the categories of any given context in a double bind whereby it both must and cannot be fully translated. The universal meaning of his name is of a concrete historical kind: it is the eschatological future of all humanity. As Donald Dawe puts it:

“The ‘name of Jesus’ is the disclosure of the structure of new being. It is the pattern of salvation. So the universality of Christianity is grounded in the translatability of the ‘name of Jesus’, not in the imposition of particular formularies on others. This power of new being operates throughout the world under the names of many religious traditions. It is recognized end celebrated by Christians because they know its pattern or meaning through Jesus of Nazareth”. (D. Dawe and John B. Carman, ed. Christian Faith in a Religiously Plural World, Maryhill, Orbis, 1978, 30)

Christian theology does not offer precise hypotheses a priori about the role of other religions, but it does expect to find in them elements that accord with its own understanding of salvation and that can enrich it. Far from being content with an abstract ‘undecidability’ which consigns its dealings with the religious other to superficiality, it goes to meet the other on the basis of a set of insights summarised in the name of Jesus; as these resonate with comparable insights in other traditions, each such interchange gives a new accentuation to the name of Jesus, whose universality unfolds as this capacity for encounter and reciprocal illumination.

The eschatological temporality that shapes Christian language and doctrine is reinforced by the interreligious encounter and in turn lends new meaning to this encounter. The eschatological figure of Christ lights up the dynamism whereby religions tend beyond themselves toward the goal in function of which they have been constructed. The eschatological vision bears not only on Christian existence, but on the entire cosmos: ‘the creation waits with eager longing’ (Rom. 8:19). The figure of Christ addresses the other traditions with the assurance that they have a special role in the universal travail of the creation of meaning, which is constantly corroded by the nihilating Power of time and contingency. To extend a fraternal hand to struggling humanity while ignoring the immense investment of hope and passion of which the religions are the monument would be an impoverished and unimaginative way of translating the message of the Kingdom.

By viewing other religions in the perspective of its own eschatological hope, Christianity puts pressure on them, bringing to bear the biblical vision of history, a vision confirmed by the unique role of Jesus Christ. But in return Christianity expects the other religions to throw light on its eschatological vision and to give it a more determinate shape. The obscurities of Christian eschatology refer us to the broken lights of the other religions, and the plurality of eschatologies deepens our sense of how enigmatic and opaque is the future envisaged in religious hope. This obliges us to recall eschatology to its ground in the processes of salvation that are afoot in the present and that can be phenomenologically discerned. The path of enlightenment, the Path of the Kingdom, the path of Torah-fidelity each contain their future in their present enactment; the true outline of the promise, stripped of all imaginary projections, lies inscribed in what is nearest to hand. The eschatological primacy of Christ unfolds in dialogue with all other forms of hope and expectation, and can emerge convincingly only as the message of the Kingdom is enacted in present circumstances.

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FOR AN EMPTY CHRISTOLOGY

In determining how traditional Christology, whethe ‘mythic’ or dogmatic, can still function as a ‘skilful means’ for bringing into view the truth revealed in the Christ-event, we must find a middle way between substantialist attachment to traditional conceptions and nihilistic critique which robs them of all authority. This can be done by reflecting on the intrinsically ‘empty’ and provisional character of these conceptions, as makeshift historical constructs marked by all the inadequacies of human language and thought in face of the transcendent. Accepting this emptiness, one may retrieve the traditional language in a modified form, and use it more lightly and adroitly. It is by its lack of a definitive and substantial hold on its object that it witnesses best to the ‘emptiness’ of that object; for Christ is not a substance to be defined, but an event to be interpreted, and the process of interpretation – as the Gospels already show – advances by letting go of definitive understanding in order to open up to a reality which eludes our conceptual clutches.

We have seen that Christology is always a culturally determined construction, which can never yield a final understanding of the meaning of Christ, for this meaning is constantly renewed according to the responses of the cultures which receive and interpret it. The Incarnation implies an accommodation without reserve to the heterogeneous possibilities of history and culture. This mystery cannot, and does not want to, be expressed in terminology other than inadequate, and at the same time it pushes us to surpass the inadequacy of each of the successive interpretations. The meaning of Christ, as a breakthrough of divine freedom in human life, carries all the marks of the places and times in which this breakthrough happens. If one seeks to resume in a general ontological structure the sequence of events in which Christ is known, the resultant statements will themselves bear the marks of a particular cultural site; an archaic metaphysical language will have been imposed on the vital unfolding of the Christ-event across our history.

In the interreligious horizon the figure of Jesus can emerge anew in its attractive force. No longer as the Christ-king of Christendom, nor as the remote depersonalised figure which the language of dogma unwittingly projects, but as a concentration of enlightened, compassionate wisdom, as one who is saviour not by acting on the world from the outside in some inconceivable mythical or metaphysical process, but by the prophetic truth of the cross which transforms the world according to the laws of its own inmost aspirations.

Neither Buddha nor Christ are conceivable without the culture which permits their discourse and its continuing interpretation. The luminous innovation they bring makes sense only by reference to a prior religious tradition which it transcends. It is only under the limiting conditions entailed by this inevitable historicity that they are bearers of a revelation of the absolute. Moreover, the absolute element at the heart of the narratives and discourses through which their message comes can scarcely be sifted out; it is a perfume which pervades the entire Christian or Buddhist tradition, an intangible melody suggested everywhere. The basic inspiration which underlies all the variations of the melody can never entirely lose its original Indian or Hellenistic Jewish character, but it communicates itself along the paths of history by creative interactions with the cultures it successively meets. When philosophies meet, the aim is to ‘open the concept without destroying it’ (Merleau-Ponty). In the same way, Christology is opened up, through listening to its distant resonances in other traditions, and there is no need to destroy it as a myth that allegedly obstructs dialogical listening. Its structural resistance to closure positively favours this opening to the other.

It is clear that such a point of view implies a fundamental criticism of the Johannine schemas of pre-existence and of the ontology of Nicaea. Unless they are reinterpreted in depth, transferred from the direct to the oblique, these pillars of traditional Christology are in contradiction with the contingency of history. One cannot erect a historical figure, carrying the mark of all the contingencies of human existence, and subject to the play of interpretations to which everything historical lends itself, into a transcendental signifier, pure sign of the ultimate transcendental signified, God. Such an autonomous and fully adequate revelation never takes place; the meaning of Jesus Christ, as of any historical event, is always on the way to being defined. Against the Derridian critique of the status of transcendental signifier accorded the phallus by Lacan, it has been claimed that for Lacan this signifier signifies only ‘difference’ (Barbara Johnson). Christ, too, can be seen as a mobile signifier, marking the diffference and forming a link between the divine and the human in a great variety of ways, and having himself no fixed form outside this function. If the name of Jesus functions as transcendental signifier, it is as marking the site of a whole process of signification which has no end, other than an eschatological one. This signifier, like the divine names, serves to protect the signified from any definitive grasp.

Two expressions have emerged as central to our reflections in this book: ‘emptiness’, an abstract philosophical word, the key theme of the Perfection of Wisdom sûtras, which sums up centuries of Buddhist analysis, and ‘Jesus Christ’, a concrete proper name, the centre of the New Testament, which is the most pregnant cipher of the actualisation of God’s Word in human history. Each of these words provides a field of application for the modern philosophical insights rehearsed in our opening chapters: the pluralism and relativity of historical meaning, its Quinean indeterminacy or Derridean dissemination, and the resulting situatededness and provisionality of any statement of truth. From Buddhism we learned that the fragility and conventionality of thought and language does not exclude, but rather enables, their use as a soteriological ‘skilful means’, and does not render otiose a concern with rationality and truth. We saw that the biblical naming of God assumes this fragility and conventionality into a dynamics of incarnation, whereby God is manifested across the tangled historical dialectic of our efforts to name him, a process marked at every step by the kind of constricting double binds that delight Derrida.

Is a final synthesis possible between these two paths? Can we make ‘emptiness’ rhyme with ‘Jesus Christ’? ‘Rhyme’ is the right word here, with its suggestion of creative artifice, for it would be a mistake to expect that the two traditions can neatly dovetail. Rather we have to construct a bitonal counterpoint in which powerful affinities continue to co-exist with pungent clashes in a give and take that is likely to nourish religious thought for a long time.

The most powerful effort to rethink Christ in terms of emptiness is John Keenan’s. His groundbreaking intuitions can be consolidated by close study of particular Christian texts, wherein one may identify places at which substantialist ontological presuppositions can profitably be wedged open to the Buddhist sense of emptiness. His account of Christ as ‘empty of any essence and engaged in the dependently co-arisen world in all its radical contingency’ (The Meaning of Christ, Maryknoll, Orbis, 1989, p. 225) tries to do justice to the teaching of Chalcedon, while contesting the use of rigid metaphysical categories:

“Jesus as empty of any essence whatsoever is an ineffable outflow from the ultimate realm. But as emptiness is identical with dependent co-arising, so Jesus is enmeshed in the web of the constantly flowing and changing events of his time. He is ultimate and absolute inasmuch as he is totally empty, and human and relative inasmuch as he is totally interrelated with the world”. (p. 237)

As empty, Jesus exists as openness to God, in direct awareness of ultimate meaning; as dependently co-arising he is engaged in this world in the preaching of the Kingdom. Perhaps Keenan associates these two indissociable aspects of Jesus’s humanity too quickly with his divinity and his humanity respectively: ‘Whereas the pair of terms, divine and human, function as opposites in the traditional account, emptiness and dependent co-arising are convertible, complementary each fully interpenetrating the other’ (p. 238). The ultimacy of Jesus is not merely his transparency to the Father in the Abba experience; it is the constitution of his entire human life as the enfleshment of the eternal Word. On the ontological level, the divinity and humanity of Jesus are certainly not convertible, however far the ‘communication of idioms’ is pushed.

Yet though the Word infinitely transcends its fleshly vehicle, it is concretely known and felt only through this enfleshment, so that on the gnoseological level there is a convertibility between the limited contingent figure of Jesus Christ crucified and the infinite divine Word (see 1 Cor.1:23-4). Though we may say that the divine Word is above and beyond the realm of dependent co-arising, we have no access to that Word independently of the incarnational unfolding which occurs in the most salient and concentrated way in the story of Jesus. Just as one cannot set samsâra and nirvâna in opposition (Nâgârjuna, MMK, 25.19-20), so one cannot set the being of Christ in his dependent co-arising over against his being as Logos. To know him in his dependently co-arisen humanity is to know him as Logos; nor can one be known without the other; they are in this sense coterminous. Though we can imagine the Word as eternal and unchanging, this becomes a barren projection if we do not at the same time seek to hear that Word in the mobile variations of its historical unfolding. The attempt to think the Word apart from its incarnation results in an image of God modelled on the human mind, as in the Augustinian and Thomist presentations of the Trinity. Such projections exist only to be shattered by the concrete manifestation of the Word in history, which has to be sought again and again.

Keenan correlates the two truths, ultimate and conventional, with ‘the transcendent dimension of Jesus, expressed through his experience of Abba’ and ‘the incarnational dimension… expressible in a host of languages and cultural philosophies’. But the incarnational dimension is itself the happening of transcendence, just as dependent co-arising is itself emptiness. Should not the two truths correspond rather to two ways of apprehending this total event, a conceptual way and a transconceptual one? Keenan suggests as much when he writes: ‘The resurrection was presented by these early communities as a doctrinally empty, vertical experience of ultimate meaning in Jesus alive as Christ and enunciated horizontally in the kerygma’ (p. 234). Thus there is no privileged a-historical discourse of Jesus’s Abba-experience as opposed to the preaching of the Kingdom, but there can be a contemplative apprehension of the entire event in both its protological and eschatological reach, through a union with the risen Christ which is qualitatively other than the conventional representations of the kerygma. However, since faith in the Word of God is more central in the Christian economy than contemplative insight into the divine presence, a conventional discourse which closely engages with historical contingencies can have a higher profile there than in Buddhism. For the Christian to understand Christ as ‘the worldly and conventional speaking of God’ is not something less than to understand ‘the naked Logos’ as Origen imagined, nor need one itch to transcend this conventional level to attain the ultimacy of immediate gnosis.

In any case it seems clear that from the point of view of Buddhist ontology there can be no fixed substance of the humanity, divinity, person, or nature of Jesus Christ. Chalcedon can be brought into accord with this, for it is not part of the intent of the dogma to attribute either to the human Jesus or to the divine Word a substantial self-contained self; their hypostatic union can be interpreted rather as the mutual openness of two dynamic processes. In Jesus the Word is incarnate in history, in a world textured as universal co-referentiality. To say that ‘Jesus is God’ or that ‘Jesus is the Saviour’ makes sense in this context only as a twitch in this universal web, a pointer to the place where divinity or salvation emerge. This place is not a fixed point: it is the network of relations in which Christ unfolds his being.

Jesus is empty of own-being in virtue of his interdependence with all other humans, fully assumed and expressed in his cross. In principle, then, to return to that human, historical Jesus, or to find Christ in one’s concrete historical neighbour, is not to leave the Christ of faith but to pass freely from the emptiness-dimension to the form-dimension of the one Christ. The emptiness of the risen Christ is one with the emptiness of the eternal Logos, the emptiness of God himself. Yet this does not abolish the ontological gulf between the human and the divine. Since Buddhist emptiness does not transcend dependently co-arising form in anything like as clear a way as God transcends creatures, the application of the Mahâyâna language here stumbles on discords and resistances which must be carefully negotiated and which cannot be brushed away.

We have sought a middle path between abstraction and particularity, between dissolution of Christ in a process of general revelation and sectarian fixation on limited images of Christ. This chimes with the central intuition of Mahâyâna Buddhism: ‘form is itself emptiness, emptiness is itself form’ (Heart Sûtra). The relation is the same as the one in Christian teaching between divine ‘emptiness’ and the particular form of Christ crucified, or between the ‘emptiness’ of Christ as universal, pneumatic Lord, and the particular forms that he takes in the practical reinventions of the Gospel, that is, in every local community which is able to give body to the commandment of love. There is no simple identity here: the relation is kenotic in both directions. God is emptied of his abstraction when recognised in Christ; Christ is emptied of his particularity when acknowledged as divine. Again, Christ is emptied of his abstraction when Christians make him incarnate in particular styles of life, born of the encounters between Gospel and culture; but in referring all established embodiments of Christ to the eschatological  ‘Lord’, always other, always greater, which is ‘Spirit’ (2 Cor. 3:17), they prevent these formations from becoming rigid. The form of Jesus in its relation of interdependences with all other human beings is fully opened to the divine emptiness, and this is what legitimates the identification of the life of Jesus – in its widest historical, pneumatic and cosmic extensions – with the Logos of God.

Jesus crucified assumes fully the manque-à-être (want of being) which is constitutive of human existence, just as the Buddha unflinchingly gazed on the texture of existence as suffering, impermanence and non-self. The obverse of this recognition is the discovery of the eternal life or nirvâna, human existence broken open to ultimate reality.

But the dynamic equivalence between these two versions of ultimate bliss cannot elide the heterogeneity between the different ways of focusing the ultimate in each religion. One is constructed on the basis of the biblical separation of finite and infinite, the other ignores this distinction and bases its economy of meaning on the perception of reality as such. One crystallises in a personal language which places the creature before a Thou; the other dissolves such personal language by its fidelity to the ultimate real which no caregory can express. One is a harmonious movement back and forth between two registers, which become one to the Buddha-eye; the other is a constant discovery of an infinite Other, to be rejoined across the uneven, chequered Calvary-path of history.

Thus, even as the Buddhist analogies crowd in on us, we must retain a sense of the irreducibility to Buddhist categories of the incarnational covenant between a transcendent God and human finitude. While admitting that the ontological vision of the world as dependently co-arisen opens existence onto the nirvanic dimension underlying it, which is that of the Logos and divine transcendence, one must avoid saying that this structure of finitude, even as lit up by the cross, is itself the presence of the infinite, just as dependent co-arising is itself emptiness according to Nâgârjuna. To escape monism, it is better to say that the finite world is broken open to the divine emptiness which infinitely surpasses it. As an event of grace, this breakthrough cannot be reduced to a perception of the ontological texture of the world. Similarly, one should not simply identify the revelation of God in Jesus Christ with the discovery of emptiness in Buddhist meditation. God is incarnate in Jesus not in any arbitrarily chosen form or in a general fashion in all forms as such, but in a very particular narration addressed, through precise historical mediations, to the problems of sin, death and ultimate human liberation. Buddhist thought opens new paths to the understanding of this narration, but at a certain point it sends us back to the perpetual task of theology, that of thinking the meaning of Christ in the terms suggested by Christ himself. The Christian narrations are not a conventional language indicating an absolute reality better grasped by a leap beyond them. If God allows himself to be ‘entangled in stories’ (in the sense of Wilhelm Schapp’s narrative phenomenology), it is because the concrete meaning of our finite lives cannot be fully revealed in more abstract languages and because God himself is known only abstractly as long as he has not introduced himself into our stories and our history.

Thus from the Christian vantage point the Buddhist to-and-fro between form and emptiness is to be regrounded in the more concrete coming and going between God and human stories. Buddhist thought stops us from conceiving this in a naive or anthropomorphic way, but conversely the powerful Christian story makes impossible any forgetting of the suffering flesh of real humanity. It is here that the biblical God writes his revelation, in forms not destined to effacement in some mystical subtilisation, and which can rejoin ‘emptiness’ only via a real transformation of their being, or what we call the resurrection of the body.

Thus the breaking-open of the dependently co-arisen world to ultimate divine reality which is effected in Christ is mediated by the eschatological aspect Christ’s existence, as always transcending itself toward the future of the Kingdom. The step back from Christ to God is less a mystical quest for the beginning than a prophetic anticipation of the end (1 Cor. 15:24-8). Economy opens onto theology not by a blurring of its historical contours but through pursuing to the end the consequences of this historical enfleshment. The event of salvation, historical and fleshly, in which we are caught up, according to the Gospel, cannot be reabsorbed into any general philosophical vision, even that of Buddhism. Every philosophical or religious encounter throws new light on it, but does not muddy or replace its essential references to the God of Israel and the figure of Jesus.

The continuation of this adventure, in fuller awareness of its historical particularity and with greater freedom towards the languages in which it has sought to grasp itself, is assured by no general philosophical or religious ideal, but only by the vivid memory of Jesus Christ. This would be a fragile foundation if this memory belonged only to the past, but the Christian trust is that this Jesus ‘is going before us’ (Mt. 28:7) and is always ahead of us ‘to the close of the age’ (Mt. 28:20).

4. Derrida on Truth

 

Our task of defending the objective truth of religious doctrines while clarifying the modality of their historical emergence and transmission has made some philosophical reflection on the notion of truth indispensable. A dialogue with Derrida’s idiosyncratic account of truth might seem a luxury, but it will, I think, be found doubly instructive: his exploration of the textual inscription and the writerly character of truth undoes the fixation on Truth with a capital ‘T,’ which is the foundation of religious dogmatism; meanwhile he himself exemplifies mistaken ideas about truth which are the staple of agnosticism.

 

If the meaning of a statement is destabilised by its contextuality, its inscription in the network of archi-writing, this instability affects in turn the judgement of truth that one makes in regard to such a statement. Thus to the wound inflicted by ‘dissemination’ at the level of ‘meaning’ is added that of undecidability at the level of truth (a distinction Derrida tends to blur). Whereas in classical philosophies the condition of possibility of judgements is some transcendental truth, whether conceived as residing in being, in the subject, in a totality of meaning, or in the correspondence of a thing with its notion (Hegel), deconstruction focuses on the inscribed, textual status of all propositions, revealing archi-writing as the quasi-transcendental condition of possibility of truth-effects. A contextual theory of truth has a quite different upshot here than in Hegel: where Hegel dissolves partial truths in the integral grasp of that which is to be thought, Derrida dissolves them in an element which is essentially non-truth. The truth of truth is realised not in an ‘absolute knowledge’ but in a textual performance which refuses to be defined in terms of knowing or truth. Far from gathering themselves in the totality of the true, judgements are always threatened with being swallowed up by this khôra, this undecidable medium which permits their formulation.

 

Derrida sees himself as ‘a philosopher motivated by concern with reason and truth,’ but ‘there comes a moment at which this interrogation of truth is no longer subject to the authority of truth’ (F. Rötzer, Französische Philosophen im Gespräch, Munich, 1987, 72-3); that is the moment at which the structure of archi-writing comes to light as one that permits and enframes truth-effects but cannot itself be judged true or false. This entails no destruction of truth, but merely puts it in context: ‘The value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts’ (Limited Inc, Northwestern UP, 1988, 146). If Derrida does sometimes speak of destroying truth, what is meant is a deconstruction that reveals the complex conditions of the truth-effect:

 

The ‘rationality’... which governs a writing thus enlarged and radicalized, no longer issues from a logos. Further, it inaugurates the destruction, not the demolition but the de-sedimentation, the de-construction, of all the significations that have their source in that of the logos. Particularly the signification of truth. (Of Grammatology, Baltimore, 1976, 10)

 

Deconstruction brings to light a realm of undecidability which is ‘beyond truth’ and which is the condition of possibility of our true statements while also marking the provisionality of any formulation of truth:

 

Far from being a sort of empiricist agnosticism or skepticism, deconstruction is, so to speak, a hyper-cognition of a truth beyond truth, ‘a supplement of truthless truth’ (‘Living On’, 139), to the extent that it also inscribes the structural limits of cognition – thus, however, radically altering the concept of cognition as such. (R. Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror, Harvard UP, 1986, 267)

 

This hyper-cognition dissolves the classical concern with the foundations of truth and knowledge by showing how the true always withdraws and is deferred, leaving only traces of itself in the play of the signifiers. Truth is not exhausted by the set of true statements one can enunciate, but if one asks what knowledge the statements convey beyond their explicit content one is thrown back on the enigma of their textuality as the medium in which all truths emerge and into which they recede. The cult of upper case Truth, a Lacanian master-signifier which becomes a paralysing Gorgon, obscures this abyssal textual ground of true statements and seeks to found them instead in some direct transparent encounter of the mind with the real. Archi-writing checks this dogmatism at its root and invites us to find a gentler method, more poetic and indirect, of insisting on truth, or rather of letting truth insist across the play of our speech and writing. This insistence of truth, even amid textual complexity, needs however to be meditated on more intensively. It is doubtful if textuality, as the truth of truth, entirely sublates the truth of particular judgements. Derrida’s apparent claim that it does is largely based on a notion of truth that has not well differentiated the truth of rational judgement from three other matters which are quite distinct from it: truth as unconcealment or presencing, truth as conceptual adequation, and reference. (2021: Jean Greisch's recent book Rendez-vous avec la vérité focuses principally on truth as unconcealment or presencing.)

 

 

FALSE IDENTIFICATIONS OF TRUTH

 

Derrida shows that its inscribed condition undoes classical conceptions of truth as phenomenal presence or as conceptual adequation, obliging philosophers to develop a subtler responsiveness to the ‘truth’ of textuality which is always marked by traits of absence, inadequation, undecidability. But he seems to gloss over what is more central and crucial in the philosophical tradition: the truth of propositions as affirmed in the act of judgement. This is realised at a level beyond the givenness of the data and their conceptual ordering, and cannot be subsumed under the notions of unconcealment or adequation. What Derrida sees as the classical conceptions of truth in reality deserve the name ‘truth’ only in a secondary and derivative sense. They are metaphysical myths which obscure truth’s actual mode of being. Derrida effectively dismantles these myths, but he falls victim to them himself when he takes their deconstruction for a deconstruction of truth proper.

 

Truth is not phenomenal. A principal target of Derrida’s critique is the phenomenological understanding of truth as coming-to-presence or unconcealment. Derrida constantly identifies truth with presence, whether in Hegel’s terms: ‘the presence or presentation of essence’ (Margins of Philosophy, Chicago, 1982, 120); ‘the presence of the being, here in the form of presence adequate to itself’ (80); in Husserl’s: the givenness of the thing itself in intuition; or in Heidegger’s: ‘the alleged simplicity of the opening, of the aperity – the letting-be, the truth that lifts the veil-screen’ (Dissemination, Chicago, 1981, 314). If these thinkers really reduce truth to coming-to-presence, this prevents them from doing justice to the truth of rational judgement, for the contact with being which a true judgement achieves does not take place in the mode of presence.

 

Heidegger opposes truth as unconcealment to ‘mere correctness’ and sees unconcealment as the ultimate condition of possibility of correctness. He seeks to render his thought adequate to the being of what is, not by forming rational judgements, but by a suspension of concept and argument in favour of the fine discriminations of a contemplative attending on the phenomena. In his view, the truth of judgement, as correspondence between propositions and states of affairs, can be the bearer of a cognition of beings, but never of a knowledge of being. Whereas for Aristotle it is propositional discourse alone that shows that things are and that they are what they are, Heidegger, more concerned with the first openness of human existence, sees speech in general as the lighting-up of beings in their being. Without this prior opening of being, better attested by a poetic word than by a proposition, the sense of the ‘is’ in anv proposition we affirm remains fundamentally unclarified.

 

Though it is a simplification to present the truth of being as the foundation and origin of the mere correctness of propositions, the Heideggerian rhetoric is not simply mystificatory. If it were, the Johannine or any other religious vocabulary of truth would be even more so. One would have to reduce the notion of religious truth to the sum of correct religious propositions, as some analytical philosophers of religion seem happy to do. Heidegger has recovered for thinking a lost continent whose existence such stunted rationalism studiously ignores.

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What can be objected to Heidegger, and to Derrida insofar as he identifies truth-as-presence with truth as such, is that the truth identified in a correct judgement is not intrinsically reducible to unconcealment; its core or essence is something that eludes the register of phenomenality. The difference between the propositions ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ and ‘Caesar crossed the Thames’ (one true, the other false) can be identified by empirical verification and falsification, but the fact of truth or falsehood is not reducible to empirical or phenomenological terms. The limit of the phenomenological view of truth is seen in its inability to bring into view the difference between true and false propositions. If I utter a true judgement, e.g. ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon,’ one could say that the truth of this judgement presents, represents, shows itself, reveals its presence, in the judgement. But does this way of speaking focus at all precisely the manner in which the judgement attains truth? Phenomenological theories of intentionality or the pre-predicative foundations of the act of judging tell us much about how truth is known, but this phenomenality of truth remains secondary to the fundamental concern of judgement. Judgement is a matter of correctness, veridicity, objectivity, rather than anything phenomenal.

 

For Derrida, Western philosophy has been obsessed with truth as presence. It has repressed all memory of the impurity of its written condition and:

 

watches over its margins as virgin, homogeneous, and negative space, leaving its outside outside, without mark, without opposition, without determination, and ready, like matter, the matrix, the khôra, to receive and repercuss type. This interpretation will have been true, the very history of truth. (Margins, xxvii)

 

This repression of the margins proceeds from ‘an active indifference to difference’ (17) by which is maintained the artificial identity of ‘truth as the presentation of the thing itself in its presence’ (18). All of this seems irrelevant to the truth of propositions or the truth of judgements. Indeed, one might maintain against Derrida that truth, as the truth of judgement, has often functioned in Western philosophy as an instance that undermines the metaphysics of presence.

 

Truth is not conceptual. The only other sense of ‘truth’ that Derrida attends to is truth as adequation:

 

‘Truth’ has always meant two different things, the history of the essence of truth – the truth of truth – being only the gap and the articulation between the two interpretations or processes… The process of truth is on the one hand the unveiling of what lies concealed in oblivion… On the other hand… truth is agreement (homoiôsis or adaequatio), a relation of resemblance or equality between a re-presentation and a thing (unveiled, present), even in the eventuality of a statement of judgment. (Dissemination, 192-3)

 

Do presence and adequation cover all the senses of truth? Is a true judgement merely an adequation (of predicate to subject) ultimately grounded in ‘the ambiguity or duplicity of the presence of the present’ (192), or is there a specific truth of judgement which cannot be satisfactorily grasped either as presencing or as adequation? If différance reveals the non-originarity of presence and the impossibility of an adequation of logos to eidos, has it thereby put truth as such in question?

 

Derrida amalgamates two distinct levels, that of sense and meaning and that of the true; the level of concept and interpretation and the level ofjudgement. When he speaks of truth he means that which answers the question ‘what is it?,’ not that which answers the question ‘is it?’ ‘Truth’ is ‘that by which the question what is? wants answering (ce qu’il faut répondre)’ (177). But if the factors that constitute meaning are not those involved in the determination of truth, if the demand for the definition of an essence is not the same thing as the demand for a judgement of truth or falsehood, then semantic complications which make meaning too mobile to be controlled by the resources of phenomenology and dialectics do not necessarily involve any disabling of judgements of truth. Ignoring the scholastics’ distinction between the first and the second acts of the intellect, between concept (locus of meaning) and judgement (locus of truth), Derrida puts forward a conceptualist account of the classical notion of judgement, seeing it as essentially a matter of adaequatio: ‘the essence of judgement being to say the essence (S is P)’ (‘Préjugés,’ in La faculté de juger, 1985, 93; though a little further on he does link judgement with the ‘thesis of existence’ and deconstruction with the Husserlian épochè of that thesis, 96).

 

A theory of judgement which affirms the irreducibility of the ‘yes or no,’ whereby every judgment anchors itself in being, gives the question of truth some independence from the level of meaning and hence from the structure of différance in which the articulation of meaning is caught. Truth in the sense of adequation, in Hegel for example, is unfolded on the level of the relation between subject and predicate, but the truth of a judgement, which affirms or negates a proposition, has to do not with defining an essence or a thought but with deciding the relation of the proposition to what is the case.

 

‘Why is the metaphysical concept of truth in solidarity with a concept of the sign, and with a concept of the sign determined as a lack of full truth?’ (Margins, 80). Again Derrida is talking about one metaphysical concept of truth, a conceptualist one, which is not the best that Western philosophy has to offer, and which misses the existential force of judgement. Hegel did not overcome the conceptualist notion of judgement that Kant expressed in these words:

 

The objective criterion of truth is the correspondence (Übereinstimmung) of the representations in a judgement with one another according to general rules of understanding and reason, that is, through intuitions or concepts… All truth consists in the accord of all thoughts with the laws of thinking, and thus with one another. (Eisler, Kant-Lexikon, 595)

 

This is meant to correct the unsatisfactory definition of truth as correspondence of knowledge with its object (Critique of Pure Reason, A 57-62; B 82-6). How measure our knowledge against an object that is independent of our knowledge? We can measure our knowledge only against the object as known, which means we measure our knowledge by immanent criteria: ‘All truth consists in the necessary correspondence of a cognition with itself’ (Akademieausgabe XVII, 373). The abstract criterion of truth as correspondence of cognition to object is ‘cashed’ in a more concrete demand for the adequation of intuition to concept. But the slippage from correspondence (of knowledge to object) to adequation (of intuition to concept) confuses the level of judgement and truth with that of concept-formation and sense. A sharper focusing of truth as the correspondence of a judgement to a state of affairs frees truth from the ideal of adequation and the logic of concept-formation, instead showing truth to reside not in the ‘objective validity’ of concepts and the Grundsätze spun out of them (A 242, B 300), but exclusively in the correctness of what a judgement asserts.

 

Joseph Maréchal, building on the scholastic tradition, sharply distinguishes the two aspects of the propositional judgement in Aristotle, namely, synthesis and affirmation. Judgement remains for Kant a conceptual synthesis, and he fails to differentiate the specific contribution of affirmation and negation:

 

 

The Critique of Pure Reason makes existential judgement a ‘synthesis’, under the supreme type of the formal unity of consciousness. Affirmation (reality) and negation figure only as ‘categories’ – we could say: as formal a priori modes of the concretive synthesis’(Le point de départ de la métaphysique V, Louvain, 1926, 217)

 

But synthesis is as yet only a conceptual achievement:

 

If we arrest any proposition at the last stage before it crosses the threshold of affirmation, what we find is an expression in which are grouped the terms of that judgement, under a form that abstracts from the true and the false. (219)

 

Judgement is not merely a static proposition but the dynamic act that sets the mind in relation to being.

 

Frege’s warnings against confusing predication with assertion, the level of thought with the level of truth, might also be invoked in this context. Like the scholastic distinction between abstraction and judgement it seems the merest common sense. But it becomes a source of illumination when confronted with common confusions of philosophical discourse and with the reluctance of many contemporary thinkers to cross this pons asinorum of epistemological analysis. Truth is not included in the logos; it is the logos (the object of the first act of the intellect) that permits the judgement (the second act of the intellect): judgement transcends the conceptual level. What most distinguishes logos 1: ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’ from logos 2: ‘Caesar crossed the Thames’ is not the difference in sense (though this determines their truth-value) but the fact that one is true and the other false.

 

There is a secondary sense in which one may retain the usage of ‘truth’ in the sense of conceptual adequation, the truth of the notion (Hegel), while rejecting the conceptualist temptation to see this adequation as founding the truth of individual propositions (so that the truth of each proposition depends on the truth of the whole). ‘Socrates is mortal’ is truer (at least in one perspective) than ‘Socrates is not a banana’ – in the sense that the first predicate is adequate to the notion of the subject. Indeed any discourse on facts has to bring in truth as adequation:

 

In matters of fact there is not only factual reference but also, and consequently, adequacy or inadequacy with respect to fact. Moreover such adequacy or inadequacy is rarely complete: unlike logical truth and logical falsity factual truth and factual falsity are not polar opposites, but contraries since, though incompatible, they are not exhaustive. (M. Bunge, Treatise on Basic Philosophy, II, Dordrecht, 1974, 81)

 

Derrida’s critique of truth as adequation bears on ideals of a logos that concords ever more fully with the presence on which it is superimposed; or, conversely, à la Husserl, of a complete intuitive filling of the empty signifying intentions of language, in which the object they envisage will finally be fully given. But the quest for increasing adequacy in the statements we make does not require that we entertain these ideals, which are in fact an encumbrance to it. Surrendering all notions of a perfect adequation to the real, we say these statements are ‘more or less adequate’ – meaning ‘more or less true’ – without laying ourselves open to Derrida’s critique.

 

The distinction between reference and truth. Derrida equates truth with reference. The famous essay in which he plays the Mallarmean economy of writing off against the Platonic one is in reality more a critique of referentiality than of truth. In Plato,

 

It is through recourse to the truth of that which is, of things as such, that one can always decide whether writing is or is not true, whether it is in conformity or in ‘opposition’ to the true… In each case mimêsis has to follow the process of truth. The presence of the present is its norm, its order, its law. It is in the name of truth, its only reference – reference itself – that mimêsis is judged. (Dissemination, 185, 193)

 

As in the case of truth, deconstruction seeks not to undermine the referentiality of language but to bring it into perspective:

 

It is totally false to suggest that deconstruction is a suspension of reference. Deconstruction is always deeply concerned with the ‘other’ of language… Certainly, deconstruction tries to show that the question of reference is much more complex and problematic than traditional theories supposed. (in R. Kearney, Dialogue with contemporary Continental thinkers, Manchester, 1984, 123)

 

Our discourse engages the real, but one can never survey reflexively the relation between words and things, for the things are not accessible in their purity, uncontaminated by the words, nor can the words be cut off from the world they name. This mutual contamination is the sense of the statement that ‘there is no outside-the-text’ (Of Grammatology, 158; translation modified). Much of what Derrida says about truth thus applies better to the question of how words name things or how language reflects the world than to the quite different question of how propositions correspond to the true. In supposing that they do so somewhat as names correspond to things, he can carry over the deconstruction of the referential text-thing relationship to the veridical proposition-truth relationship. This is an illegitimate move.

 

Frege might be of help here if he had more consistently distinguished reference and truth; his well-known view that the truth-value of a sentence constitutes its reference is toned down when, ‘in a letter to Russell in 1904 he concludes (more reasonably) only that the reference of a sentence must be “most intimately connected with its truth”’ (G. Currie, Frege, Harvester Press, 1982, 90). In equating truth-value with reference, Frege makes the truth of a sentence a composite from the references of its parts; distinguishing truth from reference, we can maintain that truth is incomposite, consisting in nothing more than the fact that the state of affairs picked out by the sentence really is the case; truth, correlated with the assertoric force of the sentence, has to do not with any synthesis established at the levels of sense or reference, but with an affirmation of what is the case.

 

‘Both sense and reference are prior to any assignment of truth value’ (Bunge, 47). I can say that the referent of the expression ‘Creator’ is God without thereby making the truth-claim that God exists. Reference can be fully determined while truth remains undecidable (as in Gödel). When Derrida speaks of the undecidability of certain expressions, what is principally in question is the indeterminacy of their reference. Yet it may be that undecidability of reference does not necessarily entail impossibility of judgement. It might be maintained that the reference of religious statements such as ‘God is good’ is undecidable, although we affirm them as true. Reference may always involve a blind leap of faith; the formation of sense or meaning may also be an arbitrary cut in the end-less movement of dissemination; but the judgement ‘true or false?’ though intimately connected with sense and reference is not reducible to them, and the instability descried in them is not immediately transferable to it.

 

Truth has no essential connection with speech. Metaphysics, Derrida claims, has always assigned the origin of truth in general to the logos:

 

the history of truth, of the truth of truth, has always been… the debasement of writing, and its repression outside ‘full’ speech… All the metaphysical determinations of truth… are more or less immediately inseparable from the instance of the logos, or of a reason thought within the lineage of the logos… Within this logos, the original and essential link to the phonê has never been broken…This experience of the effacement of the signifier in the voice… is the condition of the very idea of truth. (Of Grammatology, 3, 10-11, 20)

 

Derrida’s implausible and much-criticised thesis of phonocentrism clearly derives from his understanding of the ‘metaphysical determinations of truth, as presence and adequation. Truth as presence, adequately grasped in a logos, requires the immediacy of speech and abhors the indirections of writlng. In reality, however, Derrida’s claims about the interweaving of thought with speech, and the impossibility of reconstituting a ‘private language’ of the pure self-presence of consciousness, affect only the level of meaning (so that even clearly defined mathematical meanings depend on linguistic arrangements for their formulation and cannot be conceived as existing apart from these in a realm of pure thought). They do not necessarily affect the level of truth. The true and the false have nothing to do with phonocentrism, the uncontaminated self-presence of concepts in a pure inner voice: they are unrepresentable, unconceptualisable, and as such have nothing to do with logocentrism either; indeed, their autonomy in regard to phonê and logos subverts the totalising project of logocentrism.

 

As an account of what truth has meant in the West the myth of the logocentric, phonocentric metaphysics of presence is askew, for the value of truth has not been systematically yoked to presence and linguistic transparency, and is therefore less vulnerable than these are to the demonstration that presence is originarily compounded with non-presence. The notion of originary différance, which is the heart of Derrida’s thought, erects a barrier against a recurring temptation of Western metaphysics: the lure of pure presence, absolute origins, and a language that is simply transparent to them. But when these myths of immediacy are equated with .truth, and when their demise is proclaimed to be the demise of truth, Derrida himself succumbs to a metaphysics of presence.

 

To speak of ‘a truth, or a meaning already constituted by and within the element of the logos’ (Of Grammatology, 14) is to blur the distinction between meaning and truth. The two equations, truth = presence, truth = meaning, imply the equation meaning = presence. By identifying presence, meaning and truth, Derrida can conclude that the notion of truth is only an epoch in the history of archi-writing, or rather, the dominant notion of the epoch we call history:

 

the value of truth in general, which always implies the presence of the signified alêtheia or adequatio), far from dominating this movement, and allowing it to be thought, is only one of its epochs, however privileged. A European epoch within the growth of the sign. (286)

 

‘The very concept of history has lived only upon the possibility of meaning, upon the past, present, or promised presence of meaning, of its truth’ (Dissemination, 184, translation modified). In this epoch some supreme instance – paradigmatically God – ultimately assures the determination of meaning and the judgement of truth.

 

The word or concept of truth has sense only within the logocentric closure and the metaphysics of presence. When it does not imply the possibility of an intuitive or judicative adequation, it nevertheless continues in alêtheia to privilege the instance of a vision filled and satisfied by presence. (Of Grammatology, 337)

 

The alleged European epoch is far from being as homogeneous as this suggests. Many philosophical views of truth not only escape the charge of logocentrism but reveal that truth, correctly grasped, overcomes logocentrism. If it is myths of truth that writing inscribes and punctures, one could say that the metaphysical tradition has never been entirely under the spell of such myths. If it had been, how could Kant have written: ‘in itself truth has nothing to do with time and eternity, slnce it is nothing existing’ (Eisler, 594)? Few have been more convinced of the reality of truth than Frege, yet this conviction is precisely what kept him from adopting any of the stereotypical conceptions of truth which Derrida ascribes to Western philosophy. His references to the notions of mimesis and correspondence scarcely make Frege an easy target here:

 

An idea is not called true in itself but only with respect to an intention that it should correspond to something. It might be supposed from this that truth consists in the correspondence of a picture with what it depicts. Correspondence is a relation. This is contradicted, however, by the use of the word ‘true,’ which is not a relation-word and contains no reference to anything else to which something must correspond.

 

Indeed, not only is the notion of correspondence useless for the purpose of defining the true, but it turns out that no definition is possible:

 

The attempt to explain truth as correspondence collapses. And every other attempt to define truth collapses too. For in a definition certain characteristics would have to be stated. And in application to any particular case the question would always arise whether it were true that the characteristics were present. So one goes round in a circle. Consequently, it is probable that the content of the word ‘true’ is unique and indefinable. (Frege, in P. Strawson, Philosophical Logic, Oxford UP, 1967, 18-19)

 

As Michael Dummett explains: ‘“True” is said by Frege to be undefinable: but the True can be picked out from other objects by means of any true sentence’(The Interpretation of Frege’s Philosophy, Harvard UP, 1981, 170).

 

Later philosophers have not accepted Frege’s rather peremptory declarations of indefinability in regard to truth and other key-notions. But when Tarski, for example, sets about defining truth, the result again suggests that truth has nothing to do with presence. The sentence ‘snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white: this disquotational definition ‘tells us what it is for any sentence to be true, and it tells us this in terms just as clear to us as the sentence in question itself’ (W. V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth, Harvard UP, 1992, 82), without any reference to truth being unveiled for a cognitive subject or to truth as presence. The quoted sentence can refer to a presence, but this epistemic content doesn’t affect the definition itself. Even if this account of truth is seen as a correspondence-theory, it is so in a sense remote from that attacked by Frege. To say that truth is a correspondence between statements and facts becomes merely a convenient generalisation of truisms such as ‘“Snow is white” is true, for snow is white.’ What Kant, Frege and Tarski have to say about truth seems free, then, of the illusions denounced by Derrida. This renders inoperative any claim that deconstruction brings into view the possibility of a disappearance of truth, since deconstruction turns out to miss the most authoritative contemporary accounts of what truth is.

 

Redundancy theories of truth such as those propounded by F. P. Ramsey and the later Wittgenstein (according to which ‘it is true that snow is white’ is merely a verbose way of saying ‘snow is white’) have been rejected on logical grounds or because they cannot do justice to the practice of testing whether or not a given statement is true. A reductive, merely disquotational theory of truth is also contested within the analytical tradition, with a tendency to swing to the opposite extreme that sees truth as dependent on its role in human epistemic performance. It is evident in any case that such theories are at the antipodes of a mythology of truth as presence. A discourse on truth which examines the conditions of possibility and the philosophical implications of our capacity to utter correct judgements remains a plausible project. The Derridian critique can save this discourse from metaphysical illusions, but does not disqualify it.

 

 

THE TEXTUAL INSCRIPTION OF TRUTH

 

1. How Writing Exceeds Truth. Every signified is marked by secondarity from the beginning: ‘The secondarity that it seemed possible to ascribe to writing alone affects all signifieds in general, affects them always already, the moment they enter the game’ (Of Grammatology, 7). Since the signified is reduced to being the signifier of another signifier, the trace of a trace, it follows that a true statement does not pin the signs to the things themselves but deploys strategically the available marks so that they accord with the insistence of the true. Even in affirming the clearest fact - ‘it is raining’ – I consign my assertion to language, textuality interextuality, iterability, non-saturable context. The truth-effect my statement achieves is already ‘inscribed’ in language, and cannot be abstracted from this inscribed condition as a pure proposition immune to its mobile play.

 

Nothing prevents one from writing a truth. But to do so one sets in motion the complicated and treacherous machine of writing, which escapes the vigilance of the writer. The true sentence, caught in this web, cannot be assured of its relation to the thing itself. If one tries to envisage this relation according to the schemas of adequation, correspondence, unveiling, coming to presence, they turn out to be defective. The judgement ‘Caesar crossed the Rubicon’, if true, is eternally true. But if we try to grasp the absolute essence of this truth we manage to catch only a verbal form. The actual fact as such eludes our clutches, in its ‘self-dissolving absoluteness.’ The verbal form, iterated each time we want to assert the truth of the fact, is caught in the play of dissemination. Despite the purity that logic and mathematics can attain, the same situation seems to prevail for truths of reason such as ‘two and two are four.’ Truths of faith are still more vulnerable to this textual condition: in the case of ‘God exists’ or ‘Jesus Christ is the Son of God,’ one cannot appeal to the data of ‘sense-certainty’ (the most elementary stage in The Phenomenology of Spirit); the terms of such propositions draw their meaning from the most advanced forms of consciousness, and are the product of a historical labour of mind, which exposes them to all sorts of contingent interferences.

 

Thus writing inscribes truth ‘in a system in which it is only a function and a locus’ (Writing and Difference, Chicago, 1978, 296), ‘a system of figures not dominated by the value of truth, which then becomes only an included, inscribed, circumscribed function’ (Margins, 18). This writing ‘cannot be governed by the motif of truth whose very horizon it frames’ (Dissemination, 296). Every debate about the true is governed and enframed by the play of rhetorical or syntactic structures on which the question ‘true or false’ has no hold. Syntax, an affair of spacing and intervals, does not lend itself to the question of truth, which concerns only fixed and stable statements. A ‘horizon’, the ground upon which these statements emerge, would still be subject to the question of truth, especially when it is posed in Heideggerian style. But ‘enframing’ cannot be mastered by that question. If truth then no longer regulates our discourse as an immovable criterion, our speech become a net thrown into the dark, responsive to that otherness of the real which eludes it, and which it can only aim at in adventurous strategy, and misses if it tries to name it directly: ‘In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field’ (Margins, 7).

 

No text attains the signification it aims at. The more elaborately it develops its resources to express what it wants to say, the more the envisaged meaning becomes muddied and withdraws. Instead of referring directly to its content, the text is caught up in the play of its own elaboration, which one cannot cut short. The final relation of this play to the thing itself cannot be fully elucidated:

 

The infrastructures dissolve the comprehension of the thing itself. Instead of offering themselves, they withdraw. They efface themselves, constantly disappearing as they go along. ‘They cannot, in classical affirmation, be affirmed without being negated’ (Dissemination, 157). What thus makes its entrance into philosophy is the very possibility of a disappearing of truth. (Gasché, 150)

 

In the same way, the other, whoever or whatever it may be, resists our horizons of understanding and cannot be presented and seized in its ‘truth.’ A fully literary text, that is, a reflected text which has permitted the laws of the textual to work themselves out in all their complexity, will resist all efforts to bring its meaning back to a thematic unity and to subordinate its statements to the regime of judgements of truth. The more a writing is refined, the less it presents itself as true. This is not to say that it loses itself in falsehood, for the refined text is assuredly ‘closer to truth’ than a banal one. Thus the domain toward which writing burrows is that of the neither true nor false, that of the undecidable.

 

In the essay on Mallarmé, Derrida plays off the subtlety of writing against ‘the ontological: the presumed possibility of a discourse about what is, the deciding and decidable logos of or about the on (being-present)’ (Dissemination, 91). In writing ‘there is no longer any textual difference between the image and the thing, the empty signifier and the full signified, the imitator and the imitated, etc.’ (209). Language does not state the truth of things from a position external to them, but sets in motion a to-and-fro between signifier and signified in which it becomes impossible to abstract the signified in a pure state. One must find one’s way within this situation, without any possibility of jumping out of it to some ‘outside-the-text,’ ‘What is produced is an absolute extension of the concepts of writing and reading, of text, of hymen, to the point where nothing of what is can lie beyond them’ (223).

 

Mallarmé’s Mimique describes a scene in which Pierrot mimes the murder of his wife as he has first premeditated, then accomplished it:

 

The scene illustrates but the idea, not any actual action, in a hymen (out of which flows Dream), tainted with vice yet sacred, between desire and fulfillment, perpetration and remembrance: here anticipating, there recalling, in the future, in the past, under the false appearance of a present. That is how the Mime operates, whose act is confined to a perpetual allusion without breaking the ice or the mirror: he thus sets up a medium, a pure medium, of fiction. (quoted in Dissemination, 175)

 

This refined fiction exposes the infrastructural conditions of what we call ‘truth.’ Between the imitator and the imitated the relation is no longer one of simple exteriority, but an undecidable ‘hymen’ or ‘between’(entre) which ‘renders this alternative between internal and external inoperative’ (Dissemination, 221):

 

In this perpetual allusion being performed in the background of the entre that has no ground, one can never know what the allusion alludes to, unless it is to itself in the process of alluding, weaving its hymen and manufacturing its text… That this play should in the last instance be independent of truth does not mean that it is false, an error, appearance, or illusion. Mallarmé writes ‘allusion,’ not ‘illusion.’ Allusion, or ‘suggestion’ as Mallarmé says elsewhere, is indeed that operation we are here by analogy calling undecidable. An undecidable proposition, as Gödel demonstrated in 1931, is a proposition which, given a system of axioms governing a multiplicity, is neither an analytical nor deductive consequence of those axioms, nor in contradiction with them, neither true nor false with respect to those axioms. Tertium datur, without synthesis. (219)

 

Mallarmé’s writing breaks up the Platonic economy of mimesis; it is no longer truth which judges the mime’s performance, but the performance enframes and circumscribes truth. In Mallarmé’s description:

 

What is marked there is the fact that, this imitator having in the last instance no imitated, this signifier having in the last instance no signified, this sign having in the last instance no referent, their operation is no longer comprehended within the process of truth but on the contrary comprehends it, the motif of the last instance being inseparable from metaphysics as the search for the arkhê, the eskhaton and the telos, (207-8)

 

Truth is reduced to a thematic effect, subordinated to the machinery which stages it, ‘the irreducible excess of the syntactic over the semantic’ (221). The scene of writing exceeds the thematic content it presents within its framings. If we focus on this content we will talk with ease of its meaning and truth, but if we attend to the writing as such we find that the notion of truth has no grip on it. The reader is involved in it in an active way; every reading is part of the play of writing, whose borders are forever changing according to changing contexts.

 

Analysis of the excess of the text over its content brings to light the quasi-transcendental infrastructures, never the same from one text to another, which assure that one will find at bottom every time something one cannot master by a definitive identification. This undecidability is the seal of the alterity of the other, which imposes respect. The text shows itself to be caught in a double bind which is the very law of its composition and which imposes itself on the reader: one writes to state the true, but the truth of writing is that the true, the thing itself, perpetually withdraws. Similarly, another person, or God, or being, or the moral law, or the desire constitutive of the human subject make themselves known only under the species of a double bind obliging us to engage in a struggle of interpretation. Derrida insists that the impossibility of imposing a closure on différance and the undecidable doesn’t imply any paralysing indeterminism, but an alert openness to the other and a freedom for creative interventions. But does this way of seeing things leave any place for theoretical or ethical judgements which would be other than arbitrary?

 

2. How Truth Exceeds Writing. The textual inscription of truth mirrors the way that in everyday life the utterance of truth is a performative act, limited by the situational constraints of a concrete contexr. Derrida admires the ‘Nietzschean’ (Margins, 187) daring of John L. Austin’s cashing of ‘truth’ in terms of felicitous speech-acts:

 

It is essential to realise that ‘true’ and ‘false,’ like ‘free’ and ‘unfree,’ do not stand for anything simple at all; but only for a general dimension of being a right or proper thing to say as opposed to a wrong thing, in these circumstances, to this audience, for these purposes and with these intentions. (Austin, quoted in Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida, University of Nebraska Press, 1984, 113)

 

But taken literally this, like Rorty’s pragmatism, is an incomplete definition of truth. If there is an excess of the situation, or the text, over the truth-effect inscribed in it and which it makes possible, may there not also be an excess of truth over its conditioning contexts? This way of talking of truth-effects and of subordinating them to a wider context seems to imply a naturalistic attitude reminiscent of Wittgenstein, for whom the association of ‘true’ and ‘proposition’ is no more significant than that ‘l’ comes after ‘k’ in the alphabet:

 

in that sense ‘true’ and ‘false’ could be said to fit propositions; and a child might be taught to distinguish between propositions and other expressions by being told ‘Ask yourself if you can say “is true” after it. If these words fit, it’s a proposition.’ (Philosophical Investigations 137)

 

Such naturalism glosses over the distinction between meaningful concepts and true judgements. To say, with Waismann, that ‘“True,” “agreement with reality,” etc., are expressions within a calculus, not expressions connecting the calculus with reality’ (G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, An Analytical Commentary on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Oxford, 254) is to deny this distinction, insofar as it is suggested that ‘truth’ is merely a further determination of a proposition in addition to the conceptual grasp of a possible state of affairs which the proposition contains. Affirmation and denial have a specific ontological import that is missed when we grasp them only as applications of a truth-value calculus.

 

Against Derrida’s subordination of truth to its textual inscription. I would see propositional truth as the lever that raises the truth of judgement out of its subordination to the mechanisms of language. ‘Is it really the case?’ – the instability that this question induces is incommensurable with the reflections on the semantic conditions of enunciation, to which Derrida confines himself. Even if meaning is always vulnerable to dissemination, the application to a given statement of the question, ‘true or false?’ brings into play an instance which is not affected by the possible divagations of meaning. However, it is true that the text as such may elude this question; to ask whether a Mallarmean sonnet is true or false is as futile as to ask whether an apple is true or false. Derrida would argue that any statement, viewed as a textual performance, is equally impervious to the question of truth, and that it points rather to the element of archi-writing, where the notions of truth and falsehood no longer apply.

 

‘True’ textuality outstrips truth and is itself beyond the grasp of the category of truth. But the truth of true statements in its turn outstrips the textuality in which these statements are inscribed. What the ‘textual inscription of truth’ actually overcomes is a conception of truth as correspondence based naively on the analogy with the correspondence between a thing and the label attached to it. This notion of true statements as a mimetic mirroring of the world is the fallacy Derrida unmasks. But is it correct to say that it is essentially in this way that the whole of Western philosophy has understood judgement? Does Derrida himself confuse two senses of reference? When a word refers to a thing there is a relationship of mimesis, which indeed turns out to be more complex than Plato suspected. But when we affirm a true proposition the manner in which this proposition refers to the truth has little to do with mimesis, and thus the critique of Platonic mimesis has little reference to the truth of propositions (which is the principal sense of the word ‘truth’ both in philosophy and in everyday life). The textual inscription concerns the dimension of signs and meaning, but doesn’t embrace what is quite other, the truth or falsity of a proposition. One might say that undecidability characterises the material basis of true utterance. but once truth is uttered the contact with the real which has occurred can no longer be recuperated by the structures examined by Derrida.

 

The question ‘true or false?’ directly applies only to assertions. In a literary fiction all the assertions are false, if one insists on the criterion of factual reality; but it is better to say that the question ‘true or false?’ is inapplicable. Similarly, the infrastructural domain to which Derrida wants to recall truth eludes the question ‘true or false?’ in virtue of the fact that no assertion can be formed there. This milieu can enframe or permit assertions but it cannot master them or triumph over them, for what transpires in an objective judgement is incommensurable with this matrix which is its condition of possibility but not its sufficient reason. Finite truths can be uttered, even if always subject to a possible redescription, and even if every utterance affects thousands of other utterances and finds itself solicited by them in an infinite textual play. Even within this ‘textual labyrinth panelled with mirrors’ (Dissemination, 195) one can formulate a true judgement, and this effect of truth as such escapes from the labyrinth, as an irreducible remainder not brought into the economy that presides there.

 

When the truth or falsity of a statement has been established, what exactly has happened? Not an encounter of intellectus and res (for how speak of such an encounter without figuring the thing known independently of the cognition by which one knows it, which is impossible; truth is not a noematic object); not the overlapping of the structure of language with the structure of facts as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus; not a moment in a dialectical progression to total comprehension as in Hegel; not an ontological unconcealing as in Heidegger; not the affirmation of a fiction useful for practical purposes or for the will-to-power. It seems that what takes place in a judgement of truth eludes all categorisation. Perhaps truth can be described only by referring to categories which are equally indefinable, such as being: ‘a true judgement is the affirmation of what really is (or is the case).’ Such discourses indicate only in a vague way what happens when one utters a truth. We run up here against a limit of language; but it remains instructive to meditate on this indefinable and ineffable character of truth as such.

 

Derrida’s efforts to subordinate truth to textuality often play on the imperfect accounts of truth we have examined above. Thus in the following passage he identifies truth with what presents itself in a revelation of its presence:

 

The truth of Choral Work (Peter Eisenman)… is not a truth: it is not presentable, representable, totalisable, it never shows itself. It gives rise to no revelation of presence, still less to an adequation … all these layers of meaning and of forms, of visibility and invisibility lie in each other, on or under each other, in front of or behind each other, but the truth of this relation is never established, never stabilised in any judgement. It always causes to be said, allegorically, something different from what is said. In a word it causes to lie. The truth of the work is this power of deception. (Psyché, 1987, 505)

 

An intricate writing (or play of architectural codes in the case of an Eisenman building), which launches the reader from one layer of meaning to another without allowing any halt in a firm judgement, frustrates the desire for truth and shows that the haste to form judgements is inadequate to the texture of reality. Such writing can stage the deceitful ideals of the true as revelation or representation and thus show up their illusory quality. It can reinscribe these images of unveiling, adequation, full presence, givenness, used in a loose rhetoric to point toward truth, and show that they are fictions, which become undecidable structures when one allows their fictive powers to be deployed. But the true as such is not entirely mastered by this machinery any more than it had been by the suggestive, indicative images this machinery undoes. It may frustrate the application of the question ‘true or false’ but it does not put it out of play forever.

 

The fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes is seen as another example of the enframing of truth by writing:

 

A ‘literature’ can thus produce, stage and put forward something like truth. It is thus more powerful than the truth of which it is capable… The psychoanalytical scene, as stripping off and deconstitution of Einkleidung, is produced by The Emperor’s New Clothes in a scene of writing which undresses, without appearing to, the master meaning, the master of meaning, the king of truth and the truth of the king. (La carte postale, 1980, 447-8)

 

But if Andersen’s story sticks in the memory is it not as a celebration of the power of truth to cut across the weavings of fashion and of signifiers without a basis? Note that the greatness of this fable is shown by the fact that everyone knows it though very few can remember having read it; it circulates orally, in everyday allusions or in the nursery. The claim that this eulogy of plain truth is even in its oral forms a sophisticated text aiming to relativise the true, or even crude images thereof, is implausible. Be that as it may, the story would in any case not be an attack on truth but merely on conceptions of truth as unveiling. The more basic point is that efforts to state the truth bluntly and directly are betrayed once they are put into words, for words bring into play illimitable intertextual contexts and call for endless commentary to clarify their meaning. The prophet stands up to cut through webs of deceitful verbiage, but his own words are immediately woven into the web. To speak an effective word one must first calculate its relation to the web in which one would intervene, and one is already in the text before one speaks.

 

 

THE BIBLICAL INSCRIPTION OF TRUTH

 

Mutatis mutandis one could apply all these remarks to the biblical text. Truth seeks to inscribe itself, and is inchoate and inarticulate until it finds verbal form. It has a passion for manifestation, and that passion seeks outlet at first in prophetic speech:

 

If I say ‘I will not mention him,

or speak any more in his name,’

there is in my heart as it were a burning fire

shut up in my bones,

and I am weary with holding it in,

and I cannot. (Jer. 20:19)

 

But the spoken prophecy constitutes a text, and soon the passion for manifesting truth become ‘the passion of inscription,’ the writer’s desire to give body to truth in the adventure of composition. As the text grows more labyrinthine, its truth shifts from the initial dogmatic clarity to the register of the undecidable. It is in the total movement of the text, with its loose ends and open questions, and in its intertextual resonances, that its truth finally resides. Select out one proposition as for ever and ever true, and you have hewn a sword for sectarian warfare. The abiding truth of such a proposition as ‘I am the way and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14:6) can be upheld only in constantly referring the proposition back to its entire literary and historical context; its sense and truth are carried by the entire Johannine revelation-event and its inscription.

 

However suggestive the prophetic word or its literary recomposition, it is always a limited and limiting precipitate of the wider, vaguer truth one sought to express in it. The moment of inscription is ‘the moment at which we must decide whether we will engrave what we hear’ (Writing and Difference, 9). The biblical words are decisions about what can be said, and they carry with them a sense of the solemnity and venturesomeness of what is there decided. The calculation behind the setting down of the biblical words is usually mediated by a long process of sifting traditions, of which only the end-point is preserved in the Bible. This palimpsest quality of the Bible is a necessary feature, for the articulation of revealed truth is too solemn a matter to be left to individual inspiration. Thus though the Bible is a rich source for mystical and prophetic exploitation, for Gnostics and Kabbalists, it is also a carefully constructed fortress, with moats and trellises to keep the mystic at bay (see G. Scholem, Zur Kabbala und ihrer Symbolik, Frankfurt, 1977, 11-48). If the complexity of inscription frustrates the dogmatist, its fixity as durable mark resists mystic dissolution.

 

Yet there have been massive rewriting projects, that recuperate the entire scriptural text and alter its fundamental orientation. The most successful such enterprises have added a new scripture to the old – Paul, Muhammad, the Mahayana Sutras. In such cases the defenders of the old scripture will denounce the new as an imposture, and the new will claim to provide the sole adequate hermeneutic of the old, understanding it better than it understands itself. From these mutual recriminations we can draw the lesson that no scripture has as firm a hold on truth as it imagines.

 

A historical spiritual movement that precipitates a set of scriptural traces cannot control their intertextual relation to other such traces, except by a sweeping fiat which tries to make history and textuality transparent and univocal in a way that they can never be. Yet religions need not be fundamentally mistaken about their own identity even if inadequate categories force them to caricature the identity of the other. Judaism, Islam, Christianity early and later Buddhism may all be regarded as fundamentally true on their own terms. Each opens a space of textuality, a way of writing human existence and history which has unique validity, though much of the small print will inevitably turn out to be time-bound. The play between these truths is as complex as the play between their textual traditions, which cannot be overleapt towards some simplistic doxographical rapprochement. Truth is captured in the errances of writing. Scripture aims at the univocal, curbing the captious intellect and the superstitious imagination at every turn, yet the space of clarity it creates is finally a very limited, fragmentary one, and what marks its limits most is the indeterminacy of its fraying edges, the incursion of opacity whenever we try to pull the text into the light and examine its understitchings. Subjected to such treatment texts fall silent before our demand for their truth, unravel into mere redactional marks for which no bedrock anchor in the thing itself can be discovered. The communities that live from old scriptures use them well in allowing them to conjure up their spaces of vision; the scholar who traces the light back to its opaque source in the warp and woof of writing will emphasise the historical finitude of this particular perspective on truth.

 

Inscription actualises ‘the excess of signifying possibilities preceding the text’ (C. Johnson, System and Writing in the Philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Cambridge UP, 1993, 29), but it is always haunted by this excess which it has failed to master and so it constantly requires to be supplemented by other inscriptions and reinscriptions. The pain and passion that mark the passage to insciption is the pain of passing from intuitions of infinity to incarnate finitude. Each book of the Bible is marked by this pain, particularly apparent in a religion which has renounced all monist fusions or endless incantations in order to state precisely what it is that God has to say to us in the historical here and now. A spirit, an élan, pervades the biblical text, never caught completely in its letter, which always threatens to kill it; but we do not have access to this spirit independently of the letter which gives it form. The economy of the inscription of biblical truth is that of all successful writing: the ‘fall to inscription’, the ‘fall from excess to finite totality’ (58-9) is temporalised, bearing with it the past to which it alludes and the future of its supplementations and reactualisations. One frees the letter from sterility by stepping back to the past and to the unimaginable infinite origin from which it speaks, and by stepping forward to the unimaginable ‘fulfilment’ of the biblical word. ‘The “trace” is a diminished effect of an originary, conditioning force in which that force is preserved [se garde] and saved from singular annihilation’ (60). The force of the Spirit traverses its traces in the letter of Scripture; the letter controls an excess of blind force but at the same time it must keep itself open to the upsurge of the Spirit.

 

The Bible is full of scenes of revelation and recognition. But the revelation inscribes and incarnates itself; the recognition is always tied to a particular context, and it is staged in a text which surpasses this context, re-enacting or actualising it in view of another context; the successive contexts of the text’s readers then actualise the recognition in as many new ways as they read in new contexts. The text is a machine for producing effects of revelation. There is no unitary revelation-event that embraces the plurality of biblical texts and contexts, but the adventure of inscribing truth has always to begin anew in a risky act of writing or reading. What we call revelation is a series of particular events of all sorts, which we know only through literary narrations. To judge the exterior multiplicity of biblical writing in the light of a unitary and interior notion of revelation, as Origen and Augustine did, instead of trusting to the texture of the biblical world, as Irenaeus, Luther and Calvin did, is a Platonic bias that represses awareness that every effect of interior illumination is captured in advance in the web of writing (by Lacan’s symbolic order, one might say, but Derrida makes this order too mobile to be dominated by any paternal authority; every instance of transcendental stability is structurally dependent on its an-archic counterpart).

 

The myth of interiority, which opposes the world of spirit to the exteriority of the body, is far from being overcome in our theology. We seek a spiritual truth hidden behind the plurality of the biblical gestures, not seeing that it’s in these gestures themselves that truth happens. ‘All is in order’ (Wittgenstein) in the language that these gestures create; espousing their rhythm one is freed from the compulsion to seek their hidden foundation.

 

The heterogeneity of the biblical narratives is marked also in the varying degrees of their theological refinement, literary quality, and historical value. All dramatise the revelation of God, but rather than spelling out its content with univocal clarity, they mime this revelation in an allusive way. The text is neither interior nor exterior to the divine word to which it witnesses, but situates itself in the ‘between.’ It can be appropriated only by a play of interpretation, which itself is neither within nor outside this event of witness. If the intention of the biblical authors was to formulate a determinate content, the contradictory plurality of their witness and the obsolescence of their presuppositions make impossible for us a direct and immediately transparent reading, and oblige us to take them as an immense literary performance miming the event of revelation. Every univocal notion of this revelation is absorbed as but one in a multitude of such mimings.

 

Acceptance of this situation would give biblical studies a new pertinence for theology. What now seems a detour and a distraction would then be seen as the normal mediation of the divine presence or absence. If we query the logocentric habit of postulating an origin, if we sound the retarded character of every image of an initial, foundational word of revelation, if we make theology face the irreducible facticity which shows through the biblical texts, renouncing all the avatars of the sensus plenior – every notion of a theological centre unifying the sacred texts – then we find that religious language points to the transcendent in a new way: ‘The infinite distance of the Other is respected only within the sands of a book within which wandering and mirages are always possible’ (Writing and Difference, 69).

 

If all particular truths as well as truth in general – divine revelation – are inscribed in and exceeded by the textual play which stages them, then it becomes very difficult to say in what sense the Bible communicates truth. One might see the language of Scripture more as a strategic writing aimed to free us from illusions and fixations than the direct transmission of a concrete message; as an ensemble of language games to be practised, not in the confidence of uttering truth, but in an effort to maintain the demystificatory force of this mature and subtle language without falling back into the platitudes of a less refined one. The concern with truth and falsehood remains as vital as ever but its application to the biblical witness comes down to clear ‘yes or no’ only with great difficulty, for in the realm of religious truth any such statements demand commentary and commentary becomes an endless, unmasterable text.

 

 

THE ART OF JUDGEMENT AND THE ABYSS OF DIFFÉRANCE

 

In a world in which meaning is never perfectly stable, to judge is more an art than a science. Judgement becomes in part a strategic choice, carried out by a more or less arbitrary cut or halt whereby the mobility of the signifiers is provisionally suspended. I stop the drift of the words, and of a sentence as a whole, to apply the words to a given context. This suspension of the drift is a creative intervention, almost a fiction, and not a simple transparent presentation of the things themselves. Does judgement then become merely an agile and inventive participation in the play of the undecidable statements, whereby one shakes the chains ofex-signifiers in a liberating fashion? Or is the work of formulating and criticising propositions in view of truth not so much abolished as integrated into this play, losing nothing of its necessity though caught in a process that exceeds it and that it cannot master?

 

Faced with undecidable structures, it is useless to invoke the hope of an eschatological clarification, for even the last judgement is put under erasure in a revision of the notion of apocalyse: apocalypse is no longer the bringing to light of naked truth, but the revelaticn of the undecidability which dominates all judgement:

 

an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation, envois (for the ‘come’ is in itself plural), addresses without message and without destination, without decidable sender or addressee, without last judgement, without any other eschatology than the tone of the ‘Come,’ its very difference, an apocalypse beyond good and evil. (in H. Coward and T. Foshay, ed., Derrida and Negative Theology, SUNY Press, 1992. 66; translation modified)

 

The apocalyptic, in this sense, would be ‘a transcendental condition of all discourse’ (57). The absolute authority of the true, recognised implicitly in each of our statements, is undone when we try to state it as such. The law of every discourse turns out to be structurally untenable; the truth of truth turns out to be non-true.

 

What is the meaning of the following remarks?:

 

In no case is it a question of a discourse against truth or against science. (This is impossible and absurd, as is every heated accusation on this subject.) And when one analyzes systematically the value of truth as homoiôsis or adequatio, as the certitude of the cogito (Descartes, Hussed), or as a certitude opposed to truth in the horizon of absolute knowledge (Phenomenology of the Mind), or finally as alêtheia, unveiling or presence (the Heideggerean repetition), it is not in order to return naively to a relativist or sceptical empiricism… I repeat, then, leaving all their disseminating powers to the proposition and the form of the verb: we must have [il faut] truth. For those who mystify (themselves) to have it trippingly on the tongue. Such is the law. (Positions, Chicago, 1981, 105)

 

Is this a thoroughgoing fictionalism? But that is a Nietzschean thesis which Derrida explicitly criticises, opposing to it the subtler implications of Nietzsche’s thought. Thus John Caputo’s interpretation may be contested:

 

It is différance which makes possible the endless linkings of signifiers in an irreducible diversity of combinatorial and associative chains and interweavings… Now, on one level, Derrida thinks that it is a matter of living with this drift, coping with it, so that what Heidegger would call our ‘average everydayness’ may continue its undisturbed routine. Truth, after all, is necessary – that is to say, we need our fictions. (That is why Derrida writes that he is not a sceptic, in that he recognizes the Nietzschean and pragmatic need for truth as a necessary fiction. ‘We must have truth,’ ‘Il faut la vérité.’) We cannot function without taming the wildness of the play, without imposing normality, without a certain measure of stilling the flux. (Radical Hermeneutics, Indiana UP, 1987, 144-5)

 

In arresting the polysemic play of ‘il faut la vérité’ to make of it a pragmatist thesis, Caputo holds that truth is nothing more than a necessary fiction. This thesis cannot be stated without self-contradiction, unless one puts this ‘fiction’ at the service of some materialist or mystical super-truth (life, will-to-power), or enlarges the meaning of the word ‘fiction’ to the point of abolishing any effective contrast with its opposite, truth. The fictionalist and pragmatist dogmas belong to an anti-metaphysical way of thinking which remains the captive of the categories it combats, and which effects no (step back’ toward the ground of truth as Derrida promises to investigate it. Caputo eludes the double bind of this ‘il faut,’ which says both that ‘truth is necessary’ and that ‘truth is lacking.’ ‘“Il faut” does not only mean it is necessary, but, in French, etymologically, “it lacks” or “is wanting”’ (Derrida, in Coward and Foshay, 315). Truth makes its exigency felt by constantly withdrawing from our grasp.

 

The first movement of deconstruction is to avoid judgement and to err perpetually on the level of meaning: ‘the whole discourse on différance, undecidability, etc. can be seen as a dispositive of reserve towards judgement under all its forms (predicative, prescriptive, always decisive).’ But judgement imposes itself as the very law of every discourse. To speak at all is to find oneself, like the character in Kafka, ‘before the law’: ‘It would be easy to show that, under this apparent reserve, a judgement has installed itself or returned, commanding the scene from which it seems to be absent with a denegatory tyranny all the more impossible to overcome’(‘Préjugés,’ 95-6). Here Derrida sets up a thoroughly abstract law of judgement which seems to refuse to be cashed in any definitive way in particular judgements (just as he espouses an eschatology without a concrete eschaton, a messianism without a Messiah, a truth which is non-truth). Against him, I would maintain that individual true judgements, however provisional their language, attain a core of truth which in itself is not caught up in the movement of universal contextualisation and relativisation, though it is impossible to isolate this core in a pure form, independent of its relative inscription.

 

With Lyotard, Derrida states that:

 

Judgement is neither founding nor founded. It is perhaps secondary but for that very reason it cannot be a question of getting rid of it… It is because it rests on nothing, and does not present itself, especially not with its philosophical titles, its criteria and its reason, that is, its identity card, that judgement is paradoxically ineluctable. (97)

 

He adds a few twists to this conception of judgement. For Lyotard, ‘there is a law but one doesn’t know what this law is saying. There is a kind of law of laws, a meta-law which is “Be just”’ (107). For Derrida, the purity of law is always contaminated by its necessary reference to a narrative, not only in the Bible but even in Kant. The law is always thus caught in the net of différance: ‘the discourse of law doesn’t say “no” but “not yet”, indefinitely’ (122); ‘the law which isn’t there but that there is. The judgement, itself, doesn’t happen’ (123).

 

This paradoxical structure of ethical law is similar to that of the literary text: ‘The text keeps to itself, like the law. It speaks only of itself, but then of its non-identity with itself. It does not reach itself or allow itself to be reached. It is the law, makes the law and leaves the reader before the law’ (128). The same structure lies at the heart of the referentiality of our most ordinary statements: ‘the play of enframing and the paradoxical logic of limits which introduces a sort of perturbation in the “normal” system of reference, while revealing an essential structure of referentiality.’ This structure of referentiality does not itself refer, ‘any more than the eventhood of an event is itself an event’ (131). Once again he is not questioning the reality of reference, but he is examining its transcendental condition. Our judgements obey a law, the ‘il faut’ of truth, but this law eludes every demand for face to face vision. This instance is a kind of empty transcendence presiding over all language, but on which language never has a direct hold, like the apocalyptic ‘Come!’ which relativises and disqualifies every concrete apocalypse. One may ask if the experience of judgement as an affirmation of being might not allow another approach to the enigma of referentiality. If truth makes itself known as what escapes our grasp, it is an equally significant phenomenon that being is objectively given in each true judgement. Without this grasp of being, the enigma of the irreducible otherness of truth would have little interest.

 

Derrida’s theory of truth is an elaboration of Nietzsche’s remark that truth ‘has not let herself be won – and today every kind of dogmatism stands sad and discouraged.’ Theologians have pursued truth with what Nietzsche would see as a ‘gruesome earnestness,’ a ‘clumsy importunity,’ ‘inept and improper means for winning a wench’ (Spurs, Chicago, 1978, 55). Can we bring the theological style of stating the true into accord with the oblique, elusive and plural mode of being of ‘truth as woman’? Such truth is the complete unfolding of undecidability which:

 

engulfs and distorts all vestige of essentiality, of identity, of property. And the philosophical discourse, blinded, founders on these shoals and is hurled down these depthless depths to its ruin. There is no such thing as the truth of woman, but it is because of that abyssal divergence of the truth, because that untruth is ‘truth.’ Woman is but one name for that untruth of truth. (51)

 

This realm of the undecidable and of différance is not simply a linguistic or logical condition of everyday ‘true propositions’; différance is the very grain of the real; to deconstructionist ‘atheologians’ it even seems to bear the face of the divine in its irreducible alterity, neither transcendent nor immanent, neither absent nor present. This reduction of meaning and truth to the infrastructural conditions of their enunciation, and this reduction of divine transcendence to différance, are short-circuits.

 

Caputo’s reduction of the necessity of truth to a pragmatic fictionalism is another short-circuit. Anti-dogmatism merely inverts the over-direct procedures of dogmatism. It corresponds to what Derrida calls ‘anti-castration’:

 

‘Woman’… no more believes in castration’s exact opposite, anti-castration, than she does in castration itself. Much too clever for that… she knows that such a reversal would… only amount to the same thing and force her just as surely as ever into the same old apparatus. (61)

 

In veiled polemic against Lacan on the one hand and Deleuze on the other, Derrida declares that the metaphysical notions of truth-presence function as fetishes aiming to supplement and hide the lack of phallus of truth as woman; but that if one rebels against truth, seen as castrating, one falls into the phallocentrism which inspires this denial. Reduced to a fiction truth is still something under our control. But ‘castration does not take place’ (61); the ‘il faut’ of truth, as the ‘law’ of judgement’ cannot be fixed in a stable, fetishised way. We are caught in its play without being able to master it, either by raising it to dogmatic certitude or unmasking it as illusion.

 

This Nietzschean vertigo replaces the Heideggerian vision of the essence of truth, the Ereignis, event of being. Derrida opens the Ereignis onto the enigmas of truth as woman, not to dissolve the truths of science, ethics, psychoanalysis or ontology, but to show the abyssal ground in which they are rooted and which they can never recuperate or reduce. The Ereignis, interpreted in this way, subordinates presence to a play of the simulacrum and of seduction, for the Ereignis reveals itself to be ‘origin-heterogeneous’ (Of Spirit, Chicago, 1989, 107); instead of recollecting in itself the essence of being, it dissolves every notion of proper origin or foundation.

 

One might equally attempt to conceive the truth of God, pneumatic truth, as origin-heterogeneous, as the non-place of woman. The perpetual variability of religious discourse would then be the mark of its function of espousing this originary khôra, which like Buddhist emptiness is the kenosis of every fixed identity, a milieu in which nothing exists except in relation – but in which, however, an ultimate reality announces itself. Derrida evokes this space in an abstract way, as the place of différance, the spacing of archi-writing. This ultimate foyer of Derrida’s thought invites comparison with the Spirit of Hegel, the Being of Heidegger, the Infinite of Lévinas. Perhaps what Derrida is pointing to from afar, and in an oblique way, is the dimension that Buddhism apprehends as emptiness. At least we may attempt to give a new force and coherence to his thought by interpreting it in light of this spiritual tradition.

 

From Joseph Stephen O’Leary, Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, Edinburgh University Press, 1996. Also available as an e-book: http://isbndb.com/d/book/religious_pluralism_and_christian_truth.html

Derrida's Aporias

Aporias. By Jacques Derrida. Trans. Thomas Dutoit. Stanford University Press, 1993.

1. Like most of Derrida's recent works this text (from Le Passage des frontières, Editions Galilée, 1994) consciously exploits its status as an oral performance, engaging the audience from the start: 'in advance, I thank you for your patience in what you are going to endure' (ix). Derrida enacts the aporias of time, finitude and ending, through references to the temporal duration of his speech: 'in the time that we have here' (47); 'The end is approaching. Precipitation and prematuration make the law, even when the thing lasts too long' (72) - a parody of the precipitation and prematuration of Sein und Zeit, which is the target of Derrida's admiring criticism. Artfully keeping his hearers in suspense, he promises from early on to deconstruct Heidegger's efforts to define or delimit the phenomenon of death: 'But we are not there yet; this will come only near the end' (28). As the speech - delivered in Cerisy-la-Salle in mid-July 1992 - lasted six hours, his disciples may have been grateful for such encouragements.

He tells us how he composed the speech - first picking a title out of the air, the word 'aporias', which has surfaced more and more insistently in his recent meditations. He refers to various other texts in which he has tried to endure an aporetic situation, that is, one in which thought can find no passage through, in which it cannot even pose a straightforward problem, so that it is menaced with paralysis (12-17). The notion of death is perhaps the one that most forces the mind into aporetic straits - witness Hamlet's soliloquy. Here it inspires one of Derrida's most intense exercises in reflection. 'Death' or 'my death' is supreme among concepts that elude definition and whose frontiers cannot be satisfactorily drawn, the kind of concepts or non-concepts on which deconstruction thrives:

“if there is one word that remains absolutely unassignable or unassigning with respect to its concept and to its thingness [sa chose - its referent], it is the word 'death'.  Less than for any other noun, save 'God' - and for good reason, since their association here is probably not fortuitous - is it possible to attribute to the noun 'death', and above all to the expression 'my death', a concept or a reality that would constitute the object of an indisputably determining experience.” (22)

A theologian might object that there can be a religious clarification of the sense of death, as of the sense of 'God', and that a reflection that finds in them only an occasion for aporia has merely a transitional or preliminary status. The challenge to the theologian is to show, in a way that does full justice to Derridian scruples, how religion dissolves the aporia or at least allows a way of dealing with it that robs it of its paralysing sting.

Heidegger explores an ontological pre-understanding of death which precedes all the ontic discourses on death in biology, metaphysics or theology:

“To put it quickly - in passing, and in an anticipatory way - the logic of this Heideggerian gesture interests me here. It does so in its exemplarity. However, I only want to assert the force of its necessity and go with it as far as possible, apparently against anthropological confusions and presumptions, so as to try to bring to light several aporias that are internal to the Heideggerian discourse.” (27)

He shows the necessity of Heidegger's analysis in a critique of anthropologists and historians who write about death without prior philosophical clarifications (24-7, 46-50). But empirical anthropology makes a comeback as he goes on to criticize Heidegger's concern with methodology, definition, order, and hierarchy, as a traditional philosophical strategy unsuited to the phenomena Sein und Zeit sought to bring into view.

Death troubles all tidy borders and undermines the basic decisions of phenomenology:

“According to Heidegger these [ontological] regions are legitimately separated by pure, rigorous, and indivisible borders. An order is thus structured by uncrossable edges. Such edges can be crossed, and they are in fact crossed all the time, but they should not be… If the property of this death proper to Dasein was compromised in its rigorous limits, then the entire apparatus of these edges would become problematic, and along with it the very project of an analysis of Dasein, as well as everything that, with its professed methodology, the analysis legitimately conditions.” (29-30)

The existential analytic of death is based on many questionable presuppositions: 'the distinction between perishing [verenden] and dying has been established, as far as Heidegger is concerned, as he will never call it into question again, not even in order to complicate it' (31). As a sensitive reader of Kafka, Celan, Beckett and Blanchot, it is just such complication which Derrida argues for. Heidegger's clean differentiation of human from animal death, or of authentic from inauthentic being-toward-death, serves to conjure away the troubling, irremediable obscurity of mortality. For Derrida, the greatness of Sein und Zeit resides in the way it exceeds its own explicit intention, through undergoing the aporias of death in the very process of trying to repress them.

Derrida speaks of death as 'the absolute arrivant' - what arrives, one who arrives, with an echo of revenant, ghost - and 'such an arrivant affects the very experience of the threshold, whose possibility he thus brings to light before one even knows whether there has been an invitation, a call, a nomination, or a promise' (33), thus undermining 'all the distinctive signs of a prior identity, beginning with the very border that delineated a legitimate home and assured lineage' (34). It seems that the this-worldly space cleared in Heidegger's analytic of Dasein, its limit marked by death, is just such an assured legitimate homeland, whose borders are put in question when the aporetic nature of death is faced up to more fully. The claim that only humans, with their gift of language, are capable of experiencing 'death as such', is a comforting essentialism, a linguistic illusion, for there is no 'as such' to be found (36-7, 76). Hence the cultural and historical diversity of human structurations of death, which cannot be levelled out.

Heidegger's own discourse on death is culture-bound, and must forgo its claims to determine the essence of death in a universal sense. His effort to found all talk of death in a prior ontological clarification 'belongs to the great ontologico-juridico-transcendental tradition, and I believe it to be undeniable, impossible to dismantle, and invulnerable (at least this is the hypothesis I am following here) - except perhaps in this particular case of death' (45). Death becomes the last refuge of the deconstructor. Derrida speaks of 'life-death', which coincidentally is the equivalent of the Buddhist jāti-maraṇa (birth-death), designating our samsaric existence. 'Life-death' is the keystone in the entire set of aporetic structures he has analysed over the years: presence-absence, speech-writing, gift-contract, meaning-dissemination, truth-undecidability, singularity and iterability of the historical date or the proper name - in each case the second member is the condition of possibility and of impossibility of the first, both its life and its death.

2. When Derrida comes to fulfil his promise to shows aporias in Heidegger's text, he gets off to a disappointing start, falling into a simple misreading. Heidegger writes:

“The question about what is after death can first be posed with methodical security only when death has been grasped in its full ontological essence. Whether such a question is at all a possible theoretical question we need not here decide.” (Sein und Zeit,  Niemeyer, 1986, 248)

The question is about life after death; what remains undecided is whether it can be posed as a theoretical question (as opposed to an existential one); the second sentence here is a quasi-Kantian obiter dictum, incidental to the course of the main argument. According to Derrida's reading of this sentence, Heidegger, having asserted that the essence of death is to be clarified from this side (diesseitig), not from the beyond (Jenseits), expresses a hesitation on this basic methodological principle:

“Heidegger allows something undecided to remain suspended as to whether the point of departure is 'on this side' and not on that side of a possible border. For perhaps in the form of avowal, he then declares: 'Whether such a question is a possible theoretical question at all must remain undecided here [bleibe hier unentschieden]'. He does not use the indicative: this remains undecided [bleibt unentschieden]. Instead, by another decision whose performative incision must remain still undisputable and undisputed… he uses the subjunctive… and 'here'. The theoretical question concerning the here, the 'this side' as point of departure must remain here, on this side, undecided, that is to say, decided without any theoretical question, before any theoretical question, without proof.” (53-4)

The question referred to by Heidegger is the question 'what is after death?'; there is nothing in the text that puts in question the basic principle that the prior clarification of the essence of death must proceed 'from this side'. Derrida's remarks on the banal idiom 'bleibe hier unentschieden' are quite misplaced. Heidegger is not making an undisputable edict; he is merely waiving discussion of the quasi-Kantian question about a theoretical formulation of inquiries about life after death.

Derrida's critique of Heidegger's hierarchical delimitations has plenty of validity in its own right, independently of his efforts to put Heidegger's text in contradiction with itself. His argument against Heidegger's methodological purism is strongest when it appeals to the phenomena - to the complexity of what we actually say and think about death. The attempt to show that Heidegger's own text undermines his methodological decisions, in line with the basic deconstructionist thesis that thought is always contaminated by its textual inscription, or that the concept is 'cooked' when it is put in writing (Glas), runs aground in this case on the vigilance and solidity of Heidegger's argumentation, to which it fails to do justice.

Rich and suggestive is Derrida's own alternative topology of death, which foregrounds aspects that Heidegger's method relegates to secondariness:

“A mortal can only start from here, from his mortality. His possible belief in immortality, his irresistible interest in the beyond, in gods or spirits, what makes survival structure every instant in a kind of irreducible torsion, the torsion of a retrospective anticipation that introduces the untimely moment [le contretemps] and the posthumous in the most alive of the present living thing [du présent vivant], the rearview mirror of a waiting-for-death [s'attendre-à-la-mort] at every moment, and the future anterior that precedes even the present, which it seems only to modify, all this stems first from his mortality, Heidegger would say. No matter how serious all this remains, it would thus only be secondary. The very secondariness testifies to the primordiality of being-toward-death.” (55)

This primordiality of the this-worldly experience of finitude goes hand in hand with the basic bias of phenomenology, 'the pre-archic originality of the proper, the authentic, and the eigentlich' (56). Against this metaphysics of presence Derrida urges the claims of 'mourning and ghosting [revenance], spectrality or living-on, surviving, as non-derivable categories', which trouble the frontiers of the ego:

“lf Jemeinigkeit, that of Dasein of that of the ego (in the common sense, the psychoanalytic sense, or Levinas's sense) is constituted in its ipseity in terms of an originary mourning, then this self-relation welcomes or supposes the other within its being-itself as different from itself.” (61)

The other is the condition of possibility and of impossibility of the ego, but conversely our relation to the other, without or within, is always a 'bereaved apprehension' (61). 'With death, Dasein awaits itself (s'attend lui-même) in its ownmost potentiality-for-being' (64, translating Sein und Zeit, 250: 'Mit dem Tod steht das Dasein selbst in seinem eigensten Seinkönnen bevor'). The untranslatable word, 's'attendre', reveals nuances unsuspected in Heidegger's analysis. In death 'Dasein is revealed to itself in its essence, and this in the mode of being-ahead-of-itself' (Sein und Zeit, 251). But this self-awaiting at the limit-situation of death is always bound up with expecting something that will happen as the completely other than oneself. Moreover, s'attendre can mean waiting for each other:

“the waiting for each other is related to death, to the borders of death, where we wait for each other knowing a priori, and absolutely undeniably, that, life always being too short, the one is waiting for the other there, for the one and the other never arrive there together… Both the one and the other never arrive at this rendezvous, and the one who waits for the other there, at this border, is not he who arrives there first or she who gets there first.” (65-6)

Such 'anachronism of the waiting for each other in this contretemps of mourning' complicates the temporality of being-toward-death, and also solicits the associated notion of truth - Dasein's certitude of death as its ownmost possibility, which it testifies to as an incomparable truth (68).

The idea that death is 'the possibility of being-able-no-longer-to-be-there' or 'the possibility of the pure and simple impossibility of Dasein' (Sein und Zeit, 250) sets off a chain of explosions in the existential analytic, ruining its basic premises, claims Derrida (68). For Heidegger death is

“an impossibility that one can await or expect, an impossibility the limits of which one can expect or at whose limits one can wait, these limits of the as such being, as we have seen, the limits of truth, but also of the possibility of truth. Truth and nontruth would be inseparable… Truth is the truth of non-truth and vice versa”. (73)

Derrida suggests that this kind of thinking is on the brink of self-dissolution: 'What difference is there between the possibility of appearing as such of the possibility of an impossibility and the impossibility of appearing as such of the same possibility?' (75). The impossibility in question is the impossibility of the 'as such', the impossibility of a securely defined identity for Dasein or for its death, and this impossibility is incapable of appearing 'as such'. The phenomenological focusing of death in anticipatory resolve must yield to a more complex aporetic waiting which can no longer map the limits of truth. Derrida accepts here Heidegger's equation of truth with a phenomenological authenticity, and his reduction of the truth of rational judgement to secondary, derivative status; but if we contest this derivation, Derrida's critique of Heideggerian truth fails to touch truth in the latter sense (as I argue in Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth, ch. 4).

Humans cannot anticipate death in its purity 'as such'; the only death we know is the death of the other, or of ourselves as other. Death is 'the most improper possibility and the most ex-propriating, the most inauthenticating one. From the most originary inside of its possibility, the proper of Dasein becomes from then on contaminated, parasited, and divided by the most improper' (77). Even this aporetic situation can never simply be endured as such: 'The ultimate aporia is the impossibility of the aporia as such. The reservoir of this statement seems to me incalculable' (78).

Sein und Zeit is still haunted by the structures of biblical anthropology (80).These structures, Derrida claims, remain inescapable in our Western thinking of death. But he has problematized them so radically that we seem to be left in some grey limbo of perpetual mourning. Or am I missing something? If one agrees with Derrida that death is insolubly aporetic and is never identified in its essence, then perhaps an answering obliqueness in religious discourses about death may have a certain justification. The historicity, plurality and relativity of these discourses does not prevent them, each in its own way, from making sense of death and pointing beyond it. None is a total clarification of the riddle, but each is a valuable existential witness. The plurality of these constructions does not render their claims to truth delusory. Truth emerges only in context-bound, culture-bound perspectives, and the true statements made within such perspectives are subject to subsequent redescription. Derrida's aporias risk inducing a paralysis of our ability to say anything at all; the challenge is to integrate fully the aporetic structures he has noted into a discourse that goes beyond them, in order to venture positive statements of truth, however fragmentary and analogical.

3. There are a number of inaccuracies in Derrida's text. The translator corrects Derrida's differe to differre (5), but fails to correct si exigua contentio de modo finium (4), for si exigua contentio est de modo finium; Libellus de optima genera oratorum (5), for Libellus de optimo genere oratorum: and de bene moriendi (60) for moriendo.

He also corrects Derrida's 'Vincent' to 'Thomas' (28). Louis-Vincent Thomas, author of Anthropologie de la mort, has come in for some captious criticism for his manner of citing Heidegger on the previous page; now Derrida has forgotten his name!

Heidegger (Sein und Zeit, 248) says that the analysis of Death 'interprets the phenomenon [of death] only in regard to how as a possibility of being of every Dasein it is lodged in the former [in dieses hereinsteht], that is, in Dasein. Derrida mistranslates: 'the possibility of being of every Dasein is engaged, invested, and inscribed in the phenomenon of death' (53).

There is no such German word as unentscheidet (56).

Derrida has Heidegger talk about having 'the heart (Mut) to approach or confront (aufkommen) this anxiety before death' (6l). What Heidegger actually wrote is: 'Das Man lässt den Mut zur Angst vor dem Tode nicht aufkommen' (Sein und Zeit, 254), that is, 'The They does not allow the courage for anxiety before death to arise'. Aufkommen means 'arise', and is an intransitive verb. Derrida's 'approach or confront' is etymological guesswork based on a grammatical oversight.

On Sein und Zeit, 265, according to Derrida, 'Heidegger wonders how the simple impossibility of existence becomes possible, when the moment when this impossibility becomes possible remains both absolutely certain and absolutely indeterminate' (72). The passage referred to has a quite different sense: Heidegger asks how the certainty and the indeterminacy of death are disclosed existentially; his answer is that the certainty of death is registered only in existential anticipation, and its indeterminacy is registered in the way this anticipation opens itself to a constant menace, in the mood (Stimmung) of anxiety.

From: International Journal of Philosophical Studies 4 (1996)

Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth: Preface

The present work, like Questioning Back (1985), is an attempt to clarify the conditions under which theological thinking can be fruitfully pursued today. It is to be followed by a third volume which will focus specifically on the role of reason in faith and theology (2006: this will appear in French shortly). This critical trilogy, a quasi-Kantian'prolegomenon to any future theology', differs from its tremendous prototype in that theology, as an empirical, historical science, has no place for the exercise of the pure theoretical or practical reason which provides the infrastructural plumbing of philosophy. It is not a science which constitutes basic principles, but one which reflects on concrete traditions. Hence our three critiques belong rather to the mixed realm explored in the Critique of Judgement. They deal with human ratiocinations about realities that exceed the conceptual perspectives brought to bear on them, and with the attempt at a critical sifting and demystified retrieval of the religious languages to which the long history of these attempts has given birth.

The three critical approaches respond to three fundamental demands affecting theology as a whole, none of which can be flouted today without a lapse from responsibility and rationality. These imperatives of theological judgement may be stated as follows:

1. IT MUST BE ‘PHENOMENOLOGICAL’. Theology must constantly question
back to the primary level of faith, the original concrete contours of the revelation-event, the 'matter itself' that is apprehended by a contemplative thinking. This requires an 'overcoming of metaphysics': the theological tradition is deconstructed by querying the tensions between its metaphysical elucidation of the biblical events and the quite different cast of these events as apprehended in faith. Heidegger found a lack of fit between the space projected by metaphysical concept-formation and the space within which the phenomena give themselves to be apprehended by meditative thinking. Similarly, there is a complex topology of the world of faith that can never be fitted into the horizons of metaphysical theology, which rather act as a screen against it. A creative retrieval of the tradition today works toward a clearing of the fundamental horizons of faith, and subordinates the quest for metaphysical intelligibility to this prior openness.

Of course, just as there is not an original revelation-event that can be recovered in a pure form, so there is no monolithic metaphysics that can be overcome once for all. Nonetheless, an ongoing labour of critical clarification, in a constant stepping back from rationalisations to the vision of faith that they obstruct, has to become an inbuilt self-critical moment in theology. One might daate the emergence of this imperative in its modern form to Luther.

2. IT MUST BE PLURALISTIC. Christian thought has to be fully open to the plurality of religious and secular voices that situate and relativise it as a contingent cultural history which can be responsibly continued only in attentive response to these other voices. This imperative has begun to make itself strongly felt only in the recent past, and it has given rise to the most interesting religious thinking of today. Dialogue, as the present work wants to show, saves Christianity from turning in on itselt in an incestuous rehash of its traditions, lets in some fresh air, and restores a human, natural complexion to religious language.

My hypothesis is that pluralism is an irreducible aspect of religious life and thought that can never be ironed out in the final triumph of a single viewpoint. The reasons for this lie in the grain of religious language itself, its reliance on ideas and images that are always culture-bound. The vitality of religion, like that of art, depends intrinsically on the maintenance of a variety of divergent styles.

At a time when science has made mighty strides toward a grand unified theory of the physical universe, this celebration of pluralism might seem regressive. But the religious equivalent of scientific unity would be a general theory of religious pluralism, which justifies it and shows its inherent necessity. Accepting-pluralism as a basic fact of religious life, rather than a surd or a regrettable contingency, we can pose the question: if religion is intrinsically pluralistic, then what does this tell us about religion? I seek the answer here in a picture of religions as products of finite, historical, situation-bound struggles, each of which projects images and a rhetoric of the transcendent and develops these in a constant ferment of self-deconstruction.

The possibility that these open-ended, incomplete, dialogical quests can actually be vehicles of the mystery with which they grapple is the crucial nexus by which they stand or fall. In this field subjective projection and objective revelation are intertwined even more enigmatically than observer and observed in quantum physics. That is another reason why we cannot step outside the pluralistic milieu of the religious enterprise in order to reduce it to a more 'objective' pursuit. Theological reflection has, then, to remain an art of attunement and discernment. Of course it must cultivate logical rigour in the texture of its discourse, but it cannot hope to constitute a system of context-independent principles, that would then be the logical foundation of the merely empirical flow of culture-bound religious ideas and practices. Even when theology has seemed to attain such objectivity, as in Aquinas, a critical historical retrieval may reveal that the apparent monolith is in reality a path of pluralistic open-ended questioning.

3. IT MUST BE RATIONAL: This is an old, and very prosaic dictate; but we miss the scope of what it currently prescribes when we take the word 'rational' in one of its older senses rather than as denoting contemporary conditions of rationality. All three critical approaches have to do with reason in a wide sense, notably in its aspects of openness to the phenomena and critical questioning of traditions. But here the focus is on reason in the most mundane sense of argument and proof. The concern is not with further enlarging the horizons of religious meaning, but rather with showing that such meaning is in harmony with criteria of rational intelligibility. Having clarified the particular phenomenological modalities of Christian truth and the pluralistic contexts of its enunciation, we can now take stock anew of the rational justification of the entire discourse. Despite the long tradition of apologetics and the rich panoply of rational argumentation in scholastic theologians, this stocktaking remains necessary for those who have sought to defend and exemplify the reasonableness of Christianity have usually been remiss in fulfilling the phenomenological and pluralistic imperatives of theological judgement, so that their justification of belief does not quite match the conditions of contemporary rationality.

All three approaches are concerned with truth. The first is concerned with the 'truth of revelation' in a phenomenological sense, remotely analogous to Heidegger's 'truth of being', and it sees this as the essential foundation of all subsequent Christian truth-claims. The second attempts to show that within the always limited and contingent horizons of a pluralistic religious universe it is possible for a discourse to refer objectively to an absolute truth or truths, though this truth can never be sighted or formulated independently of the interplay between the divergent discourses. The third will focus more sharply on the ultimate rational justification for maintaining religious claims, concerned less now with the modalities whereby religious truth is apprehended than with the rational justification and upshot of our adherence to this truth. Heidegger and Derrida, our guides in the first and second critiques, are no longer of direct service here; instead we turn to those most intently concerned with rationality as such, Kant and his heirs down to Frege and Quine.

It might be imagined that the phenomenological and pluralistic emphases put old-fashioned rational argument out of play. Some have worried that the approach in Questioning Back lay open to a 'fideism' that would be dismissive of Christian rational achievements; others feared that the present work, in its French incarnation (La vérité chrétienne à l'âge du pluralisme religieux, 1994) could not escape a 'relativism' that would be unable to do justice to the objective ontological bearing of Christian doctrinal claims. Friendly readers of sceptical disposition have objected that both works remain comfortably ensconced within the religious language-game, offering no justification for adopting it in the first place. In the third volume, even at the risk of 'rationalism', a danger against which the first two provide ample preservation, I shall attempt to allay these misgivings by offering a positive account of the rationality of belief and sketching a clear definition of what reason can (and therefore must) do in the realm of religious thinking.

If the real is the rational, and the rational the real, then religion is unreal to the degree that it is irrational. It may have a powerful phenomenological basis in encounter with the living God, and it may unfold radiantly in a pluralistic, dialogical horizon, but if the suspicion of its being mere projection is not explicitly faced and dislodged, then we have not left the doomed enclosure mapped by Freud in The Future of an Illusion. Religion draws its strength ultimately from the phenomenological level, not from reason, but reason has an indispensable role not only in defending authentic revelation against the suspicion of unreality, but also in curbing and channelling the religious energy that gives rise to lethal delusions when it shrugs off rational accountability.

This entire critical enterprise is being conducted at a happy distance from matters of immediate ecclesiastical concern. Crises of faith and morality, authority and structure, liturgy and social practice can induce a panic and precipitation which is inimical to thought. Fundamental theology can only be pursued in a quiet place, where one may take the measure of such crisis and analyse its underlying cause: the failure to present Christian claims in a manner that is thoroughly intelligible and convincing in a contemporary horizon. Then one must work out patiently and in the most general style the first methodological steps towards a demystified account of doctiine. Every generation in which Christianity has successfully confronted a non-Christian world has had its labourers at this task. Today the labourers are few; we shall be meeting some of them in the following pages. Moreover, the necessity of the task, and its 'pastoral relevance’, is not as keenly appreciated as it was in healthier periods of Christian history. Instead there is an over-reliance on the rhetoric of Scripture, or on encyclicals and catechisms, whereby one loudly tells people what to believe while dismissing as impertinent the question why.

Serene open dialogue, respect for the phenomena of biblical and traditional faith, in their variety and irreducibility, alert rational argument, such are the secrets of wholesome, truthful theological judgement. They are not secrets at all, but plainest common sense. However, the unmastered irrationalities of the past still hold us in their sinister clasp, so that the struggle for freedom – the freedom to think, the freedom to explore the rich texture of biblical revelation and of contemporary experience, and the freedom to affirm the Christian faith in dialogue with all faiths – remains as taxing and as challenging as it has ever been.

                                                   Joseph Stephen O'Leary