SOPHIA DOI 10.1007/s11841-017-0580-2
Concretion and the Concrete: a Response to My Critics Kevin Hart 1
# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract This essay consists of responses to several papers on my book *Kingdoms of God.* Keywords Phenomenology . Theology . Poetry I would like my first words to be of thanks to the five commentators for their searching and generous remarks on my book Kingdoms of God (2014). I will try to respond to the questions and concerns that have been raised, and will do so mainly by stepping back a little from the book and outlining my general position. This might make my responses more readily intelligible than would be the case if I simply engaged in dialectics over individual points. I am a systematic theologian, although perhaps an unusual one in several respects. First, the methodological element of my theology is largely given in and through phenomenology, understood more broadly than is common and, in some ways, best seen as going in a quite different direction than has been practiced in the last century. The methodology, if that really is the right word, and the systematicity are related, since phenomenology attempts to disclose the εἶδος of Christianity, which to me means nothing more (and nothing less) than how the faith—its doctrines and practices—grows together and becomes ever more concrete (in Hegel’s sense of the word). 1 Much of what theology seeks to do is resistant to the understanding, but I recognize a responsibility to give an account of the faith as a whole in as clear a way as I can. That account must be systematic for reasons of clarity and rigor; it need not aspire to complete concatenation or to be encyclopedic. Second, the impetus for my approach is drawn directly from the New Testament rather than from received Catholic theology. Husserl enjoined us to return to the ‘things 1
I. A. Ill’in, The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity, trans. Philip T. Grier, 2 vols (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010–11).
* Kevin Hart
[email protected]
1
Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA
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themselves’ by which he meant that philosophers should attend directly to phenomena and not approach them through inherited philosophical problems that all too often obscure them. 2 Theologians, too, should return to the ‘things themselves,’ beginning with the revelation of God in and through Jesus of Nazareth, and not remain content with a pre-formatting of the faith. Not that one should ignore tradition, including the history of theology; it is necessary knowledge but not sufficient for doing theology well. Besides, there is always the danger of not looking outside one’s own tradition and remaining insular in one’s perspective. Can a Catholic be a good theologian without reading in Orthodoxy and Protestantism? I do not think so. To return to the ‘things themselves’ is also a call to do phenomenology and to resist being deflected, as Husserl so often was, to theory of phenomenology. We are all drawn to theorize about our phenomenological insights, and some degree of it is important, but nothing is as important in Christian thought as trying to understand what people concretely understand by saying that Jesus is the Christ. As a phenomenologist, I am primarily concerned with ἀποκάλυψις, uncovering, and not with ‘natural theology’ or ‘revealed theology,’ two categories that impinge decisively in thirteenth-century Latin theology and introduce all sorts of issues to do with the relations between ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology,’ on the one hand, and ideas of revelation that require distinctions to be made between the extrinsic and intrinsic, on the other hand. Modernism becomes a conceptual possibility as soon as the vanishing points of scholasticism are put in place, and for good or ill I do not find myself thinking within the terms of scholasticism (which eschews experience) or modernism (which treats it in a pre-critical manner). Third, and sharing a somewhat misleading similarity with the debate over the priority of the extrinsic and the intrinsic, I do not figure God as falling in Aristotle’s category of same and other. Rather, the category of contrastive relation belongs to the order of Creation, and God is other than anything that fits into the duality of ‘same’ and ‘other.’3 Two things immediately follow from this conception of God. The first is that we should not imagine a supernatural world that contrasts with the natural world; indeed, on my understanding, the ‘supernatural’ is not a world in the first place. And the second is that God is absolutely singular, not relatively singular: a point to which I will return. Fourth, I take the proper starting point for Christian theology to be what Jesus says about the Kingdom of God, understood in a twofold manner: the divine rule, and the community of those who acknowledge that rule, explicitly or implicitly. I do not ground theology in metaphysical or epistemological terms, as one finds in theologians as different as Aquinas and Calvin. Nor, however, do I assign it the single and sole ground of Scripture; it is the emerging self-understandings, testimonies, and liturgical practices of the early Church that give us our first formal indications of what it is to be Christian, and these are legible in the proto-Catholic stratum of the New Testament. Fifth, I take as fundamental in the unfolding of my chosen starting point something more akin to ‘religion and literature’ than ‘first philosophy.’ Jesus gives us tropes and narratives about how to understand what our relations with God can and should be. Of 2
See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), I, p. 252. 3 On the distinction between same and other with respect to the Christian God, see Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995).
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particular importance here, I think, is that he gives us what I call the double structure of revelation: the Father, for Jesus, is at once like a human parent and utterly unlike one. Jesus’s theology of the Father is at once kataphatic and apophatic. It is also concrete in the phenomenological sense of the word. God is given to us not as an abstraction but as thinkable and lovable (and merciful, good, just, and so on), as someone with whom we are already in relation by virtue of being alive and who we can choose to recognize as our Father and so make something of the relationship here and now. Yet we are in relation with the Father in very unusual ways simply because he is not ‘other’ than we are in any contrastive sense. Let me draw out some of these points and, in doing so, remain in the spirit of the questions raised in the five papers. * ‘Theology,’ as I conceive it, is no more than Christian φιλοσοφία. The early Church disliked the word θεολογία because it was associated with pagan mythology, and the word was rehabilitated only with the rise of university culture in the early middle ages when we see an abiding institutional distinction being formed between ‘philosophy’ and ‘theology.’ In early modernity, philosophers of course remained deeply interested in God, yet it was only with Hegel that we find a new field called ‘philosophy of religion’: the category of religion displaces God as the object, and of course this is a consequence of exploration and empire, of passing beyond the world of the Abrahamic faiths. (Hegel was exemplary, however, in putting God and religion in dialectical relation.) Our contemporary discourse, ‘philosophy of religion,’ belongs largely to philosophy in its latest iterations, even when taught in Departments of Theology; and although I read in it, learn from it, and sometimes conribute to it, I also, in some ways, keep a respectful distance from it. Analytical philosophy of religion, especially, is governed by philosophical assumptions, itineraries, and ambitions; it deals with philosophical questions that are framed with respect to familiar philosophical topics and methodologies and mostly remains aloof from actual religious texts, beliefs, and rituals, especially in their linguistic, historical, and cultural densities. The situation has been far better in France, and still is in some ways. I remain close to the work of my friends Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Yves Lacoste, among others. But European philosophy of religion is creative these days chiefly in France, and maybe not for much longer there. Analytic philosophers have more proselytizing zeal than many evangelical churches. Even as I say these things, though, I know full well that I am not saying the whole truth. I know, for one thing, that as a Catholic there are very few days of the year when I do not have a volume of Plato or Aristotle on my desk. And I know too how much I distrust how some Christians philosophize on the basis of pre-philosophical religious commitments. I cannot think of any time as a Christian when I have been ‘pre-philosophical’ in that sense. I might not like certain strains of philosophy, or think that theology should be grounded in metaphysics or bound to a particular epistemology, but so far as I can recall I have never found the slightest appeal in pre-critical responses to Scripture, as one finds in some Reformed philosophers. Not too long ago, I argued against one such philosopher about his understanding of Scripture. So far as I could see, he felt quite at ease in maintaining reasonably sophisticated philosophical positions along with a pre-critical grasp of Scripture. I recall in particular that he thought that when Jesus is baptised in the River Jordan,
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God the Holy Spirit descended in the shape of a dove, and the Father spoke to the people there about in intelligible Hebrew. It strikes me as irresponsible not to take the trouble to find out that Caananite and Phoenician religions used the symbol of the dove, and that this symbol was adopted by the Jews and early Christians long before the Church determined a plausible pneumatology. And I found myself wondering what Hebrew accent God the Father would have had, that of Ephraim or that of Gilead or whether he spoke from the very center of the Jordan so that his Hebrew was accent free. To use philosophy to bolster pious naiveté seems to me a misuse of the discipline and it can only be an embarassement to Christianity and the academy alike. The aim of Christian thinking, it seems to me, is to find those situations in which abstractions—God, church, love, sin, and so on—variously disclose their meanings in a concrete manner. So while philosophy can be of use to a theologian in clarifying concepts, tightening arguments, and even in finding speculative ideas about God, apologetics is not something that greatly interests me. I am more concerned with seeing how the serried exfoliation of the λόγος of ὁ θεός can bring one into a relation of φιλία with God. Writing theology, as well as writing poems, is always a ‘spiritual exercise.’ The relation of friendship with God to which I hope my theology leads is at once simple and elusive. On my understanding, the idea ‘Christianity’ lights up in the convergence of the objective and subjective poles of the expression ‘love of God’: we understand when hearing the Gospel that God loves us, and we love one another, as well as God, in response to that love. Yet there is a relation of asymmetry between divine love and human love, as I will try to clarify in a moment. Phenomenology, as I practice it, is first and foremost concerned with the concrete: it does not reject the ‘what’ or the ‘why’ but instead attends to the ‘how.’ Husserl holds a privileged place in this world since he distinguished τὰ ϕαινóμενα from τὰ ὄντα. Something is given to me in experience, and if I refine that experience through mental ἄσκησις I can unfold the full intentional content of my relation with it. There are two sets of caveats that need to be registered, however. First, Husserl formalizes phenomenology in a Neo-Kantian philosophical language in the very attempt to distance his insights from NeoKantianism. Phenomenology need not be restricted to post-Cartesian thought, or indeed even philosophy. Attention to ἀποκάλυψις is biblical; attention to τὰ ϕαινóμενα occurs in ancient thought, as well as in the visual arts and literature; and all of these things require some sort of nudging to make them appear. In his last maturity, Husserl thinks of this nudging as twofold, ἐποχή and reduction, and he theorizes the ways in which we break our habitual experiencing of the world in order to look clearly at how the experience takes place: in anticipating, remembering, perceiving, imagining, thinking, hypothesizing, and so on. 4 Certainly Husserl saw that artists convert their gazes, at least in part, although he was not particularly interested in converting the gaze when viewing
4
See Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §41.
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art and reading poems or scripture. 5 Unlike Heidegger, he offers no phenomenological readings of these things; for him, language compromises the purity of the gaze that the philosopher should seek to maintain. 6 Second, Husserl prized epistemic concerns over all others, thereby preventing him from distinguishing phenomenology from philosophy. Affect and volition are secondary to knowledge, for him, and the former is to be dealt with largely by a less than convincing account of ὕλη. More generally, phenomenality is restricted to the space of knowledge claims, allowing for phenomena to be overshadowed by theory about them, and yielding a vision of phenomenology controlled entirely by inner life. That coruscating vision of transcendental subjectivity has of course been the subject of withering and productive criticism within modern European philosophy since Husserl. It is one of the things we find uppermost in the writings of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida, and Marion. The main line of criticism has been the replacing of pure inner life with a structure held to be properly basic: the ecstasies of Dasein, the ‘body subject,’ the rapport of metaphysical desire, la différance, and l’adonné. By and large, one finds two possibilities in phenomenology: either transcendental subjectivity (Husserl and, in his own way, Henry) or a replacement of that subjectivity by a formal or material structure. Reduction either leads one back to a subject or leads back to a structure that has replaced transcendental consciousness. As I read the Gospel, I see something else. Jesus pricks the people he meets so that God becomes concrete for them rather than remaining a religious abstraction. He has no interest in producing theophanies, and certainly not to create experiences that will prompt faith—he performs miracles out of compassion—and he insists that God appears only in terms of relation, with individuals and with Israel. Of course, one cannot prompt God to pass from a state of hyper-transcendence to a state of immanence, and the relation on which Jesus insists is not one that can be initiated: God is Father, and in order to exist one must already be in relation with one’s Father, even if he has long been unknown. We are led back, by parable and saying, by particular acts and the shape of an entire life, from ‘world,’ variously understood by Jesus’s contemporaries as imperium mundi, as an ordered whole, as family and work, to ‘Kingdom,’ which has a claim upon us from before the beginning of the world. The ‘world’ is not canceled but modalized, and we are invited to shift our gaze so that we place God first in life. We can glance around
5 See Husserl, BHusserl an von Hofmannsthal (12. 1. 1907),^ Briefwechsel, 10 vols, VII: Wissenschaftlerkorrespondenz, ed. Elisabeth Schuhmann and Karl Schuhmann (Boston, MA: Kluwer, 1994), p. 135. 6
See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), §§14–33. There is dispute about what Heidegger retains of his early phenomenology in his encounter with Hölderlin and other German poets. To my mind, his habit remains even though his vocabulary does not. See, in particular, his Hölderlin’s Hymns: BGermania^ and BThe Rhine,^ trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014). Husserl talks about the philosopher’s will to remain within the converted gaze in his BPhenomenology and Anthropology,^ Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931), trans. and ed., Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), p. 492.
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at the world and learn a great deal by doing so, but we cannot develop a relationship with God by glancing at him. 7 For many Christians, going to church on Sunday or quickly saying their prayers at night is perhaps no more than glancing at God. Only a loving, contemplative gaze will suffice; it cannot be sustained, of course, which is why we are always being converted. This God is concrete for us because he is our Father as well as our King; we live under his rule in specific situations with specific individuals who we are called to recognize as our brothers and sisters. Needless to say, the experience of world in play here is Roman as well as Jewish; it is the world of an occupied people, victims of empire; and the idea of Kingdom is also informed by distinct things: the Enthronement Psalms and presumably the Targum on Isaiah. 8 What seems to have been important to Jesus is the shift from world to Kingdom, learning to see life differently, and not whether the Kingdom is purely interior or purely exterior; it does not fit into mundane categories. Now phenomenology from Husserl to Marion enables one to begin to see Jesus in this way, yet it also obscures the vision that it makes possible, as I have tried to show in my account of basilaic reduction. I do not think that this account of things removes Jesus from his historical and cultural situation. Jesus uncovers the Kingdom without any philosophical vocabulary: if he ever used the word οὐσία it was only in its pre-philosophical meaning (‘property’). What we call ‘reduction’ is a consequence of what he and those who heard him called mashal. They knew of mashalim from the Tanakh and from other rabbis, although Jesus presented them in his own theological idiom, one sometimes marked by a structure of double revelation. In addition, Jesus indicates the passage from world to Kingdom for particular reasons to do with the revival of Judaism and the varied responses to Roman occupation. * Reduction must be understood, then, in terms of direction, character, and strength. What I call ‘basilaic reduction’ leads to an anterior claim that is made upon one, and it is not characterized by purity but, if anything, by messiness and danger. I am led back to see two things at once and to see that they are inseparable: divine rule of life, and that this life requires the love of people who can be hard to love. Reduction is also marked by strength: not a mental ἄσκησις that enables me to constitute a phenomenon, but rather a force of being turned around, perhaps many times in life, so that I am constituted by the one I am invited to call ‘Father.’ I am not constituted ‘Christian,’ except in intent, but as someone who, in death, might be deemed to have been Christian or at least on his way to being Christian. The faith that is given to us is not a weaker form of knowledge but a trust that God has constituted me as present to him. I do not characteristically regard him, let alone feel him, as present to me. To think of God as present to me seems to me to be what happens when thinking within what I call ‘the supernatural attitude,’ the state of construing the divine realm as a doublet of the natural world. Much idolatry takes place within that attitude. I have noted that phenomenology since Husserl has been a relentless quest to shrink the human subject, to see it more and more as a series of effects produced by a 7
On the importance of the glance, see Edward S. Casey, The World at a Glance (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). 8 See Bruce D. Chilton, ed., The Isaiah Targum, vol. 11 of The Aramaic Bible (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1987), pp. 49, 62, 77, 102.
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structure. This is an assault on the metaphysical subject, yet by itself that does not free the Christian. All sorts of other subjects remain firmly in place: the legal subject, the medical subject, and the institutional subject being three of the more prominent. We build up our selves, if we are fortunate, in a variety of ways under the gazes of law, medicine, and education, and the truly blessed are those of us who are relatively free and healthy, who learn to read, especially in more than one language, and can engage with the great traditions of the West and the East. A danger of this prosperity is that one can make oneself into the center of a world that is governed by an inflated subjectivity, and once again phenomenology can be a corrective. The objective reality of the world about us, Husserl says, is made evident to us in the subjectivity of other people; it resists us even more than objects do. 9 Such alien subjectivity is precisely what I encounter when reading literature, especially in languages other than English, and, increasingly, in engaging with other religions. I well remember when about 14 years old reading Rilke’s sonnet about the archaic torso of Apollo and reaching the final line, Du mußt dein Leben ändern [‘You must change your life’]. I thought then, and think now, that great art has that ability if we allow it to unfold in its own ways. Perhaps only when one has learned to read well can one be truly open to the strangeness of the Bible and its message. It should be apparent, then, that I do not reach my theology of the Kingdom by way of Albrecht Ritschl or the Social Gospel movement. Rather, that part of my theology is developed by way of Christology. Because this theology aspires to be systematic, my account of the Kingdom reaches back to Creation and looks forward to the End of all Things, and in doing so must eventually deal with the ideas of ‘Fall’ and Judgment. For me, Creation and End have Christological dimensions. Yet Christology is rooted in the specifics of Jesus’s preaching and life and the responses of the early Church to those things. When I read Karl Barth in my twenties, I was impressed by his insistence on following a ‘Christological thread’ through the fabric of theology, by his insistence that theology should not be grounded in philosophy, and by his starting point being the triune self-revelation of God in and through Christ. At the same time, Barth’s theology struck me as overly protological, as though everything had already been worked out in eternity before Creation. It was a way in which theology could retreat from dialectical inspection and biblical criticism alike, and perhaps one could identify a weakness in much twentieth-century theology by seeing different forms of this retreat. Bultmanan’s personal encounter with the Christ of the κῆρυγμα would be one example, and even though he recoiled against Barth and Bultmann, Pannenberg’s sequestering of the reality of God to the end times would be another. When I read the Gospels, I found a Jesus who is Jewish, who makes God intelligible, and who leaves a trace of the absolute in his words and deeds. It was much later when I read Hans Urs von Balthasar—a theologian with an immense knowledge of Western culture—but it was phenomenology that helped me ‘to see the form’ and not his accounts of theological and lay styles. His choices of authors are not mine, and his style of reading them is not mine, either: I do not recognize his Hopkins, for example. 9
See Husserl, Erste Philosophie (1923/24), 2 vols, ed. Rudolf Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1959), II: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion, p. 495. One might add that the ego of an animal would perhaps be an even better index of the transcendence of the world, since it is less familiar to us than the ego of another human being.
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That von Balthasar was right in the Theo-Drama about the dangers of Bultmannian exegesis, in separating Jesus from the Christ, I have no doubt, but it seems to me that Christology must first be built up from a theology of the Kingdom, even if a Johannine high Christology can be seen to join up with it later. One important element in the construction of that Christology is an engagement with parable and, as I have said, with the metaphors and narratives that run through them. One of my first published essays was entitled ‘Ricœur’s Distinctions,’ by which I meant the ways in which he draws distinctions and of course the distinctiveness and excellence of his writings; it was sent to be evaluated by Ricœur who was, as everyone knows, remarkably generous, especially because I was somewhat critical of his views.10 Where Ricœur prized metaphor, I wanted to draw attention to a wider range of figures and tropes at work in Western writing. Ricœur sought to save phenomenology from idealism by way of grafting hermeneutics onto it. My sense, though, was and is that phenomenology was never idealist in the first place—Husserl’s problem was his overprizing of knowledge claims, not a commitment to simple substances (Leibniz) or the self-positing ego (Fichte)—and that phenomenology provides its own hermeneutics, one that turns on empty and inadequate intuitions as much as full and fulfilling intuitions. 11 Needless to say, Derrida extended the whole issue much further, with a brilliance that could be almost blinding, yet his arguments took as their critical objects full presence and self-presence and one cannot pass from there, as he often tried to do, to ordinary acts of presencing which require a horizon and therefore elements of absence. His late project of ‘religion without religion’ seemed in the main to return us to the soft liberalism of Ritschl that had already been roundly criticized, not least of all by Barth, and I had no use for it. Whoever does not know the history of theology is likely to build a heavenly city of dead ends. Ricœur is cut from another cloth: he knew a great deal of the history of theology as well as the history of philosophy. He is surely right that metaphors allow new meanings to be generated, and that this occurs eminently in the parables of Jesus: to reduce metaphor to allegory (usually in the service of ethics or doctrine) is to miss what is significant in the parables. Ricœur distinguishes persistently between manifestation and proclamation, although to my mind proclamation is either self-manifestation or a pointing to manifestation. We part company, for a while at least, only when Ricœur restricts revelation to poetic language.12 To my mind, the parables retain a trace of the absolutely singular God, and are therefore qualitatively distinct from poems. God is absolutely singular; a poet is relatively singular. Not that poetry does not have an authority of its own, but the authority of Scripture is of another order, even if that order is itself often divided and perplexed, as is revealed for example in debates about the ‘canon within the canon.’ To turn the issue around and look at it from behind, as it were, is to ask a pastoral question. Can God come to someone in a poem by George Herbert or G. M. Hopkins, for example? Yes, indeed: God is not limited in the ways in which he moves in the world, and if the Church restricted the number of sacraments in the twelfth century, it has wisely never done the same with sacramentals. I think that See Kevin Hart, BRicœur’s Distinctions,^ Scripsi, 5: 4 (1989): 103–25. See Hart, BPhenomenology as Hermeneutics,^ Relational Hermeneutics: Essays in Comparative Philosophy, ed. Paul Fairfield (Springer), forthcoming. 12 See Paul Ricœur, BToward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,^ Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. and intro. Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1980), esp. p. 102. 10 11
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many poems or paintings or pieces of music can serve as though they are sacramentals. I am cautious and say ‘as though’ because art has various ends inscribed in it, and the situation is different with the sacramentals.13 I am especially thankful to Keith Putt for conjoining my poetry and my theology. To me, the two things are continuous, although for many readers they are disjunctive. The quarrel between poetry and theology is not as ancient as the quarrel between poetry and philosophy, but the two disputes have common features, including contrary appeals to authority. Who has the greater authority, the sacred Scriptures or secular poems? That question often fuels both sides of the argument, though it seems badly posed to me. Much of the Hebrew Bible is poetry of the first order, and only by knowing how to read it as poetry can one learn its wisdom. Poetry cannot be a scala a Deo, as Montale says it is in ‘Siria,’ though God can surely climb down any staircase he wishes.14 T. S. Eliot observed in ‘The Social Function of Poetry’ (1943): The trouble with the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man, which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless.15 I think Eliot has his own Four Quartets (1943) in mind here, a long poem that certainly shows how an educated high Church Anglican can feel about God and human beings in a time of conflict. Yet we cannot expect ourselves to feel about God and human beings exactly as Eliot did, or as earlier generations have done; our relationship with God will vary as the correlation between the fides qua and the fides quæ shifts over time. The Church is not a thing; it is an extremely slow movement, a gradual process of spiritual understanding and self-understanding; its truths remain constant but its approaches to those truths vary, and what they mean to people at any given moment is often far from steady. Perhaps faith in the triune life of God is tepid at best in our parishes, despite some lively Trinitarian theology in universities, because we do not have poetry to inform our faith in the Trinity. Each generation needs its own poetry to give utterance to ‘religious feeling.’ There are poets who write theology in their poems, but few who write poems and also write theology. (St John of the Cross is unique: he writes theology about his own poems!) I doubt that any theologian would get far without some awareness of the poetry of his or her time. * I have long been haunted by Origen’s word αὐτοβασιλεία, the thought that Jesus is himself the Kingdom he proclaims. But I have taken the thought in my own way. For me, the Passion is to be understood not only as the torture and execution of Jesus but also as the attempt to extinguish the βασιλεία; and the Resurrection is not only the raising of Jesus from the dead but also the raising of the preaching of the βασιλεία. 13
On this point, see Hart, Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 14 Eugenio Montale, Tutte le poesie, ed. Giogio Zampa (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 2005), p. 240. 15 T. S. Eliot, BThe Social Function of Poetry,^ On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957), p. 25.
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The resurrection of Jesus is also the vindication by the Father that the preaching of the Kingdom is not just one view among others, not just a ‘philosophy,’ but is the way to live out a proper relationship with the Father. Christ has a ‘form,’ as von Balthasar says, and I try to describe one of its profiles by adopting and adapting two words from Paul, κένωσις and ἐπέκτασις. In doing so, I am far less interested in developing Paul’s theology of the Christ or his account of Christian striving than in seeing what it is we imitate in Christ when we perform imitatio Christi. There is much that we cannot imitate in Jesus, especially when we see him through the lens of Christology, but I think that we can seek to empty ourselves of ‘world,’ understood as a projection of power from a center of selfhood that one occupies or wishes to occupy, and stretch into the Kingdom. I cannot think of ἐπέκτασις as constant progress—Christian life contradicts that at every moment—but I recognize it as constant striving. What needs to be neutralized in life is not ‘the world’ as such but the relentless allure with which it is bestowed by ambition, power, and control. The best word for this that I know is one that Eugen Fink uses in another context, Weltbefangenheit: captivation in, by and to the world.16 The Kingdom is no fairyland outside society; it is a way of living in the world. As Kierkegaard says, in a remarkable sentence, ‘In the spiritual sense, the road is how it is walked.’17 One aspect of that ‘how’ for the Christian is forgiveness, which I argue is prior to justice in the Christian way of thinking about things. Yet forgiveness is not a simple thing, even if it sometimes seems to be characterized by an absence of reflection in the moment it occurs in a narrative. (Jankélévitch is a prime exhibit here.18) In the coda to Kingdoms of God, I tried to isolate and examine a phenomenon that I think has been overlooked in moral theology, namely ‘guilty forgiveness,’ that is, an act of forgiveness that brackets the others who have been victims of the initial malign act and that unsettles the one who does the bracketing. The example I chose is one that I heard some years ago, and something is a good example if it sufficiently illuminates the εἶδος of the phenomenon, which in this case is not forgiveness as such but guilty forgiveness. What happens if Christian forgiveness takes place and introduces a sense of disloyalty to others who have been damaged in the process? Academic spats are a dime a dozen; the case I considered struck me as significant in that an innocent spouse and children suffered by the act of a someone who, like all too many in the academy, has been morally damaged by a sense of entitlement produced through institutional pedigree. Another question whether forgiveness is always humanly possible richly deserves attention as well. I did not include any of my work on evil in Kingdoms of God—it will come out when complete as part of my Systematic Theology—but I can say this much now. Evil is a consequence of human freedom, but freedom is not a properly basic good as metaphysics teaches us it is. God must grant his creatures freedom in order to realize the highest possible good, which is given in love. One cannot be coerced to love in any of the modes of love available to us, including romantic love, parental love, love of 16
See Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, with textual notations by Edmund Husserl, trans. and intro. Ronald Bruzina (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995). The word occurs several times in this remarkable work. 17 See Søren Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, ed., trans. and notes Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings XV (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 292. 18 See Vladimir Jankélévitch, Forgiveness, trans. Andrew Kelley (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Concretion and the Concrete
country, love of neighbor, and love of God. Human love is always in danger of losing its being—of becoming lust, sentiment, duty, or mere piety. We have love; God is love; we are subject to the categories (of being for Aristotle, of phenomena for Kant) and God is not: there is a gulf between humans and God that only divine love can initially overcome. Our love with respect to God is always belated, always inadequate, and always in the mode of response. Yet as Jean-Louis Chrétien observes, our task is to think of those negatives in an affirmative manner.19 Christian love begins to come into focus, I think, when we provisionally distinguish it from liking, something we Americans find hard to do. Finite creatures that we are, we cannot be friends with everyone, and we cannot even like everyone, but we can try to love those we meet in ways that are doubtless limited in intent, fallible in execution, and prone to truncation throughout. This is not always simply an exercise of human freedom; it requires Grace. In the face of blank evil, that Grace is profoundly needed if there is to be forgiveness. Without it, praying for one’s enemies is impossible. To pray for someone who is not a friend, who seeks to harm one in one way or another, is first of all to overhear oneself affirming an alien subjectivity, to rub up against something that resists one’s own subjectivity. No one is ever a ‘little god’; we are only brothers and sisters who stand before a Father. Also needed by victims, their loved ones and indeed the whole of society, is what Gillian Rose nicely called ‘a finite act of political justice.’20 Do we even have sufficient finite acts of justice in the United States? I think not as I look around my community, which is about as safe and harmonious as anywhere in the country. Going to work early each day on the bus, I sit with poor white people, poor Latinos and Latinas, and poor African-Americans, and the marks of huge social failure, diminished hopes, immense worries, and violence are legible in their faces and their bodies. I sometimes find myself silently repeating to myself a line from Wallace Stevens: BA fantastic effort has failed.^21 But I check myself, knowing it is always too early in history to speak of failure in a categorical way. America always has the ability to reimagine itself, and so does Christianity; and I know that these great abstractions must be rendered concrete if they are to have any moral and intellectual weight. The thought— or, rather, the hope—traverses everything I write. One evening, years ago, a Chilean man phoned me up at night to tell me that when he was being tortured in prison he recited some of my poems in Spanish translation, and the act kept him sane and gave him hope. We simply don’t know what God will do with what we do; it goes beyond the world our consciousness projects, and beyond the limits of our lives. Sometimes our words precede us into the Kingdom. I have already started to pass in my comments from Kingdoms of God to my Systematic Theology. It feels as though I have left the safety of a ship and have started to walk the plank, and (as in the cartoons) I can see many sharks circling beneath me. The passage from Kingdoms of God to the Systematic Theology is inevitable, I suppose, since the first volume of that series is entitled Phenomenology of the Christ, which is a theme of the book under discussion. The series is a daunting project to have 19 See Jean-Louis Chrétien, BRetrospection,^ in The Unforgettable and the Unhoped For, trans. Jeffrey Bloechl (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2002), p. 126. 20 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 25. 21 See Wallace Stevens, BThe Plain Sense of Things,^ Collected Poetry and Prose, ed. Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson (New York, NY: The Library of America, 1997), p. 428.
K. Hart
undertaken, as I realize each morning. At what age does one know enough to begin? At what age is it too late to begin? The questions grip me, as in a pair of pincers, but I know that the more productive questions are those put to me by others, since they will help to make the work better than it otherwise would be. So thank you again.