Excerpt of Godsends by Notre Dame Press

GODSENDS From Default Atheism to the Surprise of Revelation

WILLIAM DESMOND

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

By Way of Introduction: Superiority beyond Interiority

CHAPTER 1

Default Atheism

CHAPTER 2

Thresholds between Finitude and Infinitude: The Self-Sublation and Abjection of Transcendence

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

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Solitudes: Thresholds between Selving and the Sacred

101

Idiot Wisdom and the Intimate Universal: Immanence and Transcendence in an Intercultural Perspective

131

Mysticism and the Intimate Universal: On the Arnhem Mystical Sermons and Sri Aurobindo

157

Dream Monologues of Autonomy: Variations on the Prodigal Son

183

Exceeding Virtue: On Aquinas and the Beatitudes

215

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x Co n t e nt s

Chapter 8.

Godsends: On the Surprise of Revelation

245

Notes

273

Bibliography

299

Index

307

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By Way of Introduction Superiority beyond Interiority

ON THE COMPANIONING OF PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

Our perplexing times are replete with a living equivocity with regard to our being religious. All over the globe diverse forms of being religious thrive, often exorbitantly. Nothing seems so difficult to count out, or erase, as our being religious. Yet among the advanced intellectuals, nothing is so noticeable as what I call a “default atheism.” Among such intellectuals it seems almost as if an epoch of default atheism is taking shape. This need not be advocated in terms of any militant atheism, such as we know from communism in the last century. There are many varieties of atheism. Often default atheism enacts the death warrant issued to God by the superior indifference of intellectuals. Exasperation with the exuberant thriving of religion can still come to form in campaigns of vilification, if not cultural extermination. More often, however, we detect a secret euthanasia that would prefer not to raise the matter at all. Exorbitant proliferation twinned with a desire for death: How comprehend this equivocal, if not contradictory, twinning? There is a word that has repeatedly struck me as resurrecting the matter from the threat of dead silence: godsend. My wonder: Is there something in this word that brings us back to the space of the sacred, and in a still-living sense? Godsend is a word still often used in ordinary conversation, but rarely is it singled out for attention. It is a striking word, perhaps even more so, since the world one might associate with such a word is said to have faded, if not vanished. In the epoch after the 1

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so-called death of God there are no godsends, there are to be no more godsends. Perhaps this is to speak too charitably: among the advanced intellectuals, what the word portends is to be erased. Ecrasez l’infame! Yet, mirabile dictu, the word continues to fascinate, and perhaps to be revealing about something to which we do well to attend. Godsend may indeed tell us something surprising: something surprising about the communication of the sacred, sometimes incarnated in seemingly ordinary ways of talking. For a godsend need not mean being hit with the thunderbolt of Zeus. The godsend can come quietly and incognito. It can come in whispers, not shouts, in caresses, not blows. The world where the word godsend is said to be evacuated of meaning can be captured by the words default atheism, I venture. The explorations of this book move between the world of default atheism and the godsend, between, in a broad sense, closure to any manifestation of the divine and the surprise of unexpected revelation. The relation of philosophy and theology is at issue here. It is worth remembering that being religious and being theological are not identical, in that one might be religious without overt emergence of theological thought. Yet this does not preclude an intimate relation in their distinction. Perhaps one can imagine someone claiming to be theological without being religious, but this rather sounds like being a musicologist who cannot hear the sound of music. Being religious marks the more elemental relation, having to do, I believe, with the constitutive porosity between the human and the divine. In being theological one comes to be mindful concerning that relation and the significance of the porosity. Religious porosity can become theological mindfulness in companionship with philosophical thought. Equally, certain theological and philosophical thoughts can close off that porosity and seem to close down that relation. I say “seem” since if the porosity is ontologically constitutive of what we are, the closure is in debt to the porosity it denies. Equally, without the religious porosity, theological reflection can become sounding brass or tinkling cymbal. The confluence of being religious and being theological will be at play in this work so that one cannot easily set them apart in impermeable silos. I want first to offer some thoughts about religion/theology and philosophy as thresholding each other. On such a threshold they can turn away from each other, they can touch each other. There are a myriad of

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By Way of Introduction 3

ways of turning toward and turning away. Default atheism embodies a kind of turning away that we must explore. What then of the touching and being touched on the threshold? One need only note that, while given their difference by this threshold, philosophy and theology can also be held together by it. I will offer some Augustinian thoughts concerning the possible companionship of the philosophical and the religious/theological, but before turning to this, I offer a brief sketch of a plurality of possible relations between philosophy and religion/theology on the threshold. Each of these precipitates questions that might call for more extended reflection, but none of them quite captures what I mean by the companioning relation. To begin, one recalls what is said to be the beginning: I refer to the widely accepted view that philosophical logos (λογος) emerged from religious muthos (μύθος) and rationally superseded it. By contrast, the companion does not emerge from its other and then supersede it, as laying out in conceptual articulateness what the first companion cannot quite say truly or truly enough. This is not a helpful way to describe companioning. In truth, I would say there was much more porosity between logos and muthos with the first emergence of philosophy itself, more companioning of the sacred in the practices of philosophy itself. To me this is evident in the practices of thinking in the so-called pre- Socratic thinkers, as well as Plato. Further, one might recall classical figurations of reason and revelation, where philosophical reason is painted as natural and scriptural revelation as supernatural. The image is that of the theological queen and the philosophical ancilla: the sovereign ruler and the handmaid. Subordination is not the word for the best companioning, though again in this instance there was permeability across the threshold between philosophy and theology. The permeability coming from this companioning was not always to the fore as a theme asking mindfulness. One might give words to this permeability in terms of the secret porosity of thinking and praying. Etienne Gilson delicately offers a spousal metaphor of Scholasticism as “the honeymoon of theology.” The honeymoon is well behind us in modernity.1 Modern philosophy rebelled against any ancillary role and sought to erect a guard post on the threshold, on the immanent side of which natural reason might perfect its own self-determination. I would suggest that in the companioning

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relation, one participant, no matter from which side, does not queen it over the ancillary contribution of the other. The relation of the sovereign and the servant is, to a degree, reversed in the modern definition of philosophy as essentially self-determining. No ancilla is self-determining in the full sense that is here claimed to be the rational desideratum. The servant who becomes the autonomous master overcomes the “over- againstness” of the two by now claiming a kind of mastery over the erstwhile master or mistress. The servant becomes master of the sovereign queen and stakes its claim to be beyond all ancillary functions. Once again, I cannot see this as a good account of companioning. In companioning the one is not autonomous, the other heteronomous: there is a freedom of being between and being together, beyond the dyadic opposition of autonomy and heteronomy. Companions communicate together on the threshold of that freedom. There are further modern variations. I think of a kind of rationalistic scholasticism where philosophy, first presented as propedeutic to theology, later becomes entrenched in an apartheid of the two, especially when philosophy feels it has the measure of all its others. Claiming to be the measure of its others can itself turn into a claim over and against these others. Philosophical reason, no longer companioning, turns in some instances into the debunker of the religious. I am thinking of Enlightenment reason. This itself can mutate into the critique of the Kantian project and its descendant variations. Kant singles out religion as being called to the bar of critique and as incurring just suspicion if it does not appear for rational judgment. Such a quasi-forensic judgmentalism is not the demeanor of a genuine companion. Critical reason as judge is a kind of king on the bench and religion a subordinate to its sovereignty, despite the pious phrases that claim to let religion and theology be on their own terms. The philosophical piety is rhetoric to dissimulate the status of the ultimate judge. The critical judge might write in a serpentine way of the conflict of the faculties, but the straight message is hard to hide: the professor of philosophy is king. Once again, this is not the companioning relation. Further still, one thinks of Hegel as claiming to complete the Kantian revolution in the speculative togetherness of the religious representation (Vorstellung) and the philosophical concept (Begriff ): the professor of philosophy is now emperor in the kingdom of thought. What of

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the companioning? Where is it? The philosopher who sublates religion is more tempted by supersessionism than companionship. Perhaps even more: as the world-spirit on horseback is not a companioning partner, neither is the world-spirit in the philosophical study. By contrast, with Kierkegaard we find the slave revolt in religion against the imperial sovereignty of speculative reason. The sly dialectical slave insinuates the pretentious absurdity of absolute reason by contrast with the redeeming absurdity of faith. On looking for companioning here, we find a solitary who wants to be companioned, a companion who wants to transcend companionship. On the threshold between philosophy and religion one might anticipate some mutual attunement; but the tones of accepting conversation of companions are muted, and we worry about a parting of the ways. Do we find the companioning with post-Enlightenment philosophers like Nietzsche: atheist thought enacting a new agon—an aristocratic revolt against the slave revolt, the great poet of legislating thought over against the multitudes of saved mediocrities? Worthy of note here: the sacred companions the poetic. An interesting question would be the relation of agon and companioning. There are modes of agon and companioning empowered by a secret love rather than antagonism. I do note in earlier thinkers in the philosophical tradition the persisting traces of a proximity, indeed a kind of familial intimacy, between the philosophical and the religious. This intimacy was more a living option in the ethos of these thinkers. This is not quite true in our own time. If you like, earlier philosophy and religion rubbed against each other. Rubbing can incarnate a gesture of intimacy, being perhaps even a caressing; rubbing against can also mean being irritated with each other. I would say the intimacy could serve as a source for creativity in philosophy, and perhaps also in theology. To avoid rubbing against each other irritably, we might set the two apart into different silos, but then each suffers. Philosophy loses the urgency of ultimacy; religion decays into sentimental effusion, or expires in moralistic platitude, or mutates into the fury of a revolutionary dream of secular salvation. What of the Heideggerian option? What option? Which Heidegger? The first Heidegger of Catholic roots and convictions? The second Heidegger of Lutheran Kairos (καιρός)? The third Heidegger of theology as an ontic science like chemistry? The fourth Heidegger of a detheologized

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Kierkegaardianism on the verge of becoming Nietzschean? The fifth Heidegger, under the sway of initial Nietzschean intoxications, and sometimes speaking through his Hölderlin, of National Socialist pagan piety or impiety? The sixth Heidegger of a post-Christian pagan mystique of the earth, the sky, the radiant elements? The seventh Heidegger of the critique of metaphysics as ontotheology? Perhaps there is some companioning in the later Heidegger of the consecrated earth, but qua companioning it is hard to see how it emerges from the earlier Heideggers, and how brought into conversation with these other Heideggers; and perhaps this is so because some of the earlier Heideggers are marked by adversarial equivocity about the relation of philosophy and religion/theology. The shadow of dyadic thinking haunts the relation on the threshold and the infiltration of a surprising univocalizing of important matters. For instance: the essentializing of the entire tradition of metaphysics as ontotheology; the profession of need of an enemy, the need even to create an enemy, when one lacks one, in order to think. I would say companioning is in a space of communication that is beyond any project of interpretative violence, be it Heideggerian or deconstructive. The thresholding of companioning asks for the true plurivocity of the metaxological, beyond univocalization, beyond dyadic duality, beyond equivocal dissimulation, beyond dialectical sublation, beyond the need of an enemy. True companioning communicates out of agapeic service of the true.

AUGUSTINIAN COMPANIONING

Given this sketch, I turn to consider if, on the threshold between them, philosophy and theology need each other, or whether they must bid each other adieu. In the way modern philosophy has tended to define itself, namely, as autonomous, as self-determining thought, the need is denied, indeed rebuffed. Such a philosophical adieu is not an adieu. If philosophy demands to be self-determining, why should it be receptive, in the first instance, and in the last, to what is other to itself? This need would not be essential to it. But what if philosophy is metaxological, that is, essentially defined by its offering a logos of the metaxu (μεταξύ; the between), as I suggest it is? Then philosophy is what it is, not solely in relation to itself, but in relation to its significant others. In fact, throughout the long

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history of different practices of philosophy, our being religious and, mediately, our being theological have been the most significant of philosophy’s others. There is a sense of self-determining philosophy that is an essentially modern determination of its venture. Such self-determining philosophy is not metaxological in this relevant regard: there is to be nothing between it and theology, for it would define itself as for itself. Supposing, then, one were to affirm the need of philosophy and theology of each other, what kind of need would this be? I would say: a need that is not a dyadic relation in which each might exclude the other; nor yet a dyadic relation in which each might engage the other but not enter intimately into the life of the other; nor yet a need that is simply dialectical, if we define dialectic in the modern way as philosophy including the theological other in its own self-determining thinking. I would say the need is itself metaxological, in that both our being religious and our being philosophical are intimate others in a porous between where what is most original and ultimate is to be diversely engaged. If philosophy and theology do need each other, the need is a companioning one. Why so? How so? Companions can be themselves, and yet if they are bound together they may need each other and not always out of need alone. If companions break bread together (cum-panis), it is their shared need of what is beyond them both that binds them together. What more is important about this stress on the companioning? I would say it allows reflection on the togetherness of being religious and philosophical in a living sense, rather than on boundary questions between philosophy and theology in an academic sense. Our being is to be religious, and this is to be understood in an ontological rather than academic sense. There is a significant doubleness about being philosophical and being theological: each can refer to an exigence of thought marking our condition of being, or each can be seen as a more formal academic discipline. Companioning suggests we take the exigence as more primordial than the discipline. Of course, the exigence may require the discipline to be understood in a fuller sense. It may also mean that the discipline without the exigence can become an intellectual technē without animating soul. My own sense: the more modern philosophy has rejected the company of religion, the more it has evacuated itself of spiritual seriousness, when it does not smuggle it back into thought in unacknowledged, incognito ways.

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I am put in mind of the difference between philosophy considered as scientia (science) and as sapientia (wisdom). The modern scientific model certainly has tried to enclose thought methodically. Philosophy has lost or weakened the sapiential side of its vocation. Has this come back in an aesthetic form in the postmodern dialogue of the poet and the thinker? Might we think of the later Heidegger (Heidegger six above)? In some ways yes, in other ways, no. The aesthetics here are sacral poetics, and yet the nonscientific sapience of the religious clamors to be acknowledged as such and brought into companionship with philosophy in a less evasive way. There is a much higher promise to the companionship of philosophy and theology if we are under the guidance of the quest for sapientia. If philosophy is a science, even a “transcendental-ontological” science, this promise is less, and with consequences for the companionship. There is the oddity of Heidegger insisting in the 1920s that theology was a particular science, like chemistry or mathematics: an ontic regional study, not to be put in the company of his fundamental ontology. What a perverse will not to understand the intimate roots of the companioning of philosophy and theology! Companioning requires the daring seeking of sapientia. And companioning thought least of all is moved by need of an enemy, or the need to create an enemy, if one does not have an enemy (as Heidegger five opines). Companioning thought does not need or create an enemy in order truly to think. I find it helpful to engage here with Augustine in the companioning sense, and not simply as a scholar in a technical, professional sense. I count Augustine as a companion in my own efforts to think about fundamental questions, such as God and the soul, the nature of desire and love, and being in community with one’s neighbor. There are constant and true words here, to be worded and reworded again and again in their freshness, beyond the soon-staling slogans that infatuate the Zeitgeist, only then to jilt us. There are thinkers, among whom I count Augustine, to whom one relates not as objects of research but as companions to one’s own search. In this companioning approach, a particular thinker can be a source of inspiration and challenge, not always explicitly acknowledged as such, but of influence perhaps at a more intimate level, providing something like a secret touchstone in relation to intellectual and spiritual excellence. Of course, in conversation with a companion one might be tempted to project one’s own thoughts onto the other and take one’s

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own thoughts as if they were those of the companion. One might call this the ventriloquizing approach.2 One uses the other to make that other say the things that one would want to say in any case, regardless of what the other actually says. It is worth saying that one need not always agree with the companion, even as the companion may reprimand and correct one. Two striking and compact expressions of Augustine have had an impact on me from the beginning and continue to do so in often-unconscious ways. In a manner I explain below, the itinerary of this work reflects these two expressions. The first is when Augustine describes the character of his own itinerary and thought in the following terms as a double movement: “Ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora”— from the exterior to the interior, from the inferior to the superior (Enarratio in Psalmum 145.5). The second is when Augustine speaks of God as “interior intimo meo et superior summum meum”—more interior to me than my most intimate intimacy and superior to my highest summit (Confessions 3.6). These are famous formulations of Augustine with influences on many, and we can easily pass them around, pass them by, pass over them, becoming inattentive through familiarity to what they communicate. I find them still to arouse the sleeping promise of thought and desire, and would like to solicit their companionship in refreshing conversation about godsends and default atheism. Do they offer markers about how we might journey from default atheism to the surprise of revelation that the godsend wakes in us? This question is at the heart of the present work. What intrigues me is a kind of Augustinian adeptness in passing between philosophy and theology, beyond dyadic exclusion, dissimulating equivocity, and dialectical inclusion. In the passage between, once again the threshold between philosophy and theology becomes a matter for thought. This passing between, as here pursued, calls not for some “return to Augustine” in a scholastic sense but for a kind of re-turning that renews thought in a companioning sense. This re-turning must be taken in an elemental ontological regard in which our being religious is constitutive of our being, and so not to be defined as premodern, modern, or postmodern. There is a “superior” (to take just that) and it is not simply before, not simply present, not simply to come, since it is with what was, with what is, and with what will be. This “being with” is metaxological. In my companioning reflections here I am primarily speaking from

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a philosophical orientation, but this is not to exclude revelation, as if we moved only from below up, so to say, from inferior and interior to the superior. It is to explore our given condition of being as itself a porosity to godsends. This ontological porosity of being, and of our own being, is itself the original, elemental, and ultimate godsend.

FROM EXTERIORITY TO INTERIORITY

I described the movement of thought in Desire, Dialectic, and Otherness as an “Augustinian odyssey, embarked on in the wake of Hegel,”3 in terms of Augustine’s first formulation above, and it has returned in my thinking in different forms. Let me say a few things about it. We think of philosophical modernity as very much defined by the “turn toward the self” that is attributed to Descartes and many philosophers coming after him. Scholars will argue about the relationship between Descartes and Augustine. That is not my question now, obviously. This turn toward the self can be captured by the first phrase of the Augustinian itinerary: namely, “from the exterior to the interior.” It is a long story in modern philosophy; nevertheless, one could say that this turn toward the interior is transformed in an extraordinarily challenging way by the transcendental philosophy of Kant and the various successor forms of philosophizing that have emerged from that Kantian transcendental turn. It is not incidental that Husserl, as the twentieth century’s great transcendental philosopher, should conclude one of his works with Augustine’s own invitation to turn to the inner man if we are to find truth. “Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi: in interiore homine habitat veritas”: Do not go outside, return into yourself: in the interior man truth has its home (De vera religione 39.72).4 One sees the point of this turn, but the self toward which one turns is by no means univocal. Quite the opposite: it is full of sometimes tortuous equivocities. Pascal, an Augustinian thinker of singular character, saw this with sharpest acuteness. Kierkegaard’s turn to subjectivity as truth is a family relation. Augustine can be our companion in the exploration of those equivocities, I do not doubt. The Confessions is very much an exploration of such tortured equivocities, not least in relation to the dark ambiguities of eros.

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The modern turn to interiority is most often shadowed by a dualism between the interior and the exterior. And that itself is a major agenda in defining the perplexities of modern thought. I do not subscribe to such a dualism between interior and exterior. Rather, if we stress the notion of the between, the metaxu, it becomes clear that what is most at stake is the passage between the two. The so-called self is as much exterior, that is to say, out there in the world, in the midst of things, and with the others, as interior in shaping and mediating a whole world of meaning within its own rich immanence. We know that much of modern philosophy aimed at overcoming the gulf between subject and object, self and other. The notion of the between is not a bridge in this regard. Rather, it is something that makes possible the relation between the two, something that indeed defines both the interior and the exterior as themselves betweens, or as metaxological. Here is not the place to pursue its full significance, since this has engaged me in many other works. Suffice it for now to say: the between is not a neutral determiner of possibility but an ontologically fertile enabler of the coming to be, and the becoming, of both self and other. Exterior here also invokes what we often talk about as the question of the other. Living in the midst of things is living with other humans in various forms of togetherness or community, and indeed hostility. There is a social, communicative exteriority that is a metaxological “being with,” and it is not necessarily antagonistic to immanent interiority. Once again dualism may state a problem at times, but it is not the answer. Dialectic has much to offer in our explorations of this between- space and “being with.” I see in the dialectical philosophy of Hegel a desire to acknowledge the essential place of the other, but I see his logic of relation being finally defined, via reciprocal, symmetrical mediation, by a more encompassing self-relation, one that includes within itself the relation to the other. One finds oneself again in the other, and so can be at home with oneself again (bei sich sein). This, in fact, is how he defines freedom. Other-relation in the end is mediated by the more inclusive and more ultimate self-relation. And this too applies even to Hegel’s speculative reconstruction of the Trinitarian God.5 Yes, there is something extraordinary about the self, or as I prefer to say, about selving. But if we take seriously the between character of the relationship between self and other, and indeed of the constitutive between relating self and other, this type of dialectical inclusivity cannot

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answer the fullness of what is at play. There is more to the self, there is more to the other, there is more to the relationship between them. There is something that exceeds our self-determining and self-mediation; there is something excessive about the other as mysterious in itself and for itself; there are multiple forms of selving and othering, and of being in relation, ranging from the tyrannical to the agapeic. I am mainly now speaking of human relations, but mutatis mutandis the spectrum from tyranny to the agapeic can also define a relation to other things. The point is also not devoid of religious and theological significance. I remark on something I find illuminating: namely, that the double movement from exterior to interior, and from inferior to superior, is reflected in philosophical attitudes to the traditional proofs of God. I refer to the efforts of natural theology. The traditional contrast of the natural and the supernatural echoes that of the inferior and the superior. Natural theology, purportedly on the basis of reference to our rational powers alone, and not to revelations, seeks to move from the inferior to the superior. Aquinas’s five ways are perhaps the most well-known “proofs.” These consist of the arguments: from change in the world to the first unchanged mover; from causality to the first uncaused cause; from possibility or contingency in finite being to God as necessary being; from gradations of perfection in the world to absolute perfection; and from the teleology of things in nature to God as ultimate governance. Among the proofs Anselm’s ontological way has also been of great interest. It has supposedly been refuted again and again, and yet also has been defended again and again by strong thinkers, and indeed reinvented in new guises, for instance, by Hegel. Some of the proofs that are said to be a posteriori, such as arguments from motion and from contingency, are dependent on evidences from the external world from which they move to the divine superiority. A second set of proofs, by contrast, seem to be somewhat more a priori, at least in seeming not to be beholden to an evidentiary source external to reason itself, such as the ontological proof. They seem to follow a more interior way. I think Kant’s moral argument can be seen in this light. The first set looks to the evidences of externality for signs that communicate some sense of a divine source. The second set claims that the way is through what is most intensive in inwardness itself. Both of them are intended to move toward what I would call the hyperbolic thought

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of God—the being greater than which none can be conceived, in the words of Anselm’s argument. The ontological proof is a way that, having turned toward interiority, seeks to make a transition from the inferior to the superior. We are the inferior, even in the inward infinity of our thinking. Within that interiority there is an inescapable reference to what is more than us, infinitely more than us: God.6 What of the companioning? My sense is that passing on a threshold between thought and being religious was at work, often in unnamed manners, in these ways. I would prefer to name them as ways on the threshold rather than proofs on one side of it, said to be the rational, the philosophical. The porosity between thinking and praying is operative in Anselm, for instance; and the reticent hinterlands of living religious observance stand silently by the side of thinking in Aquinas. With modern thinkers from Descartes onward, the thoughts become orphaned from that nurturing matrix where being philosophical and being religious are familial companions. The thoughts become more univocalized, geometricized, transcendentalized. Their metaxological promise is crystallized in a determinate manner that abstracts them from the living between and contracts our porosity to the dimension of the overdeterminate.7

FROM INFERIORITY TO SUPERIORITY

I will come in due course to the intimacy of being, but I remark in anticipation that neither a Cartesian, nor an idealist, nor a Kantian, nor a positivist, nor a pragmatist philosophy can do justice to the reserved richness of this intimacy of being. Now I want to point out how this stress on self creates in modernity serious hindrances to the second side of the Augustinian itinerary, namely, the movement from the inferior to the superior. It is obvious that with Augustine the movement to the superior is a movement toward a sense of divine transcendence that cannot be exhausted in the finite determinacies of the created order. There is always something more. If we think we have comprehended this, we have not comprehended. Hence his famous “Si comprehendis, non est Deus” (Sermones 52.16). The fact that there is always something more rebounds back on our own sense of selving. We cannot be the measure of all things, because we ourselves are measured by something superior to

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