Philosophy of Religion

RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY OF. In the continental tradition, religion and the question of God have often been an integral part of philosophy. Whether theistic or atheistic, intellectual movements such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism have all engaged in various ways with questions of ultimacy, transcendence and alterity. Two of the foremost thinkers in this dialogue are Kierkegaard and Heidegger, the former emphasizing faith over reason and the latter giving precedence to thought over faith. Both, however, draw from a Paulian tradition, although they interpret it differently. To that extent, a proper understanding of continental philosophy of religion presupposes some familiarity with the ways major thinkers of this tradition re-open and re-interpret old debates (ancient and medieval). Some of the early thinkers in the history of western philosophy were also saints and Church Fathers (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas), and some later continental thinkers received early training in seminaries (Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger). Perhaps the conversation between theology and philosophy then goes much farther than one would suspect, so much so that ‘philosophy of religion’ can arguably be said to be a pleonasm: must not any philosophy worth its salt ultimately deal with questions of transcendence? Such a view was reflected most succinctly in John Scotus Eriugena’s maxim, ‘true religion is true philosophy and, conversely, true philosophy is true religion’. However, this loving relationship between philosophy and religion was not always uncontested. Already since medieval times the question as to what extent philosophy can be allowed to contaminate revelation and vice versa was crystallized in the formula aut fides aut ratio, either faith (religion) or reason (philosophy). The two were seen as incompatible with each other; their incompatibility was primarily judged on the grounds of reason, on which philosophy was supposed to firmly stand and which religion was supposed to lack. This debate goes as far back as Paul’s Letters, where ‘the wisdom of this world’ is branded as ‘folly’ (I Cor. 3:19). Two thousand years later, Heidegger returned the accusation. Since Christian philosophy has recourse to the Biblical narratives of a creator God, it could never raise the fundamental question of metaphysics – namely, ‘why there is something, rather than nothing?’ – therefore, it is not a philosophy at all. Heidegger, then, goes on to call this kind of thinking ‘a round square and a misunderstanding’ (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935). The opposition, however, between an irrational faith dependent on Revelation and an independent and rational thinking seeking knowledge is not as uncomplicated as it appears. In the long history of philosophy there are many cases that would allow for a quite different story. Let us take, for example, Paul and Heidegger again. Both men have significantly helped in removing reason from its imperial throne: Paul declared in First Corinthians the Gospel he was preaching to be ‘a stumbling block to the Jews and to the Greeks foolishness’ and went as far as to characterize himself as a ‘fool for Christ’s sake’. Heidegger, on the other hand, in his unceasing critique of grounds (Grund in German can mean both ‘ground’ but also ‘reason’) had disqualified reason as the sole foundation of philosophical thinking. More tellingly, perhaps, Nietzsche’s evangelist of the death of God (a proclamation that can also open the way to a new, non-conceptual understanding of God) was a madman who sought God (The Gay Science, 1882). In the end, a genealogy of madness could show that irrationality permeates both camps (that of philosophy and of religion) and is perhaps one of the elements, as Plato argues in his Phaedrus, which unites rather than separates them. With the advent of phenomenology, all normative questions about theistic claims – for example, the debate about the existence of God – are bracketed or suspended for the sake of a different and arguably more meaningful set of questions: Could God be given to consciousness as a phenomenon? What kind of phenomena are religious experiences? What sort of phenomenological methodology is needed in order to describe them? In recent years, the question of God has assumed such important dimensions that Dominique Janicaud writes of a ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology. In its existential trajectory, phenomenology, following Kierkegaard and Levinas, would embrace Pascal’s distinction between the God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, giving precedence to the latter over the former. Such a gesture indicates a move away from metaphysics towards a God that surpasses the old categories of omnipresence, omniscience and omnipotence. Contemporary French thought (Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry and Jean-Louis Chrétien) has offered us some exemplary cases of such thinking. Marion, in particular, has greatly contributed to the formation of a non-metaphysical thinking of God. First, by following Heidegger’s critique of ontotheology by which he freed God from any ontological burden (God Without Being, 1982); more recently, by recovering the notion of giveness in Husserl (Being Given, 1997); and finally, by developing his own insights on the ‘saturated phenomenon’ (In Excess, 2001). In its hermeneutical trajectory, phenomenology, following Heidegger and Ricoeur, would exercise both a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of affirmation. Under the hermeneutical movement one should classify John Caputo (radical hermeneutics) and Richard Kearney (diacritical hermeneutics). Caputo should be credited with the revival of continental philosophy of religion in North America. Besides being the chief exponent of deconstruction’s implications for religion (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, 1997), his thought and a series of conferences at Villanova and now Syracuse universities have been of tremendous significance in explicating Derrida’s ‘turn to religion’, represented by a series of works, most notably ‘How to Avoid Speaking’ (1987), ‘Khora’ (1987), Circumfession (1990), The Gift of Death (1992) and ‘Faith and Reason’ (1992). Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics (1987) led him to a novel, post-metaphysical understanding of religion ‘without religion’ (On Religion, 2001), signaling with this paradox the undecidable mystery of God – ‘an infinite questionability’ that is, at the same time, ‘endlessly questionable’. Kearney’s diacritical hermeneutics, on the other hand, attempt to steer a middle path between Romantic hermeneutics (Schleirmacher) which retrieve and re-appropriate God as presence and radical hermeneutics (Derrida, Caputo) which elevates alterity to the status of undecidable sublimity. This debate has already made its mark as one of the most challenging directions of continental thought. J.P. Manoussakis