Overcoming the Death of God in Postmodern Philosophy

Introduction

According to many accounts, one of the hallmarks of the end of modernity, generally, or the

Enlightenment, specifically, is the acceptance of the death of God. Along with the crumbling of

traditional beliefs in the power of the human mind to know the world as it really is and

confidence in utopian visions of political freedom and peace, the belief in an all-powerful,

perfectly good and just God, who is the creator and sustainer of the world, was thought to have

become untenable. Under the withering scrutiny of Marx’s analysis, religion was seen as an

“opiate” that was used to tranquilize the masses in order to keep them from recognizing their

impoverished and enslaved condition. Or, following Freud, one now could clearly see by turning

one’s attention to the “psychical origin” of religious beliefs that are “given out as teachings” that

such beliefs are “not the precipitates of experience or conclusions of thought: [but rather] …

illusions: the fulfillment of the oldest, strongest and most pressing wishes of humanity.”1 Of

course, one may point to the fact that people continue to believe in God, but for radical critics of

modernity such facts are beside the point. Even Marx and Freud recognized the possibility that

such illusions might continue to exercise great power. As did Nietzsche, perhaps the most

(in)famous of these original critics. In a story told in the Joyful Science, Nietzsche reflected, in

the person of his “madman,” on the untimely character of his own pronouncement of God’s

death: “This monstrous event is still on its way, still wandering—it has not yet reached the ears

of men. Lightening and thunder take time; the light of stars takes time; deeds take time, even

though completed, to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than the most

distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves.”2 These daring critics of modernity were not

arguing against the continuing presence of religion among the untutored, but rather they were

arguing that philosophically or scientifically such belief was no longer tenable.

As great a challenge as these stark claims still present to us, the focus of this essay is not

on the death of God, but rather on the return of God. It is not just any old return of God or

religion that is at question here, however. As was noted above, the continuance of religion or the

return or perseverance in faith was either predicted or acknowledged by these earlier

philosophers of suspicion. The existence of those who reject the power and persuasiveness of

Onto-Theology

Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (to name a few) and continue in religious belief is hardly surprising,

but what is surprising is a resurgence of belief—or at least interest—in religion and the question

of God by those who consciously have taken on the mantle (however much many of them

deconstruct the term) of the “post” modern, i.e., by those who acknowledge the force and even

rightness (up to a point) of Nietzsche’s critique. In this essay, I shall attempt to trace out and

explain how such religiosity came to arise out of the darkness of the twilight of the idols. In

particular, I will focus on a crucial essay by Martin Heidegger, The Onto-Theological

Constitution of Metaphysics. In large part, or so I shall argue, it was Heidegger’s ability to re-

interpret Nietzsche’s account of the death of God as the death of a particular (if enormously

influential) understanding of God, that is, the metaphysical or onto-theological God, that made

possible the opening up of various paths for a postmodern, post-metaphysical philosophy of

religion.3 After this presentation of Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology, I shall conclude with a

brief sketch of some of the various paths taken by post-modern thinkers of religion.

Heidegger and Onto-Theology

1. From the Image of God to Human, All too Human: Nietzsche and the Death of God

One could argue that Western Philosophy arises out of the midst of legend with Parmenides and

his account of his voyage in the chariot of the Goddess. It is on this voyage that the true path to

knowledge is revealed to be the recognition that Being or Reality is the One that abides eternally

and without change. This eternal fire may take on different forms, whether the mysterious and

flickering flame of Heraclitus’s LÒgow or the blazing Good that shines outside of Plato’s cave,

but it has represented the call that has led many a thinker out into the unknown. Against the

masses that call for these so-journers to turn back from the blaze of the Absolute, these

philosophers pushed onward towards Being itself. As one might expect, Aristotle, in his

Metaphysics, states this clearly:

Such a life [that of the blessed thinker] would be superior to the human level. For someone will live it not insofar as he is a human being, but insofar as he has some divine element in him. … Hence if understanding is something divine in comparison with a human being, so also will the life in accord with understanding be divine in comparison to the human life. We ought not to follow the makers of proverbs and “Think human, since you are human,” or “Think mortal, since you are mortal.” Rather, as far as we can, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element; for however much this

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element may lack in bulk, by much more it surpasses everything in power and value.4

The call to seek God, for Aristotle, equals the call to seek the fundamental truths of reality or

Being: “This science [metaphysics] alone happens to be divine in both ways; for God is thought

by all to be one of the causes and a principle, and God alone or in the highest degree would

possess such a science.”5 With these words, the course of western metaphysics was in some way

set. From Aquinas to Descartes, from Leibniz and Spinoza to Hegel, the greatest works of

metaphysics have linked the ultimate structure of the world, of Being, to the being and nature of

God. If the metaphysical is the ultimate basis of all phenomenal truth (that is, reality as it appears

to us) and God is the source and truth of such metaphysical realities, then knowledge of these

metaphysical realities and, ultimately, knowledge of God is the foundation of all truth, the height

of human knowing. To cite, one of the more famous examples of this, we can look at Descartes.

For Descartes, it is only knowledge of God’s perfection—and thus goodness—that rescues him

from eternal doubt concerning the reality of anything outside his own thinking.6

What, however, would happen if we could no longer trust in such heights of human

knowing, such mental super-gymnastics? What if we discovered that at root finite human beings,

despite their most marvelous creations (or even because of our most marvelous modern

creations), are incapable of such a leap? In other words, what if the unceasing delving by

modern critical science into the foundations of our histories, both collective and individual,

finally revealed in the cold dawn of reason, when we are finally truly enlightened, that we are

human, all too human? What if our investigations into our unconscious subterranean dirty

laundry turned up, not noble images of the divine or positive ideas of perfection, but blind

pedestrian strivings for power and self-assertion? Could we turn back from such reflections of

ourselves? Would such a world be able to stand the very idea of God? Or even worse, could we

even face up to this new impossibility? Would we be forced to live hollow, contradictory, and

self-deluded lives? Of course, this is the very diagnosis of Nietzsche’s famous “madman,” whom

we encountered earlier.

Have you not heard of that madman who, one bright day, lit a lantern and ran to the market place calling out: “I seek God! I seek God!”—His cries produced a big laugh from many in the crowd, for they did not believe in God. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he

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afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? —Thus, they shouted and laughed.

The madman sprang into their midst and pierced them with his gaze. “Whither is God?” he shouted. “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? … Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? … How shall we comfort ourselves, murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?7

We have already noted what comes next: though we have done this to ourselves, we are not yet

capable of understanding it or owning up to it. Only the madman knows enough to spend his day

entering various churches singing “a requiem aeternam deo” [“Grant God eternal rest”];

commenting as he leaves: “What after all are these churches now if they are not the tombs and

sepulchers of God?”8 How can those who accept the radical critique of modernity, whether they

accept the name, “postmodern,” or not, believe in God or anything resembling religion again in

1 Sigmund Freud, Die Zukunft einer Illusion (Leipzig: Int. Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1927), Section IV. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, translated and edited by James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961), p. 38. All translations from German and French are my own. Relevant English translations are cited following the original reference where available.2 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Die Fröliche Wissenschaft” in Nietzsches Werke, volume 2 (Salzburg: Das Bergland-Buch, 1949), 600. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 182.3 This debt to Heidegger is acknowledged by most postmodern thinkers, but there are a few authors who recently have made this acknowledgement central to their projects. For example: Bruce Benson, Graven Ideologies: Nietzsche, Derrida, & Marion on Modern Idolatry (Downer’s Grove: IVP, 2002); Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, translated by Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2002); and Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2001). 4 Aristotle, translated by Terence Irwin, Second Edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), pp. 164-65 (1177b28-1178a2).5 Aristotle, translated by Hippocrates Apostle (Grinnell: The Peripatetic Press, 1979), p. 16 (983a5ff).6 See, Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by Donald A. Cress, third edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1993), pp. 25ff.7 Nietzsche, Die Fröliche Wissenschaft, p. 599. The Gay Science, p. 181.8 Ibid.

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something like an authentic manner? For many of those who have found a way to re-introduce

God and the religious back into philosophical and theological discourse, without simply ignoring

Nietzsche’s withering attack, the path begins with Heidegger’s uncovering of what he calls the

onto-theological roots of modern accounts of metaphysics and religion, and our attempt

introduce the current postmodern philosophers of religion must pass through his thinking.

2. Heidegger : Fundamental Ontology versus Onto-Theology

We have yet to speak of Hegel, but for Heidegger it is Hegel and Nietzsche that set the stage for

the discussion of onto-theology. Heidegger argues that Hegel and Nietzsche represent two sides

of the coin inscribed with the epitaph for both traditional metaphysics and theology and thus for

modernity itself. Heidegger returns to the pair of Nietzsche and Hegel again and again in his

attempt to come to grips with the beginning and the end of metaphysics. We noted above

Aristotle’s famous quote linking theology and metaphysics, but one finds the same sentiment

expressed in Hegel. For example, in his “Introduction” to his Lectures on the Philosophy of

Religion, Hegel notes how the central convictions or beliefs about God in classical theism are

expressly developed in his logical or metaphysical system:

God, in the general or indeterminate sense of the truth of all things, is the result of the entirety of philosophy. This begins, in our division of philosophy, with Logic (pure thinking in its development), followed by Nature, and the third section, Spirit, which, though finite in relation to nature, elevates itself [sich erhebt—from sich aufheben] to Absolute Spirit. Philosophy in its development leads to the point where God is seen as the last result. The highest thing here is therefore the proof that God is; that is, that this universal, which is in and for itself and in which all is embraced and contained, is that alone in which all things are and that this universal is the truth. This One is the result of philosophy.9

Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung—the reconciliation or mediation of difference that

overcomes the difference without reducing the difference to the same—represents the most

sophisticated attempt, according to Heidegger, to encompass all reality in a system.

Metaphysically this absolute reconciliation requires that both the eternal and the temporal

(historical) be seen as parts of a mediated whole. Ethically this requires that the desire for pure

9 G. W. F. Hegel, “Einleitung und Der Begriff der Religion,” volume 1 of Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1993), pp. 266-67; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: One Volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827, edited by Peter C. Hodgson, translated by R.F. Brown, P.C. Hodgson, and J.M. Stewart (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 115.

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moral universality be reconciled with finite human social/political institutions. Religiously this

involves the philosophical development of the Christian ideas of creation, incarnation, and

eschatological history (the eternal kingdom of God made manifest at the end of history). Faced

with this final, overwhelming, attempt, Heidegger—influenced by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and

his mentor Husserl’s theory of temporality—“steps back”:

For Hegel, the conversation with the earlier history of philosophy has the character of Aufhebung, that is, of the mediating concept in the sense of an absolute foundation. For us, the character of the conversation with the history of thinking is no longer Aufhebung, but rather the step back. Aufhebung leads to the heightening and gathering area of truth posited as absolute, truth in the sense of a completely developed certainty of self-knowing knowledge. The step back points to the realm which until now has been skipped over, and from which the essence of truth becomes first of all worthy of thought.10

Faced with the impossibility of such a complete mediation or system, criticized so forcefully by

Nietzsche’s genealogical critique, Heidegger attempts to come to grips with the actual character

of this onto-theology in order to effect a side-step or a step-back that finds a different path that

has heretofore been hidden or ignored. If the shadow of Nietzsche has permanently foreclosed

the possibility of absolute knowledge, then a different route must be taken if the question of

Being is to be raised. It is not the purpose of this essay to examine in any detail Heidegger’s own

positive attempts to develop what he sometimes calls, in order to distinguish it from classical

metaphysics, fundamental ontology; rather, we shall briefly spell out what he has to say about

the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics in order to see the possible horizons (one of

which is, to be sure, Heidegger’s) that may be discovered at the borders or limits that fix or

confine the history of philosophy and theology.

Heidegger artfully draws out the boundaries that identify metaphysics as onto-theology.

The story he tells so essentially shapes the history of postmodern discussions of religion—both

positively and negatively—it is worth setting out some key passages of the text at length.

Western metaphysics, however, since its beginning with the Greeks, has eminently been both ontology and theology, still without being tied to these rubrics. For this reason my inaugural lecture What is Metaphysics (1929) defines

10 Martin Heidegger, Identität und Differenz (Stuttgart: Günther Neske, 1999), p. 39. Heidegger, Identity and Difference, translated by Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002), p. 49.

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metaphysics as the question about Being as such and as a whole. The wholeness of the whole is the unity of all beings that unifies as the generative ground.11

The key ideas here are “whole” and “generative ground.” For Heidegger these two desires are

found generally in all Western metaphysics and specifically—in an exalted and absolute form—

in Hegel. This understanding of Being (and of God) as the totality of what is and the ground out

of which all things are generated results in the understanding of God as the self-caused cause of

all (causa sui). Heidegger sums up his position as follows:

[T]he Being of beings reveals itself as the ground that gives itself ground and accounts for itself. The ground, the ratio by their essential origin are the lo/gov, in the sense of the gathering of beings and the letting them be, the e4n pa/uta. Thus “science,” that is metaphysics, is in truth, “logic,” for Hegel not because the theme of science is thinking, but because Being remains the matter of thinking; while Being, ever since the early days when it became unconcealed in the character of lo/gov, the ground that grounds, claims thinking—the accounting of the ground—for itself.

Metaphysics thinks of beings as such, that is, in general. Metaphysics thinks of the Being of beings both in the ground-giving unity of what is most general, what is indifferently valid everywhere, and also in the unity of the all that accounts for the ground, that is, of the All-Highest. The Being of beings is thus thought in advance as the grounding ground. Therefore, all metaphysics is at bottom and from the ground up, what grounds, what gives account of the ground, what is called to account by the ground, and finally what calls the ground to account.12

The problem, noticed in a fashion by Nietzsche, is that this God can only be understood as the

cause or ground of what is, in particular, the being of humankind. In order, however, for God or

Being to be understood as the most High, the transcendent, we must be able to think the

difference between the ground and what it grounds; that is, we must think of the Other or God

apart from His appearance as our cause, but this, according to Nietzsche, is impossible. It is

impossible because we have reduced God to this appearance, that is, as the cause of our

existence. Even if we elevate his causality to an ultimate cause, which is also self-caused (causa

sui), we still acknowledge God only as the cause. As cause, God is determined in relation to His

effects. If all our knowledge is of such effects (the logic or lo/gov, which explains reality as

meaningful insofar as it represents the effects of some sufficient cause or reason), then God or

Being as it or He is apart from these effects is unknown. If this difference between Being and 11 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 45; Identity and Difference, p. 54.12 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, pp. 48-49; Identity and Difference, pp. 57-58;.

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beings, which makes the whole causal account plausible, cannot be thought, then it amounts to

no-thing for metaphysics or reason and thus also for theology (as the “logic” or account of God).

The transcendent God whom we might worship is indeed dead as Nietzsche prophesized; dead

by our own onto-theological hands. As Heidegger notes, it is this hidden, unquestioned,

difference between Being and beings that “gives Being as the generative ground” and that this

“ground itself needs to be properly accounted for by that for which it accounts, that is, by the

causation through the supremely original matter—and that is the cause as causa sui. This is the

right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the

causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and dance before this

god.”13

We can now see how Heidegger appropriates the Nietzschean critique. In so far as

modernity and modern society reduces truth to the knowledge of the causes that bring about, and

are thus fundamentally determined in their essence by, the finite objects and projects in which we

are immersed, then such causes are also, in a strict sense, human all too human. Or, if we wish to

go further in our impoverishment of the role of the deity, we might note that the more we

understand ourselves and our world materialistically, mechanistically, and technologically the

more the cause of such a world will resemble a material, mechanical, and technological thing.

The difference between such a god and the vibrant gods of antiquity is so great that it is no

stretch to say that this God(s) is, for all intents and purposes, dead! We can now see how

Heidegger’s account of onto-theology meshes with Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of

God, but this does not explain how and/or why post-modern (post-Nietzschean) thinkers have

returned to the fields of religion. What could be left of religion and God now?

13 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 64; Identity and Difference, p. 72.

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3. Beyond Onto-Theology

In order to understand this phenomenon, we will need to see the other side of Heidegger’s

discussion of onto-theology. If onto-theology explains why modernity and metaphysics

necessarily result in the death of God, it also, by de-limiting the problem as a difficulty that

arises within the parameters of onto-theology, opens up the possibility for a side-step or a “step

back” from the fixations of metaphysics and modernity.

The god-less thinking which must abandon the god of philosophy, god as causa sui, is thus perhaps closer to the divine God. Here this means only: god-less thinking is more open to Him than onto-theo-logic would like to admit.14

The categories and schemes of onto-theology have run their course for both Nietzsche and

Heidegger, and one can no longer speak meaningfully of God in this fashion. Thus, as Heidegger

notes: “Someone who has experienced theology in his own roots, both the theology of the

Christian faith and that of philosophy, would today rather remain silent about God when he is

speaking in the realm of thinking. For the onto-theological character of metaphysics has become

questionable for thinking, not because of any kind of atheism, but from the experience of

thinking which has discerned in onto-theology the still unthought unity of the essential nature of

metaphysics.”15 Though we cannot be sure “if this possibility of thinking otherwise than the God

of onto-theology will become a new way of thinking,” taking the death of the modern God

seriously may not lead to nihilism as in certain readings of Nietzsche; rather, a way or ways may

be opened to a new experience of the divine.16

Heidegger’s retrieval of Being falls under the name (most of the time) of fundamental

ontology. He labels it, “fundamental,” in order to distinguish it from onto-theology, and

throughout his life his fundamental investigation focused on the so-called ontological difference,

that is, the difference between Being and beings that preserves Beings’ otherness and

transcendence even as it points to its incursion or disclosure in beings. In his major early work,

Being and Time, Heidegger searches out these points of difference in an examination of human

being in the world (what he calls, Dasein, literally, “being–there”). He attempts to find in his

14 Ibid.15 Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, p. 45; Identity and Difference, p. 54.16 For an account that argues that Nietzsche already develops an account of Nihilism as a positive position that makes room for a return of the Christian God, understood as radically incarnational and immanent, see Vattimo, After Christianity.

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analysis of what it means to exist or be as a questioner/questor after Being the very fissure or

difference that is the key to Being itself. This difference or otherness is found existentially in the

paradoxical presence and absence of each person’s death to him or herself and in the dynamics of

futurity (temporality). It is found in our being-towards-death insofar as each individual person’s

death is his or her own, that is “present” to that person in a unique way—no one can take on

another’s actual death—while at the same time it is an event that that person absolutely can not

experience (make present)! This existential discovery leads to the broader inquiry into time. The

future is both present to a person in the very projections of his or her possible actions entertained

in the current moment—projections that make sense or provide a horizon for the future (as his or

her own future) and, at the same time, only functions as the horizon of that person’s projects in

not being present; that is, it is the not yet. In his later writings, Heidegger moves through

different, less existential, ways of getting at this difference between Being and being. He

examines it in terms of broader issues of language and a re-interpretation of the meaning of truth.

Being is understood, not as a ground that is determined by what it grounds, but rather as that

which makes possible the being of beings by simultaneously revealing and concealing. It is in its

very non-phenomenality that Being is Being. Though Heidegger usually does not link his

writings on fundamental ontology directly to a religious discourse, and, while many thinkers

have criticized his work (even while acknowledging their indebtedness to it), the dynamic and

productive character of his thinking, “outside the box,” has provided the stimulus for much of

current postmodern thinking about religion. At the very least, most of these thinkers have

adopted, at least in part, this grand narrative of metaphysics as onto-theology as a means of

continuing on with their own projects in the philosophy of religion. Though it is impossible to

do justice in this short essay to the complexities of the various reactions to, and appropriations

of, Heidegger’s account of onto-theology, a brief sketch of some of the terrain covered by his

post-modern heirs will be beneficial.

Heidegger’s Heirs

1. Radical Phenomenology: Lévinas and Marion

We have already noted, however briefly, Heidegger’s move from classical phenomenology into

fundamental ontology, but there were other appropriations of the phenomenological method that

radicalized Husserl’s and Heidegger’s initial projects in dramatic ways.17 Two of the most

important of these philosophers are Emmanuel Lévinas and Jean-Luc Marion. For these two

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thinkers, the desire after truth, even the truth of Being as the differing power of disclosure and

concealment, misses the most radical possibility of phenomenology; namely, the “disclosure” of

that which goes beyond all appearing. In other words, it is at the point of the failure of our

understanding and intending to reach its aims that we reach both the disruption of

phenomenology and its fulfillment. For Emmanuel Lévinas, this desire to exercise and develop

our talents, desires, and intentions—what he calls by the Latin name, conatus—is always the

desire to bring the other, the unknown, into the totalizing circle of the known; that is, knowledge

is always first and foremost a desire, which appropriates or consumes. A more radical desire, if

it is to be a desire that truly leads beyond the merely phenomenal world of my creation in which

Nietzsche claims the post-modern human being is irretrievably enclosed, must represent a radical

breach with this solipsistic world in which I enjoy myself and my creations. This desire must

come not from something that I want, which is always pre-figured by my own conceptions and

plans, but by a radical encounter with the Other or a radical alterity that says, “No,” to my

rapacity, my desire to understand and com-prehend (“grasp”). This alterity can be understood in

terms of the radical notion of infinity hinted at in metaphysics or as the radical alterity of a God

who confronts us out of the whirlwind and destroys our pretensions and beliefs; or, famously for

Lévinas, in the face of the victim, who, despite the fact that he or she is in my power,

nevertheless, produces in me (or may so produce) a desire that is grounded not in my ability to

bring him or her into my self-understanding, but, rather in a strange, debilitating desire for their

sheer exteriority, for a (non)-presence that remains outside of my ken.

This Desire does not coincide with any unsatisfied need, it sets itself beyond satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The relation with the Other, or the idea of the Infinite, brings it about. Each may live this Desire in the strange desire for/of the Other, which no sensuous desire (volupté) can surmount, close off, or deaden. Thanks to this relation, the human person, drawn back from the element, gathered into a dwelling, represents for him or herself a world. Because of this relation, this being present before the face of the Other—the person does not allow him or herself to be fooled by the glorious triumph of being alive; but, separated from mere animality, he or she can know the difference between being and phenomena,

17 Classical Phenomenology here can be understood as a method that examines the meaning or essence of the intended objects of consciousness as they present themselves without any reference to their possible relation to objects outside of consciousness as this method is practiced by its founder Edmund Husserl. Heidegger’s phenomenology, in questioning the nature, stability, and foundational character of consciousness, opens up radical new possibilities of experience and thus for phenomenology. These radical possibilities, in turn, are developed further and differently by philosophers like Lévinas and Marion.

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recognize his or her phenomenality, the lack in his or her plenitude. This is a lack that cannot be converted into a need, and which, beyond plenitude and emptiness, has no way of uniting them.18

Lévinas’s account of the disruption of phenomenology by an absence of the fulfillment of

intention is complemented by Jean-Luc Marion’s understanding of the incursion of God or the

Absolute Other into our lives as a surplus or overwhelming of our intentionality by an excess of

meaning and Being. His initial analysis of this problem, from a more strictly religious point of

view, concerns the difference between idolatry and iconicity; with the former representing an

illegitimate attempt to capture or conceive of the Absolutely Other within the confines of our

conceptuality and the latter representing a presentation in finite categories that points not towards

the sufficiency of the category or presentation, but rather precisely away from this sufficiency

towards that Other which exceeds presentation and, thus, re-presentation. Marion, like Heidegger

and Lévinas before him, can acknowledge his debt to Nietzsche insofar as Marion, too, is

searching out the idols of the age, but unlike Nietzsche, he believes that our experience of the

world at its limits, the possibility that our finite representations may point beyond their own

limitations to the boundless or excessive brings the possibility of a post-modern religious

sensibility that echoes the work of the great mystical thinkers of Antiquity and the Middle Ages

(e.g., Justin Martyr, Gregory of Nyssa, Denis the Areopagite, etc.). For Marion, onto-theology

remains a form of idolatry, and a god who is only an idol may die or be destroyed: “The idol

provides for us a space in which the divine may dwell in order that we may engage in a

commerce with it and that bit by bit, encloses it. … The idol is characterized by this submission

of god to the human conditions for experiencing god….”19 If the idol “lacks the distance which is

the authentic identity of the divine as such,” this is not the case for the icon. The icon does not

offer something that is consistent with our visual capacities, but rather offers us the divine

precisely as invisible. The figure of the icon is a figure “not of a God who, in this particular

figure, would lose his invisibility in order that we might become familiar with Him right up to

the point of familiarity, but rather a Father who radiates all the more from a definitive and

irreducible transcendence, which is given without limit to be seen in the face of his Son.” 20

18 Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1971), 196; Totality and Infinity, translated by Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1969), p.

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Though he later, in his more strictly phenomenological or philosophical work, comes to focus on

this abundance of God, less as icon, but more as superabundant gift seen in what he calls

“saturated phenomenon,” the basic idea remains the same. True religion appears at the point of

the rupture of the visible by the non-appearing “appearance” of the divine as it exceeds our

vision even as it saturates it. In both cases (the confrontation with the icon and the Eucharistic

presence/non-presence of God in the gift) the proper response is not intellectual but liturgical,

specifically, the response of praise.21 This shift from knowledge to liturgy/praise has had echoes

in other post-modern accounts of religion, particularly, Christian existentialism.

19 Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1977), 20. Idol and Distance, translated by Thomas A. Carlon (New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2001), p. 5. 20 Marion, L’idole et la distance, pp. 22-23; Idol and Distance, p. 8.21 For a recent interpretation of Marion’s thought see, Benson, Graven Ideologies, pp. 169ff.

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2. Christian Existentialism and Neo-orthodoxy: Kierkegaard, Barth, Bultmann, and

Westphal.

Though it may seem odd to group these thinkers and theologians together, there is a common

thread. We may call it a concern for the limitations of knowledge, but while such theories may

use the tools of phenomenology, they do so in light of a narrative centered on our sin and

finitude. This can be seen in the criticisms of morality and desire in Kierkegaard, or in the

challenge of Karl Barth to natural theology, or in Bultumann’s distinction between history and

Kerygma, but our discussion here will focus on the recent work of Merold Westphal. The focus

here on Westphal is inspired not only by the clarity and range of his thinking, but also by the fact

that he explicitly places is thinking on religion within the narrative of the deconstruction of onto-

theology. The difference between Westphal's avowedly Christian view and most other

postmodern accounts is that he understands Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology as

fundamentally an epistemological critique. He sums this up quite beautifully in his essay,

Overcoming Onto-Theology:

In affirming God as Creator I am affirming that there is an explanation of the whole of being and I am pointing in the direction of that explanation; but I am not giving it, for I do not possess it. To do that I would have to know just who God is, and just how and why God brings beings into being out of nothing. But both God’s being and God’s creative action remain deeply mysterious to me. They are answers that come loaded with new questions, reminding me in Heideggerian language that unconcealment is always shadowed by concealment, or in Pauline language that I only see “through a glass, darkly” (or “in a mirror dimly,” I Corinthians 13:12). My affirmation of God as Creator is not onto-theological because it is not in the service of the philosophical project of rendering the whole of being intelligible to human understanding, a project I have ample religious reason to repudiate.22

Because he sees the critique of onto-theology as focused on epistemology; that is, as a critique of

finitude (a critique, as he notes, that can be translated into the Judeo-Christian language of Sin

and Fall), Westphal is able to make room, by denying knowledge (as did Kant in his own way),

for faith. He, thus, links Heidegger’s critique to a specific Christian narrative or theology.

“Within Christian history, the critique of onto-theology belongs to a tradition of de-hellenizing

repristination. Heidegger explicitly links his critique with Luther, and thus, by implication with a

tradition that looks back to Augustine and ahead to Pascal, Kierkegaard and Barth.” 23 Westphal

22 Merold Westphal, Overcoming Onto-Theology, p. 150.

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is able to affirm, therefore, that there “is a metanarrative; it’s just that we aren’t in on it. We may

have access to aspects of it on a need to know basis, but that gives us far less than philosophy

requires for its purposes; for its need to know is the absolute need posited by objectivity, while

the believer’s need to know is the limited need posited by subjectivity.”24 Thus, for Westphal,

the death of onto-theology does not necessarily mean that there is no relation between God and

Being, or that talk of God as the cause of our existence or as our creator is meaningless; rather,

the death onto-theology means a limit is place on the authority and character of our systematic,

philosophical, conceptions of God.

The last two branches of the Heideggerian family tree represent two even more skeptical

or circumspect traditions. In one way or another, such thinkers remain suspicious of such

critiques of knowledge in the service of faith as too close to certain metanarratives that are

irresistibly drawn to or guided by onto-theology. We will begin with the more moderate of these

skeptical traditions, the hermeneutical, before turning to the “radical” hermeneutics of

Deconstruction.

3. Hermeneutics of the Sacred Text: Ricœur and Kearney

If phenomenology at its root examines reality as it appears immediately or purely to

consciousness (even if this account is of an extraordinary appearing that overwhelms appearance

itself, either because it is too much (Marion) or completely Other (Lévinas)), hermeneutics

examines the case where what appears remains unintelligible or incompletely intelligible but

does not then escape into a pure mystical or apophatic knowing or “experience.” This

incompleteness requires interpretation, that is, a working out of meaning in the event that arises

between the self and the other.

Paul Ricœur accepts the possibility of a phenomenology of certain aspects of religion, the

experience of awe, fascination, or “absolute dependence,” for example. These phenomenological

investigations examine the “manifestation” of the sacred as a transformation of the ordinary

experience of everyday objects in the world: “That a stone or a tree may manifest the sacred

means that this profane reality becomes something other than itself while still remaining itself. It

is transformed into something supernatural—or, to avoid using a theological term, we may say

23 Ibid., p. 157.24 Ibid., p. 149.

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that it is transformed into something superreal (surréel), in the sense of being superefficacious

while still remaining a part of common reality.”25 Even though Ricœur acknowledges the

possibilities of such pre-verbal manifestations, he also argues that it is necessary for the believer,

to whom the sacred thus appears, to interpret this appearance in more or less explicit ways (by

praise, dance, prayer, theology, etc.). This need for interpretation is especially evident when one

turns to the religions of the Word (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). An attempt to isolate

phenomenology, no matter how radical, from the labors of hermeneutics is both misleading (it

cannot be done) and dangerous (it can lead back to mystical fanaticism). As he notes, in a recent

article that critically examines the more dramatic claims of French phenomenologist of religion

(particularly, Marion): “Religion is like language itself, which is itself only realized in

languages . . . . This monumental fact condemns phenomenology to pass along the humble roads

of a hermeneutic and more precisely through a hermeneutic that is textual or scriptural.”26 For

Ricœur, one must approach all claims to transcend our finitude by way of direct, immediate, and

individual experiences of the divine or radically Other with suspicion or a critical distance that

leads us to an act of interpretation or hermeneutics. It is only such a hermeneutic that allows us

to bring to meaning our religious experience and thus create a world in which the radical other,

God, may receive a name by which He may be addressed and worshiped.

Ricœur’s student, Richard Kearney has also taken up a hermeneutical challenge to such

radical phenomenology:

The “saturated phenomenon” of mystical eucharistic encounter with the divine is informed by such a hyper-excess that it can be neither seen, known, nor understood.… We hit here upon a serious hermeneutic muddle. If the saturating phenomenon is really as bedazzling as Marion suggest, how can we tell the difference between God and madness? How are we to distinguish between enabling and disabling revelations? Who is it that speaks when God speaks from the burning bush? … Or as John D. Caputo adroitly inquires, when we are confronted with the saturated phenomenon of God, how can we discriminate between excess and defect—“How do we know that we have been visited by a super eminent excess and not just invaded by khora?” How indeed!27

25 Paul Ricœur, Figuring the Sacred (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), pp. 49-50.26 Paul Ricœur, “Expérience et langage dans le discours religieux,” in Courtine, Phénomenologie et théologie, 19; “Experience and Language in Religious Discourse, in Janicaud, editor, translated by Bernard Prusak, Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”(New York: Fordham Univ. Press, 2000), p. 130.

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Instead of either an onto-theological conception of a God who is absolutely immovable even as

He moves all else with a mighty power (that is, as the causa sui that causes all other things with

an ultimate, irreversible, and unchanging efficacy) or a conception of the divine as the absolutely

Other who intersects with history in such dramatic ways that the nature of such intrusions

exceeds all interpretation or representation, Kearney offers a God whose power is not causal

efficacy but du/namiv (“enabling power”) that is, a God who makes justice, goodness, and

holiness possible. Thus, for example, the unnamable God (as re-counted to us in Exodus, chapter

three), intrudes upon Moses’ peaceful tending of his flocks and disrupts his world. Moses hears

the call of the God who “names” himself as the “I am who am” or “I am who I will be.” Such a

name confounds any attempt to appropriate or control the one who is before him, and because of

this failure to know all there is to know about this divine being and the story to follow, a surprise

is possible that upsets all his previous interpretations or beliefs about himself and God (namely,

the belief in the impossibility of confronting Pharoh and freeing the slaves). Such an encounter in

fact leads to the re-naming of God within a new narrative of liberation or exodus. This

“almighty” God is thus not the power to control and eliminate all divergence from His will but

rather the power to open up new ways of interpreting our human condition so that we are

empowered to make God’s will manifest in places and ways that were hitherto thought to be

impossible. Such a hermeneutics of possibility provides one way of incorporating a notion of the

divine that allows for the impossibility of God’s name ever being fully interpreted or settled,

while at the same time indicating a certain interpretive coherence insofar as we speak of the more

or less successful strivings towards these horizons of liberation. This hermeneutical

understanding is called by Kearney the “onto-eschatological.”28

Such a hermeneutics of religion represents an important way in which post-modern

thought could re-appropriate religious life and discourse, but is it sufficiently radical? Or is it too

close to the old onto-theology? For John Caputo, as helpful as such hermeneutical accounts may

be, they are insufficiently “radical” to satisfy the demands placed upon us by the deconstructive 27 Richard Kearney, “The God Who May Be,” in Questioning God, edited by John D. Caputo, Mark Dooley, & Michael J. Scanlon (Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2001, 164. Kearney sometimes refers to this form of hermeneutics as “diacritical hermeneutics.” See, Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 17. For a more complete development of these themes, see Kearney, The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2001).28 Kearney, “The God Who May Be,” p. 155.

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critique of Jacques Derrida. The fact that thinkers like Caputo and Derrida might question the

radical character of other thinkers is no surprise, but what is surprising is the fact that even such

radical hermeneuts or deconstructive thinkers have turned their gaze to the philosophy of religion

in recent years. I will conclude this essay, therefore, with a look at the greatest shock of all: the

“prayers and tears of Jacques Derrida.”

4. Deconstruction: Derrida and Caputo

In his book, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, John Caputo proposes the following

hypothesis:

What if theology were to confess itself no longer able to save the name of God? What if, beyond the economy of sacrifice, it were to give up the name of God to translatability without return? What if it were to pray without (sans) knowing where to direct its prayers, without its sense of destinal assurance, without trusting that its prayers up to heaven rise? What if it were to have faith without faith, foi sans foi (maybe even foi à sang froid), the sans serving to save faith from dogmatism, to believe without quite knowing in what it believed, so that it had to ask, “what do I love when I love my God?”29

This project or hypothesis is based on a series of moves made by Derrida over the past few years

on the possibility of a religion without religion, faith without faith (as in the Faith, the Credo, or

der Glaube), a messianism without a Messiah, or a praying without (sans) direction or addressee.

Caputo and Derrida have argued in one form or another that the religious dimension does not

require either a super-phenomenology or a religious hermeneutics (both of which fail to

adequately take into account and thus deconstruct their onto-theological heritage) in order for

what is most important in religious discourse to be preserved. Derrida captures this hope for a

religion without religion in his book, The Gift of Death.

Christian themes may be drawn together around the idea of the gift as the gift of death, the limitless gift of a particular sort of death: infinite love (the Good as the goodness which infinitely forgets), sin and salvation, and repentance and sacrifice. What is brought about by and lies between these themes and all of their significations, in an internal and necessary manner, is a logic, which at its heart (and this is why we can still, up to a certain point, call it a “logic”) does not require a revelatory event or the revelation of an event. This logic does not need to think about a particular revelatory event but only of the possibility of such an event. This is a major difference, which allows one to participate in such a

29 John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 61-62.

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discussion without referring to a dogmatic, institutional religion. It also allows one to propose a genealogy, which reflects on the possibility and essence of religion without being an article of faith.30

Derrida’s thinking on topics that range along the border of the political/ethical/religious,

challenge us to think of an eschatological hope that resides in the impossible. Even though we

cannot grasp/know what is to come; even if it is impossible for justice/God/the Messiah to come

(there is no way for it to appear), we can still be affected by it, we can still pray for it. Insofar as

post-modernity (a word that has always been rejected by Derrida) takes seriously the death of

God, that is, the impossibility of God’s ex-isting or appearing, it would seem to make religion

impossible. We reach, with Derrida and Caputo, the strongest possible affirmation of this

“postmodern” or deconstructive position, and, at the same time, we have the affirmation that it is

just this impossibility that makes possible true faith.31 If our question at the beginning of this

essay concerned the possibility of post-modern thought approaching or having any share in

religious, discourse, the answer we seem to find in radical hermeneutics here at the end of our

investigation, is more than “yes.” Rather, it may even be something like: If you would be saved,

if you would be truly religious, than a post-modernist you must be”! Quelle surprise! Derrida the

champion of religion? What might he say to this? Perhaps, ambiguously, “Mon Dieu!(?)”

Mark D. GedneyGordon College

Fall 2003

30 Derrida, Donner la mort (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1999), pp. 74-5. Derrida, The Gift of Death, translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 48.31 The roots to Kierkegaard are obvious, but a satisfactory exposition of how these thinkers are related to Kierkegaard is impossible here.

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