TRANSCENDING BOUNDARIES IN

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY

Presenting new opportunities in the dialogue between philosophy and theology,
this interdisciplinary text addresses the contemporary reshaping of intellectual
boundaries. Exploring human experience in a ‘post-Christian’ era, the distinguished
contributors bring to bear what have been traditionally seen as theological resources
while drawing on contemporary developments in philosophy, both ‘continental’ and
‘analytic’.
Set in the context of two complementary narratives – one philosophical
concerning secularity, the other theological about the question of God – the authors
point to ways of reconfiguring both traditional reason / faith oppositions and those
between interpretation / text and language / experience.
 Transcending Boundaries in
Philosophy and Theology
Series editors:
Martin Warner, University of Warwick
Kevin Vanhoozer, Trinity International University

Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology is an interdisciplinary series

exploring new opportunities in the dialogue between philosophy and theology
that go beyond more traditional ‘faith and reason’ debates and take account of the
contemporary reshaping of intellectual boundaries. For much of the modern era,
the relation of philosophy and theology has been conceived in terms of antagonism
or subordination, but recent intellectual developments hold out considerable
potential for a renewed dialogue in which philosophy and theology have common
cause for revisioning their respective identities, reconceiving their relationship, and
combining their resources. This series explores constructively for the 21st century
the resources available for engaging with those forms of enquiry, experience and
sensibility that theology has historically sought to address. Drawing together new
writing and research from leading international scholars in the field, this high profile
research series offers an important contribution to contemporary research across the
interdisciplinary perspectives relating theology and philosophy.

Also in this series

Divine Knowledge
A Kierkegaardian Perspective on Christian Education
David Willows

Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God

Steven Shakespeare

Impossible God
Derrida’s Theology
Hugh Rayment-Pickard

On Paul Ricoeur
The Owl of Minerva
Richard Kearney
Transcending Boundaries in
Philosophy and Theology
Reason, Meaning and Experience

Edited by

KEVIN VANHOOZER
Trinity International University, USA

MARTIN WARNER
University of Warwick, UK
© Kevin Vanhoozer and Martin Warner 2007

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Kevin Vanhoozer and Martin Warner have asserted their moral right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
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Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology: Reason, Meaning and Experience.
– (Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology)
1. Faith and reason. 2. Knowledge, Theory of (Religion). I. Vanhoozer, Kevin J.
II. Warner, Martin.
210

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology: Reason, Meaning, and Experience /
edited by Kevin Vanhoozer and Martin Warner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Philosophy and religion. 2. Theology. I. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. II. Warner, Martin.
B56.T735 2007
201’.61–dc22 2006011954

ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5318-9 (hbk)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-5324-0 (pbk)

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
 Contents

Notes on the Contributors vii

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology 15

Martin Warner

2 Once More Into the Borderlands: The Way of Wisdom in Philosophy

and Theology after the ‘Turn to Drama’ 31
Kevin J. Vanhoozer

Section One: Reason, Rationality and Traditions of Rationality 55

3 What is Secularity? 57
Charles Taylor

4 Rational Religious Faith and Kant’s Transcendental Boundaries 77

Chris L. Firestone

5 Boundaries Crossed and Uncrossable: Physical Science, Social

Science, Theology 91
Philip Clayton

6 The Logos, the Body and the World: On the Phenomenological Border 105
Graham Ward

Section Two: Meaning, Language and Interpretation 127

7 The Question of God Today 129

Nicholas Lash

8 Felicity and Fusion: Speech Act Theory and Hermeneutical Philosophy 145
Dan R. Stiver
vi Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Section Three: Experience, Imagination and Mysticism 157

9 Experience Skewed 159

David Brown

10 On Philosophers (Not) Reading History: Narrative and Utopia 177

Grace M. Jantzen

11 What To Say: Reflections on Mysticism after Modernity 191

George Pattison

Bibliography 207
Index 225
 Notes on the Contributors

David Brown is Van Mildert Professor of Divinity in the University of Durham and a
Fellow of the British Academy; he was formerly a Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford. His
books include The Divine Trinity (1985), Continental Philosophy and Modern Theology
(1987), Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change (1999), Discipleship and
Imagination: Christian Tradition and Truth (2000) and God and the Enchantment of Place
(2004).

Philip Clayton is Ingraham Professor of Theology in Claremont Graduate University;

he was formerly Principal Investigator of the ‘Science and the Spiritual Quest’ project
at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences in Berkeley, California, Humboldt
Professor in the University of Munich, and also winner of the Templeton Book Prize for
the best monograph in the field of science and religion. His books include Explanation
from Physics to Theology (1989), God and Contemporary Science (1997), The Problem of
God in Modern Thought (2000), Mind & Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness
(2004) and (as editor) The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (2006).

Chris L. Firestone is Associate Professor of Philosophy in Trinity College, Deerfield,

Illinois, Trinity International University. His books include Theology at the Transcendental
Bounds of Reason (forthcoming) and (as editor) Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion
(2006).

Grace M. Jantzen died from cancer while this volume was in preparation. She was
Research Professor of Religion, Gender and Culture in the University of Manchester.
Her books include God’s Body (1984), Power and Gender in Christian Mysticism (1995),
Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) and Julian of
Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (2nd edn 2000). At her death she was at work on an
envisaged multi-volume study of the roots of violence in western culture, and the search for
alternatives, entitled Death and the Displacement of Beauty; her Foundations of Violence
(2004) is its first volume.

Nicholas Lash is Norris-Hulse Professor Emeritus of Divinity in the University of

Cambridge, and a former president of the Catholic Theological Association of Great Britain.
His books include Theology on Dover Beach (1979), Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on
Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (1988), The Beginning and the End of
‘Religion’ (1996), Believing Three Ways in One God: A Reading of the Apostles’ Creed
(2003) and Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God (2004).
viii Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Theology in the University of Oxford;
he was formerly Dean of King’s College, Cambridge. His books include Agnosis:
Theology in the Void (1996), The End of Theology and the Task of Thinking about God
(1998), Art, Modernity and Faith: Restoring the Image (2nd edn 1998), Anxious Angels:
A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (1999) and Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding
Discourses: Philosophy, Literature and Theology (2002).

Dan R. Stiver is Professor of Theology in the Logsdon School of Theology, Hardin-

Simmons University; he was formerly Associate Professor of Religious Philosophy in
the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Kentucky. His books include The
Philosophy of Religious Language: Sign, Symbol, and Story (1996) and Theology after
Ricoeur: New Directions in Hermeneutical Theology (2001).

Charles Taylor is Board of Trustees Professor of Law and Philosophy, Northwestern

University, and Professor of Philosophy and Political Science in McGill University; he is
a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Canada, and was formerly
Chichele Professor of Political Science and Social Theory in the University of Oxford.
His books include Hegel (1975), Philosophical Papers (2 vols 1985), Sources of the Self:
The Making of the Modern Identity (1989), The Ethics of Authenticity (1992) and Modern
Social Imaginaries (2004).

Kevin J. Vanhoozer is Research Professor of Systematic Theology in Trinity Evangelical

Divinity School, Trinity International University; he was formerly co-Chair of the Systematic
Theology Group of the American Academy of Religion, and Senior Lecturer in Theology
and Religious Studies in the University of Edinburgh. His books include Biblical Narrative
in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (1990), The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical–linguistic
Approach to Christian Theology (2005) and (as editor) The Cambridge Companion to
Postmodern Theology (2003), Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible (2005)
and Hermeneutics at the Crossroads (2006).

Graham Ward is Professor of Contextual Theology in the University of Manchester and

Senior Executive Editor of Literature and Theology; he was formerly Dean of Peterhouse,
Cambridge. His books include Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (1999), Cities
of God (2000), Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice (2004), Christ and Culture
(2005) and (as editor) The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (2002).

Martin Warner is Associate Fellow of the Department of Philosophy at the University

of Warwick, where he was formerly Senior Lecturer and co-founder of the University’s
Philosophy & Literature research and teaching programmes. His books include
Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion (1989), A Philosophical
Study of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (1999) and (as editor) The Bible as Rhetoric: Studies in
Biblical Persuasion and Credibility (1990), The Language of the Cave (1992) and Religion
and Philosophy (1992).
 Acknowledgements

The contribution by Nicholas Lash is an expanded version of the first chapter of his
Holiness, Speech and Silence (Ashgate, 2004). An earlier version of the contribution
by Charles Taylor entitled ‘Closed world structures’ appeared in Mark A. Wrathall
(ed.), Religion After Metaphysics (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Material
from the earlier papers is reproduced by permission of the authors and, in the latter
case, of Cambridge University Press.
We are grateful to Peter Larkin of the University of Warwick Library for
bibliographical assistance.
This page intentionally left blank
 Introduction

Two Strategies

To transcend a boundary is neither simply to breach nor to ignore it; it is to surmount

or otherwise go beyond that limit. With respect to conceptual boundaries there have
traditionally been two strategies for achieving this. The first is at least as old as
Aristotle, and is nicely exemplified in his own intellectual trajectory from the claim
of the Eudemian Ethics (1217b25–35) that there can be no unitary science of being,
that the boundaries between the different categories of being are in this respect
insurmountable or untranscendable, to his attempt to develop just such a science
(episteme) in the Metaphysics (see 1003a21–b19). It is by now widely recognized
that this seminal development became possible through his increasing grasp of the
potentialities for the dispelling of ambiguities of what has become known as ‘focal
meaning’ (somewhat misleadingly assimilated by the Scholastics to analogy), where
derivative uses of a term are related in principled fashion to a focal case, so a term like
‘being’ or ‘good’ is said ‘relative to one thing and to a single character’ (1003a33–
4; Owen’s translation, 1979: 17). This is a variant of his characteristic dialectical
procedure whereby Aristotle sought to overcome puzzlement by reconceptualizing
the problematic terrain in such a way that it became possible both to understand why
apparently competing positions held the attractions they did and how they may still
play a role in pointing to aspects of the phenomena that no adequate account should
overlook.
Kant appears to make an analogous move in his Third Critique, seeking to find
a vantage point whereby the tensions between the first two Critiques, between
theoretical and practical reason, may be resolved and hence, so Chris Firestone argues
in this volume, the boundary between knowledge and faith transcended. While such
a reading is no doubt controversial, the Hegelian dialectic is often regarded as a
paradigm of such boundary transcendence, though it is indeed but one inflexion
of the possibilities. Here the opposition of thesis and antithesis may be overcome
in a higher ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung); the literal meaning of aufheben is ‘to lift up’
but it can also mean both ‘to cancel’ and ‘to preserve’, and in this context what
is aufgehoben is transcended without being wholly discarded. In all such cases an
attempt is made to develop a new conceptual framework in terms of which familiar
intellectual boundaries may be seen in a new light, and thereby as less fundamental
than they were previously thought to be.
But there is also what may, with some reservations and with an eye to the
incipient paradox, be termed a more ‘immanent’ strategy for transcending conceptual
boundaries (though the two strategies cannot always be sharply separated). Instead
2 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
of the ambitious project of developing a new intellectual map, an attempt is made to
make apparent and press against the limitations of the framework within which one
is working, with an eye to suggesting the possibility and, usually, importance of what
lies (or does not lie) beyond that limit. In literature and music we are familiar with
those ‘limit texts’ that, operating at the limits of their genre, have been instrumental
in reconfiguring the possibilities for their successors: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
and James Joyce’s Ulysses come immediately to mind and, although its subversive
potentialities have perhaps been less obviously exploited, the latter’s Finnegan’s
Wake may be thought of as exploding the genre of the novel from the inside. On
the broadest possible canvas, that of ‘all that is the case’, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
exemplifies this characteristically Modernist procedure:

[T]he aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather – not to thought, but to the
expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to set a limit to thought, we should have to
find both sides of the limit thinkable (i.e. we should have to be able to think what cannot
be thought).
It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the
other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. (1961: § 1 & p. 3)

But this is to ‘view the world … [as] a limited whole’, ethics and aesthetics we note
are transcendent to it, and ‘Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is
mystical’ (§§ 6.421 & 6.45), so it is hardly surprising that these very ‘elucidations’
are to be recognized as ‘nonsensical’; the reader ‘must transcend these propositions,
and then he will see the world aright’ (§ 6.54). Such attempts are indeed problematic,
for without the security of a revised conceptual framework enabling us ‘to find both
sides of the limit thinkable’ they are vulnerable to Frank Ramsey’s famous jeer:
‘What we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t whistle it either.’ (Ramsey 1931: 238)
It is worth noting that by the time of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein
has dropped this sort of ‘immanent’ strategy for overcoming limits in favour of a set
of procedures for helping us to see what for the Tractatus was an absolute limit as
relative to a set of problematic assumptions – as a ‘false prison’ (Pears 1987–88).
Nevertheless Ramseyan tough-mindedness can sometimes appear too easy, blocking
the sort of authentic wrestling with the possibilities of human understanding we find
in Nietzsche’s (grammatically expressed) aphorism: ‘I’m afraid we’re not rid of God
because we still believe in grammar’ (1997: 21).
Both the ‘reconceptualizing’ and the ‘immanent’ strategies for transcending
boundaries – from without, as it were, and from within – are represented in this
volume, including some attempts to combine them. All the contributors see current or
recent ways of configuring theology, philosophy, their procedures, and/or the relation
between them as defective, and a number see recent intellectual developments as
providing resources for seeking to remedy some of those defects in ways that allow
the boundaries between knowledge (or reason) and faith to be seen in a new light
or otherwise transcended. Philip Clayton images such boundaries in terms of walls;
Dan Stiver in terms of ditches (echoing Lessing’s ‘ugly, broad ditch’ between the
‘accidental truths of history’ and the ‘necessary truths of reason’, 1956: 53–5). But
 Introduction 3
what is striking, and highly characteristic of the contemporary intellectual scene, is
that however these boundaries or limits are conceived, while the most dialectical
paper – Graham Ward’s exploration of the phenomenological limits – is in many ways
the most purely ‘immanent’ one, the most favoured mode for seeking an ‘external’,
reconceptualized, perspective on conventional boundaries is that of narrative.

Alternative Perspectives

Charles Taylor and Nicholas Lash provide complementary narrative, diagnostic,

accounts of the contemporary intellectual scene as it bears on religious belief, and in
the light of these propose alternatives to the received wisdom.
In the case of Taylor it is in fact a counter-narrative, for his claim is that our
ability adequately to understand contemporary secular western culture is impeded
by a number of master narratives that ‘naturalize’ secularity. But these master
narratives themselves have a history, and exploring how they came to interlock helps
us to grasp how it has happened that far from intellectually water-tight ‘subtraction
stories’, of the progress of science eliminating ‘transcendental’ myths to establish
materialism and of a humane, autonomous moral identity and social order arising
from the sloughing off of what since Kant has been termed the ‘transcendent’, have
provided mutual support to sponsor a family of conceptual ‘world structures’, closed
to the possibility of any reality ‘transcending’ (that is, surpassing or independent of)
the ‘natural’ or material universe, or the categories of experience, and in such a way
as to make them seem inevitable. What Kevin Vanhoozer describes as Kant’s ‘turn’
to the ‘subject’, with its experiential categories, was of seminal importance here.
Contemporary secularization is thereby understood as mainly a recession of religion
in the face of science, technology and rationality. Once held captive by such a picture,
experience of the spiritual and the sacred becomes marginal at best. But recognition
that such ‘closed world structures’ are themselves historically constructed helps de-
naturalize secularity, and recent philosophical developments have put in question the
materials out of which they have been constructed. The closed boundary that tends
to ‘blank out the transcendent’ ceases to be the limit of our world, but rather an all
too human construction.
This is a broadly philosophical narrative. Nicholas Lash provides a theological
counterpart. In the early modern period, as part of the construction of modern
moral identity, traditional ‘authorities’ were discarded in the search for certainty
and power, and this involved a shift in imaginative and intellectual ambition. In
seeking intellectual mastery of the world, ‘the word “god” came to be used, for the
first time, to name the ultimate explanation of the system of the world’, and once it
became felt that there was no need for this hypothesis modern ‘atheism’ was born.
The term ‘atheism’ is put into scare quotes not simply because it, like ‘theism’,
‘monotheism’ and ‘polytheism’, was invented in the seventeenth century, but because
so understood (at least if that ultimate explanatory principle is understood as a being
of a certain kind) atheists turn out to have at least this in common with Christians,
4 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Jews and Muslims, ‘that none of them believes in gods’. Before modernity ‘gods’
were understood as whatever people worshipped, but description has usurped
worship as the primary context for the use of the word. To use Taylor’s terminology,
the developing secularization associated with closed world structures has in effect
naturalized the transcendent in the very process of marginalizing it. In retrieving
that earlier relational conception of the divine the boundaries between believer and
unbeliever shift and, it is argued, we need to learn again that speaking appropriately
of God is, while not impossible, difficult and even dangerous, ‘because appropriate
speech brings to language appropriate relationship’, a relationship that in the case of
God essentially involves responsibility for ‘truthful speech and action’.
Lash notes that the story needs to be told differently in English- and German-
speaking cultures, though the bifurcated narrative converges on the contemporary
substitution of the language of description for the language of address as the
primary grammar of the concept of God. In the former God became an (ultimately
unnecessary) explanatory hypothesis in the scientific system of the world, but in
the latter it was philosophy rather than physics that displaced theology. Theology is
properly ‘response speech’, but German metaphysics from Kant onwards substituted
‘pure thought for prayerful reflection’. And in any full narrative of the development
of the intellectual horizons of contemporary culture, as already noted, the Kantian
influence is inescapable. His First Critique may be seen as developing the materials
for a closed world structure bounded by the limits of the phenomenal, and yet his
Second appears to open the possibility of breaching that boundary, of giving access
to the noumenal. The tension thus set up (which Wittgenstein’s Tractatus echoes) is
still with us. Chris Firestone tackles this tension head on.
Drawing on recent Kantian scholarship, he too recounts a narrative, albeit one
with a much narrower focus: that of the development of Kant’s critical philosophy.
The traditional reading, which ‘puts a debilitating boundary line between knowledge
and faith’, arises from giving primary weight to the First Critique and not taking
sufficient account of the way that Kant’s understanding of these matters developed
over time. (It would, after all, be unwise to seek to interpret Book Г of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics to make it conform with the Eudemian Ethics.) On the proposed
reading, Kant in his Third Critique indicates that we must go beyond theoretical
and moral philosophy to considerations of teleology, aesthetics, poetics and religion
in order to resolve the tensions arising from the attempt to harmonize his response
to the question ‘What ought I to do?’ in the Second Critique with that to ‘What can
I know?’ in the First, to stabilize the relations between practical and pure reason.
Further, attention to the later writings makes it clear that in this project rational
religious faith (where ‘religious’ is conceived in broadly Christian terms) plays a
major role in enabling us to grasp what the Third Critique (1952: 176) describes as the
‘ground of the unity of the supersensible’ and thereby stabilize reason. On Firestone’s
account, contemporary scholarship enables us to see that rational religious faith is
Kant’s way of finally coming to terms with the transcendental needs of reason in a
critically satisfying way, and the very dynamic of his thinking points forwards to
contemporary possibilities. ‘Understanding Kant means transcending Kant’, and the
 Introduction 5
retrieval of his final perspective opens the possibility of ‘completing the development
of a transcendental theology consonant with what reason requires and what history
demands’. So understood, Kant’s resistance to closed world structures can be seen
as grounded in his understanding of the nature of reason itself.
Such a proposal puts in sharp focus the criteria for interpreting and reinterpreting
texts, and for seeking to ‘complete’ their projects. In what sense can understanding
a text involve transcending it? For religions with authoritative scriptures this is a
particularly delicate issue. And here Dan Stiver’s contribution is to the point. It has
long been recognized that more needs to be considered than simply the standard
meaning of the words with their grammatical constructions, for how they are taken
may affect their meaning (one remembers Nicodemus’ literal-minded bafflement
at being invited, as he saw it, to ‘enter the second time into his mother’s womb’,
John 3:4). A new orthodoxy appears to be emerging in theology and biblical studies
whereby a development of speech act theory to include texts is taken to provide the
required framework, providing a principled account of the conventions in terms of
which words are uttered and texts written. Further, by enabling us to take account
not only of what is written, but of what is done in what is written, it throws light on
the notoriously problematic, yet theologically central, notion of God speaking, for
example commanding, assuring and promising through the words of Scripture. But
this move sponsors its own limitations; it is in danger of relativizing all discourse
to culturally available conventions and renders the interpretation of texts from
authors or cultures about which our knowledge is defective virtually impossible. So
understood, such an orthodoxy is in danger of becoming the hermeneutic equivalent
of a ‘closed world structure’.
To transcend its boundaries, Stiver argues, we need to have recourse also to
perspectives associated with the hermeneutic tradition as reconfigured by Heidegger,
Gadamer and Ricoeur. We need to take account of what is meaningful to us as well
as what could have been significant at the time of the production of the text; we need
to seek to fuse these two ‘horizons’. There are no hard and fast rules here, for even
when we have some grasp of the available conventions we need to judge what has
been done, perhaps creatively, with them; such judgement is to be understood as a
form of ‘phronesis’, Aristotle’s term (originally deployed in ethics) for applying
general rules to particular situations, for deliberating well. And such judgement
needs to take account of the tacit ways in which beliefs and attitudes are embodied,
which may require vivid and empathetic imagining. But this indicates that meaning
may not be transparent to the consciousness of either author or reader, and ‘the
hermeneutics of suspicion’ help us interrogate the possibilities of distortion provided
by the available conventions, as well as by ideologies and vested interests. Charles
Taylor’s counter-narrative to those that lie behind his ‘closed world structures’ may
itself be seen as an exercise in the hermeneutics of suspicion. Thus the perspectives
now made available by contemporary hermeneutic theory enable us to see the more
limited framework as just that. By rooting texts in the broader context of human
horizons, cultures, interests and readers, they provide us with ‘phronetic’ criteria to
judge when we need go beyond conventional readings, when to engage in critique
6 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
as a part of interpreting them, and perhaps even make sense of the notion that the
dynamic of a text may point us to forms of understanding unavailable to its author.
With David Brown we move from the interpretation of texts to that of experience.
Even among those whose world structures are not closed, there appears to be something
of an impasse with respect to the possibility of that which transcends the physical
universe breaking through, partially, in experience (not of course in its totality,
otherwise it would have become immanent). The issue is often focused in the notion
of ‘religious experience’. In contemporary debates within the analytical tradition of
philosophy of religion it tends to be understood as constituting a specifiable, fairly
narrow, range of experiences that may be regarded as religiously evidential. But in
forms of theology strongly focused on the ‘otherness’ of God such a privileged status
is characteristically denied, and attention directed to the literary hermeneutics of
texts, such as those of the Bible, that purport to record such experiences (a move of
course widely advocated in today’s intellectual community, strongly influenced by
what Vanhoozer describes as a culture-wide intellectual ‘turn’ to language). On this
account, properly speaking there are no isolatable elements of experience that can
properly be designated ‘religious’.
But neither approach is plausible. Authoritative sacred texts themselves allude
to distinctive forms of experience as disclosing the transcendent, such as the vision
of Jesus’ exaltation in the Gospels we call the Transfiguration; to flatten out their
distinctiveness runs counter to what faithful literary hermeneutic interrogation of
the texts displays. And the philosophers’ preoccupation with evidence tends to skew
their models for interpreting such experience in terms of epistemically privileged
categories such as perception (rather than, say, the sense of beauty) and of action
(rather than just being). Worse, this sort of modelling of the evidential seems
premised on the conviction that such experience should be taken as actual experience
of a being of a specific kind, the sort Christians would call ‘God’, a conviction we
have seen to be itself theologically inept, a function of closed world structures. The
common, misleading, assumption is that religious experience is an absolute, an all
or nothing affair, ideally without mediation through the senses or culture. However,
no experience can escape mediation, and though the religious traditions teach that
God may be found in the ordinary, not simply the strange or spectacular, we should
note that experience can be understood as being from God without being of God:
interpreting an event as an answer to prayer is very different from a simple sense of
transcendent awe in the presence of a mountain landscape. These apparently opposed
modes of misconstruing, or ‘skewing’, the phenomena point to the need to regain a
perspective in which different and potentially conflicting aspects of experience may
be built into a whole in any argument from religious experience, and ‘experiences of
religious mystery’ may be recognized and ‘placed’ in a continuum that resists simple
‘evidential’ modelling but may yet point to an account of what might make such an
experience possible and intelligible.
While David Brown argues for a perspective in which ‘religious’ and ‘ordinary’
experience may be seen as part of a continuum, Philip Clayton reports the increasing
recognition of continuities across the once sharp dichotomy between science and
 Introduction 7
religion. Like Stiver, he reads the signs of the times positively, as indicating a
breaking open of one of the key building blocks of Taylor’s hegemonic closed world
structures, in that the received ‘subtraction story’ of the development of science has
been losing ground. In the days of that story’s power, the boundary between science
and religion represented the fundamental boundary of the modern period, but now
the very distinction between them ‘has become a matter of debate’, and there is
increasing recognition of their mutual dependence. The counter-movement started
within the sciences themselves, when the recognition that the natural sciences are in
part interpretative began to break down the boundary between the natural and social
sciences, thereby giving rise to a new paradigm of science as the overcoming of
puzzlement in place of that of grasping an object of study objectively.
This account no longer presupposes a qualitative distinction between scientific
and non-scientific rationality, and the possibility of drawing ‘clear lines of implication
from main-line scientific work to some underlying metaphysical position’ is now
widely accepted. Theology has significant features in common with all areas of
enquiry, and religious struggles with fundamental questions are different more in
degree than in kind from those of the social (and indeed aspects of the natural)
sciences. Understanding our existence, Clayton maintains, is enhanced when all
the sciences can work together with theologians and scholars of religion. Despite
some notable nay-sayers, sniping across ‘the walls of the past’, he argues that a
clear knowledge of the differences between theology and the sciences encourages a
sense of their complementarity, and sees those walls as increasingly becoming ‘more
tourist destinations than functional blocks to … incursions’.
For Kant faith is a matter of the will or heart, and in the first instance associated
with practical reason rather than the pure reason that undergirds the sciences. And
for Christianity love is central, involving both Lash’s ‘appropriate relationship’ with
God and engagement with one’s neighbour (Kant saw the Categorical Imperative
as exhibiting the Golden Rule). This suggests that ‘God-talk’ should be understood
primarily in dynamic and dramatic terms, a proposal developed by Kevin Vanhoozer.
His proposed reconceptualization is developed in part cartographically, which the
word ‘perspective’ seems to invite, but it also contains a strong narrative element.
The ways in which one maps the varying boundaries between philosophy and
theology, and their degrees of insurmountability, will turn significantly on the
self-understanding of each discipline. These have of course varied over time and
between practitioners, but as cultural products neither is immune to the surrounding
intellectual currents, and it is noteworthy that within the recent past influential
elements of each have been subject, in swift succession or even contemporaneously,
to a number of reconceptualizations or ‘turns’: to the subject (most notably in Kant),
to language (as noted in their different ways by both Stiver and Brown), to narrative
(as exemplified by most of the foregoing accounts) and to ‘social practice’ (whose
imprint, as we shall shortly see, may be found in Grace Jantzen’s contribution). The
last three of these Vanhoozer groups together as exemplifications of the ‘hermeneutic’
imagination which he, like Stiver, understands in terms of phronesis, of deliberating
well.
8 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Today, he suggests, we can see the potentiality for deepening the significance of
these shifts of perspective in terms of yet another ‘turn’: to embodied action and,
more specifically, to drama, such that theological doctrines state acts, not simply
facts, and direct us to participate in these acts. One notes that Lash’s narrative of
the substitution of the language of description, in relation to God, for a language
of address that essentially involves relationship and hence appropriate action bears
the mark of at least three of these ‘turns’. In contemporary analytic philosophy the
theory of content (at once linguistic and mental) is increasingly seen as basic for an
adequate understanding of subjectivity, with the subject modelled less in terms of the
spectator or thinker than of the agent who relates to the world by acting in and on it.
Indeed, it has become customary to speak of the ‘practical turn’ in this connection,
for individuation of content essentially involves the ability to discriminate one
‘demonstrative’ thought from another, to discriminate between thoughts that enable
us to refer to particular items and their properties (to this dining chair and to that
one), and ‘the distinctive standard use of demonstratives is a use grounded in our
capacity to act upon objects and, in turn, be acted upon by them’ (Luntley 1999:
343). For Vanhoozer such agency is essentially interactive and ‘dramatic’, with these
categories having application beyond the understanding or construction of the self,
so that both theology and philosophy may be reconceived in terms of participating
in being-as-action, of ‘living well with others’, and theological doctrines understood
in terms of directions for how rightly to relate to reality, a perspective which enables
a further remapping, and in some cases transcendence, of received boundaries in the
borderlands of theology.

Pressing the Boundary

‘Now my hammer rages fiercely against its prison’, declared Zarathustra (Nietzsche
1969a: II, ‘On the blissful islands’, p. 111). A certain controlled rage may be thought
to infuse Grace Jantzen’s invocation of those who have been marginalized by past
and present ‘hegemonic discourses’ and her advocacy of the imagination’s ‘utopian
function’. Crucial elements of Taylor’s dominant closed world structure, with its
supposedly autonomous moral identity and social order, can be seen in her ‘auto-
narrative of traditional history, the complacent story (in the West) of progress,
freedom and democracy, ideas often treated as universals’ (a treatment that helps, of
course, close the structure). This story is seen as a form of ideology, and hence false
consciousness, but rather than providing a large-scale counter- (or meta-) narrative in
the style of Taylor she presses against its framework of presuppositions by drawing
on disruptive elements of particularity still retrievable within it, including elements
highlighted by recent work in feminist theology and philosophy, not least by pointing
to the role in our self-understanding of the multiplicity of ways in which we tell our
own life-stories. The inescapable role of birth within such a story, which necessarily
involves others both in its actuality and in our ability to know anything of it, points
 Introduction 9
to the human limits of individualism; we can die, but hardly be born, alone. Yet it is
upon the stories of narratable selves that historical accounts must stand or fall.
This casts light on western religious identity. The auto-narrative of the Israelites
as we find it in the Bible has had an afterlife which, in combination with the
narratives of Classical civilization, has profoundly shaped western consciousness,
even in its secular forms; such notions as ‘progress’ and ‘development’ are secular
variants of ‘salvation history’, constituting the goals of a family of Vanhoozer’s
social practices. The dominant (gendered) version of this narrative is death-focused:
salvation comes through the sacrifice of Christ and ‘men follow the Lord of Hosts
to battle’; one is reminded of the traditional characterization of the Church on earth
as ‘militant’. But another version is open to us, one that focuses on birth rather
than death, with newness, creativity and hope, always in interconnection with other
selves, each unique and irreplaceable. Salvation bespeaks atomistic individualism,
rescue from an intolerable situation, not a change in the situation itself. But the
model of ‘flourishing’ implies interconnection in a web of life, and is vitally reliant
upon the body, and upon nourishment and reproduction. Both models are to be found
in the biblical writings. That of flourishing is well focused in Jesus’ ‘I am come that
they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly’ (John 10:10). That
of salvation has very largely displaced this, however, giving rise to ‘an ideology of
dominance and the technologies and practices of violence, while natality, creativity,
beauty and flourishing have been suppressed or ignored’. By listening to voices
from the margins of biblical texts, and from the history of religion in the West,
there remain resources for creativity, and the desire it expresses, for imagining and
working towards newness. Retrieval of the alternative model helps enable us to
recognize that ‘salvation’ and its secular counterparts are in these contexts used as
metaphors – salvation is not ‘literal doctrine’ – and thus weakens the power of the
pictures they sponsor to hold us captive.
The body and desire also feature prominently in Graham Ward’s exercise in
pressing the limits of phenomenology. As conceived by Husserl, the latter operates
at a more basic level than that of the cultural narratives Jantzen seeks to reconfigure,
for its work of ‘reduction’, investigating what is given in immediate intuition, aims
at recovering the ‘primordial’, the ‘ultimate limit’. In this respect it has affinities with
the project of the Tractatus, and as with that project it thereby points beyond itself, for
pure description, free from interpretation, is a mirage. We cannot distil the experience
of a phenomenon’s primordial givenness to consciousness from its representation
to consciousness. A star is perceived differently by the pagan astrologist and the
contemporary astronomer. Thus there have been repeated attempts to ‘reach beyond
phenomenology’, yet the attempt to do this in theological terms is characteristically
resisted, even resisted as ‘a transgression of phenomenology’s project’. But this
objection, Ward maintains, is in itself such a transgression for it embodies the secular
assumption that the horizons of the immanent are not themselves constituted by that
which gives and transcends them; however, phenomenology aspires to a rigorous
neutrality on such matters, and there is no good reason why the phenomenological
method may not be employed as part of a theological analysis. This he undertakes
10 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
with respect to what it is to be embodied, incarnate (there is an affinity here with
Vanhoozer’s ‘dramatic’ emphasis on embodied action), with specific reference to a
phenomenological analysis of touch, seen as more fundamental than sight and as
operating at the juncture between the corporeal and the spiritual. The body itself
can have knowledge, which is tactile rather than conceptual and informed by desire
(including erotic desire), which is itself informed by the way that body sensuously
encounters and negotiates the thoughts and knowledges of other bodies. Further,
touch cannot distance (unlike sight and hearing), ‘does not submit to a general
vocabulary without ceasing to be what it is’, and thus communicates only to the other
being touched. It may thereby be used to model both the intimacy of God’s presence,
‘God’s profound touch’, and the goal of contemplation, to know even as I am known.
So understood, touch is an orientation towards being incarnate and it finds its true
self-understanding in love. Bodies ‘strive towards a condition that the account of the
Word made flesh narrativizes’, and thus it is the mystery of embodiment itself that
moves us beyond phenomenology and towards the theology of phenomena. Through
pressing the phenomenological project in terms of our embodied condition we find
that ‘the limits (and beyond) of phenomenology are theological’.

Combining the Strategies

Distinguishing between strategies ‘from without’ and ‘from within’ for transcending
boundaries can be a useful heuristic and expository device, but it should not be
pressed too far. Aristotle was led to his reconceptualizations in part, at least, from
finding (‘immanently’, as it were) that the available conceptual resources were
constricting and hence distorting, and Nietzsche’s hammering against the prison
walls of grammar enabled him to see himself as preparing for and announcing a new
perspective, that of the ‘great noon’ (1968: Ecce Homo, ‘Dawn’, II), which he could
grasp only imperfectly but sufficiently to discern that in the light of it ‘everything
stood on its head’ (1968: Ecce Homo, ‘Twilight of the Idols’, I).
For at least two contributions to this volume, attempting to enforce the
distinction brings diminishing returns. With George Pattison we move from Husserl
to Heidegger, who is used to provide an alternative perspective for the understanding
of mysticism, which is then inflected by Dostoevsky. Thus far his paper exemplifies
the first strategy. But the impetus for this challenge to a widespread contemporary
consensus, dominated by Vanhoozer’s ‘linguistic turn’ whose role in theological
accounts of ‘religious experience’ was noted by Brown, arises from the sense that
the bounds of the linguistic prison that consensus sponsors are radically unstable,
for the intentionality embodied in language points beyond itself to the matter that
language ‘means’ or ‘intends’. The consensus appears to form part of a closed world
structure in terms of which experiences are to be understood as generated and shaped
by symbolic systems. In contesting this, Pattison considers Heidegger’s insistence
that language and Being are not separable, and in this context invokes the latter’s
‘event of appropriation’ to help us see how ‘an absolute experience of nothingness’,
 Introduction 11
while indeterminate with regard to conceptual content, may be appropriated by us in
the form of a determinate structure of meaning. However, whereas for Heidegger the
sole occurrence of language capable of recalling us to an awareness of being is found
in the poetic word, speaking from beyond the orbit of quotidian affairs, for Pattison
a novelist such as Dostoevsky can similarly speak to us, though polyphonically out
of the very experience of modernity, in a way that requires our own engagement in
the argument. Yet while Dostoevsky’s text rehearses the experience of modernity
itself, it is not closed to the possibility of experiences that seem to come from beyond
our present cultural horizons. The Heideggerian perspective, both in its poetic,
Hölderlin-like, form – coming as it were out of the silence – and in its novelistic
polyphonic version in terms of lived experience with others, enables us coherently
to claim that in interpreting events that seem to befall us as experiences of something
‘from beyond’, we are not simply shuffling our linguistic tokens. In this respect at
least, ‘we remain free to contest the world-view of our age’.
In an intellectual context dominated by closed world structures, mysticism not
implausibly tends to be located at the margins of discourse. Martin Warner’s attempt
to redress the balance of the old forms of conceptual mapping engages with that
context’s heartlands. His paper argues that when we attempt to think through the
distinction between knowledge and belief, which since Kant has been taken as
marking the most fundamental boundary between philosophy and theology, taking
account of such theological perspectives as ‘knowledge by identification’, we find
that it needs radical reconfiguration, not just as a matter of Kantian scholarship as with
Firestone, but more generally. And in this reconfiguration we find that philosophy
is itself a kind of writing (for Vanhoozer, indeed, it is a kind of drama) inescapably
enmeshed in imaginative and rhetorical procedures, and that the ‘phronetic’ model of
reasoning (championed by Stiver and Vanhoozer) enables us to see that some forms
of interdependence between rational principle and subjectivity do not necessarily
foreclose objectivity, and hence that the boundaries between reason, sensation,
emotion and will attacked by Nietzsche (1997: 83) need themselves to be subjected
to the hermeneutics of suspicion. The principles underlying any hermeneutic,
however, need themselves to be interrogated, and here we find that attention needs
to be paid to the broader contexts of thought and action of both interpreter and
interpreted, and also – thereby radicalizing the claims of Stiver and Vanhoozer –
that the idea that philosophers of language, biblical critics and other interpreters of
religious texts, literary critics, legal theorists and theorists of hermeneutics should
each work within distinct intellectual boundaries needs itself to be put in question.
Such considerations could all be construed as ‘immanent’ forms of critique, seeking
to show that in the contemporary context some of the most fundamental boundaries
need to be at least rethought, but there is also the suggestion that these are not just
reflections of contemporary concerns and that we may be able to retrieve elements
of half-forgotten traditions of intellectual engagement, such as Pascalian finesse,
which are subversive of these boundaries and provide perspectives for rendering
such reconfigurations intelligible.
12 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Reconfiguration

The very project of transcending boundaries in philosophy and theology invites

attention to that which lies between the two. On Charles Taylor’s account a set
of master, broadly philosophical, narratives have established a certain intellectual
hegemony in significant parts of the academy, which have had the effect of
‘normalizing’ secularity more widely. The resulting family of interconnected closed
world structures presents theology with a dilemma: either to operate in terms of
secular norms, epistemological, historical, sociological, linguistic, hermeneutic and
so on, or to insist on its own integrity at the cost of losing credibility in its engagements
with the secular world – of having intellectual warrant for preaching only to the
converted. The first horn of the dilemma effectively eliminates theology as a form
of enquiry with its own integrity, its continuing existence becoming dependent on
administrative structures: part ecclesiastical, part educational, part bibliographical.
Theology’s boundary is ‘transcended’ only in the sense that Poland’s was transcended
when its third partition removed it from the map. If we embrace the second horn,
then philosophy’s concern is with reason and knowledge, theology’s with faith and
revelation, and the boundary between them is insurmountable. Further, it is situated
at the extreme limit of our closed world structure and theology is thereby thrust to its
periphery. Vanhoozer’s paper seeks to escape the horns of this dilemma.
Its presuppositions are, however, questionable, and its implications less than
compelling, as we have seen. The narratives normalizing secularity, the ‘subtraction
stories’ of science and morality, together with the more positive story of human
progress giving rise to the contemporary social and economic order, are deeply
flawed, historically and epistemologically; thus intellectually informed and rigorous
interrogation of the making of the modern identity can disrupt their normalizing
function. They are also open to theological critique, for several have religious roots
and the defects of the stories are in part a function of defective theology. Thus the
shift from a relational to a descriptive concept of God enabled the subtraction story of
science, and unhealthy focus on the metaphor of salvation in Christian theology gave
shape to the narrative of progress. Further, while Kant’s seminal articulation of the
division between knowledge and faith is often read as providing intellectual warrant
for the development of closed world structures incompatible with his thought, it
seems that in the later phases of his critical philosophy he is feeling his way to a form
of religious faith with grounds at once transcendental and rational.
When we turn to the implications of such a closed world understanding of human
experience it seems to fare no better. When philosophy presses its phenomenological
boundaries it regularly finds the need to transcend them, and when the focus
is on our embodied condition it is plausible to maintain that to do so it requires
properly theological resources. And to the extent that the philosophy/theology
divide sponsors that between science and religion, it is noteworthy that there is
increasing recognition of forms of complementarity incompatible with closed world
structures. While the papers that follow offer a number of different suggestions for
reconfiguring the boundary between philosophy and theology, there is a general
 Introduction 13
consensus that conceiving of it in traditional terms as a middle wall of partition is
no longer sustainable.
The other major boundaries that are addressed concern language, and in particular
those between experience or text on the one hand, and interpretation on the other.
With respect to texts, whether in philosophy or theology, the attempt to transcend
that between interpreted and interpreter through ‘fusion’ of their respective horizons
requires an element of critique (in principle of both horizons) if the one is not to
be absorbed into the other. Such critique should ideally take account of a much
broader horizon than simply that of the text, and also recognize the latter as an
active force, not merely a passive object of study, such that the interplay between
text and reader may be understood in dynamic, even dramatic, terms, making sense
of the claim that to understand Kant may indeed be to transcend Kant. With respect
to experience, the recognition that all forms of it are mediated has led some to
subordinate experience to language, such that experiences are to be understood as
generated and shaped by symbolic systems. Since these systems are functions of
culture this is effectively a reinscription of a closed world structure, eliminating the
need to take seriously the disruptive possibility that that structure might itself be
subverted by experience, whether ‘religious’ or other. This is once again the partition
of Poland strategy, overcoming a boundary by eliminating it. But while claims for
extra-linguistic experience, where this is understood to be outside and beyond all
cultural relativity, are no doubt unsustainable, so is linguistic idealism. We need so
to conceive language as to allow for a certain mutuality between experience and
interpretation, as we do in the case of texts; in doing so we may well need to go
beyond our accustomed categories.
Whether with respect to the boundary between language and experience, between
interpretation and text, or indeed between philosophy and theology, it is worth
enquiring what, other than bulldozing the boundary, might make mutuality between
what lies each side of the divide possible and intelligible. Contemporary suspicion
of established categories makes the enterprise opportune. Recent rethinking of
rationality and of the status of scientific knowledge, together with developments in
the philosophy of language and interpretation theory, point to the interconnections
between dialectic, rhetoric and narrative in such a way as to reconfigure the roles
of practice and of inwardness in our understanding of the world, together with the
potentiality for transcending some of the traditional contrasts between knowledge
and faith.
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 Chapter 1

Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy

and Theology
Martin Warner

Knowledge and Belief

‘I know that my redeemer liveth’; Handel’s musical setting makes the stress
unmistakable and, through the popularity of his oratorio, has made this affirmation
resonate through the English-speaking world. But from the point of view of classic
epistemology it would appear an odd sort of knowledge. In the context from which
it is taken (Job 19:25) the words seem less an expression of justified true belief (the
familiar tripartite definition, despite recurrent critique from Plato onwards) than of
anguished hope against hope, hence the exclamation following the sentence of which
the affirmation is a part, in the Revised Standard Version: ‘My heart faints within
me!’ The translators of the New English Bible lose their nerve in a paraphrase: ‘But
in my heart I know that my vindicator lives’; one is reminded of Austin’s ‘We all
feel the very great difference between saying even “I’m absolutely sure” and saying
“I know”’ (Austin 1961: 68). On Austin’s account ‘I know’ provides a warrant for
others of a kind reports of psychological states do not; qualifying ‘I know’ with ‘in
my heart’ looks suspiciously like taking away with one hand what is given with the
other. It would hardly have suited Handel’s purposes.
Of course the text here is notoriously corrupt, and Christian prefigurative
commentary lies behind Handel and his librettist. What is clear is that Job’s
developing hope that in some way God will prove to be just, despite all appearances,
is given especial prominence and associated with the deepest awe. If paraphrase
rather than translation is what is sought then there is much to be said for the New
English Bible version; Job’s ‘knowledge’ about his goel (redeemer or vindicator)
looks more like a fleeting insight (or of course flash of wishful thinking), partially
foreshadowed but immediately lost to view, than even a settled conviction, let alone
knowledge in the epistemologist’s sense, and the same goes for the associated claim
(on some readings) that ‘without my flesh shall I see God’, lost sight of not just for
the rest of the book but for centuries thereafter. In context, Job’s claim may express a
psychological state but is hardly a reliable warrant for others. In subsequent religious
tradition ‘believe’ has figured a good deal more prominently than ‘know’, while
claims to knowledge or gnosis have often been treated with considerable reserve
– the early Church, in particular, setting its face against ‘gnosticism’.
16 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Along these lines one might develop a familiar type of commentary. Knowledge
requires justification, a suggestion going back to the proposal in Plato’s Theaetetus
that it should be analysed in terms of true opinion with a rational explanation,
justification or logos. But, as Plato’s Socrates pointed out, the problems of circularity
here are difficult to avoid the moment one tries to analyse and clarify the status of
‘justification’ or ‘logos’. Often justification has been construed in foundationalist
terms, and with increasing scepticism about the possibility of any ‘hard’ data that
could act as a relevantly informative foundation doubts have developed about
knowledge itself. If knowledge is a derivative notion whose derivation remains
perpetually elusive, we are perhaps best advised to concentrate on more fundamental
notions such as truth and the varieties of justification for belief (though some of
course have resisted relegating knowledge to a derivative category). On such an
account the religious emphasis on belief rather than knowledge has been prescient
and the important issue lies in the forms of justification, if any, for religious belief
or beliefs. From his perspective among the ashes, scraping his sores with a potsherd
and convinced of his innocence, the justification of Job’s belief in the justice of
God, it appears, seems remarkably weak, hence perhaps his hope against hope for a
vindicator.
To which there is, of course, an equally familiar riposte. One should discriminate
between varieties of belief, and those associated with religious faith are importantly
different from those central to classic epistemology, from the belief that Socrates
is snub-nosed to the belief that Fermat’s last theorem is provable; faith in God is
not to be construed analogously to the belief that the abominable snowman exists,
or that a greatest prime number does not, or even that every event has a cause (on
some accounts empirical, analytic and synthetic a priori beliefs or judgements
respectively). Often the distinction is drawn between ‘belief that’, the province of
the epistemologist, and ‘belief in’, that of personal relations and religious faith, with
the claim that neither is reducible to the other. Of course this can hardly be a claim
about surface grammar, since ‘Jones believes that the abominable snowman exists’
can be idiomatically rendered ‘Jones believes in the existence of the abominable
snowman’ and vice versa; rather, this convenient if perhaps potentially misleading
shorthand points to the claim that ‘an attitude to a proposition’ is radically different
from ‘an attitude to a person, whether human or divine’ (Price 1969: 426). On such
an account the favoured forms of ‘belief in’ involve forms of trust, in the reliability or
faithfulness of that in which one believes (not only persons, a complication perhaps
insufficiently noticed), and seeking justifications or tests for such belief may often
be not merely inappropriate but even radically counterproductive, as in a number of
Shakespeare’s plays; in religious terms: ‘Thou shalt not tempt (that is, test) the Lord
thy God’. It is this sort of trust in God’s faithfulness, not justified (or unjustified) true
(or false) belief, that Job here expresses.
But perhaps this is a little too easy; denying knowledge to make room for faith
has a suspiciously anachronistic, Kantian, ring. The various gnosticisms were, after
all, not entirely without scriptural support, and it may be that it was (at least in part)
their models of knowledge (often with Platonic overtones) that proved problematic in
 Martin Warner 17
Christian terms rather than invocations of knowledge as such. ‘We know [oidamen,
the same verb as in the Septuagint translation of Job’s affirmation] that we have
passed from death into life’, writes St John, ‘because we love the brethren’ (1 John
3:14), and the impending regress is blocked with ‘By this we know that we love the
children of God, when we love God and keep his commandments’ (5:2); again, he
maintains, ‘By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought
to lay down our lives for the brethren’ (3:16). In each case a form of explanation,
indeed warrant, is offered for that which is affirmed as known, but the type of
logos or justification offered is rather different from those familiar from classic
epistemology. The knowledge in question relates to correct interpretation: in the first
case knowledge of one’s own status is warranted by one’s attitude and knowledge of
one’s attitude is, in part, warranted by one’s behaviour; in the second case knowledge
of the nature of love is provided by correct interpretation of another’s action, which
together warrant a pattern of behaviour.
Though the Greek should not be pressed too far, St John also seems to provide
what is at least the suggestion of a contrast between belief and knowledge, ‘I write
this to you who believe (pisteuousin) in the name of the Son of God, that you may
know (eidete) that you have eternal life’ (5:13); the New English Bible offers ‘to
assure you’ (Austin’s warrant) for ‘that you may know’. ‘Belief in’ being taken
as given, the further knowledge or assurance is provided by his own letter which
provides the recipients with criteria to test their own status: ‘let us not love in word
or speech but in deed and in truth. By this we shall know that we are of the truth’
(3:18–19). Once again knowledge is related to attitude and action, which of course
brings Johannine ‘knowledge’ close to Pauline ‘faith’. But, again like St Paul in the
case of faith, such knowledge points beyond itself: ‘it does not yet appear what we
shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see
him as he is’ (3:2). Rowan Williams’s commentary on this passage is to the point:
‘Knowledge of God is not a subject’s conceptual grasp of an object, it is sharing
what God is, … knowledge by identification, loving union.… God is known in and
by the exercise of crucifying compassion’ (St John’s ‘laying down his life’) and ‘if
we are like him in that, we know him’ (Williams 1990: 14).
Selective quotation from biblical texts is, of course, of little value in itself. What
gives wider significance to such passages is the way that this model of knowledge of
God has played a significant role in Christian (and indeed other monotheistic) theology
and spirituality. What is essential to it is that such knowledge has an inescapably
subjective element, more closely akin to personal knowledge than to knowledge of
the truth of propositions: God is discerned in the context of a transformed pattern
of life into which, phenomenologically speaking, it seems that one is drawn, rather
than God’s existence and characteristics being deduced from sets of observations
and concepts independent of the life of faith; John’s offer of assurance is ‘to you
who believe’. St Augustine, in his influential Confessions, tells how he was led by
his reading of ‘the Platonists’ to explore his own inwardness and there encountered
‘the immutable light higher than my mind’, but nevertheless found himself ‘far from
you’ (Augustine 1992: VII x 16, p. 123) for ‘Where was the charity which builds on
18 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
the foundation of humility which is Christ Jesus? When would the Platonist books
have taught me that?’ (VII xx 26, p. 130) God, for Augustine, makes himself known
as he who ‘resists the proud’ through giving grace to the humble that seek to love
God and neighbour; it was the experience of humiliation that enabled him to grasp
‘with what mercy you have shown humanity the way of humility in that your “Word
was made flesh and dwelt among men”’ (IV xv 26; p. 66; Vii ix 13, p. 121), and led
him to that central insight of the work ‘Da quod jubes et jube quod vis’, ‘Grant what
you command, and command what you will’ (X xxix 40, p. 202, etc.), the repeated
cry which sparked the Pelagian schism (in this respect Pelagian epistemology is far
more Platonist). For Augustine nearness to God is the same as likeness to God, for
‘it is not by place, but by being unlike Him, that a man is afar from God’ (Augustine
1979: Ps. 95.2, p. 467; Ps. 94.2 in original, fuller, Latin text; see also Williams 1990:
84), so knowledge of him becomes possible only as one is drawn into his likeness.
The model, once again, is neither knowledge by description nor even (in the ordinary
sense) knowledge by acquaintance, but knowledge by identification, and the criteria
for identification relate to the extent to which an individual’s life bears the marks of
that which is known (in this case the marks of the life of the incarnate Word).
Augustine is not alone. The Eastern Orthodox tradition similarly brings together
knowledge and love of God. For St Gregory of Nyssa, for example, ‘The vision of
God is discipleship’ (Williams 1990: 63). In St Gregory Palamas the Divine essence
is wholly beyond us and the Divine energies are known only though our participation
in them, by being experienced rather than through detached conceptualization; the
goal of theosis or ‘deification’, involving transformation of the whole person, is that
of union with the divine energies, not with the unknowable divine essence (which
would point the way to pantheism). In the central tradition of Christian spirituality
apophatic theology, the via negativa, is rarely far away. Even in St Thomas Aquinas
the knowledge ‘by connaturality’ of contemplation, based on God’s presence in the
self, is a form of darkness interdependent with love of God. Pascal’s ‘Memorial’ with
its challenging ‘“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob”, not of philosophers
and scholars’ (Pascal 1966: Fragment 913, p. 309) is part of a record of his own
decisive spiritual experience which brought ‘Certainty, certainty’ of a sort very
different from that sought by Descartes, characterized in the Pensées (Pensée 887;
p. 300) as ‘useless and uncertain’. More recently Kierkegaard’s insistence on raising
fundamental questions of truth in terms of ‘subjectivity’, which lies behind much
twentieth-century existentialism, draws on this tradition. In these terms, one might
argue, rather than remaining content with boundaries established by Kant (1958:
B xxx, p. 29), who ‘found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room
for faith’, we might wish to re-inspect both concepts. Scrutiny of the concept of
religious faith has become a familiar activity; the above suggests that there may be
scope for reconsideration of that of religious knowledge as well.
But perhaps not only religious knowledge, but knowledge more generally. For,
philosophical preconceptions apart, it is not at all clear that individuals’ subjective
states should be regarded as irrelevant to the knowledge of which they are capable,
any more than mathematical, logical or scientific competence are irrelevant to the
 Martin Warner 19
capacity to grasp complex theorems and scientific laws. The return to prominence
of what has become known as ‘virtue ethics’ has revived interest in the Aristotelian
insight that practical wisdom, or phronesis, requires appropriate experience and
training, for ‘each man judges well the things he knows’ (Nicomachean Ethics,
1094b). Aristotle is here primarily thinking of normative matters (though the notion
of phronesis has been taken up by modern hermeneutics, a matter to which we shall
return) but if God is understood as ‘That than which no greater can be conceived’,
to use St Anselm’s formula, theology is itself inescapably normative. However, on
the Aristotelian account mere knowledge by acquaintance of ‘the actions that occur
in life’ is of itself of little value; what matters is conjoining such experience with
logos, a rational principle through which to interpret it; phronesis is embodied by
the phronimos, the man of practical wisdom, for ‘regarding practical wisdom we
shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit it with’ (1140a),
and to the extent that we identify with the phronimos by modelling our lives on his
we become ethically wise – this is not just a matter of will and intellect but requires
habituation and (ideally) training. Once again, the criteria for identification relate to
the extent to which an individual’s life bears the marks of that which is known.
If this is not to be entirely circular some specificity has to be given to the appropriate
logos, and this Aristotle seeks to provide, but always in the context of human action
and lived experience, which brings us back to that traditional account of knowledge
sketched earlier, which requires logos as well as true belief. The obvious objection
to reading the required logos in terms of any form of human subjectivity is that the
logos element is supposed to add an objective, rational, element to the knowledge
claim; if I know I cannot be, not merely am not, wrong, but human subjectivity is
always fallible. The canons of rationality cannot be person (perhaps not even culture)
specific. But as the phronesis model suggests, some forms of interdependence
between rational principle and subjectivity do not necessarily foreclose objectivity,
and recent recovery of other models of rationality, which have been marginalized in
the modern period, reinforce the point – which returns us to Job.

Reason, Will and Feeling

One of the more striking features of the Book of Job, as we have it, is the way that it
incipiently displays two competing models of rationality. The ‘comforters’ operate,
effectively, in terms of familiar deductive patterns of argument. God is just and
almighty, Job is suffering, therefore Job’s suffering is just; he should, therefore, repent
the sin which has brought just suffering upon him. Job is sure that his suffering is
innocent (the Prologue endorses this), and seeks understanding. Experience teaches
Job the falsity of the traditional wisdom, and the chiding of his friends provides the
goad that forces him on in his intellectual and emotional progress. The work presents
a pattern of human development in such a way that it is possible for the reader to
judge its credibility; this development culminates in an experience of the numinous
that integrates its various strands and leads to a conviction of the presence in the
20 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
midst of innocent suffering of a God felt as making himself known through the evil,
with questions of disavowal or affirmation being transcended in the consciousness of
God’s presence with the sufferer. If the pattern displayed is psychologically credible,
and it recurs throughout religious literature from Isaiah to Simone Weil, then it shows
how a person may be brought by experience to such a conviction, and to the extent
that Job’s experience appears to readers to resonate with their own it enables them to
see how it could resolve their own perplexities. Thus far, in biblical terms, the work
appeals to the ‘heart’. Of course, however much such a faith might resolve one’s
perplexities, it cannot be accepted if it is self-contradictory or otherwise refuted;
thus the work both tests it against the wisdom of orthodoxy, showing that in terms of
faithfulness to the facts it is a better account, and sets out to guard against the charge
of inconsistency (Warner 1989: ch. 4); the ordinary empirical and analytic norms are
respected, but represented as inadequate.
This inadequacy is instructive, though to explore this is to go beyond the thought
world of the Book of Job. The ‘comforters’ are represented as deducing false
conclusions from allegedly first principles. In contrast, the book takes an example
of a relevant pattern of experience, and attempts to display its paradigmatic status
by showing it coming recognizably to terms with fundamental human concerns in
a manner that resolves both psychological and intellectual perplexity. Unless one is
to rule out the relevance of religious experience altogether in the establishment of
first principles in religion, such a method looks promising; how promising begins to
emerge when we consider the establishment of first principles more generally, and
here Aristotle is again a useful point of reference.
For much of his corpus there is a threefold distinction between demonstration,
dialectic and rhetoric; demonstration starts from first principles, but ‘dialectic is a
process of criticism wherein lies the path to the principles of all inquiries’ (Topics
A. 101a–b). This criticism employs both deduction and induction and takes its
start from reputable opinions (which may of course be false); it characteristically
explores conflicts between such opinions, or between them and the apparent findings
of experience, and seeks to find a way of rethinking the issue in question in a way
that explains such conflicts and thereby to provide a superior way of integrating and
organizing human experience. This does not, of course, formally guarantee the truth
of the ‘first principles’ that fall out from this process, but the process is not only
subject to formal constraints since dialectic properly takes place in the context of
debate between competent individuals cooperating in a genuine attempt to arrive at
the truth, thereby ensuring that any doubtful move is subjected to criticism. Even
this, one might think, can hardly be expected to establish without reasonable doubt
the truth of first principles on which, for Aristotle, all science depends, and in any
case his model of disinterested enquiry with no element of arguing for victory is
hardly realistic, as Augustine long ago pointed out. Aristotle’s distinction between
dialectic and rhetoric is, it appears, one of degree, turning on the level of expertise
and type of motivation possessed by those involved, and what Gilbert Ryle (1949:
8) frankly called ‘persuasions of conciliatory kinds’, which Aristotle would have
classified as rhetorical, have regularly played a role in dialectical debate.
 Martin Warner 21
At the beginning of the modern period Descartes, for these and other reasons,
rejected such dialectic and argued for the primacy of deductive demonstration, after
the model of geometry. But his attempt to establish first principles in this way, most
notoriously through the Cogito, have failed to carry conviction. Subsequent attempts
have also proved problematic, leading in recent years to what has been termed
‘philosophical relativity’, where ‘the answer one prefers for a certain philosophical
problem depends on what assumptions one has adopted in relation to that problem’
(Unger 1984: 5); alleged ‘first principles’ are person- or culture-relative. Pascal saw
the weakness at once, describing Descartes’s ‘method’, as we have seen, as ‘useless
and uncertain’. Complementing l’esprit géométrie, he maintained, is l’esprit de
finesse (Pascal 1966: Pensée 512; pp. 210–12), which his Pensées in large part
exemplify, and his analysis weaves together Aristotelian and biblical elements. It
sketches a mode of reasoning other than the demonstrative to establish first principles,
a mode which takes its starting-point from a number of diverse elements which
themselves need to be subjected to critical scrutiny, and proceeds by attempting
to bring out underlying principles that will reconcile apparent ‘contradictions’
among these elements. But this familiar Aristotelian picture is revolutionized by the
introduction of the Augustinian theme of the centrality of the will, itself a version of
the importance the Bible assigns to the ‘heart’; we are ‘thrown’ (jetée) into the body
– Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (1962: sections 29 and 38) – embarqué as embodied
beings with all that that involves (Pensée 418; pp. 149–50), thus any framework of
thinking that centres round the ideal of detached contemplation is radically defective,
and a perverse will is liable to give rise to perverse beliefs.
Pascal’s procedure involves presenting a series of observations drawn from the
most pervasive features of human life, including the fields of understanding, aspiration
and feeling as commonly distinguished, and challenging the reader to recognize
their uncomfortable accuracy, representative nature, and cumulative significance
(see Warner 1989: ch. 5). It takes into account that feature of belief remarked on
by Wittgenstein (1969: para. 141): ‘When we first begin to believe anything, what
we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light
dawns gradually over the whole.)’ Pascal presents the reader with a multitude of
interrelated vignettes of the human condition and says, in effect, ‘This – doesn’t it?
– bears such a relation to that’, and in response to the expected ‘Yes, but . . .’ we find
sketched another cluster of phenomena that relate to the ‘but’, helping to strip away
self-deception so long as we interrogate ourselves and our experiences honestly (as
with Aristotelian dialectic, the procedure is ideally part of a cooperative endeavour).
There are also religious perceptions designed to fit in with those other observations, so
that we may be led to see how revelation completes our best fragmentary intimations
in ways that satisfy the most deep-seated aspirations of our understanding and of our
will; it brings out, that is, the ‘reasons of the heart’ (Pensée 423; p. 154). Thus far,
one might think, the best that the procedure can deliver is culture-relative, but Pascal
invites us to interrogate ‘all the religions of the world’ (Pensée 149; p. 76), and
the context makes it clear that non-religious philosophies are included; any which
fail to make sense of the full range of our apparently paradoxical experience are
22 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
to be rejected. His claim that Christianity alone does this is of course based on a
very restricted range of alternatives, but the procedure is open-ended. It appears to
presuppose, contra Rorty, the possibility either that ‘language does not go all the
way down, or that … all vocabularies are commensurable’ (Rorty 1982: xxx), but in
recent years a number of factors, several associated with the women’s movement,
have restored interest in reopening the debate about cultural universals. Pascal’s
procedure exploits a version of what Peirce (1934; vol. V, para. 189) identified as
abduction: ‘The surprising fact, C, is observed; but if A were true, C would be a
matter of course. Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true’. Of itself abduction
is little more than a heuristic tool, suggesting what may be the case, but if we can
only find one place-filler for ‘A’ then that greatly increases its plausibility; this prima
facie plausibility Pascal seeks to reinforce by means of detailed evidences drawn
from history and a hermeneutically informed reading of Scripture.
Abduction is a procedure familiar from the progress of the sciences, both natural
and social, as Peirce was well aware. A suggestive use of the pattern has been
developed in more recent philosophy of science. Thomas Kuhn’s influential claim
that ‘competition between [scientific] paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be
resolved by proofs’ (1970: 148) led some (such as Paul Feyerabend) to conclude that
in scientific progress ‘anything goes’. Others, however, have sought to develop more
sophisticated models of rationality, one of the most interesting of which is still that
of Imre Lakatos, for whom those elements of continuity we find in science derive
from the following out of research programmes which consist of methodological
rules. In the progress of science there is a proliferation of research programmes,
and where they come into conflict we can (though sometimes only with hindsight)
distinguish between the manner in which they are developing, taking account both of
their degree of empirical content and of how they fare in the testing of that content;
in technical terms by the manner in which they balance theoretical with empirical
‘problem-shifts’ (Lakatos 1970). What to a ‘degenerative’ research programme are
surprising facts, to its competing ‘progressive’ one is a matter of course. He extends
this general account to metaphysics generally; we eliminate a metaphysical theory if
it produces a degenerative shift in the long run and there is (construed in these terms)
a better metaphysics to replace it. Careful comparison of this extended model with
that of Pascal for avoiding the tendency to ‘believe … submissively and without
reason’ (Pensée 149; p. 79) could well be rewarding.
The abductive pattern is characteristic of finesse but, as elsewhere, it always
needs supplementation. Pascal used it to defend what for him was ‘the true religion’,
but Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, employing a variant of the
finesse model, are concerned to show that there are a number of other hypotheses
besides the ‘religious’ one according to which the ‘surprising’ factors adduced would
be a matter of course, and that the only sense in which the ‘religious hypothesis’ has
independent support is too empty to count as an explanation of the phenomena in
question. Again Nietzsche, for whom Pascal was ‘the only logical Christian’ (1969b:
letter 187), not only presents a seriously worked out alternative to the Pascalian
but is prepared to do battle in the reading of history and Scripture, hence his anti-
 Martin Warner 23
religious slogan ‘Historical refutation as the decisive refutation’ (Nietzsche 1982:
para. 95). In this supplementation of abduction, the procedure familiar from legal
reasoning of arguing from particular case to particular case, argument by analogy,
plays an important role. John Wisdom, indeed, has urged that in the end all forms
of legitimate reasoning can be analysed in terms of this ‘case by case procedure’,
understood as ‘a presenting and representing of those features of the case which
severally co-operate in favour of the conclusion,… – it is a matter of the cumulative
effect of several independent premises, not of the repeated transformation of one or
two’ (Wisdom 1953: 157; see also Wisdom 1991).
The procedure is also familiar from those of translation and, more generally,
interpretation, where comparison of one element with another in the light of wider
hypotheses which are themselves checked against those elements (the famous
‘hermeneutic circle’) seeks to bring it about that ‘light dawns gradually over the
whole’, a light that is nevertheless not self-authenticating and needs to be checked
against the possibility of construing the text in another light. Indeed, Aristotle’s notion
of ‘first principles’ here seems curiously out of place, too reminiscent of l’esprit
géométrie; for l’esprit de finesse, as Pascal puts it, ‘the principles are so intricate and
numerous that it is almost impossible not to miss some’ (Pensée 512; p. 211). On the
broader stage represented by Pascal and Nietzsche the interpretation is not of a text
but of human experience – it is hardly accidental that the contrast between l’esprit
géométrie and l’esprit de finesse and that between Heidegger’s ‘exact’ and ‘strict’
thinking is so striking (1956: Postscript; 387) – and here what is required is a form of
self-interrogation that seeks a unified understanding and ultimately finds inadequate
‘the separation of reason, sensation, emotion, and will’ (Nietzsche 1997: ‘Raids’,
para. 49, p. 83); we need to look and see in each case what elements in this complex
are appropriate in the endeavour to achieve reliable judgements. Perhaps the habitual
self-deceiver is not as well placed as the genuine seeker to judge the merits of what
Hume termed ‘the religious hypothesis’. The Book of Job still has its relevance.

Language, Meaning and Interpretation

The notion that serious thinking about the human condition ought to operate solely
in terms of the standard logical canons has always been honoured more in the breach
than the observance. The persuasive power even of Spinoza’s Ethics owes more to the
quality of its imaginative vision than to its pretensions to operate ordine geometrico,
and it may be doubted whether any significant work of philosophy has obeyed this
self-denying ordinance; Ryle’s ‘persuasions of conciliatory kinds’ are endemic (even
in Descartes where they often take the form of narrative). Recognition of the fact
that philosophy is itself a kind of writing inescapably enmeshed in imaginative and
rhetorical procedures has led some to impugn its pretensions to be a truth-seeking
activity. The very notion of there being ‘truths’ of the human condition, particularly
if conceived as relating to ‘the ultimate nature of reality’, on such accounts itself
represents a kind of mirage brought about by failure to grasp the role of ‘metaphor
24 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
in the text of philosophy’ (the subtitle, of course, of Jacques Derrida’s ‘White
mythology’; 1982: 207–71).
Derrida himself was too subtle to press the case this far, for recognition that
‘persuasions of conciliatory kinds’ play an essential dialectical, and not merely
rhetorical, role in philosophy should only lead us to collapse the difference between
literature and philosophy if the conventional picture of philosophy as a ‘rigorous’
discipline, with ‘rigour’ defined in terms of deduction, holds us captive; in this respect
Derrida was a free spirit. However, Richard Rorty, with whom he is sometimes
bracketed, invokes just this picture when he contrasts ‘rigorous argumentation
– the procedure characteristic of mathematics’ with ‘the inconclusive comparison
and contrast of vocabularies … characteristic of literary culture’ (Rorty 1982:
xli). Paradigmatic for literary culture is hermeneutics, the attempt to understand
the practice of interpretation, which is itself locked into the ‘hermeneutic circle’;
in such a practice ‘the acquisition of truth dwindles in importance’ (Rorty 1980:
365; see also 318), but it is only as such a practice that such future as remains for
philosophy lies. The plausibility of this programme rests on the assumption that the
only ‘rigorous’ method for attaining truth is some approximation to the Cartesian,
but if the Pascalian alternative is allowed, and if all philosophical argument – even
that of Spinoza – is inevitably to be assessed in part by such criteria as capacity to
‘illuminate experience’ and so on, then we should analyse these criteria, integrate
them into our overall account of rationality, and seek to discriminate the more
rigorous from the less.
The other side of this project to diminish the role of truth-seeking in philosophy
by aligning it with ‘literary culture’, of course, is the assumption that the latter
is not itself truth-seeking, and this is at least challengeable. M. H. Abrams, for
example, argued, well before Rorty, that its ‘judgements are not arbitrary’, but are
subject to broad criteria to do with coherence, adequacy, penetration, distortion and
disinterestedness: ‘Although such a mode of discourse is rarely capable of rigidly
conclusive arguments, it possesses just the kind of rationality it needs to achieve its
own purposes’ (Abrams 1972: 53). It should not be taken for granted that truth, or
at least the avoidance of falsity, is not among these purposes. Against this, it may
be urged that if hermeneutics is paradigmatic then literary culture itself is locked in
some version of the hermeneutic circle, and this circularity disables the credibility
of any such truth-seeking. However, this claim is problematic, even granted the
supposed paradigm status of hermeneutics, for at least two reasons.
First, it needs to be shown that the circular procedure is necessarily vicious. The
circle in question represents our inability to understand a whole (for example a text)
without understanding its parts, nor the parts without understanding the whole, but
both in interpreting or translating texts and in learning a language this circle is hardly
disabling. We start with hypotheses that we test against others; if we are construing
a section of a text we take account of the consequences of that construal for other
sections and for our grasp of the whole, and we test that grasp against the detail
of the passages. More generally, we bring prejudgements to any interpretation, but
these only degenerate into prejudices if we are not prepared to allow experience to
 Martin Warner 25
modify them (see Gadamer 1993: 265–307). Right from the start, proponents of the
patterns of argument we have been exploring have insisted on the importance of
such preparedness; Aristotle distinguished ‘contentious’ argument from true dialectic
in terms of the genuineness of the participants’ concern to arrive at the truth, and
his phronesis is only attainable for ‘those who desire and act in accordance with a
rational principle’ (logos; Nicomachean Ethics 1095a). Gadamer’s classic work on
hermeneutics, indeed, sees Aristotelian phronesis as exemplary in the interpretative
enterprise; his analysis ‘offers a kind of model of the problems of hermeneutics’
(324). Of course, as Gadamer insists, we need to relate that which is to be interpreted
to our own situation, as ‘rational principles’ have to be brought into relation to the
range of actions available to us in the ethical case; but this does not show that we
cannot get our prejudgements badly wrong, and where this is possible it is difficult
to see why truth and falsity have somehow become unimportant.
Second, it may be queried whether interpretation is indeed necessarily circular.
Two familiar ways of breaking the circle have been proposed, one with reference to
the text, the other with reference to its author or context. Paul Ricoeur has proposed
the model of a ‘hermeneutic arc’, one side of which is firmly grounded in features
of the text that relate to the protocols of the language in which it is written, which
may be ascertained in a non-circular, more ‘scientific’ manner; any interpretation
that disregards these is defective (Ricoeur 1981b). The implications for the pattern
of argument proposed by Pascal are apparent enough; perhaps not all those features
of human experience to which he points are interpretation- or even culture-relative.
Others have laid more stress on the possibility of the author’s intention providing
constraints on the range of defensible interpretations, while seeking to avoid falling
into the notorious problems associated with what has been called the ‘intentional
fallacy’. In some cases, at least, it appears that what was intended has a bearing on
how one should read; those who read Defoe’s ‘The Shortest Way with the Dissenters’
had him imprisoned and literally pilloried when they discovered he had written it as
a satire, rather than resting content with insisting that his intentions were irrelevant
to how it should be read. Even Derrida, not usually aligned with this camp, proposes
a typology in which ‘the category of intention will not disappear; it will have its
place, but from that place it will no longer be able to govern the entire scene and the
entire system of utterances’ (1982: ‘Signature, event, context’, 326).
The notion of ‘utterance’, indeed, lies behind much of this way of thinking.
Broadly speaking, those who insist on the autonomy of the text see meaning in terms
of a complex of rules or other interdependent items that can normally be identified
independently of context of utterance: la langue is independent of parole, semantics
of pragmatics (the misreaders of Defoe understood his pamphlet’s meaning but
mistook its force); on the influential Saussurian projection these items are construed
in circular fashion. Their opponents decline to separate meaning from force so
readily, arguing that meaning subserves communication and that meaning has
ultimately to be analysed in terms of the capacity to communicate through speech
acts or other forms of utterance. Some go further and see an ethical dimension here;
26 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
refusal to attend to the meaning of the author is to treat the latter as a means rather
than an end.
So far as the principles of interpretation are concerned, St Augustine seems at
first sight firmly to align himself with both camps at once. ‘All of us are trying to find
and grasp the meaning of the author we are reading’, he maintains (1992: XII xviii
27, p. 259) but, given that one mode of expression can be understood in a number
of different ways, as an expositor of Scripture ‘I would choose to write so that my
words would sound out with whatever diverse truth each reader was able to grasp’
rather than set down one true meaning which excludes the others (XII xxi 42, p. 271).
Further, in the case of the Pentateuch it is much more difficult to determine ‘This is
what Moses meant’ than ‘Whether Moses meant this or something else, this is true’
(XII xxiv 33, p. 263), but fortunately the link with intention can profitably be cut
altogether, for ‘what evil is it if an exegesis … is one shown to be true … even if the
author … did not have that idea?’ (XII viii 27, pp. 259–60) Augustine’s magnificent
intellectual journey, across what is now a no-man’s-land between rival camps, was
rendered coherent by reference to the Holy Ghost as the true author of Scripture, as
were a number of the other complex hermeneutic systems of the same period. One
may interpret a scriptural text in a way unthought of by, perhaps even inconceivable
to, its human author to the extent that it is proper to suppose that its divine author
intended it; without some such move it is indeed difficult to defend a good deal
of New Testament prefigurative interpretation of the Old. It is now more than a
century since Dilthey showed in a famous essay how hermeneutic debates within the
Church have, in significant part, developed the categories and set the terms within
which much modern debate about interpretation proceeds. Nevertheless, biblical
critics who have lost any significant faith in the Holy Ghost, and literary critics
who disavow any concern for the veracity of the texts they seek to interpret, finding
themselves unable to recreate analogues of those ancient syntheses that gave point to
the practice of interpretation, have often remained oddly reluctant to break with the
traditional categories and concepts.
Time has brought its revenges. In Dilthey’s day one was urged to read the Bible
‘as literature’, but today literature is often read as though it were the Bible – with
different critics championing one aspect of an older unity against another. Sartre
(1967: 157) claimed with some bravado to have ‘caught the Holy Ghost in the cellars
and flung him out of them’, but admitted that ‘atheism is a cruel long-term business’,
and among major recent and contemporary figures perhaps only Derrida has taken
with full seriousness the difficulty and radical nature of the changes in our thinking
required by any resolute attempt to discard or ‘deconstruct’ our hermeneutic traditions
– traditions which he saw as being riddled with the ‘metaphysics of presence’.
Whether Derrida was correct in his analysis of this metaphysics, or indeed in his
distrust of it, is of course disputable. Indeed, the difficulty involved in understanding
human communication if we make such radical shifts may suggest that attempting
to fling the Holy Ghost out of the cellars is a misconceived enterprise. Perhaps those
ancient hermeneutic systems still have something to teach us.
 Martin Warner 27
As a means of breaking the hermeneutic circle appeal to the author’s intention,
human or divine, might be thought to be of limited value, since our access to an
author’s intention is typically itself hermeneutic in nature, often primarily through
the words to which we are attending. However, we also need to look beyond the
words to the ‘form of life’ (Wittgenstein 1958) out of which a text or utterance
came, that broader context on which each one of us is embarqué and on which
Pascal and Heidegger have insisted. In the broader context of the interpretation of
human experience, with which Pascalian finesse and Heidegger’s ‘strict’ thinking
are primarily concerned, the colour may even flow back from the textual. Ricoeur,
for example, has argued that our existence as beings in time seeking understanding
inevitably leads us to seek to ‘extract a configuration from a succession’ (Ricoeur
1981c: 278), his model for narrative thinking, and hence to understand our lives and
ourselves in terms of narrative (Ricoeur 1991a); the analogue of his ‘hermeneutic
arc’, which in the case of texts relates to the protocols of language, here relates
to human universals concerning human understanding. In pressing the primordial
role of narrative he is far from alone, though the case can certainly be contested,
and it is arguable that our most illuminating models for understanding narrativity
are textual. On the narrower front of the interpretation of texts, some extra-textual
control seems desirable because, as Augustine noted, texts can be understood in
a number of different ways. In recent years this has led to the notion of different
‘interpretative communities’ providing that control, making the meaning of a text
community relative, but this sits uneasily with the continuity between texts and other
linguistic products and acts; it is as if one could as a matter of logic only preach
(or at any rate write texts) to (or for) the converted, an approach encouraging the
distortion of those ‘language games’, with their forms of life, that are seen as alien or
objectionable – Wittgenstein’s (1979) charge against Sir James Frazer’s The Golden
Bough.
The problem might be thought to be at least partly overcome where either there is
some form of recognizable affinity between forms of life (such as that I invoked, with
a psychological twist, in the case of the Book of Job), or there are traditions linking
the form of life out of which utterances and texts arise and a given interpretative
community (as in my treatment of St John’s ‘knowledge’). In the case of the Bible
one might think that the latter is provided by the Church, a very traditional move; one
difficulty with it, of course, is that there are rival interpretative communities claiming
to be part of the Church, to which one might respond that there are nevertheless
certain coordinates (such as the historic Creeds) to which the overwhelming
majority subscribe, and these provide important controls on interpretation. But here
the hermeneutic circle seems to re-emerge, for the Creeds have been interpreted in
different ways; if the same words can be used to different effects one may even ask
whether, for example, today’s feminist theologian worships the same God as a fifth-
century Egyptian ascetic. As Rowan Williams (2002) has argued, such questions
cannot be answered by reference to the words alone; we need to explore how the
words in each case are related to the lives of those who have used them.
28 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
And this of course brings us deep into the difficulties of religious language, the
attempt to speak of that which is not open to detached conceptualization. Kierkegaard
wrote of the need for ‘indirect communication’here, and recent thinking about language
has thrown some light on indirection of communication in communicative contexts
generally, not just the religious. What Paul Grice has identified as ‘implicatures’
subserve those radically context and relevance dependent inferences by means of
which we, often quite properly, understand texts and people to be conveying more
than they actually say. In the case of metaphors, for example, part of the point of
not meaning what one literally says is to encourage those addressed to imagine one
item or complex in terms of another. Often when the affinities and oppositions of
two or more uses of an expression used in literal discourse are different there are
different but analogous meanings (hence we can drop stitches, friends and hints
without merely equivocating over the word ‘drop’), and where analogous extensions
are metaphorical many of the affinities and oppositions of the one are carried over
to the other. As James Ross has argued, key concepts here are those associated with
context, inertia and force. Some types of utterance are so associated with a particular
range of contexts that their utterance in a particular one drives the hearer or reader to
reinspect the current context or to reinterpret the utterance; linguistic inertia leads one
to attempt to construe the words according to the standard patterns with which one is
familiar, but when the verbal or other context renders such construals unacceptable,
the phenomenon of linguistic force comes into play to force adaptations of meaning
(Defoe’s pamphlet would be a case in point). Now in some cases skill in action
may be necessary for a full grasp of the discourse, it is ‘craftbound’, and here the
basic vocabulary is anchored to ‘benchmark situations’; since ‘religion is taught to
modulate living . . . and living in God . . . is the object of the craft of Christian doing’
(Ross 1981: 167) its discourse too is craftbound, and here scriptural narratives act as
benchmarks, able to ‘structure and stabilize the central meaning relationships’ (158).
On this account the intertextuality of religious discourse is broken by the relation to
practice, and nothing bars treating certain benchmark stories (of the Crucifixion and
Resurrection, for example) as having extra-linguistic reference; further, by providing
the anchors of benchmark situations, with their associated sentences and narratives,
sufficient content is given to the notion of initial context for linguistic inertia to have
a role to play in providing controls on scriptural interpretation and perhaps even
the development of doctrine – the phenomenon of implicature serving to prevent
the notion of ‘inertia’ being taken too unimaginatively. Indirect communication
through language, whether figurative or other, need not be unprincipled, for it can
be understood as an extension of familiar linguistic phenomena. It is not only in the
case of religion that we need to explore how words are related to the lives of those
who use them.
 Martin Warner 29

Transcending Boundaries

The above has provided only an outline sketch of some of the interconnected
contexts in which traditional boundaries within and between philosophy and
theology increasingly seem outgrown. In an important sense this is a function of
recent intellectual developments, but I have been concerned to bring out the way that
some of these at least have made us better able to hear again a range of voices that
have long been marginalized, and take them into our intellectual economy.
Epistemologists may find it helpful to look more closely not just at ‘personal
knowledge’, but at ‘knowledge by identification’ as found in religions, Christian and
other; this in turn may put in question not simply the Kantian dichotomy between
knowledge and faith, but also such over-familiar oppositions as those between
‘knowledge that’ and ‘knowledge how’, and perhaps even ‘belief that’ and ‘belief
in’. Such considerations relate to recent rethinking of rationality itself; the divisions
between reason, will and feeling, themselves remnants of faculty psychology,
are highly porous, and the ways that choices can be wise and feelings apt point
to normative elements in rationality as such (see Gibbard 1990). I have sketched
Pascal’s anti-Cartesian model (which is but one among others) as having fruitful
scope for development, putting in question Rorty’s dichotomy between ‘rigorous
argumentation’ and ‘hermeneutics’. Hermeneutics could itself benefit from taking
account at one and the same time both of its historical religious (together of
course with its legal) roots and of recent attention to the broader contexts within
which language is set; the idea that philosophers of language, biblical critics and
other interpreters of religious texts, literary critics, legal theorists and theorists of
hermeneutics should each work within distinct intellectual boundaries may well
be approaching its sell-by date. What new intellectual shapes will emerge from
these and other attempts to redraw or transcend the intellectual boundaries we have
inherited it is unsafe to predict.
Perhaps one might echo Nietzsche’s exclamation (1974: para. 343), though
without his self-stultifying exclusion of the religious dimension: ‘perhaps there has
never yet been such an open sea!’

Further Reading

Abrams, M.H., ‘What’s the use of theorizing about the arts?’, in M.W. Bloomfield
(ed.), In Search of Literary Theory, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972,
2–54
Gadamer, H.-G., Truth and Method, trans J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall,
London: Sheed & Ward, 1993
Grice, H.P., ‘Logic and conversation’, in his Studies in the Way of Words, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, 22–40
30 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Lakatos, I., ‘Falsification and the methodology of scientific research programmes’,
in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, eds I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 91–196
Price, H.H., Belief, London: Allen & Unwin, 1969
Ross, J.F., Portraying Analogy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981
Warner, M., Philosophical Finesse: Studies in the Art of Rational Persuasion,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989
Williams, R., The Wound of Knowledge, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1990
 Chapter 2

Once More Into the Borderlands: The

Way of Wisdom in Philosophy and
Theology after the ‘Turn to Drama’
Kevin J. Vanhoozer

For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a
stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks, but to those who are called, both Jews and
Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Cor. 1:22–24)

I. Introduction: Into the Borderlands

In his 1961 inaugural lecture to the Norris-Hulse Chair of Cambridge University,

Donald MacKinnon spoke of the ‘borderlands’ of theology, an appropriate topic and
title given his lifelong concern with the problems of metaphysics and christology that
lie on the ‘frontiers of intelligible discourse’ (MacKinnon 1968: 32). His many forays
into the borderlands, his sustained attention to particulars, especially as rendered
in literature, and rigorous commitment to combining metaphysical analysis with
existential imagination, all make MacKinnon a fit guide for the present expedition.
According to Kant, what lies beyond the frontiers of intelligible discourse is (by
definition) transcendence. To the extent that theology avoids the question of truth
concerning references to the transcendent, we are ‘doomed in the end to evacuate
Christian faith of any serious intellectual content’ (MacKinnon 1968: 30). Christianity
thus involves discourse on ultimate reality (metaphysics), and this means ontology,
that part of philosophy concerned ‘to provide a systematic account of the concepts
used in discussion concerning any subject-matter’ (P.T. Geach, so MacKinnon 1987:
73). We can only articulate the uniqueness of Jesus’ Incarnation, understood as a
divine ‘act of assumption’ (MacKinnon 1987: 178) by which the eternal enters into
the temporal, in metaphysical terms (MacKinnon 1987: 172; cf. Cross 2002).
C.F.D. Moule addresses the relation of metaphysics to theology in a Festschrift
presented to MacKinnon by posing two distinct questions: (1) does the New Testament
employ philosophical language? and (2) is philosophical language necessary
when it comes to defining the implications of what the New Testament seems to
say? (Moule 1982: 1–11). Moule notes that on occasion the NT authors employ
ontological language (for example, Col. 1; Heb. 1:3) and that Jesus himself makes an
ontological claim at John 8:58: ‘before Abraham was, I am’. Jesus’ question, ‘Who
32 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
do you say that I am?’, drives us to the borderlands of ontology to the extent that we
cannot identify him without implicitly assuming something about his nature. Moule
concludes: ‘However sparingly the New Testament borrows the language of that
country beyond the frontier, students of the New Testament discover themselves to
be in some sense its citizens’ (Moule 1982: 10).
MacKinnon also believed that philosophers such as Kant were ‘deeply in
bondage’ to generalized forms of expression; Kant’s work ‘is suffused with hostility
to the particular’ (MacKinnon 1968: 25). Even if the particularity of Jesus Christ
presents ‘awkward material’ to the philosopher, however, that is no excuse not to
do justice to Jesus’ historical particularity. If christology is a ‘human intellectual
response to the overwhelming fact of the ministry, crucifixion and resurrection
of Jesus’ (MacKinnon 1968: 64), then some form of christology – the attempt to
understand why Jesus is or is not the Christ, and what it means for Jesus to be Christ
– is inevitable, even for the philosopher.
Christology necessarily involves historical fact and metaphysics alike:

we are fudging if we allow ourselves to suppose that we do not recognize a distinction

between the actual and the non-actual, between the eruption of Vesuvius and the murder
of Caesar on the one side, and the birth of Venus from the foam, and the exploits of
St. George with his dragon, on the other; and it is a matter of crucial importance for
Christian belief that the resurrection of Jesus belongs with the former, and not with the
latter. (MacKinnon 1968: 77)

Taking the concrete history of Jesus seriously means, for MacKinnon, attending to
the metaphysical implications of particulars.
The most stubborn particular, one that resists easy ontological categorization,
is the cross of Jesus Christ. MacKinnon is suspicious of theological systems that
proceed to resurrection too fast: ‘there is no escape from contingency’ (MacKinnon
1968: 81). The truth of the Gospel is not merely theoretical but historical. It follows
that Christian theology may be ‘much more than it realizes the victim of the victory
won in the person of Plato by the philosophers over the poets, and in particular
the tragedians’ (MacKinnon 1968: 100). Tragedy, not theory, is the genre that most
closely corresponds to the subject matter of theology itself. MacKinnon would no
doubt approve of T.R. Wright’s claim that literature’s task is ‘to explore, to complicate
and to enrich the apparent security of theological concepts’ (Wright 1988: 13) by
attending to particularities. Here, for example, is MacKinnon on Hamlet: ‘It can
hardly be denied that our understanding of such notions as responsibility, free-will,
decision are enlarged, even transformed … by the dramatist’s most subtle exploration
of the Prince’s personal history’ (MacKinnon 1968: 50). The purpose of the present
essay is to examine how categories drawn from drama can transcend the traditional
disciplinary boundaries of philosophy and theology, especially as these concern the
personal history of the Prince – not of Denmark but of Peace.
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 33

II. On the Borderlines: Transcending which Boundaries?

The notion that we can transcend boundaries presupposes that there are borders
and boundaries to begin with. Is it legitimate to cross the lines separating theology
and philosophy, lines drawn not in the sand but in society, academy and church?
There is a difference between transcending illegitimate boundaries and transgressing
legitimate borders. What kind of boundaries need to be transcended and what kind of
boundaries, if any, need to be respected?

An ontological boundary: The creation versus the Creator

Perhaps the most important boundary that needs to be respected is that between
God the Creator and the created world. Thinkers as disparate as Aquinas, Barth and
Heidegger all affirm what Kierkegaard terms ‘the infinite qualitative difference’
between God and creaturely reality. Heidegger, for instance, posits an ontological
difference between Being and beings and criticizes the ‘ontotheological’ constitution
of metaphysics that makes of God an ingredient of a metaphysical system. The living
God of revelation should not be confused with God as ‘first cause’ of a metaphysical
system: ‘if the only impetus to the practice of theology were the attempt of
cosmologists and philosophers to offer theoretical explanations of certain features
of the cosmos or humankind, then theology would play a very minor role in the
contemporary world’ (Wolterstorff 2005: 81).
Pascal similarly insists on the distinction between the God of the philosophers and
the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Walter Kasper redirects Feuerbach’s critique
at theists for whom God is simply a projection of their best metaphysical thoughts
and goes so far as to speak of the ‘heresy of theism’ (Kasper 2000: 295). A more
polemical way of staking the ontological boundary, then, is to draw a distinction
between the reductionistic conceptual ‘idols’ of metaphysics and the conceptual
‘icons’ that derive from God’s self-revelation in Christ (Marion 1991b). So one way
of avoiding idolatry is to adopt a methodological distinction between the God of
philosophical theism and the triune, biblical God (Moore 2003: 30).

An epistemological boundary: The genius versus the apostle

Perhaps the most common way of conceiving the modern boundary between
philosophy and theology trades on Kant’s determination of the limits of knowledge.
According to Kant, all knowledge begins in human – which is to say, spatio-temporal
– experience. We experience the world via sensory intuitions that the mind organizes
according to its default rational categories. The result is a boundary between the
world as it appears to us (phenomena) and the world as it really is (noumena),
between that which is spatio-temporally structured and that which is not, between
that to which our concepts apply and that to which they do not (Wolterstorff 2000:
159). Because (for Kant) God does not appear in human experience as such, God-
talk (theology) falls beyond the pale of intelligible human discourse.
34 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Kierkegaard’s ‘On the difference between a genius and an apostle’ construes
the limits somewhat differently. The ‘genius’ is typically the one who reaches
the truths of reason the fastest. Socrates is for Kierkegaard the epitome of the
philosophical genius. Kierkegaard locates Socrates, Kant and other geniuses on the
side of immanence and asserts that philosophers can never know more than their
own minds. By contrast, the apostle – one sent – knows something the genius cannot
know, something transcendent, but only because he has been told by an authoritative
source (for example, the Holy Spirit; cf. Matthew 16:17). The apostle is not irrational
just because he believes something on the basis of testimony (so Coady 1992). It is
significant that Jesus, too, was ‘one sent’ – sent from the Father. Hence, though
Socrates and Jesus may both assert ‘There is eternal life’, only Jesus knows what he
is talking about, says Kierkegaard, for only Jesus has it on reliable authority. Jesus
was not a genius: to say ‘There is eternal life’ is not profound. The point is that it
is as one sent from God that Jesus says it (Kierkegaard 1940: 156–7). While both
Kant and Kierkegaard affirm an epistemological boundary, then, on this account
only Kierkegaard allows for the possibility of transcending it.

An ethical–eschatological boundary: The other versus the Wholly Other

According to Emmanuel Levinas, it is precisely philosophy’s emphasis on

epistemology that leads it to violate what is ultimately an ethical boundary, namely,
the respect for the other. Philosophy – in Levinas’s terms, ‘Greek think’ – is a violent
intellectual procedure that reconciles differences and oppositions by reducing them
to aspects of a single, comprehensive vision: ‘The labor of thought wins out over
the otherness of things and men’ (Levinas 1989: 78). Philosophical discourse, to the
extent it employs ‘totalizing’ conceptual schemes, becomes ‘a violence which we do
to things’ (the words are Foucault’s [1982], but their spirit is Levinasian). And not to
things only, but to God and the Word of God as well.
The name Jesus Christ ‘is not a system representing a unified experience of a
unified thought; it is the Word of God itself’ (Barth 1975: 181). Theology must
do justice to its peculiar subject matter, the self-revelation of God, a reality that is
wholly other than what human beings normally think and experience. Barth’s so-
called ‘dialectical’ theology is an attempt to speak of the gracious and contingent
divine in-breaking to the world in the person of Jesus Christ. If, as Levinas contends,
ethics seeks to do justice to the other, how much more does philosophy have a
responsibility not to totalize the wholly other? Theology’s mandate is to bear witness
to God’s free and loving action, a freedom to which no a priori conceptual scheme
can do justice.
For Barth, then, the boundary that demarcates human religious experience and
theology proper is not ethical but eschatological; it is a matter of another, eternal
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 35
order interrupting the present world order. It is the boundary that distinguishes this
world from the world to come, ousia from parousia.1

III. The Two Ways: Stating the Missions; Charting the Turns

Ultimately we may do better to think of the difference between philosophy and

theology in terms not of distinct spaces or ‘limit’ statements but of distinct activities
and ‘mission’ statements: philosophical and theological statements respectively
pursue two distinct yet variously related missions, each concerned with, among
other things, clarifying, providing guidance and truth-telling – in short, with the
search for wisdom and understanding.

Mission statements

The apostle Paul is in no doubt about the mission of the theologian: to preach the
Gospel, the wisdom of God made flesh in Jesus Christ. As to philosophy’s mission,
I take my cue from the etymology of the term itself: the love (philia) of wisdom
(sophia). Socrates’ mission began with his commissioning by the oracle at Delphi,
where he learned that the confession of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom.2
Socrates stands for philosophy’s attempt to cultivate the way of wisdom, to grasp
the truth about the meaning of the whole by means of unaided reason.3
Philosophers seek, with Socrates, to understand the cosmos and the place of human
beings in it; Christian theologians, following the apostle Paul, seek to understand the
cross and the benefits of being ‘in Christ’. Socrates says, ‘the unexamined life is not
worth living’; Paul retorts, ‘the unexamined Christ is not worth preaching’. What
we have here are two distinct yet related discourses: the philosopher (and genius)
says how the world goes; the theologian (and apostle) says how the Word goes. The
discourses are related because each ultimately pertains to understanding the real
world in which humans dwell and seek to live well, yet they are also distinct: the one
works with universal human experience, the other binds itself to the authority of the
canonical Scriptures that attest Christ.

1 This boundary is related to the one of which T.S. Eliot speaks which, in his opinion,
delineates a difference more fundamental than that between male and female, white or black
– namely, the difference between those who believe in divine revelation and those who do not
(in Baillie and Martin 1937).
2 At his trial, Socrates claims to be ‘god’s gift to Athens’ (Plato, Apology 30d7–e1).
I contrast the missions of Socrates with Jesus in my ‘The trials of truth’ (Vanhoozer 1999).
3 Gunton views the attempt to engage the meaning of the whole as a religious
enterprise (Gunton 1996: 300).
36 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology

Charting the turns: Adventures in philosophy and theology

To speak of philosophy and theology as distinct types of discourse, each with its own
mission, is to highlight what distinguishes them from one another. Charting their
respective histories, by contrast, tends to show how both philosophy and theology
have been affected by the same broader cultural and intellectual developments. What
Alain Badiou says of philosophy’s status as a concrete universal – a message addressed
to all from a situated time and place – pertains to theology as well: ‘Philosophy is
… both a universal aim of reason and, simultaneously, one that manifests itself in
completely specific moments’ (Badiou 2005: 67). Both theology and philosophy, for
example, have had their Greek and German ‘moments’.
Despite their typological dissimilarities, then, philosophy and theology share
certain ‘chronotopic’ similarities.4 Each has been affected by the Enlightenment
and by Kant’s ‘turn to the subject’. One helpful way of mapping the relation of
philosophy and theology, then, is by charting these epoch-making turns and seeing
how the two disciplines respond to them. A ‘turn’ is in fact a revolution, a decisive
paradigm shift that alters the way thinkers in many disciplines view themselves and
the world.5 Kant likened his famous turn to the subject to a Copernican Revolution:
as Copernicus showed that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the sun the
earth, so Kant showed knowledge to be a matter of the world’s conformity to the
mind rather than the mind to the world.
We turn now to examine three further revolutionary turns: to language, narrative,
and practice. Each in its own way turns away from (that is, transcends) the traditional
epistemological boundary that divided faith from reason. It would therefore behove
us to see how these turns in intellectual and cultural history have opened up new
possibilities for relating philosophy and theology.
I pursue this brief cartographic exercise in dialogue with Badiou’s recent attempt
to trace what he calls the ‘adventure of French philosophy’ in the latter half of the
twentieth century (Badiou 2005). Badiou helps us to see the various turns as reactions
to the prior ‘turn to the subject’ and to identify the axis on which these subsequent
turns revolve as poised between ‘life’ and ‘concept’. The human subject is at once
an existing organism and a conceptual thinker; this dual emphasis accords well with
MacKinnon’s concern to relate metaphysical analysis and existential imagination, a
concern to which we shall return in due course. According to Badiou, all contemporary
French philosophy engages with the heritage of the German Enlightenment in a
search for ‘a new relation between concept and existence’ (Badiou 2005: 70).

4 By ‘chronotope’ I mean a way of speaking and thinking that prevails in a specific

place and time (the term itself comes from Bakhtin). The novel, for example, may be the
quintessential nineteenth-century European form of consciousness.
5 In their introduction to The Interpretive Turn, the editors state that ‘It is now popular
to mark shifts in philosophical method and preoccupation as “turns”’ (Hiley et al. 1991: 1).
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 37
The turn to language: A new cultural geographic boundary? The first great turn
away from Descartes’s autonomous knowing subject and Kant’s transcendental
knowing subject is the turn to language. Twentieth-century thinkers from a variety
of disciplines now see language as the medium in which both thought and existence
live and move and have their being. Philosophy, says Paul Ricoeur, begins from ‘the
fullness of language’ (Ricoeur 1974: 288), theology from what we might call ‘the
fullness of the Word’. The turn to language acknowledges something prior to and
deeper than the subject, something – a structure, a system of differences – that serves
as a framework for human reason and experience, for concepts and existence alike.
The turn to language has in fact led in two different directions: the Anglo-American
or ‘analytic’ and the ‘Continental’. What is important to note is that this new divide
transcends the disciplinary boundaries: there are analytic philosophers and analytic
theologians on the one hand and Continental philosophers and theologians on the
other.
To what does this distinction actually refer? Badiou’s categories – ‘concept’
and ‘life’ – provide a first approximation. For Anglo-American ‘analytic’ thinkers,
language is a medium for thought, and the task of philosophy and theology is to
clarify thought, in ordinary and in biblical language respectively. For Continental
thinkers, by contrast, language is a medium for existence and the task of philosophy
and theology is to explore, and emancipate, existence by interpreting, situating and
deconstructing language. According to Richard Rorty, analytic and Continental
thinkers have different aims: ‘getting things right’ (the ambition of science) versus
‘making things better’ (the ambition of sociocultural critique) (Rorty 2003). The
distinction is not only theoretical but names an institutionalized intellectual faultline
on either side of which one can find rival journals, conferences and university
departments. In short: ‘analytic’ versus ‘Continental’ has become a boundary
within a boundary, separating philosophers from philosophers and theologians from
theologians.6
Analytic thinkers ‘prize such intellectual virtues as expository clarity and
argumentative rigor’ (Quinn 1996: 49) and employ techniques of philosophical
analysis in their work (Harris and Insole 2005: 3–4). With respect to theology they
see themselves as engaged in a rather traditional form of ‘faith seeking understanding’
that expresses itself more concretely as a quest for consistency, rationality and truth
with regard to theistic beliefs (Quinn 1996: 54). Analytic thinkers believe they
have got beyond Kant and beyond positivism and hence are able, through careful
examination of the concept, to attain knowledge of ‘God’. Indeed, Robert Adams
compares analytic theism to ‘a sort of scholasticism, in the logically disciplined,
socially interactive manner of making progress on details that largely constitutes its
wissenschaftlich character’ (Adams 1996: 80).
Continental thought tends to respect the boundary erected by Kant that forbade
what for him was an unequal yoking of ‘knowledge’ and ‘metaphysics’. They tend
to be text- rather than problem-oriented, focusing on the writings of certain thinkers

6 For a helpful survey of this disciplinary landscape, see Loades 2005.

38 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
(for example, Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche). The analytically inclined find
this tendency to offer commentary rather than argumentation frustrating in the
extreme. Yet this is simply the Continental way: to approach problems textually and
contextually (Critchley 1998: 8–9). The awareness of context – of cultural, historical
and social situatedness – is a hallmark of the Continental style: ‘the gain of the
Continental tradition is that it allows one to focus on the essential historicity of
philosophy as a practice and the essential historicity of the philosopher who engages
in this practice’ (Critchley 1998: 10). Continental thought has often been stronger
outside philosophy departments than within them, flourishing especially in the
groves of literary and social theory (Critchley 1998: 5).
Members of each group are often quick to stereotype, and sometimes demonize,
the other. The one complains: ‘insufficiently rigorous in logic and argumentation!’;
the other shouts back: ‘insufficiently aware of history and culture!’ Self-serving
caricatures by each party of the other ultimately serve no one and are particularly
insidious when they feed into ideological distortions of national temperaments
(Critchley 1998: 4).7 I dare say phenomenologists and even certain deconstructionists
employ rigorous methods. Derridean deconstruction is nothing if not the devil in the
details.
Continental thinkers, for their part, are often baffled by the epistemological
confidence of analytic thinkers, particularly in regard to their ability to gain
knowledge of God (Wolterstorff 2000: 153) and by their taking metaphysical realism
for granted: ‘“Theism” is an abstraction dealing with second-order questions that are
not closely connected to the living practices of religion’ (Evans 1996: 62).8 Not all
analytic thinkers check their traditions or their particularity at the academy’s door,
however, as if one could philosophize as a merely generic human being. Plantinga
sees no contradiction in beginning with the fiduciary framework of Christianity on
the one hand while maintaining the rationality of his Christian beliefs on the other,
hence his Warranted Christian Belief.
Nowhere is this particular boundary on more conspicuous display than in
the discussion between philosophers of religion in the American Philosophical
Association and their counterparts in the American Academy of Religion (Wainwright
1996).9 Walter Lowe speaks of two types of philosophy of religion: the one (call it
‘A’ for ‘analytic’) makes frequent appeal to logic and sees itself as a kind of science;
the other (‘non-A’) is far more attentive to the particularities of experience and
practice. ‘A’ wants to clarify the concept of God; ‘non-A’ ‘evinces more interest in
religion than in God’ (Lowe 1996: 31). ‘Non-A’ is therefore preoccupied with issues

7 For an interesting suggestion that both analytic and Continental philosophical

traditions are therapeutic, though each employs its own techniques, see Sandbothe 2003.
8 Evans himself disputes this characterization, maintaining that theism, so conceived
as an exercise in conceptual analysis, simply tries to clarify and examine beliefs that inform
the lives and practices of believers.
9 In general, members of the APA are ‘more likely to identify themselves as
analytic philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition, and those in the AAR as hermeneutic
philosophers in the Continental tradition’ (Proudfoot 1996: 71).
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 39
of culture and multiculturalism that are matters largely of indifference to ‘A’. ‘A’
seeks to demonstrate the rational intelligibility of theistic belief and thus employs
logical argument as its preferred literary genre; ‘non-A’s’, concerned more with
the particularities of religious life, ‘tend to stress the idea that religion is a socially
constructed cultural product’ (Quinn 1996: 55) and to write in the genre of edifying
discourse (Proudfoot 1996).
This APA/AAR encounter represents a peculiarly North American equivalent
of the adventure of concept and existence. Yet the analytic–Continental fault-line
persists through the other turns as well.

The turn to narrative: Literary forms and historical traditions ‘One could not
displace the concept without inventing new philosophical forms’ (Badiou 2005: 72).
The singular alliance between literature and philosophy – which Badiou deems as
‘one of the most striking characteristics of contemporary French philosophy’ – has
significance far beyond France. The turn to narrative has affected Anglo-American
analytic and Continental philosophers and theologians alike.10
Why narrative? One reason is that thinkers in many disciplines have come to see
narrative, like language, as the medium in which humans live and move and have
their being (see Hauerwas and Jones 1989). Stephen Crites speaks of the ‘narrative
quality of experience’ (Crites 1989), Alasdair MacIntyre of the narrative shape of
human action (MacIntyre 1989), and Paul Ricoeur of narrative as the form of language
best suited to articulating human temporality (Ricoeur 1988) and identity (Ricoeur
1992). Narratives sustain the particular identity over time not only of individuals but
of communities, hence their association with historical tradition. Personal identity is
largely constituted by one’s place in an ongoing story. Human beings are not merely
‘in’ history but exist ‘as’ history: ‘life’ must be narrated if it is to be grasped as a
meaningful whole.
Interestingly enough, Nicholas Wolterstorff observes that what makes a
philosopher an analytic philosopher is not the commitment to rigorous thought
and clarity of expression, as the popular view would have it, but rather ‘that he
places himself within a certain story line of philosophy in the twentieth century’
(Wolterstorff 2000: 152). Analytic philosophy of religion stands in the tradition
shaped by Locke, whereas its Continental counterpart stands in the tradition shaped
by Kant. In Wolterstorff’s opinion, it was largely eighteenth-century thinkers who
believed ‘that religion should be rationally constructed on the basis of our shared
human nature’ (Wolterstorff 2000: 166). Contemporary analytic thinkers (at least,
the Reformed and Roman Catholic among them) do not fit this stereotype; they
attempt to philosophize on the basis of their respective particular traditions. The turn
to narrative is but another way of speaking about the rejection of the requirement that
in order to be rational we have ‘to extricate ourselves from our particular traditions

10 Though one would not know it by consulting the reference works edited by Audi
1999 or Honderich 1995, neither of which has an entry for ‘narrative’.
40 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
and frameworks of convictions so as to conduct ourselves as generic human beings’
(Wolterstorff 2000: 167).
Narrative provides a space in which ‘there is no longer a formal differentiation
between concept and life’ (Badiou 2005: 73). The cognitive significance of
narrative has been recognized by many in different disciplines. Ricoeur views
narrative as a unique and irreducible cognitive instrument that is able to ‘configure’
– to synthesize in the form of a unified plot – a heterogeneity of otherwise unrelated
persons, places and events and, as such, is the distinct form of historical understanding
(Ricoeur 1984). MacIntyre contends that progress in epistemology is a matter of
constructing and reconstructing ever more adequate narratives (MacIntyre 1989).
Historical traditions thus become the bearers of a properly narrative reason because
all rationality is tradition-based (MacIntyre 1988).
With regard to narrative, it may be better to speak not of the ‘turn’ but of
the ‘return’ of literary form. Martha Nussbaum has written extensively on the
significance of literature for ethical understanding: ‘Literary form is not separable
from philosophical content, but is, itself, a part of content – an integral part, then,
of the search for and the statement of truth’ (Nussbaum 1990: 3). Similarly, in the
realm of theology, David Tracy views the return of literary forms as a reaction to
modernity’s bondage to a single form – the propositional – and to its concomitant
attempts to name God in terms of a particular ‘ism’ (Tracy 1994).
Narrative is a pre-eminent biblical form for identifying both Jesus Christ (Frei
1974) and the triune God (Jenson 1997: 42–60). Indeed, it is the cradle of theology
for doctrine is largely the interpretation of the biblical narrative (McGrath 1990:
52–66). Indeed, from one point of view theology is precisely a matter of ‘using the
texts to think with’ (Watson 2000: xiii).

The turn to practice: Culture and collective action Narratives generate traditions
that in turn perpetuate certain practices. A ‘practice’ is ‘a dense cluster of ideas and
activities that are related to a specific social goal and shared by a social group over
time’ (Bass 2002: 2–3). Analytic philosophy, as we have just seen, is a tradition
whose members are committed to maintaining the practices that constitute its identity,
and the virtues that make for excellent practice (Quinn 1996: 49). Similarly, ‘the
touchstone of philosophy in the Continental tradition might be said to be practice . .
. our historically and culturally embedded life in the world as finite selves’ (Critchley
1998: 12). The difference between the APA and AAR can thus be seen in terms of
two ‘tribal cultures’ with different intellectual environments and social locations in
the academy (Quinn 1996: 43).
Theologians have also made the turn to practice: ‘knowing the triune God
is inseparable from participating in a particular community and its practices – a
participation which is the work of God’s Holy Spirit’ (Buckley and Yeago 2001:
1). It follows that ‘it is the concrete context of ecclesial practice that constitutes the
framework of reflection within which agreements and disagreements over various
methodological strategies … are contained’ (Buckley and Yeago 2001: 4). Note
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 41
that the human subject on this view is not primarily a thinker – a locus of mental
representations – but an agent who relates to the world by acting in and on it.
Philosophers and theologians who relocate the standards for speech, thought and
action from universal rational criteria to the logic implicit in their local institutional
practices, whether academic or ecclesial, may be said to have made the ‘cultural–
linguistic’ turn (see Lindbeck 1984: 32–41 and Vanhoozer 2005a: 10–11). ‘Getting
it right’ in this context is neither a matter of corresponding to the way things are nor
of ‘making things better’, but rather of ‘conforming to grammatical and social rules’
of a particular culture.

The interpretative turn: Two (or more) kinds of biblical hermeneutics This last
turn is not really a separate event so much as a way of summing up the preceding.
Badiou sees what I have described as three turns as more or less coordinated moves
to rearticulate the relation of concept to life through a production of new forms and a
new political engagement: ‘It is the novelty of this relation between the philosophical
concept and the external environment that constitutes the broader innovation of
twentieth-century French philosophy’ (Badiou 2005: 71–2). Though Badiou does
not put it in these terms, it is fair to say that the relation of concept and life that he
traces through the twentieth century is a thoroughly hermeneutical adventure. Here,
too, we must distinguish between analytic and Continental styles of hermeneutics,
each of which has its philosophical and theological representatives.
Theology is clearly an interpretative discipline, philosophy less so. There is a
growing consensus, however, among thinkers in the humanities, social sciences and
natural sciences alike, that traditional options in epistemology have been superseded
by hermeneutical questions: what is interpretation?, what makes one interpretation
better than another?, if interpretative practices do not presuppose universal rational
standards, is it community relativism all the way down? (Hiley et al. 1991: 2)
While the interpretative turn ‘has benefited from the interpretive practices
of such disciplines as literary criticism, cultural anthropology, jurisprudence,
historiography, and feminist theory’ (Hiley et al. 1991: 1), there is perhaps no better
measure of a philosophy or a theology than the way it approaches the interpretation
of the Bible. The advantage in using Scripture as a hermeneutical litmus test is that
biblical interpretation involves convictions about nature and human being as well
as about God. The distinguishing traits of many a philosophy and theology quickly
become apparent when their proponents set about reading the Bible.11 This is true
even on the descriptive level, quite apart from evaluations about orthodoxy and the
like. Assumptions concerning God, world and self quickly reveal themselves in
and through the process of textual commentary. ‘By their interpretative fruits shall
ye know them.’ The practice of biblical interpretation may therefore be the best
concrete location in which to bring boundaries of philosophy and theology to light,
and even to transcend them (or not).

11 I learned this while working on the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Vanhoozer 1990),
but it has been confirmed many times since.
42 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Anthony Thiselton has convincingly documented the effect philosophical
presuppositions have had on biblical hermeneutics (Thiselton 1980). Different
theological assumptions have a similar effect (Vanhoozer 2005b). Moreover, the
analytic–Continental distinction affects philosophical and theological hermeneutics
alike. The focus of Continental hermeneutics is focused human being (‘life’),
historicity and understanding. Biblical interpretations owing more to Continental
thought tend to view the text either as an expression of human experience (e.g.,
Bultmann’s notion of faith as ‘Christian self-understanding’) or as a means for
transforming or enlarging human existence (for example, Ricoeur on the ‘new
being’ displayed ‘in front of the text’, Ricoeur 1991b: 95–8). Biblical interpretation
for Ricoeur is a regional instance of a general hermeneutic where the task of
interpretation is to display the kind of being-in-the-world refigured by the text. To be
sure, the biblical world-of-the-text is unique in that it names ‘God’ in relation to the
story of Israel and of Jesus Christ, yet Ricoeur insists that events such as the exodus
and resurrection point not to past facts so much as present existential possibilities for
the reader (Vanhoozer 1990: 230–66).
In contrast, for analytically inclined philosophers and theologians, biblical
interpretation is largely a matter of exposition and clarification of thought. In this
tradition, exegesis is largely an explicatory practice. Wolterstorff acknowledges the
tendency of analytic thinkers to focus on arguments (concept) rather than experience
(life) and recommends that philosophers of religion in this tradition devote more
attention to the lived experience of religion, especially to ‘the reading and interpreting
of canonical scriptures’ – a topic to which analytic thinkers have paid too little
attention in his opinion (Wolterstorff 2000: 169). It shows. Analytic thinkers have
a predilection for sentence-long discourse. If the pathology of Continental biblical
interpretation is the tendency to reduce God-talk to talk about human subjectivity,
the analytic pathology is the tendency to distil propositions from texts in order to
evaluate their cogency. It is an open question, then, whether analytic philosophy can
do justice to the particularity and plurality of the Bible’s diverse literary forms and
thus avoid the interpretative crime that Wordsworth’s lines chillingly depict: ‘Our
meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things: – / We murder to
dissect’ (Wordsworth 1969: ‘The Tables Turned’, 377).12

12 This is a concern related to that expressed by Harriet Harris, namely that analytic
philosophy curbs the philosophical ambition of philosophers by narrowing their focus and
detaching their discipline from people’s driving concerns, not least for help in gaining wisdom
for living (Harris and Insole 2005: 15).
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 43

IV. Phronesis and the ‘Turn to Drama’

‘All philosophy is in Shakespeare.’13

If ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’, surely the unexamined life of Jesus
Christ is not worth following. ‘Examining’ life means negotiating the relationship
between concept and existence, a transaction that involves transcending boundaries
not only between philosophy and theology but between concepts and other forms of
discourse as well. The so-called ‘ancient quarrel’ between poets and philosophers
has recently entered a fascinating new phase (Nussbaum 1990). Here we may recall
MacKinnon’s suggestion that theology may be ‘the victim of the victory won in the
person of Plato by the philosophers over the poets, and in particular the tragedians’
(MacKinnon 1968: 100). The present section proposes that both philosophy and
theology follow MacKinnon’s lead and turn to drama. Indeed, the turn to drama
represents an exciting new chapter in the adventure of ‘concept’ and ‘life’ as these
come together in the notion of the subject as an actor acting with others on the world
stage.

A dramatic proposal: Transcending boundaries via phronesis

What I am calling ‘the turn to drama’ embraces and transcends the previous turns to
language, narrative, practice and interpretation, and hence provides new resources
for philosophy and theology alike. In the first place, a drama involves doing things
(drao – ‘to do’) with words and physical movements. Of special significance is
the recognition that ‘saying’ is a form of ‘doing’, for language is often the primary
dramatic medium; many dramas consist largely of dialogical action. Second, dramas,
like narratives, have plots. Dramas, however, show rather than tell; the theatre speaks
the language of action.
Third, ‘the turn to drama’ gives a practical twist to the notion of theoria, returning
it to its original home in the theatre. Whereas for Greek philosophers theoria
pertains to contemplation of eternal truths (‘beholding’ with the mind’s eye), for
the Greek poets and tragedians beholding tragedies transforms the heart (catharsis).
The audience is not abstracted from but caught up in the action; the very notion
of interactive theatre thus breaks down the theory/practice barrier. Finally, the turn
to drama casts the interpretative turn in a new light by encouraging us to see the
outcome of hermeneutics not in terms of propositions but of performance (cf. Hiley
et al. 1991: 10–13).
Drama involves speech, story, practice, and it demands that we act with others
with whom we share a particular situation. It is precisely because of their ability
to help us make sense of particular situations that Nussbaum commends forms of
literature such as the novel to ethics and philosophy. I want to say something similar
about drama: drama is a form of understanding that fosters and facilitates concrete

13 Levinas, as cited by Ford 1989: 128.

44 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
rather than abstract reflection. Drama combines concept (what Stanislavski calls the
‘super-objective’ or main idea of the play) and existence in a way that is both fresh
yet ancient.
To determine what is fitting to say or do in a particular situation requires wisdom,
not simply information, and a dramatic paradigm, not simply theoretical principles.
The turn to drama is all about the working out and testing of convictions in the
crucible of everyday life. As such, drama brings concepts and existence together as
ingredients in judgements. A judgement is neither a statement of a theoretical truth
nor an expression of mere subjectivity, but rather a form of practical reasoning about
what to say and do in specific contexts.
What the turn to drama therefore brings to the fore is phronesis: practical
reason, the process of ‘deliberating well’ about how to realize the good in particular
situations. The turn to drama transcends old boundaries between philosophy and
theology by reframing the discussion in terms not of faith versus reason but of rival
forms of phronesis.
Aristotle appeals to phronesis to specify what is unique about ethical reasoning.
Gadamer appropriates phronesis for hermeneutics, on the ground that ‘Understanding
is … a special case of applying something universal to a particular situation’
(Gadamer 1993: 312). What the turn to drama adds to this notion of phronesis is the
theme of understanding as performance. Understanding must be demonstrated in
right action. Practical reasoning embodies one’s implicit understanding of why we
are here and what we are to do – one’s grasp of the meaning of the whole. The turn
to drama is thus a turn to wisdom, the ability to grasp meaningful patterns, solve
practical problems and live well in the world (Kekes 1980, esp. ch. 5).
Neither philosophy nor theology can afford to stay on the level of theoretical
science. Continental thinkers in particular reject scientism and its false assumption
‘that the scientific or theoretical way of viewing things … provides the primary and
most significant access to ourselves and the world’ (Critchley 1998: 13). The priority
that Heidegger assigned to the practical view of the world as ready-to-hand is similar
to the dramatic view of the world, and of human being-in-the-world, as ready-to-
speak and ready-to-do.

The turn to drama in philosophy: Living well with others in the world

According to Badiou, philosophy is itself a ‘militant’ practice that does not merely
reflect upon politics but seeks to transform it (Badiou 2005: 76). Continental
thinking, as we have seen, is meant to be an edifying discourse that does not simply
leave things where they are but criticizes them. The turns to language, narrative
and practice highlight the importance of interpretation and hence the importance
of deciding ‘how then shall we live?’ The awareness of the contingency (or as
Derrida would say, the deconstructibility) of our ways of doing things thus gives
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 45
14
rise to crisis. Indeed, one responsibility of the philosopher is to be a ‘civil servant
of humanity’ (Husserl 1970a: 17) – especially by producing crises that awaken a
critical consciousness that something now has to be done.
Ricoeur’s late writings on identity and imputability illustrate the turn to drama in
philosophy. Indeed, Ricoeur’s corpus proves a fertile proving ground for observing
the effects on philosophy of all the turns we have hitherto considered. There is
a foreshadowing of the turn to drama even in Ricoeur’s early work in which he
describes human existence as ‘the desire to be’ and ‘the effort to exist’ (Ricoeur
1969). One reflects on human being not through direct inspection, as it were, but
through a hermeneutical reflection on the ways in which the subject expresses its
existence in words and acts. The self ‘realizes’ and ‘recognizes’ itself in and through
its lived performance, a performance that is decisively informed by the particular
drama – that vision of the meaning of the whole of life – to which one is committed
(Ricoeur 2005).
What became increasingly central in Ricoeur’s thought was the notion of the
doing rather than the knowing subject: the ‘I can’ or capable self who is able to
speak and act (Ricoeur 1992). Ricoeur uses the category of narrative to speak of the
self’s identity, which does not belong to the category of events or facts but of action.
The self is essentially not so much a ‘what’ as a ‘who’: an agent with a cohesive
history of its speech and actions. Yet the self is not who it is without those others
who contribute to its story. Acting and interacting with others, often through speech,
is of course the stuff of drama.15
The call of the other to the self represents what improvisers, in the context of
the theatre, call an ‘offer’. Anything one does is a kind of offer that invites others to
respond. To ‘accept’ an offer is to join in the action; to ‘block’ the action is to prevent
it from developing. Because the self exists not as an island but as an archipelago, there
is no end of others making offers. Is the other another human being, or the Wholly
Other (Ricoeur 1992: 355)?16 Regardless of how one answers this question, the task
of philosophy and theology alike is phronetic – discerning how one’s convictions are
best lived out with others in particular situations (Mandry 2004: 75).

The turn to drama in theology: Living well with others in the world before God

Christianity is not primarily a system of beliefs or even a moral system but a way of
life oriented by the hope that in Jesus Christ is indeed the way, the truth and the good
life. At the heart of Christianity are claims concerning a series of divine words and

14 Critchley sees the theme of crisis running like Ariadne’s thread through a host of
Continental thinkers (1998: 12).
15 Ricoeur sees phronesis as necessary precisely because of the possibility of ‘a
tragedy of action’ (Ricoeur 1992: 274) occasioned by the tension between universal moral
claims and particular ethical situations.
16 It is probably not too far off the mark to suggest that, for Ricoeur, the difference
between philosophy and theology is that the latter conceives of human existence as a gift.
46 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
divine acts: a ‘theo-drama’ (Balthasar 1988). MacKinnon’s intuition about the subject
matter of theology is correct: ‘If the Christian faith is true … its truth is constituted
by the correspondence of its credenda with harsh, human reality, and with the divine
reality that met that human reality and was broken by it … At the foundation of
the faith there lies a deed done … what these [theological] interpretations seek to
represent is the act that sets our every essay in conceptualization in restless vibration'
(MacKinnon 1979: 21–2).
To say the divine Word became flesh is to confess the Word become chronotopic,
located at a particular time and place. The life of this embodied word is the stuff
of drama, for the Word speaks and acts with and for others. Indeed, the Word is
‘God with us’ and ‘God for us’. The life of faith is a response to this divine offer in
word and deed, promise and passion. Significantly, the earliest theological reflection
sought to clarify the divine dramatis personae and produced the doctrine of the
Trinity.
All reflection, whether philosophical or theological, begins in first order
language and life. The Bible is the narrative that identifies ‘who’ God is in terms of
the communicative acts of Father, Son and Spirit. In modern times, theologians have
tended to view the Bible as revelation, a category that has been co-opted in debates
about epistemology, rationality and epistemic criteria. Better to see Scripture as a
script, the normative specification of the Gospel, made up of a plurality of voices and
a diversity of communicative acts.
Theology on this view is ‘faith seeking theo-dramatic understanding’, where
understanding involves both a grasp of what God has said and done, in creation and
pre-eminently in Christ, and a grasp of what we must say and do in order rightly to
fit in with the action (Vanhoozer 2005a: 236–7). One gains understanding through
having one’s capacity for judging (and this involves reason, imagination, emotion
and volition alike) formed and transformed by the ensemble of canonical practices
that constitute Scripture. Note that the turn to drama highlights the manner in which
biblical interpretation is ultimately a matter of performing the Scriptures (Lash 1986:
37–46).
Doctrine gives direction to individuals and the church for fitting participation
– right performance – in the ongoing drama of redemption (Vanhoozer 2005a: 100–
110). This drama concerns the arrival of the kingdom of God in Jesus Christ and is
ultimately oriented to living well with others before God to God’s glory. Theology
serves the church in its role as an enacted parable of the kingdom by helping it to
see the world, and itself, sub specie theodramatis. Doctrine, as a species of dramatic
direction, thus resembles phronesis more than theoria. Theological phronesis is all
about determining what shape these goods – and the Gospel itself – ought to take
in specific situations. Doctrine is a form of practical wisdom that aims at certain
theo-dramatic goods: the salus of the individual; the shalom of the community; the
glorification of the shema or name of God.
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 47

V. Following Doctrinal Direction: Between Drama and Metaphysics

Doctrine is direction for fitting participation in the drama of redemption as it continues

to be played out in new contextual scenes. How do things stand between this ‘faith
seeking theo-dramatic understanding’ approach to theology on the one hand and
philosophy on the other? Does the directive theory of doctrine privilege the analytic
or the Continental tradition? What follows from the notion of ‘fitting participation’,
central to the directive approach, for epistemology and metaphysics?
In the first place, the turn to drama transcends old faith–reason boundaries
and represents a new stage in what Badiou (2005: 67) terms the ‘adventure of
philosophy’ to the extent that dramatic phronesis frames the relation between life
and concept in a fresh new way. With regard to implications for epistemology and
metaphysics, however, everything seems to hinge on the definition of doctrine and
its implications: ‘A realistic construal of a religious doctrine is relatively univocal
as to the main function of the doctrinal affirmation: it is meant to state a fact. An
antirealist construal denies that, and opens a question as to what is the main function
of the doctrinal formula’ (Adams 1996: 85–6). What would MacKinnon say: is
my directive theory of doctrine a discourse on reality or has it wandered from the
borderlands into the metaphysical badlands, where no ontology ever blooms?

The world-stage well lost? The pragmatist critique

Let us begin with the notion of following directions. The metaphor of the map
commends itself because actors in the theo-drama follow a script (Scripture) into new
contexts. The Bible is a canonical atlas, composed of different kinds of maps (for
example, literary genres) that together chart out the way of truth and life (Vanhoozer
2005a: 294–9). It is important to see the map as an interpretative framework, not an
objective representation of ‘how things really are’. Maps are not mirrors of reality
and there is no such thing as a universal, all-purpose map; rather, every map serves
specific purposes and is selective in what it represents.17
One might argue that dramaturgy is even less inclined towards realism to the
extent that its directions are not intended to be representations of ‘where (and what)
things are’. Such is the pragmatist critique: if doctrines are dramatic directions, then
theology’s task is not providing believers with true beliefs about the way things are
but of helping people to navigate the Christian way. While it is ironic to suggest that
the cartographic metaphor of following directions leads to the loss of the world – for
what else are maps mapping? – this is precisely Rorty’s position. On his view, what
we call truth claims are just useful devices that get us where we want to go.
Critics of Lindbeck’s cultural–linguistic theology make a similar point. In
Lindbeck’s regulative account, ‘getting it right’ is less a matter of corresponding to
the way things are than of conforming to a particular set of grammatical and social

17 For recent works on the question of representation and truth in cartography, see
MacEachren 2004 and Andrews 2001.
48 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
rules. Lindbeck likens doctrines to grammatical rules for correct speech: ‘second-
order rather than first-order propositions [that] affirm nothing about extra-linguistic
or extra-human reality’ (Lindbeck 1984: 80). The danger is that theology becomes
a species of ethnography whose task is simply to describe how one particular
community talks; doctrine then becomes an instrument for socialization into an
ecclesial community. As to Scripture, Lindbeck’s notion of intratextual truth gets us
no further than intrasystematic fittingness: the biblical narrative is internally coherent
but it does not correspond to the external (extrasystematic) world. An utterance is
intrasystematically true, says Lindbeck, when it coheres not only with the biblical
text but with the ‘total relevant context’, which is to say, the Christian form of life
(Lindbeck 1984: 64).
Lindbeck himself links the two senses of ‘following directions’ – the cartographic
and dramaturgical – when he compares using maps to performance. The context is
his discussion of truth: while doctrines themselves may not make propositional truth
claims, religion as a whole – the language and the form of life for which doctrine
gives the rules – when actually lived ‘may be pictured as a single gigantic proposition’
(Lindbeck 1984: 51). Similarly, maps become true propositions ‘only when actually
utilized in the course of a journey’ (Lindbeck 1984: 51). The converse also holds:
even if a map is in error with regard to its scale of distances and topographic
markings, ‘it becomes constitutive of a true proposition when it guides the traveller
rightly’ (Lindbeck 1984: 52).18
Because maps can be misread, Lindbeck is unwilling to bestow the epithet
‘propositional truth’ on the documents themselves. The cartographic proposition is
for Lindbeck not a property of the text itself but of its use. For the realist, however, a
problem arises when maps that are in error are nevertheless said to be ingredient in a
true proposition.19 ‘Truth’ for Lindbeck is a ‘success’ term, where success is measured
in terms of pragmatic efficacy. While realists expect the truth to be profitable, profit
alone is not the measure of truth. Doctrinal maps are not true because they work;
they work (if they work) because they are true. Lindbeck confuses cartographic
perlocutions (use) with cartographic locutions and illocutions (representations and
directions).
A related worry about the status of theological truth has been raised with regard
to the so-called ‘moderate postmodern trajectory’ of phronesis (Guarino 1993: 42).
Is there place in a phronetic conception of doctrine as direction for discipleship
for a cognitive understanding of doctrinal statements as truth claims as well? Must
doctrines be either directive or referential? The realist’s concern is that the turn
to phronesis ‘cannot sustain the referential and final nature of truth which seems
essential to revelation theology’ (Guarino 1993: 54).

18 Some sort of residual correspondence view seems to be at work in Lindbeck’s

notion of maps being ‘in error’.
19 J.B. Harley, who is by no means a naive realist when it comes to cartography,
nevertheless says that maps ‘state an argument about the world and they are propositional in
nature’ (cited in Andrews 2001: 18).
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 49
The turn to drama and phronesis need not lead to this pragmatist cul-de-sac.
The prior question, however, is: ‘What’s wrong with seeing doctrine as a map that
gets us to our destination despite its errors and inaccuracies?’ I am reminded of
my own attempt at forging short-cuts in my secondary school calculus class. My
formula produced the right answer more often than not. My maths instructor,
rightly sensing that something important was at stake, urged the rest of the class
not to follow me into differential no-man’s-land. He then produced a page-long
demonstration showing why ‘Vanhoozer’s Law’ would eventually generate wrong
answers: because it ‘worked’ for the wrong reason. Theologians who conceive of
their task as ‘faith seeking understanding’ will not be content merely to end up in
the right place for the wrong reason, without knowing how or why. This way neither
wisdom nor understanding lie.
A directive account of Christian doctrine will remain committed to the project
of metaphysics – saying ‘what is’ – because of its emphasis on fitting participation.
The ‘fit’ is not simply a matter of what works but of what ‘befits’ the way things
are. In addition, the notion of fittingness serves as an indispensable critical principle
without which speech and practices would be prone to various kinds of ideological
distortion. The meaning of the drama of redemption may not be reduced to my, or
my community’s, performance of it. On the contrary, metaphysics is the discourse
about the underlying intelligible structure of our commitments, ‘what constitutes
them as more than arbitrarily willed options’ (Williams 1995: 6). Embedded in our
most important practices are metaphysical beliefs, convictions about the way things
are. Metaphysics remains necessary, then, not as an abstraction from but precisely as
a critical reflection on practice.

On the dogmatic location of metaphysics

In terms of the older subject/object dichotomy, metaphysics pertains to the objective

content (reality) that theories and doctrines strive to grasp and represent. Metaphysical
categories such as ‘substance’, ‘essence’, ‘nature’, ‘form’ and ‘matter’ were thought
to cut reality at its very joints. In terms of the present essay, however, the ultimate
reality to which theology corresponds is dramatic: a whole and complete action.
Both philosophy and theology, viewed in light of the turn to drama, offer directions
to their respective disciples on how to ‘live well in the world with others’. Moreover,
both parse ‘living well in the world’ in terms of ‘fitting participation’ in some kind
of unified activity or process. Some see the process as entirely naturalistic – for
example, the neo-Darwinian ‘drama of evolution’.
Is theology thus only a regional instance of a general metaphysic? I want to
say about metaphysics what Ricoeur says about hermeneutics: though biblical
interpretation appears to be a regional instance of philosophical hermeneutics, it so
happens that theological hermeneutics ‘presents features that are so original that the
relation is gradually inverted’ (Ricoeur 1991b: 90). The ‘qualities’ in question are
particularities of the history of Jesus Christ.
50 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Doctrine gives direction to disciples on the way. Is this direction a matter of
metaphysics or morality? It is both: the way of wisdom transcends the dichotomy
between a merely theoretical metaphysics and a merely practical morality.
The directive theory of doctrine thus requires some reference to reality – call it
‘theodramatic correspondence’ or ‘theodramatic realism’ – where reality is defined
not merely in terms of God’s being but in terms of God’s work (for example, the
created order) and in terms of God’s triune being-in-act. Theology aims at promoting
theodramatic correspondence: a way of speaking, thinking and living that is not only
‘according to the Scriptures’ but a way that is ‘according to’ the real – God’s creative,
communicative and recreative activity, as revealed in the history of Jesus Christ.
In the spirit of MacKinnon, we must say that the Gospel is at once theodramatic
and metaphysical. A ‘theodramatic metaphysics’ provides a systematic account of
the categories needed to describe what God has done to renew all things in Christ
through the Spirit. Doctrines are not only statements of what is – and what is coming
to be – but directions for how rightly to relate to it, directions for bringing practice
into correspondence with the divine in the creative and recreative action of the triune
God.
To speak of Jesus’ history as ‘theodramatic’ is to offer a ‘thick description’ that
makes use of the category of divine action. Here I need to underline two points:
(1) what happens at the level of theodrama requires new categories and concepts
(for example, divine work, divine action, creation, redemption) in order to avoid
reducing what emerges at this level to mere epiphenomena of lower-level processes;
(2) what happens at the level of theodrama is no less real than what happens at,
say, the levels of physics, chemistry and biology (see Peacocke 1993 and McGrath
2002). In directing us to participate fittingly in the theodrama, then, doctrine orients
us to a higher level of reality.

‘In Christ’: Towards a christological metaphysic

Doctrines state acts, not simply facts, and direct us to participate in these acts.
Theodramatic categories assume metaphysical status because they describe a level of
the real without which our descriptions of the world and what happens in it would be
too thin (that is, reductionist).20 Jesus is the clue to transcending boundaries between
philosophy and theology because it is through an examination of his life that we
come to understand the drama of universal history and the being-in-act of God.

20 Though I cannot press the case here, I believe that divine action is no less
metaphysically disadvantaged as a category than human action. Theodrama here functions
as a categorial principle, a principle that allows us to understand some aspect of reality in
a different way or at a deeper level, a principle without which we should understand not
more but less: ‘Metaphysical theories are not testable in the same way as scientific theories,
but then metaphysical pronouncements differ in their logical character from scientific
pronouncements. … It is overall understanding that the metaphysician seeks to provide, not
merely understanding in a particular area’ (Walsh 1963: 187).
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 51
It was Kant who analyzed the schema of the concept ‘real’ in terms of ‘existence
in time’. Jesus’ existence in time is thus a good place to examine his reality. The
strangeness of Jesus’ concrete reality is rooted in ‘the way in which he lived uniquely
as the frontier of the familiar and the transcendent’ (MacKinnon 1987: 180). Jesus’
historical time is connected to the pre-existence of the Logos as well as to the time of
the risen and ascended Christ. In short, Jesus’ being-in-time – his person, prayers and
practices – is bound up with the life of the triune God. The actions of the triune God
in the history and fate of Jesus Christ are expression in time of God’s eternal being.
Though Christian theology acknowledges Jesus Christ as the supreme locus
of God’s being-in-act, the Christian theodrama encompasses others who also
participate in the life of the triune God when the Spirit unites them in Christ to
the Father. To engage in the theodrama is to participate not in a Platonic Greek
universal but in a Pauline Jewish particular: the form of the historical life of Jesus
Christ, itself a function of divine energies and agencies. So doctrinal direction is not
a matter of pragmatism, but of participation. Disciples participate not in the ‘being’
or substantival nature of God so much as in the being-in-act of God: the event of
triune self-communication and communion. In directing disciples to participate
rightly in the theodrama, then, doctrine involves metaphysical presuppositions and
implications, to which I can here only gesture.
Union with Christ by the Spirit is the operative notion ‘by which we are taken
up to participate in (and be transformed by) God’s trinitarian life and love’ (Canlis
2004: 184). Participation in Christ is not merely symbolic but involves a real ‘union’,
in particular an incorporation into his death and resurrection, of which baptism is the
sign and seal (Calvin Institutes IV.15.1–6). It is not a matter of being swallowed up
into his divine nature but of sharing Christ’s life through the Spirit. Humanity thus
participates in divinity without subverting the ontological boundary that distinguishes
the Creator from creation.
To be ‘in Christ’ is the apostle Paul’s preferred designation for right participation
in the theodrama. It is also a thick description of Christian identity: ‘if any one is in
Christ, he is a new creation’ (2 Cor. 5:17). Such participation in Christ does not entail
abstracting ourselves from the world but engaging in a ministry of reconciliation
and loving the proverbial ‘others.’ To be ‘in Christ’ is to give a thick, theodramatic
description of human agency and human capabilities. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the
‘I can’ needs to be completed by his namesake the apostle Paul’s ‘I can do all things
through Christ who strengthens me’ (Phil. 4:13).
As God and humanity participate in Christ, so too does the world: ‘in him all
things were created … and in him all things hold together’ (Col. 1:16–17). Indeed,
the ‘super-objective’ of the whole theodrama set forth in Christ is a plan ‘to unite all
things in him, things in heaven and things on earth’ (Eph. 1:12). Stanley Grenz thus
speaks of an ‘eschatological realism’ (Grenz and Franke 2001: 266–73). Though
union and communion are future goals, the future is upon us: we are already united
with God in Christ through the Spirit. This is the Christian ‘metadrama’ for which
doctrinal direction provides practical understanding and to which it corresponds.
52 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
VI. Conclusion. Two Types of Practical Wisdom: A Pairing or Parting of
Ways?

‘Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.’ (James Joyce, Ulysses 1968: 622)

In a celebrated image, Paul Tillich contrasts two types of philosophy of religion: the
way of meeting a stranger (viz., God as supreme Being) and the way of overcoming
estrangement (viz., God as Being-itself) (Tillich 1959). A similar contrast may help
us to distinguish two types of practical wisdom. Is the dialogue between philosophy
and theology more like meeting a stranger or ought we to work towards overcoming
estrangement? Perhaps the better image would be to see the two disciplines
personified in the two disciples on the road to Emmaus ‘talking with each other
about all these things that had happened’ (Luke 24:14).
Even Karl Barth spoke of the philosopher as the ‘companion’ of the theologian
(Barth 1986: 80). Both the philosopher and the theologian are after understanding:
a way of bringing ‘concept’ and ‘life’ together in order to make sense of the whole.
Barth also notes that neither one, as a human being, is in a position ‘to speak down
from heaven’ (Barth 1986: 80). Nevertheless, the ‘one whole Truth’ to which
the theologian is committed – the truth of creation, incarnation and redemption
summed up in the name and narrative of Jesus Christ – concerns a ‘mighty act of
condescension’ (Barth 1986: 85). By contrast, the philosopher begins by reflecting
on the whole of human experience and seeks to reach transcendence ‘from below’.
While they both may be headed towards Emmaus, then, there is some dispute
about the correct route. The philosopher, even after the event of Jesus Christ,
appears ‘to walk the path from the human being to God’ (Barth 1986: 89). Despite
this difference, Barth urges the philosopher and the theologian not to stray so far
apart that they lose sight or go out of earshot of one another, for it is possible to
learn from the other and be guided on a step along one’s own way without having to
change paths (Barth 1986: 91). The theologian admires the philosopher ‘as a prudent
expositor of [the creation’s] self-understanding and self-description’ (Barth 1986:
92). The philosopher is ‘worldly-wise’ and so helps keep the theologian ‘earthed’. Yet
the theologian is ‘wordly-wise’ and so plays the role of Hamlet to the philosopher’s
Horatio with the reminder that ‘There are more things in heaven and earth … / Than
are dreamt of in your philosophy’ (Shakespeare, Hamlet Act I, scene v).
Colin Gunton depicts the relation of theology and philosophy as that of
‘indispensable opponents’ (Gunton 1996). Theology’s concepts are accountable to
particular historical claims – the drama of Jesus’ passion – in a way that philosophy’s are
not. Nevertheless, Gunton credits theology’s philosophical dispute with Gnosticism
with the emergence of the doctrine of creation out of nothing. Both disciplines want
to say something about the kind of world we live in, and theology ‘articulates its
statements in a struggle with philosophy for the same Lebensraum’ (Gunton 1996:
305). What was implicit in Scripture – the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo; Act 1 of the
theodrama – would have remained so had it not been for a philosophical dispute.
 Kevin J. Vanhoozer 53
Such examples lead me to resist the notion that dialogue between philosophy and
theology ought to result in a ‘fusion of horizons’, for this in effect means the collapse
of two horizons or voices into one. I prefer a Bakhtinian approach that insists on the
importance of ‘outsideness’: ‘In order to understand, it is immensely important … to
be located outside the object … It is only in the eye of another culture that foreign
culture reveals itself fully and profoundly’ (Bakhtin 1986: 7). Outsideness is not an
obstacle to understanding but the condition of a deeper, creative understanding – an
understanding that grasps what would otherwise remain potential or implicit. Bakhtin
thus explains the phenomenon that Gunton has observed: concerning the doctrine
of creatio ex nihilo, for example, philosophy’s outsideness was the condition for
theology’s creative understanding.
The description of MacKinnon as ‘an inside “outsider”’ (Roberts 1989: 2)
who refused premature foreclosures of the conversation between philosophy and
theology takes on special significance after Bakhtin. MacKinnon well knew that
the philosopher is kin with others who make ‘protesting raids upon the theologians’
cherished homeland’ (MacKinnon 1968: 54). The dialogue between philosophy
and theology thus resembles the game of kabbadi. In a rectangular dirt area divided
into two halves, individual players from each team make occasional ‘raids’ into the
other side. Any player they touch is ‘out’ and must leave the game. There is a catch:
players making raids must say ‘kabbadi’ repeatedly without taking a breath until
they return to their own side. If they fail to return or run out of breath, they are out
of the game.
Theologians can raid the philosophers’ territory as well, appropriating various
topics for their own purposes and debating topics such as the nature of the world,
knowledge and morality. Of course, theologians must say not kabbadi but Kyrie, for
if their discourse fails to give epistemic primacy (Marshall 2000: 45–6) to the story
of Jesus Christ, as norm both for the story of humanity and of God, they are out of
the game.
While the turn to drama allows us to transcend old boundaries, it need not and
does not follow that all boundaries be abandoned. With regard to philosophical
and theological phronesis, then, I cannot simply say that ‘opposites meet’. On this
point, the present proposal is closer to Paul than to James (Joyce). To collapse all
boundaries between philosophy and theology would be to collapse the one into the
other, resulting not in creative but impoverished understanding. A little outsideness
is not a bad thing.
In the final analysis, it is persons – the actors in the drama – who demonstrate
understanding and embody what wisdom they have, and it is persons who must
transcend boundaries. Some make raids; others, who hold dual citizenship, make
legal passage. And then there are the nomads, like myself, who hold dual citizenship
in Athens and Jerusalem yet nevertheless make their earthly home in neither city
exclusively, preferring rather to dwell, with others in the diaspora, in the borderlands:
on the philosophical plains at the foot of Mount Zion. Here I stand – philosophically,
metaphysically. Theologically I can do no other.
54 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology

Further Reading

Badiou, A., ‘The adventure of French philosophy,’ New Left Review, 35, Sept–Oct
2005, 67–77
Hiley, D.R., Bohman, J.F., and Shusterman, R. (eds), The Interpretive Turn:
Philosophy, Science, Culture, Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press,
1991
Lindbeck, G.A., The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal
Age, Philadelphia, PA: Westminster, 1984
MacKinnon, D.M., Borderlands of Theology and Other Essays, Philadelphia, PA,
and New York: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1968
Nussbaum, M.C., Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990
Ricoeur, P., From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, trans. K. Blamey and
J.B. Thompson, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991
Vanhoozer, K.J., The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical–linguistic Approach to
Christian Theology, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2005
Wainwright, W.J. (ed.), God, Philosophy and Academic Culture: A Discussion
between Scholars in the AAR and the APA, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1996
 SECTION ONE

Reason, Rationality and Traditions of

Rationality

Few would confine the notion of rational discourse to that which strictly follows the
canons of deductive or inductive logic, not least because premises have to come from
somewhere, inductive criteria need to be validated in non-circular fashion, and what
counts as reduction to ‘absurdity’ tends in the interesting cases to be problematic,
even culture-specific. Our concepts of what count as reason and rationality, and
hence of their scope, are functions of intellectual and broader cultural traditions
(which is not to deny that some may be preferable to others), several of which are
addressed in the papers that follow.

Charles Taylor points to the ways that historical contingencies have led to the
widespread acceptance in the West of a set of narratives that have together served to
make secular perspectives seem ‘natural’, to provide norms by reference to which
claims for the reality of that which transcends the physical world seem less than
rational. The resulting ‘closed world structures’, that is, ways of experiencing and
understanding the world that are closed to the possibility of the ‘transcendent’, are
however themselves a product of history rather than nature, and excavating their
history casts doubt on their claims, even in their own terms, to be themselves
rational.

Chris Firestone takes up what is arguably the decisive intellectual ‘moment’ in this
history, Kant’s denial of the possibility of knowledge of the transcendent in order
to make room for faith. For Kant’s account of the categories of the understanding
as engaging only with what is ‘immanent’ in experience (the ‘phenomenal’) has
led many to dismiss what lies beyond it (the ‘noumenal’) as beyond the frontiers of
rational, even intelligible, discourse. Firestone argues that careful attention to the
development of Kant’s thinking shows that such dismissals are unsustainable, for
the space required in Kantian terms for faith turns out to be grounded in the nature of
reason itself, without reference to which reason is radically unstable.

Philip Clayton’s focus is on the continuing reshaping of some of these intellectual

traditions, with particular reference to those setting a sharp boundary between
science and religion. One of the most powerful of Taylor’s secularizing narratives
is that whereby the progress of science is seen as a function of the elimination of
‘transcendental’ myths in order to become fully rational. The history here is no
56 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
doubt questionable, but Clayton is more interested in that narrative’s contemporary
unsustainability for modelling science itself. The recognition that even the natural
sciences are in part interpretative has progressively led to a rethinking of the nature
of their rationality in a way that at least softens the distinction between the natural
and the social sciences; but the resulting reconceptualization of science as the
overcoming of puzzlement no longer presupposes a qualitative distinction between
scientific and non-scientific rationality, making it worthwhile for scientific and
religious struggles with puzzles raised by fundamental questions to be brought into
more positive relations with each other – a potentiality which is already being widely
exploited.

Graham Ward addresses the phenomenological tradition, as developed by Husserl,

which has helped to form contemporary ‘Continental’ philosophy. It seeks to
investigate what is immediately ‘given’ in experience but, as in the case of the natural
sciences, the quest for ‘pure’ description of what is given turns out to be a wild goose
chase, for description cannot be separated from interpretation. Phenomenology
therefore points beyond itself to interpretative frames, and here the theological
frame proves fruitful when one focuses on what is given in that most basic aspect of
embodied experience, the sense of touch. It is the mystery of embodiment itself, in
theological terms the mystery of incarnation, that moves us beyond phenomenology
and towards the theology of phenomena.
 Chapter 3

What is Secularity?
Charles Taylor

How did this secular age come about? And what exactly is this age whose
development I’m trying to explain? There are all sorts of ways of describing it:
separation of religion from public life, decline of religious belief and practice. But,
while I’ll touch on these, I’m interested in another facet of our age: belief in God,
or in the transcendent in any form is contested; it is an option among many; it is
therefore fragile and for some people in some milieux very difficult, even ‘weird’.
Five hundred years ago in our civilization, this wasn’t the case. Unbelief was off the
map for most people, close to inconceivable. But that description also applies to the
whole of human history outside the modern West.
What had to happen for this kind of secular climate to come about? (1) There
had to develop a culture which marks a clear division between the ‘natural’ and the
‘supernatural’, and (2) it had to come to seem possible to live entirely within the
natural. I believe that (1) was something striven for, but (2) came about at first quite
inadvertently.
But before presenting my own views, I want to remark that the transformation
represented by (1) + (2) is one of the most important and remarkable in human
history. It is unprecedented for a civilization to make this kind of ‘secular’ turn. It is
an explanandum calling out for a convincing historical account.
Now I think that our attempts to come to grips with this question are obscured
and impeded by a very powerful master narrative, or family of such narratives,
which is even hegemonic in some parts of the academy. These narratives have the
effect of making the secular turn look less remarkable than it is; they in a sense
‘normalize’ or ‘naturalize’ it. I will try in the following pages to identify key features
of this narration, using the key terms ‘death of God’, and ‘subtraction story’. I hope
that both a picture of this kind of narrative and of the alternative that I propose will
emerge.
My aim is to account in particular for phase (2); that is, I want to explore the
constitution in modernity of what I will call ‘closed’ or ‘horizontal’ worlds. I mean
by this shapes of our ‘world’ in Heidegger’s sense which leave no place for the
‘vertical’ or ‘transcendent’, but which in one way or another close these off, render
them inaccessible, or even unthinkable.
This has become ‘normal’ for us. But we can bring out again how remarkable this
is if we take a certain distance from it, jump back five hundred years in our western
civilization (aka Latin christendom), as I indicated above. At that time, non-belief in
58 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
God was close to unthinkable for the vast majority;1 whereas today this is not at all
the case. One might be tempted to say that in certain milieux the reverse has become
true, that belief is unthinkable. But this exaggeration already shows up the lack of
symmetry. It is truer to say that in our world a whole gamut of positions, from the
most militant atheism to the most orthodox traditional theisms, passing through every
possible position on the way, are represented and defended somewhere in our society.
Something like the unthinkability of some of these positions can be experienced in
certain milieux, but what is ruled out will vary from context to context. An atheist
in the Bible belt has trouble being understood, as often (in a rather different way)
do believing Christians in certain reaches of the academy. But, of course, people
in each of these contexts are aware that the others exist, and that the option they
can’t really credit is the default option elsewhere in the same society, whether they
regard this with hostility or just perplexity. The existence of an alternative fragilizes
each context, that is, makes its sense of the thinkable/unthinkable uncertain and
wavering.
This fragilization is then increased by the fact that great numbers of people are
not firmly embedded in any such context, but are puzzled, cross-pressured, or have
constituted by bricolage a sort of median position. The existence of these people
raises sometimes even more acute doubts within the more assured milieux. The polar
opposites can be written off as just mad or bad, as we see with the present American
culture wars between ‘liberals’ and ‘fundamentalists’; but the intermediate positions
can sometimes not be as easily dismissed.
What I want to try is to articulate some of the worlds from within which the
believing option seems strange and unjustifiable. But this articulation involves some
degree of abstraction – indeed, three kinds of abstraction, with the corresponding
dangers.
First, what I shall really be describing is not worlds in their entirety, but ‘world
structures’, aspects or features of the way experience and thought are shaped and
cohere, but not the whole of which they are constituents. Additionally, I will not be
describing the world of any concrete human beings. A world is something which
people inhabit. It gives the shape of what they experience, feel, opine, see, and so on.
The world of the cross-pressured is different from that of the assured. But what I’m
doing is trying to articulate certain world-types (‘ideal types’, in a quasi-Weberian
sense), which may not, will almost surely not, coincide with the totality of any real
person’s world. Third, the articulation involves an intellectualization; one has to get
at the connections in lived experience through ideas, and very often ideas which are
not consciously available to the people concerned, unless they are forced to articulate
them themselves through challenge and argument.
Nevertheless, this effort I believe is very worthwhile because it enables us to see
the way in which we can be held within certain world structures without being aware
that there are alternatives. A ‘picture’ can ‘hold us captive’, as Wittgenstein (1958)

1 See Lucien Febvre’s The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century (1982).
 Charles Taylor 59
2
put it. And by the same token, we can gain insight into the way two people or groups
can be arguing past each other, because their experience and thought is structured by
two different pictures.
What I want to try to lay out is world structures that are closed to transcendence.
All of these arise during the slow development in Latin christendom and its successor
civilization of a clear distinction between what came to be called the ‘natural’ and
the ‘supernatural’, as two separate levels of reality. This kind of clear demarcation
was foreign to any other civilization in history. There have always been distinctions
between, for instance, the sacred and the profane, higher beings and worldly beings,
and so forth, but in the ‘enchanted’ worlds that humans have inhabited in earlier
times, these two kinds of reality were inextricably interwoven. The sacred was
concentrated in certain times, places, acts or persons. The natural/supernatural
distinction implies a great sorting out, in which the ‘natural’ becomes a level which
can be described and understood on its own. This is the precondition for going the
further step, and declaring this the only reality. The ‘supernatural’ can be denied only
from a firm footing in the ‘natural’ as an autonomous order.
So I want to look at some closed world structures (CWS), and try to draw from
them some of the features of modern experience, or inability to experience the
spiritual, the sacred, the transcendent. Of course, this term ‘transcendent’ makes sense
most clearly within a world in which natural and supernatural are distinguished; it is
what ‘goes beyond’ the natural. It would have been hard to explain this concept to a
mediaeval peasant, or it would have slid quickly into other concepts (for example,
the realm of God, as against that of the Saints). But we have to use some terms to
discuss these issues, and they are bound to make sense in some epochs and not
others. So I use one that does make sense to us.
Our time is full of struggle and cross-purposes on this issue of the transcendent.
We are opposed, sometimes bitterly and strongly; but we also often are speaking
past each other. I’m hoping that a study of some key CWS will cast some light on
the differences and also on the cross-purposes. I want to look ultimately at four, but
with very unequal treatment. I will give special attention to the third in the series
(in the order of their introduction, not the order of their arising). That’s because I
think that it is in an important sense the most significant and also the least explored
or understood.

CWS 1: Here I want to introduce the structure of modern epistemology, which I

am taking not only as a set of theories which have been widespread, but also at the
level of a structure in my sense; that is, an underlying picture which is only partly
consciously entertained, but which controls the way people think, argue, infer, make
sense of things.
At its most blatant this structure operates with a picture of knowing agents as
individuals, who build up their understanding of the world through combining and
relating, in more and more comprehensive theories, the information which they

2 ‘Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen.’ Philosophical Investigations, para. 115.

60 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
take in and which is couched in inner representations, be these conceived as mental
pictures (in the earlier variants) or as something like sentences held true in the more
contemporary versions.
Characteristic of this picture are a series of priority relations. Knowledge of the
self and its states comes before knowledge of external reality and of others. The
knowledge of reality as neutral fact comes before our attributing to it various ‘values’
and relevances. And, of course, knowledge of the things of ‘this world’, of the natural
order, precedes any theoretical invocation of forces and realities transcendent to it.
The epistemological picture, combining as it does very often with some
understanding of modern science, operates frequently as a CWS. The priority
relations tell us not only what is learned before what, but also what can be inferred
on the basis of what. There are foundational relations. I know the world through
my representations. I must grasp the world as fact before I can posit values. I must
accede to the transcendent, if at all, by inference from the natural. This can operate
as a CWS, because it is obvious that the inference to the transcendent is at the
extreme and most fragile end of a series of inferences; it is the most epistemically
questionable. And indeed, granted the lack of consensus surrounding this move, as
against earlier steps in the chain (for example, to ‘other minds’), it is obviously
highly problematic.
Now I introduce the epistemological picture in order to bring out some features
of the way CWS operate in our time, the way they are on the one hand contested and
on the other maintain themselves.
The contestation of the epistemological picture is a familiar theme. But referring
to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty as paradigm cases of the refutation of epistemology,
we can see that this view has been comprehensively turned on its head. (1) Our
grasp of the world does not consist simply of our holding inner representations of
outer reality. We do hold such representations, which are perhaps best understood
in contemporary terms as sentences held true. But these only make the sense that
they do for us because they are thrown up in the course of an ongoing activity of
coping with the world, as bodily, social and cultural beings. This coping can never
be accounted for in terms of representations, but provides the background against
which our representations have the sense that they do. (2) As just implied, this coping
activity, and the understanding which inhabits it, is not primarily that of each of us
as individuals; rather we are each inducted into the practices of coping as social
‘games’ or activities, some of which do indeed, in the later stages of development,
call upon us to assume a stance as individuals. But primordially, we are part of social
action. (3) In this coping, the things which we deal with are not first and foremost
objects, but what Heidegger calls ‘pragmata’ – things which are the focal points
of our dealings, which therefore have relevance, meaning, significance for us, not
as an add-on but from their first appearance in our world. Later, we learn to stand
back and consider things objectively, outside of the relevances of coping. (4) In later
Heidegger these significances include some which have a higher status, structuring
our whole way of life, the ensemble of our significances. In the formulation of ‘das
 Charles Taylor 61
Geviert’, there are four axes to this context in which our world is set: earth and sky;
human and divine.
Although all those who follow something like this deconstruction of epistemology
do not go along with this fourth stage, it is clear that the general thrust of these
arguments is to utterly overturn the priority relations of epistemology. Things that
are considered as late inferences or additions are seen to be part of our primordial
predicament. There is no getting behind them, and it makes no sense to contest them.
The ‘scandal of philosophy’ is not the inability to attain to certainty of the external
world, but rather that this should be considered a problem, says Heidegger in Sein
und Zeit. We only have knowledge as agents coping with a world, which it makes no
sense to doubt since we are dealing with it. There is no priority of the neutral grasp
of things over their value. There is no priority of the individual’s sense of self over
the society; our most primordial identity is as a new player being inducted into an
old game. Even if we don’t add the fourth stage, and consider something like the
divine as part of the inescapable context of human action, the whole sense that it
comes as a remote and most fragile inference or addition in a long chain is totally
undercut by this overturning of epistemology. The new outlook can be built into a
new CWS, but it doesn’t offer itself as a CWS in the same direct and obvious way as
the epistemological picture did.
We can learn something general about the way CWS operate, suffer attack and
defend themselves from this example. From within itself, the epistemological picture
seems unproblematic. It comes across as an obvious discovery we make when we
reflect on our perception and acquisition of knowledge. All the great foundational
figures – Descartes, Locke, Hume – claimed to be just saying what was obvious once
one examined experience itself reflectively.
Seen from the deconstruction, this is a most massive self-blindness. Rather what
happened is that experience was carved into shape by a powerful theory which posited
the primacy of the individual, the neutral, the intra-mental as the locus of certainty.
What was driving this theory? Certain ‘values’, virtues, excellences: those of the
independent, disengaged subject, reflexively controlling his own thought-processes,
‘self-responsibly’ in Husserl’s famous phrase. There is an ethic here, of independence,
self-control, self-responsibility, of a disengagement which brings control; a stance
which requires courage, the refusal of the easy comforts of conformity to authority,
of the consolations of an enchanted world, of the surrender to the promptings of the
senses. The entire picture, shot through with ‘values’, which is meant to emerge out
of the careful, objective, presuppositionless scrutiny, is now presented as having
been there from the beginning, driving the whole process of ‘discovery’.
Once you shift to the deconstructing point of view, the CWS can no longer
operate as such. It seemed to offer a neutral point of view from which we could
problematize certain values – for example, ‘transcendent’ ones – more than others.
But now it appears that it is itself driven by its own set of values. Its ‘neutrality’
appears bogus.
Put another way, the CWS in a sense ‘naturalizes’ a certain view on things. This is
just the way things are, and once you look at experience, without preconceptions, this
62 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
is what appears. ‘Natural’ is opposed here to something like ‘socially constructed’;
and from the deconstructing point of view, you have to tell a quite different story
of the rise of this outlook. It isn’t just that one day people looked without blinkers
and discovered epistemology; rather this is the way things could be made to look
from within a new historical formation of human identity, that of the disengaged,
objectifying subject. The process involves a re-invention, a recreation of human
identity, along with great changes in society and social practices. There is no simple
stepping out of an earlier such identity into the pure light of bare nature.
It is a feature of our contemporary CWS that they are understood by those who
inhabit them in this naturalizing way. It also follows from this that those who inhabit
them see no alternative, except the return to earlier myth or illusion. That’s what
gives them their strength. People within the redoubt fight as it were to the last, and
feeblest, argument, because they cannot envisage surrender except as regression.
The naturalizing emerges in a kind of narration they proffer of their genesis, which I
want to call a ‘subtraction story’.
But to develop this idea I should move to another, richer CWS, or constellation
of CWS. It is what people often gesture at with an expression like the ‘death of
God’. Of course, this expression is used in an uncountable range of ways; I can’t
be faithful to all of them, nor even will I be simply following the originator of the
phrase (though I think my version is not too far from his),3 if I say that one essential
idea which this phrase captures is that conditions have arisen in the modern world in
which it is no longer possible – honestly, rationally, without confusions, or fudging,
or mental reservation – to believe in God. These conditions leave us nothing we can
believe in beyond the human – human happiness, or potentialities, or heroism.

3 The ‘death of God’ reference is from The Gay Science, para. 125. Later on, Nietzsche
says: ‘Man sieht, was eigentlich über den christlichen Gott gesiegt hat: die christliche Moralität
selbst, der immer strenger genommene Begriff der Wahrhaftigkeit, die Beichtväterfeinheit
des christlichen Gewissens, übersetzt und sublimiert zum wissenschaftlichen Gewissen, zur
intellektuellen Sauberkeit um jeden Preis. Die Natur ansehn, als ob sie ein Beweis für die Güte
und Obhut eines Gottes sei; die Geschichte interpretieren zu Ehren einer göttlichen Vernunft,
als beständiges Zeugnis einer sittlichen Weltordnung und sittlicher Schlussabsichten; die eignen
Erlebnisse auslegen, wie wir fromme Menschen lange genug ausgelegt haben, wie als ob alles
Fügung, alles Wink, alles dem Heil der Seele zuliebe ausgedacht und geschickt sei: Das ist numehr
vorbei, das hat das Gewissen gegen sich, das gilt allen feineren Gewissen als unanständig,
unehrlich, als Lügnerei, Feminismus, Schwachheit, Feigheit’ – ‘One can see what it was that
actually triumphed over the Christian god: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness
that was taken ever more rigorously; the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience,
translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price.
Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and care of a god; interpreting history in
honour of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral
purposes; interpreting one’s own experiences as pious people have long interpreted theirs, as if
everything were providential, a hint, designed and ordained for the sake of the salvation of the
soul – that is over now; that has conscience against it; every refined conscience considers it to be
indecent, dishonest, a form of mendacity, effeminacy, weakness, cowardice.’ (Nietzsche 2001:
para. 357) It will be clear later on where my interpretation agrees with Nietzsche’s.
 Charles Taylor 63
What conditions? Essentially, they are of two orders: first, and most important,
the deliverances of science; and then, secondarily, the shape of contemporary moral
experience.
To take up the first, perhaps the most powerful CWS operating today, the central
idea seems to be that the whole thrust of modern science has been to establish
materialism. For people who cling to this idea the second order of conditions, the
contemporary moral predicament, is unnecessary or merely secondary. Science alone
can explain why belief is no longer possible in the above sense. This is a view held
by people on all levels, from the most sophisticated ‘We exist as material beings in a
material world, all of whose phenomena are the consequences of physical relations
among material entities’ (Lewontin 1997: ‘Billions and billions of demons’, 28) to
the most direct and simple: Madonna’s ‘material girl, living in a material world’.
Religion or spirituality involves substituting wrong and mythical explanations,
explaining by ‘demons’ (Lewontin’s article again, quoting from Carl Sagan). At
bottom it’s just a matter of facing the obvious truth.
This doesn’t mean that moral issues don’t come into it. But they enter as accounts
of why people run away from reality, why they want to go on believing illusion. They
do so because it’s comforting. The real world is utterly indifferent to us, and even
to a certain degree dangerous, threatening. As children, we have to see ourselves
as surrounded by love and concern, or we shrivel up. But in growing up we have
to learn to face the fact that this environment of concern can’t extend beyond the
human sphere, and mostly doesn’t extend very far within it.
However, this transition is hard. So we project a world that is providential, created
by a benign God. Or at least, we see the world as meaningful in terms of the ultimate
human good. The providential world is not only soothing, but it also takes the burden
of evaluating things off our shoulders. The meanings of things are already given.
So religion emanates from a childish lack of courage. We need to stand up like
men, and face reality.
Now the traditional unbelieving attack on religion since the Enlightenment
contains not only this accusation of childish pusillanimity, but also an attack on
religion as calling for terrible self-mutilation, actuated by pride. Human desire has
to be checked, mortified. And then this mortification is often imposed on others, so
that religion is the source of a terrible infliction of suffering and the visiting of severe
punishment, on heretics and outsiders. This shows that the unbelieving critique of
religion is more complex and many-tracked than I'm dealing with here; but on one
very widespread version of this critique, the basic reason for resisting the truth is
pusillanimity.
Unbelief has the opposite features. The unbeliever has the courage to take up an
adult stance, and face reality. He knows that human beings are on their own. But this
doesn’t cause him just to cave in. On the contrary, he determines to affirm human
worth, and the human good, and to work for it without false illusion or consolation.
So he is counter-mortification. Moreover, he has no reason to exclude anyone as
heretic; so his philanthropy is universal. Unbelief goes together with modern
(exclusive) humanism.
64 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
So goes one story. The crucial idea is that the scientific–epistemic part of it
is completely self-supporting. That’s something the rational mind will believe
independent of any moral convictions. The moral attributions to one side or the
other come when you are trying to explain why some people accept and others resist
these truths. The connection between materialist science and humanist affirmation
comes because you have to be a mature, courageous being to face these facts. As to
why mature courage embraces benevolence, which figures here in the portrait of this
humanism, the answer can simply be that left to ourselves we do want to benefit our
fellow humans; or that we have developed this way culturally, and we value it, and
we can keep this going if we set ourselves to it.
From the believer’s perspective, all this falls out rather differently. We start with
an epistemic response: the argument from modern science to all-around materialism
seems quite unconvincing. Whenever this is worked out in something closer to detail,
it seems full of holes. The best example today might be evolution, sociobiology, and
the like. But we also see reasonings of this kind in the works of Richard Dawkins,
for instance, or Daniel Dennett.
So the believer returns the compliment. He casts about for an explanation why
the materialist is so eager to believe very inconclusive arguments. Here the moral
outlook just mentioned comes back in, but in a different role. Not that, failure to rise
to which makes you unable to face the facts of materialism; but rather that, whose
moral attraction, and seeming plausibility to the facts of the human moral condition,
draw you to it, so that you readily grant the materialist argument from science its
various leaps of faith. The whole package seems plausible, so we don’t pick too
closely at the details.
But how can this be? Surely, the whole package is meant to be plausible precisely
because science has shown.... and so on. That’s certainly the way the package of
epistemic and moral views presents itself officially; that's the official story, as it
were. But the supposition here is that the official story isn’t the real one; that the real
power that the package has to attract and convince lies in it as a definition of our
moral predicament.
This means that this ideal of the courageous acknowledger of unpalatable truths,
ready to eschew all easy comfort and consolation, and who by the same token
becomes capable of grasping and controlling the world, sits well with us, draws us,
that we feel tempted to make it our own. And/or it means that the counter-ideals of
belief, devotion, piety, can all too easily seem actuated by a still immature desire for
consolation, meaning, extra-human sustenance.
What seems to accredit the view of the package as epistemically driven are all the
famous conversion stories, starting with post-Darwinian Victorians but continuing
to our day, where people who had a strong faith early in life found that they had
reluctantly, even with anguish of soul, to relinquish it because ‘Darwin has refuted
the Bible’. Surely, we want to say, these people in a sense preferred the Christian
outlook morally, but had to bow, with whatever degree of inner pain, to the facts.
But that’s exactly what I’m resisting saying. What happened here was not that
a moral outlook bowed to brute facts. Rather it gave way to another moral outlook.
 Charles Taylor 65
Another model of what was higher triumphed. And much was going for this model:
images of power, of untrammelled agency, of spiritual self-possession (the ‘buffered
self’). On the other side, one’s childhood faith had perhaps in many respects remained
childish; it was all too easy to come to see it as essentially and constitutionally so.
Of course, the change was painful, because one could be deeply attached to this
childhood faith, not just as part of one’s past, but also to what it promised. But even
this pain could work for the conversion. It has been noted how many of the crop
of great Victorian agnostics came from Evangelical families. They transposed the
model of the strenuous, manly, philanthropic concern into the new secular key. But
the very core of that model, manly self-conquest, rising above the pain of loss, now
told in favour of the apostasy.4
So I am less than fully convinced by the major thrust of the ‘death of God’ account
of the rise of modern secularity; its account in other words of the modern conditions
of belief. What makes belief problematical, often difficult and full of doubts, is not
simply ‘science’.
This is not to deny that science (and even more ‘science’) has had an important
place in the story; and that in a number of ways. For one thing, the universe which
this science reveals is very different from the centred hierarchic cosmos which our
civilization grew up within; it hardly suggests to us that humans have any kind of
special place in its story, whose temporal and spatial dimensions are mind-numbing.
This, and the conception of natural law by which we understand it, makes it refractory
to the interventions of Providence as these were envisaged in the framework of the
earlier cosmos, and the connected understanding of the biblical story. Seen in this
light, ‘Darwin’ has indeed ‘refuted the Bible’.
For another thing, the development of modern science has gone hand in hand
with the rise of the ethic of austere, disengaged reason I invoked above. But all this
still doesn't amount to an endorsement of the official story, that the present climate
of unbelief in many milieux in contemporary society is a response to the strong case
for materialism which science has drawn up during the last three centuries.
Of course, a strong reason for my lack of conviction here is that I don’t see the
case for materialism as all that strong. To state just why would take me much too far
afield, and lead me away from the enquiry I want to pursue. But I acknowledge that
this is a loose end in my argument which I won’t be able to tie up. I hope however
that this lacuna in my case can be partly compensated for by the plausibility of the
explanation I offer in place of the official account, and which sees the attraction of
materialism arising not so much from the conclusions of science as from the ethic
which is associated with it.
But, one might object, why shouldn’t bad arguments have an important effect in
history, as much if not more than good arguments? In a sense, this objection is well
taken; and in a sense, therefore, the official story is also true. Since lots of people
believe that they are atheists and materialists because science has shown these to

4 See for example Stefan Collini’s studies of ‘English pasts’ (1999).

66 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
be irrefutable, there is a perfectly good sense in which we can say that this is their
reason.
But an explanation in terms of a bad reason calls for supplementation. We need
an account of why the bad reason nevertheless works. This is not necessarily so, of
course, in individual cases. Individuals can just take some conclusion on authority from
their milieu. Just as we laypeople take the latest report about the micro-constitution
of the atom from the Sunday paper, so we may take it on authority from a Sagan or
a Dawkins that Science has refuted God. But this leaves still unexplained how an
authority of this kind gets constituted. What makes it the case that we laypeople, as
also the scientific luminaries, get so easily sucked into invalid arguments? Why do
we and they not more readily see the alternatives? My proffered account in terms of
the attraction of an ethical vision is meant to answer this deeper question.
I am not arguing that an account of someone’s action in terms of erroneous
belief always needs supplementation. I may leave the house without an umbrella
because I believe the radio forecast to be reliable, and it predicted fair weather. But
the difference between this kind of case and the issue we’re dealing with here is first,
that the weather, beyond the inconvenience of getting wet today, doesn’t matter to
me in anything like the same way, and second, that I have no alternative access to
this afternoon’s weather than the forecast.
This latter is not simply true in the question of belief in God. Of course, as a
layperson, I have to take on authority the findings of paleontology. But I am not
similarly without resources on the issue whether what science has shown about the
material world denies the existence of God, because I can also have a religious life,
a sense of God and how He impinges on my existence, against which I can check the
supposed claims to refutation.
I want to draw the Desdemona analogy. What makes Othello a tragedy, and not
just a tale of misfortune, is that we hold its protagonist culpable in his too ready
belief of the evidence fabricated by Iago. He had an alternative mode of access to
her innocence in Desdemona herself, if he could only have opened his heart/mind to
her love and devotion. The fatal flaw in the tragic hero Othello is his inability to do
this, partly induced by his outsider’s status and sudden promotion.
The reason why I can’t accept the arguments that ‘science has refuted God’,
without any supplement, as an explanation of the rise of unbelief is that we are on
this issue like Othello, rather than the person listening to the forecast as he hesitates
before the umbrella stand. We can’t just explain what we do on the basis of the
information we received from external sources, without seeing what we made of the
internal ones.
All this doesn’t mean that a perfectly valid description of an individual’s
experience might not be that he felt forced to give up a faith he cherished because
the brute facts of the universe contradicted it. Because once you go this way, once
you accept unbelief, then you will probably also accept the ideology that accords
primacy to the external sources, which depreciates the internal ones as incompetent
here, indeed, as likely sources of childish illusion. That’s how it now looks ex post
 Charles Taylor 67
facto – and how it looked to Othello. But we who have seen this happen need a
further account of why Desdemona’s testimony wasn’t heard.
Thus, once one has taken the step into unbelief, there are overwhelming reasons
why one will be induced to buy into the official, science-driven story. And because
we very often make these choices under the influence of others, on whose authority
we buy the official story, it is not surprising that lots of people have thought of
their conversion as science-driven, even perhaps in the most dramatic form. Science
seemed to show that we are nothing but a fleeting life-form on a dying star; or that
the universe is nothing but decaying matter, under ever-increasing entropy, that there
is thus no place for spirit or God, miracles or salvation. Something like the vision
which Dostoevsky had in the museum in Basle before the Dead Christ by Hans
Holbein, of the absolute finality of death, which convinced him that there must be
something more, might easily have the opposite effect, of dragging you down and
forcing an abandonment of your faith.
But the question remains: if the arguments in fact aren’t conclusive, why do they
seem so convincing, where at other times and places God’s existence just seems
obvious? This is the question I’m trying to answer, and the ‘death of God’ doesn’t
help me here; rather it blocks the way with a pseudo-solution.
So my contention is that the power of materialism today comes not from the
scientific ‘facts’, but has rather to be explained in terms of the power of a certain
package uniting materialism with a moral outlook, the package we could call ‘atheist
humanism’, or exclusive humanism. But this doesn’t bring me to the end of my
search; rather, the further question arises: how in turn to explain something like the
power of this package?
Here’s where we might invoke the second level of the ‘death of God’ account, the
one which starts from our contemporary moral predicament. The conclusion here is
the same as with the argument from science, that we can no longer rationally believe
in God; but the starting-point is now the ethical outlook of the modern age.
Now it is true that a great deal of our political and moral life is focused on human
ends: human welfare, human rights, human flourishing, equality between human
beings. Indeed, our public life, in societies which are secular in a familiar modern
sense, is exclusively concerned with human goods. And our age is certainly unique
in human history in this respect. Now some people see no place in this kind of world
for belief in God. A faith of this kind would have to make one an outsider, an enemy
of this world, in unrelenting combat with it. Thus one is either thoroughly in this
world, living by its premisses, and then one cannot really believe in God; or one
believes, and one is in some sense living like a resident alien in modernity. Since we
find ourselves more and more inducted into it, belief becomes harder and harder; the
horizon of faith steadily recedes.5
Now this adversarial picture of the relation of faith to modernity is not an invention
of unbelievers. It is matched and encouraged by a strand of Christian hostility to the

5 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, para. 125, the famous passage about the
madman who announces the death of God, also makes use of this horizon image.
68 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
humanist world. We have only to think of Pius IX, fulminating in his Syllabus of
1864 against all the errors of the modern world, including human rights, democracy,
equality, and just about everything our contemporary Liberal state embodies. And
there are other, more recent examples, among Christians as well as believers in other
religions.
But this convergence between fundamentalists and hard-line atheists doesn’t make
their common interpretation of the relation of faith to modernity the only possible
one. And it is clear that there are many people of faith who have helped to build and
are now sustaining this modern humanist world, and are strongly committed to the
modes of human well-being and flourishing that it has made central. Once again, the
‘death of God’ account leaps to a conclusion which is far from being warranted. It
is possible to see modern humanism as the enemy of religion, just as it is possible
to take science as having proved atheism. But since the conclusion is in neither case
warranted, the question arises why so many people do so. And that brings me back
to the central issue I’ve been raising.
This moral version of the ‘death of God’ account seems plausible to many people,
because they make an assumption about the rise of modernity, which helps to screen
from them how complex and difficult this quest is. The assumption is what I have
called ‘the view from Dover Beach’: the transition to modernity comes about through
the loss of traditional beliefs and allegiances. This may be seen as coming about as
a result of institutional changes, for example mobility and urbanization erode the
beliefs and reference points of static rural society. Or the loss may be supposed to
arise from the increasing operation of modern scientific reason. The change may be
positively valued – or it may be judged a disaster by those for whom the traditional
reference points were valuable, and scientific reason too narrow. But all these
theories concur in describing the process: old views and loyalties are eroded. Old
horizons are washed away, in Nietzsche’s image. The sea of faith recedes, following
Arnold. This stanza from his Dover Beach (1979: 256, lines 21–8) captures this
perspective:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

The tone here is one of regret and nostalgia. But the underlying image of eroded faith
could serve just as well for an upbeat story of the progress of triumphant scientific
reason. From one point of view, humanity has shed a lot of false and harmful myths.
From another, it has lost touch with crucial spiritual realities. But in either case, the
change is seen as a loss of belief.
 Charles Taylor 69
What emerges comes about through this loss. The upbeat story cherishes the
dominance of an empirical–scientific approach to knowledge claims, of individualism,
negative freedom, instrumental rationality. But these come to the fore because they
are what we humans ‘normally’ value, once we are no longer impeded or blinded
by false or superstitious beliefs and the stultifying modes of life which accompany
them. Once myth and error are dissipated, these are the only games in town. The
empirical approach is the only valid way of acquiring knowledge, and this becomes
evident as soon as we free ourselves from the thraldom of a false metaphysics.
Increasing recourse to instrumental rationality allows us to get more and more of
what we want, and we were only ever deterred from this by unfounded injunctions
to limit ourselves. Individualism is the normal fruit of human self-regard absent the
illusory claims of God, the Chain of Being, or the sacred order of society.
In other words, we moderns behave as we do because we have ‘come to see’ that
certain claims are false – or on the negative reading, because we have lost from view
certain perennial truths. What this view reads out of the picture is the possibility that
western modernity might be powered by its own positive visions of the good – that
is, by one constellation of such visions among available others, rather than by the
only viable set left after the old myths and legends have been exploded. It screens out
whatever there might be of a specific moral direction to western modernity, beyond
what is dictated by the general form of human life itself, once old error is shown up
(or old truth forgotten). For example, people behave as individuals because that’s
what they ‘naturally’ do when no longer held in by the old religions, metaphysics
and customs, though this may be seen as either a glorious liberation or a purblind
enmiring in egoism, depending on our perspective. What it cannot be seen as is a
novel form of moral self-understanding, not definable simply by the negation of
what preceded it.
In terms of my discussion a few pages ago, all these accounts ‘naturalize’ the
features of the modern, liberal identity. They cannot see it as one, historically
constructed, understanding of human agency among others.
On this ‘subtraction’ view of modernity, as what arises from the washing away of
old horizons, modern humanism can only have arisen through the fading of earlier
forms. It can only be conceived as coming to be through a ‘death of God’. It just
follows that you can’t be fully into contemporary humanist concerns if you haven’t
sloughed off the old beliefs. You can’t be fully with the modern age and still believe
in God. Or alternatively, if you still believe, then you have reservations; you are at
least partly, and perhaps covertly, some kind of adversary.
But of course, as I have argued at length elsewhere (Taylor 1989), this is a quite
inadequate account of modernity. What has got screened out is the possibility that
western modernity might be sustained by its own original spiritual vision – that is,
not one generated simply and inescapably out of the transition. But this possibility
is in fact the reality.
The logic of the subtraction story is something like this: once we slough off our
concern with serving God, or attending to any other transcendent reality, what we’re
left with is human good, and that is what modern societies are concerned with. But
70 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
this radically under-describes what I’m calling modern humanism. That I am left
with only human concerns doesn’t tell me to take universal human welfare as my
goal; nor does it tell me that freedom is important, or fulfilment, or equality. Simply
being confined to human goods could just as well find expression in my concerning
myself exclusively with my own material welfare, or that of my family or immediate
milieu. The in fact very exigent demands of universal justice and benevolence which
characterize modern humanism can’t be explained just by the subtraction of earlier
goals and allegiances.
The subtraction story, inadequate though it is, is deeply embedded in modern
humanist consciousness. It is by no means propounded only by the more simplistic
theorists. Even such a penetrating and sophisticated thinker as Paul Bénichou (1948:
226) subscribed to a version of it in his Morales du grand siècle: ‘L’humanité
s’estime dès qu’elle se voit capable de reculer sa misère; elle tend à oublier, en même
temps que sa détresse, l’humiliante morale par laquelle, faisant de nécessité vertu,
elle condamnait la vie.’6 Modern humanism arises, in other words, because humans
become capable of sloughing off the older, other-worldly ethics of asceticism.
Moreover, this story is grounded in a certain view of human motivation in
general, and of the well-springs of religious belief in particular. This latter is seen
as the fruit of misery and the accompanying self-renunciation is ‘making a virtue of
necessity’. Belief is a product of deprivation, humiliation and a lack of hope. It is the
obverse of the human desire for flourishing; where we are driven by our despair at
the frustration of this desire.
Thus human flourishing is taken as our perennial goal, even though under eclipse
in periods of misery and humiliation, and its content is taken as fairly unproblematic,
once one begins to affirm it.
We see here the outlines of one version of an account of modern secularity, which
in its general form is widely and deeply implanted in modern humanist culture. It
tends to have four connected facets: (1) the ‘death of God’ thesis that one can no
longer honestly, lucidly, sincerely believe in God; (2) some ‘subtraction’ story of the
rise of modern humanism; (3) a view on the original reasons for religious belief, and
on their place in perennial human motivations, which grounds the subtraction story.
These views vary all the way from nineteenth-century theories about primitives’
fears of the unknown, or desire to control the elements, to speculations like Freud’s,
linking religion to neurosis. On many of these accounts, religion simply becomes
unnecessary when technology gets to a certain level: we don’t need God any more,
because we know how to get it ourselves.7 These theories are generally wildly and
implausibly reductive.

6 ‘Man appreciates his own worth from the time he sees that he is able to make inroads
against poverty. He tends to forget, along with his material distress, the humiliating ethics by
which he condemned life, making a virtue of necessity.’ (Bénichou 1971: 251)
7 There is a more sophisticated version of this in Steve Bruce, Religion in Modern
Britain (1995: 131–3).
 Charles Taylor 71
They issue in (4) a take on modern secularization as mainly a recession of
religion in the face of science, technology and rationality. As against the nineteenth
century, when thinkers like Comte confidently predicted the supersession of religion
by science, as did Renan: ‘il viendra un jour où l'humanité ne croira plus, mais où
elle saura; un jour où elle saura le monde métaphysique et moral, comme elle sait
déjà le monde physique’8 (quoted in Denèfle 1997: 93-4), today everybody thinks
that the illusion has some future; but on the vision I'm describing here it is in for
some more shrinkage.
These four facets together give an idea of what modern secularization often looks
like from within the humanist camp. Against this, I want to offer a rather different
picture.9

In order to develop this alternative picture, I want to explore another domain of

CWS, which I think is more fundamental. This is the domain in which the moral
self-understanding of moderns has been forged. I would want to tell here a longish
story. But in its main lines, my account centres on the development of an ascending
series of attempts to establish a Christian order, of which the Reformation is a key
phase. These attempts show a progressive impatience with older modes of post-
Axial religion in which certain collective, ritualistic forms of earlier religions existed
in uneasy coexistence with the demands of individual devotion and ethical reform
which came from the ‘higher’ revelations. In Latin christendom, the attempt was to
recover and impose on everyone a more individually committed and Christocentric
religion of devotion and action, and to repress or even abolish older, supposedly
‘magical’ or ‘superstitious’ forms of collective ritual practice.
Allied with a neo-Stoic outlook, this became the charter for a series of attempts to
establish new forms of social order, drawing on new disciplines (Foucault enters the
story here), which helped to reduce violence and disorder and to create populations
of relatively pacific and productive artisans and peasants, who were more and more
induced/forced into the new forms of devotional practice and moral behaviour, be
this in Protestant England, Holland, or later the American colonies, or in counter-
Reformation France, or the Germany of the ‘Polizeistaat’.
My hypothesis is that this new creation of a civilized, ‘polite’ order succeeded
beyond what its first originators could have hoped for, and that this in turn led to a

8 ‘A day will come when humanity will no longer believe, but when it will know;
a day when it will know the metaphysical and moral world, as it already knows the physical
world.’ [eds]
9 If I can manage to tell this story properly, then we will see that there is some,
phenomenal, truth to the ‘death of God’ account. A humanism has come about which can
be seen, and hence lived, as exclusive. And from within this, it can indeed seem plausible
that science points us towards a materialist account of spirit. The ‘death of God’ is not just
an erroneous account of modern secularity on a theoretical level; it is also a way we may be
tempted to interpret, and hence experience, the modern condition. It is not the explanans I am
looking for, but it is a crucial part of the explanandum. In this role, I am very far from wanting
to deny it.
72 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
new reading of what a Christian order might be, one which was seen more and more
in ‘immanent’ terms (the polite, civilized order is the Christian order). This version
of Christianity was shorn of much of its ‘transcendent’ content, and was thus open to
a new departure, in which the understanding of good order (what I call the ‘modern
moral order’) could be embraced outside of the original theological, Providential
framework, and in certain cases even against it (as with Voltaire, Gibbon, and in
another way Hume).
Disbelief in God arises in close symbiosis with this belief in a moral order of
rights-bearing individuals, who are destined (by God or Nature) to act for mutual
benefit; an order which thus rejects the earlier honour ethic which exalted the warrior,
as it also tends to occlude any transcendent horizon. We see one good formulation of
this notion of order in Locke’s Second Treatise.
This ideal order was not thought to be a mere human invention. Rather it was
designed by God, an order in which everything coheres according to God’s purposes.
Later in the eighteenth century, the same model is projected on the cosmos, in a
vision of the universe as a set of perfectly interlocking parts, in which the purposes
of each kind of creature mesh with those of all the others.
This order sets the goal for our constructive activity, in so far as it lies within our
power to upset it, or realize it. Of course, when we look at the whole, we see how
much the order is already realized; but when we cast our eye on human affairs, we
see how much we have deviated from it and upset it; it becomes the norm to which
we should strive to return.
This order was thought to be evident in the nature of things. Of course, if we
consult revelation we shall also find the demand formulated there that we abide by
it. But reason alone can tell us God’s purposes. Living things, including ourselves,
strive to preserve themselves. This is God’s doing.

God having made Man, and planted in him, as in all other Animals, a strong desire of
Self-preservation, and furnished the World with things fit for Food and Rayment and other
Necessaries of Life, Subservient to his design, that Man should live and abide for some time
upon the Face of the Earth, and not that so curious and wonderful a piece of Workmanship
by its own Negligence, or want of Necessaries, should perish again …God . . . spoke to
him, (that is) directed him by his Senses and Reason, …to the use of those things, which
were serviceable for his Subsistence, and given him as means of his Preservation. … For
the desire, strong desire of Preserving his Life and Being having been Planted in him, as
a Principle of Action by God himself, Reason, which was the Voice of God in him, could
not but teach him and assure him, that pursuing that natural Inclination he had to preserve
his Being, he followed the Will of his Maker. (Locke 1698: I.86)

Being endowed with reason, we see that not only our lives but that of all humans
are to be preserved. And in addition, God made us sociable beings. So that ‘every
one as he is bound to preserve himself, and not quit his Station wilfully; so by the
like reason when his Preservation comes not in competition, ought he, as much as
he can, to preserve the rest of Mankind’ (Locke 1698: II.6; see also II.135 and 2000
para. 116).
 Charles Taylor 73
Similarly Locke reasons that God gave us our powers of reason and discipline
so that we could most effectively go about the business of preserving ourselves. It
follows that we ought to be ‘Industrious and Rational’ (1698: II. 26). The ethic of
discipline and improvement is itself a requirement of the natural order that God had
designed. The imposition of order by human will is itself called for by his scheme.
We can see in Locke’s formulation how much he sees mutual service in terms of
profitable exchange. ‘Economic’ (that is, ordered, peaceful, productive) activity has
become the model for human behaviour, and the key for harmonious coexistence.
In contrast to the theories of hierarchical complementarity, we meet in a zone of
concord and mutual service, not to the extent that we transcend our ordinary goals
and purposes, but on the contrary, in the process of carrying them out according to
God’s design.
This understanding of order has profoundly shaped the forms of social imaginary
which dominate in the modern West: the market economy, the public sphere, the
sovereign ‘people’.
This is the key entry point to modern secularity. Within this somewhat stripped
down notion of Providence and divinely sanctioned order, one which made ordinary
human flourishing so central, it became more and more conceivable to slide towards
forms of deism, and ultimately even atheist humanism. The order which was first
seen as providential could be then located in ‘Nature’ (this was not a big step,
since God created Nature), and then later further relocated as one of the effects of
‘civilization’.
As such it becomes connected with narratives of its genesis in history, out of
barbarism and religion.10 ‘Polite’ society involves the evolution out of earlier phases
in which war was the paramount activity to a mode of life in which commerce and
production are the most valued activities. The economic dimension assumes crucial
importance. At the same time, it requires the evolution of religious forms that accept
this paramountcy of this kind of order in society.
Seen from this perspective, religion could be portrayed as a threat to this order.
We see this in the critique offered by Gibbon and Hume, for instance. Key terms
of opprobrium were: ‘superstition’, by which was meant continuing belief in an
enchanted world, the kind of thing which modern Reform Christianity had left
behind it; ‘fanaticism’, by which was meant the invocation of religion to justify
violations of the modern moral order, be they persecutions, or any other type of
irrational, counterproductive behaviour; and ‘enthusiasm’, by which was meant the
claim to some kind of special revelation, whereby one could once more challenge
the norms of the modern order. One might say that ‘superstition’ was the speciality
of Catholics and ‘enthusiasm’ of extreme Protestant sects; but ‘fanaticism’ was a sin
of which both were capable.
The rooting of the Enlightened critique in this modern idea of moral order can
be seen again if one looks at the two lists of virtues which Hume provides in the

10 I have drawn on the very interesting discussion of John Pocock in his Barbarism
and Religion, 1999.
74 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Enquiries: those he considers properly virtues and the ‘monkish’ ones for which he
has no use (see especially Hume 1998).
We can see how this understanding of civilized order and ‘polite’ society could
function as a CWS, if not excluding all religion at least ruling out as unacceptable
‘fanatical’ forms of it. Ensconced within this understanding of order, and situated in
the narratives of its genesis, certain other forms of life appear as ‘barbarian’, and (at
least certain forms of) religion as unacceptable.
Here we have one of the most powerful CWS in modern history. Religion was to
be severely limited, even in some versions banned, because it ran against the natural
order itself. From within the acceptance of this order as the end of history, nothing
could seem more obvious and secure, even if this could also accommodate milder
positions which espoused deism, or some carefully controlled and parsimoniously
dosed religion. This is a very widespread CWS in our time, except that it has been
radicalized to marginalize the intermediate positions available in the eighteenth
century, like Voltairean deism.
And we can also see how this CWS exists in a kind of relation of mutual support
and symbiosis with the others evoked above. The modern conception of social order,
starting with individuals, reinforces and is reinforced by the primacy of the ego
in epistemology. The stance of disengaged reason is also essential to the range of
disciplines by which a social reality was built in which the norms of the order –
disciplined and productive individuals whose activity tends to mutual benefit – can
seem a plausible description of ‘human nature’. For from within this perspective the
modern moral order is fully ‘naturalized’. It is the way humans are, and were meant
to be. Indeed, disengaged scientific understanding, the highest ideal of epistemology,
is one of the achievements of ‘civilization’.
At the same time, the narrative of the emergence of polite civilization confers
the status of adulthood on those who inhabit it, in relation to the immaturity of
barbarians and the superstitious, or enthusiastic, or fanatic. It therefore helps to
anchor the various CWS of the ‘death of God’ and, indeed, gives its full weight to
the moral superiority of adulthood from which the ‘refutation’ of religion by science
draws much of its strength.
But it was also this CWS of polite civilization which inspired the most bitter
controversies. Because this understanding of order was and is hotly contested; and
this from a host of directions. Some saw it as insufficiently inspiring and uplifting;
others as poisoned by forms of discipline which repress and crush the spontaneous
or the emotional in us; still others as rejecting true human sympathy and generosity
in condemning ‘enthusiasm’. But others again rejected it because it turned its back
on violence, and hence heroism, and hence greatness; because it levelled us all in a
demeaning equality. We find some of this latter kind of reaction in Tocqueville, for
instance; but most famously in Nietzsche.
As this latter name reminds us, the remarkable thing about this wave of protests,
which begins in the latter half of the eighteenth century, is that they each can be taken
in more than one direction. The sense of the moral order as unliveable and reductive
could either lead back to a more full-hearted religion (for example, Wesley, the
 Charles Taylor 75
Pietists), or it could lead beyond to modes of unbelieving Romanticism. Similarly,
the ‘tragic’ dimension could be invoked for a return to a real sense of human sin; or
it could justify a rejection of Christianity as the original historical source of modern
morality, the trail blazed by Nietzsche. Again, dissatisfactions with existing forms
could lead to more radical and utopian versions of order, as we see with Jacobinism,
later communism and Marx; or it could justify abandoning it, as with the Catholic
Reaction after 1815; or again, in a quite different way, with Nietzsche.
So while the modern ideal of moral order can be the centre of one of the most
influential CWS of modern society, the attempts to criticize it, to denounce its self-
‘naturalization’, can also be a source of new and more profound CWS. After all,
the source whence the expression ‘death of God’ flows into general circulation is
The Gay Science. Modern culture is characterized by what we could call the ‘nova
effect’, the multiplication of more and more spiritual and anti-spiritual positions.
This multiplicity further fragilizes any of the positions it contains. There is no longer
any clear, unambiguous way of drawing the main issue.
But a crucial reference point in this swirling multiplicity is the modern idea of
order; in the sense that our stance to that is an important defining characteristic of
our position, as much as our stance, positive or negative, on transcendence. The
dimension in which interesting new positions have arisen is that which combines
severe criticism of the order with a rejection of the transcendent. This is where we
find what we might call the ‘immanent Counter-Enlightenment’, following Nietzsche
(see Taylor 2000), as well as new ways of invoking paganism against Christianity.
This is as old as the Enlightenment in one sense: Gibbon clearly had some sympathy
for what he saw as the sceptical, very unfanatical ruling class of Rome, puzzled
by the rush to martyrdom of this obscure sect of Christians; Mill spoke of ‘pagan
self-assertion’; Peter Gay (1977) has even described the Enlightenment as a kind
of ‘modern paganism’. But we find more recently attempts to rehabilitate precisely
what was suppressed by monotheism. There is a discourse of ‘polytheism’ (Calasso,
Spinosa), which profoundly rejects the notion of a single, dominant moral code, an
essential feature of the modern moral order. One can even hope to erect a novel CWS
on this basis.
Among these new forms, Heidegger deserves a mention. I said above that he is
one of those who have contributed to undoing not only the CWS of epistemology,
but also that of scientism and the belief that ‘science has shown’ that there is no
God. He even has a place for ‘the gods’ in some sense in his notion of das Geviert.
And yet there seems to be a rejection of the Christian God here; or at least some
unwillingness to allow that the Christian God can ever escape the dead end of onto-
theology: ‘auch der Gott, wenn er ist, ist ein Seiender.’11
I have been trying to explore the modern landscape of belief/unbelief, in the main
by laying out some of the principal world structures which occult or blank out the
transcendent. The main intellectual struggle around belief and unbelief turns on the

11 (‘The god also is, when he is, a being.’) Quoted in Jean-Luc Marion, Dieu sans
l’être, 1991a: 105. I have found Marion’s discussion of this issue extremely enlightening.
76 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
validity/invalidity of these CWS. It is clear that modern society generates these, but
not in any consistent fashion. Some of them can define our horizon only through our
rejecting others. Many of them have already shown that they are grounded on a false
and over-hasty naturalization. The crucial question at stake in the debate is, are they
all similarly invalid? It may be beyond the reach of any single set of arguments to
show this. And even if it were determined, it wouldn’t by itself decide the question
whether there is a God or not, whether there is transcendence. But it could open this
issue for a more active and fruitful search.12

Further Reading

Berger, P.L., The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion,

New York: Doubleday, 1969
Bruce, S., God is Dead: Secularization in the West, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002
Heidegger, M., Being and Time, trans J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1962
Taylor, C., ‘Overcoming epistemology’, in his Philosophical Arguments, Cambridge,
MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1995, 1–19
Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford:
Blackwell, 1958

12 An earlier version of this paper, entitled ‘Closed world structures’, appeared in

Mark A. Wrathall (ed.), Religion After Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2003.
 Chapter 4

Rational Religious Faith and Kant’s

Transcendental Boundaries
Chris L. Firestone

Introduction

The traditional approach to interpreting Immanuel Kant understands his philosophy

to put a debilitating boundary line between knowledge and faith. So complete
is this separation in the Critique of Pure Reason that a realist religious faith is
thought to lack any meaningful grounds in reason whatsoever.1 According to the
traditional approach, faith is effectively dead on arrival in Kant’s critical philosophy.
Knowledge and understanding are built on the firm foundation of the phenomenal
realm; theology and speculation are built on the shifting sands of the noumenal realm.
Discursive human reasoning is capable of pursuing truth only via facts about nature,
not via faith in supersensible things. Theology, under traditional Kantian strictures,
can find no sure footing in either the sensible or the supersensible. God is part of the
noumenal realm, and humans (including theologians) are part of the phenomenal
realm, and thus humans cannot think or say anything intelligible about God. The gap
is too big, too deep, and the bridge that would be required to traverse such a gap is
simply too immense for reason to fathom. In fact, the gap is impossible to bridge.
References to God in Kant’s philosophy, if that philosophy is to be consistent, are
taken merely to be references to an idea or postulate – an intellectual fiction good
for the moral life of the one entertaining the idea, but nothing more. In the light of
traditional approaches to Kant, theologians have limited options. They can in good
conscience choose from among atheism, agnosticism, non-realism and deism.
Although it is true that God cannot be an object of knowledge for Kant in the sense
that no intuition is synthetically sufficient to the concept of God, the knowledge/
faith dichotomy, contrary to what traditional interpreters consistently portray, is not
exhaustive of the possible grounds for theology in Kant’s philosophy. Work on Kant
over the last forty years has suggested that traditional interpreters have misjudged
the value of the transcendental dimension of Kant’s philosophy, and, by extension,
undervalued the potential for Kant’s philosophy of religion to establish rational

1 Initial citations of Kant’s writings contain the full title of the relevant work.
Subsequent citations adopt standard abbreviated forms. For example, the Critique of Pure
Reason is cited as the first Critique, the Critique of Judgement is cited as the third Critique,
and Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is cited as Religion.
78 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
grounds for religious faith. Traditional interpreters limit the contribution of Kant’s
philosophy of religion to his critical philosophy either by directing its implications
narrowly towards the institution of moral non-realism or by removing God from the
discussion altogether, identifying Kant’s religious faith with Enlightenment deism.
Rarely noted, however, is the fact that properly critical concepts such as space and
time, the twelve categories, pure (as opposed to empirical) cognition, freedom,
the moral law, purposiveness and aesthetics are, in Kant’s estimation, significant
contributors to human understanding, and crucial features in the determination of
what we can know about the transcendental nature of reason and what we must
believe about the world if it is to make sense.
The difficulty with understanding the transcendental contribution of Kant’s
philosophy to theology is that Kant’s estimation of these matters developed over
time. Our understanding of how they relate critically to one another likewise requires
that we take the time to consider in some measure the fullness of Kant’s arguments.
Reason critically analysed is reason in transition. When considering the full counsel
of Kant’s writings on religion and theology, what we recognize to be true prima
facie of reason is that, for Kant, its transcendental boundaries are multi-dimensional.
Moving from the question, ‘What can I know?’, to the question of, ‘What ought I
to do?’, is transcendentally equivalent to moving away from the forms of intuition
and conception that separate the known and the unknown to freedom and the moral
law as the transcendental constituents of right action. Kant sets up the additional
question, at the outset of the Critique of Judgement, of whether or not a second
transition is needed to answer the question of hope satisfactorily in light of the
problems inherent in the fact–value divide. To understand Kant’s critical excavation
of the transcendental bounds of reason as anything like a completed process, what
Kant seems to indicate to his readers is that they must go beyond theoretical and
moral philosophy to considerations of teleology, aesthetics, poetics and religion.
Only in this way can we understand the final intellectual frontier of metaphysics on
Kant’s critical terms.
Such an understanding of Kant’s project, I suggest, is the only way to make a
smooth transition from the critical analysis of knowledge and duty to an equally
critical answer to the question of hope. The trajectory of this line of reasoning will
ultimately lead to my claim that Kant’s critical excavations of the transcendental
boundaries of reason reach their crescendo in his classic text on religion, Religion
within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. This is not a claim that I can defend here, for
it would require more space than the pages allotted to me.2 For this present essay, I
would like to defend a related but more modest claim, namely that a movement is
currently underway away from the theologically pessimistic understanding of Kant
on religion and theology (what I have termed ‘the traditional interpretation’), and
towards a more theologically affirming understanding. In support of this claim, I
will point to recent work on Kant and present five motifs that make up the seminal

2 The claim is, however, defended at length in a book I am presently preparing for the
Ashgate series on ‘Theology at the Transcendental Bounds of Reason’.
 Chris L. Firestone 79
features of this movement. I will briefly sketch some of the arguments for these
motifs and present them as having significant value to theologians concerned
with understanding the resources for theology at the transcendental boundaries of
reason.

The Current Situation in Kant-studies

Over the last two centuries, much work has gone into the process of criticizing,
rejecting, transcending or otherwise coming to terms with Kant’s philosophical
strictures on religion and theology. Comparatively little work, however, has been
done to advance our understanding of the transcendental grounds for religion and
theology as they are found in what Kant calls ‘rational religious faith’. In Kant’s
Moral Religion (1970: 1), Allen Wood writes, ‘Much careful and fruitful labor has
been devoted to the analysis of the subtle argumentation of Kant’s epistemology and
moral philosophy; but his philosophical outlook as a whole, his view of the world
and man’s place in it, is often grotesquely caricatured’. Wood then challenges the
traditional Kant establishment to do more: ‘there is an area of Kant’s philosophical
thought – itself badly neglected by responsible scholarship – which though no less
demanding on the reader than most of his writing, does give us a more or less direct
access to Kant’s outlook as a whole. … This area of thought is Kant’s investigation
of rational religious faith.’ (Wood 1970: 1–2)
Since Wood’s call for more responsible scholarship, numerous interpreters
have stepped forward with insights (and many with full-fledged interpretations)
unpacking Kant’s notion of rational religious faith and what they take to be its
positive implications for contemporary discussions of religion and theology. I won’t
take the time here to recount all the many interpretations that have contributed to
this movement; suffice it to say that a detailed accounting of these interpretations
is given in the ‘Editor’s Introduction’ to Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion
(Firestone and Palmquist 2006: 1–39). What I hope to do here instead is put this
movement into historical context and break down some of its major themes and
fundamental components. Scanning through the literature over the last one hundred
years, it would appear that there are as many interpretations of Kant’s significance for
religion and theology as there are affirmative interpreters of Kant. This has created
a conflict of interpretations in the literature that has splintered the dissemination of
Kant’s work and made it difficult to discern the shape of the whole of his philosophy.
The theologically pessimistic view of Kant gains currency from the fact that, though
always under attack from what seem to be overwhelming forces, the conceptual
territory it occupies is never overrun and inhabited because there has never been a
unified, theologically affirmative force capable of replacing the power and influence
of the traditional regime.3

3 The story goes something like this: one interpreter makes convincing arguments
against the traditional approach to Kant and forwards a new interpretation of Kant meant
to supplant the worn out standard. Opponents to that interpretation then surface out of the
80 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Internal disagreements of the past have made it appear as though there is no single,
identifiable version of Kant’s philosophy of religion ready-made to overcome the
traditional one and few prospects of there ever being one. Even though theologically
affirmative approaches represent the growing majority of Kant interpretations, these
interpretations are not necessarily compatible with the doctrinal interests of theology
and not always friendly to one another. It is the conflict of interpretations that, at this
point in time, seems to be the principal impasse in the way of a more welcoming
reception of Kant in theological circles. This problem, however, is now showing signs
of finally being overcome. While disagreements and family squabbles still persist,
what has become increasingly clear is that motifs are beginning to emerge within
the affirmative camp of Kant interpreters that provide guidelines for interpreting
Kant on which virtually all within this camp can agree. There is a critical mass of
interpreters beginning to gather in various research groups throughout the English-
speaking academy developing research programmes and projects (including seminars
and conferences) based on these affirmative motifs.4 Fuelling this development is an
emerging consensus that, in the context of these motifs, Kant’s philosophy of religion
does provide affirmative grounds for theology. These affirmative grounds are not just
additions to the formal components of Kant’s theoretical or practical philosophy, but
transcendental grounds for an existentially robust faith in God rooted in the question
of hope. A realist faith in God is now being seen by many as not only compatible
with the later developments in Kant’s thinking on rational religious faith, but also the
inescapable entailment of Kant’s entire approach to the philosophy of religion.
The remainder of this essay is an attempt to unpack some of the most important
motifs within this emerging consensus. I will outline four of them. It should be
noted that these motifs are matters of Kant interpretation rather than maxims for
the discipline of theology. As we will see, however, there is overlap between the
two fields, and it is by way of this overlap that Christian theology and Kantian

traditional camp. Rather than a debate ensuing between theological and a-theological
interpreters, other theologically affirmative interpreters join forces with a-theological
interpreters to demonstrate the weaknesses of the proposed interpretation. What ends up
happening is that new interpretations proliferate, never providing a unified alternative to the
traditional standard. The tradition stands not because of its exegetical or explanatory merit,
but because it is unified and undaunted, and cannot easily be synthesized with the many
theologically affirmative accounts of Kant’s philosophy in the literature. The problem, of
course, is that the success and staying power of the traditional interpretation has had an adverse
impact on conventional understandings of Kant’s philosophy of religion and the theological
reception of Kant’s philosophy based on them.
4 As this essay is being prepared to go to print, I am aware of at least two working
groups and a major conference devoted to theologically affirmative interpretations of Kant’s
philosophy of religion. A portion of this essay was read as a paper presentation for a session
sponsored by the Evangelical Philosophical Society at the American Academy of Religion
Annual Conference (2005). The session was entitled, ‘What Can Christian Theologians Learn
from Kant?’ The Society of Christian Philosophers devoted an entire conference to this topic
in May of 2006.
 Chris L. Firestone 81
philosophy are able to find common ground. I would encourage readers who are
as yet undecided about the prospects of revisiting Kant to resist the temptation of
dismissing too quickly the utility of some or all of these motifs. At minimum, I hope
to show that there is much to be gained by engaging Kant’s work, even if at the end
of the day we find his principles, for whatever reason, to be unpalatable. As a final
measure meant to strengthen our resolve in giving Kant another look, I will conclude
this essay by suggesting a fifth motif that, if accurate, both defuses any concern
that Kant’s philosophy is fundamentally antithetical to theology and points the way
forwards to a healthy relationship between the two of them.

Kantian Motif Number One – Religious Faith is Necessary for Rational

Stability

Within Kant’s philosophical system, a deep divide exists between facts and values, one
that threatens to undermine the consistency of the entire philosophical programme.
The first Critique provides Kant’s transcendental account of knowledge about nature
and the conditions within reason that make this knowledge possible, and the second
Critique does the same with regard to freedom and the moral law as necessary
conditions for the possibility of right action. Both Kant and his interpreters have
noted the instability of this account of rationality given the fact–value divide that
emerges when these two great spheres are considered together as driving features of
a single philosophical worldview. At the outset of the third Critique, for example,
Kant writes:

There must, therefore, be a ground of the unity of the supersensible that lies at the basis
of nature, with what the concept of freedom contains in a practical way, and although the
concept of this ground neither theoretically nor practically attains to knowledge of it, and
so has no peculiar realm of its own, still it renders possible the transition from the mode
of thought according to the principles of the one to that according to the principles of the
other (176).5

In the third Critique and the writings on religion that follow it, Kant is acutely
aware of the difficulties posed by the fact–value divide and outlines a plan for their
resolution.
In the 1920s, Clement Webb was among the first in English-speaking Kant-studies
to argue that this gap in Kant’s system requires a religious solution. It was his position
that Kant makes a concerted effort to bridge this gap in his philosophy of religion.
Unity in Kant’s philosophy, according to Webb, ‘was essentially unattainable by the
method of Science’, and pure practical reason was little help either. Webb asserted
that the essential bridge in Kant’s philosophy ‘was apprehensible by faith, or, in

5 Except in the case of the third Critique, quotations of Kant are taken from The
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. For the third Critique they are taken from
Meredith’s Oxford translation. I cite Kant’s writings next to the quotation using the German
pagination as it appears within these editions.
82 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
other words, belonged to the sphere of Religion’ (Webb 1926: 2–3). Rather than
develop third Critique resources to bridge this gap, Webb turned to Kant’s Religion
text in conjunction with his moral philosophy. More recently, Ronald Green has
taken up and developed this strategy. He draws a close connection between the unity
of Kant’s philosophy and religious faith by characterizing the logic that supports the
fact–value divide as the chief source of conflict in Kant’s philosophy. Like Webb, he
describes it as principally a moral problem, characterizing it as a conflict between
prudential reasoning (or moral reasoning in an employed theoretical context) and
impartial reasoning (or moral reasoning in a formal practical context). Elsewhere
(Firestone 1999) I have noted the exegetical weaknesses of this position, which I
will not rehearse here. My point is only that the fact–value divide question drives
Kant towards considerations of feeling, hope and meaning, and ultimately to a robust
treatment of rational religious belief itself.
Michel Despland, in his Foreword to Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion,
refers to this tension and the efforts by Kant to ameliorate it with religious faith. He
writes,

The first and properly foundational tension [in Kant’s philosophy] is that found in the
joint impact of The Critique of Pure Reason and The Critique of Practical Reason. Firm
limits are set for knowledge. Noumena are distinct from phenomena. … These arguments
are momentous and have understandably given rise to canonical views of the Kantian
philosophy: they provide a solid and indispensable framework for all readers. (Firestone
and Palmquist 2006: xii)

In the next paragraph, Despland continues, ‘Kant however moved beyond this
framework, or, rather, pressed vigorously against the limits it established’. He
goes on to point out recent work in French emphasizing the Critique of Judgement,
Kant’s third instalment of the Critical Trilogy, as providing crucial and as yet
underdeveloped resources for overcoming the potentially stifling effects of Kant’s
fact–value divide. This work in French corresponds to a similar movement in the
Anglo-American context emphasizing the importance of wholeness for Kant’s
philosophical programme and the crucial role of the third Critique in establishing
it.
The third Critique, which is divided into distinct but closely related halves,
presents a two-staged approach for overcoming the fact–value divide. In the first
stage, feelings of beauty and sublimity spearhead Kant’s project of unifying reason.
According to Kant, these feelings provide the rational resources (what he calls a sense
of ‘purposiveness’) through which facts and values achieve a measure of harmony.
Even though this purposiveness is felt, it is never captured by the human intellect. In
the third moment of a judgement of beauty, for example, humans experience a sense
of ‘purposiveness without a purpose’. This ‘aesthetic judgement’ is complemented
in stage two by human reflection on meaning and purpose. The highest object of this
reflection is the summum bonum or highest good. This poetic concept, however, is
never constitutive of an aesthetic judgement. Instead, it is the natural byproduct of
discursive reflection as rational creatures contemplate the meaning of the world in
 Chris L. Firestone 83
light of the facts of experience and values inherent in the moral life. Kant calls this
process ‘teleological judgement’ and reckons it to provide the appropriate launching-
pad for a robust treatment of rational religious faith.
In this way, the third Critique carries on with a transcendental building process
meant to stabilize the relationship between facts and values and initiate a critical
approach to philosophy of religion. When morality is understood formally, it is self-
sufficient – that is, ought implies can. But when moral reasoning is employed in the
theoretical context of actual experience, issues revolving around the transcendental
account of the moral disposition of human beings and its relationship to divine
directives take centre stage. In Kant’s estimation, the transcendental consideration
of hope leads ineluctably to the position that radical human depravity is the natural
condition of human beings. This realization becomes, for Kant, the principal challenge
to the stability of reason. For this reason, the question of hope is fundamentally a
religious question, and becomes the final conundrum towards which Kant’s entire
philosophical programme points. John Hare (2006: 76) puts his finger on the basic
issue: ‘if a person does have reverence for the moral law, then without God she is in
what I call “the moral gap.” … [M]y view is that if she cannot produce a working
alternative to theism in bridging this gap, her position will be unstable in just the
same way Kant said Spinoza’s was. She will not be able to make consistent her
beliefs about what she can do and what she should do’.
Hare understands the essential core of Kant’s account of religious faith to have a
three-part structure – high moral demand, human depravity and the need for divine
assistance. According to Hare (1996: 7), ‘[Kant] raises the problem of the moral gap
vividly, because he places the moral demand on us very high and recognizes that we
are born with a natural propensity not to follow it’.6 Rational religious faith is Kant’s
way of finally coming to terms with the transcendental needs of reason in a critically
satisfying way. Where feeling harmonizes the fact–value divide to the satisfaction
of reason empirically considered, faith does so to the satisfaction of reason morally
considered. Hope regulates this harmony by requiring rational flexibility in the face
of our ever-changing concepts and experiences. More could be said on this point.
For my purposes here, it is important merely to note that, for Kant, religious faith
plays a crucial role in the quest to excavate reason completely. In terms of motif, it
is clear that, for Kant, religious faith is necessary for rational stability. Considering
reason as a whole, the fact–value divide and its religious analogue human depravity
become radically destabilizing features; they produce moral guilt, remove moral
hope, and lead reason down the retrograde path of moral nihilism, not instability.

6 He goes on to argue that ‘[Kant’s] solution is to appeal to the possibility of assistance

by God’ (Hare 1996: 38).
84 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Kantian Motif Number Two – Religious Faith is Properly Grounded on Values,
not Facts

Kant’s fundamental conviction is that facts, considered on their own, are always non-
descript. What I mean by this is that facts don’t tell stories; they don’t tell us what
they mean. Facts, for Kant, are something like statements about the world formulated
when sense datum and rational concept are synthetically brought together in the
judgement of reason. When reason then employs these facts discursively, they can be
used to either prove or disprove a variety of metaphysical propositions. Theologians,
Kant thinks, are often faced with the temptation to prove their convictions about
metaphysical matters by using facts as a foundation for argumentation. Such a
strategy serves as a bulwark against those who would oppose faith. The problem
with these proofs, however, is that similar proofs can almost always be articulated
so as to yield conclusions in direct opposition to the theologian’s claims. Kant
identifies several pairs of arguments in such opposition and dubs them ‘Antinomies
of Reason’. We can, argues Kant, prove that the world had a beginning in time and
had no beginning in time; that every composite substance in the world consists of
simple parts and does not consist of simple parts; that freedom is both a part and
not a part of the causal nexus of nature; and that there is and is not an absolutely
necessary being that belongs to nature (first Critique: A426–60/B454–88).
Something is going wrong with reason when it presses itself into these kinds of
contradictions. Rather than continuing to marshal evidence on one side or the other
of these debates, or seeking some grand synthesis of these positions, Kant would
have us turn towards an analysis of the apparatus being employed in the arguments
– what he calls ‘bare reason’. Bare reason is reason unemployed. It is the object of
the transcendental question, ‘What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of
experience?’ As Kant turns towards an analysis of bare reason, he finds that dogmatic
theologians are usually the first to object to his findings, and, interestingly enough,
they often do so by illegitimately reasoning from empirical facts to metaphysical
truths. The arguments for God’s existence are Kant’s principal example. The problem,
according to Kant, is that these proofs are an attempt – pardon the American football
metaphor – to run a kind of theological ‘end-around’ reason. They posit an image
of God supposedly rooted in indubitable reasoning about the world without first
attempting to understand what trace of the image of God is manifest in human reason
alone.
Kant’s so-called demolition of the traditional arguments for God’s existence in the
first Critique is among the most documented aspects of Kant’s thought in theological
circles. What is not nearly as well documented is the argumentative context in which
this demolition takes place. Kant uses his analysis of the arguments for God’s
existence not as a means to dismiss theology, but to point out the shortsightedness of
reason and to map out a plan for establishing theology on a more secure foundation.
Admittedly, this plan is somewhat convoluted and underdeveloped within the
first Critique, and, for this reason, is often overshadowed by Kant’s chastening of
theology. Nevertheless, Kant is insistent that theologians do themselves no favours
 Chris L. Firestone 85
by attempting to prove the existence of God. For those who favour employing the
arguments for God’s existence as a primary means of support for faith, the strength
and security of their faith often depends on the strength and security of these
arguments. Even if an argument could be made to prove God’s existence, this would
not be a good thing in Kant’s estimation. It would have at least two very negative
consequences: (1) we would have to keep the details of this argument in mind lest we
waver at the first of many challenges along life’s way, and (2) faith, as we typically
think of it, would be dead. The ‘stepping out’ of faith would have to be replaced by
a type of certainty or ‘knowledge’.
Kant’s dictum, that he wants to deny knowledge to make room for faith, is a
perennial matter of dispute in the world of Kant-studies. What is this faith and where
is the room prepared for it by the critical philosophy? This is something like the Holy
Grail for those interested in Kant’s philosophy of religion. Some think a statement
denying knowledge for the sake of faith is a contradiction in terms. Peter Byrne, for
example, takes the denial of knowledge to be a simultaneous denial of the possibility
of faith. According to Byrne (1979: 335), ‘If one rules out knowledge of God as
impossible in principle then one also rules out the possibility of faith, where this
entails believing or thinking that God exists’. Most, however, think Kant’s statement
makes sense, but that a requirement for understanding Kantian faith is moving
beyond the first Critique. The traditional interpretation, to its credit, usually allows
for moral faith, but only in a weak sense of ‘faith’. The faith that Kant made room
for was merely the moral postulates of the practical philosophy. Kant’s doctrine of
God, on this view, is not atheistic or deistic (as it would have to be for someone like
Byrne), but instead non-realistic. The recent tide of affirmative interpretations of
Kant is united in opposition to both these caricatures of Kant. Kant wants to deny the
strict knowledge of all metaphysical claims in favour of a critically instantiated faith
at the transcendental boundaries of reason. His philosophy makes room for a realist
religious faith, but, to see exactly how, one must first understand the transcendental
nature of reason and follow the development of Kant’s thinking all the way to his
writings on religion. In the first Critique, it is Kant’s concern that we not get ahead
of ourselves by circumventing the philosophical need for critical reflection on the
nature and aptitudes of reason. Not only does reason run out of resources to prove
God’s existence as it moves deeper and deeper into analytic reflection, it does so
necessarily by the very nature of reason itself.
For Kant, faith is a matter of the will or heart, and it is for this reason that values,
and not facts, are the appropriate foundation for religious faith. The entire religious
question will finally turn on this issue in Kant’s worldview. This is why Kant, in
Book One of Religion, argues that humans have a radically evil disposition, and, in
Book Two, that the meaningfulness of the world and our place in it is dependent on
faith in the transcendental provision of God’s Son. Belief in God and God’s work
on our behalf is the only way we can have moral hope, thinks Kant. No amount of
empirical proof is sufficient to engender genuine religious faith. Only an irrefragable
conviction in God’s high moral standards, human moral insufficiency and God’s
ultimate deliverance stabilizes reason.
86 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Kantian Motif Number Three – Religious Faith is Properly Augustinian, not
Pelagian

One of the most common objections to Kant’s philosophy of religion is that it

promotes a religion of works rather than grace. Such an interpretation is part and
parcel of what many traditional interpreters take to be Kant’s own. On this reading,
Kant’s Religion is thought to be best understood from the vantage-point of Kant’s
moral philosophy. This strategy for reading Kant is common parlance in the halls of
power in the field of Kant-studies. It presupposes that Kant’s philosophy of religion
is, in other words, fundamentally Pelagian. What this means is that interpreters
understand Kant’s philosophy of religion to be centred on the autonomous individual
and the intrinsic power of his or her personal moral resources. Kant, on this reading,
celebrates the stoic quest to live a good life – a life that at the end of the day has but
the naïve hope of being found well pleasing to God. Kant’s philosophy of religion is
taken to defend this moral fecundity of human persons, so much so that individual
human beings can become the stoic heroes of their own stories.
Numerous essays have emerged in recent years presenting an impressive
catalogue of evidence and argumentation pointing out the weaknesses of this position
and the real importance of divine grace and belief in divine action to the entire thrust
of Kant’s philosophy of religion. In Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion, for
instance, Philip Rossi points to the work of Jacqueline Mariña as a good recent
example. According to Rossi’s analysis of Mariña, the Augustinian character of
Kant’s account of grace contains a key element – namely, ‘an acknowledgement of
the function of grace for the general orientation of the human will prior to making
any specific choice’ (Rossi 2006: 114). Later, he writes, ‘Mariña’s argument against
considering Kant to be a Pelagian draws attention to the universal function of grace
in constituting the unconditioned moral worth of humans whereby God establishes a
relation with us “before any act on our part”’ (117). Rossi takes Mariña’s account of
grace to be what he terms ‘a relational’ way forwards beyond those interpretations
that would see Kant’s philosophy of religion to be either Pelagian or somehow based
upon arbitrary reward. Rossi’s account of grace is one of a growing number finding
their way into the recent literature.7
Nathan Jacobs and I have for the past few years been working on an interpretation
of Kant’s Religion that takes Kant to be moving decisively away from the moral
individualism of his practical philosophy to a kind of transcendental Platonism
based on logical developments in his transcendental theology between the Critique
of Pure Reason and his later writings on religion.8 The exact nature of this movement

7 Recent discussions of what I am calling the Augustinian character of Kant’s

thought include Jacqueline Mariña, ‘Kant on grace: a reply to his critics’ (1997), John E. Hare,
‘Augustine, Kant, and the moral gap’ (1999), David Sussman, ‘Kantian forgiveness’ (2005),
and Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Moral faith and the highest good’ (2006).
8 See the companion essays by Nathan Jacobs, ‘Kant’s prototypical theology’, and
Chris L. Firestone, ‘Making sense out of tradition: Theology and conflict in Kant’s philosophy
of religion’ (2006).
 Chris L. Firestone 87
is expressed in various places in Kant’s writings from the first Critique right through
to Religion, but is particularly evident in his Lectures on Metaphysics. There, Kant
appears to be presenting the case that faith is most properly associated with what
he calls ‘pure cognition’. Pure cognition is the ability of reason to get something
in mind or simply to have an idea at all. Once we have God in mind, we have
the possibility of developing a faith in God that is both consonant with what we
already know about reason and ourselves, and open to what God might have to
say about himself. From this vantage point, Kant’s analysis of moral hope develops
beyond simple moral individualism into a religious universalism in which a critical
approach to the metaphysics behind God’s relationship to humankind can take place
at the transcendental boundaries of reason. Kant’s movement away from moral
individualism in his later writings is simultaneously a movement towards a more
Augustinian approach. When this aspect of Kant’s thought is recognized and applied
to our understanding of Religion, many of the problems pointed out by the traditional
interpreters of Kant simply dissolve.

Kantian Motif Number Four – Religious Faith is Properly Christian, not

Generic

Some readers may be surprised to learn that a robust transcendental christology

resides in Kant’s philosophy of religion. I know I was when, after years of reading
Kant, I first started putting all the pieces of Kant’s argument for religion together
outside of the context of what traditional interpreters were saying about it, and re-
examining his writings on religion with more optimistic theological lenses. Kant
sows the seeds for rational religious faith in his moral philosophy, but the growth of
these seeds into an actual philosophy of religion is not fully apparent until Religion.
For theologically affirmative interpreters of Kant, Religion constitutes Kant’s
transcendental examination of the conditions for moral hope and the true measure
of all philosophies of religion that purport to be Kantian. I do not have the space
to develop this point here, but I would draw the reader’s attention to two aspects
of Kant’s argument in Religion that, if seriously considered, should go some way
towards convincing the sceptic that Kant’s position is in a significant sense amenable
to the term ‘Christian’.
First of all, having made the case in Book One of Religion that human beings
possess a ‘propensity’ to deviate from the moral law called ‘radical evil’, Kant
provides his famous solution to this human depravity in Book Two by bringing
together divine grace and a Christic figure he calls the ‘prototype of perfect
humanity’. Jacobs (2006) calls this feature of the text ‘Kant’s prototypical theology’.
At the apex of Kant’s philosophy of religion stands a Christ-like figure in whom we
must believe if we are to have moral hope. Only by believing in the divine–human
prototype of humanity or what Kant calls ‘humanity in its full moral perfection’ can
we hope to overcome the depravity understood to be inherent in our being when
nature and freedom are considered simultaneously. It must be remembered that, for
88 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Kant, this analysis of rational religious belief is transcendental and thus prior to
experience. It is rooted in what Kant calls ‘pure cognition’ and the programmatic
quest to understand the nature of the human moral disposition in light of the question
of moral hope. In Book Three, Kant adds to his prototypical theology a corporate
vision of moral hope where redeemed humans (that is, those adopting the prototype’s
disposition as their own) band together in the form of the Church. Kant’s idea is that
moral hope can only be achieved if human beings work together in order to progress
towards the ideal of an ethical commonwealth or Kingdom of God.
Beside this prototypical theology and the related ecclesiastical vision, we find
Kant’s philosophy of religion to be amenable to the term ‘Christian’ in another
significant way. In Book Four, Kant employs his previously established prototypical
theology and understanding of the Church as a litmus test meant to ferret out the
positive and negative features of the Christian faith. According to Kant, the positive
features of Christianity, including its doctrines of the corrupt disposition, the need
for a dispositional revolution, the prototype, and so on, ought to be exalted and
held in esteem. Kant has a very high view of Jesus (whom he calls ‘the Teacher of
the Gospel’) and the early Christian church. Although Kant’s view of Christ and
the Church is purely philosophical (a position consonant with the pure tenets of
his chosen vocation), together they form the basic make-up of Kant’s most robust
treatment of the transcendental grounds for rational religious belief. They are also
the main features of what he calls ‘New Testament Christianity’. The doctrines
promoted by the ‘Christians’ of the early church are what comprise the essence of
Christianity critically construed and mark it historically as the first ever universally
valid religion. The doctrines essential to Christianity, Kant argues, are identical with
those of rational religious faith. They make up the core of true religion and are the
measure of what is peripheral to true religion. They also provide the appropriate
foundation for the comparative study of religious faiths. For Kant, rational religious
faith must be essentially ‘Christian’ in orientation by promoting the doctrines of
rational religious faith previously mentioned, for without these essential components
no faith can stabilize reason and provide human beings with a lasting hope.

Concluding Hermeneutic Postscript

Kantian Motif Number Five – Religious Faith is the Appropriate Response to
the Conflict of Human and Divine Perspectives

To my mind, Kant’s motif of a necessary conflict of perspectives between

philosophy and theology provides an epistemic framework for approaching Kant’s
work that empowers theologians of all makes and models to utilize his philosophy
constructively. Elsewhere, I have argued that present in Kant’s philosophy of religion
is a basic understanding of the relative perspectives of philosophy and theology
(Firestone 2000). According to Kant in his final publication, The Conflict of the
Faculties, ‘The biblical theologian proves the existence of God on the grounds that
 Chris L. Firestone 89
He spoke in the Bible, which also discusses his nature … [and] must … count on a
supernatural opening of his understanding by a spirit that guides to all truth’ (7:24).
When Kant writes of theology in Conflict, he understands theology to be a field of
enquiry where God’s Word and Spirit are believed to constitute the standpoint of
authority. In contradistinction, ‘the philosophical faculty must be free to examine in
public and to evaluate with cold reason the source and content of this alleged basis
of doctrine’ (7:33). When Kant writes of philosophy, he understands it to be a field
of inquiry where reason and freedom constitute the standpoint of authority. If this is
right, then Kant’s philosophy of religion is not the end of the discussion over what a
properly Kantian philosophy of religion must look like. It is more like a statement of
where Kant stood in faith given his analysis of reason in an era decisively influenced
by the Gospel of Christ.
The transcendental boundaries of reason are the place where this religious conflict
takes place, and the location where, ultimately, faith under the Kantian rubric either
stands or falls. Kantian theologians of the past have intuitively known this to be true
of Kant’s philosophy, and so, in establishing the discipline of theology in response
to Kant’s philosophy, have chosen to develop the grounds for theology in ways that
transcend Kant. As Paul Tillich writes, ‘In my student years, there was a slogan
often repeated: Understanding Kant means transcending Kant. We all try to do this.’
(Tillich 1967: 70) In this process, some theologies become farther removed from Kant
than others and may not prove, at the end of the day, to be definable comfortably as
Kantian theologies at all. For example, transcendental Thomism in the sense of Karl
Rahner or Bernard Lonergan comes to mind. On the other hand, some theologies
get so close to Kant that it is not always easy to discern on what basis they offer
a theological perspective that substantively transcends the theological implications
of Kant’s moral and aesthetic philosophy. Here, John Hick’s moral theology and
Gordon Kaufman’s contemplative theology might be cited as examples. A theology
grounded on Kant’s transcendental boundaries maintains tension between the
disciplinary perspectives and yet must be firmly rooted in a top–down revelatory
schema. Only in this way can it hope to engage Kant’s philosophy in conflict and
compel it to do more – perhaps by becoming more consistent or offering ever more
compelling answers to the perennial questions of human existence.
Theology proper, according to Kant, is rooted in the faith that God has spoken
and the conviction that what God has said and done, as it is written, provides a
trustworthy perspective on reality. This does not mean, however, that theology
provides an independent source of information about God that threatens to undo
reason and the vocation of philosophy. Just as anything known is, for Kant, the
product of the synthesis of intuitions and concepts, everything believed in rationally
must be rooted in the moral and cognized for the sake of hope. For Kant, theology
must be upheld, not because it promises religious data that cannot be gleaned from
reason, but because theology promises to awaken reason and hasten the day when
rational religion will reign supreme (see Firestone 2006). What Conflict provides
Kant’s philosophy of religion with is a context for completing the development of
a transcendental theology consonant with what reason requires and what history
90 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
demands. Rather than promoting stagnation by putting theology into a theoretical,
moral, aesthetic or religious box, Kant places his philosophy of religion into the
dynamic and moving environment of the university. The resulting conflict of
the disciplines promotes the evolution of theology for the sake of truth, and this
according to the rational stability religious faith can afford. Rational religious faith,
for Kant, is rooted in the transcendental needs of reason, but is not arbitrary or non-
realistic. Instead, it is grounded in eternal moral values that, according to his analysis
in Religion, must lead to faith in God’s grace and the transcendental provision for
humanity of God’s perfect Son. Such is the starting-point of rational religious faith
at the transcendental boundaries of reason.

Further Reading

Davidovich, A., Religion as a Province of Meaning: The Kantian Foundations of

Modern Theology, Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993
Despland, M., Kant on History and Religion, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1973
Firestone, C.L., and Palmquist, S.R. (eds), Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion,
Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006
Galbraith, E.C., Kant and Theology: Was Kant a Closet Theologian?,San Francisco,
CA: International Scholars Publications, 1996
Hare, J.E., The Moral Gap: Kantian Ethics, Human Limits, and God’s Assistance,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996
Michalson, Jr., G.E., Kant and the Problem of God, Oxford: Blackwell,1999
Reardon, B.M.G., Kant as Philosophical Theologian, London: Macmillan, 1988
Wood, A.W., Kant’s Moral Religion, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970
 Chapter 5

Boundaries Crossed and Uncrossable:

Physical Science, Social Science,
Theology
Philip Clayton

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun,
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast …1

Modernity was the great period of boundary-drawing. Finally having access to solid
data, Galileo, Kepler and Newton were able to give increasingly reliable formulations
of natural law. Possessing these laws led them and others to an increasing sense of
the power of the natural scientific method. With this new-won sense of power came
the obvious need for science to declare its independence from the constraints of the
Christian worldview.
What in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries was played out in fundamental
physics and cosmology was played out in biology in the mid–nineteenth century,
and in the human sciences a few decades later. Until Darwin, researchers in anatomy,
zoology and medicine could acknowledge the ordering, providential hand of God
in the biosphere while engaging in their science with de facto independence. But
Darwin was drawn to careful empirical research of differing reproductive success
based on the adaptation of individuals and species to their environments. The
evidence showed that variations which were random relative to the selection process
produced the full range of phenotypical differences that we observe in nature. Not
only were divine interventions not necessary to explain the data; traditional ideas
of a pre-orchestrated nature actually conflicted with the biological account of the
evolution of the biosphere. From this point on the biological sciences had to proceed
as independent fields of enquiry.
In 1888 Émile Durkheim published ‘Suicide et natalité. Étude de statistique
morale’ (‘Suicide and the birth rate: A study in moral statistics’), followed in 1897

1 Robert Frost, ‘Mending Wall’, Collected Poems, Prose and Plays (1995).
Subsequent extracts are from the same poem.
92 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
by his epoch-making Le Suicide, étude de sociologie. By linking data from what
appeared to be two distinct areas of human experience, Durkheim sought to show
that these most personal of decisions – whether to give birth, and whether to end
one’s own life – were actually due to ‘distinctly social causes, or if one prefers
moral causes’2. Noting that ‘birth rates constitute social facts’ (Durkheim 1994
[1888]: 130), Durkheim declared them the domain of an independent, objective area
of study, which he would later dub sociologie. As Ken Morrison notes, ‘Instead
of viewing birth rates as a function of some organic disposition (e.g., fertility) he
demarcates them as social subject matter and this brings them under the rubric of
“ruling social customs and ideas in society” … Birth rates are not, then, imposed by
organic necessity as common sense would assert, but are social facts to the extent
that they point to underlying practices to which individuals comply’.3 With ‘Suicide
et natalité’, then, the social sciences were launched on an independent trajectory
similar to physics and biology.
The result of these various revolutions, it seemed, was to move humans from
a position of ontological primacy, and our planet from a position of cosmological
centrality. Both were replaced by the frightening immensity of infinite worlds, by a
universe without a centre, and by a blind process of natural selection, ‘red in tooth
and claw’, which (critics complained) left no place for the glory of God and little
place for the glory of man and woman.
One by one, then, in a progression that moved increasingly close to home, the
major areas of study were spun off from the unified ‘medieval synthesis’ (such as
it was) and began their modern existence as separate fields of enquiry, beholden to
no authority outside themselves. Not only had theology lost its primacy in studies
of the physical world, the biosphere and the human person, it had been banned
from crossing the boundaries that constituted these new fields of study as empirical
sciences. Moreover, with each new developing science the challenge for theology
appeared to grow greater. Thus the unbroken regularity of Newton’s laws raised
outcry because they left no place for a unique occurrence like the Resurrection –
or, for that matter, for any miraculous occurrence.4 But this severely limited the
hand of God, who was no longer able to act ‘with signs and miracles’ to witness to
the divine power. The same response, if anything in more virulent form, arose in
response to Darwin. Now not only were miraculous acts ruled out, but providential
guidance became suspect and the ontological uniqueness of the human person as a
soul-impregnated being was rejected. The continuity thesis of Man and Ape was just
as hard to take as the demotion had been in Newton’s case.

2 Durkheim, ‘Suicide and the birth rate,’ in D. Lester (ed.), Emile Durkheim’s Le
Suicide: One Hundred Years Later ([1888] 1994), 132.
3 Ken Morrison, review of Robert Alun Jones, The Development of Durkheim’s Social
Realism, in Canadian Journal of Sociology Online (March–April 2000), at <http://www.arts.
ualberta.ca/ cjscopy/reviews/durkheim.html>, visited 24 February 2005.
4 Newton himself did not accept the opposition as a consequence of his ‘natural
philosophy’, but by the time of Laplace few of his followers shared his optimism in the
concordance of miracles and the new physics.
 Philip Clayton 93
Of course the picture is more complicated than the sketch just offered. But the
basic lines of the sketch are accurate nonetheless. Gradually the dividing walls
between theology and the sciences grew higher. Here, however, it was not just
theology, the endangered side, that built lines of defense; science, the party generally
viewed as the stronger side, also devoted great energy to the fortifications. Not only
were the quasi-scientific explanations sometimes offered by theologians roundly
rejected, but even distinctly non-empirical accounts, such as theistic evolution, came
under fire as epistemically suspect. De facto, the scientists were following a strategy
sometimes associated with the Maginot Line, famously described by Clausewitz: ‘If
you entrench yourself behind strong fortifications, you compel the enemy to seek
a solution elsewhere’. The only difference was, all the domains that mattered to
explaining the world seemed to be located on the science side of the boundary.
In one sense, then, the boundary between science and religion represented the
fundamental boundary of the modern period.5 It was set already in Bacon’s famous
castigation of the ‘Idols of the Theatre’:

Lastly, there are idols which have immigrated into men’s minds from the various dogmas
of philosophies, and also from wrong laws of demonstration. These I call Idols of the
Theatre; because in my judgment all the received systems are but so many stage-plays,
representing worlds of their own creation after an unreal and scenic fashion. Nor is it
only of the systems now in vogue, or only of the ancient sects and philosophies, that I
speak: for many more plays of the same kind may yet be composed and in like artificial
manner set forth; seeing that errors the most widely different have nevertheless causes
for the most part alike. … And there is yet a third class [among the Idols of the Theatre],
consisting of those who out of faith and veneration mix their philosophy and theology and
traditions; among whom the vanity of some has gone so far aside as to seek the origin of
science among spirits and genii. (Bacon 1868: Part I, sections 41ff.)

But boundary-drawing is rarely the activity of one side alone. While science fought
to preserve the sanctity of its methods, the Church fought just as hard to preserve
the sanctity of its content. From Luther and Calvin to Barth and Cornelius Van
Til, theologians worked to formulate their own proprietary standards and criteria,
effectively protecting sacra doctrina from incursions and critiques from the other
side. At its strongest, this boundary-building affirmed, with Barth, that there could
be no Anknüpfungspunkt, no point of contact whatsoever, between theological
proclamation and scientific reflection. Boundary-drawing and what Hans Albert
(1985) has called ‘immunization strategies’ – the immunization of one’s claims from
outside criticism – often go hand in hand.

5 For detailed histories of the interactions between science and religion see David C.
Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter
between Christianity and Science (1986); idem, When Science and Christianity Meet (2003);
John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (1991); John
Hedley Brooke and Geoffrey Cantor, Reconstructing Nature: The Engagement of Science and
Religion (2000); and John Hedley Brooke, Of Scientists and their Gods (2001).
94 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
II

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each…

If modernity was the epoch of drawing boundaries, defining areas of study and spinning
off sub-disciplines, postmodernity is the epoch of transgressing these boundaries.
Interestingly, the order of advance is now proceeding in exactly the opposite
direction. First the clear boundaries between the human and the biological sciences
came under fire, for reasons we will explore in a moment. Then the methodological
distinctions between the ‘rigorous’ and the non-rigorous natural sciences were cast
into question by philosophers of science and others. Finally, in recent years even the
fundamental distinction between science and religion has become a matter of debate.
At its most extreme, at the hands of post-structuralist thinkers like Jacques Derrida,
the drawing of all boundaries whatsoever emerges as an arbitrary act. Of course,
when all boundaries are transgressed, the very notion of boundary is deconstructed.
It will be our task to evaluate this radical claim and, if possible, to chart a safe course
between boundary-mania on one side and boundary-phobia on the other.
Now there are many ways to transgress boundaries, many ways to (attempt
to) undercut or detour around sharp separations. Still, there is a clear difference
between transgressing boundaries and ignoring them. The latter approach, which
takes the boundaries we have been surveying and defines them out of existence
altogether, is in some ways the more disturbing: it deconstructs boundaries without
doing the work of deconstruction. Janus-like, it wears two faces, the one claiming,
in effect, that there is no science, the other that there is no (viable) religion. In its
first form – which unfortunately is gaining in cultural influence in the USA today
– this strategy takes all of modern science to be merely the expression of an atheistic
worldview. Thus, advocates can claim, the details of scientific data and theories can
be dismissed outright, because they are merely expressions of a mistaken worldview
– just as, say, the intricacies of Zoroastrian cosmology can be freely dismissed
by those who do not accept the fundamental dualism built into its worldview. For
example, it is sometimes said that the methods and results of evolutionary biology
or neuroscience simply do not touch the Christian: since Christians know that the
underlying worldview is mistaken, they are not required to pay attention to scientific
conclusions. In its second form, the strategy holds that science has transgressed
no boundaries in dismissing religion, since metaphysics in general, and religion
in particular, never was a significant (epistemic) force to begin with. All questions
are scientific questions; indeed, every meaningful statement that can be made is an
empirical statement. As a theory of meaning – the so-called verificationist theory
– this stance has been as exhaustively falsified as any position in the history of
western thought; as an anti-metaphysical stance, however, it continues to hold some
 Philip Clayton 95
sway in scientific circles. Nota bene: this strategy does not transgress boundaries as
much as it collapses them.
Both strategies are manifestations of the same underlying move, which is a subtle
(and sometimes not so subtle) form of imperialism: since the other does not exist as a
genuine other, no negotiations with the other are necessary and no genuine dialogue
is possible. Ironically, we now see that the ultimate transgression of boundaries is
to deny that there were any boundaries to begin with: no real difference, no genuine
other that one needs to understand, no opponent to battle with and vanquish.
In contrast to such approaches, I shall argue that there are real boundaries to be
analyzed, real contrasts to be understood, real walls to be broken down. The deeper
answer to the boundaries question is to acknowledge difference – even irreconcilable
and permanent difference – yet in such a way that the two halves of the difference
are co-constituted by their relationship with the other. This recognition of mutual
dependence colours both sides, each in its own way. With this result we reach my core
thesis in this particular paper: what it means to ‘be religious’ today has everything to
do with the similarity of religion and science and with the impossibility of defining
(and living) religion today apart from its only-too-visible other, science, together
with the myriad technologies that it has spawned, from the Nikes on our feet to
the cellphones on our ears. Yet this recognition is a two-edged sword: what it is
to ‘be scientific’ is also influenced by the origins of science in religion; and the
burning scientific conclusions of our day continue to raise equally burning religious
questions.

III

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’…

The triad of terms in my subtitle is significant: the renegotiation of boundaries

between the physical sciences and metaphysics or theology has everything to do
with recent work in the social sciences. To boil a long story6 down to a single two-
part observation: it is difficult, in light of recent work in the history and sociology
of science, to deny that the natural sciences are in part interpretative; post-Kuhnian
philosophy of science includes an irreducibly hermeneutical dimension. But the
social sciences, it appears, remain distinct from the natural sciences: while the latter
are characterized by a ‘single hermeneutic’ – an interpreting agent explaining a non-
interpreting world – the social sciences are characterized by a ‘double hermeneutic’
– an interpreting agent now attempts to explain the actions of ‘objects of study’ who

6 See my Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and Religion

(1989), esp. chs 3 and 5.
96 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
are themselves also subjects involved in constructing their own interpretations of the
world and of the experimenters themselves. As Anthony Giddens (1976: 158) notes,
the social scientist faces ‘a pre-interpreted world where the creation and reproduction
of meaning-frames is a very condition of that which it seeks to analyze’.
For a particularly evocative and challenging example of how the boundary
between natural and social sciences is first transgressed and then reinstated, consider
the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz. Geertz’s classic The Interpretation of
Cultures appears allied with Giddens’s thesis:

Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he
himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not
an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning …
construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. (Geertz 1973: 5)

Human cultural constructs are built up out of ‘a multiplicity of complex conceptual

structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are
at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which [the ethnographer] must contrive
somehow first to grasp and then to render’ (Geertz 1973: 10). Nor is any deductive
science of culture possible: ‘social actions are comments on more than themselves;
. . where an interpretation comes from does not determine where it can be impelled
to go’ (Geertz 1973: 23). Indeed, the very idea of abiding structures is suspect in
sociology or anthropology:

The view of culture, a culture, this culture, as a consensus on fundamentals – shared

conceptions, shared feelings, shared values – seems hardly viable in the face of so much
dispersion and disassembly; it is the faults and fissures that seem to mark out the landscape
of collective selfhood. Whatever it is that defines identity in borderless capitalism and the
global village it is not deep-going agreements on deep-going matters, but something more
like the recurrence of familiar divisions, persisting arguments, standing threats, the notion
that whatever else may happen, the order of difference must be somehow maintained.
(Geertz 2000: 250)

The trouble is, the pieces of social explanations, ‘the elements concerned, the dots or
the tiles, are neither compact nor homogeneous, simple nor uniform. When you look
into them, their solidity dissolves, and you are left not with a catalogue of well-defined
entities to be arranged and classified, a Mendelian table of natural kinds, but with a
tangle of differences and similarities only half sorted out’ (Geertz 2000: 249). What
holds for pieces holds for lines: ‘the line between (Moroccan) culture as a natural
fact and (Moroccan) culture as a theoretical entity tends to get blurred’ (Geertz 1973:
15). This fact leads Geertz to emphasize the analogy between anthropology and art:
‘the line between mode of representation and substantive content is as undrawable
in cultural analysis as it is in painting’ (Geertz 1973: 16). In short: ‘the whole point
of a semiotic approach to culture is … to aid us in gaining access to the conceptual
world in which our subjects live so that we can, in some extended sense of the term,
converse with them’ (Geertz 1973: 24).
 Philip Clayton 97
Geertz is by no means alone here: virtually all the advocates for a clear boundary
between the natural and social sciences, going back to Wilhelm Dilthey, the father
of interpretative social science in the late nineteenth century, have argued similarly.
What comes as a shock, then, is to realize that Geertz does not in fact draw the
sharp boundary that one would expect; the ‘double hermeneutic’ does not get the last
word. Against the jarring backdrop of grinding expectations Geertz draws exactly
the opposite conclusion:

There is no reason why the conceptual structure of a cultural interpretation should be any
less formulable, and thus less susceptible to explicit canons of appraisal, than that of, say,
a biological observation or a physical experiment. (Geertz 1973: 24)

In this context, as in others, Geertz emphasizes the difficulty of the task of

ethnography. But he grants no qualitative difference, no sharp boundary, between
this intellectual task and those of the natural sciences. The social scientist may have
further to go, but it is not because her task is inherently different from her colleagues
in biology or physics:

The meanings that symbols, the material vehicles of thought, embody are often elusive,
vague, fluctuating, and convoluted, but they are, in principle, as capable of being discovered
through systematic empirical investigation – especially if the people who perceive them
will cooperate a little – as the atomic weight of hydrogen or the function of the adrenal
glands. (Geertz 1973: 362–3)

How can this be? Hasn’t Geertz questioned the very line ‘between mode of
representation and substantive content’(Geertz 1973: 16)? When the classical boundary
between natural and social science, Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft,
is transgressed, we shall see, both sides are transformed, and a new paradigm for
knowledge emerges. Herein lies the point of Geertz’s comments. No longer can we
be satisfied with the conception of a ‘great divide’ between the natural and social
sciences, as if they were two great continents standing opposed to one another:
‘one driven by the ideal of a disengaged consciousness looking out with cognitive
assurance upon an absolute world of ascertainable fact, the other driven by that of
an engaged self struggling uncertainly with signs and expressions to make readable
sense of intentional action’ (Geertz 2000: 150). Instead, Geertz perceives

a loose assemblage of differently focused, rather self-involved, and variably overlapping

research communities in both the human and the natural science … an archipelago, among
the islands of which, large, small and in between, the relations are complex and ramified,
the possible orderings very near to endless. (Geertz 2000: 150)7

7 Interestingly, in making his case in this section Geertz draws not only on Charles
Taylor and Wilhelm Dilthey, but also on the neurologist Gerald Edelman and the physicist
Richard Feynman. The point is important: the case can be made from both sides; no secret
hegemony of the social sciences is intended here.
98 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
What matters most here – especially for the science–religion relation, as we shall
see in a moment – is the nature of this new paradigm of knowledge. According to
this model, the claim to attention of any science does not depend on its grasping an
object of study objectively or definitely or absolutely. Rather it rests ‘on the degree
to which [the scientist] is able to clarify what goes on in [faraway] places, to reduce
the puzzlement – what manner of [persons] are these? – to which unfamiliar acts
emerging out of unknown backgrounds naturally give rise’ (Geertz 1973: 16).
Puzzlement, and the quest to overcome puzzles – this is the common core of
all ‘scientific’ work under the new model. Indeed, Geertz argues, this is what ties
together the various once-dichotomized disciplines: ‘Whatever differences in method
or theory have separated us, we have been alike in that: professionally obsessed with
worlds elsewhere and with making them comprehensible first to ourselves’ (Geertz
2000: 83). The common quest for understanding is the anthropological foundation
on which all subsequent scientific activity (of whatever kind) is built. In some
sense, the scientific quest is a necessary concomitant of the quest for self: it is ‘the
gaps between me and those who think differently than I’ – or, we might add, the
gaps between me and the things that are different from me – that ‘define the real
boundaries of the self’ (Geertz 2000: 77–8, quoting Arthur Danto).

IV

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down…

So what does all this suggest about the religion–science relationship? The formal
answer is not difficult to state: at least in the West, we are by and large in a third
phase of the relationship, having moved beyond the ‘unified worldview’ stage
and the Maginot Line phase, the phase of wall-building. The third phase involves
the recognition of common properties; old boundaries are first transgressed and
then habitually crossed, though without dissolving all difference between the two
territories. As usual, of course, the devil is in the details.
In the medieval synthesis there could be no tension between theology and science,
or what was then called ‘natural philosophy’ (philosophia naturalis). God was the
source of the natural order and its sustainer at every moment, and the principles
manifested in the natural world had to be grounded in the supernatural world, in
the being and nature of God. Theology was thus the queen of the sciences, and each
particular area of study was one of her handmaids. The modern period, by contrast,
was defined by the progressive peeling-off of individual sciences one by one from
the medieval synthesis. To be a distinct natural science just was to be defined by a
particular set of methods and a particular area of study – in short, by the autonomy
(non-theology-dependence) of that particular science. To speak today only of a grand
 Philip Clayton 99
metaphysical synthesis without acknowledging the methodological autonomy of the
sciences would be to miss the significance of this irreversible history and perhaps
to leave out an essential feature of the scientific study of the world. During the
period of cold war between theology and the sciences, the only synthesis one could
conceive was the downward reduction of the disciplines that study more complex
natural entities to the disciplines that study the particles and forces that underlie and
explain complex phenomena. In the cold-war period, science was literally defined by
being ‘boundaried off’ from religion.
One might be inclined to argue that nothing has really changed. Those who defend
the doctrine of continuing detente, such as Stephen J. Gould (1999), (wrongly)
advocate a stalemate between opposing powers with no common ground: science
studies the natural world and religion the realm of the supernatural; science answers
how-questions, religion why-questions; science is concerned with fact, religion with
value; to religion is assigned (as Hume once said) the Before and the After, whereas
science is responsible for explaining all that lies in between.
But too much data speaks against this answer for it still to be convincing. The
(verificationist) attempt to define all metaphysical questions as meaningless proved
to be a dismal failure. The so-called ‘formalist’ attempts to uniquely specify the logic
of scientific explanation were unable to give unique expression to a distinctive logic
(see Clayton 1989: ch. 2), just as, a few decades earlier, attempts to formulate the
‘principle of demarcation’ between science and metaphysics were unable to defend
an in-principle distinction between the two.8 Treatments of the rationality of science
influenced by Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions – and their
number is legion – no longer presuppose a qualitative distinction between scientific
and non-scientific rationality (though it is also true that very few of these treatments
actually equate the rationality of these two separate spheres of human activity).
And what was once a cardinal sin – to draw clear lines of implication from main-
line scientific work to some underlying metaphysical position – is now the topic of
dozens of conferences and a continuous output of books by scientists, philosophers
of science, philosophers of mind, theologians and others (see, for example, Clayton
2004). These developments provide good reason to doubt whether the old ‘warfare
model’ still offers an adequate response to today’s situation.
But if we are not still locked in our respective trenches, facing the enemy’s
bayonets across a desolate no-man’s-land, what is this new situation? If science
and theology cannot be definitively boundaried off one from the other, can they be
identified, leaving all boundaries behind? There are a few treatments that make this
suggestion, though they are generally not written by theologians.9 As I’ve already
argued, it’s not possible to regain our pre-modern innocence: there can be no turning

8 Most famously, Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (2nd edn 1980) and
Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1969).
9 See Paul Feyerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of
Knowledge (1975); Fritjov Capra, The Tao of Physics (1975).
100 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
back to an age when science did not yet exist in its present form and the only real
battle was at the level of clashing worldviews.
Up until now, theology has been boundaried off in two diametrically opposed
ways. Theists have often claimed that theology’s uniqueness stems from the fact
that it alone recognizes the self-revelation of God; hence the disciplinary integrity
of theology lies in its willingness to respond to this revelation.10 Non-theists
generally claim that theology is unique because it has no clearly defined object of
study, with the result that – unlike the sciences but like other metaphysical systems
– its very autonomy as a discipline must remain a matter of dispute. According to
these opponents, whereas the sciences are concerned with real objects in the world,
theology merely projects human attributes onto a non-existent object (God), a non-
existent origin (creation ex nihilo) and a non-existent future (the Second Coming
for Christians, the coming of Messiah for Jews, the entrance into Paradise for
Muslims).
What the Geertzian perspective does for the social sciences – preserving their
distinctive subject matter, yet also revealing the fundamental symmetry that ties them
to the natural sciences – it can do also for theology. Geertz allows us to see beneath
the two combating construals of theology, the one hostile and the other apologetic,
to the features that theology shares with all areas of enquiry. The resulting analysis is
important, I believe, for understanding boundaries that exist but are not inviolate.
Recall that for Geertz all sciences share the feature of allowing the self to define
itself, and to act, by bringing a certain order into chaos – an order that is at the same
time a recognition of really existing structures that precede the self. (That some
of these structures are electrons, others cells, and others institutions, languages,
norms and prohibitions, represents a crucial distinction but not a dichotomy.)
Each discipline is ‘an archipelago, among the islands of which, large, small and in
between, the relations are complex and ramified, the possible orderings very near to
endless’ (Geertz 2000: 150). Each one is part of the broader effort to reduce human
puzzlement in light of what we as individual subjects encounter.
The same is true for religion, indeed with a vengeance. When we struggle
with the religious question, the question of the ultimate meaningfulness of the
universe and of our existence within it, we find ourselves located somewhere in
an archipelago of islands, with various pieces spread out before us in no particular
order. The difference of this archipelago from the other ones has to do with the level
of generality of the questions and the level of variability among the answers. The
data with which physicists are concerned show little variation across cultures: inert
gases act the same, no matter what language the laboratory workers speak. Cultural
dynamics are much stronger in the social sciences: although certain human features
do reappear across cultures, many social interactions are highly sensitive to cultural

10 Thomas F. Torrance, Theological Science (1969) and The Ground and Grammar of
Theology (1980). Torrance’s view is derived from Karl Barth and echoed in the recent volume
by Alister E. McGrath, A Scientific Theology, vol. 2: Reality (2002); see my review of this
work in Theology Today, 61 (2004:121–2).
 Philip Clayton 101
and historical location. (If you are not sure about this, try burping loudly at the end
of a meal in different cultural contexts.) Religious questions evoke even greater
variability; the differences are compounded by several orders of magnitude. Here
one wonders whether there are any shared features in modes of reflection across
persons and cultures. Obviously, religious or theological reflection does occur
across cultures, and certain motifs (Jungian archetypes?) seem to reappear in diverse
cultural contexts. But whether there is a common core to human religious beliefs
and responses will remain highly contested into the foreseeable future. Certainly
comparative religious studies in the last, say, four decades has done more to highlight
differences than it has to reveal a common core, a philosophia perennialis common
to all persons at all times.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me –

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors’.

It would be most ironic to conclude an essay on transgressing boundaries with

an attempt to lay out the true and final boundaries between science and theology,
and even more ironic to attempt to rebuild the rock buttresses that once supported
theology’s impregnable mighty fortress. Let us ask instead, what might it mean to
inhabit the territory of theology in an age when the walls of the past are more tourist
destinations than functional blocks to any incursions by scientists?
At this point a limitation of the metaphor we have been using emerges. The phrase
‘transgressing boundaries’ applies only to the transition phase: for many years the
boundaries were inviolate, and then at some point they begin to be crossed. When a
boundary is crossed for the first time, or when only a few persons manage to cross
it, we say that it is transgressed. One thinks, for example, of the period when few
could cross the former ‘Iron Curtain’, when the wall between East and West Berlin
was all but inviolate. But when the people of East Berlin streamed to the once sacred
space next to the wall on the evening of 9 November 1989; when the border guards,
overwhelmed by the numbers and lacking any clear orders from higher up, chose not
to enforce the old boundary; and when the people began streaming through the now
opened gates into West Berlin – at that point everything changed. Fifteen years later
there is still a ‘west’ and an ‘east’ in Berlin, and not all differences have disappeared.
But no boundary is ‘transgressed’ when today one walks up Unter den Linden and
through the Brandenburg Gate.
The situation for theology is analogous. Religious questions will never be
identical to scientific questions; the distinction, one assumes, is permanent. But the
movements back and forth between the two areas of human experience have become
increasingly common, and one may safely predict that the trend will continue.
102 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Someday, one may hope, it will be natural for scientists to encourage the pursuit of
religious questions and religious belief, just as it will be natural for theologians to
encourage the scientific exploration of the natural world. A clear knowledge of the
differences between the two territories encourages a sense of their complementarity.
Where their tasks are discrete, no competition can emerge; where they offer competing
answers to similar questions, it becomes our task to adjudicate their differences in
the most rational manner possible.
‘Good fences make good neighbors’. The poignancy of Frost’s poem lies in its
recognition of differences that do not divide. Fences are useful because humans
are generally at home in one territory or another. But since movement between
territories is crucial for human intercourse and understanding, the ideal fence allows
egress and ingress. In such cases the fence marks the transition from one territory to
another without blocking the movement: ‘There where it is we do not need the wall:
/ He is all pine and I am apple orchard.’ Understanding human persons is enhanced
by cooperative work between natural and social scientists; it is undercut by warfare
between the two groups of scientists. Similarly, understanding our existence in the
world is enhanced when all the sciences can work together with theologians and
scholars of religion.
A generation or two ago scholars and laypeople began massing towards the
boundaries of what were then warring nations. Certainly there were casualties among
the first groups to cross, and some today remain the victims of gunfire issuing from
the ‘hotspots’ that still lie along the border. But by and large the days of total war
are past. In numerous books and journals one can observe the dismantling of the
remaining fortifications, so that in many areas of the theology–science discussion it
is no longer necessary to speak of ‘transgressing boundaries’ at all. Sometimes the
interactions are constructive and productive; at other times participants continue to
struggle with differences of language and method that make interactions strained.
But the discussion is now far enough that one can see why the remaining attempts to
(re)build unscalable walls – from whichever side the effort is initiated – are doomed
to eventual failure. It is not a romantic wish but a sober prediction that the resources
of collaboration and cooperation will become increasingly available to inhabitants
of both territories.

Further Reading

Brooke, J.H., Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991
Clayton, P., Explanation from Physics to Theology: An Essay in Rationality and
Religion, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989
_____ , Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004
 Philip Clayton 103
Geertz, C., Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000
Lindberg, D.C., and Numbers, R.L. (eds), God and Nature: Historical Essays on
the Encounter between Christianity and Science, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1986
Peacocke, A., Theology for a Scientific Age: Being and Becoming – Natural, Divine,
and Human, enlarged edn, London: SCM, 1993
_____ , Paths from Science Towards God: The End of All Our Exploring, Oxford:
Oneworld, 2001
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 Chapter 6

The Logos, the Body and the World:

On the Phenomenological Border
Graham Ward

A Necessary Prolegomenon

Phenomenology practises a teleology aimed at recovering the primordial. From its

earliest examinations with Husserl, phenomenology as a philosophical project that
takes seriously the end of metaphysics announced by Nietzsche has been submitting
intuitions and their access to intentions to further and further reductions. The work of
reduction, investigating what is given in immediate intuition, is always attempting to
prescribe the ultimate limit, a transcendental a priori. In The Idea of Phenomenology,
Husserl’s defines this ultimate in Kantian terms; phenomenology ‘questions things
[Sachen] themselves (Husserl 1999: 35). In doing so, it conceives of a transcendental
ego, something of an empty space, as that which makes possible the consciousness
by which intuitions are grasped. But when we arrive at The Crisis of European
Sciences Husserl presents the new principle of ‘starting purely from natural world-
life, and by asking after the how of the world’s pregivenness [der Vorgegebenheit der
Welt]’ (1970a: 154).1 Heidegger, indebted to Husserl’s account of the Umwelt for his
own understanding of In-der-Welt-sein, then, reaches beyond phenomenology with
his attempt to think the call of Being and the ontological difference. Levinas reached
beyond phenomenology with his thinking of alterity and a radical exteriority in which
the other (autre) and the call of its Saying ruptures all phenomenality and ontology.
Merleau-Ponty (1964: 186) reached beyond phenomenology, particularly in his late
work, with moves beyond immanence discerned in painting, and points to a work
of the eye that opens ‘the soul to what is not soul’, intimating an invisibility beyond
the visible.2 Marion, while insisting (particularly in Réduction et donation) that he
does not transgress the proper boundaries of phenomenality laid down by Husserl,

1 [Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale

Phänomenologie: Ergänzungsband Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934-1937, Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic (1993: 157)]. Marion’s concern to locate his own investigations into givenness
within the phenomenological project as conceived by Husserl takes some pains to detail
Husserl’s earlier musings on givenness. See especially the first three sections of Book 1 of
Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness (2002).
2 Such is the criticism of both him and Chrétien by Dominique Janicaud in
Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (Janicaud et al.: 2000).
106 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
nevertheless makes a phenomenological reduction to a primordial givenness. This
givenness is both defended and further explored in his Etant donée, developing the
notion of ‘saturated phenomena’ that are in excess of either intuition or intention.
Furthermore, he draws attention to a call that proceeds from such givenness. With
the exception perhaps of Levinas, none of these struggles to think the limits (and
beyond) of phenomenology are theological. Marion may be misguided to believe his
own phenomenological work is not assuming a faith commitment, but he certainly
insists that phenomenology and theology are separate enterprises.
Nevertheless, it seems somewhat strange, given this history of phenomenological
investigation always attempting to reach beyond itself, that Dominique Janicaud
insists the ‘theological turn’ is a transgression of phenomenology’s project. For
transgression is built into the very structure of the project. Furthermore, in calling
phenomenology to attend once more to its former rigour within the horizons of
immanence, Janicaud assumes a tight boundary establishes such horizons and
nothing lies outside them. To move beyond such a horizon is to take a hermeneutical
turn, that is, to name such a beyond a theological mode of transcendence. Thus is
violated a fundamental axiom: ‘The phenomenologist is neutral, in the sense that he
or she is open to the thing itself, without any other teleological prejudice than the
ideal of rational and scientific truth.’ (Janicaud et al. 2000: 48) But there are at least
two questionable presuppositions in this line of thinking: one philosophical and the
other ideological. First, philosophically, it is presupposed that the phenomenological
investigation is not itself hermeneutical or transcends any of the hermeneutical
procedures. The second, ideologically, assumes the self-evident truth of the scientific
worldview in which ‘neutral’ observers can investigate from a neutral distance the
things (in the Husserlian sense of Sachen) before them. What is assumed then is
the secular; that the horizons of the immanent are not themselves constituted by
that which gives and transcends them. For a more rigorous neutrality, as in an
agnosticism, would be unable, rationally, to decide whether an investigation into
what was immanent might or might not open further conditions for the possibility
of the horizon. Why should, a priori, the immanent be an end in itself, a bad infinite
(in Hegel’s term)?
We need to follow through these two presuppositions in a little more detail to
understand what is at stake here and recognize why, as Janicaud himself seems to
accept, ‘phenomenology is less a doctrine than a source of inspiration and less a
school than an abundance of heresies’ – heresies issuing from ‘the contradictions in
Husserl’s own oeuvre’ (Janicaud et al. 2000: 96). The question of the relationship
between phenomenology and hermeneutics turns us towards an examination of
intuition; and the question concerning the horizon of immanence and its possible
transgression requires that we examine the belief that phenomenology conducts a
philosophical investigation that is non-metaphysical.
 Graham Ward 107
Intuition and Interpretation

Intuition is fundamental; without it there is no phenomenological project. And all

intuitions have content; indeed it is this content that reduction works upon. No intuition
can, therefore, lack representation. The Sache is given in the intuition. Its intention is
apperceived; grasped through the reduction. Husserl recognized the intimate relation
between what we perceive and our representation of it, between our apprehension of
the sensible and the meaning that adheres to it, between the noematic and the noetic.
But phenomenology as a rigorous science was conceived as describing that which
appears and gives itself to us; the performance of the reduction was a descriptive act
rather than an interpretative one. This becomes important for the legitimacy of the
‘theological turn’ in phenomenology, for, according to Janicaud (and Derrida with
respect to Levinas) the theological interprets the manifestation of the phenomenon,
names it theologically (as given by God, as revelation, as the infinite other). The
theologian hence ruptures, by such an interpretation, the immanent horizons of
the phenomenological investigation, moving beyond the phenomenon itself. The
philosophical difficulty here is how to distil the experience of the phenomenon’s
appearance, its givenness to consciousness (even embodied consciousness), from its
representation to consciousness. In other words, how to achieve a pure description
that is free from interpretation. Both Heidegger and Wittgenstein concur that we do
not simply see; we see as. Can the nature of that as ever concern simply a descriptive
process? In an important essay entitled ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, Charles Taylor
begins by demonstrating how much of our experience involves descriptions that
in turn compose judgements about the world (1985: 47). Things have ‘import’ for
us. That is why we register and experience them, and why, in turn, that import tells
us something about the kind of people we are (58). Reasoning is then ‘embedded
in feeling’ (62), and concerns itself with interpretation. Language facility is also
then bound up with these feelings and their interpretation. Language is constitutive
of our emotional experience and interprets such experience. So, Taylor concludes,
‘interpretation plays no secondary, optional role, but is essential to human existence’
(76).
Now while Taylor in no way wishes to espouse a linguistic idealism – that there
is nothing out there but what language constructs; a purely immanent project indeed
– it becomes impossible to distinguish between description and interpretation.
Description is interpretation. For phenomenologists to maintain, as a fundamental
principle, a distinction between a description of what is given to consciousness and
an interpretation implies that the language of conscious representation is transparent
with respect to the world it perceives. This is an inflection of the Kantian distinction
(and ambiguity3) between ‘things in themselves’ and the categories that construct
these things for us. What is at stake here is the positing of a primordial and neutral
representation of the world, that intuition grasps. In fact, as Ricoeur (2000: 129)
observes, intuition becomes the prisoner of such a primordial representation: ‘And

3 On this ambiguity see Stephen Priest, Merleau-Ponty (1998: 260–61).

108 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
if one takes intentionality to be the prisoner of representation, then one would have
to say that the feelings and dispositions evoked above [the feelings and dispositions
that can be qualified as religious] mark the beyond of the intentionality imprisoned
by its representative limit.’ If there is no representative limit, no opening onto what is
beyond representation – the feelings and dispositions that can be qualified as religious,
for example – then phenomenology risks a profound nominalism. Merleau-Ponty was
alert to this risk. For in accepting that the ‘elementary event is already invested with
meaning’ (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 11), he distinguishes between the ‘starting point’
(which ‘admits of no philosophy other than that of nominalism’, 18) and ‘perception
… understood as interpretation’ (42). Intuition is not a prisoner of representation but
intimately bound to an interpretation of the world; an interpretation that must admit
of other possibilities for the investment of meaning. By understanding description
as interpretation one does not reduce the world to its representation, but opens it for
that which escapes any one representation.
The question arises with the ‘theological turn’ in phenomenology as to what the
difference would be between the necessary and legitimate perception as interpretation,
intention always bound up with representation, and the theological as an unnecessary
and illegitimate hermeneutic. Take this observation by Jean-Louis Chrétien (2000:
150), who, while respecting that phenomenology cannot prove God’s existence,
nevertheless wishes to examine religious phenomena phenomenologically: ‘The
invisible before which man shows himself can range from the radical invisibility of
the Spirit to the inward sacredness or power of being visible itself, like a mountain, a
star, or a statue.’ The star (we will avoid the complexities of phenomenology and the
aesthetics of reception) will be perceived differently and therefore as a phenomenon
will belong to a different intentional field, if the one perceiving it is a contemporary
astronomer or a pagan astrologist. Granting the necessary bracketing of personal
convictions, to become completely transparent to oneself is impossible such that
the kinds of reduction performed will nevertheless be related to sets of values and
presuppositions that see that object as that kind of object. The most profound ideology
is that which is most hidden, most invisible. The very possibility of an epoché that
abstracts the phenomenon from its historical and cultural conditions, foundational
for Husserl’s turn to examining intentional acts of consciousness, is impossible to
achieve. The moon I perceive, Blake pined for and Olympias worshipped is not
the same phenomenon to consciousness and so different intentional structures with
respect to the noema and noematic will be given.
What I am voicing here, then, is a disquiet over the assumed possibility of the
phenomenologist to a ‘neutrality’; a neutrality based upon an alleged possibility
of distinguishing description from interpretation. For the sake of clarity, it might
be useful to distinguish between descriptive and explanatory interpretations
– though since both are acts of ‘giving an account of’ no clear line can divide
them. But there is a difference between my describing the appearance of a certain
phenomenon in a particular way and my subsequently trying to give an account of
why the phenomenon appears in that way. This is important in the borderlands of
phenomenology and theology, as we will see. I may give an account of the body
 Graham Ward 109
by conducting a phenomenological investigation into touch. But then to make the
move from this account of the body to, say, a doctrine of the Incarnation in which
Christ’s embodiment becomes the benchmark by which all forms of embodiment are
measured marks a shift from a descriptive to an explanatory mode of interpretation.

Phenomenology and Metaphysics

Phenomenology has always found it difficult to shake off metaphysics. Its concern
with that which makes an appearance appear, whether it is examined in terms of
what is given to consciousness to be conscious of or whether it is examined in terms
of that which gives Sachen in their self-manifestation, means phenomenology battles
to define itself as neither idealism nor realism, solipsism nor positivism, purely
epistemology not ontology, pure immanence not transcendence. Phenomenology
throughout handles metaphysical categories and, as phenomenologists have
frequently found, the work of reduction moves towards that which is irreducible.
The ultimate irreducibility is figured in any number of religious or quasi-religious
terms. One example will suffice.
Take Merleau-Ponty’s important lecture to the Société française de philosophie in
1946 – just after the publication of The Phenomenology of Perception. He concludes
the lecture on the primacy of perception, his early investigation into the transcendent
within the immanent, the invisible in the visible, with a direct comparison between
phenomenology and the Christian worldview:

Nietzsche’s idea of the death of God is already contained in the Christian idea of the
death of God. God ceases to be an external object in order to mingle with human life,
and this life is not simply a return to a non-temporal conclusion. As Malebranche said,
the world is unfinished. My viewpoint differs from the Christian viewpoint to the extent
that the Christian believes in another side of things where the ‘renversement du pour au
contre’ takes place. In my view this ‘reversal’ takes place before our eyes. And perhaps
some Christians would agree that the other side of things must already be visible in the
environment in which we live.4

Now this remarkable statement that begins with distinguishing phenomenology

from Christianity only to reframe both projects – and surely Chenu’s theological
understanding of materiality and de Lubac’s understanding of nature would
concur with Merleau-Ponty’s final conclusion – was picked up in the discussion
that followed. There Merleau-Ponty announces a corollary of his argument: ‘As to
mystical experience, I do not do away with that either.’ (1964: 35) Indeed, he cannot

4 The Primacy of Perception (1964: 27). The reference to Nicholas Malebranche is

significant. Merleau-Ponty became so fascinated with this seventeenth-century philosopher
who wrote about the theological conditions for sensibility that he spent two further years
working on him. For a highly interesting account of the impact of Malebranche’s theological
empiricism on Merleau-Ponty see Judith Butler, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the touch of Malebranche’
(2005).
110 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
– but then this returns us exactly to the question of who a priori can decide whether
with such an experience we are treating ‘the effective passage to the absolute’ (and
therefore a mode of transcendence) or ‘only an illusion’ (and therefore a mode of
immanence) (1964: 35)? In fact, throughout Merleau-Ponty’s work he was never
quite able to tame the Catholic imagination that expressed itself in terms of the
‘incarnate subject’, the ‘metaphysical structure of the body’, the ‘pre-existent Logos
[a]s the world itself’ and phenomenology’s task as revealing the ‘mystery of the
world’. In his last published essay, ‘The Visible and the Invisible’, about which
much has been written, Merleau-Ponty insists he is not treating ‘an absolute invisible
… but the invisible of this world’ (1968: 151). In this way he distinguishes between
transcendence per se (announced in Levinas’s understanding of the infinite and
the wholly other) and intentional transcendence (that given to consciousness from
a phenomenon exterior to that consciousness). Nevertheless, the use of religious
or quasi-religious language opens the question of a politics of closure. One can
admit, as Husserl does explicitly in #58 of Ideas, that absolute transcendence or the
transcendence of God must be excluded from the study of phenomenology, which
treats only ‘a field of pure consciousness’ (1931: 134). For God is not an object in
this world; or a proper name for that matter. But if we take Gregory of Nyssa’s (1979:
333) view that ‘The term “Godhead” is significant of operation, and not of nature’,
who can draw the line between absolute and intentional transcendence? Who can
strictly announce that the invisible is only the invisible of this world?
From the preceding analyses it would seem reductive not to allow that the
phenomenological method can be employed as part of a theological analysis. I say
part, for given the strictures of the approach – its examination of the manifestation
of things, how they are rendered meaningful as such – the things themselves cannot
be transcended; though the enigma that they pose in their manifestation can become
apparent. This ‘enigma’ can open onto theological questions. I admit the theological
might then be used to ‘explain’ or ‘interpret’ these phenomena and such explanations
would move beyond the phenomenological project as descriptive. But my point is
that the ‘enigma’ of their appearance is implicated in a demand, Marion and Chrétien
would say ‘call’, for such ‘explanations’. Of course, this then opens itself up to the
question of the hermeneutical circle – I am reading these phenomena in terms of
the enigmatic status that they might have with a theological framework that would
suspend the material in its positivist sense. But I would argue here that: (1) given
phenomenology cannot divorce itself from hermeneutics (at the level of description),
as we saw above, it can never extract itself from the hermeneutical circle anyway.
Hopefully, the conductor of the phenomenological investigation continually keeps
this circle in mind and addresses the questions such circularity demands. (2)
reductions performed with respect to the particular phenomenon being investigated
should provide credible analytical descriptions such that the theological account of
them can be understood as a logical inference, even if such inference lies beyond
phenomenology itself. (3) reduction in the phenomenological project has continually
been concerned with pushing beyond the epistemological to the ontological to reveal
the enigma of the world.
 Graham Ward 111
A Phenomenological Analysis of Touch

In what now follows I wish to undertake a phenomenological investigation into

being embodied, what Merleau-Ponty would express as ‘incarnate’, through a
phenomenological analysis of touch. I want to orientate this investigation with a
statement made by John Damascene in his treatise De Fide Orthodoxa, when he states
that sensations of the world, acts of intellection and the stirring of desire all involve
‘movements of the soul’ (John Damascene 1973: II, 11.22.46, 248). The Greek word
is kinemapsuches and it is indebted to Aristotle.5 I want to suggest – contrary to all
dualisms of mind and body, psyche and soma – that it is an investigation into the
operations of the soul and the senses (particularly touch) that will deliver to us an
understanding of the body.
The soul is a subject that Aristotle claimed was one of the most difficult to
investigate yet one of the most valuable entities to be investigated. Aristotle’s own
analysis, in De Anima, remains important to later Christian conceptions, as Aquinas’
large commentary on the text testifies.6 In fact, the text is being revisited today
by a number of contemporary moral and analytical philosophers concerned with
overcoming the mind/body dualisms bequeathed by various Cartesians7 – though
wrestled against vigorously, if in the end vainly, by Descartes himself. What Aristotle
has to say about the soul is instructive and we shall build upon it.
First of all, while there is no identity there is a profound relationship between the
soul and the body such that all ‘the affections [pathai] of the soul involve the body’
(403a16);8 affections are, in an older translation, ‘enmattered’. Even intellection
that might be thought to operate independently of the body does not, because to
understand requires imagination and there can be no imagining without the body.
As Aquinas concludes: ‘Understanding, then, it seems, does not occur where there
is no body’ (Thomas Aquinas 1994: 8; ad I 403a), though later I wish to reverse the

5 Aristotle distinguished between motion, kinesis, and actuality or energeia. They

were not dualistic concepts but constituted two poles of a spectrum. ‘Energeia’ was the
perfection or realization of all that was potential. ‘Kinesis’ was the movement that moved all
things towards their formal (in the Aristotelian sense of ‘form’) completion. The form is the
‘logos of the essence’ (Physics II.3.194b27). See L.S.A. Kosman, ‘Aristotle’s definition of
motion’ (1969).
6 Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima: St. Thomas Aquinas (Thomas Aquinas
1994). In a somewhat similar manner – though the vocabulary differs from both Aristotle and
Aquinas – Maurice Merleau-Ponty has examined the way that ‘every thought known to us
occurs to a flesh’. See his essay ‘The interwining – the chiasm’ in The Visible and the Invisible
(1968: 146). Other Christian theologians whose reflections upon the soul took the form of
commentary upon Aristotle’s De Anima include Albertus Magnus, Cajetan and Suarez. A
number of French phenomenologists, after Merleau-Ponty, have also returned to Aristotle’s
text – Rémi Brague and Jean-Louis Chrétien among them.
7 See Martha C. Nussbaum and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle’s
De Anima (1992) and Christopher Shields, ‘Some recent approaches to Aristotle’s De Anima’
(1993).
8 I refer throughout to Hamlyn’s translation.
112 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
direction of this thinking and suggest all understanding affects the body. Aristotle
himself suggests this when he goes on to exemplify in a manner that recalls the
citation from John Damascene: ‘Being angry is a particular movement of the body
of such and such a kind’ (403a24, see also 408b5). For Aristotle, ‘the soul, therefore,
will be the actuality of the body’ (412a16) where actuality is related to potentiality
as form to matter. The soul is the body’s essential whatness. Secondly, the soul is
the origin of movement where sensation, appetite and thought are each considered
movements with respect to the soul (415b8).9 The body is not then self-moving
and autonomous. Rather it participates in motions, engaging in them passively and
actively.10 The soul as the origin of motion is both unmoved and always in motion
(408b29). It is ‘unmoved’ because it is stirred into moving by objects that it recognises
as desirable.11 Third, the soul is not the mind; cognitive operations take place within,
and are governed by, the soul. So that throughout the treatise Aristotle refers to the
soul’s actuality consisting in its possession of knowledge. It is the ‘enmattered’ soul
that knows; knows in a more profound because more inclusive way than the mind
alone knows. The soul’s knowledge is also the body’s knowledge.
Let us pursue this line of thought because I want to suggest the body is always
immersed in a field of intentions that the mind frequently only recognizes later, and
that this is the fundamental level at which the body operates intersubjectively. We
might speak here of the body’s knowledge, recognizing that I am not talking about
knowledge as a body of facts. In Britain, increasingly, education is being reduced to
just this – the impartation of information where information can be quantified as a
commodity. That is simply head-knowledge; knowledge as representation. It is not
irrelevant to the condition I am pursuing, but it is not identical to it. The knowledge
I am speaking of is more like the knowledge a sportsperson has with respect to the
position of his or her body to a ball, a bat, another competitor. It is frequently said
of Tim Henman that he is too intelligent to be a great player and so often his mind
rather than his instincts rules his playing. For professional experience has shown
that a body that has been highly trained and disciplined in a certain sport knows of
itself where it must be in order to win or perform to its very best. The knowledge I
am speaking of then has much to do with performance, on the one hand, and relation
on the other. Knowledge occurs within a relational process called knowing. It is an

9 Aristotle here is following Plato, who also viewed motion as properly belonging to
the soul. See Phaedrus, 245c ff. See also Laws, 897, where Plato also recognizes motion as
not primarily about physical forces (as in Newton), but as emotional and intellectual. It is in
and through such motions that there is participation in the Forms, and therefore in the Good
as the highest Form.
10 My understanding of motion in Plato, Aristotle and Christian theology in indebted
to Simon Oliver’s immensely interesting study, Philosophy, God and Motion (2005).
11 ‘The “motion” of the soul is the energeia of “seeing” or “understanding” an object
as significant so as then to initiate kinesis’ (Oliver 2005: 47). See also D.J. Furley, ‘Self-
movers’ (1994). As Oliver (2005: 49) recognizes, with Aristotle difference becomes the
fulcrum for motion such that all bodies are caught up in matrices of interactive relations. As
such, motion is ecstatic.
 Graham Ward 113
active condition. Knowledge here is both an intuiting and a practising, a coming to
know and a practical ‘knowing how to’ that issues from being trained in how to do
it. Nobody simply knows how to cook; and to cook so that flavours and textures of
foods distinctively offset each other takes practice. Knowledge is inseparable, then,
from experience and socialization; it is always a ‘knowing how to’. So I might say
I know Arthur Schnizler wrote a collection of short stories published in 1925 and
entitled Die Frau des Richters, but what I suggest is happening is that I am actually
saying I know how to use the term ‘short story’, the numbers composing a date, and
recognize a name, Arthur Schnizler, with respect to authoring this work. I know
how to employ three forms of speaking in a grammatical unit. I am saying no more
than Wittgenstein said here, but unlike Wittgenstein I want to relate this knowing
to the enmattered soul and the field of intentions that are intrinsic to intersubjective
living.
Knowledge becomes a performance demonstrating that one knows how to. But
it is also only relational. That is, that performance takes place within the context of
other performances and in response to these other performances. Knowing, then,
is implicated in economies or movements of response, exchange and declaration.
It is continually caught up in communicating and in the communications of others.
Even when asleep the ensouled body communicates – by how it lies, turns, moans,
snores or is simply still. It communicates with respect to others, in answer to
others, as a declaration to others. I am not some monadic centre of my knowing
and my knowledge; I am immersed in a transcorporeal exchange of knowledges
in which sensing is always simultaneously sensibility. That is what I mean by a
field of intentions. I am caught up in an interactive knowing that issues from micro
acts of interpretation that concern what the body is in contact with and that become
necessary, inevitable, because I am placed within intricate webs of communication.
In a final and elliptical essay on the phenomenology of the body, Maurice Merleau-
Ponty writes of how ‘my own body’s “invisibility” can invest the other bodies I see.
Hence my body can assume segments derived from the body of another, just as my
substance passes into them.’12 In this transcorporeality the ensouled body is already
politicized; for its knowing is politicized – that is, its knowing only issues from that
ensouled body’s being an active participant in a larger social grouping. Its knowing
is always political because it is always relational.13
So much then for the manner in which the enmattered soul exists politically. How
does the appetitive relate to this ontologized, and politicized, epistemology? The
soul is indivisible, as Aristotle demonstrated. The indivisibility of the soul suggests
that desire cannot be divorced from sensation and thought; that desire is actualized
only with respect to sensation and thought. Aristotle observes that where there is
‘sense-perception, then also [there is] imagination and desire [orexis]. For where

12 ‘Eye and mind’, trans. Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of Perception (Merleau-
Ponty 1964: 168).
13 Obviously such relational knowing is also implicated in ethics because of its
continual involvement with others.
114 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
there is sense-perception, there is also both pain and pleasure, and where these are,
there is of necessity also wanting [epithumia]’ (413b16). Orexis is a general word for
longing in which there are three forms of desire: passion (thumia), wishing (boulesis)
and wanting (epithumia).14 Aristotle views only ‘wishing’ to be associated with
the rational part of the soul; passion and wanting are subrational but nevertheless
associated with thinking because of the role played by the imagination (433b5). We
will develop this line of thinking later. For now, what is central is that desire is not
a source; it is a condition. If the condition of the soul is both the origin of motion
and always in motion, this motion is related to the soul’s desiring. What is desired
is actuality, the complete realization of their form in the body. All things move,
for Aristotle, towards their true topos or condition in the world (Physics VIII.4).
Kinesis is then related to desire (III.10.a17–20). Aristotle does not employ the term
eros15 (although Plato uses epithumia to denote sexual desire), but as the notion of
desiring was associated with the Christian command to love from at least the time
of Origen,16 so we find in Christian theology much support for the idea of the soul

14 See Hamlyn in his edition of Aristotle’s De Anima (1993: 92).

15 It is well known that in the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle speaks of friendship or
philia (Books 8 and 9). He outlines three different teloi for philial-love – pleasure, usefulness
and virtue – which give rise to three modes of behaviour. One might think that these forms
of friendship might be connected with the different modes of desiring and kinesis: thumia
and epithumia with pleasure (hedonia) and usefulness, which are inferior forms of philia,
and the more rational boulesis with the virtuous form of philia. But, in fact, the main verb
throughout for desiring is boulomai. Sometimes he uses the middle voice of ephiemi or the
more acquisitive form of desiring in orego, but references to epithumia are rare (Book 9.v.3).
Earlier he quite explicitly informs us that pleasure (eudaemonia) is not itself a motion (I.7). It
is an aspect of energeia, a realization, an end in itself. Pleasure is not then a dynamic aspect
of desire – as it is for Plato in Symposium. But Aristotle does not examine this association,
and, unlike Plato, he nowhere investigates the difference between philia and either eros or
agape. In fact, in Books 8 and 9 although phileo is dominant he uses both agapao and erao as
synonyms (8.i.6; 8.iii.1; 9.xii.1), and under philia includes erotikos and erastos (8.iii.5; 8.iv.1;
9.i.2; 9.v.3).
16 See Origen’s Commentary on the Song of Songs (1957: 63–71) for an argument
in favour of the use of eros by Christian theologians to discuss both God’s own loving and
the Christian’s love of God (made possible on the basis of God as the origin of all possible
loving). Origen refuses here to view eros as simply an acquisitive and appetitive desire. As
in Plato’s Lysis and Phaedrus (though not in the Symposium), eros is recognized as ecstatic,
demanding the forgetting of self, and excessive to utilitarian ends. In his own Commentary
on the Songs of Songs, Gregory of Nyssa (1960: 383) goes even further, speaking of eros as
the intensification or realization of agape: ‘The bride is wounded by a spiritual fiery shaft
of desire (eros). For agape which is aroused is called eros.’ A detailed study of eros in the
Platonic and the early Christian traditions can be found in J.M. Rist, Eros and Pysche (1964)
and Catherine Osborne, Eros Unveiled: Plato and the God of Love (1994). Both of these
authors are critical of the influential study Agape and Eros by Anders Nygren (1982). See also
James Barr, ‘Words for love in Biblical Greek’ (1987) for a series of insightful observations
on agape, eros and philia. Barr concludes significantly, ‘though eros is used in disapproved
 Graham Ward 115
as the seat of transformative and ecstatic love. It is evident in the work of Gregory
of Nyssa, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Bernard of Clairvaux and many of those
mediaeval commentators on Canticum Canticorum.17 The soul is not the source of
desire; to desire is written into the nature of what it is to be ensouled, to participate
in the world as one who senses, thinks and creatively responds to what is continually
being given. Desire is to be educated, not erased in Christian praxis and one cannot
desire without a body; as one cannot think without a body.18
Let me relate this understanding of desire back to my earlier sketch of what it is to
know and suggest the body’s knowledge is intimately associated with the movements
of desire. If the body’s knowledge is constituted in and through its negotiations with
other bodies and is intimately associated with desire, then the economies of response
that I outlined above, those fields of intention, are caught up in complex movements
of desiring. As such, desire is then both politically informed and politically informs.
Desire is produced and desire is a work that produces.
There is a canny scene in Star Trek: The Next Generation where the android
Data is captured by the Borg that illustrates my point here. The queen of the Borg
reads a strong determination of Data’s desire to experience life as a real (conceived
as sensate therefore emotional) human being. She stages this desire for him by
electronically mapping onto Data’s arm a piece of human skin. The camera closes
in for a shot of the taut piece of skin, white (this is Hollywood), pimpled, covered
in tiny golden hairs. The queen of the Borg blows softly across these hairs. ‘Do you
feel that Data?’ she asks, in a voice as warm and deep as seduction itself. ‘Was that
good for you, Data?’ she asks, quickly associating sensation with erotic appetite, her
blowing lightly on the hairs of the flesh with orgasm. Desire, sensation and thought
are inseparably associated here in operations that move across the subjectivities of
two bodies. Data’s desire to be an affective human is reproduced for him as a desire
for sexual satisfaction. This, of course, is another of Hollywood’s ideologies. But
the point I am wishing to make is only that the body’s knowledge is informed by
desire while desire is also informed by the way that body sensuously encounters
and negotiates the thoughts and knowledges of other bodies. Desire, that fosters
determinations for how the body will act, will itself be disciplined by that body’s

erotic contexts, this in no sense sets it apart from philia and agapesis, which are typically used
also in theologically positive relations’ (1987: 10).
17 For an overall examination of commentaries on Song of Songs, see Denys Turner,
Eros and Allegory (1995a). For an excellent reappraisal of ‘desire’ in Gregory of Nyssa, see
Martin Laird, ‘Under Solomon’s tutelage: The education of desire in Homilies on the Song of
Songs’ (2002); he points out how important it is ‘to be aware of a certain lack of consistency in
Gregory’s vocabulary of desire’ (521). For a concise account of ‘desire’ in Bernard, see Pierre
Dumontier, Saint Bernard et la Bible (1953: 39–43).
18 Challenging some earlier readings of the call to apatheia, Morwenna Ludlow
observes with respect to Gregory of Nyssa that ‘Apatheia is … not the absence of desire but
freedom from any materialistic impulse or passion’, Universal Salvation: Eschatology in the
Thought of Gregory of Nyssa and Karl Rahner (2000: 58). The education of materialistic
impulses does not deny but intensifies appreciations of embodiment.
116 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
engagement in the world. As such politics is always an impassioned affair; and the
movements of desire, sensation and thought within the soul means the politics of the
body’s knowledge is continually under revision.
Of course this observation too would have come as no surprise to Plato – whose
Republic is founded upon the city as structured according to the human soul; nor
Aristotle, who in Nicomachean Ethics conceived politics to be inseparable from
phileo; nor Perikles, who urged that citizens ‘should fall in love with’ the city,
employing – in his Funeral Oration – the erotic term for lovers, erastai;19 nor
Augustine, who represented the city of God as a specific social form organized
according to an orientation of desire towards God. A certain analogy governs the
relationship between the enfleshed psyche and the gathering and negotiation of
knowledges in the polis. What I am suggesting here is that entwined physical,
rational and spiritual growth and nourishment of the ‘enmattered soul’ is determined
by the body’s negotiations with other bodies.
If the body’s knowledge is erotic (as in affective), then such knowledge is not
only relational, it is tactile. It is at this point that we encounter the role of touch.
Aristotle observes, ‘those living things that have touch also have desire’ (414b6).
The ensouled flesh comes to an understanding of itself through touch.20 Aristotle
insists, ‘without the faculty of touch none of the other senses exists’ (414b33) and
‘in respect of touch [human beings are] accurate above all others. For this reason
[we are] also the most intelligent of animals’ (421a16). Aquinas’ commentary on
Aristotle here is important because of the manner in which the faculties of the senses
are often hierarchized, not only in Christian theology, but perhaps through Christian
theology in philosophy more generally (even phenomenology).

Yet it might seem that mental capacity corresponded rather to excellence of sight than
of touch, for sight is the more spiritual sense, and reveals better the differences between
things.21 Still, there are two reasons for maintaining that excellence of mind is proportionate
to fineness of touch. In the first place touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole; for
obviously the organ of touch pervades the whole body, so that the organ of each of the
other senses is also an organ of touch, and the sense of touch by itself constitutes a being
as sensitive. Therefore, the finer one’s sense of touch, the better, strictly speaking, is one’s
sensitive nature as a whole, and consequently the higher one’s intellectual capacity. For

19 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (1954: 149). See also Richard
Sennett for an extended analysis of the relationship between the Greek polis, desire and
nakedness in Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (1996: 31-67).
20 For a comprehensive survey of touch in Aristotle, see Cynthia Freeland, ‘Aristotle
on the sense of touch’ (1992).
21 The priority of ‘sight’ as the most spiritual sense has a long history in Greek and
Christian thought that concerns the nature of light. Sight is related to fire, whereas touch is
related to the earth. Light is related to divine illumination and so, for Augustine, it is light that
enables the soul to understand at all. It is the key to the intellectual grasp of what is given in
the senses (see De Genesi ad litteram, III.5–6; Migne 1844–62: PL, XXXIV). Enlightenment
thinking, as Foucault’s examination of the episteme of the gaze reveals, is dominated by the
visual.
 Graham Ward 117
a fine sensitivity is a disposition to a fine intelligence. (Thomas Aquinas 1994: 152–3; ad
II 421a16–26)

The second reason for the importance of touch is that ‘fine touch is an effect of a
good bodily constitution or temperament’ such that ‘those whose touch is delicate
are so much the nobler and the more intelligent’.22 This is a very important comment
because it ontologizes touch. Touch operates at the juncture between the corporeal
and the spiritual. It is more fundamental than sight – that is associated with the
epistemological. In fact, we might infer from this that touch is our finest sensibility
for apprehending the divine. It is the most immediate of our perceptions since ‘touch
alone seems to perceive through itself’ (435a11). By this I do not imply that God
can be directly touched or even directly apprehended. God is not corporeal. I merely
suggest the possibility that our profoundest because most immediate understandings
of what it is to be incarnate are intuited through touch; where, first, divine spiritual
presence (and our participation in it) becomes inseparable from physical existence
and where, second, we are most affected (transformed) by such an intuition. Through
touch there is contact and through contact there is nourishment (or, if the contact is
abusive, malnourishment) and nurturing (or violation). Either way, through touch
there is movement within the soul such that the whole person is caught up in the
circulations of desire – the desire of the other as well as that person’s desire for the
other.23 Aquinas calls this ‘the mover moved’.24 The ‘intuition’ involved is not blind
(in the Kantian sense of intuitions without concepts being blind). For since there are
forms of desire in both the rational and the irrational parts of the soul, according to
Aristotle and Aquinas, and ‘movement always … involves imagination and desire’
(432b13), then imagination and desire, touch and movement are related. Aristotle
‘includes imagination under intellect’, Aquinas observes (Thomas Aquinas 1994:
244). In fact, intellect and desire are the two forces of movement within the soul and,
evidently, not entirely distinguishable because continually crossed by the operations
of the imagination.25 Contemplation requires images (432a3); so contemplation

22 (Thomas Aquinas 1994: 153). For the theological importance of touch for Aquinas,
see John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, ‘Truth and touch’ in Truth in Aquinas (2001: 60–
87), and for the theological implications of touch, see John Milbank, ‘The soul of reciprocity
part two: Reciprocity granted’ (2001). See also Jean-Louis Chrétien, ‘Body and touch’
(2004).
23 See De Anima 433a9–443b21 on the faculty of desire as it relates to motion. Aquinas
(1994: 244), in what constitutes a refutation of Lacan’s (and Žižek’s) claims, ‘It is absurd to
say that desire is for the sake of desiring; desire is essentially a tendency to “the other”.’
24 Thomas Aquinas 1994: 246–7; ad III 433b14–21: ‘The mover moved is the desire
itself; for whatever desires is moved inasmuch as it desires, desire itself being a certain act
or movement in the sense that we give the term “movement” when we apply it to activities
that are consequent upon actuality (prout motus est actus perfecti), such as sensing and
understanding.’ Later Aquinas outlines how this movement of desire is ‘circular’.
25 ‘[I]ntellect only moves anything by virtue of appetition’; ‘the final motive-force
derives from the soul itself acting through the appetitive power.’ (Thomas Aquinas 1994: 245;
246).
118 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
concerns movement, desire and an intuition that is imagined, imaged. ‘The soul
never thinks without an image’ (431a8); and such thinking is inseparable from being
affected physically even if the intellect can distinguish itself from the fleshly (and
judge it) (429a29). If, then, such intuition, contemplation, imagination, movement
and desire depend upon touch, then the ensouled flesh is not monadic. It only realizes
itself in community; in political and erotic communities or ekklesia.
Let me clarify here the mode of touch that I am treating and what I am investigating
in this treatment. First, I am not concerned here with forms of contact. Aristotle’s
attention to touch in De Anima has been criticized for its ‘exclusive concentration on
passive rather than active touching’26 or ‘contact sense’. I am far from sure this is a
correct evaluation of Aristotle, but it serves to emphasize that the treatment of touch
here is exclusively concerned with active touching. In German one can distinguish
between two types of body, Koerper, that is inert, and Leib, that is not. Koerper can
refer to the physical bodies of people or animals and can be extended metaphorically
to speak of the body of a text (Textkoerper), for example. Leib, on the other hand,
bears several interrelated senses. First, it is the precondition for perception. As such
it is the German translation of what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘body’ – that site of crossing
between the seeing body and that which is seen, the touching body and that which
is touched. Self-reflexivity is the very condition for Leib. Secondly, Leib refers
on a social level to the complex matrix of relations and circumstances in which
individual bodies are implicated. As such it is only because of this body (as Leib)
that community becomes possible. The body as Leib is political because the body
as Leib lives (bios) whereas the body as Koerper subsists (zoe).27 Thirdly, Leib is,
theologically understood, the dwelling-place of the soul.
This examination of touch, then, concerns bodies in the German sense of
Leiber. Furthermore, it is concerned with the active touching between persons.28 In
the active touching between persons we are examining the intentional structure of
touching. I use ‘intention’ in a way developed by Husserl in the fifth of his Logical
Investigations – the experience of an object of my directed attention (Gerichtetheit),
an object made meaningful for me (Husserl 1970b: vol. 2, 533–659, particularly
552–96). These intentions are constitutive of the experience of the perception
(apperception) and there is an indeterminancy about them intrinsic to what is being
presented as such. Intentional experiences involve interpretative relations and may
become the basis upon which volitional intentions to act are made by an agent,
but are prior to such intentions. Intentional structures, as Husserl wrestled to point
out, are complex and multi-layered. An examination of such structures attempts to

26 Freeland 1992: 230. See also Jean-Louis Chrétien’s excellent examination of

Aristotle on touch, ‘Body and touch’ (2004). He agrees that Aristotle is not talking about
‘contact’ (116–17), rather ‘Touch is the perpetual place of exchange’ (117).
27 For an important discussion of the politics of bios and zoe and the logic of
sovereignty that seeks to produce a biopolitical body, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998).
28 One could examine intentional touch between persons and animals, for example;
though one would have to define how ‘intentions’ are ascribed to forms of animal behaviour.
 Graham Ward 119
clarify some of these layers. The intentional structure of touching cannot simply be
examined from the point of view of the one touching. For it is the nature of this mode
of touch (and Aristotle was certainly aware of this) to affect whatever is touched
– as the example of Jesus’ response to the haemorrhaging woman makes plain. As
a swimmer one quickly comes to recognize an accidental ‘brush’ against another
swimmer and a touch whose intentions are, in some subtle way, communicated (that
is, delivered and received). Those intentions can take on various communicative
shadings – sexual suggestion, aggressive warning, competitive edge and so on. The
context is important: both bodies are exposed, each to the other. The nakedness
renders them both open to the world, vulnerable to suggestion. What is important
for this analysis, and returns us to the object of this investigation into touch, is how
a ‘recognition’ of the intentional structure of that touch is produced. What is the
operation of such knowledge, what are its effects, and what are the implications of
both that operation and its effects for a theological anthropology? These are some
of the questions I wish to examine. In the pool much is communicated between two
swimmers about each other, but without words or often distinctive gesturing (for
the swimming proceeds through a steady rhythm of strokes that neither wishes to
disrupt). Nevertheless temperament, present mood, past training, ability and even
levels of intelligence are all communicated through mutual observation (which has
always an element of voyeurism about it). Jean-Louis Chrétien (2004: 130) speaks
of how ‘The flesh listens. And the fact that it listens is what makes it respond’.
The addition of intentional touch, though, dramatizes this communication. It is this
dramatization that is being investigated below.
Origen in Contra Celsum (1953: I.48) writes: ‘And they touched the Word by
faith so that an emanation came from him to them which healed them … [Jesus’]
truly divine touch.’ He refers to 1 John 1:1 in which the ‘Word of life’ is apprehended
or ‘handled’ by three senses: hearing, seeing and touching – handling ‘the Word of
life’. 1 John continues that there is a bearing witness that can take place by describing
what the followers of Christ have seen and repeating what they have heard. These acts
of representation also disseminate a power that will bring those who picture and hear
them into a fellowship, a participation that is ultimately Trinitarian (1 John 1:3). But
what the witnesses cannot communicate is their touching Christ; for representation
distances and renders into a general vocabulary that which was personally experienced.
And touch individuates by a bringing into contact and proximity. Touch cannot
distance and does not submit to a general vocabulary without ceasing to be what
it is. Touch communicates only to the other being touched. It cannot communicate
to a third party. A third party may witness touch and draw inferences about it, but
she has not entered into what was being communicated in the touch. Touch can be
described in terms of pleasure, pain, pressure, warmth and so on, but that which
has been brought into being by the touching cannot be brought into being through
the representation of that touch. Touch intimates; it does not speak. Speaking of the
child’s early tactile experience, the psychologist Katz (1925: 160), uses the term
‘prehension’ [Eindruck]. The intimacy it creates communicates not a knowledge but
a knowingness; an intentionality that expects a response. It brings this knowingness
120 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
into existence not as creation from nothing but as the realizing of the singularity of
that which exists. It announces that it is I, in my very corporeal individuality, who is
knowing (rather than who knows) you in your very corporeal individuality. As such,
this singularizing is a bringing forth from an indifference, an indeterminancy, an
anonymity. It is not a bringing to identity, for identity is too strong a word for what
is only intimated. Rather, it is a bringing into relation because of an intimation of
difference. This relational difference is recognized only in a belonging, only in the
interchange that in intimating something brings about a transformation in what is
perceived and understood in and between the touching and the touched; though the
substance of this transformation is only realized in a subsequent reflection.
I would, then, modify what Maurice Merleau-Ponty (for whom also embodied
perception is a locus of mystery and enigma) observes about touch and perception
when he writes:

The moment perception comes my body effaces itself before it and never does the
perception grasp the body in the act of perceiving. If my left hand is touching my right
hand, and if I should suddenly wish to apprehend with my right hand the work of my
left hand as it touches, this reflection of the body upon itself always miscarries at the last
moment: the moment I feel my left hand with my right hand, I correspondingly cease
touching my right hand with my left hand. But this last-minute failure does not drain
all truth from that presentiment I had of being able to touch myself touching: my body
does not perceive, but it is as if it were built around the perception that dawns through it.
(Merleau-Ponty 1968: 9)

Merleau-Ponty, here as elsewhere in his work, while wishing to move beyond the
dualism of mind and body, nevertheless draws a distinction between the body and
reflection in which perception is already cognition and prejudgement. This is a
model of perception founded upon seeing29 and I would accept what both Heidegger
and Wittgenstein have taught us that we ‘see as’. But I suggest that in touch the body
does not efface itself. There is an intimation of its very corporeality; as if the body
is brought into being by that touch. In fact, in his earlier work Phenomenology of
Perception, Merleau-Ponty points exactly to that when he writes that in touch, ‘I do
not only use my fingers and my whole body as a single organ, but also, thanks to this
unity of the body, the tactile perceptions gained through an organ are immediately
translated into the language of the rest. … Each contact of an object with part of
our objective body is, therefore, in reality a contact with the whole of the present or
possible phenomenal body’ (1962: 369). And so I would correct Merleau-Ponty’s
later phrase, writing: ‘my body does perceive and is built around that perception’.
The body perceives itself in relation and knows the nature of that relation. If
Merleau-Ponty misses that, it may well be because in the left hand touching the right

29 Chrétien views Merleau-Ponty as making touch fit into his understanding of sight,
‘Body and touch’ (2004: 100–101).
 Graham Ward 121
there is no other; both hands are mine. They are ‘one sole organ of experience’.30
There is what he elsewhere calls the crisscrossing ‘of the touching and the tangible’
(1962: 133), but the touching does not enter a field of intentions and an economy
of response, because there is no eros.31 Consider a different kind of touching of
oneself in which there is eros: masturbation. Here the body is effaced and there is
no experience of ‘touching myself touching’, for a distance is opened up by fantasy,
erotic scenarios into which the body is inserted; not the physical body but one of the
many fantasized bodies we live with. Fantasy consumes the body’s perceptions. The
body cannot be intimate with itself. Though it can pleasure itself, it cannot singly
enjoy the pleasuring of itself without withdrawing from the fantasized scene that
supports the pleasuring. The body cannot intimate things to itself.32 The eros that is
conjured in masturbation has first to project and maintain a body image elsewhere. It
has to manufacture a distance, an exteriority, for itself such that touching and being
touched can take place.
If then the body comes to a sense of itself as different, as singular, as a unity
through touch, the economy of that response is governed by desire. Desire issues
in a play of nearness and separation, availability and inaccessibility, masking and
revealing. If desire can only be desire through an economy of distance, then the

30 Merleau-Ponty 1962: 141. In his late essay ‘The intertwining – the chiasm’ (in
The Visible and the Invisible, 1968), very briefly Merleau-Ponty broaches again the question
of ‘touching the hand of another’ and coins, elliptically, the term ‘intercorporeality’. But the
model of what he calls ‘the circle of the touched and the touching, the touched takes hold
of the touching’ (141) is founded upon a synergy in which because the organs of my body
communicate with each other therefore a transitivity is founded from one body to another
(143). In the handshake, then, where each experiences being touched in touching, I ‘touch in
it the same power to espouse the things that I have touched in my own’ (141). In this there
is a transcending of difference as my movements ‘address themselves to the body in general
and for itself’ (143). His account of incorporeal touching is, as he himself claims, curiously
locked into the logic of Narcissus. My own account emphasizes that touching and being
touched by a sentient other goes beyond reflexivity. There is a sense in which Merleau-Ponty’s
own vocabulary performs a transcendence that he does not investigate beyond an allusive
Spinozistic monism; he uses descriptors like ‘magical’, ‘mystery’, ‘enigma’, ‘surpassing’ and
‘miracle’. Even ‘vision’ in the late essays takes on the gravity of disclosure, revelation and
epiphany. He never manages to shake off his Catholic imagination, but he does not reflect
upon it either.
31 Desire arrives late in the economy of perception for Merleau-Ponty. In ‘The
interwining’, he describes ‘the patient and silent labour of desire’ (1968: 144) that follows
touching and is related to articulation. We see this move in much more detail in Phenomenology
of Perception, where, in the development of his phenomenology of the body, ‘The body in
its sexual being’ (1962: 178–201) he lays the foundation for ‘The body as expression, and
speech’ (202–32). Although Merleau-Ponty suggests in that volume (178) that an analysis of
‘desire or love’ will enable us to understand ‘the birth of being for us’, he views desire as a
mode of affectivity, not, as I suggest, the condition for affectivity itself.
32 Chrétien concludes, ‘Self-touch cannot be the truth of touch’, ‘Body and touch’
(2004: 118).
122 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
economy of response is intertwined with an unfolding of distances, differences,
exteriorities that pass in and out of interiorities. This movement in and out, separation
and penetration,33 is not only the heart-beat of the economy of response; it is an
exchange, a giving and reception, and a communication. One recalls that the word
‘intimate’ in its verbal form comes from the Late Latin verb intimo – to flow into
(Julius Solinus, AD250), to communicate to the spirit (Tertullianus AD160–240),
to put into, but also by AD400 to narrate, tell, describe, relate. Its adjectival form
comes from the earlier Latin intimus – innermost or most secret. It is used by Cicero
(43BC) to describe a form of relationship, even a close friend. One might also add,
a little more felicitously, a relation to in-timeo, where timeo means to dread, to
fear, and the prefix in negates that experience. I add this last conjectural possibility
because intimacy is always ringed with fear, even when it most excludes, and
this is part of the way in which desire and distance are interrelated. For intimacy
demands the body’s openness, its vulnerability. The calibre, or profundity of the
giving or reception, depends upon recognizing the possibilities of fear, of dread, and
negotiating them. The negotiation involves a suffering because I am not the other,
and intimacy, while fearing absorption by the other, also suffers the longing for an
integration. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, at the climax of an argument
between Catherine Earnshaw and Nelly Dean concerning Cathy’s obsession with
Heathcliff, Cathy shouts out, ‘I am Heathcliff!’ (Brontë 1965: 122) But she is not and
that is both her triumph, as a character who epically takes her place at Heathcliff’s
side, and her tragedy. Intimacy causes a tearing apart, to expose the suffering of
longing. Distance, difference are figurations of longing (long-ing) – without them
there would be stasis.
Intimacy and distance then require flows, movements, operations and economies.
Aquinas provides us with a theological account of this state of things when discussing
the divine governance of creation:

Thus this God does work in every worker, according to these three things. First as an
end. For since every operation is for the sake of some good, real or apparent; and nothing
is good either really or apparently, except insofar as it participates in a likeness to the
Supreme Good, which is God; it follows then that God Himself is the cause of every
operation as it ends. Again, it is to be observed that where there are several agents in order,
the second always acts in virtue of the first: for the first agent moves the second to act.
And thus all agents act in virtue of God Himself: and therefore He is the cause of action
in every agent. Thirdly, we must observe that God not only moves things to operate, as
it were applying their forms and powers to operation … but He also gives created agents
their forms and preserves them in being. Therefore He is the cause of action not only by
giving the form which is the principle of action, as the generator is said to be the cause
of movement in things heavy and light; but also as preserving the forms and powers of

33 Merleau-Ponty observes, ‘my own body’s “invisibility” can invest the other
bodies I see. Hence my body can assume segments derived from the body of another, just as
my substance passes into them’, ‘Eye and mind’ trans. Carleton Dallery in The Primacy of
Perception (1964: 168).
 Graham Ward 123
things … And since the form of a thing is within the thing [est intra rem], and all the more
as it approaches nearer to the First and Universal Cause, and because in all things God
Himself is properly the cause of universal being which is innermost of all things [quod
inter omnia est magis intimum rebus], it follows that in all things God works intimately
[in omnibus intime operatur]. (Thomas Aquinas 1964–81: vol. 14, Ia.105.5. responsio
[author’s translation, eds])

We will return to this passage. Distance here has only to do with spatiality in so
far as spatial images are used to conceive it. But distance cannot be reduced to
some mathematical measurement separating two bodies in some pure or idealized
space. Bodies can be in close proximity, touching, even interpenetrating, and yet
nevertheless distance is experienced. Distance cannot in fact become an identifiable
object. Perhaps the closest we get to distance as such is the identification of
difference. The distance is intimated to those differences that compose it. This
distance is implicated then in a common participation, a common recognition of
exteriority: I am not the other; the other is not I; the other is not reducible to or
measurable by me; and I am not reducible to or measurable by the other. What is
intimated in this distance is an excess; the mystery of alterity. Every representation
made of this distance must fail if the aim of such representation is to define. For there
is no place from which an exhaustive representation is possible, no neutral locus
– which again appeals to an ideal, mathematically conceived spatiality. Even the
notions of exteriority and interiority lose their meaning as neither subject has access
to this distance outside of participating in it. The memory of that participation may
attempt to re-present it – but at best it will be an echo of the experience bouncing
back from the walls of a single consciousness. It is not that the distance escapes
representation; in fact, it demands representation because the distance constitutes a
command to communicate. Distance precedes and haunts all communication. But
what is intimated in this distance exceeds chains and combinations of signifiers. At
best it can imbue signs with a semantic plenitude – like the phrases ‘I know you’ or
‘You know me’, spoken by those participating in what Jean-Luc Marion describes
as an ‘intimate alterity’ (1977: 199). These phrases are bridges of suspending steel
that open up the distance, sway in the wind, and expand and contract with the rise
and fall of temperature. The knowledge of distance and its negotiation as it arises in
intimacy, is a knowledge of difference-in-relation. But, again, this is not a conceptual
knowledge, for ‘the relation’ itself is rendered indefinable in this distance. The
relation is always in play, always under construction. Like the distance itself, the
relation is never there as an object as such. This is not a conceptual knowing; it
is a bodily knowing that is received, given and lived prior to any reflection. The
reflection cannot erase the traces of what the body has received, given and lived.
In fact, it is these traces that call forth reflection, or rather meditation or what the
prayerful understand as contemplation.
124 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
We must distinguish here between reflection, as Merleau-Ponty, after Husserl,
understands it, and contemplation.34 For it is in this distinction that the theology of
embodiment (and touch as the most fundamental mode of coming to an understanding
of being embodied) announces itself most clearly. Following Descartes, to reflect
is always to grasp one’s own knowing (cogito ergo sum), to recognize it as such.
Reflection conceptualizes and therefore represents certain states and conditions
to itself. Its movement is circular in the way phenomenologists since Hegel have
recognized the dialectic of In-Itself and For-Itself. To contemplate is to transcend
the circularities of reflection; for it is a movement towards the other – a movement
that is facilitated, even solicited, by that other. It is to be drawn to the other, who is
drawn to you. It is a movement without concepts – though images may be used in
the first instance (as with an icon). As the goal of reflection is understanding; so the
goal of contemplation is a mutual discerning – to know even as I am known. There
is not a content to this knowledge. The knowing is a condition of being, a condition
in the Johannine texts that is often described as abiding (meno – to stay, to stand, but
transitively to await, to expect).
Intimacy is mutual abiding, what in John’s Gospel is described as the centre
of Messianic relationality – I in you and you in me. This relationality participates
in and reveals the logic of the Incarnation. As the Prologue to the Gospel of St
John describes it through a complex combination of prepositions: ‘he came into [eis]
the world. He was in [en] the world, and the world came to be [egeneto] through
him [di’autou]’ (John 1:9-10). Christ indwells that which is already in Christ – the
world that was made through him. And so the only-begotten of God begets. The
one who, as Origen expounded it,35 is eternally generated by the uncreated God
creates, and then indwells his creation. In this sense we can speak of God’s profound
touch; the intimacy of His presence as that which touches through maintaining our
very existence as an emanation of His own essence. This is at the heart of Aquinas’
understanding of divine operations above in which he employs the adjectival form
of ‘intimo’. He also explicitly relates the intimacy with the cognates of the verb
– to flow into, to communicate to the spirit. In Summa Contra Gentiles he observes:
‘one finds a diverse manner of emanation of things [diversus emanationis modus
invenitur in rebus], and, the higher a nature is, the more intimate to the nature is that
which flows from it [et quanto aliqua natura est altior, tanto id quod ex ea emanat,
magis ei est intimum].’36 Gregory of Nyssa (1960: 324) in his Eleventh Homily
on the Song of Songs describes this intimacy as the ‘perception of his presence
[aesthesis parousias]’, a perception or feeling (aesthesis) in which the remoteness of
the uncreated ousia of God effects in the soul a profound closeness. If this tension

34 We can associate this difference with the difference between ‘understanding’ and
‘discernment’. With discernment and contemplation (rather than understanding and reflection)
a religious metaphysics begins to take shape; in this case, a Christian epistemology.
35 De Principiis, I,2,2 (See Origen 1936).
36 Summa Contra Gentiles (1975: IV.11.1). Latin text available at http://www.
corpusthomisticum. org
 Graham Ward 125
of intense proximity and distance is the very nature of human beings created in the
image of God, it issues from the logic of the Incarnation. Salvation is to become
enfolded within this enfolding logic – to attain the condition of being incarnate as the
Word is incarnate or what Gregory and others termed theosis. More clearly, human
beings have to participate in becoming flesh as He became flesh. Human beings are
not truly themselves, are not truly flesh, until they have become flesh as He became
flesh. We are, then, seeking a body; through intimacy we seek an intimacy with that
source of the ‘emanation of things’. It is a body being prepared for us. According to
Paul’s letter to the Ephesians,37 it is ‘his body, the fullness [to pleroma] of him that
fills all in all’ (Ephesians 1.23). It is a condition of enfleshment that is eschatological
– a resurrection body, a new kind of embodiment that in its very singularity indwells
or is, to use a term coined by Merleau-Ponty, ‘transcorporeal’. Giorgio Agamben
describes this condition as being at ‘ease’: ‘The Provençal poets (whose songs first
introduce the term into Romance languages in the form of aizi, aizimen) make ease
a terminus technicus in their poetics, designating the very place of love. Or better, it
designates not so much the place of love, but rather love as the experience of taking-
place in a whatever singularity.’ (Agamben 1993: 24)
Touch is an orientation towards being incarnate and it finds its true self-
understanding in love. Even the touch involved in violence towards, in abuse of,
oneself or the other, is a call for love, a recognition of its absence. To cut oneself is
an attempt to attain some recognition of an embodiment that seems constantly to be
under threat of disappearing. It is the mark of the wish to feel again; the recognition
of being in a frozen state, without desire. Touch is always an action, an activity – as
distinct from seeing which is more passive and at my command. As Merleau-Ponty
(1962: 369) observes: ‘In visual experience, which pushes objectification further
than does tactile experience, we can, at least at first sight, flatter ourselves that we
constitute the world, because it presents us with a spectacle spread out before us
at a distance, and gives us the illusion of being immediately present everywhere
and being situated nowhere’. Seeing invokes the possibility of pure separation,
of exteriority, of rampant individualism, of social atomism, of the society of the
spectacle. But touch, adhering as it does ‘to the surface of the body’, disrupts the
‘spectacle’ as ‘spectacle’. Theologically understood, it disrupts the production of
idols – it forestalls reification by the instauration of an economy, a movement, an
action. It is at this point that touch is related to flows, for the movement described
above as the economy of response (that is inseparable from touching and loving)
is a profoundly kenotic movement – the emptying of one towards the other, that is
ongoing and endless.

37 I am aware of the arguments that range among commentators as to whether this

letter can in fact be attributed to Paul, but the arguments have no bearing on the christology
announced in this letter.
126 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Conclusion

It may seem almost paradoxical to suggest it, but this essay argues that that which
moves us beyond phenomenology and towards the theology of phenomena is the
corporeal, is the mystery of embodiment itself. This is, then, an essay on incarnation.
It views incarnation as twofold. First, incarnation is God made flesh in Jesus Christ.
Second, incarnation is our flesh being enfolded in the Word. Incarnation is not only
the Word entering fully the condition of being human, it is also the human entering
fully into the Word. Phenomenology as a human science investigating the immanent
cannot proceed from the first of these premises. If it could then it would be offering
itself as another form of ontotheology. Indeed, it would be offering a proof for the
existence of God. But it can proceed with an examination of the second premise
– that is, with an account of the mystery of flesh. This is not a new investigation.
Merleau-Ponty, Henry and Chrétien each offer phenomenological investigations into
being embodied. But where this investigation differs from theirs is in offering an
account of the body rooted in a phenomenology of touch and desire. My argument
throughout this investigation is that the body is always a transgressive site. The
essence of its irreducibility lies in its continual endeavour to transcend itself.
With Augustine in mind, we could say, its permanent restlessness seeks a rest, a
condition of being, that it cannot find within itself but recognizes as defining its own
humanness. In other words, bodies strive towards a condition that the account of the
Word made flesh narrativizes.

Further Reading

Chrétien, J.-L., ‘Body and touch’, in his The Call and the Response, trans. A.A.
Davenport, New York: Fordham University Press, 2004, 83–131
Janicaud, D. et al., Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate,
trans. B.G. Prusak, New York: Fordham University Press, 2000
Marion J.-L., Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. J.L.
Kosky, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002
Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, trans. K. Foster, OP, and S.
Humphries, OP, Notre Dame: Dumb Ox Books. 1994
 SECTION TWO

Meaning, Language and Interpretation

The language we use through various and subtle means helps shape the way we
interpret phenomena and give our actions and experience meaning. However,
it is ‘language’ in a large sense of the term, including not simply vocabulary and
grammar but the ways we do things with words, and indeed without words. Duelling
is impossible in a world where the appropriate vocabulary is not in place and there
are no analogues of the speech act of insulting someone. Further, there are forms
of acting and performing, such as those invoked earlier in this volume by Kevin
Vanhoozer, that have their own analogues of language. It is the bearing of these
interconnections on the ways we may configure theology, philosophy and their
boundaries that are the focus of the contributions to this section.

Nicholas Lash focuses on the ‘logical grammar’ of the word ‘God’. As part of the
constitution of modernity ‘gods’, which until then were understood to be whatever
people worshipped, became instead beings of a certain kind. From a theological
perspective worship of any such being might be thought to verge on the blasphemous.
This usurpation of the grammar of worship by that of description has led to a
deformation of the concept of God; in Buber’s terminology from I-Thou to I-It. We
need to retrieve that earlier relational conception of the divine, recognizing that in
doing so the boundaries between believer and unbeliever shift, and learn again that
speaking appropriately of God is, while not impossible, difficult and even dangerous,
since appropriate speech brings to language appropriate relationship.

Dan Stiver is concerned with the methodology of interpretation of what is said

and written. We need to take account of the vocabulary and syntax of the language
in question, and also of the conventions available at the time for speech acts and
their analogues, but beyond this we need to learn from recent developments in the
tradition of philosophical hermeneutics, using vivid and empathetic imagining to
integrate what is meaningful to us with what could have been significant at the time
of writing or speech, bearing in mind the tacit and sometimes self-deceiving ways
in which beliefs and attitudes are embodied. Since meaning may not be transparent
to the consciousness of any of the relevant parties, we may need to interrogate the
possibilities of distortion provided by past and present conventions, as well as by
ideologies and vested interests. Lash’s critique of the contemporary meaning of ‘God’
may plausibly be seen as just such an exercise of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’.
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 Chapter 7

The Question of God Today

Nicholas Lash

What Does God Look Like?

I remember a conversation, over forty years ago, with a friend, a retired primary
school teacher. She was very angry. Her grand-daughter, aged six or seven, had
just come back from school, in some distress. An idiotic teacher had told the class
to draw a picture of God. The school was in Marlow, a small town on the Thames,
some thirty miles upstream from London. The little girl had drawn a picture of a
swan, sailing serenely along among the rushes. The teacher, on seeing it, berated her,
complaining: ‘That’s not what God looks like!’
All one’s sympathies, of course, are with the child – who had, presumably,
provided what, in today’s jargon, we might call an ‘icon’ of majesty and beauty.
But what, one wonders, was the teacher looking for? What did she think God looks
like?
This might seem to be a foolish question because, since God is generally agreed to
be invisible, there is presumably nothing whatsoever that God could ‘look’ like. And
yet, however much we emphasize that everything we say of God is metaphorically
said; however much we insist that the holy mystery which we call ‘God’ absolutely
outstrips not merely our imagination but our understanding; when people talk of
God – whether they do so as atheists, agnostics or devout believers, or whether as
Christians, Jews, Muslims or Hindus – they usually suppose themselves to have
some idea of what they are talking about. And, whatever one is talking about, if
one has got some idea of what one is talking about, then – however general, vague,
confused that idea may be – there is some sort of story one could tell about it; some
picture one could paint, however broad the brushstrokes that one used.
What, then, might God look like? Here is another parable, from Salley Vickers’s
novel about Venice and the Book of Tobit, Miss Garnet’s Angel. Tobias is talking to
his guide Azarias (better known to the reader, although not yet at this point in the
story to Tobias, as the archangel Raphael): ‘“Azarias”, I said: “You told me once I
may find out who or what you worshipped when we got to Ecbatana. Might you tell
me now?” “How would courage and truth and mercy and right action strike you?”
“But those are not gods!” I protested. “Tobias, for heaven’s sake, what do you think
a god looks like when he works in men?”’ (Vickers 2001: 327–8)
That exchange suggests, first, that, when thinking about God or (shall we say)
considering what God looks like, we should be thinking about what people worship
and, second, that, when thinking about what people worship, we should perhaps
130 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
be thinking not so much about ‘things’ – objects, entities, individuals – but rather
about occurrences, activities, patterns of behaviour. Courage and truth and mercy
are displayed (or not displayed) in the ways that we behave, in what we do. More
generally, it is only through what we do and undergo that what we are is shown and
known. We should not, perhaps, rule out the possibility that something similar may
be true of God.
A few years ago, a survey was conducted among seventeen-year-olds in the
Czech Republic. Only one per cent of those interviewed were skinheads, but eight
per cent knew what skinheads were about. Only fifteen per cent said that they were
Christians. Readers presuming that to be bad news should brace themselves for
worse: the percentage of those interviewed who knew what Christianity was about
was – fifteen!
We underestimate at our peril the comprehensiveness of the ignorance of
Christianity in contemporary western cultures. At least the teenagers of Prague
seemed to know that they did not know what Christianity is about. My guess is that,
for most people in Britain, ignorance takes the more intractable form of supposing
that ‘everybody knows’ what Christianity is, and that ‘everybody knows’ that it is
false: at best, a fairytale less engaging than The Lord of the Rings; at worst, a child’s
comforter clung to by those lacking the courage to face the bleakness of existence.
This state of affairs has not, of course, come about overnight. Here is Cardinal
Newman writing, as an old man, in 1882, to a friend:

[The] primary and special office of religion men of the world do not see, and they see only
its poverty as a principle of secular progress, and, as disciples and upholders and servants
of that great scientific progress, they look on religion and despise it.… I consider then
that it is not reason that is against us, but imagination. The mind, after having, to the utter
neglect of the Gospels, lived in science, experiences, on coming back to Scripture, an utter
strangeness in what it reads, which seems to it a better argument against Revelation than
any formal proof. ‘Christianity’ [it says] ‘is behind the age’. (Newman 1976a: 159–60)

Reason, Imagination and the Importance of Theology

‘It is not reason that is against us, but imagination.’ That is the point. The ways in
which we ‘see’ the world, its story and its destiny; the ways in which we ‘see’ what
human beings are, and what they are for, and how they are related to each other and
the world around them; these things are shaped and structured by the stories that we
tell, the cities we inhabit, the buildings in which we live, and work, and play; by how
we handle – through drama, art and song – the things that give us pain and bring us
joy. What does the world look like? What do we look like? What does God look like?
It is not easy to think Christian thoughts in a culture whose imagination, whose ways
of ‘seeing’ the world and everything there is to see, are increasingly unschooled by
Christianity and, to a considerable and deepening extent, quite hostile to it.
 Nicholas Lash 131
In such a situation, continuing to hold the Gospel’s truth makes much more
serious and dangerous demands than mere lip-service paid to undigested information.
Unless we make that truth our own through thought, and pain, and argument; through
prayer and study and an unflinching quest for understanding, it will be chipped away,
reshaped, eroded, by the power of an imagining fed by other springs, tuned to quite
different stories. And this unceasing, strenuous, vulnerable attempt to make some
Christian sense of things, not just in what we say, but through the ways in which we
‘see’ the world, is what is known as doing theology.
And yet, in my experience, most Christians in Britain take a different view. I
never cease to be astonished by the number of devout and highly educated Christians,
experts on their own ‘turf’ as teachers, doctors, engineers, accountants or whatever;
regular readers of the broadsheet press and at least occasional browsers through the
Economist or the New Statesman, the New Scientist or the Times Literary Supplement;
visitors to the theatre who usually read at least one of the novels on the Booker short-
list, who nevertheless, from one year to the next, never take up a serious work of
Christian theology and probably suppose The Tablet to be something that you get
from Boots the chemist.
It is, of course, perfectly true that erudition, or even literacy, are not necessary
conditions of that aspect of holiness which is Christian wisdom. Nevertheless,
ignorance is never virtuous, nor is the refusal to engage all the resources of the mind
and heart at the service of faith’s quest for understanding. It is difficult to avoid the
conclusion that devout and educated Christians who refuse to acquire a theological
competence cognate to the general level of their education simply do not sufficiently
care about the truth of Christianity to seek some understanding of that Word through
whom all things are made, into whose light we have been called, and which will set
us free.
Having given quite a lot of thought as to why it is that the study of theology is
as comprehensively marginalized from educated public discourse as it is in most
western countries, and being quite willing to concede that theologians must bear
some share of the responsibility for this, I believe that some of the deeper reasons are
to be sought in a systemic failure of the Christian churches to understand themselves
as schools of Christian wisdom: as richly endowed projects of lifelong education.
What follows is a very broad-brush sketch of how, as I see it, this marginalization
of theology has come about in western culture during the past four centuries, and
the impact that the process has had on Christian understanding. I shall do this under
three heads: ‘Changing the Subject’, ‘The Changing Nature of God’ and ‘The
Changing Nature of Belief in God’. My focus will be purely formal or, as disciples
of Wittgenstein might say, ‘grammatical’. Such an account, restricting itself to
consideration of the ways in which the word ‘god’ has been used, and notions such as
‘belief in God’ construed, will contribute little, directly, to an account of mainstream
Christian understanding of the way God is and acts (although, at the end, I will
briefly indicate how such an account might go).
132 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Changing the Subject

It sometimes happens, in the history of a word or phrase, that what was once what
we might call the ‘home territory’ of its usage, its primary or central sense, atrophies
or weakens until some quite other sense (which, in the beginning, either did not
exist at all or was, at most, entirely marginal) moves centre stage, takes over and
makes itself at home. And, when this happens, it will often be very difficult, perhaps
impossible, straightforwardly or spontaneously to recapture, or even to imagine, the
way in which the expression was originally used.
Consider, for example, the word ‘invention’. When this word first appears
in English, some time in the fourteenth century (the first occurrence listed in the
Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1350), it carries the same sense as the Latin
verb – invenio, invenire – which it translates. Invention is a matter of coming upon
something, discovering or finding it. Within two hundred years, other senses have
been derived from this: by the 1530s, for example, it is possible to invent something,
find it, come upon it, without ever leaving one’s armchair – simply by working
it out or making a plan. Occasionally, the usage is pejorative: to charge someone
with ‘inventing’ something may, by the mid-sixteenth century, be to accuse them of
making it up, of telling lies – in Coverdale’s translation of 1535, Susanna defends
herself against the elders: ‘I never did any such things, as these men have maliciously
invented against me.’ (Daniel 13:43)
And it is this originally marginal, derived sense, or something very like it, which
moved to centre stage, to the extent that, if someone who knew nothing of the history
of the expression came across an old-fashioned liturgical calendar, they would be
baffled by the Church’s celebration of ‘The Invention of the Cross’. What on earth,
they might well wonder, was Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, up to?
How could a woman, even one of royal blood, who died some two hundred years
after the Crucifixion, possibly have ‘invented’ the Cross of Christ (except in the
sense that few historians, these days, would be quite sure that she found it)?
In this case, the usurpation of the home territory of the meaning of ‘invention’
by a later sense originally entirely derivative and marginal has done no great harm:
we have plenty of other ways of expressing the process of coming upon things,
finding or discovering them (although there is perhaps a sense in which Christopher
Columbus ‘invented’ America).
But, to move from an actual to a fictional example, imagine a state of affairs in
which the word ‘love’, and all its cognates, had ceased to be used, by anyone, to
say things like ‘I love you’ or ‘We love each other’ – expressions (originally the
primary and central uses of the word ‘love’) which those using them had known how
dangerous it was to use them carelessly; had known how vulnerable the users were to
the risks of their misuse. Imagine, that is to say, a situation in which the word ‘love’
was now only used, as it were, at a distance, in the derived and secondary territory of
reported speech. In stark contrast to the risks – to one’s identity, responsibility and
history – of serious, self-involving use of the simple confession ‘I love you’, think
 Nicholas Lash 133
how little is invested by the speaker in a statement such as ‘Queen Victoria deeply
loved Prince Albert’.
If, per impossibile, it were ever thus to happen that the primary and central
confessional, self-involving, uses of the word ‘love’ and its cognates were to be
rendered practically and imaginatively almost irrecoverable, human existence would
have been thereby devastatingly, perhaps terminally, impoverished.
It might seem as if this example is so far-fetched as not to have been worth
concocting (or inventing!). And yet, I now want to argue that something not entirely
dissimilar has happened, in western cultures, during the past four hundred years, to
the word ‘God’.
Few changes in the character, or structure, of the ways in which we understand,
imagine, think about ourselves, the world, its history and all that’s in it have been
more comprehensive, or had more far-reaching consequences, than the change from
late mediaeval to early modern western culture. At one level, we can tell the story of
the change as a shift in imaginative and intellectual ambition. Finding themselves in
the dark, on a long and dangerous journey, mediaeval people tried to find out where
to go and how to get there. Seeking their way home (for they knew themselves to be
in exile), the intellectual dimension of their quest can be summed up as a search for
understanding. And the search for understanding is, for all people and at all times, an
endless search: whoever you are, and however wise and learned you may be, there is
always infinitely more that you might try to understand.
Early modern man (and, in the context of this thumbnail sketch, I doubt if any
feminist who knows a little history would object to the expression) was in search
of certainty and power. He wanted firm ground beneath his feet (his own feet,
because standing on one’s own two feet, without assistance from unreliable so-called
‘authorities’, became, increasingly, part of his ambition) and, as it were, a mountain-
peak on which to stand. He sought an explanation of the world, its intellectual
mastery.
Explanation, unlike understanding, if successful comes to an end. Explanations
are stories of causes and effects. Why is there a damp patch on the ceiling? Because
water is dripping through from the floor above. Why is there water dripping through?
Because that blasted child let the bath overflow. End of story. End of explanation.
Problem solved. Even in these supposedly ‘postmodern’ times, the totalitarian
ambition of ‘complete’ explanation, of a comprehensively explanatory ‘theory of
everything’, of becoming, intellectually, ‘masters of the universe’, still lingers on in
certain scientific circles.1
Where does God come into all this? During the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, the word ‘god’ came to be used, for the first time, to name the ultimate
explanation of the system of the world. And, when it was in due time realized that
the system of the world was such as not to require any such single, overarching,

1 See, for example, the closing pages of Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
(1988), although Professor Hawking seems recently to have moderated his ambition on rediscovering
Gödel’s Theorem.
134 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
independent, explanatory principle, the word ‘god’ was dispensed with, and modern
‘atheism’ was born.2

The Changing Nature of God

Against this general background of the comprehensive transformation from pre-

modern into modern culture, I now turn to what I have called ‘the changing nature
of god’. My argument, in a nutshell, will be that ‘gods’ which, before modernity,
were understood to be whatever people worshipped became, instead, beings of a
particular kind – a ‘divine’ kind, we might say. And there are analogies between
this usurpation of worship by description as the ‘home territory’ of uses of the word
‘god’ and my fictional parable of what might one day happen to uses of the word
‘love’. (Incidentally, if ‘gods’ are now beings of a particular kind, then Christians,
Jews, Muslims and atheists all have this, at least, in common: that none of them
believes in gods.)
For most of our history, then, ‘gods’ were what people worshipped. I do not
mean that people worshipped things called ‘gods’; I mean that the word ‘god’
simply signified whatever it is that someone worships. In other words, the word
‘god’ worked rather like the way in which the word ‘treasure’ still does. A treasure
is what someone treasures, what someone highly values. And I can only find out
what you value by asking you and by observing your behaviour. Some people value
reputation, some a quiet life. The point is that there is no class of objects known as
‘treasures’. There is no use going into a supermarket and asking for six bananas,
a loaf of bread, two packets of soap and three treasures. Valuing is a relationship:
treasures are what we value.
Similarly, ‘gods’ are what people worship, have their hearts ultimately set on.
I can only find out what you worship, what your gods are, by asking you and by
observing your behaviour. And, these days, it is almost certain that the gods you
worship will not be named by you as gods. Most of us are polytheists, inconsistently
and confusingly worshipping ourselves, our country, ‘freedom’, sex or money. There
is no class of objects known as ‘gods’. Worshipping is a relationship: gods are what
we worship.
Even at this stage in the story, two notes of caution need to be sounded. In the first
place, there are, of course, degrees of valuing: you can value something very highly
indeed, or you can value it a little. Are there, similarly, degrees of ‘worshipping’?
In point of terminology, clearly the answer is ‘Yes’, otherwise people in local
government would spend a great deal of time confusing the Creator and Redeemer
of the world with the local mayor (addressed formally as ‘your worship’). And
so, every tradition comes up with ways of distinguishing the worship due to the
unknown and holy mystery confessed to be Creator and Redeemer of the world from
the various forms of reverence, estimation, acknowledgement of worth (‘worth-

2 See Michael Buckley, At the Origins of Modern Atheism (1987).

 Nicholas Lash 135
ship’) differently due to creatures. The worship due to God, of course, goes far
beyond mere reverence. It is, in its ambition, the total and absolute surrender of the
self, acknowledgement of sheer contingency: ourselves and all things given back to
the eternal giving which they express and celebrate. The great religious traditions of
the world are best understood as schools, contexts of education, the participants in
which help each other thus to worship, while yet not worshipping any thing: not the
world, nor any constituent fact or feature of the world; not any individual or ideal;
not any nation, dream, event or memory.
My second cautionary note concerns a disturbing carelessness that is widespread
in contemporary writing on the subject of religion. We live in a society the intellectual
movers and shakers of which increasingly take it for granted that only children and
the simple-minded still believe in God (Christianity is, as Newman said, deemed
to be ‘behind the age’). Nevertheless, when writing about cultures other than their
own, these educated secularists will tell you a great deal about other peoples’ ‘gods’.
Indians, especially, are said to worship many gods. Notice the racism implicit in
this description: most Indians, it implies, are either infantile or simple-minded. And
yet it is questionable whether the Sanskritic tradition has ever, in fact, advocated
polytheism.3 (The term ‘polytheism’ was first coined, in the seventeenth century, by
an English Protestant, as a way of indicating that Indian ritual practices were really
no better than the superstitions of Catholicism!)
In other words, if the first point to be made is that the fundamental and primary
uses of the concept of God are relational – ‘gods’ are what we worship – the second
point to be made is that elementary courtesy, to say nothing of concern for truth,
requires us to pay continually discriminate attention as to which words well translate
as ‘god’ and which do not, and as to which patterns of behaviour do and do not count,
and in what sense, as instances of ‘worship’. (A similar problem arises from the
insouciance with which English-speaking people in the nineteenth century presumed
that there must some word in every other language which corresponded to the sense
which the word ‘religion’ had newly come to acquire. Thus the Sanskrit word
‘dharma’ was mistranslated as ‘religion’ and intractably deep misunderstanding
between Indians and English-speaking westerners was guaranteed. See Lash 1996:
22–3).
The confusion arises, of course, because those who write so carelessly about
other peoples’ gods simply take for granted that the word ‘god’ names a natural kind,
a class of entity. There are bananas, traffic lights, human beings and gods. Or perhaps
not: on this account of how the word ‘god’ works, ‘theists’ are people who suppose
the class of gods to have at least one member; ‘monotheists’ those who maintain that
the class has one, and only one, member; and ‘atheists’ are those who think that, in
the real world, the class of ‘gods’ is, like the class of ‘unicorns’, empty. (It should
not, by now, surprise the reader to learn that all these words – ‘atheism’, ‘theism’,
‘monotheism’, ‘polytheism’ – were first invented in the seventeenth century.)

3 See Julius Lipner, The Hindus: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1994: 305);
cf. Nicholas Lash, The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’ (1996: 52).
136 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
One further complication: as the ‘primary grammar’ of the concept of God
shifted from the relational language of praise and worship, of address, to the derived
and secondary territory of description, the situation unfolded rather differently in
English- and in German-speaking culture. In Britain, by coming to name the ultimate
explanatory principle of the system of the world, ‘god’ ceased to be the subject of
what Thomas Aquinas had called ‘holy teaching’, and became, instead, a topic in
‘mechanics’ or, as we would say these days, physics – the scientific study of the
system of the world.
In German culture, things went rather differently, the Germans being less interested
in machinery than in deep thought. German metaphysics, from Kant to Heidegger,
became an immensely impressive exercise in substituting philosophy for theology,
pure thought for prayerful reflection. Way back in the eleventh century, St Anselm
had written two small books: one called Monologion or ‘monologue’, the other
Proslogion or ‘dialogue’, ‘response-speech’. Philosophy is of the first kind, theology
of the second. Many of the great modern German thinkers supposed themselves
to be developing the traditions of Christian thought into the circumstances of the
modern world whereas they were, in fact, subverting it, substituting for theology a
quite different enterprise.
In 1807, Hegel published his Phänomenologie des Geistes. A 1977 translation
rendered this as Phenomenology of Spirit, whereas, in 1931, an earlier translator
had preferred Phenomenology of Mind. Was Hegel trying to give expression to the
history of thought, or was he trying to realize the history of God? Or did he, perhaps,
presume these two histories to be identical?
There are so many words around – words such as ‘absolute’ and ‘spirit’; ‘the
sublime’, ‘transcendence’, ‘power’ and ‘being’ – the large and misty use of which
disguises from our view the depth of the gulf separating the monologues of modern
metaphysics from those endlessly demanding, strenuously self-involving exercises
in prayerful reflection which have characterized, in different ways, the theologies of
the great religious traditions of the world.
When talking about God, what difference does it make to spell it with a capital
or a lower-case initial letter? Not a lot, one would have thought: bread and butter are
still butter and bread, whichever word comes at the beginning of the sentence. What
has happened, of course, is that we have got into the habit of imagining that ‘God’
(with a capital ‘G’) is the proper name of the object of our worship. Common names
are names of members of a class: ‘tree’ names all the things that count as trees.
Proper names are names proper to individual members of a class: all readers of this
text are human beings but I am, I think, the only Nicholas Langrishe Alleyne Lash.
But the incomprehensible and holy mystery we worship is not, I have been urging,
a member of any class.
Each of the great religious traditions of the world has had its own procedures
for protecting us from the illusion that the Holy One can be thus pinned down,
classified, given a proper name. When Moses stands before the burning bush and
asks, ‘If I go to the Israelites and tell them that the God of their forefathers has sent
me to them, and they ask me his name, what I shall say?’, he receives an answer
 Nicholas Lash 137
which more or less boils down to ‘Mind your own business!’ (Exodus 3:13–14) (It is,
incidentally, this mysterious reply, sometimes translated as ‘I am who I am’, which
Aquinas quotes at the beginning of the discussion usually known as ‘the Five Ways’,
in which his aim is not, as modern philosophy misleadingly puts it, to ‘prove that
God exists’, to establish that there is a god, but rather to consider the sense in which
‘existence-talk’ is or is not appropriate here. Denys Turner, 2004: 152, has expressed
it beautifully: ‘what the proofs prove is that in showing God to exist we have finally
lost control over the meaning of “exists”.’)
But if God has no proper name, how may we speak of Him? By discriminating
among the innumerable names that we might use for Him. Much recent writing has
given the impression that there are two kinds of theology: one kind which says things
about God, using what one writer has called ‘concrete anthropomorphic imagery’,
and which is good enough, apparently, for the simple-minded people who still go
to church; and another, more ‘austere’, sophisticated kind, known as ‘negative’
theology, which denies the appropriateness of the things that the simple-minded say.
This latter way of doing things is sometimes attributed to an esoteric tribe known as
‘mystics’.4
This, of course, is nonsense. Everything that human beings say of God, of
the incomprehensible and holy mystery confessed by Christians to be creator and
redeemer of the world, is said in words and images carved from the fabric of the
world which the creator makes. We have no other materials to use, no other way to
think, or speak, or act. In this sense, everything that is said of God, whether by way
of affirmation or denial, is anthropomorphically expressed.
The language that we use, the terminology that we employ, does not become
less anthropomorphic, less sprung from earthly soil, by becoming more abstract,
rarefied or technical. If anything, something more like the opposite is the case: the
entire Bible bears witness to the fact that the imagery of the poet and the storyteller
is better fitted than the abstractions of the philosopher to express the relations that
obtain between the Holy One and the creation which He convenes and calls into His
presence.
In saying this, it is not my intention to disparage the indispensable contribution
of rigorous philosophical reflection. The point is that everything we say of God,
whatever our style or register of discourse, is anthropomorphically, metaphorically
said, and that, perhaps paradoxically, habits of speech which, as it were, carry
their metaphorical character on their sleeve may be less likely than more abstract
expressions to lead us into the trap of supposing that now, at last, we are getting
nearer to getting a ‘fix’ on God, to grasping ‘what God looks like’.5

4 James M. Byrne, God (2001: 69) and elsewhere; see my review in The Tablet (15
September 2001: 1300).
5 Some readers may wonder whether there are not things that may be said of God not
metaphorically but analogically. Although it would take another essay to furnish warrants for
the assertion, I believe that modem uses of the concept of ‘metaphor’ are capacious enough
138 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
‘Oh, I see: God is “spirit”, God is “transcendent”, God is “ineffable” – now I
understand.’ Oh no you don’t! Or, at least, you are probably better set upon the road
to understanding if you sing, with the psalmist, that God covers himself with light as
with a garment, makes the clouds his chariot, and rides upon the wings of the wind
(see Ps. 104:2–3) or, with Martin Luther, that ‘a mighty fortress is our God’. Images
of strengthening and power, of sovereignty and weakness, of suffering and joy: these
are good tools to take to school in quest of ever less inappropriate speech because,
among other things, they remind us that to speak appropriately of God is always, at
the same time, to speak appropriately of the world which God creates, and of our
place and duties in that process of creation.
Where creatures are concerned, it is possible to distinguish between, on the one
hand, the kinds of things best thought of as what were once called ‘substances’,
‘chunky’ things, we might say, enduring over time – such as mountains, trees and
rock formations, porpoises and people – and, on the other, things such as movements
and events, actions and occurrences, the things we do and undergo, aspects of the
ceaseless movement which constitutes our ever-changing world. Which kind does the
word ‘God’, as used by Christians (who know that God is not a ‘thing’ of any kind)
attempt to mention? Which is the more misleading: to speak of God as we might
speak of things (including people), or as we might speak of events and movements
and occurrences (such as ‘speaking’, for example)?
This question can serve as a reminder that it may be well worth noticing that
Thomas Aquinas (among other theologians in the past) took very seriously the
suggestion that ‘the word “God” might actually be better regarded grammatically as
a verb’6 rather than a noun.
It is, and always has been, exceedingly difficult to speak sensibly of God. The
attempt is, nevertheless, required of every Christian – in response to the one Word
which God is, and which has been spoken to us. There are not now, nor have there
ever been, two theologies: one ‘positive’, the other ‘negative’. The negative way,
the ‘via negativa’, is simply the endless and endlessly demanding disciplining
of language and imagination which we need. Newman put it well in a paper on
‘Certainty, intuition and the conceivable’, written in 1863 but unpublished in his
lifetime:

We can only speak of Him, whom we reason about but have not seen, in the terms of
our experience. When we reflect on Him and put into words our thoughts about Him,
we are forced to transfer to a new meaning ready made words, which primarily belong
to objects of time and place. We are aware, while we do so, that they are inadequate, but
we have the alternative of doing so, or doing nothing at all. We can only remedy their

to take account of thirteenth-century distinctions between metaphorical and analogical

predication.
6 Fergus Kerr, After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism (2002: 187). Recently, the Franciscan
theologian Thomas Weinandy has suggested: ‘Put succinctly and boldly, the persons of the Trinity are
not nouns; they are verbs and the names which designate them – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – designate
the acts by which they are defined.’ (Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer?; 2000: 45–6)
 Nicholas Lash 139
insufficiency by confessing it. We can do no more than put ourselves on the guard as to
our own proceeding, and protest against it, while we do adhere to it. We can only set right
one error of expression by another. By this method of antagonism we steady our minds,
not so as to reach their object, but to point them in the right direction ... by saying and
unsaying, to a positive result.7

The Changing Nature of Belief in God

If what I have called the ‘primary grammar’ of the concept of God, that sense of the
way the word works which most people in our culture simply take for granted, has,
as I have suggested, undergone a fundamental shift or sea-change – from ‘god’ as
‘whatever it is that you worship’, whatever it is on which your heart is ultimately set,
to ‘god’ as the name of a kind or class of entities of which there may or may not, in
reality, be any members – then we might expect that what is meant by ‘believing in
God’ has undergone a corresponding shift. And this, indeed, is what has happened;
hence my heading for this section: ‘The Changing Nature of Belief in God’.
‘I believe in God.’ Every Christian says this, or something like it, every time that
they perform that act of worship which is the credal confession of Christian faith.
What does it mean? Consider these three statements of belief: ‘I believe in unicorns’;
‘I believe in keeping out of debt’; ‘I believe in Tony Blair’. Someone using the first
of these expressions is almost certainly expressing the opinion that there are, in
the real world, actual members of the class of unicorns. Most people don’t say, ‘I
believe in gods’, but many people, even these days, do say, ‘I believe in God’. And
I guess that, in saying this, many of them are saying something like, ‘I believe that
God exists’, that God is as real as, or infinitely more real than, the other realities that
there are. I cannot imagine someone saying, ‘I believe in unicorn’, in the singular.
Perhaps we say ‘I believe in God’ in the singular because debate, these days, rages
not between those who believe in many gods and those who believe in one, but
between those who believe that there is one real god and those who believe that all
gods are fictional. The trouble is, of course, that, along this track, it is very difficult
to avoid falling into the trap of supposing, as I put it earlier, that ‘god’ is the name
of a particular kind of thing: namely, divine things. But, if this is how the statement
is understood, then, for reasons that I indicated earlier, far from being an expression
of Christian believing, such as might find its place at the outset of a Christian creed,
it is incompatible with Christian (and Jewish, and Islamic) faith – because particular
kinds of things, whether the kinds have one or many members, are what creatures
are, jostling and competing with each other for space, and interest, and survival.
Let’s try my second candidate, ‘I believe in keeping out of debt’. Unlike
‘I believe in unicorns’, this is not an opinion as to a matter of fact, but rather an
evaluation; its object is a policy of action, a way of living: keeping out of debt is
what I ought to do. Facts and values, what ‘is’ the case and what we ‘ought’ to do,

7 John Henry Newman, The Theological Papers of John Henry Newman on Faith and
Certainty (1976b: 102).
140 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
are so inextricably intertwined that sometimes, I suspect, when people say that they
believe in God, they are expressing their commitment to a whole range of moral
policies and attitudes which they take to be entailed by such belief. Nevertheless, the
statement ‘I believe in God’, even taken as a declaration of ethical policy, is still not
a Christian confession of faith.
It might seem obvious that ‘I believe in Tony Blair’ is the least plausible candidate
to be considered by analogy with ‘I believe in God’. It does, however, have something
going for it. Whereas ‘I believe in unicorns’ merely expresses an opinion as to fact,
and ‘I believe in keeping out of debt’ goes one step further by committing the speaker
to a way of living, ‘I believe in Tony Blair’ takes us into quite different territory. It
expresses the speaker’s trust, whether prudently or imprudently, in someone else. It
thereby brings us out of the isolated world of individual opinion and preference and
evaluation into the realm of personal knowledge and relationship.
These puzzles about ‘believing’ have a very ancient history. In the fifth century,
St Augustine gave them classical expression in distinguishing between three
Latin constructions. ‘Credere Deo’, he tells us, is believing in God in the sense of
believing God, believing what God says. ‘Credere Deum’ is a matter of believing
God to be God, both in the sense of acknowledging that God exists and in the sense
of acknowledging that the one we mention when we speak of ‘God’ is, as it were,
the only real God. (The natural rendering of this, in English, would probably be
‘believing in God’ in the sense that, I have suggested, has become so problematic.)
Finally, there is ‘Credere in Deum’, the expression as we have it in the Creeds;
an expression with a sense of movement, of direction, of going somewhere, of
‘godwardness’, believing ‘into’ God. Here is Augustine’s account: ‘What is it,
therefore, to believe in Him [credere in eum]? It is in believing to love, in believing
to delight, in believing to walk towards him, and be incorporated amongst the limbs
or members of his body’.8
We live in a culture in which many people, believers and nonbelievers alike,
seem to think that the word ‘god’ is really quite easy to use. We have developed a
dangerous kind of deafness to the wisdom of all the world’s great religious traditions
– Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Upanishadic Hinduism, perhaps also some strands
of Buddhism – which, having learned the hard way, have for centuries insisted that
speaking appropriately of God is, while not impossible, the most difficult, the most
demanding, the most dangerous thing that human speech can do, because appropriate
speech brings to language appropriate relationship. But, if this is the case, and if the
word ‘God’ (with a capital ‘G’) has today become so burdened with inappropriate
use, why don’t we simply discard it, and speak in some other way about the holy
mystery which the word misnames? After all, it is not on a three-letter word that
our hearts, identities and hopes are set. The short answer, I suggest, is that the long,
and complex, and conflictual history of humankind’s engagement in the educational

8 Augustine’s discussion may be found in his Commentary on John, xxix (Migne 1844–62:
PL, XXXV, 1631). The somewhat free translation is my own: see Nicholas Lash, Believing Three
Ways in One God (1992: 20).
 Nicholas Lash 141
process of learning non-idolatrously to worship, learning wholeheartedly and without
reserve to give ourselves to the truth, and flourishing, and freedom, to which we have
been called, is simply too bound up with the history of the uses and misuses of this
little word. However difficult it is to use appropriately, there is no other word which
similarly signals that the truth and destiny and healing of the world infinitely outstrip
the world’s capacities.

Knowing the Unknowable God9

Nevertheless, it is not the troublesome little word ‘god’ that is the heart of the matter,
but the sense of who we are, as human beings, and of how all things – the world
of which we form a part – hang together. The first of two fundamental lessons to
be learned through the educational practices or (as they are usually called these
days) ‘religious rituals’ of such ancient schools of wisdom as Judaism, Christianity,
Islam and Hinduism, is that the deepest sense of things is not contained within the
narratives and structures of the world. It follows that there is no feature of the world
on which we may absolutely set our hearts, which we may worship.
Hence the insistence that God is not an entity or member of a class of entities;
not ‘one of the items that exist within the universe’, sharing ‘the same conceptual
territory as do the limited agents we are familiar with’.10 Thus, for example, the
equation ‘God + the world = x’ (an equation for which pantheism gives ‘x’ the value
‘1’, while many modern western theisms and the atheisms which deny them give it
the value ‘2’) is incoherent precisely because it presupposes that ‘God’ does share
‘the same conceptual territory’ as ‘the world’.11

9 Cf. David B. Burrell, Knowing the Unknowable God: Ibn-Sina, Maimonides, Aquinas
(1986).
10 Archbishop Rowan Williams, ‘Analysing atheism: Unbelief and the world of faiths’, a
lecture delivered in Georgetown University, Washington, DC, on 29 March 2004. I am grateful to
the Archbishop for permission to quote from his lecture.
11 In circles which suppose the equation to make sense, God is often said to be a
‘supernatural’ being (whose existence atheists deny and theists affirm). Originally, the term
‘supernatural’ was used, adjectively or adverbially, to indicate the condition of creatures enabled,
by God’s grace, to act beyond the capacities of their given nature. As I have often pointed out
to students, if you come across a rabbit playing Mozart on the violin, you can bet your bottom
dollar that that rabbit is acting supernaturally. Rabbits have not got it in them to play the violin.
Moreover, things being the way they are with human sinfulness, if you come across human beings
acting with consistent kindness, selflessness and generosity, the same assumption is in order. We
simply have not got it in us to be that virtuous. On this account, it is possible that creatures, graced
by God’s enlivening gift, may act supernaturally. God, alone, cannot be supernatural, cannot act
supernaturally, for what would graciously ‘elevate’ or heal God’s ‘nature’?
In time, unfortunately, people forgot all this and, having decided that all there is in the
familiar world, the world which we inhabit and explore, may be lumped together under the
one word ‘Nature’ (which rapidly acquired the capital initial letter), they described those who
supposed that, over and above this real world of nature, there are forces and entities of some
142 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
The second fundamental lesson to be learned in the ancient schools of wisdom
is that, as Hegel put it: ‘God does not offer Himself for observation.’ (Hegel 1984:
258) He was not saying that knowledge of God is impossible, but that it is not the
kind of knowledge at which scientists and historians aim, as they put some feature of
the world, or some event in history, under the microscope of academic scrutiny. The
objects of such scrutiny are, shall we say, inert, picked up with tweezers, inspected,
classified, conceptually controlled. God is not such an object.
Thus it is that most of the major religious traditions of the world have sought in
personal knowledge – in the knowledge that human beings acquire of themselves
and of each other through networks of relationship – the least inappropriate analogy
or metaphor for the character of the relations between human beings and God.
Participants in the school of wisdom that is Christianity learn three things about
the world, themselves, and God.12
Christians are people who have learned that all there is is not mere brute fact,
uninterpretable surd, structured by random power and violence, but – in the last
analysis – gift: gift given in tranquillity, and that the ending of all things is peace. To
understand all things as given, as expression of the giving that is God’s own self, and
the outcome of all giving to be life and harmony, is to understand what Christians
mean by ‘Holy Spirit’. Learning to be a Christian is learning, through acceptance of
the gift God is, to give oneself to others, and to God.
Christians are also people who have learned that, notwithstanding the savagely
destructive egotism with which human beings disfigure the world, all things do – in
the last analysis – make good sense. The world is articulable, utterable, and human
beings – the ‘speaking part’ of things – bear the responsibility of truthful speech
and action. Truth is tradition-dependent, and learning how to speak the truth takes
time. Moreover, the fundamental form of speech is utterance in response to God’s
constituting utterance of the world. The fundamental form of speech, in other words,
is prayer. To understand all things as uttered, as expressive of the utterance that is
God’s own self, is to understand what Christians mean by naming God as ‘Word’:
the one Word through whom all things are made and whose focal and definitive
expression is Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh.
Christians are, finally, people who have learned that human beings ‘come to the
real truth about themselves precisely by the fact that they patiently endure and accept
their knowledge that their own reality is not in their own hands’ (Rahner 1978: 43).
To learn this is to reconfigure mutual dependence as, not bondage and lordship, but

other, higher order, as postulating the existence of ‘supernatural’ beings, the very head or chief
of which is the being which religious believers know as ‘god’ (or, by analogy with ‘Nature’,
‘God’). In other words, this fundamental shift in usage of the concept of the supernatural was,
albeit unintentionally, pregnant with modem atheism.
12 Having, for most of this paper, confined myself to formal or ‘grammatical’ considerations, it
seems necessary, in conclusion, to attempt some constructive account, however ludicrously telegraphic,
of the Christian doctrine of God. This paper is, in fact, an expanded version of the first chapter of a book
the remainder of which is devoted to this constructive task: see Nicholas Lash, Holiness, Speech and
Silence (2004).
 Nicholas Lash 143
friendship: friendship not only between creatures but also between creatures and the
fecund generosity, creating all things out of nothing, we call ‘God’. To understand
that ‘the autonomy of the creature does not grow in inverse but in direct proportion
to the degree of the creature’s dependence on, and belonging to God’ (Rahner 1966:
12) is to understand what Christians mean by naming God as ‘Father’.
Participants in the school of wisdom that is Christianity learn that they, and all
things, are created, are lovingly created, and lovingly created into peace. Learning this
entails acknowledgement of responsibility to grow in openness – through everything
we say, and do, and suffer – to the all-transforming truth which we confess.

Further Reading

Buckley, M.J., Denying and Disclosing God: The Ambiguous Progress of Modern
Atheism, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004
Burrell, D.B., Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions, Notre Dame: University
of Notre Dame Press, 1993
Kerr, F., After Aquinas: Versions of Thomism, London: Blackwell, 2002
Lash, N., The Beginning and the End of ‘Religion’, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1996
_____ , Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of
God, Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1988
_____ , Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God, Aldershot
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004
Rahner, K., ‘Thoughts on the possibility of belief today’, in his Theological Investigations,
V, trans. K.-H. Kruger, Baltimore, MD, and London: Helicon Press and Darton,
Longman & Todd, 1966, 3–22
Turner, D., The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995
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 Chapter 8

Felicity and Fusion: Speech Act Theory

and Hermeneutical Philosophy
Dan R. Stiver

A number of thinkers, especially in the field of theology and biblical hermeneutics,

have turned to speech act theory in order to traverse ugly hermeneutical ditches
from the past and to enable interpretative advances. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Kevin
Vanhoozer and Nancey Murphy are three of the most notable.1 All three have been
attracted to speech act theory because it allows for more nuanced approaches in
dealing, for example, with the vexed relationships between history and literature
(might we say ‘fiction’?) in the canonical Christian gospels. All endorse the extension
of the range of speech act theory to ‘textual acts’; in other words, to written works.
All three mentioned above also conclude that this turn to speech act theory undergirds
a return to the idea of authorial intent as a control for interpretative anarchy.
While endorsing this basic appropriation of speech act theory, what I would
like to do in this paper is to set out some significant limitations that have slipped
under the radar, so to speak, which would thus, as an example, call into question
the revival of authorial intent. The lens through which I will examine the strengths
and weaknesses of speech act theory is continental hermeneutical philosophy. The
reason for the latter is that the aforementioned speech act theorists appropriate
speech act theory for its hermeneutical contributions, but they generally are critical
of continental hermeneutical philosophy per se.2 In addition, as they applaud the

1 Representative books are Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical

Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (1995); Kevin Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in
This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (1998); Nancey C.
Murphy, Beyond Liberalism and Fundamentalism: How Modern and Postmodern Philosophy
Set the Theological Agenda (1996).
2 Wolterstorff directly contrasts his ‘authorial discourse interpretation’ view with
Paul Ricoeur’s ‘textual sense interpretation’, Ricoeur being a pre-eminent continental
hermeneutical philosopher along with Hans-Georg Gadamer (Wolterstorff 1995: 152). Murphy
contrasts her ‘Anglo-American postmodernity’ with what she considers to be relativistic
deconstructive continental postmodern philosophy. See especially her Beyond Liberalism and
Fundamentalism (1996) and Anglo-American Postmodernity: Philosophical Perspectives on
Science, Religion, and Ethics (1997). She actually does not seem to consider the tradition of
continental philosophy represented by Ricoeur and Gadamer. Vanhoozer is the exception in
that he has written a book on Ricoeur (Vanhoozer 1990), appropriates continental philosophy
a great deal, and sets speech act theory within a broader horizon of communicative action.
146 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
extension of spoken acts to written acts, they do not always appreciate the subtle
shift in dynamics that this creates, which continental thinkers such as Paul Ricoeur
and Jacques Derrida have highlighted.3 What I hope to show is that speech act theory
does provide a supple framework for hermeneutics that is genuinely helpful, but
its fruitfulness and its implications are limited by not drawing upon the kind of
dynamics of which hermeneutical philosophy is particularly aware.
First, I will briefly indicate the basic direction of this new approach of speech act
theory. Second, I will probe it for some significant limitations. Third, I will explore
the kind of supplement provided by continental hermeneutic philosophy that will
both enable and perhaps transform the appropriation of speech act theory.

New-style Speech Act Theory

Wolterstorff highlighted the more recent appropriation of speech act theory in the
publication of his Gifford Lectures entitled Divine Discourse. His main thesis is that
speech act theory opens up in a remarkable way the possibility of regarding God
as speaking that does not reduce to the act of revelation, which he regards as too
limiting. In fact, he says, ‘I think now, finally, after all these centuries, contemporary
speech action gives us the theoretical equipment to see why [we can say that God
literally speaks]’ (Wolterstorff 1997: 30).
This, of course, involves the extension of speech act theory to written works
from the past that are contained in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, as well as
other written works. Speech act theory offers the flexibility of not only noting what
is written but what is being done in what is written.4 A speech act may be ‘unhappy’
or ‘infelicitous’ by being false, but it may ‘misfire’ in several other ways as well.5
According to Wolterstorff, speech act theory thus points us to the manifold variety
of actions in communication, such as deputizing and appropriating others’ works,
which give him a vehicle by which we can understand what is traditionally called
God’s inspiration of Scripture.6 He concludes that we cannot get away from the idea
that God is speaking, for example – commanding, assuring, promising – through the
words of Scripture. Quite apart from the complexities that arise through this idea

He contrasts, however, his emphasis upon authorial intent in a similar way to Wolterstorff
with continental emphases upon the text. See, for example, the chapter, ‘Undoing the reader:
Contextuality and ideology’ in his Is There a Meaning in This Text? (1998: 148–95)
3 A representative text for the former is Ricoeur’s ‘The hermeneutical function of
distantiation’ in his Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences (1981a: 131–44). For the latter,
it is Derrida’s Of Grammatology (1974). Derrida is not usually included as a hermeneutic
philosopher – and is sometimes antagonistic towards Gadamer and Ricoeur – but his own
style of a hermeneutics of suspicion and emphasis on writing versus speech, along with some
other themes, chimes in with broader contours of continental philosophy.
4 The landmark work is John L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (1975).
5 The language goes back to Austin’s work.
6 See especially Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse (1995: ch. 3).
 Dan R. Stiver 147
of ‘double discourse’ (1997: 44), Wolterstorff (1995: ch. 10) also maintains that
we must return to the criterion of authorial intent because speech actions could not
be understood apart from the intentions of an author (whether they be human or
divine!).
Vanhoozer (1998: ch. 5) joins Wolterstorff at this point in insisting upon the fact
that the appropriation of speech act theory necessitates the return to authorial intent
as a criterion of meaning. At the same time, he also affirms speech act theory for the
flexibility it brings when expanded to deal with texts such as Scripture.
Nancey Murphy (1996: 124) likewise sees a necessary connection between
speech act theory and authorial intent. She appropriates speech act theory as an
Anglo-American postmodern account of language that transcends the dichotomy
between seeing language as expressive and as representative, noting that it can be
both.
For all of them, speech act theory overcomes the stultifying simplicity of other
views, allowing a place for questions of history and reality. It allows, for example,
a place for both literary questions of genre and questions of historical context. The
place of authorial intent also limits the proliferation of meaning, narrowing it to the
intended speech act by the author. As Vanhoozer puts it, ‘My thesis is twofold: that
texts have determinate natures, and that authors determine what these are’ (1998:
228).

Limitations

In an earlier article (Stiver 2001b), I pointed out how a dialogue between speech act
theory and Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutical philosophy can enhance both. In terms of
the limitations of speech act theory, Ricoeur provides a much broader philosophical
framework, offering a hermeneutical view of the self, of the self's judgements, and
of how historical and fictional judgements both involve the mimetic or productive
imagination. Speech act theory is more precise in showing how historiographical
conditions and literary conditions interrelate. Ricoeur is more helpful in showing
that they are inherently interrelated and what kind of judgement is involved in
each. Moreover, Ricoeur develops a much more elaborate hermeneutical process, a
hermeneutical arc, that allows for appropriate use of critical methodologies, which
speech act theory per se hardly touches.
For our purposes, three related limitations of speech act theory are of concern.
One is that speech act theory was generated out of conventional examples that are
rather clear-cut, with the ubiquitous commands such as ‘Pass the bread, please’, or
declarations such as ‘I now pronounce you husband and wife’.7 In doing so, they
have explored in detailed ways the immense variety of speech acts in language and
thus demonstrate the problem of the ‘descriptive fallacy’, that is, the assumption that
most linguistic activity involves simple description (Austin 1975: 1, 100). Austin

7 For example, see Austin (1975), Searle (1969) and McClendon and Smith (1994).
148 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
concluded that even these descriptive statements, ‘constatives’, were a kind of
speech action (52). When this paradigm was moved to include written works, things
became more complex.
Still, there is a tendency to think in terms of strict conventions that guide
judgements of what kind of speech act is occurring, whether it is a smaller unit such
as a promise or command or a larger unit such as genre and plot. What this provenance
in conventions tends to miss, however, is precisely what generates hermeneutics,
namely the places in written works, often from different times, places and cultures,
that are immensely creative, provocative, and thus not easily domesticated in terms
of any kind of common convention. For example, Ricoeur’s major work on metaphor
(1977) focused upon the creativity of metaphor, its ‘semantic impertinence’ that
precisely does not follow conventions. Further, understanding a Platonic work as a
kind of dialogue does not go far in helping to understand what Socrates is doing, for
example, in the Meno or the Euthyphro. Understanding that Luke is writing a gospel
and Jesus telling a parable does not go far in discerning the meaning of the Parable
of the Prodigal Son. Understanding the conventions, as far as they go, is crucial – or
we might say, necessary – but not sufficient. Thus, speech act theory has tended not
to connect clearly with larger issues that involve difficult matters of epistemology,
larger issues of the nature of the self, and even larger issues of metaphysics.
Secondly, and related, with speech act theory’s concern to show the complexity
of language that we do understand, it has hardly dealt with the problems of ideology
and power relations that go so far to undo and disturb communication. This complaint
is not unlike Jürgen Habermas’s (1980) criticism of Hans-Georg Gadamer that
Gadamer does not deal with the issue of systematically distorted communication.
While others like Ricoeur and even Gadamer himself have grappled with that issue,8
there is no comparable treatment of the issue for speech act theory. It is thus not clear
how critical methodologies such as source criticism and ideological criticism come
into play in speech act theory.
A third problem that arises from the starting-point in conventional speech acts
is that the move to texts, especially ancient texts, problematizes the whole notion of
the author. When focusing on an evident interaction between a speaker and a listener,
as much as we may learn from it, the dynamic of figuring out what the speaker is
intending to say or do is natural. As one moves to texts that are composites, often
with unknown authors, multiple authors, and editors or redactors, this dynamic
shifts. We may have texts, as with Aristotle, that may involve notes from him or by
students at different times in his life compiled by someone, which may or may not
be Aristotle, into one work. In Genesis, we apparently have multiple sources from
different epochs combined in various stages into one work – by an unknown author at
a time and place that is only roughly known (spanning perhaps centuries). What does
it mean then to appeal to authorial intent as the means of hermeneutical control? One
of the worries of Wolterstorff (1995: 89, 172–3), for example, is that if we do not

8 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Hermeneutics and the critique of ideology’ (1981d); Hans-Georg

Gadamer, ‘On the scope and function of hermeneutical reflection’ (1976).
 Dan R. Stiver 149
know the author’s intent, the work may be some kind of deception or even the work
of a madman! The problem is that we often do not know the author, particularly in
the case of much of Scripture. The implication of Wolterstorff’s concern is that we
would not be able to attach any confidence to the works about whose authors and
intentions we do not have some reasonable knowledge. This would play havoc, also,
with something like folk tales, whose original authors are lost to the distant past.

Revisions

We can highlight and also attempt to supplement these limitations of speech act theory
by looking at four concepts that arise out of the hermeneutical tradition: the fusion of
horizons, practical wisdom, embodiment, and the hermeneutic of suspicion.
The notion that any act of understanding involves a fusion of horizons is of
course based on Gadamer’s thought (1993: 306). He says, ‘It is enough to say that
we understand in a different way, if we understand at all’ (297). In the background is
his concern with interpreting ancient texts such as those of Plato and Aristotle. The
contemporary reader obviously brings a different horizon of culture, background
beliefs, attitudes and expectations (to the text) than ancient philosophers. Gadamer,
however, is not pessimistic about the outcome; rather, he is filled with wonder at the
act of understanding, even across such a ditch of history. What he does want to say,
nonetheless, is that understanding is a creative act of the fusion of these different
horizons. The understanding of a reader is a new production, in part complicated and
in part enriched by the history of the interpretation of that same text. In comparison
with speech act theory’s rather simple examples from within a culture, this concept
drawn from examples between cultures points out that neither conventions nor
knowledge of author’s intentions can fix the meaning. Even having a fair idea of
an author may not be able to fix intent. Think about, for instance, the meaning of
Plato’s forms or Aristotle’s active intellect. In the New Testament, consider Jesus’
command not to resist an evildoer but to turn the other cheek or Paul’s reference to
election and predestination, not to mention notoriously complex notions such as the
Kingdom of God and of Heaven and Hell. These are highly contested notions that
are also extremely rich. They are not so diffuse that one cannot have strong views,
even convictions, about them, and offer significant backing for one’s views. Yet they
cannot be resolved by appeal either to authorial intent or to common conventions.
They point on the one hand to the significance of the interpreter’s horizon and also
to the complexity of issues that can be pointed to but not necessarily explicated by
conventions.
The fact that common conventions can aid but not resolve an issue indicates the
second hermeneutical notion that is relevant, that is, practical wisdom, or phronesis.
This notion is rooted, of course, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, but has been
extended, especially by Gadamer and others, to be a basic form of intellectual
150 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
judgement in many areas.9 Aristotle conceptualized phronesis most clearly as the
judgement needed to apply a general ethical rule to a particular situation, realizing
that no rule can do justice to all the particulars.10 With the demise of classical
foundationalism, such wisdom is also needed when decisive evidence or reasons are
not forthcoming in any area, especially in determining what should be the foundations
of a particular discipline or viewpoint.11 It is the kind of judgement that is rooted
in who we are – in our horizon – that enables us to make judgements when the
conclusions are underdetermined by the evidence. Speech act theory seems to trade
on examples precisely where phronesis is not needed, where conventions establish
what act is occurring. That is why appeal to the author’s intended speech act in this
type of case is not too problematic: the author’s intention can be seen in the speech
act itself, not in some hidden, ghostly event. When speech act theory, however,
moves to large literary works that are provocative and creative, the general rules
and conventions are a part of the meaning but cannot easily establish it. Plato can
use a dialogical style to describe the ideal republic, but his creative approach cannot
be understood just by knowing what other people have done. What he did in that
speech act inevitably involves something like phronetic judgement in moving from
conventions or what is generally understood to what he means that is creatively new.
Ricoeur (1992: 10th Study), who expands phronesis to his concept of ‘attestation’
as one’s ability to take a life-stance in the world with others, sees it as especially
dealing with one’s ethical stance and with those issues that cannot be resolved in any
certain way. In speaking of attestation, he says:

To my mind, attestation defines the sort of certainty that hermeneutics may claim, not only
with respect to the epistemic exaltation of the cogito in Descartes, but also with respect to
its humiliation in Nietzsche and its successors. Attestation may appear to require less than
one and more than the other. (Ricoeur 1992: 21)

Likewise, phronesis also points to the significance of the reader, who is making the
judgement, as much as to the author. A contribution of reader-response theory, which
developed out of phenomenology, as did hermeneutical philosophy in general, is that

9 See especially Gadamer, Truth and Method (1993), which develops this idea as
a whole, but especially 324. The Foreword to this second edition makes clear that he sees
this kind of hermeneutical or phronetic understanding as applying even to the foundations of
science (xxix). Also, for the universal extension of phronetic thinking as hermeneutics, see
Bernstein (1985: 131–50) and Dunne (1993).
10 For example, see Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, chapter 12. Many
debates have ensued about whether Aristotle meant for phronesis also to include deliberation
about the ends as well as the means. In any case, as we shall see below, this is the move that
many contemporary thinkers have taken.
11 For classical foundationalism, see especially Alvin Plantinga, ‘Reason and belief
in God’ (1983). See William C. Placher, Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a
Pluralistic Conversation (1989) for an account of how several disciplines, including not only
the hard sciences but even mathematics, cannot establish their own foundational principles or
axioms apart from such interpretative judgement.
 Dan R. Stiver 151
the writer intends for the reader to fill in the gaps, which adds support to Gadamer’s
insight that a ‘fusion of horizons’ is involved in any act of understanding. Thus
not everything is written or described because the reader’s reading competency and
imagination is assumed in order dynamically to produce or even create meaning.
While reader-response approaches can be relativistic and virtually leave out the
author altogether, they need not be and can even support a rather conservative, author-
oriented approach. However, with the kind of rich texts that we are considering, the
role of a ‘phronetic imagination’ on the part of the reader, we might say, is crucial
even in arriving at the meaning intended by the author. Like Aristotle’s sense that
ethical rules cannot suffice to discern the good in a particular situation, neither can
conventions suffice to discern the meaning of rich texts.
As a third indicator of the elusive nature of interpretation of provocative texts,
the phenomenological and hermeneutical emphasis on embodiment comes also into
play. A part of anyone’s horizon, and, for that matter, anyone’s phronetic judgement
involves not just drawing insightfully upon linguistic convention and specific beliefs
but also upon the tacit way in which beliefs and attitudes are embodied. Contrary
to much of our intellectual tradition where the body and emotions were seen as
impediments to understanding, the body and emotions are ingredient in any act of
understanding. Maurice Merleau-Ponty underscored that through our bodies ‘we are
involved in the world and with others in an extricable tangle’.12 Our background
attitudes and beliefs are embodied in deep ways that influence our ways of interacting
especially with peoples and works of very different cultures.
A contemporary affirmation of the value of this physical life, for example, will
likely shape – and perhaps challenge – the way we approach Plato’s more negative
view of the material world as well as that of many mediaevals. Ancient Greek
debates about what constitutes happiness cannot be understood apart from a felt life,
something which is difficult to put in words or to explicate. Our lived experience
will affect how we respond to a philosopher who calls for involvement in public
life or one who calls for withdrawal from public life. In any case, interpretation
of a rich text involves drawing on these reservoirs of lived feeling and experience
that cannot be reduced to conventions. They are a part of what constitutes our

12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1962: 454). It is

interesting to note that Ricoeur saw himself as attempting, especially in his Freedom and
Nature, to ‘provide a counterpart in the practical sphere to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology
of Perception’ (Ricoeur 1995: 11). See my chapter (Stiver 2001a: 161–7) on the issue of
embodiment in Ricoeur. To these two thinkers, we should not fail to mention Gabriel Marcel,
of whom Ricoeur saw himself as a disciple. On the contemporary scene, this perspective is
increasingly supported by scientific studies such as those of Antonio Damasio, Descartes’
Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (1994) and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow
and the Feeling Brain (2003). Other important works that emphasize that cognition is
impossible without the body and the feelings are Martha C. Nussbaum’s Poetic Justice: The
Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995) and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence
of Emotions (2001); also George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (1999).
152 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
horizon and our individual phronetic judgement. Rather than being an obstacle, our
emotional experience is something that enables us to understand in a deeper way.
We could not express anything well without conventions, but conventions cannot
capture everything, particularly creative and provocative expressions, which is what
we usually are most concerned to interpret in philosophy and in theology – and what
are usually most deeply rooted in embodied experience. Again, this third indicator
points to the importance of the reader, in what the reader brings to the text, as much
as to the author.
Martha Nussbaum is instructive on this point in trying to show how attention to
literature informs and shapes the judgements made on legal issues. In other words,
knowing the technicalities of the law is not enough to guide the kinds of difficult
decisions that judges have to make; rather, the capacity to imagine and feel how
a ‘reasonable person’ in a very different situation might respond is critical. She
explains this in the context of how much of our tradition has judged the emotions:

The calculating intellect claims to be impartial and capable of strict numerical justice,
while emotions, it alleges, are prejudiced, unduly partial to the close at hand. … [Thus]
the reader of novels, taught to cherish particular characters rather than to think of the
whole world, receives a moral formation subversive of justice. This we may doubt.
… the abstract vision of the calculating intellect proves relatively short-sighted and
undiscriminating, unless aided by the vivid and empathetic imagining of what it is really
like to live a certain sort of life.13

She probes, among several cases, the way a conservative Supreme Court justice
showed remarkable capacity to empathize with a female construction worker being
harassed on the job (1995: 104–11).
It is not difficult to imagine how a ‘calculating intellect’, often so prized in
law and in philosophy (and in religion) might excel in erudite speech act analysis.
The contribution that hermeneutical philosophy might be able to make to speech
act theory lies in the requirement of ‘vivid and empathetic imagining’, something
critical to phronesis and attestation. Such a capacity to broaden and fuse horizons
is thus reminiscent of the challenge of interpreting rich texts, a similarity of textual
and legal interpretation that has been deeply plumbed by hermeneutical philosophers
such as Gadamer and Ricoeur.14
A final contribution of hermeneutical philosophy is the hermeneutic of suspicion.
This brings a heightened sensitivity to the way speech acts can not only misfire but

13 Nussbaum 1995: 67f. Nussbaum actually frames the book around Charles Dickens’s
novel, Hard Times, and the need for ‘fancy’.
14 Gadamer (1993: 307–41) draws on legal hermeneutics to make the point that
application is not an optional third dimension to understanding and interpretation but is
implicitly ingredient at the start. Ricoeur also argues in his hermeneutical arc that interpretation
is incomplete without application, but he especially draws (1980) on the idea of a witness at a
trial to develop his early understanding of attestation. See also on this point my Theology After
Ricoeur (2001a: chs 2 and 7).
 Dan R. Stiver 153
also be systematically distorted by ideology in covert and complex ways. Especially
in the context of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc which allows for a dialectic between
understanding and critical explanation, critical theory and methodology can be
brought to bear. In the end, however, the critical moment is not necessarily the final
moment but calls for a ‘post-critical’ appropriation, not apart from, but in and through,
the moment of suspicion. Here, speech act theory with its analysis of conventions
and structures of communication has an important, even necessary, place. However,
the more explicitly developed critical dimension of hermeneutics (and continental
philosophy in general) brings more attention to the place of distortion as well as to
the dynamics of appropriation by the reader across horizons of culture and critique.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer: An Example

An example may be helpful in tying these ideas together. Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s general
story is well known, and his significance is well deserved not only as a great and
stimulating theologian but also as one of the best-known modern Christian martyrs.
One aspect of the background to his courageous faith in resisting Nazi Germany was
his brief study in New York City at Union Seminary in 1931–32, especially with
Reinhold Niebuhr.15 Perhaps more important even that that, he met two friends and
fellow students who seemed to have great influence upon him. One was an African–
American student, Franklin Fisher, who influenced him in exploring Harlem and
going to an African–American Baptist church, where Bonhoeffer participated in
lively black worship. Under the preaching of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr, he also
taught a Sunday School class and worked with youth clubs for six months. Some of
Bonhoeffer’s most noted expressions were apparently proclaimed by Powell, such as
‘cheap grace’ and ‘world come of age’ (see Holland 2000). Bonhoeffer was so struck
by this that he later would play tapes of their worship for his seminary students in
Germany, telling his students that he was fulfilling a promise not to forget what he
learned there (Nelson 1991). Bonhoeffer thus drank deeply of the black experience
in the United States. Once he led a walkout of an American restaurant when he saw
that his friend Franklin was not going to be served (Nelson 1991). Scott Holland
adds:

Bonhoeffer was intrigued by the music and culture of New York but he hated its racism.
He became a smart and sensitive critic of American racism and this attention to racism
seemed to deepen his critiques of German anti-Semitism. He discussed this problem freely
with his brother Karl-Friedrich, who had studied at Harvard on a physics fellowship. Karl-
Friedrich concluded that the problem of racism in the United States was so terrible that he
could never imagine raising a family in America. (Holland 2000)

15 Scott Holland, ‘First we take Manhattan, then we’ll take Berlin: Bonhoeffer’s
New York’, Cross Currents, 50 (Fall 2000), journal online, http://search.epnet.com/direct.
asp?an=3672625&db=aph, accessed 8 May 2004.
154 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
This, of course, was before Hitler had risen to power in Germany and induced his
anti-Semitic madness.
Another friend that Bonhoeffer made at Union was a deeply dedicated Christian
pacifist named Jean Lasserre. At one point, Bonhoeffer, Fisher and Lasserre made a
cross-country trip together across the US into Mexico for a conference on pacifism.
Anyone aware of the distance from New York City traversing that far across the US
and Mexico in the early 1930s can appreciate the concrete embodied dimension of
such a trip! Lasserre reported, ‘We shared the same things and hours and hours of
driving together and looking for the hotel room and making our own cooking very
often. So I have seen him and known him on a very human level’ (Nelson 1991).
Now what does one make of this in light of the preceding discussion? When
Bonhoeffer returned to Germany and finally remained even when it led to prison
and martyrdom, how did he see through the deception and distortion that so many
others did not? More to the point, how did he possess the hermeneutic of suspicion
to discern the systematically distorted communication that others missed? What was
behind the conviction, impelling him to return to the dangers of Germany, in the
following words?:

I have made a mistake in coming to America. I must live through this difficult period
of our national history with the Christian people of Germany. I will have no right to
participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share
the trials of this time with my people. (Kelly 1991)

When speech acts were flying all over the place by masters of communication,
calling for faithfulness to the Vaterland and to the Führer, for appreciation of
Hitler’s success in overcoming devastating inflation – most did not see through it.
But Bonhoeffer did.
This kind of situation starkly reveals the weakness that still limits the current
development of speech act theory. It is not that understanding of the dynamics of
speech acts is not relevant; it is necessary, one might say, but not sufficient. The
normal ways in which speech acts may misfire – grammatical mistakes, situational
discrepancies, affective incongruities – are involved, but normal grasp of such
errors can hardly begin to pierce the thick fog of deception and misdirection in a
situation like this. It is not difficult to see how the incarnational immersion into
another situation of racism, involving deep feelings in worship, friendship and
extended dialogue could sensitize one in a way that other Germans lacked. This
helped Bonhoeffer bring from his holistic experience another horizon to the German
context. The resultant cognitive dissonance called for a kind of phronetic judgement
that could not be reduced to rule-following – because there were not sufficient rules
to guide him.
Conversely, one can see how these hermeneutical dynamics of continental
philosophy and speech act theory can work together. Understanding of the intricacies
of speech and what is done with it coupled with hermeneutical resources could allow
for deeper critique as well as affirmation. Presumably, Bonhoeffer had to possess all
 Dan R. Stiver 155
of these tools to work his way through the ‘great masquerade of evil’ (Bonhoeffer
1967: 26).
As a pacifist, Bonhoeffer was nevertheless finally drawn into the plot to
assassinate Hitler, surely a plight that demanded all of the resources of judgement
that he could put into play. He had to weigh his pacifist sensibilities with the appeal
to protect the victimized. He first, of course, had to discern that there were victims,
which was, as we know, no small feat. A hermeneutic of suspicion that can bring in
other horizons and also is alert to the way ideology can undermine even the most
well-regulated communication is crucial. His immersion into another experience of
racism at a felt level was apparently also critical. Presumably many other factors that
are hardly enumerable played a role in his unusual insight and courage to act upon
his convictions. This kind of complexity seems to lie behind Aristotle’s observation
that the right thing to do in a particular situation relies on the practical wisdom
(phronesis) of a wise person and cannot be reduced to a universal rule.
Now place such a difficult situation into the context of attempting to understand a
written text from a much different time and place. How much more, rather than less,
will these hermeneutical factors come into play? The extension of speech act theory
from spoken language in a common horizon to textual works from quite different
horizons truly brings new dimensions to the hermeneutics of written texts, but it
also needs to be able to draw upon the kind of resources mentioned above that were
developed specifically to address such issues.

Conclusion

Melding the approach of speech act theory with these categories of hermeneutical
philosophy, as it were combining felicity and fusion, can add depth to the
interpretative act and help to avoid the limitations that have been noted. It gives
recognition to the fact that ‘text-actions’ are indeed doing many things with words,
not just simply describing, and that they require a multiplex approach. At the
same time, it recognizes that even understanding this dynamic does not mean that
understanding is conventional, or easy, or is indisputable. It brings to interpretation a
fuller recognition of the role of the reader and the reader’s horizon, which also makes
it easier to understand – and deal with – how significant differences in interpretation
may occur and also how interpretation is laden with issues of ideology and vested
interests. It offers a wider array of methods that can be helpful in dealing with these
other dynamics such as ideology critique, social–historical criticism and, not the
least, the need for trained philosophical awareness of the role of presuppositions and
background frameworks. With these will come awareness of the limitations of any
technique (‘method’, in Gadamer’s terms) to settle or determine the meaning, no
matter how well known the author.
The hermeneutical approach does not rule out authors since it sees texts as human,
albeit all-too-human, works, although here is a place where speech act theory can
prevent the idea of texts being seen as non-human productions, an implication that has
156 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
often been drawn from continental philosophers. Most hermeneutical philosophers
can affirm with speech act theorists that texts are not rootless Platonic ideas; they
are intentional acts. While Ricoeur may not do full justice to this point, he expresses
it well: ‘Not that we can conceive of a text without an author; the tie between the
speaker and the discourse is not abolished, but distended and complicated’ (Ricoeur
1981e: 201). The focus, however, lies more on the text and perhaps even on the reader
than on the author. In so far as knowledge of the author and the context of writing is
helpful, it is used along with everything else. The publicness of speech and writing
that hermeneutical philosophy emphasizes, however, mitigates against privileging
speech over writing or relying on exact knowledge of the author’s intentions. It is
not hamstrung by unknown authors such as we have in many ancient texts or by texts
like the constitution of the United States that has multiple authors (whose intention
counts?). Even as the new speech act theorists emphasize, inasmuch as they attempt
to transcend the Romantic appeal to authorial intent, the road to meaning is paved by
consideration of the text. Hermeneutical philosophy does not avoid the problem of
disembodied texts by just returning to the author, however, but by rooting texts in a
much broader process of human horizons, cultures, interests and readers.
Hermeneutical philosophy, nevertheless, can be deepened and enriched also
by the contributions of speech act theory. The divide between Anglo-American
philosophy that lies behind speech act theory and continental philosophy that lies
behind hermeneutical philosophy can be as wide and ugly as Lessing’s famous
historical ditch. Interpreting complex texts as well as discerning complex situations
such as Bonhoeffer faced require all the resources available and thus crossing this
divide, in Gadamer’s terms one of the most difficult horizons to fuse.

Further Reading

Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words, eds J.O. Urmson and M. Sbisà, 2nd edn,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975
Gadamer, H.-G., Truth and Method, trans. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall,
London: Sheed & Ward, 1993
Nussbaum, M.C., Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston,
MA: Beacon Press, 1995
Ricoeur, P., Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1992
Stiver, D.R., ‘Ricoeur, speech-act theory, and the Gospels as history’, in After
Pentecost: Language and Biblical Interpretation, eds C. Bartholomew, C. Greene
and K. Möller, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2001, 50–72
Vanhoozer, K.J., Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader, and the
Morality of Literary Knowledge, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998
Wolterstorff, N., Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God
Speaks, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995
 SECTION THREE

Experience, Imagination and Mysticism

While the papers of the first two sections have sought to examine the placing and
shaping of human experience through the lenses of our traditions of rationality and
our forms of language respectively, those in this final section reverse the process.
The creative work of the human imagination in engaging with experience may
in principle subvert those traditions and forms, and we should not foreclose the
possibility that the human imagination may on occasion be shaped by that which
transcends all cultural horizons.

David Brown argues that what is often termed ‘religious experience’ tends to be
systematically distorted or ‘skewed’ by contemporary models of both reason and
language. In the philosophy of religion the analytic tradition of philosophy selects
and interrogates such experience in terms of that tradition’s preferred models of
what counts as evidence, while biblical theologians focused on the ‘otherness’ of
God seek to deflect any claims for distinctive forms of experience as disclosing
the transcendent by reference to the literary hermeneutics of the texts in which
such experiences and claims are recorded. However, such deflection is resisted by
hermeneutic interrogation of those texts themselves, and our capacity to discriminate
between different types of ‘religious’ experience puts in question the favoured
evidential models. The boundary between religious and ordinary experience needs
to be reconfigured so that experiences of religious mystery and more standard
‘evidential’ aspects of human experience may be seen as part of a continuum.

Grace Jantzen’s ‘genealogical’ interrogation into how newness enters the world
sees today’s dominant western ‘rational’ narrative concerning progress, freedom and
democracy as masking masculinist ideology with its roots deep in our Christian
and Classical heritage. She points to aspects of our experience, such as those of
birth and nurturing, that are typically marginalized by such ideologies, and seeks
to use them to articulate a counter-narrative, of flourishing, desire and creativity,
which does more justice both to our experience and to our potentialities. Utopian
thinking may be contrasted with the ideological, and the imagination itself, through
its utopian function, may have a constitutive role in helping us to rethink the nature
of our social life. By listening to voices from the margins of our religious traditions,
our imagination may be set free to develop a ‘poetics of transformation’ with real
potentiality for transforming our self-understanding.
158 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
George Pattison takes up the distinctively linguistic deformation of our experience
of otherness. Theorists such as Don Cupitt (after whose Mysticism after Modernity
his contribution is named) interpret the phenomena of mysticism in cultural and
linguistic terms since language ‘makes experience possible’; it is not human thought
and language the mystics seek to transcend but only their specific cultural forms.
Against this Pattison invokes Heidegger and Dostoevsky to argue that in interpreting
events that seem to befall us as experiences of something ‘from beyond’, we may not
simply be shuffling linguistic tokens but rather reflecting in language an experienced
reality of that which abides in the midst of temporal change, transcending our
rationally and culturally grounded conceptual structures of the self and its world.
 Chapter 9

Experience Skewed
David Brown

Introduction

In this essay what I want to suggest is that contemporary discussion in philosophy and
theology alike skews the true nature of religious experience, but ironically from quite
different directions. In philosophy not only is such a distinct category of experience
accepted, but also strong evidential claims made, usually on the basis of some more
narrow range within it. By contrast many contemporary theologians are to be found
either undervaluing or else dismissing altogether the relevance of such a distinct category
either as evidence or as integral to the construction of religious belief. In saying this it
should be emphasized that what I am trying to identify are prevalent tendencies in both
disciplines rather than invariant practice.
So far as contemporary analytic philosophy of religion is concerned, as confidence
in the more traditional arguments for the existence of God has declined so has there
been a corresponding rise in interest in the so-called argument from religious experience.
To quote an obvious case in point, it plays the central and decisive role in Richard
Swinburne’s The Existence of God (1979: 244–76). Among those more sympathetic to
Alvin Plantinga’s rejection of Cartesian foundationalism, there is no need for its use in
such a justifying role, since on this view faith in God is already at the centre of the web
of the Christian’s beliefs and not a mere superstructure requiring some more basic belief
on which to found it. Nonetheless, religious experience usually still plays a central role as
illustrative, non-justifying evidence (offering what he calls ‘warrants’; Plantinga 2000:
326–53). In theory in both positions notice might be taken of all types, but in practice the
focus is usually more narrow. Visions, for example, usually get short shrift in the search
for certainty. In the first part of the paper I want to examine, therefore, the impact of this
more narrow focus.
Schleiermacher is often described as the founder of modern theology. Given that
background it might seem surprising that religious experience could be anything other
than central to contemporary theological discussion, for integral to Schleiermacher’s
argument was the claim that experience is foundational for doctrine and not the other
way round. It was an approach that was continued in the twentieth century in the writings
of Karl Rahner on the Catholic side and Paul Tillich on the Protestant. But more recent
writing in both communions has seen renewed rise in the suspicion of ‘religion’ and
a corresponding insistence on the otherness of revelation and of God, most notably
through the writings of Balthasar and Barth. In line with such ways of thinking, sustained
attempts are quite commonly made to undermine any contention that great significance
160 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
attaches to a distinct category of experience called ‘religious’. In the second part of the
paper I shall attempt to identify what is wrong with such strategies.
The result of my investigation will be to suggest a weakening but not the elimination
of a role for religious experience in justifying belief, the former (‘weakening’) implicitly
rejecting the philosophical approach, the latter (‘elimination’) the theological. However,
my final section will suggest that, so far from this conclusion lessening the importance
of religious experience, it actually strengthens it. It is by admitting its more tentative and
varied character that we can rediscover its pervasive presence in a much wider range of
human experience than is at present commonly acknowledged.

Within the Philosophy of Religion

With so much published these days, safely identifying trends is no easy matter. The
present popularity of the philosophy of religion in universities and schools means that
there are a large number of introductory textbooks currently available. So one possibility
is consideration of how religious experience is treated within such volumes. My survey
makes no pretence to be exhaustive, but it is representative to this degree, that it includes
all recent acquisitions of this kind that the catalogue system has placed together in my
local university library.
The two English philosophers Beverley and Brian Clack (1998: 31–7) set Richard
Swinburne and C.B. Martin against one another. While adopting the same wide range as
Swinburne (what might be briefly characterized as sunset, resurrection, dream, mystic
union and conviction of prayerful response), they use the variety to lay great weight on
Martin’s objection that all such experience seems parasitic on prior religious training. The
one other book that offers the same variety is the selection offered in Charles Taliaferro’s
and Paul Griffiths’s jointly edited volume (2003: 141–81), where extracts from William
James, Rudolf Otto and Caroline Franks Davis all appear. Significantly, however, they
are not listed under ‘Theistic Arguments’ but rather as ‘Explanations for Religion’. Brian
Davies has produced two widely used introductions. One work offers an essay specially
written by William Alston in which he distinguishes between experiences emerging out
of one’s ordinary life experience and direct awareness of God (Davies 1998: 65–9). The
term he wants to use for the latter is ‘mystical experience’ and he thinks that this can
form the basis of an argument. In Davies’s other volume Martin reappears as a foil, but
this time in relation to Alston rather than to Swinburne (Davies 2000: 356–89). Alston’s
tactic is once more to employ the perceptual analogy. Eleonore Stump in her joint work
with Michael Murray (1999: 139–49) also appeals to Alston, but this time with an extract
from Teresa of Avila by way of preface.
A number of features emerge. First, with Swinburne and Alston predominating there
is a strong emphasis on the analogy with perception. Second, although the range varies,
most interest is shown in the out–of-the-ordinary rather than the everyday. This is
true even of Clack and Clack, as Martin’s objection clearly applies most forcibly
to the more content-full type of experience. Other reasons may of course also be
playing their part. Mystical experience would seem easier to align with ordinary
 David Brown 161
vision than is something like response to prayer. In the latter the separable character
of the imposed interpretative grid is much more obvious. Then again, it might be
added, many mystics (such as the saints) are self-evidently closer to God, and so
their evidence is of more worth. Third, the interest shown seems premised on the
conviction that such experience should be taken as actual experience of a being of
a specific kind, the sort Christians would call God. Thus, nowhere is consideration
given to the possibility that the evidence might all be much more tentative and indeed
admit of a range of attributes, not all necessarily pulling in the same direction.
The prominence given in these Introductions to William Alston’s treatment of
the issue makes it highly appropriate that we should focus here on his book-length
contribution, Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience (1991).
In that work the analogy with ordinary sensory perception is pursued at length
to draw conclusions not dissimilar from Swinburne’s principle of credulity, that
a presumption exists in favour of ‘Manifestation’ or M-beliefs where the person
concerned has a ‘perception’ of God present and acting upon him or her. His
difference from Swinburne is, in Alston’s view, more one of emphasis, with Alston
giving much more attention to the key role played by ‘socially established doxastic
practices’, conventions within a particular community (in this case the Christian)
about how certain experiences should be read, affecting not only the individual most
directly concerned but also the ability of others within the community in question to
accept such testimony.1
There is much that is excellent in Alston’s discussion. Particularly valuable
is the way in which he retreats from earlier claims that such experience is ‘self-
authenticating’ or ‘ineffable’, as though such assertions could of themselves put an
end to further questioning.2 If ‘ineffable’ were taken literally, no epistemic claims
could be made at all since nothing would have been said either way, while the
subjects of such experience themselves give the lie to any notion of the experience
being self-authenticating since they themselves seek out tests for checking that their
experience is indeed veridical.3 So the checks help to establish the kind of scenarios
where what seems to be the case is rightly taken to be so. In this parallels can be
drawn with other non-universal doxastic communities such as wine-tasters where
proper procedures establish a credibility that is immediately acceptable within the
community’s horizons, even if not immediately accessible to those without prior
training.4
However, there are also a number of difficulties with his presentation. The first
concerns the legitimacy of the perceptual analogy. As we have seen, Alston is quick

1 Alston 1991: 195. He talks of ‘minor deviations between Swinburne’s principle

of credulity and our thesis’. For ‘doxastic practice’ see 146–225, especially the principle he
formulates on 175.
2 For a good, more detailed critique of ineffability, see K.E. Yandell, The Epistemology
of Religious Experience (1993: 61–115).
3 For ineffability, 31-2; for self-authenticating, 210-1; for tests, 201-3.
4 Alston 1991: 199; theoretical physics is given as a contrasting example.
162 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
to speak of ‘perception of God’.5 This might easily lead the reader to suppose that
he has primarily in mind scenarios under which the subject ‘hears’ God’s voice or
‘sees’ a vision of some kind. As a matter of fact, Alston gives little prominence to
such phenomena. That being so, it is all the more puzzling that he and Swinburne
make the analogy so central to their discussion. After all, an earlier generation of
philosophers had picked upon a quite different kind of analogy, the intuition of
morality or beauty.6 The eclipse of the latter may reflect no more than the current
decline in confidence in the objectivity of moral and aesthetic values, as well as a
parallel eclipse in intuitionist approaches to how such potential knowledge might
be gained. However, the change does raise a question that needs to be set against
all such analogies, the degree to which they obfuscate as well as illumine. Of
course, if something visual or auditory is involved that seems to have no obvious
natural explanation, the move from, for example, ‘a divine voice’ to ‘perception of
the divine’ appears linguistically quite natural. But where such stimuli are absent,
‘awareness’ or ‘intuition’ might well seem more appropriate terminology, and so
draw one closer to the other analogy.7 Indeed, this might even be the case, where
sensory stimuli do play a key role. For example, a mountain landscape that mediates
religious awe does not necessarily entail that the visual elements in the former simply
constitute or slide into the other. They could, but it might be more a case of the visual
prompts mediating an awareness of transcendent otherness that has nothing at all to
do with ‘perception’. Of course, the earlier parallel with morals and aesthetics also
had its difficulties, not least in the fact that what was assumed to be a personal and
interactive reality (God) was being compared to what was quite otherwise. Perhaps
what such limitations in the analogies indicate is the need to take more seriously
the fact that such experience is sui generis. Indeed, that is precisely what might be
expected, given the claim that what is experienced is not an item in the world but the
source of all that is.8 The trouble is that, until this is acknowledged, the temptation
will be to fit the experience to the analogy rather than analysing it in its own right.
So, significantly, already on his first page Alston has made integral to M-beliefs that
‘God is doing something vis-à-vis the subject – comforting, guiding, communicating
a message, sustaining the subject in goodness, power, lovingness’. It is all the sort of
thing that we can ‘see’ our fellow human beings do, but the more basic question that
needs to be raised is whether the divine might not communicate presence as such
without any sense of ‘doing’ at all.
Another way of highlighting my concern that distortion is the inevitable result
if one starts with the argument and justification rather than with the experience in

5 The phrase is introduced in the book’s very first sentence, and used repeatedly
thereafter.
6 As in C.D. Broad, Religion, Philosophy and Psychical Research (1953: 190) and
A.E. Taylor, ‘The vindication of religion’ (1964).
7 In terms of its Latin root, ‘intuition’ is of course connected with vision, but I take it
that apart from stressing immediacy the metaphor is a dormant one.
8 Saints and demi-gods clearly fall somewhere in between.
 David Brown 163
its own right is by considering the sorts of experience that Alston himself chooses
to focus upon. He excludes what he takes to be the inferential or interpretative,
and focuses on direct perceptions for which he is happy to use the phrase ‘mystical
experience’ or ‘perception’.9 To his credit, the discussion then proceeds by offering
a wide range of examples, particularly from the writings of St Teresa of Avila. But
what is intriguing is that for the most part it is the experience of saints and mystics
to which appeal is made, and only very occasionally the highlight of a more ordinary
individual’s life. Indeed, he concedes at one point that the experiences that he has in
mind are rare.10 Yet at the end of the book he suggests that ordinary Christians can be
confident in building their own belief system on the pale reflections that they have in
their own lives of such experiences (Alston 1991: 305–7).
What is problematic in all of this is the way in which the extraordinary is exalted
above the ordinary. Religious experience so described becomes exceptional for the
ordinary believer, far less ever to be had by the agnostic or uncertain. But, just as
different analogies for the experience have, as we have seen, assumed prominence at
different points of time over the twentieth century, so there is every reason to believe
what is judged normal or abnormal has very much varied over the centuries. Alston
thus unwittingly contributes to the marginalization of a range of religious experience
that would once have been regarded as commonplace in Europe but has now come
to be seen as inferential rather than a matter of direct awareness. Thus few historians
of religion would deny that what was once regarded as direct and immediate for the
mediaeval peasant is now expressed much more tentatively. Yet this is not because
as a people we have become more sophisticated, but simply because to make the
claim in more direct terms would immediately be challenged in the sort of society
we are now in. The wider ramifications of this fact are what I shall explore in the
concluding section of this paper. Here I want only to stress that what from an earlier
age Alston would have had to treat as direct perception might well be formulated in
our own age more tentatively, but not because anything in the experience as such has
necessarily changed. So, in short, the argument skews the true nature of religious
experience in two key ways: first, in the narrowness of the range to which appeal is
made; then, second, in failing to take account of the culture-relative way in which
such experience is expressed as inferential or otherwise.
There is, however, one clear sense in which that greater tentativeness is the more
correct approach. As Alston himself comes close to admitting now and then, there
is nothing in the experience as such that could in itself indicate what is meant by
the God of philosophical theism: omniscient, omnipotent, timeless and so on.11 So

9 Alston 1991: 5. He rejects the term ‘religious experience’ (34–5) partly on the
ground that it is often used to include every aspect to life where religion is concerned, including
‘thoughts, reasoning and doubts’, and partly because he wants explicitly to exclude the
transcendent aspect to all experience identified by the likes of Schleiermacher and Rahner.
10 Alston 1991: 208: ‘mystical experience, except for a few choice souls, is a rare
phenomenon.’
11 For such occasional concessions, 47, 60.
164 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
the experience can at most only capture some small element in that totality. The
surprise is that Alston, so far from working thereafter on that basis, actually permits
the doxastic practice to build in even bigger foundations in a way that excludes
the incompatible claims of other religions (1991: 255–85). Although conceding
that divergence between the world religions is the most difficult issue for his case,
he suggests that traditional western philosophy and theology might well work to
strengthen the case for exclusion. It is an odd strategy to employ since it means that
the experience can carry no significant conviction in its own right but only when set
against a vast range of other suppositions.
In this his approach is markedly different from another philosopher who found
her ways into the surveyed Introductions, Caroline Franks Davis. Although her
categorization of types of religious experience is somewhat idiosyncratic, there is no
doubt that she considers a much wider range than does Alston.12 More importantly,
unlike him she attempts to answer the diversity objection by trying to distinguish
content and overlay. While rejecting any suggestion that language determines the
form that experience takes, she does attempt to account for diversity by suggesting
that a common form is often given quite different conceptualization precisely because
of competing alternative traditions of descriptions (Davis 1989: 143–65, esp. 159–
60). Her suggestion is that we try to penetrate beyond these into a common core. So,
for example, instead of actual perceptions of the saint or divinity concerned, visions
might really be ‘religious insights conveyed in “picture” form’ or else perhaps ‘the
objectified “idea-patterns” of a community’.13 Again, whereas Zaehner (1957) had
attempted to distinguish a hierarchy of types of mystical experience that placed the
Christian emphasis on union with the divine at the top as the most profound with
Eastern absorption a poor second, Davis’s proposal is that we pay closer attention
to how both might be derived from essentially the same experience. ‘Mystics very
probably have the same sort of experience viz. freedom from all sense of time,
space, personal identity and multiplicity which leave them with a blissful “naked
awareness” of perfect unity and a sense that “this is it”, the ultimate level of reality.
. . . On emerging from the experience, however, they reflexively interpret it, usually
in accordance with their doctrinal set, as “union with God,” “isolation of the eternal
self,” “liberation from samsara” and so on’ (Davis 1989: 178).
Her suggestions are valuable, but raise two types of worry. The first is that such
reconciliation is often too quick and superficial to win ready credence. Although
she can quote some Buddhist scholars in her support, the idea that the Buddhist
no-self and the Christian assertion of the true self are really saying the same thing
cloaks a multitude of conceptual difficulties (Davis 1989: 182–6). This is not to deny
that some comparisons may prove possible, but the language and forms are just so

12 Her six categories of religious experience are interpretative, quasi-sensory,

revelatory, regenerative, numinous and mystical (Davis 1989: 29–65). The problem is that
they do not seem even at first glance to be mutually exclusive.
13 Both options are mentioned at 156, the former explored at 170 and the latter at 217
(a suggestion of G.N.M. Tyrrell in his 1943 work [revised 1953], Apparitions).
 David Brown 165
different that inevitably the task would be a highly arduous one. Again, approaching
the issue from the opposite end as it were, her proposal involves not just a change in
how the subjects of religious experience see themselves responding to the divine but
also in how they think of the divine acting on them. Greater commonality of form
may draw the different religions closer together, but the process also results in them
all alike now standing further apart from the divine. In order to reconcile the accounts
of saints in rival religious traditions, their apparent intimacy appears to be replaced
by a uniform but distant divine reality. Yet this might be an advantage. Biblical
scholarship is increasingly forcing us towards a more indirect way of understanding
divine action in the creation of the scriptures and this might have to be applied
elsewhere. This is an issue to which I shall return.
Distance, though, is perhaps not the right word. It is only so if we focus on
questions of divine action and not of divine presence. There is an intriguing passage
in St Teresa where she expresses anxiety that God can only be said to be present
when He is performing an act of grace: doing something. ‘I did not know that God
was in all things, and, when he seemed to me to be so very present, I thought it
impossible. I could not cease believing that he was there only by grace; but I could
not believe that … and so I continued to be greatly distressed.’ (Teresa of Avila 1946:
I, 110–11) There is palpable relief on her part when she discovers from a learned
Dominican that there can indeed be presence without an accompanying action.
Although currently largely ignored by contemporary philosophical theology because
of its preoccupation with questions of divine will and action, as I shall suggest later,
much of human religious experience may be precisely of this kind. An image of St
Augustine’s may prove of help at this point. God’s relationship to the world is seen
‘as though there were sea everywhere, nothing but an infinite sea without bounds,
that had within it a sponge, as large as might be but still finite, filled through and
through with the water of this boundless sea’.14 What the image suggests is a God
uniformly present to his creation. A key aspect of religious experience might be the
ability to tap into just such a presence rather than God having to do some action over
and above in order to make His presence felt.
In short, then, my suggestion is that the philosopher’s concern with proof tends to
skew the way in which the evidence is approached. Instead of trying to analyse and
value religious experience in its own right, either through selection or reduction, those
aspects are focused on that are thought to be most conducive to the argumentative
task. In the process valuable points are often made, but what gets ignored as a result
is the limited and tentative character of much such experience. If the alternative
approach produces a wide range of divine attributes not easily reconciled, it may
also bring recognition of experience much more widely disseminated than the
philosopher’s focus would suggest.

14 Augustine, Confessions VII, 5 (my translation).

166 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Within Theology

As I observed in the Introduction, contemporary approaches within theology are

quite different. Despite the trend set by Schleiermacher and continued in theologians
of the calibre of Rahner and Tillich, much more common these days is a general
suspicion of appeals to experience. I shall begin with some more general remarks
on the popularity of Barth and Balthasar before examining in more detail two recent
attempts to undermine religious experience as a significant category of experience.
For those like Barth who set biblical revelation over against religious experience,
the claim would be that ‘religion’ distorts the structures of our knowledge. God needs
to reorder our minds through his grace, not simply be found at the end of a search for
him. I have always found this argument a false dichotomy, for what is found at the
end of a search may well radically rearrange one’s understanding and so transform
rather than simply confirm expectations. So divine initiative and human search need
by no means be seen as essentially incompatible. But my worries run much deeper
than this. Although Barth is careful to differentiate between the word of the text and
the divine Word, he still relies on the old model of listening to or ‘hearing’ what God
has to say. That at the very least sounds experiential, and indeed not far removed
from the philosophers’ ‘perceive’. The tendency among Barth’s followers, however,
is to focus instead on the literary hermeneutics of the text rather than on how it is
now experienced, or might have been in terms of its original creation. Yet the latter
in particular is of huge importance if continuing sense is to be given to the notion of
revelation. Biblical criticism over the past two centuries has forever robbed us of the
idea that the authors simply heard what God had to say through them.15 There was
a much more complicated dynamic within which there was an inescapable human
contribution. So biblical authority itself becomes entwined in the general question
that faces all religious experience, of how its veridical character is to be maintained
in the face of obvious aspects of cultural conditioning.
If that admission means that the biblical text may become more like the
interpretative grid that the modern believers impose on their own experience of life,
at the same time there are elements within the text that pull in a quite different
direction. Biblical scholars went through a period of fighting shy of taking any of
the more spectacular accounts of visions and auditions as roughly literal records of
what had happened. But increasingly recognition is being given to the extraordinary
experiences that some of the prophets may have had, and indeed Jesus himself. Later
I mention the baptism and temptations as cases in point. So here we might take the
Resurrection itself. Even if the disparate character of the existing narratives might
incline one to the belief that they are all narrative expressions of later convictions
rather than a literal recording of events, there still remains the issue of what the

15 Still retained in Leo XIII’s encyclical Providentissimus Deus of 1893: ‘written at

the dictation of the Holy Spirit’ (Spiritu sancto dictante conscripti sunt).
 David Brown 167
16
first ever appearances were like, as listed by Paul. Some argue that these earlier
experiences may have been more like visions of Jesus’ exaltation than what now
confronts us in the Gospels.17 But, whether so or not, the point is that the question of
the text itself alluding to what we would now identify as religious experience is not
escaped, even where it is accepted that its present form has now more the shape of a
story than an actual record of an experience.
So, however high a doctrine of biblical revelation is advocated, modern biblical
scholarship still precludes in more than one way disengagement from the issue of
how religious experience has shaped the biblical narrative. Beyond the biblical canon,
other strategies for denigrating the significance of religious experience have also
been tried, and here I would like to look at two in particular, both from Cambridge
professors. Both share the conviction that stress on religious experience is essentially
a modern idea, and actually a distortion of the Christian tradition. As a matter of fact
both are also practising Roman Catholics. So, before proceeding any further, it might
be as well to bring to the fore one key element in such an objection and often quoted
in its Thomist form: that since God defies human understanding, although He may
account for the experiences we have, we would never be in a position to identify
Him definitively as the object of our experience. He is, after all, not an item in the
world.18 Certainly, it makes no sense to claim that we could ever have an experience
of God in his totality. But from this nothing follows about identifying aspects of the
divine, a transcendent otherness, a reassuring goodness, and so on. It is these more
tentative forms that I am pleading should be treated more seriously.
Nicholas Lash takes as his starting-point William James’s classic The Varieties of
Religious Experience (1902). In essence his argument is that the attempt to isolate an
element called ‘religious experience’ disguises the true nature of Christianity. Such
stress on appropriate psychological conditions and exotic subject matter distorts the
way in which the Christian God transforms all our experience, and so it is the totality
that shapes belief and not some discrete, isolatable element.19 While I am inclined
to agree with him in his critique of those aspects of James’s treatment, and he is of
course right that there is something wrong with faith if it does not try to produce a
total perspective, it does not follow from this that certain ‘experiences’ are not more
truly seen as in themselves experiences of the divine (‘religious experience’) than
are other aspects of our lived experience.20 The latter may also help to shape our

16 I Cor. 15:3–8. Nowhere, for instance, is the first of all (to Peter) described, although
its existence is also implied by Luke, 24:34.
17 Of the kind Stephen has in Acts 7:54–6. This would help to explain the prominence
given to the opening verse of Psalm 110 in the Church’s early proclamation. See further, for
example, L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord (1988: 93–124, esp. 118).
18 Thomas Aquinas 1964–81: vols 2–3, Ia. 2.1; Ia. 12.1–4; Ia. 12.11.
19 N. Lash, Easter in Ordinary (1988: 9–83). For stress on psychological conditions,
esp. 18, 46; for the exceptional and paranormal, 75–6, 79.
20 I find utterly implausible, for example, his attempt to turn Schleiermacher’s appeal
to ‘feelings of absolute dependence’ into a mere Wittgensteinian rule about how the word
‘God’ should be used: 120–30, esp. 127.
168 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
view of God, but the elements of interpretative grid and inference are much more
obvious. By this I do not mean that those more properly called religious experiences
should, therefore, be treated as foundational for all else. The Bible, philosophy,
or whatever might well be more important in guiding how one’s experience as a
whole, is seen, much in the way (advocated by Lash himself) that von Hügel utilized
Newman’s ‘three offices of Christ’, to produce a more balanced perspective.21 For
some individuals they may be, and philosophers may want to make them so in terms
of some justifying argument. But there is no necessity for any of this in what I am
saying. My essential point is rather this: there are varying degrees of overlay in all
experience, but with some it seems more natural to talk of an actual experience
of one or more divine attribute rather than these simply functioning as part of an
inferred interpretation. Taking something as an answer to prayer or believing Christ
present and active in the Eucharist are structured readings in a way that a simple
sense of transcendent awe in the presence of mountain landscape is not, or again
the birth of a child sensed as gift rather than product. Lash describes his strategy
as one of ensuring that one finds God in the ordinary and not only in the strange or
spectacular. I would agree that that is where He should be sought, but in analysing
experience we should not do so in a way that privileges our own religion by ignoring
degrees of interpretative layer or the way in which experience can be seen as from
God but without necessarily being of God. So, for example, the answered prayer
may be one of also being suffused by divine love, but it may be simply an inference
drawn without any accompanying experience that could be said to have God as its
object.
Denys Turner’s specific focus is the notion of mystical experience. In The
Darkness of God he provides a subtle and highly nuanced analysis of the history of
the western mystical tradition up to St John of the Cross. His argument in rough is that
mystical experience has wrongly been identified as a separate form of experience,
that this has only really happened in modern times, and that in terms of the history
of mysticism the final stage of the mystical way was not really an experience at all
but rather intended as a critique of all such experiential claims.22 Mystics had found
God in the ordinary practices of their own faith (prayer, liturgy and so forth) but,
following Denys’ combination of Plato’s Cave and Moses’ Ascent of Sinai, they
use the language of mysticism and the apophatic tradition to call into question the
adequacy of all positive and negative descriptions of God secured in this way.23

21 For discussion of Newman’s three offices of ‘prophet, priest and king’, and their
adaptation in von Hügel, see Lash 1988: 136–77. Baron von Hügel was wrong in my view to
go on from this to deduce that there was no such thing as ‘specifically mystical experience’:
166.
22 He concedes that John of the Cross can be read in an experiential way, and that this
is still more obviously true of St Teresa: D. Turner, The Darkness of God (1995b: 177, 249–
51). For some key passages attacking experiential readings of earlier authors, 79 (Augustine),
129–33 (Bonaventure) 174–9 (Eckhart), 206, 210 (Cloud).
23 ‘Negating the negations’ with ‘everything denied and nothing abandoned’ is how
Turner expresses it: 129, 272.
 David Brown 169
Turner’s analysis of the various texts is careful and well argued, and he seems to
me clearly right that the mystical was never intended by such authors to function on
its own as though what had gone before was now seen as of no value. So modern
mysticism of the kind that treats its own experiences as something self-contained
and entirely independent of the community tradition is not to be seen as working
under the same rules.
However, while accepting these elements in his critique, there remain a number
of reasons for doubting whether he is right in rejecting all talk of experience at
this point. First, he makes much of the fact that the language of experience is not
used until more recent times. This is a dangerous argument to employ. The nearest
mediaeval equivalents may well be confined to sensory experience and not be used
of the intellectual elements that culminate the mystical way, but that of course would
only be true of how the language was then used and not necessarily of how we might
apply the word ‘experience’ now, if asked to reflect on what was going on.24 Again,
nowadays we are all conditioned to reflect much more on the subjective conditions
of our experience and not just on their object; so, inevitably, earlier generations
would not sound experiential in the same way as us, even if that was the true nature
of their experience. Second, the images employed suggest some kind of experience.
The metaphor of Moses’ journey up the mountain suggests some sort of continuity in
what is being said.25 It would be odd if story is used to deny that a story can in fact be
told. Likewise, the images of sight and hearing and their negation in blindness surely
imply that something rather more than purely intellectual claims is at stake. Third,
there is the question of evidence for what is being claimed by the mystics. Turner in
a well-argued chapter seeks to make plausible the negations, but there is a serious
flaw in those arguments that he fails to notice. The use of infinity to argue that God is
equally distant from all positive predications is a non sequitur (1995b: 42–4). So long
as discussion is confined to mathematics, all is well. Infinity is equally distant from
both the finite numbers 1 and 3, and that will also apply to God where mathematical
infinity is in play, for example on the question of divine power. But in an expression
like ‘infinite goodness’ the qualifier surely does not work in the same way; the
meaning is more like ‘good without qualification’. So I cannot see any legitimate
pressure to proceed towards negation. If that was nonetheless where the presumed
justification was supposed to lie, then the mystical apophatic tradition was built on a
mistake. But my suspicion remains that there was also an element of experience that
compelled the more positive elements to be complemented by the more negative. If
so, matters would not be all that different from what I suggest pertains elsewhere, the
need to realize that different and potentially conflicting aspects of experience need
to be built into a whole in any argument from religious experience rather than it be

24 Turner may possibly be right that till the fourteenth century imagination and
experience were linguistically cognate terms (1995b: 171), but that entails nothing about how
we might now view reports of what was more intellectual and non-sensory.
25 Exodus 19 with its reference to Moses climbing into thick darkness (vs 9, 16, 18),
was more important than the other visit in Exodus 32 with its vision of God’s back.
170 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
simply assumed that there is a single whole there in the first place against which all
such experience should be measured.

A Positive Proposal

What the preceding sections have demonstrated, I would suggest, is the tendency of
philosopher and theologian alike to err when it comes to the question of religious
experience. One claims too much; the other too little. The philosopher’s temptation
is to suppose that there are certain forms of religious experience so relatively simple
and so closely analogous to perception that they may legitimately be taken in and of
themselves to yield awareness of God and all that term might mean; the theologian,
on the other hand, is so cautious that even the very possibility of such an experience
is called into question. What is equally wrong with both alternatives is twofold: first,
the tendency to absolutize, to accept the supposition that what we are dealing with is
an all or nothing affair; second, the failure to appreciate the extent to which all such
experience is context-relative. The two faults are of course related.
Lash and Turner are of course right that stress on religious experience is
modern, but that does not make the whole thing a modern invention. The modern
turn to subjectivity means that we are now all far more aware of what is going
on in our consciousness and so with that the quality of particular experiences. But
the experiences were always there. What has changed is the focus, with the object
of the experience now no longer the exclusive concern but equally its subjective
conditions. An obvious parallel is human love. Modern romantic literature often
gives only cursory descriptions of the beloved compared to the lengthy portrayal
of the subjective dis-ease that accompanies being in love. In a similar way the
subjective conditions of awe and intimacy are now used to characterize certain
forms of religious experience rather than their possibly objective correlates in
transcendence or immanence. But simply because the prophet Isaiah, for example,
describes the relationship of the divine to the human as like that of a great bird to
tiny grasshoppers far below without any corresponding mention of any experience
of awe surely does not mean that none was present, only that he was part of a culture
where only the conclusion mattered.26
But equally Alston errs in treating his examples as though they offered instances
of direct perception of God unaffected by cultural context. As we have seen, most of
his examples come from mystics who were members of religious orders, such as St
Teresa of Avila. But how experience is described is a function not just of its object but
also of the community in which the person is set. This can affect both the confidence
with which the assertion is made and the shape which is given to its content. Thus,
inevitably individuals will tend to be much more tentative in communities where
they expect to be disbelieved. Equally, how the content is expressed is likely to be
adapted to what is congruent with existing patterns of belief. This is not to say that

26 Isaiah 40, esp. v.22.

 David Brown 171
individuals deliberately lie, but it is to say that, given a choice, for example, between
intimacy and absorption into the divine, they are likely, largely unconsciously, to
mould descriptions of the subjective conditions of their experience to what will meet
with doctrinal approval from their hearers or readers.
Philosophers and theologians alike often write as though mystical experience
was the most refined and pure of all types of religious experience. By contrast,
visions such as those associated with the Virgin Mary are usually viewed as the
lot of the naïve, and everyday experience such as answers to prayer regarded as
involving too heavy an overlay of interpretation to be seen as significant. On the
last point I would agree on exclusion from consideration, not because of the overlay
which I think is present in all experience but rather because I doubt whether such are
appropriately described as religious experiences at all. Take a simple case. Someone
desperate to get to a job interview on time offers up a desperate plea that a parking
place might immediately become available. When this happens, it is taken to be an
immediate answer to prayer. Irrespective of how we may view such an attitude to
specific providence, all would surely agree that the experience is of God producing
an effect in the world, not of God being encountered in Himself. There is perhaps
a sliding scale, but nonetheless a significant difference between some event in the
world being perceived to be an act of divine love and actually feeling oneself to
be caught up into the divine love and care, with ‘the everlasting arms’ underneath
as it were. That is why visions and mystical experience need on my view to be put
together in a way that separates them from what is often called ordinary religious
experience. Yet one must guard against supposing that visions necessarily involve
the greater overlay. St Teresa, for example, like many others frequently identifies the
presence of Christ in her mystical experiences but there were, so far as we know, no
explicit visual elements, whereas at least with the Marian apparitions Mary appeared
in forms recognized by the various children and others involved. Perhaps the issue
can be put most directly by raising the issue of what Christ experienced at his baptism
and immediately thereafter in his forty days in the wilderness. The evangelists allow
for the possibility that the former was more like a subjective, mystical confirmation
of his vocation, whereas with the latter the incidents are recorded as though they
were objective events.27 Modern theologians often toy with the idea that it is only
their adoption into story-form that has led to that conclusion, but might not the
time at which Jesus lived and the intensity with which he lived have led to such
objectifications?28 In countenancing that possibility, my aim is not to undermine
their source in God. Rather, it is to suggest that mystical or visionary may be more

27 Matthew and Mark allow for the possibility that only Jesus saw and heard what
happened at his baptism. Luke makes it a public event, while John the Evangelist records that
John the Baptist was a witness: Matt. 3:13–17; Mark 1:9–11; Luke 3:21–2; John 1:32–4.
28 For some examples of biblical scholars accepting that Jesus was subject to visions:
C. Rowland, The Open Heaven (1982: 358–60); M.J. Borg, Jesus: A New Vision (1987: 33–4,
43).
172 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
a matter of context than anything to do with degree of reliability. The tendency
towards over-determination is there in all religious experience.
For some this draws them to the conclusion that there is no more there than prior
determination.29 That could of course be the case. But a more plausible analysis is
that in this religious experience resembles all other experience. Thus as a rule we
do not infer a particular interpretation of what some familiar individual is doing,
but we simply see it that way, for example one’s wife’s love for her child in the way
she washes it. Yet for all the outsider knows to the contrary the motivation could
really be a concern for her own reputation as a mother. Equally, under-determination
may be the appropriate verdict when comparison is made with the same scenario
against a quite different backdrop. So, to give a familiar example, the English do not
differentiate shades of white in types of snow, but the Inuit do. So what seems to me
required in looking at religious experience is caution, not scepticism. As culture and
contexts vary, so over-determination or under-determination may be the appropriate
conclusion to draw, and in the modern western world it may well be the latter that
in fact predominates.
That may be a surprising conclusion to draw, but the sociologist Max Weber
argued that experiences of religious mystery would gradually disappear from the
world as rational instrumentality came increasingly to dominate modern ways
of thinking,30 and in this contention he may well be right, not least because even
modern-day believers often now approach matters in a similar sort of way. So, for
example, church architecture is assessed exclusively in terms of how it serves the
needs of the worship, and worship in its turn simply in terms of the help it offers to
the worshipping community over such issues as mission or self-fulfilment. If that is
the backdrop against which modern discussion is conducted, it is hardly surprising
that people are only incipiently aware of the potential of worship or of the building
in itself to open them up to experiences of God, and so only verbalize their own
experiences tentatively, if at all. Yet for most of human history architecture was
explicitly seen as offering just such a possibility, and that is why arguments were so
often ferocious about what type of style was appropriate for a religious building. The
point applies no less to a whole range of other aspects of culture that are now viewed
largely in secular terms, ranging from place to landscape painting, from gardens to
sport, from music to the human body, from meals to dance.31

29 The case is argued at length in W. Proudfoot, Religious Experience (1985). His

view is that there is really no common object; ‘the terms in which the subject understands
what is happening to him are constitutive of the experience’ (121). But what this ignores is the
aspectival character of religious experience. Even the Christian can concede that Paul, Wesley
and Schleiermacher (117) experienced quite different divine attributes, and that it is a further
inference that it was the same God involved in each of the three cases.
30 He makes the point in a number of places. It is particularly focused in his notion
of ‘the disenchantment of the world’, for example in his essay ‘Science as a vocation’ (1948:
129–56, esp. 155).
31 Architecture, place, pilgrimage and landscape painting are all discussed in some
detail in my God and the Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience (2004), sport
 David Brown 173
It is hard for us to think ourselves back into such a world, but that does not make
those earlier experiences any less real or veridical. Readers familiar with the relevant
literature are hardly likely to deny that they felt real to those who experienced them.
More contentious is the claim that they actually did offer experience of the divine,
and so might be united with the more tentative, parallel experiences of today to
offer some justification for religious belief. It is at this point that we must confront
yet another way in which contemporary discussion skews the nature of religious
experience. If one fault is the all-or-nothing approach, and another the failure to
recognize that context inevitably affects the nature and strength of the claim, yet
another is a general suspicion of mediation. The mystical is liked because it appears
not to be mediated through the senses, or, if the senses are permitted, at most it is
thought that this should be through perception of the natural world, since this is itself
a direct creation of God.
What such preferences ignore is that no experience of the divine can escape
mediation and that none comes pure, as it were. Thus, as mystical writers themselves
fully acknowledge, preparatory techniques both mental and physical are of the utmost
importance. These would include prayer, purging one’s mind of inessentials, careful
control of one’s breathing and posture, and so on. The calming of mind and body and
the single-minded, integrated focus are thus not irrelevant to the experience of the
divine as timeless and unitary. This is not to say that they are the same thing, since
one can be had without the other. But this is no less true of experiences of divine
transcendence or otherness. One can marvel at a mountain landscape without any
accompanying sense of religious awe, but that awe can come no less through the
mediation of the soaring quality of a great Gothic cathedral.
The fact that the latter is a human artefact does not mean that it is somehow
less capable of mediating an objective divine presence. On the contrary, it was
built in that way with precisely this aim in mind, of encouraging a sense of divine
transcendence and thus with it the possibility of the corresponding experience.32 Nor
were such aims by any means unique to Gothic. Classical architecture was pursued
at the Renaissance with the intention of reflecting divine order and rationality,
Baroque with the aim of ‘making the miraculous manifest’ and in imitation of divine
exuberance and playfulness. Nor was architecture by any means the only human
artefact of this kind. One can find similar principles in activities as different as music
and gardening. Islamic water gardens were intended to reflect the order and balance
of Paradise, and John Evelyn and many another writer of his time and earlier in the
Christian tradition saw in the ordered garden the longing to return to the innocent

and gardens more cursorily. Music and dance, food and attitude to the body are considered in
its sequel, God and Grace of Body (2007).
32 The mediaeval mind would not have put it in terms of expressing divine
transcendence, but implicitly the experience thereby followed, even if not explicitly sought. By
the nineteenth century and neo-Gothic, however, that was also part of the overall intention.
174 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
discipline of Eden.33 The ‘landscaped’ and ‘natural’ garden movements suggest quite
different philosophies, not necessarily all religious. But the point is that such variety
in the human artefacts was once intended to bring out contrasting aspects of the
divine that, it was believed, could only be imperfectly detected in the created order
as it was. Such, for instance, is often the rationale behind the work of the more
devout landscape painter. The intention was not simply to copy what the painter saw
before his eye but rather so to adapt it that the viewer could then return to the scene
and experience the world for what it was – suffused with the divine. Accordingly, so
far from nature having priority over artefact, one might argue that the more effective
mediation actually works the other way round.
Since many of my examples have come from the arts, I may inadvertently have
given the impression of a new sort of elitism, just as bad as I was claiming attached
to exclusive focus upon mystical experience. If so, that was not my intention. I
would want to claim that such experiences are to be found in ‘low’ art no less than
‘high’. Gardening, for example, is not necessarily a ‘high’ art. Again, it should be
emphasized that experiences of the kind I have associated with architecture do not
of themselves require detailed understanding of the principles involved in respect
of a particular style. Indeed, in our own day a more likely inhibiter is the way in
which so many of such places are now crowded with tourists milling around. In
this respect one might contrast the feeling of secularity that so often overwhelms
visitors in tourist attractions such as Westminster Abbey or York Minster with the
quite different experience of individuals sitting quietly in the nave of a cathedral like
Durham. So artistic forms have the potential to reach all.
Nor is there any shortage of other examples more generally applicable that
might be quoted. The dialogue between belonging to a place and transcending it
by going elsewhere in pilgrimage is a dialectic that has found its way into all the
major religions, and that is surely no accident. It speaks of the divine locating and
securing the individual but also pulling him or her into something beyond; in other
words, both providential care and an eternal or other-worldly destiny. Again, the
once common practice of saying grace before meals was not simply a formality but
spoke of thankfulness for what was seen as an unmerited ‘favour’ (the root meaning
of the Greek word ‘grace’); it was after all the case that there was nothing in the
person concerned that gave him or her such an entitlement while others went hungry.
Similarly, the fact that, before eating, a part of the animal was once commonly offered
in sacrifice to the divine has been interpreted by some anthropologists as indicating
a sense that there was no right to kill; only by making the divinity complicit could
the act be justified. So meals were once intimately connected with gratitude to the
divine; only something beyond the world could legitimate one’s good fortune.
I think the atheist would be wrong to deny that such elements are integral to the
experience. However vague, for the subject they were a constitutive element, not
part of some subsequent reflection. A more legitimate criticism would be that they

33 Apart from his Diary, Evelyn is best-known for Sylva with its campaign to reforest
England. Throughout his writings, however, his religious attitude to horticulture is evident.
 David Brown 175
simply reflect psychological longings within the subject, and not any independent
objective reality that has been encountered in this way. There is no knockdown
response to this upon which believers can rely. What they can do is sketch the type
of God or divine existent who might make such experience possible and intelligible.
If we return to Augustine’s image, what is envisaged is a God everywhere alongside
His creation. What such experiences, therefore, do is, as it were, tap into an already
existing presence. What is then yielded is a range of attributes that certainly suggest
divinity but not sufficiently precisely to arbitrate between some of the long-standing
points of contention across the religions, for example between God as personal or
impersonal. Even order and rationality might simply entail something greater than
personality, as Plotinus, for instance, argued. The final resolution of such issues
would therefore hang on other questions, such as the status of the various religions’
claims to revelation or more general philosophical considerations.
There is not the space to pursue that matter any further here. Instead, I shall end by
underlining what I take to be the central contention in this essay: that contemporary
discussions in philosophy and theology alike skew the true character and importance
of religious experience by wrongly locating the key issue as an absolute, an all-
or-nothing affair. Instead, aspectival experience of the presence of the divine was
once commonplace and could be so again, and it is these rather indefinite but
confirming experiences that need to be treated with maximum seriousness once
more. That way, religion is recognized as part of people’s ordinary way of interacting
with their environment, not something that can only be justified by appeal to the
exceptional.34

Further Reading

Alston, W.P., Perceiving God: The Epistemology of Religious Experience, Ithaca,

NY: Cornell University Press, 1991
Brown, D., God and Enchantment of Place: Reclaiming Human Experience, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2004
_____ , God and Grace of Body, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007
Davis, C.F., The Evidential Force of Religious Experience, Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1989
Lash, N., Easter in Ordinary: London: SCM, 1988
Swinburne, R., The Existence of God, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979
Turner, D., The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995

34 In advocating a return to the ordinary, this is to support the approach of some earlier
writers on religious experience such as John Oman and H.H. Farmer. The difference is in my
stress on the varied content of such experience, and the need to acknowledge the way in which
different divine attributes come to the fore in different types of experience.
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 Chapter 10

On Philosophers (Not) Reading History:

Narrative and Utopia
Grace M. Jantzen

How does newness enter the world? How can such newness disrupt the violence of
(post)modernity, violence whose perpetrators often invoke the names of God? And
how can philosophers of religion and theologians help to change the world rather
than be reduced to ineffectual hand-wringing, or, worse, be complicit in the violence?
Philosophers of religion in the Anglo-American world have traditionally held tightly
to disciplinary boundaries, concerning themselves with issues of universal truth:
issues of faith, belief, the nature and existence of God, immortality and so on. I have
argued elsewhere (Jantzen 1998, 2004) that the pursuit of such abstractions is in
fact a masculinist escape from the messy realities of life. In this article, rather than
repeat that critique, I wish to show that in order to be effective in helping to change
the world, it is necessary for thinkers to transcend disciplinary boundaries, moving
beyond ideas of universals and engaging with the concrete narratives of individuals
and cultures.

Function and Narrative

There have been efforts to explain violence itself by seeing it as a universal and
identifying its essence: the exertion of force (de Vries 2002: 1), or the making of
boundaries (Schwartz 1997: 88), or mimetic rivalry (Girard 1977, 1996). There is,
however, a fundamental objection that undercuts all such definitions together, an
objection drawn from the work of Michel Foucault. One of the most significant
aspects of Foucault’s intellectual legacy is his persistent questioning of the very idea
of essence. Foucault’s strategy was to develop ‘a systematic scepticism with respect
to all anthropological universals’, a scepticism that was fostered by ‘interrogating
them in their historical constitution’ (Foucault 1994: 317). In his own work he
applied this strategy to rationality, discipline, sexuality and so on to undermine the
idea of a universal fixed essence for each of these categories. What was needed
instead, as he showed, was an account of how each of these functioned through
time, changing in different historical and cultural contexts. Although Foucault did
not apply his strategy to the idea of death and violence, it is not difficult to see that
these ideas, too, have varied; they have a history, a narrative which underlies and
178 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
frames our present conception.1 What are the forms which violence – in particular
religious violence – has taken in the West? How has it functioned? And where are
the resources for alternatives?
Foucault used the terminology of genealogy or archaeology of a concept,
excavating its layers to show how its sediments continue to underlie present thought.
I shall in addition use the idea of narrative, especially as it has been developed
in the work of Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero. Narrative is a particularly
useful concept here for three reasons. First, while maintaining the Foucauldian idea
of genealogy, it widens the approach so that the changing function of violence is
seen within the broader historical trajectory. Second, narrative cannot escape the
dimension of gender, an aspect which Foucault’s genealogies much too readily
ignored. Third, Judaism and Christianity, the religions that have shaped the West,
are themselves explicitly rooted in narratives and emphasize to their adherents the
importance of remembering and retelling these narratives.
The idea of narrative has not been uncontested in contemporary thought.
Jean-François Lyotard famously defined the ‘postmodern as incredulity toward
metanarratives’, whether metaphysical, political or economic (Lyotard 1984: xxiv).
Any totalizing discourse, any narrative that subsumes everything within its grand
scheme, must be suspect, since by its very nature it allows nothing to stand against
it. What we need is not a grand theory of everything, but rather an alertness to those
things that would call our metanarratives into question: our search must be for
instabilities, for the alien, the marginal and the foreign, which discomfort us in our
too easily unchallenged scheme of things.
I suggest, however, that narrative as I shall be exploring it is not a grand scheme
of things in Lyotard’s sense; neither is it uncontested. On the contrary, ever and again
the choice of violence can be seen as precisely that: a choice, which could have been
made otherwise. There are resources of resistance; and they come, often, from the
marginal and the foreign to destabilize received certainties just as Lyotard hoped.
Identities are forged, for individuals and for societies, by the narratives we assume
about ourselves. We can be more or less explicitly aware of these narratives; we can
all too easily bury unwelcome aspects of them in our unconscious. Yet the stories are
there all the same, framing our sense of ourselves and one another and shaping the
ways in which we act. We have stories whether we like them or not. Our choice is
not about whether we have stories, but about whether we become conscious of them
and choose how they shall shape our future.

Narrative Identity

Who are you? Who am I? Who are we – as a group, a society, a nation? To answer
any of those questions requires not reflection on abstract ideas like ‘the Meaning of
Life’ but a story, which at an individual level involves a name, parents, a place and

1 I discussed this in relation to death in Jantzen 2004: 29–34.

 Grace M. Jantzen 179
time of birth, and an account of the trajectory of the life of the individual from then
until now. Adriana Cavarero, in her important book Relating Narratives (2000), has
shown how significant our personal narratives are to our identity. Our selfhood is
inextricable from the story that can be told of that self.

Without effort or intention, every time and in every circumstance, we perceive ourselves
and others as unique beings whose identity is narratable in a life-story. Each one of us
knows that who we meet always has a unique story. And this is true even if we meet them
for the first time without knowing their story at all. (Cavarero 2000: 33)

Ever since Plato, philosophy has been immersed in the question of what ‘man’ is
– and has seldom bothered much about woman. In our actual lives, however, we are
far more concerned with who we are, ourselves, and also the people we meet: the
unique, unrepeatable and always gendered selfhood of each of us. As Hannah Arendt
was fond of insisting, it is not ‘Man’ – not the universal – who inhabits the earth, but
individual, unique, fragile men and women (Arendt 1958: 7).2 Although philosophy
has concerned itself with the universal ‘Man’, and sought to provide an ontology
or define the essence of this ‘featherless biped’, Arendt argues that human reality,
whether individual or social, cannot be understood by appeal to such universals.
Take for example Oedipus, when faced with the riddle of the Sphinx. Which animal
is it, the Sphinx asked, who goes first on four legs, then two, and at last three?
‘Man!’, Oedipus triumphantly replied, remembering infancy, maturity, and crippled
old age. But clever as he was, this solution, this idea of Man, did not tell him what
he needed to know about himself as an individual man, and thus did not save him
from the disaster of murdering his father and marrying his mother. For him to ‘know
himself’, as Greek philosophers were fond of exhorting, he needed to know more
than universals. He needed to know his own story: crucially, he needed to know the
story beginning with his birth. It is the narratable life-story, beginning with birth and
continuing with all the specificity and irreplacability of the individual life, which
provides meaning and locates an individual in the understanding of herself and
others. Nor is this an optional extra. As is vividly illustrated in the case of Oedipus,
one’s actions flow out of the life-story one tells about oneself – with disastrous
consequences if that story is mistaken at crucial points.3
Oedipus’ need for a story shows, as well, the centrality of memory for personal
identity, and the importance that the memory be accurate. As Cavarero says,

We are all familiar with the narrative work of memory, which, in a totally involuntary way,
continues to tell us our own personal story. Every human being, without even wanting to
know it, is aware of being a narratable self – immersed in the spontaneous auto-narration
of memory. (Cavarero 2000: 33)

2 Though her account cries out for it, Arendt had little to say about gender. Cf. Honig
1995.
3 The example of Oedipus is central to the discussion in Cavarero 2000.
180 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
This is the case even when, as in the story of Oedipus, the auto-narration is in fact
false. How we live, what we choose to do, depends on the memory we have of
ourselves.
Moreover, it now becomes clear that for some of these memories we are
dependent upon others. This is paradigmatically true in relation to birth, as the story
of Oedipus again shows. We cannot remember our own birth, and yet who we are,
the story we tell about ourselves in the ‘auto-narration of memory’, cannot start
without it. Philosophers in modernity have been acutely aware of the significance of
memory in relation to personal identity, but they have seldom paid attention either
to birth or to the need for the memories of others to intersect with and contribute to
one’s own. John Locke, in his example of the prince and the cobbler (Locke 1959:
Book II, ch. 27, paras 15/17 [vol. I, p. 457]), suggested that if the ‘soul’ of each were
to inhabit the body of the other – if, that is, the cobbler woke up one morning with
all the prince’s memories, and vice versa – then the prince and the cobbler would
actually have turned into each other. The cobbler would live in the prince’s body
and in the prince’s palace; and although he would look like the prince he would be
the cobbler and know himself as such, remembering the cobbler’s life-story as his
own. The same would be true for the prince. Though now he would be greeted by
the neighbours of the hovel in which he found himself living – since he now had the
cobbler’s body and appearance – he would be gravely affronted by his circumstances
and their coarse familiarity as altogether unbefitting to the prince which he knew
himself to be.
Locke’s account of memory has been subjected to many sorts of scrutiny,
especially in relation to the importance of the body for personal identity. Most often,
however, it has been the isolated individual who has been in focus, the prince and/or
the cobbler, not the wider community with which each of their lives intersects. But
what if Locke’s tale were told not from the perspective of the prince or the cobbler
but from the point of view of their parents, spouse and children? Who would the
cobbler’s mother consider to be her son: the man whose body she had known since
his infancy or the man who remembered the bedtime stories she used to tell? Which
man would the children call ‘Daddy’: the one they now lived with and who looked
like their father, even though he now seemed not to know them, or the one who knew
all about them but whose body they had never seen before? Which man would the
princess royal be willing to sleep with, the man whose body she knew intimately but
who seemed to have gone off his head with silly ideas about shoemaking, or the man
who looked like a cobbler, but who, like Odysseus with Penelope, could remember
the bed they had shared? Who would be chosen to sire the royal line?
Whichever way we answer these questions, it is obvious that Locke’s story
is vastly more complicated than he himself saw: indeed, it is perhaps ultimately
incoherent. What the questions also make clear, however, is the way in which our
identity, our narratable self, is interlocked not only with our gendered body and its
history (think of the additional complexities if one of Locke’s protagonists had been
female) but also with the memories and narratable selves of others. Ultimately, it is
 Grace M. Jantzen 181
the collection of intersecting narratives that forms the history of a group or society
or nation. As Hannah Arendt says,

That every individual life between birth and death can eventually be told as a story with
beginning and end is the prepolitical and prehistorical condition of history, the great story
without beginning and end. … History ultimately becomes the storybook of mankind.
(Arendt 1958: 184)

Just as philosophers have sought to define an essence of ‘Man’, so also they have
tried to ascertain the ‘Meaning of History’. But if Arendt is right that history is
‘the storybook of mankind’, then the philosophical understanding of history cannot
properly be detached from the intersecting stories of those selves.
Cavarero goes so far as to say that ‘since it results from the interweaving of
individual stories, the great History of humanity is nothing but the book of single
stories’ (Cavarero 2000: 124). This I think overstates the case: history involves not
just the accumulation of stories but also includes attempts at interpreting them and
making sense of their interaction. Nevertheless, Cavarero is certainly right to insist
that it is ultimately upon the stories of narratable selves that historical accounts must
stand or fall. Philosophers can generate universals in abstraction, but in so far as
we hope to understand the world and the society which we inhabit, let alone offer
constructive interventions, we cannot dispense with actual life-stories, the narratives
of individuals and their intersections.
Stories can be told in more than one way, of course. Each of us chooses not only
what aspects of our individual stories we share with others but also, at least to some
extent, what aspects of our own stories we remember and what we forget or repress.
There are deliberate falsifications and fabrications as well as sincere but misguided
interpretations and selections of events. A narrative is not ‘true’ in the sense of being
a complete recital of facts nor in the sense of being the only possible interpretation
(or even the best possible interpretation) of those facts; it is nevertheless the story
which is continued or modified as its trajectory moves onwards. Narrative is therefore
as much about the future as it is about the past. The history we (rightly or wrongly)
claim as our own has an afterlife; its patterns repeat themselves. As Pierre Bourdieu
put it in his development of the idea of the habitus, history reproduces itself on
the basis of history (Bourdieu 1990: 56). If this is so, then in so far as violence
is built into the religious self-understanding of the West, this narrative has shaped
western identity and been acted out in repeated patterns of escalating force. And as in
individual stories, there are within that narrative suggestions for a counter-narrative
which need to be lifted up so that we may be empowered for change.

Narrative and Western Religious Identity

To begin with the obvious, the Bible itself is a book of stories, a sequence of narratives
large and small which together make up the larger narrative of the early Israelites.
Most children in the West learn Bible stories: the creation of the world, Noah’s flood,
182 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Abraham and Isaac, Jonah and the whale. There are longer accounts, too, such as the
chronicles of the lives and reigns of kings. To what extent any of these stories are
(or even purport to be) accurate history is a matter of continuing dispute, but they
have been taken as the auto-narrative of the Israelites. There are of course also other
ingredients in the Hebrew Bible – psalms, proverbs, legal codes – yet even these fall
within the context of the overarching narrative and would make little sense without
it (Alter 1981; Gunn and Fewell 1993).
The detail must be omitted here, but even a cursory glance shows how that narrative
had a profound afterlife which has profoundly shaped western consciousness. The
biblical idea of being the chosen people was taken up by the Christian church,
basing itself on the violent ‘sacrifice’ of Christ; and the self-identity of christendom
is grounded in the narratives of the New Testament and the doctrinal teaching which
bases itself upon them. Again, this is not an argument for the veracity of either the
stories or the dogmas but an observation of the centrality of narrative to the self-
identity of christendom and a recognition of the way narrative lives on and frames
subsequent belief and practice. The Eucharist, for instance, cannot be understood
in terms of abstract or universal dogma, but rather is a perfect example of how one
narrative is embedded in another, and also extends it. Its idea of a ‘new covenant’
could not be understood were it not for the story of the original covenant which
shaped the identity of the Israelites. Similarly, the notion of Jesus as ‘sacrifice’ or
‘Lamb of God’ is part of the afterlife of the narratives of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac
and the rituals of blood sacrifice in the history attributed to ancient Israel. Without
these prior narratives of sacrifice, Jesus’ death could not have been interpreted in
the terms that have become familiar; yet that very interpretation also reshaped the
narrative and extended its afterlife into christendom and beyond.
The narratives of christendom and of the Hebrew Bible are different in important
respects from the narratives of classical civilization, but they combined with them to
form the self-identity of the West. I have shown elsewhere (Jantzen 2004) how the
Romans appropriated for themselves the Greek narratives of heroism, especially the
Homeric epics, so that for example Vergil portrayed Augustus Caesar as descended
from the gods through the heroic Trojan line. This narrative became part of the
ideology of Roman greatness, and served as justification for empire. Romans – at
least upper-class Romans – saw themselves as superior to barbarians, a superiority
massively reinforced when it was combined with the idea held by christendom
of being the specially chosen people of God, the Church as the ark of salvation
which would bear its adherents to heaven while the rest of the world was damned.
Whatever cruelties or injustices Christians visited upon the peoples they conquered
or colonized, they could represent themselves as bringing a generous mission to
people less fortunate than themselves, civilizing them in this world and saving
them from damnation in the next. The Roman Empire, duly christianized, became
a crucial part of the narrative of the West. It lived on in repeated patterns of the
Holy Roman Empire, the Spanish and Napoleonic and British Empires, and now
the American Empire. All of these styled themselves at least in part on christianized
narratives of Rome. Since that narrative was deeply invested in gendered violence,
 Grace M. Jantzen 183
it is not surprising that its afterlife is a history of violent repetitions. Masculinity
was represented in Roman thought as paradigmatically active killing – penetration
by penis or by sword. In christendom this combined in sometimes uneasy patterns
with ideas of violent martyrdom and sacrifice, real and rhetorical, and the practices
of holy war on heretics and infidels: the gendered violence of the narratives has an
afterlife which continues to structure the West until this day.
Now, it might be thought that the power of this violent narrative of identity would
lose its grip in secular modernity. With the deliberate separation of Church and State
in the American Constitution, and the sharp decline of the churches of Europe, surely
biblical narratives of covenant, chosenness and holy war can no longer be used to
justify political or military action? I would argue, however, that discounting the
role of biblical narratives is misguided for two reasons. In the first place, it has
become apparent that religion plays a much larger role in western political thinking
in the twenty-first century than had previously been acknowledged, especially in
the USA where no politician can afford to ignore the power of the religious right
and where every presidential address ends with ‘God bless America’. In American
interventions from Nicaragua to Iraq it is obvious in both action and rhetoric that
America considers herself to be superior, not only militarily, which she obviously is,
but also morally and politically, which is much less obvious. Any means may be used
to preserve her way of life and impose ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ (to say nothing
of global capitalism) on others: indeed, it is her vocation to do so. The vocabulary
of ‘vocation’ or ‘calling’ comes easily to presidential lips, a vocabulary that implies
a divine call to a chosen people. Although British and European political leaders
would use such overtly religious language less glibly, they too appeal to notions of
trust and moral obligation, and easily assume the superiority of western democracy
and culture over that of others.
This points to a second reason why it is important to take biblical stories and
ideas as fundamental even to the ostensibly secular identity of the West. As John
Gray has argued, modernity itself is founded upon the religious idea of salvation.

The prevailing idea of what it means to be modern is a post-Christian myth. Christians

have always held that there is only one path to salvation, that it is disclosed in history and
that it is open to all. … Worshipping one God, Christians have always believed that only
one way of life can be right. (Gray 2003: 103)

Gray points out that Eastern religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism do not seek for
a meaning in history: salvation does not occur in time or history but rather is liberation
from it. In the modern West, however, history itself is construed as ‘progress’, a
secular variant of ‘salvation history’; and the West considers itself farthest along that
road of modernity, which should come to all nations as they continue to ‘develop’.
There is therefore in western nations a secular faith, inherited from the Christian idea
of salvation, that ‘as the rest of the world absorbs science and becomes modern, it is
bound to become secular, enlightened and peaceful – as, contrary to all evidence, they
imagine themselves to be’ (Gray 2003: 118). The Christian idea of salvation from
sin was transformed, partly through its absorption of Greek philosophical concepts,
184 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
into the idea of salvation from finitude. Once release from finitude was envisaged,
then scientists, politicians and economists could rely on the religious mythology
that informs the half-unconscious auto-narrative of the West to support their drive
for progress and development. To suppose that because the modern West is secular
it is no longer influenced by biblical narratives is therefore to misunderstand the
character and basis of secular modernity.

Narrative and Resources for Change

The auto-narrative of the West, steeped as it is in biblical stories and the classical
world, is thus an auto-narrative deeply invested in gendered death-dealing. War and
killing are marks of masculinity: men follow the Lord of Hosts to battle, literal or
spiritual, while women are passive and accept suffering and sacrifice. Mimetic desire
as analysed by René Girard is a powerful account of the spiral of violence of the
West and its fixation on death; far too much of the history of the West can be told in
terms of necrophilic longings premised upon a lack which is filled by violence and
mastery on the part of men, and the sacrifice and submission of women.
It can easily be seen, however, that not all desire is mimetic or premised upon a
lack. In particular, creativity, and the desire it expresses, must be both innovative,
not merely mimetic, and require something other than lack. To paint a picture or
write a book, unless it is merely derivative, involves having new ideas; moreover,
it cannot be done just because someone else has done so and I desire to do the
same. The desire to be creative, to bring something new into the world out of the
overflowing fullness of resources, is at least as important as mimetic desire, though
it has received far less scholarly attention. But how is this creative desire to be
understood, and how can it be channelled to generate resources for change?
I suggest that it is once again to narrative that we can look as a place to begin the
investigation. In any story of a self, we assume that it has a beginning and has (or
will have) an end: birth and death. Our auto-narratives begin with our parents and
our birth, even though the story of our birth (and ultimately also our death) can only
be told by somebody else. Moreover although it is inevitable that each of us will die,
it would be perverse – or sick – to tell the story of our lives as though death were its
whole focus or meaning. The lives that we live and the narratives we tell of those
lives are full of actions and events that are done and experienced with the resources
that we have from birth and have developed since then. It is paradigmatically with
the birth of a child that newness comes into the world: new possibilities of choice
and action, imagination and creativity. Birth and death are the events that begin and
end each human life; natality and mortality are the philosophical categories that take
their bearings from these events. As I have argued elsewhere, western philosophy
has been much preoccupied with mortality, defining the meaning of life by reference
to its temporal finitude, the fact that it must end. Yet it is with natality, with the
possibility of new resources and ideas flowing out of fullness of creative desire,
 Grace M. Jantzen 185
from which hope can be drawn. This is as true at the level of society as it is for the
meaning of individual lives.
It follows that the narrative of the West can be told in more than one way. Full
of wars and violence as the West has been, it has also been full of love and beauty
and creativity. A history that concentrates on violence and war is like a life-story that
places the focus of meaning upon death. Death is significant, to be sure, and not to
be ignored; but birth, too, is part of the story; and it is with birth, with creativity, that
newness can enter the world. Natality is that which offers the possibility of fresh
starts, new and creative approaches that can subvert violence and destruction. It is
therefore crucial, in developing resources for change, that we look not only at the
narratives of mortality, war and violence, where mimetic desire as lack spirals into
destruction, but also at narratives of natality and creativity, expressions of beauty
and newness.
Moreover, natality cannot be thought of without body and gender: the body of the
mother and the sexed newcomer to whom she gives birth and whose life-story begins
in the web of relationships anchored in the mother. A focus on mortality can ignore
gender. It can look away from the body, as it has through centuries of christendom,
and concentrate instead on an immortal soul. It can treat the self as an atomistic
individual, unconnected with others, since it is after all possible to die alone. But
no one can be born alone: a focus on natality must recognize the narratable self in
interconnection with other selves, each of whom is as unique and irreplaceable as
itself.
Once we begin to tell stories of the self and stories of culture in a way that
takes natality seriously, another shift occurs. It becomes obvious that the metaphor
of salvation which has dominated western history (both sacred and secular) is indeed
a metaphor, and one that fits snugly with a focus on mortality. Salvation connotes
rescue from an intolerable situation, not a change in the situation itself. It is a rescue
that is effected by someone outside, not brought about by the one in peril. It bespeaks
atomistic individualism, just as does mortality: one individual can be miraculously
‘saved’ while everyone else is destroyed. Christendom is full of such stories, from
Noah’s flood to the book of Revelation, where hand-picked individuals rejoice in
heavenly bliss while the rest of the world is swallowed up in damnation. The body,
and especially its unruly sexuality, has often been seen as a hindrance to salvation:
it is the soul that is saved, on some accounts by escaping the body, on others by
effecting the body’s transformation. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in a
religious rhetoric that focuses on mortality and salvation, the body has been suspect,
and women – sexually attractive, embodied, birth-giving – represented as inferior to
the male.
If, however, we begin with birth and use the category of natality as a frame of
reference, then the metaphor that comes to mind is not ‘salvation’ but ‘flourishing’ as
a garden or a plant flourishes and flowers. Unlike salvation, which could be granted
to one individual alone, flourishing (like natality) implies interconnection in a web
of life, a web in which each contributes to the well-being of the other in a circle of
interdependence (as plants, bees, birds, rain and the earth itself need one another to
186 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
flourish). If there is something amiss, it must be put right: a single individual cannot
flourish while leaving an intolerable situation as it is. Nor does flourishing require
miraculous rescue from the outside. Provided that conditions are right, flourishing
is natural; it comes from within, from the resources of life growing into fullness. It
is therefore vitally reliant upon the body, and upon nourishment and reproduction.
Working from the metaphor of flourishing one would never minimize the importance
of the body, gender, or the maternal; and the misogyny which has plagued christendom
would have no place. The metaphor of flourishing has an important place for death
as the natural end of life, but it does not allow the idea that it is death which gives
life its meaning and significance. The metaphor of flourishing has a place in biblical
writings, but it is very largely displaced in christendom by the metaphor of salvation,
to such an extent that flourishing may now seem like a novel concept and salvation
as literal doctrine, not a metaphor at all. In the narrative of the West, the focus on
mortality and the metaphor of salvation have given rise to an ideology of dominance
and the technologies and practices of violence, while natality, creativity, beauty and
flourishing have been suppressed or ignored.
But this does not mean that they do not exist. Just as the narratives we tell of our
individual lives select some things and omit others, depending on the purposes for
which we tell them, so also the religious narratives of the Bible and of christendom
select and omit, depending on the storyteller and the context in which they were
written. The Bible is after all not a single book, even though the christendom of
the West has chosen to present it as if it were, by enclosing it within a single set of
covers, with uniform typeface and consecutive pagination. It is a whole collection
of literature written by authors with conflicting agendas and to audiences with
varying needs. Hence ‘the biblical canon should not be understood as the product of
a peaceful consensus, but as the result of protracted struggles for authority between
competing communities’ (Schwartz 1997: 146), a process that continues through its
whole afterlife until the present. It is within the fissures and ambiguities of narrative,
I suggest, that effective history is found, a history that renounces the complacency
of ideology and looks instead for the resources that can help to bring about change.
So long as our auto-narratives, individual or collective, try to focus on universals,
and reject the disruptions presented by particularity with its invitations to think and
act otherwise, we shall repeat the patterns established in that narrative. On the other
hand, if we accept the invitation to destabilize this auto-narrative, then I suggest that
we can discover openings which lead to resources for change. I shall discuss two
such openings, beginning with the negative.

The Power of the Negative for Change

A philosopher who expended much effort in theorizing the significance of the

negative and its role in bringing about change was G.W.F. Hegel (see especially his
Phenomenology of Spirit). Hegel is often caricatured as a philosopher of totality: one
form of life or consciousness meets its opposite, and in the conflict a new third form
 Grace M. Jantzen 187
emerges, only to meet its opposite in turn in a stately waltz of the Absolute through
time. There is something in this caricature; certainly in the Phenomenology Hegel
appears to be charting the advance of (human? German?) spirit in terms of such
encounters. The detail has been endlessly discussed.
However, it is much more interesting for my purposes to ask about how Hegel
understood the role of opposition or the negative in such encounters, the dynamism
of the negative which makes it a resource for change. Here we return to the idea of
desire as lack. In Hegel’s terms, consciousness sees itself over against what it is not,
what it does not have. This gives rise to desire, a desire which works to fill the lack.
By working through this lack towards fulfilment desire acts as a powerful dynamic
of change. Judith Butler, in her analysis of the role of desire in Hegel’s thought,
says:

Conceived as a lack, a being-without, desire initially signifies negativity; as the pursuit

of substance, desire thus implicitly raises the question of whether human negativity,
that which constitutes its ontological difference, can be resolved into an encompassing
network of being. Human desire articulates the subject’s relationship to that which is not
itself, that which is different, strange, novel, awaited, absent, lost. (Butler 1999: 9)

Desire as negativity is thus vital as the dynamic of change. Both Hegel and Butler
write in abstract terms; it is easiest to conceive of their ‘subject’ as an individual
human consciousness. But it is not hard to see how this theory is concretely
instantiated in relation to the ambiguities of narrative and effective history. As the
individual or collective subject becomes conscious of the fissures and disruptions,
comes to recognize the complacent ideology of traditional history for what it is, and
hears the voices from the margins of what might have been but is not, the subject
comes to desire this negative.
Desire for what one is not can of course be destructive and violent, as Girard
showed in his account of mimetic rivalry. The example that springs most readily to
mind in relation to Hegel is his account of lordship and bondage, where two subjects
desire recognition from one another and engage in a struggle to the death in order
to achieve it. While the importance of this aspect of desire as lack could hardly be
overstated, however, it is not the whole account. Desire can also, after all, be for
what is good, what is creative, that is experienced as a lack or a negative by the
desiring subject. Thus negation is not merely a principle of destruction but also a
principle of creativity. Judith Butler says,

The negative is also human freedom, human desire, the possibility to create anew; the
nothingness to which human life had been consigned was thus at once the possibility of
its renewal. The nonactual is at once the entire realm of possibility. The negative showed
itself in Hegelian terms not merely as death, but as a sustained possibility of becoming.
(Butler 1999: 62)

Neither Butler nor Hegel writes in terms of narrative, but it is clear that the account
of the creative role of the negative can be applied. When the ambiguities and fissures
188 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
of effective history disrupt the traditional story, glimpses appear of what it is not,
its negative; and these begin to show themselves as possibilities of what might be.
I shall argue in a moment that unless there is also desire that overflows, desire not
premised upon a lack, then these negatives on their own can lead at best to partial
transformation, at worst to mere reversal: the old slave becomes the new master
but the system of slavery is not overcome. Nevertheless, the negative, and desire
for what is not, is of enormous importance in the development of narrative identity.
Yearning for peace instead of violence, generosity rather than greed, flourishing
rather than dereliction, is indispensable for the creation of a better future, even
though this yearning, so long as it is based on a negative, is as yet yearning only
for the mirror image of what is undesirable. Sometimes, indeed, confronting the
negative as negative is all that is possible in a concrete situation. Jean-Paul Sartre
famously recognized that there are times when the only freedom left to an individual
or a group is the freedom to say no. The power to refuse an intolerable state of affairs
is a terrible final freedom in a situation where such resistance comes at the price of
one’s life; but nevertheless it remains open, and in the context of Nazi occupation
and the resistance movement within which Sartre wrote, this freedom of resistance,
the ultimate negative, was embraced, often with great heroism. If it was not within
their power to bring about a better world, they could at least refuse to be party to the
evils of the regime that was being imposed upon them. They could say no.
The negative is thus crucial as part of the dynamic for change, and should not
be passed over too quickly. Hegel writes of ‘tarrying with the negative’, ‘looking
the negative in the face’ (Hegel 1977: 19, emphasis mine), not treating it merely
as nothing or false or of no importance. It is important to confront the violence
and death-dealing of western self-identity in all its dimensions if we are to develop
resources for change. Only by facing up to and tarrying with the negative in our
individual and collective auto-narratives will the yearning for change grow. If we
turn too quickly away from it, do not come to terms with it as that which has made
us what we are, then our efforts at change are likely to be mere repetitions. As Paul
Ricoeur once said, ‘If we want to be instructed by events, then we must not be in
a hurry to solve them’ (Ricoeur 1965: 247). To jump quickly from an immediate
crisis to a ‘solution’ without confronting the ambiguities of the history which forms
the context in which the crisis occurs is to risk repetition and escalation, history
reproducing itself on the basis of history.
Thus if in our present context we hope to offer constructive suggestions for non-
violent alternatives to the conflicts that are tearing the world apart in the name of
God, we must take the time to study the genealogy of religious violence in the West.
The goal of such study is threefold. First, it will make us aware of the complex ways
in which religion, gender and violence have been interlocked in the history of the
West. Second, it will increase yearning for an alternative, desire for the ‘negative’ of
this destructive pattern. Third, by raising up the counter-narratives and dissonances,
listening to the voices from the margins, we will find clues for how it could have
been different, how we might learn to think otherwise and bring about change for
the better.
 Grace M. Jantzen 189
Thinking Utopia

This third goal, however, already indicates that though it is essential to tarry with the
negative and not pass over it too quickly, ultimately the negative is not good enough.
Though the negative can be dynamic, fostering desire for change, the desire that is
premised on lack will still always be desire for the polar opposite of the situation
perceived as negative: master and slave will reverse positions. If change is to be truly
transformative rather than simply the antithesis of the present (like the negative of a
photograph), then the negative is not enough. It is at this point that creativity enters,
the desire to bring about something new, out of overflowing abundance, not out of
lack, and aiming towards flourishing rather than destruction.
In political terms, the vision for positive change has been presented as utopia.
Utopia literally means ‘no place’: it does not exist and perhaps never could. It is
the place outside the auto-narrative of the community, extra-territorial, that calls
traditional history into question and reveals other possibilities.

From this ‘no place’ an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange,
nothing more being taken for granted. The field of the possible is now open beyond that of
the actual; it is a field, therefore, for alternative ways of living. (Ricoeur 1986: 16)

Paul Ricoeur, who wrote these words, contrasts utopia with ideology. Ideology can
(with qualifications) be seen as the auto-narrative of traditional history, the complacent
story (in the West) of progress, freedom and democracy, ideas often treated as
universals. The exterior, the outside, the place on the margins, problematizes this
complacency; but it is also the place from which real alternatives can be imagined.

May we not say then that the imagination itself – through its utopian function – has a
constitutive role in helping us rethink the nature of our social life? Is not utopia – this leap
outside – the way in which we radically rethink what is family, what is consumption, what
is authority, what is religion, and so on? Does not the fantasy of an alternative society and
its exteriorization ‘nowhere’ work as one of the most formidable contestations of what is?
(Ricoeur 1986: 16)

Any theoretical account of how this ‘leap outside’ is to be achieved is about as

useful as a theoretical account of any sort of leap, or indeed any sport or skill. One
does not learn to run or jump or play an instrument by reading books about it, but
by practice; and if that practice is guided by a skilled coach or teacher it is all the
more likely to produce good results. In the effort to find an ‘exterior’ place from
which the ‘contestation of what is’ can get a purchase, it is no help to generate more
abstractions. Nevertheless, we need not work in a vacuum: there are excellent guides
among many groups who have been marginalized whether because of gender, race,
colonization, disability, or any of the other ways of not being the normative white
heterosexual affluent male. Teresa de Lauretis, discussing how feminism has learned
to represent gender otherwise, writes of the ‘exterior’ place like this (using ‘utopia’
here in a negative sense):
190 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
That ‘elsewhere’ is not some mythic distant past or some utopian future history: it is the
elsewhere of history here and now, the blind spots, the space-off, of its representations. I
think of it as spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the
interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati.
(de Lauretis 1987: 25).

There are, de Lauretis says, spaces that exist and that can be discerned in ‘counter-
practices and new forms of community’ (26). By attending to these ‘chinks and
cracks’, listening to the voices from the margins of the biblical texts and the history
of religion in the West (and being aware that many voices have been silenced
altogether), there are resources for imagining and working towards newness.
The creativity of imagination empowered by desire for newness is inspired by the
counter-narratives and alternative perspectives of exteriority, and guided by values
of natality and flourishing. It is this imagination that is set free by attentiveness to
the life and beauty that emerges ever and again as contrasted with the sordid violence
that structures the narrative of the West, and develops a poetics of transformation. In
concrete terms, what is required is a painstaking genealogy not only of the religious
violence that has formed the West but also of the voices of resistance, beauty and
hope. Only by reading history can philosophers of religion be effective in helping to
bring newness into the world.

Further Reading

Arendt, H., The Human Condition, Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1958
Cavarero, A., Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans. Paul A. Kottman,
London and New York: Routledge, 2000
Gray, J., Al Queda and What it Means to be Modern, London: Faber and Faber,
2003
Jantzen, G.M., Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion,
Manchester and Bloomington, IN: Manchester University Press, and Indiana
University Press, 1998
_____ , Foundations of Violence: Death and the Displacement of Beauty, Volume
One, London and New York: Routledge, 2004
Schwartz, R.M., The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism, Chicago,
IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997
 Chapter 11

What To Say: Reflections on Mysticism

after Modernity
George Pattison

Whatever its virtues, the word ‘mystical’ also covers a multitude of philosophical
sins. Many recent – and, for that matter, not so recent – commentators see it as
especially delinquent in respect of its entanglement in some basic confusions about
the interrelationship between language, experience and selfhood. One thing that
is especially striking about such critics is that they represent a range of otherwise
disparate ideological positions yet are united in their resistance to the idea that the
ambiguous, evasive or paradoxical language of ‘the mystics’ is to be understood as
the mirroring in language of an extra-linguistic experience in which the normally
reliable structures of the self and its world were suspended or even obliterated.
A classic statement of this earlier view was made by Dom Cuthbert Butler in his
1922 study Western Mysticism. Here Butler wrote that

It is well to warn the reader that much of the language used will appear hardly intelligible,
and may even give rise to doubts as to the mental balance of some of the writers. It has
to be asserted strongly that the great mystics were not religiously mad; nor were they
pious dreamers: far from it – they were, most of them, peculiarly sane and strong men
and women, who have left their mark, many of them, for good in history. The obscurity
and apparent extravagance of their language is due to their courage in struggling with
the barriers and limitations of human thought and language in order to describe in some
fashion what they experienced in the height of the mystic state. (Butler 1960: 67)

Even apparently heretical statements of a pantheistic kind, identifying God and

the world or God and the soul, are, Dom Cuthbert believed, to be ascribed to the
difficulties of this translation.
An early paradigm of what has since become a near-consensus among many
philosophers of religion was the 1978 essay by Steven T. Katz, ‘Language,
epistemology and mysticism’. Katz was by no means dismissive of the possibility
of mystical experience, but he did object to a number of claims typically made by or
on behalf of those who reported such experiences. Especially, he took issue with the
then prevalent view that there was a single core ‘experience’ underlying the dazzling
variety of mystical writings, utterances and phenomena. Such a view perpetuated a
naïve – and certainly pre-(late)Wittgensteinian – understanding of the relationship
192 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
between language and experience. Experiences are not something that go on in a
kind of silent parallel universe and then get translated, more or less successfully,
into words. Experiences only occur as experiences, as human experiences, as our
experiences, because they occur in a context framed by the beliefs, values and
intentions embedded in the universal medium of self-conscious life: language.
‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must keep silent’1 – these closing words
of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, though often referred to as ‘mystical’, can be taken
in a sense, a sense provided by the later Wittgenstein himself, as profoundly anti-
mystical: for where language has nothing to contribute, then there is nothing for us
to talk about. Only what has its place within language can be regarded as worthy of
discussion.
Katz stated what he calls ‘the single epistemological assumption’ behind his
essay in the following terms:

There are NO pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more
ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any grounds for believing that they
are unmediated. That is to say, all experience is processed through, organized by, and
makes itself available to us in extremely complex epistemological ways. The notion of
unmediated experience seems, if not self-contradictory, at best empty. (Katz 1978: 26)

As becomes clear in the remainder of Katz’s essay, the most important of the complex
epistemological ways in which experience is always already mediated is language.
As he goes on to say, ‘The Christian mystic usually says that what he experiences
is “union with God”. The Hindu mystic says that his experience is one in which
his individual self is identical with Brahman or the Universal Self.’ (29) By this,
Katz does not mean to say that mystical experiences don’t happen, but simply that
they don’t happen outside the structures of interpretation given in, with and under
linguistic form. If we want to understand what’s going on in mystical experience,
then, we should not try to familiarize ourselves with that ineffable pre-linguistic
dimension of which the mystic seems to speak; we should simply try to understand,
precisely, what the mystic says. There is not ‘a’ mystic experience, but a Hindu
experience and a Christian experience, and, within each of these, a multitude of more
specific experiences that speak to and out of the more specific linguistic and cultural
coordinates of the experiencer.
Although Katz does not subscribe to the basic philosophical assumptions
of phenomenology (in fact, he makes a point of telling us that he is ‘no great
admirer’ of phenomenology), he does find some value in what he takes to be the
phenomenological concept of intentionality. In the context of language this means
that no word or linguistic unit is at any stage to be found floating around without any
intended reference whatsoever: consciousness is always to be found related to some
‘datum as meant’, that is, an intentional aim at ‘some specific meaning or meaningful
content’ (Katz 1978: 63). The mystics’ words about the ineffability of what they have
experienced are, perhaps despite appearances, always understandable in terms of the

1 Author’s preferred translation [eds].

 George Pattison 193
total discourse within which the peak moments of their rhetorical self-presentation
are set.
The broad features of Katz’s approach, as described, have since acquired
something like normative status in wide reaches of contemporary Anglo-American
philosophy of religion, even, as previously indicated, being common to widely
divergent ideological tendencies. Thus, on the one hand, George A. Lindbeck has
privileged what he calls the cultural–linguistic model of religious truth over what he
sees as its main current rivals, the experiential–expressivist and cognitive models.
On Lindbeck’s account religious symbols and doctrines are neither a means of
expressing pre-theological experience nor assertions about independent metaphysical
or empirical states of affairs. Rather, they are to be understood in terms of the whole
cultural ‘code’ to which they belong. Although language has a special place in the
structure of cultural encoding, Lindbeck notes that symbolic action, such as liturgy,
must also be included here. However, as he puts it, ‘the most easily pictured of
the contrasts between a cultural–linguistic model of religion and an experiential–
expressive one is that the former reverses the relation of the inner and the outer.
Instead of deriving external features of a religion from inner experience, it is the
inner experiences which are viewed as derivative’ (Lindbeck 1984: 34). Rather than
gesture, ritual and word being attempts to express or to communicate the immediacy
of some pre-symbolic experience, experiences are to be understood as generated and
shaped by symbolic systems.
If Lindbeck’s position offers a subtle defence of existing religious cultural–
linguistic systems (that is, Churches), it is the moments of rupture and transformation
in these systems that most engages the British philosopher of religion Don Cupitt, not
least with regard to what he regards as the meaning of ‘mysticism after modernity’.
Cupitt sees mysticism as a feature of those periods in history when the foundations
of reigning religious orthodoxies began to crumble and radical figures were setting
out in search of something new. In these terms, as Cupitt puts it, ‘This suggests a
certain proportionality: the mystics were in the same sort of position relative to the
culture of their time as the various New Age and other counter-cultural movements
are in relation to the violent upheavals of our own time.’ (Cupitt 1998: 108) Yet,
like Katz and Lindbeck, Cupitt agrees that whatever the mystic is taken as doing,
it is something done in and as language: ‘The mystic’s task then is to overcome
the contradictions of orthodoxy and create religious happiness. This is a task for
a writer. You can’t first experience religious happiness and then transcribe it into
words, because writing produces experience, writing forms and produces experience,
writing makes experience possible.’ (114) The characteristic dislocations of mystical
discourse are therefore seen as arising from the tension between what Cupitt sees as
two distinct vocabularies, the one being ‘the mythological and poetical language of
the Scriptures, of worship and preaching and popular belief’, the other being ‘the
official “high” language in which the limits of permissible belief and practice are
laid down, orthodoxy is defined, and the faith is systematized’ (118). The ‘strange
ways’ in which mystics use language are therefore part of an attempt ‘to recreate
religious freedom and a spirit of levity, within a tradition that has become a cruel
194 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
and alienating power-structure’ (120). The mystics are not to be seen as fumbling
desperately for words but, in a sense, as virtuosi of language, drawing attention
to the inconsistencies of the given cultural–linguistic systems that define the given
religious landscape and projecting new and unrealized possibilities for the future. It is
not ‘human thought and language’ as such that the mystics are seeking to transcend,
but always and only a culturally specific form of human thought and language.
It is perhaps a not dissimilar sense for mysticism as a very specific kind of
language (rather than a kind of experience) that leads Denys Turner to assert that, in
fact, ‘modern interpretation has invented “mysticism” and that we persist in reading
back the terms of that conception upon a stock of mediaeval authorities who knew of
no such thing – or, when they knew of it, decisively rejected it’ (1995b: 7). Within the
modern period – indeed, from the fourteenth century onwards – Turner suggests that
the categories of ‘theologian’ and ‘mystic’ are to all intents and purposes mutually
exclusive. Whatever Christian theology is or should be about, it is not the modern
invention of some transcultural mystical experience.
One of my aims in this paper is to contest this consensus. In doing so, however,
I am not denying that important insights have been registered and that the kinds
of positions I have just summarized impose a certain conscientiousness in
acknowledging the enormous complexity of the kinds of cultural data being offered
in mystical texts. The tendency of historians of religion or comparative religionists
to group what can now be seen as widely diverse cultural and textual materials into
catch-all categories such as ‘mystical experience’ could often lead to a flattening
out rather than an enriching of understanding – although, arguably, in its own time
and place the ‘invention’ of mysticism by nineteenth-century theorists (if that is
what actually happened) did draw attention to much that would otherwise have been
neglected. Without the impetus given by a William James, an Evelyn Underhill or a
Dom Cuthbert Butler texts and contexts that now call for very different interpretation
from their own would have continued to be unread and unstudied.
Yet my chief aim is not really to call for ‘two cheers’ for these earlier writers on
mysticism, still less to seek to reinstate their leading idea of ‘a’ mystical experience,
outside and beyond all cultural relativity. Perhaps it is more to question some of
the assumptions about language and about the relationship between language and
experience and what is going on in mystical experience that seem to be shared –
despite all their differences – by Katz, Lindbeck, Cupitt and many others.
There will be two main foci to my discussion. The first is provided by the
meditations on language found in the later Heidegger. I shall then seek to relate these
to the representation of religious experience in some of the writings of Dostoevsky.
Heidegger is, in one perspective, a challenging choice of interlocutor, since he
would seem to be the ancestor of one strand of our current pan-logism, that is, the
view that there is nothing outside language. Certainly, language is absolutely pivotal
to both early and late Heidegger, and, in the later Heidegger at least, it would seem
questionable whether there is or can be a genuinely human moment or experience
that is not always already mediated by language. Even if, for Heidegger, the form
of language that is given greatest weight is the perhaps exceptional word of the
 George Pattison 195
poet, it is in the speaking of this word that the world becomes open and that we, its
speakers and auditors, are granted access to something that abides in the midst of
what is otherwise the sheer meaningless flux of temporal becoming. In no other way,
it seems, do or can we become human, apart from the way in which our humanity is
opened up in, by and as language.

II

A convenient presentation of Heidegger’s approach is found in his lecture ‘The

Principle of Identity’. Much of his argument has now been incorporated into the
stock-in-trade of the philosophy of religion in the continental tradition. Nevertheless,
precisely because many of his expressions are so extensively traded in the
contemporary knowledge-market, where one is tempted to say that they are often
used merely as slogans or lapel badges, it is worthwhile reminding ourselves how
Heidegger himself arrived at and used them.
Heidegger sets out to consider the contemporary significance of the principle of
identity, conventionally summarized in the formula A=A. As he proceeds to interpret
this formula, Heidegger discovers in it a further layer: that A is not understood here
simply as A being equal or equivalent to A, but as A being A. A=A means A is A. This
doesn’t seem to get us very much further, until Heidegger turns to a Parmenidean
fragment, translated by Kirk and Raven as ‘for the same thing can be thought as can
be’.2 Glossing this saying, Heidegger interprets it as a statement of the belonging
together of man (the one who thinks) and Being. He argues that for most of the western
philosophical tradition (and, for Heidegger, this invariably includes philosophical
theism) this has been understood primarily in terms of the ‘togetherness’ of thinking
and Being. In other words, the truth of thinking is determined by its sameness – its
identity – with what is. To speak truthfully is to state what is the case. Speaking,
logos, truth is determined by its conformity to what is, to Being or, more precisely, to
the particular being under consideration whose ‘being’ is assumed to be comprised
in and constituted by its identity with itself. Language is merely the instrument by
which the selfsameness of the object being thought is enabled to appear in thought,
as itself.
This assumption, Heidegger claims, is one of the basic principles of western
European thinking and of western science and technology. For even though science
and technology do not waste time on such an abstract idea as the principle of identity,
they nevertheless assume it – otherwise, Heidegger says, ‘science could not be sure
in advance of the identity of its object, it could not be what it is’ (ID 26). But this also
applies to humanistic science. Thus, in relation to the theory of mysticism, we could
say that the approach of James, Butler and other earlier theorists of the kind criticized
by Katz was predicated on the principle of identity in that it assumed that there was a
‘being’ – even if only a psychological being or entity – that provided the determining

2 Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference (1969: 269). Further references are given
as ID in the text.
196 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
and self-identical measure of theory. The mystical experience – irrespective of the
objectivity of its deliverances about supernatural beings – was the ‘thing itself’ that
made any scientific study of the phenomenon of mysticism possible.
Heidegger does not directly attempt to refute this principle. What he does
instead is to sketch an alternative approach, which, he hints (and explores more fully
elsewhere), is attentive to dimensions of the Parmenidean saying that have passed
unnoticed in the course of western philosophical history. Instead of focusing on the
‘togetherness’ of thought and being, he suggests, let us try to think instead in terms
of the ‘belonging’ aspect of the phrase ‘the belonging together of man and Being’.
If we do this, Heidegger argues, a quite different view emerges. This view is not
– as what one might call ‘pop-Heideggerianism’ would have it – simply an alternative
to the view that finds its supreme expression in science and technology. For the view
offered by the focus on belonging is, as Heidegger will say, even to be glimpsed in
the enframing that he regards as the operative principle of technology (ID 38). If this
enframing sets up and disposes the world in such a way as to allow only what can
be scientifically known and technologically acted upon to count as reality – thereby,
however unknowingly, giving effect to the principle of identity – it also reveals,
however obscurely, that there is a fundamental belonging in the relationship between
humankind and Being. In terms of the modern world’s scientific self-understanding,
we cannot be (that is, live) otherwise than as denizens of the reality that science and
technology enframe. We cannot escape the world and there is nothing in the world
that is not, in principle, knowable by us. Even in our modern alienation from the
world, we recognize and, indeed, proclaim that we belong fundamentally to it.
Yet, in insisting that only what appears within the frame of science and technology
can count as real, the modern world excludes aspects of the belonging together of
humankind and Being that also merit attention. So dominant is the frame of science
and technology, however, that we can only get to see these other aspects by taking
what, from the scientific point of view, must appear like a leap into the irrational
dark. Heidegger, however, sees it as a leap ‘into the realm from which man and
Being have already reached each other in their active nature [Wesen], since both are
mutually appropriated, extended as a gift, one to the other’ (ID 33).
In other words, where the representational thinking that is characteristic of
philosophy, science and technology sees Being in terms of the ‘reality’ to which
thought has to conform (even when, as with ‘the mystical experience’, that reality is
itself a mental event), the leap takes us into a realm where it is simply not necessary
to worry about establishing a connection between thought and Being because they
are each experienced in their inalienable mutual coinherence. Thought never is
without Being, being never is without thought. Heidegger speaks here of a ‘realm,
vibrating within itself’ (ID 37) – ‘vibrating’ in that there is no final fact, thing or
reality to which meaning could be reduced and, equally, no final logical requirement
to which Being would have to answer to count as true. In his idea of ‘the event of
appropriation’ he therefore seeks to stress both that this is an ‘event’, something that
 George Pattison 197
happens, and an ‘act of appropriation’ in which we, as human subjects, are fully
engaged and active.3
Crucial here is the question of language.

To think of appropriating as the event of appropriation means to contribute to this

self-vibrating realm. Thinking receives the tools for this self-suspended structure from
language. For language is the most delicate and thus the most susceptible vibration
holding everything within the suspended structure of the appropriation. We dwell in the
appropriation inasmuch as our active nature [Wesen] is given over to language. (ID 37–
8)

Language reveals Being as being open to language. Being ‘is’ as a linguistic

‘happening’ and only as such is it thinkable. This may sound like, but is very far from
being, a repetition of the view that we have no access to Being apart from language
and that, therefore, Being ‘is’ only what it is in and as language (which would be the
position of the post-Wittgensteinian philosophers of religion previously discussed).
In a Heideggerian perspective it would be more accurate to say instead that Being
‘is’ also as it is in language – and language ‘is’ (that is, functions as meaningful
discourse) also as it is a revelation of what is given to us in and by Being.
In this connection there is a very deliberate acoustic metaphor in Heidegger’s
emphasis on the ‘belonging’ of humankind and Being, since the German word
incorporates the everyday word for ‘hearing’ (Ge-hören, where hören means ‘to
hear’). Language-users do not ‘construct’ meaning, but derive it from the manner
in which they listen or attend to Being. Language itself arises as the form that such
listening and attention take in human existence. Moreover, even though all language
is likely to contain some trace, however distorted or diminished, of its original
belonging-together with Being, some forms of language express this in greater
measure than others – and, for Heidegger, it is above all the poet who speaks the Word
that most resonates with the vibrancy of this belonging-together. Where language is
most true to its own essence, then, in this poetic attention to the resonance of Being
within it, it is not undisciplined – but its discipline is that of poetic utterance rather
than scientific statement.

3 The phrase ‘event of appropriation’ is used here – unsatisfactorily – to translate

Heidegger’s term Ereignis. At one level, this is a very ordinary word translatable as ‘event’
or ‘occurrence’ and perfectly comprehensible to the person on the street. However, Heidegger
also makes us attentive to the word ‘eigen’, buried, as it were, within Er-eignis. This is
related to another famous Heideggerian term, Eigentlichkeit, conventionally translated as
‘authenticity’. Eigen relates to what is one’s own, thus ‘appropriation’. Ereignis thus signals
that what happens when we understand something is both an event, something that happens to
us and an event in which we make what we understand our own. ‘Appropriation’ is, however,
an unfortunate term if it is allowed to have connotations of making one’s own in the sense
of ownership or even theft, since it is central to Heidegger’s idea that the understanding that
arises in the event of appropriation is not something we, as it were, ‘take’, but something that
is given to us.
198 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
How might these Heideggerian reflections be fruitful for the understanding of
mysticism in modernity?
Several different paths lie open, in fact. One of these – probably the path most
travelled in the reception of Heidegger – would go back a step and remind us, rightly,
that everything Heidegger says about language and the event of appropriation
has to be understood in the context of what he has said in earlier works about the
manifestation of metaphysical nothingness in the phenomenon of anxiety. As he had
famously argued in his 1929 inaugural lecture in Freiburg University, anxiety is a
state in which ‘beings as a whole slip away’ (Heidegger 1978: 103). Where scientific
rationality presents a world in which everything is as it is for some reason and some
kind of explanation is always required of any would-be truth-claim, anxiety makes
us see the world as ultimately groundless. This, Heidegger held, was not simply the
subjective anxiety analysed by Kierkegaard. It was, instead, the recognition that the
‘world’ constructed according to the worldview of modern science and technology
was just that – a construction. This worldview is capable of explaining much – but
not everything. There is a point in our experience at which it explains, simply,
nothing. Against such a background the event of appropriation appears as an original
occurrence of Being that ‘nothing’ precedes, ‘nothing’ explains, and ‘nothing’ serves
to ground. We cannot understand it by tracing its cause, only by interpreting it.
This seems to open up far-reaching possibilities for setting in motion a dialogue
between Heidegger and East Asian, especially Buddhist, thought. Here too there
seems to be an insistence on an absolute experience of nothingness as the sole
ground of any important religious truth. Moreover, Heidegger’s thought can help
us to see how such an experience, while in itself entirely indeterminate with regard
to any conceptual content, may – must – nevertheless, qua human experience, be
appropriated by us in the form of a determinate structure of meaning, as a word,
a work of art or a ritual action. This could also lead to reflection on the possibility
of a ‘pure experience’, an immediate experience of the content-less ‘nothing’ that
is the ground of all experience. And this might further be brought into connection
with some aspects of postmodern religious speculation.4 The exploration of such
connections is certainly not excluded by the less-travelled path I now intend to
take. In turning to Dostoevsky I do not rule out the possibility that what we read
concerning mystical experience in the writing of Dostoevsky is susceptible of being
harmonized with certain currents in Buddhism, nor that this might be done in the
spirit of Heidegger – but to demonstrate such connections would take us far beyond
the limits of the present subject.
Where the enquiry into an experience of nothingness that might be taken
as the common ground of Buddhist enlightenment and the Heideggerian event
of appropriation seems to lead to a moment of pure experience, abstracted from

4 This line of interpreting Heidegger is especially associated with the Kyoto School
of philosophy, in such representatives as Nishida Kitaro, Nishitani Keiji and Abe Masao.
For my own approach to this see Pattison, Agnosis: Theology in the Void (1996), especially
chapter 4.
 George Pattison 199
conceptual or cultural determination, the writings of Dostoevsky, so characteristically
dense in dramatic, psychological and sociological detail, work with materials that
seem already to be over-determined. The air of a Dostoevsky scene is thick with
argument, the clash of opposing perspectives, and the interplay of personal, political
and religious agendas, both open and concealed. We are, it seems, a long way
from the ‘emptiness’ of Buddhist experience and from the purity of attention that
Heidegger’s poetic word seems to require of its listeners if they are to hear in it the
voice of Being.
Precisely on this point, however, lies the challenge that Dostoevsky might be
taken as mounting in relation to Heidegger. For is it beyond dispute – as Heidegger
appears to think it is – that the sole occurrence of language capable of recalling
us to an awareness of Being is found in the poetic word? The word of the novelist
– I suggest – deserves no less than the word of the poet to be taken into account
at this point. It is, of course, a very different word, not least when the novelist is
Dostoevsky. For where the poetic word of Heidegger’s own favoured poet, Friedrich
Hölderlin, speaks to us from beyond the orbit of the scientific–technological
worldview, invoking the lost kinship of mortals and gods in the dawn of history, the
novelist – here Dostoevsky – speaks to us out of the very experience of modernity
in all its dirty, grey detail. Moreover, where the poet speaks most poetically as a
single voice, as bearing the word in all its primal purity, what the novelist gives us
is a strife of voices, a polyphony that, in the case of Dostoevsky, often sounds more
like a cacophony. If this reflects the novelist’s determination to be true to our actual
experience of modernity, it might also seem to mark him out as being too entangled
in that same modernity to be capable of speaking a word that might signal the advent
of other possibilities. Having incarnated himself so deeply in his age, is the novelist
still capable of looking beyond it?
These questions suggest that what will come out of reading Dostoevsky will not
be simply an illustration of the Heideggerian idea of the event of appropriation. On
the contrary, it will in certain respects challenge that idea and look to transform it. At
the same time, as I hope to show, Heidegger’s thought provides a way of seeing the
philosophical interest of what is going on in Dostoevsky’s text. Here, of course, that
interest is focused on the question concerning mystical experience and whether or
how such experiences are pre-determined by the linguistic and cultural framework
inhabited by those who enjoy them. It is, then, to the issue of mystical experience in
Dostoevsky that we now turn.

III

For much of the twentieth century Dostoevsky’s presence in the philosophy of

religion was largely as having created, in the person of Ivan Karamazov, a voice for
the protest of atheist humanism that, in the era of totalitarianism and the Holocaust,
seemed almost unanswerable. Having depicted a succession of actual crimes of
extraordinary cruelty committed against children, Ivan goes on to argue that no
200 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
possible future happiness could ever make up for what those children suffered. Even
if their tormented mothers should come to accept what had happened and to forgive
the tormentors, Ivan will not do so.

Oh, Alyosha, I’m not blaspheming! I do understand how the universe will tremble when
all in heaven and under the earth merge into one voice of praise, and all that lives and
has lived cries out: ‘Just art thou, O Lord, for thy ways are revealed!’ Oh, yes, when the
mother and the torturer whose hounds tore her son to pieces embrace each other, and all
three cry out with tears: ‘Just art thou, O Lord’, then of course the crown of knowledge
will have come and everything be explained. But there is a hitch: that is what I cannot
accept.5

Ivan fully realizes that this refusal scarcely counts as an argument: it is, to think in
Nietzschean terms, an act of valuation – what Ivan does is to value the suffering
of children above any explanation as to the ultimate purpose of the universe. In
the face of such suffering, the question ‘Why?’ simply cannot be answered. As he
goes on to say, ‘I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unquenched
indignation, even if I am wrong’ (BK 245).
But perhaps Ivan is also saying something more: it is not just that he refuses any
explanation, ‘the crown of knowledge’, perhaps he is also, implicitly, refusing any
possible compensatory experience, any compensatory joy that could overwhelm and
transform the memory of suffering.
The possibility of such a joy seems to be at issue in an anecdote that, later in
the novel, the Devil himself (or, at least, a hallucinated exteriorization of Ivan’s
unconscious ‘Devil’) recounts to Ivan (although, as we learn, it was really an
anecdote that Ivan himself had made up as a seventeen-year-old schoolboy). The
story concerns a Russian nihilist who, obviously, didn’t believe in life after death
and, we may infer, would have held views similar to those expressed by Ivan in his
tirade against any possible theodicy. Yet, when this nihilist dies, he wakes up on the
‘other side’ where, in the darkness, he learns (we are not told exactly how) that if
he walks a quadrillion kilometres, then the gates of paradise will be opened to him.
Refusing to accept the whole scenario as being ‘against his convictions’, he simply
lies there for nearly a thousand years. Then, for whatever reason, he gets up and sets
out on what we are told is more than a billion years’ walk. Finally, he arrives, the
doors of paradise are opened and ‘before he had even been there two seconds, he
exclaimed that for those two seconds it would be worth walking not just a quadrillion
kilometres, but a quadrillion quadrillion, even raised to the quadrillionth power! In
short, he sang “Hosannah” and oversweetened it so much that some persons there,
of a nobler cast of mind, did not even want to shake hands with him at first… ’ (BK
644).
Here the issue seems not to be the ‘explanation’ that Ivan refuses in his moment
of protest, but something more immediate, a simple experience of a joy beyond all

5 Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1992: 244). Further references are given as
BK in the text.
 George Pattison 201
possible measure. Such a joy does not refute but it overturns the nihilist’s previously
held convictions. Could it even overturn Ivan’s valuation of the suffering of children
as higher than the eschatological harmony of the world-order? If so, is it then
Ivan’s own subconscious that provides the only possible answer to his ‘rebellion’
– an answer that ‘works’ only in so far as it is not an explanation, ‘the crown of
knowledge’, but the experience of ultimate joy itself, joy so great that it allows for no
counter-argument? The question is nicely poised since, given that the anecdote about
the nihilist was composed by his younger self, it does not seem to have prevented
the development of Ivan’s own protest. Even in its own terms, it is no theoretical
answer, and the nihilist is not ‘persuaded’ until the moment he enters paradise. In any
case, the very absurdity of the scene, in which a rather coarse, stupid and garrulous
hallucination talks theology with the tormented Ivan, underlines Dostoevsky’s
awareness that there can be no direct communication of such a possibility.
At the same time, the idea that a genuinely lived experience of such joy may,
even in this life, be available to us is suggested by the experience of Alyosha, the
youngest Karamazov brother, in the aftermath of the death of his mentor, the elder
Zosima. Alyosha has been keeping watch by the elder’s body and, falling asleep
during the reading of the Gospel story of the wedding at Cana of Galilee, where
Christ turned water into wine, he had dreamed (or seen?) the elder Zosima himself,
mingling with the crowds at the wedding and gesturing to Christ himself, ‘our Sun’.
Rushing out, Alyosha has a moment of rapture in which earth and heaven seem to
merge. Throwing himself to the ground he weeps, watering the ground with his tears,
as we are told.

What was he weeping for? Oh, in his rapture he wept even for the stars that shone on him
from the abyss, and ‘he was not ashamed of this ecstasy’. It was as if threads from all those
innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over,
‘touching other worlds’. He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask
forgiveness, oh, not for himself but for all and for everything, ‘as others are asking for me’
rang again in his soul. But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something
as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul … ‘Something visited
my soul in that hour,’ he would say afterwards… (BK 362–3).

This plainly has several of the classic features of religious experience, not least
regarding both Dostoevsky’s and Alyosha’s reticence concerning ‘what’ it was that
entered his soul. Whatever happened in that moment was a matter of ‘as if’, of
rapture, of ecstasy and of ‘something’ that is not named.
On a straight reading of the novel – and perhaps on a deeper reading too
– this passage is pointing us towards the singular status of Alyosha as a potential
representative of an exemplary Christian life in the world. This experience presents a
kind of existential warrant for this exemplary status. One who experiences existence
in such a direct, total and honest way, we feel, already belongs to another world
from that of the lies, self-deceits and rationalizations in which so many of the other
characters seem to live. Yet even here, Dostoevsky leaves much unsaid. After all,
the whole context allows us to see Alyosha as being simply overwrought and it is
202 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
therefore possible to interpret his experience as no more than a kind of hysteria,
irrespective of whatever he might have made of it himself. Nor is it clear as to whether
this experience has any clear transcendent meaning. Are its cosmic dimensions – the
stars and the earth – emphasized to the exclusion of a relation to the transcendent
God of Christianity or is this experience meant to give a human and cosmic ‘seal’ to
the Christian vision of the heavenly wedding feast that precedes it?
That Dostoevsky refrains from giving clear answers is consistent with the
treatment of religious experience elsewhere in his authorship. ‘A Little Boy at
Christ’s Christmas Tree’ and ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ from his Diary of a
Writer both include accounts of visionary experiences of other worlds, the former
of the heavenly world to come, the latter of a prelapsarian earthly paradise. Yet, as
with Alyosha’s dream of Cana of Galilee, it is emphasized both that these are merely
dreams or visions and, in any case, doubly mediated by virtue of the fact that they
are, simply, fictions. ‘Why did I invent such a story, one that conforms so little to an
ordinary, reasonable diary?’, Dostoevsky (1984: 172) asks himself and his readers at
the conclusion of ‘A Little Boy at Christ’s Christmas Tree’, inserting a tone of irony
that rescues the story from mere sentimentality.
But perhaps the most pointed treatment of the issue is in The Idiot, in the build-
up to one of the eponymous idiot’s epileptic attacks. Here he himself reflects on the
nature and significance of his experiences in those moments:

there was a stage in it just before the fit itself (if the fit occurred while he was awake),
when suddenly, amidst the sadness, the darkness of soul, the pressure, his brain would
momentarily catch fire, as it were, and all his life’s forces would be strained at once in
an extraordinary impulse. The sense of life, of self-awareness, increased nearly tenfold
in these moments, which flashed by like lightning. His mind, his heart were lit up with
an extraordinary light, all his agitation, all his doubts, all his worries were as if placated
at once, resolved in a sort of sublime tranquillity, filled with serene, harmonious joy, and
hope, and filled with reason and ultimate cause. But these moments, these glimpses were
still only a presentiment of that ultimate second (never more than a second) from which
the fit itself began. (Dostoevsky 2001: 225–6)

Prince Myshkin, the ‘idiot’, himself considers that these illuminations may be no
more than a reflex of his illness, the subjective reflex of a physiological cause. At the
same time, as he says to another character:

‘at that moment I was somehow able to understand the extraordinary phrase that time
shall be no more. Probably’, he added, smiling, ‘it’s the same second in which the jug of
water overturned by the epileptic Muhammad did not have time to spill, while he had time
during the same second to survey all the dwellings of Allah.’ (2001: 227)

Neither Myshkin nor the reader has any final grounds for saying that this is ‘merely’
a pathological condition or that it is a moment of mystical vision. It is entirely
ambiguous.
From the point of view of those who believe that mystical experience is
inseparable from and perhaps even a product of the language in which it is described,
 George Pattison 203
Myshkin’s dilemma about his own experience – and Dostoevsky’s way of using
religious experience in his novels as a whole – may thus seem to reflect or to
articulate the distinctive crisis of religious experience in the era of radical early
modernity. In this historical and cultural moment, traditional claims and legends
concerning the visionary experiences of the saints found themselves scrutinized,
explained and explained away by new, science-based reductionist philosophies of
life, philosophies in which all experience would, ultimately, be explicable in terms
of physiological and biological causes. If the ‘explanations’ offered by the Russian
nihilists of the 1860s and onwards were, in scientific terms, crude and mechanistic
in comparison with the explanations offered by our contemporary science, the basic
question has been sharpened rather than otherwise by such scientific advance. This
seems to leave us with what may be stated as two alternative positions or, arguably,
two facets of one basic position.
On the one hand, religious experience (and, along with religious experience
the whole panoply of religious beliefs and practices) are revealed as ‘nothing but’
the manifestation of more fundamental, scientifically explicable processes. On the
other hand, religious experience is seen as ‘religious’ simply and solely in so far
as it is ‘constructed’ by culture and language as religious. In neither perspective is
there anything in the primary, immediate experience itself that requires us to find it
‘religious’ or to see it as the revelation of some kind of religious truth about God or
about other, heavenly, worlds.
Dostoevsky, qua novelist, seems to have accepted that he can do no more than
to describe how his characters experienced their moments of greatest visionary
fulfilment and joy, and, in doing so, he makes it clear that what those moments
‘really’ were is beyond the ability of any third party to decide. In fact it is beyond
the characters’ own ability so to decide, since, while Alyosha remains clear that
‘something’ visited his soul, Prince Myshkin cannot even be sure of that. Yet if the
experience itself, in its pre-verbal bliss, does not determine how it is to be understood,
we may at the very least say that such experiences as those of Alyosha and Myshkin
call for interpretation. If whatever language they – or we – are to use to describe
these experiences will inevitably reflect the given possibilities of our language, that
language itself seems here to be held hostage to ‘something’ that didn’t itself originate
in language or, to put it in more philosophical terms, the intentionality embodied in
language points beyond itself to the matter that language ‘means’ or ‘intends’.
And there is a further point. Dostoevsky is not simply reiterating the conventional
hesitations and paradoxes of those who have sought to describe mystical experiences
in words. It is not as if, in Dostoevsky, we have a mystic struggling to put his experience
into words, peppering his account with ‘as ifs’ and ‘so to speaks’ or insisting on
the ineffability of what has been disclosed to him. What we read in Dostoevsky is
the depiction of characters who, caught between the demands of experience and
the fragmentation of religious discourse into mystical and reductionist dimensions,
can no longer know whether they have even had a ‘mystical’ experience but who,
nevertheless, remain convinced that what they have experienced must have some
large and even total significance for how they think and feel and act. As in other
204 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
areas of Dostoevsky’s writing, language itself, its figures of speech, its concealments
and evasions is openly problematized: here is something – how are we to speak of
it? What we do in and with language may decide whether such experiences come to
be called or are allowed to be called ‘mystical’, but language itself – in the fractured
polyphony of often discordant voices that is the verbal texture of a Dostoevsky novel
– doesn’t exist otherwise than as the persistent questioning of how such experiences
are rightly to be named.

IV

These remarks return us to Heidegger and to the question concerning the philosophical
interpretation of claims regarding mystical experience.
Starting with the view of Katz, Lindbeck and others that the interpretation of
whatever it is that happens in mystical experience is always going to be determined
by the cultural and linguistic presuppositions that we – experiencers and interpreters
alike – bring to it, we saw how Heidegger argued for an understanding of language
that does not, as these commentators do, presuppose the separation of language and
Being. Rather, Heidegger insists, language in its deepest roots belongs together with
Being. In other words, language essentially happens in and as the way in which we
are attentive to the presence of Being. This does not mean that experience arrives
accompanied by an authorized interpretation, but it does mean that how we interpret
experience in language is not just a matter of linguistic conventions. If that is, in
fact, all our interpretation amounts to, then this is a sign that we have fallen into
linguistically and experientially impoverished times. That, of course, is just what
Heidegger thinks has happened to us. Under the hegemony of the age of technology
language has, typically, lost its original connection to Being and Being itself has
withdrawn from the realm defined by our public, reified language. All is not lost,
however, since there remains one privileged form of language in which it is still
possible for the voice of Being to reach us: the language of poetry. In learning to
hear the word of the poet and to submit ourselves to it we have a real possibility of
hearing again the voice of Being, in, with and under the distortions it suffers at the
hands of modernity.
In this essay, I have deviated from Heidegger in one important respect. Instead
of turning to the poet, I have turned to the novelist and, I suggest, this offers us a
different – though perhaps complementary – picture. For our relation to the word
of the novelist is very different from the kind of relation to the poetic word called
for by Heidegger. We do not simply listen to the novelist. It is, indeed, impossible
in the case of a novelist such as Dostoevsky simply to attend to or to submit to his
word, since that word reaches us as a complex, fractured and polyphonic word that
requires our own engagement in the argument set in motion by the novel. Yet the torn
and complex fabric of the Dostoevskian text, a fabric that so accurately rehearses
the experience of modernity itself, is not closed to the possibility of experiences
that seem to come from beyond the frontiers of our present cultural horizons.
 George Pattison 205
Qua novelist, Dostoevsky does not claim to have identified a pure, transcultural
experience. Whatever we experience, including even the extraordinary visions of
a Myshkin, only becomes real for us in so far as it enters into the way in which it
is appropriated in language. There is no question here of getting behind language
or of somehow putting language aside. Yet neither does language impose itself on
experience. Language and experience belong together. For the novelist, however, this
very inseparability makes it impossible to speak a pure word concerning experience:
the meaning of experience is always problematic and the shape of language is always
being worked on by experience.
If the exalted word of the poet prophetically calls us to turn away from a society
that has fallen under the power of enframing, the word of the novelist comes to us as
the word of one citizen to another. Yet, precisely as citizens of the age of science and
technology, we remain free to contest the worldview of our age, and, in the present
case, free to explore the meaning of those events that seem to befall us, in the midst
of the world, as experiences of something ‘from beyond’. In such exploration, we
are not simply shuffling the pack of our linguistic tokens; we are struggling to attend
to the truth of Being itself.

Further Reading

On Heidegger

Caputo, J.D., The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, Athens, OH: Ohio
University Press, 1978
Kovacs, G., The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology, Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1990
Parkes G. (ed.), Heidegger and Asian Thought, Honolulu, HW: University of Hawaii
Press, 1987
Pattison, G., Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to the Later Heidegger, London:
Routledge, 2000

On Dostoevsky

Bakhtin, M., Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. C. Emerson, Minneapolis,

MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984
Jones, M., Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Christian Experience, London: Anthem
Press, 2005
Pattison, G., and Thompson, D. (eds), Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001
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Wood, A.W. (1970) Kant’s Moral Religion, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press
Wordsworth, W. (1969) Poetical Works, eds T. Hutchinson and E. de Selincourt,
Oxford: Oxford University Press
224 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Wrathall, M.A. (ed.) (2003) Religion after Metaphysics, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press
Wright. T.R. (1988) Theology and Literature, Oxford: Blackwell
Yandell, K.E. (1993) The Epistemology of Religious Experience, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Zaehner, R.C. (1957) Mysticism Sacred and Profane, Oxford: Clarendon Press
 Index
abduction 22 see also inference
Abraham 18, 31, 33, 182
Abrams, M. H. 24
Adams, Robert 37, 47
aesthetics 2, 4, 6, 78, 82, 89–90, 96, 105,
108, 162, 172, 174, 198
Agamben, Giorgio 118n, 125
agency 8, 10, 17, 19, 28, 39, 40–41, 45, 50,
51, 59, 61, 65, 69, 95, 96, 118, 122,
125, 141, 155–6, 165
Albert, Hans 93
Albertus Magnus 111n
Alston, William 160–64, 170
Alter, Robert 182
analogy 1, 23, 28, 96, 116, 134, 137–8n,
160–63
Andrews, J. H. 47n, 48n
Anselm of Canterbury, St 19, 136
apophatic tradition, see via negativa
Aquinas, Thomas, see Thomas Aquinas, St
Arendt, Hannah 178, 179, 181
Aristotle 1, 4, 5, 10, 19, 20, 23, 25, 44,
111–14, 116–19, 148, 149–51, 155
Arnold, Matthew 68
asceticism 27, 70
atheism 3, 26, 58, 65, 67–8, 73, 77, 85, 94,
129, 134, 135, 141–2, 174, 199
Audi, Robert 39n
Augustine of Hippo, St 17–18, 20, 21, 26,
27, 86–7, 115, 116, 126, 140, 165,
168n, 175
Austin, John L. 15, 17, 146n, 147–8
Bacon, Francis 93
Badiou, Alain 36–7, 39–41, 44, 47
Baillie, John 35n
Bakhtin, Mikhail 36n, 53, 205
Balthasar, Hans Urs von 45–6, 159, 166
Barr, James 114–15n
Barth, Karl 33, 34–5, 52, 93, 100n, 159, 166
Bass, Dorothy C. 40
Being 10–11, 33, 52, 105, 195–9, 204–5
Beiser, Frederick C. 86n
belief 2, 3–4, 5, 11, 15–19, 21–22, 29, 32,
34, 35n, 37–9, 45, 47, 49, 57–8,
62–76, 78, 82–90, 96, 101–2, 106,
109, 127, 129, 131, 134, 135,
139–42, 149, 150n, 151, 159, 161–3,
165–8, 170, 172–5, 177, 182, 183,
192, 193, 200, 203; see also faith;
epistemology
Bénichou, Paul 70
Berger, Peter L. 76
Bernard of Clairvaux, St 115
Bernstein, Richard J. 150n
Bible, the (also biblical; Scripture) 5, 6, 9,
11, 15, 16–17, 20–21, 22, 26–8, 29,
31–2, 33, 35, 37, 40, 41–2, 46–50,
52, 58, 64–5, 88–9, 114n, 115,
124–5, 129, 130, 137, 145–7, 148,
149, 157, 165, 166–8, 171, 181–4,
186, 190, 193
biblical references 5, 6, 9, 15–16, 17, 18,
19–20, 31–2, 34, 51–2, 119, 124–5,
132, 136–7, 138, 148, 149, 167,
169n, 170, 171, 181–2, 185, 201
birth 8–9, 91–2, 157, 168, 179–81, 184–6,
190
Blake, William 108
body, the 8, 9–10, 12, 21, 46, 56, Ch. 6 pas-
sim, 140, 151–2, 172–3, 180, 185–6,
201; see also incarnation
Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 153–6
Borg, Marcus J. 171n
boundaries Introduction passim, 18, 29,
32–5, 36–8, 41, 43–4, 47, 50–51, 53,
55, 77–9, 87, 89–90, Ch. 5 passim,
105–6, 127, 145, 149, 156, 157, 177
Bourdieu, Pierre 181
Brague, Rémi 111n
Broad, C. D. 162n
Brontë, Emily 122
Brooke, John Hedley 93n
Brown, David vii, 6, 7, 10, 157, Ch. 9
226 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Bruce, Steve 70n, 76 7 passim, 149–53, 156, 158, 164–5,
Buber, Martin 127 177–8, 183–4, 186–90, 192, 194,
Buckley, James J. 40–41 195–9, 204–5
Buckley, Michael J. 134n, 143 contemplation 10, 18, 21, 43, 82–3, 89,
Buddhism 140, 164–5, 183, 198–9 117–18, 123–4
Bultmann, Rudolf 42 content, theory of 8
Burrell, David B. 141n, 143 Copernicus, Nicolaus 36
Butler, Dom Cuthbert 191, 194, 195 Creation, the 33, 46, 50, 51, 52–3, 100, 122,
Butler, Judith 109n, 187 124, 131, 134, 137–8, 142–3, 165,
Byrne, James M. 137n 173, 175, 181
Byrne, Peter 85 creativity 5, 9, 53, 115, 148–52, 157, 177,
184–90
Cajetan, Thomas de Vio 111n Creeds, the 27, 139–40
Calasso, Roberto 75 Critchley, Simon 38, 40, 44–5
Calvin, John 51, 93 Crites, Stephen 39
Canlis, Julie 51 Cross, Richard 31
Cantor, Geoffrey 93n culture 3, 4, 5–6, 7, 9, 11, 13, 19, 21–2,
Capra, Fritjov 99n 24–5, 36–9, 40–41, 47–8, 53, 55,
Caputo, John D. 205 57, 58, 60, 64, 70–75, 94, 96–7,
Cavarero, Adriana 178–9, 181 100–101, 108, 130–31, 133–6, 139,
Chenu, Marie-Dominique 109 140, 148–9, 151, 153, 156, 157–8,
Chrétien, Jean-Louis 105n, 108, 110, 111n, 163, 166, 170, 172, 177, 183, 185,
117n, 118n, 119, 120n, 121n 192–4, 199, 203–5; see also western
Christ, see Jesus culture
Christianity 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 15, 16–18, Cupitt, Don 158, 193–4
21–2, 28, 29, Ch. 2 passim, 58, 62n,
64–5, 67–8, 71–5, 80, 87–8, 91–4, Damasio, Antonio 151n
100, 109, 111, 114–17, 124, Ch. 7 Danto, Arthur 98
passim, 145–6, 153–4, 157, 159, Darwin, Charles 49, 64–5, 91–2
161, 164–5, 167, 172n, 173–4, 178, Davies, Brian 160
181–4, 186, 192–4, 200–202 Davis, Caroline Franks 160, 164–5
christology 31–2, 50–51, 87–8, 124–5 Dawkins, Richard 64, 66
Church, the 9, 12, 15, 26, 27, 33, 40–41, 46, death 9, 17, 51, 67, 177, 178n, 181, 182,
48, 88, 93, 131, 153, 172, 182–3, 184–6, 187–8, 200, 201
193 ‘death of God’ 57, 62, 65, 67–70, 71n, 74–5,
Cicero 122 109
Clack, Beverley 160 Defoe, Daniel 25, 28
Clack, Brian R. 160 deism 73–4, 77–8, 85
Clausewitz, Carl von 93 de Lauretis, Teresa 189–90
Clayton, Philip vii, 2, 6–7, 55–6, Ch. 5 de Lubac, Henri 109
Coady, C. A. J. 34 Denèfle, Sylvette 71
Collini, Stefan 65n Dennett, Daniel 64
Columbus, Christopher 132 Denys (the Pseudo-Areopagite), see Pseudo-
Comte, Auguste 71 Dionysius
concepts (also conceptualization) 1–4, Derrida, Jacques 23–4, 25, 26, 38, 44, 94,
7–8, 9–13, 17–19, 23, 26, 28, 31–4, 107, 146
36–53, 55–6, 57, 59–60, 62n, 69, 73, Descartes, René (also Cartesian) 18, 21, 23,
74, 77, Ch. 4 passim, 96–7, 99, 105, 24, 29, 37, 61, 111, 124, 150, 151n,
107, 111, 115, 117, 123–4, 127, Ch. 159
 Index
desire 9–10, 25, 45, 63, 64, 70, 72, 111,
113–18, 121–2, 125–6, 157, 184–5,
187–90
Despland, Michel 82
de Vries, Hent 177
dialectic 1, 3, 13, 20–21, 24–5, 34, 124, 153,
174, 186–7
Dickens, Charles 152n
Dilthey, Wilhelm 26, 97
doctrine 8, 9, 28, 40, 46–51, 52–3, 85, 88–9,
106, 109, 142n, 159, 167, 186, 193
Dostoevsky, Fyodor M. 10–11, 67, 158, 194,
198–205
drama 7–8, 10, 11, 13, 31, 32, 43–53, 130,
199
Dumontier, Pierre 115n
Dunne, Joseph 150n
Durkheim, Emile 91–2
Edelman, Gerald 97n
education 112, 115, 131, 135, 140–43
Eliot, T. S. 35n
emotion 11, 19, 21, 23, 29, 46, 74, 82–3,
96, 107–8, 115, 124–5, 151–2, 154,
167n, 174
Enlightenment, the 36, 63, 73, 75, 78, 116n
epistemology 6, 12, 15–19, 29, 33–4, 36,
38, 40, 41, 46, 47–9, 53, 59–62, 64,
74–5, 79, 88, 93–4, 109–110, 113,
117, 123–4, 148, 150, 160–4, 191–2;
see also belief; knowledge
eros, see love
eschatology 34–5, 51, 115n, 125, 149, 182,
185, 200–202
eternity (also eternal) 17, 31, 34–5, 43, 51,
90, 124, 135, 164, 173, 174, 202
ethics (also morality) 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12,
19, 25–6, 34, 40, 43–6, 49–50, 53,
61–75, Ch. 4 passim, 113, 139–40,
150–52, 162, 183
Evans, C. Stephen 38
Evelyn, John 173–4
evidence 6, 22, 66, 69, 72, 91, 150, 157,
159, 161–5, 169
existential 18, 31, 36, 42, 80, 201
experience 3, 6, 9, 10–11, 12–13, 18–23,
24–5, 27, 33, 34–5, 37–8, 39, 42, 52,
55–6, 58–9, 61–3, 66, 71n, 82–3, 84,
88, 92, 101, 107, 109–110, 112–113,
227
115, 118–23, 125, 127, 130, 138,
151–2, 153–5, 157–8, Ch. 9 passim,
184, 187, Ch. 11 passim
explanation 3–4, 16–17, 20, 22, 33, 53, 58,
59, 63, 64–7, 70, 71n, 91–3, 95–6,
99, 108–9, 110, 133–4, 136, 153,
160, 162, 177, 198, 200–201, 203
faith 1–4, 7, 11–13, 16–18, 20, 26, 29, 31,
36, 37, 42, 44, 46–7, 49, 55, 64–8,
Ch. 4 passim, 93, 106, 119, 131,
139–41, 153, 159,167, 168, 177,
183, 193; see also belief
Farmer, Herbert H. 175n
Febvre, Lucien 58n
feminism 8, 22, 27, 41, 133, 189
Feuerbach, Ludwig 33
Fewell, Danna Nolan 182
Feyerabend, Paul 22, 99n
Feynman, Richard 97n
Firestone, Chris L. vii, 1, 4–5, 11, 55, Ch. 4
Fisher, Franklin 153–4
flourishing 9, 67–8, 70, 73, 141, 157,
185–90
Ford, David F. 43n
Foucault, Michel 34, 71, 116n, 177–8
Frazer, Sir James 27
freedom
social and political 8, 69–70, 89, 134,
157, 183, 188, 189, 193–4
spiritual and of the will 24, 32, 34, 78,
81, 84, 87–8, 89, 115, 131, 141, 157,
164, 183, 187, 190, 193–4
Freeland, Cynthia 116n, 118n
Frei, Hans 40
Freud, Sigmund 70
Frost, Robert 91, 94, 95, 98, 101–2
Furley, David 112n
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 5, 24–5, 44, 145–6n,
148–51, 152, 155–6
Galilei, Galileo 91
Gay, Peter 75
Geach, Peter 31
Geertz, Clifford 96–8, 100
gender 9, 178–80, 182–6, 188–9
Gibbard, Allan 29
Gibbon, Edward 72, 73, 75
Giddens, Anthony 96
228 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Girard, René 177, 184, 187 Hinduism 129, 135, 140, 141, 183, 192
Gnosticism 16–17, 52 history 2, 3, 5, 8–9, 12, 22–3, 27, 29, 32, 33,
God 2, 3–4, 5, 6, 7–9, 10, 12, 15–20, 26–8, 36, 38–42, 49–52, 55, Ch. 3 passim,
Chs 2, 3 & 4 passim, 91–3, 98, 100, 89–90, 93, 98–9, 108, 132–4, 142,
107–10, 114n, 116–17, 119, 122–3, 145, 147, 149, 163, 172, 177–8,
124–6, 127, Ch. 7 passim, 146–7, 181–3, 186–90, 193
149, 157, Ch. 9 passim, 177, 182–4, Hitler, Adolf 154–5
188, 191–2, 199, 200–203 Holbein, Hans 67
Gödel’s Theorem 133n Hölderlin, Friedrich 11, 199
Gould, Stephen J. 99 Holland, Scott 153
grace, divine 18, 34, 86–7, 90, 141n, 153, Holy Spirit, the 26, 34, 40, 46, 50–51, 89,
165, 166 108, 138n, 142, 166n
Gray, John 183 Honderich, Ted 39n
Gregory of Nyssa, St 18, 110, 114n, 115, Honig, Bonnie 179n
124–5 hope 9, 15–16, 21, 45, 70, 78, 80, 82–3, 85,
Gregory Palamas, St 18 87–9, 184–6, 188–90, 202
Green, Ronald 82 Hume, David 22, 23, 61, 72, 73–4, 99
Grenz, Stanley 51 Hurtado, Larry 167n
Grice, Paul 28 Husserl, Edmund 9, 10, 45, 56, 61, 105–10,
Griffiths, Paul 160 118, 124
Guarino, Thomas 48
Gunn, David 182 identity
Gunton, Colin 35n, 52–3 moral, religious and/or social 3, 8–9,
12, 39, 40, 51, 61–2, 69, 96, 178,
Habermas, Jürgen 148 181–4, 188
Hamlet 32, 52 personal 39, 45, 61–2, 69, 96, 120, 164,
Hamlyn, D. W. 111n, 114n 178–81
Handel, George Frideric 15 principle of 195–6
Hare, John 83, 86n ideology 8–9, 66, 108, 148, 152–5, 157,
Harley, J. B. 48n 182–4, 186–7, 189
Harris, Harriet 37, 42n imagination 3, 5, 7–9, 11, 23, 31, 36, 46,
Hauerwas, Stanley 39 73, 110, 111, 113–14, 117–18, 127,
Hawking, Stephen 133n 129–33, 138, 147, 150–52, 157,
heart, the 7, 15, 20–21, 43, 85, 131, 134, 169n, 184, 189–90
139, 140–41, 202; see also will incarnation (also human embodiment) 10,
Hegel, G. W. F. 1, 38, 106, 124, 136, 142, 12, 18, 21, 31, 46, 52, 56, 107,
186–8 109–126, 151, 156
Heidegger, Martin 5, 10–11, 21, 23, 27, 33, individualism 8–9, 59–62, 69, 72, 74, 86–7,
38, 44, 57, 60–61, 75, 105, 107, 120, 125, 185–6
136, 158, 194–9, 204–5 inference 17, 19, 20–22, 24, 28, 55, 59–61,
Helena, St 132 96, 110, 117, 119, 163, 168, 172
Henry, Michel 126 intellect, the 19, 42, 82, 117–18, 149, 152
hermeneutics 5–7, 11, 12, 13, 19, 22, 23, intention (author’s) 5–6, 25–7, 145–52,
24–7, 29, 38n, 41–5, 49, 51, 53, 88, 155–6, 166, 169, 186
95–8, 106–10, 127, Ch. 8 passim, interpretation 4–7, 9, 11, 13, 17–19,
157, 166, 204–5; see also interpreta- 23–9, 37, 40, 41–50, 56, 62n, Ch.
tion 4 passim, 95–8, 107–9, 110, 113,
Hick, John 89 118–20, 127, Ch. 8 passim, 157–8,
Hiley, David 36n, 41, 43
 Index 229
Ch. 9 passim, 181–2, 192–4, 198, Kuhn, Thomas 22, 95, 99
201–5; see also hermeneutics Kyoto School 198n
Isaiah 20, 170 Lacan, Jacques 117n
Islam 4, 100, 129, 134, 139–41, 173 Laird, Martin 115n
Lakatos, Imre 22
Jacobs, Nathan 86–7 Lakoff, George 151n
James, William 160, 167, 194, 195 language 1, 2, 4, 5–8, 10–13, 22, 23–29, 31–
Janicaud, Dominique 105–7 2, 37–9, 41–3, 46, 47–8, 107, Sect. 2
Jantzen, Grace M. vii, 7, 8–9, 157, Ch. 10 passim, 157–8, 164–5, 168–9, 183,
Jennens, Charles 15 Ch. 11 passim; see also meaning
Jenson, Robert W. 40 Laplace, Pierre 92n
Jesus (also Christ) 6, 9, 10, 18, 31–5, 40, Lash, Nicholas vii, 3–4, 7, 8, 46, 127, Ch. 7,
42–3, 45–6, 49–53, 67, 87–90, 109, 167–8, 170
119, 124–6, 131, 142, 148, 149, Lasserre, Jean 154
166–7, 168, 171, 182, 201–2 legal (theory and reasoning) 11, 23, 29, 41,
Job 15–17, 19–20, 23, 27 152
John Damascene, St 111–12 Leo XIII 166n
John of the Cross, St 168 Lessing, Gotthold 2, 156
John the Baptist, St 171n Levinas, Emmanuel 34, 43n, 105–7, 110
John the Evangelist, St 17, 27, 124, 171n Lewontin, Richard 63
Johnson, Mark 151n Lindbeck, George A. 41, 47–8, 193–4, 204
Jones, Robert Alun 92n Lindberg, David 93n
Joyce, James 2, 52–3 Lipner, Julius 135n
Judaism 4, 31, 100, 129, 134, 139, 140, 141, literature 2, 4, 6, 10–11, 24–6, 29, 31–2,
178 36n, 38–42, 43–5, 66, 78, 122, 125,
Jung, Carl 101 129, 137, 145, 147, 150, 152, 166,
170, 186, 193, 194–5, 197, 199–205;
Kant, Immanuel 1, 3, 4–5, 7, 11–13, 16, 18, see also poetry
29, 31–2, 33–4, 36–8, 39, 51, 55, Loades, Ann 37n
Ch. 4 passim, 105, 107, 117, 136 Locke, John 39, 61, 72–3, 180
Kasper, Walter 33 logic 17–24, 37–9, 41, 55, 96, 99, 110, 125,
Katz, David 119 127, 195–7 see also inference
Katz, Steven 191–4, 195, 204 Logos, the (also Word) 10, 18, 34, 35, 37,
Kaufman, Gordon 89 46, 51, 89, 105, 110, 119, 124–6,
Keiji, Nishitani 198n 131, 138, 142, 166, 197
Kekes, John 44 logos 16, 17, 19, 25, 111n, 195
Kelly, Geffrey B. 154 Lonergan, Bernard 89
Kepler, Johannes 91 love (also eros) 7, 10, 17–18, 51, 114–18,
Kerr, Fergus 128n 121, 125, 132–3, 140, 168, 170,
Kierkegaard, Søren 18, 28, 33–4, 198 171–2, 185
Kirk, G. S. 195 Lowe, Walter 38–9
Kitaro, Nishida 198n Ludlow, Morwenna 115n
knowledge 1–2, 4, 10, 11–13, 15–19, 29, Luntley, Michael 8
33–4, 36–8, 40, 45, 55, 59–61, 69, Luther, Martin 93, 138
71, Ch. 4 passim, 97–8, 112–13, Lyotard, Jean-François 178
115–16, 119–20, 123–4, 140, 141–3,
162, 166, 179, 196; see also episte- MacEachren, Alan 47n
mology MacIntyre, Alasdair 39–40
Kosman, L. S. A. 111n
230 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
MacKinnon, Donald 31–2, 36, 43, 46, 47, Murray, Michael 160
50–51, 53 music 2, 15, 153, 172–3
Madonna (Ciccone) 63 Myshkin, Prince 202–3, 205
Malebranche, Nicholas 109 mysticism 2, 10–11, 109–10, 137, 158,
Mandry, Christoph 45 160–61, 163–5, 168–71, 173–4, Ch.
mapping 2, 7–8, 11, 12, 36, 47–9 11 passim
Marcel, Gabriel 151n
Mariña, Jacqueline 86 Narcissus 121n
Marion, Jean-Luc 33, 75n, 105–6, 110, 123 narrative (also story) 3–5, 7–11, 12–13, 23,
Marshall, Bruce 53 27, 28, 36n, 39–40, 42, 43, 45, 46,
Martin, C. B. 160–61 48, 52–3, 55–6, Ch. 3 passim, 126,
Marx, Karl 75 129–30, 133–4, 137, 141, 152, 157,
Mary, the Virgin 171 166–7, 169, 171 Ch. 10 passim,
Masao, Abe 198n 199–205
materialism 3, 63–7, 71n Nelson, F. Burton 153–4
McClendon, James 147n Newman, John Henry 130, 135, 138–9, 168
McGrath, Alister 40, 50, 100n Newton, Sir Isaac 91–2, 112n
meaning 1, 2, 3–4, 5, 10–11, 23–8, 39, 41–5, Nicodemus 5
47, 63, 78, 82–3, 85, 94–5, 96–7, Niebuhr, Reinhold 153
99–100, 107–8, 110, 118–19, Sect. Nietzsche, Friedrich 2, 8, 10, 11, 22–3, 29,
2 passim, 169, 178–9, 181, 183–6, 38, 62n, 67–8, 74–5, 105, 109, 150,
192–3, 195–8, 203, 204–5; see also 200
language normativity (also values) 19, 29, 46, 60–61,
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 60, 105, 107–8, 62–5, 67–75, 78, 81–5, 90, 96, 99,
109–11, 113, 118, 120–26, 151 100, 134–5, 140–43, 151, Ch. 10
metaphor 9, 12, 23–4, 28, 47, 129, 137–8, passim, 200
148, 169, 185–6 Numbers, Ronald 93n
metaphysics 4, 10–11, 22, 26, 31–3, 37, 38, Nussbaum, Martha C. 40, 43, 111n, 151n,
47–53, 69, 71, Ch. 4 passim, 92–5, 152
99, 105–6, 109–10, 117, 124n, 136, Nygren, Anders 114n
148, 177, 179, 187, 195–9, 204–5
Milbank, John 117n objectivity 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 47–50, 53,
Mill, John Stuart 75 Ch. 3 passim, Ch. 5 passim,
miracle (also providence) 62n, 63, 65, 67, 105–9, 118–20, 125, 145–53, 155–6,
72–3, 91–2, 121n, 171, 173, 174, 160–65, 170–75, 177–8, 189–90,
185–6 191–7, 204–5
Modernism 2 Oedipus 179–80
modernity 3–4, 7, 11, 12, 19, 21, 33, 40, 46, Oliver, Simon 112n
Ch. 3 passim, 91–4, 98–100, 127, Olympias 108
133–6, 158, 159, 163, 166–70, 172, Oman, John 175n
177, 180, 183–4, 193, 194, 196, ontology 10–11, 31–3, 47, 51, 52, 92,
198–9, 203, 204–5 105–6, 109–10, 113, 117, 179, 187,
Moore, Andrew 33 195–9, 204–5
morality, see ethics Origen 114, 119, 124
Morrison, Ken 92 Osborne, Catherine 114n
Moses 26, 136–7, 168–9 Othello 66–7
Moule, C. D. F. 31–2 Otto, Rudolf 160
Muhammad 202; see also Islam Owen, G. E. L. 1
Murphy, Nancey 145, 147
 Index
Palmquist Stephen 79, 82
pantheism 18, 141, 191
Parmenides 195–6
particularity 5, 8, 23, 31–2, 38–46, 51–2,
149–52, 177–81, 186
Pascal, Blaise 11, 18, 21–3, 24, 25, 27, 29,
33
Pattison, George viii, 10–11, 158, Ch. 11
Paul, St 17, 35, 51, 53, 125, 149, 167, 172n
Peacocke, Arthur 50
Pears, David 2
Peirce, Charles Sanders 22
Pelagianism 18, 86–7
Perikles 116
phenomenology 3, 9–10, 21, 38, 56, Ch. 6
passim, 150–51, 192
philosophy Introduction passim, 18, 21, 22,
23–4, 29, Ch. 2 passim, 56, 60–62,
Ch. 4 passim, 93, 94, 95, 105–8,
111, 116, 127, 136–7, Ch. 8 passim,
157, 159–65, 170–71, 175, Ch. 10
passim, 191–3, 195–6, 203, 204
phronesis (also practical wisdom) 5, 7, 11,
19, 25, 43–9, 52–3, 149–52, 154–5
Pickstock, Catherine 117n
picture 3, 9, 24, 58–61, 71, 129, 193, 204
Pius IX 68
Placher, William 150n
Plantinga, Alvin 38, 150n, 159
Plato (also Platonic; Platonists) 15–16, 17–
18, 32, 35n, 43, 51, 86, 112n, 114,
116, 148–50, 151, 156, 168, 179
Plotinus 175
Pocock, John 73n
poetry (also poetics) 4, 11, 32, 43, 78, 82,
125, 137, 157, 190, 193, 194–5,
197–9, 204–5; see also literature
Poland, partition of, 12–13
Popper, Sir Karl 99n
postmodernity 48, 94–5, 133, 145n, 147,
177–8, 198
Powell, Adam Clayton 153
practical wisdom, see phronesis
practice 7–9, 13, 24, 28, 36, 38, 40–41, 43,
44, 49, 60–61, 135, 141, 161, 164,
168, 174, 183, 186, 189–90
pragmatism 24, 47–9, 51
prayer 4, 6, 51, 123, 131, 136, 142, 160–61,
168, 171, 173; see also worship
231
presence 10, 18, 19–20, 26, 117, 124–5,
137, 161–2, 165, 171, 173, 175,
204–5
Price, H. H. 16
Priest, Stephen 107n
progress 3, 8–9, 12, 22, 40, 55, 68, 67–75,
88, 92, 98–9, 130, 157, 183–4, 189
Proudfoot, Wayne 38–9, 172n
providence, see miracle
Pseudo-Dionysius 115, 168
Quinn, Philip 37, 39, 40
Rahner, Karl 89, 142–3, 159, 163n, 166
Ramsey, Frank 2
Raven J. E. 195
reader, the 2, 5, 13, 19–20, 21, 25–6, 28, 42,
130, 145–6n, 149–53, 155–6, 202
realism 8, 23–4, 31, 38, 46, 47–51, 59–62,
77–8, 80, 85, 89–90, 109, 196
reason 1–5, 7, 11–13, 16, 19–23, 24–5, 29,
33–4, 35–41, 44, 46, 47, 55–6, 64–9,
71–4, Ch. 4 passim, 95–6, 99, 102,
106, 107, 114, 116–17, 130, 138,
149–53, 157–8, 161, 165, 172, 173,
175, 177, 198
redemption 15, 46–7, 49, 50, 52, 88, 134,
137; see also salvation
Reformation, the 39, 71, 73
relativism 5, 21, 25, 27, 41, 145n, 151
religion 3–7, 9, 10–13, 15–16, 18, 20, 21–3,
28–9, 34, 35n, 38–9, 42, 47–8, 52,
55–6, Chs 3 & 4 passim, 93–5,
98–102, 108–10, 124n, 130, 135–6,
140–42, 152, 157, Ch. 9 passim,
177–8, 181–4, 185–6, 188–90, 191,
193–4, 198, 201–3
Renan, Ernest 71
representation 9, 41, 47–8, 49, 59–60,
96–7, 107–8, 112, 119, 123–4, 147,
189–90, 196
Resurrection, the 28, 32, 42, 51, 92, 166–7
revelation 12, 21, 33–5, 46, 48, 50, 71, 72,
73, 89, 100, 107, 110, 121n, 130,
146, 159, 164n, 166–7, 175, 185,
197, 200, 203
rhetoric 11, 13, 20, 23–4, 183, 185, 192–3
232 Transcending Boundaries in Philosophy and Theology
Ricoeur, Paul 5, 25, 27, 37, 39–40, 41n, 42,
45, 49, 51, 107–8, 145n, 146, 147–8,
150–53, 156, 188–9
Rist, John 114n
Roberts, Richard 53
Rorty, Amélie Oksenberg 111n
Rorty, Richard 22, 24, 29, 37, 47
Ross, James 28
Rossi, Philip 86
Rowland, Christopher 171n
Ryle, Gilbert 20, 23
Sagan, Carl 63, 66
salvation 9, 12, 62n, 67, 125, 182–6; see
also redemption
Sandbothe, Mike 38n
Sartre, Jean-Paul 26, 188
Saussure, Ferdinand de 25
Schleiermacher, Friedrich 159, 163n, 166,
167n, 172n
Schnizler, Arthur 113
scholasticism 1, 37, 137–8n
Schwartz, Regina 177, 186
science 3, 4, 6–7, 12–13, 18–19, 22, 25, 37,
38, 41, 44, 50n, 55–6, 60, 62n, 63–
71, 74, 75, Ch. 5 passim, 106, 107,
126, 130, 133, 136, 142, 150n, 151n,
172, 183–4, 195–9, 203, 204–5
Scripture, see Bible
Searle, John 147n
secularity 3–4, 9, 12, 55, Ch. 3 passim, 106,
130, 135, 172, 174, 183–4, 185
self 8, 9, 18, 21, 40, 41, 45, 60–61, 65, 72,
96, 97–8, 100, 108, 114n, 121, 125,
132–3, 135, 136, 142, 147–8, 157,
158, 164–5, 178–81, 184–5, 191–2;
see also subject
Sennett, Richard 116n
Shakespeare, William 16, 32, 43, 52, 66
Shields, Christopher 111n
sin 19, 74–5, 141n, 183–4
Smith, James 147n
society (also the social) 3, 7–8, 12, 33,
38–9, 40–41, 48, 58, 60–62, 65,
67–9, 71–6, 91–2, 95–7, 100–101,
113, 116, 125, 135, 154, 157, 161,
163, 172, 178–9, 181–4, 185, 188,
189–90, 196, 204–5
Socrates 16, 34, 35, 148
Solinus, Julius 122
speech acts 5, 25, 127, Ch. 8 passim
Spinosa, Charles 75
Spinoza, Benedict de 23–4, 83, 121n
spiritual 3, 10, 18, 59, 65, 68, 69, 75, 114n,
116–17, 184
spirituality 17, 18, 63
Stanislavski, Konstantin 44
Star Trek 115
Stiver, Dan R. viii, 2, 5–6, 7, 11, 127, Ch. 8
Stravinsky, Igor 2
Stump, Eleonore 160
Suarez, Francisco de 111n
subject (also subjectivity) 3, 7–9, 11, 13,
17–19, 36–7, 41, 42, 43–5, 49, 60–
62, 96, 100, 110, 112–13, 115, 123,
161–2, 165, 169–71, 172n, 174–5,
187–8, 197–8, 202; see also self
subtraction story 7, 12, 57, 62, 69–70
Sussman, David 86n
Swinburne, Richard 159–62
Taliaferro, Charles 160
Taylor, A. E. 162n
Taylor, Charles viii, 3–4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 55, Ch.
3, 97n, 107
Teresa of Avila, St 160, 163, 165, 168n,
170–71
Tertullian 122
testimony 34, 62n, 67, 161
texts 2, 5–6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 23–9, 37–42,
48, Ch. 8 passim, 157, 166–7, 190,
194, 204
theism 3, 33, 37–9, 58, 75, 83, 93, 100, 135,
141, 163–4, 195
theology Introduction passim, 17–19, 29,
Ch. 2 passim, 56, 72, 75, 77, Ch. 4
passim, 92–3, 95, 98–102, 106–10,
114–26, 127, 130–31, 136–8, 145,
152, 155, 157, 159–60, 166–71, 175,
177, 194, 198
Thiselton, Anthony 42
Thomas Aquinas, St (also Thomism) 18, 33,
89, 111, 116–17, 122–3, 124, 136,
137, 138, 167
Thucydides 116n
Tillich, Paul 52, 89, 159, 166
time (also temporality) 27, 31, 33, 36,
39–40, 46, 51, 65, 78, 84, 109, 133n,
 Index 233
138, 155, 158, 164, 173, 177–9, 183, Weber, Max 58, 96, 172
184, 187, 195, 202 Weil, Simone 20
Tocqueville, Alexis de 74 Weinandy, Thomas 138n
Torrance, Thomas 100n Wesley, John 74, 172n
touch, sense of 10, 56, 109, 111–26 West, the (also western culture) 3, 8–9, 55,
Tracy, David 40 57, 69, 73, 94, 98, 130–31, 133, 135,
Trinity, doctrine of the 33, 40, 46, 50–51, 141, 157, 164, 168, 172, 178, 181–6,
119, 138n, 142–3 188–90, 191, 195–6
truth (also truths) 2, 4, 16, 17–18, 20, 23–5, will, the 7, 11, 19–23, 29, 43, 46, 72–3, 85,
26, 31, Ch. 2 passim, 62n, 77, 84, 86, 118; see also heart
89, 90, 106, 129–30, 131, 141, Williams, Rowan 17, 18, 27, 49, 141n
142–3, 177, 179, 181, 193, 195, 196, wisdom 19–20, 31, 35, 42n, 44, 49–50, 53,
198, 203, 205 131, 140–43,
Turner, Denys 115n, 137, 168–70, 194 practical wisdom, see phronesis
Tyrrell, G. N. M. 164n Wisdom, John 23
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 2, 4, 9, 21, 27, 58–9,
Underhill, Evelyn 194 107, 113, 120, 131, 167n, 191–2,
understanding Introduction passim, 19, 197
21, 23–4, 27–8, 32, 35, 37, 40, 42, Wolterstorff, Nicholas 33, 38, 39–40, 42,
43–53, 55, 59–60, 69, 74, 77–8, 89, 145–7, 148–9
98, 102, 111–12, 116–17, 124–6, Wood, Allen 79
129, 131, 133, 138, 142–3, 146, 148, Word, the, see Logos
149–53, 154–6, 157, 167, 179, 181, Wordsworth, William 42
194, 196–8, 204–5 world, the 2, 3–4, 6, 8, 13, 21, Ch. 2 passim,
Unger, Peter 21 55, 57, 60–61, 63, 65–8, 72, 78–9,
utopia 8, 75, 157, 189–90 82–3, 84–5, Chs 5, 6 & 7 passim,
150–52, 157–8, 162, 165, 167, 171,
values, see normativity 172, 173–4, 177, 181, 182, 183,
Vanhoozer, Kevin. J. viii, 3, 6, 7–8, 9, 10, 184–5, 188, 190, 191, 195–6, 198,
11, 12, Ch. 2, 127, 145–7 200, 205
Van Til, Cornelius 93 world structures 3–8, 10–13, 55, Ch. 3
Vergil 182 passim
verificationism 37, 94, 99, 109, 110 worship 4, 27, 108, 127, 129–30, 134–6,
via negativa (also apophatic tradition) 18, 139, 141, 153–4, 172, 183, 193; see
137–8, 168–9 also prayer
Vickers, Salley 129 Wrathall, Mark ix, 76n
Voltaire (Arouet, François-Marie) 72, 74 Wright. T. R. 32
von Hügel, Baron Friedrich 168
Yandell, Keith 161n
Wainwright, William J. 38 Yeago, David S. 40–41
Walsh, W. H. 50n
Ward, Graham viii, 3, 9–10, 56, Ch. 6 Zaehner, R. C. 164
Warner, Martin viii, 11, Ch. 1 Zarathustra 8
Watson, Francis 40 Žižek, Slavoj 117n
Webb, Clement 81–2 Zoroastrianism 94