Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | März/2018 |
Spalte: | 253–255 |
Kategorie: | Philosophie, Religionsphilosophie |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Oakes, Kenneth [Ed.] |
Titel/Untertitel: | Christian Wisdom Meets Modernity. |
Verlag: | London u. a.: Bloomsbury T & T Clark 2016. XVI, 252 S. = Illuminating Modernity. Geb. US$ 122,00. ISBN 978-0-567-66687-1. |
Rezensent: | Matthew Levering |
This winsome volume contains Christian engagements with di-verse currents of European (continental) philosophical, theological, and cultural modernity. The collection is bookended by two chapters that propose overarching visions of what modern philosophy is and how it should be engaged and appropriated.
In the first chapter, David Walsh contends that in its focus on subjectivity, philosophical modernity has been always been aware »of the unsustainability of truncated reason« (3). Reason cannot be investigated unless it presupposes its own validity. Giving Heidegger the central place in the unfolding of this insight, Walsh argues that the problem is that Heidegger excluded himself from his in-vestigation of »the stretching of thought beyond itself« (4). Levinas recognizes that »the other« is prior to one’s own opening toward being; the call of the other is prior to the response, and thus »[b]eing is the face of the other« (6). But Derrida’s analysis of hospitality and gift suggests that no debt can be repaid, and so true communion and communication remain impossible. Walsh finds the solutions in Kierkegaard, who »returns us to the only whole in which the whole can be contained: the person« (11). Analysis of the person reveals that it is the radical Abrahamic surrendering of the self to God that is the call and fulfillment of the person: »the one who has given away the most is most all« (15).
In the final essay of the volume, Balázs Melei proposes that everything depends upon tracing the ongoing presence of ancient cosmological theology in Western philosophy. We must come to recognize the pervasiveness – even (in a hidden way) in modern philosophy – of the »understanding of the cosmos as an organic unity in which human beings possess a central place so that they can view of the circulation of the stellar bodies and accommodate their en-tire lives to these movements« (207). Among the seven crucial features that, according to Melei, result theologically from this cosmology, let me single out three: »the notion of lower nature as fundamentally moldable by higher or divine nature,« »the notion of nature as containing structures reproducible in particular products of human action,« and »imitation as the essence of human action« (211). Both Christian philosophy and modern philosophy fail to go deep enough in their demythologization of pre-modern Western philosophy, because they either value cosmo-theology too highly or fail to recognize its pervasive and ongoing presence. Melei grants that Christian philosophy, represented today in thinkers as diverse as Maritain and von Balthasar, critiques and adapts cosmo-theological thinking. But after Auschwitz, Christians must face more boldly the need for »radically new approaches to philosophy« (227), which are possible only when philosophy is able to understand its own tradition. He concludes that the task of »cosmo-theological criticism« (227) will be to perceive that »the genuine nature of reality […] is closer to personal existence than to the rigid material beings given in our external sensation« (230). Thus Melei arrives at a conclusion quite similar to Walsh’s, but with a notably differ-ent program in view.
Among the many excellent essays sandwiched between Walsh’s and Melei’s, that of D. C. Schindler deserves particular mention because its program is equally expansive. Schindler’s essay exposits the work of Ferdinand Ulrich, but does so for the purpose of recommending Ulrich’s path as the best way forward. For Schindler and Ulrich, »it is precisely the light of faith, recognized as faith, that allows us to restore the integrity of reason in its natural operation« (149). Drawing upon Aquinas in dialogue with Hegel and Heidegger, Schindler and Ulrich hold that »love is the meaning of being« and that »love is that which determines all other things« (150). Since this is so, the metaphysics of being must be adapted to under-score that being is free self-surrender, utterly generous gift. Everything subsists as pouring itself out; and everything can only be received rightly as gift. The critique of Hegel and Heidegger unfolds from these points, given that the Logos, who subsists in the absolute gifting of the Trinity, has poured himself out in creation and preeminently in Christ. The key to engaging philosophical modernity, then, consists in receiving revelation in faith as a gift and thereby engaging »with modernity […] on the basis of love, as the meaning of reality as a whole« (163).
Let me quickly tour the other essays. Aaron Riches argues that in light of modern nihilism we should retrieve Bérulle’s understand-ing of the human person as ex nihilo – a recognition of human no-thingness as a starting point rather than a nihilistic endpoint. Peter Casarella suggests that von Balthasar reconceives theology in terms of a »theological phenomenology« that is made concrete ecclesially in the theo-drama of saintly lives, which explains why von Balthasar considered the Community of St. John central to his theological mission. David Bentley Hart inhabits Charles Baudelaire in order to combat, in the name of Christ whose utter self-surrender may seem absurd, the rationalism, mechanism, and »materialist prudence« of modernity (31). Cyril O’Regan displays a variety of Catholic responses to Heidegger in order to show the depths of von Balthasar’s critique of Heidegger’s immanentism. John Betz retrieves Erich Przywara to show that the modern world, having rejected the analogy of being, has consigned itself to oscillating »between an exclusive transcendence and an exclusive immanence« (89). Patrick Gorevan argues that in the work of Romano Guardini – as in the liturgy – we find that »the great human realities of flesh and spirit, individual and community, freedom and rigour, often opposed to one another, are given a space where they dwell in unison and enrich the interior life« (62). Kenneth Oakes shows that Karl Barth consciously retains a number of »modern assumptions« while leading them »to surprising ends« (96). Adrian Reimers suggests that Karol Wojtyła’s philosophical project should be understood through the lens of his theol-ogy of the body, which reveals »a coherent phenomenological account of the human person« that recalls modern people to »what love is, why love is exclusive to persons and how we can attain love« (146–47). Mátyás Szalay finds that modernity serves Christian conversion especially through its appreciation of imagination, even if we must reject modernity’s Promethean understanding of the imagination as »fantasy« (192).
For those who think, as I do, that the Christian engagement of modernity should primarily involve retrieving biblical, patristic, and medieval resources, these essays offer valuable insights into why serious engagement with European philosophical modernity is worth the effort.