Language and Spirit

Language and Spirit Edited by D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr Language and Spirit Claremont Studies in the Ph...

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Language and Spirit

Edited by

D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr

Language and Spirit

Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion General Editors: D.Z. Phillips, Danforth Professor of the Philosophy of Religion, the Claremont Graduate School, California; and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Rush Rhees Professor Emeritus, University of Wales, Swansea; Mario von der Ruhr, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Wales, Swansea. At a time when discussions of religion are becoming increasingly specialized and determined by religious affiliations, it is important to maintain a forum for philosophical discussion which transcends the allegiances of belief and unbelief. This series affords an opportunity for philosophers of widely differing persuasions to explore central issues in the philosophy of religion. Titles include: Stephen T. Davis (editor) PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE D.Z. Phillips (editor) CAN RELIGION BE EXPLAINED AWAY? RELIGION AND MORALITY D.Z. Phillips and Timothy Tessin (editors) KANT AND KIERKEGAARD ON RELIGION PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN THE 21ST CENTURY RELIGION WITHOUT TRANSCENDENCE? RELIGION AND HUME’S LEGACY D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr (editors) LANGUAGE AND SPIRIT Timothy Tessin and Mario von der Ruhr (editors) PHILOSOPHY AND THE GRAMMAR OF RELIGIOUS BELIEF

Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71465–2 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Language and Spirit Edited by

D.Z. Phillips and

Mario von der Ruhr

Editorial matter, selection and introduction © D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr 2004 Chapter 1 © Anselm Kyongsuk Min 2004 Chapter 2 © Mario von der Ruhr 2004 Chapter 3 © Merold Westphal 2004 Chapter 4 © Schubert M. Ogden 2004 Chapter 5 © Patrick Sherry 2004 Chapter 6 © James Kellenberger 2004 Voices in discussion 1–6 © D.Z. Phillips 2004 Remaining material © Palgrave Macmillan 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–1820–1 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Language and spirit / edited by D.Z. Phillips and Mario von der Ruhr. p. cm. – (Claremont studies in the philosophy of religion) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–1820–1 (cloth) 1. Philosophical theology. 2. Spirit. I. Phillips, D.Z. (Dewi Zephaniah) II. Von der Ruhr, Mario. III. Series. BT55.L36 2004 211—dc22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

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Contents Acknowledgements

vi

Notes on Contributors

vii

Introduction D.Z. Phillips

1

1 Hegel’s Dialectic of the Spirit: Contemporary Reflections on Hegel’s Vision of Development and Totality Anselm Kyongsuk Min

2

3

Voices in discussion 1

35

Spirit and Romanticism Mario von der Ruhr

39


60

Kierkegaard on Language and Spirit Merold Westphal

64


86

4 Toward Interpreting the Language of Spirit: The Legacy of Rudolf Bultmann Schubert M. Ogden

5

6

8

91


106

Is God a Spirit? Patrick Sherry

113


125

Spirit and Truth James Kellenberger

131


144

Name Index

151

Subject Index

153 v

Acknowledgements The papers in this collection were delivered at the 2002 Claremont Conference on Philosophy of Religion. I acknowledge, with gratitude, the financial support by Claremont Graduate University, Pomona College and Claremont McKenna College. I am also grateful to the participants for their contribution to the Conference Fund. I am particularly grateful to Professor Van Harvey of Stanford University who was invited to give critiques of the conference papers. His comments gave shape and stimulus to all the discussions. I am indebted to Helen Baldwin and Jackie Huntzinger, Secretaries to the Department of Philosophy at Swansea, and to the School of Religion at Claremont, respectively, for their administrative help. I am also grateful for the help of graduate students during the conference, particularly my research assistant Francis Gonzales – who was also responsible for typing my Introduction and Voices in discussion. Finally, I thank my co-editor Mario von der Ruhr for proof-reading the collection and for seeing it through its various stages of publication.

vi

Notes on Contributors Van A. Harvey retired as George Edwin Burnell Professor of Religious Studies at Stanford University in 1996. He is the author of A Handbook of Theological Terms; The Historian and the Believer; and Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion, which won the American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in 1996. He has written extensively on nineteenthand twentieth-century Protestant thought. James Kellenberger is Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Northridge, USA. His research interests include ethical theory, religious pluralism, and philosophy of religion. He has published numerous articles and eight books including The Cognitivity of Religion: Three Perspectives; Inter-Religious Models and Criteria; Relationship Morality; Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance; and most recently Moral Relativism, Moral Diversity, and Human Relationships. Anselm Kyongsuk Min is Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate University, USA. His theological interests are in contemporary constructive theology (trinity, Christology), theological method, theologies of liberation, religious pluralism, and Asian theologies. His philosophical interests include Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, recent European thought, classical American philosophy, and political philosophy. He has published on liberation theology, Hegel, pluralism, Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and Asian theologies. He is the author of Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Theology of Liberation and is currently writing Nature, Grace, Glory: Aquinas’s Trinitarian Theology of Creation. Schubert M. Ogden is Professor Emeritus at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, USA and Marty Center Visiting Senior Scholar in Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His publications include The Reality of God and Other Essays; Faith and Freedom: Towards a Theology of Liberation; and Doing Theology Today. D.Z. Phillips is Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus and Rush Rhees Professor Emeritus at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is the author of many books, the most recent being Philosophy’s Cool Place; Recovering Religious Concepts; Religion and the Hermeneutics of vii

viii Notes on Contributors

Contemplation. He has newly completed books on Religion and Friendly Fire; The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God; and Wittgensteinian Fideism? (with Kai Nielsen). Patrick Sherry is Professor in Philosophical Theology Emeritus at the Department of Religious Studies, Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of many books including Spirit and Beauty; Images of Redemption; Religion, Truth and Language Games; and Spirit, Saints and Immortality. He was the editor of Philosophers on Religion, and with N. Smart, J. Clayton, and S.T. Katz, he co-edited Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West. Merold Westphal is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, USA. His primary interest lies in Continental Philosophy from Kant to the Present. In particular, he is currently interested in the historical development and systematic integrity of individual thinkers and the dialogue or debate between pairs of thinkers; their contributions to the philosophy of religion, political philosophy, and aesthetics; and their contributions to issues of philosophical methodology in terms of dialectical holism, ideology critique, existentialism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and so on. He is the author of many books including Overcoming Onto-Theology, and Postmodern Philosophy and Christian Thought. Mario von der Ruhr is lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wales, Swansea. His research interests include the Philosophy of Religion, Kantian ethics, Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and the thought of Simone Weil. He is an Associate Editor of the journal Philosophical Investigations, and co-editor of the series Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion and Existential Themes in Theology and Philosophy of Religion.

Introduction D.Z. Phillips

Why has the concept of spirit been neglected in contemporary anglophone philosophy? Why has it been neglected in philosophy of religion where, it might be thought, a belief in God as Spirit would have commanded attention for the notion? I do not pretend to provide an adequate answer to these complex questions in this brief introduction. Neither am I going to trace, or repeat, the answers to the question one finds explicitly, or implicitly, in the papers which make up this collection. Their clarity is such as to render such an attempt on my part utterly superfluous. I do, however, want to explore one aspect of replies to the questions which runs throughout the papers and discussions of them: this has to do with our difficulty in placing the concept of spirit. There seems to be a general lack of confidence about the use of the notion, one which is, at the same time, a hesitancy about the ways in which it can, or should, enter our discourse. I can bring out what I mean by the difficulty of ‘placement’ by referring to a tension which, as far as I am concerned, was never far away in the papers and discussion. This is a tension between philosophy and theology or, more particularly, a tension between ontology and theology. At one end of the spectrum, there are those who entertain what might be called ontological ambitions for the notion of spirit, such that to talk about ‘spirit’ becomes a way of talking about ‘what there is’, or ‘all things’, in a way which appears, in different forms, in philosophical ontologies. It might be said that ontological ambitions for ‘Spirit’ reach their highest point in Hegel. Ever since the answers given by the Presocratics to the question, ‘What is the nature of all things?’, advocates of ultimate ontologies have had to face the question of how the ontological reality, whatever form it takes, is supposed to account for that which comes to 1

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be and passes away, that is, for what actually happens in the world. Even when the ontology has taken a mathematical form, as with the ultimate mathematical units of the Pythagoreans, there has been the difficulty of showing why, from those units, it follows that mathematical configurations and operations should take the forms they do. It is hard to see a way round this difficulty if, as seems surely the case, mathematics does not spring from ontological units, but, rather, itself gives sense to them. Without mathematics, how would one know that they were mathematical units at all? Hegel, it could be argued, tried to circumvent these difficulties by attempting to marry metaphysics and history, so that the unfolding of that history becomes the necessary unfolding of the ontological character of reality; the necessary unfolding of a realm of Absolute Spirit identified as ‘what there is’. In this way, necessity is introduced into the realm of history, thought to be associated with radical contingency. History is no longer an account of how things happened to go, but an account of a progression or development endowed with an inherent meaning. But it is precisely at this point that insuperable difficulties emerge. At one level, they concern the intelligibility of ascribing a meaning to history. The historian, of course, seeks to give an illuminating account of events which actually occur, but it does not follow that those events are reduced to a meaningless succession if we do not say that history as such, has a meaning, one which unfolds in that succession. At another level, difficulties emerge in accepting the actual applications Hegel sought to give to his ontology of Spirit. So far from reflecting a necessary development in history, they reflect his own political and religious preferences. This becomes evident, for example, in his gradation of religions; in his failure to allow genuine differences in his desire to make them phases of a single development. Thus, Christianity itself, though held to be superior to other religions, itself becomes a phase in the unfolding of Absolute Spirit. It is hard not to grant Kierkegaard’s satirical point when he commented on how fortunate Hegel was to have been born in time to see reality come to fruition in his own metaphysical system. I do not want to dwell on the difficulties incurred by Hegel’s ontological ambitions for the religious notion of Spirit, but they raise an issue of more general significance between ontology and theology. If ontology is said to precede theology, it follows that the placement of the religious notion of Spirit will depend on the character of that ontology, so much so that, if the ontology were thoroughly materialistic, it could be, and has been, denied any placement at all. If philosophy is taken to be the

Introduction 3

investigation of ‘being’ or ‘the nature of all things’, God as Spirit, if placed at all, will be given a place as an instance among many of the things which participate in that nature as one being among many. It is precisely at this point that theology is prone to react to the philosophical import of the above conclusions. Its reactions, however, may take different forms. Without claiming exegetical accuracy, we may borrow Kierkegaard’s name in describing one kind of reaction as a Kierkegaardian reaction. Concerned as he was with ‘the monstrous illusion’ which he thought gripped the Denmark of his day, Kierkegaard wanted to rescue Christianity from the grip of its confusions. He wanted to clarify how difficult ‘becoming a Christian’ is, so that, at the very least, opposition to Christianity would be opposition to the real thing. He saw philosophy itself as contributing to the confusion he wanted to combat. It did so by turning Christianity itself, with its talk of our failure to obey the law, and our need for grace, into some kind of philosophical thesis or system. It might be said that Kierkegaard wanted to return Christian language to what he took to be its natural home, namely, to those aspects of human life which have to do with the interplay between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious in human experience. Problems arise from Kierkegaard’s account of the interplay between the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, which I simply mention here, but do not resolve. The ones I have in mind arise from the problem of how Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘the ethical’ is to be understood. Some commentators take him to be referring to a category which is independent of religion, one influenced in its form by Kant’s moral thought excluding the development of the religious postulates and argued for in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone; in short, a morality in which duty and respect for the moral law which demands its fulfillment, are recognised as the only acceptable motivation for moral action. Other commentators, however, see ‘the ethical’ as a religious category in Kierkegaard, one captured by his conception of ‘religiousness A’ in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. After all, Judge William, in the second volume of Either/Or certainly has a religious belief of some kind. Yet, it is to this very character that an appeal is often made to illustrate ‘the ethical stage’ in Kierkegaard’s thought as being independent of religion. Fortunately, the problems to which I want to point do not depend on solving this exegetical dispute. For on either view, insufficient attention is paid to the heterogeneity of morals. Morality is certainly a more varied phenomenon than the account given of it by a secular Kantianism would suggest. This is the case, even more so, if we take ‘the ethical’ in Kierkegaard to be already a specific ethic of an ethico-religious

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form. If one accepts that morality is a heterogeneous phenomenon, it will follow that the account of ‘spirit’ in a human being, the formation of a ‘self’, which concerns Kierkegaard, will already be informed by the specific ethic, secular or ethico-religious, which he is expounding. Even so, it might be asked, why does this create a possible tension for the relation between philosophy and theology’s discussions of the notion of ‘spirit’? The long-overdue answer is this: I said that theology is likely to react to philosophy’s ontological claims, precisely at the point at which ‘God as Spirit’ is made subject to the criteria of a wider ontology which makes the divine being, one instance, among many, of ‘being as such’. The theologian is likely to see this as a threat to the notion of God’s sovereignty. How can that sovereignty be thought of as subject to anything if it is supposed to be sovereign over all things? Theology cannot be made subject to ontology in this way. Indeed, if it is a matter of who holds the trump hand, the theologian may want to counter-attack by saying that theology precedes ontology. If one comes to the above theological conclusion, familiar difficulties begin to reappear. Theology now seems to inherit the difficulties of any metaphysical ontology, namely, to show how, from its declared primacy, an account can be given of what actually happens at various times and places. If theology wants to succeed ontology as an account of ‘all things’, can it, after all, take the heterogeneity of morals seriously? Can it allow the genuine conceptual independence of moralities other than its own? Or must those moralities be shown to be confused, incomplete, or mistaken, in some sense or other? Is that task something that can be achieved theoretically, without begging the question by invoking a Christian ethic at vital stages of the account? It might be thought that Kierkegaard eschews this task by concentrating on specific confusions between the categories of ‘the aesthetic’, ‘the ethical’ and ‘the religious’ in relation to Christianity. But is this altogether true? In his remarks on the development of the self, is he not drawn, sometimes, at least, to describe the fate of non-believers in ways which simply may not be the case, even for the most trivial of pleasure-seekers? I am thinking, for example, of some remarks made about such people in Purity of Heart. If this is so, and I only say if, in this context, it seems that sometimes Kierkegaard presupposes a religious anthropology of the human spirit which will allow him to draw certain conclusions about God’s relation, as Spirit, to that conception of the human spirit. But what if that religious anthropology of the human spirit is itself a disguised ontology in a new context? What then?

Introduction 5

It may well be true, as Kierkegaard and Bultmann insist, that the issues Christianity poses for us are existential issues, and that they are misconstrued if taken to be metaphysical theses. Indeed, it can be argued that, along with many others, they argued for a distinction between metaphysical and existential questions. Further, it could be argued that both Kierkegaard and Bultmann recognised that metaphysical investigation is not a kind of factual investigation, and hence also recognised that metaphysical conclusions are not the discovery of a realm of super or very general facts. Metaphysics, it may be said, is an investigation into the sense of things, the conditions of its possibility. Nevertheless, ontological ambitions may reassert themselves if, in the realm of values, those conditions are given an unsustainable generality. Thus, what is given through Christian revelation by way of a moral way of life, may be thought to correspond to human nature in its essence. A recognition of the heterogeneity of morals does not allow such a conclusion to be drawn. Hence, one is still faced with the question of how the notion of God as Spirit is related to different moral and religious conceptions of value. The theologian may reply that there are resources within Christianity which allow one to recognise the presence of Christ outside the boundaries of Christendom. The sameness of the spirit will be located in the quality of life irrespective of the name attached to it. These spiritual comparisons would allow the possibility, not only of saying of certain Buddhist practices, ‘Christ is present there’, but also the possibility of saying of certain Christian practices, ‘There is the spirit of the Buddha.’ Yet, such preparedness depends on the presence of the same or very similar religious practices. It hides the ontological ambition to encompass all practices, no matter how different the values manifested in them. How any such encompassing is possible remains an issue. There are conceptions within contemporary philosophy of religion which make any talk of a divine spirit encompassing the whole world even more problematic, namely, the attempt to define ‘spirit’ as a person without a body. It ought to be remembered that the tradition in which God is thought of as a person without a body, is the same philosophical tradition in which human beings are spirits with bodies. In each case, the essence of a person is thought to be consciousness. Though I will not attempt to argue the matter in this introduction, such conceptions of God and of human beings have to argue against the view that this notion of consciousness is unintelligible. Furthermore, the notion of God as a person without a body is not one that can be found in the Bible. It will not do to argue that this is one of the many things we now know which the Hebrews did not. Rather, the point is that the notion

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does violence to religious discourse in the Bible, where images of the divine are often expressed in terms of breath, air, or wind – as something independent of us and which yet can pass through us. This seeks to do justice to the notion of God as Spirit, that element in which believers say that they live, move, and have their being. At this point, another familiar argument in contemporary philosophy of religion will make itself heard. It will say that talk of the life of the spirit, or of spiritual realities, only makes sense on the assumption that spirits exist. If they do not exist, how can there be a life of the spirit? Once again, an ontology attempts to reassert itself, only this time as an ontology of the spirit. The difficulty with talk of ‘existence’ here has a parallel in the more general context of a metaphysical ontology. As we have seen, ontology is equated with reality. If we say that reality exists, that invites us to investigate the conditions of existence which would, in any such investigation, have to be independent of reality itself – an absurd idea. Similarly, if the all-encompassing divine spirit is said to exist, an investigation of the conditions of its existence would seem to suggest that it is not allencompassing after all. On the other hand, talk of God’s existence and the denial of it, do have a place in our discourse, so the task in hand will be to do justice to it without falling into the difficulties we have mentioned. It can be argued that romanticism tried to address the above task. In its emphasis on the notion of ‘spirit’, it sought to realign the categories which religion is thought to comprise of, categories which it thought had been far too influenced by the success of the natural sciences. Romanticism turned its attention to what it took to be the neglected realms of artistic creation in poetry, music and the visual arts. In doing so, it was not emphasising expressive or affective meaning, as distinct from factual or cognitive meaning. That is how many contemporary philosophers of religion would react to its efforts, but this is to grossly underestimate its aims. Romanticism was not advocating an additional realm of meaning to that of cognitive significance, but reclaiming the notion of factuality and cognition from the impoverished conceptions we are left with if we allow them to be determined by concepts and interests which have their home in the natural sciences. This would be like saying that the notion of a human being is to be determined solely by biology. Things of the spirit in human affairs, not to mention ‘God as Spirit’, are constituted by the human concerns expressed in music, art and literature. But these concerns are not decorative appendages to our lives, but give to those lives their character as human lives.

Introduction 7

Yet, having said this, the things of the spirit do not form a neat unified class, since it must be remembered that if Jesus wanted to teach us and remind us of things of the spirit, so did Nietzsche, though the things they had in mind were very different from each other. This brings us back to our main question regarding God as Spirit, one I must leave with the reader. If religious believers want to say that God as Spirit is the element in which all things are seen and encompassed, does that mean that it must be shown to be the real account of all else in some theoretical way? Is it not enough to see all else in the spirit which believers say is of God? Does that spirit need to be grounded in an ontology more general than itself, one which gives us reason to live in this spirit rather than another? What if the notion of such an ontology is not only not forthcoming, but radically confused? Is it the case that the spirit which is God is then left arbitrary and groundless, providing no reason why we should strive to abide in it? But if what is loved by believers is that very spirit, what work is an ontology supposed to perform? To have faith in God as Spirit is to love that spirit for what it is, and to give oneself to it. But did I not say that there were different conceptions of ‘things of the spirit’, some of which proclaim that the spirit of humanity depends on its unqualified apposition to religious conceptions of things of the spirit? True enough. How then are we to decide between these claims on us? Instead of asking how we can decide, we should ask how we do. The answer is that our allegiance will be won over by what one or other of these conceptions have to offer. Or perhaps we are indifferent to such matters. In any event, there is no by-passing the personal decision or commitment that is called for, and which may be lacking. It would be extremely foolish to think that philosophy could be a means of doing so, by showing you, in some philosophical way, how that decision can be demonstrated on one’s behalf. Philosophy may clarify ‘things of the spirit’, including the notion of ‘God as Spirit’, but whether it leads one to embrace any of these is not a matter that can be determined philosophically.

1 Hegel’s Dialectic of the Spirit: Contemporary Reflections on Hegel’s Vision of Development and Totality Anselm Kyongsuk Min

The Spirit in Hegel’s philosophy To speak of the Spirit in Hegel is to speak of everything there is, like speaking of being in classical metaphysics. Spirit means, first and foremost, the “absolute” or the “truly infinite” Spirit, the divine Spirit who does not remain merely infinite or transcendent but posits the finite as its own other, maintaining self-identity in that other and reconciling the finite with itself. All reality is an expression of the absolute Spirit. When taken in its abstract structure in isolation from its objectification in nature and history, the absolute Spirit is called the absolute Idea, the fundamental unity of concept and reality operative in all reality. When objectified in unconscious externality, it is called nature. When objectified in the social movements and institutions of self-conscious humanity, it is called history, in which the absolute Spirit is immanent as the “world spirit” and more specifically as “the spirit of the time” or “the spirit of the nation.” When immanent in the self-transcendent and self-universalizing movement of a finite spirit, it is called the human individual. The realms of art, religion, and philosophy are the spheres in which the absolute Spirit contemplates itself in its absolute, universal reality. All reality, then, is either the absolute Spirit itself or its finite others empowered by the absolute Spirit to transcend themselves toward their infinite other in time and space. The absolute Spirit constitutes the ultimate source, substance, and end of all things in their very movements. Hegel’s Spirit, then, is quite different from the many things often associated with being Spirit in popular imagination. It is neither 8

Hegel’s Dialectic of the Spirit 9

something purely invisible and inward – like a “ghost” – nor something merely individual – like a “mind” or “soul” – nor something confined to the “religious” and “spiritual” – like devotional practices – nor something limited to the divine – like the Holy Spirit. The essence of spirit, whether absolute or finite, is to actualize itself by acting, which always involves manifesting and concretizing itself in an other, and to enter the developmental dialectic of self and other for the self-transcending end of achieving its concept, the realization of a harmonious relationship with the other in which it can find itself. When it cannot find itself, its goal or concept, in a given reality involving the other – like the human body that cannot realize its goal of living when contradicted and overwhelmed by a cancerous other – it perishes, a sure sign of its finitude, which Hegel locates in the inability of a thing to sublate the difference between its (formally infinite) concept and its (materially finite) reality. The infinity of the absolute Spirit lies precisely in its ability to sublate this difference and find its infinite concept actualized and reconciled, without alienation, in the reality of the finite, its other, demonstrating the identity of its concept and reality.1 The Spirit, therefore, is neither merely a “thing” or “substance” with a self-identity nor merely a “subject” in social relations with others but a “spirit,” that is, the dialectical activity of self and other, subject and object, interiority and exteriority, individual and society, finite and infinite. As activity, the Spirit is neither something purely spiritual, invisible and inward but the invisible spiritual interiority in the process of making itself material, visible and external, nor something purely subjective but subjectivity in the process of making itself objective, nor something merely confined to the “religious” but religiosity in the process of actualizing its transcendent content in the secular experience of economics, politics, and culture, nor something only limited to the divine but the divine Spirit in the process of realizing its absolute Idea, the unity of infinite and finite, in nature and history as their ultimate empowering end. Hegel’s Spirit is not an abstraction but the very source and goal of all that is concrete, the very opposite of what is identified with it in popular understanding. To speak of the Spirit in Hegel, then, is to speak of the absolute Spirit, which in turn is to speak of everything there is and there can be, which also means speaking of the whole of Hegel’s philosophy, from the Phenomenology to the Logic to the Philosophy of Right to the various Lectures on history, art, religion, and philosophy. Hegel’s comprehensive understanding of the Spirit has been accused of everything from pantheism to totalitarianism, historical cynicism to unrealistic optimism,

10 Anselm Kyongsuk Min

speculative rationalism to oppressive logocentrism, the contempt for the individual, forgetfulness of being, and forgetfulness of the other. As the culmination of modernity, Hegel has been held responsible for virtually everything that has gone wrong in the modern world. For obvious reasons I cannot here discuss the whole of Hegel’s philosophy nor go into all the standard criticisms bearing on it. Instead, I have decided to limit myself to illustrating the dialectic of spirit in the specific sphere of religion and providing contemporary reflections on the issues arising from that dialectic. There are two parts to this chapter. In the first part, I will present a brief review of the history of religions according to Hegel’s “spiritual” hermeneutic so as to show as concretely as possible what Hegel means by spirit, its structure and dynamics. I could have illustrated Hegel’s dialectical understanding of spirit just as well from his view of the history of the world, the history of the arts, or the history of philosophy. In the second part, I’ll share my reflections on three particular issues bearing on Hegel’s spiritual hermeneutic of religion, his concept of necessary progress, his Western ethnocentric interpretation of non-Christian religions, and his concept of totality.

The Spirit in the history of religions Hegel’s philosophy of religion follows the dialectical structure of spirit, the moment of the concept of religion, the actualization of the concept in determinate religions, and the moment of the adequate, self-conscious unity of the concept and reality of religion in the absolute, Christian religion. According to its concept, that is, according to what religion ought and seeks to be in its essential structure, religion is the mutual relation of the infinite, universal, divine Spirit seeking to realize and know itself in the reality of the finite, particular, human spirit, and of the latter finite spirit seeking to realize and know itself in the infinite Spirit as its own essence. Religion involves both the elevation of the human consciousness to God and the movement of God seeking to realize herself in human consciousness or, rather, the intrinsic unity of the two. This first moment of the concept of religion, the “substantial,” abstract, indeterminate unity of the human and the divine, is sundered, in the second moment of the concept, into the relation of the human and the divine as two distinct entities related to each other in the modes of feeling – which includes the certainty of faith – representation, and thought. The third moment of the concept of religion is that of the cultus, in which the antithesis or mutual remoteness of the human and the


divine is sublated and the human subject enjoys union with God in “grace.” This “concept” of religion, for Hegel, is an abstract, indeterminate universal and must become actual and concrete in the “reality” of the “determinate,” particular, historical, “ethnic” religions, which, however, remains inadequate to the “concept,” the unity of the divine and the human, because these religions still contain unsublated alienations of various kinds. It is only in the “absolute” religion of Christianity where the trinitarian God overreaches the finite other and incarnates himself in the determinacy and negativity of finitude, overcomes that negativity, and reconciles the finite with himself that the concept of religion finds its adequate reality, that alienations are overcome, at least, in principle.2 According to the concept of religion as the relation of the finite and infinite spirit, it is important, in reviewing Hegel’s developmental view of the history of religions, to keep three questions in mind. (1) What is the self-image of the human beings involved in the particular religion? (2) What is their conception of the divine? and (3) What kind of relations obtain between human beings and their gods? Following what I would call the “principle of coherence” Hegel states that “even as the content, God, determines itself, so on the other side the subjective human spirit that has this knowledge determines itself too. The principle by which God is defined for human beings is also the principle for how humanity defines itself inwardly, or for humanity in its own spirit. An inferior god or a nature god has inferior, natural and unfree human beings as its correlates; the pure concept of God or the spiritual God has as its correlate spirit that is free and spiritual, that actually knows God.”3 Given the unity of our consciousness of ourselves and our consciousness of an object, there must be some coherence or correspondence between our conception of ourselves and our conception of the highest being that is at once our fulfillment and our “truth.” We cannot pride ourselves as rational beings, on the one hand, and worship a purely irrational being as our God, on the other, or vice versa. The nature of the relation between human beings and their gods will also be determined in accordance or coherence with the respective conceptions of the human subject and the divine object. A slavish human being tends to worship a tyrannical god, and vice versa, and their relationship will be one of fear and obedience. Keeping these three questions in mind, then, will help us understand later the criteria by which Hegel evaluates and ranks the different religions. For Hegel, religious progress consists in the gradual “spiritualization” of the content, that is, universalization and interiorization,


in the image of the divine object, the self-image of the human subject, and their mutual relationship. Hegel mentions three forms of “determinate” religion in progressive order (1) religion of nature that characterizes Asian religions from the religion of magic and shamanism to the Confucianism and Daoism of China, the Buddhism and Hinduism of India, to the transitional religions of Persia and Egypt (2) the religion of the spiritual raised above the natural that characterize the Greek religion of beauty and the Jewish religion of sublimity (3) the religion of expediency that characterizes the Roman religion. The first stage of nature religion is the religion of magic, which identifies the divine with another human being, the magician, in his dominion and power over nature. Human beings exist in a state of immediate desire, force, and action, as yet without the rupture brought about by objectifying, universalizing reflection and thought. There is not yet the fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom which requires the mediation of thought, but only the instinctive fear of the forces of nature in its sheer givenness, contingency, and power over human beings. Here nature is less experienced in the stability and regularity of the rising and setting of the sun or the return of the four seasons than in its disruptive impingements on human life such as earthquakes, thunderstorms, droughts, floods, and rapacious beasts. The relation between human beings and nature thus remains one of fear and domination. The spiritual does not yet exist as spiritual in its universality but only as the particular and contingent human self-consciousness that, nevertheless, knows itself to be nobler than nature and transcendent over it. In this relationship the highest power is conceived as power over nature, that is, magic. The second, more developed stage of the religion of magic is Confucianism and Daoism. Confucianism is a religion of Heaven as the highest ruling power, which is not merely a power of nature but also bound up with moral characteristics on the basis of which it dispenses or withholds its blessings according to moral deserts. This Tian or Heaven, however, remains “wholly indeterminate and abstract universality,” “the wholly indeterminate sum of the physical and moral nexus as a whole,” while the emperor, as the sole mediator between Heaven and human beings, actually rules over everything in the world. It “is the emperor and not Heaven that is sovereign on earth.”4 This is why, for Hegel, Confucianism still remains a nature religion despite its moral conception of Heaven: in his contingent particularity “the emperor alone knows the mandates of heaven, he alone stands in communication


with heaven, and his lordship extends over both the visible and the invisible.”5 We are still “wholly” within the sphere of nature religion because the contingent will of the individual in his empirical particularity still counts as what is highest.6 Daoism represents the next stage out of the immediacy of nature religion in its contingency and externality, that is, the return of consciousness into itself or inwardness. Daoism, however, is a purely abstract thinking and therefore not yet a qualitatively higher religion any more than Confucianism is. Just as, in Confucianism, Heaven provides only an “abstract” foundation while the emperor is the “actuality” of the foundation, so the Dao or Reason remains abstract, external, and indeterminate, becoming actual, determinate, and vital only in the immediate consciousness of contingent individuals. It does not yet provide an immanent basis for judgement and action as in the case of conscience born of genuine freedom and rationality in the interiority of a subject. Without this mediation of genuine subjectivity “everything external is for them something inward.”7 The second stage of nature religion is Buddhism, a more determinate and intensive form of inwardness or being-within-oneself. Here the absolute is not grasped as an abstraction external to the immediacy of self-consciousness as in Daoism, but as a being with subjective interiority who is also an absolute power over the world, its creation and maintenance, the one substance or essence of the world. As such, it involves elevation above the immediacy of desire and singular will, the negation of untamed desire and immersion in inwardness. The ultimate reality is nothing or non-being, the indeterminate, the negation of everything particular, the Empty purified of every determination. All particular existences are considered mere forms and accidents without genuine independence. The goal of human life is to immerse oneself in this state of negation, this nothing, this eternal tranquility of nirvana by willing nothing, wanting nothing, and doing nothing. This inwardness is an essential stage in the progress from immediate, empirical singularity to the determination and representation of the absolute as “substance,” that is, the universal substantial power that governs the world according to a rational pattern and whose power is unconsciously effective in all things. The Buddhist and generally Oriental standpoint is that of pantheism in the sense that the absolute substance is the only thing truly real, all other things in their particularity being merely transitory, ephemeral, and ideal. It is this standpoint of substantiality that also constitutes the basis of the third stage of nature religion, that is, Hinduism. Here substantiality


is found not only in the interiority of certain individuals, but in the totality of externality or the world, which in all it richness and diversity still remains something accidental yet is also known as the selfparticularization of the universal substance and therefore belonging to it. Here we have a broadening of the horizon beyond Buddhism to embrace the concrete totality of the world as manifestation of the substance. The substance is not just one, the Brahman, but also concretized into a plurality of particularizations, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. However, the substance remains external to its particularization and does not have its reality as such in the particular. A multiplicity of divine powers or divinities emerge in “an unbridled polytheism,”8 but they remain external to the one substance, not yet taken up into spirit nor yet posited as ideal, as objects of thought, understanding, or beautiful imagination. The substance has not yet permeated this multiplicity of particularizations as its own, which remain merely external and independent. Yet there is also an inconsistency. While distinctions emerge from the one as independent deities, they also resolve themselves again into the unity. The relation of human beings to the Brahman, the One, is characterized by renunciation of all passions and needs, a most complete emptying out of the human, as in the example of a yogi. The goal is total abstraction from the world, total indifference toward everything ethical or substantive social obligations, toward all worthy human pursuits, so as to concentrate oneself totally within oneself and attain identity with the Brahman “in this pure egoism”9 while leaving the remaining content of spirit and nature to “run wild in all directions.”10 The unity of the Brahman remains solitary, by itself, without becoming concrete as the bond of the manifold powers of nature or as the bond of many spiritual activities and sensibilities, which would generate science, duties, and rights. The One remains an abstract unity without selfdifferentiation. Human life is no more valuable than a natural thing. For Hegel, the task of transition is twofold. One is to move from the indeterminate, abstract unity of the Brahman as a substance to a determinate, concrete unity as a subject and grasp it as a totality in itself. What is required is the unification of the abstract One and the many distinct powers into an internally differentiated unity or concrete totality, in which the distinctions are denied in their independence, but preserved as distinctions, posited as ideal, and thus sublated into the moments of spirit as concrete totality. The other task is to separate empirical self-consciousness from the absolute self-consciousness of God so that God attains proper objectivity for the first time. In the Hindu yogic experience the Brahman is identified with the inwardly


absorbed empirical consciousness. What is necessary is a break between subjectivity and objectivity so that God is recognized as essentially objective and independent of human beings. The first form of religion in this transition is the religion of light, the religion of Persia. The absolute is here grasped as a pure, simple, although abstract, totality. God is known as what truly has being in and for itself, inwardly determinate, and thus the good. It is in this religion that the concept of subjectivity as internally self-differentiating and selfdetermining totality comes to consciousness for the first time. Whereas in Hinduism the world of many deities emerges from Brahman but in a way incompatible with its unity, here the many determinations are not purely empirical manifolds but results of the inner self-determination of the absolute substance, and thus good and true as reflections of its knowing and willing. All things – the world in its manifold existence, concrete empirical life in general – proceed from the power and selfdetermination of the absolute and remain intrinsically connected to the good. The particular is posited within the absolute itself, and there is an affirmative coherence between the absolute, the good and true, the infinite on the one hand, and the finite world in general, on the other. It is no longer necessary to escape from all concrete actuality into the self-absorption in the Brahman in order to find affirmative coherence. Finite things are created from the good and are good. The deficiency of this form of religion is that the good still remains abstract and general. As yet undeveloped and abstract, it is one-sided and simply opposed to evil, leading to the simple, Oriental opposition or dualism of good and evil. The good in its universality exists in a natural mode, a pure manifestation, a natural being, the simple manifestation which is light. The concept of the divine is also abstract, still in immediate unity with the good, without the mediating activity of a creating subject. In its immediacy, then, light is opposed to darkness, in a merely external relationship, which Hegel calls “the impotence of nature.”11 Light is the power of banishing darkness, but it is simply placed side by side with its negation. The divine is still powerless, unable to embrace and endure the contradiction within itself. Ormazd and Ahriman are two superficial personifications of good and evil without developed subjectivity. Ormazd is the god of light, the universal sensible life as well as the energy, spirit, soul, love, and bliss in that life, the substance and the good in all particular things. It is in the Egyptian religion that a beginning is made in the process of overcoming the dualism of light and darkness in such a way that the dark or negative aspect occurs within subjectivity itself. God Osiris has


Typhon opposed to him as an enemy, but this opposition is not external but internal. The negation enters into the subject itself. The subject is killed, Osiris dies, but he is also perpetually restored, and represented therefore as belonging to the realm of the spiritual, no longer to the natural realm, as the ruler of both the living and the dead who no longer exist sensibly, as a judge over right and justice, implying that the good has the might to enforce its authority. To say that Osiris is a ruler of the dead also means that the dead are no longer posited in the sensible, natural realm, but endure by themselves on a higher plane, withdrawn from the transitory world. As Herodotus pointed out, Egyptians were the first to declare that the human soul is immortal. China and India know about survival and metamorphosis, but in Hinduism immortality is itself subordinate and nonessential compared to the state of nirvana. In contrast, the highest element of consciousness for Egyptian religion is subjectivity as such, independent, possessing the antitheses within itself but also overcoming them, and thus immortal. Here, for the first time we have subjectivity in the form of representation, something spiritual represented in human fashion, although not yet as a human being elevated above the natural. Its deficiency is that it is only the representation of subjectivity and therefore subjectivity as an abstraction. Lacking the depth of the universality of the antithesis, subjectivity is not yet present in its absolute universality. Known only in representation, it is only a contingent, superficial, external universality. Greek religion is an advance over the religions of nature insofar as it subordinates the natural to the spiritual and knows the divine as spirit with rational and ethical characteristics. It is in Greek religion that we first encounter free subjectivity that has raised itself above the immediacy of the natural, knows itself as spirit, and regards the natural as only an instrument for “glorifying, manifesting, and revealing the spirit.”12 The Greeks represented the gods as human beings not because the human form is their own but because the human form is the only form in which the spirit can exist in an immediate, natural, sensible way and be intuited as such, not just represented. As a result, the distinctive character of the Greek cultus is that the subject has an essentially affirmative relationship to its god in contrast to Hinduism where the relationship with the absolute requires the self-negation of human consciousness. The divine powers are recognized and revered, but they also represent the ethical aspects proper to humanity such as love, justice, fury, law, family, and wisdom, the ethical vocations of human beings, not an external substantiality. In honoring and revering the gods they are only honoring and revering themselves and their own humanity.


The problem with Greek divinities is that they are finite and subject to all the necessities of finitude, its particularity, transitoriness, and onesidedness, as well as to the pure power of destiny or fate that governs all things with simple, uncomprehended, blind necessity. They are particular and limited in their contents and liable to mutual collision as seen in tragedies, and relate to human beings only externally on the soil of sensible representation, not yet pure thought. The sheer multiplicity of particular ethical powers needs unification into a universal power with subjective unity that is inwardly differentiated and concrete. This also means a shift from the soil of sensible representation to the soil of pure thought, the only soil on which it is possible to conceive a pure, spiritual, universal subjectivity withdrawn from both external sensibility and sensible representation. The God of the Jews is a spirit in its infinity and universality, meriting the name of God for the first time in the history of religions. The ethical characteristics that exist scattered and limited in a multiplicity of particular divinities in Greek religion are united into one divine purpose, which constitutes God’s “holiness” as opposed to the “beauty” of Greek divinities. God is above all the One universal and pure subjectivity. The unity of God is explicit, not implicit as in the case of the Hindu and Chinese religions. This unity contains only one power, which is therefore the absolute power. Nature is not external to God because it is itself something posited by God and subject to God’s absolute power. God’s inwardly infinite, pure subjectivity consists essentially in thinking and cannot, therefore, reveal himself in the immediacy of natural material or for sensible representation but only for thought, the essential soil for God. The Jewish God is a self-determining wisdom, but it is wisdom in its initial stage and therefore still abstract and external. God lacks the internal self-differentiation of the triune God through the Son, which would make possible her real relation to the world. As a simple, self-relating subjectivity God remains the creator and originator of the world, but in no way also a result of the mediation of his self-relating activity through the created world. Although creatures are thoroughly dependent on God, God remains only identical with himself, unmediated by his relation to the world, and thus an absolute power over against it. This power is also wisdom, whose specific moments are goodness and justice. God’s goodness lies in the creation of the world as his selfexternalization, his releasing himself from himself and setting what is released free, even from his absolute unity. Only free beings can let other beings be in their difference. God freely releases himself as other and lets it


exist on its own right. Justice lies in the manifestation of the nullity or ideality of the finite world in the sense that finite beings are not independent of God because it is God’s absolute power that sustains them in being. Justice also means that nature no longer enjoys immediate unity with the divine, as it does in the Oriental and Greek religions. Nature is now reduced to a collection of merely natural objects divested of divinity and rendered profane, in which God may manifest himself contingently and sporadically in the mode of sublimity. God remains infinitely exalted and sublime over the world, demanding negation of the world in its naturality. In the Greek religion of “beauty” there was an adequacy between the spiritual and its external material expression, between the signifier and the signified, between the inner and the outer. In contrast, “sublimity” means direct and express negation of all external materiality as adequate signs of the divine infinite. The world is only something posited by God as his manifestation, but God remains superior to, and outside, this manifestation. God creates the world with purposive wisdom. This purpose remains indeterminate and superficial in the realm of nature. Its true realization occurs in human history, theoretically for human consciousness, where it is known, acknowledged, and glorified, practically in the history of the world spirit as such, where it manifests itself first of all as ethical life, walking before God, freedom from self-seeking, doing what is right in relation to God. Our natural existence must be ruled by the divine ethical law. Here is a bond of necessity, moral and divine, no longer blind as in Greek religion. The encounter with the holy and sublime God necessitates moral self-reflection and interiorization and descent of the spirit into its own depth. There is, however, a limitation to the divine purpose and ultimately to the representation of God in the Jewish religion. The divine purpose and wisdom at this stage remain general, abstract, and undeveloped because God is represented only as the One without eternal, inward selfdevelopment. The Jewish God also remains a national God limited to a particular nation. Divine commandments, cultic actions, and political institutions appear only as something given and prescribed by God in fixed, unchanging forms. Externalism, formalism, and positivism are characteristic of these practices. They are particular, contingent, and are to be obeyed simply because they have been given by God, an absolute, arbitrary power. The Jewish consciousness, therefore, is a servile consciousness, that of the slaves who look on God essentially as their master. The third form of determinate religion is the Roman religion of purposiveness. In the religion of sublimity the divine purpose was a limited,


undeveloped one, but it was still an essential purpose dealing with certain substantive aspects of human life, such as the family, natural ethical life, and so on. This divine purpose is enlarged in the Roman religion to include the comprehensive, essential end, the state. Here, the overriding purpose is that of universal dominion over the world, and Jupiter Capitolinus is the principal god who accomplishes the purpose through the Roman people. The state, however, is an abstract state, the unification of human beings under one bond but in such a way that its unity lacks an internal rational organization because God is not yet conceived as an internally rationally organized entity or concrete spirit. The state is not yet really a “state” but only dominion, the unification of individuals and peoples under one power that seeks to impose its purely subjective will on the peoples it conquers. The purpose of the state, therefore, remains a worldly end, external to God’s own proper nature. Likewise, because Jupiter is not a genuine, spiritual unity or a selfcontained rational totality, he remains only an abstract power, and particularity falls outside it. Besides Jupiter, therefore, and besides the universal purpose of dominion, which is often oppressive and burdensome for individuals, we have the appearance of gods who fill particular private needs and purposes. In Roman religion, then, basically an ideology of the state, God is served for the sake of a human purpose. The content of religion is not derived from God’s nature but from human needs and purposes. The Roman imperial purpose of universal dominion is abstract and external and does not allow individuals to develop their particularities. The universal element in fact remains only the form, while the content is filled out by human needs to be fulfilled by the gods. Romans worship the gods because Romans needed them and when they needed them. Life in Rome turns on the contradiction between the abstract universality of Fortuna Publica in which the individuals perish and the concrete particularity of human needs that provide the actual content of religion. The Roman virtue is patriotism, the service of the interest of the state and the submergence of the individual in the universal to the point of cold-blooded disregard for individual human life. The universal is embodied in the arbitrary power of emperors like Caligula and Nero, “a power that can rage wildly and without restraint, beyond all legal or ethical bounds.”13 The Roman religion of expediency, therefore, is also an experience of utmost alienation of individuals from the divinized state as an abstract universal in which they cannot find themselves. In all the religions from the religion of nature to the Greek religion, then, there is an experience of contradiction or antithesis between


individual subjectivity and various kinds of objectivity individuals face, be it nature, life in the world, the ethical law, political life, or fate. In all of them, however, the basic contradiction remains partial in the sense that it bears on a particular aspect of human existence, for example, violation of a particular commandment, and external in the sense that it is not something internal to human existence, but something that comes to it from outside. Human beings are therefore evil only in this or that respect, partially, not universally or in the totality and depth of their existence. What is required now, then, is the interiorization and universalization of evil as an intrinsic existential of human existence in its totality and depth, the recognition that human existence as such, and therefore every human being, is evil. This requires, for Hegel, two forms of alienation, the vertical antithesis to God, which awakens in us the sense of evil, and the horizontal antithesis to the world, which awakens in us the sense of misery. The antithesis to God is the experience of infinite anguish, the contradiction between what a subject is in its innermost depth and what it ought to be in relation to the infinite and universal demand of good, which is possible only when the good or God is known as one God. Only an encounter with the one, holy God in his infinite demand of absolute purity can push the human subject to confront the depth of his own existence and recognize its natural existence as evil, as not what he ought to be, as not corresponding to his essence. Humiliation and remorse are the result of this infinite anguish. For Hegel, this is the experience of the Jewish religion of sublimity. The separation between the human subject and the world appears as misery or unhappiness. At the natural level human beings are related to one another as contingent beings in the play of powers, in which they do not find themselves at home as free, ethical beings. The contradiction of the sheer contingency of the external world and the ethical, rational demands of the human subject produces the misery of life, which in turn pushes the human subject to flee from the world into himself, his own inwardness in which to find the harmony and identity of himself with himself that he cannot find in the world, as in Stoicism and Scepticism. The happiness one cannot find in the world, one seeks to find in this abstract self-absorption. As the experience of the universal misery of the world, this is the experience of the Roman religion of expediency. For Hegel, these contradictions are the highest, most abstract moments of all: “here the antithesis is at its height, and both sides embrace the antithesis in its most complete universality – in the universal itself – and


in its innermost essence, its greatest depth.”14 Both, however, are equally one-sided. The first contradiction contains the anguish and humiliation of self-negation in the utter lack of correspondence between the subject and the universal, the most abstract antithesis between the infinite and the fixed, abstract finitude which regards everything that belongs to oneself as evil and finds nothing good in one’s finite existence in the world. This self-negation finds its complement in the second contradiction, the self-affirmation of the subject in sheer inwardness in separation from the totality of the external world. If the first lacks self-affirmation, the second is an abstract self-affirmation achieved only by means of a flight from the actuality of the world, which is in fact also a flight from my actuality, at least from the actuality of my own will, which can no longer actualize itself in the world. What remains for me, therefore, is only the immediacy of my selfconsciousness. As an alienation within the unity of the subject and therefore as a self-alienation, this double alienation from God and the world is alienation at its most intense, most universal, and most profound, demanding a sublation into a mode of reconciliation in which the human spirit can find itself at home with both God and the world. In the Jewish and Roman experience such a demand has become an actually existing need, an experience of the world spirit. For Hegel, this is the “spiritual” meaning of the biblical “fullness of time” in which God sent his Son (Gal. 4:4). As a “consummate” religion, Christianity comes on the scene of the world proclaiming the good news of reconciliation. It is the “absolute” religion in which the concept of religion, the absolute unity of the divine and the human, is actualized by the absolute Spirit itself beyond all the alienating limitations of the “determinate” religions. Through the incarnation of the Son in Jesus of Nazareth the fundamental identity or unity of the divine and the human, the infinite and the finite, has become visible. In his death on the cross God is himself dead, suffering the extreme negativity of sin and finitude, but by rising to new life God accepts and transforms finitude and sin in a death of death into a moment of divine life. In the incarnation, ministry, death, and resurrection of the Son, God reconciles the world to himself, overcoming all alienations, between God and the world, sacred and profane, finite and infinite. The world, the totality of actuality, is no longer separated from God and without God; it is the other of God accepted and reconciled by God with himself. Human beings do not have to flee into inwardness to find God. In doing so, the history of Jesus also reveals the nature of God as the triune God. The Father eternally distinguishes himself from himself and


posits an other of himself, the Son, and reconciles himself with the Son in the Holy Spirit. God is no longer a self-identical substance but also a subject or spirit with inner self-differentiation and self-identification. Because God has an other in himself, he can also posit an other outside himself, the world, and release it to exist on its own. The world, however, remains God’s other, not something completely separated from God. God posits the world as his other and maintains his identity and unity with himself in it. The finitude, negativity, and sin of the world does not endanger God’s unity with himself in the world. The “absolute” or “truly infinite” power of God lies precisely in the power to posit selfdifferentiation and bear all its contradictions without having his primordial unity with himself destroyed. Since God has reconciled the world to himself, the only thing that remains to be done is for individual human beings to appropriate that reconciliation explicitly for themselves through faith. The Spirit is present and active in the community of believers as the unifying and reconciling power assisting the community in this work of subjective appropriation and internalization of objective reconciliation through faith, teaching, and the sacraments. Sins have been forgiven in principle; what remains for human beings is to accept that forgiveness. There is no longer the perpetual dualistic struggle with sin and evil as in the Parsee religion or Kantian philosophy. The eucharist provides the experience of a mystical union with God. For Hegel, however, there still remains one hurdle on the way to this genuine reconciliation of religion and the world. For all its doctrines of God’s self-reconciliation with the world, the Christian religion is still burdened with dualism and externalism, against which secular enlightened reason asserts its freedom and autonomy. What is necessary is to sublate this opposition between the purely formal subjectivism of enlightened reason with its autonomy and the dualistic objectivism of religion without freedom into a philosophy that safeguards both autonomy and objectivity, both form and content by developing the content from itself, that is, the nature or concept of spirit in its idea and development and regarding that content as objective and necessary “in and for itself.” The content of religion is given in the Christian religion, its doctrine of the triune God and the reconciliation of God with human beings in the world. Christianity is called the “revelatory” or “consummate” religion in the sense that it reveals the full nature of spirit in all its dialectical actuality. Its content is “absolute” in that it comprehends all reality as in principle reconciled through the self-actualizing and selfreconciling activity of the Spirit, overcoming all the oppositions of one power and another at the natural level, interiority and exteriority, unity


and multiplicity, good and evil, finite and infinite, individual and the world, that have surfaced in the history of religions from the natural religion of magic to the Roman religion of expediency. The form of Christianity, however, is that of “representation” which still objectifies the content in dualistic fashion. The last step in reconciliation, then, is to acquire the “absolute” perspective or form corresponding to its “absolute” content, which lies in “conceptual” or “speculative” thinking that conceives all reality as the self-differentiating and self-reconciling activity of the Spirit. Hegel proposes his dialectical philosophy as this absolute form, which is also theology insofar as it provides the intrinsic justification of religion through its spiritual hermeneutic. “It presents the reconciliation of God with himself and with nature, showing that nature, otherness, is implicitly divine, and that the raising of itself to reconciliation is on the one hand what finite spirit implicitly is, while on the other hand it arrives at this reconciliation, or brings it forth, in world history. This reconciliation is the peace of God.”15

Hegel’s vision of development and totality for today Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit has spawned a number of controversial issues. I have dealt with some of the specific issues in his philosophy of religion elsewhere.16 Here I limit myself to three issues, the idea of necessary progress, which seems to deny historical contingency, the evaluation of all religions by the single modern Western criterion of freedom construed as the essence of spirit, which seems to be Western ethnocentrism pure and simple, and the idea of totality, which seems to reduce all things to identity. What can we say about these issues from our contemporary perspectives? First, about Hegel’s idea of necessary progress in history. Hegel does talk about “necessary progress” in history, and his Lectures on the history of religions is indeed meant as a demonstration of that necessity, as are his lectures on the philosophy of world history, philosophy of fine art, and history of philosophy. There are two questions that we may ask here. The first question is whether the progression Hegel draws from nature religions to Christianity is indeed a progress. Much here will depend on what one understands by progress. Many will agree that transcendence of natural immediacy and therefore the nature religion of magic is indeed a progress as a first step toward civilization. Not many will agree either that Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism should be ranked together among the religions of nature, which indeed boggles the mind, or that any of them is inferior to Persian, Egyptian, Greek,


Jewish, or Christian religions. One may also note the absence of Islam in Hegel’s history of religions; perhaps he could not fit it into his own spiritual hermeneutic. It also boggles the mind to realize that the progress of spirit is also a consistently westward geographical progress from the Far East to India to Persia to Egypt to Greece, Palestine, and Rome. One only wonders what necessity lies behind this suspiciously marvelous coincidence of geography and spiritual progress. If we turn to the history of the twentieth century with its many wars, genocides, concentration camps, and other imperialist atrocities, and ask in what sense the twentieth century is a progress over the nineteenth century, we will have to admit the superficiality of any glib affirmative answer to the question. The second question is what is meant by “necessity” in this context. Hegel’s necessity is neither a purely objective, mechanical, or causal necessity nor a purely subjective, inner, psychological necessity but the “spiritual” necessity of human existence as it is structured and conditioned as a finite spirit. There is no mechanical power or external cause or objective condition that automatically brings about the transition from one stage of religion to another. Hegel does not explain the transition in terms of certain material conditions or sociological causes in the way we are used to from Durkheim, Marx, or Weber. Nor is there a purely subjective, inner, psychological cause that operates on the human spirit without any interaction with the surrounding world. Hegel’s necessity is “spiritual” in the sense that it is rooted in the ontological “need” of spiritual beings who can and must actualize their selfidentity only in a self-transcending relation and movement to the “totality” of the world and the “infinity” of the transcendent source of that world, and only in a reconciliation with totality and infinity in which they can also find a fulfilling self-affirmation. It is a necessity neither purely subjective nor purely objective, but rooted in the interaction between subjectivity and objectivity on the part of spiritual beings thus constituted. Given this structure and dynamism of spirit, the latter is bound to act or suffer in certain ways when historical conditions meet or do not meet its structural and teleological needs. Given the inherent capacity for self-transcendence and need for harmonious relationship with others, the human spirit cannot persist in the state of natural immediacy where it relates to others only as objects of power and greed. Given the need for coherence between my inwardness and my external world, as well as the need to objectify and actualize myself in the world, absorption in pure inwardness as a way of life as in Buddhism and Stoicism is not a feasible option. Given the need for some sort of unity and order in the world in which one has to live and act,


dismissing the world as illusion or tolerating the world in its sheer multiplicity as in Hinduism is not realistic. Given our actual existential ties to the world, a religion that conceives of the ultimate as opposed to the world either in indifference as in Hinduism or in domination as in Judaism is not credible. Given the transcendental necessity of presence to ourselves in all things that we do and that we are, an ultimate reality that we can meet only on the other side of the world or that is so incomprehensible and transcendent as to defy all immanent description and particularization so that we cannot find ourselves in it as in Judaism and representational Christianity will always remain abstract and alienating to us. Nor can the human spirit believe in an ultimate reality that is only human or that is even inferior to humanity in terms of developed subjectivity and interiority as in Greek religion. Nor can we believe in an ultimate reality that serves only as the ideology of the ruling class in a society, providing a transcendental justification for oppression as in Roman religion. Just as there is a necessity for growth in openness and universality in our self-consciousness, so there is a necessity for growth in universality in our conception of God, both needs creating the spiritual necessity for reconciliation with both God and the world. These are the basic structural necessities of the human spirit that become self-conscious and selfexpansive precisely in the process of history. When these necessities are not met, the human spirit suffers self-alienation, which contains the immanent demand for sublation and liberation. Given the essential unity of the many dimensions of the human spirit, interiority and exteriority, individuality and sociality, finite and infinite, reality and ideality, the demand for reconciliation of these many dimensions is inherent in the very structure of the human spirit. It is precisely these structural necessities of the human spirit that Hegel was trying to describe by means of the history of religions. Such necessities are what constitutes the “concept” of spirit, and each religion was regarded as “true” to the degree to which the “reality” of each religion corresponded to that concept. His interpretation and evaluation of many particular religions may be or, in fact, simply are wrong and superficial, as is his association of a particular necessity with a particular religion. I suggest, however, that there is more than plausibility to his historical delineation of the basic structural necessities of the human spirit, which we may ignore only to our great loss. In addition to the two questions above, there are also four sympathetic glosses I would like to add in order to provide a certain nuance for understanding Hegel’s attempt to see progress in history. The first gloss


is that Hegel’s was not an attempt to provide a map for the future so that we can predict what the future is going to be. Hegel’s was an attempt to understand the past once it became past and to make some sense of history which otherwise would appear to be just one contingent event after another or, as someone put it more colorfully, “one damned thing after another.” The Owl of Minerva takes flight only with the fall of dusk. The job of the philosopher is not to predict what the future ought to be but to grasp or conceive what has been and disclose the meaning and intelligible necessities that underlie history. Human existence is essentially historical existence, and the search for meaning of human existence is preeminently the search for meaning of historical existence. Hegel was just as much aware of the negativities of history as was any historian or philosopher, but he also wanted to see the positive in the negative as much as he wanted to see the negative in the positive. It is easy enough to remain simply offended and appalled by the atrocities of history, but it is not easy to locate them in their proper context and discern certain trajectories of meaning and hope even in those events that otherwise drive us to despair. Meaning of history is not indifferent. To see no meaning in history is ultimately to see no meaning in human existence itself. Certainly Hegel’s historical “optimism” was no cheap optimism. The second gloss is that Hegel’s philosophy of history is itself based on a theology of hope, the hope that nature and history are unfoldings of the absolute Spirit who not only produces distinctions and alienations but also sublates them into his own eternal life. The history of Jesus, his death and resurrection, is a paradigm for the understanding of all history and all reality precisely as the history of the divine Spirit. It is in light of this life of the absolute Spirit that Hegel interprets the past, and it is in the same light that he sees hope for all history. The theological vision of history as the unfolding of the Absolute Spirit is the basis of his philosophy of history and as such the “regulative” and “constitutive” idea for all considerations of history. His philosophy of history is the result in part of historical investigation, in part his faith in God as the absolute Spirit, and in part hope for the future based on that faith. There may be negativities of history, but they shall be overcome in the absolute Spirit, who is “absolute” precisely because its self-identity remains indestructible in all its alienations. If we accept the essential role of hope for the vitality of the present from thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Gabriel Marcel, and Jurgen Moltmann, we should not be too eager to dismiss this dimension of hope implicit and explicit in Hegel’s philosophy of history.


The third gloss is that there are indications that he was not himself so optimistic about the possibility of achieving reconciliation in the modern world. His 1821 lecture manuscripts on philosophy of religion speak of the “discord” between reason and religion, between the Enlightenment “vanity of understanding” and theology. Although his later lectures of 1824, 1827, and 1831 do not speak of a “discord,” they still do speak of the unresolved contradiction between the purely formal infinity of the Enlightened reason and the material infinity of the absolute still only “represented” in religion.17 His lectures on fine art end with the dissolution of all objective content into the purely formal, accidental subjectivity of the comic consciousness.18 Nor was he always certain about the place of each religion in the overall march of the absolute Spirit. He placed Judaism before Greek religion in 1821 and 1824, switching their places in 1827, and placing Judaism even before the Egyptian religion in 1831. He put Buddhism before Hinduism in 1824 and 1827, but switched their places in 1831. In 1824 he put both Confucianism and Buddhism under the religion of magic, but in 1827 he separated Buddhism from the latter, while in 1831 he also separated Confucianism from the category of magic, placing Confucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as stages of the same category, the “internal rupture of religious consciousness.”19 Neither his historical optimism nor his historical interpretation came cheap.20 My fourth gloss is that although Hegel did it most systematically and with a vengeance, he was not either the first or the last to try to see some sort of necessary progress in history. The idea of necessary progress was widespread in nineteenth-century German thought from Schleiermacher to Troeltsch. Nineteenth-century historicism saw everything as developmental, every development as a necessary unfolding of a common essence, and such a development as a progress toward Christianity regarded as the perfect religion embodying the essence of religion to the fullest degree. For a modest but nonetheless real argument for the necessary progress of different religions toward Christianity one has only to turn to the fifth speech in Schleiermacher’s “On Religion” or Troeltsch’s “Absoluteness of Christianity.”21 What about Hegel’s Western ethnocentrism? Nothing should be easier today with our heightened multicultural and pluralistic sensibility than to spot ethnocentrism in a thinker, especially if that thinker happens to be Hegel, who, one could say, cultivated modern Western Christian ethnocentrism to systematic perfection. I have already referred to his placement of major Asian religions, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism, among the religions of nature, in the same category as the


religion of magic, while also ranking them inferior to the Persian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian religions. It is quite strange that Hegel should place the Roman religion as the religion of the Roman Empire right before the Christian religion while treating Confucianism, the religion of the Chinese Empire, as simply “a developed religion of magic.”22 Hegel himself argued that the concept of Tian or Heaven had certain moral characteristics but that these characteristics were abstract and that it was the contingent individuality of the emperor that really decided right and wrong. In the case of the Roman religion Jupiter was the personal embodiment of the most universal purpose, but this too, for Hegel, was abstract and external to the Roman Empire, not yet really a state, where it was likewise the contingent individuality of the emperor that made all the decisions. In both the Chinese and Roman religions the ultimate remained abstract and external, and the concrete determination of right and wrong was in fact left to the arbitrary decision of the emperor. What justification, then, could there be in Hegel’s own logic for placing Confucianism near the bottom of the scale and Roman religion near the top, other than the fact that Rome was the historical and geographical predecessor of Christian Europe? Hegel also blamed the Chinese for lacking intrinsic morality and being dependent on sheer external power and for being, therefore, “the most superstitious people of the world.”23 He also blamed the Hindus for lacking appreciation of the values of this world and human life and a determinate form of rational freedom with its rights and duties and for being thereby “utterly sunk in the depths of an unethical life.”24 One can go on multiplying examples of this sort of assertion in Hegel’s lectures. This sort of disparagement of Asia and Asian religions and cultures in general, of course, is not unique to Hegel; it has been standard fare in much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western depictions of Asia. This raises too many issues of historical interpretation, ethical judgment, and cultural critique for me to get into in this chapter. Let me simply note that many Asians have been reciprocating by calling the Christian West the most systematically imperialist and aggressive nations ever in world history. I am inclined to locate the essence of Hegel’s modern Western ethnocentrism in the application of a single modern Western value as criterion for the evaluation and dismissal of other religions and cultures. Hegel’s central preoccupation was how to overcome the dichotomy of finite and infinite, secular and religious, and his solution was to unite the infinite demand of the human subject for freedom and autonomy with the


infinite divine content and do so in history, not in the beyond. Any negative subordination of the human subject to the transcendent demand of the infinite was regarded as the cause of “unhappy consciousness.” All reconciliation must be in this world, which was possible only by reducing the content of the divine life to its concrete actualization in history; any discussion of the divine independent of this world or of the “immanent” trinity as distinct from the “economic” was dismissed as abstract and alienating. Any talk of divine “mystery” was attributed to the work of external “understanding” that did not know how to find itself in its divine Other. “Actuality” meant only historical actualization. God, too, is actual and concrete only insofar as God is involved in this world.25 As political reconciliation in history was Hegel’s preoccupation, so it was also the sole criterion for the evaluation of religions and cultures. No religion that subordinates political liberation in history to anything higher would be acceptable. Any religion that subordinates it to inwardness, incomprehensibility, or transcendence, or leaves the human being vulnerable to divisive multiplicity, uncomprehended power, or brute universality was an unfree religion because it alienates the human being from herself. Ultimately, nothing is true or good unless the human being can affirm himself in it. And who is this human being whose selfidentity remains the ultimate criterion for the acceptability of all Others? No doubt, the modern European self with its demand for “infinite” subjectivity and freedom. No doubt, too, Hegel does insist that this infinite subject remains formal and empty unless it rises to mutual recognition in the Spirit of the community, but it is also true that both the authenticity of the Spirit and that of a community lies in their respective capacity to accommodate the demand of the infinite subject. The modern European self remains king, and it is to the kingship of this modern European self and to the single value of political freedom that Hegel subordinates all non-European religions and cultures as well as all other values. For Hegel, freedom of self-actualization is “the ultimate end of the world in general,” “the highest concept of all,” and “the sole end of the spirit.”26 This, I submit, is the heart of his ethnocentrism. It is also well known how this normative elevation of the modern European self as the goal of all history has served as the ideology of modern Western colonialism and imperialism in the rest of the world. Having said this, it is also compelling to point out that the Hegelian value of freedom, although not the only value in the world, is also an essential human value that can be contradicted only at the cost of injustice and oppression. To be sure, there is something parochial about the


attempt to reduce history to the development of freedom or to reduce the meaning of human existence to the quest for freedom, but it is also true that freedom is an essential, necessary, if not the sufficient, condition of human life. In this sense, the struggle for freedom and justice is not an exclusively European value but a universal value that applies to all human beings insofar as no human being enjoys oppression and injustice, insofar as all human beings cry out for liberation when oppressed, even though there are historical differences among human beings and cultures with regard to the degree of consciousness of the value of freedom and the intellectual interpretation and justification of its content. Self-identity of the subject is not the whole reality of the subject, but it does remain an essential condition of its integrity. The intensity and variety of independence and liberation movements in all parts of the non-Western world in the second half of the twentieth century is an eloquent testimony to this essential yearning of the human spirit to be able to affirm itself and to breathe free. The pains and struggles of building appropriate institutions of freedom in which most non-Western nations are still involved today are part of this ineradicable quest for freedom. In this regard Hegel’s philosophy of freedom still finds an echo, a relevance, as it still remains an important source of insights for objectifying and institutionalizing freedom. Many nonWestern cultures and religions still have something essential to learn from this most systematic of all ethnocentric Western philosophers. There are many values and gifts to human life, but the value and gift of being able to live together with those who are different with mutual recognition and personal integrity – the central challenge of nation building in most nations – is indeed a legacy of the modern West whose absolute interpreter Hegel claimed to be. As long as these struggles for freedom and recognition continue, Hegel will remain a potent and compelling source of insight and inspiration, as witness the liberation theology of Latin America.27 What, then, about Hegel’s idea of totality? It seems clear, to begin with, that Hegel’s attempt to totalize history in one area of life, the history of religions, has turned out to be one-sided because it is based on the application of a single Western value, artificial because he had to squeeze all the historical particularities into one unifying scheme, and dangerous because it could be and has been used as the justifying ideology of Western colonialism and imperialism. One can say the same thing with regard to his totalization of world history, history of fine art, and history of philosophy.28 Hegel’s idea of totality, of course, it must be remembered, is that of “concrete” totality that is internally differentiated, with room for


particularity, and growing out of the interaction of particularities, not “abstract” totality that imposes itself on the particular from outside and remains, therefore, essentially repressive of the particular.29 It all depends, however, on who interprets the totality and how it is interpreted in relation to the particularity, on, therefore, whose totality is being made central to the particular. Insofar as this totality is itself always interpreted in terms of a philosophy that is also inescapably particular, the danger of reducing concrete to abstract totality must be recognized as a perennial one, with Hegel’s own experiment as the paradigmatic example of it, which has been said many times over since Marx and Kierkegaard. The contemporary deconstructionist critique of Hegel by Levinas, Lyotard, and Derrida, likewise, deserves careful heeding. There is also something positive, however, in Hegel’s conception of totality that continues to demand our attention. Hegel applies the concept of totality, which he often uses interchangeably with unity and universality, to many different things, the unity of the human subject, the unity of a nation, history as a whole, the unity of Idea, Nature, and Spirit. In many ways the concept of totality fulfills the function of the Kantian “regulative” idea, even though Hegel often turns it into a “constitutive” use by pretending to give an “absolute” interpretation of its content. It is a regulative idea in the sense that it contains the ideal of harmony and reconciliation in the midst of the many fragmentations and alienations of historical existence toward which the human spirit necessarily strives in order to find peace between itself and the world. It is a utopian vision of a world in which different parts are intelligibly connected with one another as to form a harmonious whole, a world which is more than an accidental collection of purely externally connected parts. For Hegel, the alternative to totality and unity is bifurcation and alienation. Hegel’s central project was to overcome the many alienations of modern European culture, and the concept of totality was essential to that project. He was also keenly aware and often insistent that all finite totalities are subject to dissolution and possess only temporary, provisional justification. Is the concept of “totality” dead, then, today? On the one hand, we do live in a pluralistic, polycentric world, and given the dangerous connection between philosophical totalization and political totalitarianism, as multiculturalism and postmodernism never tire of pointing out, it is clear that we do well not to make any totalitarian claims for any human theory, whether constitutive or regulative. Someone or some group somewhere are bound to be excluded and suffer from such claims. On the other hand, the dynamics of the pluralistic world does not allow us


the luxury and comfort of simple abstention from totality. Theoretical pluralism is itself a product of a world that brings different peoples, cultures, and ideas together into common space, both making us sensitive to difference and diversity on the one hand and imposing on the other the necessity of finding a way of living together despite our differences, a law, a policy, an institution that both prevents exclusion and discrimination against the other and promotes respect for the integrity of the other. The pluralistic world is not a world that leaves one another alone and complacent in their mutual differences but precisely a world that demands the creation of a structure that makes possible cooperation of those who are different, a structure, a law that applies to all by nature and therefore a totality. Respect for the “infinite” dignity of the other (Levinas) is possible only on the basis of a totality that institutionally protects that infinity and therefore only on the basis of the construction of a liberating totality. The yearning for infinity without totality and often against totality as deconstructionism tends to insist is empty and impotent, like the “beautiful soul” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The “eschatological solidarity” of infinite others that Levinas yearns for must become incarnate in a totality that concretely promotes the historical conditions of solidarity. The only alternative to repressive totality is not retreat into sheer “eschatology” (Levinas) but the construction of a liberating totality that would prevent totalitarianism. What is compelling today, therefore, is neither the simple dismissal of totality nor its simple acceptance, but something far more difficult to do, to maintain the tension between Levinasian infinity and Hegelian (and Marxian) totality. Without infinity, totality does lapse into totalitarianism; without totality infinity becomes an abstraction; and the name of mediation between the two is solidarity aware of both its transcendent and historical conditions, a solidarity that will do justice to precisely what Hegel calls the “right of infinite subjectivity” in all its pluralistic forms.30 It is also important to remember, however, in all fairness to Hegel, that one can be guilty of totalitarian thinking not only by including all things as legitimate only insofar as they find their proper places in one’s own totality, which I would call “positive” totality, but also by excluding all things from legitimacy precisely because not agreeable to one’s own, which I would call “negative” totality. Hegel may have been one of the most famous positive totalitarians along with Karl Marx, but a claim to totality, especially negative totality, has been endemic to modern Western thought from Descartes to Derrida, who remains thoroughly modern in this regard. By this I mean the tendency to dismiss the


totality of tradition, the whole tradition, either because it is not “clear and distinct” to a Cartesian ego, does not contain “matters of fact” based on sense experience (Hume), or is “precritical” (Kant), “ideological” (Marx), forgetful of “existence” (Kierkegaard) or “being” (Heidegger) or the “Other” (Levinas), “substantialist” (Whitehead), “confused” (Wittgenstein), or “ontotheological” (deconstructionists). It is certainly not self-evident, which is worse, to accept all things as part of one’s own positive totality while acknowledging one’s own indebtedness to all, or to reject all things except one’s own perspective as a negative totality. If it is hubris to claim one’s own philosophy as the “absolute knowing” of all that has gone by, it is no less hubris to absolutize one’s own perspective by rejecting all preceding philosophies as not agreeable to one’s own. One can totalize not only by including but also by excluding. If inclusivism is unacceptable, so is exclusivism, as contemporary discussions of religious pluralism clearly show. In either case, one’s own criteria become the totalitarian criteria. Such negative totalitarianism, one must say, is obvious on every page of, ironically, Levinas’s Totality and Infinity, which dismisses the whole of Western philosophy as “egology.”31 Self-forgetfulness, Kierkegaard claimed, was the central problem of his age. In an important sense it may also be the endemic occupational disease of the modern and postmodern Western intellectuals. We know that we will all die someday, although we forget ourselves by making an exception for ourselves. Likewise, as thinkers, we know or should know, from all the historical evidence, that all human philosophies and theologies are just as mortal, that their claims to ultimacy eventually lose the ring of urgency and persuasiveness, that their historical relevance passes away. And yet in an arrogant act of self-forgetfulness we pretend that all other philosophies may pass away, but not ours. As a result we make for our philosophies absolute claims valid for all times and places, whether affirmative or negative, that all history is such and such, or that the whole tradition is illegitimate because it is precritical, ideological, patriarchal, ontotheological, and so on. Making modest claims seems to be the hardest thing for the modern Western intellectual. Reflection on Hegel’s totality should be an occasion to reflect on the mortality of individual philosophies and the way in which philosophy can and should integrate that mortality and its epistemological consequences into its own methodology in a self-conscious way. Hegel at least had the virtue of recognizing his own totality and synthesis as a product of his culture and age, fully aware that “no philosophy can overleap its own time.”32


Notes 1. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: OneVolume Edition, The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 188–9, referred to hereafter as Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. 2. On the “concept” of religion and the basic structure of Hegel’s philosophy of religion, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 104–10. 3. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 203. 4. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 237. 5. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 243. 6. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 236. 7. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 249. 8. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 271. 9. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 283. 10. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 288. 11. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 304. 12. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 329. 13. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 386. 14. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 450. 15. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 489. 16. I have published in several essays my interpretations and reflections on various aspects of Hegel’s philosophy of religion from the concept of the “Absolute” to the meaning of “sublation” (Aufhebung) to “absolute knowledge” to his trinitarian understanding of God. See “Hegel on the Foundations of Religion,” International Philosophical Quarterly 14:1 (March 1974), 79–99; “Hegel’s Absolute: Transcendent or Immanent?” Journal of Religion 56:1 (January 1976), 61–87; “Hegel’s Retention of Mystery as a Theological Category,” CLIO 12:4 (Summer 1983), 333–53; “The Trinity and the Incarnation: Hegel and Classical Approaches,” Journal of Religion 66:2 (April 1986), 173–93; “Towards a Dialectic of Truth: Contemporary Reflections on Hegel’s Conception of Truth”, Truth: Interdisciplinary Dialogues in a Pluralist Age, ed. Christine Helmer and Kristin D.C. Troyer (Leuven: Peeters, 2003), 159–77. 17. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: Volume III: The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985), 161, 246, 347, 374. 18. Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, II, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1236. 19. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 498–99. 20. On Hegel’s many shifts of position on the place of Judaism and other religions in his philosophy of religion in the varying years of 1821, 1824, 1827, and 1831, see Peter Hodgson, “The Metamorphosis of Judaism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion,” The Owl of Minerva 19:1 (Fall 1987), 41–52, and Dale M. Schlitt, “Hegel’s Berlin Lectures: Determinate Religion,” The Owl of Minerva 18:2 (Spring 1987), 179–98. 21. For nineteenth-century attempts to rank religions from Schleiermacher to Troeltsch, see Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, I (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), 129–36.

Hegel’s Dialectic of the Spirit 35 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 235. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 249. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 291. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 417. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans. H.B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 55. For Hegel’s influence on liberation theology, see Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988; 15th anniversary edition), 19, and Anselm Kyongsuk Min, Dialectic of Salvation: Issues in Latin American Theology of Liberation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), 32–5. For a full-scale discussion of totality in the context of Hegel’s claim to “absolute knowledge,” see the whole issue of The Owl of Minerva 30:1 (Fall 1998), and John Burbidge, “Hegel’s Absolutes,” The Owl of Minerva 29:1 (Fall 1997), 23–38. For a discussion of Hegel’s concept of “concrete totality” and its political implications, see my essay, “Karel Kosik, The Dialectic of the Concrete,” New Scholasticism 55:2 (Spring 1981), 247–54. For a critique of Levinas’s critique of totality in the name of infinity, see my essay, “Towards a Dialectic of Totality and Infinity: Reflections on Emmanuel Levinas,” Journal of Religion 78:4 (October 1998), 571–92. I also provide a critique of Derrida’s notion of the “messianic,” which plays the same critical function as Levinas’s notion of the “infinite”; see my essay, “The Other Without Society and History: A Dialogue with Derrida,” in D.Z. Phillips and Timonthy Tessin (eds), Philosophy of Religion in the 21st Century (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 167–85. For a critical relation between Hegel and Derrida, see Stuart Barnett (ed.), Hegel after Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998). Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 44. Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 112.

Voices in discussion 1 Harvey*: As I listened to your paper, and to the series of qualifications you want to make in order to bring out why Hegel is still of value to us, I was reminded of Marx’s remark that Hegel was the greatest philosopher * In previous “Voices in Discussions,” in volumes of the Claremont conference, I have not identified the speakers, but given them the letters A, B, C, and so on. The reason for my doing so was that “Voices in Discussion” consists of notes that I write in the course of the conference. I try to be as faithful to what was said as possible, but I cannot guarantee this. I therefore did not attribute my notes directly to the conference participants. That difficulty remains, but I felt that, given the lively character of some of the exchanges, much would be lost, philosophically and theologically, if the reader were deprived of the speaker’s name. I have combined these conflicting considerations by the use of the asterisk which is meant to indicate that what is recorded is the speaker’s remarks as understood by me. This applies throughout the volume to all speakers indicated in “Voices in Discussion.”


who ever lived and that his ideas are a mystification. Kierkegaard said that his philosophy becomes comic. The question you have to face is whether, given your qualifications, there is anything left of Hegel’s notion of spirit. Look at the things you do not want to accept. You do not want to accept his notion of necessity in the development of self-consciousness. You do not want to accept his grading of religions with Christianity coming out on top. You say that Hegel’s grading of them makes one’s mind boggle. You do not want to accept his notion of necessity in history, with his conception of the state as the summit of this necessary development. Despite these qualifications, you seem to think you can still employ Hegel’s notion of spirit. But you can’t. In taking “necessity” out of his system you have removed its very lynch-pin. You don’t have his notion of spirit any longer. Let me give you four examples of further difficulties. First, take the notion of meaning in history. You do not find this notion problematic, but you owe us an account of it, because some of us, including myself, do not know what it means. Of course, historians give an account of how various things happened, but what would it mean to say that they had to happen, or that history, as such, has a meaning that unfolds? As for Protestant theology, as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, its conception of an encounter between God and man does not depend on any notion of the meaning of history. Second, what did Hegel mean by “hope”? The idea seems quite empty. I know what a theologian like Moltmann means by “hope,” but what do you mean? Third, you emphasize connections between “spirit” and “freedom,” but it has to be remembered that Hegel was no friend of freedom, certainly not of democratic values of the kind you and I may have in mind. Both Feuerbach and Marx criticized the elevated position he accorded the state in his system. Isn’t there a tension between Christianity and this conception? Fourth, you seem to attach considerable importance to something called “totality.” But, again, some of us, myself included, do not know what this means, so you owe us an account of it. If you look at all the qualifications you have made, then, I repeat, you have to ask whether you have left any water in the tank. Min: I did not pretend for one moment that I can accept the whole of Hegel’s system. As a total system, it collapses, for the reasons I gave. It does not follow, however, that Hegel’s system does not contain valuable insights, and I tried to point out what these are.


Hegel offers us certain general categories that belong to us as creatures in history. As I said, I cannot go along with the ways in which he applied the categories to specific cases. His applications are often ludicrous and cannot be held together as a system. But, again, this does not mean that the categories he offers us are not valuable. They point us in certain directions in which hope and meaning can be found in history. It is true that he finds the main paradigm of this hope and meaning in Christianity; in the death and resurrection of Christ, and in what he says about the negation of a negation in this connection. Of course, different people may interpret history differently, and offer us different paradigms. Hegel offers us one, and I have tried to bring out what is of value in it. Ogden: As I understand the intention behind this conference, and the topics to which we were assigned, we were meant to ask, What do we mean by “spirit”? What does the language of spirit amount to? That is not a question we can answer in the general way you have presented. We have to look at specific contexts and ask, in them, what kind of conceptuality the word “spirit” belongs to. I do not find you doing that in your paper. You use it too comfortably in an Hegelian way, without investigating what might be called “the depth grammar” of the concept. Phillips: I, too, share that concern about the generality in your use of the notion of “spirit.” In seeking to correct what you take to be misunderstandings of religion, you say that, for Hegel, the job of the philosopher is not to predict what the future ought to be but to grasp or conceive what has been and disclose the meaning and intelligible necessities that underlie history. Again, you say that the self-identity of Spirit is never destroyed. But, no sooner than you say this, you also say that although there is a “concrete totality” in history, “all depends on who interprets that totality.” Where are we left after such a qualification? You seem to appreciate the difficulty, but, nevertheless, argue that this does not mean that the notion of “totality” is dead. You say that “the reality of the pluralistic world does not allow us the luxury and comfort of simple abstention from totality.” You seem to think that we cannot go on without “totality.” But we do go on. You seem to be calling us from our situation, “the reality of the pluralistic world,” toward something called “totality.” But the very reality of our pluralism, as you call it, shows that we can and do go on without the notion of “totality.” “How we in fact go on” is a pretty ragged business. There are different movements, different individuals, with different aims and interests. They jostle with each other, agree, disagree, compromise, fight, and so on. Doesn’t the notion of “totality” simply mystify this reality?


Davis: That “tidying up” of plurality is exemplified in the grading of religions. We might compare Hick and Hegel in this respect. Hick gives A⫹ to all the world religions, while Hegel only gives A⫹ to Christianity. Christine Helmer: On the other hand, Hegel is indebted to Christianity in his system. For example, he makes use of the doctrine of the Trinity. The trouble is that while that doctrine gets its sense from specific theological and religious traditions, Hegel’s notion is an abstraction from these contexts. Min: Despite what you all say, I want to insist that the notion of spirit in Hegel does point us in some universally valid directions. Think of the connection between “spirit” and “freedom.” Why was it that Korean intellectuals could come together to sign a joint declaration concerning human freedom, if not because all people, whatever their situation, want to be free from exploitation and oppression? I could have met Ogden’s concerns by writing a paper on the notion of “spirit” in an abstract, metaphysical context, but I chose to go by another route. Have I watered down the notion of “totality” in doing so? I do not think so. I tried to show how Hegel’s reference to “totality” is consistent, or can be made consistent, with concern for the particular and the concrete. You may say his particular applications are false, but is that an argument against his categories? Are they valueless? I may think that some of Kierkegaard’s actual applications of “spirit” is false, but the category is still of value. Kellenberger: Your appeal to the universal need for freedom may achieve less than you think. You admit that Hegel’s paradigms come from Christianity and Western culture. The problem is that, in certain Asian traditions, what is meant by “freedom” is very different. Restrictions may be accepted there which would not be tolerated in the Western traditions. Harvey: That brings us back to the central problem: you attempt to drive a wedge between Hegel’s categories and his application of them in history. You want to say that his category of “spirit” is one thing, while what he says about it in history is another. But, for Hegel, the unfolding of history is the unfolding of the absolute Spirit. Take that necessity away, and you take away Hegel’s whole notion of Spirit at the same time.

2 Spirit and Romanticism Mario von der Ruhr

In a commentary on the new Catholic Catechism’s discussion of the Holy Spirit, Fr John O’Donnell is struck by the fact that the relevant paragraphs in the Catechism (683–747) contain surprisingly little theology – the only dogmatic affirmation being that the Holy Spirit is one of the persons of the Trinity – and that their perspective on the salvific role of the Spirit remains ‘strictly intra-ecclesial’, and hence much narrower than would have been desirable, especially in the light of Vatican II and such documents as Gaudium et Spes.1 He writes A point which is underdeveloped is the universalist perspective which a theology of the Holy Spirit could give. The text almost immediately launches into the history of salvation and the role of the Holy Spirit in Israel, giving no attention to the work of the Holy Spirit outside the covenant community. Likewise the text concludes with the role of the Spirit in the Church. A broader perspective would be useful for the dialogue of Christians with those of other faiths and with non-believers.2 Unfortunately, O’Donnell does not elaborate on what a properly universalist theology of the Holy Spirit would entail, except to say that it would have to eschew an undue emphasis on the Church as institution: One of the limitations of the theology of the second millennium was its stress on the Church as institution and the sharp opposition which such a theology implied between Church and world. At the same time, one of the blessings of Vatican II was its openness to the presence of the Spirit in the laity, in members of other churches, and in the world at large.3 39

40 Mario von der Ruhr

As an example of the spiritual openness propagated by Vatican II, O’Donnell refers to Gaudium et Spes 22, according to which ‘the ultimate vocation of humankind is in fact one’ and ‘the Holy Spirit, in a manner known only to God, offers to every person the possibility of being associated with this paschal mystery of Christ’. It is regrettable, so O’Donnell continues, that this universalist, future-oriented perspective is not found as such in the chapter on the Holy Spirit. Rather the discussion is strictly intraecclesial. While it is true that the Catechism is primarily for believers, and while we must recognise that it is not possible to say everything, a more universalist perspective on the Spirit would enrich the Catechism and add as well a particularly fruitful dimension of the theology of the Holy Spirit which was brought to light by the Second Vatican Council.4 On O’Donnell’s account, the need for a properly universalist theology of the Spirit is a desideratum expressed in Gaudium et Spes no less than in Saint Paul’s description of the Holy Spirit as a work of hope for all, in which the whole of creation is eventually drawn back to the Father,5 so his remarks on the Catechism’s treatment of the Spirit may also be seen as a grammatical reminder of the inclusive dimensions of the concept as they are revealed in the Scriptural tradition. It invites reflection on the issue of the believer’s relation to his own spiritual ancestry and the beliefs of others, on the concrete ways in which a universalist perspective on the Spirit would generate a sensitive attention to its extraecclesial workings, on what would be involved in a genuine dialogue of Christians with those of other faiths or none, and on the possible tensions between such an inclusive perspective and the ostensibly exclusive doctrinal assertions of a particular religious creed. Since a proper treatment of these issues would be well beyond the scope of the present chapter, I shall limit myself to noting some strands in nineteenthcentury Romantic thought – for example, the notion of Spirit as it figures in German Idealist philosophy, and the significance of mythological narrative for a proper understanding of man’s relation to both God and nature – which, apart from gesturing towards the universalist perspective suggested by Fr O’Donnell, also raise more general questions about the interpretation of sacred texts. More specifically, I shall (i) look at a poetic expression of a broadly Christian outlook on man’s relation to the world, (ii) sketch out a philosophical elaboration of that expression, and (iii) introduce the work of the contemporary German theologian

Spirit and Romanticism 41

Eugen Drewermann, whose Scriptural exegesis is guided by the very conviction that ‘in religion we can observe the goal of all romanticism, the living unity of faith and poetry, in the traditions of the people’,6 and whose views on the spiritual genealogy of such key Christian concepts as the virgin birth and divine sonship promise to shed further light on some of the issues raised in O’Donnell’s article.

Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn One of the literary figureheads of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, the poet Novalis, defines the motives of Romanticism in the following terms: When I give the commonplace a higher meaning, the customary a mysterious appearance, the known the dignity of the unknown, the finite the illusion of the infinite, I romanticize it.7 For Novalis, the transfiguration of the familiar and ordinary into the mysterious and ineffable, whether through poets like himself or landscape painters in the style of Caspar David Friedrich,8 is not to be understood as a wilful distortion of ‘how things really are’, as a mode of self-deception or sentimental abandon to fantasy and irrationality, but as sensitive attention to those aspects of experience that transcend the narrow boundaries of discursive reason, and whose adequate expression therefore requires a language of its own. A poem by the Romantic writer Ludwig Uhland9 may illustrate this point. Ludwig Wittgenstein, incidentally, refers to it in a well-known letter to Paul Engelmann and applauds it as a fine example of how something deep and significant about a human life and its relation to nature can show itself in a poem without being explicitly stated or, in the terminology of the Tractatus, without being said. Uhland’s poem is worth reproducing in full, also because it reveals something about the Romantics’ concern with the relation between language and the ineffable: Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn Count Eberhard Rustle-Beard, From Württemberg’s fair land, On Holy errand steer’d To Palestina’s strand.

And when he reached his home, He plac’d it in the earth, Where little leaves and buds The gentle Spring call’d forth.


The while he slowly rode Along a woodland way, He cut from the hawthorn bush A little fresh green spray.

He went each year to it, The Count so brave and true; And overjoy’d was he To witness how it grew.

Then in his iron helm The little sprig he plac’d; And bore it in the wars, And over the ocean waste.

The Count was worn with age The sprig became a tree; ’Neath which the old man oft Would sit in reverie.

The branching arch so high, Whose whisper is so bland, Reminds him of the past And Palestina’s strand.10 We know from his diary that Uhland wrote the major part of this poem during the evening of 13 October 1810, at the Palais Royal in Paris, where he was studying law.11 The legend of Count Eberhard was one of the folk tales told in his Swabian Heimat near Tübingen, where Uhland had spent his youth.12 Quite probably, the young Uhland, cut off as he was from his natural environment of the Swabian forests and people, felt intensely homesick when he wrote these verses, and may have seen in the Eberhard legend an embodiment of his own desire to return to his familiar habitat. Indeed, venturing far afield for a noble cause and returning home safely is one of the poem’s central themes. As the legend has it, Count Eberhard of Württemberg (1459–96) embarked on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and returned from there with a hawthorn twig which he planted in the garden of his favourite residence, Einsiedel Castle. Soon, the twig grew into a tree and came to be associated with the fortunes and misfortunes of the princely estate, the tree’s own fate foreshadowing that of the Count’s family. We do not know how much of this story is true, other than that Eberhard embarked on a pilgrimage to Palestine, and that there was an impressive hawthorn tree in Einsiedel, not far from Uhland’s Tübingen home.13 But these facts are quite incidental to the meaning of the poem, in any case, and need not be dwelt on. What matters is the distinctive attitude towards life and the natural world that it reveals in the thoughts and actions of the Count, who represents what Paul Méjasson properly describes as ‘la foi simple et naïve d’une époque antérieure à la foi raisonneuse du Protéstantisme’.14 It is part of Eberhard’s ‘foi simple et naïve’ to regard as holy the land associated with the figure of Jesus Christ; to cut a twig from a hawthorn bush, both in pious remembrance of Jesus’ hawthorn crown and as a potent gesture of the willingness to accept his


fate in imitatio Christi; to express gratitude for his safe return to Württemberg by planting the hawthorn twig in his garden and seeing it grow; and in his old age to sit beneath the imposing tree, seeing his own life and that of the tree intertwined in a pious union that could not have flourished without the grace of God. The picture of a life that is drawn here is too rich in imagery and symbolism to describe. It contains allusions to the relation between (the Count’s) goodness and (nature’s) beauty; to the spiritual significance of places and things; to the importance of the past and the ways it can nourish an individual; to the contingencies of, and a certain kind of gratitude for, one’s life; and to a dimension of life that can only be hinted at or shown, but not articulated in a list of propositions. As Wittgenstein puts it in his letter to Engelmann: The poem by Uhland is really magnificent. And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered.15 What is unutterable in Uhland’s poem is the distinctive character of Eberhard’s perspective on his life, and the subtle ways in which it is bound up with certain sorts of religious imagery and behavioural manifestations that would ‘naturally’ be taken to be expressive of it. While that attitude may be broadly described as Christian, Uhland’s references to Christ are no more than isolated brushstrokes on his poetic canvas, rough outlines of a rich and far wider framework of thinking. There is no attempt to make this framework more explicit by, for instance, invoking specific doctrinal elements of the Catholic, the Protestant, or any other religious creed. Eberhard’s faith and the way it manifests itself in his life is a ‘foi simple’ – it is expressed in the poem and, like a picture, says itself. The significance Eberhard invests in the hawthorn tree – and indeed the appeal which the poem has for the reader – would be greatly diminished if one tried to capture the Count’s attitude towards it by speaking of its psychological comforts or sentimental value. Such talk would fail to capture the distinctive religious framework within which the Count’s ritual conduct towards the tree is set, and for this reason also the kind of significance it has for him, even if, as may well be the case, the serene beauty of the hawthorn tree does have a soothing effect on his mind. The Welsh poet R.S. Thomas puts the point well in his poem Bleak Liturgies: Faith can remove mountains. So can cordite. But faith


heals. So does valium’s loosening of the taut nerves.16 If the character of Eberhard’s relation to the hawthorn tree was like that of a neurasthenic to his valium, then it would not be, as Uhland clearly describes it as being, an expression of religious faith. Once this background is removed, the significance of the objects that play a part in it changes as well. Compare the Eberhard story with, for example, the case of Salvador Dali. The latter’s well-being depended on the permanent presence of a particular piece of wood which he had once found under ‘extraordinary circumstances’, and which he carried around with him wherever he went. Dali found himself incapacitated without it but insisted that, as soon as he touched it, even the most agonizing fear – and Dali lived under a constant fear that things might turn against him – would subside: Since I found my piece of wood, I have been free from all anxiety … I can do whatever I want, provided that my piece of wood is with me.17 I am not suggesting that Dali’s conduct is unintelligible. On the contrary, there are different ways in which objects that strike us in certain ways may become talismans or good-luck pieces for us, whether or not we encounter them, as Dali did, under ‘extraordinary circumstances’. Nor am I suggesting that there are no similarities between Dali’s and Eberhard’s attitudes towards life, but these are far less striking than the differences. While Eberhard, too, may have regarded the hawthorn twig as a sort of talisman which he ‘bore … in the wars and over the ocean waste’, it was, of course, important to him that it was a hawthorn twig, and that could not be understood independently of the religious picture – the story of Jesus’ life and suffering – in which it plays a part. In Dali’s case, however, there is no indication that his attitude towards the natural world is set within a framework richer than a sense of dependency on contingencies over which one has no control. Even so, critics of the Romantic strain in Eberhard’s view of life may well be prompted to think of Boso, Anselm’s interlocutor in Cur Deus Homo, and the former’s objection that ‘all these things may be recognised as beautiful, and yet, as it were, mere pictures’, or figments ‘painted on a cloud’.18 Is the significance the Count attaches to the hawthorn tree, not a purely subjective attitude towards an otherwise indifferent feature of the natural world; and the reference to Christ, simply a metaphorical representation of a remarkable individual? But such criticism would be based on the very


assumptions that a Romantic conception of reality would want to question. When Novalis calls for a romanticization of the world, or when the equally influential writer Schlegel insists – in his Discourse on Poetry – that a ‘new mythology must … be formed from within the deepest depths of the spirit’, which will also inform the physical sciences and generate a ‘harmony between the Real and the Ideal’,19 they are propagating a perspective on the world which acknowledges its mystical aspect without falling into abstract idealism, and its empirical aspect, without embracing a crude, reductivist realism. It is a perspective in which the transcendent reveals itself in the ordinary, just as the unutterable shows itself in a poem, hence a conception of reality that conditions the very romanticization Novalis is advocating. But this requires further elaboration.

Spirit and God My earlier description of Eberhard’s relation to the natural world as a ‘pious union’ was also intended to reflect the Romantics’ insistence that the sharp, categorical distinction between man and world, subject and object, spirit and matter, is a false dichotomy which must be abandoned in favour of a holistic, mystical conception of nature. As Friedrich Schelling, the main philosopher of the Romantic circle, puts it: That which is mystical above all is nature, which those enemies of all mysticism consider to be the least mystical (…) Sensuousness in general and the way in which the senses work, this is what is most hidden of all that occurs in nature.20 For Schelling, to see nature as mystical is to see matter and spirit as aspects of an organic whole, or as objectifications of what he calls the Absolute, in which ‘nature becomes visible spirit, and spirit invisible nature’.21 Schelling’s holistic perspective carries resonances of Spinozistic monism on the one hand, and Kantian transcendental idealism, on the other, and is intended to dissolve the distinction between realism and idealism in favour of a perspectivism that incorporates both.22 The philosophical desideratum, as it were, is a conception of reality that retains Spinoza’s monism, while also leaving room for the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal, such that the empirically real may still be viewed as transcendentally ideal. Consequently, philosophy cannot just concern itself with the highest things, it must, if it is to be the science which grasps everything, really connect the


highest with the lowest. Whoever throws nature away in advance, as that which is absolutely devoid of spirit, thereby deprives himself even of the material in which and from which he could develop the spiritual.23 One implication of this construal is that, where philosophy purports to talk about religious belief, for example, or of manifestations of the divine, it ought to ensure that its conceptual elucidations always preserve the link between the natural and the supernatural: All these concepts, such as supernatural, otherworldly, are unthinkable without their correlates. There is no otherworldly God who is not simultaneously thought in relation to the world. The complete detachment of the supernatural from the natural is what creates the un-natural.24 The point not only reiterates the Kantian observation that (religious) concepts without intuitions are empty, but urges the philosopher to pay attention to the complex conceptual relations between religious and non-religious discourse, to the ways in which the meaning of the former is conditioned by the latter, and to the praxis that warrants the ascription of religious belief in the first place. But the parallels to Kant’s transcendental idealism do not end here. Another feature of Schelling’s construal is that God or Spirit is not to be viewed as an object among objects – an insight also expressed in Spinoza’s postulation of Substance – as a phenomenon among phenomena, but rather as a (noumenal) reality both transcendent to, and at the same time immanent in, the phenomenal. Thus, God can be in all things, and all things in God, precisely because God or Spirit is an undifferentiated, ultimate reality, whose nature is not describable except in the concepts and terms that designate its phenomenal manifestations. However, in spite of these transcendental–idealist resonances, Schelling also expresses serious reservations about the Kantian account of religious belief. These concern, among other things, the idea of God as a postulate of (practical) reason; and the significance of the concrete, historical manifestations of the divine spirit. Regarding the first point, Schelling finds that, in Kant’s system, ‘God was just the necessary thought for the formal conclusion of human knowledge’,25 whereas in his own system, God is a subject which has gone through the whole of nature, through the whole of history, through the sequence of all the moments of which it seemed only the


last result, and this going-through was thought of as a real movement (not as a progression in thought alone), it was even thought of as a real process.26 When, in his discussion of Jacobi’s work, Schelling speaks of ‘the emptiness of absolutely unhistorical theism, of the so-called pure religion of reason’,27 the allusion is also to Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, which seeks to show the teleological completeness of moral endeavour by invoking the idea of God as a regulative ideal, and which depicts the historical Jesus as a paragon of virtue and contingent vehicle for the proclamation of universal truths of reason. More specifically, the criticisms of Kant might be expressed as follows: First, Kant locates the genesis of religion in a natural need of the understanding to transcend the particular in favour of the general and all-encompassing. The difficulty about this analysis is that it depicts God as a being who is, in fact, two tiers removed from the believer’s life,28 since He is not even included among things-in-themselves, and thus among that which appears to the human subject. ‘God’, says Kant, ‘is the creator of things in themselves’,29 whereas ‘man is principium originarium of appearances.’30 This suggests that, unlike things-in-themselves, God not only does not, but cannot manifest Himself in appearances, and is thus radically detached from the world of those who worship Him. This reading is further supported by Kant’s claim that the concept of God may be posited ‘only as a Something [ein Etwas überhaupt]’,31 that, while it is of ‘a personal intelligent being’, it is also one that has been ‘created by reason itself’;32 that, indeed, ‘God is not a being outside of me, but only a thought within me’,33 a ‘subjective principle of thought’.34 This, on the face of it rather crude, exposition of the grammar of God might be defended by arguing that it is merely intended to capture, and ultimately to overcome, the tension between the idea of a God who is not reducible to anything in the realm of appearances, on the one hand; and the notion of a God cum nobis, as it were, whose reality is nevertheless more substantial than that of ‘a thought within me’, on the other. Kant’s resolution of this apparent paradox, it might be argued, consists in the faithful employment of the idea of a radically detached, but just, God, as a regulative principle governing every facet of the believer’s life. It is as a regulative idea, in other words, that God can be at once detached from, and an integral part of, human existence. While this reading draws attention to one of the (necessary) paradoxes surrounding belief in God, and shows how, though radically distinct from the world of phenomena, He can nevertheless enter that world in the


form of human action falling under certain ethico-religious descriptions – and is this not, after all, an essential part of what it means for God to be at work in one’s life: not merely as intellectual assent to an abstract idea, but as activity in imitatio Dei? – Kant’s focus throughout his analysis is on reason, and his account of the divine only manages to eschew a thing-like conception of God by identifying it with a regulative idea ‘created by reason itself’, instead of affirming, as would have been more appropriate, the logical primacy of God, even over the deliverances of reason. The point could be put more bluntly by saying that, in the final analysis, Kant can only succeed in bringing God closer to man by profaning the concept and turning it into a convenient postulate of a humanistic ethic, in the hands of which acts of grace become acts of reason, and the divine, a by-product of the unifying tendencies of human thinking. It is evident that such a construal remains unsatisfactory, especially if one asks why the principle of the systematic unity of the world should be called ‘God’ to begin with. Kant does not provide a convincing justification for this claim, nor is it easy to see how he could; how, without the ecclesiastical, historical background that he wants to eliminate from religion within the limits of reason alone, his construal could yield more than the shadow of a theism that is still at a considerable distance from the Christian God. Ironically, Kant himself seems to admit as much when he says that it does not matter – it is ‘völlig einerlei’35 – whether the unity of the world is ultimately conceived of religiously, or in rather more secular terms: In other words, it must be a matter of complete indifference to us, when we perceive such unity, whether we say that God in his wisdom has willed it to be so, or that nature has wisely arranged it thus.36 In the light of these remarks, one wonders, not only how the believer can be as certain of God’s reality as was suggested earlier on, but also whether the God in Kant’s universe is not also a superfluous God. The problem here is that, with such implications, Kant’s grammatical story about God would be a story badly told, and would require major revisions to be convincing. Returning to Schelling’s picture of the Spirit’s revelations in natural – including human – history, it should be noted that its teleological aspect is by no means identical with a naive notion of spiritual progress. While Schelling does think that ‘Christ is the end of Revelation’,37 he also holds that the development of Christianity is subject to the same sorts of disruption and obstacle … as any other process in nature.38


Human spiritual development is just as vulnerable to setback, disruption and subversion as other processes in nature: The means by which God’s spirit works are not limited to a one-sided operation; he has created everything through opposites, and in all opposites he remains the one powerful, insuperable spirit.39 Apart from acknowledging the vital role of grace in the unfolding narrative of the Spirit’s self-realization, Schelling’s observation also hints at the spiritual possibilities for the future, at a scenario in which religious division is resolved and superceded by a unity that mirrors the Spirit’s all-encompassing and unifying nature. Hence his conjecture that ‘the church in which paganism and Judaism are united, is still to be regarded as a church for the future’,40 and his insistence that ‘always and everywhere there will only be one church, the church of which Peter is the foundation stone’.41 But in spite of his contention that Christ constitutes the end of revelation, Schelling also notes, in Philosophy of Art, that it is ‘essential that Christianity be mindful of the revelations of the world spirit, and not to forget that it is a part of the latter’s plan that even this world, which had been formed by modern mythology, is to become past.’42 Christianity is a historical appearance, but it is neither the beginning, nor the end of the Spirit’s history. Schelling’s future-oriented, spiritual universalism also comes out in this self-characterization: For me it is not a matter of agreeing with any one church doctrine. I have no interest in being orthodox, as it is called, just as I would have no difficulty in being the opposite. For me, Christianity is merely a phenomenon that I seek to explain.43 The quotation leads to the second major criticism of Kant’s construal of religion. For Kant, as will be remembered, rational religion isolates from the multitude of religious faiths and their respective historical manifestations a common core, consisting of (a) a conception of moral value which, though requiring no external justification, nevertheless gestures towards the transcendental, and (b) belief in a God or ens realissimum as a postulate of reason, consequent on acceptance of (a). Now, since a proper conception of moral duty is graspable by reason on its own, it follows for Kant that all religious faiths are merely variations of one and the same theme, namely, ‘pure religion’, and the specific mythologies and practices in which it is expressed, no more than


contingent manifestations of the moral law and its requirements. On the one hand, Kant certainly recognizes the need for religious belief to be clothed in the tangible rituals and ceremonies of a living religious tradition: Because of he natural need and desire of all men for something sensibly tenable, and for a confirmation of some sort from experience of the highest concepts and grounds of reason (a need which really must be taken into account when the universal dissemination of faith is contemplated), some historical faith or other, usually at hand, must be utilised.44 On the other hand, he also makes it clear that particular religious traditions are primarily to be regarded as instruments or vehicles for the transmission of an essentially moral message: When, therefore … a historical faith attaches itself to pure religion, as its vehicle but with the consciousness that it is only a vehicle, and when this faith, having become ecclesiastical, embraces the principle of a continual approach to religious faith, in order finally to be able to dispense with the historical vehicle, a church thus characterized can at any time be called the true church.45 The problem with this construal is not merely, as has already been noted above, that the particular manifestation of the divine is too closely identified with a specific, absolute conception of morality, but its description of that manifestation as something that is ‘usually at hand’ and ‘only a vehicle’ for the transportation of a moral paradigm. While it is true that, for Schelling, the various religious faiths are but particular manifestations of one and the same Absolute, the fact that they are also necessary manifestations of Spirit, bestows on them a significance which the Kantian account fails to appreciate. As Schelling notes: Within the identity philosophy, however, that which has gone before gets its truth only in the relatively higher that succeeds it, and thus, in the final analysis, in God.46 Given that the history of religions is a history of the Spirit’s actualization – and of man’s reconciliation with it – and given that a proper understanding of the later stages in that history also involve an understanding of those that precede it, there is an important emphasis


on the particularity of a given religious faith and its function as a necessary episode in the divine dramaturgy. Contrary to Kant, then, it is not at all accidental that the Spirit should manifest itself in the way that it does, any more than the myths and rituals associated with a given faith are merely contingently connected with the truths that are revealed in it. This is quite compatible with the claim that the universal may still reveal itself in the particular, albeit in a way that is not expressible except through a mythological narrative. But now, what does this mean for our understanding of the relation between the various religions? And what is meant by saying, as Schelling does, that Christ may still be seen as ‘the end of Revelation’? One way of responding to the latter question might be to say that there is a sense in which Christianity brings to completion something that has already revealed itself, perhaps more obscurely and less explicitly, in preceding objectifications of the Spirit, and therefore provides a lens through which its previous objectifications may – retrospectively – be seen as revelations which, though chronologically pre-Christian, are Christian in spirit – or intimations of Christianity – without thereby diminishing their significance. On the contrary, sensitive attention to the various emanations of the Spirit might show that the realities towards which Christianity gravitates as it deepens – for example, the crucifixion and passion, grace and salvation through love, and so on – are also to be found in Greek, Egyptian, Indian and Chinese mythology and European folklore, and that all these constitute invaluable sources of mutual, spiritual illumination. As Simone Weil has put it: Any number of accounts drawn from mythology and folklore could be translated into Christian truths without deforming anything in them, but rather, on the contrary, thus throwing a vivid light upon them. And these truths would, in their turn, thereby take on a new clarity.47 In addition, the proposed conceptual investigation may reveal a spiritual genealogy which not only blurs the distinction between the various religious faiths, but which opens up the possibility of many incarnations of the Holy Spirit. Fr O’Donnell would presumably shrink from a universalist perspective which entailed that conclusion, but then the question becomes one of elucidating the uniqueness of the Christian incarnation in ways that goes beyond stipulation. Not only that, but the above construal equally seems to blur the distinction between the sacred and the profane, between religious belief on the one hand, and so-called


paganism on the other. This leads me to the work of the German theologian Eugen Drewermann, who insists that the relation of Christianity to the pagan religions and to history as a whole must be worked out differently from the way it usually is. We shall no longer be able to say, for example, that the religious symbol of the virgin birth of the divine Redeemer is based on Christ. Rather we must acknowledge that the very symbols of faith, including the Christian creed, are as old as the creation of the human race, indeed in a certain sense as old as the creation of the world.48

Eugen Drewermann – mythology and scripture Eugen Drewermann49 was once described in the German weekly Der Spiegel as ‘the most popular and controversial theologian in the Germanspeaking world’,50 not least because his Scriptural exegesis and fervent criticism of institutionalized Catholicism eventually led to his suspension from all priestly and academic offices in 1991/92. Since Drewermann’s oeuvre is extensive – his contribution to the subject comprises over [70] books in which moral theology, psychology, philosophy, literature and Scriptural exegesis combine into an intricate and often densely argued anatomy of religious faith – and since a fair appraisal of his position would require a separate chapter, I shall confine myself here to a rough sketch of his approach. To begin with, Drewermann shares with Kant the conviction that the historicization of religious statements, whether in ordinary, everyday religious discourse, or in the context of theological exegesis, can only undermine the faith: ‘Historical-critical exegesis’, Drewermann notes, ‘continually loses itself … in historicizing investigations’, but ‘in the end it only finds in passage after passage that things certainly did not occur the way the narrative says they did’.51 Examples are not hard to find: There would be a host of historical-critical reasons for saying that if the shepherds are out in the fields, then naturally it can’t be cold and wintry, as the Christmas carols proclaim. Since he was a ‘carpenter’, Joseph was certainly not poverty-stricken. (…) The text in fact says nothing about any ‘search for lodging’ or any hard-hearted [Lk 2: 1–20] innkeeper’s turning anyone away. In Palestine the ‘manger’ is never a box lying on the floor, as countless pictures of Christmas


show. The ox and the ass come from Isaiah 1:3. Luke himself attaches no importance whatsoever to them.52 Drewermann’s concern is with the spirit in which present-day religious believers are to approach the Gospel narratives. If the believer understands the gospels as straightforward historical reports of past events, and religious beliefs and rituals as reminders and celebrations of ‘what actually happened’, then he should also acknowledge that, if the reports in question turn out to be false, his rituals and beliefs rest on false assumptions and are, therefore, misguided. Drewermann’s point, however, is not that the New Testament is a unique collection of falsehoods, or a paradigm example of sloppy historical narrative, but that the very contradictions between the different Gospel narratives on the one hand, and the blatant inconsistencies between certain elements of the Gospel stories and the findings of painstaking historical research, on the other, already suggest that a historical interest in the Scriptures only makes a very limited contribution to an understanding of the religious message contained in it. Drewermann thinks the language of history encountered in the Gospel narratives often has a special use, bestowed on it by the religious context in which it appears, that is, it is itself a part of the language of religion, and stands in the shadow of its grammar. Drewermann’s concern is precisely with this grammatical transfiguration, and thus also with a reading of the Scriptures that pays attention to its mythical and symbolic content, so as not to become obsessed with the letter at the expense of the spirit. One of the examples he uses in this connection is the story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem: Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem is contradicted by Jesus’ roots in Nazareth. The authors evidently wanted to speak of the ‘city of David’, Bethlehem, in order to present the prophecy of Micah as fulfilled and Jesus as the ‘son of David’, the Messiah. To motivate the journey to Bethlehem Luke makes use of the emperor’s command to register for taxes. But then in the meantime Mary and Joseph would have had to live together, because such a journey was forbidden to engaged couples. But there is no mention of their getting married. Furthermore it is historically true that Augustus introduced a new system of tax assessment, part of which involved a new registration on the tax rolls every fourteen years. But Flavius Josephus reports that in this case a tax assessment wasn’t carried out until 6 C.E. by Quirinus (together with the first procurator Coponius), when Judea was incorporated into the province of Syria.53


For Drewermann, the moral to be drawn from findings such as these is that the birth of the Son of God does not occur on the level of history or, to use Kantian terminology, the phenomenal. It takes place on the level of a reality that can only be described metaphorically. The story of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem should therefore be read symbolically.54 The birth of Jesus takes place on the level of history; that of the Son of God does not. Even so, the language of history, of concrete times, places, and events, can itself become a medium for the transportation of the religious perspective, as when Jesus’ birth is transposed to the city of David. It is for this reason, too, that ‘Bethlehem’ can evoke deep questions about where the religious believer is himself ‘located’ with respect to the Christian message or, in Schelling’s terminology, the Spirit’s self-realization: The Bethlehem on the map lies twenty kilometres south of Jerusalem, but the real ‘Bethlehem’ lies right next to ‘Jerusalem’ in our own hearts. And where do we really live?55 Another example of Drewermann’s approach revolves around the image, frequently encountered in the gospel narratives, of the shepherd: It’s different when the ‘shepherds’ are understood not as a social class but as a mythical typos. Then they designate the border region between nature and culture or the transition from the level of hunters and gatherers to the life of the sedentary farmers. Like hunters, shepherds still belong to nomadism, and they too consume the flesh of animals. On the other hand they already live on the products of nature – in the form of milk, cheese, wool, etc.; and they raise animals as the farmer raises wheat and millet. Precisely as embodiments of transition, shepherds are proper recipients of the message from a God who himself personifies the pure transition, the ripening and fulfilling unity of opposites, the evolution of the inchoate developing essential form of the human psyche.56 Once the shepherds in the biblical narrative are seen, not merely as a social class, but as the ‘mythical typos’ of transition, God, too, can appear as the personification of a transition – from the nomadic wanderings of a restless intellect to a faith that is content to rest in God, from unbelief to belief, and so on. Perhaps it would be best to construe the interpretive approach advocated by Drewermann as a dialectical dance in which the language of religion and the language of history can mutually reinforce each other in a mythical union, so long as it is


remembered that the gospel narratives are more akin to ‘expressionistic works of art’,57 than they are to exercises in historiography. Drewermann’s example of the shepherd image also shows how the Gospel narrative can be seen to be relevant even to those readers who are not part of the cultural context in which it was originally formulated: by employing mythical pictures or symbolic images whose existential import transcends, and is indeed quite independent of, the historically contingent. To quote Drewermann again: These images [eg. father, mother, etc.] can be found in every person and are expressed, to a greater or lesser extent, in every religion, unless it’s utterly imageless.58 The general point might be put saying that the myths and symbolisms in a religious perspective of the world contain images whose significance is not tied to a specific time or place, but transcultural and universal, and which may themselves be regarded as God/Spirit-given: We must and may believe that it is theologically justified to say that God has given us these particular images ‘for the road’, so that we can find our way in this world and not lose sight of the path back to our eternal homeland.59 It would be going too far to read in this remark a modern theologian’s way of talking about Kant’s universal truths of reason, even though Drewermann identifies the timelessly significant images expressed in myth and metaphor as general features of religious belief. Unlike Kant, however, he does not set out to offer an account of religion within the limits of a certain moral conception, nor does he take the images in question to be unique to religious discourse. The overlappingness between Drewermann and Kant is perhaps at its most perspicuous in the conviction that what matters in religion is not the dogmatic insistence on the historicity of the gospel narrative, or on the literal truth of certain doctrinal proclamations, but a careful application of religious pictures to the concrete praxis of human life. As Kant writes: It is essential that, in the use of these historical accounts, we do not make it a tenet of religion that the knowing, believing, and professing of them are themselves means whereby we can render ourselves well-pleasing to God.60


Again, it is true that a merely verbal affirmation of belief in the truth of Scriptural narrative can hardly count as a serious manifestation of religious faith, since the latter essentially involves a desire to please God, which in turn calls for certain sorts of activity, but this is still a far cry from the thought that Jesus is not merely a vehicle for the transportation of a moral paradigm, but the very content of Christianity itself. Now, Drewermann has convincingly argued elsewhere that, far from being unique to the Christian faith, the idea of a Virgin Birth permeates the history of folklore and religious belief from Ancient Egyptian times onwards: … in folktales from all over the world the appearance of an ‘angel’ so often introduces the birth of a divine child. In the language of myths, fairy tales, and dreams the symbol of the ‘child’ always stands for the basically religious permission to get a fresh start in life.61 The same holds for the concept of the Son of God, which appears to have an equally long history: The whole concept of the Son of God, who is born of a virgin, overshadowed by spirit and light (by Amun-Ra), born into the world was, as we see, completely worked out in ancient Egypt as an idea thousands of years before Christianity. (…) Only when the ancient religion died did people begin, for example, to write down the Osiris myth. Every cult that has to be propped up with explanations, because it isn’t self-explanatory, is on its last legs. (…) Hence we must gratefully acknowledge the fact that the theology of divine sonship was not originally developed by Christianity but borrowed from Egypt.62 Fr O’Donnell might, of course, acknowledge this genealogy of the concepts of the Virgin Birth and Divine Sonship, without having to give up his conviction that the gospel narratives are unique, since earlier employments of these concepts might simply be regarded as prophetic intimations or conceptual premonitions of God’s incarnation in the historical Jesus. Even so, the insistence that such-and-such occurrences must have taken place as described, seems to place the faith on a weaker foundation than it deserves, since the falsity of the corresponding ‘factual’ reports would ipso facto undermine the credibility of Christian belief. As Drewermann aptly puts it: But what did we theologians accomplish when over the centuries we kept choosing an increasingly rational and ‘realistic’ language for


interpreting religious symbols? The more this language progressed, the more people it had to exclude from the circle of believers.63 Contrary to what Drewermann’s critics have alleged, the move away from a ‘realistic’ language for interpreting the Scriptural narrative is by no means tantamount to a reductivist construal of religious belief as a grand metaphor for the human condition, nor is Drewermann offering such a simplistic construal. On the contrary, his attempt to lead modern readers to a deeper understanding of the Scriptural message through a deeper appreciation of its language, involves the rejection of the very dichotomy between the literal and the metaphorical which some seem to be so reluctant to give up. As Drewermann puts it: For us moderns there is no longer any direct access to the ways mythical narratives think and speak: Whenever we suppose to take them ‘literally’ we misunderstand them. And whenever we try to read them ‘symbolically’, we risk deflating the seriousness of their claims on us and flattening their unconditional validity into something arbitrary and aesthetic.64 Biblical narrative should not be approached in terms of a simplistic (historicizing or symbolizing) interpretive schema but, like myth, as a distinctive way of understanding the meaning and significance of human existence whose truth reveals itself to those who embrace it in the spirit of a faith that seeks no further (external) explanations or justifications. This is not to say that the gospel narratives are ‘merely’ stories or symbols, but that the reality they uncover, while not cut off from the historical, is also irreducibly spiritual and hence transcendent to it. If, as I am suggesting here, Drewermann is right about this, then he is also perfectly justified in rejecting the very historicization of the gospel narratives demanded with such fervour by his clerical superiors, since that would be incompatible with his role as spiritual guardian of the faith. Drewermann’s interpretive approach to the religious message is not an unfortunate aberration from the ‘true’ faith, but just as much rooted in the repository of the Christian faith as the claim that the story of the Virgin Birth is more than a symbolic halo painted around the figure of Jesus. Given some of his clerical superiors’ insistence that decent Catholics must read such stories as factual reports, however, Drewermann rightly wonders whether the lip service thus demanded of him is not itself a reductio of the gospel message.


Notes 1. John O’Donnell, ‘The Holy Spirit’, in Michael J. Walsh (ed.), Commentary on the Catechism of the Catholic Church (London: Chapman, 1994), 166–7. 2. Ibid., 167. 3. Ibid., 176. 4. Ibid., 177. 5. ‘We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we are saved’ (Rom 8:22–4). 6. Drewermann, Discovering the God Child Within, trans. Peter Heinegg (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 17. 7. Novalis [Friedrich Leopold, Freiherr von Hardenberg], 1772–1801. The quotation is from Novalis, Werke, ed. Hans-Joachim Maehl, II, 334 (Munich/ Vienna: Hanser, 1978). 8. Caspar David Friedrich, 1774–1840, German landscape painter. 9. Ludwig Uhland (26.4.1787–13.11.1862) was appointed Professor of Languages and Literature in Tübingen in 1829. Some of his poems became popular folk songs. 10. Quoted in Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir by Paul Engelmann, ed. Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 83–4. 11. Paul Eichholtz, Quellenstudien zu Uhland’s Balladen (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1879), 62–3. 12. Ibid., 62. 13. Ibid., 60. 14. Paul Méjasson, Le Sentiment Réligieux Dans la Poésie d’Uhland (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, Editeur, 1913), 95. 15. Wittgenstein, Letters, 6. 16. In R.S. Thomas, Mass for Hard Times (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1992), 62. 17. Gerold Prause, Genies Ganz Privat (Munich: DTV, 1994), 12–13. 18. Anselm, Cur Deus Homo? (London: Religious Tract Society, n.d.), Section IV, 39. 19. Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Gespräch über die Poesie’, in Kritische und theoretische Schriften (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1978), 193. 20. Schelling, ed. Michaela Boenke (Munich: Eugen Diederichs, 1995), 184. 21. F.W.J. Schelling, ‘The Philosophy of Nature’, in On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 77. 22. Schelling, ed. Boenke, 286. 23. F.W.J. Schelling, ‘Jacobi and Theosophy’, in On the History of Modern Philosophy, trans. A. Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173. 24. F.W.J. Schelling, Werke., ed. M. Schröter (Munich: Beck, 1927), XIII, 188. 25. F.W.J. Schelling, ‘The Phiilosophy of Nature’, 132. 26. Ibid. 27. F.W.J. Schelling, “Jacobi and Theosophy”, 167. 28. For a detailed discussion of this issue, see Karl-Heinz Michel, Immanuel Kant und die Frage der Erkennbarkeit Gottes (Wuppertal: R. Brockhaus, 1987). 29. Immanuel Kant, ‘Reflexionen zur Metaphysik’, Nr. 4135, in Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (eds), Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1926), 17:429. 30. Kant, ‘Reflexionen zur Metaphysik’, Nr. 6057, in Gesammelte Schriften, 18:440.

Spirit and Romanticism 59 31. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman kemp Smith (New York: Martin’s Press, 1965), A678/B706. 32. Immanuel Kant, ‘Opus Postumum’, in Gesammelte Schriften, 21:48. 33. Ibid., 145. 34. Ibid., 147. 35. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A699/B727. 36. Ibid. 37. Schelling, ed. Boenke, 393. 38. Ibid., 425–6. 39. Ibid., 434. 40. Ibid., 452. 41. Ibid., 431. 42. Schellings, Werke, V, 442. 43. Ibid., XIV, 201. 44. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper, 1960), 100. 45. Ibid., 106. 46. Schelling, ed. Boenke, 362. 47. Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest (London: Routledge, 1954), 28–9. 48. Drewermann, Discovering the God Child Within, 37. 49. Eugen Drewermann (1940–) studied philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis, before taking up his priestly vocation in Paderborn (Germany), where he also lectured on moral theology and worked as a church counsellor, until he was suspended from all these offices in 1991/92. Drewermann’s research record contains a commentated translation of the gospel of St Mark, a multivolume work on psychoanalysis and moral theology, as well as depthpsychological interpretations of the gospel of St Luke, all of Grimm’s fairytales and Saint-Exupéry’s ‘Petit Prince’. The Catholic Church’s disagreements with Drewermann began in 1983, when, in response to his criticisms of the Church’s environmental policies, he was prohibited from training prospective teachers of religious studies, and were further exacerbated in 1996, when he advocated that divorcees be allowed to remarry in church. Drewermann emerged as a major figure in the public debate about the Catholic Church in the early 1990s, when his best-selling Kleriker (Munich: DTV, 1991) was published, and when he became a familiar face on television talk shows and at religious conventions across the country. 50. Der Spiegel Nr. 52, 23 December 1991, 61. 51. Drewermann, Discovering the God Child Within, 105. 52. Ibid., 107. 53. Drewermann, God Child, 105. 54. Ibid., 113. 55. Drewermann, God Child, 127. 56. Ibid., 117. 57. Ibid., 125. 58. Ibid., 37. 59. Ibid., 36. 60. Kant, Religion Within, 80. 61. Drewermann, God Child, 50. 62. Ibid., 73–4. 63. Drewermann, God Child, 19. 64. Ibid., 32.


Voices in discussion 2 Harvey: In your paper on romanticism, you make a general appeal to myth and symbolism. But what does that tell us about the notion of ‘spirit’? Precious little, it seems to me. Some criteria for ‘spirit’ have to come into the discussion in order for it to have any substance. Those criteria, in Christianity, are found in a call to faith. What is the language of ‘spirit’ that you are talking about? Not all myth gives us the language of ‘spirit’, so the generality does not help us. von der Ruhr: I am suggesting that romanticism was an attempt to widen our conception of ‘what there is’, or ‘what there is to see’. One suggestion is that certain features of human life may be focal points for appreciating ‘the spirit’ in which it is lived, hence the emphasis on birth, death and sexuality. These focal points can be found not only within the doctrinal confines of what religions say about ‘spirit’, but in art, poetry, music, ritual, and in responses to nature. In this way, the notion of ‘spirit’ is widened. Westphal: But do we need to claim that such appeals widen the doctrinal notions, since after all, among those doctrines we have one concerning divine providence which, it is said, can take a general form outside the context of creedal affirmations? It is part of God’s general providence that there should be these other manifestations of the spirit. That being so, why not make ‘providence’ the over-reaching notion rather than ‘spirit’, since it seems to do the work you want to accomplish? So Father O’Donnell’s lament about the neglect of the Holy Spirit in the commentary on the Catholic Catechism may not be so urgent as you think. Sherry: I do not really see why that is such an issue, since after all, if God’s providence is linked to his being a Creator Spirit, there does not seem to be a necessary tension between the notions of ‘spirit’ and ‘providence’. Davis: I’m not happy with the category of spirit as the over-reaching category for a different reason, namely, its down-playing of historical considerations in Christianity, as though they did not matter. There is an appeal to the fact of the matter which cannot be brushed aside. If certain historical facts were not so, Christianity’s distinctive claims could not stand. von der Ruhr: Drewermann’s suggestion is that where matters of the spirit are concerned, the question, ‘But did it happen?’ cannot be settled in a straightforwardly factual, empirical way. Phillips: I take it that what we are dealing here with grammatical questions such as those that Ogden raised in his response to Min’s paper. In the category of ‘spirit’ romanticism hopes to offer a conceptual


context which transcends the misleading distinction between fact and value. The romantics wanted to rescue ‘the world’ form a purely scientific view of it. The appeal to ‘spirit’ also goes beyond empiricism and idealism. So when we ask, ‘Did it happen?’, we no longer have the familiar view of the factual as a necessary precondition of the spiritual. Seeing nature as ‘spirit’, or seeing ‘spirit’ in nature, won’t admit of that analysis. Ogden: I think the divide between nature and ‘spirit’ does lead us astray as far as Christian witness is concerned, since the unifying term one has there is not ‘spirit’, but ‘logos’. It is the same logos that is seen both in nature and in human affairs. Phillips: But suppose I ask what kind of logos we are talking about here? Ogden: Then I agree that ‘logos’ and ‘spirit’ would find themselves within the same conceptuality. Question from the audience: A number of people seem concerned to offer an alternative to ‘spirit’ from the Christian tradition. Their concerns seem to be Christocentric. But isn’t it important to recognize the presence of ‘spirit’ outside this context, and that the notion is not dependent on it? The speaker was suggesting that learning lessons from romanticism enables us to do this. After all, Asian or other religions, while being manifestations of ‘spirit’, needn’t contain the Christian candidates to be the over-reaching concept, such as ‘providence’ or ‘logos’. So ‘spirit’ seems the better term. von der Ruhr: Your point is an important one. It is one reason for emphasizing an important distinction between philosophy and theology. Theology belongs to a certain religion and its traditions, while philosophy seeks to recognize a wider range of cases. I presented romanticism as an attempt to recognize these cases. But I admit that there are tensions in the attempt. For example, while Schelling wanted to recognize the wider cases, he also wanted to speak of Christianity as the end of revelation. Harvey: I want to repeat, however, that in the Christian tradition, God as ‘spirit’ is said to be everywhere. So there is no difficulty in recognizing that spirit in other cultures. The only thing I have insisted on is that such a recognition depends on the operation of criteria by which the presence of ‘spirit’ is recognized. It won’t be an indiscriminate matter of locating myths and simply assuming from that fact alone that ‘spirit’ is present. But Barth, for example, has no difficulty in saying that Christ can be found everywhere. Sherry: That would be similar to Hick’s points about our recognition of saints in other religions. We recognize them as holy saints because of the spirit manifested in their lives.


George Newlands: The points being made now illustrate important connections between the notion of ‘spirit’ and that of ‘participation’. Worship, both in relation to myself and to the community in which I live, is seen as a matter of participating in the spirit. The life of the spirit, on this view, would not be a matter of my intentionality, depending on my decision from moment to moment, but a life which draws me into itself to dwell in it. Min: That point has been emphasized by Catholic theologians as well, such as Rahner. ‘Spirit’ in a person is shown in the openness of that person to others, whereas seeing ourselves as mere bodies would be an excluding relation between ourselves and others. Westphal: The same point arises in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, where he speaks of our being drawn into loving the neighbour. It is not so much a matter of decision, as of love begetting love. Phillips: Let me return to the concerns of the question raised from the audience. Since it was made, we seem to have gone back to the emphasis on the way in which there are resources in Christianity for the recognition of manifestations of the spirit outside its boundaries. I am assuming that if we are talking about recognizing the same spirit, it would not only be possible for a Christian to say of these manifestations, ‘Christ is there’, but it would be possible for a Buddhist to say of Christianity, if he found the same spirit there, ‘There is the spirit of the Buddha’? Ogden: That is correct. That reversibility is essential if we are talking about the same spirit. Phillips: I take that point. I am still concerned, however, that the drift of the discussion has taken us away from the philosophical issue of the way in which the romantics tried to use the notion of spirit to enlarge our conception of ‘factuality’ and of ‘what there is to be seen’. This was Davis’ concern earlier. No doubt he would want to remind us that Jesus could not have been divine if he had never existed. True enough, but the philosophical question concerns what it means to see that he is divine. Is it a matter of believing in his existence (the propositional element of belief ) plus something else? I doubt it. In a paper in an earlier Claremont conference, published in Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief, which he edited along with Timothy Tessin, von der Ruhr, in a paper called ‘Is Animism Alive and Well?’ referred to complaints heard from native American religion about the attitude of white people. The latter tell the believer in a Native American religion to plough his land, to unearth the rich minerals which may be found there. The Native American worshipper of Mother Earth replies that he would not dream of plunging a dagger into his mother’s breast.


He complains that the white man does not listen to what trees and rivers have to say. What sort of belief is it to believe that the earth is one’s mother? Could we say that it consists of two things: belief in the existence of the earth plus an interpretation of that fact? I do not think so. The earth is seen in that way. That is all one can say. So ‘the existence of the earth’, as an independent fact, is not a precondition of the belief. It plays no part in it. I wonder to what extent the above point applies to seeing Jesus as the Son of God. It may be a mistake to see Jesus’ existence as the precondition of something else, namely, his divinity. These matters cannot be separated for the believer – ‘Behold, the man!’ I think romanticism was trying, as I think von der Ruhr showed, to break down the dualism between the factual and the evaluative. The former is not the precondition of something called an ‘evaluative interpretation’ with respect to Jesus, where matters of the spirit are concerned. Finally, I think ‘spirit’ is a useful notion when we want to do justice to a wide range of manifestations of ‘spirit’ outside Christianity. As the questioner from the audience points out, Christocentric notions may not be present on other religions. It does not matter if Christians are prepared to apply those notions to other manifestations of ‘spirit’, since that is not how others will speak of them. For that reason alone, it is difficult to see how Christocentric notions can be the overreaching concepts. Such concepts cannot be equated with Christian readiness to ‘reach over’. For these reasons, speaking of ‘manifestations of spirit’ seems to be a more faithful way of talking. Ogden: In the development in the nineteenth century of the critical study of religion there was a distinction between what is believed, and what can be believed. The problem is that, under the influence of Enlightenment conceptions of rationality, what one was supposed to be able to believe became reductive in character. I feel the same about some of the analyses you speak of in connection with Drewermann, especially those derived from psychoanalysis. von der Ruhr: I was not suggesting that one has to accept the analogies with psychoanalysis and depth psychology uncritically. Certainly not that one had to embrace Freud’s theories. Nevertheless I am suggesting that in many of the comparisons Drewermann makes, he is concerned to rescue the language of spirit from what he takes to be an impoverishment of it in contemporary insistence on assent to propositions, and to creeds so understood. I suggested that both he and the romantics are concerned with what we have been calling in the discussion ‘manifestations of things of the spirit’.

3 Kierkegaard on Language and Spirit Merold Westphal

Kierkegaard’s lack of enthusiasm for Hegel’s speculative project is well known. But as someone who so regularly describes the pathology of the present age as “spiritlessness,” his Hegel critique can hardly have the form of simply rejecting out of hand the concept of spirit. No doubt you have heard about the fellow who assured his friends that when they got to know him well, they would discover that deep down he was quite shallow. Kierkegaard agrees with Hegel that deep down we are spirit, and that we are shallow indeed until we fully realize ourselves as spirit. We can be human only to the degree that we become human by fulfilling our destiny as spirit. Of course, this agreement is quite formal and is fully compatible with a deep disagreement about what it means to become spirit. Still, the agreement is not trivial. Perhaps it is because I have spent so much time buried in the texts of Hegel and Kierkegaard that when I list course objectives on my syllabi, no matter which course it is, item #1 is always, “To become more nearly human.” As you might imagine, my students, lacking not only Hegelian and Kierkegaardian but even Aristotelian horizons in which such talk might make sense, are quite surprised to find someone who thinks they are not already human, who doesn’t share with them and their parents the view that their primary task is to become successful. Hegel famously describes spirit as “this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: ‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is ‘I’. It is in self-consciousness, in the concept of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning point, where it leaves behind it the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the 64

Kierkegaard on Language and Spirit 65

present.”1 But this concept is only the “turning point,” and Hegel is careful to spell out what must occur for it to be fully actualized. First, the individual, independent self-consciousnesses that make up this “We” as an “absolute substance” can retain their “perfect freedom and independence” in this unity only by means of reciprocal recognition. Second, this “We” that is composed of self-conscious individuals must itself become self-consciousness. It is not the “I think” of Cartesian/Kantian/Husserlian transcendentalism that must become fully self aware but something more like Rousseau’s general will, or Montesquieu’s spirit of the laws, or even, as Hegel’s own language suggests, Spinoza’s one and only substance, the organic totality of all mind and matter. Thus Hegel writes, The word or reconciliation is the objectively existent Spirit, which beholds the pure knowledge of itself qua universal essence, in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself qua absolutely selfcontained and exclusive individuality – a reciprocal recognition which is absolute Spirit … The reconciling yea, in which the two “I”s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the “I” which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.2 What Kierkegaard offers us, sometimes pseudonymously and sometimes in his own name, is an alternative account of spirit and, accordingly, an alternative account of who we most deeply are and must become if we are to be truly human.3 When speaking most abstractly, he presents us with a Socratic humanism; when speaking more concretely, with a Christian humanism.4 Together, these humanisms represent his “attack upon Christendom.” This attack is not restricted to the too-hot-to-publish Judge for Yourselves and the polemical articles written, as if were, from his deathbed. It can already be found in Fear and Trembling and even in the dissertation, The Concept of Irony. It is a double-barreled critique: the cultural elite do not know how to distinguish Christianity from an aesthetic Romanticism and a speculative Idealism that are, in each case, quite pagan, with the result that they do not even get as far as Socrates; and the bourgeoisie do not know how to distinguish salvation from socialization. So being a Christian is reduced to being nice5 and, so far as possible, cultured. By contrast with Schleiermacher a generation earlier, Kierkegaard addressed himself to those who took themselves to be Christians but were in fact its cultured despisers. Since such a “present age” is frequently

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characterized in the complex authorship in terms of its spiritlessness, we can begin with this negative notion of what spirit is. Kierkegaard often works with a tripartite anthropology according to which we are body, soul, and spirit. As merely sensate and psychical or body and soul, we are but clever animals, a complex confluence of instinct and intelligence. It is only as spirit, or at least the capacity for spirit, that we possess any “superiority over the animal.”6 But the frequency with which spirit is contrasted with the merely animal should not lead us to identify spiritlessness with the frat brothers of National Lampoon’s Animal House. At least they have passion,7 if only for sex and beer, which means that they fall more into the category of paganism than spiritlessness “in that the former is qualified toward spirit and the latter away from spirit. Paganism is, if I may say so, the absence of spirit, and thus quite different from spiritlessness” (CA 95). Genuine spiritlessness is to be found elsewhere, for example, in the “philistine–bourgeois” mentality that reduces life to “triviality” (SUD 41–2), even when it takes to itself the honorable name of prudence. “From the purely human point of view the most prudent thing is always to make life as trivial as possible (as devoid of ideas, as spiritless or as devoid of spirit as possible) – for the more mediocre, the easier life becomes” ( JP IV, ¶ 4348). Anti-Climacus, our author here, appears to continue his assault on the hoi polloi. The “majority of people” are immersed in “sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant,” are “too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit.” They “have no conception of being spirit … ” with the result “that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement.” But like Nathan the prophet, getting ready to lower the boom on King David for his adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband, Uriah the Hittite (2 Samuel 11–12), AntiClimacus is only rendering his cultured target more vulnerable through complacent superiority. His “thou art the man” reads like this: A thinker erects a huge building, a system, a system embracing the whole of existence, world history, etc., and if his personal life is considered, to our amazement the appalling and ludicrous discovery is made that he himself does not personally live in this huge, domed palace but in a shed alongside it, or in a doghouse, or at best in the janitor’s quarters. The “spiritless sense of security” that accompanies this condition only masks the real situation: that the dwelling of speculative philosopher is as far removed from a truly human home as that of the sensate majority


(SUD 43–4). Even when spirit becomes the fundamental category of speculation, the latter remains spiritless. Perhaps recalling this passage and the parable about the idolater who prays in truth (“with all the passion of infinity”) to an idol and the Christian who prays in untruth to the true God,8 Kierkegaard later made the following journal entry: Spirit is the power a person’s understanding exercises over his life. The person who has perhaps a false conception of God but yet observes the self-renunciation this false idea requires of him has more spirit than the one who perhaps even has the most correct scholarly and speculative knowledge of God but whose knowledge exercises no power at all over his life. ( JP IV, ¶ 4340) Of course, the contrast between spirit and spiritlessness does not belong to the aesthetic any more than to the speculative: it is “the ethical-religious category” (SUD 45). In The Concept of Anxiety, Vigilius Haufniensis points us in that direction by defining spiritlessness in terms of the absence of anxiety over the use of our freedom (CA 42, 95); in terms of the absence of any sense of life as a task set by anyone in authority (CA 95), and, correspondingly, in terms of the notion that guilt is foolishness (CA 107). Several of Kierkegaard’s journal entries point us in the same direction: On the other hand, if a person must be decisively developed to be “spirit” so as to dare appropriate “grace,” then God knows how many there will be in each generation who actually feel any need for or have any use for Christianity. (JP IV, ¶ 4333) If I were spirit, I would consequently be so strong that I would have but one single concern – for my sin and for my soul’s salvation. If this is true, then Christianity is as mild as mild can be … But unfortunately I am not pure spirit, or I am not spirit. I am flesh and blood, a weak human being – and so Christianity is exceedingly rigorous. For Christianity … first of all desires to transform me into spirit. If a man who has not a trace of the qualification of spirit in him could understand this, he would be obliged to flee Christianity as the greatest plague. ( JP IV, ¶ 4336) And the passage cited above about the prudence that “makes life as trivial as possible” continues: Perhaps someone could go further and think that this would be most prudent to do because one might thereby manage to avoid being

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noticed by God, to stay clear of his criterion, for if one is just a specimen, a unit in an enormous number, how is God’s eye going to fall upon him? ( JP IV, 4348) Passages like these from Haufniensis and his literary creator point us in the right direction and take us about as far as we can go along our via negativa (though we shall eventually have to return to one dimension of spiritlessness that has been deliberately excluded from the discussion so far). If we are to make further progress in understanding the alternative notion of spirit offered to us in the Kierkegaardian corpus, we will have to turn to its positive exposition; and there is doubtless no better place to begin than with Anti-Climacus’ famous and (perhaps too) familiar definition of spirit as the self that is “a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another” (SUD 13–14). This is a very formal formula that could be filled in in a variety of different ways, not all of which would yield spirit. We must examine the possibilities for all three dimensions of this definition: (1) the self as a relation, (2) as a self-relating relation, (3) and as an other-relating selfrelation. First, the self as a relation, or, as Anti-Climacus puts it, a synthesis. This latter term should not get us to thinking in terms of resolved chords, as if the tension between the bi-polar elements of the various syntheses is eliminated or even mitigated. The related terms are a synthesis only insofar as in their opposition they are inseparable. Four syntheses are named: infinite and finite, temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity, and the psychical and the physical. We already know that the latter pair does not yield spirit and that any account that stops with the human self as embodied consciousness or an intelligent animal will be spiritless. This synthesis will have to be aufgehoben or teleologically suspended in something higher. Whether the synthesis of freedom and necessity points to this something higher is unclear. Since freedom will turn up again at the next level of analysis, I am inclined to think not (at this point), to see this freedom either as the merely voluntary which does not include deliberation and choice or, which may amount to the same thing, as a compatibilist freedom that includes deliberation but not choice in the incompatibilist sense of liberum arbitrium. The naturalist and even the eliminative materialist could describe the human self in terms of these two syntheses. The story is similar with the other two syntheses. Not everyone would describe the human self as temporal/eternal or as finite/infinite. But it is quite possible to do so without getting to spirit in the sense AntiClimacus has in mind. Both Spinoza and Hegel do so. Everything will


depend on how the poles of eternity and infinity are defined. Since Anti-Climacus links both to the decisive category, “before God” (SUD 26, 79), it is clear that at this point these terms, along with “freedom,” are place holders whose concrete meaning we must await like the verb in a German sentence. To describe the human self as a complex, dialectical or bi-polar somewhat is not to say anything very determinate. Even if freedom, eternity, and infinity are included among the poles, one does not unambiguously get beyond the physical and psychical to spirit. At the second level we are told that the self is a relation that relates itself to itself. Against the background of modern European philosophy from Descartes through Kant and Fichte to Hegel, what comes immediately to mind here is self-consciousness, and we recall that Hegel doubly defines spirit in terms of self-consciousness: it is composed of individual self-consciousnesses, and the “We” that results must itself become selfconscious. So I find it striking that Anti-Climacus does not articulate the self’s relation to itself in terms of self-consciousness. Perhaps he takes this dimension of self-relation as sufficiently self-evident to need no mention. A more interesting possibility is that we are dealing with a silent jibe at Hegel and the traditions of modernity whose culmination he is, for which the preoccupation, even obsession, with self-consciousness signifies the double assumption that (1) philosophy is primarily epistemology because (2) the human self is primarily a knower. However that may be, it is in terms of freedom rather than selfconsciousness that Anti-Climacus limns the self’s relation to itself. It is “a relation that, even though it is derived, relates itself to itself, which is freedom. The self is freedom” (SUD 29). The freedom that occurs at this second level of analysis can hardly be a mere repetition of the freedom we met at the first level, and, indeed, to say that “the self is freedom” seems quite different from saying it is a synthesis of freedom and necessity. Does this get us beyond the merely voluntary or a compatibilist notion of freedom? It is not clear. Anti-Climacus does insist that despair, a disease of spirit, is not to be thought of as a misfortune, as something that happens to us, that we suffer, like death or disease: we are rather to see it as something for which we are responsible by having brought it upon ourselves. Despair is an act, something we do (SUD 14–17, 62).9 But the compatibilist will also say we are responsible for our actions and should distinguish these from misfortunes that befall us involuntarily. Kierkegaard’s own view of freedom is stronger than this. In a striking journal entry written a couple of years before he wrote Sickness Unto Death, he argues that divine omnipotence, so far from being a barrier to human freedom, is its presupposition. Only omnipotence can produce

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a being and then withdraw so completely as to leave it wholly free. What is of interest here is not that argument as such, but the conception of freedom as independence from one’s ultimate ground that it employs ( JP II, ¶ 1251). For the compatibilist, the self is not independent of the causal nexus in which it is embedded and, a fortiori, not independent of the God who is the ground of that nexus, whether in Spinoza’s sense or in a theistic sense. Kierkegaard makes the self’s independence in relation to God more dramatic in an earlier entry: “That God could create beings free over against himself is the cross which philosophy could not bear but upon which it has remained hanging” ( JP II, ¶ 1237). It is hard to see how the human self could act against an omnipotent creator unless possessed of an incompatibilist freedom. Of course, we cannot simply read Kierkegaard into Anti-Climacus, but we can read the latter in the light of the former, especially in view of (1) the fact that Kierkegaard composed Sickness Unto Death with the intention of publishing it under his own name (SUD xv–xvi) and (2) the fact that we need to distinguish the freedom that belongs to the self as relation from the freedom that belongs to the self as self-relation. In any case it is clear that in speaking of the self’s relation to itself the emphasis falls on action and responsibility rather than on knowing. Cognition is not the essence of the self as spirit. We may well be rational animals, as Aristotle assures us, but he is wrong when he presents this as an essential definition. What makes us more than featherless bipeds is not that we are clever critters but that we are responsible agents. So we come to the third level: because the self is established by another, it not only relates itself to itself but “in relating itself to itself relates itself to another.” Once again the formula is formal; both Spinoza and Hegel could sign on, though their accounts of the other by whom the finite self is established differ from each other as well as from Kierkegaard’s account. But before turning to the specific way AntiClimacus fills in this blank, we should notice two things. First, the story about Kierkegaard and Nietzsche being the fathers of existentialism by virtue, in large part, of a radical individualism in which the self is seen as isolated and alone is a myth. However it may be with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard’s self is every bit as radically relational as Hegel’s, though the two give radically different accounts of the relation. Second, and as if to emphasize the first point, Anti-Climacus does not say that the self relates itself to itself and then relates itself to another. He does not even simply say that the self relates itself to itself and relates itself to another. He says that in relating itself to itself the self relates to another. The relation to the other has always already insinuated itself


into the self’s relation to itself. As the British Hegelians would put it, this is an internal relation; it belongs to the essence of the self so related and is constitutive of that self’s very identity. The other to which the self relates is the middle term in its relation to itself. So, as with Hegel, there is no immediate self-relation and thus no isolated, lonely, atomic self. I am reminded of a chorus I learned in Sunday School as a boy: No never alone; no never alone. He promised never to leave me; never to leave me alone. For Anti-Climacus, this is an ontological fact long before it is a soteriological promise. It comes as no surprise that for Anti-Climacus as throughout the corpus, this other who has established the self and to which it relates in relating to itself is God – the personal Creator and Redeemer of traditional theism. The human self is spirit by virtue of existing “before God,” and becomes spirit by becoming conscious of this fact (SUD 27, 46). This consciousness is not found in paganism or in paganism in Christendom. As we have already seen, the former at its best was moving toward spirit (is this where Socrates fits in?), while the latter is genuine spiritlessness by virtue of moving away from spirit (compare SUD 46–7 with CA 93–5). Those without this sense have “mortgage[d] themselves to the world,” while those with it have a self “for whose sake they could venture everything” (SUD 35).10 To live “before God” is to become a self “whose criterion is God! A cattleman who (if this were possible) is a self directly before his cattle is a very low self [think Nietzsche’s herd], and similarly, a master who is a self directly before his slaves is actually no self [think Hegel’s master–slave relation] – for in both cases a criterion is lacking” (SUD 79). To live “before God” is to be “invited to live on the most intimate terms with God!” (SUD 85). The ultimate category of Anti-Climacus’ “logic” is “before God.” His whole definition of the self as spirit culminates in this moment, and short of it the definition fails to tell us what spirit is. *

*

*

Of the many elements that go into understanding this crucial category, I shall look at only three: individualism, faith, and sin. When discussing the spiritlessness of the one who has “never gained the impression that there is a God and the ‘he,’ he himself, his self, exists before this God,” Anti-Climacus writes, “What wretchedness that they are lumped together and deceived instead of being split apart so that each individual

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may gain the highest” (SUD 27). In his very first paragraph, he defines Christian heroism in these terms: “to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious strenuousness and this prodigious responsibility” (SUD 5). Thus one form of despair “seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by ‘the others.’ Surrounded by hordes of men … such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood … finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man … I cowardly gain all earthly advantages – and lose myself” (SUD 33–5).11 Here is the famous existentialist critique of mass society as the crowd, the herd, or the horde and the equally famous individualism that goes with it. But nota bene. This individualism is not foundational but derivative. There is no archaic atomism or primordial particularity. I am never simply alone but always alone – before God (unless, of course, I flee from the strenuousness of this responsibility, which is precisely to fail to be a self by failing to be myself). I am first related to God and only as such am I an individual. The principle of individuation is not unintelligible matter, nor the self-consciousness of the “I think,” nor my ownmost Sein-zum-Tode. It is “before God” that I am utterly unique. This is why the ethical must be teleologically suspended in the religious, according to Fear and Trembling. For Silentio, the ethical is what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit, the laws and customs of one’s people.12 For the tragic hero, this concrete universal is the highest, whereas for the knight of faith there is something higher still. Even when required by the laws and customs of his people to kill his own child, the tragic hero has the comfort of his culture and the solace of his society. Abraham is a knight of faith because in his God-relation he is reflected out of the ethical and left alone – before God – with a task he cannot explain to his family in terms they will understand. Accordingly, Anti-Climacus designates as spiritlessness any “human existence that is not consciousness of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc)” (SUD 46). It might seem that the aesthete is the true “existentialist” hero, the one who succeeds in being atomically alone. He (Kierkegaard’s models are typically male)13 is immediate, allowing neither God nor the social order to be essential to his identity. But the young man A in Either/Or, to take a specific example, is as much embedded in a romantic counterculture as his adversary, Judge William, is embedded in the “official”


bourgeois culture. He despises the Judge’s Sittlichkeit and the institution of marriage which is so central to it.14 But he does so as a card-carrying member of a romantic Übersittlichkeit that is constituted in large part by its scorn of marriage.15 I am reminded of my junior high days when in order to be “different” (I gotta be me!) we all wore the same uniform consisting of jeans (no – they had to be Levis!) worn so low they were in danger of falling down, engineer boots with silver studs around the heels, and a shirt with the collar turned up in back. We were different from our parents, to be sure, who looked upon our urgency in the matter with varying degrees of humor and irritation, but only by becoming social conformists to a code as strict as that to which any man in a gray flannel suit ever succumbed. Individuals we most surely were not. For Anti-Climacus despair is the fundamental sickness of spirit, the failure to exist properly before God. So we might expect him to identify spirit’s health as hope. But he rather identifies it as faith. Like a composer who introduces a theme a few notes at a time, Anti-Climacus gives us his formula for faith in fragments. It first appears without reference to faith or to God. Despair is overcome when “in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it” (SUD 14). It is no mystery that Anti-Climacus takes this power to be God the Creator and shortly after introducing his decisive category, “before God,” he tells us that “the self is healthy and free from despair only when, precisely by having despaired, it rests transparently in God” (SUD 30). Still no reference to faith. But a little later he gives us his “formula for faith: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it” (SUD 49; cf. 131). The reference to God is gone, but surely not forgotten. So we finally get the following definition of faith: “that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God” (SUD 82). If you are old enough, it may be that, like me, you first encountered Sickness Unto Death in a double feature with Fear and Trembling. I love to show my students the Doubleday Anchor paperback with its 95¢ price smiling serenely on the front cover. The two accounts of the religious as existence before God complement each other nicely. To be noted in the present context is Silentio’s sustained polemic against the Hegelian notion that faith can be presupposed and that the pressing task is to get “beyond faith” to understanding.16 He simply portrays Abraham as the knight of faith and the father of the faithful and dares anyone to say, “I’ve gotten that far and now must go beyond faith to (speculative) knowledge.” Similarly, Anti-Climacus, by portraying despair as universal,

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even if it is not universally recognized, and by defining faith as the complete overcoming of despair in accordance with the formula about willing to be oneself and resting transparently in God as one’s source, poses the question whether anyone can simply say, “I have faith. I am no longer unterwegs zum Glauben but have already arrived and am now ready for the greater challenge of moving from faith to reason, or, as Hegel would put it, from Vorstellung to Begriff.” It becomes immediately clear that we should not use the formula from the gospel narrative, “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mk 9:24) to express this. Betraying the fact that their creator is a Lutheran and not a Platonist, neither Silentio nor Anti-Climacus see faith as primarily a matter of cognition, the pistis of the Republic’s divided line, where one plays the knowledge game but badly. Faith is, if one may put it this way, a move in a different game altogether. It may well always presuppose belief, but as we have already seen, for Silentio it is primarily a matter of Abraham’s obedience, while for Anti-Climacus it is primarily a matter of willing and resting and thus of responsibility for the use of one’s freedom. Given the Lutheranism of the author of our author, I am inclined to read this “resting” in terms of trust. None of these activities show up on the divided line; nor are they illuminated by the contrasts between opinion (as unclear and uncertain) and knowledge or between Vorstellung and Begriff. This move away from the epistemological (read: Cartesian modernity) and the speculative (read: Hegelian modernity) is accentuated by another congruence between the two authors of our double feature. Silentio limns faith in terms of courage, humility, and, eventually, humble courage (FT 33–4, 48–9, 52, 73). While his emphasis falls on the courage of faith, Anti-Climacus stresses the humility of faith, but like his predecessor, whom he apparently has read, he also sees faith as humble courage (SUD 78, 85–6). While this is not quite an answer to the ancient question of the unity of the virtues, it does make it clear that faith belongs to virtue theory rather than to epistemology (even virtue epistemology). As spirit the human self is not primarily a knower but a responsible agent – before God. If the category “before God” is the key to both the individualism and the understanding of faith to be found in Kierkegaard’s writings, it also lies at the root of his preoccupation with sin. The God before whom we exist is wholly other, not ontologically by virtue of creation, but morally by virtue of our fallenness. Thus Climacus writes, “But if the god is to be absolutely different from a human being, this can have its basis not in that which man owes to the god (for to that extent they are akin) but in that which he


owes to himself or in that which he himself has committed. What, then, is the difference? Indeed, what else but sin …”17 Four days later, Haufniensis tells us that in innocence I am spirit but spirit is only dreaming. “Awake,” however, “the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended” (CA 41). But this waking is nothing but the leap from innocence into sin and in this context “my other” is none other than God. To be aware of myself as spirit, as existing before God is, in the first instance, to be aware of myself as estranged from the power that established me. This is why, to be born as spirit, one must have “God’s conception of the dreadfulness of sin [and] the gloriousness of salvation” (JP IV, ¶ 4363).18 The authorship has a great deal to say about sin, and even if we stick to Anti-Climacus, who has been our primary guide, this entire chapter would be too short to deal adequately with what he says. So once again, only a brief sample. Part I of Sickness Unto Death culminates in the analysis of the despair of weakness, not willing to be oneself, and the despair of defiance, willing to be oneself but only in despair or without God. Part II, entitled “Despair is Sin,” begins with definition: “Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself. Thus sin is intensified weakness or intensified defiance: sin is the intensification of despair … it is the conception of God that makes sin dialectically, ethically, and religiously what lawyers call ‘aggravated’ despair” (SUD 77). When he repeats this definition a few pages later, Anti-Climacus adds two important points to his analysis. First, sin is disobedience. He would probably find the language of estrangement too soft, a temptation to evasion and denial, as if our problem were something that had somehow happened to us. But, as we have seen, Anti-Climacus insists that despair is something we do, not something that befalls us, and vehemently rejects the Socratic interpretation of sin as ignorance and all of its cousins (SUD 14–17, 87–100). The assumption is clearly that the task of becoming spirit, of living before God in faith, comes to us as a divine command, and the failure to do this, whether out of weakness or defiance is disobedience. Defiance says “Hell no. I won’t go!” Weakness says nothing, or perhaps, “It’s too hard,” but in either case, does not go. These are two different ways of saying, “I’ll be a self my own way, thank you,” and both are disobedience. Second, seen in this light sin is not so much a matter of particular deeds or omissions as of a fundamental project of self-willfulness. The problem is sin rather than sins. The latter are the symptoms; the former is the disease (SUD 81–2, 106).19 At its root it is not a matter of doing more good things

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and fewer bad things but rather of adopting an entirely different posture before God. This posture, whose name is obedience, is another theological virtue that we can add to humble courage as ingredient in faith. When Anti-Climacus gives us his definition of sin for a third time, it is to observe “how seldom is there a person who is so mature, so transparent to himself, that this can apply to him … Most men are characterized by a dialectic of indifference and live a life so far from the good (faith) that it is almost too spiritless to be called sin – indeed, almost too spiritless to be called despair.” Lacking an “essential sin-consciousness,” a life “immersed in triviality and silly aping of ‘the others’ … is worthy only, as Scripture says of being ‘spewed out’ ” (SUD 101).20 The conclusion to draw, of course, is not that the malignancy is absent because the categories for recognizing it are missing, but rather that it is inoperable until those categories become operational. *

*

*

There is much more that can and should be said about the concept of spirit presented to us by Kierkegaard; the above is only a very basic sketch. But it is time to notice a silence made all the more conspicuous by our conference theme: language and spirit. I take the question to be, What role does language play in various concepts of spirit? More particularly, what role does it play in the account of spirit presented to us by Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms? At first glance it does not seem that they have taken the linguistic turn; when they thematize spirit they rarely thematize language. But there are at least three linkages between language and spirit as themes in the Kierkegaardian corpus, which I now mention in order of increasing importance. First, spiritlessness is often described in terms of triviality, and for Haufniensis, who apparently has been reading Heidegger,21 this infects our language. To a certain degree, spiritlessness may therefore possess the whole content of spirit, but mark well, not as spirit but as the haunting of ghosts, as gibberish, as a slogan, etc … So when spiritlessness is to be represented, mere twaddle is simply put into the mouth of the actor, because no one has the courage to put into the mouth of spiritlessness the same words one uses oneself … Spiritlessness can say exactly the same thing that the richest spirit has said, but it does not say it by virtue of spirit. Man qualified as spiritless has become a talking machine, and there is nothing to prevent him from repeating by rote a philosophical rigmarole, a confession of faith, or a political recitative. (SUD 94–5)22


Note that the triviality of this discourse is not a matter of its content. It is not, at least not necessarily, the WHAT that is deficient, but the HOW. I am reminded of two preachers, one from many years ago and one more recently, whom I described to my wife as having the uncanny ability to make the truth, or at least what they and I took to be the truth, sound utterly trivial. No doubt a study of what Kierkegaard has to say about good and bad preaching would bring to light an interesting theory of authentic speech, but we can already see that it can consist neither in rhetorical skill, nor in political correctness, nor in theological orthodoxy, and certainly not in the obscure and solemn incantations of a certain kind of Heideggerian. Spiritlessness takes the life out of language; authentic speech will have to be spirit filled. Second, Johannes de Silentio does not thematize spirit and spiritlessness as fully as Haufniensis and Anti-Climacus, but Fear and Trembling’s account of Abraham as a knight of faith is surely an account of the strenuousness of existence before God. As such it belongs to the Kierkegaardian account of spirit; and it takes on a linguistic dimension in Problema III’s long reflection on Abraham’s silence in not telling Sarah, or Eliezer, or Isaac what he is up to.23 “Abraham remains silent – but he cannot speak. Therein lies the distress and anxiety. Even though I go on talking night and day without interruption, if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking. This is the case with Abraham” (FT 113). This is not a new theme in Problema III. It turns out Silentio has been telling us all along not only that Abraham cannot speak because no one can understand him, but also why this is so: unlike the tragic hero, he does not rest in the universal and can derive neither comfort nor intelligibility therefrom (FT 10, 21, 60, 67, 71, 76, 80). Now in Fear and Trembling the universal is not some abstract principle such as Kant’s categorical imperative but the concrete universal of the social order, Hegel’s Sittlichkeit, the laws and customs of one’s people. Silentio identifies this universal with the family, the state or nation, the church, and even the sect (as if he has been reading Troeltsch). It now becomes clear that the universal is not just a community but a language game, a shared form of life linguistically constituted. That Abraham, as the knight of faith in the extremity of his existence before God, finds it necessary to be silent because no one can understand him, surely does not mean that those around Abraham lack the linguistic competence to understand their language’s equivalent to the sentence “God has told me to sacrifice Isaac, and I am going to do so.” What it means is that no human language game, by which such communities as family, nation, church, or sect are constituted, is or can be the ground or legitimation of the individual’s existence before God. Au contraire! To be most fully spirit

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is to have one’s relation to every human language game grounded in one’s God relation.24 This is why, in Problema I and II, the social universality of the ethical is not the highest but is only of relative authority and requires to be teleologically suspended in the religious. (It is also why I cross my fingers whenever I pledge allegiance to the flag.) When any human language game purports to be the mediator between God and the self, it arrogates to itself the role of the paradoxical God in time, in accordance with the epistle which reads there is one God there is also one mediator between God and humankind Christ Jesus, himself human who gave himself a ransom for all. (1 Tim. 2:5–6) It turns out that the knight of faith, while silent within various human language games, is not silent before God. Silentio tells us that if he had been the one commanded to sacrifice Isaac, he would have promptly embarked on the journey, but as he mounted his horse would have said to himself, “Now all is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him and along with him all my joy … for in the world of time God and I cannot talk with each other, we have no language in common.” Would this make him greater than Abraham? Such a supposition is “utterly false, for my immense resignation would be a substitute for faith. I would not be able to do more than make the infinite movement in order to find myself and again rest in myself” (FT 35, emphasis added). It is different with Abraham, who is a knight of faith and not merely of infinite resignation. On this matter he cannot speak to Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac because “he speaks no human language. And even if he understood all the languages of the world, even if those he loved also understood them, he still could not speak – he speaks in a divine language, he speaks in tongues” (FT 114). Glossolalia? Hardly. The point is rather that if Silentio, as a knight of infinite resignation, has no language in common with God but exists as a relation to himself that can only “find myself and rest in myself” (the essence of despair according to Anti-Climacus), Abraham as a knight of faith is able to speak with God. He and the Almighty are united in a language game as eccentric to every human language game as is glossolalia. What sort of language game is this? Such a question brings us to our third and most important Kierkegaardian linkage between language and spirit. Wolterstorff and Levinas and Sartre can help us see what goes on in the Kierkegaardian text. The former insists that speaking is not revealing


and, a fortiori, divine discourse is not to be understood primarily as revelation.25 Speaking consists of performing such illocutionary acts as asserting, commanding, and promising and it is not the essence of such acts to reveal. Of course, speaking can be revealing, and that in two senses. An assertion (or some other speech act for that matter) may dispel ignorance by revealing what was hidden. The kids cannot find the last of the hidden Easter eggs, since I am diabolically clever at hiding them. So I tell them, “It’s in the ashes in the fireplace,” visible, as family rules require, but just barely. Here we have propositional revelation in which, by asserting a fact, I give to my hearers a piece of knowledge they previously lacked and bring that fact, so to speak, out of hiding. On the other hand, virtually any speech-act involves self-manifestation, intentional or unintentional. If I promise to take the kids to the circus I reveal (but not by asserting some true proposition) my intention to take them to the circus. But promising is not constituted by this revelation. If I only say, “I intend to take you to the circus,” I have promised nothing. Wolterstorff’s point is not to deny that speech acts, including divine discourse, can reveal otherwise unknown facts to one’s hearer(s).26 It is rather that these functions are not the essence of discourse, which accordingly cannot be reduced to them. Both for his purpose and for ours, his focus on three particular types of illocutionary act is fortuitous. Without denying that discourse sometimes takes the form of asserting, he reminds us that it can just as easily and importantly take the form of commanding and promising (to which self-manifestation is incidental). Silentio has read his Wolterstorff and knows all this. It was by faith, he tells us, that “Abraham received the promise that in his seed all the generations of the earth would be blessed,” and it was by faith that he “emigrated from the land of his fathers and became an alien in the promised land.” The reference here to the promised land cannot disguise the fact that this emigration was not Abraham’s idea but obedience to a frightening command, which Silentio does not bother to cite. But he does cite the even more terrifying command of Genesis 22:1–2, “And God tempted Abraham and said to him, take Isaac, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt offering on a mountain that I shall show you.” And he reminds us that this command is all the more terrifying since this son was not only innocent but at the heart of the divine promise (FT 17–19). What Wolterstorff helps us to see as we read the biblical account and Silentio’s telling of it, is that the language game that includes God and Abraham (but not Sarah, Eliezer, and Isaac) has its origin in covenantal promises and frightening commands given by God to Abraham.

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Levinas can help us to see more fully the significance of this fact. He reminds us of a Platonic text, the one about the magic ring of Gyges that enables its wearer to see without being seen.27 Levinas takes this to be a powerful symbol of the knowing subject as conceived (and obsessed over) by the mainstream of Western philosophy.28 For such a subject the world is not just a spectacle (a collection of facts or events already expressed in propositions in some Platonic heaven waiting to be asserted in the sentences of some cave language); it is a silent spectacle for a solitary subject.29 Such a subject first relates itself to itself as the a priori condition for the possibility of experience and then relates itself to an other, which, N.B., is an object. Being is a subject–object relation and to be a self is to play the subject role. Thus the silence, for objects do not speak. Thus the solitude, for I am “with” the object only as observer. Levinas thinks that the Husserlian conception of intentionality is the high point of this tradition and he wages a sustained critique of this notion.30 In its emphasis on the priority of the subject’s act of Sinngebung and the subject’s horizon of expectation, along with the strict correlation of noesis (intentional act) and noema (intentional object), he sees a reduction of the other to the same. Knowing is absorbing what is other and making it mine the way I do when I eat food. Whether my enjoyment is cognitive or culinary, I am “entirely deaf to the Other, outside of all communication and all refusal to communicate – without ears, like a hungry stomach” (TI 134; cf. 118). But Levinas insists that he remains a phenomenologist,31 and that he seeks “an intentionality of a wholly different type” (TI 23). We can call it reversed intentionality. To begin to understand what this might mean, recall the journal entry cited above about the spiritless prudence that “manage[s] to avoid being noticed by God” ( JP IV, ¶ 4348). Perhaps we are reminded of Adam and Eve who, after they had disobeyed God, hid from God (Gen. 3:8).32 We can also recall Sartre’s analysis of the Look and of our desperate attempts through violence and manipulation to objectify the one who looks at us, restoring the subject–object relation that is threatened by the Look.33 One could even argue that Sartre’s analysis of bad faith is about the attempt to avoid being seen by oneself.34 Or, as Augustine puts it, you took me from behind my own back, which was where I had put myself during the time when I did not want to be observed by myself, and you set me in front of my own face so that I could see how foul a sight I was … you were setting me in front of myself, forcing me to look into my own face, so that I might see my sin and hate it. I did know it, but I pretended that I did not. I had been pushing the whole idea away from me and forgetting it.35


Insofar as in being seen there is awareness or consciousness of the one who sees me, we are still within the domain of intentionality. But the intentional arrows are moving in the opposite direction. Instead of emanating from me as subject to the other as object, they are coming toward me as object of the other’s gaze. It is no longer my Sinngebung that defines the situation but that of the other, who has become the subject, the one who defines me instead of the other way around. Sartre’s emphasis on shame renders the situation all too vivid. And Derrida reminds us that God is the one who sees without being seen.36 Part of the reason Levinas speaks of the Other in terms of the face is precisely because the Other is the one who looks at me and thereby calls me into question, commands me, and judges me (TI 51). But the face does not do this merely by looking. The face expresses itself in conversation, or, in other words, “The face speaks” (TI 51, 66). With or without the locutionary acts of uttering or inscribing, the gaze of the Other addresses me, and it is in language, so construed, that reversed intentionality reveals most clearly the irreducibility of the Other to the Same. Levinas calls this transcendence and makes it clear that the self fulfills its highest, ethical task only in welcoming the Other in the glory of this transcendence. Of course the test case is the Other whose glorious transcendence is not empirically obvious. Drawing on the biblical prophets, Levinas identifies the Other as the widow, the stranger, and the orphan. This means that, strictly speaking, it is the Other who is invisible (TI 33–5), by contrast with Adam and Eve and Sartrean “man” who would like to use the ring of Gyges to make themselves invisible. For Kierkegaard the Other is, in the first instance, God. Accordingly, where Levinas speaks of welcoming, he speaks of faith. But this faith is never merely believing, much less opining. Abraham’s faith is the unconditional welcoming of God into his life as the voice that addresses him with promises and commands. Even the promises are decentering, for they, too, make it clear that it is God and not Abraham who sets the agenda for Abraham’s life.37 Then come the commands that render him an exile and, to all appearances, a murderer. Abraham welcomes God by believing the promises (where does this show up on the divided line?) and by obeying the commands. For him as for the apostle Paul, faith cannot be other than the obedience of faith (Rom 1:5, πακοxπgστεω ).38 For Kierkegaard to be spirit is to exist before God and to exist before God is to be caught up in an asymmetrical language game in which the agenda is set by God’s promises and commands; human discourse is always the response that welcomes the divine initiative or is offended by it.39 If Abraham is the father of the faithful, Mary is their mother in her

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response, “Here am I [Levinas’s me voici], the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word” (Luke 1:38). We see this same structure in Works of Love (Pt. 1) where to exist before God is to be addressed by the command, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Returning to Sickness Unto Death, we find that to exist before God is to be addressed with the startling command, “Thou shalt believe in the forgiveness of sins,” which is introduced by the lament, “it is unbelievable what confusion has entered the sphere of religion since the time when ‘thou shalt’ was abolished as the sole regulative aspect of man’s relationship to God” (SUD 115). In his second book, Anti-Climacus presents faith as welcoming rather than being offended at the invitation, which combines promise with command, “COME HERE TO ME, ALL YOU WHO LABOR AND ARE BURDENED, AND I WILL GIVE YOU REST” (PC 11–144).40 The believer is, as Marion puts it, the interloqué (der Angesprochene, the one addressed, interrogated, called out, or, perhaps, called up short).41 For Anti-Climacus, faith is willing to be oneself and resting transparently in God. Linguistically put, these two are united in the definition of faith as the willingness to be united with God in the language game of reversed intentionality. We can summarize the linguistic account of spirit that emerges from Kierkegaardian texts in three theses, each of which presupposes that to be spirit is to exist before God. 1. Spiritlessness is the evisceration of language, leaving behind chatter which, however full of sound and fury it may be, signifies nothing of any great importance. 2. Spirit, as the individual’s relation to God, is not mediated by any human language game, which is to say that, since it is not grounded in such, it cannot be justified by such. 3. Spirit actualizes itself in a language game characterized by reverse intentionality, in which the role of Sinngeber passes from the human spectator to the divine speaker, by whom the former is addressed and thereby decentered.

Notes 1. Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 110–11. Translation altered. In rejecting Hegel’s concept of Spirit Kierkegaard rejects his concept of presence and thereby sides significantly with the


2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

critiques of the metaphysics of presence to be found in Levinas (who calls it ontology) and Derrida. Phenomenology, 408–9. I speak of “an alternative account” for the sake of convenience, leaving in the background the question of the degree to which Kierkegaard and his various pseudonyms contribute to a single, coherent point of view. Respecting Kierkegaard’s wishes, I shall cite the pseudonyms by name and hope that context will make clear when “Kierkegaard” signifies the authorship as a whole (which is indeed presented to us by Soren Kierkegaard) and when it signifies non-pseudonymous texts. Thus, for example, Religiousness A and Religiousness B in Concluding Unscientific Postscript and Part I and Part II of Sickness Unto Death. I am thinking here of Stanley Hauerwas’ wickedly Kierkegaardian comment that when he went to Duke he discovered that Methodists had a theology after all, and an ethics to go with it, namely that God is nice and we should be nice too. Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 15. Cf. 58 and 143. Also The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 42–3, and Soren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967–78), I, ¶67 and IV, ¶4323m, 4349m, and 4357. Henceforth, in notes and text, SUD, CA, and JP, respectively. On the link between spirit and passion, see Two Ages, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 22, and Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 121–2, where, in contrast to the self-deceptive spiritlessness of the age, the “essentially human” is defined as passion, love is presented as a passion, and faith as “the highest passion in a person.” Henceforth TA and FT, respectively. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), I, 201. Henceforth CUP. From an earlier draft: “But the category of responsibility corresponds to the category of spirit. God constituted man as a relation, but when this relation relates itself to itself, God releases it from his hand, as it were. In this way the human being is a self, and the misrelation is possible” (SUD 144). “Moving toward spirit” is doubtless too weak a formula for the way Socrates is presented throughout the corpus. He surely has a self for which he is prepared to venture everything. But already by the time Plato writes him up, the spirit of Socratic humanism is beginning to dissolve into the speculative. Johannes Climacus sounds the same note. “Just as in the desert individuals must travel in large caravans out of fear of robbers and wild animals, so individuals today have a horror of existence because it is godforsaken; they dare to live only in great herds and cling together en masse in order to be at least something” (CUP I, 356). This is not the case throughout the corpus. Johannes Climacus, for example, has a notion of the ethical that is closely tied to the religious rather than set over again it. Even a causal comparison will show that he does not use the term in Silentio’s sense.

84 Merold Westphal 13. For an illuminating account of Claudine as a female aesthete and of her aesthetic “virtue,” see Norman Lillegard, “Thinking with Kierkegaard and MacIntyre about Virtue, the Aesthetic, and Narrative,” in Kierkegaard After MacIntyre, ed. John J. Davenport and Anthony Rudd (Chicago: Open Court, 2001). 14. Whether or not he knows it, the Judge is a good Hegelian. Hegel’s account of Sittlichkeit in Philosophy of Right begins with a sustained analysis of marriage (158 ff.). 15. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hang (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 16. In Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Jon Stewart argues convincingly that the immediate target of the polemic against going “beyond faith” is Martensen; but the idea is central to Hegel’s own thought. 17. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 46–7. Henceforth PF. 18. Cf. JP I, ¶ 67: “To believe the forgiveness of one’s sins is the decisive crisis whereby a human being becomes spirit; he who does not believe this is not spirit.” 19. In his analysis of Religiousness A, Climacus insists that existential guilt is total and qualitative rather than merely quantitative. As such it is to be recollected, not remembered. CUP I, 525 ff. 20. The biblical reference is to Rev. 3:16, where Christ says to the church in Laodicea, “So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth.” 21. See the analysis of Gerede or idle talk and the authority of the superficial in Being and Time, ¶ 35. 22. Cf. TA 104, “And eventually human speech will become just like the public: pure abstraction – there will no longer be someone who speaks, but an objective reflection will gradually deposit a kind of atmosphere, an abstract noise that will render human speech superfluous, just as machines make workers superfluous.” 23. That he did not tell Isaac can be inferred from the latter’s question on Mount Moriah (Gen. 22:7). That he said nothing to his wife and servant is stipulated by Silentio beyond the biblical narrative. 24. For my discussion of this relation as developed in TA, see Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 1991), ch. 4, “Kierkegaard’s Sociology.” 25. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Divine Discourse: Philosophical Reflections on the Claim that God Speaks (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 2. 26. The difference between speech and writing is not relevant here. One can perform illocutionary acts both by the appropriate utterings and by the appropriate inscribings. 27. Plato. Complete Works. ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1000 ff., 1216. 28. Which he calls ontology, reserving “metaphysics” for the ethical relation with the Other who is not reduced to the Same. 29. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 61, 90, 170, 222. Henceforth TI. 30. Throughout TI. But also see Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998),


31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

and “Beyond intentionality,” Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). In TI and in “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996), Levinas argues that Heidegger only appears to free himself from the mainstream tradition. See the Foreword to Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). That they succeeded temporarily is indicated by the fact that God has to ask, “Where are you?” But they could not escape the field of divine discourse and its interrogatory illocutionary acts: “Where are you? … Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat? … What is this that you have done?” (Gen. 3:9–13). Nor were they able to hide from the imprecatory illocutions which followed (vv. 16–19). Being and Nothingness, Pt. 3, chs. 1 and 3. Being and Nothingness, Pt. 1, ch. 2. Confessions, trans. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963), VIII, 7. In the Pine–Coffin translation, the paragraph concludes, “I had known it all along, but I had always pretended that it was something different. I had turned a blind eye and forgotten it.” The Latin is “noveram eam, sed dissimulabam et cohibebam et obliviscebar,” literally, I dissimulated, repressed it, and became oblivious. At least as presented by Patocka and Silentio. The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 2, 24–5, 27, 40, 56, 91. See Sarah Coakley’s suggestion that contemplative prayer, “the defenseless prayer of silent waiting on God” is a “willed practice of ceding and responding to the divine” in which “we cease to set the agenda … ” “Kenosis and Subversion: On the Repression of ‘Vulnerability’ in Christian Feminist Writing,” in Swallowing a Fishbone? Feminist Theologians Debate Christianity, ed. Daphne Hampson (London: SPCK, 1996), 107. Is Paul thinking of Abraham here, and again in Romans 12:1–2, where he reverses the order and presents faith as sacrifice and exile? Anti-Climacus is emphatic that it is offense rather than doubt that is the alternative to faith. Practice in Christianity, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), note on p. 81. Cf. the analyses of offense by Climacus in PF and by Anti-Climacus in SUD. Quoting Matt. 11:28. See Jean-Luc Marion, “L’Interloqué,” in Who Comes After the Subject, ed. Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy (New York: Routledge, 1991), and Reduction and Givenness, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 200–5. In “The Saturated Phenomenon,” in Dominique Janicaud et al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate, 211, Marion refers us to an essay in which he renders interloqué as the subject on its last appeal. I like “the one called up short,” from the forthcoming English translation of an essay by Marléne Zarader. At the purely phenomenological level, Marion argues, the interloqué is the one called without identifying the caller. To name the caller as God is to pass over into theology, a move we have seen take place in SUD.

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Voices in discussion 3 Harvey: It is a commonplace to say that the difficulty in reading Kierkegaard is the problem of interpretation. What are we to say of the pseudonymous works? It seems that only Anti-Climacus is said by Kierkegaard to be a Christian. So there is a problem about treating the pseudonymous works as containing paradigms of Christianity. Is Fear and Trembling a paradigm of faith? Is it a religion of immanence? Is it supposed to be religiousness A or religiousness B? If it is A, it is without Christ, so how can it be a paradigm for faith? I found your paper remarkable in that it examined “spirit” without mentioning Christ. You discuss different degrees of consciousness in becoming a self, then you apply these to Christianity. But in Christianity a person is never alone before God. There is always a mediation, and that mediation comes through Christ. It is in that mediation that one is given a conception of one’s goals, aspirations, and so on. One is not alone before an absolute “other.” That is why I say that Fear and Trembling cannot be meant as the paradigm of faith. Westphal: While I acknowledge your point about the pseudonymous works, I want to argue that they have an organic unity. In them we are given two paradigms of faith, but not Christian faith: Socrates and Abraham. In Fear and Trembling we do not find religiousness A, but something more like religiousness B, only a Jewish rather than a Christian version of it. In the Fragments and the Postscript certain modes of the self are recognized. Socrates has a faith, but it is not the Christian faith. So you do not have to be a Christian to be in the generic realm of faith. Ogden: I think it important to emphasize the points Harvey has made. In the Protestant tradition, and in the early Fathers of the Church, sin is understood as refusal to live by the word of God. The image is not one of reciprocal vision: of my looking at God and God looking at me. It is emphasized that we cannot see God, we can only hear him. How is he heard? Through the Word, through commandment and promise. It is not a matter of vision. Westphal: I completely agree. There is a difference between my looking at you, and you looking at me. The Word, language, is integral to the notion of the face; to being addressed by the other who confronts you. Harvey: But in Christianity God does not address you. That is the purpose of Christ. In a diary entry of 1851 Kierkegaard says that before one has a duty toward another, one must ask him for his word. In our


relation to God, Christ is that word. To respond to that word is not to be in a certain condition, or to acquire something like an Aristotelian virtue. Rather, despite what was said by Newlands in the earlier discussion, about participation in the spirit, it is a matter of constant decisionmaking. Every moment, in every event in my life, I have to ask who I am. Westphal: But surely faith can be regarded as a virtue, since it can become an habitual activity. Harvey: I am denying that it is habitual. On the contrary, there is no guarantee that the decision you have made in one moment is going to sustain faith in the next. That is why Kierkegaard speaks always, not of being a Christian, but of becoming one. After all, how do you know that the voice you hear is not demonic? This is part of the difficulty in making “spirit” the bottom line. Paul speaks of the need to discern the spirits. It is in that discernment, in Christianity, that the mediation of the Word is crucial. Min: In the relation of man before God, there is a dialectical relation between the finite and the infinite. You didn’t elaborate on this in your paper. If we say that our concern is solely with the infinite, faith becomes a matter of turning away from the world. On the other hand, if our concern is solely with the finite, we ignore the call of faith to go beyond our present situation. That is why Kierkegaard wants to insist that our relation to the infinite is a relation to it in time. Davis: I think that Fear and Trembling means what it says about the teleological suspension of the ethical. It points out the limits of the ethical, and that it is those limits which show us the place at which grace and forgiveness come in. These belong to faith, rather than to the category of the ethical. Kellenberger: But, then, what is Abraham’s faith? There seems to be a tension in the story. On one reading we think of Abraham’s faith as being tested in his being asked to do something that flies in the face of what has been given to him by God. He is asked to sacrifice Isaac. On the other hand, it seems that the one thing he can be certain of is that Isaac is going to be given back to him. So the one thing he believes with certainty is that Isaac is not going to die. But, then, what does the call to sacrifice him amount to? Is there not a tension between different conceptions of faith here? So if you say it offers us a paradigm of faith, which paradigm are we offered? Westphal: I agree that we do not find a single account of one’s relation to God, but one which gives us a family resemblance between different aspects of this relation. Kellenberger: But what if the different aspects clash?

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Westphal: One has to admit that they might, but I do not think that they do. Phillips: Well, it depends. Much will depend on what one takes a promise “to have Isaac back again” to consist in. Take the way Kellenberger put it: that Abraham is certain that Isaac is not going to die. Then it looks like this: it may seem that a bad thing is going to happen to you, but, if you have faith, it will not happen. The ram, or something, will always turn up. Such a view runs into obvious difficulties. Bad things happen to good people. Presumably, the Book of Job is a protest against the view that there is a correlation between character and the events which befall one. Yet, despite this, this kind of faith can still prevail. If Isaac is not given back to one in this life, he will be in the next. It is a faith in happy endings and people certainly want to hear it. But there is another kind of faith which is in tension with this. There is a faith that “Isaac will be given back to one” which depends on the very fact that he will not be given back in the sense in which the faith in happy endings depends. Isaac is seen as a gift of grace in the first place. Part of accepting such a gift is readiness to return it. No one is pretending that it may not be much harder to say “The Lord hath taken away,” than to say “The Lord hath given,” but each is internally related to the other. If I can let go of the gift, I can still feel grateful for my life, the life in which that gift was received. In this way, though Isaac dies, he is given back to me. For years I tried to maintain the thought that, in doing philosophy of religion, I was simply disagreeing with colleagues over the correct conceptual analysis of the same faith. I came to see how mixed a bag religion is, and that what constitutes “faith” varies a great deal; that the hopes and expectations connected with it may be very different. Harvey: This is connected with what one takes Kierkegaard to be doing in the pseudonymous works. He is inviting the reader to a certain selfreflexive understanding of the self. Indeed, without such an understanding, one might say, no self has been formed. He presents certain categories as he elucidates this task: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. He is not advocating any of these, but through an elucidation of them he hopes to get people to reflect on who they are. Heidegger makes this reflexive understanding central in his philosophy. Human beings are the only creatures who, thrown into life, ask themselves who they are. He desires, one might say, a whole philosophy of the spirit. Westphal: I agree that you can derive a lot of content from Kierkegaard’s categories and you can’t subsume them all under Christianity. On the other hand, I would have a hard time in denying that Kierkegaard wants to privilege Christianity. If one is going to say


this, what is one to make of all the remarks written in his own name which elucidate Christian concepts? Art Hurtado: But that assumes that Kierkegaard is doing the same thing in the pseudonymous works as he is in the works written in his own name. In the former, he wants us to be clear about certain perspectives, but he is not suggesting that clarification of them will lead to faith. Westphal: But isn’t all this a prelude to getting the reader to see what it is to be addressed by God? Keith Lane: Why must God always be taken to be addressing me? Why not the family or society? Westphal: There are hints of a social ethic and an ecclesiology in Kierkegaard, but, often, these remain as hints. On the other hand, in Works of Love, in the language of love of the neighbour, concern for “the other” is obviously central. Voice from the audience: If I am addressed, by God, does not this place an emphasis on my intentionality? I have to respond. Don’t I become an object in being addressed? Westphal: I don’t see why. In being addressed, your responsibility is recognized. But in being addressed with promises of love, it is being acknowledged that you can become a lover. Voice: But if I have to respond, don’t I, of necessity, become an unhappy lover, in the grip of an unhappy consciousness? Westphal: No, because I do not define the rules for the response. Of course, I may be offended by what is asked of me, or respond willingly. Ogden: It is not a matter of reverse intentionality, a matter of saying that in order for “a” to address “b,” “b” must already be capable of hearing “a.” That assumption is broken, theologically, by what Harvey said earlier about the mediation of the Word. Of course, once having this, one can pursue, phenomenologically, the question, of what the experience of being addressed by the Word is like. David Brown: Why aren’t you happy with the view that to see what is meant by “being addressed by God” we have to look to the appropriate religious language-games? Westphal: I can answer by reference to Abraham. It seems to me that no amount of elucidations of language-games and forms of life will get me to the point at which God speaks to me now. Although reflecting on languagegames may act as a mediation through which we come to that point. Sherry: Language-games do not mediate anything. They simply refer to various forms of discourse we engage in. Patrick Horn: But, then, you would have to look to religious language-games for this sense of “addressing.”

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Westphal: But Abraham was asked to go beyond what is normally expected. God may address us in such a way that our ordinary understandings are insufficient to cope with it. Horn: And one’s religious tradition may contain just such a conception of God. You do not by-pass religious traditions in order to account for what you say. Any extension of one’s conception will have to be related, in the same way, to the conception it supercedes. Richard Amesbury: I’d like you to comment on whether you see any connection between Kierkegaard’s conception of “the holy other” and Derrida’s claim that every other is holy. Westphal: I do not think that Derrida is offering The Gift of Death as an exegesis of Fear and Trembling. He is using it as a point of departure for Levinasian insights. For Derrida, every person represents a claim on me that is not reducible to what my society says at any time. That is why he can say that the law has a mystical source. What justice demands is never identical with the present state of the law. To that extent, there are parallels with the call to Abraham, which takes him beyond existing language-games and forms of life. Phillips: There are difficulties in that way of putting the matter since, for Wittgenstein, apart from confusions, the place “beyond” all languagegames and forms of life is no place at all. And there are times when Kierkegaard wants to speak of “God’s voice” in an unmediated way. He suggests that if God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he could ask me to do the same today. The problem is that it is logically impossible for me to repeat Abraham’s action. Even if I signed up for Mount Moriah tours, bought the only Abrahamic knife on sale, bound my son, raised the knife, I would not be repeating Abraham’s action. Why? Because what Abraham did has some connection with the practice of child sacrifice, and that is no longer present to us. If I said that God had asked me to sacrifice my son, I’d probably be put in a mental institution, or, at least, be kept under close watch. What if Abraham had been the father of a cult and killed Isaac? What then? If we asked why this terrible thing happened, we might receive Wittgenstein’s reply, “Because it is terrible.” A people who can see the terrible as a sacrament. Westphal: If in fact, Abraham had been the head of a cult, then he could have been a tragic hero, not a knight of faith. Phillips: That, presumably, is the Christian’s understanding of his predicament. But what status does the remark have? It clearly does not reflect the self-understanding of the person being so described. That is something we have not discussed.

4 Toward Interpreting the Language of Spirit: The Legacy of Rudolf Bultmann Schubert M. Ogden

I How are we to understand “the language of spirit”? Into what conceptual category does “spirit” fall or, better, what is the grammar of “spirit”? Such, I understand, are the questions constituting the inquiry to which this paper seeks to contribute. Its guiding question, accordingly, is: What have we received from the work of Rudolf Bultmann toward interpreting the language of spirit that is significant for clarifying and, perhaps, answering these questions? The presupposition that something significant for our inquiry has, in fact, been passed on to us by Bultmann requires no justification. Were we to consider him simply as one of the most accomplished New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, his work would provide unusually rich resources for our reflection. Moreover, the fact that all of his writings, even the more historical, are informed throughout by a remarkable degree of philosophical sensitivity and sophistication makes them peculiarly relevant to any inquiry in the philosophy of religion, including ours here. Even so, it is neither as a historian nor as a philosopher that Bultmann primarily thought of himself or is now usually thought of by others. In his own mind, certainly, he was, first and last, a Christian theologian, who did all of his work in the service of the church and its witness; and it is in this capacity that he is now widely regarded as one of the two or three Protestant theologians of his time whose impact on Christian theology promises to be lasting. Recognizing this as well as what I myself am most qualified to contribute to our discussion, I have 91

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determined that the center of interest of my chapter will be his legacy as a Christian theologian, and, more exactly, a Christian systematic theologian. By this I mean simply a Christian theologian whose special responsibility is so to interpret Christian witness as to secure its continuing adequacy, and thus, in my terms, its “appropriateness” and “credibility,” or, as Bultmann would say, its “purity” and “understandability” (1930: 81). To meet this responsibility, however, the systematic theologian has to reflect toward a twofold Christian praxis: not only the primary praxis of bearing Christian witness, but also the secondary praxis of doing theology itself. And one measure of the significance of Bultmann’s work as a systematic theologian is that it has as much to offer along the second line of reflection as the first. This is one reason, then, for dividing the analytic and interpretative core of the paper into two main parts – the first focusing on Bultmann’s understanding of Christian theology as a certain way of interpreting the language of spirit; the second, on his interpretation of such language as a Christian systematic theologian. Another reason for this two-part division of the paper is the ambiguity of the phrase, “the language of spirit.” Beyond the fact that the word “spirit” is commonly capitalized, and so used of the divine Spirit as well as the human spirit, the phrase as a whole is ambiguous in that, like other genitive phrases, it may be taken either subjectively or objectively. Taken in the first sense, it refers to the language that spirit and/or Spirit speak as subjects, while taken in the second sense, it refers to the language that is spoken about spirit and/or Spirit as objects. So far as Christian witness and theology are concerned, this ambiguity is systematic and significant. Not only do they traditionally speak about both the human spirit and the divine Spirit as objects that are rightly understood, in their different ways, precisely as subjects, but Christian witness, at least, also makes or implies the claim to be divine revelation, and as such not only spirit-spoken, but also Spirit-spoken or divinely inspired language. Since Bultmann, for his part, is insofar thoroughly traditional in his theology, his contribution toward interpreting the language of spirit is again best treated in two main parts – the first focusing on his understanding of such language as spoken by both spirit and Spirit as subjects, the second, on his interpretation of what has to be said about both spirit and Spirit as objects by any adequate Christian theology and witness. In the fourth and concluding part of the paper, then, I shall offer some comments by way of critically appropriating Bultmann’s legacy in our own efforts toward interpreting the language of spirit.

Toward Interpreting the Language of Spirit 93

II We turn, first, to Bultmann’s understanding of Christian theology in connection with the language of spirit, itself understood subjectively as the language spoken by both spirit and Spirit as subjects. The connection here, Bultmann holds, is that Christian theology, as critical reflection on Christian witness, is rightly understood as a certain way of interpreting just such language, or, at any rate, what purports to be such, that is, language spoken by the divine Spirit as well as by the human spirits of Christians bearing their witness. But what kind of language, exactly, is this? And what way of interpreting it is proper to Christian theology? Bultmann typically replies to these questions by saying that the language spoken by both spirit and Spirit is “existential” (existentiell ) in kind, while the way of interpreting such language proper to Christian theology is that of “existentialist” (existential ) interpretation. To say no more than this, however, is already to raise the question of the relation of Bultmann’s theology to the philosophy of the early Martin Heidegger; for aside from an insignificant difference in his way of spelling the words, Bultmann’s distinction between “existential” and “existentialist” understanding is one of the many things he learned to think and speak of in the concepts and terms distinctive of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. This is not the place, however, to go into this question. My own view, for what it is worth, is that most interpreters, philosophical as well as theological, have tended to exaggerate the importance of Heidegger’s influence on Bultmann’s thought. That he was deeply indebted to Heidegger for the concepts and terms in which, as a theologian, he came to think and speak about human existence and being generally, is beyond question. But as he himself always understood Heidegger’s achievement, it was simply to have brought the phenomena themselves to clear and consistent expression, so that it was really they, not Heidegger, who authorized him to think and speak as he did, as well as to control his appropriation of all philosophical analyses, Heidegger’s included. Moreover, there is no question that the really decisive influence on the substance of his thought was that of his own revered teacher in systematic theology, Wilhelm Herrmann. It was Herrmann’s work in ethics, he says, that opened up for him “a truer understanding of history than was contained in the so-called Historismus,” even if, instructed by Sein und Zeit, he subsequently attained “a deeper understanding of the historical character of human existence” and therewith “the conceptual framework in which theology too can operate in order to bring faith to appropriate expression as an existential attitude” (1959).


Be this as it may, our concern is to understand Bultmann’s answers to our questions as his answers, and this requires that we understand, first of all, what he means by an existential kind of language. He means, I suggest, one of two main kinds of ordinary language that are cognitively significant. Actually, this is to put in my terms what Bultmann himself puts somewhat differently. Instead of saying that a certain kind of language is cognitively significant, he says simply that it talks about reality. So, in his way of putting it, existential language is one of two main kinds of ordinary language that talk about reality. But then, as he immediately infers, “‘reality’ can be understood in a double sense” (1963: 128). It can be, and commonly is, understood in one sense as the reality of the world, including ourselves, as represented by “objectifying seeing,” or, as we may say, I think, our ordinary sense perception more generally. This is the reality immediately presented to us from which we distinguish ourselves as such, as selves or persons, even as we are ever concerned to orient ourselves with respect to it. To begin with, it is simply “at hand” (zuhanden) and therefore comprises everything that we can control and dispose of by the “work-thinking” (Arbeitsdenken) whereby we attempt to secure our lives. But with a certain characteristic abstraction from such pragmatic thinking, it becomes all that is merely “on hand” (vorhanden), and so the object of the way of looking at things that is fully developed in the special sciences and in the technology that they in turn make possible. In another sense, however, “reality” can and should be understood as the reality of our own existence precisely as selves or persons. This is the reality always already disclosed to each of us nonsensuously, in our own unique self-understanding. As such, however, it comprises vastly more than simply our own individual existence as of any particular moment. It also includes not only our own individual past and future and all the other persons and things that encounter us, but also the transcendent reality that we experience as being of ultimate significance for us. But here, too, there is the possibility of a characteristic abstraction, in this case from the meaning of our existence for us here and now in the present to the structure of our existence in itself and as such. And it is just this abstraction from our existential self-understanding in the moment that is fully developed in the existentialist analysis that belongs to the proper business of philosophy. In a broad sense, then, the kind of language that Bultmann distinguishes as existential rather than objectifying could be said to include both the properly existential language mediating concrete self-understanding and


the properly existentialist language formulating philosophy’s abstract analysis of human existence. But if this might seem to mean that, in his view, the language spoken by both spirit and Spirit may be taken to include existentialist as well as existential language, it is really only the second that he understands “the language of spirit” in this subjective meaning of the phrase to be. The existentialist language of philosophy is directly concerned with the structure of existence in itself and therefore only indirectly addresses our existential question about the meaning of existence for us. Existential language, on the other hand, addresses our existential question directly, calling us to decide for a specific self-understanding here and now. And the language of spirit is just such direct address calling for existential decision – the language spoken by the human spirit mediating the call immediately addressed to us by the divine Spirit. Mention of our existential question leads naturally to what Bultmann means by existentialist interpretation, which he takes to be the interpretation proper to Christian theology. His main point can be put as follows: if existential language, properly understood, is language addressed directly to the question about the meaning of our existence, existentialist interpretation is interpretation oriented by this same existential question and rendered in the conceptuality of an appropriate existentialist analysis. Presupposed by this formulation is the elaborate hermeneutical theory that is one of Bultmann’s most important contributions to the theology of theology itself, or to what is usually called “prolegomena to theology.” Fundamental to this theory is that any understanding of language as of human expressions generally necessarily presupposes what he calls a “preunderstanding” (Vorverständnis). In the case of language that is cognitively significant or about reality, this preunderstanding is grounded in the interpreter’s own “life relation” (Lebensverhältnis) to the same reality as well as in some vital question that she or he is concerned to ask about it (1950: 227 f.). Preeminent among such vital questions is the question that we all ask, implicitly if not explicitly, about the reality of our own existence in its meaning for us. But then correspondingly preeminent among the various ways of interpreting what others have to say to us is the way oriented by just this existential question, which asks about the possibility of self-understanding, or understanding of existence, that they thereby express or imply. In principle, of course, all human expressions are open to such existentialist interpretation, since they all at least imply some possibility or other of understanding our existence. But the expressions that most obviously call for it are those in which the existential question is


explicitly asked and answered, indirectly if not directly. These include, first and foremost, all religious expressions as well as those of philosophy; but they also include works of literature and poetry and of art generally, which, in their own ways, are likewise addressed to our existential question and so invite existentialist interpretation. It should be clear, then, why such interpretation is the way of interpreting Christian witness that is proper to Christian theology. Like religious expressions generally, Christian witness purports to be the language of spirit in the double sense of not only immediately expressing the faith of the human spirits bearing it but also mediating to others the divine Spirit’s own call to faith. As such, it is, on Bultmann’s analysis, language directly addressed to our existential question and therefore demands to be interpreted in an existentialist way if it is to be understood in keeping with its own intention. But it is just so, of course, that Christian theology as such is charged with interpreting it, and so the only interpretation proper to Christian theology is precisely an existentialist interpretation oriented by the same existential question. The other requirement of such an interpretation is that it be rendered in the concepts of an appropriate existentialist analysis. Theological interpretation, like any other, involves an interpretans as well as an interpretandum. In its case, what is to be interpreted is Christian witness and, in all instances, the formally normative witness of the New Testament. But what is to do the interpreting can only be concepts appropriately analyzing human existence in general or simply as such. This is because the sole reason for theology’s existence, finally, is to provide the critical reflection and proper theory requisite to securing the adequacy of Christian witness, and thus both its purity and its understandability. In the nature of the case, this means that theology must be nothing but critical interpretation of Christian witness – and, more exactly, as we have seen, critical interpretation oriented by the existential question about the meaning of our existence. But if the intention of Christian witness is to speak directly to this existential question, it can be, and remain, pure in expressing its intention only if it is interpreted in appropriate existentialist concepts. At the same time, only the same concepts permit it to be and remain understandable to the contemporary hearer as the direct existential address it intends to be. A word of caution here may be necessary. Too many interpreters have quite missed Bultmann’s point by supposing him simply to call for traditional Christian preaching to be displaced by sermons cast in the technical jargon of Heidegger’s early philosophy. What he really calls for, however, is importantly different – namely, that Christian preaching, in whatever


terms, be controlled by a Christian theology whose interpretation of Christian witness is formulated in an appropriate philosophical conceptuality. In other words, in Bultmann’s view, a sermon is one thing, the theological interpretation requisite to controlling its purity and understandability, something else. And anyone troubling to study his own sermons in comparison with his theological books and essays will see at once how consistently and conscientiously he practiced what he taught. This brings us, at last, to some brief comments on demythologizing, which can be understood sufficiently for our purposes against the background of the preceding discussion. The important point is connected with Bultmann’s distinction, already mentioned, between the intention of existential language, and so also of the language of spirit, and the conceptuality in which this intention may be more or less appropriately expressed. Not the least reason for his making this distinction is the peculiar form of religious language that he takes to be properly distinguished as “myth” (1941: 22 f.; 1952a: 180–4). Myth, he argues, is the form of the language of spirit in which its existential intention is expressed inappropriately in principle – namely, in concepts appropriate to the other main kind of cognitively significant language with its “objectifying” intention. Thus, by its very nature, myth involves a “category mistake,” in just the sense in which Gilbert Ryle uses the phrase to mean “the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another.” But, then, what Bultmann means by “demythologizing” myth is very close to what Ryle goes on to speak of as “exploding” it. “To explode a myth,” Ryle says, “is accordingly not to deny the facts but to reallocate them” (Ryle, 1949: 8). Bultmann’s proposal for effecting just such reallocation is existentialist interpretation. And this explains, of course, why he never tires of insisting that what he means by “demythologizing” is a properly “hermeneutical procedure,” directed not toward the elimination of myth but toward its interpretation (1941: 24; 1963: 128). It also explains his repeated statements about the need for demythologizing by way of existentialist interpretation. If this is the only way in which Christian witness can remain understandable to hearers whose preunderstanding has been shaped by the world picture of modern science and a distinctively modern understanding of themselves, this is not the only thing that makes it necessary. No less at stake is the purity of Christian witness; for notwithstanding that even the formally normative witness of the New Testament is formulated mythologically, its mythical concepts are in principle inappropriate to their own existential intention as well


as to that of Christian witness. In this sense, Bultmann’s justification for demythologizing by way of existentialist interpretation is not only, or even primarily, a demand of contemporary hearers to whom traditional Christian witness is no longer understandable, but that it is, as he puts it, “a demand of faith itself” (1952a: 207). There remains a final point about the relation of Christian theology to traditional philosophy. What Bultmann understands by “the problem of demythologizing” is by no means peculiar to contemporary, or even to modern, Christian theology. From early on in Christian history, theologians have realized, to some extent, that the mythological formulations of traditional witness are problematic – witness the widespread practice already by the church fathers of interpreting such formulations allegorically. Moreover, the dogmas that gradually resulted from the later controversies and councils of the church are, in their own way, demythologizing insofar as they interpret the mythological language of the New Testament in the nonmythological concepts of classical Græco-Roman philosophy. To Bultmann’s mind, however, these earlier attempts at demythologizing are themselves part of the problem. For if what disqualifies myth as an appropriate means of theological interpretation is precisely its objectifying conceptuality, any other language similarly objectifying must be insofar disqualified. Thus Christian faith itself demands that its witness be freed at last not only from myth, but also from every other form of objectifying thinking. If this certainly includes the thinking represented by the modern special sciences, Bultmann is clear that it also includes most traditional philosophy, in whose concepts earlier theological attempts at interpreting Christian witness nonmythologically have been carried out. Here, too, he argues, thought remains fundamentally oriented to the reality of the world disclosed by sense perception and is insofar objectifying, even if its goal, as befits any philosophy, is to explicate the understanding of existence and of being generally given in any self-understanding. Thus, even in most traditional philosophy, human existence has been explicated more or less inappropriately, in concepts objectifying it to worldly reality, with the result that its unique historicity has been ignored or obscured rather than explicitly taken into account. Recognizing this, Bultmann can say, to the consternation of many of his fellow theologians, that at issue for Christian theology, finally, is “the question about the ‘right’ philosophy.” If the language of spirit mediated by Christian witness is properly existential language, it can be interpreted theologically, in keeping with its own intention, only by way of existentialist interpretation. But then no Christian theology can avoid


the philosophical reflection required to think and speak about human existence appropriately. In this sense, but only in this sense, Christian theology is perforce dependent on the “right” philosophy, by which Bultmann means, as he says, “simply the kind of philosophical work that endeavors to develop the understanding of existence that is given with human existence in an appropriate conceptuality” (1952a: 192).

III Up to this point, we have been following Bultmann’s theology of theology itself, in the sense of his line of reflection as a Christian systematic theologian toward the secondary praxis of doing Christian theology. In this connection, we have also considered his understanding of Christian witness as “the language of spirit” in the subjective sense of the language spoken by the divine Spirit as well as the human spirit as subjects. Our concern now is to understand his other main line of theological reflection toward the primary praxis of bearing Christian witness; for although doing theology, in his view, is distinct from bearing witness, its whole point, finally, is so to interpret witness as to provide the control necessary to bearing a witness that is both pure and understandable. Naturally, all that we either can or need to understand of such theological reflection here is Bultmann’s interpretation of “the language of spirit” in the other, objective meaning of the phrase, and thus what, in his view, has to be said about both spirit and Spirit as objects by any adequate Christian theology and witness. The main thing to keep in mind, of course, is that Christian witness, being “the language of spirit” in the subjective sense of the phrase, is, on Bultmann’s account, properly existential language. Therefore, anything it speaks about as objects, including the human spirit and the divine Spirit, it speaks about existentially, in language addressed to our existential question about the meaning of our existence. To be sure, what is said about spirit and Spirit in the formally normative Christian witness of the New Testament is cast throughout in the objectifying concepts of myth. But Bultmann’s contention, as we have seen, is that both the nature of myth in general and its use in the New Testament in particular confirm its intention to be existential rather than objectifying, so that Christian theology, for its part, has the right as well as the responsibility to interpret Christian witness accordingly. To see more exactly what this means for interpreting Christian witness’s language about spirit and Spirit, we need to follow up some things said earlier. The first is that such language, like existential


language generally, is, in its own way, cognitively significant or about reality. Specifically, as we have seen, it is about the reality of our own existence as selves or persons, which is disclosed to us immediately in our self-understanding, or in what Bultmann describes as “the understanding of existence that is given with human existence itself” (1952a: 189). It is just this characteristic description, however, that has occasioned serious misunderstandings of what he has in mind. Again and again, critics from Karl Barth on down have supposed “existence” as he understands it to be a merely anthropological, even psychological concept. On the contrary, Bultmann protests, the existence of which he speaks “is in no way ‘the inner life of a human being,’ which can be understood apart from all that is other than it and encounters it (whether the environment, fellow human beings, or God).” For human beings “exist only in a context of life with ‘others,’ only in encounters,” and “existentialist analysis endeavors to develop an appropriate conceptuality in which this can be grasped and understood as such” (1950: 233 f.). This means that to exist as a human being is to be related understandingly not only to oneself and to the world of other persons and things, but also to what Bultmann usually speaks of in such contexts simply as “a transcendent reality” (eine transzendente Wirklichkeit), or, somewhat more fully, as “an other, unworldly power that is not visible to objectifying thinking” (eine jenseitige, unweltliche Macht, die dem objektivierenden Denken nicht sichtbar wird) (1971: passim; 1952a: 184). If we ask, then, about the objects of Christian witness’s language about spirit and Spirit, they are respectively the human self or person as the subject of our self-understanding and this transcendent reality or power to which we are also related understandingly in understanding ourselves and the world. Moreover, Bultmann sees a significant analogy between the subject that we are ourselves and this transcendent reality, which is, in its own way, subject, or subject-like. Being beyond the self as well as the world and invisible to all objectifying thinking, the transcendent reality is at the same time of ultimate significance for human existence, analogously to the way in which one human person can be significant for another. But if these two subjects, human and divine, are the reality that Christian witness is about, the other thing we must pursue further is the distinctive way it is about them. Precisely because its language is properly existential, it is about them existentially, in their meaning for us, as distinct from their structure in themselves. Here we may recall Bultmann’s analysis of the existential kind of language in the broad sense as including both properly existential and


properly existentialist language. Whereas the first, as we saw, is directly addressed to our existential question about the meaning of our existence, the second addresses this question only indirectly because its direct concern is with something else and more abstract – namely, the structure of human existence in general or simply as such. Thus to say, for example, that to be human is to be the subject of self-understanding and so to be related understandingly to a transcendent reality as well as to oneself and the world is to make a properly existentialist statement. And the same is true of all the other statements I have just made in trying to clarify Bultmann’s understanding of the reality that Christian witness is about. But while such properly existentialist statements are necessarily presupposed by Christian witness, what it itself says about spirit and Spirit is not abstract but concrete, because it addresses our existential question directly, calling each of us to a certain selfunderstanding here and now in our own unique existence. This means that, in addressing each of us as a human spirit, Christian witness holds us accountable for understanding ourselves in a certain way and leading our lives accordingly. It thereby presupposes, naturally, that our reality as a self or person, in its structure in itself, is that we are each the free and responsible subject of our own self-understanding and life-praxis. But what it directly says entirely concerns the meaning of this reality for us: that we are each responsible here and now for understanding ourselves and leading our lives in the specific way that it, as witness, explicitly represents to us. Analogously, then, what Christian witness says to each of us in speaking about the divine Spirit is that we are authorized by the transcendent reality beyond ourselves and the world to understand ourselves and lead our lives in just this specific way. Presupposed by this, of course, is that transcendent reality, in its structure in itself, is such as to be appropriately thought and spoken about analogously as the divine subject of such authorization. But what witness directly says about this transcendent reality has entirely to do with its meaning for us: that it itself entitles and empowers us here and now to understand ourselves and conduct our lives in just the way that witness explicitly authorizes us to do. But now what way, exactly, is this? Bultmann’s summary answer is that it is the way decisively revealed by God’s saving action in the event Jesus Christ. Christian witness, in his view, is witness precisely to this unique event; and the divine Spirit authorizing it as well as the selfunderstanding and way of life for which it calls is none other than the Spirit of Jesus Christ. But to say only this is to remain on the same purely formal level of everything else I have said up to now about the objective


meaning of Christian witness’s language of spirit, while what the question obviously asks for requires us to unpack Bultmann’s answer as to clarify its material meaning, which is to say, to make clear just what way of understanding ourselves and leading our lives the event of Jesus Christ decisively opens up. It is just here, however, that we must reckon with one of the most striking things about Bultmann’s theology. For all of his insistence on the decisive significance of Jesus Christ, he is equally insistent that the possibility of self-understanding opened up by this event and explicitly authorized by the divine Spirit through Christian witness is nothing mysterious or supernatural, but simply our “natural” possibility as human beings. But then it is the very possibility that the “right” philosophy, in the sense of an appropriate existentialist analysis, also discloses, in its way, as our authentic possibility. Philosophy’s way of disclosing it, of course, is indirect, since its concern as existentialist analysis is to explicate the structure of human existence in itself as distinct from directly addressing our existential question about its meaning for us. But precisely in pursuing its properly existentialist task, Bultmann argues, philosophy cannot avoid being “indirect address,” and insofar, as he can say, “genuine proclamation” (1955: 122). On his interpretation, then, the way of existing and acting authorized by the divine Spirit through Christian witness is just the way indirectly called for by any appropriate existentialist analysis. This means that it is a way of existing and acting in radical inner freedom: both freedom from all things, oneself and everything else, and freedom for all things, all other things as well as oneself. As such, it is precisely a way of existing and acting that must be actualized ever again, in each new moment of decision, by how one understands oneself and leads one’s life. In this sense, it is never simply an indicative state or condition in which one already is, but always also stands under the imperative that one continually become what one is. But if this way of understanding ourselves and leading our lives is the possibility authorized by the divine Spirit, Bultmann nonetheless points to at least one other, more important difference between philosophy’s indirect disclosure of it and its direct mediation through Christian witness. Whereas philosophy, for its part, takes this way to be not only a possibility in principle for all human beings, but also a possibility in fact, Christian witness sharply denies this and claims, on the contrary, that it first becomes a possibility in fact for any of us only because of God’s unique saving act in Jesus Christ. For although existing and living in this way is indeed our possibility in principle, for actualizing which


we each remain accountable, we have all always already forfeited it by deciding for the other, contrary way of inauthentic existence. Instead of obediently entrusting ourselves to the transcendent reality that ever and again gives itself to us from the future, we turn away from it in distrust and disobedience, thereby succumbing to what is always perishing and so already past. Anxious lest we lose our lives, we try to secure them by using and possessing things in the world around us, as well as by relying on what we ourselves are and do in order to merit an ultimate acceptance that we otherwise despair of receiving. Consequently, our existence in fact is an existence in radical bondage to ourselves and the world, rather than the existence in radical freedom that is in principle our authentic possibility. In this sense, Bultmann argues, human existence in fact can only be an existence in sin; and it can become the existence in faith that it in principle can and should be, thanks only to the unique event of Jesus Christ by which God acts savingly to forgive our sin. Only where we are each so encountered by Christian witness to this event that it becomes God’s liberating acceptance of us in spite of our sin, do we have the possibility in fact of authentic existence. For only then does God’s forgiveness of sin become forgiveness of our sin – which is to say, my sin and your sin – and only then are we each free in fact for a new existence in faith. Assuming, then, as Bultmann does, that it is precisely the divine Spirit that both authorizes Christian witness and thereby entitles and empowers each of us to exist in this new way, he can speak of the Spirit in its meaning for us as simply “the power as well as the norm” of this radically new way of existing, thereby identifying the Spirit with “the possibility in fact of the new life that is disclosed in faith.” So it is, he says, that, already in the New Testament witness itself, “the concept of the ‘Spirit’ is demythologized” (1952b: 45 f.; 1941: 41). There is no need for our purposes to go into the details of Bultmann’s interpretation of Christian witness for any adequate Christian theology and witness today. The essential point is that, as he interprets it, everything that Christian witness has to say about “life according to the Spirit” is about the same way of understanding oneself and leading one’s life that an appropriate existentialist analysis can and should clarify as authentic human existence. This means, among other things, however, that a theological interpretation of Christian witness has done all it can possibly do when it has interpreted witness’s language about spirit and Spirit in the conceptuality of just such an analysis – namely, as the possibility of self-understanding that, for each of us, is our own authentic


possibility. Whether we then decide so to understand ourselves and lead our lives accordingly depends in no way on us or on theology’s existentialist interpretation, but solely on the divine Spirit; for that this possibility is ever actualized is itself, Bultmann asserts, “donum Spiritus Sancti” (1952c: 174; 1952a: 191 f.).

IV Turning finally to critically appropriating Bultmann’s contribution, I recall the questions constituting our inquiry. As I understand them, these questions are proper, not to Christian theology, but to the philosophy of religion. Therefore, far from attempting anything like an adequate criticism of Bultmann’s legacy as a Christian theologian, I shall criticize it solely in relation to our questions. Moreover, I shall confine myself, for the most part, to positive criticism by making two brief comments on what I take his work to contribute toward clarifying and, possibly, answering them. My first comment is on his answer, in effect, to our question about how we are to understand “the language of spirit.” On his understanding, as we have seen, the language spoken by both spirit and Spirit as subjects is properly existential, which means that it can be interpreted in accordance with its own intention only by way of a properly existentialist interpretation, that is, an interpretation oriented by our existential question and rendered in the conceptuality of an appropriate existentialist analysis. As I see it, the significance of this understanding for our inquiry lies in its underlying philosophical account of the “deep structure,” or the “depth grammar,” of the language of spirit subjectively understood. This account fully explains why such language is, in its own way, cognitively significant, even while clearly distinguishing it from other languages that are simlarly significant: not only the other main kind of such language – what Bultmann calls “objectifying” language about the reality of the world – but even from properly existentialist language about the reality of our own existence in general or simply as such. Whereas such properly existentialist language is cognitively significant because it is about the reality of our existence in its structure in itself, the properly existential language spoken by both spirit and Spirit is thus significant because it is about this same reality in its meaning for us. This is not to claim either that Bultmann’s answer to our first question is uniquely adequate or that his actual formulations of it are entirely free of difficulties. Others seem to me to have offered or implied very similar


accounts and to have done so, in at least some cases, rather more adequately. Moreover, I question whether Bultmann always sees the logical relations between existential and existentialist understanding as clearly and consistently as my interpretation here might suggest; and I remain as convinced as ever that his existentialist conceptuality, however appropriate in other respects, is not fully appropriate to transcendent reality and the other strictly metaphysical conditions of human existence. But even if I should be right about this, it still seems to me that his contribution toward answering our first question is considerable. His is at least one account of the language of spirit that validates its claim to be cognitively significant without obscuring its important differences from other languages making or implying the same claim. My other comment has to do with “the language of spirit” understood objectively as language about both spirit and Spirit as objects. If Bultmann’s account is correct, that the language of spirit considered subjectively is properly existential language, this must be true of any of the concepts and terms comprising such language understood objectively, that is, as cognitively significant or about reality. Thus all such concepts and terms, including “spirit” and “Spirit,” fall into the conceptual category of properly existential language, or – to put it in the alternative way of asking our second question, their grammar, which is to say, their depth grammar, is that of properly existential concepts and terms. But then, if this is the right answer to the question, Bultmann’s existentialist interpretation of what Christian witness says about spirit and Spirit as objects is and must be exemplary – not only for Christian theology’s interpretation of Christian witness, but also for the appropriate interpretation of any other way of speaking about spirit and Spirit that makes or implies anything like the same claim to be Spirit-spoken or divinely inspired. I do not mean by this, of course, that any other such way of speaking must be interpreted as expressing materially the same possibility of selfunderstanding mediated by Christian witness. Just as different conceptualities may more or less appropriately mediate the same possibility of understanding human existence, so the same concepts may more or less appropriately express different possibilities of self-understanding. But Bultmann’s theological interpretation of Christian witness nonetheless provides an example, in that any other way of speaking about spirit and Spirit that makes or implies the same existential claim demands to be interpreted in formally the same way. Moreover, his writings, historical as well as systematic, fairly abound in careful existentialist interpretations of


just such other ways of speaking. In fact, what I most regret finally deciding to omit from this chapter is any discussion of his countless interpretations of the other, significantly different way of speaking about spirit and Spirit that has been comparably formative for Western culture – namely, that of the humanistic–idealistic tradition going back to classical Greece. In this respect, too, then, I find Bultmann’s legacy to us significant. It provides a model for philosophers as well as Christian theologians of how properly religious talk about spirit and Spirit can and should be interpreted.

Works cited Bultmann, Rudolf (1930) “Die Geschichtlichkeit des Daseins und der Glaube: Antwort an Gerhardt Kuhlmann,” in Heidegger und die Theologie: Beginn und Fortgang der Diskussion, ed. Gerhard Noller (Munich: Christian Kaiser Verlag, 1967), 72–94. ——(1941) “Neues Testament und Mythologie: Das Problem der Entmythologisierung der neutestamentlichen Verkündigung,” in Kerygma und Mythos 1, ed. H.W. Bartsch. 2nd edn.: (Hamburg: Herbert Reich-Evangelischer Verlag, 1951), 15–48. ——(1950) “Das Problem der Hermeneutik,” in Glauben und Verstehen 2 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1952), 211–35. ——(1952a) “Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung,” in Kerygma und Mythos 2, ed. H.W. Bartsch (Hamburg: Herbert Reich-Evangelischer Verlag, 1952), 179–208. ——(1952b) “Der Mensch zwischen den Zeiten nach dem Neuen Testament,” in Glauben und Verstehen 3 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960), 35–54. ——(1952c) Letter to Karl Barth, November 11–15, 1952, in Karl Barth – Rudolf Bultmann Briefwechsel 1922–1966, ed. Bernd Jaspert (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1971), 169–95. ——(1955) “Echte und säkularisierte Verkündigung,” in Glauben und Verstehen 3 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1960), 122–30. ——(1959) “Milestones in Books, IV,” The Expository Times 70:125 ——(1963) “Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung,” in Glauben und Verstehen 4 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965), 128–37. ——(1971) “Die protestantische Theologie und der Atheismus,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 68: 376–380. Ryle Gilbert (1949) The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson & Co. Ltd).

Voices in discussion 4 Ogden: One must understand Bultmann’s theological task at a number of levels. First, there is the semantic level: you are trying to understand what is said. Second, there is the level of deep grammar: you are trying


to understand what kind of language is being spoken. This is a logical enquiry. So we have a distinction between surface and depth questions. So Bultmann is concerned with a number of things. He is concerned with a theology of theology; he is concerned with depth grammar; he is concerned with the specific semantic meaning of Christian teaching. But Bultmann, in letting the language of spirit be itself, does not simply repeat it. He also interprets it. So his critical interaction with that language was his own critical intention? Yes. This is how his talk of demythologyzing is to be understood. It is not meant as an eliminative interpretation, as so many people think. So he is not reducing anything or substituting anything. He is interpreting. There is no question as to how Bultmann understood his task. He wanted to show how the language of spirit is to be understood. Construed subjectively, the issue concerns this language which is spoken by humans and by God. The question of what constitutes the proper interpretation is theology’s proper question. What kind of language are we concerned with here? Bultmann’s answer is that we are concerned with existential language. Reality can be understood in two ways: via sense-perception, but also via our understanding of our own existence. Spelling this out is the substance of my paper. As I say in my conclusion, Bultmann thinks that confusion occurs if we try to use objectifying language to understand existential language. This does not mean that existential language is devoid of cognitive significance. There are some difficulties I feel concerning the relation between the existential language which is the language of spirit, and the existentialist language which Bultmann found in Heidegger, which seeks to explicate the structure of existential language. I do not think that the existentialist analysis is adequate to account for transcendent reality and the other strictly metaphysical conditions of human existence. What Bultmann does succeed in showing is how the notion of “spirit” and “Spirit” fall into the conceptual category of existential language. This reveals the depth grammar of the language. If this is right, it must apply to any attempt to speak in this way of “spirit” or “Spirit.” This does not mean that other ways of speaking of the spirit must be interpreted as the same possibility of self-understanding found in Christian witness. I regret that I do not have time to discuss the way in which there have been countless other ways of interpreting what it means to talk of “spirit” and “Spirit”, all of which can be found in Western culture – for example, the humanistic–idealistic tradition going back to classical Greece.


Harvey: Without doubt, Ogden is Bultmann’s best American friend. He rescues Bultmann from those who have read Bultmann on demythologyzing and nothing else. Though I am not a theologian any more, I know of no more powerful expression of possibilities of Christian sense than those found in Bultmann. I want to focus on Christian theology and the issue of the proper conceptuality for a language of spirit. Perhaps it could be called the search for a right philosophy. I think that Bultmann is less dependent on Heidegger than one might think. If we speak of existentialist philosophy, there is the question of whose we have in mind – Sartre’s, Jaspers’, or Heidegger’s? When we look at them, they seem to call for very different conclusions, so much so that Heidegger did not want his thought to be called ‘existentialist.’ I draw attention to these differences because in searching for “a right philosophy” Bultmann did not mean “one acceptable to the Christian faith.” It must be one which is acceptable on independently philosophical grounds. This raises the question of what happens if what we find in Heidegger is inconsistent with the Christian faith. Heidegger says that human beings are the only creatures for whom their existence is a question for them. We are thrown into this world, and if we reflect on the fact that we are going to die, we realize the groundlessness of our world. Heidegger calls this living toward death. That is living authentically. Now, what if, as a Christian, you think there are grounds of existence, that underneath are the everlasting arms? Heidegger would say that this is an escape from authenticity, a fleeing from the meaninglessness of existence. So if we say with Bultmann that there are many possibilities of faith and that Christianity is only one of them, aren’t we ignoring the fact that Heidegger would say that the socalled Christian possibility is inauthentic? Now what is one to say? Do we simply say that Heidegger has simply got it wrong? Is Heidegger’s philosophy not “the right philosophy” after all? Or can theology simply pick and choose those parts of the philosophy which are useful for its witness? But then one hasn’t got a conception of a “right philosophy” at all, but simply what Heidegger would call an inauthentic mode of existence. What would happen if you could convince Bultmann that Marx was correct? Bultmann said that that would falsify the Christian faith. So there are limits to the appeal to the existential character of Christian faith. It is open to challenges. Defenders of Heidegger would, of course, defend his atheism. Are we to say that these disagreements are not the business of philosophy? Perhaps Heidegger would


appeal to his anthropology as a way out. Can Christian theology do the same? Ogden: These are very important questions for the Christian theologian. This has been true down the ages, and it is certainly true of Bultmann. After all, he had to face the neo-orthodoxy of Barth. I want to address Harvey’s challenge to show that “the right philosophy” does not simply become the one one finds most congenial. Here we must remember the Christian tradition. Think of the Lutheran tradition and its relation to philosophy. For Luther, the divine law to love God and one’s neighbor is the same as natural law. So a ground is provided. A philosopher is going to say that that ground is given. But then the necessity for that ground is defended by argument. If we look at Sartre, we have to face his claim that any talk of the everlasting arms is an illusion. Bultmann says that a battle with Sartre about the nature of the self is a real battle. And in this battle he enlists the help of different soul mates, as it were: Jaspers, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, in an attack on the God who rescues us against all contingencies. This was a mark of a false desire for security in religion. Philosophy is of no use whatsoever to theology in this particular task. Phillips: You spoke of interpreting the language of spirit, and of Christian conceptuality as being one such interpretation. I wonder whether you would be prepared to speak of elucidation rather than interpretation. If one speaks of the latter one may wonder what it is, beyond all conceptualities, which is being interpreted. One can still allow for similarities in spirit between different religious conceptualities. Ogden: I see nothing against that suggestion. Phillips: I think you will as I continue. Let us get to the point at which we may come to a fundamental disagreement. You also say that the existential language of the spirit, in essential respects, corresponds to a natural law concerning us as human beings, and that this grounds the existential commitment in a truth about us as human beings. Ogden: Yes, the truth it discloses is a truth which is present to all of us as human beings. All religions make this claim. They appeal to an original light in us to which we are all accountable. Harvey: Heidegger does not have an essence of human nature in his thought. Like Kierkegaard, he concentrates on the self’s relation to itself. We must face the world as it is. In our fallenness we must heed the voice of conscience. Phillips: This still seems to be an attempt to smuggle in, a priori, a specific response to what you have called the groundlessness of our world.


Davis: I don’t see a great deal of difference between answers given by Heidegger and Bultmann to the issue of salvation. But if you want to align the answers offered by Heidegger and Luther, I do not see how they fit. Heidegger speaks of authentic living, while Luther speaks of the forgiveness of sins. Ogden: I tried to address this in the third part of my paper. You are right, life ascending to the Spirit cannot be equated with authentic existence. The equation only comes about if you come into contact with the saving power of Christ. There is a tension here. Richard Amesbury: If we want to say with Heidegger that the categories of human existence are groundless, and that not recognizing this is inauthentic existence, why should the groundlessness create a problem? Harvey: Well, you are thrown into a world governed by groundless categories; you have to make a choice. Phillips: I think Amesbury’s point was that if to look for a ground is confused, why does the invoking of groundlessness create a problem? Of course, it will if you start appealing to the light of reason which is to shine in all men. But what if you put out this one light and recognize the existence of many? Then it will not be natural light which grounds our different perspectives, but our perspectives which throw light on what “reason” amounts to in them. Ogden: That is where I part company with you. It can’t be turtles all the way down. The whole thing will be arbitrary. Phillips: But why not have faith in one of the turtles? You still seem to be looking for a theological elephant on which to ground the perspectives. Ogden: What is your alternative? Phillips: Have faith in one of the turtles. The trouble with talking of “turtles all the way down” is that it gives the impression of a missing ground. I’m saying one does not need one. Ogden: In a way, I am sympathetic to that idea. Westphal: What is the role of philosophy in theology? Does the theologian need an existentialist language? Bultmann claims that theology needs an existentialist philosophy. How would you respond to this kind of argument? Look at Luther and Calvin and the way they do theology, they do not appeal to abstract philosophical analyses, and then put them to work. The question becomes poignant if you say that the only worthwhile philosophy is an independent one. It then looks as if the task of philosophy is to correct theology, and the latter would not be allowed to be itself.


Ogden: Bultmann’s text presupposes the difference between theology and philosophy. No theology can develop its own ontology. So where do we get our ontology from? Do we depend on an ontology? Bultmann did not say that we need to read Heidegger, but he did say that you have to have an ontology. Take historicity: this is something true of us all. If you abstract from Luther his understanding of Aristotle and the Catholic tradition, and his alternative, you have two ontologies. He got this from his nominalist teachers. Westphal: But if you say that there is a nominalism at work in Luther’s ontology, it now looks as though it is the task of theology to embrace some abstract philosophical conception. But should theology allow any philosophy to impose itself on it? Ogden: I have some sympathy with that view. On the other hand, nothing is more characteristic of Luther than his constant appeal to the natural light of human reason. Phillips: Once again, I want to extinguish that conception of light in favor of many lights. I think the appeal to an ontology is radically confused. Ogden: But there are general categories involved, such as human beings being language users. Human historicity is another. Harvey: Historicity is not itself historical. It is the category in terms of which we understand that we are creatures in time. So these categories are important. Phillips: Wittgenstein said it was misleading to say that truth and falsity is what belongs to propositions. Rather, we should say that we only call something a proposition if it can be true or false. The first view suggests that we know what truth and falsity amount to before we look at the context of the propositions in question, whereas the second view does not. Similarly, instead of saying that historicity is what belongs to human beings, we need only say that human beings have histories. Instead of saying that game-playing belongs to human beings, we should simply say that human beings play games. Ontologies are thereby reduced to descriptions of human practices and contexts, and shown to be idle wheels. Min: You have asked how theology can maintain its independence under the threat of having a philosophy imposed on it. In the Catholic tradition this is an unreal question, since philosophers, so far from being set over against Christianity, may be part of its revelation. This is because revelation is never complete, but is always developing further. So the question facing theology is not one of defending its independence,


but of finding how it can continue to learn from all kinds of developments occurring around us. Ogden: Whitehead said that all the great philosophies enjoyed insights beyond the systems we attach to their names. We can always link them up with other things. If you read Bultmann, there are grounds for saying that there are the beginnings of a philosophy of nature, a philosophy which will benefit from insights from other quarters, for example, from Marx and elsewhere. Keith Lane: What does a specific Christian notion such as the Incarnation mean for the language of spirit? Ogden: I tried to address this in the third part of my paper. In the context of the Incarnation, spirit is the new power in Jesus Christ. The form of this power is spirit, but its content, of course, is Christocentric, and internally related to the understanding of the Church. Harvey: Here there is an analogy with Kierkegaard’s concerns. Jesus is the Word, and it is a Word that is addressed to our existence.

5 Is God a Spirit? Patrick Sherry

It has become common practice in some recent philosophy of religion to define God as a spirit of a certain kind (omnipotent, omniscient, and so on), and then to define a spirit as a disembodied person or an immaterial substance. We find versions of such definitions in the work of earlier writers too, for example, John Locke. In this paper I want to look at such definitions, and consider three objections to them: (1) Such definitions have travelled far from Biblical usage. (2) They seem to make God a member of a genus: He is, it would seem, the greatest of spirits, somewhat in the way that the elephant is the biggest of animals. (3) The ideas of a disembodied person or an immaterial substance do not make sense, because they are self-contradictory. I shall conclude that it is still proper to describe God as spirit, but that this is somewhat different from defining Him as a spirit in the way just mentioned. This conclusion does not, however, commit us to agreeing with the third objection that the idea of a spirit as such is nonsensical.

Swinburne on spirits Before looking at these three objections, however, let me start by looking at some of Richard Swinburne’s work, as exemplifying the kind of usage in question. At the beginning of his book The Coherence of Theism he starts out by defining God as ‘something like a “person without a body (i.e. a spirit) who is eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything, is perfectly good … the creator and sustainer of the universe” ’.1 In due course there follow chapters on each of the main attributes listed; 113

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but very little is said about the concept of a spirit. It is true that there is a long chapter on the idea of an omnipresent spirit (ch.7). Most of this chapter, however, consists of a long disquisition on personal identity, which Swinburne has published elsewhere previously. As regards the concept of a spirit, he simply says, ‘By a “spirit” is understood a person without a body, a non-embodied person’,2 without more ado. There is no justification given for this definition, and no discussion of it, for Swinburne launches straight into the task of answering the objections made by Paul Edwards and others to such a concept. He repeats his definition in his later book, The Existence of God.3 As we shall see, similar definitions are used also by those who reject the concepts of God and of a spirit as incoherent. Before discussing them, however, I want to look more closely at the initial definition of a spirit, which is assumed without question by both Swinburne and his opponents. As I have said, he simply defines a spirit as a ‘non-embodied person’, by which he means, he tells us, ‘an individual who thought and perhaps talked, made moral judgements, wanted this and not that, knew things, favoured this suppliant and not that, etc., but had no body’.4 He passes on immediately to discuss the question of what it is to be an omnipresent spirit, and he tackles this in terms of a thoughtexperiment: we are to imagine ourselves gradually becoming aware of what is happening in other bodies and material objects so that we are able to give invariably true answers to questions about them, coming to see things from any point of view we choose, able to move directly anything we choose, uttering words that can be heard anywhere, and so on. ‘Surely’, he concludes, ‘anyone can thus conceive of himself becoming an omnipresent spirit’.5 Some people may find Swinburne’s God more like the creation of a science fiction writer than the living God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. A more philosophical objection is that he nowhere argues for his initial definition of a spirit. Perhaps he thinks that it is obviously correct, so that no argument is required. Yet other definitions are possible: for instance, St Thomas Aquinas says at one point that the rational soul ‘is called spirit according to what properly belongs to itself … namely, an immaterial intellectual power’.6 Now such a definition is not incompatible with Swinburne’s; but if we wish to accept both, we need an argument enabling us to move from one to the other. The history of philosophy will suggest many possible arguments. One might argue that in general a power can only be identified with reference to a substance or a person, in which or whom it inheres; or, more specifically, one might argue, like Descartes, that an intellectual power must inhere in an

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intellectual substance.7 Or one might argue that such descriptions are required in order to explain how spirits can continue to exist when they are not acting in the world – how they exist on their days off, as it were. No such arguments, however, are forthcoming from Swinburne. These considerations suggest two different questions: (i) Has Swinburne defined a spirit correctly? (ii) Is God such a spirit, – or, indeed, any kind of spirit? As regards the first question Swinburne has some justification for his position, in that definitions like his have been current in philosophy at least since Locke’s time, and similar ones are found earlier (though they usually refer to immaterial substances, rather than persons). Moreover, some such definitions are current in ordinary languages. People often speak of ghosts, and the dead generally, as ‘spirits’. Such beings are regarded as incorporeal (at least in the sense of being without ordinary physical bodies), and as having personal attributes, for example, speaking through mediums, being happy or unhappy, and in the case of poltergeists, manipulating material objects (I am not sure whether that quite makes them ‘persons’: P.F. Strawson has invented the useful phrase ‘former persons’ to apply to such cases, a coinage which has drawn from Antony Flew the sharp retort that ‘former persons … are no more a sort of person than ex-wives … are a sort of wives’8). Unfortunately, however, the appeals to the history of philosophy and to ordinary language provide insufficient support for Swinburne’s definition. The philosophical tradition running from late scholasticism through Descartes to Locke and others was already questioned by Hobbes (in Leviathan, ch.34, and elsewhere, as we shall see) and by Kant when he argued in an early work, Dreams of a Spirit Seer, against Swedenborg, that a spirit should be defined as a being that has reason, for example, a man, and not as a separable spiritual substance.9 Moreover, the appeal to ordinary language is not decisive. Because the term ‘spirit’ has been used in many different contexts, for example, the Bible, Stoicism, Greek medicine, alchemy, scholastic metaphysics, and nineteenth-century Idealism, it has acquired a complex and varied character. Even in everyday parlance it is commonly used in many different ways: we say, for instance, ‘There was a spirit of discord there’, ‘She showed a resolute spirit’, ‘He took it in the spirit in which it was meant’; we speak, too, of the spirit of an age, a place, an institution, or an artistic movement.10 Some of these common uses are nearer to the original meaning of the term than later philosophical and theological ones. Both the Greek

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pneuma and the Hebrew ruach meant originally ‘breath’ or ‘wind’, hence there is sometimes a play on words, for example, in Jn.3:8 and 20:22. The same term was used with these different meanings, because breath, wind, and spirit were thought of as permeating, penetrating, or pervading material bodies. This is well expressed by Aquinas in one of the few passages of his works describing God as spirit: ‘Spirit’ is taken from the respiration of animals and extended to the impulses and movements of every airy body, e.g. wind or fine vapour diffused through their members for their movement; then, because air is invisible, it is extended to all invisible motive powers and substances; and hence to the sensible soul, the angels, the rational soul, and God – God because He proceeds by love, a kind of moving force.11 The analogy with ‘breath’ suggests that we should look a little more closely at the mode of a spirit’s action. The terms ‘permeating’, ‘penetrating’, and ‘pervading’ that I have used suggest that the workings of a spirit are essentially internal, and in religious contexts particularly associated with the movements of the heart, that is with moral awareness and with conversion. It is perhaps unfortunate, therefore, that many philosophers of religion look to parapsychology for parallels. Donald Evans, for instance, in his reply to a paper by Paul Edwards suggests that telepathic influence might provide a model for ‘the attitude and initiative of a hidden personal being called “God” ’.12 Since, however, telepathy is usually used to describe intuitive communication between people distant from each other, it is surely precisely the wrong model for the God in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’. Similarly with another commonly used parallel, that of theoretical entities in scientific explanations. The parallel is useful in giving us the idea of an invisible and independent agent, but it misses the characteristic of personal agency, as well as, as we shall see shortly, the permeating and moral characteristics of the divine spirit. Some of these considerations are relevant to the second question that I have raised about Swinburne’s account, namely: is God a spirit? Here, again, there is some support for his position in the history of philosophy and theology. The tendency to describe God as a spirit is familiar to us from philosophers like Locke, but also from earlier Christian writers: St Anselm, for example, describes Him as ‘summus spiritus’ in his Monologion (ch.32), while St Augustine gives a definition not unlike Swinburne’s, ‘He is eternal, immortal, incorruptible, unchangeable,


living, wise, powerful, beautiful, righteous, good, blessed, and spirit’, in his On the Trinity (Bk.15, ch.5; it should be noted, however, that Latin lacks the indefinite article; and also that in this passage Augustine specifically warns against taking the last term alone as signifying substance).

Three objections We must now go on and ask, however, whether such definitions, modern or earlier, are faithful to Biblical tradition, and this question takes me to the first objection mentioned at the beginning of the paper. In the Bible the term spirit is used very widely: of God’s spirit, of angels and evil spirits, of human beings or some aspect of them, of departed human spirits, and of course in its original senses of breath or wind13 (I have already suggested that in Biblical usage the metaphorical nature of the term is still in the background). Geoffrey Lampe says that when used of God, ‘the term “Spirit” properly refers, not to God’s essence but to his activity, that is to say, his creativity’, and he goes on to remark that as time went on the term lost its connotation of activity and became more of an ontological than a functional term.14 To be more specific, I think that the phrases ‘spirit of God’ or ‘Holy Spirit’ are used to denote a power, a power that is experienced as permeating the world, especially human beings, and one which, when permeating them, is often especially associated with the heart (in the Biblical sense).15 There is only one Biblical text that seems to straightforwardly describe God as a spirit. I shall need to discuss this text in some detail, as it is relevant to both the first two objections I have raised. This text is John 4:24, in which, according to the Authorized Version, Jesus says to the Samaritan woman at the well, ‘God is a spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.’ But Greek of course lacks the indefinite article, as also does Aramaic. Hence the beginning of the passage (Pneuma ho Theos) can equally well be translated as ‘God is spirit’, which seems to fit in better with the rest of the verse, and indeed it is so translated by recent versions like the RSV, the NEB, and the Jerusalem Bible. Many commentators adduce I Jn.1:5 (‘God is light’) and I Jn.4:16 (‘God is love’) as parallel usages. In so doing, they are following some early Christian writers. Origen, for example, commenting on Jn.4:24, adduces the parallels of Deut.4:24 (‘God is a consuming fire’) and I Jn.1:5, and argues that such expressions are to be taken figuratively: ‘spirit’ is used to indicate that God is incorporeal, an intelligent being, and that He fills us with new life. He accuses Celsus, a pagan opponent of Christianity, of having a materialistic, Stoic

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conception of spirit (Against Celsus, VI. 70–1).16 Another third-century writer, Novatian, gives a similar interpretation of Jn.4:24, and argues that when God is called spirit, this is not meant to be an exhaustive definition of His being, but an attempt to lead on our understanding, as when we call Him Love or Light, though His substance is not contained in either: ‘if you take spirit to be the substance of God, you make God out to be a creature’ (On the Trinity, ch.7; cf. ch.5). Novatian was one of many early Christian writers who were chary of using pagan, particularly Stoic, concepts in theology; though in the passage quoted, his stricture is directed, not at a pagan, but at Tertullian, who not only spoke of spirit as a substance (the sort of stuff, as it were, of which God is made), but asserted that since God is spirit, He is [a] body, for spirit is body of a kind (Against Praxeas, 7; 27). Interestingly, Tertullian was here anticipating Hobbes, who in response to an Anglican divine, Dr Bramhall, defined God as ‘a most pure, and most simple corporeal spirit’, and spirit as ‘thin, fluid, transparent, invisible body’.17 Again, spirit is treated almost as the kind of stuff out of which God is made. I have dwelt at some length on this particular text, Jn.4:24, because it also takes me to my second objection: if we translate it as ‘God is a spirit … ’ we seem to make God a member of a class, spirits, rather in the way that, as I suggested at the beginning, an elephant is a member of the class of animals. I think that this is an implication of Swinburne’s account, and also, more clearly of Locke’s in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke says that we frame the complex idea of an immaterial spirit by putting together the ideas of thinking, perceiving, liberty, and movement with that of substance (II.xxiii.15), and that God is an infinite spirit (II.xxiii.21). Thus we have ideas of three sorts of substance: God, finite intelligences, and bodies (II.xxvii.2); and, he says later, we can conceive that there are many species of spirits or ‘intelligible creatures above us’ as there are sensible and material ones below us (III.vi.12), though we know of their existence only through revelation. Such accounts were probably common by Locke’s time: the Oxford English Dictionary quotes a Scottish divine, Hugh Binning, as describing men, angels, and God all as ‘spirits’ in a sermon in 1653. Aquinas would have agreed with Locke in much of what he says, especially about the many species of angels, but there is one point to which he would have a vehement objection, that is, that Locke seems to make God ‘one of a kind’, that is, a member of a genus, spirits. One reason why Aquinas rarely uses the term spiritus of God is perhaps that he does not want to give the impression that God is a member of a genus that includes angels, devils, and human beings. In Summa Theologiae 1a.3.5 he


emphatically states that God is not a member of any genus, not even substance, and that He cannot be defined. This does not, however, preclude there being a likeness between creatures and God, in this case an analogical one (1a.4.3ad3). Hence Aquinas goes on to argue that, as regards the question of how we can predicate terms like ‘merciful’ or ‘wise’ of God, which we also use of human persons, we apply such terms analogically to Him (1a.13.5). Thus for him a wise man, a wise owl, and God no more belong to the class of wise beings than a seaside resort, a complexion, and a person belong to the same genus, just because they can all be described as ‘healthy’ (to use Aquinas’ favourite example, borrowed from Aristotle, of an analogical term). Aquinas does, however, occasionally use the term spiritus of God, as we have seen, as conveying God’s incorporeality and so on. He did not find the idea of an intelligent, immaterial agent absurd, and this distinguishes him from many modern philosophers. But this takes me to our third objection: is not the idea of a spirit absurd? In an essay ‘Difficulties in the Idea of God’, Paul Edwards puts clearly some standard modern objections. He asks ‘What does it mean to speak of a pure spirit, a disembodied mind, as infinitely (or finitely) powerful, wise, good, just and all the rest?’18 He argues that we understand such terms when applied to human beings having bodies, with publicly observable behaviour; but that we have no idea what it would be like to ask justly, for instance, without a body, for ‘psychological predicates are logically tied to the behaviour of organisms’. This certainly raises an important question about divine agency, but any further analysis of the concept of a spirit is lacking. Edwards is content to conclude that the belief that God is a disembodied spirit is unintelligible.19 Others have gone on and argued that the concept of such a spirit is what might be called an illegitimate reification or hypostatization: ‘spirit’ properly refers to certain human capacities, which are abstracted and imagined as existing (to an infinite degree, in the case of God) apart from any physical body, perhaps inhering in an ‘immaterial substance’. Antony Flew compares this with Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire cat’s grin, which is described as still existing when the face disappears.20 A second objection raised by many contemporary philosophers concerns the possibility of identifying a spirit. Flew, for instance, claims that it is difficult, if not impossible, to supply appropriate means of identification and criteria of identity for incorporeal personal substances, for the qualification ‘incorporeal’ negates the identifying content of the term ‘substance’.21 Swinburne answers these two common objections by arguing that a spirit can express its hopes, fears, wants, and so on by acting in the

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world, and that in some ways God is related to the world as a person to his body; and that personal identity is something ultimate – he accuses Penelhum and others of failing to distinguish two different questions: what does it mean to say that person 1 is the same as person 2, and what is the evidence for it (an epistemological question).22 Since I am doubtful about both Swinburne’s and his opponents’ accounts of spirit here, my own response to these sceptics would be somewhat different. I think that Edwards, Flew, and Nielsen have an over-simple view of agency: they all seem to assume that causal language is confined to the actions of material bodies and organisms. But what of the power of ideas, theories, and arguments? Edwards is wrong too in saying that psychological predicates are logically tied to the behaviour of organisms: he forgets that we sometimes speak of ‘thoughtful’ books and ‘intelligent’ films, not to mention, again, powerful arguments, clever theories, moving words, and so on. It might be replied that these are analogical uses, because we are really describing here writers, directors, and speakers. I am not sure that all such uses are analogical; in any case, the important point is that we are assessing meanings here, rather than the physical qualities of books, films, and people. The contrast I have in mind was well brought out by the psychologist C.G. Jung when he contrasted the treatment of neuroses by means of drugs with that by psycho-therapy: A suitable explanation or a comforting word to the patient may have something like a healing effect. … The doctor’s words, to be sure, are ‘only’ vibrations in the air, yet … the words are effective only in so far as they convey a meaning or have significance. It is their meaning which is effective. But ‘meaning’ is something mental or spiritual. Call it a fiction if you like. None the less it enables us to influence the course of the disease in a far more effective way than with chemical preparations.23 Strangely, we find a similar crudity to that found in Edwards et al. in a very different author, Rudolf Bultmann when he wrote: Biological man cannot see how a supernatural entity like the pneuma can penetrate within the close texture of his natural powers and set to work within him.24 One might as well ask how encouragement, friendship, and words of advice manage to penetrate biological entities. Of course these things,


like Jung’s counselling, are transactions between bodily persons, but the point is that such transactions are something more than transfers of physical energy. Bultmann’s problem only arises if you have a very crude Physicalist view. His crudity here is surprising, for elsewhere he shows a sensitive understanding of the way in which the penetration of the Holy Spirit differs from that of some magic power: in his Theology of the New Testament he points out that in the New Testament the Spirit’s might is not a magical or mechanical power but one which demands and presupposes a transformation of the will, one which is received by the heart.25

God as spirit So much for the three objections to describing God as a spirit. From what I have said, it will be apparent that I agree with the first one, though I would amplify it by emphasizing the original metaphorical and experiential character of the term ‘spirit’, which seems to have got lost somewhere between Aquinas and Locke. As Wittgenstein said in a lecture in 1930: … man’s spirit was pictured as his breath, then the picture was forgotten but the language derived from it retained. We can only safely use such language if we consciously remember the picture when we use it.26 It also agree with the second objection, to the extent of not regarding God as one of a kind. I find myself, however, in a cleft stick as regards the third objection, since I accept neither Edwards’, Flew’s, and Nielsen’s materialism nor the kind of view that they are attacking, yet I still want to describe God as ‘spirit’. But what is at stake here? What’s in an ‘a’ (‘a spirit’ versus ‘spirit’)? Some of the early Christian writers whom I have quoted have their clear answers: saying that God is spirit is not attempting to define His essence, but indicating that He is immaterial or incorporeal, intelligent, and the source of new life. Nearer to our own time, C.H. Dodd (one of the editors of The New English Bible) stigmatized it as ‘the most gross perversion of the meaning’ of Jn.4:24 to translate it as ‘God is a spirit’, for this implies a class of pneumata, an idea of which there is no trace in the Fourth Gospel; rather, the term pneuma, says Dodd, connotes reality, as living, powerful, and life-giving, to be contrasted with sarx [flesh].27 This still, however, commits one to an ontology other than that of materialists: we are still saying that God is incorporeal and so on. As

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Dodd indicates, Biblical writers constantly contrast ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’ (though admittedly this is often more of an ethical than an ontological contrast, especially in St Paul28). Thus Isaiah contrasts ‘spirit’ with ‘flesh’ when he says ‘the Egyptian is a man, not a god; his horses are flesh, not spirit’ (31:3, contrasting human and divine strength). Moreover, even if we prefer the term ‘power’ to that of ‘person’, there is still the implication that spirit exists independently of us and has causal efficacy: people who are filled with God’s spirit have new capacities indeed, but they regard them as having been brought about or fostered by something outside of themselves, a power, and so see these capacities as a gift. This appeal to the power of the Spirit to increase or enlarge our spiritual capacities, however, points to another important difference between the Biblical concept of spirit and Locke’s or Swinburne’s: the former is more of an experiential concept (and this again is confirmed by looking at the etymology of terms like ruach, pneuma, and spiritus), whereas ‘immaterial substances’ and ‘incorporeal persons’ sound more like inferred entities, known through philosophical reasoning, especially natural theology. The starting point of the relevant experience is the feeling of being ‘empowered’ in the ways I have suggested, and this leads people to ascribe their new capacities to an external cause, partly because they think that they have not acquired them by their own efforts and cannot do so, partly perhaps because they sometimes feel conscious of the workings of this power. Thus Keith Ward says of the Holy Spirit that it is ‘a force arising within individuals, yet somehow other than them’.29 Clearly, however, these considerations do not evade philosophical problems. People may think that they experience a power within them, but it may just be that they can do more than they think they can, that they have underdeveloped capacities. So what reason is there to hypothesize an external cause, let alone a spiritual cause? Is not such a move an example of what William James called an ‘overbelief’? In any case, what is the inside/outside contrast here? One answer I have suggested is that the capacities attributed to the power or the gift of God’s spirit are not under our own control. But then many ordinary physical states like feeling well or ill, tired or energetic, are often not under our control, either. In any case, is such an appeal to non-physical powers any better off than talk of ‘incorporeal persons’? Does it still not involve an illegitimate hypostatization? What does it mean to describe the Holy Spirit as wise or loving, or as leading or teaching people? Moreover, the question of identification still remains: how would I tell whether I was empowered by the Holy Spirit rather than by Satan or the Muses, or that other people were so empowered?


These questions amount to a rephrasing of those raised by Edwards, Flew, and Nielsen. As regards the last one, it is worth noting, as a matter of fact, that religious traditions do have practical procedures of identification, for it is always necessary to detect what might be called ‘spiritual phoneys’. In Christianity this procedure is often described as the ‘discernment of spirits’. The early Church set out three criteria for deciding whether people were, as we might put it, truly ‘Holy-Spirited’, namely ethical, communitarian, and Christological: those called upon to practise discernment looked for the fruit of the Spirit (Gal.5:22) and for God-likeness, since the Lord who is Spirit turns us into images of Him (II Cor.3:18); for unity, because all believers share fellowship (Phil.2:1; II Cor.13:13); and for an acknowledgement of Christ (I Jn.4:2f.; I Cor.12:3). Obviously, however, our sceptics would reply that these criteria are internal to Christianity; and that, in any case, since we can only identify spatio-temporal particulars, the early Church was really sorting out good and bad people, not ‘discerning spirits’. But, again, I would question such an over-simple view, for reasons already suggested: there are more complex kinds of identification, for example, of pieces of music, theories, and arguments; and in the case of discernment of spirits the believer is not simply sorting out people but claiming to discern a common source of certain powers in them. The crucial question which remains is what weight is to be put on the term ‘source’: is it an agent, and if so, of what kind, and what are the reasons for regarding it as one? The point we have got to now, I think, is the fundamental difference between those who insist on a materialist ontology, and those who claim that we may experience and be influenced by God who is spirit, understood as powerful but immaterial and as giver of new life. Is there anything more to be said? Clearly someone like Swinburne thinks that we should go on and attack materialism, both by putting forward a natural theology and by defending mind–body dualism (as in his book The Evolution of the Soul). This strategy is adopted by others, most clearly by Charles Taliaferro in his Consciousness and the Mind of God,30 in which theism and dualism are presented as complementary: he first attacks recent materialists like Daniel Dennett and Paul Churchland, and defends what he calls ‘integrative dualism’; and then, in parallel fashion, he attacks theologians like Adrian Thatcher and Grace Jantzen, and goes on to advocate ‘integrative theism’. (Unlike Swinburne, however, Taliaferro does not make use of the concept of a spirit.) Taliaferro scores some good points against materialism; but I am not sure about his and Swinburne’s general strategy here. The ancient

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Hebrews were not, I think, body–mind dualists; yet they acknowledged the spirit of God. Hence I suspect that it may be impolitic for theists to hitch their wagon to mind–body dualism: it might turn out to be the case that materialism is false or incoherent anyway. I am haunted by Wittgenstein’s remark about sensation: ‘It is not a something, but not a nothing either!’ (Philosophical Investigations, 304). That is perhaps rather elusive. What I am more certain of is that, when people describe God as spirit, they are not getting involved in philosophical controversies about mind–body dualism. I think, therefore, that the two topics should be uncoupled.

Notes 1. Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 1. 2. Ibid., 99. 3. Idem, The Existence of God (revised edn, Oxford, 1991), 8. 4. Idem, The Coherence of Theism, 102. 5. Ibid., 105. 6. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a.97.3. This is not his only definition of spirit. 7. This is somewhat along the lines of Descartes’ argument for the existence of incorporeal substances in his reply to Hobbes’ objections to his Meditations (Adam & Tannery vii, 175–6). I take it that such arguments are an application of the mediaeval principle operari sequitur esse. 8. A.G.N. Flew, The Presumption of Atheism (London, 1976), 154, in answer to P.F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Elek for Pemberton, 1959), 151–2. 9. Prussian Acad. edn, II, pp. 319, 321. 10. O.Marquard shows that even before the rise of Idealism Geist was used to cover mens, anima, genie, esprit, evil genius, the Holy Spirit, genius loci, familiar spirit, earth-spirit, and the spirit of an age, nation, or the world. See J.Ritter (ed.), Historische Worterbuch der Philosophie, Band 3 (Darmstadt, 1974), column 185. 11. Summa Contra Gentiles IV.23. Cf. his Summa Theologiae, 1a.36.1 ad 1, where he says that by spiritus is signified the immateriality of the divine substance (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975). 12. ‘Commentary on Paul Edwards’ Paper’, in E. Madden, R. Handy and M. Farber (eds), The Idea of God (Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1968), 84. Evans also gives the parallel of poltergeists, as does Swinburne in the passage already mentioned in which he is discussing the concept of an omnipresent spirit. To be fair, Swinburne, following Aquinas, does justice to God’s presence in things through His creative power. But there is no reference to religious concepts of prayer, conversion, and so on here. 13. See Marie Isaacs, The Concept of Spirit: A Study of Pneuma in Hellenistic Judaism and its Bearing on the New Testament ( London: Heythrop College, 1976), Appendix D, for a useful classification of the New Testament uses. 14. Geoffrey Lampe, God as Spirit (Oxford, 1977), 17, 210.

Is God a Spirit? 125 15. See further my ‘Are Spirits Bodiless Persons?’, Neue Zeitschrift fur Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie, 24 (1982), 37–52, esp. 44–6. 16. See also Origen, De Principiis I.1–4; Commentary on St John, XIII.23; and St Irenaeus, Against the Heresies, II.13.3. 17. Thomas Hobbes, An Answer to Dr Bramhall, in Molesworth edn, Vol. IV, 306, 309. 18. Paul Edwards, ‘Difficulties in the Idea of God’, in E. Madden et al. (eds), The Idea of God, 48. 19. Ibid., 53. 20. A.G.N. Flew, The Presumption of Atheism, 141. 21. Idem, God and Philosophy (London: Hutchinson, 1966), 31–2; The Presumption of Atheism, 147. Similar objections are made by Kai Nielsen in Contemporary Critiques of Religion (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), ch.6, and ‘God, Disembodied Existence and Incoherence’, Sophia xxvi; 3 (1987), 27–52, and by Terence Penelhum in Survival and Disembodied Existence (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1970), chs 6 and 10. The latter answers the problem of how we might identify an incorporeal being by making the heroic suggestion that perhaps there may be only one such, namely God. 22. Richard Swinburne, The Coherence of Theism, 105–10. 23. C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., Ltd., 1933), 258f. 24. Rudolf Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’, in H.W. Bartsch (ed.), Kerygma and Myth, Vol. I (London: S.P.C.K., 1953), 6. 25. Idem, Theology of the New Testament (New York: Scribner, 1952), §§14, 38. 26. Desmond Lee (ed.), Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1932 (Totowa, N.J.: Rowan and Littlefield, 1980), 25. 27. C.H. Dodd, The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), 225–6. 28. See Marie Isaacs, The Concept of Spirit, ch. 8 (London: Heythrop College, 1976). 29. Keith Ward, The Concept of God (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), 215. 30. Charles Taliaferro, Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

Voices in discussion 5 Sherry: Somewhere between Aquinas and our arrival at Descartes and Locke, God becomes a spirit, greatest among spirits, much in the way in which the elephant is the biggest among animals. Some blame Scotus, others attach the blame elsewhere. I have emphasized that God is Spirit, not a spirit. God is not one of a class. According to Swinburne, God is one of a class, its greatest member. He does not spell this out, but Locke does. God is an immaterial substance. Once this seventeenth-century usage is established, the metaphorical character of the language of spirit is lost. What is more, the notion of a disembodied spirit is unintelligible. So I neither accept the objections of Flew, Edwards or Nielsen, nor a materialist ontology, but neither do I

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accept Swinburne’s defence. I find the notion of a spirit, independent of us, but imbued with causal agency, to be unintelligible. I have suggested that the language of spirit is better understood in relation to uses of it which talk of power, permeation, and the heart. The kind of power I have in mind is the enlarging of our spiritual capacities, something far removed from Locke and Swinburne. Biblical images such as ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ are used to emphasize this – the spirit, like the wind, blows through you, empowers you. It is not a matter of inferred entities. Edwards, Flew and Nielsen will deny that these are new powers. They will say that the empowerment is simply due to the fact that our capacities were greater than we thought. We do not need to postulate an external cause. In reply one might point out that religion has criteria for detecting religious phoneys. The spirits are discussed in a Christological, ethical and communitarian way. Once again, sceptics will say that we are simply sorting out good and bad people, but I find this an oversimplified view. There is no avoiding the issue of the source of spiritual power. What do we make of ‘the source’? Is it an agent? This is the bottom line between those who invoke a materialist ontology, and those who experience God as empowering spirit. Is there anything more to say? Some philosophers want to say there is, and that one must combat materialism by advocacy of mind–body dualism. I have been attempting to uncouple ‘spirit’ from that enterprise. Harvey: I have difficulty in determining the bottom line of your chapter. I know what you are opposed to – mind–body dualism, but what is your alternative? Is ‘empowerment’ supposed to be the proper context for talk of ‘spirit’? But ‘empowerment’ in what respect? How is it linked, for example, to the notion of God as creator; to the claim that he created the world out of nothing? What are the metaphysical implications of your suggestions? I have never understood why saying that God is Spirit entails that he cannot be one of a class. Why is it nonsensical to speak of God as a self-reflexive being? So I find your negative reasons weak. On the positive side, it surely is not enough to speak of ‘empowerment’. We need criteria to link it to the language of spirit. As yet, I do not see the connection. Sherry: I have suggested that the connection can be found in Biblical language. We find talk there of empowerment, permeation and the heart, but it is not a physical empowerment like getting drunk. In the fourth century one has arguments about the divinity of Christ, what it means to be saved through Christ. It was said that he has the


power to save us because he gives us the fruits of the spirit. This was then linked to the Trinitarian doctrine. This doctrine links ‘holy spirit’ with creation. No definite article is used. Aquinas, too, says that all three persons of the trinity are ‘spirit’. Is God the member of a class? Swinburne does not say explicitly that he is, but seventeenth-century writers say he is. Aquinas emphatically denies this, but says that God has an analogical likeness to other things. Analogies cross boundaries all the time. We say, for example, that the quality of mercy is not strained. Davis: I agree with Aquinas on most matters, but I disagree with him on this. Every thing has to be a member of a class in order to be itself. We can say that God is a member of the class of classless things, perhaps the only member. We can also say that God is member of the class of ‘all things’, that is, of all beings. Further, to invoke the fact that the Hebrews were not mind–body dualists is a frail appeal. So what? There were lots of other things they didn’t know. So mind–body dualism may still turn out to be what their language presupposes metaphysically. Sherry: I do not see the advantage of saying that God is the member of a class. What is the point of doing so? Westphal: Scotus is the source of these problems in his failure to distinguish between ‘class’ and ‘genus’. Again we can appeal to Aquinas. A genus is not a class. It has univocity in its generic dimension. Scotus wanted to say that with respect to their ‘being’, God and other things have univocity. Davis: Surely there must be some equivocity between God and other things in order for them to be related analogically. Patrick Horn: Don’t we run into the paradoxes Frege discussed when we start speaking of a class as a member of itself? Phillips: You can’t say that God is a member of the class of ‘all things’, since there is no such class. We think otherwise because we think that ‘thing’ is itself a kind of thing. We can ask, ‘What thing is that?’ and be told, ‘That thing is a table.’ But we can’t ask, and we don’t, ‘What kind of a thing is a thing?’ A thing is not a special kind of thing, and not even God could be one of them. Kellenberger: Where do we go from there? Are we going to look at talk about spirits, or look for grounds for that talk? Suppose someone does something he thought he was incapable of doing. Why should he ascribe it to be God? We have, as yet, had no explication of the nature of God’s agency. I may say that his wife smiles at him and his spirits are lifted up, but why bring in God to explain this?

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Sherry: Inspiration is a fact. People only speak of it when it is good. George Eliot spoke of being taken over by something outside herself. So even in secular contexts people speak in this way. But I agree that different people read different things into the conscience. So people have these experiences and some are within religious traditions where there is talk of discerning spirits to see whether they are of God. Are you asking me for grounds for the tradition? Kellenberger: I wasn’t asking so much about coherence, as asking whether you are concerned with truth. Sherry: Again, what do you want? People have a language which makes certain experiences possible. What more do you want? Kellenberger: Don’t you think we need support for the claim that the spirit we have received is a gift? What are we to say to the critics who do not accept this? Sherry: Do you mean critics like Nielsen who will insist on saying that Beethoven had more gifts that he realized, but that they are natural gifts? Kellenberger: I suppose we’d ask for evidence that the gift is from God? Ogden: The evidence is in what lies before us. Kellenberger: But surely Nielsen would probe and seek an account of the agency involved. Sherry: Evelyn Waugh was capable of outrageous behaviour. Someone asked how this was consistent with his being a Christian. He replied, ‘You should have seen how I behaved before I became a Christian’. Harvey: As you say, talk of Spirit is at home in certain traditions where one has agreement on the use of the term. Ogden: For example, we hear that God is spirit, and that they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. The word of God speaks of the miraculous works of the spirit. It is these which show the reality of God. We have something beyond the natural. Westphal: I want to get back to Kellenberger’s question about truth and justification, since I think it is being evaded. Let us put this in our hermeneutical context. An artist may say the muses have inspired him. The Christian may say it is God. Nielsen will say that the artist has greater gifts than he realizes. Why should we say one rather than the other? Kellenberger: Does religion have to make some effort to rule out the other contenders? Must it offer explanations in this context? Westphal: In epistemology, the internalist will insist that I have to give an account of these experiences which will show their legitimacy. The externalist thinks that I can be justified without producing such an account.


Phillips: I think that ‘externalism’ in philosophy of religion has come to mean a very odd thing, due to its still being in the grip of empiricist or Reidian epistemology. There is the common assumption that we have to start with our ideas. The problem then is how we can know that these ideas tell us about a world external to ourselves. The empiricist answer is that we infer the external world from some features of the ideas. The neo-Reidian answer is that the external world, say a tree, causes a sensation in me. That sensation immediately causes me to have a belief that I am, in fact, seeing a tree. Ideas and beliefs on this view are mental entities. It is a view which depends on the nonsensical idea that ideas can simply generate their own meanings or concepts. But concepts are capacities. We are not set over against the world with a set of mental entities, but are active in the world from the outset. I do not perceive an idea of a tree, I perceive a tree. Further, when I am climbing a tree, sitting in it, eating its apples, I do not believe I am doing so. If it were an epistemic matter, then, if someone could convince me that I am now in Swansea, I should say that it is false that I am now in a conference in Claremont. But, if that really were to happen, I’d say I was going crazy. All my yardsticks would be falling apart. So if one asked for a justification of my sureness that I am now in Claremont, I’d have nowhere to go. There is something similar going on in the requests being made to Sherry to give a justification of a form of life in which religious belief has its sense. Sherry: I wanted to say that if we wanted to understand the language of spirit, then, like any other form of discourse we have to look to the form of life to see what it amounts to. Art Hurtado: But what about the spirit in which theology and philosophy discuss the experiences of believers? Sherry: I think it ought to be the same. They want to achieve the same understanding of the life of the believer. In both cases connections are made. Art Hurtado: What sort of connections? Sherry: Connections that bring out clarity. Phillips: But there is a difference isn’t there? The theologian is the guardian of the grammar of faith, whereas the philosopher has no such obligation. He is motivated by a desire to do conceptual justice to the world in all its variety. Harvey: Well, I am not unacquainted with theology. I used to be a theologian, but am one no longer. So making connections can lead one away from something. Art Hurtado: What led you away from theology?

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Harvey: Well, I don’t want to rehearse the whole thing. Let me begin by saying that the view of Christian anthropology found in Bultmann and in Ogden’s discussion of it, is the profoundest view of human existence that I know of. But I have difficulties with it. First, Christian theology had to deal with historical matters, but it couldn’t handle the results of rigorous historical enquiry. So I’m left with Ogden’s position, but this leads to my second difficulty. Second, having looked at what Heidegger says about the groundlessness of human existence, I think it unhorses Bultmann. Third, classical theism does not even come close to meeting the problem of evil. When Marilyn McCord Adams and others tell me that God must be hidden, otherwise there would be no room for faith, I simply see this as an evasion of the issue. For reasons such as these, I do not think it is enough to say that the language of spirit empowers. Specific difficulties, such as those I have mentioned, must be faced.

6 Spirit and Truth James Kellenberger

I would like to explore several interrelated issues in religion that concern spirit and truth. These issues importantly have to do with religious language or religious discourse. They also have to do with religious practice. Inextricably bound to these two kinds of issues are further questions about the forms that religiosity or religiousness can take. In this enquiry I shall address four questions: (1) Does talk of spirit presuppose belief in the proposition “spirit/spirits exist”? (2) If religion does not presuppose the truth of the proposition “God as spirit exists,” what happens to truth in religion, and can we nevertheless speak of “true” or “false” spirit? These two questions were suggested by D.Z. Phillips, and I believe that pursuing them gets us well into the overarching issue of spirit and truth. In addition, I shall consider two further questions, both of which seem to me to be involved as well in the greater issue. They are: (3) Does religious faith presuppose belief in spirits or a spirit? (4) Do some forms of religiousness presuppose belief in spirits or a spirit? The issue of spirit and truth in a broad construction can arise for several if not all religious traditions. It can arise, for instance, for popular Hinduism, in which there is a belief in and worship of a variety of gods (even if they all are to be seen as manifestations of one deity, as for some and even many Hindus).1 It can arise for Theravada Buddhism, for which there are realms of “ghosts” and devas in the cycle of rebirth.2 Do the forms of religiousness in these traditions presuppose belief in spirits or spirit? This is a variant of our fourth question, and it gains a purchase in regard to these traditions.

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Still, in an evident way it seems to me, the overarching issue expressed in our four questions applies most urgently to the theistic traditions with their central belief in God. For this reason I shall pursue this enquiry as it relates to theistic traditions, and specifically as it relates to the Christian tradition. However this does not deny the broader application of the issue.

Question (1) Does talk of spirit presuppose belief in the proposition “spirit/spirits exist”? That is, does religious talk of spirit presuppose belief in the proposition “spirit/spirits exist?” No, I believe it does not, for it does not for Don Cupitt and Don Cupitt religiously speaks of spirit. But is his “talk” just talk? Is it merely an idiosyncratic and specially created way of talking? I suggest not. It is nourished by and reflects some deep connections to religious sensibilities. In Taking Leave of God Cupitt reflects on the meaning of God and spirituality. Spirituality has a requirement and a goal, and for Cupitt a personal God is this requirement and this goal personified. Cupitt says: … the religious requirement is for complete spiritual integrity, for purity of heart and for an entire change of life. Nothing can be kept secret or withheld from it. It is precisely what I have most carefully hidden and have kept most deeply buried that the religious requirement insists on bringing to light. I do not begin to be truly religious until I have faced things that I have hidden even from myself and quite forgotten; and in that sense the religious requirement seems to be omniscient, for it searches the heart and knows me better than I know myself. Cupitt continues: And God is not only the requirement personified, but also the goal personified. When we choose God we choose a demand upon ourselves which is a priori and overriding, namely the demand that we shall become full individuated, free, responsive and purely spiritual subjects. God is that, and when we have become what is demanded of us we are united with God. Then we are spirit as God is spirit.3 While Cupitt may be nontraditional in various ways, his understanding of what is spiritually required and the place in religion of spiritual

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development places him within a broad religious tradition. Cupitt’s focus is on spirituality, the religious practice of spirituality and personal spiritual development, as found in various traditions. Cupitt speaks of “Christian Buddhism,” which would nourish the “admirable and beautiful religious attitudes, values [and] practices,” although he appreciates it would be rejected by “a traditional believer who attaches importance to creeds and orthodoxy.”4 The idea that there may be spiritual progress and essentially the same spiritual progress in different religious traditions is not held by Cupitt alone. John Hick, who disagrees with Cupitt’s general nonrealism, would agree on this point; and he agrees that valuable spiritual development can take place in a nonrealist as well as a realist religious orientation.5 Cupitt’s thinking about spirits and spirituality, then, we should allow, connects to several religious traditions, and to the Christian tradition in its mystical and devotional strains. Yet for Cupitt the God of spirituality is not a being that exists independently of religious practice and belief; for Cupitt it is not presupposed by spiritual practice that God exists as a “spirit.”6 Rather, God is spiritual practice personified, and spirit is better understood as a capacity of human beings, except that “… it is not quite correct to speak of spirit merely as a capacity, for one ought to add it is an extraordinary capacity of persons,” says Cupitt.7 At times Cupitt sees himself as providing a “new religious meaning of God,” and at other times he believes he is reclaiming the original religious meaning.8 My point is that even if Cupitt is giving a new and nontraditional meaning to God he continues to speak of spirituality and of spirit in an identifiably religious way. For Cupitt, then, we may speak of spirit without our doing so presupposing belief in the proposition “spirit/spirits exist.” Moreover, for Cupitt, spirits or pure spirits do not exist. For Cupitt the issue of the truth of the existence of God as spirit is meaningful in that it can be addressed, and in fact he argues that it is not true that God or any being exists as pure spirit. He asks: … if spirit is a supernatural capacity (namely the capacity to exceed one’s natural capacities, the power of self-transcendence) are there any beings who are purely spirits – just spiritual, so that their being spirit is their essence? And he replies with this reasoning: … . Surely only a being that is already something else, that already has a nature, can have superadded to it the power of self-transcendence?


So the idea of an individual pure spirit appears to be an empty idea. There cannot be a free-floating pure spirit. There can only be something’s becoming spirit. So spirit exists only in persons who have become spirit. In them it is self-transcendence, but it is not a transcendent being apart from them.9 The God of whom Cupitt is “taking leave” is this transcendent God or spirit conceived to exist apart from spiritual development. To be noted is the role of becoming in Cupitt’s thinking. Spirit as a mode of self-transcendence is what persons have a capacity for becoming. There is no spirit without becoming, he says. Here, regarding becoming, there is an interesting near-parallel with Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard, the father of existentialism, existence is the unavoidable state of human beings, which is a condition of striving and becoming.10 In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript at one point Kierkegaard says, “God does not exist, he is eternal.”11 D.Z. Phillips observes that in saying this Kierkegaard is saying “the Hebrew-Christian conception of God is not a conception of a being among beings.”12 Kierkegaard is certainly saying and insisting that God is not a being among human beings, since God is not a striving becoming being, as human beings are. It is for this reason, for Kierkegaard, that God does not have existence, rather God is eternal and unchanging. I do not mean to say that Kierkegaard thought there was no truth to there being a God or to the proposition “there is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” For Kierkegaard in the Postscript, as I read him, there is the eternal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the very God who entered into time, was born, and became human; and, for Kierkegaard, believing this is involved in believing what he calls “the absurd” – that the eternal became temporal – which is the “objective uncertainty” that faith must embrace. In the Postscript Kierkegaard defines faith as “an objective uncertainty held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness” and the absurd is the ultimate objective uncertainty, which religious faith holds fast.13 This way of thinking about faith committed Kierkegaard to the truth, in Kierkegaard’s terms, the “objective truth,” of the proposition that God as spirit exists. Still for Kierkegaard, as for Cupitt, becoming has a religious significance: for Kierkegaard striving and becoming is the human lot and the religious attitude of faith carries this becoming to its highest pitch, and for Cupitt spirit is the extraordinary capacity for becoming self-transcendent. This remains even though for Cupitt there is no propositional truth for “spirits exist” (or for “pure spirits exist”) and no truth for “God as spirit exists”, while for Kierkegaard there is and must be.


Question (2) If religion does not presuppose the truth of the proposition “God as spirit exists,” what happens to truth in religion, and can we nevertheless speak of “true” or “false” spirit? For Cupitt there is no truth to the proposition “God as spirit exists.” It has no “objective truth,” we might say, using Kierkegaard’s category. But there are other kinds of truth. There is, to use again Kierkegaard’s categories, “subjective truth,” which is not the truth of the proposition believed but the truth of the way in which it is believed, the “how” of the belief, its passion and commitment. In the Postscript Kierkegaard contrasts a person who lives in Christendom with an idol worshipper, and he rhetorically asks: If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, the house of the true God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting on the image of an idol – where then is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshipping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and therefore is in truth worshipping an idol.14 Thus Kierkegaard’s parable of the idol worshipper, and the answer he expects to his rhetorical question is clear: “more truth” is with the idol worshipper. It is the idol worshipper who has more truth, for he prays in a true spirit, while the member of Christendom, although he believes what is objectively true, has less truth, for he “prays in untruth” (or “prays in a false spirit” in the Swenson and Lowrie translation).15 The Kierkegaardian lesson here, we should appreciate, is not that there is no objective truth about God, but that praying in a true spirit does not require having the true – the objectively true – idea or conception of God. Kierkegaard is not denying there is a true conception of God. As an ordained Lutheran he could have filled it in with little hesitation. In the Postscript, in this parable, his point is that truth in religion is not a matter of having the objectively true conception: it is praying with a true spirit, having the right subjectivity. What about going further and denying there is objective truth or propositional truth (or cognitive truth, as it was called in earlier discussions of the status of “God-statements”)? Can such truth be denied for even “there is a God” and yet a viable form of religion be maintained?


There is Cupitt’s form of spirituality. But could there be forms of religious belief with such a denial? Here perhaps we should recall the religious thinking of R.B. Braithwaite and how his expressionist view of religious belief and language was thought to have relinquished all of religion or at least to have hopelessly reduced it. For Braithwaite, we will recall, religious belief came to be the “intention to behave in a certain way (a moral belief ) together with the entertainment of certain stories associated with the intention in the mind of the believer”. For Christians, one of these stories would be the story of the good Samaritan. Religious utterances or “assertions” – like “God is love” – came to be the expression of an intention to follow such a religious policy of behavior in one’s life.16 It may not be surprising that Cupitt, though he does not mention Braithwaite, says of religious language about an “objective personal God” that, though the “old language is still used, the modern believer should use it expressively rather than descriptively.”17 For Braithwaite there is religious belief, but it is very different from propositional belief that something is true. Taking up religious belief for him was a matter of the reorientation of the will, as he said, essentially a reorientation toward an agapeistic way of life, not a matter of coming to believe some things hitherto not believed are true.18 R.M. Hare, in a lecture that he gave at Yale Divinity School in 1968, took the occasion to reflect on Braithwaite’s Christianity. He told this story: It has been maliciously said of Professor Braithwaite that he may have given a true account of the faith of King’s Senior Combination Room, but not of that of the saints and martyrs. But it needs to be asked … what it was in their beliefs that made them into saints and martyrs, and whether mankind in the future can be got to go on believing in this … . Some years ago, Braithwaite came to talk to a college society in Oxford, and told us the story of his religious life, and how he came to be baptized, and about his religious beliefs. At the end of the meeting, he bravely asked if he might take a vote on the question whether he was a Christian or not. Unfortunately I cannot remember the exact figures; but they were distributed fairly evenly between “Yes,” “No,” and “Don’t know.” But what was more significant was this. I had the strong impression … that, on the whole, the people who said he was a Christian were the Christians, and the people who said he was not were the non-Christians.19 Brian Moore in his novel Catholics provides a scenario that widens the perspective that Hare’s comments on Braithwaite offer us. Moore’s novel


was published in 1972 but set in the future, after “Vatican IV,” in a time when there is a strong ecumenical movement, and Christianity and Buddhism are drawing together with the approval and encouragement of the Church. It has come to the attention of Rome that the old Latin Mass and private confession, now forbidden and judged reactionary, are being followed by the monks at Muck Abbey on a small island off the coast of Ireland. The Father General of the Order dispatches Father Kinsella to the abbey to correct the situation. It is the religiousness of Father Kinsella that is relevant here. In conversation with the Abbot, who is closer to the older forms of worship, Father Kinsella says, “I suppose the Mass to me, as to most Catholics today, is a symbolic act. … Therefore I do not, in the old sense, think of God being present, there in the tabernacle.” The Abbot remarks in reply, “I think I was born before my time. A man does not have to have such a big dose of faith anymore, does he?” Kinsella reflects but does not say that “today’s best thinking saw the disappearance of the church building as a place of worship in favor of a more generalized community concept, a group gathering in a meeting to celebrate God-in-others.” Kinsella does not articulate his thought because, he decides, the Abbot may not be “ready for that step.”20 Kinsella’s teacher and hero, Father Hartmann, was a man who became a priest and joined the Order not so much for the sake of “souls” as for “the good of mankind,” as Kinsella tells the Abbot. He had taken Holy Orders as a means toward social action and revolution in South America. Hartmann taught Kinsella that “despite its history and dependence on myth and miracle” the Church today exists “as the quintessential structure through which social revolution can be brought to certain areas of the globe.” Though his body was finally crippled by Brazilian torturers, by virtue of his social action, Hartmann, Kinsella knew, had become “a twentieth-century Bolívar to [a] generation of South American revolutionary priests and nuns.”21 Moore’s Father Kinsella does not make a pronouncement on the truth or the cognitive status of the claim that “an objective personal God exists,” but we can well imagine that he and Father Hartmann, as well as the Father General of the Order, would be in tacit agreement on that score. Father Kinsella exhibits a form of spirituality different from Cupitt’s spirituality of personal development and perhaps closer to Braithwaite’s agapeistic belief, but yet different. Kinsella’s religiousness is ecumenical in its liturgical dimension and sensibility, and in its practical aspiration toward social revolution it is more like a theology of liberation. Yet all of these forms of religiousness, we can allow, may express a form of “subjective truth,” consistently with their denying the “objective truth” of the claim that God as spirit exists.


Question (3) Does religious faith presuppose belief in spirits or a spirit? Braithwaite’s fellow Christians judged him to be a Christian, but did he have faith? Father Kinsella has dedication and social commitment, but does he have faith? Does faith require belief in the existence of God as spirit, where spirit or pure spirit is a being that exists independently of religious belief and practice, so that if Braithwaite’s conative religious belief and Cupitt’s spirituality were to die from the earth God would yet exist? For those traditional and orthodox believers Cupitt refers to, faith does have this requirement. It does for Kierkegaard as well. For Kierkegaard in the Postscript, faith requires belief in such a God (the eternal who became temporal), for faith is precisely the passion of embracing in belief the supreme objective uncertainty that this eternal became temporal. However, perhaps not quite all forms of faith presuppose such a belief in God’s existence. Miguel de Unamuno’s agonic faith may not. In The Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno wrote Those who believe that they believe in God, but without any passion in their heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, without an element of despair even in their consolation, believe only in the God-idea, not in God Himself.22 Unamuno, who was born nine years after Kierkegaard’s death, learned Danish to read Ibsen but went on to read Kierkegaard. Clearly his thinking about agonic faith is greatly influenced by Kierkegaard. But there is a chasmic difference between the two. For Kierkegaard, one with faith strives to hold fast an objective uncertainty in belief and succeeds. For Unamuno, one with agonic faith may fail to believe. Unamuno’s short story “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr” is instructive on this point. In Unamuno’s story Don Manuel is the priest in a small Spanish village, Valverde de Lucerna. He gives his life to the village, supporting and nourishing the faith of his parishioners by his words of encouragement and by his own selfless life. However, he has a secret. His secret is that he cannot believe. He falls silent at the final verse of the Creed. He trembles when he gives communion.23 Don Manuel struggles with his uncertainty and anguish, but cannot believe. Yet on one construction of Unamuno’s agonic faith Don Manuel nevertheless has faith, by virtue of his passion. If so, his faith does not presuppose his belief in God as an


objectively existing spirit, even though we must acknowledge that his passion and anguish arose from his struggle to hold that very belief. Furthermore, we should observe, if D.Z. Phillips is right about the general character of religious belief, it does not involve accepting the truth of “there is a God,” understood as an existence-claim about an object or being in the universe. Religious belief does not involve a claim like the claim that there is one more star than we thought.24 As Phillips says, “Coming to see that there is a God involves seeing a new meaning in one’s life, and being given a new understanding.”25 Taking up religious belief, for Phillips as for Wittgenstein, is taking up a belief that regulates in one’s life, affecting one’s actions and affections.26 It is to enter into a form of life, to use Wittgenstein’s term, but it is not to make an existenceclaim about God. Phillips is not offering a new understanding of the meaning of God, as Cupitt is (as he sometimes says), and he is not identifying a special form of faith, like Unamuno’s agonic faith. He is offering an understanding of ordinary or traditional religious belief in God, or at least of one of its main forms. While we may have reservations about accepting Phillips’ analysis of religious belief as applying to all manifestations of religious belief in God, it would be hard to show that it applies to none.

Question (4) Do some forms of religiousness presuppose belief in spirits or a spirit? If I am right in what I have said so far, then not all forms of religiousness presuppose belief in spirits or a spirit. Cupitt’s form of spirituality does not. Braithwaite’s does not, and Father Kinsella’s does not. Not even all forms of faith do, given Unamunos’s agonic faith in my construction, nor do the forms of religious faith to which Phillips’ understanding of religious belief applies. But Kierkegaard’s model of faith in the Postscript does, and not it alone. Let us consider the case of one of the martyrs. I have in mind not Unamuno’s martyr, Don Manuel, and not Moore’s Father Hartmann (who, though he did not die for his religious cause yet suffered greatly for it), but the more traditional kind of martyr that Hare must have had in mind. Let us consider Maximus the Confessor, the seventh-century martyr who died for his faith. Maximus had a faith that turned on his not denying a particular belief about an objectively existing God; he died for his belief that Christ had two wills, one divine and one human, not one will. This belief was no theological quibble for Maximus. Christ’s having two wills meant for Maximus that in the Redemption


our sinful human wills were healed; if Christ had had but one divine will, and not also a human will, our human wills would not have been saved, given the “ancient patristic principle that whatever was not assumed in the Incarnation was not healed in the Redemption.”27 Maximus was defending the spiritual validity of the Church and its redemptive teaching in holding fast his belief in Christ’s having a human will. Maximus would seem to be quintessentially “a traditional believer who attaches importance to creeds and orthodoxy,” to use Cupitt’s phrase. But moreover, Maximus’ apparently fine point of doctrine was inseparable from his own spirituality and was the fulcrum of his own faith’s commitment. Well, this side of martyrdom, however, there are more commonplace forms of religiousness that might be considered. It does seem that a number of religious persons follow various traditional religious practices that they could hardly follow without believing it to be true that God exists – that is, exists independently of their religious practice and belief and, in this sense, objectively. For such traditional believers, though they may not heed the creedal formulations of orthodoxy all that carefully, it would seem a number of familiar religious practices require some kind of belief in an objective or independently existing God. Consider religious worship and confession. In accord with one clear traditional way of understanding them, they are worship of God and confession to God and so internally require a tacit belief that there is an independently existing God. Similarly, petitionary prayer to God, traditionally understood, seems to require the same tacit belief. And, as Peter Geach observed, even the Lord’s Prayer has a petitionary element.28 Even nonpetitionary prayer expressing only acceptance of God’s will, if it is not an apostrophe, is prayer to God, and if prayer is colloquy, then there is something believed to be received in return, if one is not talking to oneself. To be sure prayer can be understood as meditation, and the religious practices I have named can be ritualistically followed without belief, but it remains that there is a traditional way of believers understanding their participation in them that connects them internally to belief in a God that exists over and above the practices themselves. Let us consider giving thanks to God in more detail. Cupitt, as I observed, recognizes that there are “admirable and beautiful religious attitudes, values [and] practices.” These ought to be retained, he believes. One of these he describes as follows: “In spite of all the ugliness and cruelty in the world, it is good that one should at least sometimes experience and express cosmic awe, thanksgiving and love.”29 What would such thanksgiving be in Cupitt’s form of spirituality? It could not


be a giving thanks to God for what God has given, for that would require believing God to be an objectively existing being distinct from religious practice. It could be an experience and expression of thanksgiving as an undirected feeling of thankfulness, as one might feel one ought to thank someone for one’s good luck. Such a feeling is coherent and understandable, but it is not yet giving thanks in the sense that informs the more traditional practice of giving thanks to God. The more traditional practice retains the common sense conceptual connections which have it that if one thanks another for something, then it is believed that there is another and that that other has in some manner given something. In particular, in the traditional religious practice of giving thanks, it is believed that something was given by God and believers offer thanks to God for that gift. If God is thanked for one’s recovery from illness or for the food before one, or for one’s returning home safely in the evening, within the traditional practice I am citing, it is believed that thanks are due to God because these are gifts of God. Although the believer may not presume to speculate on the nature or means of God’s activity, the coherence of his or her giving thanks requires a belief that there is a God to be thanked and that thanks are due to God for what was given. In nonreligious settings, when these conceptual connections are severed, the feeling of thankfulness that remains is like feeling generous but not giving anything to anyone; in such a case, there may be an echo of the feeling that goes with generosity, but full generosity, we should say, is lacking. In a religious setting, where the traditional practice of thanking God that I am citing is followed, not being able to believe there is a God to be thanked can become a crisis of faith.30 In Moore’s novel the Abbot of Muck, for a long time before Kinsella’s visit, has periodically experienced what amount to crises of faith. These periods were moments or hours or even days when he could only stare at the altar, and, as Moore puts it, he knew “the hell of those deprived of God. When [these times] came upon him he could not pray, prayers seemed false or without any meaning at all.”31 What is it for the Abbot to feel the hell of those deprived of God? God is not present when he tries to pray: when he tries to say the words “Our Father Who Art in Heaven,” there is no Father in Heaven, as Moore puts it.32 Kierkegaard’s member of Christendom prays in untruth or falsely, though he believes in God, believes the true God exists. The Abbot in his moments of crisis cannot believe there is a Father in Heaven, and prayers thereby seem false or without meaning. The failure or crisis of faith that we find in Moore’s portrayal of the Abbot is not precisely that which Kierkegaard shows us. It is much nearer to a failure of belief that there is a God at all.

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James Kellenberger

What emerges from these examples, then, is that there are different forms of religiousness, and different ways of understanding faith, connecting in different ways to belief in spirits or a spirit, and thus in different ways to belief in the existence of an independent and objectively existing God. It is too much to say that all forms of religiousness require such a belief, but it is similarly too much to say that none do. John Hick speaks of a contemporary Copernican revolution in theology, which allows us to abandon the old theologically Ptolemaic vision of religion that puts one’s particular religion at the center of the universe of faiths. The new Copernican vision, for Hick, allows us to see the various world religions as turning around a central divine reality. Borrowing Hick’s metaphor, perhaps we can allow that there is a galaxy of religious forms in the religious universe, each with its own center. This image does not deny that the galaxy itself has a divine center or presence that orders its phenomena, nor does it require that all the forms that constitute that galaxy require a belief in that center or presence.

Notes 1. John A. Hutchinson, Paths of Faith (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), 169; and Nancy M. Martin, “Introduction: Inter-Religious Understanding,” in Ethics in the World Religions (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2001), 6–7. 2. I.B. Horner, “Buddhism: The Theravada,” in The Concise Encyclopedia of Living Faiths, ed. R.C. Zaehner (London: Hutchinson, 1977), 275. 3. Don Cupitt, Taking Leave of God (London: SCM Press, 1980), 86 and 88. 4. Ibid., 81–3. 5. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 201–2. 6. Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, 94–5. 7. Ibid., 88 (Cupitt’s emphasis). 8. Ibid., 84 and 91. 9. Ibid., 89. 10. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Vol. I, Text, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) e.g., 86 and 92. 11. Ibid., 332. 12. D.Z. Phillips, “Faith, Scepticism, and Religious Understanding,” in Faith and Philosophical Enquiry (New York, Schoken Books, 1971), 17–18. 13. Kierkegaard, Postscript, 203, 210, and 611. 14. Ibid., 201. 15. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 180. 16. R.B. Braithwaite, “An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief,” in The Existence of God, ed. John Hick (New York: Macmillan; London: CollierMacmillan, 1964), 239, 240, 242, 244, and 250.

Spirit and Truth 143 17. Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, 93. 18. Braithwaite, “An Empiricist’s View of the Nature of Religious Belief,” 241–2. 19. R.M. Hare, “The Simple Believer,” in Religion and Morality, ed. Gene Outka and John P. Reeder, Jr (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1973), 426. 20. Brian Moore, Catholics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972), 70–1. 21. Ibid., 24–5 and 44. 22. Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Dover, 1954), 193. 23. Miguel de Unamuno, “Saint Manuel Bueno, Martyr,” trans. Anthony Kerrigan, in Great Spanish Stories, ed. Angel Flores (New York: Modern Library, 1956), 357, 369, 375, and 378. 24. D.Z. Phillips, “Religion and Epistemology: some Contemporary Confusions,” in Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, 131. 25. Phillips, “Faith Scepticism, and Religious Understanding,” p. 18. 26. D.Z. Phillips, “Philosophy and Religious Education,” in Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, p. 159, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lectures on Religious Belief,” in Lectures & Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, compiled from notes taken by Yorick Smythies, Rush Rhees and James Taylor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966), 54. 27. Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings, trans. George C. Berthold, intro. Jaroslav Pelican (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), Introduction, 4. 28. Peter Geach, “Praying for Things to Happen,” in God and the Soul (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 86. 29. Cupitt, Taking Leave of God, 82. 30. Some see a problem here, however. What happens if we ask such a traditional believer if she or he believes there is a God? Say we ask this question just after having joined her or him in giving thanks to God? We may not get a resounding affirmative in reply. We may get a blank look. From this blank look we should not infer that the traditional believer does not believe there is a God. But neither should we infer that she or he does believe that there is a God. The blank look comes from our question not making much sense in the context. Since the question does not make sense, the reply that “of course I believe there is a God” is similarly senseless or at least curious. The point here is that if we cannot understand someone’s saying something (the meaning of what is said), we can hardly understand its being true. There is no language game into which it fits, as we might put it. If we vary the context, however, this difficulty disappears and we can understand the meaning of what is said when a traditional believer says that she or he believes that there is a God, and we can understand its being true. Imagine a conference on “Christianity Old and New” attended by Christians of various stripes. Some follow Don Cupitt’s lead, some are like Father Kinsella, and some are like our traditional believers. Here, if the communication has attained a degree of intimacy and frankness, the question whether one believes there is a God, and its affirmative, or negative, reply make sense. Nor need we go this far. “Do you believe that God exists?” is a question that can arise in more than one context. After the course is over, students may ask their guarded Philosophy of Religion instructor this question. Or a man, realizing that he does not know if his friend of many years believes in God or not, may ask this question of him.

144 James Kellenberger And think of our saying of traditional believers of this sort that they give thanks to God and so believe that there is a God. Are we in the position of not understanding our saying of these traditional believers that they believe in God, but yet understanding it to be true of them. I do not think so. It seems to me that if we regard those who pray to God, or worship God, or confess to God, in the traditional way before us, we will misrepresent their religious belief, as they understand it themselves, unless we say of them that they believe there is a God (the God to whom they pray). These religious believers, when they say the Creed and proclaim “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth … .” are committing themselves to the belief that there is a God. Perhaps they are committing themselves to much more, and perhaps others say the words ritualistically without commitment, but the commitment to belief on the part of these traditional believers remains. This language game, or these language games, we may say, are played. 31. Moore, Catholics, 81. 32. Ibid., 82.

Voices in discussion 6 Kellenberger: The answer to my first question is that talk of spirit does not presuppose that spirits exist. Don Cupitt is certainly religious, he displays religious sensibilities, and talks of purity of heart. Like Hick, Cupitt wants us to make progress in our understanding of religion, but he goes further than Hick in an important respect: he says that “pure spirit” does not exist. For him, it is an empty idea. The life of the spirit is a matter of “becoming.” This is true for Kierkegaard, too, in the Postscript. The task of becoming a Christian has its sense over against a God who is eternal and unchanging. But whereas, for Kierkegaard, the proposition “God exists” is true, Cupitt denies that the proposition “God/Spirit exists” has meaning. The answer to my second question is “Yes”. For Kierkegaard, even though a believer may believe in objective truth, if he does not pray in the right spirit, he is further from God than someone who does, though his gaze is fixed on an idol. So the belief in objective truth may be correct, and the “spirit” be false. So even though religion does not presuppose the truth of the proposition “God as spirit exists”, we can still speak of true and false spirit. What of my third question: does religious faith itself presuppose belief in spirits or a spirit? In at least one conception it does not. Unamuno has an agonic faith, but can’t believe. For Kierkegaard, as I have said, God’s existence is presupposed. Unamuno doesn’t say that everyone has the kind of faith his is talking about, but Phillips and Winch seem to be


offering general answers to the nature of faith. This is why their critics have said that their work, which claims to be descriptive, is, in fact, prescriptive. Like Wittgenstein, Phillips insists that God’s independence from me is not like that of a physical object. God does not exist as an object among objects. So belief in God seems to become a regulative power in people’s lives. My fourth question asks whether certain forms of religiousness presuppose belief in spirits or spirit. I do not see how anything other than an affirmative answer can be given to these questions. It is difficult to see why one would pray if one didn’t believe that there is a God to pray to. How one could thank God or ask God for anything if one did not believe that there was a God independent of the practice in which the thanking and petitioning occur? My conclusion is that there is a galaxy of religious forms in a religious universe. The presence of such a galaxy need not be a denial of a source which explains this phenomenon, nor that every form within the galaxy presupposes belief in such a source. Harvey: The problems of philosophy of religion are often the problems of the Christian religion. Why equate religion with “Spirit”? Why shouldn’t a theologian deny “spirit”? After all, Buddhists do not believe in a transcendent spirit. But some philosophers talk as if the denial of “spirit” would be the denial of God. Cupitt doesn’t deny “spirit”, but wants to take leave of God. No one denies that he is religious, but is he a good theologian? He certainly has passion, but does anyone want to defend the notion of “pure spirit”? Suppose we substitute “Fuhrer” for “God”? Can we rely on the presence of passion to deem it genuine allegiance? We need some criteria for truth here. Unamuno struggles with passion, but I cannot identify with him. Isn’t the emphasis on “passion” and “spirit” a way of avoiding the issue of truth? Religiosity is not enough. We must have a normative view of faith, otherwise, we won’t know what we’re talking about. Sure, you can pray without doing theology or philosophy, but normative questions can’t be avoided. All sorts of people have passion – they scare the hell out of me. Contentment with passion weakens the theological task of elucidating “what is the case.” I’m with analytic philosophy of religion on that issue – what are the facts? There are forms of faith that require something “out there,” whether you call God a “thing,” a proper name, or not. If you accommodate norms out of existence, then theology can say what it likes. So it goes as a Christian sermon. Kellenberger: One simple answer to the question of why I talked about “spirits” is because that’s the term of reference I was given for my paper.


But I did not, as you imply, give up on objective truth. I said that in Kierkegaard’s case, the existence of God as an objective truth is presupposed. But it is not this presupposition which makes faith faith. Phillips: I want to raise some exegetical points. I do not see the distinction in Kierkegaard between objective truth and faith. I read him as making a grammatical distinction. After all, he says explicitly that God does not exist, but that he is eternal. The point, I take it, is that “eternity” is not a matter of “existence” at all. Kellenberger: I don’t see that. Of course the believer does not say that God does not exist, because of course, he is eternal. But it doesn’t follow that you can’t say that God exists. Phillips: That misses the grammatical point. If “eternity” is a separate conceptual category, then talk of “existence” and “non-existence” is ruled out. Eternity is not matter of duration at all. But I don’t want to quarrel over labels. People do say that they believe that God exists, and others say that they do not. The task then will be to explicate the grammar of “exists” in these contexts. What does it mean to believe in an eternal God? What does it mean not to believe in such a God? At this point, I have another worry. You say that faith presupposes the existence of God. You ask what would be the sense of a religious practice, such as prayer, if it did not presuppose the existence of a God independent of it. I think this harbors a great deal of confusion. I am reminded of O.K. Bouwsma’s humorous suggestion that certain books in the Bible have been lost. They were the pre-Genesis books. Their loss was most unfortunate because they contained all the presuppositions on which the rest of the Bible is based. His point was, of course, that the sense of religion is to be found in practice, not in anything it presupposes. I am reminded also of a conversation on Wittgenstein between John Searle and Bryan Magee in the latter’s The Great Philosophers. Having observed, rightly, that language-games are conceptually distinct forms of discourse, Searle forgets this when he turns to religion and says that believers wouldn’t play this language-game, for example, pray, unless they first thought that there was a God to pray to. But that cannot be right, since it is only in terms of these language-games that we come to understand what it means to pray to God. Belief in God’s existence, therefore, cannot be the presupposition of them. Kellenberger: I certainly do not want to suggest that God exists as we do. That is why we are in a relation of “becoming” with respect to him. But that doesn’t mean that we do not presuppose his existence in this relation to him. It is simply that we seldom have occasion to state this fact.


Phillips: I don’t think that will do. By the way, this theme came to fruition in Wittgenstein’s last great work On Certainty, where he is concerned with the sureness in our language-games. The point I have made about religious practice is not peculiar to it. It applies as much to the so-called belief in the reality of physical objects. We do not sit on chairs, climb stairs, walk on the ground, because we presuppose the reality of physical objects. Rather, the reality of physical objects is held fast, gets its sense, from these activities. What is more, certain facts in certain circumstances are simply not questioned. As I speak now, the question of whether I am in a conference in Claremont simply does not arise. If it were to arise, if I could become convinced that I am now in Swansea, that I hear my wife express relief that I recognize her, telling me that for more than a day I have been acting as if I were in a conference, talking to people called Ogden, Harvey, and so on, I’d be terrified, because I’d think I was going insane. What this shows is that we are not related to “being in the world” as the epistemic knowers of that fact. If it were a matter of epistemology, then I’d have to say, on finding out, or being told that I was in Swansea, that the proposition, “I am now speaking at a conference in Claremont” is false, whereas, as I say, what I would actually think is that I was going insane, since all my yardsticks would be breaking up. It is important to recognize that Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is a work in logic, not in epistemology. Harvey: But in On Certainty Wittgenstein is concerned with knowledge and belief. Why, otherwise, is he so concerned to discuss the views of G.E. Moore, and the claim that Moore knows that he is sitting near a tree, or that he has a hand. He does have epistemic concerns. Phillips: No, that is true with the first part of On Certainty, where Wittgenstein seems to be looking for a substitute for Moore’s use of “know.” If Moore says, “I know that I have a hand,” he can be asked how he knows. Moore acknowledged that any fact he cited would be less certain than the claim it was meant to support. So Wittgenstein searches for a substitute word for “know” which captures our sureness. He discusses a number, but they all prove to be unsatisfactory. Do I believe, trust, assume, take for granted, presuppose, that I am speaking now in a conference at Claremont? He rejects all these alternatives as eggshells still sticking to him from his early views, and comes to the conclusion that he has been looking in entirely the wrong direction. We are not concerned with presuppositions. Our mistake is to try to give a positive account, in some epistemic way, to account for matters which do not arise. Rush Rhees, in his forthcoming book on On Certainty, says that the


best way of understanding the sureness in our language-games is to imagine that sureness withdrawn. Ogden: But, surely, we presuppose matters all the time. Of course, we do not state what we presuppose in propositions, but our presuppositions are implicit in everything we do. von der Ruhr: The questions we are discussing are not only not epistemological, they are not psychological either. We are talking of logic. If we want to understand talk of the language of spirit we have to look at the form or the grammar of this discourse. Look at belief in God. Part of Cupitt’s point is that in expressing it we are confessing something. The point is not to deny the reality or independence of God, but to recognize that we do not know, in advance, what that “reality” or “independence” comes to without looking at the discourse in question. Kellenberger says in his paper that we wouldn’t pray unless we presupposed that there was a God to pray to who is independent of the practice of praying. In one sense, of course, that is true, but, so far, we have not said what this comes to. After all, in confession, for example, it is not like giving some distant relative information he lacks. God does not get to know something about us in that way. Kellenberger: Cupitt speaks of “taking leave of God.” He is trying to reform religious practices and give an account of them shorn of the presuppositions and postulates of philosophical realism. All I am doing is to recognize this fact. I am recognizing that there are forms of religion which require God’s existence to be independent of religious practice, as independent as the existence of mountains, and that sometimes religious belief comes to have new meanings. Phillips: Again, that misses the logical point. “Independent of the practice” doesn’t mean anything. Practice, what we do, when it is a conceptually distinct form of speaking and acting, shows what “independence” comes to. We are not talking of the presuppositions of our thinking, but of what is involved in our thinking. Min: I do not think we give up a reason in matters of faith, despite what we have said about the confusions of historical approximation to it. Faith itself is a post-critical experience. It is not established by reason, but we can use reason up to that point. Thus, although faith is not established by reason, it is not against reason. So, if “God” is defined as “Spirit,” we must ask whether faith is a propositional matter. If we say that God’s existence is “independent” we must ask what is the mode of existence involved. In this way we are exploring the nature of the objective ground of faith.


Kellenberger: I agree that the mode of objectivity would have to be spelled out. But why do I need to go into that? I did not see it as part of my task. Phillips: But, surely, it was part of the task, otherwise we will go on saying, with Alston, that “p is true if and only if p”, without investigating the grammar of “p”. It then looks as though there is a logic which determines what can and cannot be said, whereas, by contrast, in On Certainty, Wittgenstein asks whether he is not getting nearer and nearer to saying that logic cannot be described, but that we will see it if we pay attention to our practices. Davis: I see no objection to the generality of Alston’s claim that “p is true if and only if p”, since, in that claim, by virtue of its very generality, “p” has no grammar. Art Hurtado: In Sherry’s paper there was a reference to Wittgenstein’s remark that although pain is not a “something”, it is not a “nothing” either. I think that remark bears, not only on Sherry’s concerns, but on Kellenberger’s too, since isn’t there a parallel if we say, “Although “spirit” is not a something, it’s not a “nothing” either”? What kind of distinction are we drawing here? There seems to be distinction between flesh and spirit. Davis: “The flesh” refers to the body under sin. Art Hurtado: But if that is so, to talk of “the spirit” and its contrast with “the flesh,” is to mark a moral, rather than an ontological distinction. Paul in Galatians talks of “walking in the spirit.” So why, then, in philosophy do we go after an ontological category, and try to make God as Spirit a person without a body? Davis: If you cite Paul, he does speak of being away from the body, but present to the Lord. Isn’t that some kind of dualism? Ogden: I don’t see why. A spiritual body would be a body infused by the spirit. George Newlands: That brings us back to my earlier remarks about “participation in the life of the spirit,” which takes us away from the idea of an ontology which we must presuppose in order to make sense of such participation.

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Name Index Abraham, 73, 77, 79, 81, 86–90, 114, 134 Adam, 80–1 Ahriman, 15 Alston, W., 149 Anselm, Saint, 44, 116 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 114, 116, 118–19, 121, 125–7 Aristotle, 70, 87, 111 Augustine, Saint, 80, 116 Augustus, 53 Barth, K., 61, 100, 109 Bath Sheba, 66 Beethoven, 128 Binning, H., 118 Bloch, E., 26 Bolivar, S., 137 Bouwsma, O.K., 146 Brahman, 14 Braithwaite, R.B., 136–9 Buddha, 5 Bultmann, R., 5, 91–112, 120, 129–30 Caligula, 19 Calvin, J.,110 Capitolinus, J., 19 Carroll, L., 119 Celsus, 117 Churchland, P., 123 Christ, 5 Copernicus, N., 142 Cupitt, D., 132–40, 144–5, 148 Dali, S., 44 Dennett, D., 123 Derrida, J., 31–2, 81 Descartes, R., 32, 65, 69, 114–15, 125 Dodd, C.H., 121–2 Drewermann, E., 41, 52, 54–7, 63 Durkheim, E., 24

Edwards, P., 114, 116, 119–21, 123, 125 Eliezer, 77–9 Eliot, G., 127 Eliot, T.S., 109 Engelmann, P., 41 Evans, D., 116 Eve, 80–1 Feuerbach, L., 36 Fichte, J.G., 68 Flew, A., 115, 119–21, 123, 125–6 Frege, G., 127 Freud, S., 63 Friedrich, C.D., 41 Geach, P., 140 Hare, R.M., 136 Hebrews, 5 Hegel, G.W.F., 1–2, 8–12, 14–15, 20–33, 35–8, 64–5, 68–9, 71–2, 77 Heidegger, M., 33, 93, 108–11 Herodotus, 16 Herrmann, W., 93 Hick, J., 61, 142, 144 Hobbes, T., 115 Hume, D., 33 Husserl, E., 65, 80 Isaac, 77–90, 114, 134 Isaiah, 122 Jacob, 114, 134 Jacobi, F.H., 47 James, W., 122 Jantzen, G., 123 Jaspers, K., 108–9 Jesus, 7, 21, 54, 56, 63, 101–2, 112, 117 Joseph, 53 Josephus, F., 53 Jung, C.G., 120–1 151

152 Name Index Kant, I., 3, 22, 31, 45–51, 55, 65, 69, 77, 115 Kierkegaard, S., 2–5, 31–3, 36, 38, 63, 64–8, 70, 74, 76, 78, 81–2, 86–90, 109, 112, 134–5, 138–9, 140–1, 146 Lampe, G., 117 Levinas, E., 31–3, 78, 80–2 Locke, J., 113, 115–16, 118, 121, 125 Luther, M., 110–11 Lyotard, J.-F., 31 Magee, B., 146 Marcel, G., 26 Marion, J.-L., 82 Mary, Virgin, 53, 81 Marx, K., 24, 32–3, 35–6, 108, 112 Maximus, 139–40 McCord-Adams, M., 130 Méjasson, P., 42 Micah, 53 Moltmann, J., 26, 36 Montesquieu, C., 65 Moore, B., 136–7, 139, 141 Moore, G.E., 147 Nathan, 66 Nero, 19 Niebuhr, R., 36 Nielsen, K., 120–1, 123, 125–6, 128 Nietzsche, F., 7, 70–1 Novalis, 41, 45 Novatian, 118 O’Donnell, J., 39–41, 52–3, 56, 60 Origen, 117 Ormazd, 15 Osiris, 15–16 Parsee, 22 Paul, Saint, 40, 81, 122, 141 Penelhum, T., 120 Phillips, D.Z., 131, 134, 139, 144 Plato, 80 Presocratics, 1 Pythagoreans, 2

Quirinus, 53 Rahnert, K., 62 Reid, T., 128–9 Rhees, R., 147 Rousseau, J.-J., 65 Ryle, G., 97 Sarah, 77–8 Sartre, J.-P., 78, 81, 108 Schelling, F., 45–50, 54 Schlegel, F., 45 Schleiermacher, F., 27, 65 Scotus, D., 127 Searle, J., 146 Sherry, P., 149 Shiva, 14 Socrates, 71, 86 Spinoza, B., 45–6, 65, 68 Stoicism, 24 Strawson, P.F., 115 Swedenborg, E., 115 Swinburne, R., 113–16, 118–19, 123, 125, 127 Taliaferro, C., 123 Tertullian, 118 Tessin, T., 62 Thatcher, A., 123 Thomas, R.S., 43 Troeltsch, E., 27 Typhon, 16 Uhland, L., 41–3 Unamuno, M., 138, 144 Uriah, 66 Vishnu, 14 Ward, K., 122 Waugh, E., 128 Weber, M., 24 Weil, S., 51 Whitehead, A.N., 33, 112 Wilder, T., 109 Wittgenstein, L., 33, 41, 90, 111, 121, 145–9 Wolterstorff, N., 78–9

Subject Index Buddhism, 12–14, 23–4, 27–8, 131–3, 137, 145 Christianity intimations of, 51 Confucianism, 12–13, 23 Daoism, 12–13 ethnocentrism, 27–9 faith, 74–6, 87–8 agonic, 138–9, 144 doctrine and, 140 ecumenism and, 137 sin and, 75–6 virtue and, 74 Hinduism, 13–17, 23, 25, 27, 131 history meaning, 26, 36 totality, 31–3, 36–7 incarnation, 51, 112 magic, 12, 27–8 morality, 3–4 paganism, 52, 66, 71 prayer, 140–1, 144–5 realism, 133 religion, 10–11 Christian, 24, 27–8 Greek, 16–17, 23, 27, 28 Jewish, 18, 23, 25, 28 Egyptian, 15–16, 23, 27–8 nature and, 12–14, 23 Roman, 18–19, 25, 28 Romanticism idealism and, 45 progress in, 48

realism and, 45 reality in, 45 supernatural in, 46 particularity in, 50–1 salvation, 110 Scriptures, 53, 55–6 Spirit absolute, 8–9 agency and, 120 Christ and, 101–2 Church and, 39–40 despair and, 73–4, 78 dualism and, 123–4, 126 existentialism and, 76–82, 86–9, 91, 93–5, 97–105 freedom and, 29–30, 36, 38, 69–70, 102–3 God as, 113 history and, 26 morality and, 3–4 necessity and, 25, 36–8 ontology and, 1–7 philosophy and, 33 power and, 122, 125–6 progress and, 23, 24–5, 27 providence and, 60 pure, 144–5 psychoanalysis and, 63 romanticism and, 41 self and, 68–71, 86 theology and, 1–4, 134 transcendence and, 81 universalism and, 39–40 Stoicism, 24 theology interpretation in, 96–9 mythology and, 97–9 philosophy and, 108–12, 145 preaching and, 96–7

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