References
- A move perhaps reminiscent more of Hegel than of Joachim de Fiore. See Anthony C. Sciglitano, “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar's Trinitarian ‘Response’ to Gianni Vattimo's Secular Christianity”, Modern Theology 23:4 (2007), pp.525–559, in which he draws attention to this connection and claims that Vattimo, just like Hegel, seems to know a little too much about the nature of the divine from an allegedly radically interpretive standpoint. Sciglitano argues that “to the extent that his system is Hegelian, Vattimo's philosophical theology falls well short of the criterion he sets for all theology: it falls short of love”. This shortfall is the depersonalization of God, Sciglitano enumerates in seven similarities between Hegel and Vattimo: “(1) The Trinity is depersonalized; (2) the divine-world relation is given a modalistic and ultimately monistic reading; (3) Passibility is radical and history becomes constitutive, or stronger, determinative of divine being; (4) Scriptural revelation is overcome by a ‘spiritual sense’ reading that envisions a reconciliation between divine being and the being of the world, thus asserting some form of identity; (5) Jesus’ historical existence becomes religiously insignificant; (6) Resurrection does not lead to exaltation and ends kenosis, and does not apply to Jesus as an individual, but rather continues kenosis as a general diffusion of divine Being into the secular or as the secular; (7) Divine will, election, and missions are excised from theological reflection” (p.538).
- On the question of doctrine this desire is very clear: “Above all, returning to the question of doctrine, it is not, for me (or for anyone else who has a similar trajectory through secularization in modernity), a matter of rediscovering the literality of the truths of faith as they are often so preached by the Church. I am persuaded, and not merely out of attachment to my passions, that if I have a vocation to recover Christianity, it will consist in the task of rethinking revelation in secularized terms in order to ‘live in accord with one's age’, therefore in ways that do not offend my culture as, to greater or lesser extent, a man who belongs to this age. This is the exact opposite of returning to the father's house (as a Catholic discipline), filled with repentance, prepared to abase oneself and to mortify one's intellectual pride” Gianni Vattimo, Belief, tr. Luca D'Isanto and David Webb, Stanford: Stanford University Press 1996, p.75.
- With Heidegger, Vattimo believes that “the Ge-stell might be preparing a way for an overcoming of metaphysics through the dissolution of the subject-object relationship that has dominated modernity” (Gianni Vattimo, Nihilism and Emancipation: Ethics, Politics & Law, ed. Santiago Zabala, tr. William McGuaig, New York: Columbia University Press 2004, p.16). With metaphysics, its attendant violence may also be averted: “One departs from metaphysics and the violence connected to it by letting it recall—and not only negatively—the dissolution that the Ge-stell places upon the subject and the object of metaphysics” (“Metaphysics and Violence” in Weakening Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo. ed. Santiago Zambala. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007, p.419).
- Vattimo is familiar with this criticism: “Fine, one might say (among other things), won't this recovery of Christianity be an effort to give power to weak thought, that is, to a particular philosophy, thus legitimating and recommending it as authentic heir of the prevalent religious tradition which is dominant in Western society?” He realizes that critics must indeed wonder whether “from my perspective, the link between post-metaphysical thought, weak ontology and nihilism, on the one hand, and Christian doctrine, on the other, is in the end resolved in favour of one or the other term?” (Belief, p.91). His answer boils down to a confession of faith which believes in partaking in an event which he trusts to have the kenotically benevolent quality and his residual sympathy for the Christian religion (Ibid., p.92).
- This is, of course, not what Professor Vattimo wants. Indeed his entire project of an incarnational hermeneutic ontology follows Joachim de Fiore's inspiration of folding the kenotic quality of God into the historical process precisely to structure weakening as a positive force of charity rather than a completely arbitrary one. In this way, the death of God weakens and eventually dissolves strong metaphysical and social structures for the benefit of humanity. Joachim of Fiore may not be, however, the best inspiration for a post-metaphysical Christianity because in him one can already detect the Hegelian death trap of incarnational ontology: the depersonalization of God into an immanent, monological historical principle.
- Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity (1985), tr. Jon R. Snyder, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991. Gianni Vattimo, Beyond Interpretation. The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (1994), tr. David Webb, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, (no original Italian publication date given), tr. Luca D'Isanto, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, Hereafter AC.
- Vattimo describes this weak ontology as follows: “Ontological hermeneutics replaces the metaphysics of presence with a concept of Being that is essentially constituted by the feature of dissolution. Being gives itself not once and for all as simple presence; rather, it occurs as announcement and grows into interpretations that listed and correspond (to Being). Being is also oriented toward spiritualization and lightening, or, which is the same, toward kenosis. It is quite probable that ontological hermeneutics, which is generated from the dissolution of the metaphysics of presence, is not only a rediscovery of the Church but also, and mainly, the retrieval of Joachim of Fiore's dream” (AC 68). For Vattimo, the history of Being as the history of secularization is the history of salvation (Ibid., 24). He states clearly that he is engaged in “a recovery of religion—summed up as the manifestation of Being as the destiny of weakening at the end of metaphysics” (Ibid., 38).
- Belief, p. 35f; A related passage: “This [Vattimo's weak ontology] approach emphasizes that the weakening of Being is one possible meaning—if not the absolute meaning—of the Christian message, through the radical reading of incarnation as kenosis. This message speaks of a God who incarnates himself, lowers himself, and confuses all the powers of this world” (AC 80).
- “If the meta-narrative of positivism no longer holds, one can no longer think that God does not exist, because his existence cannot be established scientifically. If the meta-narrative of Hegelian or Marxist historicism no longer holds, one cannot argue that God does not exist because faith in God belongs to an earlier stage within history of human evolution, or because God is just an ideological representation at the service of domination” (AC 86).
- Vattimo also acknowledges here his indebtedness to Rene Girard's religious anthropology: “In my view, Girard has persuasively demonstrated…that if a ‘divine’ truth is given in Christianity, it is an unmasking of the violence that has given birth to the sacred of natural religion, that is, the sacred that is characteristic of the metaphysical God” (AC 38).
- AC 135; for a fuller description see Belief, p.77 ff.
- Belief, p.78: “Is what Schleiermacher called the pure feeling of dependence the only sense left in the use of the term ‘father’? Probably yes, and once again this is the kernel that, in my view, cannot be an object of reduction or demythification”. Indeed, nor can it be the object of any qualification.
- AC 67. Earlier Vattimo had already asked: “But will the same secularization not be rather a ‘drift’ inscribed positively in the destiny of kenosis? As regards the meaning of dogmatic Christianity, it is to this question that the recognition of a ‘substantial’ relation with hermeneutics ultimately leads” (Beyond Interpretation, p.51).
- Which has always been the problem of Stanley Fish's interpretive approach.
- He insists, though, that we cannot appeal to this idea as the metaphysical ground of all being which we then yield as a club in our attempt to Christianize the nations.
- Belief, p.65. This principle does, of course, have to spiritualize away the ‘hard sayings of Jesus,’ by further spiritualization as history progresses to overcome Jesus’ upholding and sharpening of principles Vattimo does not endorse (for example Jesus’ affirmation of marriage and hatred for divorce).
- Belief, p.64. See here also his understanding of the concern Christians may have with this stance: “Aside from the objections that refute the very idea of modernity as secularization (such as Blumenberg's)—and which seem untenable to us by virtue of the fact that they do not give sufficient consideration to the historical roots of modernity in the ancient and medieval tradition—the objections that in general, above all by believers, are raised against this vision of the secularization as a destiny ‘proper to Christianity’ concern the possibility of establishing a criterion that permits the distinction of secularization from phenomena that confine themselves to applying the Christian tradition, often in a distorted fashion, yet which are themselves outside or indeed in opposition to it. Yet it is precisely there that one should rediscover the ‘principle of charity’ which, perhaps not by accident, constitutes the point of convergence between nihilistic hermeneutics and the religious tradition of the West. Secularization has no ‘objective’ limit: the Augustinian ‘ama et fac quod vis’ holds even for the interpretation of the scriptures. For dogmatic Christianity (that is the substance of the New Testament revelation) recognition of its relation with nihilistic hermeneutics means the emergence of charity as the single most decisive factor of the evangelical message” (Beyond Interpretation, p.51).
- See de Lubac's assertion that compartmentalization of natural and supernatural, as well as the abstraction of natural ends was not part of traditional Christian doctrine. Not even the scholastics, with their “absolute realism proposed such a thing”. Lubac concludes that “Excessive naturalism and essentialism belong much more to the stream of modern philosophy—which has to some extent invaded the manuals of scholasticism, but in doing so has perverted the traditional teaching it was intended to transmit” (Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, Milestones in Catholic Theology, NewYork: Crossroad Pub. 1998, p.63). See also here Phillip Blond's review of Vattimo's Belief in Modern Theology 18:2 (2002), pp.277–85.
- Paul Ricœur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, tr. David Pellauer, ed. Mark I. Wallace, Minneapolis: Fortress Press 1995, p.268.
- “Logos in the New Testament does not, as in Heraclitus, mean the being of the essent, the gathering together of the conflicting; it means one particular essent (ein besonderes Seiendes), namely the son of God. And specifically it refers to him as mediator between God and men. This New Testament notion of the logos is that of the Jewish philosophy of religion developed by Philo whose doctrine of creation attributes to the logos the function of mesites, the mediator…a whole world separates all this from Heraclitus”. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Ralph Manheim, New Haven: Yale University Press 1987, p.134. The whole point of Heidegger's effort is, of course, to show how the wrong identification of the ‘essent’ Christ is objectifying God and makes Christianity ‘Platonism for the People’ (Ibid., 106).
- This is, for example, one of the reasons why Luther and Aquinas are actually a lot closer in their definition of faith than is often supposed, a fact which also modifies Aquinas's supposed Aristotelianism. In the words of one commentator, “the philosophical notion of supreme, first truth and the Thomistic ‘first truth’ as the formal motive for our faith have no more than the name in common…. First truth, for Aquinas, is not an impersonal essence, but a personal God…. Faith, then, is not a simple agreement of our intellect with a supreme metaphysical truth, but is in the first place the hearing and acceptance of this word of his…. Thus it becomes clear that the import of veritas prima for Aquinas is completely new by comparison with the philosophical notion of the supreme metaphysical truth”. In: Stephen H. Pfürtner, Luther and Aquinas on Salvation, New York: Sheed and Ward 1965, pp.70–73. Thomas therefore, “discovers a function of the intellect which the Greeks did not know in this express form. ‘Reason’ is no longer, as it was for them, more or less exclusively a capacity for knowing facts; it is also a power of the soul for knowing persons, able to grasp the truthfulness, the fidelity and the trustworthiness of the one whom I know. It is obvious that we are here concerned with a relationship of trust: Intellegere in faith is to base oneself on God's trustworthiness” (Ibid. 77). It is therefore no accident that Luther's annoyance with Aristotelian terminology began with this very notion of apprehending truth as intellegere which did not, to him, convey the biblical notion of personal trust.
- Nihilism and Emancipation, pp.67 and 69.
- AC 121 (emphasis added).
- This sentence is a paraphrase of the same statement by Anthony Sciglitano Jr. in “Contesting the World and the Divine: Balthasar's Trinitarian ‘Response’ to Gianni Vattimo's Secular Christianity”, p.546.
- Indeed as Marie L. Baird argues, Lévinas actually borrows from Rabbi Haim a distinct notion of divine kenosis as incarnational ethics that is not onto-theological, does not ignore the incarnation (as Vattimo alleges) and which also collapses the distinction between profane and sacred history and even rejects negative theology. She concludes in her comparison of Vattimo and Lévinas that for the latter “ethical responsibility, hospitality, and charity are not mere philosophical abstractions, be they diachronic and transcendental or anchored in the recognition of Being as event. They refer to real relationships of love, fidelity, and the exercise of virtue. On this final point all three thinkers [i.e. Lévinas, Derrida and Vattimo] would agree”. Baird also wonders, as I have, why Vattimo does not see similarities between his own notion of the church's new universal vocation of hospitality and Derrida's idea. Marie L. Baird, “Whose Kenosis? An Analysis of Lévinas, Derrida, and Vattimo on God's Self-Emptying and the Secularization of the West”, Heythrop Journal (2007), pp.423–437, pp.435 and 433.
- Beyond Interpretation, p. 50; Jüngel's concept of God's being as becoming may be helpful here, but even this requires a strong sense of Being which Vattimo would most likely reject.
- Again, I am taking this term from Sciglitano's article “Contesting the World and the Divine”, p.549: “The secular describes not a reified entity, but a relationship the world has with God, that is, the world as revealed in its creatureliness and gratuitousness through this relationship. In contrast to both Hegel and Vattimo,…if there is no difference, as Vattimo says, then the world in fact has no autonomy vis-à-vis the divine; instead, cultural movements will be tightly tied to revelation, thus distorting both salvation and secular history to make each fit a single vision of the other. Once again, monologue will trump dialogue”.
- While we should appreciate Vattimo's emphasis on the historical and on interpretation in ethics, he makes very clear that this “historical event of the incarnation” has no reality beyond its historical effect which he has already determined as “a teleology in which every ontic structure is weakened in favour of ontological Being, namely the Verbum, Logos, Word shared in the dialogue (Gespräch) that constitutes us as historical beings” (AC 112).
- So, for example, Vattimo's comment in the context of trying to reconcile peace and liberty: “What we really need to do—and this does not necessarily have to conflict with religiosity, especially Christian religiosity—is to say farewell to claims to absolute truth. In a society in which we are more and more likely to encounter ethical and religious positions and cultural traditions unlike the ones we were born into and grew up with, the best stance to adopt is that of a ‘tourist’ in a history park. The real enemy of liberty is the person who thinks she can and should preach final and definitive truth” (“Liberty and Peace in the Postmodern Condition” in Nihilism and Emancipation, p.56). At the same time, Vattimo realizes that in his context, this history part is European, Western and Christian (ibid, 57).
- Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005, p.66f. It is indeed ironic that Vattimo is drawn toward a more symbolic Protestant view of the Eucharist at a time when many evangelicals reinvestigate a possible real presence at the Lord's Table. Also protestants such as Luther and Calvin had a much ‘thicker’ view of the Spirit's presence than Vattimo seems to be aware of.
- Paul Ricœur opposes Kant's notion of freedom to Augustine's without, however, giving up on the notion of a corrupt heart that is, though, balanced by a good will (Figuring the Sacred, p.80f).
- J.M.R. Tillard, Flesh of the Church, Flesh of Christ: At the Source of the Ecclesiology of Communion, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, p.54.
- I assume and agree here with Merold Westphal's point that hermeneutics is epistemology. Westphal comments on Rorty's attempt to oppose epistemology and hermeneutics: “By presenting hermeneutics as an alternative to epistemology [Rorty] makes it easy to specify the sense in which it is rather an alternative epistemology. To repeat, hermeneutics is epistemology” (“Hermeneutics as Epistemology”, The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology, eds. John Greco and Ernest Sosa, Oxford: Blackwell, 1999, 415–435, 417).
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, “Akt und Sein“, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke, München: Chr. Kaiser, 1986, vol. 2, p.112. Hereafter DBW.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, ed. Clifford J. Green, tr. Reinhard Krauss and Nancy Lukens, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998, vol. 2. p.32. Hereafter DBWE.
- Bonhoeffer draws on Paul's assertion that the church is the body of Christ: “Not ‘you are supposed to be. No, precisely you ‘are’. God has already done everything. Out of free grace he made us the gift of being the body of Christ. That means, however, he has forged us together (zusammengeschweisst) into one life, whose power, breath, blood, and Spirit (Geist) is Jesus Christ. To belong to the church means to belong to God's community, which is not at all the same as the community of our church. It means to be privileged by God, to share (Teilhabersschaft) in the gifts of eternity…. It means to live out of Christ, but that means out of God, out of eternity. This, however, not alone but a life with all those who love Christ. Church means community with the people of God in God himself’ (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Predigten und Meditationen, ed. Otto Dudzus, München: Kaiser, 1984, vol. 1, p.167f).
- DBW 2: 127–29. “Theological knowledge is not existential knowledge; it has its object in the events stored in the community's memory of Bible, preaching, and sacrament, prayer, confession, in the words of the Christ person, which are preserved as existents (Seiendes) preserved in the historical church” (128).
- Bonhoeffer argues that Christ's nature is to be in the middle of things, of our existence, of history and of nature, with, obviously, important implications for church-state relations in DBW 12, 307. Especially in the sections titled “positive Christology”, Bonhoeffer emphasizes the importance of keeping the mystery of the incarnation constantly before us, in order to ensure a proper ecclesial understanding of the new humanity as Christians (DBW 12: 340–348).
- DBW 6: 81; Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics, ed. Eberhard Bethge, tr. Neville Horton Smith, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995, p.93f.
- Bonhoeffer writes that the whole reality of the world is in Christ, and hence in the church. Hence “this realm of the church is not something that exists for itself but something which always already stretches far beyond itself, precisely because it is not the arena of a cultic club (Kultvereins) which has to fight for its existence in the world, but because it is the place which witnesses to the foundation of all reality in Jesus Christ” (DBW 6: 49).
- This sentiment is also encapsulated in his description of the church as the new human being who has been incarnated, judged, and brought to new life in Christ. DBW 6: 84.
- D'Arcais suggests that Vattimo's desire for emancipation defined as “an eternal life of charity”, as ontologically grounded in a hermeneutic progression, is not warranted by his ontology: “He wants the hope of salvation to be something more than our wager/commitment, if not inscribed dialectically in history, at least standing as the rigorously preferable response to the sending (even if it is not cogent) of Being” (“Hermeneutics as the Primacy of Politics”, in Weakening Philosophy, p.266). For Grondin's assertion of Gadamer's faith in reason and rejection of nihilism in favour of a reality which transcends our interpretations of it, see “Vattimo's Latinization of Hermeneutics: Why did Gadamer Resist Postmodernism?” in Weakening Philosophy, pp.212–214. And, indeed, Grondin is right to claim that Vattimo cannot really keep his promise of total openness, for he too assumes that his own interpretation of the history of Being is the right one.