Michael McGravey’s Navigating Postmodern Theology makes a convincing argument that the twentieth century saw a move away from religious traditions to personalized faith. I agree with this argument for many reasons. Richard Rubenstein famously said that God died in Auschwitz;1 the scale of atrocities committed in the twentieth century called into doubt the loving God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Mass migration into (and also emigration from) western countries exposed populations to different religious and cultural traditions, making the exclusive truth of their own seem implausible. The inexorable rise of diverse and increasingly pervasive information and communications technologies again highlighted the infinite plurality of opinions, leading to skepticism in the idea of there being one “Truth” with a capital “T.” Furthermore, economic, technological, and medical developments meant people felt they could lead their lives with no need of God, especially when institutions promoting belief in, and worship of, God have been so frequently mired in scandal. This latter idea of taking leave of God draws closer to Nietzsche’s understanding of the “death of God,”2 that is, of him being forgotten or made obsolete. However, as McGravey rightly notes, religion has persisted, not least the Catholic Church (34). Christianity has thrived in America, while immigrant populations in Europe especially have maintained and developed their faiths. Nevertheless, as Charles Taylor has pointed out,3 even those living after the death of God who persist in pursuing traditional religious practices and maintaining conservative religious faiths are still living in a “secular age” in which their faith is marked with the impossibility of ignoring the reality of the pluralistic society in which we are living.

What, though, of a theology fit to engage with this contemporary world, this “secular age”? Due to the trends of growing secularism, individualism, and widespread rejection of traditional beliefs, values outlined in chapter 1 of McGravey’s book, any such theological approach would need to be inclusive and it would need to be flexible, not dogmatic. I would like to comment on McGravey’s appraisal of Gianni Vattimo’s contribution in this regard as this is my principal area of research. In particular, I want to focus on two of his claims about the usefulness of Vattimo’s thought in relation to the notion of creating a post-metaphysical theology for the contemporary West. Firstly, I would like to critically assess his claim that Vattimo’s use of weak thought to return to religion allows one to explore the concept of “God” in “such a way [that it] offers an opportunity to engage theology intellectually, without a reliance on a system that introduces limitations from the start” (229). Secondly, and relatedly, I would like to appraise his claim that Vattimo’s pensiero debole “dissolves metaphysical dogmatism,” allowing for a more inclusive and charitable interpretation of Christianity (225). McGravey sees Vattimo’s philosophy as having potential for a theological approach which is both inclusive and not pre-limiting because he thinks it overcomes the rigidity of metaphysical theology, the kind which reduces views back to fixed first principles, whereby Vattimo’s critique is “an attempt to overpower the traditional and given hermeneutics, which have shaped both church and state for centuries” (205). Vattimo thought metaphysics was “violent,” and so his “weak thought” sought to show how, if we have “read the signs of the times” correctly,4 we should realize that we are living after the death of God. The latter phrase means not that God has died in a flat-footedly literal way, but that the highest values have devaluated themselves. In this world of information and communications technology, we are left with an irreducibly plural series of images and messages which means that Being “happens” rather than should be seen as “presence” as per metaphysics.5 For Vattimo, Being has a nihilistic vocation for weakening which has its origin in the Christian message of God kenotically emptying himself into history in the person (and message) of Christ, encouraging us to befriend one another in the spirit of charity with “the ‘spiritual’ sense of the scriptures [becoming] increasingly in evidence, with charity taking the place of discipline.”6 It is in this charitable spirit that one should seek out, and listen to, the other today. Nonetheless, the importance of tradition for Vattimo anchors his hermeneutically nihilistic pluralism in the intellectual inheritance of Christianity, meaning that it is a forward-looking return to one’s Christian heritage,7 but one in which syncretism points toward the future, of continually “twisting” the metaphysical legacy of the Judeo-Christian God in ways which weaken such language indefinitely.

Vattimo and Prelimiting Intellectual Exploration

While McGravey thinks that Vattimo’s weak thought is “a way to engage theology intellectually without relying on a system that introduces limitations from the start” (183) it is Vattimo’s focus on language which does in fact provide such an inbuilt limitation. Vattimo follows both Heidegger and Gadamer in identifying Being with “language.” In fact, Vattimo goes further than them both in making this identification clear. Indeed, Gadamer famously wrote that “Being, that can be understood, is language,”8 but this at least distinguishes between Being which can be understood and which cannot be understood; there is a possibility of that which can “Be” outside of language in Gadamer’s thought. Heidegger also wrote that “language is the House of Being,”9 but that does imply that there is a distinction between Being and its House—they are not identical. For example, Vattimo wrote “Tradition is the transmitting of linguistic messages that constitute the horizon within which Dasein is thrown as a historically determined project: and tradition derives its importance from the fact that Being, as a horizon of disclosure in which things appear, can arise only as a trace of past words or as an announcement that has been handed down to us.”10 In drawing upon his “weak” interpretation of Heidegger, Vattimo is unable to think of God as a “being,” for this would be reducing Being to presence. As McGravey notes, Vattimo followed Heidegger in thinking Being is eventual, that it happens (217). What this means is that Vattimo rules out what has sometimes been referred to as “right Heideggerianism,” of there being “sendings” of Being which come to us from outside language. In other words, Vattimo’s theory is restricted to what Giovanni Giorgio refers to as “horizontal transcendence.”11 This latter phrase means that we are able to move beyond ourselves to explore the horizon into which we have been thrown, but that this horizon is governed by our linguistic inheritance, of the linguistic traditions which have been passed down to us. What Vattimo’s theory rules out is “vertical transcendence,” of any Being beyond language. Vattimo was suspicious of any kind of positing of the “Other,” bracketing thinkers as diverse as Derrida, Levinas, Altizer, Van Buren, Barth, and Bonhoeffer together as having approaches and theologies which appeared to him as metaphysical.12 Dario Antiseri criticized Vattimo for not acknowledging the possibility of vertical transcendence.13 As such, it is fair to say that Vattimo’s philosophical style of “weak thought” contains a significant limiting factor within its core principles, one which rules out vertical transcendence as all Being comes through sendings contained within linguistic messages.

Vattimo, Charity, and Inclusivity

Kenosis for Vattimo is not merely an interpretation of late modernity from a particular perspective (that of Christianity), but the way in which we have got to the point of the death of God and the end of metaphysics. This is because for Vattimo kenosis was the emptying into history of the message of weakening, of God’s announcement through Christ of him no longer being master but friend to humans (John 15:15). Indeed, kenosis for Vattimo is not, as McGravey says, “a literal weakening of the Divine” (222), but a message of weakness: “The interpretation given by Jesus Christ of Old Testament prophecies, or (better) the interpretation which he himself is, reveals its true and only meaning: God’s love for his creatures.”14 This “love” is caritas, of love for the other. God, for Vattimo, historicized himself, shedding himself of remote metaphysical inertia by entering into the life of Christ and announcing his friendship with humanity. Drawing upon figures such as Wilhelm Dilthey,15 Vattimo argued that this pushed faith inward; rather than faith being identifiable through ritual, it became something inner to do with brotherhood and faith. This “subjective turn” constituted the kenotic, weakening thread which has come down through Christ to Augustine, to Descartes, Kant, and Nietzsche, which has ended up emphasizing the importance of interpretation; this is secularization for Vattimo. The view that Christianity initiated such a subjective turn to interiority (to the inner experience of the will) is found in Dilthey and informs Vattimo’s own view, according to which Christianity undoes from within the objectivity of the truth. Such an interiorizing of life prefigures modern hermeneutics, which dissolves metaphysics’ structures in both philosophy (Being as presence, such as Plato’s Forms) and in religion, showing how Vattimo drew upon Girard who thought natural religions use sacrificial scapegoating to maintain social order.16 Jesus’ message of love reveals this mechanism, showing the sacred as inherently violent and initiating a process of de-sacralization and secularization. The concept of the natural sacred is violent and tied to scapegoating, as Girard has said; it is, therefore, important to Vattimo’s understanding of secularization. For Vattimo, the incarnation of Christ had revealed and dissolved the structural violence of the sacred; this initiated the process of de-sacralization. Here is where the process intersects with Vattimo’s understanding of kenosis, or God’s self-emptying, in the form of a historical process of weakening strong, authoritarian structures. For Vattimo, secularization is the historical unfolding of this kenotic message toward a more pluralistic and interpretative society. By relating Dilthey’s subjective turn, Girard’s unmasking of sacred violence, and the concept of kenosis, Vattimo presents secularization as the realization of the Christian ethos of love and charity, progressively undermining violent and metaphysical structures.

However, by reading the history of the West as being tantamount to the history of Christianity, this simply reframes the centrality of Christianity: rather than Christianity’s primacy being due to its foundationalism (as per a traditional understanding of Christianity, such as a Thomistic one), its primacy is due to secularization being the unfolding of kenosis in history, and caritas being the way in which one should engage in dialogue. In other words, if one “reads the signs of the times,”17 then one should recognize the other as historically situated, linguistically embedded Dasein engaged in hermeneutics and listen to them as one recognizes oneself as such. Essentially, this is a postmodern Categorical Imperative, but one which is made possible through the West’s Christian inheritance. What looks inclusive is thus less inclusive because it is based around the historical legacy of Christianity. What looks inclusive becomes even less inclusive when one realizes that “strong” voices (of reactive nihilists who carry on as though the death of God has not happened) who have not “read the signs of the times” are excluded from such dialogue because they are perpetuating the violence of metaphysics by not acknowledging the provisional nature of their own beliefs and values. This is not speculation, but something one can find in Vattimo’s works. In After the Death of God, Vattimo states, “once you turn inward you must also try to listen to others like you.”18 What does he mean by “others like you”? “Turning inward,” again betraying the influence of Dilthey, refers back to secularization, of the message of caritas moving through history kenotically emptying metaphysical beliefs of their strength and finding its culmination in hermeneutical nihilism. The more intriguing part of Vattimo’s quotation is “listen to others like you.” What does this mean? As Vattimo does not believe in facts, this cannot be appealing to a common human nature. Elsewhere Vattimo makes clear he is not talking about intersectionality or appeal to individual differences.19 Vattimo stated that listening should take place “between defenders of finite positions who recognize that this is what they are and who shun the temptation to impose their position on others.”20 What this tells us is that Vattimo thought caritas should only be extended to fellow weak thinkers; as Erik Meganck puts it, “hermeneutic plurality is only allowed within weak thought.”21 This is the kind of tolerance which does not tolerate intolerance. While this sounds good in theory, anyone can become a strong thinker even by being a theistic personalist, or even a realist with regard to the divine. In fact, Vattimo’s attitude to Islam as a religion seems to exclude its adherents, for he saw the chador as a sign of “strong thought,” but not the cross.22 As a good amount of the world’s population believe in the reality of God, that is a lot of people to ignore for a theory which is meant to be inclusive. As Thomas Guarino writes, “for Vattimo, no one with strong beliefs can truly participate in the public sphere.”23

Conclusion

Gianni Vattimo’s weak thought looks on the surface like a promising candidate to develop a post-metaphysical theological style. It is contemporary in its language of “love” and acknowledging “weakness,” it rejects violence, and recognizes the infinite plurality of perspectives and messages unleashed by the internet and social media. Furthermore, it looks back to tradition as a necessary way of understanding how we are today, as well as putting forward a reason why God talk is still not only relevant, but required to make sense of our current situation. However, both its theory and its practice rule out too much which is still important to religious believers the world over. The philosophical style of weak thought rules out “vertical transcendence,” of there being something more than just linguistic messages. Furthermore, “inclusivity” for Vattimo only applies to fellow weak thinkers; anyone who is a “strong thinker” need not be listened to. As the appellation “strong thinker” could simply apply to anyone who subscribed to the possibility of vertical transcendence (and this could include any theistic personalist or even theological realist in general), then large swathes of the world’s population would be ruled out from engaging in dialogue and being listened to according to Vattimo. Therefore, another approach needs to be taken to finding a post-metaphysical theological style which aims to move beyond metaphysics but without writing off anyone who still subscribes to such beliefs.

On a number of occasions throughout his book, Navigating Postmodern Theology: Insights from Jean-Luc Marion and Gianni Vattimo’s Philosophy, Michael J. McGravey notes that “there are those who assert theology has no place in a phenomenology that is derived from Husserl, Heidegger, and others” (145). He then frequently connects this claim to the problem of metaphysics being “deeply ingrained in Roman Catholicism and its theology,” taking for granted the claim that phenomenology and metaphysics are inherently at odds with one another whereby, if Catholic theology is to take phenomenology seriously then it must do away with its metaphysics (145). I take the thesis of the book to be that Catholic theology needs “to move beyond the limitations of authority and metaphysics” in order to renew interest in the faith and speak to postmoderns where they are at (11). McGravey concludes with the proposal that “the Church must emphasize itself as an apostle of Love [. . .] and a disciple of the self-abasing, kenotic God of Philippians 2:7” (248). I am profoundly moved by and agree with McGravey’s insight that phenomenology has much to offer Christian theology and that the Church should always be concerned with properly attending to the signs of the times and effectively communicating God’s love to all people. I, however, find McGravey’s characterization of phenomenology as a philosophical system rather than a philosophical method to be problematic insofar as it occludes the phenomenon of being as it is given in experience (Erlebnis and Erfahrung). I also have some concerns about McGravey’s overall description and characterizations of the LORD because his argument does not seem to sufficiently attend to the fact that God reveals Godself in time, God reveals Godself to have a name and that name is not Love but YHWH: I Am Who I Am.

In light of these concerns, I would like to outline an alternative path forward for thinking about the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics by seriously considering the thought of the phenomenologist and Catholic saint who stands between Husserl and Heidegger and precedes Levinas and Marion: Edith Stein. While it is beyond the scope of this response to thoroughly explain her thought, I hope to draw out some of Stein’s key insights that provide the contours for how phenomenology and metaphysics can be brought together in a way that enriches both. She provides a way for taking finitude and historicity seriously without devolving into an idolatrous apophaticism that fails to sufficiently acknowledge the fact that the LORD dwells with us in time. I would, ultimately, be curious about the extent to which Stein’s alternative approach resonates with McGravey.

St. Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD) was born in Breslau, Germany, now Wrocław, Poland, in 1891. She was one of Edmund Husserl’s brightest students and considered his true heir by some of his Göttingen students. Stein arrived at Göttingen to study with Husserl in 1913, only months before he published Ideas I, his more systematic account of the phenomenological method founded in the Logical Investigations. Here a systematic account of the phenomenological method is to be distinguished from turning the phenomenological method into a system of philosophy. When Husserl’s Logical Investigations was first published, it seemed to be a return to the philosophia perennis and an act against the critical way of thinking that had overtaken modern philosophy.1 As Stein describes it, the first volume of the Logical Investigations “was epoch-making because in it Husserl radically criticized the then prevailing psychologism and all relativism” by establishing logic as the framework for objectively existing truth.2 The second volume of the Logical Investigations “far surpassed its predecessor in significance as well as in bulk” and was where “for the first time Husserl treated problems in logic with the method which he later developed systematically into the ‘phenomenological method’ and which he expanded to cover the entire area of philosophy.”3 The virtue of Husserl’s Logical Investigations and his phenomenological method for philosophy is that he was able to overcome all the relativisms—naturalism, psychologism, historicism—of modern philosophy by exhibiting that the mind and spirit do not create truth but find truth.4 Meaning is not made; it is found. This insight reopened a way to the idea of absolute truth, and its correlate, objective knowledge, was no longer rendered impossible by nature, consciousness, or history.

The task of phenomenology, according to Stein, “is to clarify and, thereby, to find the basis of all knowledge.”5 Phenomenology seeks to ground the foundations of human knowing through insight into the essences of what is given in and through experience. To this end the phenomenological method “considers nothing that is in any way ‘doubtful,’ nothing that can be eliminated.”6 This means that “the entire surrounding world, the physical as well as the psycho-physical, the bodies as well as the souls of [humans] and animals (including the psycho-physical person of the investigation himself) is subject to the exclusion of the [phenomenological] reduction.”7 The phenomenological method suspends the entire world of experience [Erfahrung] or the natural attitude from its investigation in order to gain clarity into essences. As Stein keenly poses to her reader, “What can be left if the whole world and even the subject experiencing it are canceled by the phenomenological method?”8 In reply she informs us that what the phenomenological method leaves behind is “an infinite field of pure investigation.”9 This infinite field is consciousness or pure experience [Erleben]. The reason why I do not cancel or suspend my experience [Erleben] is because “what I cannot exclude, what is not subject to doubt is my experience of the thing (the perception, memory, or other kind of comprehension) together with its correlate, the full ‘phenomenon of the thing’ (the object given as the same in a series of diverse perceptions or memories).”10 One could say that Husserl and Kant, therefore, have opposite projects because Husserl seeks the foundations for knowledge and essence of objects through experience, whereas Kant seeks the foundations for knowledge and the essence of objects apart from and without any reference to experience.

In one of his lecture courses in 1913, Stein heard Husserl teach that “an objective outerworld could only be experienced [erfahren werden] intersubjectively i.e., through a plurality of perceiving individuals [erkennder] who relate in a mutual exchange of information [Wechselverständigung]” or self-understanding,11 such that “an experience of other individuals is a prerequisite” for an objective outerworld.12 Husserl gave this “experience [Erfahrung]” of other individuals “the name Einfühlung [empathy].”13 Empathy is thus a philosophical problem and a philosophical problem of method concerning the phenomenological method itself that reaches back into the foundations of what brings consciousness, experience, and knowing to givenness in the first place. Stein wrote her 1916 dissertation on this constitution and methodological problem. In On the Problem of Empathy, Stein argues the basic problem of empathy and thus the basic problem of constitution and method concerning phenomenology is an experiential problem. It is the problem of how “the [experiencing (Erfahrung)] of foreign subjects and their experience [Erleben]” is possible.14 The problem of empathy is the problem of how I somehow appear to have access to [Erfahrung] someone’s living [Erleben], what in common speech we might call someone’s interior life. Erfahrung is the common word for experience in German and has underlying meanings of “journeying through.” It is the word Husserl uses to describe experience in the natural attitude and transcendent experience. Erlebnis is a more recent invention, popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey. It carries with it the emphasis of “living through or in” one’s experience. Erlebnis is the word Husserl uses more frequently because it is the word he uses when talking about experience in the phenomenological attitude and pure experience or consciousness.

In her magnum opus, Finite and Eternal Being: An Attempt to Ascend to the Meaning of Being, Stein innovates on Husserl’s method. The main text of Finite and Eternal Being is divided into eight chapters with two appendices:

I. “Introduction: The Question of Being”

II. “Act and Potency as Ways-of-Being”

III. “Essential and Actual Being”

IV. “Essence—Essentia—Ousia—Substance, Form and Matter”

V. “The Be-ing as Such (Transcendentals)”

VI. “The Meaning of Being”

VII. “The Image of the Trinity in Creation”

VIII. “The Meaning and Foundation of Individual Being”

Appendix I: “Martin Heidegger’s Philosophy of Existence”

Appendix II: “Interior Castle” [St. Teresa of Avila]

The structure of Stein’s arguments proceeds by first setting out the state of affairs, so to speak, concerning how the question of being has (and has not) been attended to throughout the ages. The second chapter, “Act and Potency as Ways-of-Being,” and the third chapter, “Essential and Actual Being,” proceed phenomenologically by investigating how the phenomenon being is given in experience or the phenomenological attitude. Stein innovates on what the ownmost original knowledge or what is closest to us and thereby, the starting point for an objective inquiry with respect to the phenomenological method.15 What is closest in us is that which is inseparable from and inescapable to us, making it the certain fact of our own being. This certain fact of our own being as our ownmost original knowledge is an appropriate starting point from which to begin an inquiry because it admits nothing from “beyond me.” Everything “beyond me” can only be “known” by me in relation to this fact. Rather than experience [Erleben] or consciousness, as well as the cogito, Dasein, or givenness for that matter, our ownmost original knowledge according to Stein is properly specified as the life-of-the-I. The life-of-the-I [Ich-leben] is Stein’s new way of naming experience, replacing Er-leben [experience], which has an ambiguous relationship to the I and the I’s role in experiencing. The essence of the life-of-the-I is threefold: (1) I, (2) being, and (3) the awareness of this being. Since the life-of-the-I is one way of naming experience (although still not fully complete since we have yet to deal with Erfahrung), the essential structure of experience on the most basic level is (1) “I,” (2) “being,” and (3) “awareness of,” which are all necessary and they are all concomitantly necessary. It is only after phenomenologically beginning with the human person understood as the life-of-the-I and her ownmost original knowledge that in the fourth chapter, “Essence—Essentia—Ousia—Substance, Form and Matter,” Stein turns to experience as Erfahrung and investigates being as it is given in the natural attitude and as it has been considered in the past by figures like Aristotle, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas. Following this, in the fifth chapter, “The Be-ing as Such (Transcendentals),” Stein considers what her phenomenological investigation revealed about being and what her metaphysical investigation revealed about being in light of transcendentals. The beginnings of this integration find their full synthesis in the sixth chapter, “The Meaning of Being.” The seventh and eighth chapters set out the practical anthropological implication of Stein’s insights into the divine I am, the structure of experience, the meaning of being. Her concluding appendices likewise bring these insights into critical dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s Dasein and St. Teresa of Avila’s interior castle.

The sixth chapter is the culmination of her investigation and the place where her two different methods and starting points for ascending to the meaning of being meet is the Divine I Am Who I Am. Stein argues, “It is of the utmost significance, it seems to me, that in this passage God does not say, ‘I am being [das Sein]’ or ‘I am who is be-ing [der Seiende],’ but ‘I am who I am [der Ich bin].’”16 Her reasoning being that “Only a be-ing that in its own being is aware of its being and aware at the same time of its being different from every other be-ing can call itself ‘I.’”17 Although “every I is unique,” it is nonetheless the case that “the relationship of the divine ‘I am’ to the many different finite be-ings is the most primordial analogia entis.”18 While “an infinite distance obviously separates the being of the I from divine being,” the human being “resembles divine being more than anything else within the reach of our experience [Erfahrung], and it does so precisely by being an I, by being a person.”19 This is why the being of the human person—not Dasein but the human person—is the proper starting point for an objective inquiry, for in “starting from this being we shall come to grasp divine being.” The divine life-of-the-I “has a fullness within itself and from itself: it receives nothing from elsewhere—for it is that from which all else receives whatever it has, it is that which, itself conditionless, conditions all else.”20 Stein concludes that “love is giving oneself away, over, to a thou, and when complete it is—because the self-giving is mutual—being one.”21 Since God is love, “his being must be the being-one of a plurality of persons, and his name ‘I am’ must mean ‘I give myself wholly to a thou,’ ‘I am one with a thou,’ and so it must also mean ‘we are.’”22

Some of Stein’s fundamental concerns about Heidegger’s existential philosophy were that while rightly recognizing the need for phenomenology to investigate being, Heidegger failed to adequately investigate being, which caused his “phenomenology” to devolve into a school of thought rather than remain a method and also, if followed to its logical conclusions, devolves into a violent nihilism. Heidegger conflates Being [Sein] with be-ing [seiend] in such a way that the be-ing [seiend] of the finite human be-ing [Seiendes] becomes absolutized in his understanding of what Being is as such. Heidegger’s conception of being is in this sense, I would argue, the epitome of idolatry with all the seductiveness and believability of a “good” idol that stands close to the truth but makes key distortions. From a Steinian perspective neither Marion nor Vattimo, despite their best efforts, have escaped the inadequacies, overlooked ontological questions, and from a Christian perspective, idolatry underlying Heidegger’s philosophy. While I know he discusses Marion’s understanding of the Divine Name, I would be interested in hearing McGravey discuss in further detail not only his understanding of the significance of the divine name but of the phenomenological significance of the Divine Name for our understanding of being and metaphysics, since God could have revealed the Divine Name to be Love but instead reveals it to be I AM WHO I AM.

Postmodernism is a strange term. Its cultural expression, mediated by a perspectivalism that goes back to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil at least, is characterized by a multivariance and internal set of contradictions that are present in its own self-understanding. The manifestation of postmodernism and the social context within which its own categories are intelligible—in literary works, philosophical reflection, theatrical performances, architectural objects, and other modalities of human creative output—are marred with so many technical inconsistencies between forms of media that a coherent definition is almost impossible to formulate. In art, postmodernism seems to exponentially extend the modernist aesthetic trajectory of alienating beauty from artistic communication to such an extent that most contemporary art museums are filled with temporary exhibits that not only make no sense but are often visually repulsive and tarnished with sloppily articulated political overtones. Similarly, there seems to be a vague distinction between “postmodernism” and “postmodernity” as formal descriptive terms, the former referring to an ideological structure or hermeneutic method and the latter referring to a sociocultural condition, a descriptor of contemporary society with its many incommensurable contextual horizons. Michael McGravey, in his insightful and challenging reflection on Jean-Luc Marion and Gianni Vattimo as sources for a realization of “postmodern theology,” offers a working definition for postmodernism that I will conditionally accept: the “disregard for or distrust of master narratives and institutional bodies of authority” (32). The topic that he presents and investigates is massively important: what is the identity and status of the Church as an ecclesial structure in a “postmodern” social nexus? On this basis, the book seems to be less an exposition of Marion and Vattimo for the sake of merely interpreting their work but rather using them with a clear argumentative program: namely, to see their thought as paving the way for a post-metaphysical “pluralist” ecclesial setting that calls into question the normative patterns of magisterial authority.

My knowledge of Marion is marginal, having read only God Without Being, and I have a cautious appreciation for what I have read. My knowledge of Vattimo is next to nothing, only having been exposed to his work through McGravey’s skillful and precise overview in the book under discussion. Any statement that I make about those two figures would and will be disfigured by my own ignorance. My focus then will be rooted in chapter 2 of Navigating Postmodern Theology, which—to my mind—presents McGravey’s own theological commitments and perhaps his reason for writing the book in the first place. Given my obvious epistemic limitations, I have no qualms with McGravey’s summary and interpretation of the interlocutors with whom he engages, and I will leave a more properly exegetical response to those who know these authors more carefully than I do. My response will lie instead on what I see to be the reason McGravey chooses these authors: that is, to present a theological approach, within a Catholic location, that engages more fully with postmodern philosophical methods and that extends its boundaries beyond a magisterial “traditionalism” that closes the door to cross-cultural, ecumenical, and interreligious conversation. In order to honestly engage with the content presented in chapter 2, I will lay my cards on the table. While a modernist claim to universal(ist) rationalist principles and ethical norms is broadly indefensible, I think that postmodernism as a reaction against modernity is not only incompatible with Catholic theology but dangerous, injecting into its ecclesial horizon a range of horizontalizing and immanentizing presuppositions that would help encourage the kind of ecclesia-cide happening in so many social-justice-oriented and, as my friend Gabriel Gordon articulates, “ethically supersessionist” progressive denominations of Christianity: i.e., the death of the Church as the central mediating social structure and sacramental context for transcendence. If the Christian Church, in the words of Lumen Gentium, “subsists in the Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him” (Lumen Gentium 8), how can we expect anything but its own internal self-destruction when the metaphysical foundations that circumscribe its own self-understanding are intentionally broken down? The remainder of my investigation will be divided into three parts. First, I will call into question the normative understanding of “traditional metaphysics” (58) as presented by McGravey. Second, I will reemphasize the necessity of an ecclesial magisterium, especially concerning issues related to dialogue with other philosophical systems and religious traditions. Third, I will ground the broad claims of postmodernist philosophy/ideology in the lived horizon of aesthetics and liturgics, arguing that the ways in which postmodern “pluralism” is actualized are not compelling when applied to the self-diffusive splendor of the Beautiful in the pluriformity of Nature, the depths of sacred liturgy, and (most importantly) the cruciformic Christological center of revelation.

lThe cosmos—discoverable in metaphysical illumination—includes and necessitates the self-transcending superabundance of being, pointing to—and yet infinitely distinct from—the triune God through Whom all finite reality is realized. McGravey, in order to pose postmodern philosophy as an alternative to the older scholastic form of metaphysics present in the Catholic Church’s official theology, alludes to Aristotelian (natural) theology and the praeambula fidei at the beginning of St. Thomas’s Prima Pars in broadly critical terms. While I agree that an essentialist, propositional, neo-scholastic reading of Thomas is typically unhelpful, my sense is that to reject Thomas outright—including his natural theology that forms a single (though important) speck of the Summa—as a consequence of that reading and to replace it with a decentered pluralist postmodernist approach seems hasty and unnecessary. Natural theology forms a good starting place for doing theological work after-revelation, but the metaphysical imagination of St. Thomas does not stop at Aristotle but includes, by necessity, the Fathers, Dionysius, John Damascene, and the medieval scholastic tradition that precedes him. Likewise, why should we trust the Heideggerian critique of ontotheology? Metaphysics, in both Catholic and Orthodox contexts, is not the same as ontology but includes a category of “beyond-[creaturely]-being,” as seen in the Eastern Fathers, Dionysius, Maximus, Eckhart, and the mystics. In other words, it includes ontology but is not itself reducible to ontology. Metaphysics surpasses language: it is circumscribed by the via negativa.. Marion himself, as McGravey articulates, goes back to Dionysius and the Fathers to defend a post-metaphysical approach to God (or God) as Beyond-Being. But why do we need to read Heidegger and Derrida to go back to those figures? Are we not able to just ignore the claims of deconstruction and read the ancient and early medieval sources by themselves, or is that too naïve? Additionally, twentieth-century Catholic theologians/philosophers such as Przywara, Balthasar,1 Lonergan, and MacIntyre demonstrate that a Thomistic ressourcement in light of contemporary historical consciousness, phenomenology, and/or scientific study is not only defensible but necessary. To move away from the analogia entis that delineates the structure of creaturely being in its contrapuntal relationship to the ever-greater God as Przywara expresses it, for example, is to abolish a coherent understanding of creatures in their relation to their Creator that is most clearly articulated by St. Thomas and the Fourth Lateran Council (contra the teleological immanentism of Joachim of Fiore, which de Lubac describes as an early expression of many modern philosophical errors). We need both natural theology and a Christological metaphysics in light of revelation. However, I am not a modernist rationalist. I have great sympathies with a postliberal approach: namely, affirming that the metaphysical “grammar” by which a given narrative is articulated is only learnable from within the context of the tradition of which that metaphysical system is constitutive.
The hierarchical leadership of the Church has a responsibility to act as a clear and traditional magisterial authority to ensure that the dogmatic unity of the Church’s life is not compromised. McGravey gives the example of Dominus Iesus, “which,” in his words, “asserts the primacy of Christianity and Catholic faith specifically” in “challeng[ing] the pluralism and curiosity of other faith systems many philosophers are open to” (74). The Church, as the Body of Christ sacramentally mediated by the Holy Spirit in its visible structure as well as in its invisible eschatological horizon, absolutely should assert her ontological primacy. The teaching on salvation in Dominus Iesus, in which the possible and yet mysterious salvation of non-Christians only comes from Christ through the particularity of the Church, is simultaneously (i) a profound development of “extra Ecclesiam nulla salus” while (ii) also affirming the sacramental necessity of the Church as Christ’s Body. Support for the teachings present in Dominus Iesus—as well as support for the Church’s sexual ethics, for example—is often anathema among Catholic theologians of a certain generation. The issue with a postmodern(ist) approach is that it often presents an utterly decentered understanding of narrative, in which (i) there are an infinitude of possible narratives and (ii) there is no way to judge and ascertain the veracity of any epistemic claim, since the category of “truth” (transcendentally central to traditional metaphysics) has deteriorated into the horizon of “perspective.” What happens when the teaching of Dominus Iesus is disputed in favor of a globalized pluralism? We get theological pluralism: i.e., the notion that all religions lead to the same path. It ends up in the uninspiring and banal religiosity of much of American Christianity derived from the 1970s: our arms locked in pluralist unity, singing Marty Haugen’s “All Are Welcome,” as we march up to our carpeted corporate-conference-center-looking church to worship a tolerant “god” who accepts everyone’s decisions and judges no one. Ecumenism and interfaith dialogue that just stop at the word “dialogue” are boring, since Christ taught His disciples to “preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15, KJV). What needs to be asserted in any conversation across traditions are the differences between them in an authentic spirit of charity and yet in the proclamation of the truth that “shall make you free” (John 8:32, KJV) through the particularity of the Church’s eschatological mission.

• Finally, any postmodernist approach, including in its philosophical and theological variations, breaks down when we arrive at the question of beauty. Postmodernism offers no conceptual resources by which to articulate the structure of beautiful existents in the perimeter of our spiritual-sensory experience. A simple question needs to be asked: does anybody really find postmodern art beautiful? Or what about music? What about the confluence of these modalities in sacred liturgical expression? The postmodern approach horizontalizes art to such a degree that there are no rational standards by which to make aesthetic judgments beyond the particularity of our own atomistic context. Beauty is the greatest proof of metaphysics, since beauty—for its intelligibility to be realized—depends on a metaphysical structure and a transcendental horizon. My hero Ralph Waldo Emerson, the American Platonist that he was, understood this well. Even Nietzsche, the Emersonian anti-Platonist, believed that some forms of music were better than others: he clearly preferred Heinrich Schütz, in his simultaneous profundity and Monteverdian delicacy, to what he saw as the superficiality and hypocrisy of Richard Wagner. My sense is that Schütz’s Italian spirit was the source of Nietzsche’s admiration. The sacred beauty of the liturgy, both in its classical Latin context and Greek Byzantine iconographical context, sublates intra-worldly beauty and takes it up into a Christological matrix. Beauty, as both St. Thomas and Balthasar affirm, is that “which is pleasing” to the subject “when seen” (ST I, q. 5, a. 4), and the eyes that “see” the beautiful existent are windows into a structure of being that transcends even the depth of our comprehension. We do not need postmodernism. We need to go beyond postmodernism to the affirmation of that which expresses Christological metaphysical truth within the particular beauty of tradition. Instead of the Missa Papae Francisci, could we return to the Missa Papae Marcelli? Instead of the banal postconciliar liturgical expressions that are still hanging on for dear life, could we return to the iconic mystery of the Byzantine Rite and the polyphonic symbolic universe of the Traditional Latin Mass?

Briefly, to begin, I would like to thank Michael J. McGravey for his fine book, and thank my former student Ethan Vander Leek for the invitation to respond to it. To be honest, it has been some time since I have immersed myself in the technical aspects of phenomenology and the philosophy of religion that flows from this approach, even if at one time it was the academic air I breathed, so this book was a marvelous re-evocation of matters that once so occupied me, and with questions that continue—although now in broader strokes—to animate my intellectual life. Moreover, it has been some decades since I read either Jean-Luc Marion or Gianni Vattimo (although when I did, I read them with interest and appreciation1). If at one point I could probably with some justification call myself an expert in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas,2 regarding the two principal thinkers whose work McGravey expounds in this book, I could only ever be considered a dabbler, even if the issues they engage were and continue to be of importance to me. All of this to say that my response will be less focused on the technical details of McGravey’s readings or conclusions (while fully acknowledging the importance of such work, and the labor involved in producing it), and turned more to the broader questions that the reading of this book evoked in me as I worked my way through it. Let me add finally in opening these remarks that I am in fundamental sympathy with the general trajectory of the book, that is, with the potential of phenomenology (among other things) to revivify both theology and (more importantly) faith in our postmodern, postmetaphysical, post-Christian age, and so my questions and concerns are as much for myself as they are for McGravey.

The main question I found myself pondering as I turned the pages of the book was whether the whole question of getting beyond metaphysics—specifically in the philosophy of religion (although, of course, the question is broader than that specific focus)—might look different from diverse denominational perspectives. Much of McGravey’s concern, it seems to me, following in part from his intensive reading of Jean-Luc Marion, stems from his (and Marion’s) grounding in Roman Catholicism, a tradition I do not share (even if relatively late in life I had the good sense to marry an Irish Catholic woman). I was raised and remain a Quaker, a tradition (especially on its theological left) for which metaphysics not only counts for nearly nothing at all, but is largely anathema, a tradition which nevertheless, and partly thereby, has its own problems. If Catholicism is saddled with Thomism and related discourses, and a theology that makes the question of Being/being (especially the Being of God) foundational to any subsequent theological discourse, my own tradition is liberated from any definite (or even shared) metaphysics in the name of hyper-personal, spiritual (vs. religious) experience, resulting—at the communal/ecclesiastical level—in theological anarchy, and finally an ignoring of theology (as theo-logos) altogether—with the consequence that any possibility of shared God-talk (along with any acknowledgment of the importance of, let alone faith in, God) is dismissed in deference to a shared political agenda. That is, perhaps there can be too much metaphysics, and perhaps also too little. There is something, indeed much, to be said for the move from God to Gød (with Marion and McGravey, crossing out the “o”), yet another thing to neglect “God” altogether (and cross out “God” entirely).

That is, while I appreciate the concern to overcome metaphysics in theological discourse, and the eclipsing of any genuine encounter with the divine that too often follows from overemphasizing it, I wonder whether metaphysical discourse does not, nevertheless, provide some important ballast to the theological ship. (I do not think McGravey necessarily disagrees with this . . . just continuing the conversation.) I wonder whether what is demanded (and what is being advocated for in the book, despite much of its rhetoric) is not the rejection of metaphysics per se, but a rejection of a certain dogmatically enforced version of metaphysics taken as the foundational discourse. For metaphysics can mean a variety of things—not always related to some specific set of ontological concerns. If metaphysics is (as I take it, while respecting what it has come to signify in the post-Heideggerian context) most broadly speaking an inquiry into what is “real,” and not necessarily a specific set of answers to that question arising out of a particular tradition, might not those questions be entirely valid, even theologically crucial, especially in a scientistic age for which the material stuff of the universe governed by immutable (as far as we know) natural laws are recognized as the only reality? If technically speaking we might want to claim that God does not “exist” (that God “is” [sic!] beyond being), that God is not best reduced to some mode of being (or even, and especially, Being itself), might we not, in the first place, need some kind of “metaphysical” reflection to make such judgments, and, secondly, to “rescue” (sorry, terrible word) “God” from the blunt, modernist dichotomy of “science gives us access to reality” and “everything else is either the side effect of this (the only) reality, or else pure fantasy”?

But maybe we can find a shared theological discourse as the body of Christ beyond the individualism of “free radicals” (which are damaging to the cell and ultimately to the “body”—with due apologies to the fine art of chemistry for this “loose” metaphor), yet also outside of metaphysics, beyond a concern with the “real,” with the reality/being of God, and McGravey (if I am reading him right) seems to follow Marion in putting phenomenology forward as a hopeful candidate. I am genuinely excited by such a prospect, followed McGravey’s analyses most sympathetically, and have even engaged in correlative projects myself . . . but I still have some questions (once again, and perhaps especially, for myself). Indeed, one of my continuing attractions to phenomenology is that done well (at least on my view) the “method” employed answers to the phenomenon in question rather than the phenomenon answering to, that is, being delimited in advance by, the contours of the method. But as a human construct surely that flexibility has its limits, especially when it is a matter of the encounter with the divine. Indeed, Dominique Janicaud’s version of phenomenology excludes religious phenomena. So, let’s employ a richer version of phenomenology, one more adequate to the subject matter in question! Amen! But would it not be naive in the extreme to believe that any phenomenological method could be as fully adequate to the religious Sache as we might hope, one that would not bring its own restrictions and prejudices (perhaps even systematic distortions) to bear, especially (though not only) when the resultant descriptions cannot but be articulated in our positive languages, and with our available categories? Only the latter, it seems to me, would provide the possibility of constituting the shared logos of a meaningfully communal theo-logos. In providing his account of the work of Marion (168–83) McGravey presents Marion (fairly, from what I can tell) as giving us a phenomenology that claims to be all but purely receptive, as “intuitive,” as attuned not to Dasein but to what gives itself, to what “floods one’s consciousness”—as if the “method” didn’t impose parameters (both possibilities and restrictions) on what “shows itself.” “The phenomenon appears as itself, giving itself to the observer without any prior conception” (175). Being a reader of Levinas, I can appreciate further the change in “modality” in the encounter of the Other from the activity of conceptualization to the passivity of being responsible/accused, from “being” (the concern with what something “is”) to “goodness” (the concern with what something/someone demands of me), or, for Marion, from imperium to the Cross. But perhaps I can be forgiven for bringing a bit of hermeneutic suspicion to the pretension that this could serve as the basis of a theology that somehow escapes the finite, fallible formulations that we as theologians (whether professional or not) bring to our work. Even while acknowledging with gratitude such attention to the “passive” moment in any genuine encounter with the divine (correlative with, as I understand it, even if not entirely equivalent to, Levinas’s insistence on passivity in the encounter with the face of the human other), as entering into the collective human discourse of theo-logy the aforementioned is only a moment—the provocation demanding a response (which is why, I think, Levinas insists that discourse consists of both the saying [le dire] and the said [le dit]). And I simply can’t get my head around how that response could be anything other than human. Revelation is always interpreted even as it breaks through, interrupts and disrupts, overwhelms and saturates, every such interpretation.

Is it not, moreover, a caricature of metaphysics to claim that it necessarily (structurally) prohibits the encounter/event of the divine, such that it needs to be overcome? Might not metaphysical discourse, at its best, in running up against its own limitations as it founders in the face of mystery lead as potentially to the mysterium tremendum as to dogmatic speculation? And could not the various methods of phenomenology be as restrictive as the settled certainties of various takes on metaphysics? And “love” is surely as susceptible to becoming as hackneyed and as put to perverse ends as is “being” (acknowledged by McGravey, 181). Isn’t it an illusion to think that phenomenology somehow escapes the limitations of language and finitude and somehow provides some direct/pure intuition of, or encounter with, the thing itself, as if it is not also a project launched by finite human beings? (But the contrary seems to be the claim that McGravey makes on 176: “[. . .] the encounter with God in these instances is something that lacks the ability to be apprehended by any other means outside of phenomenology,” as if phenomenology alone were capable of jumping out of its human skin, or, put otherwise, be the method that isn’t one.) That is, is the problem we are hoping to surmount metaphysics per se, or the way in which any human discourse is taken up: as privileged and foundational, or as seeing through a glass darkly? If we are going to ground our human reception of and response to transcendence in our finitude (and what choice do we have?), would not every response (phenomenological, metaphysical, theological, psychological, or what have you) bear that mark? Do not our discourses of any and every kind simultaneously provide a vista upon the given, but in a necessarily restricted way—a limited way of taking what is given? Is the solution to substitute a more adequate discourse (phenomenology?, even while it is confessed that it too is ultimately inadequate, 171) for an inadequate one (metaphysics?), or to resist the temptation to take any discourse as adequate, even while confessing that at various times for various purposes certain discourses are more adequate to their subject matter than others (even metaphysics for certain purposes?), and that it is sometimes—though not always—salutary to shake things up?

Perhaps my taking distance over the past several years from concern with the technical aspects of philosophy in favor of a more contemplative approach to thinking things through stems less from intellectual laziness and the onset of senescence than it does from a lesson I try to consistently learn from 1 Corinthians 3:18, illustrated for me by an old joke (from pre-Google Maps days): Hopelessly lost I see a local by the side of the road, so I slow and roll down my car window to ask him the way to my destination. He thinks for a moment, stroking his beard before responding: “You can’t get there from here.” Perhaps we can’t. Or perhaps it is laziness and senescence after all.