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to Unedited Philosophy Quotes and Ramblings about Intequinism.
Book name: ANATHEISM {
Returning to God After God }
Author: RICHARD
KEARNEY
Publisher: COLUMBIA
UNIVERSITY PRESS
Place: NEW
YORK
Date: Paperback edition, 2011
Ownership: Columbia University Press
Reader: Mr. M.D. Pienaar
Table of Contents
P.
xi
'Many
speak of a "religious turn" in Continental philosophy or, contrawise, of an
"antireligious turn" in a new wave of critical secularism
(Daniel Dennet, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens). … The
God question keeps returning again and again, compelling us to
ask what we mean when we speak of God. A deity of omnipotent
causality or of self-emptying service? A mighty monarch or a
solicitous stranger? A God without religion
or a religion without God? A bringer of war or peace?'
p.
xii
"But
in addition to witnessing sectarian violence, I also
experienced the arrogance of certain Protestant and Catholic
leaders speaking as if God was on their side."
'Indeed
my education with the Benedictine monks of Glenstal played a
formative role in my life. My mentors there took seriously the
Rule of St. Benedict regarding uncompromising "hospitality to the stranger."'
p.
xiii
"
.. my belief that spiritual commitment had the means to
provide one of the most effective antidotes to the perversion
of religion. Thus while I certainly revolted at an early age
against the ecclesiastical authorities of my land, and roundly
rejected the God of Triumph, I never ceased to harbour a deep
fascination for spiritual questions and an enduring admiration
for religious peacemakers."
"
.. radically secular society like
France—where the principle of laïcité reigned supreme—I
discovered myself coming back again to the God question."
French secularism, in French, laïcité (pronounced
[la.isiˈte]) is a
concept denoting the absence of religious involvement in
government affairs as well as absence of government
involvement in religious affairs. French secularism has a long
history but the current regime is based on the 1905 French law on the Separation of the Churches
and the State. (From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laïcité on 29 April
2013)
"..
what kind of God
were we talking about?
This
question continued to haunt me during my doctoral studies with
Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas in Paris."
'In
the present volume, I hope to weave some of these reflections
into a renewed quest for a God after God. This is I believe,
an increasingly pressing inquiry for our "postmodern" age
where the adversarial dogmas of secularism and absolutism threaten the option of
considered dialogue.'
p.
xiv
"The
absolute requires pluralism to avoid absolutism."
p.
xiv – xv
'In
Paris my dialogues with Jewish thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida were a crucial
influence on <p. xv> my growing appreciation of
emancipatory "messianic" horizons, and this was
later extended to include a dialogue between the
Judeo-Christian circle and the Islamic tradition (occasioned
by my encounters with Sufi philosophers in Cairo
and Kerala).
p.
xv
"If
the word was in the beginning, so was hermeneutics. There is no God's eye
view of things available to us. For we are not Gods, and
history tells us that attempts to become so lead to
intellectual and political catastrophe. Hermeneutics is a
lesson in humility .. Hermeneutics reminds us that the holiest
of books are works of interpretation—for authors no less than
readers. … If Gods and prophets talk, the best we can do is
listen—then speak and write in turn, always after the event,
ana-logically and ana-gogically, returning to words already
spoken and always needing to be spoken again. Hermeneutics was
there from the beginning and will be there to the end."
p.
xvii
"In
this sense, the present volume might be described as a
narrative of narratives, that is, a philosophical story about
the existential stories of our primal encounters with the
Other, the Stranger, the Guest—encounters
that in turn call for ever-recurring wagers and responses."
p.
xviii
"
.. we never exit from our hermeneutic circles—unless tempted
by a God's-eye view not ours to possess. The acknowledgement
of our finite hermeneutic situation saves us, I believe, from
both relativism and absolutism."
p.
xix
"All
three parts hope to show how the anatheist response to the
stranger may be witnessed in 1.
Primary lived experience, 2. Poetic re-experience, and 3. A
doubly renewed experience of ethical and spiritual praxis.
Combined they seek to suggest how a faith beyond faith may
serve new life."
p3
"..
this wager of faith beyond faith, I call anatheism. Ana-theos, God after
God."
p3
After
Kearney rejected dogmatic theism and
militaristic atheism he
yearned for God and therefore he is defining God anew.
P4
".. I
proceed to extrapolate implications of anatheism for
interreligious dialogue and for a new
hermeneutics of the "powerless
power" of
God."
P6
"But
let me be clear. When I speak of anatheism I am not advocating
some new religion. God forbid. Anatheism is not a hypothetical
synthesis in a dialectic moving from theism through
atheism to a final telos.
P7
"Anatheism,
in short, is an invitation to revisit what might be termed a
primary scene of religion: the encounter with a radical Stranger who we choose or don't
choose, to call God."
Self
I
recall there is a verse written by Paul in which he said we
should never call another God. Of course he meant it in the
singular because he wrote about God in the singular sense and
the statement was specifically about Jesus if
I recall correctly. I recall that Paul wrote there were
Israeli's or Jews who said Jesus was God whilst he was alive
and it should not have been said. The singularity and
plurality is important. Singular God does not exist for me any
more therefore in my view if a group is referred to as part of
God the person doing the referring can include or exclude
him/her self from the group.
P7
'But
the scene of the Stranger is at the core of the
anatheist wager that concerns us here, even if this epiphanic
moment of awakening is often neglected in official theologies.
Anatheism,
in other words, is nothing particularly new. It is simply a
new name for something old and, I hasten to add, constantly
recurring in both the history of humanity and of each life.'
P7-8
Anatheism
is true to the western tradition of knowing not to know and to
realize new knowledge. Socrates said true knowledge is knowing
not to know all and Kant identified
the noumenon, which cannot be known and wrote about pure
reason which is sophistical.
P8
Meeting
God as a Stranger is a cataphatic experience after
losing God during apophatic analysis.
Self
Apophatic
refers to explaining God in the sense of what God is not.
Kearney thus opines that apophatic reasoning about God
causes irreligious feelings. Apodictic in
the sense of Kant's Critique of pure reason
means validity. It is not currently sure whether Kant
described certainty in Critique
of pure reason as a sensible orientation in a cataphatic sense or in an
apophatic sense. Roy Clouser promotes apophatic (?) knowledge
of God whilst quoting Turkish theologians.
apophatic |ˌapəˈfatik|
adjective Theology
(of knowledge of God) obtained through negation.
The opposite of cataphatic .
DERIVATIVES
apophatically |-ik(ə)lē| adverb
apophaticism |-ˌsizəm| noun
ORIGIN mid
19th cent.: from Greek apophatikos ‘negative,’ from
apophasis ‘denial,’ from apo- ‘other
than’ + phanai ‘speak.’
cataphatic |ˌkatəˈfatik|
adjective Theology
(of knowledge of God) obtained through
affirmation. The opposite of apophatic .
ORIGIN mid
19th cent.: from Greek kataphatikos ‘affirmative,’ from
kataphasis ‘affirmation,’ from kata- (as
an intensifier) + phanai ‘speak.’
affirmation |ˌafərˈmā sh ən|
noun
the action or process of affirming or being
affirmed : an affirmation of basic human values | he
nodded in affirmation.
• Law a formal declaration by a person who
declines to take an oath for reasons of conscience.
ORIGIN
late Middle English : from Latin affirmation-,
from the verb affirmare (see affirm ).
P8
Anatheism
in a territorial sense is the interaction between Greek
objective truths and Jewish transcendent truths. Jerusalem has
been host and guest to the Other (Athens)
and Athens has been host and guest to the Other (Jerusalem)
through the ages and these two cultures have influenced the
other city to form the current synthesis of Western religion.
Self
My
thoughts before I read Anatheism
led to the idea of Others-than-only-selves as a defining of
God.
P10-13
Mimeses are
explained as flights of heroes who become Strangers in Other territories.
Strangers'
bodies' or their Souls depart, depending on the outcome of the
specific mimesis. The sacred souls
however do not leave Earth but dwell here to protect.
P14
Art
and religion are intertwined in figurative speech and writing.
Self
Plato's
spirit might fall back to Earth and burn down the spirits of
Aristotles if Kearney's book reaches dark outer space.
P15
Once
corresponding truths are not part of one's religion an
anatheist reinterpretation of own faith will almost certainly
include metaphorical combinations to describe relationships
with Jesus and
the Other.
P16
Anatheism
is a "movement" not a "state" because anatheisms do not take a
definite position in favour or against any ideology. Believers
of anatheisms' existences are constantly on the move from one
state to an-other.
p17-20
Three
Abrahamic faiths are identified as
Jewish, Christian and Islamic. In these faiths meetings with
the divine Other have
been written about for example the time when Sarah gave birth
to Isaac. The annunciation was by three men to Abraham and
after a year Sarah gave birth to Isaac. When the Other
appeared to Abraham he welcomed them and did not react with
hostility towards them. Kearney shows the discrepant actions
of Abraham. Abraham expelled his servant, Hagar and his son
Ishmael to fend for themselves and he was willing to sacrifice
his other son Isaac.
P21
The
Hebrew Bible has thirty-six commands to love the Stranger and only two to love
one's neighbour.
Self
Jesus's first thought about loving
the Other was
projected at his neighbour and his second thought was to
include Samaritans in his definition of neighbour. Kearney
acknowledges the influence of Sartre's existentialism on him
(p.xii). Sartre wrote about one's neighbour being trouble.
P22
Other is
translated in Hebrew as eesh/iysh,
in Latin as vir and
in Greek as anthropos.
P23-25
The
annunciation to Mary is portrayed as if she conceived
another's child and not Joseph's child.
Self
In the
two genealogies of Jesus in
Matthew and Luke Joseph is mentioned as the father of Jesus.
Joseph's father is however not certain according to the Bible
because of the uncertainty about Nathan or Solomon as
forefather of Jesus.
P26-30
Jesus was
a Stranger to his family and his
disciples and Jesus preached that the Other should
be helped and treated as Guest.
P30-32
Muhammad of Islam met a
Stranger in a cave who gave him
the Islam message. This message can be interpreted to invoke
hostilities or hospitalities.
P32-34
There
was however many Islamic promotions for peaceful co-existence
for example by Averroes who spoke against
literalists.
Self
Did
Averroes generalize against
literalists without distinguishing between good and bad
literalists?
P37-39
There
is a clear "ambivalence" in Abrahamic religions and
Christianity between accepting strangeness and rejecting
strangeness.
Self
The
ambivalence requires the re-evaluation of Western religions,
distinguishing between good and evil in the religions.
6 May
2013
p.40
"The
anatheist wager I am trying to describe has five main
components: imagination,
humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality.
Imagination
Imagination
implies seeing a stranger as someone according
to a hermeneutic interpretation.
p.42
Empathy
is central to the imagination when the Other is
seen '"as"' Other in the hermeneutic sense. The suffering
of the Other is thus felt in a manner of speaking.
Humor
p.43
'The story of Jesus's own life is itself divinely
comic, moreover. To the extent that it was largely lived, as
Kierkegaard observed, "incognito." It is the drama of a Holy
Fool disappearing in presence and reappearing in absence, at
once there and not there'.
P.42-43
Humor
for Kearney relates to the paradoxes of Christianity and the
references to miracles. The 'least will be the most', the eye
of a needle and a camel and the sight of The-vagrant
transcribed into divinity.
Commitment
p.44
Commitment
relates to commitment of being not-God, for example the
opposite of the commitment of Jesus to
beyond the Rubicon to death to his own God.
Discernment
P.44-47
When
the other is met, a judgement has to be made. Is the other
like the self or is the Other God?
If the other is like the self, then the-I, have to be weary
because the other could then be a deceiver, a murderer or a
rapist.
Hospitality
p.47-48
Hospitality
is the crucial action, which follows the discernment. If the
wrong is hosted it could lead to death or damage of the self.
Only God is good and forgive all therefore the hospitality should be based on
knowledge and that includes the awareness of not knowing all.
Self
Kearney
makes the mistake, which Kant explains
in Critique of pure
reason. The mistake is to accept the existence of an
object, which does not exist. Existence is the proof of
validity according to Kant. Kearney's definition of God, God
who forgives all, is not true because the entity does not
exist. The definition is mere words. Kearney uses the
definition to explain he is not God [Later in the book Kearney
writes about '"us"' being God and he acknowledges that we are
the Other of others, we are thus all the Other of
someone.] therefore he will turn some vagrants away and will
show welfare to others because of his judgement.
P49-52
Most
religions have similarities and one of them is hospitality to
the Stranger.
p.52
"Another
aspect of the fivefold wager worth emphasizing at this point
is the powerlessness of the divine."
p.53
Kearney
says that the idea of a powerful God comes from a literal
reading of the Bible.
Self
Reliance
in religion is important. God has to be an entity that can
resist the evil of the devil. The devil uses force and
therefor logically God has to be powerful. It is not from a
literal reading of the Bible but logical. God is the plural in
Gen. 1:26. '"Let us make man in our image, in our likeness,
and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of
the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and all the
creatures that move along the
ground."' The plural indicates power. Singularity indicates
weakness. It is because a partly literal reading of Kearney
that he ascribes Godly attributes to the singular. Most places
in the Bible God are referred to in the singular as Him or His
etc.
P.58
'The
young Jewish writer Etty Hillesum recognized this when she
wrote in her diary from the jaws of her Holocaust hell, "You
(God)) cannot help us, but we must help you and defend Your
dwelling place inside us to the last."'
Self
A god
who does not help is not legal because the legal system is
supposed to help individuals.
p.61
'So
where was God in Dachau and Treblinka? Suffering with his
people. From an anatheist perspective, the covenant is to be
understood as a divinity calling humans to full partnership,
to co-creation, or,
as the old Talmudic adage had it, to the completion of the
seventh day of Creation.'
p.62
'Also
writing in the shadow of the Holocaust, the Jewish philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas, who
lost many of his family in Dachau, speaks of the necessity to
reject the infamous God of power who
could allow such horrors.'
'..
Levinas holds that the gift of
Judaism to humanity is atheism—namely, separation from God so
as to encounter the other as absolutely other.'
p.70
A
characteristic of an anatheist is the proposition that God is
weak and suffering.
p.74
'The
philosopher dreams of a prophet who would realize today the
liberating message of Exodus that exists prior to the law: "I
am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt,
out of the house of bondage." Such faith speaks of freedom and
proclaims the Cross and Resurrection as invitations to a more
creative life; a belief that
articulates the contemporary relevance of the Pauline
distinction between Spirit and Law
and interprets "sin" less as the breaking of taboo than as the
refusal of life.'
Self
The
above is contrary to the definition of love by Jesus because
Jesus equated love with compliance to laws and prophecies.
p.76
Anatheism
is a result of philosophical atheism's
criticism of traditional religion and the search for new
definitions for God by looking at traditional religion's
origins.
p.85
'"Only
through singularities can we find the divine." —Spinoza'
Self
The
above quote of Spinoza makes sense if the fear of being alone
and weak and human in difficult situations makes us realize
that only plurality can be God.
p.87-94
With
regard to sacraments Husserl and Heidegger mentioned the flesh
but did not acknowledge the flesh as flesh. Merleau-Ponty
recognised the bread of the Eucharist as bread in his
phenomenological writings and he opines that God is in this
world suffering as a human being. It is not clear what
Merleau-Ponty's opinion is about singularity and pluralities
in God.
p.96
"Julia
Kristeva—… But she, no less than Merleau-Ponty, rejects the
God of metaphysical theism. She recommends, in Strangers
to Ourselves, that we surmount the theocratic dualisms of pure
and impure, saved and damned, native and stranger; for, she argues, such
dualisms lead to sacrificial scapegoating and war. "The big
work of our civilization," she says, "is to fight this
hatred—without God.""
10 May
2013
p.98-99
"In
both writing and healing, the reversible transubstantiation of
word and flesh expresses itself as catharsis. (32) Kristeva
goes on, rather boldly, to suggest that the aesthetic of
transubstantiation not only helps to heal the wounded psyche
but also releases writers like Proust and Joyce from the
prison house of linguistic idealism.
…
What
pertains to Proust, I will suggest, also pertains to Joyce and
Woolf. And it is to a closer reading of these three novelists
that I return in my next chapter. My aim is to sketch a
sacramental aesthetics that
illustrates how dying to an acosmic God
may allow a God of cosmic <p.99> epiphanies to be
reborn. Whether these authors are concerned more with an aesthetic religion or
a religious aesthetic
remains and open question."
p.99
"Kearney
motivates that God is of cosmic nature and not "acosmic". Thus in this world. He
refers to Francis of Assisi who broke with "previous
metaphysical doctrines of Christianity as acosmic denial of
the body."
Self
It is
not now clear to me whether Kearney refers only to a body in
the past tense or also to a body in the present tense or
bodies in the past and/or present tense. Whether his "body" is
dead or alive, if in the present tense is also not sure. His
"body" seems to be a human "body" of flesh and not "in the
flesh".
p.99-100p
'Against
the acosmic tendencies of
mainstream metaphysical Christianity, Francis's intrepid
achievement was to combine love of God with a sense of union
with the life and being of Nature. (36) His greatness was to
have expanded the specifically Christian emotion of love for
God the Father to embrace "all the lower orders of nature,"
while at the same time uplifting Nature into the glory of the
divine.(37) … For here, after all, was a "mystic who dared
conjoin transcendence and immanence, the
sacred and
the secular, by
calling all creatures his brothers, ..
<p.100> .(38)'
Self
The
above quote implies that Kearney's God he promotes is 'Nature'
because he quotes someone else's or Francis of Assisi's '"..
lower orders of nature,"'.
p.100
'This
mystical panentheism—the
view that God is in all beings—was condemned as blasphemy by
many orthodox Christians before and after Francis.'
p.101-102
'Each
was deeply marked, to be sure, by their religious education
and upbringing: Joyce as a Catholic, Woolf as a Protestant,
and Proust as someone with a mixed Christian-Jewish
background. …
There
is a notion among modern intellectuals that matters of
existential profundity and ultimacy, previously considered the
preserve of churches, are now, in Western culture at least,
being transferred to the sanctuaries of art. .. it often
misses the degree to which many authors remained deeply
committed to a sacramental imagination that
defied the either/or division between theism and
<p.102> atheism.'
p.102
'For
these three authors believe, along with Paul Eluard, that
there is indeed another world, but that it is inside this one.
…
I will
be suggesting, in other words, that these three authors .. ,
in favour of a retrieval of the sacramental in
the sensible. The Eucharistic imagination, described by
Merleau-Ponty and Kristeva in the last chapter, is no longer
the exclusive preserve of High Church liturgies,'
Proust 2
Proust, Marcel (1871–1922), French novelist,
essayist, and critic. He devoted much of his life to writing
his novel À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27). Its central
theme is the recovery of the lost past and the releasing of
its creative energies
through the stimulation of unconscious memory.
Woolf |woŏlf|
Woolf, Virginia (1882–1941), English novelist,
essayist, and critic; born Adeline Virginia Stephen. A
member of the Bloomsbury Group, she gained recognition with
Jacob's Room (1922). Subsequent novels, such as Mrs. Dalloway
(1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), established her as an
exponent of modernism.
Joyce |jois|
Joyce,
James (Augustine Aloysius) (1882–1941), Irish writer. An
important writer of the modernist movement, he first became
known for his short stories in Dubliners (1914). His novel
Ulysses (1922) revolutionized the structure of the modern
novel and developed the stream-of-consciousness technique.
Other notable
novels: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914–15) and
Finnegans Wake (1939).
stream of consciousness
noun Psychology
a person's thoughts and conscious reactions to
events, perceived as a continuous flow. The term was
introduced by William James in his Principles of Psychology
(1890).
•
a literary style in which a character's thoughts, feelings,
and reactions are depicted in a continuous flow uninterrupted
by objective description or conventional dialogue. James
Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Marcel Proust are among its notable
early exponents.
(Version
2.1 (80), Copyright © 2005–2009 Apple Inc. New Oxford American
Dictionary)
JOYCE
p.106
'In short, the author agrees to die so that the
reader may be born.'
p.107
'(Not to reinvoke
Benjamin, who deeply influenced
both Derrida and Agamben.)'
14 May 2013
p.107
'In short,
transliterating Penelope and Odysseus into Molly and Bloom,
Joyce performs a daring act of eucharistic comedy. He converts
the epic into the everyday and rediscovers the sacred in the bread and wine
of profane existence. So doing, he proves his conviction that
the "structure of heroism is a damned lie and that there cannot
be any substitute for individual passion."(11)
Molly's rewriting of Penelope conforms, I believe, to
the basic features of comedy outlined by Aristotle and
Bergson, namely: the combining of more with less, of the
metaphysical with the physical, of the heroic with the
demotic. Or, to put it in our sacramental idiom, the combining
of Word with flesh. …love: eros defying the sting of
thanatos.)'
katharevousa |ˌkäθäˈrevoōsä|
noun
the purist form of modern Greek used in
traditional literary writing, as opposed to the form that is
spoken and used in everyday writing (called demotic).
ORIGIN
early 20th cent.: modern Greek, literally ‘purifying,’
feminine of kathareuōn, present
active participle of Greek kathareuein ‘be pure,’ from
katharos ‘pure.’
Thanatos |ˈθanəˌtōs; -ˌtäs|
(in Freudian theory) the death instinct. Often
contrasted with Eros .
ORIGIN
from Greek thanatos ‘death.’
(New)
p.108
'And it
is surely significant that Molly herself is "full with seed"
(not her husband's) as she records her fantasy of death and
rebirth, just as Bloom himself is described as a "manchild in
the womb." Allusions to second natality abound.'
p.109-110
Kearney
explains how the biblical texts are transfigured into fiction
and how that influence readers. The Word becomes flesh through
the fiction reading. Kearney also refers to the scatological (relating
to excrement) and the eschatological in Joyce's writing.
p.110
PROUST
P.110-118
Kearney
explains how the eschatological of
the Bible is reread in the writings of Proust and interpreted
differently by different people for example Kristeva and
Benjamin. The
hermeneutic influence of the Bible
can however be noticed in the writing of Proust and in the
interpreting of Proust by readers.
P118
WOOLF
p.118-127
Kearney
explains how Woolf included an incorporeal God she called "it"
in her life and writings. "It" was included in her thoughts
and writings as nature, which cannot be copied by humans
although humans also try to create through art but can never
reach the level of creation represented by "it".
TEXTUAL
TRAVERSALS
p.128
'The
sacramental aesthetic of our three
authors is far removed from an economy of penalty and
compensation. On the contrary, it bears witness to literary
epiphanies of radical kenosis and emptying where the
sacred unhitches
itself from the Master God ("equality with the Father," as
Paul put it) in order to descend into the heart of finite
flesh. Thus the birth of the child as incarnate being attests
to the demise of the Immutable Monarch.
Unless the divine seed dies there can be no eucharistic
rebirth. Or to put it in the words of the young Jewish mystic,
Etty Hillesum, "by excluding death from one's life we deny
ourselves the possibility of a full life."'
p.130
'In
sum, anatheism is not about
evacuating the sacred from
the secular but retrieving the
sacred in the secular.'
P.127-130
Kearney
writes that in the literature of the three writers
transubstantiations take place from flesh of the writers to
their words and then to the flesh of the readers. Religion is
replaced by art with anatheism and
the artists' lives are the divine beings, which has been
influenced by the sacraments of religion.
Self
Between
secular and sacred means
the two presuppositions about God's perfection and oneness are
rejected. God is not perfect and God cannot be one person nor
is God oneness of the cosmos. Plato's Forms are perfect but
the Forms are not God.
p.133
'After
our hermeneutic detour through
sacramental poetics we return,
finally, to the question of sacramental ethics. .. what does
it mean to accept the sacred stranger into the secular universe? What is
involved in translating epiphanies of transcendence into
immanence of everyday action?
What are the practical implications of moving from sacred
imagination to a sacred praxis of peace and justice?'
Self
The
above objectives of Kearney explain what he would like to see
as the teleological ends of his anatheism.
Secularisation with a place for the sacred stranger and immanent actions
instead of transcending procrastination is important to
Kearney. Practical peace and justice instead of sacred
imaginations of utopias are espoused by Kearney. There is not
a radical element in Kearney's
wishes except radical hospitality. His wishes imply a broadening
of intellectual and religious horizons.
p.166
'Anatheism,
I have argued, is not an end but a way. It is a third way that
precedes and exceeds the extremes of dogmatic theism and
militant atheism.'
p.133-134
'TOWARD AN ETHICS OF KENOSIS
…
<p.134>
a kenotic moment of "nothingness" and "emptiness" resides at
the core of a postmetaphysical faith; but neither sees this as
the last word. Abandonment leads back to action, surrender
resurfaces as service.
Breton
.. claims… faith "must inhabit the world and give back to God
the being he has not." Speaking more specifically of Christian
kenosis, he
talks of a process that follows "the descent of the divine
into a human form, obedience unto death, the ignominy of the
Cross. …"
Self
Using
'he' above does not make sense and it was probably done
because of the presupposition of God as One in Christian
religion, without realising. 'They' would have made more
sense. Breton emphasised welfare work as an important way of
sharing.
p.134
'In
the case of the contemporary thinker and activist Gianni
Vattimo, kenosis entails
a reading of 1 Corinthians 12 (on love) that treats the
Incarnation as God's relinquishing of all power so
as to turn everything over to the secular order.'
Self
Gianni
Vattimo envisages cooperation between The-incorporeal part of
God and creaturely humans as part of God.
p.136
John
Caputo also advocates kenotic faith when he says the
sacrificial power, when sacrificing others, should be left behind and
emptied into accepting strangers and others with love.
"All
these contemporary thinkers contribute, in their distinct
ways, to the anatheist option of a sacredness beyond
sacrifice. … Or as Francis did when he followed the kenotic
way of Christ …"
Self
who
did not start a sacrificial revolution against the Romans and
Greeks who colonized Israel.
p.137
"For
what is God, as Irenaeus put it, if not us
fully alive?
The
acknowledgement of divine kenosis, .. is
by no means confined to Christianity. .. is a crucial moment
of new creation."
Self
If
survival is based on creating as an ethical methodology
instead of sacrificing others as
method of eliminating competition or of appropriating others'
assets and ideas, the above kenotic experience can take place.
p.137-138
'FROM HOSTILITY TO HOSPITALITY'
'In
what follows I propose to explore how anatheist attitudes
might be put into practice. How may one keep open the space of
hospitality when
it is real strangers knocking at the door, real migrants
seeking food and <p.138> shelter, real adversaries
challenging our way of life—and maybe even our lives? Here
then we return to the ultimate, and unsurpassable dilemma:
what is to be done?
Let me
begin by saying what, in my opinion, is not to be done. To be
avoided, at all costs, is the ruinous temptation to use
religion to dominate politics. … Stalinism and Nazism were, as
Mircea Eliade recognized, examples of perverted messianism ..
and the Middle East .. bear out the sorry lesson of ongoing
religious violence.'
p.139
'SACRED SECULARITY
… The
task is to reenvision the relationship between the holy and
the profane such that we can pass from theophany to praxis while
avoiding the traps of theocracy and theodicy.'
theophany |θēˈäfənē|
noun ( pl. -nies)
a visible manifestation to humankind of God or a
god.
ORIGIN Old
English , via ecclesiastical Latin from Greek theophaneia,
from theos ‘god’ + phainein ‘to show.’
theodicy |θēˈädəsē|
noun ( pl. -cies)
the vindication of divine goodness and providence
in view of the existence of evil.
DERIVATIVES
theodicean |-ˌädəˈsēən| adjective
ORIGIN
late 18th cent.: from French Théodicée, the
title of a work by Leibniz, from Greek theos ‘god’ +
dikē ‘justice.’ (New)
Self
Thus
theophany should be allowed as
Jesus told
his disciples by asking them to be God. In a way Kearney is
doing the same as Jesus; the most important difference is that
Kearney is not doing as he is saying because he mostly refer
to the Other whilst
excluding himself. He did however accept his own
responsibility on page 137 where he rhetorically stated: "For
what is God, as Irenaeus put it, if not us
fully alive?"
p.140-141
'Raimon
Panikkar is a contemporary philosopher who proposes the option
of a creative relationship between
the secular and the sacred. … <p.141> This is not
to say the secular and the sacred are identical. … It is a
matter of reciprocal interdependency rather than
one-dimensional conflation. And this chiasmic coexistence may
itself serve as model for the interanimation of democratic
politics and mature faith: ..'
Self
In
other words the secular needs the creativities
of creators and creatures need
networks of secularism.
p.141
'To
collapse politics and religion into one leads, as history
shows, to holy war, theocracy, and ecclesial imperialism.'
p.142
'..
Panikkar coins the word cosmotheandrism to connote the creative cohabiting of the
human (anthropos) and
divine (theos) in
the lived ecological world (cosmos). …
The
secular entails a radical reorienting of our
attention away from the old God of death and fear, for without such con-version
we could not rediscover the God of life at the heart of our
incarnate temporal existence.'
Self
Kearney
writes about the old devil, which sacrificed and caused fear
when Kearney writes about the old God of death and fear.
p.143-149
'ISLAMIC QUESTIONING'
Kearney
hopes that Islamic law will change to include democratic
systems with Sufi Islam
at the lead. He often quotes ibn-Rushd who is also called
Averroës.
Self
Democratisation
is taking place in some Islamic countries. It seems Sufi Islamic
groups have been targeted by the old tutelary powers of
Islamic states in for example Egypt. (From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufism
on 15 May 2013)
p.149
'EXTENDING THE CIRCLE
'What
then of non-Abrahamic religions? … Central to anatheism is
the freedom to converse with those who remain alien to one's
own faith. … This question of inclusive hospitality to
"other Others" seems to be particularly crucial in an age when
we are increasingly aware, through global communications, of
just how many others there
are in the world. … This question of religious difference, on
a gobal scale, cannot be avoided if anatheism is to be true to
its intentions of radical hospitality. And I say
this for practical as well as theoretical concerns: the wager
of welcoming or refusing the stranger is often a matter of
war or peace.
… It is
not simply a categorical imperative of moral reason (à la Kant)'
Self
Kant refined
Jesus's wish that we will treat
others the
way we want to be treated when Kant promoted universality of actions. Kant wrote
we should ask ourselves what the world would be like if all
act like selves do. If the envisaged impact to the world will
be negative if all act the specific way, which is questioned,
the action is wrong. If we all throw papers in the street and
not in dustbins, our streets will be a mess, therefore it is
wrong and no one should throw papers in the street. If we all
start sacrificing oppositions, the world will digress into a
state of nature, which we do not want, therefore it was wrong
when devils sacrificed their oppositions for example Jesus.
p.150
'..
here is a sample of typical formulations concerning compassion
for the other adduced in a wide variety of religions:
Zoroastrianism: "Do
not do unto others whatever
is injurious to yourself" (Sahyast-na-Shayast, 13:29)
Buddhism:
"Treat not others in
ways that you yourself would find hurtful" (Udana-Varga 5:18)
Jainism: "One
should treat all creatures in the world as one
would like to be treated" (Mahavira, Sutrakrtanga).
Confucianism: "One
word that sums up the basis of all good conduct … loving
kindness. Do not do to others what
you do not want done to yourself" (Confucius, Analects 15:23).
Hinduism:
"This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what
would cause pain if done to you" (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Self
It can
be noted that the three Magi who arrived in Israel to give
gifts of incense and gold to support Jesus's foreign spirit came from
Iran where Zoroastrianism was founded. Zoroastrianism[1]
and Jesus influenced Nietzsche when
he wrote Zarathustra. Nietzsche did not overcome the false
presupposition of a singular God, which is present in his
Zarathustra.
p.150
'Such
exchangeability between different spiritual traditions of the
planet captures one of the essential points of interreligious dialogue: namely, the
commonality of all religions across confessional differences.
Hence the claim that when you reach through creedal
distinctions to a shared praxis and mystical communion, you
realize, as the ancients say "we are all one." … But
anatheistic hospitality toward
the stranger is, as noted, not just
the recognition of the other as the same as ourselves
(though this is crucial to any global ethic of peace). It also
entails recognizing the other as different to ourselves,
as radically strange and irreducible to our familiar horizons.
p.151
'.. as
divine as the universality of Golden Rules. …
The readiness to translate back and forth between
ourselves and strangers—without collapsing the distinction
between host and guest languages—is, I submit, one of the best
recipes to promote nonviolence and prevent war.'
p.152
'The
three arcs of anatheism—the
iconoclastic, the prophetic, and the sacramental—attest to ways in which the
sacred is
in the world but not
of the world.'
p.153
'Extreme
secularism tends to ignore God as Stranger in its exclusive focus
on God as Sovereign (suprema
potestas).'
'For
if others are
strangers to us we are equally strangers to others and to
ourselves.'
p.152-153
Iconoclasm
happens when traditional religion is rejected. Prophetic parts
of anatheism relates to a better
world to come as predicted by Levinas, Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur.
<p.153> 'The sacramental moment of anatheism is
when we finally restore the hyphen between the sacred and
the secular. It is
also the moment we return from text to action, from the realm
of critical interpretation to the world of quotidian praxis
and transformation.'
Self
Earlier
Kearney promoted Jesus's love by asking that we
follow universal laws in our daily
lives. It is manifesting love of not doing things against
fellow human beings.
p.153-154
Kearney
also promotes positive action for example working for vagrants
and destitute people.
Self
I
recall Jesus said
somewhere we will be judged according to how much we gave to
destitute people.
p.158
'For
Dorothy Day, as for Dallmayr, one of the greatest tragedies of
Christianity was that Christ's teaching about nonsovereignty
went largely unheeded.'
p.159
'My
second example of sacramental action is Jean Varnier. A
Canadian philosopher who experienced the fallout of World War
II as a young man, Vanier later gave up a university career to
devote his life to the service of discarded people—those he
called the wounded of the earth. …
Exposing
ourselves to insecurity, we are instructed by the strangers we
set out to teach.'
p.163-164
'A
central aim of Gandhi's career was to combat the
dichotomy between the spiritual and the social. His key notion
of swaraj entailed both 1. personal <p.164> practice of
self-restraint ("experienced by each one for himself") (26)
and 2. public commitment to political emancipation ("a
complete independence through truth and non-violence … without
distinction of race, color or creed"). (27)'
p.166
'Anatheism,
I have argued, is not an end but a way. It is a third way that
precedes and exceeds the extremes of dogmatic theism and
militant atheism.'
Self
Today
I think that essentially Kearney is trying to find a middle
position between atheism and theism. The search for the elusive
middle made him loose contact with reality. God needs to be
powerful to be able to stand against the devils and this
reality Kearney argues against.
p.166
'Anatheism
does not say the sacred is
the secular; it
says it is in the
secular, through
the secular, toward
the secular. I would even go so far as to say the sacred is
inseparable from the secular, while remaining distinct.
Anatheism speaks of "interanimation" between the sacred and
secular but not of fusion or confusion. They are inextricably
interconnected but never the same thing.
p.167
'I am
not suggesting that faith is only genuine if it has passed
through the grids of Western liberal secularism. … Anatheism
is not something that comes only at the end of history, as
dialectical teleologies might suggest. It marks the eternal
crossing of time. It was there from the beginning and recurs
at every moment that the stranger trumps the sovereign.
...
Anatheism
… We conceive of this as a necessary purging of the
perversions of religious power, following the adage (oft
cited by Ivan Illich) that corroptio optimi est
pessima: the corruption of the best is the worst. To
justify torture, conquest, and domination "in the name of God"
is, I believe, the worst sin of all.'
p.167-168
'And I
agree with Dawkins that the idea of <p.168> God as a
superterrestrial "superintendent" of the universe, who
controls and determines our actions, needs summary debunking.
… Ricoeur noted how Nietzsche became
ensnared in the very spirit of nihilism he sought to expose,
how he fell victim to the resentment he resolved to combat—and
neglected the yea-saying. … For whenever convictions are
arrived at, not by direct contact with the objects themselves
but indirectly "through the critique of others, the processes of thinking are
impregnated with ressentiment."(3)'
p.172
'Faced
with the Huntington thesis that "we only know who we are …
when we know whom we are against," the ethic of hospitality replies
that the stranger is
precisely the one who reminds us—not as enemy but as host—that
the self is never an autonomous identity but a guest
graciously hostaged to its host. (11)'
p.176
'The
distillation of all religions into a set of common
denominators has its purpose. An impressive example of this is
the project of the Parliament of World Religions, convened in
1992, to develop a global ethic of peace, based on the Golden
Rule that we should treat all others as
ourselves. … But anatheism suggests,
once again, that there is something else, another step to be
taken that supplements the move toward universal principles.
And this second step involves a radical descent
into the specificities of each spiritual tradition .. to a
Word that surpasses us.'
p.180
'All
great ethical teachings share a set of precepts—do not kill,
tell the truth, be just, look after the weak. What religions,
anatheistically retrieved, can add to such shared priciples,
as inscribed in world charters of human justice, is a deep
mystical appreciation of something Other than
our finite, human being: some Other we can welcome as a
stranger if we can overcome our
natural response of fear and trauma.'
p.182
'The
glory of God is each and every one of us fully alive.
'But I
am talking here of a transcendence in and through
immanence,
which, far from diminishing humanity, amplifies it. If the
divine stranger does not enhance one's
humanity, inviting it to better things, that is, to a more
just, loving, and creative manner of being, then
it is not worthy of the name divine.
New Oxford American Dictionary (Version 2.1 (80),
Copyright © 2005–2009 Apple Inc.)
A
Abrahamic faiths · 7
absolutism · 2, 3
acosmic · 15, 16
anatheism · 4, 20, 21,
27, 30, 34
anthropos · 8, 26
Apodictic · 5
apophatic · 5, 6
atheism · 4, 13, 14, 17,
22, 32
Averroes · 9
B
Benjamin · 18, 19
C
cataphatic · 5, 6
Continental philosophy ·
1
creation · 13, 20, 23
creative · 13, 17, 25,
26, 34
creatures · 12, 16, 25,
28
D
Derrida · 3, 18
E
eschatological · 19
G
Gandhi · 31
God of death and fear ·
26
Golden Rules · 29
H
hermeneutic · 3, 10, 19,
21
hermeneutics · 3, 4
heroism is a damned lie · 18
hospitality · 2, 10, 11,
22, 24, 27, 29, 33
I
immanence · 16, 21, 34
interreligious · 4, 29
Irenaeus · 23, 25, 34
J
Jesus · 5, 7, 8, 9, 10,
14, 25, 27, 28, 30, 31
K
Kant · 5, 11, 27
kenosis · 20, 22, 23
L
laïcité · 2
Levinas · 2, 3, 13, 30
M
messianic · 3
Mimeses · 7
Monarch · 20
Muhammad · 9
N
Nietzsche · 28, 33
O
Other · 3, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 17, 25, 34
others · 11, 23, 24, 27,
28, 30, 33
P
panentheism · 16
Pauline distinction · 13
pluralism · 3
power · 12, 13, 23, 33
powerless power · 4
powerlessness · 11
R
radical · 4, 20, 22, 26,
27, 34
relativism · 3
S
sacramental · 15, 17,
18, 20, 21, 30, 31
sacred · 7, 16, 18, 20,
21, 25, 30, 32
scatological · 19
secular · 2, 16, 20, 21,
23, 25, 26, 30, 32
Spinoza · 14
stranger · 2, 3, 4, 5,
8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 21, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 34
Sufi · 3, 26, 27
T
telos · 4
theism · 4, 14, 17, 22,
32
theophany · 24, 25
transcendence · 16, 21,
34
transubstantiation · 15
U
universal · 30, 34
universality · 27, 29
V
Varnier · 31