Fragments: The Existential Situation of Our Time: Selected Essays, Volume 1

By David Tracy

David Tracy is widely considered one of the most important religious thinkers in North America, known for his pluralistic vision and disciplinary breadth. His first book in more than twenty years reflects Tracy’s range and erudition, collecting essays from the 1980s to 2018 into a two-volume work that will be greeted with joy by his admirers and praise from new readers.

In the first volume, Fragments, Tracy gathers his most important essays on broad theological questions, beginning with the problem of suffering across Greek tragedy, Christianity, and Buddhism. The volume goes on to address the Infinite, and the many attempts to categorize and name it by Plato, Aristotle, Rilke, Heidegger, and others. In the remaining essays, he reflects on questions of the invisible, contemplation, hermeneutics, and public theology. Throughout, Tracy evokes the potential of fragments (understood both as concepts and events) to shatter closed systems and open us to difference and Infinity. Covering science, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and non-Western religious traditions, Tracy provides in Fragments a guide for any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780226584508

Book preview

FRAGMENTS

FRAGMENTS

The Existential Situation of Our Time

Selected Essays  •  Volume 1

DAVID TRACY

The University of Chicago Press    Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-56729-7 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58450-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226584508.001.0001

The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Tracy, David, author.

Title: Fragments : the existential situation of our time : selected essays, volume 1 / David Tracy.

Other titles: Existential situation of our time

Description: Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019024423 | ISBN 9780226567297 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226584508 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Theology. | Hermeneutics—Religious aspects. | Public theology.

Classification: LCC BR85.T69 2020 | DDC 230/.2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024423

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To Arthur Rossell Tracy

brother and friend

—•—

We will never all think alike and we shall always see truth in fragments and from different angles of vision.

Gandhi

The fragment is that part of the totality of the work that opposes totality.

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Part 1: The Existential Situation of Our Time

1   Fragments: The Spiritual Situation of Our Time

2   The Ultimate Invisible: The Infinite

3   Responses to Horror and Suffering: The Responses of Tragedy and Some Religions

4   Christianity and Suffering

5   Metaphysics, Theology, and Mysticism

Part 2: Hermeneutics

6   Hermeneutical Reflections in the New Paradigm of Theology

7   Western Hermeneutics and Interreligious Dialogue

8   The Dialogical Turn of Contemporary Thought

9   Paul Ricoeur: Hermeneutics and the Dialectic of Religious Forms

Part 3: Publicness and Public Theology

10   Theology, Critical Social Theory, and the Public Realm

11   Religion in the Public Realm: Three Forms of Publicness

12   Practical Theology: Its Mystical-Prophetic Character

13   Argument, Dialogue, and the Soul in Plato

Part 4: Religion, Theology, and Dialogue

14   Metaphor and Religion: The Test Case of Christian Texts

15   Mystics, Prophets, Rhetorics: Religion and Psychoanalysis

16   Contemplation, Speculation, Action: Reflections on Orthodox Theology

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX OF NAMES

INDEX OF SUBJECTS

INTRODUCTION

THE FRAGMENT

This volume of essays is a collection of fragments.

Fragment emerged as an essential category in six distinct intellectual fields: classical studies, biblical studies, archaeology, literary theory, philosophy, and theology. My theory of the fragment can be cryptically stated as follows: Strong fragments shatter, fragment, negate any closed totality system. In the course of fragmenting all closed totalities, the most powerful fragments also show themselves not as substances but as events and positively open to liminal Infinity.

Frag-events (a neologism—fragmentary and fragmenting events) negatively shatter or fragment all totalities, even as they are positively open to Infinity. Fragments, therefore, can play an important role in a world still largely trapped in oppressive economic, social, political, and even cultural (including religious) totality systems that oppress whole peoples—especially the poor in all societies. Fragments not only shatter all closed systems; they simultaneously open one to difference and otherness. Classical frag-events open beyond all closed limits to liminal Infinity. Fragments as frag-events are philosophically warranted by modern ontologies of event, not substance. Mere fragments (e.g., period pieces) are substances, not events. The classical, emancipatory fragments in every tradition are events opening to Infinity. Fragments as fragments are what most need retrieval. In both modernity and postmodernity, the most basic ontological move is from basic reality, construed as substance in most premodern thought, to basic reality, understood as event in quantum physics, particle mathematics, and philosophical ontology of events (Whitehead) or as E-vent (Ereignis) (Heidegger).

One of the greatest discoveries of modern thought is the centrality of event—not substance—in mathematics, physics, and cosmology; and in modern philosophers, like William James, Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Heidegger, and other philosophers; as well as in historically conscious (therefore eventful) modern theologians, like Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar; political theologians (e.g., Johann Baptist Metz and Jürgen Moltmann); liberation theologians (e.g., Gustavo Gutiérrez and Juan Segundo); feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologians (e.g., Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Maria Clara Bingemer, et al.); and African American theologians (e.g., James Cone, Cornel West, Dwight Hopkins, et al.).

Reality is event, not substance. The Ultimately Infinite Real (whether named Void, Open, Being, Creativity, Good, gods, God) is event, not substance. It is a verb, not a noun. The major fragments are correctly called frag-events, not merely substances (fragments). Since all traditions are now in fragments (both negatively and positively), fragments as fragmenting events (frag-events) are, in my judgment, not the only but a very fruitful contemporary way into the liberating events in all traditions, as well as the shattering, fragmenting events in all critical theories, such as the most powerful and influential of all modern critical theories: feminism, in its many forms. Discover the right fragment—in one’s own and other traditions, in one’s own and other lives—and you will discover an entry into the eventful, infinite character of reality itself.

In classical studies, scholars as early as the Renaissance began to discover new texts in addition to critically editing all significant ancient ones. Some texts had been lost for centuries: Lucretius’s De rerum natura, for example, was finally discovered in an obscure monastery library and, as a result, became very influential again in Western culture. It reintroduced Epicurean philosophy as a real philosophical option.

At the time of Cicero and Quintilian, the text of Aristotle meant the now-lost dialogues, for which we possess but fragments. Among the Latins, the Aristotelian treatises (our modern Aristotle) were largely confined to the Aristotelian Peripatetic school as, in effect, their intellectual property. The question of Aristotle is, therefore, a question of which texts or fragments of texts (the dialogues or the treatises) served as Aristotle in different cultural periods. This proved to be a decisive issue in the reception of Aristotle. Likewise, the entire texts of Plato were not translated until Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century. In the medieval Latin culture, Plato consisted of certain texts (therefore fragments of the whole Plato), especially Timaeus. In medieval Latin culture, Aristotle —thanks to Byzantine and Islamic predecessors—eventually became the almost complete Aristotle of the treatises, but the dialogues of Aristotle existed for the medievals, as for us, only in fragments. Both Aristotle and Plato, therefore, have functioned as selective fragments in Western cultures.

In biblical studies, thanks to the pioneering scholarship of Richard Simon in the seventeenth century and, even earlier, with Erasmus’s critical Greek edition of the New Testament and the polyglot Spanish translation at the University of Alcalá, the character of biblical texts as constituted by fragments of earlier oral and written traditions became established. By the nineteenth century, scholars, through modern historical-critical methods, had begun to delineate the most probable original oral and written fragments of written biblical texts—like the hypothesis of a postulated Q (Quelle), the fragments behind certain parts of the synoptic gospels.

In modern archaeology, fragments were and are the coin of the realm. Archaeologists have unearthed thousands of ancient fragments. Through ever more sophisticated scientific and technological advances in the discipline, archaeologists have fashioned inclusive and plausible hypotheses on the nature of ancient cultures. Coins, pieces of pottery, stones from buildings, fragments of ancient texts, and so on, all are the principal fragmentary sources available to modern archaeologists in order to more accurately understand such ancient cultures in China, India, and Egypt, in Judaea, Africa, Greece, and Scandinavia, the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic cultures, and the native peoples in the Americas and Oceania—indeed, all ancient peoples. It is now difficult to conceive of a time (not so long ago, in fact) when classical scholars believed that texts alone were adequate to understand Homeric or even fifth- and sixth-century classical Greece and pre-Homeric Greece.

In literary theory and philosophy, the real intellectual breakthrough on the character and importance of the fragment as a phenomenon occurred among the German Romantics—principally, Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Novalis. They made a critical intellectual advance by articulating the category fragment as the appropriate literary form for modern (i.e., Romantic) literature. In the short-lived but influential periodical the Athenaeum, several German Romantic writers (the Schlegels, Novalis, Johann Friedrich Tieck, Schleiermacher, and the young Friedrich Schelling) wrote fragments, especially but not solely epigrams and aphorisms. Fragments need not prove only brief texts, such as epigrams and aphorisms; whole texts at times can also serve as fragments of a larger corpus. Furthermore, for the Romantics, literary fragments and even ancient and medieval ruins—precisely as fragments of a once whole culture—reinforced their nostalgic longing for ancient cultures they believed to be more unitary and harmonious than their own fragmented and, therefore, alienating modern culture. The German Romantic heralding of a philosophical and literary theory of the fragment and of ruins was a genuine advance in modern Western thought.

However, at the same time, there was a serious intellectual problem with the German Romantic formulation of the fragment as the new, liberating literary genre. For the Schlegels and Novalis, their promotion of the fragment as the modern (i.e., Romantic) genre was, in fact, not just a proposal for a genre for modern thought, but also an exercise in cultural nostalgia. For the Romantics, a fragment was understood through the image of a broken-off piece or bit of a larger lost whole, especially the lost whole of ancient Greece. For some Romantics (e.g., Novalis), medieval culture was also esteemed as a holistic, harmonious Christian culture (Christendom), which also deserved nostalgic longing and retrieval through the fragments of that culture still left.

The Romantics longed for a former culture, especially ancient Greece, which, unlike their own negatively fragmented, alienating modern culture, was construed as a now-lost harmonious whole. For the Romantics, each retrieved Greek or medieval fragment could show forth that lost wholeness. Ancient fragments, therefore, could help heal the negatively fragmented (i.e., alienating and estranged), nonholistic modern culture. Unfortunately, for Romantic interpretation, ancient Greece (as Friedrich Nietzsche argued against Johann Winckelmann) was not the purely harmonious Apollonian whole they believed it to be, but a culture in which the beauty of Apollonian harmony, unity, and wholeness was always in tension with deep, uncanny darkness and fierce, tension-ridden, sublime, tragic Dionysian energy (Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy). Ancient Greece was both beautiful and sublime; both whole and fragmented; both a profound affirmation of life (even in the tragedies, as Nietzsche rightly argued) and, from Homer forward, honest on the suffering and operation of fate in life. Ancient Greece was, therefore, both philosophical and tragic. The Romantics (including the English Romantics, like Shelley and Byron) romanticized ancient Greece, and provided, to be sure, abiding insights on the Greeks within the framework of an unfortunately too facile, harmonious misreading of Greece.

In the earlier eighteenth century, the Greece of the Romantics was not the preferred ancient fragment to be imitated in modernity. For the philosophers, not Greece but the Roman republic was the liberating fragment of the ancient world to be retrieved and imitated by modern Enlightenment culture. Both the American founders and the French philosophes (except Rousseau) turned to the Roman republic, not ancient Greece, as the preferred model for modernity. Later, however, in the nineteenth century, the German idealist philosophers, above all Hegel (more influenced by the Romantics than he cared to admit), argued that only the whole is the true.

To see the difference between the relative optimism of Hegel on what his dialectical thinking could achieve (namely, Absolute Knowledge) and a contemporary, far more pessimistic affirmation of the fragment achieved by a purely negative dialectic, recall Theodor Adorno’s anti-Hegelian epigram, The whole is the untrue. For Adorno, only the fragment in its negative dialectical honesty speaks the truth against all Hegelian claims to a nonfragmenting whole of Absolute Knowledge.

Nevertheless, it is inaccurate to think that the Romantic philosophical notion of the fragment is limited solely to broken-off bits, fragments, or pieces of a lost but nostalgically longed-for whole. In actuality, at times even Friedrich Schlegel’s notion of the fragment, is, as Walter Benjamin argued, not an exercise in nostalgia for a lost whole, but a much more dynamic, non-nostalgic, future-oriented (even at times eschatological) category that discloses a hope for a new future. For Benjamin, for example, some fragments of the past are indispensable testimonies to the suffering of the oppressed, the untold story of those defeated by history—the outcasts, the misfits, the deliberately forgotten peoples—whose story is ordinarily narrated, as always, by the historical victors: that is, yet another version of a Whig history wherein all history with all its negativity, pain, and suffering positively leads up to the Whig victors of history. Walter Benjamin’s fragments reveal a memory of suffering that forces attention on the largely forgotten, ignored, oppressed individuals (e.g., Spartacus) and whole peoples (e.g., the First Nations of the Americas), and should impel unyielding fights for justice for the oppressed in the present and the future. Even the past, as Benjamin insists, is not safe from a leveling historicism; there are events (frag-events) that are not mere leftover fragments but fragments that function as events to fragment any totality narrative written, as always, by the victors of history.

In my judgment, Walter Benjamin’s entire intellectual life can be read as an extraordinary lifelong effort, starting with his reinterpretation of the German Romantics, to articulate an adequate post-Romantic theory of the fragment. Consider the fragments he retrieved: from his doctoral thesis work on the German Romantics, through his brilliant readings of the usually overlooked northern Baroque fragmenting tragic dramas named Trauerspiel (a play of mourning, not of nostalgia), to his study of the fragmenting power of Kabbalah through the influence of his close friend, Gershon Scholem. Scholem almost single-handedly began the retrieval of Kabbalah in modernity as a mystical element in Judaism. By so doing, Scholem (and Benjamin in his wake) challenged the purely ethical monotheistic reading of modern Judaism (e.g., Hermann Cohen). The Kabbalists, like those usually called Gnostics, held to a theological understanding of a God who, in creation, fragments God’s very self. As a result of God’s self-fragmenting, human beings are sparks, fragments of the fragmenting divine Being. For the Kabbalist, fragmentation is all: the words and even the very letters of the Hebrew Bible reveal God’s mysterious fragmenting ways, even as those words and letters reveal our own existence as fragment-sparks of the divine. Together, God and human beings can redeem reality (Tikkun).

In Benjamin’s complex thinking on the fragment, besides his attention to Gershon Scholem on the Kabbalah, he also paid close attention to a far more secular thinker of the fragment on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum from Scholem: namely, the irrepressible Marxist and dramatist of genius, Bertolt Brecht. Brecht’s dramas, with their augmenting, shattering, alienation effects, were intended to shatter and fragment his bourgeois theater audiences in order to awaken them to think through, not simply feel (as in most bourgeois drama), the reality they were unthinkingly living. Benjamin was open to the dialectically conflicting voices of Brecht versus Adorno versus Scholem. Benjamin managed to hear all three mutually opposing contemporaries in articulating his own original theory of the fragment.

By assembling all the historical elements (the fragments noted above) of his never fully articulated theory of the fragment, Benjamin created his final works of singular, post-Romantic fragmentation: first, his Arcades volume, an incomplete (i.e., fragmented) collection of fragments disclosing a social-historical interpretation of nineteenth-century Paris as the capital of the capitalist nineteenth century; second, his brilliant, poignant Theses on the Philosophy of History, wherein the fragments of the memory of suffering of the forgotten ones of history received central attention. By studying the Paris arcades of the period, Benjamin argued for those arcades as witnesses to the disturbing, unsteady triumph and eventual failure of nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrial capitalism. In his arcades study, Benjamin collected quotation after quotation, fragment after fragment, to alert the attentive reader to the brutal actuality of the bourgeois capitalist culture surrounding Paris, then and now the most beautiful, seductive city in the West.

In my judgment, Benjamin was the best contemporary theorist of a post-Romantic dynamic, non-nostalgic concept of the fragment. The tragedy is that Benjamin committed suicide in despair, trying to escape over the Pyrenees from the Nazi genocide. Benjamin never had the time nor space to articulate his full theory of the fragment. Nevertheless, in spite of the incompleteness of his theory of the fragment, he—more than any other modern thinker—moved far beyond the nostalgia of the German Romantics for the fragment by his endless recovery of fragmentary resources: his original readings of the Romantics, of Trauerspiel, of Kabbalah, and of the dialectically opposing revisionary Marxisms of both Adorno and Brecht. Finally, Benjamin, who was also the major German philosophical and theological literary critic of his period, demonstrated the different fragmenting ways of some of the major post-Romantic modernist writers, especially Baudelaire, Kafka, and Proust.

Some time after Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, that exceptionally attentive close reader of texts in the French explication du texte tradition, formulated his deconstructive method that, in effect, fragments what Derrida argued was a deceptive unity and illusory pure presence of texts, both ancient and modern. In my judgment, deconstruction shows a radical fragment of différance—that is, both difference and the deferral of meaning. In spite of the brilliant, fragmenting character of his deconstructive method (in fact, a radical new hermeneutics), Derrida also seemed to believe that any notion of the fragment (as distinct from his own concept of difference—différance) is necessarily nostalgic for a lost whole and, therefore, of no real aid for contemporary thought on otherness and difference. However, as Benjamin demonstrates (as does Derrida’s mentor and friend, Maurice Blanchot, with his notion of fragmentariness), Derrida’s rejection of the fragment is erroneous, since he assumes a fragment can be only, as in the German Romantics, a broken-off bit of a lost, nostalgically longed-for whole.

The present volume of essays constitutes a collection of fragments to help guide any open reader to rethink our fragmenting contemporary culture (whether named late modernity or post modernity) by means of studying certain concepts, categories, and fragments as positive resources available to any open mind. Although the word fragment occurs only in the first essay, fragment as event (that is, frag-event) can be read as pervading all the concepts (fragments) in the remaining essays.

FRAGMENTARY ESSAYS

We live in traditions. By speaking our native language, we belong to a specific linguistic, cultural tradition. When we learn another language, we begin to appropriate another cultural tradition. Inevitably, we learn first our native language (or languages) before learning to read alternative languages. With luck and hard work, we can also learn not only to read but also to speak another language. As a result, we begin to feel more and more at home in another culture. Now we see an alternative perspective on the world. We do not really know a language simply by learning many words, as in a brilliant Ionesco play. Rather, we know a language, as Ludwig Wittgenstein says, when we can go on in the language in conversation.

All traditions are now in fragments. This fragmenting nature of all traditions can, of course, prove at certain times and places quite negative: that is, we can become fragmented, alienated, estranged by experiencing our culture as only fragments (not liberating frag-events). Then, with T. S. Eliot, all we can do is cling to the remaining fragments of a once vital culture, fragments to shore up against our ruin. To be sure, a negative fragmentation of a tradition can be devastating: Maoist China, in its destructive campaign against traditional Chinese neo-Confucianism, almost destroyed traditional Chinese culture, that oldest and richest of all cultures. The Stalinist Soviet Union attempted to shatter or fragment all religions, especially Russian Orthodoxy. The African American slaves were torn away not only from their traditional lands but even from their languages and traditions. How they created their unique, vital, liberating culture in spite of such centuries-long brutal oppression is one of the most notable cultural triumphs in the West.

Our present cultural and intellectual situation—more exactly, our existential, spiritual situation—is both negatively and positively more fragmented than any earlier Western form of our traditions. Positively, fragmentation can provide more—not fewer—resources for attentive retrieval in our present straits. The fragments as frag-events of our own culture can also free us for the now-necessary intercultural and interreligious conversation whenever the frag-events of traditions interact. The positive possibilities of our own fragments shatter or fragment any false whole—that is, any totality system with its imperialist ambitions.

Two singular frag-events are highlighted in this book: first, classical responses to suffering; and second, the category of Infinity. First, on responses to suffering, chapters 3 and 4 address three classical cultural and religious responses to suffering: Greek tragedy, Christianity, and, too briefly, Buddhism. In the study of Greek tragedy, I strongly affirm Friedrich Nietzsche’s insight that Greek tragedy, as distinct from Greek philosophy and science, rejected all overconfidence in reason. As enormously fruitful as philosophy and science have proved in our culture, on their own they cannot fully address the massive and the innocent suffering that nature, history, and society inflict upon humankind, on all other animals, on all living creatures, and on Earth itself.

Modern science has, of course, been remarkably successful in fighting suffering. For example, modern medicine since the late nineteenth century continues to make immense strides in healing diseases. As I, myself, am a frequent recipient of the wonders of modern medicine, I believe that no thoughtful modern person can deny the sheer excellence of modern medicine’s continuing conquests of ailments and, therefore, relief of so much suffering. Until the modern period, earlier medicine often increased suffering and hastened death, even for the rich and powerful: read, for example, the disturbing narratives of medical practices employed on King Louis XIV or President James Garfield. Today, thanks to so many scientific (e.g., penicillin) and technological (e.g., robotic surgery) advances, medicine is one of the major forces of the natural sciences in the battle against enormous physical and (through psychoanalysis and therapies) psychological suffering.

Nevertheless, modern medicine and even modern therapies, indispensable as they have become to fight physical and psychological suffering, cannot remove all suffering, especially a good deal of existential personal suffering and, even more so, the systemic, massive, global suffering caused by unjust social, economic, and political structures. As Nietzsche rightly insisted, in Western culture, a tragic consciousness first articulated in the ancient Greeks is one of our culture’s greatest insights into existence. Western culture is foolish when it ignores its own tragic consciousness, both ancient and modern, by either an overconfidence in reason, on the one hand, or, on the other, by any purely sentimental consolation.

Besides Greek tragedy in Western culture, Christianity is a religion that has as its paradoxical central symbol the unnerving symbol of the cross, expressing Jesus of Nazareth’s disgusting death by crucifixion. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer contended, the cheap grace of all-too-many, all-too-consoling versions of Christianity must be rejected on intra-Christian terms. For example, the bizarre gospels of prosperity saturating cable television, with their cheap consolations and their absurd promises, appeal to rancid greed and our seemingly insatiable capacities for self-delusion. At the heart of Christianity is not financial success but the cross. At the same time, as Dante demonstrated and Ludwig Wittgenstein observed, Christianity is not a tragedy. This Dantean and indeed New Testament truth about Christianity can be restated this way: Christianity cannot be understood without tragic elements (especially the passion and death of Christ), even though Christianity is not ultimately a tragedy. Resurrection joy pervades the entire New Testament without diminishing for a moment the undeniable reality of suffering in Jesus Christ, in those he heals, and in those who flee to him for some relief from intractable human suffering.

The second major fragment or concept addressed in this book is the category of the Infinite. In recent years, I have become convinced that to attempt to name the Ultimately Real, one should turn to the complex concept of the Infinite—as some scientists, some artists, and some philosophers dare to do; as theologians (logos on theos), we must also do so, if we are faithful to our task. Aristotle’s influential distinction on the infinite still holds: a distinction between the Absolute Infinite (which Aristotle wrongly deemed impossible); and the quantitative infinite in space, time, and number (the possible infinite of the ever-expanding universe, the multiple infinities of post-Cantor mathematics). This dual notion of the Infinite as either quantitative or absolute is explained in chapters 2, 5, and 8 below.

In the ancient world, Plotinus in philosophy and Gregory of Nyssa in theology affirmed the reality of the Absolute Infinite against Aristotle and even against their mentor, Plato. In the modern world, in philosophy René Descartes (the Third Meditation) and in philosophical-mystical theology François Fénelon affirmed the reality of the Absolute Infinite, both from the point of view of reason (Descartes and Fénelon) and from intense religious, indeed mystical, experience (Fénelon and Jeanne Guyon). Fénelon—mystic, theologian, philosopher—was one of the few philosophers to understand correctly Descartes’s philosophical argument for affirming the Absolute Infinite in the Third Meditation. Even Nicolas Malebranche and Baruch Spinoza misinterpreted Descartes on the Infinite, while Blaise Pascal, with characteristic, charming hauteur, dismissed all Descartes’s philosophy as useless for understanding the true God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ.

Even today, any affirmation of the reality of the Absolute Infinite should probably be kept philosophically distinct, perhaps even separate, from Aristotle’s second form of infinity (i.e., the infinity of space, time, and number). Some thinkers (e.g., Cantor in mathematics) tried to find an internal connection between mathematical infinity and God as Absolute Infinity. Whether Cantor’s fascinating, complex argument—both mathematical and oddly theological-philosophical—is successful remains controversial. In earlier modern thought, that multitalented genius Giordano Bruno held that the universe itself was infinite; at the same time, for Bruno, God is the Infinite. Bruno’s position was perhaps pantheistic, although, in my judgment, Bruno was not exactly pantheistic; rather, he posited one of the first modern panentheistic positions in the West. In modern physics, after Bruno and Spinoza, there were many formulations of an infinite universe (see Alexandre Koyré’s classic study, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe). However, in contemporary physics and cosmology (i.e., since relativity theory and quantum mechanics), any claim for an actually infinite universe as distinct from a potentially infinite (i.e., ever-expanding) universe is deemed unknowable by most physicists and cosmologists. Ironically, a century before Giordano Bruno, Nikolaus Cusanus (who influenced Bruno profoundly) was more accurate than Bruno: for Cusanus, philosophically and theologically, only God is Infinite (in Aristotle’s language, Absolutely Infinite). The universe is best described by both Cusanus, a century prior to Bruno, and Descartes, a century after Bruno, not as infinite but as indefinite. Today the universe is more accurately described as potentially infinite since ever-expanding. Whether the universe is actually infinite cannot be known with our present scientific knowledge.

If one can defend from rational argument alone the reality of God as an Absolute Infinite (Descartes), then Infinity (i.e., God) is necessarily distinct from, although not separate from, a potentially but not actually infinite universe. The divine Absolute Infinite is also distinct from the post-Cantor multiple mathematical infinities related to the mathematical infinities of set theory. The intellectual result today is that one can philosophically and theologically affirm an Absolute Infinite. Furthermore, in terms of mathematics, physics, and cosmology, we can also affirm the universe as potentially infinite (ever-expanding) but not, as far as science or philosophy can presently know, as actually infinite.

After affirming the philosophical reality of the Absolute Infinite, the next question follows: What further descriptive name properly applies to the Absolute Infinite? Here the religions and some philosophies (e.g., Neoplatonism) are the surest guide to further naming the Infinite—as in Schleiermacher’s brilliant suggestion that religion itself is a sense and taste of the Infinite. The historical, cross-cultural philosophical or religious candidates are many. Principal among them are the Void (positive as in Buddhism, negative as in contemporary nihilism); the Open (Rilke, Emerson, late Heidegger); Creativity (Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne); Being, as Ipsum Esse Subsistens (Thomas Aquinas); Sein (in Heidegger, Paul Tillich, and others); the Good beyond Being (in Plato, Plotinus, Bonaventure, Emmanuel Levinas, Iris Murdoch, and many Neoplatonists); the gods (most ancient and most indigenous religions and such contemporary religions as bhakti Hinduism); and, finally (and for me most persuasively), the radically monotheistic God.

Although all these further names for the Ultimately Real, from the Buddhist Void to the Jewish-Christian-Islamic radically monotheistic God, are traditionally expressed in nominal terms, in fact they are not substances but Infinite events (or, as ultimate, the Infinite Event). These classical names are more accurately construed as verbs, not nouns. In my judgment, the concept of the Absolute Infinite is far more obviously open to a verbal interpretation than the more familiar nominal one; so are the further names for the Infinite: Void, Being, the Good, Creativity, God. Although God is usually read as a noun, the name should be read as a verb. The further question of which name is the most appropriate one for further naming the Infinite demands a necessarily complex, full-length study. I will try to address this renaming of the Infinite as God in a future book on the Christian naming of God as Infinite Love (i.e., as Infinite Trinity). In the meantime, these essays may provide some initial reflection on the prior category of the Absolute Infinite, as distinct from the quantitative infinities of space, time, number, and as a necessary prolegomenon to the further issue of whether God is the proper name to employ for the Absolute Infinite.

Besides the essays on these two central issues—responses to suffering and the category of the Infinite as both quantitative and Absolute—this book contains studies of some other frag-events (concepts, terms, categories). Some concepts addressed include the following: first, the interesting intellectual category the invisible, as employed in mathematics, physics, philosophy, myth, religion, and theology; second, the concept of metaphor as a test case for religious texts; third, religion as intrinsically both mystical and prophetic, as that religious paradigm is employed in an essay on psychoanalysis and religion in an attempt to illuminate the very secular psychoanalysis of Freud (now read as prophetic) and the psychoanalysis of Lacan (now construed as mystical); fourth, the category contemplation as a major contribution of Orthodox theology to all theology, as indeed to all philosophy not trapped in narrow, scientistic accounts of rationality; and fifth, the category sunyata (emptiness) as a central contemplative category in Buddhism.

The other main issues in parts 2 and 3—the chapters on hermeneutics and public theology—are not studies of particular concepts or fragments. Rather they are studies of how to interpret all fragments: that is, by means of a full, contemporary hermeneutics constituted by retrieval, critique, and suspicion. Correlative to hermeneutical understanding is an essay on the public effect of all hermeneutically understood classical fragments; that is, how the ineluctably particular fragments of art and religion actually reach beyond their particular origins to achieve public and, at the limit, universal effect.

In this volume, the four chapters in part 2 on hermeneutics, in addition to chapter 13 on the foundational character of dialogue in Plato, may serve as examples of different aspects and kinds of hermeneutical inquiry: from the foundational, serene dialogical model of Hans-Georg Gadamer to the brilliant use of explanatory models added to dialogical understanding in the complex hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur; the persuasive, sharply formulated critical theory of Jürgen Habermas as a critical hermeneutics; and, finally, the dazzling, pyrotechnic, deconstructive undoing of any deceptive claims of language to unity and pure presence in the radical hermeneutics of Jacques Derrida and John Caputo.

In the companion to this volume of essays (Filaments: Theological Profiles), I further employ the complex character of philosophical and theological hermeneutics described in these essays on hermeneutics for interpreting several thinkers—ancient, medieval, and modern.

Any good hermeneutical interpretation (constituted by all three basic forms of hermeneutics—retrieval, critique, suspicion) results in an understanding of any strong fragment as a public—not private—frag-event, whether that fragment be another person, a text, an event, a symbol, an image, a concept, an idea, a notion, a metaphor, an analogy, or the self’s own self-understanding. The public character of all hermeneutical understanding of any particularity (person, text, event, etc.) is especially important for theologians to grasp in order to avoid the familiar theological temptation to retreat to a pure confessionalism, whereby every particular image, symbol, event, or person is, in effect, confined to its particular origin and contemporary community. Theology as logos on theos necessarily claims to be in touch with infinity and universality. Theology should in principle be expressed as both highly particular in origin and public in effect. Hence, the necessary theological discipline called fundamental theology is entirely right to commit itself to arguing for the reasonableness (not the unavailable, unnecessary proof) of its affirmation of God as Infinite.

For Christians, the fundamental singularity of Jesus of Nazareth proclaimed and narrated by the New Testament as the Christ is the decisive particular event and person constituting the heart of Christianity. For Christians, Jesus of Nazareth is the unsubstitutable, particular event of Christianity; the Christ is the universality disclosed in and through the very particularity of the incarnation, message, ministry, cross, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ—the universality of the Christ that also further discloses itself in the promised future coming of this Jesus the Christ. For Christians, Jesus the Christ is ineluctably particular—both as the unsubstitutable Jesus of Nazareth and the invincibly universal (the Christ). Hence, Christianity as a religion is both theocentric and Christomorphic.

Theologians are committed to a double task: first, a collaborative effort to interpret, in the full hermeneutical sense of retrieval, critique, and (when needed) suspicion, the basic fragments as frag-events in the rich, multicultural, pluralistic, and ambiguous traditions of Christianity—ancient, medieval, early modern (Renaissance and Reformations), modern, late modern, and postmodern; second, the development of arguments to show the public—indeed, the universal—character of all properly theological realities as frag-events. If theologians defend only the particularity of Christianity, then a solely confessional theology inevitably results; if theologians defend only a reasonable publicness arrived at through argument alone (thus narrowing the classical and contemporary phenomenological and hermeneutical range of reason), then theology may end by unintentionally misunderstanding the singular heart of Christianity, the unsubstitutable Jesus of Nazareth as the Christ.

All theologians should fulfill their public role to the three publics of theology (academy, church, society). They should resist any timorousness in the face of secular culture (which need not be secularist). Theology should not run away from a necessary series of critical conversations with philosophy, the social sciences, history, the natural sciences, and the arts. Science, after all, need not be scientistic: Albert Einstein, a good Spinozist, was open to philosophical-theological conversations (e.g., in his exchange with Paul Tillich) in ways that Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and others seem not to be. Secular culture need not be secularist. Theology need not be purely confessionalist. A strong affirmation of science need not be scientistic.

In sum, every theologian should venture both to interpret Christian particularity hermeneutically, on the one hand, and, on the other, to defend the public character of all theological classics. One way to perform that role is to understand the theological classics of all eras as frag-events: that is, as fragments that shatter, negate, and fragment all totality systems (including Christendom as distinct from Christianity), while simultaneously opening Christian thought and life to the Infinite Love who is the Trinitarian God revealed in Jesus the Christ. Theology is a hermeneutical enterprise and is, therefore, a public theology. Otherwise, theology will retire all too complacently to some pleasant but deceptively secure reservation of the spirit. The notion of fragment as frag-event is one way to aid the hermeneutical task of all theology.

The alternative is whistling in the dark.

Part 1

THE EXISTENTIAL SITUATION OF OUR TIME

Chapter 1

FRAGMENTS

The Spiritual Situation of Our Time

MODERNITY AND THE DISCONTENTS

If postmodernity is to avoid the essentialism it hopes to rout, it must first admit that there is no such phenomenon as postmodernity. There are only postmodernities. If modernity is to escape the trap of totalization it has unintentionally set for itself, not only must it demand modernity as political democratic pluralism (the Enlightenment’s signal achievement and still unfinished project), but also admit that there is a plurality of modernities.

By this shift to the plural for modernity, I do not refer only to the obvious differences between the forms of Western modernity and other forms of modernization, especially in Asia. To understand our cultural situation rightly, one must expand the cultural horizons, including the philosophical and religious horizons, of the contemporary Western discussion beyond a Western sense of centeredness and a Western sense of its own pluralism toward a new global sense of polycentrism. For there is no longer a Western cultural center with margins. There are many centers now, of which the West is merely one. Moreover, once one drops the Western grand narrative, the continuities in that narrative begin to dissolve. To observe that necessary disillusion, recall the now-familiar postmodernity versus modernity debate. What can this contemporary debate—a debate on two essentialisms—now mean? It is not only that within Western culture itself there are now several postmodernities. There are also several modernities. Indeed, one can find in what is often named postmodernity, as well as in the classical model of modernity itself—classical Enlightenment modernity, which repressed the more flexible, more open, more fragmented culture of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and early seventeenth centuries—elements of that creative period of early modernity before the reified model of the Enlightenment became the model of modernity (Blumenberg 1983; Dupré 1993).

Most forms of postmodernity are explosions of once-forgotten, marginalized, and repressed realities in Enlightenment modernity: the Other, the different, and above all, in this essay, the fragments that disallow any totality system by demanding attention to the Other, especially the different and the marginal Other. These repressed elements were clearly far less marginal in early modernity, that too-seldom-studied singularity in most debates on modernity. The key phenomenon provoking new study is religion. Clearly, it is time to reopen an otherwise exhausted debate on religion and modernity. It may well be, as several contemporary phenomenologists claim, that religion is the nonreductive saturated phenomenon par excellence. Indeed, I am convinced that this is the case.

And yet, even before that contemporary case can be made, it may be necessary to clear the decks of some further cultural debris. Religion has always been the unassimilable (as distinct from conquered and colonized) Other of Enlightenment modernity. Any saturated form of the religious phenomenon had to be marginalized by the Enlightenment. It could not fit what counted as rational. Other developments in Western culture fought this marginality of religion: the Romantic discovery of symbols and archaic rituals; the Western interest in Hindu excessive forms for the sacred and the Buddhist insistence on formlessness; the discovery (by Scholem and others) of fragments of the divine in Kabbalah and in rabbinic exegesis that undid the pretension that Judaism is simply a modern ethical monotheism; and—against the backdrop of the Enlightenment—Levinas’s recovery in Jewish prophetic discourse of the ethics of the Other, not the self, as first philosophy.

All of these religious phenomena, as distinct from the Enlightenment’s notion of rational religion, are clearly Other to the demands for intellectual closure in what will be allowed to count as rational in many forms of classical modernity. Why otherwise the bizarre parade since the late seventeenth century of the modern ways of naming God? That series of isms for naming God invented in modern philosophical and theological thought had very little if anything to do with God as a religious phenomenon and religion as a saturated, sacred phenomenon. Those isms were intended rationally to control the discussion of the ultimate religious Other in any radically monotheistic reflection on God. But can the question of God really be controlled as a religious question by the modern discussion of deism, pantheism, modern atheism, modern theism (Buckley 1987), or even, in the best achievement of modern Western religious thought, of panentheism from Bruno to Hegel to Whitehead?

Even before the categories of the Other and the different became such central philosophical, cultural, ethical, and religious categories for many, Western thinkers sensed the temptation to reduce all reality to more of the same (Foucault), or at best to the similar, which too often served as an ever more tattered codpiece for more of the same: the onto-theo-phallo-logical system of Western classical modernity. First sensing this totalization of Enlightenment thought, the German Romantics, especially the Schlegels, privileged the metaphor fragments over any totality and interpreted religion in its richer symbols and mythical forms, rather than the Enlightenment isms for God, especially deism. But beyond the early Romantic groping after fragments that helped to challenge the stranglehold of every modern totality system lay the two greatest unveilers of modernity’s secret dream to be the logos of its own onto-theology: namely, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Is there anyone better than Kierkegaard at exposing the bizarre drive to totality of all modern, rationalist idealist systems and of Christendom alike? What Kierkegaard showed was that Christendom as a triumphant totality system could not and cannot survive any true experiment with authentic Christian living. Indeed, Kierkegaard will do almost literally anything to break through the reified ice of Enlightenment and Christendom alike. He will write under pseudonyms (there is no Kierkegaard; there are only Johannes Climacus, Judge William, the Seducer, Don Juan, et al.). Kierkegaard will forge a new indirect discourse for the sacred to undo any claim to adequacy of direct discourse in the idealist version of totality. He will try any genre—diaries, music, exercises, dialogues, edifying discourses, narratives. He will try anything except a system. Kierkegaard’s famous charge to Hegelian systems applies to all modern rational systems. If only Hegel had written the words A Thought Experiment at the beginning of all his books, then Kierkegaard would be the first, he says, to honor Hegel as the greatest of the modern philosophers. But Hegel of course did not.

Kierkegaard’s paradoxically anti-Christian double, Nietzsche, plays the same fragmentation role for both Christendom and Enlightenment modernity alike, but now with a hammer. When Nietzsche’s hammer is too blunt a tool against Christianity and against Enlightenment modernity, he too will try any form, any genre, any intellectual strategy to break out of the modern system. Nietzsche forged style after style, from his early essays to the quasi-gospel genre of Thus Spake Zarathustra, to genealogical analysis through aphorisms piled upon aphorisms, to fragments juxtaposed with fragments, in an increasingly desperate attempt to recover not merely the controlled rhetoric of Aristotle’s Topics, but also the out-of-control rhetoric of the tropes careening with joy (not despair) at the very edge of the modern abyss. Nietzsche, while clearly dialectical in his own understanding of difference, is not of one mind. He is clearly dialectically anti-Christian, and also clearly interested in and fascinated by the saturated, othering phenomenon of religion itself. Indeed, Nietzsche was far more creative regarding religion and its saturation quality than many of its Romantic defenders. Religion, like Nietzsche himself, does not fit the modern totality system. It should not. For religion is something and somewhere else. At the very least, religion is, as William James named it, a disclosure of something more—more than classical modernity considered not merely not actual (a relatively easy argument), but not even possible. Religion, as in Kant, was never a condition of the possibility of reality. Religion did not need a fourth critique but only the brilliant postcritical study, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. The contemporary argument on religion is not finally about actuality, or even whatever is rendered possible by modern standards. The basic argument on religion, as Levinas made clear, is about the possibility of impossibility.

But one need not stay with either the new or old Kierkegaard or Nietzsche to feel their fragmenting force anew. It becomes clearer and clearer that a dominant metaphor for twentieth-century Western thought, both early and late, both radical and conservative, both modern and postmodern, is the metaphor of fragments. Fragments are our spiritual situation. And that is not so bad a place to be. It is with fragments that radical conservative critics may join postmodern critics, that theological and antitheological critics may finally listen to one another. After the welcome collapse of the religious certainties of all modern totality systems, all see fragments as a sign of hope, perhaps (with Walter Benjamin and Simone Weil) the only signs of hope for redemption.

FRAGMENTS: THE NEOCONSERVATIVES

There are three kinds of contemporary thinkers for