A Heart of Flesh: William Desmond and the Bible

By Steven E. Knepper, Cyril O'Regan and William Franke

The Irish philosopher William Desmond is one of the most compelling and adventurous Christian thinkers of our time. The essays gathered here undertake a journey through the Bible with Desmond that ranges across biblical theology, philosophy of religion, metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, political theory, and literary studies. Some of the essays examine the place of the Bible in Desmond's thought, considering his readings of the creation, the Abraham cycle, and the Beatitudes. Other essays bring Desmond's ideas to bear on broad questions that emerge from the Bible about philosophy and revelation, exegesis, theopoetics, eschatology, and tyranny. Still others bring Desmond into conversation with influential philosophers who engage (or conspicuously do not engage) the Bible, such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Tillich. Together, these essays show the rich possibilities of approaching the Bible with Desmond. All take their bearings from Desmond's "metaxological" approach, which does not seek to claim the final word, which attends to the text rather than simply imposing on it, and which allows for an ongoing dialogue.

/ Contributors: Ryan G. Duns, SJ / Caitlin Smith Gilson / Joseph K. Gordon / William Christian Hackett / Steven E. Knepper / Renee Kohler-Ryan / Andrew Kuiper / Brendan Thomas Sammon / Terence Sweeney / Ethan Vanderleek / Erik van Versendaal / Robert Wyllie

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Nov 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666799194

Book preview

Introduction

Steven E. Knepper

Philip Gonzales claims that William Desmond ( 1951 –) offers the most complete and open systematic vision of a Catholic metaphysics since Erich Przywara, SJ, published his Analogia Entis nearly one hundred years ago. ¹ Gonzales is not alone in his high regard for Desmond’s work and the resources it offers to both philosophy and theology. Desmond describes a world rich with mysterious intelligibility and beauty. Why is there a world at all? Why is it intelligible? Why is it so saturated with aesthetic worth? For Desmond, the hyperbolic excess of being strikes us with wonder. In doing so, it raises the question of an even more excessive origin of being, of a Creator God.

Unsurprisingly, then, theologians and philosophers of religion are increasingly drawn to Desmond’s thought.² Indeed, to return to Gonzales’s comparison between Desmond and Przywara, Desmond will likely inspire Christian thinking for decades to come, just as Przywara inspired Josef Pieper, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Edith Stein, Karl Rahner, and the last three popes, among others. Much of the theological and philosophical attention given to Desmond’s thought focuses on its contributions to a metaphysics of creation, to its renewal of the traditional ways to God, to its dialogue with canonical figures, and to its critique of the default atheism, clogged porosity, and ethos of serviceable disposability that pervade modernity.

Less attention has been given to Desmond’s reflections on the Bible and the resources he provides for biblical theology more broadly. Yet the Bible deeply shapes Desmond’s thought. He reflects on particular biblical texts, like the theophany of the burning bush, the ten commandments, and the Beatitudes. His reflections are always creative and insightful. At times they are playful and mischievous as well. He wonders, for instance, how Nietzsche would respond if he were subjected to the same desert temptations as Jesus. Elsewhere he casts various modern philosophers as different characters in the parable of the prodigal son.³

Biblical images and concerns permeate Desmond’s philosophy beyond these explicit reflections. For instance, Desmond emphasizes our constitutive receptivity or porosity. This porosity often becomes clogged due to selfishness, anxiety, distraction, or habit. If we are to be open to others and to God, however, our porosity must be continually cleansed. Here Desmond draws close to, and indeed draws on, a great biblical concern often explored via the image of the soft or hardened heart, the heart of flesh or stone. Desmond himself uses this biblical heart language at times. Hence, the title of this volume.

One might think as well of Desmond’s emphasis on experiences of astonishment and perplexity. Both can stir the urgency of ultimacy that draws us toward God—in praise and thanksgiving, in speculative reflection, in apophatic mysticism, in anguished questioning. Desmond’s writings on astonishment and perplexity resonate with the Psalms, which he says were a profound influence on his youth, accompanying him during his brief time in the Dominican novitiate (where psalms were part of daily prayers), during his early undergraduate studies in poetry, and during his later philosophical studies.⁴ They continue to echo in his own poems/psalms included in the books God and the Between and Godsends.

This volume, then, seeks to explicate, extend, supplement, and at times challenge Desmond’s writings by deepening their conversation with the Bible. Some of the volume’s essays examine the place of the Bible in Desmond’s thought. Some read biblical texts that Desmond does not explicitly address in light of his philosophy. Others bring Desmond’s philosophy to bear on broad questions about revelation, hermeneutics, and exegesis. Others still bring Desmond into conversation with influential philosophers who engage (or conspicuously do not engage) the Bible, such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Tillich. Together, they show the rich possibilities of approaching the Bible with Desmond. They take their bearings from Desmond’s own metaxological approach, which does not seek to claim the final word, which attends to the text rather than simply imposing on it, which allows for an ongoing intermediation. In short, the essays do not use Desmond’s thought to carve a predetermined shape into the biblical text. Again, the goal is to deepen a metaxological conversation with the Bible that is already ongoing in Desmond’s writings.

While most of the contributors write from within Desmond’s own Catholic tradition, and while all write from a Christian perspective, they do so in an open spirit and in respectful dialogue with Jewish, Protestant, and secular scholars. The hope is that even thinkers wary of any turn to the Bible will discover some evidence here of its philosophical richness for reflection on, say, relationships and community, on consciousness and desire, on care and love.⁵ Wariness of the Bible as definitive revelation (often due to a fallacious conflation of a high view of Scripture with flattening and fanatical fundamentalism) can prevent philosophers from recognizing the Bible’s profound reflections on our relations in an excessive world and with its Creator God. As William Franke points out in his afterword, Desmond’s metaxological approach illuminates these relationships. Franke sums this up in an incisive line well worth pondering: "Even more important and pertinent than ‘revelation’ perhaps is the relation to the wholly other that the Bible performs textually and rhetorically and enables us to perform in our existence as interpretive beings." In short, any simple opposition between the (philosophical) reason of Athens and the (theological) revelation of Jerusalem is misleading at best.

That said, as Cyril O’Regan points out in his insightful foreword to this collection, Desmond himself stops short of treating the Bible as revelation in the strong sense. Desmond’s discussion of revelatory godsends references the Bible throughout, for instance, but it is primarily concerned with a broad sense of revelation as transformative divine encounter, inspiration, or communication.⁶ O’Regan concludes that perhaps it is better to say that ‘revelation’ is functioning liminally [in Desmond’s writings]—between philosophy and religion—similar but not identical to the way it does in Franz Rosenzweig and in the later Levinas. In any event, here Desmond encourages us to think with him, with others, and perhaps through and beyond him. Most essays in this volume draw on Desmond in explicitly theological ways, offering a more theological gift in grateful return for his more philosophical offering. While many of these essays are written at the intersection of philosophy of religion and biblical theology, however, the volume is ultimately wide-ranging and interdisciplinary, with chapters that engage patristics, political theory, ethics, and literary studies. The volume is timely, given the ongoing renewal of biblical theology and the signs of renewed philosophical interest in the Bible.⁷ This is also a propitious time for such a collection in terms of Desmond’s career, since his latest book Godsends takes an overt biblical turn, ending with chapters on the parable of the prodigal son, the Beatitudes, and the possibility of revelation.

The volume follows a loose trajectory through the Hebrew Bible/Christian Old Testament to the New Testament before ending with two general reflections on Desmond and the Bible. In the first chapter, Joseph K. Gordon draws on Desmond to offer a multi-faceted reflection on Genesis 1—2:4a. Gordon considers the intimacy and transcendence of God, the question of creatio ex nihilo, the divine affirmation of creation’s goodness, and the Sabbath. Gordon is especially attuned to the ecological affordances in the creation narrative. In chapter 2, Renée Köhler-Ryan joins Gordon in reflecting on the Sabbath (a major concern in Desmond’s writings). She argues that experiences of both Sabbath and beauty involve a paradoxical mix of true peace and true restlessness, the latter marked not by boredom or dissatisfaction but by hunger for more of the divine excess that has stilled our usual strivings. Köhler-Ryan uses this understanding of Sabbath to shine new light on one of Jesus’ more gnomic sayings in both Matthew’s and Luke’s Gospels: Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.

The next two chapters focus on central narratives in the Hebrew Bible. In his reading of the Abraham cycle, Ethan Vanderleek shows how Desmond can help us discern within the thorniness and apparent contradictions of the Genesis narrative a growing awareness of God as both intimate and universal, of a God who calls each intimately yet does not play favorites because, in Desmond’s words, God has only favorites. In the fourth chapter, Robert Wyllie and Steven Knepper present 1 and 2 Samuel as a searching exploration of tyranny that deserves to be read alongside Plato’s Republic. Using Desmond’s concepts of the passio essendi, conatus essendi, and porosity, as well as his reflections on tyranny, they offer an etiology of Saul’s and David’s tyrannical temptations and of the ways in which the latter, at his best, strikes a responsive balance of openness and striving.

The next three chapters consider the Gospels. In chapter 5, Terence Sweeney notes that while ethics usually focuses on our actions, the fullest ethics will first attend to the gifts that we are given that allow us to give in turn, the blessings that we receive that allow us to bless others. This, Sweeney argues, is a primary lesson of the Beatitudes. In chapter 6, Ryan G. Duns, SJ, draws on Desmond and Gerhard Lohfink to interpret Jesus’ parables as transformative theopoetic events. The parables give us new eyes to see the kingdom of God entering our world, and they also issue a call—often a challenging call—for us to participate in that kingdom’s work. In chapter 7, Erik van Versendaal argues that Desmond’s metaxological intermediation offers better conceptual resources than Hegel’s dialectic for thinking about relationships in general and especially for thinking about the relationship between the church and Christ in John’s Gospel. Both critical and sympathetic toward Hegel (like Desmond himself), Van Versendaal shows that Desmond’s metaxology is preferable because it honors both Hegel’s insights and the otherness that exceeds dialectical mediation.

The next two chapters address Paul’s epistles. Brendan Thomas Sammon continues the comparison of metaxological intermediation and Hegelian dialectic. Sammon contests the many Hegelian readings of Paul’s theology of freedom and the law. He argues that metaxology can make better sense of how the law is not simply negated or sublated for Paul but remains as a powerful diagnostic, albeit one that reveals sinfulness that only the freedom of Christ can remedy. In chapter 9, William Christian Hackett offers a commentary on Paul’s hymn in Colossians 1:15–20 that recovers the ancient porosity between religion and philosophy. Hackett ultimately argues that in the Pauline hymn the (philosophical) hyperbole of being throws us toward a (religious) eschatological consummation.

The final two chapters pan back from particular biblical passages to offer broader reflections. In chapter 10, Andrew Kuiper joins Hackett in exploring the porosity between philosophy and religion. In particular, Kuiper notes how fecund patristic and medieval approaches to Scripture resist the demarcations between philosophy, theology, and biblical exegesis that scholars would later impose. Despite concerns about how Desmond construes eros and agape, Kuiper finds resources in Desmond for a renewed spiritual exegesis that does not lose what is best in the critical methodologies of modern biblical studies. Along the way he compares Desmond’s approach to religious symbolism and myth to those of Paul Tillich and Joseph Ratzinger. In the final chapter of the collection, Caitlin Smith Gilson argues that Heidegger’s account of being-towards-death comes close to renewing a spiritually serious, existentially full philosophy but ultimately, and disastrously, privileges a nihilating death per se. Drawing on the Bible and Desmond, Gilson argues that only a stronger notion of metaphysical transcendence and of the infinite allows for a proper relationship to death.

Bibliography

Duns, SJ, Ryan G. Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond and the Quest for God. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press,

2020

.

Franke, William. A Theology of Literature: The Bible as Revelation in the Tradition of the Humanities. Eugene, OR: Cascade,

2017

.

Gonzales, Philip John Paul. Reimagining the Analogia Entis: The Future of Erich Przywara’s Christian Vision. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

2019

.

Kelly, Thomas A. F., ed. Between System and Poetics: William Desmond and Philosophy after Dialectic. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate,

2007

.

Köhler-Ryan, Renée. Companions in the Between: Augustine, Desmond, and Their Communities of Love. Eugene, OR: Pickwick,

2019

.

Morisato, Takeshi. Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy: Reading Tanabe Hajime and William Desmond. London: Bloomsbury Academic,

2019

.

O’Regan, Cyril. What Theology Can Learn from a Philosophy Daring to Speak the Unspeakable. Irish Theological Quarterly

73

(

2008

)

243

–

62

.

Simpson, Christopher Ben. Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,

2009

.

Simpson, Christopher Ben, and Brendan Thomas Sammon, eds. William Desmond and Contemporary Theology. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017

.

Vanden Auweele, Dennis, ed. William Desmond’s Philosophy between Metaphysics, Religion, Ethics, and Aesthetics: Thinking Metaxologically. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan,

2018

.

1

. Gonzales, Reimagining the Analogia Entis,

249

.

2

. See, for instance, the essays gathered in Kelly, ed., Between System and Poetics; Simpson and Sammon, eds., William Desmond and Contemporary Theology; and Vanden Auweele, ed., William Desmond’s Philosophy between Metaphysics, Religion, Ethics, and Aesthetics. For book-length studies, see Simpson, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern; Morisato, Faith and Reason in Continental and Japanese Philosophy; Köhler-Ryan, Companions in the Between; and Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age. Among the many journal articles on Desmond’s work, Cyril O’Regan’s wide-ranging review essay What Theology Can Learn from a Philosophy Daring to Speak the Unspeakable is particularly relevant to the concerns of this volume.

3

. See Caesar with the Soul of Christ: Nietzsche’s Highest Impossibility in IST,

200

–

37

, and Dream Monologues of Autonomy: Variations on the Prodigal Son in G,

183

–

213

.

4

. See the autobiographical essay in PU,

1

–

26

.

5

. In twentieth-century philosophy, this was impressively demonstrated by Jewish philosophers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. Buber and Levinas are important dialogue partners for Desmond. Rosenzweig is not frequently cited, but his work and Desmond’s make for compelling comparison, as Cyril O’Regan suggests in his foreword to this collection.

6

. On godsends, see G,

45

–

71

. As William Franke’s afterword to this volume suggests, a mutually illuminating conversation could be staged between Desmond’s godsends and Franke’s account of poetic-prophetic revelation. Both provide a framework for (and compelling phenomenological descriptions of) revelatory experience in a broad sense, without foreclosing the possibility of the Bible as an exemplary, definitive, or consummate revelation. See Franke, A Theology of Literature.

7

. See, for instance, the Reading the Scriptures series from the University of Notre Dame Press and the ongoing Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible series.

1

Let There Be . . . It Is Good

Reading the Creation Poetry of Scripture (Gen 1:1—2:4a) with William Desmond

Joseph K. Gordon

In his substantial and still growing oeuvre, William Desmond only infrequently refers directly to texts from the canon of Christian Scripture. ¹ Even so, anyone familiar with the Christian Bible can detect its influence, both subtle and direct, throughout his writings. Desmond’s work can thus serve as a fruitful companion for attending to, and understanding, the Sacred Page and the realities that it mediates. Even more, for those who are not only committed to the pursuit of truth in philosophy but also who believe in the possibility and actuality of divine revelation, Desmond’s achievements can help us to come to hear, recognize, and heed the voice of the One who speaks and teaches through these texts. This chapter explores the usefulness of Desmond’s work for reading the poetic prose or prosaic poetry of Genesis 1:1—2:4a, the first creation account in Scripture. ²

There are a few reasons why this particular text is an especially poignant choice for reading with resources from Desmond’s work. Desmond often alludes to key phrases in Genesis 1:1—2:4a. The familiarity of the text also makes it a good candidate for a fresh reading. Even with biblical literacy decreasing significantly in western contexts, many still recognize the imagery and language of Genesis 1. Such familiarity can blunt our appreciation for its peculiarity and richness and can keep us from unexpected insights. Desmond’s work can help us to engage this familiar text freshly. He observes well that surprising ideas are manifest in everyday language that, while seeming ordinary, put us in mind of something not quite ordinary, perhaps something out of the ordinary (G, 246). How much more might this creation poetry, though become ordinary to us, provoke us out of our stupor to wonder at the transcendent God and the profundity, freedom, goodness, and beauty of God’s creation? Such a fresh reading is desperately needed in our time of ecological degradation; alienation from our fellow creatures, human and non-human; and forgetfulness of our limits and of the character of God’s transcendence of and immanence to creation. The modern attempt to ground a notion of the good and of ethics in our own promethean efforts is bankrupt, but we can find such a ground by attending to creation itself.³ God can remind us of our creatureliness through the provocations of this text.

What follows is not an exegesis of Desmond’s work; nor is it, strictly speaking, an exegesis of the univocal meaning of the text of Genesis 1. I instead intend, through giving attention to what I have learned from Desmond and to the particularities of Genesis 1, to talk fruitfully about the realities—divine and human, transcendent and immanent—mediated in this passage of Sacred Scripture.⁴ I presume that Scripture is an instrument of divine pedagogy through which the Triune God transforms readers to come to know God and share in God’s own life.⁵ My commentary, then, informed by Desmond’s insights, will explore how the God who gives us this sacred text may intend to teach us through it. I note the metaxological nature of the commentary I offer in this chapter. We find ourselves, of course, in the middle of creation itself; we are not there at its beginning. We are always in the middle. . . . We always begin, or have already begun, after the first origin (BB, 279). Christian believers committed to Sacred Scripture must hold the conviction that Genesis 1 usefully and truthfully mediates the mystery and intelligibility of creation to us here in the middle. I will not be done with the work of understanding this text when this chapter is finished, either; I write from within the middle of my own understanding and research.⁶ This text itself, though found at the beginning of Scripture, cannot be engaged faithfully if removed from the broader witness of the biblical texts. And finally, I write from within the middle of my understanding of Desmond’s work—and he is not at the end of that work