A Phenomenology of Christian Life

Felix Ó Murchadha

Description

Philosophical articulation of Christian phenomena

How does Christian philosophy address phenomena in the world? Felix Ó Murchadha believes that seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing the world through faith requires transcendence or thinking through glory and night (being and meaning). By challenging much of Western metaphysics, Ó Murchadha shows how phenomenology opens new ideas about being, and how philosophers of "the theological turn" have addressed questions of creation, incarnation, resurrection, time, love, and faith. He explores the possibility of a phenomenology of Christian life and argues against any simple separation of philosophy and theology or reason and faith.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Christianity and Philosophy
1. Desire and Phenomenon
2. Light and Dark
3. Glory and Being
4. Night, Faith, and Evil
5. Incarnation and Asceticism
6. Creation
7. Aion, Chronos, Kairos
8. Thinking Night and Glory
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Living
• Religious
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• General officer
• Philosophy of religion
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 11 septembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253010094
• Langue: English

Extrait

INDIANA SERIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
Merold Westphal, editor
A PHENOMENOLOGY OF CHRISTIAN LIFE
Glory and Night
Felix Ó Murchadha
Indiana University Press
Bloomington and Indianapolis
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders        800-842-6796 Fax orders        812-855-7931
© 2013 by Felix Ó Murchadha
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ó Murchadha, Felix.
A phenomenology of Christian life : glory and night / Felix Ó Murchadha.
   pages cm— (Indiana series in the philosophy of religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-01000-1 (cloth : alkaline paper)—
ISBN 978-0-253-01009-4 (ebook) 1. Christian philosophy. 2. Phenomenology. 3. Life —Religious aspects —Christianity. 4. Christian life. 5. Philosophy. 6. Philosophical theology. I. Title.
BR100 .O23 2013
248—dc23
2013008816
1 2 3 4 5  18 17 16 15 14 13
In Memory of my Father Aibhistín Ó Murchadha (1927–2008 )
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Christianity and Philosophy
1   Desire and Phenomenon
2   Light and Dark
3   Glory and Being
4   Night, Faith, and Evil
5   Incarnation and Asceticism
6   Creation
7   Aion, Chronos, Kairos
8   Thinking Night and Glory
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
P HILOSOPHICAL REFLECTION BEGINS with what is given. However, philosophical beginnings are uncertain and deeply ambiguous: philosophy begins with that which has already begun and yet attempts to incorporate all other origins into itself. Historically, philosophy arose ‘out of’ a Greek way of being-in-the-world, informed by Homer and Hesiod. It attempted to find in the logos a way of justification to which such being-in-the-world would by an inner necessity need to submit itself. Philosophy, however, began again, in the sense here understood, with Christianity. Again, it sought to incorporate a prior beginning, this time that of the being-in-the-world of scripture. This attempt left a residue, which led eventually to a disciplinary break (unthinkable in classical Greek philosophy) between philosophy and theology, just as the first beginning of philosophy had resulted, as Nietzsche shows in the Birth of Tragedy , in a break between philosophy and poetry. Certain phenomena, essential to the Christian being-in-the-world, remained philosophically unjustifiable, that is, unrecognizable and unaccountable, and hence only valid under the auspices of faith and religion. This book attempts to explore that residue, to think that which disrupts and disturbs philosophy and leads philosophy beyond its Greek beginning.
If philosophy began again in reflecting upon the Christian way of being-in-the-world, this beginning did not mark any radical break with its Greek origins. This failure had fundamental and paradoxical effects: there has been no originally Christian philosophy in the past two millennia—at most Christian trappings on Greek thought, as Max Scheler puts it. Many of the foremost Christian thinkers have been anti-philosophers, para-philosophers, snipping so to speak from the sidelines. In certain moods Paul, Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, Luther, Pascal, and Kierkegaard form a necessarily eclectic tradition of such para-philosophy. This place of Christian thought in the European tradition should make us pause. For all the undoubted influence of Christianity on that history, the paradigmatic place of Greek conceptuality remained for long periods unshaken. Greek conceptuality is fundamentally Platonic. Despite the influence of Aristotle, the Stoics, and other strands of Greek thought, at the core of all metaphysics worthy of the name is Plato, such that for Greek philosophy Whitehead's oft quoted remark about philosophy being a series of footnotes to Plato is justified. As I will show in this book, there are fundamental reasons concerning the self-understanding of the early Christian church fathers for the fact that Christianity did not essentially disturb Platonism, but rather incorporated it and by consequence was incorporated into it. The concern of this book is not to argue the merits or faults of such incorporation. Rather, in the para-philosophical tradition to which I have alluded, this book seeks to explore those themes in Christianity—revolving around the figures of glory and night—which fundamentally disrupt Platonism and Greek philosophy from Plato to Heidegger.
The crisis of Greek thought is not confined to the ontological. Emmanuel Levinas brought to the fore an encounter with Greek thought, which the para-philosophical tradition represents: the vanity of ontology and the centrality of the ethical relation. Since his groundbreaking work, it has become a commonplace to set the difference between Greek and Judeo-Christian thought along the fault line between ethics and ontology. To do this, however, threatens to reinforce the marginality of the tradition of para-philosophy. What we find in Judeo-Christianity, what we find in the extreme phenomena outlined in the New Testament, is an account of the phenomenality of phenomena that is deeply ontological at the same time as it is deeply ethical. The key term here, as Urs von Balthasar has shown, is ‘love’ ( agāpe ), which defines the being of God as much as his action in the Christian scriptures.
It is essential to note here that the term ‘Judeo-Christian’ is anything but harmless. The differences obscured by the hyphen in this term are not thematically dealt with here as they are beyond the scope of this book, but they are ever-present, particularly when the discussion turns to incarnation, creation, and time. This book is concerned specifically with a phenomenology of Christian life, but it is important to recognize that Judaism also disrupts Greek philosophy.
This book attempts to position those phenomena around a fundamental double structure of phenomenon which is expressed in the Christian tradition as glory and night. Glory here is to be understood neither principally aesthetically (von Balthasar) nor principally politically (as Agamben has recently done), but phenomenologically. Glory is understood here as a structure of appearance which in its double relation with night expresses a specifically Judeo-Christian experience of phenomenon. Furthermore this experience can only be understood in terms of ontology and ethics. From that basis glory and night are viewed as both aesthetic and political, however problematic any conjunction of Christianity and politics may be. ‘Glory’ and ‘night’ refer to the being of phenomena to which the Christian way of being-in-the-world responds. One of the crucial elements of Christianity is the central place of faith. Since Kierkegaard we have become used to thinking in terms of a ‘leap of faith’ and the decision without ultimate rational justification to take that leap. But without denying the pertinence of Kierkegaard's account, if we look to Paul for our bearings, we find that faith is first and foremost a response that has its own logic. If the Christian way of being is a way of faith, it is one which understands existence from the basis of response. Response in this sense is not a specific, but a fundamental experience. Glory and night are both modes of appearance for that being whose being begins in response. The form of that response is prayer and worship. Here language functions not to describe or bring about effects, but to give articulation to its own limits and those of the world. The true response to god's love is pure worship (see John 4:24, 9:38), a glorifying thanksgiving (see Matthew 15:36, Romans 1:8). An entity whose being begins in response is a creature, whose self-understanding leads her back to utter passivity in relation to the origins in love of her being.
The pertinence of that response, the place of Christianity in human society, is in the West at least far from self-evident. The increasingly marginal place of Christianity in today's world gives added resonance to the Pauline formula for defining the Christian as “in the world, but not of the world.” ‘Glory’ and ‘night’ express that liminal moment articulated in Paul's formula. They communicate an experience of god which paradoxically subverts the conditions of experience, or put more cautiously, subverts the worldly conditions of experience. They challenge the worldliness of appearance and of experience. This amounts to a challenge to Platonism. One of the central theses of this book is that Platonic philosophy is worldly philosophy. This thesis is not pursued as a historical claim, although it does rely on certain historical claims about Plato and the appropriation of Platonic philosophy by the church fathers. The concern rather is with contemporary debates and with the Platonic inheritance as it continues to influence our understanding of both Christianity and philosophy. The incorporation of Christianity into Platonism required a supra-cosmic reinterpretation of Plato. But I will argue that for Plato there is nothing more ultimate than the cosmos. The world of forms is not a separate world, but is the world as it really is. ‘Glory’ and ‘night’ express an intrusion into the world, which is not of the world. The