Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age

Ryan G. Duns, SJ

Description

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor, faced with contemporary challenges to belief, issues a call for “new and unprecedented itineraries” that might be capable of leading seekers to encounter God. In Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age, Ryan G. Duns demonstrates that William Desmond’s philosophy has the resources to offer a compelling response to Taylor. To show how, Duns makes use of the work of Pierre Hadot. In Hadot’s view, the point of philosophy is “not to inform but to form”—that is, not to provide abstract answers to abstruse questions but rather to form the human being such that she can approach reality as such in a new way. Drawing on Hadot, Duns frames Desmond’s metaphysical thought as a form of spiritual exercise. So framed, Duns argues, Desmond’s metaphysics attunes its readers to perceive disclosure of the divine in the everyday. Approached in this way, studying Desmond’s metaphysics can transform how readers behold reality itself by attuning them to discern the presence of God, who can be sought, and disclosed through, all things in the world.

Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age offers a readable and engaging introduction to the thought of Charles Taylor and William Desmond, and demonstrates how practicing metaphysics can be understood as a form of spiritual exercise that renews in its practitioners an attentiveness to God in all things. As a unique contribution at the crossroads of theology and philosophy, it will appeal to readers in continental philosophy, theology, and religious studies broadly.

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Métaphysique
• Philosophie de la religion
• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Individual Philosophers
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• William Desmond
• Christian philosophy
• General officer
• Metaphysics
• General
• Charles Taylor
• Pierre Hadot

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 septembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268108151
• Langue: English

Extrait

SPIRITUAL EXERCISES FOR A SECULAR AGE
SPIRITUAL EXERCISES FOR A SECULAR AGE
DESMOND AND THE QUEST FOR GOD
RYAN G. DUNS, SJ
F OREWORD BY W ILLIAM D ESMOND
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
Published in the United States of America
“Primary Wonder” by Denise Levertov, from Sands of the Well,
copyright ©1994, 1995, 1996 by Denise Levertov.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020911372
ISBN: 978-0-268-10813-7 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10816-8 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10815-1 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
CONTENTS
Foreword
William Desmond
Acknowledgments
Introduction
ONE
Beating the Bounds of A Secular Age
TWO
A Crack in Everything: Introducing
William Desmond’s Metaphysics
THREE
The Poetics of the Between: Metaxological
Metaphysics as Spiritual Exercise
FOUR
Exercising Transcendence: Indirect
Ways to God
FIVE
Epiphanic Attunement
In(con)clusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
FOREWORD
There is much of music in this book. Indeed, there is music in the book, music with a poetic, religious, and philosophical resonance. Ryan Duns is himself an adept at traditional Irish music, and I am heartened to hear something of Irish music in the words of this work. There is also something of the musical, in theological and philosophical senses, that resonates in this work. As with much music that touches one, one is tempted into variations on the theme.
The book’s exploration is a return archaeologically to origins, and in the musical sense, namely, to the muses that are the endowers of human originality in diverse domains: the poetic, the theological, and the philosophical. I do not invoke the muses to set pagan against Christian, and I do indeed think that one line of Catholic genius has been to call forth an including family of inspiration. If God is the companioning power par excellence, the muses are companioning powers, coming to the aid of the endowment that enables the originating powers of the diverse arts, offering the gift of being mindful. I have myself contrasted thought thinking itself to thought not only thinking its other but to thought singing its other. The others for philosophy in this case are especially the religious and mediately the theological, and also the poetic, though this not aestheticized in a more secularized sense but as a vocation pursed in the light of its family relation to the sacred. There is the note of this singing in Ryan Duns’s work.
Duns provides us with an illuminating map of the contemporary landscape of thought where especially the contested place of the religious and diverse attitudes toward metaphysics are outlined. Charles Taylor is a major figure in this landscape, but figures such as John Caputo, Richard Kearney, and Merold Westphal also appear. He beats the bounds of this space, and I am glad Duns has praise for my own praise of metaphysics and the impossibility of ever avoiding its ever-recurrent perplexities—and their ever-recurrent relevance to the explorations of theology. I need not repeat his admirable account of my own demurral relative to claims about the end of metaphysics, or to claims that our age is now postmetaphysical. Among other things, the cul-de-sac of the Heideggerian Holzweg has long been evident to me, and I harbor the hope that others too will come to see this. Instead of boringly repetitive onslaughts on “onto-theology,” far better to compose what I have called “metaphysical cantos” relative to the God of the between.
Of course, ways are crucial. We travel through a landscape, and if the terrain is terra incognita, a map is truly helpful. I have traveled the landscape, and I do think this book as a map will be very helpful. I myself have talked about crossing and crisscrossing the landscape of the between, and on different journeys different senses of being might well present themselves as the fitting way to word the between. In this regard Duns rightly calls on Pierre Hadot as recalling us to the older sense of philosophy as a way of life.
Our relation to this kind of journey is necessarily intimate, even if opening up to the universal. Early in my own work the image of the journey is crucially present and recurrent latter. I described Desire, Dialectic and Otherness as an “Augustinian odyssey, embarked on in the wake of Hegel.” The itinerary tried to remain true to the double directionality suggested by Augustine: ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora —“from the exterior to the interior, from the inferior to the superior.” 1 It also tried to remain true to Augustine’s deep words that God is interior intimo meo et superior summo meo —“more interior (to me) than my most intimate intimacy and superior to my highest summit” ( Conf. 3.6.11)
The itinerary more to the forefront in this book is somewhat more Ignatian than Augustinian. One need not see these two in discordance. The stress is on discernment, and askesis . Duns is discerning in stressing the itinerant way of the thought. I am thinking of my book Philosophy and Its Other: Ways of Being and Mind . Here too are ways. I should also say that although in that work I speak of philosophy as a “discipline of mindful thought,” I intend a more ecumenical sense of being mindful, not unrelated to the possibility of consecrated thought.

Crossing the between: the later Heidegger crosses (out) being and one can see the point, though qua gesture, its power, once made, tends soon to fade. I had toyed with the gesture of crossing out the entirety of God and the Between , as a figure of the apophatic side of the journey, but no publisher would stand for that. I did settle on the analogy with those older passports that carried stamps of journeys and destinations, but now crossed out once the passport had seen its day. The passport is still a witness to the fact that journeys were undertaken. Journeys would still call to be undertaken by others. In matters religious, no one else can undertake the journey for us, but witnesses can encourage or guide or warn. Duns picks up deftly on the image of the passport with multiple stamps, stressing also that others must themselves undertake their own journey along ways and along the way. Along the way we can get lost, we try to get our bearings, we conserve, we sometimes pause and think and sing.
I am recalled to the sense of an Ignatian itinerary with reference to a Jesuit philosopher/theologian who was important early in my own coming to philosophy: Bernard Lonergan. Lonergan speaks of his book Insight as being written from “a moving standpoint.” I endorse the point. The practice of thought has this moving character, and later thoughts in an unfolding are intimately related to earlier, either as modifications or reformulations or repudiations. This means that the one who tries to follow the path should enter into the moving activity of thinking, become engaged in a kind of peregrine reflection rather than be the collector of cut-and-dried propositions. Strong too was Lonergan’s stress on self-appropriation, a matter that also entails that no one else can substitute for you in undertaking the adventure of self-knowing.
I mention another figure, Hegel, with whom I have wrestled, as also giving witness to the “moving standpoint” of a dialectical unfolding, particularly in his Phenomenology of Spirit . The great French Jesuit Gaston Fessard wrote a book entitled La dialectique des “Exercices spirituels” de saint Ignace de Loyola . Duns’s book here is closer to the metaxology of the Spiritual Exercises . The “moving standpoint” has something to do with the intimate togetherness of form and matter in a philosophical reflection. The dynamism of the unfolding is not merely propaedeutic to the static presentation of determinate results. It is not a merely embellishing form added to a content or matter that otherwise can be represented. There is a seeking of fidelity to the dynamic nature of the matter itself as it unfolds itself and comes to fitting form.

These considerations are at work also in this book. There is here a kind of artistic principle, insofar as the form of art is always a forming and never a frozen structure. Forming awakens mindful movement in resonance with the dynamism of the enlivened form. One might see how a musical piece very much witnesses to such a sense of moving form. Once again, a kind of music is in the air.
I take this musical air to resonate with the relating of philosophy and theology at work here. Philosophy and theology encounter each other on a threshold where they can turn away from each other, they can touch each other, they can turn towards each other. There is a myriad of ways of turning towards and turning away, or touching. Generally, when the definition of philosophy in modernity stresses self-determining thought, a kind of turning away from theology can ensue, such as we can find in any number of thinkers. What then of the touching and being touched on the threshold? One need only note that, though given their difference by this threshold, they can also be held together by it. I find with metaxological philosophy that a companioning relation is possible between the philosophical and the religious/theological. I find this throughout this work.
What of it? A new receptivity can awaken a new porosity between them, if philosophy is metaxological, that is, as essentially defined by its offering a logos of the metaxu (the between). Then philosophy is what it is, not solely in relation to itself, but in relation to its significant others. In fact, throughout the long h