Schleiermacher is not customarily set among the existentialists, however, his investigation into man as rudimentally aware of the contingency of his being makes him, in my assessment, the radix of this movement that surrenders the speculative search for man’s nature and settles upon something more concrete: a considered description of man’s being. Indeed, “existentialist” was a prolapsed appellation for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Hegel had spoken of the Absolute as an evolution of idea in existence. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher[i] is not as absolute in his appraisal of this equation of thinking and being. There is, for him, a delicate distinction. Thought and being are correlated. Objectively, thought conforms itself to being, constituting the gestalt commonly dubbed scientific knowledge; it references Nature. Subjectively, thought attempts to conform being to itself, constituting the world of our ideals, the realm of morals and ethics; it references Spirit. The ultimate reality is the identity wherein the differentiation, Nature and Spirit, is resolved.[ii] This identity is, however, beyond all conceptual thought or understanding. It is, nonetheless, something we apprehend with a certain immediacy. Schleiermacher unfortunately spoke of this prime apprehension as a feeling, and that has befuddled understandings of his insight for generations. That which he attempts to describe is sentient in that it is not rational, but that sentience cannot be considered either simply sensible (arising from sense data) or emotive (arising from emotional response to stimuli). It is not subjective. It is the primal and definitive objective experience. If I may borrow from his philosophical posterity, it is a basal consciousness of my being-in-the-world and being-there not of my own making, an awareness of my finitude within the infinitude that holds the cosmos, of my simply and briefly appearing out of and within the sea of being. It is a constitutional, a foundational intuition that I am absolutely finite, conditioned, caused. This subliminal consciousness of dependency is, for Schleiermacher, the ground wherein religion takes root.[iii]
Schleiermacher was born into a pietist[iv] household, educated by the pietist Moravian Brotherhood. Not unexpectedly, therefore, he contends religion is a matter of personal, specific, subjective connectivity with God,[v] a matter of heart not mind. It is vibrant and spontaneous, not a submission to codes of ideas or behaviour. There can be no subscription to a religion grounded in either metaphysics or ethics. Indeed, metaphysics and ethics need to ground themselves in religion, for in man the activities of thinking, doing, and feeling cannot be realistically divorced one from the other. Without the consciousness of my finitude-within-infinitude, metaphysics would be purely a matter of theories, concepts, science in abstraction. Without a sense of dependency upon an infinite, a divine, upon God, man could decipher himself autonomous, and all ethics would become either a matter of some compromise or a blatant defiance of affiliation. (Within a few generations some philosophers will indeed begin to look upon metaphysics as properly being no more than a summation or abstraction of scientific knowledge, and in a lesser time, some will subtract man from humanity, make man superior to society, and imperil ethical autonomy with the anarchy of a “super-man”.)
In Plotinus, Erigena, Spinoza we find the circular idea: God moving out into creativity, into creature, and resolving back into the uncreated, God-mind-cosmos-God, the complementariness of nature as activity and passivity, Natura naturata et Natura naturans [nature being and nature doing]. Schleiermacher is, somewhat, in concert with this vision. The sublime unity of God and world cannot be comprehended. The terms unity and identity are themselves deficient. His understanding of the relatedness of God and world is, in keeping with Romantic nineteenth century German idealism and Schelling in particular, perhaps best uttered as an undifferentiated power (being, life-force) spontaneously self-manifesting in differentiation. It follows, personality cannot be ascribed to such a divine except symbolically. Every individual person is, however, a manifestation of this divine. If God is the resolution, the confluence of the primal differentiations (Nature and Spirit), that ought to find its reflection in the development of the divine manifest that is the individual. In every person Nature and Spirit (being and thinking) are not in vying opposition, merely, if I may, two tones standing in need of harmonization. Thus, sense is not diametrically opposed to reason nor inclination to wisdom. As one among his twentieth century ideological descendants put it, man is not dichotomous but multi-dimensional.
Natural religion is a fiction, a conceptual abstraction decocted out of elements surveyed in historical religions. All historical religions, however, evidence an ideal that can never be fully realized. As denoting the un-realized, their sundry narratives, as well as their doctrines, their definitive-most propositions, ought to be understood as symbolic expressions of the religious experience of a community of faith. As symbols they can foster as much as inhibit true spirituality. Christianity’s distinctiveness is its understanding that the relationship with God is mediated in Christ who supremely embodies the consciousness of God, and who as such is the great exemplar of true humanity. God then is known only in his relationship to us in Christ, the Christ who reveals the powers which respectively obscure and illuminate the consciousness of God (in traditional terms: sin and grace) and who in that role becomes for us the divine, our redeemer and mediator.
Schleiermacher was more the pastor than philosopher/theologian. His concern was to make Christ relevant and vital to the educated and erudite of his day who had little regard for the trappings of religion and its dogmas. They were adrift toward a vacuous humanitarianism whose natural end would be nihilism. He attempted to present Christ, the great archetype of true humanity, apart from Christianity, the institution that of necessity is always subject to the ideologies of the times from the ancient tendencies to present it either in Judaic or Gnostic forms to the nineteenth century inclinations to turn it into a system of transcendental idealism. To follow after Christ’s example is to be in a continuous state of conversion, of turning toward God as reveled in Christ. Here is the categorical imperative of life. There is no proper concern for an after-life. There is no gazing for God beyond the God within the conscience constantly calling man forth to face and overcome his shortcomings (his sin), and empowering him to rise above his biases and mis-directions. The essence of Christianity is the imitation of, the incarnation of Christ, the human exemplar par excellence.
Schleiermacher is popularly called the father of modern theology. As does Kant with his ideas about morality and history, Schleiermacher’s subjectivity tinctures, positively or negatively, every theology that follows. Tillich may speak of his indebtedness to Schelling, Bultmann and Rahner to Heidegger, Altizer to Nietzsche, etc. yet I doubt it can be successfully argued that there is a modern theologian who looks wheresoever he looks without being affected by the lens created by Schleiermacher, without feeling the need either to affirm or amend or negate his insight.
Soren Kierkegaard went in search of the truth to sit at Hegel’s feet. He found Hegel had captured within his braille everything except the truth. It contained all essences but no existence, ideas not truth, theory not humanity. He went off to Schelling for a redeeming errata, but again found only the Absolute. Discontentedly, he went off alone to pronounce a man’s essence resides in his particularity, his personal responsibility to be authentically human. Hegelianism and idealism had basically reduced being human to a movement within universal thought. Kierkegaard objected that the particular, the living individual, does not become something authentically human by losing himself in a transcendence into the universal, whether that be conceived of pragmatically as the State or philosophically as the pure Absolute. To concoct such a vast system as Hegel’s may astound as an intellectual tour de force, but it is all speculation and logic devoid of life, reality, truth.
Hegel had analysed every detail of the world within a dialectic resolving the tension twixt thesis and its antithesis. Kierkegaard counters this Hegelian resolution is a phantasy wherein neither the infinite nor the finite, neither God nor man, are reconciled, bridged, or distinguished. On the contrary, they are muddled together into a phantasmagoric dream world and hailed Absolute. The truth of our being, of life, is not something accomplished in detached reflection, in transcending our particularity, or resolved in speculative thinking about conflicting theses. Life is about making definitive decisions about ourselves, about deciding “either-or”. For Kierkegaard, who grew up in a household inundated with the melancholy and compunction of his father, this choosing is always something ominous. Rather than detail that, I shall merely note that after Either-Or there follow his works Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread, Sickness unto Death. They are ominous, plodding in style, under the spell of a man given to glowering, but, in themselves, not so much dreadful as surgical, clinical. Kierkegaard is not so much a philosopher as surgeon and psychologist. The life upon his table and the mind upon his couch are his own, and out of his dissections and discernments he hypothesizes, and universalizes a theory of what it means to be a living man, what it entails to be so authentically, truly.
Kierkegaard’s analysis turns on the distinctiveness and value of the individual. There exists contrarily in society a tendency to meld individuals into a generalized mass wherein feelings, ideas, and ideals are dictated by the impersonal collective. The herd’s mentality dominates. The individual becomes anonymous, a particular disvalued and dissolved in the universal. But the collective is not superior the individual. Only the individual is real. Only the individual can relate himself to another, a thou, and by extension, to the living God, who is not an Absolute Idea, but man’s absolute Thou. Any notions to the contrary are as much insanity as heresy.
The process of authentic self-actualization is analysed as comprising of three distinct stages. These are not new discoveries, but neither are they made mere reformulation of the traditional aesthetic, ethical, and religious/spiritual. The first stage, for Kierkegaard, the aesthetic, is the state of being under the power of the sensual and sensitive, the imaginative and romantic. Its orientation toward the infinite is always under the sway of the ambiguity inherent in emotion and feeling. In this ambiguousness there are, there can be, no firm standards of behaviour, belief, or progression. It is a formlessness that spins out formlessness, and sooner or later, that dispersal within and without will manifest as a despair. Man either lives in that tenebrous ennui or he moves on, he makes a choice for some order, some discipline.
The second stage is the ethical. Man makes the choice for some governance, standards, obligations. There is a type of acknowledgement for a categorical imperative, a particularizing in one’s actions of a universal law. There is concomitant with this a belief in one’s own power to successfully so act. Man understands himself as morally self-sufficient. This faith in self becomes challenged in conscience, and eventually the ethical heroics involved in this venture descend into a despair. Man comes to see there are demands that rise above universal moral laws and expectations, that there are absolutes beyond cold reason. Ethical man knows the specificity of fear, the consequences of choosing this as opposed to that, and therein both anxiety and guilt. He comes to know that which Freud dubs thantos [in Greek: death], a sickness unto death. Here, before the horizon that is pure potential, “the possibility of freedom”, arises dread. It quivers with attraction and repulses with terror in equal part. It presents a decisive precipice. Forward is only by a leap. The choice here is not to nullify morals and ethics, but to realize that just as reason transcends feeling, there is to reason also a transcendent, and it resides within as much as beyond. It is a boundary as much as a power. It is the spirit that ceaselessly moves man toward the infinite, toward his ultimate standing, his individual status before God, the absolute other, his Thou. Man has a choice to make: am I a tragic hero to the law or do I leap into a relationship with the Holy, a living, personal relationship wherein God speaks above reason, out of a conscience that confesses my sin, my divine alienation, and summons my accountability to a truth within; do I move from being ethical to being spiritual?
Saying yes to the spiritual is ripe with danger. There is no proving of God, no rationalizing of God, no reconciling of the goodness in the world with the evil in the world. This is not about formulating a theory, or entertaining an opinion. Here a man faces something that he cannot doubt, that has for him such palpable truth that it demands his passionate commitment, his leap beyond reason into faith, into man’s highest passion, and as a passion something only aroused, engendered, and sustained in a personal relationship. We have here a paradox: an “objective uncertainty” and a subjective certitude, “my truth”, a truth verified in its intensity and passion. Truth becomes not an object, not what one knows, but how one knows.
There are two types into which the spiritual stage may be divided. The first is characterized by Socrates, the philosopher who employs a system of intellectual midwifery, a maieutic methodology, a form of reflective listening and probing point by point to awaken the truth dormant within the mind and bring it into the light. This methodology presupposes all truth, all knowledge, is a matter of simply remembering.[vi] The other type is characterized by Jesus, the teacher who brings the truth and provides the condition for understanding it. He, as the living paradox of infinite and finite, is known (experienced) beyond rational proof or justification as the eternal truth descended to the human as the suffering servant manifesting the love of God buried beneath the guilt of sin. As such he is rightly addressed as both Teacher and Saviour.
In the religious/spiritual state man reaches the essence of man, man claims his individuality. Man is no longer subsumed in the mass, a spectator of the world, a strand of a dialectic unfurling into the abstract. Here man stands out [ex-ists, from the Latin ex-stare, literally, to stand-out], and passionately embraces becoming himself, commits himself to moving forward even in the face of the final uncertainty of death. Kierkegaard has his own practical resolution of infinite and finite: finite existence is a striving and the striving is infinite.
Although Kierkegaard remained virtually unknown outside his homeland for more than a generation after his death, his focus on man’s essential standing-out, his ex-istence, merited him the distinction of being named the Father of Existentialism.
Existentialism is not interested in speculating about the cosmos or sense data, the process of formulating ideas, etc. It roots itself in the concrete human existence, in the immediacy of our existence, its “given-ness”, the sheer factuality of our being and being here. It examines life as played out in the desire for absolute knowledge, the perpetual spectre of doubt, the thirst for happiness, the inescapability of evil in all its forms, the hope of immortality, and the blunt reality of death. It enquires after the meaning of life in life. It is not a new enquiry. Job knew these questions, as did Paul, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, et al. Hegel and the idealist of the nineteenth century knew them as well, but they supressed the individual into a manifestation of the universal and reconciled all difficulties in an eternal and/or historical unfolding. Existentialism is a reaction to this essential nullification of the individual claiming the starting point, indeed, the entire point of all serious reflection, is properly the only item of importance—the individual human being. While considering the individual and the meaning of life, there may be glances to situate that within a wider context, a theory of knowing (epistemology) or being (metaphysics) or man’s sociality (ethics) or religious aspirations (theology), but such are ancillary to the prime endeavour. In a time when the lines “What is man that Thou should make note of him” and “Remember man that thou art dust” were being rehearsed with equal parts distain and dismissiveness, when the wealth and power of the world were so rapturously in the hands of the gilded few and about to be desolated in their poisonous insularity, a few intellectuals rose to higher aims, played for them that would have ears to hear the pastor, the psychiatrist, and that most woefully maddening part, the prophet.
A prophet often appears a mad man. He is not merely impassioned, he is a living passion. He bristles fire and brimstone, thunder and lightning, or alternately effuses consolation like an embalming honeyed embrocation. He speaks in aphorisms and parables. He compresses time with an urgency that understands the futurity inherent in the present. He compels more by his delivery than his text. He is neither easily deciphered nor categorized. He is not necessarily an ecstatic, a being “divinely mad”, but he is mad. Whether it is his being mad that allows him to see that which others do not, or whether he is driven mad by that which he beholds is incidental to the fact he is deeply dis-arranged, deranged. He is in-sane with the insight that a catastrophe is unfolding and he its aposiopetic voice. Friedrich Nietzsche was no philosopher. To read him as such is an error. He is a prophet, and like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the trove of others, he needs be understood as such.
Nietzsche had three early attachments: atheism, the sense of tragedy spun out in Schopenhauer, and ancient culture. These colour his critique. The ancient Greeks understood the fundamentally tragic nature of life, but they did not capitulate to it, they transcended it in art. In Dionysus they intoxicated themselves with the wildness of life, and sank into the orgiastic primordial unity of being. In Apollo they celebrated the individual, illumination, inspiration, and order. True culture is always an equitable commixture of these two ways of apprehending life, for only in such balance can true genius be fostered. The purpose of culture, of a viable sociality, is to make way for the genius, for the one who rises above the mass and so sustains the viability of the culture into the future. This insight he turns upon the culture of the day. The preoccupation with knowledge and systems of knowledge affront life. The wild, the vital forces repressed by this ascendency are in a most volatile state of fomentation as attested to in the boil and hiss of countless contemporary revolutions and revolutionary ideas. A ruthless visionary is necessitated to correct the situation. The visionary is Nietzsche in the guise of his Zarathustra.
The Kantian categorical imperative, the injunction to all men to so act that the act be comprehensible as the manifestation of a universal rule, seemed, to some, to find support in the ideas being published by Darwin. Many understood the conflux of those ideologies as indicative of a morality founded on acting as if all men shared in the same needs and rights. Nietzsche countered this idea with his insistence on the exception, the one who rises, tends to rise, is of himself propelled to rise, above the masses. Society seeks to preserve itself by enforcing a morality. It uses compulsion that all conform to the social interest. Practice becomes habit and custom. This bodes for both good and ill creating two types of moral understanding: the master, and the slave. The master morality savours the ancient notions about the inherent nobility of man; it is not concerned with right and wrong so much as with man’s grandeur of being, his autonomy, his auto-cracy. (However, Nietzsche’s master morality is not, as was the ancient Greek, an artistry of transcending the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian visions; it has more affinity with Machiavelli than the ancient ideal of καλοκαγαθία, calocagathia. [a portmanteau of καλος (beautiful) and αγαθος (good)], something the Romans translated as magnanimitas [great-spirited] from which we derive our magnanimous. Herein resides one reason Nietzsche was easily, if superficially, co-opted by fascist forces seeking a new ethic for a “master race”.)[vii] The slave morality is about black and white, right and wrong. It extols sympathy, humility, kindness. It weakens everyone to strengthen the collective, to keep the mass coherent. It may contribute to a certain refinement in men, but below the surface it festers with resentment, and so tends toward enfeeblement. These two types of morality militate against each other. The slave morality subsists in mortification and renunciation; the master morality is oriented toward the integration of the person. Christianity, in Nietzsche’s estimation, has always been the champion of the morality of the herd.
The God who has stood behind this servile morality, the God who, to the peril of this world, has corralled occidental man into a flock awaiting an everlasting pasture, this God, the God of the Christian church must be declared vanquished and done. Man must arise and proclaim a new victory-cry: God is dead. There may once have been a time when this God provided some positivity, some bulwark against nihilism and despair, some ability to grow and foster genius, but that time is lost. It is the sign of the master morality, of the genius, that God be rejected, and with that the morality of weakness, of absolute values and laws. The superior man can create his own values, his own laws. The superior man is his own law, and that not for his own sake, but for humanity’s. This must come to be because–in practice if not in proclamation–God is dead to Europe, and what will follow will be general anarchy or a trans-valuation of all values at the hand of the great and few.
In concert with Schopenhauer, Nietzsche claims all life is a will to power. This is not intended a metaphysical declaration. It is a descriptive statement about man, a practical observation about the innermost force of life. Knowledge is a tool to interpret and use the items of the world. Ego also is a practical tool, a useful fiction built upon the interpretation of ceaseless becoming as an abiding entity. Truth also must be understood as a tool, a thing whose value resides in its usefulness. Such ideas are not foreign to the empiricists, but for Nietzsche their power, their reality, reside in their being enunciations of an internal power, the force of life within to adjust, adapt, form and reformulate itself. The genius and the mass are in conflict with each other, yet each feeds on the other. Each is an obstacle to the other over which to exert power and seek triumph. But the fullness of power and life resides in the genius. He is the superior man. Nietzsche calls him the Superman, the leader and saviour of the species, the culture, the world. He exhibits the will of a Caesar and the soul of a Christ. Such is the ideal. Can it come to pass? Nietzsche speaks of an eternal return, an absolute cyclical nature to history. Again, he is not weaving a metaphysics or a physics. It is his rendition of a categorical imperative. The superior man is he who is willing to ardently endure his decision in its every detail and consequence as if it were to be repeated endlessly in a never ending historical loop—a premonitory ideal from a man whose life seemed always to spin out discontent and whose last years were spent confined in a bedlam.
Jean-Paul Sartre begins the description of man in the abstract and moves toward the concrete. There are two categories of being, the being-in-itself (en-soi) and the being-for-itself (pour-soi). Being-for-itself is passive and inert, it merely “is”, it is “thing”. It always has a place, a situation, a facticity. The being-in-itself is the contrary, it is ‘no-thing”. This “no-thing” is not an inert absence so much as a dynamic power of negation. It moves ceaselessly to transcend facticity. Man is fundamentally ambiguous because he is a combination of these contradictory categories. Thus Sartre presents the old dichotomous idea of material and immaterial reality, body and soul. But he adds an interesting twist. The transcending dynamic of “no-thing” is sheer freedom, an undiluted negating force. Freedom is nothingness endlessly thrusting toward being something, toward concretizing itself without the loss of itself. It is no-thing seeking to be thing without loss of its pure nothingness, its freedom. It is an impossible quest, and thus man finds himself “condemned to be free”.
Soul had anciently been considered the animating principle of body, and at least in some aspect such as the rational, was expected to have a power of existence without the body. Reason and will were considered a functional unity. Over time, the power of reason becomes appreciated more as an impersonal utility, a mere tool for organizing data, and the will considered the internal dynamic, the individualizing and person-defining. I have dubbed this shift an appreciation, for while this distinction had always been present, the accent had not. Still, the soul (ego, self, psyche) was deemed worthy of being considered some-thing transcending the mortality of the body if only as an unprovable basis for allowing good and evil in man some appropriate space for reward or censure. Hume, with all the subtlety of a bagpipe, ejected the notion of soul as mere logical fiction—at best. Sartre, likewise, is given to opine he has no soul. Sartre’s analysis of the psyche reveals no abiding centre of activity, merely activity. It is nothing; it is freedom, it is incessant negating.
From Kant forward, there is a growing illation that we in some sense pick and choose, either by our constitution or disposition, how and what we see as the world. Edmund Husserl attempted to give that insight the methodology that would bring certainty to philosophy. He contends consciousness of always of something, an object we “intend” to lock on to, to pay attention to in order to extract out of the encounter some portion of the object’s usefulness. This is revealed by stepping away from that internal, meaning-ordered connectedness and reflecting upon the situation from the external perspective. Sartre adopts this, and claims if all can be taken as consciousness (for-itself) and objects of consciousness (in-itself), and consciousness is “intentional”, than the objects of consciousness (phenomena) are not so much mental entities as ways we relate to items in the world. We intend and are, therefore, responsible for our world, our horizons of meaning and value. The ego is the sense of unity given to the mass of ongoing perceptions. It is not found in being conscious of a thing, only afterward, in reflecting upon our having been conscious of something. Consciousness, of itself, cannot sustain itself; it lacks endurance. As soon as consciousness acquires some content, that content becomes the past, and consciousness moves on to be re-plenished [refilled]. We have in this a reaffirmation of nothingness at the core of man, a nothingness that keeps turning toward the world for meaning, to de-fine [limit] itself. It is the irresolvable situation.
As free, man cannot not make a choice. Despite the historical and social constraints into which we are born, the given-ness of our situation, we are oriented toward establishing our own facticity without the loss of our freedom. Man can surrender himself, his self-responsibility, his self-identity, his self-valuation to the mass, or to the identity of some function within the mass, or he can strive for authenticity. That endeavour for responsible selfhood might be characterized as Kant’s categorical imperative, to so act as if presenting the universally necessary and proper.
In this another aspect of being comes into play, the for-other (pour-autrui). The other is not found as a thing-in-itself, but encountered. The presence of the other announces itself as “I” become conscious of being objectified by another consciousness. The other makes me an object, and I respond by objectifying the other. Sartre clinically examines human interaction from shame to love, but it is always an unrequited danse macabre. The philosophical and theological Ultimate Other, God, is therein relegated an impossibility. As some abiding concoction of the impossible resolution of in-itself and for-itself, of objectivity and subjectivity, God cannot be, and the notion of God itself is without value. This not to be unexpected of the man who wrote “Hell is other people”.
Sartre was hailed the conscience of his generation. Yet, I cannot read him without feeling every venture must end not in futurity but frustration. Is this what war upon war does to joie de vivre? His ideas have been herein espied, because, contrary to that which one might expect, they do stir in contemporary theology. In the forcefulness his ideas give to man’s experience of alienation and estrangement within and without, his concentration on authenticity and responsibility, his correction of the Freudian notion wherein of the unconscious is allowed to be an escape mechanism for self-deceit, his wariness of political systems and bureaucracy (alternate forms of ultimate other) his philosophy colours approaches to gospel as liberation.
For Martin Heidegger the prime question is: where come we to the understanding of being? He proposes we must look to the one being which “stands-out”, the being in whom being becomes the question—man, or as Heidegger names him: Dasein [ex-istence]. To stand-out, ex-ist, implies a ground from which one is so situated. Man exists in-the-world. We cannot first identify Dasein and that ask what relation it has to the world. Dasein and world mutually imply each other. They are related such that neither has priority, for the world is always the world of man and man is always in the world. This is not to claim some subject-object dualism, merely to note that being is actualized in the appearing of things, and for that appearing Dasein is a constitutive element. Being is a process of appearing.
The in-the-world-ness of man is temporal. Man is always this present being in, with, within, beside this world. Man is always something thrown into this world, appearing in it out of a past. Man is a being open to potentials, oriented to the future. This temporality cannot be understood as a static, quantitative, dissectible series of fragments. It constitutes the historical and dynamic unity that is man. (Cf: Bergson in Occidental Ideas, Part 19)
Man finds himself in the world related to objects open to his use. Man finds himself in deterministic relations in this world, every situation limited in its potentials and therein indicative of the plenitude of possibilities negated in every situation. Man is a finite being involved in finite connections amid a seemingly endless field of possibilities, except that man has a boundary to his possibilities, a time-limit. Man’s being stands before death.
How ought man stand-out before death? Man can sink into the mass of humanity, surrender his individuality for an anonymous ego, and therein estrange himself from himself, his possibilities, his relevance. This is inauthentic being. To be authentically, a man must stand-out above the anonymous mass, face his finitude and the banality of the world about him. This experience manifests in anguish, the dread created before the vastness of the indefinite. Here man realizes to be means he comes from nothing. His root is in nothing. He is a temporality, limited in scope, in potential, in possibilities. Man knows his being is destined for death, for not-being. Thus, man, to live authentically, must with care and responsibility, embrace this temporality, this finitude, this indefinitive definite. In this project (projection) of his life man has conscience ever disclosing to him where authenticity is, correcting in guilt, propelling with resolve.
Heidegger left the above considerations incomplete, and went on to investigate Being as opposed to being. The question of Being is elusive because it is not an entity; it is something we attribute to beings. Occidental philosophy very quickly lost sight of this and rendered it some type of a being. Plato made it an idea. Mediaeval thinkers treated it as substance or actuality. Modern philosophy added the titles of ego, will, power. Nevertheless, there had persisted in occidental thought some notion that beings required a groundwork, a type of perfect being, a God. Today that aspirant orientation of mind has been lost to a technological attitude wherein domination is given over to man—man the technician, the maker and shaper of things.
If, however, we can step back and look upon thought before it began to forget about Being, before it reduced Being to a being, we find a pre-sensing of that which is present, a disclosing, a manifesting. This may sound vague, and it is. It is that on which, out of which, arises the world of things. It is expressed in ancient cultures as the awareness of a power behind all. It is expressed as a dawning in which, by which, things come to light. It is spoken of as the inexpressible, non-conceptual foundation of all experiencing. Schleiermacher might consider it akin to his perceptivity for the unutterable dependency of man’s being. It is neither mystical nor epistemological; it is their prior. It is the abyss out of which wonder and thought arise. It is the dawning of consciousness, a receptivity, a pure openness before which and in which we stand.
Sartre dismissed the possibility of being and freedom being coincided. God, as a Hegelian resolution of the absolute subjective and objective, idea and existence, is declared logically impossible and realistically irrelevant. Heidegger dismisses the mere consideration of the question. Metaphysical notions of God obscure the question of being. God cannot be considered either a being or Being. The entire quizzing is beyond man’s purview. Karl Jaspers is not in accord with this conclusion. He amplifies the idea of Being’s sheer potentiality, envisioning Being, muchly as had Eckhart, as a platform continuously receding from man’s analysis, with the varied types of knowledge (empirical, scientific, spiritual) ever looking beyond themselves, their limitations, toward that which can be perceived merely symbolically, in the worldly “ciphers” that signal the plenitude of Being, God.
Gabriel Marcel, true to the principle of existentialism, begins his analysis with man, the first item of our experience. However, to think in terms of our being as a series of problems to which we need find solutions is to begin with an erroneous attitude. Man’s being is not a problem to be solved or resolved; it is a mystery. Man is not a dualism, a soul having a body or a body having a soul. Man is an identity: my existence is in my body, I am my body. Likewise, my perceptions are not simple representations of things, they are not Aristotelean assimilations or Kantian constructs, they, like my body, are mine, and thus, in perceiving there is established a mystical union of subject and object. In perceiving the universe man creates the universe within. In perceiving man is open to the universe and it open to him. As open one to the other, this relationship is properly one of love. The universe becomes not a series of things but a “thou” with whom man communicates. Through such experience man matures until he makes himself open to all and receives all as open to him, ascending in love to the absolute “Thou”.
Martin Buber distinguishes to types of relationships within being: “I-It” and “I-Thou”. An I-it relationship is any wherein one objectives another, imposes upon another his own meanings and purposes. The I-thou relationship is characterized by openness to the other, receiving the other as is without objectifying the other with some purpose or meaning “for me”. One may have an I-thou relationship with nature or some work of art, but the full mutuality of an I-thou relation can appear only between persons. It is almost a matter of effortlessness that in this world we grow accustomed to I-it relationships, and they in turn tend to eclipse the possibility of I-thou. However, it is only in I-thou relationships that one can develop as a person. Despite the modern impulses toward mysticism in contraindication of the world’s increasing commercialization, the ultimate I-Thou relationship is not an ascetical or mystical advance beyond the world but something found only in encountering the world itself as a Thou. This is not an equation wherein God equals world, for God is prior to the world; the world is his realization. Unlike Heidegger and Sartre who place the primacy of authenticity with the individual and have it move toward or despite the other, Buber insists authenticity appears only mutually. Unlike Kierkegaard who had man in anguished solitude before God, man is in the world and becomes a person in openly receiving the world and its ultimate basis as freely open to him, as Thou.
[i] I have, for sundry reasons, an attachment to Schleiermacher. The subtitle of my Website is given in homage of his 1799 work, On Religion, Addresses to its Cultured Despisers. There was once a time when I entertained naming my first born son Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher. I had it, however, on firm-most assurance that failing an agamic event it would remain a desideration.
[ii] Nature and Spirit in Schleiermacher are sometimes referenced as a dualism. I find the term misleading. For Schleiermacher God is the whole manifesting in differentiation as the particular, and the prime particularities in man are experienced as Nature (the passive out-there) and Spirit (the active with-in). The term dualism too easily gives rise to a sense of being in conflict one with the other, and so throws mendacious shadow over the correct understanding of Schleiermacher’s ideas.
[iii] In 1917 Rudolf Otto published one of the most influential theological texts of the twentieth century, The Idea of the Holy. According to his analysis, the holy is that experienced as neither rational nor sensual, but as numinous, a pre-apprehension akin to Schleiermacher’s attuned-ness to the infinite, to something unconditioned, abiogenic, outside of the self, and categorically so, the “Wholly Other”. It is the mystery beyond all questions, and it presents as something both terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fasciens). Two years earlier, Emile Durkheim published his Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, and in summary of the investigations of sociology and cultural anthropology made note of the primary sense of power man universally experiences in the world about him, a power that imbues all things. This power does not threaten man despite the fact that it is dangerous due to its sheer immensity and expanse. Neither is this power a mere neutral, for as the all-immanent it has an affinity toward man; it is other yet a kindred spirit.
[iv] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 19, endnote iii
[v] For Schleiermacher the experience of dependence at the root of all religion is an objective experience, religion itself is subjective. Albrecht Ritschl shifted the focus back to the object. The accent rests upon the movement from God toward the believer. It is God who acts, man who receives. Faith is the gift. God can no longer, therefore, be the God discovered by philosophy or ethics, but the God revealed in history, in the historical person of Jesus. Ernst Troeltsch brought the relativism inherent in Schleiermacher’s ideas to completion. If religion is grounded in man, in his feeling of absolute relativity, then all religions are anthropological, fundamentally historical phenomena, and no one among them can claim superiority over another. The truth of any religion can only be weighed against the fruits of its spirituality, its capacity to render its adherents fully integrated men. According to Johann Hermann, the essence of Christianity resides in the subject, the believer, the one impacted by God in Jesus, the one inspired by Jesus’ moral example to self-examination and surrender into God-consciousness. While this Jesus, as moral exemplar, is known to the believer as Lord, this understanding cannot be confounded by confessional dogmatism or scriptural literalism. The communion with God generated remains, however, mediated by the church’s vision of Jesus as the Christ, and guided by the revelatory power of scripture.
[vi] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 2: Plato. Plato’s works, reflecting the ideas of his mentor, Socrates, hold the rational soul was once at one with the transcending ideas that in-form all things, and that the understanding of all things is fundamentally a remembering of their eternal essences, ideas, or forms. They reside within and need only be birthed.
[vii] When a God dies, so too do his people. Nietzsche was not the lone symptom of society’s demise. The era rebounds with signs that all is not well with occidental man. Empires of state, of corporations, of persons grow gargantuan, de-forming in their very enormity, devouring power, resources and persons in unsustainable rate. Reactively, the more delicate of soul looked for some respite from the grandeur of this relentless crush of Hecuba’s wheel; they turned to a story-book version of an age past, to the middle ages, to the Gothic, to its sense of chivalry, its sapience for a union of faith and function (church and state). While they painted a la mode “pre-Raphaelite”, and built turreted castles for both God and king, the gilded frenzy for power simply co-opted their efforts. Wagner dredged up Germanic myths long gone to give a nation a new god, and when he diverted his attentions with a too-Christian Parsifal, Nietzsche would have none of him. Bismarck too looked for a new cultic centre and invented his Kulturkampf. Reactively, Christianity hid itself in political correctness. The Lutheran Church began to dissipate itself in a false understanding of the rights of church and state. Rome busied itself not with gospel but in securing its rights in a series of concordats. All this but part of a series of hollow gasps we call the death rattle that continued into the dawning days of a new century when the body politic of Western culture eructed with a war that shattered the capacities for faith and hope, and that to this day depauperates churches and spirituality and will well possibly do so for generations to come.
A note on theology in the light of existential philosophy: Bultmann, Rahner, Tillich, and Altizer
Rudolf Bultmann looks upon man as a creature caught up in his world. By internal surrender to external evocations, man too easily slips into the anonymous mass, and sacrifices his freedom, his truth, his authenticity, his being, to simply subsist. Man in his depths yearns to be more, to break that bondage, to speak of it, but he can do so only if he faces the absolute determinate of his being, not Heidegger’s vague but assured determinate of death, but his own absolute determinate, the totally Other, his God. The otherness of God is not a metaphysical notion; it denotes a relationship. Theologically it is posed as the opposition of the Holy to the sinful. Philosophically it is understood as the tension between infinite and finite. Only faith stands a man before God as his totally Other, as the One who acts in Jesus in a decisive manner. In faith a man perceives God as the cause and end of himself and his world. There is no translating that perception into an empirical knowledge, a metaphysics, or a theology of divine attributes. There is no causing God to appear by conjuring up some logic, philosophy, or science unless one would worship a deus ex machina, a deification of man, or an abstraction. There is no summoning of God in moral rectitude, even if the exemplar and teacher be Jesus. Man cannot describe God. Man cannot summon God. Man can simply speak of that which God is doing in him, that which the confrontation with holiness has done to him, in him. Thus, all dogmatic pronouncements must be accepted as statements relating the significance of an encounter with the holy and nothing more. God is neither an object of understanding, nor the subject of an investigation. God is-before-whom man comes to the true understanding of himself, where man’s conscience, his heart and mind, can address him with insight and authority. In good Lutheran form, it is a matter of sole gratia, sole fide [solely by grace (from God’s side), solely by faith (on man’s)]. It is a self-knowing, a truth resident in the believer about the believer, a revelation of transcendence, a transformative understanding of the meaning of oneself—and of oneself alone.
The task of religion is to talk of this transcendent and transformative power. Christianity’s proclamation, its kerygma, is that God has acted in the person of Jesus Christ for man’s salvation, to effect in man the power to die to his old self and rise into newness of life. Religion, however, speaks within its cultural plenum, in the language and idiom of its day. The culture which gave us the scriptures and the theological language they engender is no longer comprehensible. Modern man no longer looks upon the world as a disc riding upon a primordial sea and crowned by the dome of the heavens. Modern man neither thinks in terms of Jewish apocalyptic imagery, nor awaits a cataclysm that will cause an empirical new world to descend upon the annihilate plane of this. Duelling cosmic forces, a Paradise lost, original sin, angels, demons, virginal impregnations, miracles, substitutionary sacrifice, bodily resurrections, corporeal ascensions into a heaven—all such images are foreign to modern man. Scripture is myth: the conveyance of something about this life of vital, of existential, importance presented under the guise of “another life”, “another world”. Like Strauss before him, Bultmann takes up the task of separating the Christian message from its mythology. Despite Jesus’ historicity, the declaration of Jesus as the Christ is not a historical event; it is an interpretation regarding the significance of a historical event, it is “salvation history”, an evaluation of history from a vantage point wherein Christ represents the “end of time”, the end of history as profane. The truth herein encoded can be entertained and received only in trust, only as it resonates with a personal meaningfulness.
An Excursus: I am in accord with Bultmann’s claim that modern man cannot understand scripture literally despite the fact there are millions today who stunningly cannot give any accurate account of the fundamental tenants of faith, despite the deluge of information readily available, and subscribe to all manner of antique fancies, angels being among the most popular. This, of course, is not confined to elements of Judeo-Christian iconography, for fairies, elves, and aliens thrive as well in these too many waste-lands thirsting for “living waters”, for true, life-giving spirituality.
Fully cognizant that preaching is a ritual act and, therefore, within the realm of ritual language, yet patently aware that this time of preaching is realistically the only occasion wherein sound teaching can be given, I am endlessly at pain that preachers preach the great narratives of holy writ and their descendent doctrines but virtually never remove the mythology in which they testify of God, Christ, sin, grace, redemption, etc, and speak plainly about the psychology (the soul science) they encode and denote—the coming to one’s fullness in love of self, of other, of world by and through the ardent and arduous looking upon one’s flaws and deficiencies, one’s selfishness, insularity, self-centredness, bringing their potencies to light, to understanding, and turning them into fully social and healthful powers. When I pray the focus of my meditations and invocations is a personalized God, but I know that Power I address is not a supernatural entity sitting in some higher realm, but a cosmic and psychic force beyond proportion as much present within me as integrated into the whole fabric of reality from its beginning to its end. I make no excuse for my use of such “poetry of the soul”, such mythic thinking, for I know I am exercising an artistry of being, an aesthetic as the formatting of the integration of my personhood-in-the-world. I know my prayerful utterances are not metaphrastic just as I know the quantitative parameters of my love I coo into my beloved’s ear are beyond literal. In both cases my words denote a profound most truth that no other formulary of vocabulary could so well contain.
This survey of ideas has revealed how often scholars have spoken of the impotence of human imaging before the idea of God, God the ever receding platform of Being, God the ever greater than any idea applied, etc. Admittedly, Aquinas and other mediaevals seem, despite their caveats to the contrary, to operate as if God and the supernatural are somehow simply super-material. Certainly the mass of Christian pulpit-talk carries that same predilection. As a species, I doubt we can completely escape the tendency to anthropomorphize God. We anthropomorphize, to varied degrees, everything from our pets to Mother Nature and her varied forces. Making things our own, in our image, is an aspect of our modus operandi. It requires no apology, but it does require periodic acknowledgement lest we slip into being simpletons.
Not only must scripture be de-mythologized, theology must be de-philosophized for it is, and always have been, enmeshed in the intellectual zeitgeist, and due cognizance must be given to the shape this brings to doctrinal formulations, to the manner in which this encodes questions and colours understandings. Despite this, Bultmann turns to Heidegger to secure a format for explaining the human situation to the modern world. Man, confronted by conscience, finitude, mortality, and anxiety is propelled to make a decision about the whereto of his life, a decision of life defining significance. This dynamic is pre-reflective, something at the root of living, at the base of human nature. It is the thrust toward self-valuation and understanding in the face of one’s possibilities and limitations. Man has a depth awareness of this necessity of decision, of the disquietude Augustine posed as “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee”, the perennial haunting that asks who am I, what ought I to be. The cross and resurrection of Jesus embody the summons to the consciousness of this. They present the catalyst for the existential crisis wherein man is confronted by death, the consequences of moral failures (sin), an openness to new life, and to the giftedness of life. They expose the void twixt self-alienation in meaningless bondage to the anonymous (inauthentic life) and the acceptance of one’s finitude coupled in the facticity that the world is incomplete without an-other, without ultimately its ground in the totally Other encountered as the power that frees man from the chain of finitude and anxiety (authentic life). Man lost in the mass is called to his liberty, to his true nature. Faith is the assurance that there is a holy love, a loving acceptance of self within the living totality (or the totality of living), that forgives the past, breaks its bondage, and opens man for his future, a future that is continuously unfolding before him, for him. The orientation toward this response may carry a once and for all time character, but it is a living decision, and it is, therefore, something that lives by ever being made anew and given voice.
Bultmann is not totally unredeemed in his turning to Heidegger for a vocabulary. While his methodology extracts the meaning of scripture from the cultural world-view that codes the sacred in terms of time and space (heaven, a world to come), the cosmos in a dualism of higher and lower (good and evil, matter and spirit, etc.) and sets it in new terms, it carries also the caveat that this de-mythologizing translation is also a human work replete with the history and concerns of the interpreter who must be circumspect as to the communicative nature of his work, its being an opening both of the text and of self to another.
Bultmann examines Jesus’ belief that through his agency a new world and the reign of God were about to dawn (his eschatological focus). Remove the mythology of an “end of the world” from this preaching and we find the core of Jesus’ message is about the ultimate significance of the individual’s decision for God and God’s way, for self-fulfillment and authenticity. “Life in the Spirit” denotes the potentiality of living decisively. The scriptural tension twixt flesh and spirit, world and spirit, Law and Spirit, is translated into the conflicting inauthentic and authentic existence. In Heidegger’s terminology, Christian scripture, denuded of its mythical dress, speaks of man’s being in the world, his historicity, his anxiety, his propensity to loose himself in the world, the call to surrender his insecurities, his bondage to the past, and to live unreservedly toward his future.
As such, there can be no universal or absolute ethical principles. The only law is that one love God and neighbour with the whole of one’s being, a being grounded in the present, the worldly. Future life can only be understood as a symbol of life lived in complete trust and openness to the present situation, a life, in Heidegger’s terms, free, authentic, and caring. As rooted in the individual’s encounter with the holy, everything about authenticity rests upon and within the individual. The Church may be a community but is such only as free association of isolated persons.
Bultmann is not either the first or the last to so individualistically interpret Christianity. Adherents of this position make their claim despite the fact that every prayer is by dominical instruction addressed to “our Father”, despite the fact that God so loves “the world”. Scripturally, grace and faith are primary, just as man is primarily social. The individual may need make response to the encounter with the holy, but that encounter is, as are all things individual, mediated in and trough a society. Thus, the community of faith “exists”, stands out in priority, before the individual. In Stanley Hauerwas’ terms, it functions as the witness to a story, a tale told about the intervention of God into the world of man. It exists not to prove the story, but to give evidence of its faith, to demonstrate to the world what the world is like if the story is true.
Given Bultmann’s position on demythologizing scripture, may it not be asked: does the Christian self-understanding need to be framed as an act of God? Cannot a man be said to have within the power to die to the past, to rise above it, fore-give it, to embrace a newness of life? Does the act of God need be understood as conditioned on some event in history, or may it be taken as something rooted within man, in man’s constitution, in man’s crasis as created in the image of God by the Word (logos, mind) of God? Can we understand Jesus as representing an archetype of man called from the depths of his-self (the Father and I are one) to understand himself as loved (you are my son) and summoned to act out that love in his life (I am come to proclaim goodwill, the time of refreshment and re-creation)? Is the gospel about Jesus, Jesus as the Christ, about God, about God acting in Jesus for the welfare of humanity, or is it a tale told about the potentials for good and ill resident in man’s nature, about the absolute necessity to integrate and mature the powers within the psyche (soul)? Is it a tale told to enlighten all about the healthful-most manner in which to value the universe? Is not all faith at root a sense of, a taste for, the transcendent, for the endless evocation to move onward? Is this not always a risk, an act of faith, of trust, a purposeful and subjective leap into an objective uncertainty? If a man can come to such an understanding outside the scriptures (as Bultmann acknowledged Heidegger had) are they necessary or was Heidegger simply conditioned by a Christian culture to the insight and enunciation that constitutes his analysis? Theologically faith is recognized as a gift, but in what medium, what packaging, may we, are we free to, describe the content? Do we speak of faith, of this foundational encounter-laden trust, as having a content, or is it purely potency that fecundates freedom and authenticity such that its “content” is the life it generates?
As has been marked by many of Bultmann’s critics, Heidegger’s ideas do not convey the fore-give-ness that is freedom from the past, neither do they address the notions of hope and love so prominent in the Apostle Paul. Neither does Heidegger summon God as the basis of man’s authenticity as does Paul in his ideas of grace. For Heidegger death is the end man must face for authenticity, and for Paul it is the absolute Thou by whose sovereign grace death has lost its sting. A philosophy, therefore, may be utilized to explain a point, to give clarity to some idea, but cannot—as Bultmann himself conceded–be adopted as a full and viable re-incarnation of the message, as its existential descriptive, or systematic justification.
Last, while I appreciate Bultmann’s faith that receives Jesus without need of demythologizing the encounter, it does not serve his methodology to claim all scripture is open to the removal of myth, and then make an exception where he finds it offends faith. As Strauss had argued, there is no need to deny to the person of Jesus and the kerygma of Christ the fact that their presentation is couched in terms of myth. We can, indeed we must, acknowledge Jesus-Christ is made present in scriptural witness in narrative, analyze the manner in which he is presented as divine Word and revelation, and then leave to faith, to grace, the embrace of his person, his office, his mission as something imaginatively encoded but of real significance “for me”. The whole of this series of investigations has been an attempt to elucidate the sundry manners wherein the notions of God, soul, and knowledge have been variously viewed. There is the perspective wherein God is He who is revealed; the soul, by nature or grace, immortal; knowledge of God and soul founded in God’s self-communication, variably understood either as gift given in the power of encounter, or as an idea reawakened, remembered, or innate. There is the perspective wherein God is simply the within of man or the One reflected in man’s interiority (the Self); the knowledge of which rests either on the basis of the unity of being, the validity of the analogy of being, or the viability of the structure of myth; the coming to the divine and/or the Self a process of facing the challenges of integrating the self in its worldliness and sociality. There is the perspective wherein God is a projection of man; the soul is the logical construct expressing the animating principle within man; knowledge of both confined to the empirical limits of the man’s world, a world usually understood as determined system. In defining a methodology it behooves the investigator to hold to one road and follow it to its end, knowing with surety he is working in only one of several possible perspectives, and fully capable of, having allowed one vision to run its course, to return to the beginning and begin again. Too often have we encountered a scholar looking to one point of view to the rejection of all others. Every point of view has the capacity for validity in itself, every one potentially able to enunciate the truth, but no one to proclaim the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Karl Rahner, the mid-twentieth century’s premier theologian of the Roman tradition, realized that the presentation of the faith needed to be contextualized in the world were it to be relatable to the world. Again we hear the great doctrinal statements have become incomprehensible. He adapted Heidegger’s ideas, translating being-in-the-world into spirit-in-the-world, without surrendering his roots in the scholasticism of Aquinas. Every analysis of man contrasts interiority against exteriority: body/soul, mind/extension, subject/object, material/immaterial, ego/projected non-ego, etc. In Rahner this becomes in-the-world/apart-from-world. Yet man must be understood, approached, and addressed primarily in his wholeness as a being who is aware of the fact his own being quizzes him concerning the who, what, wherefrom and wither of his life.
As with Barth, it is perhaps most helpful with Rahner to begin by considering his understanding of “the beginning”. Creation is God’s radical act of giving himself away. This he does by his sovereign Word* becoming not merely the beginning but the centre and ultimate fulfillment of creation. In this Word, which becomes for us the Christ, God gives the finite an infinite depth. Creation, predestination, kenosis, incarnation, redemption—all cohere in God’s will to be non-god, in God’s speaking himself into the godless nothingness. The world arises, and hidden within it, incarnate within it, is the presence of God, his “grace”. Within this world man emerges as the image of God, and thus, there is no mere man, no “natural” man, for man carries within, as does all God’s work, the grace of God, the imprint of the living Word of God by whom and in whom all that was made is made. Therefore, there resides within man the ground of all that is good, of faith, of freedom, of love. It is a power transformative, real, and realizing.
* The doctrine of the trinity relates God as three centres of distinct but interlaced activity variably conceived under the guise of Father, Son, Spirit, or Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier, or I Am, I Know, I Will, or I Am, I Understand, I Love. The Father is the source of all, the Son the medium through which the Father acts, therefore, his Word (Logos or Mind), and the Spirit the internal dynamic of all action. In the creation account God’s Spirit hovers above the abyss, the nothingness, and God’s Word calls forth order and the world. The Word is seen as the medium wherein God makes the world, plans, and effects its perfection. The into-the-world-ness of the Word is historically manifest in Jesus as God’s Christ whose life and death initiate the infolding of humanity into full participation with God’s self-giving.
Heidegger’s pre-apprehension of being, Schleiermacher’s depth awareness of contingency resonate for Rahner as that which Aquinas understood as the primitive unity of all being and the thirst of all being for perfection. The primitive unity of all being points toward a mystery, a horizon ever externalizing, a divine self-communication of cosmic, of truly divine proportion, hence, God as the form-al cause of all beings. (The term “self-communication” is crucial, referencing communication as in-forming, as the Word about Self, and as unitive, a com-union, a coming together of God and that which God makes.) There remains always a distinction between the infinite reality of the divine and the finite particular, but there is a foundational relationship, each being being a particularization of the self-giving of Being. God remains in himself immutable, but in his giving of himself God is open to time and its continuous unfolding. There is intended here no “proof” of God, no definition of God, simply a description of man’s constitutional openness for God, for the supernatural.
Rahner’s existential description of man’s openness for God secures the distinction between nature and the supernatural. Nature has been made with an anticipatory capacity for the supernatural. True to his grounding in Jesuit spirituality, he maintains God is free to be found in all creation. Everything is pregnant with the prevenient and gracious presence of God. Everything made by and in the divine Word resounds with an anticipation of Christ as the incarnation of the creative Word. Christ, as Word incarnate, is at the core of all life, and so the world is latent with Christ such that all that live in authenticity live either as confessing Christians or as “crypto-Christians”, Christians in spirit but without a Christian religious connection. (Cf: Can a Christian be an Atheist? October 2013.)
Man’s nature is a self-transcendency. It cannot be defined in terms of specific limit. It is a continuously unfolding “mystery”. It is spirit. Only by embracing this mystery, only in surrender of self to this mystery, this eternally new dawn, does one give oneself at once to becoming, to being, to authenticity, and to God, the mystery in which all man’s questions converge and resolve. Jesus is Christ because he understood God was his mystery and surrendered himself without reserve.
As Schopenhauer marked, guilt, the sting of conscience, sin, its suffering in body and soul constitute the universal situation of man. This ineradicable situation is that which Rahner understands as original sin. It is the history of man as co-determined by all men. It is of man, and its resolution cannot proceed from man. It must come from outside of man and his history. The resolution is hope; it stands at the end of history. It is not an ideal-toward-which man can endeavour. It can enter history only in trust, in faith, in grace as the “gift of spirit” that knows the depths of God, making whosoever freely receives it united with God as the child of God here and now summoned to manifest that which he therein becomes to the world for the world. Human history transvalues as salvation history, an ongoing revelation of God in his hypostasis, his unity with and for man. The historical Jesus becomes the Christ in whom the meaning of death and resurrection are experienced as a surrendering to the presence of God, and this surrender is comprehended not as a loss of self, but its transcendence, its saving, its fulfillment. In this newness of life and meaning Jesus-Christ becomes valued as the fulcrum of time, the revelatory event wherein beginning and end are defined.
Jesus Christ is, as Bultmann had said, encountered personally as the power that transforms existence, centring man with a depth of love in his present situation. It is a power that makes man truly present to the here and now. Man’s ethical responses are likewise and therefore oriented toward the situation before him. Universal norms ought always to be referenced, but they cannot dictate, cannot be used as abstract judgements against others or an abdication of one’s being-in-the-world. The church and its members can exist only as present here and now, as the continuation of both Christ’s presence and saving work, carefully and lovingly delivering the world from the sting of guilt, death, and the loss of self in inauthenticity, in mass anonymity, in artificial limitations, cognizant that all reality is an inter-relatedness, a living ecosystem, and that all things, even death, need to be understood in the context of the living whole wherein every part, every event, continuously affects every part, every event. (Here Rahner steps out of existentialism and into the process theology generated by the work of A. N. Whitehead.)
From virtually the beginning of Christianity’s mission to the gentiles there has been bantered around the question: what comes first, understanding or faith? Does man transcend the limits of knowledge by leaping beyond them into faith or does man embrace faith and then fill in the missing bits about reality with rationalizations? To my mind it is a diminution of the relational power that is faith into facts, an artificial division of man into an opposing/complimentary either/or entity, and a spurious rehearing of the question about the priority of chicken and egg. Paul Tillich would not be here listed as falling under the shadow of existentialism were he not, in some manner, of the same mind. Tillich begins with man’s questions about being, about the meaning of being, about the potentials and limitations of being, about dealing with the shock and anxiety that arises in the threat of not-being. Philosophy may speak to these existential issues, but the distinctive task of theology is to answer them according to the Christian message. That message is not about a unique divine act. The Christ-event is a transparency that reveals God as the ground of all things and therein opens man to a new depth, a new dimension of his being.
Man experiences himself as internally divided. He perceives his ideals as his true essence; he perceives his existence as the factuality of their ever incomplete actualization. He does not experience the caesura between them as the product of his ongoing development but as something fundamentally part of his being. He speaks of this distance between essence and existence as an alienation, an estrangement, or a fall. This separateness in its resultant dichotomous tensions of self vs world, person vs community, individualization vs participation, spontaneity vs law, freedom vs fate, finite vs infinite manifests as anxiety. Man, aware of this divisiveness and his finitude, can shield himself in the anonymous mass and the busy-ness of the world, or he can come to an understanding of the source of his alienation and anxiety. He can realize that at his core he is not a war of opposites but a series of contrasting perspectives ripe for constant integration and transcendence, and that the dynamic of this self-integration and transcendence is his spirit. He can transcend his situation and situate himself in something more firm and true, the Ground of Being-Itself, the ground in which all things are rooted, the ground out of which all things arise and are open to being received as gift: God. Man can shift the focus and power of his sundry concerns, internal and external, to his ultimate concern, centre himself in its ultimacy, and derive therefrom the courage to be with positivity and thankfulness. The state of being grasped by this power of integration and transcendence, the power to become, to continuously journey toward becoming meaningful and unambiguous is called faith.
Faith for Tillich is not understood as the freshet of the encounter with God in Christ. Faith is something universal. Faith is the relation one has with the object of one’s ultimate concern. Faith can, therefore, be in a God or in no-God or in some thing. It is about one’s highest, one’s ultimate concern, and so it involves a claim on oneself, a surrender of oneself. What is worthy of man’s ultimate concern? What really speaks of ultimacy to man? What opens man to the unconditioned basis of his life, of all being, if not Being-Itself? Tillich acknowledges he here stands with Augustine’s pre-reflective experience of the ultimate out of which emanate all knowledge and action, with Schleiermacher’s depth awareness of the unconditioned. Only before the ultimacy of Being-Itself does man encounter that which both fascinates and mystifies, sustains and threatens, that which dehisces the possibilities of transcending. It discloses the unconditional dimension of existence, and places under judgement every avowal a man might make to a finite entity or event. Thus, Tillich can add, whatsoever a man experiences as his ultimate concern is experienced by him as the Holy. Herein Tillich can rehearse the first and great commandment: love God with all thy being, for God is that in which one invests all one’s heart and soul, body and mind for only such excludes and exceeds all other concerns. God is that which concerns us ultimately.
In Exodus, Moses prayed to behold God face to face, and was denied. He was indulged to see merely the back of God as he passed. While some have seen here a Hebraic divine jest at the expense of human propriety, others a profound insight into man’s ability to know of God merely in hind-sight, Tillich see a symbol. A symbol is not a sign. A sign points to something not itself, to something beyond and other than itself. The symbol participates in that which it indicates, and thus, has a power to disclose of the being it indicates. It is not something an individual can arbitrarily invent and market. It arises out of a collective consciousness of man standing out from the platform of Being-Itself as a means of moving to action. Whensoever its utility, its vitality, is lost it either dies or becomes merely concrete, an idol. Because symbol is the only medium wherein the conditioned, the finite, the concrete can express the ultimate and unconditioned, the only non-symbolic statement theology can make is God is Being-Itself. Beyond this everything the faith community speaks is symbolic. There is meant here no diminution of dogma or ritual. Indeed, the sacraments have long and well served as potent symbols capable of addressing both the conscious and unconscious levels in man. Protestantism suffers for the loss of a sensitivity to this power dynamic for while its dogmatic focus has kept divine and human from being confused, its neglect of sacramental symbol has robbed it of the vibrancy inherent of the union of God and man in Christ.
Tillich understands the essence of Christianity as the acceptance of Jesus as the Christ, as the final revelation. He intends with this no presupposition of a super-nature descending into a human nature. Jesus is the final revelation in that all other revelatory events have been fragmentary, incomplete. The prophets surrendered universal validity by speaking in terms of the contingent and historical. The mystics abandoned concreteness by dissolving their selfhood into the universal. Jesus as the Christ presents neither as prophet nor mystic. He is the Promised One, the Revelation. Only in Jesus do we encounter a concrete and centred self who gives himself into the universal without the loss of self, perfect universality and perfect selfhood combined, man’s existential estrangement resolved and conquered. He grounds himself in Being-Itself. He becomes transparent to the ground of being: “The Father and I are one”. He is the new being. The Christian scriptures stand as the witness to this inspirational personal life. Every age has rendered the significance of this in its own terms, and the modern world can only receive this Jesus Christ as the bearer of a new mode of being in which man is healed and enters a new breadth and depth. The church is the witness to this new being in history, the place where the death and resurrection of Jesus are celebrated as the symbols of overcoming alienation and estrangement, where anxiety gives way to grace.
Rahner speaks of the divine Word creating, forming and informing all things. Tillich recites the same creed using the Greek term Logos (word/mind). Because of the universal and foundational presence of the Logos the world is latent with its gifts: grace, revelation, faith, healing, Spirit, New Being. As Christianity confesses the paradox that the universal Logos is particularized in Jesus as the Christ, the church lives the paradox. It is a historical community, but only in that it is a social incarnation of New Being, an embodiment, a continuously progressing manifestation of the spiritual community of freedom and grace, only as it is a transparency, like Jesus, of the divine. As such, the church exists as the indicative of the Kingdom of God wherein culture, religion, history, and mortality will come to their end; it exists as the denotive of Eternal Life wherein the worldly and fragmentary nature of unambiguous life will be fully resolved and made whole. The fulfillment of the world and all its content, be it noted, is “beyond time”, or as Kierkegaard conceived it, we live in a world where the striving is infinite.
Nevertheless, this spiritual manifest of church is in the world. It cannot ignore its worldly foundation: the Jesus of history. It cannot abandon as historical irrelevancies his identification with the sinner, the poor, the outcast, his execution for perturbing the peace and good governance established by the establishment. The church cannot close itself off from the world as an association of enlightened individuals hovering around a mystery cult. New Being is rooted in both Spirit and history. Neither can be ignored.
Neither can man’s autonomy be ignored. It is not a power in opposition to God, but it does provide man only a limited perspective. It needs be informed by religion to gain its depth. It needs to understand the divine will for man is not something outside of man, but, as Aquinas might have put it, the will of God for man set within man. There are norms, but they direct and guide, not command. In like manner, traditions, doctrines, and theologies possess merely an indicative, not definitive, value. Indeed, Tillich claims theology itself is not about God. Theology is analogical, the science of the symbols for God, symbols always in need of being deliteralized, such that today sin is translated as the inner conflict and sense of estrangement, salvation as healing and fulfillment, justification as acceptance of self, Jesus Christ, he who overcame estrangement and ambiguity, as the bearer of New Life.
To his critics, Tillich’s positing of God as Being-Itself is a purposeful remaking of theology into a mediaevalism, the esse ipsum [being itself] metaphysics rejected by Barth, Bultmann, Heidegger and most modern thinkers. Tillich argues his position does not render God a being, a perfect pure act, a supreme being above all others, the sum of all being, or an abstraction based on all beings. All such ideas stand on the brink of either idolatry or atheism; they cannot answer man’s ultimate questions, satisfy his ultimate desires, or ground his ultimate hope and futurity. God is the ultimate, the unconditioned, the focus of all symbols, the ground of reality’s structure, and the abyss wherein such structure is lost.
Nietzsche may have been the first to publish God’s obituary, but Thomas Altizer managed to make it the cover of Time magazine. Altizer’s theology emanates from his understanding of kenosis, the “emptying” of God into the world in his Christ. The person of the Christ and the work of the Christ, traditionally separated in theology, collapse into each other, such that God in Christ is present wherever alienation, estrangement, and anxiety manifest. (“It is not the healthy who need a physician, but the sick.”)
The modern world is desacralized; it is formed by scientific knowledge, the human base of values, the relativity of values. It is totally profane, totally without an appetite for a transcendent world. Thus, modern man may appreciate the historical reality of religions, but they speak to him neither with authority nor of reality. The world is experienced as the world of man. There is no place for an absolute, for a Wholly Other. Theology itself is aware of this, and religion has become either idolatry, humanism, individualism, or some other quest for power.
Jesus did not preach to human power. Jesus preached an apocalypse, a coming of a new world centred in God’s definitive and final act, his presence in the midst of man. Theology has never understood how to deal with this unrealized dominical expectation. Its failure to materialize was made into a spiritual ideal by the early church, effectively negating Jesus message, and elevating him as the God around whom it built up a mystical religion. The modern rediscovery of this eschatological centre of Jesus’ preaching has simply excited theology to jettison historical religion and translate his apocalyptic vision into a subjectivity of faith. Fortunately, Christianity has never been able to abandon its insistence on the importance of Jesus’ death and resurrection despite the fact it has never afforded them their true weight: the symbols of the death of the transcendent God. Altizer contends Jesus’ apocalyptic expectation was ultimately a faith in a God who self-negated himself into this world, unreservedly abandoning a life in heaven for a profane, worldly existence. It is in witness to this that theology today must stand. It cannot rehearse talk of a world beyond this, a sacred not wholly present in this present, this world.
Gnosticism, discounting the profane in favour of the sacred, infiltrated the early church and planted the seeds of irrelevance in Christianity. It created a dichotomy between the sacred and profane, denied the value of the world and history, and negated the capacity of the world to reveal God, making the world Godless. This is not to claim sacred and profane are illogical or non-experiential realities. They are, however, not essentially in opposition so much as in a Hegelian dialectical relationship with each other, mutually necessitating each other, defining each other, infusing each other. To understand their dynamic as toward the annihilation of one or the other is to descend either into Gnosticism or mysticism. The incarnation is the declaration that the profane is not abolished but affirmed. This is the true “co-incidence” of the opposites. Altizer orthodoxly insists the sacred is united to the profane as the affirmation of the profane. The sacred affirms in its self-negation. God affirms the world by giving himself away in the kenotic action of incarnation. The transcendence of God is in this totally surrendered, constituting God’s self-sacrifice and the redemption of the world. The “death of God” is the faith of modern man.
The early Fathers noted heaven had stooped to earth and the earth was made holy, but none claimed, none could logically imagine, heaven could be exhausted in coming to earth. Summarily said: “God the Father” in heaven remains, and “God the Son of God” becomes for us the Christ who the earth did treasure and fit for eternity, and “God the Spirit” continues the living nexus within the Holy One and between the Holy One and the made holy. I have consistently argued the necessity of this eternal transcendent-immanent-dynamic aspect of the divine, for, despite the pastoral, the pragmatic, and the immediate allure of placing all focus on one out of three reduces the holy to practical irrelevance, humanistic relativity, or anarchy.
Despite the vibrancy and orthodoxy at the heart of Altizer’s understanding of kenosis, a cry of “God is dead, long live Christ” is not about to amend the present ecclesiological lassitude or resolve the reduction of religion into humanism. I have no quarrel with humanism. I consider it the cultural by-product of Christianity, but it is not Christianity, not a religion, not a spirituality. Reverence for the present cannot address the holiness past, present and future deserve. To borrow from Tillich’s terminology, humanism cannot speak to man’s ultimate concern, cannot express the need for a solid-most ground for his being. Altizer brandishes an interesting summons to theological and religious relativity (the ambiguity of that term is intended), but, for all its dazzle, it lacks spiritual substance, and renders Christianity a consecrated humanism, a lovely humanism but still merely humanism. It quantifies the basic most qualitative. The proper, the logical, progression of spiritual power is truncated and cozened. Altizer gives his humanism a spiritual base and immediately eradicates it, orphaning spirituality of both root and route. Kenosis is the continuous act of creating and perfecting the world; it begins in “the beginning” when God enters creation in his Word and it shall proceed until the exhaustion of time. God present in the present cannot mean God abandons the past. Philosophically, a present exsected from past and future is a void. Without a past I have no pre-sent to stand in, no future for which to aspire. Without a past wherein God is present I have no place to kneel, to confess, to weep my sin and the pittance of my repentance, no place to say “Father I have sinned against you”. Altizer temporalizes the eternal action of creation and redemption, materializes the divine essence. Were his vision an image of God amongst others, it might stand, but as a solitary icon it is exactly what he names it: the death of God. It is also an error. As anciently espied, a power (or if you will, Power) is not exhausted either in its manifestation or gifting. Spirit is not subject to the laws of mechanics!
Altizer’s ideas garnered public attention in the late 1960s, a time when a new generation was fixated on the “Now”. I was myself then a puppy sporting a new collar and I wanted to go and sit at Tom’s feet. I had, however, a bishop who knew the ecclesiastical disciplinary equivalent of “Stay!”. That made me not a happy puppy, but “now”, as I sit in my near antiquity, I can look back to the past and appreciate the wisdom of that “old man” (Huh!), and be thankful. There was a radical-ness to the late 1960s, but then there was such also to the late 1770s, the late 1790s, 1840s, 1860s, 1890s, etc. Every generation has its heady florigen induced moment, but there is no flowering without roots, and there is no place for theology to stand unless it bows before the fact there is no Christ without Father.
An Excursus: Personal Reflections on Being and Time: As I have repeatedly asseverated, nothing goes away; everything is woven into one living whole, every part affecting every other forever. Every act carries eternal weight as part of the eternal unfolding of being. The past may act toward the present, but the present is always called to redeem, to heal, to save the past and project all things, all that is and was, toward the vibrancy of the future’s endless potential. Past, present, future do not constitute a unidirectional linear action. They are porous dimensions within a singular, dynamic, living reality. Future flows into past as much as into the present. The past is as alive as is the present, as is the future. Time is eternal and we and our every act within it. We each stand responsible for making it in its every event a heaven or a hell. (“Whatsoever you forgive on earth is forgiven in heaven…”) Death may bring for most of us an end to our history-making, not to our being, not to our particularization of being, our unique individualization in the eternal dynamic that in its every part and event awaits fulfillment in the unfolding of the boundless cosmos.
God is the mystery colouring and flavouring the internal and external edges of the horizons that surround every element, every event. I may not be able to define that which de-fines me, that which bounds me as possibility on every conceivable front, but I can, and do, as all do, cathect it. In that process I do not elect to delete all value from the idea of God. I am a theist, and as such I give to the idea of God the highest value I know: selflessness, self-giving, love. If the idea of God (the Highest Power, the Highest Value) stands at the logical top of all ideas as their unifying ground, then, to my mind, it behooves it to be represented in the highest estimation I can apply.
Saints and scholars have often struggled with this high idealization of love that acts as the summons to man’s integration and the smallness of man’s capacity to “live up” to it, the contrast twixt the ideal and the real, the infinite and the finite, the holy and the sinful. Buber spoke of the ease with which we fall into I-it relation. Sartre explored the tangled objectification of a subject. Rousseau looked upon the complications catapulted in the primitive emergence of the other. We do not need the results of a scientific investigation or royal commission to inform us that we complicate our existence with unwarranted negativity and xenophobia. We demean on the basis of race, nationality, physical type, socio-political opinion, affiliations, orientations, dispositions, and tastes. There is no place without prejudice, pre-judgements about the nature and status of others not exactly like us. We can be quite insular snobs whether we care to admit it or not. But all is not lost, for we have a more gracious side as well. We are capable of quite authentic love, care, and concern. Our histories, singular and corporate, function out of our valuations of others. Our positive and fondly held valuations of “Founders”, be they a ruler, a revolutionary, a great philosopher or scientist, a prophet of a new enlightenment, make us who we are as much as the negative valuations we disembogue in diving up into classes, and depauperating the enfeebled of sundry cause. The negativity we create in devaluing has tangible and lasting results which flood our reality, wiping out vistas and possibilities past, present and future. The positivity we create does likewise, imbuing past, present, future with sweeping power of amendment and healing, vibrancy and viability.
Before this thought proceeds, we need step back and consider more specifically the constitution of man. Modern thought has consistently looked at the idea of self or ego or soul as some consistently consistent entity and rather consistently said it is a logical fiction, or if it is some “thing” it is something beyond experiential certainty. Yet, we each think the “I” as consistently who I am despite the process of growth, maturation, and more than a few changes of heart and mind. We have a very materialistic view of our selves. We see our “self” as akin to a plant: it starts a seed, sprouts, grows, flowers, fades, returns to the prime matter of earth or eternity, but through it all it is a specific and singular plant. It is a valid analogy. There is another. Rather than look upon the self as a persisting linear entity strung out between seed and fallow, we can look upon the self as a gestalt of events operating not in a historical line but as a vaporous interlacing of dimensions, a propulsion of sundry feelings, valuations, thoughts and actions moving in a thousand directions, infiltrating a plethora of varied dimensions that we tend for conceptual convenience to chop up into those neat little parcels: you, me, them, past, present, future. Time is not a line, it is an excitation of diaphanous dimensions within which we, our consciousness, our valuations, our actions are constitutive and enduring part. “I” is not a thing; it is be-ing, a power. Personhood is a power. This is not a novelty, merely a recounting of a fact that tends to get lost in, as Buber, Sartre, Heidegger, Bergson, Rahner, et al, would acknowledge, our propensity to relate “being” as “it”. Neither is this something purely contemporary for the ancient Pythagoreans thought of reality in terms of sonic vibrations culminating in a harmonious tone, “a music of the spheres”.
Because of this permeability of being and time, our valuations, our connatural cathecting of persons and things, potentially carry their weight in all directions, all dimensions. Jesus lives not merely as a historical figure who died two thousand years ago, not merely as do all other men as one integral part of reality, but as a person literally given substantiality, weight-and-endurance [Glory as scripture names it] in his being venerated and esteemed by millions for millennia. In one degree or other, the same is said of Mary, Buddha, saints, scholars, leaders, founders, my mother and father, and all our ancestors in faith, in knowledge, or in gene. They have reality, endurance, presence in the multidimensionality of time and valuation that constitutes the blood-flow of the cosmos. In like manner, some persons are lost, somethings are vitally missing, and these lackings, these holes in the fabric of our life together haunt us. They constitute an aspect of that which religion calls sin, the overlapping cross-sections of reality where nothingness (evil) seeps in. It is repairable. Religion says forgivable, redeemable. We can correct the “past” because it is “present”, present here in its lacking, in its lack of proper vivification. Psychology may refer to it as a darkness, a shadow that needs be brought to light and given its proper place and function in the power dynamic of the psyche. We think so very highly of living in the pre-sent. We think so very highly of being “self”. The solidity of the present is an illusion as much as the constancy of the self, quantifications of the qualitative, objectifications of the spiritual. We are in the midst of forces akin to the subatomic quanta wherein psychic power has a life, a “physics” (as the ancient Greeks would call it) of its own, moving with a non-spatial directionality (freedom?) more subtle and profound than the surface of our thought is accustomed to decipher.
A sacredness quivers below the surface of this image of being and time, of this living wholeness. It is something we encounter in the spirituality of native peoples, in peoples whose spirituality has not been subjected to rational stultification in philosophical and theological dogmatization. We find it in the reverence for nature, the sensitivity for the unity of being, the interconnectedness of life. It is that openness toward being that shuns harm to life, that, as Emily Carr once so poignantly put it, “feels the pain of the rain-forests’ bleeding stumps”. It knows the vulgarity of an animal’s slaughter for food (something once we acknowledged and consecrated with blessings, prayers, and sharing within sacred precincts, something now we merely commoditize). It feels the horror of bellicosity and prejudice, the “sins” of being-in-the-world we all carry, the burden of our inability to live at-one with all, the dreadfulness of life from which we hide in the insularity of self and the anonymity of “the mass”. Without the horizon of hope, without the singular act of kindness amidst the in-sanity (the without its health and wholeness), without the potential to understand, to embrace, to forgive and to find if but one step forward together, be it with at least one other, we are lost, and life is known as meaningless alienation and desolation. Faith in a better horizon can, alone does, make it appear; acceptance, forgiveness, love alone make it, if but incrementally, actual.
From this prospect we may consider life and death, or more specifically, the All Living One, the God in whom Christianity hopes all life will be brought into its fullness, Christ, “the first born from amongst the dead”, Mary, the first of the confessing church to be given the plenitude of risen life, and the dead through whom alone we, the living, have our experience of death.
As Rahner opined, God may be found as the formal cause of reality. To name God the logical first principle of reality is not at variance with claiming God is the Creator. To name God the logical final principle of reality is not at variance with claiming God is the Highest Good and End. Does either of these sets of terms tell us anything more than that we bracket reality with a point A and a point Z? Is God reduced to a Kantian logical or practical exigency? God is properly named the logical first and final principles only because logic reflects the functionality of reality, the mode in which reality “lives”. It is this living, this psychic, this non-material vitality that logic discloses as the real: God as the élan of being, the vitality of reality. This is not the ontological argument revisited, neither is it a paean of pantheism. If there were any proof of God, neither faith nor hope would have a root in reality. Even the notion of God is ambiguous for the divine denotation must claim God is beyond spirit, as is God beyond nature, as is God beyond spirit and nature in coincidence. God must–to be God–always be more than we can ever enunciate, the Mystery behind, beyond, before all logic, all question, the ever receding from us [Deus Absconditus].Yet, even here we find ourselves anthropomorphizing for all this receding mysteriousness is at the base of that constant illusiveness I name “I”. Thus, here we have a détente with Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, and all others wont to absolutize “ego” or “will”.
Jesus, in his own reality, his own historicity has, as above noted, his endurance, but that is added to in the cathecting of millions, making him a living symbol of being-Christ, the face of loving-creativity in the world. He is become an archetype. The same may be said of Mary. She may be all but apotheosized by millions, but her true power is not some quasi-empiric reflection of her son’s, but her own. She is co-redemptrix, theotokos, etc. only as she is the living archetype of receptivity. As Christ constantly re-presents the activity of the divine in the world, Mary re-presents the receptivity for such action, for such role. She is symbolically the womb that bears the fruit of redemptive action, she is the yes to the holy that allows the holy to materialize. This is why so many Marian shrines resonate as places of healing: they are saturated with psychic, with spiritual receptivity to wholeness, to holiness and its physical manifestation—healing. Mary, and Jesus as the Christ re-present the receptivity of man and the activity of man for holiness in the world. They re-present the powers of receptivity and activity in their fullness, and therefore, in their concreteness, their in-the-wold-ness. Only because of this fullness can they be translated as “at the end of time”, as “in heaven”, and only because of this fullness are they operative as power in the world. Here is the meaning of Christ’s resurrection and ascension into heaven, Mary’s being assumed into heaven: the psychic, the spiritual reality of man and cosmos is satiated in their presence. When I pray with Mary, when I pray in Jesus the Christ I am at-one with a person of history and I am at-one with a power within and without for person is power, and in these persons power is universalized, divinized. This of Jesus and Mary is their truth, their glory. They endure beyond their historicity as psychic force within reality, within whomsoever opens self to the holy, whomsoever takes action toward the coming together of reality in wholeness and health, toward that which a more poetic soul might speak of as Kingdom, Heaven, New Jerusalem, and the like. This does not mean Buddha and other holy men and women are not wholly universalized, realistically and satiatingly present in potency. Spirit is not confined—even in its manifestations.
We come here to the concluding consideration to this divaricating descant: the dead. We remember the dead. Of some we treasure their memory. Some we name our glorious dead. Some we honour with the title of holy, of saint. All of these “gone before us” Christians rightly keep in mind when we gather in thanks to share the symbols of our common being and call to action, for if all are made one in Christ, whensoever we “do this” we remember not one man but all men in that unity, a communion made by God. Yet not all departed this world are held in esteem. History knows this earth not only consecrated in saints but debased and debauched in demons, in men whose dark and “lost” souls have torn open the fabric of our being, the integrity of our singular life. They too endure, and thus we speak of hell. We speak of hell as whereto at first the “Saviour” of the world descended. We recite that in the creeds. Do we pause to decipher what we say? To be Christ, to be Christ-ian, entails healing, bringing integrity and wholeness (holiness) to the fabric of being, to not solely the present or future, but to also the past. We pray the forgiveness of all things past. We pray for the dead. The old Roman Requiem was a progression of pleas that all the sins of the departed one be expunged by the mercy of God. The idea of purgatory arose before the occidental mind as the state wherein the past was purged, purified, made whole. These ideas bespeak our sensitivity for the need to repair the past, to, as the traditional term had it, redeem the past. Being and time are osmotic. We navigate them as porous poly-dimensional consciousness. Past is open to, if not new content, new con-text-ulaization, to our descent, our prayer, our healing, our re-valuation, our humble submission in communal repentance and integrating resolve. We each and all are open one to the other and cosmos—past, present, future. Our acknowledgement of the past in the present, the sincere remembrance and embrace of the lost-ness, the sin, the hellishness of the past in the present floods back into past, abluting the past not only in aspiration, in hope and faith, but in reality, for we are more than simply a jumble of matter. We are animate, spirited, and we cannot deny the reality of this power, this living power of faith and hope to affect any more than we can deny it to love. It is a smug and inhumane intellectualism to even opine such impotence. Being and time, nature and spirit, make each other, manifest each other. Unanimated matter does not exist; animation without matter is emptiness.
Dante learned heaven’s gate stood beyond both purgatory and hell. Christ crucified becomes world saviour and ascends to heaven only by first descending into hell. There is evidenced here a pattern to life we crave to forget: no man, no humankind, arises to God who has not suffered the past, allowed the past, found its redemption and reconciliation, and forwarded that power of integration into the torn fabric of our being together. Here is theology’s ideal of the redeemed cosmos handed back to the sovereign God by the child, here is the plenum of graciousness made concrete, a communion of saints amidst a new heaven, a new earth.