Anatheism: Returning to God After God (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)
Richard Kearney
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0231147899
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Has the passing of the old God paved the way for a new kind of religious project, a more responsible way to seek, sound, and love the things we call divine? Has the suspension of dogmatic certainties and presumptions opened a space in which we can encounter religious wonder anew? Situated at the split between theism and atheism, we now have the opportunity to respond in deeper, freer ways to things we cannot fathom or prove.
Distinguished philosopher Richard Kearney calls this condition ana-theos, or God after God-a moment of creative "not knowing" that signifies a break with former sureties and invites us to forge new meanings from the most ancient of wisdoms. Anatheism refers to an inaugural event that lies at the heart of every great religion, a wager between hospitality and hostility to the stranger, the other—the sense of something "more." By analyzing the roots of our own anatheistic moment, Kearney shows not only how a return to God is possible for those who seek it but also how a more liberating faith can be born.
Kearney begins by locating a turn toward sacred secularity in contemporary philosophy, focusing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. He then marks "epiphanies" in the modernist masterpieces of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Kearney concludes with a discussion of the role of theism and atheism in conflict and peace, confronting the distinction between sacramental and sacrificial belief or the God who gives life and the God who takes it away. Accepting that we can never be sure about God, he argues, is the only way to rediscover a hidden holiness in life and to reclaim an everyday divinity.
imagination there is no empathy between self and other. Imagining the other as other is what enables the self to become a host and the stranger { 41 } PRELUDE a guest. Empathy, as Edith Stein reminds us, is the “experience of foreign consciousness.” It is a “primordial experience of the nonprimordial” in that what is given to me by the other remains foreign to me in its very givenness. It never becomes fully myself, but only another in myself and for myself. A gap thus always remains and,
abandoned so that a second epiphany can be regained. This time not in a triumphal basilica but on a buckled paving stone. Venice is recovered in a Parisian yard. Venice, in other words, is not the last station on Marcel’s journey; and Maman is not the last object of his affections. On the contrary, by the end of the novel it seems that Maman has been finally accepted as the “lost object,” prompting Marcel to move from an aesthetic of melancholy to one of mourning. As the novel progresses, I
by contemporary philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Julia Kristeva. These thinkers operate from an agnostic space that revisits the sacramental structures of human sensation and embodiment so often occluded by the anticarnal dualisms of mainstream metaphysics and theology (soul versus body, spirit versus senses, mind versus matter). From such an agnostic space of inquiry—inspired by a phenomenological method of suspension and free variation—we may, I suggest, return anatheistically to a
natural world. Here Panikkar coins the word cosmotheandrism to connote the creative cohabiting of the human (anthropos) and divine (theos) in the lived ecological world (cosmos). And he sees this, rightly, in my view, as an alternative “middle” voice to both 1. an autonomy that deprives the secular of the sacred and 2. a heteronomy that drives a dualist wedge between them. He thus hopes to avoid the twin dangers of reductive humanism (extreme autonomy) and dogmatic fundamentalism (extreme
heteronomy). In an essay entitled “The Future of Religion,” Panikkar adverts to a major crisis occasioned by the fact that official religion is increasingly lagging behind people’s actual practice of faith. For people today, he notes, are bringing God back into the world as faith migrates from “the temple to the street, from institutional obedience to the initiative of conscience” (199). Ignoring the doctrinal disputes between the churches and the world, most people see the pressing problems of