A Theology of the Sublime

Clayton Crockett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN:
  9780415240932
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134550098
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A Theology of the Sublime is the first major response to the influential and controversial Radical Orthodoxy movement.
Clayton Crockett develops a constructive radical theology from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant - a philosophy attacked by Radical Orthodoxy - to show Kant's relevance to postmodern philosophy and contemporary theology.

1 Kantian critical philosophy as theology

Introduction

What are the possibilities for theological thinking at the turning of the millennium? What resources does Kantian philosophy provide for a theology which attempts to be intellectually responsible in an academic and secular manner? This chapter develops these questions in the course of a coarse-grained analysis which paints in broad strokes some of the historical, philosophical, and theological developments of Western European modernity in order to provide a context for a constructive understanding of theology. This coarse-grained analysis also lays the ground for a more fine-grained analysis of Kant’s thought later in the book.¹

I

In his introduction to Theology at the End of the Century, Robert P. Scharlemann points out “several distinguishing features of the postmodern in its significance for theological thinking.”² Here Scharlemann sets out the questioning of the transparency of the self, the Nietzschean declaration of the death of God, the Hegelian transformation of the speculative Good Friday into world history, and the loss of first principles, as characteristics of postmodernity. Here I am primarily concerned with the first of these features, the questioning of the transparency of the self. Scharlemann suggests that the “full transparency of the self to itself in thinking” is a Cartesian notion, but it also applies to “the Kantian notion of the apperception of the transcendental ego.”³

In his book, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology, Mark C. Taylor also identifies four characteristics of postmodernity which are important for theological thinking: the Death of God, the Disappearance of the Self, the End of History, and the Closure of the Book. These four features are similar but not identical to those delineated by Scharlemann. Taylor addresses what he calls the disappearance of the self by emphasizing the irreducible complexity and plurality over the identity and unity of the self. Appealing to Hegel, Taylor claims that “there is no identity without repetition. Something can be itself only by doubling itself.”⁴ The inevitable temporality of selfhood precludes simple and total identity. I am not evaluating the claim that the self has “disappeared,” only pointing out both the significance and the contested nature or status of self and subjectivity in contemporary theological thinking.

For me, the term “postmodern” primarily refers not to the validity of any of the above claims, nor to any others which supposedly characterize “postmodernism,” but rather to a method for asking questions about the nature and stakes of modernity. For the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo, the “post-modern” is characterized by a calling into question of the value of the modern, or the new and up-to-date as such. This occurs paradigmatically in Nietzsche’s philosophy, according to Vattimo. Such a calling into question of the modern is not a reactionary opposition that merely attempts to overcome modernity and replace it with another value-system. For Vattimo, Nietzsche is significant because he “brings into play a true dissolution of modernity through a radicalization of its own constitutive tendencies.”⁵

Therefore, a genuine postmodernism cannot simply be opposed to modernity. However, if modernity itself can be questioned, that questioning implies a distance between the “modern” and the person raising the question of the value and significance of modernity. In this case, a postmodern theological thinking can relate itself to modernity in a complex way by engaging the paradigmatic thinker of the Western Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant.

The contested nature of the self testifies to its theological significance, and in some ways a modern understanding of the self has to do not only with Descartes but also with Kant’s theoretical philosophy. On the one hand, one can rationally formulate the significance of subjectivity in terms of reflexivity, that is, that entity which asks questions about the meaning of its existence. This is Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, which he develops in Being and Time. The being of Dasein, or the being of that entity which asks questions about the significance of its own being-in-the-world, is care, Heidegger concludes.⁶ This care of, or concern with, self and subjectivity is central to the philosophical and theological thinking of modernity.

On the other hand, a concern with self and subjectivity can be deduced based on the importance and controversy the idea takes on in contemporary intellectual discussions. The concept of subjectivity can be seen as a central value for modernity as well as a contested term in contemporary debates. At one extreme, Michel Foucault is understood as announcing the death of the self when in The Order of Things he describes “man” as a footprint on a beach between two tides; that is, the human self or species is a concept recently invented and destined soon to perish.⁷ On the other hand, Charles Taylor and Seyla Benhabib more carefully articulate a complex understanding of human ethical selfhood in its relation to community.⁸ Finally, a recent discussion of subjectivity and German philosophy, with particular reference to Kant, occurs in The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy. This volume brings together continental German scholarship with contemporary analytic philosophy, in an attempt to fend off “the tendencies of current philosophy, which are very critical, and even antagonistic to, subjectivity.”⁹ The development of my analysis of post-Kantian continental philosophy suggests that it is a facile interpretation of philosophers such as Heidegger, Lyotard, Derrida, and Deleuze to state that they wish to get rid of or dismiss the subject or subjectivity, although they do complicate it for intellectuals working with more traditional paradigms. My claim is that the status of the modern subject is an important component of any contemporary theology, and that Kantian philosophy represents a central formulation of human subjectivity. By investigating and interrogating Kant’s framework of the self, which also involves temporality and imagination, we can clarify the situation for making important theological inquiries.

II

The self’s status as a central value also constitutes a key locus of concern, which I want to relate to Paul Tillich’s notion of ultimate concern. Tillich defines religion as ultimate concern. In Volume One of his Systematic Theology, which is partly influenced by Heidegger’s Being and Time, Tillich’s “second formal criterion of theology” states: “Our ultimate concern is that which determines our being and non-being. Only those statements are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of being or not-being for us.”¹⁰ Insofar as ultimate concern “determines our being and non-being,” human beings are ultimately concerned with their own identity as a self. This is a theological statement, for Tillich. Theology consists in a second-order reflection upon religious experience. Religion or religious experience is immediately concerned existence, and is related implicitly to an ultimate concern. The task of theology is to explicitly theorize the content of that ultimate concern. As we will see, however, ultimate concern does not possess any simple content.

For Tillich, religion is defined as ultimate concern. In his Systematic Theology, “ultimate concern is unconditional, independent of any conditions of character, desire, or circumstance.”¹¹ Furthermore, this ultimate concern is total and infinite. Tillich argues that the “word ‘concern’ points to the ‘existential’ character of religious experience.”¹² Everyone is religious in some way, because everybody has some amount of concern or care. But only an “ultimate” concern can be identified with religion properly so-called, and for Tillich theology represents the second-order study of this religious experience, in terms of the evaluation of claims for ultimacy on the part of any of its concerns.

Tillich claims that religion is the depth dimension of human life. In his Theology of Culture, the metaphor of depth means “that which is ultimate, infinite, unconditional” in human spiritual life.¹³ Theological reflection follows upon the experiential aspect of human existence in the world, which for Tillich is religious existence, because it is concerned existence. For Tillich, the “first formal criterion of theology” reads:

The object of theology is what concerns us ultimately. Only propositions are theological which deal with their object in so far as it can become a matter of ultimate concern for us.¹⁴

Does our concerned existence have an object which can be called an ultimate concern?

God is the only proper object of ultimate concern. Tillich claims, however, that one can do no more than symbolize this ultimate reality, or God, which he identifies philosophically with being-itself. In his Dynamics of Faith he says that “everything which is a matter of unconditional concern is made into a god.”¹⁵ But this process of making a determinate object into an ultimate concern is idolatrous, and therefore demonic for Tillich, who strives to hold onto the metaphorical nature of the symbols used to speak about ultimate reality. The self cannot be called an ultimate concern either, unless one considers it unconditional, total, and infinite.

Recall, however, that Tillich’s theological criterion is a formal criterion. He also claims later in Systematic Theology that “nothing can appear in the theological system which transcends the whole of experience.”¹⁶ An ultimate concern cannot be one concern among others in the midst of human experience, because no human experience, value or concern in itself can be total, infinite, and unconditional. Any empirical concern which is identified as an ultimate concern would be for Tillich idolatrous. The notion of ultimate concern pressures in a transcendental way the existence and claim for ultimacy of every empirical concern. As Charles E. Winquist writes, “this criterion [Tillich’s first formal criterion for theology] functions as an interrogative demand and implicates theology in existential value decisions.”¹⁷

Tillich appears to be writing a transcendental theology which deals with the possibility of religious experience. Kant, in a similar way, states at the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason that “there can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience,” (B1) and he elaborates his critique by establishing the transcendental conditions by which any object can be known as an object of possible experience. Things as they are in themselves, however, cannot be known in any certain, dogmatic, or transcendent way; this could only be known by an intellectual intuition, and is impossible for finite human knowledge (Bxl). In fact, any claim to knowledge of things-in-themselves, by making the transcendental ideas of God, self, and world objects of possible experience rather than ideas which regulate our experience of objects in the world, represents a dialectical illusion which Kant attempts to expose and deny. Our empirical representations of self can neither be hypostasized into transcendent reality, nor taken as a locus of ultimate concern. In its transcendental function, however, as a concept or idea which pressures our understanding and our values, subjectivity can be examined or interrogated in terms of or in light of its ultimacy.

Tillich is the central representative of a theologian in this book because his theology is sufficiently formal or minimal enough to allow theology to open itself up to contemporary culture and its theoretical expressions. Tillich does not wall his theology off from culture and philosophy, and he is willing to risk the form of theology itself by meditating on the possibility for theology to be relevant and meaningful, that is, to orient itself towards a concerned existence. By focusing on the form of Tillich’s theology, I am able to isolate a certain Kantianism which drives his thinking, and this reading of ultimate concern as a transcendental condition of theological thinking propels me towards what is ultimately a theological reading of Kant himself.

Tillich’s systematic theology is in many important ways a formal theology, just as Kant’s philosophy is a formal philosophy.¹⁸ Both abstract the conditions for the possibility of an experience as the form that experience can take, from the possible content of an experience. In discussing morality, Tillich claims that “while morality as the pure form of existential self-affirmation is absolute, the concrete systems of moral imperatives, the ‘moralisms,’ are relative.”¹⁹ His justification of this assertion is Kantian, because Tillich writes that the separation of form, which is necessary, from content, which is arbitrary, is “the acknowledgment of man’s [sic] finitude and his dependence on the contingencies of time and space.”²⁰ Kant distinguishes the necessary formal conditions for knowing from the arbitrary contents of knowledge, and in the Transcendental Aesthetic the two pure, universal, and aesthetic forms which intuitions take are time and space. Every object which is an object of human perception or intuition must appear in the form of time and space. For Kant, space is the form of all appearances of outer sense, that is, external sensations, while time is the “form of inner sense, that is, of the intuition of ourselves and of our inner state” (A33/B50). This attention to the form of our knowledge and experience is characteristic of European modernity, in both philosophy and theology.

III

According to Jürgen Habermas, the history of philosophy can in a very general sense be divided into three periods and/or types: philosophies of being, philosophies of consciousness, and philosophies of language.²¹ Although Habermas deals primarily with the transition from philosophies of consciousness to philosophies of language, Descartes is the paradigmatic figure representing the transition from a philosophy of being, which deals with the substance of reality, to a philosophy of consciousness which addresses the receptacle, or human form of intuiting that reality. A philosophy of language, identified with Nietzsche, attends to the material and formal linguisiticality of our conscious expressions and intuitions. In this way, philosophy becomes more and more formal, focusing on the formal conditions for knowledge rather than simply the object or contents of that knowledge. Kant represents an important stage in this development, because he abstracts the pure form of experience in both our knowing and our acting, and empties it of any necessary content. Kant does not get rid of the contents of experience; we cannot have an experience without any content whatsoever. What Kant relativizes is the particularity of any content of knowledge or experience while he universalizes the form of that knowing experience. This move becomes extremely clear regarding Kant’s morality in the Critique...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: Kantian critical philosophy as theology
• 2: On modern sublimity The challenge of Radical Orthodoxy
• 3: Ontology and linguistics Heidegger and Lyotard
• 4: Temporality, subjectivity and imagination Kant avec Deleuze
• 5: The Analytic of the Sublime
• 6: The transcendental imagination
• 7: Towards a theology of the sublime
• Notes
• Bibliography