Reimagining the Sacred

Richard Kearney Debates God with James Wood, Catherine Keller, Charles Taylor, Julia Kristeva, Gianni Vattimo, Simon Critchley, Jean-Luc Marion, John Caputo, David Tracy, Jens Zimmermann, and Merold Westphal

Richard Kearney, Jens Zimmermann, Richard Kearney, Jens Zimmermann

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231540889
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

Contemporary conversations about religion and culture are framed by two reductive definitions of secularity. In one, multiple faiths and nonfaiths coexist free from a dominant belief in God. In the other, we deny the sacred altogether and exclude religion from rational thought and behavior. But is there a third way for those who wish to rediscover the sacred in a skeptical society? What kind of faith, if any, can be proclaimed after the ravages of the Holocaust and the many religion-based terrors since?

Richard Kearney explores these questions with a host of philosophers known for their inclusive, forward-thinking work on the intersection of secularism, politics, and religion. An interreligious dialogue that refuses to paper over religious difference, these conversations locate the sacred within secular society and affirm a positive role for religion in human reflection and action. Drawing on his own philosophical formulations, literary analysis, and personal interreligious experiences, Kearney develops through these engagements a basic gesture of hospitality for approaching the question of God. His work facilitates a fresh encounter with our best-known voices in continental philosophy and their views on issues of importance to all spiritually minded individuals and skeptics: how to reconcile God's goodness with human evil, how to believe in both God and natural science, how to talk about God without indulging in fundamentalist rhetoric, and how to balance God's sovereignty with God's love.

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God After God

An Anatheist Attempt to Reimagine God

RICHARD KEARNEY

I hope it may be useful for the reader to preface this series of dialogues by offering a summary of what I mean by anatheism and the need to reimagine the sacred.

ANA: A QUESTION OF TIME

Ana- is a prefix defined in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as, “Up in space or time; back again, anew.” So understood, the term supports the deeper and broader sense of “after” contained in the expression “God after God.” The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins describes the moment of imaginative creation as “aftering, seconding, over and overing.”¹ He speaks of poetic epiphany, accordingly, as a retrieval of past experience that moves forward, proffering new life to memory, giving a future to the past. What Hopkins means by this is that certain deep experiences can be followed by moments of disenchantment, after which we may return again to the primal experience in a new light, over and over. As a religious poet, Hopkins is speaking of a specifically sacred reimagining. But, though he was himself a Catholic, this notion of sacramental repetition is not confined to any particular religion. It refers to any poetic movement of returning to God after God—God again, after the loss of God. As in child’s play, “gone, back again” (fort/da). We learn young that what disappears as literal comes back again as figural—that is, as sign and symbol, as a second presence in and through absence. And symbol here does not mean “untrue” or “unreal.” The return of the lost one—in the case of religion, the lost God—may well be the return of a more real presence. It may in fact be a much more powerful and moving presence precisely because of its return through absence.

Thus, in the prefix ana- we find the idea of retrieving, revisiting, reiterating, repeating. But repeating forward, not backward. It is not about regressing nostalgically to some prelapsarian past. It is a question, rather, of coming back “afterwards” in order to move forward again (reculer pour mieux sauter). So it is in this sense that I use the term anatheism as a “returning to God after God”: a critical hermeneutic retrieval of sacred things that have passed but still bear a radical remainder, an unrealized potentiality or promise to be more fully realized in the future. In this way, anatheism may be understood as “after-faith,” which is more than a simple “after-thought” or “after-affect.” After-faith is eschatological—something ultimate in the end that was in fact already there from the beginning. And that is why the after of ana- is also a before—a before that has been transposed into a second after.

Some people misread anatheism as a dialectical third term that supersedes theism and atheism. They construe it as a sort of Hegelian synthesis or final resolution. But I do not see it like that. It is important for me that anatheism contains a moment of atheism within itself—as it contains a moment of theism. Or should I say, anatheism precontains both, for it operates from a space and time before the dichotomy of atheism and theism, as well as after. The double a of anatheism holds out the promise but not the necessity of a second affirmation once the “death of God” has done its work. But it differs radically from Hegel’s “negation of the negation” that sees the return as a synthesis or sublation (Aufhebung). My argument is that the moment of ana- is actually a risk and a wager—an existential drama that can go either way. It can also go wrong. It is up to us. It is a matter of discernment and decision on our part. The event does not take place behind our backs, irrespective of our agency, like theodicy or Hegel’s dialectic of Absolute Spirit. There is no “ruse of reason.” Anatheism is not some ineluctable dialectic leading to a final totality. It is not about uppercase Divinity, or Alpha God. Au contraire! Anatheism is about reimagining—and reliving—the sacred in the least of these. It is lowercase from beginning to end.

Anatheism concentrates, therefore, on unrealized or suspended possibilities, which are more powerfully reanimated if one also experiences a moment of a-theism—the “a-” here being a gesture of abstention, privation, withdrawal—a moment that is less a matter of epistemological theory, dogma, creed or proposition than a prereflective, lived experience of ordinary lostness and solitude, a mood of angst or abandon, an existential “dark night of the soul”—and who has never tasted such moments?² This privative moment—the first a—is indispensable to anatheism. But in ana- we have two a’s. And if the first a is the “a-” of a-theism, the second a is the “not of the not.” The “a-a” of anatheism is a reopening to something new, after all.

So the ana- is not a guarantee of ineluctable progress or blind optimism. It is not only something that arises in the wake of religious collapse but also something that brings us back to the beginning, to a foretime before the division between theism and atheism. And in this respect, I think of Kierkegaard’s affirmative reading of “repetition” as a reliving of the past, forward. This repetition of the former as latter, of the earlier as later, meant for Kierkegaard retrieving the event of faith not as a regression to some original position but as an originary disposition of openness toward the radical Other—what he calls a “leap of faith” in Fear and Trembling.³ Abraham has to lose his son as a given in order to receive him back as a gift; he has to abandon Isaac as possession in order to welcome him back as promise. Isaac is not Abraham’s (as extension, acquisition, projection) but another’s, another, an Other (a return gift of what Kierkegaard calls the Absolute). In short, it is a matter of repeating forward rather than backward, a second retrieval of something after one has lost it. This goes beyond chronological time—that is, the notion of different moments succeeding each other in linear fashion from past to present to future—in favor of kairological time, a time out of time focusing on an epiphanic moment (Augenblick) of grace where eternity crosses the instant.⁴ Thus ana- is a prefix that seeks to capture this enigma of past-as-future, before-as-after.⁵

To say this is not, however, to deny that ana- also involves historical time. Infinite time is in-finite; it traverses finite temporality and cannot exist without it. Anatheism, in its temporal aspect, does indeed coincide today with a concrete historical situation that comes after the death of God, culturally, socially, and intellectually. It is marked by the modern announcements of Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud; the atheist exposés of the Enlightenment; the French Revolution; the critique of religion as ideology; and so on. Anatheism expresses a typical modern anxiety in the face of what Max Weber terms the “disenchantment” of the world, the desacralizing of society, the general malaise of the abandonment of God, loss of faith.

In this sense anatheism is, in part, a historical–cultural phenomenon that engages with our contemporary secular humanist culture, but not in any teleological manner—the facile idea that we were ignorant and have now seen the light, that all faith was delusion but we have finally reached the “end” of religion and are free at last. In sum, it is not complicit with the current anti-God squad of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris, nor with Francis Fukuyama’s neoliberal hubris. For me, to have lost the illusion of God (as sovereign superintendent of the universe) is to enjoy the possibility of opening oneself, once again, to the original and enduring promise of a sacred stranger, an absolute other who comes as gift, call, summons, as invitation to hospitality and justice. In short, anatheism is a radical opening to someone or something that was lost and forgotten by Western metaphysics—to cite Heidegger and Derrida—and needs to be recalled again.⁶ And here we can translate from the historical formulation of the anatheist question—What comes after the disappearance of God?—to the more existential one: How might any contemporary self experience this in one’s concrete, lived existence—that is, in one’s personal, as opposed to impersonal, being?

This is why I constantly come back to “examples” and “testimonies” of the anatheist moment, to descriptions—scriptural, literary, testimonial— of lived abandonment, disillusionment, disorientation, followed by moments of turning around again—what Socrates called periagoge, what Augustine called conversio. The first negative moment of letting go is indispensable. It is key to a proper appreciation of anatheism. Without that, we have cheap grace—God as comforting illusion, quick fix, opium of the people. I often think here of the mystics’ “dark night of the soul,” of Dostoyevsky’s sense of radical alienation, of Hopkins’s dark sonnets (“I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”), or of Christ’s own abandonment by the Father on the cross.⁷ These are all concrete moments of radical emptying that signal a return to the inaugural move of anatheism: the wager of yes or no to the stranger. This primal wager is first and foremost an existential wager—not a purely logical one à la Pascal, which is more a wager of knowledge than being, epistemological rather than ontological. And this anatheist wager—to turn hostility into hospitality—is, I contend, the inaugural moment of all great wisdom traditions. Admittedly, in Anatheism I tend to focus mainly on the Abrahamic tradition in which I grew up, trying to reimagine certain “primal scenes” of hostility-hospitality by revisiting the inaugural wagers of the scriptural narratives: Abraham and Sarah as they encounter the strangers in Mamre, Mary faced with the stranger called Gabriel, Muhammad faced with a voice in the cave. But this brings me already to my second question—regarding anatheism as an act of reimagining.⁸

REIMAGINING GOD: A QUESTION OF FICTION

Ana- is not just a question of returning in time but also of returning in space. It involves a topos as well as a kairos. It needs images. When it comes to reimagining the sacred, I travel the third of the three paths—philosophical, religious, and poetic—that I sketched out in my book Anatheism.⁹

I am interested in reimagining the sacred as a space of “negative capability.” I take the term from the poet John Keats, who defined it as the ability to be in “uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”¹⁰ I see the poetic refiguring of the sacred as somehow occupying that open, empty space. This refiguring is by no means confined to Keats and Romanticism; it goes right back to the beginning of culture, as Aristotle acknowledged in Poetics, when he defined drama as a cathartic movement back and forth between pity and fear.

If pity (eleos) is the identification with the suffering characters on the stage, fear (phobos) is the withdrawal or withholding of participation. Belief becomes quasi-belief. Tragedy, as Nietzsche and others remind us, originally derived from Dionysiac sacrificial cults, but in the transposition from religious rite to dramatic representation a radical shift takes place. The work of mythos–mimesis (emplotment–redescription) intervenes to turn the literal into the figural. The term tragedy originally meant “goat’s head,” because the main protagonists wore masks that impersonated the sacrificial animals, which themselves stood in for the pharmakoi, the sacrificial god-men (like Dionysus), who would have been celebrated in the ancient cults.

In other words, the move to dramatic imitation opened up the fictional space of “as if,” where we suspend our belief in the gods and our disbelief in fiction. Or, to quote Coleridge, we “willingly suspend our disbelief” in the imaginary in order to act as if we believe in the fictional characters.¹¹ This suspension of belief requires a simultaneous, and equally willing, disbelief in the religious—insofar as the latter implies truth claims. So as we watch the great Greek tragedies unfold, there is already a realization that the religious-cultic-sacrificial acts taking place on stage—the sacrifice of Oedipus, Iphigenia, Antigone, and so on—are not making any claims to “reality” as such. We respond to the play as if the gods and heroes were present before us, but knowing full well they are not. The figural has replaced the literal.

Now it is this detour through the kingdom of as-if—where all kinds of possibilities can be explored in a “free variation of imagination”—that allows for an anatheist disposition. We bracket our religious beliefs (provisionally at least) on entering the theater, in order to be able to believe in the theatrical make-believe. This, as I read it, is an Aristotelian foreshadowing of Keats’s negative capability (and, in a sense, of Husserl’s phenomenological epoché)—the agnostic liberty to explore all kinds of different views and attitudes without the constraints of orthodoxy, morality, or censorship.

But that is not the end of the affair for anatheism. Once we exit from the theater, once we suspend this poetic detour in turn, we find ourselves back in the real, lived world, with the option to believe in the gods again or to not believe. But without such a negative capability—as a form of poetic license—it is difficult to freely choose which, if any, religious truth claim to embrace. Authentic faith commitments are, arguably, better fostered by the hiatus of aesthetic atheism, which contains the anatheist option within itself and reanimates a real sense of existential drama in the relationship between the divine and the human. Some kind of letting go of one’s received beliefs—even provisionally, momentarily, hypothetically— is something that I consider central to the reimagining of the sacred, and to the possibility of genuine faith, which, as Dostoyevsky reminds us, comes forth from the “crucible of doubt.”

So how might this hypothesis of suspended belief relate to more contemporary literature? In Anatheism I look at Joyce, Woolf, and Proust as three modernist writers who reimagine the sacred. In Ulysses we have Stephen replying to the question, “What is God?” with the response, “A shout in the street”¹² (a street noise retrieved in Molly’s cry at the end of the book). Theos is echoed as Eros. But what does Joyce mean when he describes God as a shout in the street? What is the sense of the sacramental, the eucharistic, the sacred that Joyce is teasing out in that phrase and in the constant revisiting and rewriting of a grammar of transubstantiation throughout the book? There is a whole series of Eucharists—black masses, parodic masses, failed Communions—and then, finally, we have Molly’s own retrieval of a “shout in the street”: her climactic “yes,” along with the remembered exchange of seed cake with Bloom as they kiss on Howth Head. Is this not a powerful example of what Joyce calls “epiphany”? The sacred at the very heart of the profane? The infinite in the infinitesimal? The sacramental in the quotidian?

In Anatheism I also try to show poetic epiphanies at work in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. My question is: What does Lily Briscoe mean when she talks ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. God After God: An Anatheist Attempt to Reimagine God
• 2. Imagination, Anatheism, and the Sacred
• 3. Beyond the Impossible
• 4. Transcendent Humanism in a Secular Age
• 5. New Humanism and the Need to Believe
• 6. Anatheism, Nihilism, and Weak Thought
• 7. What’s God? “A Shout in the Street”
• 8. The Death of the Death of God
• 9. Anatheism and Radical Hermeneutics
• 10. Theism, Atheism, Anatheism
• Epilogue: In Guise of a Response
• Artist’s Note
• Notes
• Index