William Desmond and Contemporary Theology

Christopher Ben Simpson, Brendan Thomas Sammon, Christopher Ben Simpson, Brendan Thomas Sammon

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268102241
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Métaphysique philosophique

In William Desmond and Contemporary Theology, Christopher Simpson and Brendan Sammon coordinate, through a collection of scholarly essays, a timely exploration of William Desmond's work on theology and metaphysics, bringing the disciplines of philosophy and theology together in new and vital ways. The book examines the contribution that Desmond's metaphysics makes to contemporary theological discourse and to the renewal of metaphysics.

A central issue for the contributors is the renewal of metaphysics within the post-metaphysical, or anti-metaphysical, context of late modernity. This volume not only capably demonstrates the viability of the metaphysical tradition but also illuminates its effectiveness and value in dealing with the many issues in contemporary theological conversation. William Desmond and Contemporary Theology presents Desmond's contemporary, yet historically aware, continental metaphysics as able to provide revealing insights for the discussion of the relation between philosophy and theology. Simpson and Sammon argue, moreover, that Desmond's contribution to linking these two fields makes his an important voice in the academic conversation. Students and scholars of Desmond, contemporary philosophy, theology, and literature will find much to provoke thought in this collection.

Contributors: John R. Betz, Christopher R. Brewer, Patrick X. Gardner, Joseph K. Gordon, Renée Köhler-Ryan, D. Stephen Long, John Panteleimon Manoussakis, Cyril O'Regan, Brendan Thomas Sammon, D. C. Schindler, Christopher Ben Simpson, and Corey Benjamin Tutewiler.

CHAPTER 1

The Reawakening of the Between

William Desmond and Reason’s Intimacy with Beauty

BRENDAN THOMAS SAMMON

A PREFATORY REFLECTION

I was an undergraduate theology major when I first encountered the work of William Desmond. I remember gathering in the small common areas of the humanities building at what is now Loyola University in Maryland to hear conversations between members of the theology and philosophy faculty about a variety of topics. When Desmond would speak, his words were like immense waves of thought that drenched my unformed mind, satisfying a thirst I didn’t even know I had while simultaneously increasing that thirst. I found myself being opened, wooed even, into a mysterious depth of something that could not be defined, something as attractive as it was harrowing.

I had the great fortune of spending my junior year abroad in Leuven, where Desmond had recently received a faculty post. His gifts as a teacher and mentor not only made him popular among students, but alongside his philosophical work also generated a revered awe among them. There was a rotation of note takers and disseminators among those enrolled in his Philosophy of God course, a few of whom, playfully (though with no less respect for that) imitating the tradition of depicting the name “God” as “G_d,” would spell his name “D_smond.” This was emblematic of the awe that arose in that respectful distance that seemed to come with being a professor in Leuven. Unlike most professors, however, Desmond would “kenotically” cross that distance with an uncommon comfort and ease, often inviting students to continue the conversation over any one of Belgium’s finest beers.

As I sat in his class week after week, knowing very little about philosophy or the philosophical tradition, his lectures were for me more like poetry readings than philosophical instruction. Although I could barely comprehend the content of his thinking, there was something beautiful in it that drew me ever closer, something profoundly enticing that made the increasing awareness of my own ignorance tolerable, perhaps even delightful. Here was a voice, it seemed to me, that sang from a depth of being that I had never before encountered. And it was a voicing that brought me to a place of harmony and balance with the world precisely because it did not try to make sense of existence; that is to say, it did not try to force existence to conform to human ways of thinking but rather opened thinking to the gift of existence.

And so it was the beauty of Desmond’s thinking that continually sustained my struggle to see the breadth and depth that he saw. I was also fortunate to return to Leuven as a graduate student of the­ology, this time better prepared to continue to engage his thinking. The poetic sense of his thought did not withdraw, but as I became more familiar with and knowledgeable about the Western intellectual tradition, this poetic dimension of his thinking now opened itself to a more systematic side of philosophical thought, providing a balance between the two I had never before encountered. This unique balance of the poetic and the systematic became for me a mark—if not the mark—of thinking worthy of my attention.¹ Only this mark, rather than narrowing the field of my appreciation of thinkers, opened it to almost every thinker I encountered. Often it happens that a person beginning an advanced pursuit of the philosophical or theological tradition finds a thinker in whom that tradition makes sense because he or she narrows one’s vision, allowing that person to perhaps ­dismiss figures who for whatever reason don’t fit with that vision. For me, Desmond’s impact was the opposite, because he provided me with a mark, not for excluding the figures I found unfitting, but for finding in them both a poetic and a systematic sense, ever increasing my capacity to appreciate them despite certain disagreements.

Nevertheless, choices had to be made. As I pursued my own studies, I found myself drawn to figures who I believed balanced better between the poetic and systematic dimensions than others. I was drawn to the work of Thomas Aquinas much in the same way I was drawn to Desmond. Desmond’s own description of Aquinas expresses my experience with Aquinas and with Desmond himself. “Reading Aquinas,” he writes, “one can have the feeling of standing in a cathedral and of not being able to make out the sense of strange sensuous language of signs and symbols. There is something enigmatic to the many different figures and yet also a kind of intimacy. In the strangeness there is the suggestion of immense significance, though what this is exactly is hard to say.”² There is a sense of beauty in Thomas’s simplicity and clarity, which like Desmond’s thought sustained my every effort to see what he saw. I also found myself drawn to the work of Dionysius the Areopa­gite, a figure whose impact on Aquinas has all too often been eclipsed by Aristotle. This enigmatic figure, who has been receiving increasing attention in recent decades,³ shares with both Desmond and Aquinas a beauty and simplicity in his thinking that is often camouflaged by the difficult nature of his language and style. But as Aquinas himself noted, for those who diligently read him, there is a great profundity of opinion despite the difficult nature of his language and style.⁴ As I studied these figures more and more, I found a genuine kinship among them, and it is this kinship that provides the context for what follows.

INTRODUCTION

In this essay I want to argue that Desmond’s metaxology offers something of paramount importance to contemporary theology—namely, a metaphysical foundation that reawakens reason’s intimacy with beauty. His is not the only project to concern itself with reason’s intimacy with beauty in recent decades. Von Balthasar is, of course, a companion in this, and it is possible to read Von Balthasar as harboring a nascent metaxology in his thought.⁵ But I want to suggest that, although others like Von Balthasar have contributed to the reawakening of reason’s intimacy with beauty, Desmond offers crucial insight into the metaphysical foundations common to any such reawakening. This commonality is not reductive of the plurality of possible forms such a reawakening may take. Instead, it is a commonality more akin to how Desmond understands the commonality of the original power of being: “it is common precisely because it constitutes the metaxological community of being and may indeed be said to necessitate a plurality of possible articulations in order to do justice to its own power.”⁶ The reawakening of reason’s intimacy with beauty is a reawakening to a communal voicing, or “communivocity,” to borrow Desmond’s term, more primordial than any singular articulation.

Desmond’s service to theology is in providing a means whereby a plurality of theological forms and practices can enter into community with each other by affirming an underlying shared unity in and through their differences and otherness. In this respect, metaxology moves in the space between a certain impulse in modern thought that implies unity requires a mitigating of difference and otherness, as well as a certain impulse in postmodern thinking that implies any effort toward unity is already a violence toward otherness and difference.

There are two key features to the wording of my thesis, which are significant to the working out of its content. The first concerns the notion of a “reawakening,” which has a twofold sense. First, in terms of methodology, reawakening indicates a deepening of the sort of skeptical waking made most famous perhaps by Kant’s declaration in the Prolegomena that Hume had awoken him from his dogmatic slumber. In Desmond’s reading of this slumber, the dogmatist is said to fall asleep in determinate forms, resting comfortable in the univocal fixity apparent to the dogmatist. The skeptic, however, discomforted by his knowledge that such determinate forms fix something that is impossible to fix given the plurality, diversity, and difference of all that is, is alone capable of waking up from such a univocal dream.⁷ Within such a state of waking, univocity, and thus unity and identity, dissolves in the morning light of plurality, diversity, and difference, existing only as the memory of dream. Yet, as Desmond proceeds to explain, such a waking is really a withdrawal from any affirmation, fearing as it does the univocity, unity, and identity that every affirmation entails, and thus even the skeptic’s affirmation of plurality, diversity, and difference. As I attempt to show, beauty was once conceived as a unity-in-plurality, an identity-in-difference, and so, allied to reason, guarded against the equivocal tension between the dogmatist and the skeptic. Thus, in this first sense, the reawakening pointed to in this essay indicates the way in which Desmond’s metaxology enables an awakening from skeptical waking. This is especially relevant to the sort of metaphysical skepticism that took hold of Heidegger, prompting him to misconstrue something called “the metaphysical” as a way to simplify a far more complicated tradition of thought, as Ricoeur incisively saw.⁸

Second, in terms of the object of inquiry, reawakening also indicates that to which one is being awakened. Further on in his analysis of skeptical deconstruction, Desmond remarks, “Can one just be woken up to the fact that one was asleep, or perhaps always must be asleep or half asleep? If we don’t wake up to something, our being woken up is just another sleep—we wake from one ‘dream’ to another, and hence the entire point of waking up has no point.”⁹ In this sense, Desmond’s metaxology, so this essay contends, reawakens us to the presence of beauty that has remained despite the slumber that took hold of the mind amidst many of modernity’s more soporific skepticisms.

The second feature of the thesis’s wording concerns the notion of reason’s intimacy with beauty. As it is used in this essay, reason identifies the rich diverse modes of mindfulness that constitute human thought. This is an intentionally general if not indefinite way of describing it. There is a tendency today, especially in the West, to identify reason, in the wake of the “Enlightenment,” as almost exclusively a universal a priori fait accompli that is the same for all people everywhere. Reason in this sense tends to be synonymous with first principles: the principle of identity, the principle of the suspended middle, and the principle of noncontradiction. It is, in the wake of Kant, the transcendental reservoir of all possible concepts and principles that the mind uses in its engagement with objects it must ever strive to represent to itself. Reason, in this sense, is the instrument that provides clarity through a calculated measure of what is empirically encountered.

All of this certainly identifies important dimensions of how human beings reason. But when these dimensions were almost exclusively prioritized in the modern period, conditions arose in which an emphasis of certain dimensions of reason were confused with the whole of reason itself. As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, reason is culturally rooted because it is tradition-constituted.¹⁰ How a person reasons in one cultural tradition differs from how a person reasons in another precisely because culture embodies the first stirrings of the valuation system that engenders a particular emphasis on aspects of rationality. This is not to dismiss that dimension of reason emphasized in the Western world—what might be identified as “dimensions of the head”—but rather to remind ourselves that it is in fact an emphasis of a particular dimension of reason; that is to say, it is a way of identifying human thought per se that derives from a more primordial value judgment, which judgment is not itself verifiable by the very mode of reason it advances. Consequently, as an emphasis it does not exhaust the whole of human reason since nobody thinks only in his or her head. What might be called “dimensions of the heart”—passions, emotions, sensuality, memory, love—unavoidably enter into the mix of human thought whether we want them to or not (as modern romanticism and existentialism, for example, helpfully remind us). If we are to grasp reason’s intimacy with beauty, a more complete picture of reason that includes the heart must be allowed to present itself. As we will see, reason’s intimacy with beauty at one point in time allowed the balance between the matters of the heart and the matters of the head that is vital to every theological enterprise.

This essay proceeds as follows. First, I exposit both thematically and historically the way in which beauty once gifted reason with certain principles, and therefore powers or capacities, to think the mysteries of existence and God. It did this in large part by serving as the excess of intelligibility that stands in between that which is perpetually desired (the good) and that which is contracted into the categorical and conceptual structures of thought (the true). Many of the scholastics, including Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas following the Dionysian tradition, maintained that beauty is in part the good in its becoming received as truth. Broadly speaking, this meant that beauty served as a unifying force between desire and knowledge, establishing the analogical relati...