Life’s Paradox

In many theological circles, people who have done some reading in Heidegger have often thrown about the term “onto-theology.” Briefly, this term has to do with philosophers/theologians who think being before God, thus making God a part of being. In other words, we make God an idol because we do not put God first in our “system,” or whatever it may be. From such a concern, Jean-Luc Marion wrote God Without Being, for instance, where he cites Heidegger in the intro on this score– it is the underlying motivation for this early theological work of Marion.

However, as Merold Westphal mentions in the introduction to his Overcoming Onto-Theology: Toward a Postmodern Christian Faith, far too many people are eager to wield this phrase as another bullet in their holster of theological “take-down” phrases. While I do think this phrase has its adequate uses (e.g. see Conor Cunningham’s re-casting of this as the ‘meontotheological‘), some have cast this accusation not only on medievals such as St. Thomas Aquinas, but even Augustine, who both refered to God as ‘being’. (note: Marion initially made this claim against Aquinas, but later recanted.) However, I do not think it is the case that Augustine and Thomas Aquinas are “onto-theologians” by any means.

Sean McGrath, who has an essay in the soon-forthcoming Belief and Metaphysics on “Heidegger’s Approach to Aquinas,” has an excellent earlier article called “Young Heidegger’s Problematic Reading of Augustine” where he contests these claims. It begins, echoing Westphal:

1. It is a lamentable situation that Heidegger’s critique of Scholastic ontology is now better known in continental circles than Scholastic ontology itself. The Heideggerian critique of “onto-theology” has hardened into a dogma, an unreflectively repeated formula that has lost its moorings in its original sources. We all know that the Scholastics forgot being because they reduced ontology to God. By defining being in terms of that which never comes to be nor changes, that which excludes temporality, the Scholastics made it impossible to think the being that we are. Philosophical theology precludes phenomenological ontology.

2. So the formula goes. . . .

What I did want to draw attention to, though, is the following paragraph:

11. Notwithstanding the brilliance of his interpretation of Augustine, Heidegger’s critique of onto-theology never touches the heart of the medieval notion of God. It works best when dealing with proofs for the existence of God, God as efficient cause, first and highest being etc. Yet this was not the core of Scholastic theology, certainly not the core of Augustine’s theology. The essence of Augustine’s theology is the notion of simplicitas Dei. God admits no composition. Yet every thinkable being is a composite of act-potency, essence-existence, matter-form. This does not relegate God to a dimension of religious experience of no concern to metaphysics. God is the primum analogatum, affirmed to exist, but never conceptualized or grasped as a content. We can know that God is, we cannot know what God is. God is infinite meaning, the fullness of esse. Limitless esse offers theory no content. The doctrine of divine simplicity acts as a speculative speed bump in Scholasticism, a crucial reminder that at a decisive point every proof fails to articulate the being of God, and therefore, the meaning of being itself. Ipsum esse cannot be characterized as a being. In the unknowing that surrounds it like a blinding light, ipusm esse is incalculable, uncontrollable, and indefinable. In a mystical-Scholastic philosophical theology like Eckhart’s, the simplicity of God and the relational-sense of Augustine’s search for the vita beata come together: an absolutely simple being cannot be thematized and defined, but it can disclose itself relationally in the how of mystical discipleship, detachment (Abgeschiedenheit). “God” does not name a content, but a life tendency, a possibility for being-in-the-world in a different way. Augustine’s “axiologization” is his effort to work out the details of how the God-relation is to be enacted: we only “have” God in turning away from transitory pleasure and embracing the pain of a life without God. The move is entirely practical because the God relation has no theoretical sense.

McGrath also shows in the beginning of his article that Heidegger attempts to secularize some of Augustine’s conceptions, or at the very least, talk about terms such as ‘care’ “in general” such that they have no reference to God:

…In the 1921 lecture course, Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus, Heidegger discovers an essential disclosure of the being that we are in Augustine’s Confessions: the how of being a historical self is care, trouble, and self-problematization.1 In the Confessions the disclosure of the self is concomitant with the self’s discovery of its ontological directedness to God, the eternal and non-historical ground of being. Nothing in the text of Augustine suggests that this disclosure could happen in a non-theistic context.

Additionally, in the helpful appendix to his Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I., Hubert Dreyfus shows that Heidegger does the same move with some of Kierkegaard’s concept’s, namely that of angst. Dreyfus shows that Heidegger’s articulation of these terms falls flat exactly where he leaves out that the way in which these terms were always already (and not just “for the most part”!) tied in with Kierkegaard’s theological conception of sin and God. [For now, I forget Dreyfus' specifics on this, unfortunately, but may make another post on this later.]

~ by Eric Lee on October 11, 2007.