Abstract
Dr Masterson, Emeritus professor of the philosophy of religion, University College Dublin, has built here on his earlier Atheism and Alienation (1971) and more recent The Sense of Creation (2008). Philosophers of religion presuppose worshippers, philosophers thinking about worshippers, and worshippers thinking philosophically (pp. 7–8).
The ‘approach’ continues a fraught tradition of inquiries into the conditions of the possibility of religious experience (pp. 10ff) of the finite order of finite beings (pp. 42ff), of revelation (pp. 28ff), and of fruitful relations between them (pp. 1–2, 105–02, 116). Phenomenology and metaphysics are the philosophies considered here; ‘linguistic philosophy’ (p. 34) was assessed in The Sense of Creation, Chapter four.
Phenomenologists describe the subjectivity of human subjects, namely their consciousness, its orientations, its acts and its contents, and correlative objects (pp. 2, 9). Metaphysicians, at least those who, like the author, subscribe to ‘a moderate rational realism’ (pp. 3, 33–36, 123–24, 127–28), presuppose the objectivity of the various orientations of human consciousness to reveal that which is, beings as they are. Truth in the mind and being independently of the mind correspond. They are free to explore the objectivity of objects, namely their being in themselves, in their diverse number, species and existing, in their causal and other relations to one another, in their being known, loved, chosen and realized in history, and in their dependence on their beginnings and ends (pp. 2–3, 33ff).
What can either or both do to help us understand what we experience when we worship (pp. 8, 13, 15, 17, 18, 23, 25, 30, 38, 115–16, 120, 122, 130, 135), why such experiences are theophanies (pp. 13, 15–17, 22–23, 25, 26, 27, 30, 117, 120, 122–23), what the nature is of that which is worshipped (pp. l, 22, 35, 72, 81, 82–83, 85, 87, 89–90, 125), and why worshipping such a one with such a nature does not compromise our natural, limitless, rational desire for meaning, truth, being, freedom, and happiness (pp. 1, 2, 10, 30, 65, 76, 116) but, on the contrary, perfects it (p. 148).
More particularly, because the inquiry is about the possibility of Christian faith, what is the best way to find out why believers profess that (i) God, the beginning and end of all things, exists, that (ii) the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is, with Son and the Holy Spirit, to be adored and glorified as uniquely God, and that (iii) the Triune God, addressed devoutly in prayer, is really the same as the Esse Subsistens (pp. 56–58 & passim) of some metaphysicians?
The author begins to resolve these complex issues in Chapter one on phenomenology, attending especially to Jean-Luc Marion’s original work on ‘saturated experience/phenomena’ (pp. 7–32) as the possibility of religious experience. Together with Chapter two on metaphysics, the author’s own take on natural theology (pp. 33–68), and Chapter three on the theology of the revealed mysteries (pp. 69–91), he clarifies sharply what is at stake. Can a philosophy of cognitional immanence (p. 8) cohere with a philosophy of cognitional transcendence (p. 127)?
Chapter four, ‘Spirit,’ sketches the historical background, rejecting Hegel’s attempt to integrate the natural and human sciences, revelation, trinitarian theology and philosophy in a synthetic philosophy of otherwise contradictory philosophies (pp. 93–114). Rejected too is any attempt to find critical evidence of transcendence in any human desire (Marion’s qualified position), even in the natural limitless, experienced, intellectual hunger for correct answers to the totality of our questions about anything and everything—a position of some transcendental philosophers, e.g. Coreth and Lonergan.
Similarities and differences between the metaphysics and the phenomenology are made in Chapter five ‘Comparisons’ (pp. 115–35). They both begin with givens, Marion with consciousness, Masterson with being (cf. p. 2). They are both philosophers inquiring into the conditions of the possibility of believing in God’s revelation. Against very different philosophical backgrounds, they want to contribute to Christian theology. They both champion the objectivity of human experience in its transcendence of things-relative-to-us, towards things beyond us, of things as they appear to our senses, imaginations, feelings, thoughts, wishes, and wills towards things as they are. They differ as to which experience or intuition or epiphany (pp. 34, 94, 124–26, 128) accomplishes the self-transcendence. For Marion the experience in its sheer givenness constitutes its passively receptive subject beyond the ordinary workings of intentional consciousness. For Masterson, the givenness of being from without inwards guarantees the objectivity of a reciprocal movement of thought from within outwards.
Their possible complementarity is the theme of Chapter six, ‘Relations,’ (pp. 137–57). Phenomenology might throw more light on divinization (pp. 147–57)—our created participation in divine grace and love, provided that divinization is experienced. For then the metaphysical constitution of a real human being could be complemented by the phenomenological structure of a real conscious being undergoing conversion away from apparent to real goodness. After all, the causes of conscious human beings are included within the agenda of students of being because being conscious is a modality of being.
Divinization is experienced if conscious men, women, and children are being made more and more in the Triune God’s image and likeness, even though the experience itself is not self-discerning. Nobody preaches to the unconscious. No one asks unconsciously of anyone unconscious, ‘Do you believe in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit?’ Nobody answers ‘Yes’ unconsciously, nor are they unaware of who is asking and who is answering or the light in which they answer (cf. pp. 71 ff on the subject of faith).
Be that as it may, phenomenology is less suited than metaphysics to deal with the doctrine of creation ex nihilo, which requires sound concepts of what ‘is’ and ‘is not’ means when one asks: ‘is it or is it not?’ (pp. 138–47). Perhaps too Nicaea’s homoousios, and Chalcedon’s two natures of the one divine Person, the Word incarnate begs for metaphysical treatment.
An unnumbered final chapter draws tentative conclusions (pp. 159–77). God the Father, infinite Love speaking, approaches us by sending the Spirit of love into our hearts and revealing the Word of love incarnate in our histories. God’s loving us is somehow our loving God in return much as God’s revealing is human believing, and as the master’s teaching is really the disciples learning. Worshippers in return approach God in communal and personal prayer. Natural theologians approach God through the natural light of reason; believing theologians approach God through the natural light of reason illumined by the supernatural light of faith enabling them to assent genuinely to the mysteries beyond finite comprehension. And what of phenomenologists? Their situation remains in the end ‘less clear’ (p. 177).
Jean-Luc Marion presupposes as given human consciousness (pp. 2, 8 ff), its acts, contents, orientations, states, projections, conceptual, artistic or existential objectifications. With other phenomenologists he denies any transcendence immanent to conscious acts beyond the limits of an ego intending objects correlative to the contents intuited in conscious acts. However, he finds room for an exception. Against nihilists, reductionists, positivists who deny the sui generis reality of religious experience, and philosophers who deny any transcendence immanent in human consciousness, he wants to establish that there can be, given in and to the consciousness of religious subjects, an identifiable, unquestionable, self-justifying, self-transcending experience of unconditional love given and received and constituting subjects as religious.
Appearances are the contents of intuitive experiences. He champions an appearance of divine love given in what he calls an intuitive ‘saturated phenomena’ (pp. 5–16, 40, 94, 119, 120, 150,152, 165–66). Normal intuitions can be objectified adequately in concepts. But saturated phenomena are intuited consciously beyond the ‘normally defining conditions of objective experience’ (p. 22) and so constitute a conscious subject transcending consciously those bounds (pp. 15–16, 40, 94, 119–20, 150–52, 165–66). Such phenomena are given, unexpected, undreamt of, sheer gratuitous gift.
But he has a bone to pick, too, with onto-theologies, and with neo-thomist natural theologians, which is why his work is a fascinating challenge to Dr Masterson. To Marion to know that God exists is no big deal; to Karl Barth (pp. 72ff) natural theology substitutes the faith that works through love with a speculative idol that neither speaks nor enlightens, neither moves nor loves.
What is at issue is the organization of theological thought.
Traditional natural theology followed a method laid down by Aristotle. Collect problems; solve them. He reduced all questions to four: Is it? What is it? Why is it? and Is that why? The first and fourth had to do with existence (pp. 43–45); the second and third had to do with form (pp. 43–45) or essence (pp. 46–51). Accordingly a scientific natural knowledge of God had to ask, first, whether God exists, and only then to ask what God is, better what God is not, whence order all that could be said about God around one fundamental property. God exists if the proposition ‘God exists’ is true (pp. 54, 145).
The proposition is known to be true because being is the counterpart to Aristotle’s four questions. Two envisage existence, and two envisage what is essential. A common intelligent and rational sense of being (esse commune!) links the questions together and to the experiences about which the questions are asked. So together they constitute one specific being. A being is possible because of its essence; a being is actual or realized because of its existence. They are really distinct because what can be need not be but is not, what is actual is possible and is. ‘Is,’ the counterpart to the question ‘Is it’ is the basic cause. Without it possibilities are nothing.
That roughly is why Aquinas selected Ipsum esse subsistens, last to be discovered, first to illuminate everything else. Once selected he used it as the property to arrange systematically everything else that could be said about Esse, not by knowing what Esse is, but by knowing what the esse of determinate finite entities was not—Esse subsistens is not compounded of matter and form, essence and existence, it is simple, one, infinite, everywhere and nowhere, eternal, etc.
It is this arrangement of thought that Marion objects to. He rejects as a theological first the ordering of the questions about existence, nature, properties, operations, and co-existence, and their analytic and synthetic directions. He won’t have as a first any concept or affirmation of God as Esse subsistens, or Summum Bonum or even the First Cause causing all the finite causes to produce and constitute their effects. Neither will he have ‘I am who I am’ or ‘I am’ (Gn 3: 13, 14), so beloved of St Thomas because it suggested to him the infinite ocean of being. Nor is it ‘the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob’ (Gn 3:15). Instead of all these possibilities Marion proposes as given that ‘God is Agape, revealed in God’s sending his Son’ (1 Jn 4: 8–9) even though John the evangelist was not slow to write ‘I am’ and present it for our belief. What is first in the order of Christian thought is the reception of divine love.
Marion puts ‘God is agape’ first not because the proposition is true but because the gift of God’s love is somehow experienced prior to all objectifications in creed or deed. As God’s revealing themselves is people’s believing, so God’s self-giving in love is people’s reciprocal love. And as God gives the light of faith to enable people to profess their beliefs, so God gives a created share of divine love to enable people to hear and heed the two great commandments. People can be in love, vain, angry, resentful, anxious, without knowing what they are feeling. The love of one’s neighbour as oneself may well be experienced by all decent parents when they feed the hungry, clothe the naked, teach the unlearned, house the homeless, console the tearful, pacify enmities, and in general do what is needful to face the problems that occur in domestic life without ever hearing the commandment, or even despite hearing the commandment (cf. Mt 25: 31–46). Are they unknowingly experiencing agape and glorifying God as Agape?
Except in bad apologetics and philosophy text books, did natural theology begin with Esse subsistens or with the question of God’s existence? Didn’t Aquinas begin with ‘what everyone means by God’? For him that meaning was scriptural and in his time cultural. It meant the ‘I am who I am’, ‘I am’, the God of our ancestors in faith, the same ‘I am’ put by the fourth evangelist into the mouth of Jesus, proclaimed by the apostles and their successors and accepted in loving faith not as a human word but as what it really is, the word of God (1 Th 2: 13). ‘Whom do people say God is?’ ‘What do you say?’ are more likely starting points if the process ever begins. Changing times.
A second problem: what do metaphysicians know if the human sciences mean to know everything that is constituted by human meaning, and if the natural sciences mean to explain everything about what is not constituted by meaning? Is the metaphysics of substantial and accidental potencies, forms, and acts still relevant in our times? Is it not a generalization of antiquated aristotelian physics necessary to understand the history of metaphysics but no more?
A third problem: what is the meaning of the question ‘what are the conditions of the possibility of X?’ The meaning differs depending on whether the possibility is known to exist, or whether it might exist. If the latter, the only rule that determines which conditions are fitting is the principle of non-contradiction. And I suspect that the question is indefinitely regressive, for the conditions of the possibility of anything that might concretely be have themselves to be concrete, and so on and so forth. Isn’t this why Masterson leaves Marion’s phenomenology neither approaching nor being approached by God (p. 177)? On the other hand, Marion assumes that God loves us and has poured his love into our hearts by the gift of the Holy Spirit. His question, then, about the conditions of the possibility of a share in divine love is the question: why is feeding the hungry because they are hungry, and comforting the afflicted because they are afflicted also a showing of divine love to the recipients of food and consolation, and an experience of divine love on the part of the subjects feeding and comforting? Answers to this why-question do not presuppose any experience other than the experience of giving food and comfort for good reasons. Where does one find the hand of God in them? Isn’t asking the first step?
A fourth problem applies to Marion and Masterson both. Each takes as point of departure a ‘being given’ (pp. 126–27). Both are thought to escape an implicit or explicit metaphysical idealism and so they stand on common ground. But being given in experience is not to know what is given, why it is experienced thus or so, or whether it is anything significant at all, much less whether it is being converted by divine love to Agape. What is given consciously is just material for self-examination, self-discovery, self-knowledge, self-appreciation, and self-donation.
Moreover, Masterson’s given is an intuition that something exists independently of me. But just as God exists if the proposition ‘God exists’ is true, the same holds for knowing anything as existing. ‘Something is known to be independent of my knowing it’ is a fact if that proposition is true. But it seems to me that the truth of that proposition involves not a single intuition but three truths, one concerning something, another concerning me, and a third comparing what is posited to be real by the other two. ‘It is’ is the counterpart intended by asking ‘Is it?’ ‘I am’ is the counterpart intended by asking ‘Am I?’ ‘I am not this’ is intended by my asking ‘Am I this?’ If the correct answers to the first two questions are yes, but to the third is no, then I know something, I know myself and I know something other than myself.
The condition of the possibility of knowing anything at all is not knowing something so that everything else can be known by measuring up to it, nor is it, as Kant assumed and Hegel tried to achieve, that everything has to be known before anything can be known. The core condition is that our intellects are potens omnia facere et fieri; apart from that omnia there is nothing; by the light native to our intellects the so called gap between truth in the mind and reality disappears. The gap is between being objects intelligible in potency and our not understanding; being rational in potency and being mistaken; being morally good in potency and being malicious or weak or self-deceiving or stupid or negligent or sullenly self-and-other destructive. What are we committed to when we ask ‘Is it or is it not?’ of not to be or not to be? My esse is my being real.
Despite my problems and reservations I think that this is a valuable book for those who are interested in what I take to be Marion’s attempt to put conversion at the heart of theology. His exact context makes him a difficult read. But it is also a pleasure to read Patrick Masterson’s work. It is almost 50 years since I heard him lecture in UCD on the finite and the infinite, introducing Hegel into the philosophical curriculum not as a bundle of errors but as a genuine philosopher. The same gentleness then witnessed is here again in his treatment of a philosopher that either ignores (epoche) or belittles metaphysics. I wonder sometimes if some post-metaphysical thinkers ever got there in the first place. Fifty years on and I’m still trying.