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PRÉSENTATION. RELIGION ET MÉTAPHYSIQUE

Garth Green

LA FUSION DES HORIZONS DE LA RELIGION ET DE LA MÉTAPHYSIQUE

Jean Grondin
There is no doubt that the today dominant conception of religion as a form of faith (pistis) in a transcendent God has been strongly influenced by metaphysics which developed notions such as those of pistis and of a transcendent reality which would be eternal, spiritual or unphysical. It can safely be argued that this metaphysical conception is a legacy of Platonism. There has thus been – historically, conceptually and in the way religion often understands itself – a fusion of horizons of religion and metaphysics. Is this fusion felicitous or not? Must it be overcome? Can it be overcome? Does it disregard essential aspects of religion that would be foreign to metaphysics? In order to address these issues, this essay recalls, in broad strokes for the sake of discussion, some elementary distinctions one can make between religion and metaphysics and some of the reasons for their historical fusion.

LA (THEO-)LOGIQUE DE SCHELLING EN 1809

Matthew Nini
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling’s seminal 1809 Freedom Essay is an answer to perceived accusations of pantheism, and thereby an occasion for Schelling to rethink his own monism or “All-Einheitslehre.” In an attempt to creatively reinterpret the pantheist trope embodied by the phrase “God is all things” Schelling will consecrate the opening pages of his Freedom Essay to a rereading of the principle of identity. This paper seeks to elucidate the development of Schelling’s theory of identity, paying particular attention to how it is shaped by a number of older sources, especially Plato’s theory of the world-soul, Kant’s teleology, and the logic of Gottfried Ploucquet. It will argue that Schelling’s theory of identity comes to incorporate the principle of sufficient reason as its equal, with both constituting what we will call “the principle of ground.” This will give rise to the foundational distinction of the 1809 Essay, the idea of God having a ground that is in him, but not to be confused with him insofar as he exists. To say that “God is all things” is therefore a description of how parts and wholes interact in an organic system, or more specifically, how microcosmic systems relate to the overarching macrocosm to which they belong.

SPIRIT OF NATURE/SPIRIT OF GOD: The Late Schelling’s Speculative Theology of the World Soul

Sean McGrath
This paper tracks the concept of the world soul in Schelling’s early and late philosophy. The concept is central to Schelling’s early philosophy of self-organizing nature. It seems to disappear in his later period, in which Schelling distances himself from his earlier pantheism and comes to think of nature as fallen, distanced from the divine, and de-spiritualized. However, Schelling’s subordinationist Trinitarianism conceives of the Trinity as implicated in the Fall and processively included in the redemption. The redemption of nature is the special prerogative of the Third Person, the Holy Spirit, who personalizes himself by emerging through natural history as nature’s principle of organization and goal. All of nature, in the late Schelling’s Pauline vision, is directed toward the revelation of the Christ as the Lord of the Universe. The world soul is not simply identical to the Holy Spirit. For the later Schelling, the world soul does not yet exist. But it will in the end, when it will be actualized as not only the spirit of nature but also the Spirit of God.

APORIAS OF THE MODERN METAPHYSICAL CRITICISM OF RELIGION IN LEO STRAUSS’S EARLY INTERPRETATION OF SPINOZA’S THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL TREATISE

Pierpaolo Ciccarelli
In this paper I first (§ 2) examine the metacriticism of modern critique of religion that Strauss formulates in his first book on Spinoza (1930). According to this early interpretation by Strauss, Spinoza undertakes a metaphysical critique of religion in order to confute the ontological possibility of divine revelation (or ‘miracle thesis’). Spinoza’s attempt, however, ends in an aporia: the ultimate presupposition underlying belief in revelation remains irrefutable. In the § 3 I examine a text published by Strauss shortly afterwards (1935), in which I detect a self-critique of his earlier meta-criticism of modern critique of religion. Strauss become aware here that his own understanding of Spinoza’s aporia is itself aporetic. It is in this aporia, in my view, that we must look for the key to understanding what Strauss would call retrospectively (1962) his own ‘change of orientation’ and, consequently, his discovery of ‘philosophical exotericism.’

WILLIAM CHILLINGWORTH AND THE ORIGINS OF ANGLO-AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

William Sweet
In this paper I look at one of those thinkers who set the stage for, and influenced, Locke and Hume, William Chillingworth (1602-1644), and show how he understood faith, reason, and the relation between the two. Addressing the question of how the relation of faith and reason came to be an issue in the Anglo-American theological and philosophical traditions will provide some context for the later discussions by Locke and Hume on this relation, but will also show the distinctiveness of this earlier account of faith and reason – an account which may provide some insight and resources for discussing the general issue of the relation of faith and reason today.

A PHILOSOPHICAL CHRISTOLOGY OF XAVIER TILLIETTE: Revelation as Kenotic and Reason as Ecstatic

Tyler Tritten
This study has two aims: 1) to provide a concrete instance of how revelation critiques and enlarges philosophy, of how faith dictates to reason, and 2) to draft an outline of a philosophical christology that would fall squarely within the confines of Xavier Tilliette’s own operative principles. Consequently, if revelation is kenotic, then philosophy must also sketch a general ontology that is also kenotic. In other words, if revelation critiques and enlarges philosophy, then kenosis is not exceptional but paradigmatic and so philosophical ontology and philosophical theology must be kenotic all the way down. This article is an attempt to sketch the latter, i.e. a thoroughly kenotic philosophical theology.

THE DOUBLE EXCESS OF THE NAME: Deconstructing the Metaphysics of Exodus

Jacob Rogozinski
Etienne Gilson called “metaphysics of the Exodus” the thought which affirms the identity of God and Being, a fundamental thesis of “Christian philosophy” since Augustine. It is indeed authorized by the word – “I am He who is” – addressed to Moses on Sinai, as it was transmitted through its Greek and Latin translations. Which seems to inscribe the God of Biblical Revelation in Western metaphysics understood as onto-theology. Such a “god” then exposes himself to the same fate – and the same decline – as that which affects the ontology inherited from the Greeks. However, this ontological understanding of the Word of the Bush has been challenged in various ways. Several authors, from Eckhart to Lacan, have seen in it a negative statement – “I am who I am” … and do not ask for more – , that is to say an enigma. The dominant trend of Jewish tradition has understood it, on the contrary, as the affirmation of a being-with, the promise of a covenant: “I will be with you as He who will always be with you”. Should we discover here, as Ricoeur suggests, a “nonGreek understanding of Being” where biblical Revelation would exceed the onto-theological determination of metaphysics? Couldn’t this statement have a more directly political meaning, that of a subversion of the self-affirmation of the Pharaoh’s power? Perhaps the text of Exodus 3 attests there is another excess, more radical, when he superimposes to the promise of the Covenant the revelation of a singular Name: that of an Other I whose call would thwart the anonymous neutrality of Being.

CE QUE RELIGION ET METAPHYSIQUE SE DONNENT L’UNE À L’AUTRE : une contribution pour repenser leur rencontre

Carla Canullo
Religion and philosophy have always encountered and contaminated each other. Philosophers have talked about this encounter in different ways since Plato and Aristotle. A determined form of religion, Christianism, has encountered philosophy as metaphysics and has found the means of its cultural diffusion in this philosophical form. In my paper, I argue that religion and metaphysics have given a lot to each other, especially regarding what topics to address. Among these topics, starting from the event of the incarnation and the cross, I will develop the question of time as a spiral that these two events generate. My aim is to investigate 1) this first moment in which philosophy as metaphysics has begun to think about what it has discovered thanks to religion and 2) the new concept of temporality that it enables to conceive.

L’HYPOTHÈSE INÉLUCTABLE…

Marie-Anne Lescourret
Before he became a writer, Robert Musil (1890-1942) was a scientist. He first graduated as an engineer. He then completed a doctoral thesis about the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach, for whom physics though belonging to the Naturwissenschaften - so called “exact sciences” relying on a strict observation of matter and facts- did not exclude the Geisteswissenschaften in charge of humanity and spirit. Therefore, though Musil uttered a strong criticism of religion, as a social behaviour and as a dogma, using his typical irony against the immediacy of “revelation,” he couldn’t but reckon that empiricism and rationality were continuously overweighed or challenged by the unexplainable, the irrational, the possible. He hence replaced strict rationality by what he called the “ratioide,” and replaced mysticism by the Anderer Zustand, the other state of mind. This A.Z allows the feeling, the experience of things that are foreign to ordinary life, such as the Absolute or the Divine, which Musil – still a scientist- names the unescapable hypothesis, which he then describes in his “lay theology” nevertheless connected to Saint Paul. Emphasizing the notion of possible in which merge physics and metaphysics, Musil might announce what the French philosopher Frédéric Nef calls the third way of metaphysics.

Blaise Pascal, Voilà de que c’est que la foi. Textes présentés et commentés par Jean de Saint-Cheron ; préface de Jean-Luc Marion. Paris, Éditions Salvator, 2023, 13 × 20 cm, 160 p., ISBN 978-2-70672-492-3

Rémi Caucanas

David E. White and Michael J. Maranda, Bishop Butler and Logic, Love, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the Age of Unreason (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K., Lady Stephenson Library, 2021, 15 × 23 cm, 330 p., £ 64.99, ISBN 978-1-5275-7388-8

Graeme Hunter

Béatrice Bizot, Violence et fraternité. Une lecture du récit de Caïn et Abel, préface d’Olivier Artus. Bruxelles - Bern - Berlin - New York - Oxford - Wien, Peter Lang, 2022, 14,8 × 22 cm, 224 p., ISBN 978-2-87574-655-9

Chi Ai Nguyen

Jean-Pierre Lémonon, Le Christ de Paul. Paul a-t-il cru en la divinité de Jésus ? (Paul apôtre, 8). Montréal-Paris, Médiaspaul, 2022, 13 × 20 cm, 177 p., ISBN 978-2-27122-1615-3

Sonny Perron-Nault

Claude Geffré, Dire Dieu dans l’histoire. Recueil d’articles et de textes inédits, rassemblés et édités par Bruno Demers (Cerf Patrimoines). Paris, Éditions du Cerf, 2024, 15,2 × 22,8 cm, 256 p., 28 €, ISBN 978-2-204-16243-2

Louis Roy, o.p.

Richard Schenk, Revelations of Humanity. Anthropological Dimensions of Theological Controversies (Thomistic Ressourcement Series, 20). Washington D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2022, xvi-461 p., 14,5 × 22,2 cm, ISBN 978-0-8132-3552-3

Louis Roy, O.P.

LIVRES REÇUS

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