In Heidegger’s lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology, finitude, not the infinite, is shown to be the site of ‘divine’ awareness of being. Heidegger uses the term ‘abandonment’ (Verlassenheit) to summarise the finitude that Hegel overlooked – abandonment being a theme that Heidegger had first developed in Sein und Zeit as Überlassenheit or ‘delivered over’. However, while abandonment counters the Hegelian absolute, where nothing is ever left out, it does not escape it, since the distress of finitude then becomes what is essential (...) or timeless. This realisation comes to Heidegger later, during his lectures on Nietzsche, where the notion of the abandonment of beings by Being (Seinsverlassenheit) conveys that, from the standpoint of Being, finitude is what is positively given in time rather than an essence that is recovered with the demise of the infinite. The ‘death of God’, in other words, thought from the side of Being rather than beings, is what first lets finitude be. Finally, I suggest that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which also exhibits affirmative rather than resentful atheism, develops the theme of abandonment in a very different register from Heidegger – as the end of every telos or work. Heidegger’s thought of abandonment, by contrast, remains tied to a task. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra as Nietzsche’s attempt to write a ‘holy book’ that sanctifies laughter. I compare two important scenes, that of the jester and ropedancer from the Prologue, and that of the ‘ass festival’ from part IV, to show the progressive incorporation of laughter into Zarathustra’s teaching. Throughout, I show that laughter in Zarathustra is ambivalent, possessing both critical and constructive elements. As such, the laughter that is celebrated by the end of the Fourth (...) Part is not merely ironic and self-parodying, but also constitutes a teaching with positive content. In other words, laughter itself represents the heart of Nietzsche’s new revelation of ‘holiness,’ one that challenges regnant expressions of religion and piety while resisting serious, doctrinal formulation. I defend this interpretation against readings that recruit laughter toward a modest philosophical ideal of self-ironization. While laughter does parody and destabilize Zarathustra’s own teachings, it also animates a teaching of holiness that can be helpfully illuminated by Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque. In closing, I suggest that scholars should respect the ‘religion-like’ ambitions of Nietzsche’s work rather than assimilating them to the more modest projects typical of modern scholarship. (shrink)

This paper argues that Friedrich Nietzsche presents a relatively new and thought-provoking challenge to Christian theologians, urging them to avoid committing what I call ‘gravitolatry’ – an idolatrous commitment to unconditional seriousness. Drawing upon his vivid metaphor of the Spirit of Gravity, the first section of this paper will analyze how and why Nietzsche suspects this form of idolatry is deeply embedded within Christian thought. The second section outlines the intellectual sources of this idolatrous tendency, examining interpretations of Plato, Jesus, (...) and select patristic theologians. The third section shows how gravitolatry illuminates Nietzsche’s suspicion that Christianity is a religion of ressentiment. The final section proposes a critical appropriation of Nietzsche’s insights along the lines of theological methodology and Christology. The conclusion is a plea for Christian theologians to heed the constructive challenge Nietzsche poses, which has not yet received sufficient recognition among theologians, by finding ways to reconcile levity with the gravity of theological discourse. By embracing the constructive dilemma Nietzsche presents here, theologians can pave the way for a more nuanced theological landscape that promotes laughter, strengthens joy, overcomes resentment, and fully affirms human life. (shrink)

Prompted and resolved by acts of volitional imagining, dramatizing figures a situation in which actors share in having something important at stake such that imminently some of their actions will be momentous (making great differences) and fateful (defining of lives). Religious dramatizing does this very ambitiously. In amplifying the stakes of action there is a danger of being inappropriately dramatic, as in Don Quixote’s fantasies or Chicken Little’s ‘The sky is falling!’ But dramatization can be validated by successfully enacting the (...) dramatic heightening of a situation, by conventionally instituting heights of importance, and by having convincing experiences of situations as dramatic. Kant worries about an inappropriately romantic dramatizing of the moral life; Lucretius warns that religious visionaries will make people crazy with fear of divine retribution. The issue is taken seriously within religious dramatizing. For example, apocalypticism seems to entail an irresponsible termination of care for continuing life. Correctives are offered by Hans Urs von Balthasar’s theory of ‘theo-drama’ and (Francis’s, 2015) encyclical ‘On Care for Our Common Home’. These examples show how the modulation of dramatizing is no less a religious concern than the dramatic heightening of human life. (shrink)

This paper gives a first theoretical formulation to a religious phenomenon which has not received much attention in philosophical discourse so far despite appearing in different highly heterogeneous religions. Vicarious religious ordinance refers to cases in which a living or deceased fully mature human being is knowingly or unknowingly assigned a religious affiliation without their consent or the consent of their dependents. I shall first offer three real-world examples of vicarious religious ordinance from Mormonism, Islam, and Shintoism and then raise (...) some normative concerns. I suggest (i) that vicarious religious ordinance does not fit neatly into current debates about religious epistemology, especially the recent debate on religious disagreement. I argue (ii) that normative questions as to why vicarious religious ordinance elicits indignation in its ‘victims’ is not easily explained through adducing similar examples. This paper aims to motivate further coordinated research on this topic. (shrink)

This article shows how the triumph of Socratic optimism in Nietzsche’s first book, The Birth of Tragedy, is due to a slave revolt in morality that promulgates a religious faith in the value of scientific truth. This early argument parallels his critique of the ascetic ideal that infects science in The Genealogy of Morality. I draw out the resemblance between Socrates’s martyrdom in The Birth and Jesus’s crucifixion in the Genealogy in order to illuminate how ritual human sacrifice mythically immortalizes (...) both figures, together inaugurating the ascetic ideals that Christianity will eventually unite. I discuss Nietzsche’s understanding of religious martyrdom and his explanation for the success of Christian Platonism, whose ascetic ideals ground the European value system that he is known for attacking. (shrink)

In this short introductory article the guest editors discuss the reason for this special issue on Grammatical Thomism. Both parts of ‘grammatical thomism’ receive conceptual clarification. Issues arising out of this are addressed, and a case is made for the ongoing relevance of the grammatical thomist tradition.

Philosophers discuss what they call the philosophical ‘problem of evil’ while sometimes making two assumptions. The first is that ‘God is good’ means that God is morally good. The second is that there is no other sense in which God can be good. I argue against both of these assumptions and conclude that the problem of evil, insofar as it depends on their truth, rests on a failure sufficiently to distinguish between God and creatures.

Though a central figure in Grammatical Thomism, David Burrell, CSC’s work is also deeply influenced by his teacher Bernard Lonergan, SJ. This paper articulates a twofold influence of Lonergan on Burrell, both of which support Burrell’s grammatical reading of Thomas Aquinas. First, Burrell developed his grammatical readings of Thomas Building on Lonergan’s exegesis of the ‘inner word’ of understanding which becomes grammatical in Burrell’s interpretation. Second, Burrell reads Lonergan’s method, in Insight and Method in Theology, and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations as (...) complementary, non-foundational quests for understanding, despite their radically different styles. (shrink)

Herbert McCabe was unique amongst the grammatical thomists in making significant use of the thought of Karl Marx. He engaged, moreover, with two topics in Marx which have generally been avoided by Christian theologians: class struggle and atheism. This paper examines McCabe’s treatment of both themes, and concludes that he effected a compelling incorporation of them into Christian thought. With respect to class struggle, McCabe understands there to be an intrinsic antagonism in capitalist society. He holds that an antagonistic society (...) is antithetical to Christian norms, and concludes (with Marx) that this kind of society ought to be done away with by engaging in the side in the class-struggle – namely the working class – which has the capacity to do away with class society. He situates this view ironically, however, relativising the claims made about socialist society in the light of God’s Kingdom. With respect to atheism, McCabe brings his thomistic doctrine of God into conversation with Marx’s atheism, arguing that what Marx rejects when he rejects ‘God’ is a thing in the world, whereas God is – by thomistic hypothesis – not one more thing in the world. A radical view, therefore, is sustained by a traditional theology. (shrink)

In this article, I aim to raise questions for natural theology by casting doubt on the intelligibility of absolute limit concepts, like ‘reality’, through comparing the reception of Wittgenstein by two English Dominicans, Cornelius Ernst and Herbert McCabe. First, I briefly examine the evolution of the Tractarian conception of a limit that demarcates sense from nonsense as it morphs in Wittgenstein’s middle period before being abandoned entirely. Ernst is consciously aware of this shift and concerned about its implications for theology. (...) After establishing Ernst’s more wary reading of Wittgenstein, I then consider McCabe’s approach to the question of God as a question regarding absolute limits. Ultimately, I suggest that the sheer nonsense of such terms fails to provide a basis for natural theology, but that divine revelation can legitimise this talk of limits by revealing the absolute contingency of all ‘created’ things as an eschatological limit placed upon history from within history. Ironically, though, McCabe’s eschatological vision is not the crossing of this limit, but its inevitable erasure when we find that God is not ‘other’ but ‘all in all’. (shrink)

A large part of the contemporary philosophy of religion concerns the so-called ‘problem of evil’. It is difficult to see how pain and wickedness, and all the calamities that afflict our poor world, could even happen in a world created and ruled by God as he is described in classical theism. The problem of evil would likely make the very existence of the God of theism very unlikely, if not logically and existentially absurd. There are, however, some dissenting strands in (...) this almost complete unanimity about the enormous philosophical and religious importance of the problem of evil. It could be found in Herbert McCabe’s and Brian Davies’s works. What McCabe and Davies say is linked to their diagnosis of a certain creeping anthropomorphism in the understanding of divine action, which has particularly spread in modern and contemporary philosophy of God. It results from a certain metaphysical presupposition about God, which McCabe and Davies do not share with most analytical philosophers, whether friends or foes of Christianity; and it seems to me that one would find some close presupposition among many continental philosophers, even if it is expressed in a very different way. (shrink)

Not all theists who are members of the Abrahamic faiths will sign up to a particular metaphysics of evil: some may be sceptical theists, and others may be uninterested in metaphysical questions altogether. In this paper, I argue that theists in the Abrahamic faiths who are interested in metaphysics and who are not sceptical theists should endorse a privative account of evil. This is because a privative view of evil is the only metaphysic of evil that is compatible with the (...) theism of the Abrahamic faiths. In order to persuade you of this, I will explain the religious importance of the privative view, and show how the three alternatives to the privative view that might initially appear compatible with theism are not, after all, compatible with the particular theism of the Abrahamic faiths. Privative views are often objected to on the basis that pain is an evil that does not seem like a privation. I will put forward one (non-exclusive) defence of the privative view of evil in response to this objection, drawing on the work of Herbert McCabe. (shrink)

I argue that grammatical thomism helps to clarify certain problems in philosophical theology by focusing attention on the parameters of coherent God-talk. By drawing on figures like David Burrell, Brian Davies, Kathryn Tanner, and Denys Turner, I show that the first rule of theological grammar is to avoid talking about God as if God were some sort of thing existing alongside the world. In fact, Aquinas concedes that we cannot really know what God is at all. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s later emphasis (...) on meaning as use helps us to see why we can still talk intelligibly about God by focusing on the use of the word more than its referent. I connect this with the work of Stephen Mulhall and Cora Diamond on the nature of riddles, and suggest that this genre is one way of illuminating the peculiar grammar of certain Christian doctrines: in particular, the doctrine of the incarnation and of creation out of nothing. Finally, I look outside Christian contexts to the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedānta, and argue that the language and imageries of non-dualism can provoke us into reconsidering the essence of Christian grammar and alert us to some of the therapeutic possibilities of grammatical thomism. (shrink)

This essay presents a systematic reconstruction of the problem of divine providence in Quobna Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery. I argue that reading Thoughts and Sentiments in this frame allows interpreters to take Cugoano at his word without compromising on the religious and political sophistication of his argument. Cugoano, I show, develops an innovative account of providence’s relationship to slavery by engaging both contemporary apologies for slavery and abolitionist arguments for divine retribution. His theory of (...) providence accounts for slavery as a social inequality as well as the difficulty of making restitution for modern slavery. (shrink)