What does the cross, both as a historical event and a symbol of religious discourse, tell us about human beings? In this provocative book, Brian Gregor draws together a hermeneutics of the self—through Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor—and a theology of the cross—through Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Jüngel—to envision a phenomenology of the cruciform self. The result is a bold and original view of what philosophical anthropology could look like if it took the scandal of the cross seriously instead of reducing it into general philosophical concepts.
What does the cross, both as a historical event and a symbol of religious discourse, tell us about human beings? In this provocative book, Brian Gregor draws together a hermeneutics of the self—through Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor—and a theology of the cross—through Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Jüngel—to envision a phenomenology of the cruciform self. The result is a bold and original view of what philosophical anthropology could look like if it took the scandal of the cross seriously instead of reducing it into general philosophical concepts.
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Overview
What does the cross, both as a historical event and a symbol of religious discourse, tell us about human beings? In this provocative book, Brian Gregor draws together a hermeneutics of the self—through Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Taylor—and a theology of the cross—through Luther, Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, and Jüngel—to envision a phenomenology of the cruciform self. The result is a bold and original view of what philosophical anthropology could look like if it took the scandal of the cross seriously instead of reducing it into general philosophical concepts.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253007049 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/06/2024 |
| Series: | Philosophy of Religion |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 278 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Brian Gregor is a postdoctoral teaching fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Fordham University. He is editor (with Jens Zimmerman) of Bonhoeffer and Continental Thought: Cruciform Philosophy (IUP, 2009) and Being Human, Becoming Human: Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Social Thought.
Read an Excerpt
A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross
The Cruciform Self
By Brian Gregor
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2013 Brian E. GregorAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-00704-9
CHAPTER 1
Philosophy, the Cross, and Human Being
Sustained by philosophy, religion receives its justification from thinking consciousness. —G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion
Justifying religious faith through thinking consciousness: this is arguably the highest aspiration of the philosophy of religion. Whether this aspiration is itself justifiable, however, is another question. Can religious faith be grasped and grounded, so that its content is justified by the necessity of the philosophical concept? Does religious faith have its telos in philosophical consummation? Or does there remain some residual opacity that philosophy cannot penetrate, some otherness that philosophy cannot reconcile within its own conceptual scheme? How should philosophy approach a reality that claims to be an irresolvable scandal for philosophical thinking?
This book explores that question with regard to a specific problematic—namely, whether philosophy can think the cross of Jesus Christ, which is central to Christian faith as both a historical event and a fundamental figure of Christian discourse. The cross poses a unique challenge—according to the apostle Paul, a scandal—for philosophical wisdom, and during the course of this study we will encounter several cases of philosophical engagement with the cross: in Hegel, for whom the cross is pivotal in the historical development of Spirit; in Nietzsche, who sees the cross as nihilistic, as a curse on human life, strength, and flourishing; in Heidegger, for whom the cross provides an ontic model for the Destruktion of the history of metaphysics; and in Ricoeur, who interprets the death of Jesus on the cross as a triumph of life and love over death, as an ethical transfer of love to the lives of his followers. The question, however, is whether these philosophical interpretations preserve the true scandal and offense of the cross, or whether something crucial is lost in them. Our task will be to consider how philosophical thinking can face the cross honestly, so that it is transformed by the cross rather than transforming the cross in order to fit its philosophical agenda. We are investigating, in order words, the possibility of an authentically cruciform philosophy.
No doubt this is a vast undertaking. In order to set the parameters of our investigation, I will focus specifically on the significance of the cross for philosophical thinking about what it means to be human. With the phrase anthropologia crucis, I am presenting this book as a contribution toward a philosophical anthropology of the cross. What does the cross of Christ—as both a historical event and a figure of Christian discourse—mean for thinking about the human being and what it means to become a self? How does the cross disrupt philosophical anthropology? How does the cross affect the continuity of selfhood? How does it change the way we think about human capability and responsibility? How does it challenge the way we think about self-reflection and self-understanding? What is the relation between the cross and human religiosity? Does the cross entail a denial or even hatred of life in the world? These are the questions that will occupy us in these pages.
The basic question of philosophical anthropology can be posed several ways. What is the human being? (Was ist der Mensch?) That is how Kant approached his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, and since Kant this has been a familiar way to pose the question of human being. Anthropological inquiry can also be pursued in terms of "the human condition." With the hermeneutical turn in philosophy, the quest for a general essence or definition of human being shifted to the question of self-understanding: Who am I? and Who are we? But whatever form it takes, the anthropological question can be seen as carrying forward the Delphic imperative: Know thyself. Like the anthropological question, the oracle's imperative has been interpreted in a variety of ways throughout the Western philosophical tradition. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis laments the fact that German philosophy had misinterpreted "know thyself" as an invitation to an ethereal self-consciousness, which is quite different from the self-knowledge Socrates sought. Socrates understood that true self-knowledge is not absolute, speculative self-consciousness, but rather a truth that must be lived concretely, existentially, subjectively. Kierkegaard argues for a retrieval of the Greek (most significantly, Socratic) model of self-knowledge—but, nota bene, "as the Greeks would have understood it if they had possessed Christian presuppositions" (CA 79). That's not a bad description of what I want to do in this book, though my concern is not so much to reinterpret the Socratic notion of self-knowledge as it is to consider how the anthropological question is altered by one specific Christian presupposition—namely, the cross of Christ. How does the word of the cross alter philosophical thinking about human being?
God on the Cross
What is this strange and uncouth thing?
—George Herbert, "The Cross"
A running theme of this book will be the tension between philosophy and Christian faith. The cross heightens this tension by exposing the fundamental incommensurability of two rival ontologies—i.e., two competing accounts of human being, identity, and selfhood. As the apostle Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians, the word of the cross is a foolishness by which God destroys the wisdom of the wise (I Cor. 1:18–19). Jews ask for signs and Greeks ask for wisdom, but the word of the cross is a scandal to both (a "stumbling block" for the Jews and "foolishness" for Gentiles) (22–23). It will not accommodate the wisdom of the world; it upsets our expectations and overturns our assumptions about what is good, wise, and strong. The word of the crucified Christ appears as foolishness and weakness—and yet "the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (25). The point is not that God, even at his weakest and most foolish, ranks higher than human beings on a shared hierarchy of power and wisdom. Rather, the word of the cross is discontinuous with such a hierarchy; it introduces a new horizon of evaluation, a new reality with a new understanding of power and wisdom.
For philosophical anthropology, the word of the cross is a scandal par excellence. First of all, it is troubling because of its historical particularity. How should philosophy handle the troubling suggestion that, in Kierkegaardian terms, a historical event should be the point of departure for one's eternal happiness? The word of the cross does not have a merely formal significance, and it does not symbolize a general concept like subversion or scandal. It is the proclamation of the singular, historical actuality of Christ's crucifixion—an eminently contingent event that claims to be the locus of true self-understanding for the human being.
In addition to the problem of history and truth, the scandal of the cross also encompasses the offensive thought that this historical event is in fact the crucifixion of God. As the Lutheran hymn proclaims, "God himself lies dead/ On the cross he has died." After nearly two millennia of Christendom the figure of the cross has become so familiar as to be innocuous, and thus it is difficult to appreciate how scandalous the crucified God was for the ancient world. As Nietzsche observes:
Modern men, obtuse to all Christian nomenclature, no longer feel the gruesome superlative that struck a classical taste in the paradoxical formula "god on the cross." Never yet and nowhere has there been an equal boldness in inversion, anything as horrible, questioning, and questionable as this formula: it promised a revaluation of all the values of antiquity.
Martin Hengel confirms this in the primary texts of antiquity, which express a deep aversion to anything associated with crucifixion. The cross was invoked as a gesture of mockery, contempt, and curse, and as the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro observes, even the very word crux is phonetically harsh. Similarly, Cicero writes: "Let even the name of the cross be kept away not only from the bodies of the citizens of Rome, but also from their thoughts, sight and hearing." The suggestion of a crucified God was scandalous from the Greco-Roman perspective, but also from the Jewish perspective. As one biblical scholar observes: "On a real cross in this world hangs the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. How can that be anything other than an epistemological crisis?" The word of the cross is a rupture in the framework in which we understand God, ourselves, and our world. Thus "for Paul and his contemporaries the cross of Jesus was not a didactic, symbolic, or speculative element but a very specific and highly offensive matter which imposed a burden on the earliest Christian missionary preaching."
The offense of the cross is one reason for the appeal of Docetism, which provides a hermeneutical principle to interpret the death of God incarnate as an appearance rather than an actual historical event. This is why Paul's readers in the Corinthian church "sought to escape from the crucified Christ into the enthusiastic life of the spirit, the enjoyment of heavenly revelations and an assurance of salvation connected with mysteries and sacraments." Just as Docetism was tempting for the early church, it continues to be a temptation in our time. In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard's pseudonym Anti-Climacus comments on the modern version of this heresy: the concrete, individual humanity of Christ is replaced by appearance in that "he docetically becomes fiction, mythology, which makes no claim upon actuality" (SUD 131). We have to consider this point carefully, since there is a way in which symbols, fiction, and myths do make a claim on the concrete existence of the self. Paul Ricoeur has convincingly shown that figurative discourse discloses existential possibilities, which are not merely abstract universal possibilities but the contours of a world I might inhabit. This imaginative disclosure of possibility is vital to our understanding and action in the world, and thus it does make a claim on actuality.
On one level this insight applies to the cross as it does to any symbol or image. Like all symbols, the cross gives an abundance of meaning to be thought, and like all symbols it quickens the imagination to disclose new possibilities and a new world for the self to inhabit. But we will need to discuss more carefully what sort of possibilities the cross (and the resurrection) discloses, because the word of the cross claims a unique ontological efficacy insofar as it participates in a concrete historical event—an event that Christian faith interprets as central to the meaning of all history and the condition for the transformation of human being. No doubt the cross changes my self-understanding and discloses a strange new world that I might inhabit. But as I argue in chapters 5 and 10, it is vital that the cross not merely disclose my ownmost ontological possibilities. It brings an eschatological possibility that comes from beyond the immanence of human being in order to transform it.
It is very difficult for philosophy to countenance such a claim. The word of the cross is a scandal for philosophy because it is a limit that philosophy cannot surpass, an excess of meaning it cannot contain, and a power it cannot reduce to human capability. But offense does not always lead to outright rejection. It can also create intrigue. Philosophy tends to become fascinated with its others, that is, with anything that suggests a reality outside philosophical comprehension. Kierkegaard in particular was attuned to the way speculative philosophy dreams of incorporating the otherness of Christian revelation within philosophical thinking. Philosophy is fascinated by the challenge of something that resists conceptual resolution and that threatens to elude objectification and universalization. As Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus observes, this fascination "is the ultimate paradox of thought: to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think." Is the cross a reality that philosophical thought cannot adequately think? If so, what can the philosopher do with the scandalous, unsurpassable, irresolvable reality of the cross?
* * *
Philosophy has employed some shrewd strategies for overcoming and internalizing this otherness. Anticipating the threat of an alterity it cannot fully overcome, philosophy can inoculate itself by injecting a measured, controlled amount of alterity into its system, as a vaccine to build up its internal defenses against an outright invasion. We see this in Hegel's philosophical theology: despite his profound confrontation with the cross and the theme of the death of God, Hegel ultimately rationalizes the historical fact of the cross and reinstates the priority of philosophical speculation. The cross is a pivotal moment in the historical process of Spirit moving toward reconciliation with itself in absolute self-consciousness.
This move appears as early as Hegel's Faith and Knowledge, with its famous discussion of the "speculative Good Friday" that is a necessary moment in the development of the supreme Idea. Following the Enlightenment attack on religious faith, European civilization was marked by a feeling of "infinite grief," a sense of loss, that "God Himself is dead." In quoting the Lutheran hymn Hegel draws a connection between the modern experience of atheism and the historical event of Good Friday, aiming to show that both historical events disclose a truth about God—namely, that God includes death within himself. This is why the feeling of modern atheism is "a moment of the supreme idea," and also why philosophy must confront Good Friday—not as a merely historical event but speculatively, "in the whole truth and harshness of its God-forsakenness." The confrontation with this universal and necessary truth makes possible a resurrection in which a true philosophy of the absolute, the totality, can arise.
While Hegel concludes his Faith and Knowledge with this provocative suggestion, the speculative interpretation of the cross figures more prominently in his Phenomenology of Spirit. There Hegel describes the negative as an essential moment within the life of Spirit, something that is revealed pre- eminently in the crucifixion. Here too the ultimate significance lies not in the historical death of the particular man Jesus, but what it makes known for speculative philosophy:
The death of the divine Man, as death, is abstract negativity, the immediate result of the movement which ends only in natural universality. Death loses this natural meaning in spiritual self-consciousness, i.e. it passes into its true conception ... death becomes transfigured from its immediate meaning, viz. the non-being of this particular individual, into the universality of the Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected.
The dead Jesus is resurrected in the spirit of the church-community, and the truth that this community preserves through its religious representations then receives its fullest interpretation in speculative philosophy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Philosophical Anthropology of the Cross by Brian Gregor. Copyright © 2013 Brian E. Gregor. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. Philosophy, the Cross, and Human Being
Part 1
2. The Hermeneutics of the Self
3. Faith, Substance, and the Cross
4. The Incurved Self
5. The Anthropological Question
Part 2
6. The Concreteness and Continuity of Faith
7. The Capable Human Being as a Penultimate Good
8. The Call to Responsibility
9. Reflexivity, Intentionality, and Self-understanding
10. Religion within the Limits of the Penultimate?
Notes
Select Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
The power of Bonhoeffer's witness has caused many to overlook the great depth of his reflection. This fine work not only plumbs that depth, but also finds conclusions that may cause us to reconsider our approach to many contemporary questions and concerns.
Makes a sustained contribution to the very important debate over the proper space between philosophy and theology. Original, well researched, beautifully written, and provocative.
"Makes a sustained contribution to the very important debate over the proper space between philosophy and theology. Original, well researched, beautifully written, and provocative."