Conventional and Ultimate Truth

Joseph Stephen O'Leary

Description

In Conventional and Ultimate Truth, Joseph Stephen O'Leary completes his trilogy on contemporary fundamental theology, which began with the volumes Questioning Back (1985) and Religious Pluralism and Christian Truth (1996). Common to all three works are dialogues with European philosophers Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism. In the current volume, O'Leary deals with the nature of theological rationality today, recommending the practice of reflective judgment, as opposed to systematic determinative judgment.

Inspired by the Buddhist notion of conventional truth, O'Leary claims that if we fully accept the fragility and conventionality of religious language, we can find a secure basis for a critical, reflective theology. This proposal is fleshed out in a dialogue with classical negative theology and with the implications of twentieth-century art and literature for religious epistemology. Embracing conventionality does not mean that the dimension of ultimacy is lost. The two are intimately conjoined in the Buddhist two-truths doctrine. Revisiting traditional sites of theological ultimacy, such as the authority of scripture and Christian dogma and the appeal to religious experience, O'Leary argues that we do justice to them only when we fully accept the conventionality of their historical articulation. By relating these traditions of thought to one another, O'Leary produces a new model for contemporary fundamental theology, one that will positively refocus and revitalize the field.

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Christian Theology
• Philosophie et théologie
• Philosophy
• Buddhism
• General officer
• Theology
• Buddhist philosophy
• General
• Madhyamaka
• Derrida
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Martin Heidegger

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 15 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780268088682
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

CONVENTIONAL AND ULTIMATE TRUTHTHRESHOLDS IN PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
Jeffrey Bloechl and Kevin Hart, series editors
Philosophy is provoked and enriched by the claims of faith
in a revealed God. Theology is stimulated by its contact with
the philosophy that proposes to investigate the full range
of human experience. At the threshold where they meet,
there inevitably arises a discipline of reciprocal interrogation
and the promise of mutual enhancement. The works in this series
contribute to that discipline and that promise.Joseph Stephen O’Leary
C O N V E N T I O N A L
A N D
U LT I M AT E T R U T H
A Key for Fundamental Theology
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, IndianaCopyright © 2015 by the University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Leary, Joseph Stephen
Conventional and ultimate truth : a key for fundamental theology /
Joseph Stephen O’Leary.
pages cm — (Thresholds in philosophy and theology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-268-03740-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 0-268-03740-X (pbk. : alk. paper) —
ISBN 978-0-268-08868-2 (e-book)
1. Truth—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Philosophical theology.
3. Christianity—Philosophy. I. Title.
BT40.O43 2015
230.01—dc23
2015000693
∞ The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence
and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines
for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.In Memory of
Padraic Conway (1962–2012) and Sean Freyne (1935–2013)Contents
Preface ix
List of Abbreviations xvii
One Theological Judgment as Open-Ended Reflection 1
Reflective Rationality 6
Pathologies of Theological Judgment 15
Open Faith 28
Relativism 33
Judgment and Method 39
Two The Twofold Truth 48
Negative Dialectic 54
Conventionalism 62
Freedom from Views 69
Three The Religious Dynamic of Modernist Literature 79
The Sacrificial Dynamic of Modernist Art 86
Transformation in Proust and Joyce 91
Beckett: The Self-Deconstruction of Modernism 97
Four Metaphysics and Its Overcoming 104
Theology and Philosophy 106
The Ontotheology Debate 116
Marion on Augustine 126
Causa Sui 134
The Objectification of God 139
Rahner and Metaphysics 143viii Contents
Five Scripture and Revelation 156
Scripture as a Conventional Vehicle of Ultimacy 159
Lack at the Origin 171
Six Religious Experience 176
Ultimacy and Immediacy 178
Mysticism on Trial 187
Consulting the Classics 194
Augustine’s Plotinian Ecstasies 196
Seven Negative Theology 217ive Theology as Platonic 220
A Model: Gregory of Nyssa 226
Overcoming Classical Negative Theology 238
Rewriting Dionysius 245
Negative Theology and Gospel Kerygma 254
Phenomenological Retrievals
of Negative Theology 257
Negative Theology and Deconstruction 266
Vedantic Apophasis 273
Buddhist Apophasis 280
Negative Theology in a Pluralist Key 287
Eight Interreligious Dialogue 293
In the Key of Pluralism and Conventionality 296
Identity Reshaped in Dialogue 303
The Parity of Religions 309
Beyond Dominus Iesus 313
Nine Dogma 326
The Method of the Step Back 327
A Trinitarian Trajectory 336
A Christological Trajectory 347
The Impact of Emptiness 368
References 376
Index 391Preface
The present work is intended as a contribution to fundamental
theology and sets forth as a paradigm for theology today the practice of
a reflective judgment that attends to the interplay of conventionality
and ultimacy within Christian tradition and in the wider inter religious
horizon. The theme of reflective judgment has a Kantian background
and the dyad of ultimate and conventional derives from Mahāyāna
Buddhist philosophy, especially the Madhyamaka school founded by
Nāgārjuna (second-third centuries), but my handling of these two
topics is not confined by any scrupulous obedience to these historical
figures. Open-ended critical reflection on conventions in view of
ultimacy is an art of theological judgment that discovers its own
principles and possibilities as it proceeds and as it relativizes or overcomes
conceptions of the theological task that are less adequate to what is to
be thought today.
“Conventional truth,” the axial notion of this book, will strike
many as an oxymoron. Surely Christian faith stands or falls by the
capacity to express truth plainly in an irreducible form? To talk of a play
of conventions sounds like nominalism, or nominal Christianity, in
which the play of names and representations is kept up at the expense
of any real encounter with or enactment of the thing itself. In the age
of the Internet, Christian talk is in far greater supply than Christian
faith and deeds. “For as one speaks of chattering oneself away from a
subject by a long talk, so has the human race, and the individual within
it wanted to chatter itself out of being a Christian and sneak out of
it by the help of this shoal of name-Christians, a Christian state, a
ixx Preface
Christian world, notions shrewdly calculated to make God so
confused in His head by all these millions that He cannot discover that He
has been hoaxed, that there is not one single . . . Christian” (Kierk e -
gaard, 127).
This danger is real, and yet I want to put in a plea for a convention -
alist understanding of Christian language and views, for three reasons.
First, this approach is intellectually satisfying, and reassuring for faith,
insofar as it enables us to take in stride the flimsiness, the
contradictions, the all-too-human distortions of our religious language as it has
grown and changed over three millennia and to find meaning in these
apparent absurdities. In Kierkegaard’s time many theologians were
seduced by the speculative “chatter” of Hegel and Schelling about the
Trinity and the Incarnation, which promised a rescue from the
broken, finite, incarnate condition of the language of faith. The
conventionalism I would oppose to any such ideal of speculative transparency
is meant, not to undercut the reality of the core affirmations of faith,
but on the contrary to make them more persuasive by thorough re -
flect ion on the human historical texture of the language that has been
their vehicle.
Second, this conventionalism is liberating in that it provides a
medicine chest for healing the many forms of obscurantism,
fanaticism, and violence that have attached to our religious views down
through history. Third, it is ecumenically enriching, insofar as it
integrates into Christian reflection the wisdom of Buddhism, which sees
language as a source of delusive entanglement but uses it skillfully as a
provisional raft and which sees all views, especially right views, as
imprisoning attachments, to be handled with skeptical caution.
There is also a fourth reason: acceptance of the conventional
texture of our language leaves us free to experience the emergence of
realities marked by ultimacy. We do not need to clutch at every
utterance of scripture or church tradition in order to encounter the divine
word that scripture and the creeds attest. Rather, it is in letting go of
whatever is hollow or obsolete, and treating all religious language as a
convention to be skillfully deployed, that we are best prepared to
discern and respond to whatever carries the full weight of prophetic truth
or contemplative vision. Christianity is based on hearing a divine wordPreface xi
or call, embracing it in faith, and attempting to live by it; this is as
ultimate an experience as one could wish. Yet this ultimacy does not carry
over to the specific cultural forms that the divine call takes in different
epochs; indeed, a divine call, in its newness, will probably run athwart
and subvert these previous forms. The old stories of encounter with
divine reality can inspire us, but we are not obliged to take on board the
archaic symbolic or conceptual frameworks within which they were
located. Even the way monotheism comes to be constructed in
biblical history is not a binding template. As a construct it can be tested for
its adequacy to modern experience and understanding; it may be
imperative to reforge the idea of God in the name of creative fidelity to
the monotheistic tradition, soliciting one strand or another within the
pluralistic and historically mobile texture of scriptural language. Again,
the various ways in which the Resurrection has been named, imagined,
conceptualized, and narrated are only pointers to a reality that is of an
ultimate and incomparable order and that may summon up other
languages to speak of it today.
Constructing a religious template that allows modern aspirations
to be freely expressed, and that reflects the much larger cosmic
context of today as compared with that of biblical times, can be seen as a
“development” of the old perspectives, but this development is not
achieved by logical, metaphysical reasoning whereby one tight
system is reshaped into another tight system. Rather, today, we realize
that no religious system is tight, that imagination or poetic vision
plays a huge role in all of them, and that their truth is that of a valid
convention rather than a transparent objective account of how things
are. This leaves us free to look back at the history of our traditions, as
a chronicle of human strivings to imagine the divine, enshrining
moments of grace when the divine manifested itself in saintly figures,
saving events, and holy lifestyles and communities. Doctrinal debate
about who was right and who was wrong is radically relativized as we
see more clearly the nature of religious constructs. The theological
quest for truth takes a different turn as it deinvests from fetishized
topics and brings all questions of true and false back to a basic
underlying question about human understanding of ultimate reality. This
frees us for a flexible hermeneutic that can pore over Christian andxii Preface
non-Christian traditions, tracking intimations of ultimacy among so
much that is obsolete or even deluded. The c