The Deconstruction of Christianity

As a guiding epigraph to this whole endeavor, these words from Nietzsche’s The Antichrist: “The theologians and everything that has theologian blood in its veins: our whole philosophy.” Add to it these words of Hölderlin, in their ambivalence: “Christ, I hold too fast to you!”

My question will be very simple, naïve even, as is perhaps fitting at the beginning of a phenomenological procedure: How and to what degree do we hold to Christianity? How, exactly, are we, in our whole tradition, held by it? I am well aware that this is a question that may appear superfluous, because it has an obvious answer. We know that our tradition is Christian, that our source is Christian. Yet it is a question that seems to me to remain obscure, because at bottom it is never confronted head on. That said, I have just learned that Michel Henry is now also taking up this question.1 Thus it may represent a certain trait, or a certain necessity, of the times.

For my part, I will observe that the question “How and in what sense, precisely, are we Christian?” (a question Nietzsche, in his own way, answered) is no longer among those one asks. True, there have been debates on the theme “Is there or is there not a Christian philosophy?” debates that have sunk in the quagmire to which they were destined by their very formulation, but we must recognize that something of that enormous, massive Christian reference has been systematically obfuscated qua explicit reference in and by philosophy—something that not only is part of our tradition, but of which it may be said that it has constituted the very axis of our tradition since Christianity came into being. Now, this is the question: How, given the existence of Christianity, has our entire tradition, including the one antedating Christianity, found itself gathered up and launched anew?

That is the question. But in the phenomenological tradition (in that tradition par excellence, but not in it alone), what has been fertile and obvious since Husserl and Heidegger is the Greek source, not the Christian one. Beneath the Greek source it has been possible to reveal in Heidegger the presence of a latent, hidden, repressed Jewish source.2 It seems to me that between these two references, or as a nexus connecting the two of them, there may be the Christian source, if we may call it that. In other words, one could wonder whether the “jewgreek” Derrida speaks of at the end of “Violence and Metaphysics” (that “jewgreek” he says is our history) is not the Christian. One could also wonder why we systematically avert our gaze from the Christian, why our eye always veers toward the “jewgreek,” as if we didn’t want to look directly at the Christian. Let us say, then (with a grain of salt, which is probably my way of being a phenomenologist), that the Christian or Christianity is the thing itself that is to be thought. Let us attempt to proceed toward it directly, by laying down two principles.

The first is: “The only Christianity that can be actual is one that contemplates the present possibility of its negation.” This is a phrase of Luigi Pareysson, an Italian philosopher who was Umberto Eco’s teacher. It is quoted by Émile Poulat in his book L’Ère postchrétienne: Un monde sortide Dieu (The Post-Christian Era: A World That Has Left God),³ the work of a Catholic Christian, which is not really a philosophical work but which I find extremely valuable as a testimony, whose essence is conveyed in that quotation.

The second principle is a correlative to the first. Parodying the first formula, I will express it as follows: “The only thing that can be actual is an atheism that contemplates the reality of its Christian origins.” Underlying both of these principles, I formulate tentatively this question: “What is there, then, in the depths of our tradition, that is, in our own depths?” or, “What has been handed down to us by our own tradition from the depths of this storehouse of Christian self-evidence, which is so self-evident to us that we do not examine it more closely?”

What I propose here is not a completely finished systematic exposition. I deliberately run the risk of presenting a reflection that is still under construction, trying to find its way and unable to reach any conclusion except a pragmatic and tentative one. In a first attempt, I will distinguish the ways the problem is to be approached, then I will briefly consider three—and only three—aspects or components of Christianity: faith, sin, and the living God. These will be, after a sort of long methodological approach, only three elements taken up from a long, programmatic list that would have to be gone through to hope to arrive at a result.

Let us go back to our title: “The Deconstruction of Christianity.” It is a title that might seem provocative or seductive (i.e., seductive because provocative). But I seek no provocation—nor, consequently, any seduction derived from a provocation. Moreover, if this title were to appear to be a provocation, that provocation would be scarcely more than the dream of a somewhat dated imagination, since in fact today, when it comes to Christianity, everything is taken for granted. No one can imagine being confronted today by a Voltaire-like philosopher, having at Christianity in an acerbic tone—and doubtless not in the best Nietzschean style … Perhaps the reader would be more likely to have thought, reading “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” that the title was not a provocation and that the vaguely sulfurous smell of such a title was destined to end up, if not with an odor of sanctity, at least in befitting considerations. The fact is, after all, that one can do virtually anything with Christianity: we have come into a climate, not only of aggiornamento, but of post-aggiornamento ; a climate in which Christianity seems able to lend itself to everything and anything, provided only that we free it [en défalque] from a purely reactionary portion of fundamentalism,4 in which Christianity is no longer recognizable.

I will therefore keep my distance from both critical provocation and any further step in the direction of accommodation and aggiornamento. I will do so for the very simple reason that there can be no question today, it seems to me, either of attacking or of defending Christianity, that is, either of damning or of saving it. Such projects are simply out of season, and it is precisely the profound, historial reasons that make them unseasonable that we have to be able to analyze. As a rough approximation, let us say that they are unseasonable because Christianity itself, Christianity as such, is surpassed, because it is itself, and by itself, in a state of being surpassed. That state of self-surpassing may be very profoundly proper to it; it is perhaps its deepest tradition—which is obviously not without its ambiguities. It is this transcendence, this going-beyond-itself that must therefore be examined.

Being surpassed, self-surpassing, do not mean that Christianity is no longer alive. Doubtless it is still alive and will be for a long time, but at bottom, if it is alive, it has ceased giving life—at least as the organizing structure of an experience that would be something other than a fragmented individual experience. (Moreover, is it still, in that case, an experience?) It has ceased giving life in the order of sense, if it is true that there is never sense for just one person. If sense is of the order of the “common,” then there is no doubt that Christianity has ceased giving life—no doubt that it has passed from itself into a different status, a different realm of sense and common allotment of sense. This we all know, whether we are Christians or non-Christians. In a more general sense, Christianity’s fate is perhaps the fate of sense in general, that is, what has been called in the last few years, outwardly, the “end of ideologies.” The “end of ideologies” is at least the end of promised sense or the end of the promise of sense as an intention, goal, and fulfillment. That is doubtless what it is: the end of the self-surpassing of Christianity. Hence what is required of us with the greatest necessity is what we will have to call “the deconstruction of Christianity.” Before revisiting this concept, I would like to reformulate these initial givens in a different way, by positing a triple axiom.

1. Christianity is inseparable from the West. It is not some accident that befell it (for better or worse), nor is it transcendent to it. It is coextensive with the West qua West, that is, with a certain process of Westernization consisting in a form of self-resorption or self-surpassing. This first axiom presupposes—as does a good portion of what I propose here—my overwhelming agreement with the work by Marcel Gauchet, Le Désenchantement du monde (The Disenchantment of the World),5 particularly with the part related to Christianity, titled “The Religion of the Departure from Religion.”

2. The de-Christianization of the West is not a hollow phrase, but the more that process advances the more it becomes manifest, through the fate of immobilized churches and anemic theologies, that what still attaches us in many ways to the West is the nervation of Christianity itself. Nietzsche put it very well in saying that the Buddha’s shadow remains for a thousand years before the cave in which he died. We are in that shadow, and it is precisely that shadow that we must bring to light. We are in the nervation of Christianity; it holds us, but how ? This second axiom posits, therefore, that all our thought is Christian through and through. Through and through and entirely, which is to say, all of us, all of us completely. We must try to bring to light how we are still Christian without, perhaps, remaining pious; this cannot be said in Nietzsche’s terms (“how we, too, are still pious”): to ask ourselves “how we are still Christian” takes us to the very end, to the ultimate extremity of Christianity.

3. The West itself, Occidentality, is what is carried out by laying bare a particular nervation of sense: a nervation in some way empty or exposed, that of sense as a settled affair, carried to the limits of sense or of the possibility of sense. Thus to deconstruct Christianity is to accompany the West to that limit, to that pass at which the West cannot do otherwise than let go of itself in order to continue being the West, or still be something of itself beyond itself. In this pass, it must let go of itself; thus it is the same move—letting go of the West and letting go of Christianity. In this pass, however—and this is what I think properly and necessarily gives rise to a deconstructive move—in this pass it is a question not of rejecting a tradition, of shedding an old skin, but of meeting squarely what comes to the West and Christianity from beyond themselves, what comes toward us from the depths of our tradition as more archaic (in the sense of arch and not of historical beginning, of course) than Christianity. In other words, the question is to find out whether we can, by revisiting our Christian provenance, designate in the heart of Christianity a provenance of Christianity deeper than Christianity itself, a provenance that might bring out another resource—with an ambiguity that for now I take entirely upon myself—between a gesture of Hegelian dialectical Aufhebung and a different one that is not dialectical sublation. However that ambiguity may play itself out, if one accepts the identification of the West with Christianity one also accepts the consequence, which is that there is no way out other than by means of a resource that replaces the Christian one entirely, without being a watered-down version or a dialectical rehearsal of the same. Let us add that we do not yet even know, perhaps, what Hegelian dialectical sublation really is, that perhaps we don’t know what negativity is. To find out we must plunge into its heart—a heart that risks being, if I dare say so, Christian.

Given these axioms, we can now resume, taking as our new point of departure the following. It is often said that the more or less pronounced degradation of Christianity—its smaller number of congregants, its marked disappearance as a common reference point and explicit regulative index, as well as its profound internal disaffection—is assumed to be the effect of the modern transition toward a rationalized, secularized, and materialized society. So it is said, but without having any idea why that society has become what it is …, unless that is because it has turned away from Christianity, which merely repeats the problem, since the defined has thereby been placed within the definition.

Let us therefore, very simply but very firmly, posit that any analysis that pretends to find a deviation of the modern world from Christian reference forgets or denies that the modern world is itself the unfolding of Christianity. That denial is serious, since it amounts to forbidding the modern world to begin to understand itself, inasmuch as (and this is precisely the point) the world we call “modern” is undoubtedly constructed—and this is no accident—on the internal denial of its Christian reference. We need only reflect very briefly on the Kantian phenomenon, for example, to realize that it is open to two kinds of reading: as a manner of denial, or repression if you will, of the Christian reference and at the same time, as a full and total reenactment of Christian reference. Indeed, we must not forget that this sentence from the Preface to The Critique of Pure Reason—“I have had to suppress knowledge in order to make room for belief”—provides an opening for belief within the limits of reason. It is too often forgotten that this is Kant’s purpose and that what is at stake concerning modernity is in truth something other than a deviation or an abandonment. The truth is of another order—though not the opposite one, if the opposite consists in saying that the internal decomposition of Christianity has delivered Western society to its modern loss of direction. The reader will have recognized in this opposite thesis the old model of the Catholic accusation addressed to the Reformation and Anglicanism, that of the internal self-accusation of Christianity losing itself and all the others along with it. That is, generally speaking, the “fundamentalist thesis” within each of the Christian families and between these Christian families. In an even more general way, it may be said that the conflict between “fundamentalism” and what not so long ago the Catholic Church called “modernism” is the specific conflict to which the West subjects religions (its own, at any rate), and along the lines of which it has constituted or structured its religion. The conflict between a religious fundamentalism and its dissolution by adaptation to a world that at once comes from it and detaches itself from it, rejecting and denying it—this internal conflict in the form of schizophrenia or division within itself is unrelated to the conflicts between the dogmas or between opposing beliefs. This conflict internal to Christianity (which is at present becoming internal to Judaism and Islam, though in a different way) has nothing to do with the conflict between Christianity and Judaism, if that is indeed a conflict, or with the conflicts that exist between all the great religions. Indeed, within Christianity a specific type of conflict occurs, which is probably the conflict between an integrality and its disintegration. It is in this specific conflict that the first indication of a nuclear property of Christianity, the first clue to the possibility of its evolution, is to be sought. Is not Christianity, in and of itself, a divided integrality? Is it not the very movement of its distension, of its opening out and of its dissolution?

Only if the response to these questions is affirmative can the gesture of deconstruction make sense, because deconstruction can then try to reach, at the heart of the movement of integrality’s self-distension, the heart of this movement of opening. My inquiry is guided by this motif of the essence of Christianity as opening: an opening of self, and of self as opening.

In all the forms of opening, throughout all its reverberations: opening as distension, as interval [écart], but also Heidegger’s “Open” (which, since the opening of Heidegger, commands a contemporary climate of thought). What of the opening of Christianity or of Christianity as opening? What of—and this is at bottom the real question—an absolute transcendental of opening such that it does not cease pushing back or dissolving all horizons?

That is our situation: no more horizons. From all directions horizons are asserted in the modern world, but how can we grasp what I would call “horizontality”? How can we grasp the character of horizon while we are on a ground that is not a ground of horizon(s), a ground without ground of indefinite opening? That is the question to which Christianity, at bottom, seems to me to lead.

From that indefinite opening—not from that accidental property of opening, but from opening as an essential property, from opening as Christian ipseity, hence from distension of self, from relation to self as indefinite exiting from self—I will take up for the moment, simply a first indication, evoking the complex, differentiated, and conflicted genesis of Christianity. The historical reality of that genesis is always too easily and too quickly covered over by what I would like to call “the Christmas6 projection,” that is, by a pure and simple birth of Christianity, which one fine day comes along and changes everything. Now, quite curiously, our whole tradition, as unchristian as it would like to be, still retains something of “the Christmas projection”: at a given moment “that” takes place, and we find ourselves thereafter in a Christian condition. But how was that possible? We do not wonder enough how and why Classical antiquity produced Christianity: not how it befell it on Christmas Day, but how that world made it possible. Without undertaking extremely complex historical and theoretical analyses, I will simply highlight the difficulty by pointing out that Christianity is this very curious event in our history that imposes for its proper reading, and in its own tradition, the double schema of an absolute happening (which I have called “Christmas”) and, at the same time, a dialectical Aufhebung or, if one cannot call it that, an integration of the entire preceding heritage, since Christianity conceives of itself as a recapitulation and Aufhebung of Judaism, Hellenism, and Romanity. When we consider the history of Christianity, we find three stages: a Jewish Christianity (Christianity is at first a Jewish religion, if not a sect), a Greek Christianity, and a Roman Christianity; three stages whose conjunction corresponds to the constitution of a dogmatic/ecclesiastic integrality and to the internal tension of an identity that can be conceived only in relation to what it negates in transcending it. Christian identity is therefore from the start a constitution by self-transcendence: the Old Law in the New Law, the logos in the Word, the civitas in the civitas Dei, and so on. Christianity shares, no doubt, with all other religions the schema of the constitution of an orthodoxy by defining heresies, the production of schisms, and so on, but the schema proper to Christianity is different in that it is the schema of an orthodoxy that understands itself to be the virtually infinite movement through which a faith discovers itself in relation to what precedes it, which it renews and enlightens. This faith is what it is only in revealing itself to itself progressively as the integration of what preceded it, which it carries further forward. There is something unique here: the Christian faith is itself the experience of its history, the experience of a plan followed by God for the execution of salvation. Thus there is, on the one hand, upstream, in the direction of the Jewish root, a history, a plan followed and oriented, whereas on the other hand, on the side of the Christian movement, this execution of salvation becomes indissociable from human history, becomes human history as such, History. From the point of view of Catholic orthodoxy, what I am advancing here is not a commentary. It is a Catholic theological thesis: that the plan for salvation is indissociable from human history is a thesis from Vatican I. It follows that the dimension of history in general, as a Western dimension, is fundamentally Christian and that the way and the life of salvation are not only, for Christianity, the modality of and the procedure for access to a specific mystery, as in all types of initiation and conversion, but the very progression of homo viator, of “journeying man,” man en route, whose journey is not only a passage but constitutes in itself the gait and the progression of revelation. Hence, history understood as distortion, opening (with retention and protention), history as the opening of the subject as such—who is only a subject by being a historical subject, in distension with itself—is the matricial element that Christianity brings progressively to light as its truth, because it does not in fact come to pass all at once, ex abrupto. That matricial element, that essential historicity, posited and “thought” in Christian faith as such, that historicity—let us say—of the faith (not only the historicity of faith as an act of belonging, but the historicity of the very content of faith) is what ends up separating rigorously, implacably, Christianity from the element of religion in general and making of it, in Marcel Gauchet’s phrase, “the religion of the egress from religion.”7

Hence Christianity, stretched between the virtually infinite antecedence in which it never ceases deciphering the signs of its own anteriority and an infinite future into which it projects the final advent of its event in progress, is constitutively stretched between passage and presence. From the passage of God into man to the presence/parousia of God un to man, the consequence is valid, but that consequence from passage to presence is precisely what is called sense. Thus Christianity is in the element of sense, in both senses, significative and directional, of the word. Christianity is par excellence the conjunction of both senses: it is sense as tension or direction toward the advent of sense as content. Consequently, the question is less that of the sense of Christianity than that of Christianity as a dimension of sense, a dimension of sense that—and this is the point to be analyzed—is at once the opening of sense and sense as opening. From passage to presence, it does not cease being averred that presence always repeats passage, or that passage always leads to more opening at the heart of sense. The extreme point of that tension is attained when the absolute of parousia, the absolute of presence, ends by merging with the infinity of passage. Sense is then completed, or, to say the same thing differently, used up. It is complete sense in which there is no longer any sense. That is what ends up being called “the death of God,” in a phrase that is not accidentally of Christian provenance (it comes from Luther), for it states the very destiny of Christianity. In other words, closer to Nietzsche, Christianity is accomplished in nihilism and as nihilism, which means that nihilism is none other than the final incandescence of sense, that it is sense taken to its point of excess.

Christianity is, therefore, not at all the obvious, aggressive, critical negation or despair of sense. It is protention toward sense, the sense of sense, acute in the extreme, beaming with its last light and burning out in that final incandescence. It is sense that no longer orders or activates anything, or nothing but itself; it is sense absolutely in its own right, pure sense, that is, the end revealed for itself, indefinitely and definitively. Such is the complete idea of Christian revelation.

This idea has never been that of the revelation of something or someone. In that sense it is certainly the surpassing, the Aufhebung, the Jewish departure outside Judaism, for the idea of Christian revelation is that, in the end, nothing is revealed, nothing but the end of revelation itself, or else that revelation is to say that sense is unveiled purely as sense, in person, but in a person such that all the sense of that person consists in revealing himself. Sense reveals itself and reveals nothing, or else reveals its own infinity. Yet to reveal nothing is not a negative proposition. It is, rather, the Hegelian proposition that the revealed is properly that God is the revealable: what is revealed is the revealable, the Open as such. It is on that sharp point that Christianity breaks and reveals itself to be what Nietzsche has termed nihilism.

So long as we do not grasp the full extent of this situation, which makes up our Christian provenance, as a Western one, to be the provenance that destines us to the revelation of the revealable, or yet again to sense as pure, absolute, and infinite, we will remain prisoners to something that has not been elaborated in such a way as to be adequate to that history and that destiny. Everything, then, is contingent on this point: to think the infinity of sense, to think truth as an infinite of sense. Or yet again, to think sense as the absolute opening of sense and to sense, but in a sense that is in a way empty, empty of all content, all figure, all determination. Let us say, punning without punning, this is “Christianity’s cross,” since it is exactly on that point that Christianity is simultaneously constituted and undone. Consequently, by focusing on that point it is appropriate to try to deconstruct Christianity.

Let me specify what the operation of “deconstruction” means. Deconstructing belongs to a tradition, to our modern tradition, and I am entirely ready to admit that the operation of deconstruction is part of the tradition just as legitimately as the rest; consequently, it is itself shot through and through with Christianity. Furthermore, “deconstruction” has this peculiarity: if we look back at its origin in the text of Being and Time, it is the last state of the tradition—its last state as retransmission, to us and by us, of the whole tradition in order to bring it back into play in its totality. To put the tradition into play according to deconstruction, according to Destruktion (a term Heidegger was determined to protect against Zerstrung, i.e., against “destruction,” and that he characterized as Abbau, “taking apart”) means neither to destroy in order to found anew nor to perpetuate—two hypotheses that would imply a system given as such and untouchable as such. To deconstruct means to take apart, to disassemble, to loosen the assembled structure in order to give some play to the possibility from which it emerged but which, qua assembled structure, it hides.

My hypothesis is that the gesture of deconstruction, as a gesture neither critical nor perpetuating, and testifying to a relation to history and tradition that is found in neither Husserl nor Hegel nor Kant, is only possible within Christianity, even though it is not formulated intentionally from within it.8 Indeed, it is only from within that which is in itself constituted by and setting out from the distension of an opening that there can be a sense to seek and to disassemble.

It is important, therefore, that we not take the assemblage of Christianity en bloc, to refute or confirm it, for that would be tantamount to placing ourselves outside or alongside it. That is the move that we philosophers make too often and too soon. It has long been taken for granted that we are no longer Christian, and that is why we keep between ourselves and Christianity a distance sufficient to allow us to take it en masse. When we do so, it appears as an autonomous mass in relation to which we can, it is true, take all sorts of attitudes, but concerning whose point of assemblage we will remain always ignorant. But at its point of assemblage, or, as Heidegger said, at the systasis of the system, there is perhaps something to be brought to light and let play as such, something Christianity may not as yet have freed. What might be the possibility, power, or exigency, as you will, brought into play by such a disassembling? That possibility would not—would no longer be—Christianity itself. It would no longer be the Western world itself, but rather that from which or on the basis of which the West and Christianity are possible. Something the West has up till now apprehended only in the ambivalence of the upsurge of Christianity.

The deconstruction of Christianity comes down to this: an operation of disassembling, focusing on the origin or the sense of deconstruction—a sense that does not belong to deconstruction, that makes it possible but does not belong to it, like an empty slot that makes the structure work (the question being to know how to fill the empty slot without overturning in the process the integrality of the integrity of the Christianity we are trying to disassemble).

In a sense, as I have been saying, Christianity is in itself essentially the movement of its own distension, because it represents the constituting of a subject in the process of opening and distending itself. Obviously, then, we must say that deconstruction, which is only possible by means of that distension, is itself Christian. It is Christian because Christianity is, originally, deconstructive, because it relates immediately to its own origin as to a slack [jeu], an interval, some play, an opening in the origin.

But, as we well know, in another sense Christianity is the exact opposite—denial, foreclosure of a deconstruction and of its own deconstruction—precisely because it puts in the place of the structure of origin, of any and all origin, something else: the proclamation of its end. The structure of origin of Christianity is the proclamation of its end. Such is the determinate form taken by the distension I have been discussing: Christianity resides essentially in the proclamation of its end. More precisely, Christianity resides in the end as proclamation, as something proclaimed, as Evangel, as euaggelion, “good news.” That message is the heart of Christianity.

The Christian message of proclamation is therefore something entirely different from prophecy in the vulgar (and not Jewish) sense of divination or prevision. The Christian annunciation of the end is not at all prevision, nor is it even, in a certain sense, the promise. Of course the promise is a Christian category, but for the moment, to be clear and lay things bare, I retain only the word proclamation. Christianity, then, is not proclamation as a predisposition in one way or another of the end; in it, the end itself is operative in the proclamation and as proclamation, because the end that is proclaimed is always an infinite end. This is what truly makes up Christianity, what constitutes, as the theologians say, the “kerygma” of Christianity, that is, the essence, the schema of what is proclaimed, the schema of the proclamation. What is Christianity? It is the Evangel. What is the Evangel? It is what is proclaimed, and it is not texts. What is proclaimed? Nothing. Marcel Gauchet was attentive, as Nietzsche had been, to the thinness of the four Gospels: almost nothing. We do not think enough about the fact that this almost nothing, this bit of writing, is the Aufhebung of all prior biblia—the fact that properly Christian writing (next to nothing) consists in tracing very quickly the word proclamation, in saying “that proclaims,” and that someone lived his life in such a way that he proclaimed.

If Christianity is essentially kerygmatic or evangelical, the question is to try to concentrate our gaze on the heart of proclamation as such, on the living, evangelical heart of Christianity, in order to go beyond the point where Nietzsche left off. Nietzsche is still one of those who separate the wheat from the tares, those who separate an original, pure kernel from its subsequent development. In my opinion the question is rather one of grasping anew—as a pure nucleus, as an Evangelical nucleus—what truly constitutes the possibility of all the rest. That must lead us not to isolate, according to a move that is well known and that might be dubbed “a Rousseauism of Christianity,” a good primitive Christianity, and then to proceed to lament its betrayal.

This said, let us take a further step. To enter the heart, the essential movement of kerygmatic or Evangelical Christianity, to enter its proclamatory structure—this also must be done without having recourse exclusively to the Gospels by taking a stand against their subsequent dogmatic development. On the contrary, it is in dogmatic development that we must recover the inspiration proper imparted to this dogma by the fundamental structure of the proclamation and opening of sense. In the Christian dogmatic edifice, we are dealing with a theological construction, that is, also and primarily with a philosophical construction and elaboration. I say “philosophical” not in the sense in which there would be a Christian philosophy situated alongside other philosophies, but in the sense in which the original structure of the Christian kerygma developed in a specific historical relation to a philosophical history. It is, therefore, in the disassembling of the philosophical constituents of Christian dogma or Christian theology that we must perceive the philosophemes of the proclamation. It is therein that the proclamation itself must be perceived, the kerygma itself as a manifold of philosophemes, or as becoming increasingly, in the course of our history and tradition, the manifold of philosophemes that from now on will configure the articulation of our thought.

Without insisting at length on this point, I will recall the philosophical constituents of Christian theology. It is well known that the heart of Christian theology is obviously Christology, that the heart of Christology is the doctrine of incarnation, and that the heart of the doctrine of incarnation is that of homoousia, consubstantiality, the identity or community of being and substance between the Father and the Son. This is what is completely unprecedented about Christianity. To set itself apart from the spectrum of philosophical ontology (Ousia, homoisis, etc.), the theologian will say that homoousia is just a word that is appropriately used in the service of an intention of faith that must not allow the sense of the notion to be reduced to a thought of essence or of substance, and that the community of the Father and the Son is of a different nature than the singular homoousia that means, philosophically, a community of essence or nature. It will suffice in turn to address the following question to the theologian: Of what other nature or essence is the community of the Father and the Son if it is not of essential essence or natural essence?

Even if we assume that the sense understood by faith, that is, the sense proclaimed, awaited, and expectantly tendered by faith, is infinite, the fact remains that it is in setting out from ousia, taken in a determined historical/philosophical context, that that infinite remove can be thought: Christianity can only posit and conceive of the infinite remove of ousia on the basis of that ousia. In other words, the parousia of the homoousia, far from representing a difference in nature between theology and philosophy, in fact represents the infinite opening of the sense of ousia thought of as presence, a parousia of itself. Taking this as our point of departure, we can link together the entire order of reasons of theological ontology, including the Heideggerian question of the ontic/ontological difference and of the sense of being, so long, that is, as the deconstructive move does not weaken the sense of this sense. This is to say that, setting out from ousia, one can proceed all the way to the end of the philosophical concatenation of the concepts of ontology and find everywhere at work—as a projection into the future of the possibility of these concepts—the opening itself, beyond the conceptual philosophical systematicity to which the theologian thought to set himself in opposition.

Now let us examine the Christian categories that I announced, while trying to grasp them on the basis of the methodological principles we have set up.

Let us consider, first of all, the category of faith, since, to what has just been said about ousia, the theologian (or, more precisely, the spiritual man, the true Christian) will answer that all this ignores the irreducible, singular dimension of faith and of the act of faith as a dimension that it is impossible to reduce to a discourse.

In a certain way I feel bound to begin the analysis by asking: Is there another category of faith than the Christian category? Not the act of faith each of the faithful can pronounce in his or her heart, which it is not my aim to examine here, but the category of faith (for that is what can become the object of the gesture of deconstruction). With utmost respect for the act of faith considered as an act acting within the intimacy of a subject, I cannot fail to consider that the Christian category of faith is above all the category of an act; that of an act of and within the sphere of intimacy. That is what must be examined, knowing that it is one thing to examine this category as that of an intimate act on the part of the subject, and that it would be quite another to go after that act as such, if it takes place and where it takes place, a place into which, obviously, my discourse cannot extend.

Is not the act of faith, qua act, that which announces itself par excellence, that is, that of which the act itself, that of which entelechy, is a proclamation and not a showing? What is faith? Faith consists in relating to God and to the name of God, to the extent that God and his love are not present, shown—to the extent that they are not present in the modality of monstration. But it is not in the domain of belief, because faith is not an adherence without proof. The greatest spiritual and theological analyses of the Christian faith show that faith is rather, if we insist on expressing it in terms of adherence, the adhesion to itself of an aim without other. I will say, in phenomenological terms, the adhesion to itself of an aim without a correlative object, or with no fulfillment of sense but that of the aim itself. One could perhaps say that faith is pure intentionality, or that it is the phenomenon of intentionality as a self-sufficient phenomenon, as a “saturated phenomenon,” in Jean-Luc Marion’s sense. I understand perfectly well that Marion, in speaking of “saturated phenomena,” is not talking about a phenomenon like faith, but rather of phenomena that would offer themselves as faith, or that would entail faith; nevertheless, I leave open the question of whether faith might not be such a “saturated phenomenon,” or even, perhaps, saturation itself.

Faith, in any case, is not adherence without proof or a leap beyond proof. It is an act by a person of faith, an act that, as such, is the attestation by an intimate consciousness to the fact that it exposes itself and allows itself to be exposed to the absence of attestation, of parousia. In homoousia, faith understands itself as exposed to the absence of parousia of the homoousia, without which it would not be faith. If Christian faith, then, is the category of an act of intimacy that misses itself, that escapes itself, then Christian faith is distinguished precisely and absolutely from all belief. It is a category sui generis, which is not, like belief, a lack of …, a dearth of …, not a state of waiting for …, but faithfulness in its own right, confidence, and openness to the possibility of what it is confidence in.

What I am saying here would be perfectly suitable to our modern definition of faithfulness in love. It is precisely that, for us—faithfulness in love, if we conceive of faithfulness as distinct from the simple observance of conjugal law or of a moral or ethical law outside the conjugal institution. This is even, perhaps, what we mean more profoundly by love, if love is primarily related to faithfulness, and if it is not that which overcomes its own failings but rather that which entrusts itself to what appears to it as insufficiency—entrusts itself to the beyond-itself in order to be what it needs to be, that is, to be faithfulness. That is why the true correlate of Christian faith is not an object but a word. Faith consists in entrusting oneself to the word of God. Here again, our amorous faith is entirely Christian, since, as faithfulness, it entrusts itself to the word of the other, to the word that says “I love you,” or doesn’t even say it. At the same time, the faith in act that the theologians call fides qua creditur, the “faith by which one believes,” actualizes, as a profession of faith by the faithful one, faith as content, fides quae creditur, the faith that is believed, the sense of the word of God. In other words, the veritable act, the entelechy of the fides quae creditur, is the fides qua creditur: the act actualizes the sense.

At this point, two possibilities present themselves.

1. The moment of the act as such is dominant, and the sense merges into it. In that case, we may say that the sense of faith is so intimate, so private, that it is inaccessible to the subject. The subject of faith is, in this case, the person who puts his or her faith entirely in the hands of God’s grace, as attested by these words attributed to Joan of Arc, in response to the question “Do you think you are in grace?” “If I am not, may it be God’s will to put me there, and if I am, may it be God’s will to keep me there.” Here, faith consists in the reception of the grace of faith.

2. On the contrary, the moment of the word and of spoken, communitarian sense is dominant. In this case, all division, all dissolution of the community is at the same time the division and dissolution of faith qua communitarian attestation, qua act shared by the community and dissolving along with it. Now, this dissolution of the faith with the community represents, perhaps, the “cross” of the history of Christianity, if the kerygma and grace are, in principle, for all humanity, or if the Gospel and grace are for everyone.

Considered in this twofold schema, faith always comes down to adherence to the infinity of sense, whether it be the infinity of sense dissolved in the attestation without attestation of intimacy, or the infinity of sense spreading outside all discernible community to the outer limits of humanity. From the point of view of the Christian community, to interpret the act of faith as a subjective and existential adherence is, consequently, completely erroneous. Yet it is true that faith is the being-in-act of a non-appropriable infinite sense and that it becomes progressively, as faithfulness, faithfulness to nothing, faithfulness to no one, faithfulness to faithfulness itself. We are becoming a culture of pure faithfulness: the faithful assured not only to be obliged, but to want to be faithful. Faithful to what? To sense, and thus faithful to no other thing than to the very gesture of faithfulness.9

Second category: sin. Sin, because we cannot conceive of Christianity without sin, because it is by sin that Christianity, in the most visible and external way, has dominated—some would say that it has subjugated, enslaved—whole areas of our history and culture. But let us remark, nevertheless, that if there is nothing incongruous about speaking of Christian faith, to speak of sin today seems rather old-fashioned, inasmuch as our Christianity is no longer a Christianity of sin so much as of love and hope. But that in itself is already a sign. What is a Christianity virtually without sin? It is probably no longer Christianity. But then how is it that Christianity can, from within, free itself, rid itself, of sin? I know full well that there have long been plenty of good Christians who have bemoaned the disappearance of sin, and that Bloy and Bernanos railed in unison against the elimination of sin, and of the devil along with it.10 But just so, that elimination is an accomplishment.

For how is Christian sin characterized? Christian sin presents a difference from the misdeed analogous to the one between faith and belief. A misdeed is a transgression, a dereliction that leads to punishment and eventual atonement. Sin is not primarily a specific act. (The image of confession and of recitation of articles has completely deformed our perception of sin.) Sin is not primarily an act, it is a condition, and an original condition. It is only through original sin that we get the full schema of the divine plan: creation, sin, redemption. Outside this divine plan, neither God’s love, nor the incarnation, nor homoousia, nor the history of mankind has sense. Sin is, therefore, above all an original condition, and an original condition of historicity, of development, because sin is a generative condition, setting in motion the history of salvation and salvation as history, it is not a specific act, much less a misdeed.

Sin being a condition, what counts above all in Christianity is man the sinner. The original condition is that man is a sinner, thus the sinner is more important than the sin itself; moreover, this is why that which is truly pardoned is the sinner. The sinner, once pardoned, is not, of course, wiped clean—one does not simply remove from her or him the stains of sin. The pardoned sinner is regenerated and reenters the history of salvation. The sinner is then less one who breaks the Law than one who deflects toward him or herself the sense that was oriented toward the other or toward God. That is how the word of the Serpent was interpreted in a Christian way: “You shall be as gods.” This reversal of sense self-ward is precisely what causes the emergence of self, the oneself, the self qua related to itself, not distended and not open to the other. Such is not only the indication of the sinful condition, but the sinful condition itself. We would never be able to go through all the texts in which the Western tradition unceasingly shows that evil is egoity or egotism. It is the self relating to itself. Consequently, sin is, in a sense, closing, and saintliness, opening. Saintliness is not (and it is this that Christianity thinks of as an Aufhebung of the Old Law in the New Law) the observance of the Law, but the opening to what is addressed to faith, the opening to the proclamation, to the word of the other.

The truth of our sinful condition does not, finally, lead to the expiation of a misdeed but to a redemption; to the redemption of the person who has submitted to the slavery (a slave is redeemed) of temptation. We should examine the category of temptation at great length, and ask ourselves what it is, fundamentally. Temptation is essentially the temptation of self, it is the self as temptation, as tempter, as self-tempter. It is not in the least a question of the expiation of a misdeed, but of redemption or salvation, and salvation cannot come from the self itself, but from its opening. Salvation comes to the self as its opening, and as such it comes to it as the grace of its Creator. Now, what does God do through salvation? Through salvation, God remits to man the debt he incurred in sinning, a debt that is none other than the debt of the self itself. What man appropriated, for which he is in debt to God, is this self that he has turned in upon itself. It must be returned to God and not to itself. Sin is an indebtedness of existence as such.

In other words, while Heidegger tends to detach existential Schuldigkeit from the category of “transgression” or of “debt” (in the ontic sense of the term), I wonder, rather, whether that Schuldigkeit does not realize the essence of sin as the indebtedness of existence—“indebtedness of existence” meaning, at one and the same time, that existence itself is in debt, and that what it is in debt for is precisely for itself, for the self, for the ipseity of existence.

In conclusion, the living God is what maintains the assemblage of all other elements. God, who is neither represented nor representable, but living; the Son, “the invisible image of the invisible God,” says Origen, is his very presence. The Son is the visibility, itself nonvisible, of the Invisible, not in the sense of a god who would appear, but in the sense of a proclamation of presence. It is in that proclamation, in that address to man, in that call, that vision is made. Now, what is thus addressed is the person itself: the life of the living God is properly auto-affection; it presents the person to itself in the infinite dimension of itself to itself. That pure proclamation is interlocution as infinite sense of the pure person or of pure life. The living God is therefore the one who exposes itself as life of the appropriation/dis-appropriation extending beyond itself. Thus everything brings us back again to opening as the structure of sense itself. It is the Open as such, the Open of the proclamation, of the project, of history and faith, that, by the living God, is revealed at the heart of Christianity.

If it is in fact opening, the Open as horizon of sense and as a rending of the horizon, that assembles/disassembles the Christian construction (which undoes the horizontality of sense and makes it pivot into a verticality: the present instant like an infinite breakthrough), let us say, to conclude very provisionally this ongoing project, that in that (de)construction the horizon as question, the horizon as a proper noun for the finitude that turns toward its own infinity, is lost, but also springs forth.

The Open (or “the free,” as Hölderlin also called it) is essentially ambiguous. (It is the entire self-destructive or self-deconstructive ambiguity of Christianity.) In its absoluteness, it opens onto itself and opens only onto itself, infinitely. It is thus that Christianity would be nihilism and has not ceased engaging nihilism, the death of God. But the question is thus posed: What is an opening that would not sink into its own openness? What is an infinite sense that nonetheless makes sense, an empty truth that yet has the weight of truth? How can one take on afresh the task of delineating a delimited opening, a figure, therefore, that still would not be a figurative capturing of sense (that would not be God)?

It would be a matter of thinking the limit (that is the Greek sense of horiz: to limit, to restrict), the singular line that “fastens” an existence, but that fastens it according to the complex graph of an opening, not returning to itself (“self” being this very non-return), yet, again, according to the inscription of a sense that no religion, no belief, nor any knowledge—and of course, no servility, no asceticism—can saturate or assure, that no Church can claim to gather and bless. For that, there remains for us neither cult nor prayer, but the exercise—strict and severe, sober and yet joyous—of what is called thought.

Translated by Michael B. Smith