Reverence as Critical Responsiveness
Between Philosophy and Religion
TYLER ROBERTS
Critical reading is the pious labor of a historically unusual sort of person.
—Michael Warner (2004)
I have been given time to learn what to say, with the help of the language of praise: because this is a language in which my finitude and limit are affirmed at the same time as my freedom and value I may better learn from this how to speak to others without assuming their refusal, giving time to them and inviting them to give it to me.
—Rowan Williams (1988)
Philosophy, Religion, Critique
A major task of a future philosophy of religion will be to contribute to a postcritical ethos of participation. Such a contribution will depend on the ability of philosophers of religion to reimagine and rethink the critical relationship between philosophy and religion. By “participation,” I gesture with some hesitation and much qualification to philosophical and religious visions centered on the conforming of mind and body to God, cosmos, reason, or some other fundamental reality through active intellection and receptive contemplation. Today, the idea that we can identify such a reality is properly suspect and thus subject to various critical procedures that expose the historical and social construction that produces this “reality.” But are there limits to these critical perspectives beyond which we may still think about “participation” in something beyond the human? After all, we certainly are enmeshed with and depend on forces beyond our making and control—not everything we are and do is the product of human constructive activity. This brings me to the “postcritical.” Even if we agree that it is imperative to submit all claims for what is ultimately real and authoritative to historicist and other forms of criticism, the question of how we hold together incisive critical thinking and affirmative attachment to or participation in existence remains. Thinking anew about religion and its critical capacities is, I submit, one route to answering this question. Philosophers of religion, because they work at a site of crossing between the philosophical and critical, on the one hand, and the religious and participatory, on the other, have a crucial role to play in this effort. They can help us think, as William Desmond (2005, 106) puts it, in a “two-way intermediation or communication between religion and philosophy, not just a singular direction from religion to reason.” To do this, though, philosophers have to look beyond the modern, but by now well-worn idea that where philosophy and other forms of modern thought are critical, religious thought, based as it is on faith and reverence, is not. In other words, they need to consider reverence as a discipline of attention and thoughtful vigilance. If critical thought today is to avoid becoming ideological or mystifying, we need to see that it is not just a matter of analyzing, exposing, and debunking, but also a practice by which we discern and give ourselves to, with attention, intelligence, and care, what is beautiful, worthy, and meaningful—even divine or sacred.
I’ll begin with David Wood’s account of philosophy after Heidegger:
Philosophy is at war with the complacency of the concept. … The concept functions both to disclose and to conceal: its practical benefits obscure its selective operation. Where chaos threatens, philosophy may temporarily side with the concept, but when systematic conceptualization becomes the order of the day, eternal vigilance requires a liminal interrogation—probing, challenging, poking at the lines we have drawn on the map. (Wood 2002, 1)
Wood poses some obvious questions. When and to what extent does chaos “threaten” such that conceptual determination and systematizing frees us from obscurity and mystification? But, also, when does conceptual stability produce its own kind of obscurity? How, in sum, do we negotiate or interrogate liminally between chaos, disorder, and deferral, on the one hand, and order, stability, and closure on the other?
Especially in its Kantian, analytic, and pragmatic forms, philosophy of religion has typically sided with the concept, debating, for example, the validity of arguments for the existence of God or the epistemic value of religious experience. But all academic disciplines not only seek and produce stable concepts, they depend on them: for philosophy of religion, these concepts are, most importantly, “philosophy” and “religion.” At least since Kant, this stability has meant “philosophy” as an independent, secular method of inquiry that takes “religion,” as a set of “beliefs,” as the object of its inquiry. “Philosophy of religion” is thus one among other disciplines dedicated to thinking critically about and contributing conceptual clarity to—understanding and explaining—religious thought and practice.1
The critical thinking about religion made possible by this stability has been impressive. Yet we know that “philosophy” and “religion” have meant different things in different times and places, and nothing at all in others. This raises critical questions. What, for instance, is the role modern philosophy has played in the construction of these categories? And, more central for my purposes, what is obscured when we insist on drawing and policing a sharp boundary between philosophy, as a secular, academic discipline, and religion, as the object of that study?2 For many scholars, this boundary between religion and disciplines such as philosophy or sociology is precisely what makes the study of religion possible; because the academic legitimacy of the field is at stake, this boundary requires vigilant policing. But the zeal and suspicion with which at least some scholars guard the boundary may be the best indication that some liminal interrogation is needed, especially when we keep in mind those formative and contemporary theorists—from Marx to Bruce Lincoln and Stathis Gourgouris—who posit religion as the discourse par excellence of obscurity and mystification or as the heteronomous other to “critique.” Rather than remain content with the idea that religion is the “other” of critical thinking, I suggest we follow the advice of scholars such as Noah Solomon and Jeremy F. Walton (2013, 409): “instead of defending the critical study of religion as a secular privilege, we … think more critically about the relationship between religion and criticism itself.”
Critical Thinking and Practices of Subjectivity
What do I mean by “criticism” or the “critical”? Although Michael Warner (2004, 13–15) warns of the difficulties involved with trying to define the “critical,” I will distinguish, without claiming to be exhaustive, between four kinds of critical operations. First, critical thinking is reflexively analytic. On a very basic level, all critical thinking is grounded in analysis that makes useful and illuminating distinctions with respect to the constitutive elements of concepts, arguments, literary works, practices, etc. Such thinking becomes properly critical when it becomes reflexive, that is, when one reflects on one’s own stance or perspective in relation to the object of analysis and the distinctions one employs. Second, critical thinking is “critique”—in the Kantian sense of the term—when it identifies the conditions of possibility and the limits of particular concepts and experiences. Third, there is “critique” as a demystifying procedure, originating with Marx and developing in many directions since, that employs historical, psychological, sociological, and linguistic methods to expose the workings of desire and power in the construction of concepts, values, and social relations.3
I pause here, before moving to a fourth meaning of the critical, to make a few generalizations about the first three. First, we can employ each of these modes of critical thinking, or various combinations of them, to stabilize or destabilize our conceptual maps. Further, and as Michael Warner (2004, 24) puts it with respect to “critical reading” or “critique,” these modes of critical thinking entail “a negative movement of distanciation, whether of disengagement or repudiation.” As “disengagement,” critical thinking is influenced by scientific ideals of dispassionate, objectivizing knowledge and guided by modern discourses of autonomy to bracket various “biases,” such as normative commitments and personal feelings, in order to examine its objects rigorously and methodically. And such disengagement is often a first step toward what Warner calls “repudiation,” in which critique, in the Marxist and post-Marxist sense of the term, is employed to show that particular ideals or particular claims to social authority function ideologically, that is, to mask their real sources and effects. It is relevant to my project here that at the intellectual origins of such repudiation, not just in Marx, but also in Nietzsche and Freud—Paul Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion”—religion is the primary target.
Warner also usefully explores the link between critique and subjectivity. Though it is often assumed that to read critically is a fundamental skill that can and should be learned and applied by anyone, Warner (2004, 35) argues that as it has developed in the modern academy, critique is tied up with a host of assumptions, values, and ideals and, most important, entails an “elaborate discipline of subjectivity.” This is the discipline of freedom as autonomy, the discipline of the modern, liberal, secular subject who can separate himself from his attachments, commitments and values in order to examine them critically and decide whether he wants to affirm them or not (20). Such subjects are suspicious of attachments that are not the products of “autonomous preference formation,” that are “imposed” from outside, whether from tradition, family, or even our uneducated, immediate desires, that are, in short, “heteronomous.” Once we recognize this link between critique and subjectivity, Warner concludes, we should agree with anthropologist Saba Mahmood’s claim that “the standard of the critical … could and should be parochialized in turn as an ethical discipline of subjectivity rather than as the transparent medium of knowledge.”4
In other words, we are not being critical enough about critical thinking. To critique the “critical” would be to think at the limits of critical thought, to ask, with Warner (2004, 16), whether there are other ways to “suture textual practice with reflection, reason, and a normative discipline of subjectivity.”
Criticism and Religion
This brings me to the fourth kind of intellectual operation that we associate with the “critical.” I will use the term criticism to refer to critical thinking directed to the appreciation of cultural phenomena or, more generally, to the synthetic and constructive work of evaluation that makes judgments, negative and positive, about our aesthetic, moral, political, and religious commitments and values. Today, as Warner notes, criticism in this sense has become marginalized in modern academic culture and is more commonly the subject of popular writing and journalism. Academic critique tends to focus only on the exposure of cultural mechanisms and philosophical or literary first principles, without rendering “judgments of value” (Warner 2004, 24–25). Such critique can tell us a lot about our assumptions, perspectives, and the way these are informed by social and historical context, but—and this is a central concern of my argument—it is much less helpful when it comes to thinking about how we move from the self-consciousness gained thereby to the revitalization and redeployment of our commitments and values. Warner does note some resistance to this negative view of criticism, citing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s distinction between “critical reading” and “reparative reading” (17), that is, between negative, distanced critique and practices of reading grounded in the “attachment” to a text, to its value and importance for informing and enlivening our lives. Though marginalized as “uncritical,” there are good reasons to think that “criticism,” as I am using the word here, deserves a more prominent place in the academy, perhaps particularly in the humanities: if we agree that critical thinking is constitutive of a particular normative discipline of subjectivity, if it is, in other words, itself a particular way of attaching ourselves to our lives, then we need to think more deeply about how we might think critically in and through, as opposed to or distanced from, our attachments.
Scholars of religion often distinguish the “religious” from the “study of religion” by claiming that the former is uncritical because it locates ultimate authority for beliefs, values, and practices in divinely authorized revelation, thereby mystifying the human origins of these phenomena and placing limits on human autonomy (see, e.g., Lease [2000], Lincoln [1996], and McCutcheon [2001]). Noah Solomon and Jeremy Walton (2013) take issue with this common sense. They note that this perspective on religion and criticism frequently is correlated with a strong emphasis on the separation between “outsiders” to religious thought, practice, and tradition and “insiders.” The claim is not that religious adherents can never study their traditions critically, but that to do so “critically” instead of “theologically” requires a self-conscious detachment that adopts the position of the outsider. The study of religion thus becomes “a secular privilege” (409). “Indeed, our at times obsessive emphasis on the critical nature of the study of religion has even threatened a sort of intellectual patricide within the discipline itself as a variety of contemporary scholars have argue that the very founders of Religionswissenschaft were insufficiently detached from their objects of study, engaging instead in the culpable attempt to promote theological visions under the guise of cold objectivity” (403–404). In this, Solomon and Walton echo Catherine Bell’s (1996, 187) observation that contemporary scholarship on religion is characterized by a “nearly paranoid degree of anti-theology polemic.” And they echo Eve Sedgwick’s more general claim that dominant forms of academic criticism have drifted into an essentially paranoid suspicion of textual attachment (Warner 2004, 16–17).
Does religious “attachment” necessarily compromise critical thinking, or is it possible to think critically with and through one’s attachments, religious or otherwise? Solomon and Walton (2013, 411) argue that scholars need to abandon “the axis of distinction that locates critical theory on one side and pre-theoretical practice on the other” and attend more closely to the ways that “disciplines of criticism” work within religious traditions. I agree, but what, exactly, do we mean by religious “disciplines of criticism”? Few would deny that religious discourse can be critical, if all we mean by that is that it negatively or positively evaluates ideas and practices on the basis of whether they conform or not with religious beliefs or customs. But such criticism is not necessarily “disciplined” for sometimes religious adherents simply invoke “scripture” or “doctrine” or “revelation” or “tradition” without further argument. In such cases, it does seem a kind of heteronomy is at work that precludes disciplined critical thinking. The question is, however, whether all appeals to, say, “revelation” entail that kind of heteronomy. Is there a way of thinking—and do we want to still call it critical?—between “autonomous preference formation” and the heteronomy of imposed and unreflective attachments? Is there a religious criticism that reflects on religious beliefs and practices, and on all issues to which these are relevant, not from the detachment of “cold objectivity” or “methodological atheism” but from reflective religious attachment? Or, to anticipate my argument below, is there religious criticism that thinks through religious attachment with an attentiveness and an openness that makes judgments only while also inviting critical response?
Something like this I find in Rowan Williams’s account of “theological integrity.” Williams (2000, 5) writes that theology must show “in its own working a critical self-perception [by] displaying the axioms to which it believes itself accountable [and making] it clear that it accepts, even within its own terms of reference, that there are ways in which it may be questioned and criticized.” Terms and phrases such as discipline and critical self-perception do indicate some kind of distance and even autonomy. But we need a nuanced account of this. Does it really make sense to say of our most important attachments that they are simply “chosen,” the result of a process of intentional, methodical “preference formation”? Is this how we love or yearn or commit ourselves to a cause? It seems to me that there is always an element of something like “heteronomy” involved in our most important and meaningful attachments, some real sense in which words such as capture or compel are more appropriate than choose. How might we think about such attachments with “critical self-perception”? The point would not be to reject autonomy outright, but to ask whether the autonomy/heteronomy binary is a useful way to think about our most important attachments and about the way we participate in the world through them.5 Hent de Vries (2009, 14) has argued that “[e]nlightenment and its philosophical concept of critique can no longer be defined as being merely opposed to, rather than being traversed or haunted by faith and trustworthiness that borders on heteronomy.” The task, as I see it, is to think through this traversal by disrupting conceptual paradigms that link critique with enlightenment and autonomy and contrast these ideals with religion, heteronomy, and faith.
Philosophy and Critical Responsiveness
This will entail thinking differently about both “religion” and “philosophy.” One way to begin to do this is to expand our perspective on both to include not just questions of belief and epistemology but also questions of practice and spiritual exercise. Traditionally, philosophers of religion have focused on religious belief, examining, for instance, arguments for the existence of God or the problem of theodicy. Because modern philosophy has been so focused on epistemological issues, and because the study of religion has tended to conceptualize “religion” on the model of Christianity as a discourse of belief, this is not surprising. Recent decades, however, have seen a decisive shift in the study of religion, as scholars have turned to explore, for instance, religious practice in everyday life and ritual as something more or other than the simple expression of belief. Scholars increasingly understand that “religion” (however uncertain and contested the concept itself becomes) is about much more than beliefs and propositions. But philosophers of religion not only need to think about religion as practice, including religious thought as practice, they also need to consider the practical turn in philosophy itself. By this, I refer, first of all, to the work of Pierre Hadot (1995, 265), who has made the influential argument that philosophy in antiquity was “a mode of existing in the world, which had to be practiced at each moment”; it was an existential practice or “way of life”—a set of spiritual exercises. Hadot argues that beginning with the scholastics, philosophers become increasingly detached from this existential vision of the love of wisdom and thus less “philosophers” than purveyors of “philosophical discourse” (270–271). In other words, they became academic philosophers focused on cognitive determination and conceptual stability.
Hadot does note some exceptions to this trend, such as Spinoza and Nietzsche. Further, he has helped inspire others to read the philosophical past and present in a new light.6 Two contemporary philosophers who can be profitably read from a Hadotian perspective are Martha Nussbaum and Stanley Cavell, both of whom conceive philosophy in practical terms, Nussbaum as a form of “therapy” and Cavell as “moral perfectionism.” They both, that is, redirect philosophy toward “spiritual exercise” as critical work on self and community. Though neither is a philosopher of religion, they are helpful for my project because they both develop visions of what I call “critical responsiveness,” a form of criticism that departs in significant ways from the kind of distanced academic criticism Warner discusses and that I think is useful for thinking about some forms of religious criticism.
“Critical responsiveness,” as I think about it, entails the view that we always think and critique as participants in particular social formations and histories and as enmeshed in the natural world. Nussbaum and Cavell articulate disciplines of thought and practice (and thought as practice) by which they reflect on, engage critically, and ultimately enliven such participation in and through attention to relations of dependence, mutual receptivity, and responsiveness. This means that they approach the objects of their criticism and the relations they constitute in and through such criticism not as objects of detached intellectual scrutiny, but as objects and people to which/whom they give themselves in the kind of exposure and trust that make genuine responsiveness possible (though, of course, such responsiveness may in any given case mean a withdrawal of trust). Trust and exposure allow or elicit response, requiring fine attention to oneself and to one’s tastes, desires, and attractions, but they also require a letting go of the self, a giving up of control and security in order to open oneself in a way that allows the other, whether an object such as a poem or a film or another person, a voice. For Nussbaum (1990, 278), this is “learning to fall,” as in deliberately falling with the faith that someone will catch you. Cavell, who criticizes empiricist epistemologies that view experience as mere “checkpoints in sensory prediction” urges a receptive, as opposed to a representational, thinking in which we “let objects become impressive to us, matter to us” (2005b, 13, 51, emphasis mine).
The experience of “mattering”—someone that matters, some ideal that compels, some action that presses itself upon one—can of course be threatening, for it often places demands on us that require upsetting established habits and views or that provoke longstanding fears and anxieties. The difficulty of “letting” things matter, of cultivating a complex interaction between action and passivity by which one puts oneself in a position to receive and respond to others and to one’s culture, is central to what I’m calling critical responsiveness, for it requires critical work on both the self and one’s attachments. Where critical thinking is frequently understood as a mobilization of reason detached from passions and personal attachments, critical responsiveness unfolds in the midst of passion and attachment as they emerge in responsive relations with others and in our interaction with the world. Here, the discipline is as much a matter of distancing oneself from the desire for control over one’s feelings and attachments—control over oneself—than from the object of criticism. This makes possible the trust by which one gives oneself over to responsive relationship and thus to the possibility of finding oneself anew in that responsiveness. The payoff, for both Nussbaum and Cavell, is that criticism, as it deepens, expands, and shares, “enlivens” (Nussbaum 1990, 16) and “resuscitates” (Cavell 2005b, 252) our attachments to each other, to our culture, and to the world.
Both Nussbaum and Cavell develop their views of philosophical criticism by means of an illuminating sensitivity to the way philosophy can be supplemented by other forms of knowing. For this, both turn to art: Nussbaum focuses on literature, and Cavell on film (and on “aesthetics” more generally). “Before a literary work,” Nussbaum (1990, 282–284) writes,
we are humble, open, active yet porous. Before a philosophical work, in its working through, we are active, controlling, aiming to leave no flank undefended and no mystery undispelled. … But, to make room for love stories, philosophy must be more literary, more closely allied to stories, and more respectful of mystery and open-endedness than it frequently is.
Philosophy needs to make room for love stories, she argues, in part because love is a kind of knowledge: it is in love that we learn to fall, be responsive. More generally, the idea is that detached, intellectual scrutiny is not the only route to knowledge, that aspects of our lives remain obscure when we insist that we must know everything by means of the active and grasping knowing of philosophical or scientific cognitive determination. Our knowledge of ourselves and others is more complete, then, when there is an alliance between literature and philosophy, when philosophy learns from literature to be porous and attend to the “multiplicity of the everyday” (283) and, reciprocally, when philosophy brings to our understanding of literature its conceptual and therapeutic capacities for classification, analysis, and the exposure of self-deception (239, 283). In other words, Nussbaum is less interested in “philosophical criticism” that “explains” literature than in an intermediation between the philosophical and the literary through which we come to a greater understanding of both and of ourselves. Working along similar lines, Cavell says that “the sort of emphasis I place on the criticism, or reading, of individual works of art … [let the] work of art have a voice in what philosophy says about it” (Cavell 2005, 10).
As I note above, Desmond makes a similar point about the relation of philosophy and religion. Nussbaum and Cavell, though, present themselves as secular philosophers, each exhibits, at times, the kind of insensitivity to and impatience with religion that is one of the most unthinking reflexes of modern philosophy. Yet, each, when poised at the most delicate interstices of art and philosophy, especially at those points where they are brought up against the limits of autonomy, invokes concepts such as “grace,” “mystery,” “gratitude,” “praise,” and “God.” Nussbaum elaborates the idea of “learning to fall” with the idea of “aiming for grace,” as in handing oneself over to God in the act of “prayer.” These ideas help her to think about the stance of “porosity” necessary for love’s knowledge. For his part, Cavell (2005b, 67) describes cultural criticism as “a conduct of gratitude … a specification and test of tribute.” The language of praise and gratitude refers back, for Cavell, to the fundamental conditions, or “criteria,” in terms of which and through which our words, meanings, and values bind us together in forms of life: what matters to me and the meaning it has for my life is never just a matter of me and my taste but of us and our life together. Praise and gratitude, then, are not simple expressions of our recognition of this fact or of our acknowledgment of dependence. They are that, but because we so easily fall into habits of superficial conformity and unresponsiveness, in both language and act, praise and gratitude also are disciplines of attention to and recovery of these bonds, disciplines through which we recover and work out our participation in culture and world and thereby “resuscitate” our “aliveness to the world” (252). They also are practices through which we expand these conditions. Our forms of life are never simply given and static, but are ever-changing. Our words of praise and gratitude can thus take us beyond our agreements by expanding and refiguring them, like fresh metaphor that allows us to see things in a new way: “What makes metaphor unnatural,” Cavell (1988, 147) writes, “is its occasion to transcend our criteria; not as if to repudiate them, as if they are arbitrary; but to expand them, as though they are contracted.” From this perspective, criticism as gratitude and praise becomes an experiment with a kind of transcendence by which new forms of connection are engendered, identified, and cultivated. Cavell concludes the early essay “Knowing and Acknowledging” with an expression of “gratitude” toward poetry as the means by which human beings turn to the “unknown” and begin expanding, through new words and figures, our connections with each other and the world. “This sense of unknownness,” Cavell (1977, 266) writes, “is a competitor of the sense of childish fear as an explanation for our idea, and need, of God.”
The point of this detour into Nussbaum and Cavell is not to argue that they, as philosophers, need to take religion more seriously. For their own purposes, they take it seriously enough, mostly. Rather, it is to suggest that the kind of philosophical criticism they practice might be developed at the interstices of philosophy and religion, that, specifically, forms of religious criticism might be instructive for thinking criticism beyond the binary of autonomy and heteronomy. Let me now elaborate by considering the idea of “reverence,” as I find it in theologian Rowan Williams and philosopher William Desmond, as a practice that “borders on heteronomy” and is constituted by “porousness,” “praise,” and “gratitude.”
Theology and Criticism
Like Nussbaum and Cavell, criticism for Rowan Williams is fundamentally a matter of responsiveness. His links with Cavell are particularly strong since Williams, too, is indebted to Wittgenstein, nowhere more clearly than when he argues that we should understand interpretation and criticism not on the model of “science” but as a “social project” based in “responsive action” (Williams 1988, 47). And responsiveness is at the center of what I identified above as Williams’s view of discursive integrity, which is based on speaking “in a way which allows of answers,” that makes no claims to be “final” and does not “seek to prescribe the tone, the direction, or even the vocabulary of a response” (Williams 2000, 5). This means that theologians must acknowledge the humanness of their discourse—they should not claim a God’s eye-view (6)—but also that critics of theology and religion, such as Freudians, Marxists, and sociobiologists, should avoid totalizing strategies that claim to produce definitive general truths about “religion.” From Williams’s point of view, all interpretations of religious and other cultural phenomena are selective, ignoring some aspects of the matter at hand and highlighting others. Their value resides in the way they can illuminate particular, concrete phenomena in the context of social interaction, and thus further connection, conversation, reflection, and action.
The selectivity of any interpretation and any critique means that a crucial element of critical consciousness and discursive integrity is the acknowledgment and reflection on one’s fundamental commitments, articles of faith, basic assumptions, or, as Williams puts it, “fundamental axioms.” Responsiveness and integrity entail making these axioms clear as axioms. What I find particularly suggestive in Williams as a theologian is that the fundamental Christian axioms to which he is committed, which constitute his Christian faith and theology, have less to do with definitive propositions about God, humanity, and world than with a process of questioning that is fundamentally both critical and enlivening. Or, to perhaps be more accurate, his most definitive propositions about God and Christ have to do with the way they put the Christian into question, including her views of “God” and “Christ.” For Williams, the basic idea that God is both truth (and so judgment) and love (and so salvation) always must be understood in the context of the Gospel, at the heart of which, for Williams (2000, 87), as it was for Rudolf Bultmann, is the “scandal of the cross,” or sacrifice and death. In other words, God shakes the Christian out of his world, disrupts his frames of reference and his “realities,” calling him to a life of dispossession. But the Gospel, and Scripture and tradition more generally, also offer a new frame of reference by which such dispossession is understood as a practice of reverence and the taking on a new self. In the celebration, praise, and worship of God, the Christian receives the language—from scripture and the tradition—through which he learns to become a lover of God, self, and others. Here, he engages in the “the struggle [elsewhere “the stammering” (38)] to voice how the directedness of my regard depends on, is moulded by, something irreducibly other than itself” (9–10). Revering God, the Christian works out what it is to be a finite creature that loves.
One way to get at what this looks like in Williams’s work, and at how it relates to questions of criticism and autonomy, is to consider his treatment of “contemplation.” For theology to have integrity, Williams claims, it must root itself in the silence and listening of contemplation and prayer. “Contemplation … is a deeper appropriation of the vulnerability of the self in the midst of the language and transactions of the world; it identifies the real damaging pathologies of human life, our violent obsessions with privilege, control and achievement as arising from the refusal to know and love oneself as a creature, a body” (2000, 12). Opening him- or herself up to God in prayer, and struggling with the difficulty of doing so, which includes the difficulty of genuinely turning toward and praising God (instead of the self), the contemplative must confront the many ways that she is caught up in the powers and shaping forces of the world and comes to find her value and affirmation in “privilege, control, and achievement.” And confront as well the ways that these same “obsessions” work their way into the religious life, especially in the need to grasp God for one’s own purposes. As exemplified in Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross, Williams (1990, 172) argues, the illumination found on the mystical path is not a matter of “mystical trances, visions or ecstasies, but the sense of being drawn into a central magnetic area of obscurity” where language and thought “run out” and we encounter a reality ungraspable by our conceptual capacities. This invocation of mystery is neither triumphalist nor apologetic, nor is it part of a mystificatory effort to negate explanation. Rather, Williams means it to keep Christians attuned to the “questioning at the heart of faith” (Williams 1990, 11). John’s dark night of the soul is achieved only in ever-deepening confrontation with pain and suffering and with the propensity to disavow this pain—his own and that of others—in ideological mystifications, such as those that would lean on any particular experience to confirm God’s reality and favor or other forms of positive knowledge of God. “No experience that can be held on to, possessed or comprehended can have to do with God” (173). Here, faith is not a way of possessing God and securing the self, but a practice of dispossession through which we open ourselves to God’s love. And this is a process in which “the last enemy to be overcome is religion” (176).
Thus theology’s particular critical intensity: “Language about God is kept honest in the degree to which it turns on itself in the name of God, and so surrenders itself to God: it is in this way that it becomes possible to see how it is still God that is being spoken of” (Williams 2000, 8). Williams’s writing is full of references to and exemplifications of the difficulty of theological speech, references to silence, stammering, the ephemeral nature of theological claims. For him, how one speaks is as important as what one speaks about. The “experience” of the call or, perhaps more accurately, the practice of opening oneself to the call, is fraught with difficulty and temptation, which means that a certain critical consciousness with respect to the possibility and the danger of such opening—in particular the danger of illusion and self-aggrandizement—is built in. To have integrity, theology must not only open itself to other forms of critical discourse, it must give space and time, with contemplative silence and stammering speech, to God’s work and initiative, even as it recognizes that these manifest themselves only obscurely. This means that praising and expressing gratitude to God in acts of worship always entails also opening oneself to God’s judgment, stripping oneself of ego and illusion.
The temptation here will be to make the Nietzschean argument that the deep critical moment of Christian theology is the life and self-denying opposite of modern critical autonomy. On this reading, the language of judgment strips us of our self-affirmations and imposes a heteronomous language of sin and submission. This is an argument to take seriously, one to which Christian thinkers need to respond; it is certainly borne out by some theological perspectives. But not, I would claim, in someone like Williams, for whom the language of sin has much more to do with directing our attention—as the symbol of the cross does above all—to the victims of our inability to face our own complicity in forms of oppression and exploitation than in a moralizing attack on worldly joy and pleasure. Another way to put this is that the language of judgment in Williams functions primarily to keep us alive to our finite condition, to “know and love oneself as a creature, a body” and to direct us to the love of God—and to the love of self, other, and world that flows from this love—and away from forms of “love” to which we are inordinately and self-destructively attached.
Of particular interest here is Williams’s treatment of dogma and revelation, theological concepts that for many critics of Christianity and theology mark the limits of any claims to theologically informed critical consciousness. For such critics, to be dogmatic is precisely to refuse critical questions and arguments, to hold to a proposition “just because,” for instance, it was revealed by God. But for Williams, the primary goal of theological doctrine is not to pin down God or Christ in propositional form or to justify or defend the Church or the faith, but rather to hold “us still before Jesus” so that we can learn who we are in light of the questions he puts to us (Williams 2000, 8, 85–86). These are questions, for instance, about the way that our habitual desires for power and security close us off to love for and from others. When dogma serves as the “ground of final validation for the rights and authority of the new community,” Williams argues, it becomes “itself a sign of the dangers of religion’s self-enclosure and claims to final legitimacy, it has been domesticated into the community’s system of control. It has become ideological” (99). A similar, though more explicitly affirmative, dynamic is at work in Williams’s treatment of revelation, that is, “the loving and nurturing advent of newness in human life” (145). Disciplines of dispossession under God’s judgment open us to new possibilities, to “events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life” (134). The “new”—the different, the other, the incongruous—is always both promising and painful. Faith in God, openness to God’s revelation, does not promise a certain future or an end to pain.7 It promises instead the “grace” that takes shape in the forgiveness that allows us to perceive the new possibilities entailed in God’s revelation and to move with them into a future of creativity and responsiveness. Put differently, the point of God’s judgment is not to leave us mired in the consciousness of sin and bound by past failures, but to practice a form of dispossession and surrender that enables us to break out of the kinds of self-isolation that keep us attached to destructive habits and modes of perception. In revelation, that is, in Jesus and in later events through which the Christian community “re-learns to interpret itself” with reference to Jesus, Christians encounter a “radical renewing energy” (141).
On this reading, dogma and revelation function to maintain theology’s critical intensity. They should, he argues, lead Christians to be suspicious of the kinds of comfortable complacency and self-aggrandizements so often associated with “blind faith” and various forms of religious triumphalism. Surely, there is an element of something like heteronomy here in that Christians are being called to open themselves to questions that come from outside themselves. Is this, from the perspective of critique, a weakness, or is it theology’s strength as a form of disciplined criticism? Williams offers, I contend, a sophisticated account of and means for critical thinking about and through our fundamental attachments as a way of deepening understanding of ourselves and engaging creatively and thoughtfully with life. In the self-critical nature of theological language, language that must always turn on itself in acknowledgment of God and God’s judgment and grace, we find what Williams, borrowing from Ricoeur, identifies as “non-heteronomous dependence.” “We speak because we are called and authorized to speak, we speak what we have been given, out of our new ‘belonging,’ and this is a ‘dependent’ kind of utterance, a responsive speech. But it is not a dictated or determined utterance; revelation is addressed not so much to a will called upon to submit as to an imagination called upon to ‘open itself’” (Williams 2000, 146–147). For Williams, in other words, critical consciousness and imagination go hand in hand. Both are grounded in faith and come to expression in and through practices of contemplation, worship, and theological reflection.
Critical Reverence
With the concept of “reverence,” William Desmond captures and develops much about Williams that I think is important in the context of thinking about religion, philosophy, and criticism. Reverence, he tells us, is the fundamental religious attitude or disposition. It is a kind of openness or “porosity of being” cultivated and enacted most directly in forms of prayer, meditation, and contemplation, a receptiveness or attunement to the givenness of being. Desmond (2005, 23, 13) describes this givenness as “the elusive mystery of things” and the “hyperbole of being.” One way to understand this is to consider that Desmond, like David Wood, is attending to “that” which is in excess of conceptual determination. Philosophy, for Wood, works between conceptual stability and chaos, order and disorder, for instance in a deconstructive or genealogical mode. As such, however, even in Wood, philosophy tends to a kind of negative or cautionary form of critical thinking. For Desmond, philosophy has not paid enough attention to reverence, and he wants to think a “post-philosophical reverence” that questions philosophy’s claim to critical authority and its privileging of conceptual determination or “univocalization” (266). “Philosophy,” he writes, “claims to wake us up from the sleep of common sense, sometimes treating religion as but another sleep, but what if philosophy falls into a new sleep, from which only a different sense of religious sleeplessness can wake us?” (25). Stanley Cavell (2005a, 6) wants art to have a voice in what philosophy says about it, a voice that “differently configure[s] intellectual and emotional avenues that philosophy is already in exploration of, but which, perhaps, it has cause sometimes to turn from prematurely.” Desmond wants philosophy, with its active, critical intellection, to wake to reverence’s receptivity.
But is reverence precisely that which blocks such real critical thinking? If we revere God, are we not prevented from questioning God? Yes and no. We have already seen how for Williams the worship of God has its own critical dynamic and that even if in some way it does not question God, it certainly questions our efforts to articulate precisely what God is and what God demands—that is, it questions “God.”8 And Williams and Desmond both want critical thinking to do more than this. Desmond (2005, 128) asks us to consider the difference between questioning and criticism that begin in skeptical doubt and questioning and criticism that begin in “wonder” or “original astonishment.” The former (as in Descartes) isolates the questioning self in suspicion, moving out toward the world and others only when its questions are satisfied. The latter acknowledges (as in Heidegger or Wittgenstein) that it is already in the world, with others—open and attached to them. This is also to acknowledge that one is not isolated and self-contained, that one’s being is bound up with and depends on that which exceeds the boundaries of the self. Thus, Desmond treats the indeterminate flux of order as the “matrix of creative life” (35) upon which we depend and in which we need to learn to participate. “Mystery” or “hyperbole of being” is, he says, “the overdeterminacy of the indeterminate in the surplus of its transcendence” (112). Reverence, then, is a mindfulness attuned to and trusting in this surplus as “gift,” not “chaos,” even as it recognizes that the line between gift and destructive or nihilistic chaos is a very fine one that itself cannot be determined with any exactness and so is always a risk. Reverence, he says, is a “finesse” (265).
How is this related to the “critical”? At least two points are worth considering here. First, if reverence is mindfulness with respect to the “givenness of being” (Desmond 2005, 226) and this givenness is overdetermined and transcendent, it cannot be the stuff of conceptual determination. Desmond invokes “mystery.” The secular, critical response at this point is often “Mystification!” But Desmond’s response, like Williams’s, is mystery without mystification: mystery, that is, not as part of an apologetic effort to protect dogma and doctrine from critical thought but as a commitment both to a fundamental generosity of being and to a generous response to this givenness that renounces controlling and manipulative efforts to unilaterally and finally determine the other—whether God, world, or other persons. In this respect, reverence entails criticism of the tendency of worldly interests and powers to absolutize identities and definitions; it exposes the limits of self-enclosed, subject- and human-centered ways of thinking; it makes possible awareness that many of our efforts to determine things conceptually or to insist on intelligibility can in fact hinder our efforts to know and to act, or at least to do so in a fitting manner; it allows us, therefore, to pose critical questions about the modern project of autonomy and to ask whether certain forms of heteronomy are freeing rather than enslaving and blinding. Reverence as mindfulness with respect to mystery or surplus thus takes shape as a phronesis by which we understand how and when to employ the determinate categories and concepts by which we work on our worlds as well as how and when to refrain from such labor, that is, how and when to let things be enough to receive them in their otherness. Williams treats this recognition of limits in terms of a fundamental trust in God’s creative power, a power that, because it is without need, is pure gift, helps us strip our worldly negotiations and relations of “violence-inducing anxiety.”
But the critical value of reverence lies not just in the cautionary invocation of “mystery,” but in an openness to attachment and dependence. Desmond (2005, 225, 346) sees reverence as an offering of dependence, a generous response to the gift of being that absolves or releases one into a world of attachment and “works of love.” So even as reverence is a turning to God, it also is a constant turning to oneself to inquire into what it is we are loving, why we love it in the way we do, and whether it is worthy of our love and whether, if so, we are worthy of it. It is, in love, the working out one’s loves. We might put it like this: reverence, as the love for God, or for that upon which we ultimately depend, is a disposition and practice by which one explores, questions, and come to understands all one’s other loves. If philosophy is the love of wisdom, then reverence, as a critical discipline, is the wisdom of love. When this wisdom is brought to bear upon philosophy, it makes possible reflection on the kinds of wisdom that philosophers do and should love and on how they live and deploy such wisdom. Philosophers, in other words, will think critically and expansively enough about religion only when they also learn to think with religion.
NOTES
1. I emphasize the word “typically” in the first sentence of this paragraph in order to indicate that there are versions of the philosophy of religion that explore religion from perspectives rather different from the ones I identify here. One example would be the work of Jeffrey Stout (2004), whose work on “secular” discourse and on democratic “piety” I find congenial with the argument I make in this chapter. And in many respects I see this chapter as an elaboration on Hent de Vries’s treatment of philosophy in, among other works, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (2009). With respect to the issue of participation, see Paul Griffiths’s (2009) distinction between knowledge that seeks to control and dominate, which he calls “curiosity,” and knowledge that takes joy in the participation with the objects and ideas it seeks to know, which he calls “studiousness.”
2. For a more extensive discussion of this question, which includes the interrogation of the concepts of the “secular” and the “academic,” see Roberts (2013).
3. See Wendy Brown (2009, 11). To follow up on my earlier point about religion as the other to critique, see specifically Brown’s discussion of “the intensity with which critique attaches itself to secularism, articulates itself as a secularizing project, and identifies itself with the dethroning of God” (11).
4. Warner (2004, 18). Warner refers to Mahmood’s Politics of Piety. Mahmood points out that even though the ideal of autonomy has been subject to numerous attacks and revisions, it is tenacious, even to be found in the tendency of poststructuralist feminists “to conceptualize agency in terms of subversion or resignification of social norms, to locate agency within those operations that resist the dominating and subjectivating modes of power” (Mahmood 2005, 14). In the previous sentence, the phrase “autonomous preference formation” is appropriated by Mahmood from political theorist John Christman, who argues that such formation is constitutive of freedom (11–12).
5. For a scintillating study of religious practice between autonomy and heteronomy, see Robert Orsi (1996).
6. See Hilary Putnam’s reading of Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas in Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life (2008). See also Sloterdijk (2013).
7. “[I]f we believe we can experience our healing without deepening our hurt, we have understood nothing of the roots of our faith” (Williams 1990, 11)
8. For a magisterial treatment see de Vries (2009).
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