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Home , Gianni Vattimo, Only a God Can Save Us

‘To catch a voice from an unknown source’

Truth in an interpretative age

Thesis Research Master Theology School of Humanities/School of Catholic Theology Tilburg University

Supervisors Prof. Dr. E. P. N. M. Borgman Dr. P. A. Bax

Tilburg, 30 January 2012

Eveline van der Ham 552708 Preface

During my studies in theology and culture. I decided to devote my bachelor’s thesis to that topic and to investigate what could be said about the meaning of a text objectively. I discerned levels of and subjectivity in interpretations and learned that what might be regarded as the deepest meaning of a text cannot be pinned down objectively. As a theologian, I had difficulties accepting that, as I wasn’t sure what it meant for our notions of revelation and . When I started exploring possible topics for my master’s thesis, I kept coming back to this matter and I decided that there was no other way to finish my academic ‘career’ but addressing this topic once again. And so I went on an adventure, not sure of where to go and what to expect. Writing this thesis has been the most difficult and frustrating exercise I have done during my studies, but I suppose it was done the way it had to be done. It has been a long and uncertain quest and it was only during the final weeks that I began to understand what I was trying to say. The results may cause more questions than answers, but at least I feel they give a direction.

I wish to express my gratitude to my patient and wise mentors: professor Erik Borgman – who guided me by always leaving me confused and at best suspecting that the answer to my questions wasn’t anywhere near – and Sander Bax, who, supervising the abovementioned bachelor’s thesis, challenged me to confront my deepest convictions. Without their exceptional support, I would not have dared to go my own way (twice!), and without their valuable and constructive feedback, I would have got lost on that way. I also wish to thank my parents, who have always confidently encouraged me to do what I thought I had to do, and who somehow truly understood my personal struggles with the topics addressed in the thesis. Finally, I would like to thank my dearest friend AJ Boyd for his excellent English editing.

1 Contents

Introduction 4

Part I

1. 6

§1.1 Short biography and general overview 6 §1.2 Key concepts 7 §1.3 Heidegger and 8 §1.4 Heidegger on God 11 §1.5 Heidegger and Christianity 13 §1.6 Heidegger on religious life 15 §1.7 Heidegger’s reception 18

2. Karl Rahner S.J. 21

§2.1 Rahner’s anthropocentric theology 21 §2.2 Nature, grace and revelation 26 §2.3 Rahner’s matters for consideration 29

3. Gianni Vattimo 31

§3.1 Vattimo and Heidegger 31 §3.2 and weak thought 33 §3.3 Conversion 35 §3.4 Truth and interpretations 37 §3.5 The event 38 §3.6 The historicity of the kenosis 39 §3.7 Evaluation of Vattimo’s thought, Heidegger revisited 41

2 Part II

4. Artistic Representation 43

§4.1 Heidegger: The origin of the work of art 43 §4.2 Vattimo on art 46 §4.3 Sacramental function of art 48 §4.4 Art, literature 49 §4.5 Why Calvino? 51

Part III

5. Italo Calvino 52

§5.1 Biography, oeuvre and themes 52 §5.2 If on a winter’s night a traveler: Plot 54 §5.3 IWNT: a closer examination 56 §5.4 Invisible Cities: Plot 59 §5.5 IC: a closer examination 60 §5.6 Interpretation: Theological perspectives in IWNT and IC 62

Conclusion 65

List of Sources 68

3 Introduction

‘We live in a world without a center, a Babel-like plurality, with an irreducible number of differing Weltanschauungen. This kind of pluralism necessarily ‘weakens’ and ‘lightens’ our understanding of , truth and .’1 The sense of nihilism this causes in our postmodern era impresses the idea upon us that we cannot know anything about God and true revelation, and it considers all conceptions as equally valid, as it appears that no objective, absolute truth can be found. It is often said that, because of ’s rationalism and postmodernity’s pluralism, the role of Christianity, and of all religion, is played out and that secularism will sweep the world. Indeed, religion may have left the place assigned to it by modernists (namely as offering explanations and absolute ), but that does not mean that it has nothing to say anymore. This thesis seeks to illuminate and to react to the questions springing from the issues of truth and nihilism. What is the meaning of truth in an interpretative age? Can we know true revelation? How? How to understand divine revelation in the Christian tradition? How to think of the divine in this modern interpretative era? I want to investigate how truth and revelation can be understood and how our interpretative age has something to say about the divine, or rather: how it lets the divine speak. I will make use of the theories of Heidegger (as he thinks in an a Christian way of the unification of nature and supernature and the presence and nearness of truth), of Karl Rahner and his theological response to those matters (influenced by Heidegger concerning his thinking of the openness of man to Being) and of Gianni Vattimo (who recognizes the problems of our interpretative age, but at the same time considers them to be an answer). Each of these -theologians may contribute to a better understanding of what truth is and does in a multiform reality and to an understanding of divine revelation. In line with Heidegger we will argue that religion cannot be dealt with objectively from the outside, as religion is not abstract, but has to do with concrete experiences, with “factic life experience” (a Heideggerian term, referring to actual and factual human experiences).2 Vattimo, too, argues that we have to work phenomenologically, ‘being inside a situation, facing it as someone who has a history, as someone who belongs to a community’.3 For that , the outcomes of the first part of this thesis will be illustrated in a case study, indicating what an analysis from factic life- experience (and not so much from an external, ‘objective’ angle) might contribute to theology; I will

1 T. Guarino, Vattimo and Theology. London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009, p. 26. 2 F. Vattimo, G. Groot (ed.) Een zwak geloof. Christendom voorbij de metafysica. Kampen: Agora, 2000, p. 33. 3 J. Caputo & G. Vattimo (ed. J. Robbins) After the Death of God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 29.

4 discuss literary artworks by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, as artistic expressions reflect the ideas of their time and react to them. The overall structure of the thesis takes the form of five chapters, the first three of which are concerned with the theoretical part. They present the philosophical and theological contributions of Heidegger, Rahner and Vattimo. The fourth chapter connects the theoretical and the practical part and offers an apologetic, a defense, for the final chapter. In the fourth chapter I will describe and illustrate the transition from normative to descriptive research and the alteration of tone that implies. The final chapter presents the case study that draws upon and illustrates the theories presented in the previous chapters. The conclusion, finally, gives a summary of the findings.

5 Martin Heidegger

Science is not an original happening of truth but always the cultivation of a domain of truth that has already been opened. It does this through the apprehension and confirmation of that which shows itself to be possible and necessarily correct within this sphere. If, and to the extent that, a science transcends correctness and arrives at a truth – i.e. an essential disclosure of as such – it is .4

This quote, taken from Heidegger’s lectures on art, proposes a remarkable method for scientists that are after the truth, namely to transcend correctness and realize the disclosure of beings, which makes us see truth. Heidegger encourages to be open to the event of “un-hiddenness” (Unverborgenheit) as in this event of un-hiddenness truth is disclosed – or in theological terms; truth is revealed. This unorthodox philosophy offers a way of thinking that is radically different from metaphysics, which regards truth rather as something thoroughly static. In Heidegger’s thinking, truth can never be established plainly, for it is always an event. According to Heidegger, this very event and its meaning are the ultimate things that philosophy has to question. Heidegger’s philosophy carries a theological appeal; though rejecting metaphysics, Heidegger does not discard themes like truth, transcendence, God and revelation. Rather, he understands them in a whole new way – a way that might enable theology to re-think some of its core concepts. A lot has been written about Heidegger’s relation to theology. It is my intention to find out what Heidegger can contribute to an understanding of what theologizing is, should be and should do, and to explain how he might contribute to a new perspective on theology.

§1.1 Short biography and general overview

Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in Germany into a Catholic family. After having studied theology and philosophy, he became a professor in Marburg at age 34. His main work Sein und Zeit was published in 1927. A year later, he succeeded Edmund Husserl as professor of philosophy at Freiburg University and in 1933 he became rector of that university. In the years to follow, he expressed his support for the Nazi-regime and was a member of the NSDAP, The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, from 1933 until 1945. Due to his association with the Nazi party, the French originally forbade him to teach after the war; only after a denazification process he was allowed to teach again,

4 M. Heidegger, “The origin of the work of art” in: Young, J. and Haynes, K. (eds. & transl.) Martin Heidegger. Off the Beaten Track, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.p. 37.

6 from 1950. He did so in Freiburg until 1958, having been granted emeritus status in 1951. Heidegger died in 1976. It is impossible to summarize Heidegger’s oeuvre, as it is extensive and characterized by internal changes and shifts. Among the abundance of topics, the central topics in his thinking are the meaning of Being and the foundational questions of philosophy and the sciences. Because of internal shifts, it is common to make a distinction between the early and the later Heidegger. Generally it is said that the main difference between the early and the later Heidegger lies in the stress on either (‘man’) or Being (terms to be explained afterwards) and the perspective from which to begin thinking about either of them. Heidegger’s early work is characterized by its focus on the Dasein and its consideration of Being from the perspective of Dasein, as he regards Being principally as a concern of the Dasein. Heidegger’s later work shows a change towards the centralization of Being, a change that was caused by the insight that the is part of Being itself; Being makes Dasein think about Being. In his later works this caused Heidegger to consider Being not as the horizon against which Dasein regards truth, but as in itself something active, as a process that reveals and conceals itself to Dasein. 5

§1.2 Key concepts

Heidegger’s main argument is that, from Plato, the understanding of truth has changed: the Greek truth, , meaning “unhiddenness”, has, from Platonic thinking on, become veritas, which is to be understood as something in resemblance with something else. This Roman interpretation of Greek thinking has had a deep impact. It led to aiming entirely at beings instead of the Being (with a capital B!) that lies beyond beings. As a consequence, Being has become a forgotten topic. Ever since, the qualification of the beings has been the main issue in philosophy and as a result, the attempt to comprehend the world through rationalistic constructions, such as covering over-all systems, has prevailed. The secret of the truth of Being has accordingly been neglected. According to Heidegger, Being is the happening (Geschick) that clears (lichtet) being. Being clarifies or reveals being. Being is always revealed in the world, in things, in events. Being is an event that comes to pass in man when appropriation happens (this will be explained in the following). That is why language has a decisive role for Heidegger; the task of thinking is to incite the Being to be spoken of in language and to become apparent in thinking. Language can accomplish the proximity of Being.

5 T. Sheelan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research” in Review 33 (2), 2001, p. 1-3.

7 The very hiddenness of the event (Ereignis) of Being is essential. The being-in-the-world (Dasein) of man is not a withdrawing from transcendence, but openness towards Being, because of which he is able to stand in the clearing of Being. Some beings, such as the divine, pull back from philosophical consciousness. They cannot be fixed as an available existing object; they only let themselves be suspected and imagined. Human beings can think in two ways: calculating or contemplating. The first is a thinking that ignores the clearing and the happening of Being, whereas the second recognizes Being as the nearest (in German this contemplating way of thinking is called andenken des Seins); it lets the Being claim and address the human while Being makes itself manifest. Man cannot grasp Being, for it pulls back the moment it shows itself. Furthermore, humanity is able to think the essence of Being, which is more than its natural or historical condition. Hence, thinking, which cannot be detached from thinking individuals, keeps open the clearing of Being. Thinking is in fact the thinking of Being; the essence of thinking is embraced by Being. Therefore thinking belongs to Being, listens to being and is also appropriated by Being. Men, unlike plants or animals, are clearing of Being. Man has a responsibility towards Being. He must let himself be claimed by the Being, because he is subordinate and inferior to the sending of Being.6 Being belongs in a unity with thinking, the nature of which can be derived from a letting- hearing-together (Zusammengehörenlassen) between man and Being. Human ek-sists; he stands out into the truth of being. As ek-sisting, man sustains Da-sein (literally: Being (t)here), by taking care and looking after the Da (there), which is the clearing of Being. Dasein itself is in essence thrown into Being; it ‘unfolds essentially in the throw of Being as the fateful sending’7. Man, as Dasein, is thrown by Being into the truth of Being. That way, he can protect the truth of Being in order to enable beings to appear in the light of the Being the way they are. In accordance with the advent of the fitting of his essence, man must take care of Being. In that sense, man is the shepherd – instead of the lord – of Being.8

§1.3 Heidegger and metaphysics

Heidegger is famous for his opposition to metaphysics, which according to him has become the mainstream way of thinking nowadays. Heidegger understands metaphysics historically, namely as

6 Obviously the differences between the early and the later Heidegger as mentioned in the previous paragraph hinge on the subtle prevailing of either Being or Dasein or of the preference for the one as a starting point, source or origin over the other. 7 M. Heidegger, Letter on 'Humanism', Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 231. 8 C. Bremmers, Overgankelijkheid. Heideggers ontwerp van een fundamentele ontologie en de kwestie van de ethiek, Leende: Damon, 2000, 228-230.

8 the basis position under which people have encountered their and still do. All further historical developments, political, cultural, scientific and societal, are to be understood as derivatives of this metaphysical basis position. Modern metaphysics is connected to science, that imposes its a priori’s on the appearing reality, that only has in mind what from its very own perspective could reasonably appear. Thus, it is inwardly bound. The metaphysical basis position is the root of the modern world view; the foundational principle of modern society. Theology has suffered from this, too, according to Heidegger.9 It is important to understand how Heidegger’s philosophy relates to the more familiar metaphysical concepts of transcendence and how it relates to the ideas of the Christian tradition. In short, the difference comes down to the observation that metaphysics is concerned with the beings that are, whereas Heidegger is concerned with the ontological question what being is, what Being lies behind, or within, all beings.10 Heidegger calls the differentiation between being and Being the ontological difference. The Being of the beings that are is, according to Heidegger, the forgotten ground of metaphysics. ‘Metaphysics does not ask about the truth of Being itself. Nor does it therefore ask in what way the essence of man belongs to the truth of Being.’11 Heidegger’s aim is to rehabilitate the Being of beings. According to Heidegger, the reason Western metaphysical philosophy is marked by oblivion of Being12, is that, due to a viewpoint related to , man tends to understand everything as being that is tangibly present in the world.13 Heidegger is both a phenomenologist and an ontologist; phenomenology means the logos of what lets exactly that be seen which primarily tends to hide itself, to remain concealed behind what is overtly manifest. means the logos of what lets being itself be seen, that Being which is covertly revealed in beings, which are what is primarily accessible.14 Heidegger famously said ‘Es gibt das Sein’ (instead of ‘Das Sein ist’), which stresses that Being ‘precences’ or ‘lets present’; that beings are granted presence by Being. From this follows that the

9 H. van Veghel, Op goddelijke grond. Heidegger over de theologische fundering van de filosofie. Best: Damon, 1999, p. 81, 85. 10 A. Murphie and J. Potts, Culture and technology, New York: Palgrave, 2003, p. 163 11 M. Heidegger, Over het humanisme (translation by C. Bremmers), Leende: Damon, 2005, p. 226. 12 John Caputo (Caputo, J.D., Heidegger and Aquinas. An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982, p. 143-145) argues how among others Aquinas made a distinction between Being and the beings in his esse-ens distinction. The difference between Aquinas and Heidegger is that Heidegger’s Sein is not subsistent and Aquinas’ is: Being never “is” (west) without beings, whereas Aquinas’ esse is. If the esse were related to the ens in Aquinas the way in which the Sein is related to seienden in Heidegger, ‘then either Heidegger would have hypostasized Being, which he has not, or Aquinas would be a pantheist, which he is not.’ If Being is taken as something subsistent, then in Heidegger’s eyes we would have made the error of reducing presence itself (Anwesen) to something present (Anwesendes). The conception of a subsistent Being, of Being itself subsisting through itself, does not fit into Heidegger’s categories, for it is not what he means by Being (Sein), being-ness (seiendheid) or beings (Seienden). 13 Caputo, “Heidegger and Aquinas”, p. 149-151. 14 J. Caputo, Radical . Repetition, and the Hermeneutic Project. Indianapolis/Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987, p. 63.

9 distinction between Being and beings is the distinction between letting-presence and what is present. Letting-presence means bestowing presence, bringing something in the open, the realm of the unconcealed. The task of thinking is to ‘de-construct’ or dismantle the structure of self- concealments, to find the original giving which grants presence, the original sending which sends Being as presence. One can then ask: if Being is given, from what source is it granted? Heidegger explains that Being is also sent into its own as presence, and time into its own as the temporal clearing, by the process of Zueignen, appropriating. This process is called Ereignis, event of appropriation. It is the event of appropriation which holds the two Sachen, time and Being, together in the unity of a single state-of-affairs.15 It is the dif-fering in the dif-ference, that whose harmony with difference yields the metaphysical difference between Being and beings, between esse and ens.16 When it comes to truth, metaphysics asserts identity, fixation and construction, whereas Heidegger asserts difference, fluidity and deconstruction. This results in two very different truth conceptions. According to Heidegger, the disclosure of truth is the event of openness. This event is a revelation, an un-hiding of truth. The un-hiddenness is the essence and the dynamic of truth. In metaphysics this position is impossible to maintain, for truth is regarded as something thoroughly static and fixed. In Heidegger’s thinking on the contrary, Being and truth can never be established plainly, for they are an event. Being is an event that man, in temporality, has to interpret when truth clears. For Heidegger, this event of intelligibility is the ultimate thing philosophy has to question. In his opinion this is in fact the first a priori, the base of everything in and concerning the world, and thus the most obvious fact of all. Heidegger’s criticism is mainly aimed at metaphysical methodology. In Heidegger’s philosophy, as well as in metaphysics, being is a central topic. The approach of the issue is however very different: metaphysics is in search of a highest being, something that is. Heidegger, on the contrary, wants to pose the question concerning the sense of the Being. He is convinced that he is the first to discuss this matter adequately. The question about the ground of beings (as is also posed in metaphysics) is fundamentally the question of the Being of beings. What philosophy actually seeks is, according to Heidegger, the transcendental background, which allows the instant presence of beings to take place and to ‘happen’ in the foreground. Whereas Being is often situated in a transcendental realm – where it is regarded as the ground of all other beings – it is according to Heidegger impossible to claim that Being is in the same way a thing in the world is. Being is not a thing, Heidegger says. Rather it should be considered as the happening, the occurring of beings.

15 Caputo, “Heidegger and Aquinas”, p. 169-172. 16 Ibidem, p. 167-168.

10 Another major difference between metaphysics and Heidegger is the relation between existence – in contrast with ek-sistence – and essence. First an explanation of Heidegger’s interpretation of these words; ek-sistence is that in which the essence of man preserves the source that determines him. The essence of Dasein lies in its existence, for man occurs essentially as the ‘there’ (Da) that is, the clearing of Being. The Being of the Da has the nature of ek-sistence (an involvement in the truth of Being).17 The differentiation between essentia and existentia made in metaphysics might be a sign of forgetfulness of Being. Concealed in its essential provenance, the differentiation of essentia and existentia completely dominates the destiny of Western history and of all history determined by Europe.18

§1.4 Heidegger on God

In response to the question, ‘what could change the current state of the world?’ Heidegger once said in an interview with Der Spiegel ‘only a god can save us’.19 Not the individual, not philosophy, not any kind of purely human reflection and endeavour, but only a god can save us. It is our task to prepare for either the appearance or the absence of this god and to wait. We cannot establish it by our thinking. It is the preparing for the absence or presence that matters, not the belief in either God’s presence or absence. Heidegger feels that the kind of thinking he tries to awaken, might at least help us prepare ourselves for our times. He argues that thinking is not inactivity – rather it is itself by its very nature an engagement that stands in dialogue with the epochal moment of the world. The consideration of the world as historical is a thoroughly Christian attitude as well. ‘Making [ourselves] ready for the aforementioned readiness involves reflecting on what in our own day … is.’20 In his philosophy, Heidegger comes to speak of God sometimes, too, but in a rather different way than the Christian tradition does. First and foremost, Heidegger states that God is not Being, but that God is at home in the transcendence of Being. Being is not what is highest, but what is nearest, the nearness of Being in us, which is nearer than all entities. He then argues that the question of God should not be posed at all. We cannot say of God that he exists in the way a rock, tree, house or angel exists. Therefore, it is better to refrain from naming God.21 Fritz Joachim von Rintelen makes an illuminating attempt to explain what God is to Heidegger, namely the form of ultimate validity that

17 M. Heidegger, Letter on 'Humanism', Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 228-229. 18 Ibidem, pp. 232. 19 M. Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten” in Der Spiegel 30 (1976): 193-219. Trans. by W. Richardson as “Only a God Can Save Us” in Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (1981), ed. T. Sheehan, pp. 45- 67. 20 Heidegger, “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten”, p. 66. 21 E.R. Babor, “God must remain mysterious: Heidegger, a strange sort of ‘theologian’” in Kinaadman, an interdisciplinary research journal 19 (2), 2008.

11 does not surpass our finite sphere, such as appears in the poetry of Hölderlin, too.22 So Heidegger does not come to speak of God as theology does, as in Heidegger’s eyes God is not absolute and not knowable. As Being is always the Being of beings, Being is not the cause of beings, Heidegger stresses. Therefore he quite overtly rejects the idea that God, or a certain understanding of God, is Being. Thoughts that equate God with his Being claim that his existence is his essence. Heidegger’s ontological difference makes clear however that being is not the same as Being, also and above all regarding God; if everything would be created by God, then God is Being itself, while everything created by him would be being. The ontological difference would fall away. Conceiving God as Being is problematic in Heidegger’s eyes for the same metaphysics is problematic: it fails to notice the Being of beings. Heidegger is clear that God as Christians conceive him cannot be equalized with Being; Being manifests in time and hiddenness, it clears every now and then and has no face. In his treatise on ‘the holy’, ‘the gods’, ‘the divineness’ and ‘God’ (which are different contexts in which Being clears) the question of the existence of any given being is regarded as an ontic matter; an ontological question on the contrary, is asked in search of the possibility of any being (whether it be God, love, art, or the like). Heidegger thinks of beings more primordially than metaphysics usually does, namely starting from thinking the thinking that thinks the truth of Being.23 Out of this truth of Being, one can think the very essence of ‘the holy’. The essence of the holy leads to the thinking of the essence of the divineness and only from the thinking of the essence of the divine is it possible to think the essence of God.24 Thus Heidegger shows the grounds on which the holy, the divine and God can be thought. These grounds, as well as all beings, can only be realized by human thinking and understanding. In so doing, man has a relation with being, and so does he with God. The being-in-the-world of man is not a withdrawing from transcendence, but an openness towards Being, because of which he is able to stand in the clearing of Being. Some beings such as the divine and God, pull back from philosophical consciousness. They cannot be fixed as an available existing object; they only let themselves be suspected and imagined. Rejecting the metaphysical idea of transcendence as an infinite object, Heidegger has a finite transcendence in mind. As we have seen before, man, as Dasein, does relate to the mystery in his expecting attitude. He relates to God ‘in the depths of the recesses of his divine mystery. In this abyss of mystery Dasein must not take God to be a being or a non-being, least he confronts God as an

22 F.J. von Rintelen, Beyond . London: George Allen and Unvin, Ltd., 1961, p. 169. 23 Again, this is a matter on which the early and the later Heidegger disagree: the early Heidegger stresses Dasein’s thinking and Being’s being thought of wheareas the later Heidegger stresses Being’s letting-think, bestowing thinking on the Dasein. 24 Heidegger, Letter on 'Humanism', p. 101 and further.

12 object of intellection.’25 In short; transcendence for Heidegger is not the grasping of Being, it is the disclosure of being, causing phenomenological truth. God is not transcendent, God is the mystery.

§1.5 Heidegger on Christianity

Now that we have elaborated on Heidegger’s ideas about God and truth, we will elaborate on how they relate to those of Christianity. It is often thought, also by Heidegger himself, that Christianity considers God in an imagining way and tries to fix him and regard him as a highest . Truth is regarded as a divine message, revealing the absolute that has been present ever since God gave it to us, i.e. ever since it was revealed. This not only leads to an objectification of God, but also to de- divining – ‘the waning of gods’, as God and the divine are no longer part of man’s experience. The understanding of truth Heidegger introduces as opposing metaphysics and Christianity, says that truth is not present in a fixed sense, but that it un-conceals itself as un-hidden, as aletheia. By the end of this chapter, I hope to have made clear that Heidegger’s ideas about Christianity’s beliefs might be mistaken and moreover; that he shares some main aspects about truth with Christianity. In 1995 The Phenomenology of Religious Life came out as Volume 60 of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. They contain the lectures that Heidegger gave as a lecturer at Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1920/21 and the summer semester of 1921. He notes that ‘the interest in the philosophy of religion is increasing. Even women write of religion and philosophers who wish to be taken seriously welcome them as the most important appearances in decades!’26 The lectures were published in their entirety, together with the draft of a lecture series prepared in 1918/19 that he would never deliver. The latter concerns the philosophical foundations of mediaeval mysticism, whereas the former partly deals with Augustine and neo-Platonism, and partly constitutes what Heidegger called an introduction to the phenomenology of religion. In The Phenomenology of religious life, Heidegger argues how philosophy arises from, as Heidegger calls it, factical life experience (actual, factual life experience). The concept of factical life experience is fundamental. The designation of philosophy as cognitive, rational comportment says nothing at all; with this designation, one falls prey to the ideal of science, thus obscuring precisely the main difficulty.27 Factical life experience gives rise to actually meaningful considerations. The same holds true for theology; so factical life experience should be at the core of any theology.

25 Babor, “God must remain mysterious”, p. 9. 26 M. Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life. (translated by M. Fritsch and J. Gosetti-Ferencei), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. (Orig.: Heidegger, M. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Gesamtausgabe, 60, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio, 1995), p. 14. 27 Ibidem, p. 6-7.

13 In criticizing Christianity, Heidegger stresses its metaphysical grounds. ‘The historical context (…) is the most inappropriate ground for the problem “Greek antiquity and Christianity”, once the problem has been admitted. Firstly, because the Christianity into which Augustine grows, is already entirely permeated by what is Greek, and secondly, because what is Greek in Neo-Platonism has already been subjected to a Hellenization and orientalization, if not also, to a Christianization.’28 He further explains what is at stake here: ‘In the objective form of Greek metaphysics and cosmology lies the problem of the meaning of object-theoretical, material science; and the question of the inner experience and the essence of factical connection harbours a much more radical phenomenon; factical life, and, above all, the relationship between the one and the other is different from a penetration of one into the other or, to put it positively, the epistemological foundation of the former (science) in and from the latter (inner experience).’29 Heidegger once wrote in a letter that neither Christianity nor metaphysics, but actually the system of Catholicism had become unacceptable to him. The Ur-christentum (the apostolic age, primeval Christianity) on the contrary did not seem unacceptable or problematic to him at all, for it was still undogmatic.30 Heidegger’s main problem with Christianity was its seizing of platonic philosophy throughout the first centuries, which caused the doctrine of two worlds; on the one hand there is the changeable world, accessible to the senses – on the other hand there is the transcendental, unchangeable world, the jenseits, of which we can only know something in dogmas. Accordingly, Heidegger basically blames Christianity of appropriating truth and . In his lectures Heidegger indicates that the distortion of the Christian manner of life by Greek thought has relevance not only when considering the past development of Christian theology but also with respect to present philosophy and what it has to say about human life: the eschatological perspective in Christianity had already grown faint by the end of the first century. One failed in later times to correctly identify all originally Christian concepts. In , too, the Christian conceptual formations remain hidden behind the Greek attitude.31 In the Freiburger lecture Einführung in die Metaphysik, Heidegger describes his problems with metaphysical Christianity in one sentence: Christianity changes the Being of the being into the being-created of the being; it identifies being with being-created (‘das Christentum deutet das Sein des Seienden zum Geschaffensein um’32). Being becomes the creaturely origin of all beings, the

28 Ibidem, p. 123. 29 Ibidem, p. 124. 30 P. Brkic, Martin Heidegger und die Theologie. Ein Thema in driefacher Fragestellung. Mainz: Gruenewald, 1994, p. 50-51. 31 B. Elliott, ‘Existential Scepticism and Christian Life in Early Heidegger’ in The Heythrop Journal 45 (3), 2004, p. 273. 32 M. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik (Sommersemester 1935). Frankfurt a.M: Klostermann, volume 40 (ed. by P. Jaeger), 1983, p. 202.

14 personal God, the creator. All that is not God, is created. In Christianity, the way to gain knowledge about the Being has become to collect and preserve doctrines about revelation. Actual truth is only announced in dogmas. Hence, truth has the character of a doctrine. Heidegger obviously does not agree with this. The German Christianity Heidegger was familiar with, left no room for lived faith, in his eyes, and therefore he deemed this Christianity lacking spiritual seriousness and power. He believed the Italian Christianity of his times to be different, however.33 In the context of this lived faith Heidegger stresses the importance of actual participation of the believer in the event of revelation, and as an event of revelation he particularly mentions the crucified God. The believers must participate in the happening of revelation (Offenbarungsgeschehen), which is only to be accomplished in existing and faith. In his faithful existence, the faithful is born again. The actual meaning of faith is conversion in its most extreme form, namely re-birth.34 According to Heidegger, the object, the positum, of theology is being Christian, which is grounded in belief. Belief is a way of existing. Philosophy’s task is to lead the research of basic principles and axioms. Heidegger argued how theology is in search of an original explanation of the Being of man for God, which is to be derived from the sense of belief itself – that its dogmatic systematics rest on a foundation that is not the believer himself.35 Heidegger said that all theology is onto-theology. By claiming that being is, because it is created by God, it makes the question concerning the Being of the beings redundant.

The one to whom for example the bible is divine revelation and truth, he has already got the answer to the question “why is there something and not nothing” before posing it: Being, insofar it is not God, is created by God. Whoever founds his faith on that belief, can indeed ask our question, but he cannot actually pose it without giving up himself as a believer. He can only pretend…36

§1.6 Heidegger on religious life

In his lectures on religious life, Heidegger stresses the original importance of the authentic experience of concrete existence in radical change, the Christian conversion. In Heidegger’s eyes, this

33 P. Brkic, Martin Heidegger und die Theologie. Ein Thema in driefacher Fragestellung. Mainz: Gruenewald, 1994, p. 62. 34 Ibidem, p. 69-70. “Dieses nur im Existieren vollzogenen Teil-nehmen ist aber als solches immer nur als Glauben durch den Glauben gegeben.” 35 H. van Veghel, Op goddelijke grond. Heidegger over de theologische fundering van de filosofie. Best: Damon, 1999, p. 89. 36 Quote from Einführung in die Metaphysik, taken from H. van Veghel, Op goddelijke grond, p. 292.

15 ‘does not affect the reality of the world around us, but rather how we relate to that world. In holding open the possibility of radical transformation, Christian life grasps human existence as a fundamental potential for becoming other than one is.’37 As said before, Heidegger states that in order to gain insight in primordial Christian religiosity one need not study the history of Christianity but rather the and historicity of life experience. Factical life experience is historical. In his lectures on the phenomenology of religious life, Heidegger interprets some of the Pauline letters. In those lectures, he claims that philosophy is attainable only through a foregoing ‘authentic transformation’. When he interprets 1 Thessalonians he mentions the absolute turning toward God. According to Heidegger, knowledge of such change (Gewordensein) is the beginning and end of theology.38 Heidegger relates this Christian consciousness of the phenomenon of radical change to temporality; he regards time as a measure of change. Repeatedly Heidegger declares that ‘Christian experience lives time itself’39. Historical temporality exists of self-questionability and change. Paul’s attitude towards time is an attitude of concern for the return of Christ. This is an attitude that goes against the general tendency of human life to content itself (Selbgenügsamkeit) with the immediate necessities of the immediate world.40 In this attitude, we recognize a concern for what is not familiar, a permanent uneasiness with the familiar. ‘For Christian life there is no security. Constant uncertainty is also what is characteristic for the basic significances of factical life. What is uncertain is not accidental but necessary.’41 For Heidegger, this uncertainty marks the authenticity of Christian life. Heidegger argues that the waiting for the return of Christ is a way of living in each moment, of living the moment as an authentically meaningful opening of existence. As Heidegger remarks: ‘The structure of Christian hope, which in truth has the sense of relating to parousia, is radically different from all expectation.’42 The urgency of the uncertain hoping of Christian life is not a waiting for something to happen (then it would be reckonable), but, by contrast, for the Christian ‘everything turns on something quite beyond the measure of the individual’s anticipatory control, that is, on the beginning of a new phase of human life with the reappearance of Christ. To live as a Christian is to grasp each moment as the possibility of such a representation of the divine’43. In Heidegger’s words:

37 B. Elliott, “Existential Scepticism and Christian Life in Early Heidegger” in The Heythrop Journal 45 (3), 2004, p. 275. 38 Heidegger, M. Phenomenology of Religious Life. (translated by M. Fritsch and J. Gosetti-Ferencei), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. (Orig.: Heidegger, M. Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens. Gesamtausgabe, 60, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio, 1995), p 10, 95. 39 Heidegger, The phenomenology of religious life, p. 82. 40 Elliott, “Existential Scepticism and Christian Life in Early Heidegger”, p. 280. 41 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of religious life, p. 105. 42 Ibidem, p. 102. 43 Elliott, “Existential Scepticism and Christian Life in Early Heidegger”, p. 282.

16 ‘For the Christian only the now relating to the context of realization (Vollzugszusammenhang) in which he is actually situated can be decisive, not however the expectation of an isolated event which is situated in future time.’44 The Christian considers himself in need of radical change, a need that is felt from a sentiment of guilt. This need causes the possibility to remain open to salvation, which can only come from God, in the return of Christ in the world. Heidegger stresses how different this attitude is from the general tendency to regard the familiar things of the world that are at hand as controllable and able to be appropriated. The concern for what is at hand ‘constitutes a form of life that realizes each moment not in relation to a basic possibility of becoming but rather as a “pre-conception” of what is actual. Absorption in the actual turns one away from the needfulness of human life and attempts to cover over the uncertainty of its contingent state of being.’45 The authenticity of the Christian understanding of temporality is to be explained from the disposition of the need of salvation. This is characterized by radical uncertainty; an uncertainty that has nothing to do with what is going on in the world and in daily life, but that has to do with the own existence as such. The Christian sense of life does not rely on the actual realization of the radical change. Rather, its temporality is lived as ‘deferred presence’46. Heidegger blames Christianity to have lost the aforementioned concepts. As soon as the eschatological interest had decreased by the end of the first century, Christianity was reshaped by Greek neo-Platonic thinking. The experience of oneself-in-need is inherent to Christianity, Heidegger argues: ‘Experiencing is an absolute urgency (Bedrängnis) which belongs to the life of the Christian himself. Accepting is a placing-oneself-in-need (Not). This urgency is a basic characteristic, it is an absolute concern (Bekümmerung) in the horizon of parousia, of finite return.’47 And: ‘For the Christian only the now relating to the context of realization (Vollzugszusammenhang) in which he is actually situated can be decisive, not however the expectation of an isolated event which is situated in future time.’48 The central experience in Paul’s letters is, according to Heidegger, the experience of Gewordensein, ‘having-become’, of which both Paul and his addressees have knowledge. When Paul repeatedly mentions ‘what the Christians have already become’, he is not referring to a completed event that happened in the past. On the contrary, their present being is their very Gewordensein, which is not the recognition of the being that is at hand in the world, but rather a being that finds itself in the factical life situation. The experience of having-become of the Thessalonians can be

44 Heidegger, The phenomenology of religious life, p. 114. 45 Elliott, “Existential Scepticism and Christian Life in Early Heidegger”, p. 286. 46 Ibidem, p. 287. 47 Ibidem, p. 297-298. 48 Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, p. 114.

17 explained by the gift they experienced; they encountered the world with both suffering and joy. The joy they experienced is the gift, something that cannot be motivated by their own experiences.49 Knowledge of life is made accessible through the absolute conversion to God, which is a conversion that demands that one constantly assimilates and relates to the given circumstances of life. The basic experience expressed in ancient Greek thought is an anticipatory grasping of sameness, a manner of relating to human life that understands everything as already given or fully actual, whereas the neo-Platonist Christian thought has a more directional sense of existence as future possibility. Heidegger regards this to be a historical opposition that cannot be synthesized.50 In discussing some of Paul’s letters, Heidegger makes clear that the religiosity in the apostolic age was centered around the question of ”what does it mean to exist?” - A thoroughly ontological question.

Heidegger never intended to present a God. As far as there is something like an Heideggerian God, it is a being, bound to time and to change. Yet, Heidegger did present a philosophical justification for our belief that we have means to have an idea of God (hence his quote ‘only a God can save us’). One could say Heidegger’s God is a God of hope, not a God of certainty.

§1.7 Heidegger’s reception

By and large four tendencies can be discerned in the reception of Heidegger’s thinking.51 Firstly, there are the ultra-orthodox, who pretend to work and think completely in Heidegger’s spirit. Then, there are the orthodox, who try to do justice to Heidegger by reading all of his works and trying to logically reconcile all of it. Thirdly, the liberal-assimilationists try to do justice to Heidegger as well by reading his works. They bring his works into dialogue with others and where necessary they adjust his thinking to new insights. Lastly there are the rejectionists who attack Heidegger, often armed with his own thinking. Heidegger’s thinking in the strictest, most orthodox, sense seems incompatible with theological thinking – Heidegger himself was the first to make clear that his thought was not theological: he particularly stressed that Being is not equal to God, that there is no fixed ground; he unmasked all theology as onto-theology and blamed it for avoiding the question of Being, as it regards Being as either being-created or God himself as knowable object. Nevertheless, there is a long and extended tradition of theological appropriation of Heidegger by what we have just called

49 Ibidem, p. 66. 50 Elliott, “Existential Scepticism and Christian Life in Early Heidegger”, p. 276. 51 T. Sheelan, “A Paradigm Shift in Heidegger Research” in Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2), 2001, p. 2-3.

18 liberal-assimilationists. Some theologians in favor of Heidegger say that we should at least consider the mystical aspect of Heidegger’s thought. Other theologians under the spell of Heidegger even argue that the language Heidegger uses can be traced back to the tradition of negative theology and that Heidegger might just be the most negative of negative theologians. (Negative theology deconstructs itself while it is put to paper, believing that God is ultimately other and thus unthinkable by human beings – Heidegger has been said to have done this in the most extreme form, namely without even mentioning God.) In between those understandings of Heidegger are those who have tried to incorporate some of Heidegger’s main concepts into their theologies. An example of that is what Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling and Eberhard Jüngel have done; in a Heideggerian way of thinking each of them stressed that revelation should be regarded as an event that overcomes the reader or hearer of the Biblical text. Anyhow, Heidegger’s thinking has not been left unnoticed by theologians – on the contrary. Heidegger himself has said a few things about his thinking in relation to theology, too. When comparing theology and philosophy in Phenomenology and theology, he uttered that he regards theology as a positive science and that it is as such very different from philosophy. ‘A positive science is the founding disclosure of a being that is given and in some way already disclosed.’52 In theology this disclosed being is faith. ‘The object of theology is the all-inclusive relationship of God to man and of man to God… [Thus] theology itself is founded primarily by faith.’53 Heidegger here links theology to metaphysics and blames both disciplines for forgetting the primordial essence of unconcealment and securing Being as a constantly present object secured in an ultimate ground and highest value.54 Heidegger understands the concept of transcendence therefore not theologically, but philosophically. Despite his statement ‘it must be said that I am not a philosopher (…) I am a Christian theologian’55 in a letter to Löwith in 1921 (quoted by Gadamer), Heidegger is aware of the distinction he consequently makes between the God of the Bible and the God of philosophy. Even though Heidegger’s thinking has a problematic relation to theology, there have been many theologians influenced by Heidegger. When it comes to the question of divine revelation and the multiplicity of interpretations, the most notable Heidegger influences are found in the works of Karl Rahner (claiming that the human spirit is already in advance directed at God) and in the works of Gianni Vattimo (arguing that the self-emptying of God has inevitably led to a proliferation of

52 M. Heidegger, “Phenomenology and Theology.” Trans. By James G. Hart and John C. Maraldo in Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks. Edited by William Mcneill. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998, p. 43. 53 F.J. von Rintelen, Beyond Existentialism. London: George Allen and Unvin, 1961, p. 49. 54 M. Heidegger, Identity and Difference. Trans. By . New York: Harper and Row, 1969, p.701. 55 G.-G. Gadamer, Heidegger’s ways. Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1994 (transl. J. W. Stanley), p. 170.

19 interpretations, that should be celebrated). We will discuss their theologies in the following, so as to come to a theological perspective on the problems Heidegger posed.

20 Karl Rahner S.J.

Heidegger articulated what is at stake in modernity: due to the prevailing of metaphysics, its distinction between nature and supernature and its objectifying thinking, we have lost a sense of Being and we are condemned to interpret reality rather than to experience it. These observations appeal to theology for a reconsideration of theological thinking about the distinction between nature and supernature and about the possibility of knowing of God in an interpretative era. One of the most famous theologians influenced by Heidegger is Karl Rahner, who studied philosophy with Heidegger in Freiburg. Already in his philosophy dissertation Geist in Welt (in which Aquinas’s epistemology, Maréchal’s Thomism and the existentialism of Martin Heidegger come together) Rahner addressed the theme that set the ground for his later work: anthropological metaphysics; a philosophy that starts from the understanding of the human being, the Dasein. It is about the metaphysics of human knowledge. His second work, Hörer des Wortes (which consists of an edited version of his lectures on the foundations of a philosophy of religion), presents a philosophy of religion and is again a mix of Thomistic metaphysics and early Heideggerian phenomenological ontology. Rahner’s theological stance comes forth from the concepts developed in these philosophical-theological works and has been written down more comprehensively in his Grundkurs des Glaubens.

§2.1 Rahner’s anthropocentric theology

Karl Rahner was born in 1904 in Freiburg, Germany. At age 18 he entered the Society of Jesus and started studying philosophy and after that theology as well, which was the normal thing to do for seminarians. Rahner’s special interest in philosophy appears from the fact that he became a doctoral candidate in philosophy; he wrote his dissertation (afterwards published as Geist in Welt (1939)) on Thomas Aquinas. Rahner’s theology has been of major influence on the Second Vatican Council, during which he was appointed as peritus; expert. Rahner taught his whole life. He died in 1984. Having been his student for several years, Rahner acknowledges that the early Heidegger has been of great influence and that he particularly taught him a great deal about interpreting texts and seeing connections that are not directly obvious.56 Besides, Heidegger’s thinking has caused him to

56 Note that Rahner is influenced by the early Heidegger, as he was a student of his in the 1930s. After that, Rahner went his own way and after the Second World War Heidegger stopped teaching for a while. Rahner consequently did not take up the shifts and struggles in Heidegger’s whole oeuvre, as they only appeared after the 1950s.

21 introduce modern problems in theology.57 At the same time, Rahner is aware of the non-theological, or perhaps anti-theological, thinking that Heidegger might give rise to:

Im Grund ist [Heideggers Philosophie] eine transzendentale Analytik des konkreten Menschen, des Daseins, eine Analytik, die als Grundlage einer Ontologie dient, d.h., die zum Ziel hat, eine treffende Untersuchung des Seins zu ermöglichen; im Lauf ihrer Entwicklung legt sie dieses Dasein aus: In-der-Welt-sein, In-der-Zeit-sein, Endlichkeit; die Transzendenz, die Stütze seines Tuns und seines Denkens, hat als letzten Horizont das Nichts; - welche Antwort wird sie, zu ihrem Abschluss gekommen, auf die Frage nach dem Sein geben? [...] Wenn radikaler Atheismus – wie zu fürchten – das letzte Wort dieser Anthropologie ist, muss Endlichkeit, Nichts auch das letzte Wort der Künftigen Ontologie sein.58

Aware of the atheistic ideas that Heidegger’s philosophy might favor, Rahner takes a different path and formulates alternative possibilities for a philosophical anthropology based on Heidegger’s thinking about the Dasein. The fundamental shift in theology that Rahner caused is in large part the result of his anthropocentric thinking. In brief, his argumentation is as follows: human beings are by nature questioning beings. Man tends to ask about everything and in doing so, he starts from ‘nothing’. Yet, this ‘nothing’ cannot be a blank ‘nothing’ that man can fill as he wishes, since he is preordained to ask about the Being on the whole, the ‘Sein im Ganzen’, the Being that lies beyond our finitude.59 It thus appears, Rahner argues, that our human spirit is created with an inherent direction towards the absolute Being, towards God. We do not experience our openness towards the infinite per se, but rather as a Befindlichkeit; a natural mood, or situatedness, which we do not consider since it is natural to our being. As such, God is das heilige Geheimnis – a Geheimnis, however, that we can know of. The ability of man to ‘know’ depends upon a priori metaphysical conditions, the incarnate spirit; the Geist in Welt. Rahner not only believes that God is the creator of beings, but also that he wants to make himself known and make us desire unity with others and above all with God. The human spirit has a preapprehension (Vorgriff), an a priori transcendental openness towards being; this supernatural existential makes us long for God so that we might become Hörer des Wortes. This reasoning clearly shows how Rahner is influenced by Heidegger, who argues that the being-in-the-

57 A. Raffelt and H. Verweyen Karl Rahner. München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1997, p. 28-29. 58 K. Rahner, Sämtliche Werken, p. 344f, cited in Raffelt and Verweyen Karl Rahner. München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1997, p. 30. 59 A. Raffelt and H. Verweyen, Karl Rahner. München: C.H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1997, p. 35: 'Wenn der Mensch nach allem zu fragen wagt, geht er von ‘nichts’ aus. Und doch kann dieses nichts nicht eine Leere sein, die der Mensch nach Laune und Willkür füllen, von der aus er hinschweifen könnte, wohin es ihm beliebte. Denn es ist ihm aufgegeben, nach dem Sein im Ganzen zu fragen.’

22 world of man is an openness towards Being, and that Dasein stands out into the truth of being; Rahner shares with Heidegger the notion of man being able to grasp the meaning of being because of its ‘immediateness’. Heidegger rejects the idea of a presupposition-less understanding of interpretation and celebrates its immediacy and natural nearness. In an analogous way, Rahner argues that humans have a preconceptual grasp of the divine. Let us clarify Rahner’s line of thought by the reasoning he sets up in his first two books: Geist in Welt and Hörer des Wortes. Rahner starts his reasoning with what is, according to both him and Heidegger, the most fundamental question; namely, the conscious human being asking for the meaning of Being. In Geist in Welt he elaborates on this, questioning the a priori conditions for this consciousness of the human being. Following Aquinas, Rahner argues that we cannot know pure Being through our senses. The conscious human being is aware of himself; he knows himself as a spiritual subject. His knowing is only possible as he conceives himself as the subject with respect to the objects that are ‘being known’, that are passive to the knower. How then, Rahner asks, can man be conscious of ‘the absolute’ that is according to him inherent to the question about the meaning of Being? After all, this absolute cannot be known objectively. Rahner argues that the absolute is grasped by the human spirit, the Geist in Welt, as the real condition of the a priori drive to know and to perfect oneself. This grasp enables our intellect to judge everything in the light of the absolute. Not the individual knowledge of things through our senses enables knowledge of the beyond – quite the opposite; the knowing subject already has a natural predisposition towards the beyond: ‘jede Einzelerkenntnis ist einen Dynamismus des Geistes hineingenommen, der über den Bereich der sinnlichen Anschauung hinausgreift, so sehr er auch an diese gebunden bleibt.’60 Thus, with Rahner, we are in some respect back at metaphysics; man’s intellect is a priori given a supernatural device, with which he can intellectually grasp the absolute, which is the condition for all knowledge. The drive a philosopher experiences in his quest for knowledge and the absolute can only by theology be exposed as actually a supernatural drive. This does not mean that we all need to be theologians in order to judge or understand God’s message as actually God’s message. Rather, it means that we may find ourselves to be directed at the absolute, if only we are open to it:

Unsere Frage geht also von vornherein nicht auf den Menschen als wirklichen Theologen, sondern auf den Menschen als das Seiende, zu dessen Wesensmöglichkeiten es gehört Theologe zu werden, wenn die freie, unberechenbare Botschaft Gottes an ihn ergeht und ihm

60 Ibidem, p. 40.

23 durch die Gnade deren geschichtliche “Erscheinung” im Wort auch erst das volle Hören können gewahrt.61

Hence the difference between Rahner and Heidegger: whereas Heidegger would argue that there is no existential distinction between the knowing subject and the object being known – since the knowing Da-sein is always already essentially in the world – Rahner states that Dasein’s being in the world is in itself made possible because of a pre-consciousness of the absolute. A major difference between the two lies in their thinking about Being. According to Heidegger, Being is an event and most certainly not a static ground. According to Rahner, on the contrary, God is the absolute and the ground of all beings and all knowing of beings. He says:

Gott bezeichnet für das metaphysische Erkennen vielmehr den absoluten Grund der Seienden und der Seinserkentnis, der immer schon eröffnet is, wenn der Mensch nach einem Seienden als solchem fragt, der aber auch immer nur als ungegenständlicher Grund des Seienden gekannt wird.62

Yet, Rahner does maintain that God is a mystery and as such incomprehensible and impenetrable. Man can know God to the extent of God’s self-communication. This is what Rahner comes to speak of in Hörer des Wortes. The metaphysical structure of man makes it possible for him to receive God’s revelation, which needs to be perceptible in space and time. God’s word is necessarily historical (geschichtlich)63:

Die konkrete Offenbarung erscheint doch wesentlich als geschichtlicher, nicht immer und überall beliebig antreffbarer Vorgang. Sie hängt in ihrer Tatsache und ihrer Eigenart unablösbar an einmaligen geschichtlichen Vorgängen, in Denen das Wort Gottes, sich bezeugend, auf den Menschen auftrifft.64

A metaphysics that acknowledges man as essentially historical brings forth a philosophy of religion that “from below” can be the only ground for theology.65 What Rahner is saying is that from his idea of metaphysics a philosophy of religion arises that grounds theology. This philosophy of religion starts with the metaphysically assumed human disposition towards the divine and a theology

61 K. Rahner, Hörer des Wortes. Zur Grundlegung einer Religionsphilosophie. München: Kösel-Verlag, 1963, p. 22. 62 Ibidem, p. 19. 63 Mind the difference between geschichtlich and historisch. 64 Rahner, Hörer des Wortes, p. 24. 65 Ibidem, p. 26.

24 systematically responding to the divine and the divine message. The metaphysical idea of the human outlook towards God springs from every man’s questioning of being, that is accompanied by a certain knowing of Being. In Rahner’s words: ‘Immer ist mit menschlichem Denken ein unausdrückliches Wissen um Sein als die Bedingung jeder Erkenntsnis des einzelnen Seienden mitgewusst. Damit ist aber einschlussweise immer die Frage gestellt, was denn dieses Sein sei.’66 It is man’s nature to ask. In asking, man comes to himself, he comes to his ‘destination’. In posing the metaphysical question about Being and experiencing the natural urge of this question, appears also the finitude of his spirit in such a way that it does appear that Being is in itself what Rahner calls Bei-sich-sein or Gelichtetheit and that is best translated with ‘being-already-alongside’ or ‘clearednes’; it is the original unity of knowing and being known.67 Thus Rahner presents his metaphysics – it is however an anthropological metaphysics as Rahner acknowledges that metaphysics is a human science, which consequently is imperfect and deceitful. ‘Wir treiben Metaphysik. Metaphysik ist aber eine menschliche Wissenschaft. Sie ist also immer und wesentlich mit der Bedrohtheit und der Dunkelheit behaftet, die unaufhebbar zum Wesen des Menschen gehören.’68 Consequently, God remains indefinite in Rahner’s thinking, too. Even though Rahner does pose God as the absolute of Being, he is aware of the limits of human knowing. In order to elucidate that this does not mean that metaphysics is a rather ‘empty’ science, Rahner explains the task of metaphysics:

Die Metaphysik, die in sich schon Religionsphilosophie ist, muss derart sein, dass sie Gott als den freien Unbekannten erkennt und den Menschen als ein aus seiner transzendentalen Subjektivität geschichtliches Wesen begreift, ihn in dieser seiner Geschichtlichkeit an seine Geschichte verweist und ihm gebietet, auf ein möglicherweise ergehendes Offenbarungswort dieses freien, unbekannten Gottes in seiner Geschichte zu horchen.69

Rahner warns that a philosophy of religion cannot judge the content of revelation a priori, as it is determined by God and for man (as Geist in Welt) to understand it. The only thing philosophy of religion can do is to evaluate the conditions of possibility for communication to the Dasein, by analyzing his essential metaphysical structure. It is theology’s task to study history and discover if, where and how God has revealed his message in time and space.

66 Ibidem, p. 47-48. 67 Ibidem, p. 61. 68 Ibidem, p. 43. 69 Ibidem, p. 25-26.

25 §2.2 Nature, grace and revelation

We will now take a step back to explain where Rahner’s line of reasoning comes from and what developments led to his ideas, in order to make clear what is ultimately at stake in his theology. Rahner, following Thomas Aquinas, is principally interested in the ability of the human intellect to actually know God – or fundamentally any non-sensible thing. In order to answer this epistemological question, Rahner comes up with the preapprehension that makes human beings reach out to the absolute and knowable. Because of this preapprehension, the “spirit in the world” (which might be regarded as Rahner’s formulation of Heidegger’s “being in the world” of the Dasein) can transcend itself without losing the worldly reality. As spirit in the world, human beings cannot but experience their transcendence in their very historicity, in their being in the world. The preapprehension is what Rahner calls a ‘supernatural existential’. By presenting it, Rahner indirectly enters into dialogue with the ideas of neo-scholastic theology and the nouvelle théologie concerning the relation between nature, grace and supernature, the first of whom argued that God’s grace is bestowed completely from the outside, the latter of whom say that after the incarnation of the divine Word in Jesus Christ nature is a theandric nature, as nature is always already graced nature. Rahner opposes the thinking of the nouvelle théologie (or at least of a certain notion of it70) which he interprets as saying that grace is somehow part of nature, for in his eyes this does not respect the gratuitous divine gift of grace or the mystery of the supernatural. The scholastic view is unsatisfactory to him, too, as it does not address man’s knowing of God. Nonetheless, Rahner and the nouvelle théologie share the same aim, namely to think of the distinction between nature and supernature as less dichotomized, less extrinsic; both Rahner and the nouvelle théologie try to somehow wipe out the dichotomy, rejecting the idea that supernature is unobtainable for nature and is merely added to nature by Gods grace that is understood extrinsically. In dealing with these matters, both directions inevitably encounter the theological issue of God’s freedom and power to reveal and bring in something of the divine in nature and the issue of man’s freedom to either accept or reject it. Rahner tries to solve this issue by splitting up the initiative: man has a desire for God (which is innate, ‘natural’, a supernatural existential), but whether that desire is answered, depends on God. The nouvelle théologie however, tries to solve the issue by reflecting on the notion of nature; according to the nouvelle théologie our nature is graced nature, recovered

70 When in the following paragraph we speak of the nouvelle théologie, a specific understanding of the nouvelle théologie is propped up, which is not necessarily the only understanding. It is however presented this simplified in order to make clear what is at stake for Rahner and what he is criticized for by those for whom the same thing is at stake.

26 creation, and therefore there is no need to speak of a separation of nature and supernature; it is an analytical distinction. Rahner reduces the distinction between nature and supernature to an anthropological matter, as it is up to man’s abilities to connect the two; he seeks to start his ‘metaphysical epistemology’ from the situatedness of man (a starting point that he obviously shares with Heidegger). In an attempt to overcome both the neo-scholastic tradition and the nouvelle théologie, Rahner argues that man must have an ability to receive God’s grace. As a result, he comes up with the supernatural existential, which allows the acknowledgement that the knowledge of the sensibly known object is limited but at the same time recognizes that within the preapprehension there is knowledge of God. In presenting the preapprehension as supernatural existential, Rahner preserves on the one hand the nature-grace distinction while at the same time on the other hand maintaining man’s situatedness and allowing for his openness towards God. The nouvelle théologie has blamed Rahner for maintaining instead of solving the modern problem of the distinction between nature and supernature, as he continues to think of an ‘extra’ feature in nature – namely the supernatural existential of the preapprehension that directs at the supernatural. The preapprehension is a divine gift of grace and in the end, in Rahner’s view, grace initiates its own reception. Thus Rahner maintains the idea of God’s granting of grace and consequently he is unable to solve the nature-supernature or nature-grace distinction. Rather, he regards it from an anthropological perspective, which brings the matter to another level, but fails to solve it or actually re-consider it.71 The intend of Rahner’s critics was not to dissolve the distinction, but rather to avoid both an arbitrary and a necessary connection between nature and supernature: grace needs to remain a free divine grace. They tried to do so by thinking of the world as more of a divine world.

Rahner ends up with a very abstract idea of human nature, that also leads to his idea that it does not matter so much who Christ was, but more so that he was. The nouvelle théologie argues that there is no such thing as ‘abstract nature’ – there is only graced nature. Rahner however maintains the mystery of Christ and God and he stresses that man is in some sense mysterious, too, as our direction to God is part of our mysterious nature.72 Now what does that mean for God’s ‘knowability’? Rahner

71 Cf. E. Borgman, Edward Schillebeeck: A Theologian in his History. Part I: A Catholic Theology of Culture (1914- 1965), London/New York: Oncinuum, 2003, p. 170-171. 72 ‘Der Mensch ist (…) in seinem Wesen, seiner Natur selber das Geheimnis, nicht weil er die unendliche Fülle des angehenden Geheimnisses in sich wäre, die unerschöpflich ist, sondern weil er in seinem eigentlichen Wesen, in seinem ursprünglichen Grund, in seiner Natur die arme, aber zu sich selbst gekommene Verwiesenheit auf diese Fülle ist.’ K. Rahner, K. Grundkurs des Glaubens. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1976, p. 215.

27 stresses that saying God is a mystery does not equal saying that God is still undiscovered and unknown. Rather,

Geheimnis ist (…) dasjenige, was gerade als das Undurchschaubare – da ist, gegeben ist, gar nicht hergeschafft werden muss, nicht ein zweites, bloss vorläufig Unbezwungenes, sondern der unbeherrschbar herrschende Horizont alles Begreifens, der anderes begreifen lässt, indem er selbst als der Unbegreifliche daseiend sich verschweigt. Geheimnis ist somit nicht das Vorläufige, das abgeschafft wird oder an sich auch anders dasein könnte, sondern die Eigentümlichkeit, die Gott (und von ihm her uns) immer und notwendig auszeichnet.73

God is necessarily an elusive mystery, not an ‘unentdeckten Nichtgewussten’, as Rahner says. Rahner explained that human beings have a preconceptual grasp of the mysterious God and he adds that God is a condition for Dasein’s search for meaning and at the same time its fulfillment. Man is directed towards revelation, and comes to his destination when becoming Hörer des Wortes. It might seem that for Rahner, becoming Hörer des Wortes rather has to do with the hearing of a message than with the experiencing of the actual event of the incarnation of God, the incarnated Word, the Word that has become flesh in the life and death of Jesus Christ. A closer look at his Christology shows that this is not the case; systematically Rahner does address the historical aspect of the incarnation. In the following we will try to explain this. Only when having addressed that issue, we can make clear to what extent Rahner explains God can be known. Becoming hearer of the word means opening up for divine revelation. Revelation, in Rahner’s theology, is the self-communication of God. This self-communication is uncreated grace, which does not only come from the outside, in the incarnated Word, but also from the inside, in being a subjective hearer, which is represented by the Holy Spirit. In the event of Jesus Christ, God ultimately communicated himself. In Jesus Christ it becomes obvious how God’s self-communication has a permanent beginning but how it also remains to be accepted for man: the incarnation of the word shows how God communicates himself to the world, to the story of each man and how it is up to man whether to accept it or not. Jesus of Nazareth accepted God’s self-communication to the fullest. He is the perfect hearer of the Word and the only man who completely came to his destination in his participating in the being of God, which is a practice that we can follow. Rahner’s Christology does not focus in the first place on the savior-role of Jesus of Nazareth (since that is not a convertible or reducible history), but it rather aims at showing how his history makes man seek for and understand what man has already found in Jesus Christ. Rahner explains how the question of Jesus being the Christ is already preceded by the belief in Jesus as Christ. ‘Die Überlegung “warum kann ich an Jesus

73 K. Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens. Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1976, p. 215-216.

28 als an den Christus glauben” geht von der Voraussetzung meines Glaubens aus. Dieser als vollzogener und immer wieder zu vollziehender reflektiert auf Seine eigene innere Berechtigung.’74 Yet, the historical happening of the incarnation is indispensable for salvation history.

Denn das Eigentliche der Botschaft des Christentums liegt ja gerade in der Aussage, dass dieser Jesus, gestorben unter Pontius Pilatus, niemand anders als der Christus, der Sohn Gottes, der absolute Heilbringer ist. Von diesem geschichtlichen Ereignis hängt das Heil aller Zeiten, ja je mein Heil ab, in diesem geschichtlichen, einmaligen Ereignis ist es begründet.75

Rahner explains that the incarnation severs the gap between God and man; the incarnate Word made the worldly reality God’s reality, because of which we can participate in the divine nature. Hence, God’s salvation does not come from a distance upon man, but exists in the possibility of participating in the being of God, which is the fulfillment of man. Man already has this possibility here on earth.

§2.3 Rahner’s matters for consideration

Rahner taught us that we can know of God, because of our preapprehenison, our supernatural existential that gives us an a priori transcendental openness towards God, just like Heidegger presumed Dasein’s a priori openness towards Being. In the incarnation of the Word, God has shown that our reality is a divine reality and that we can become Hörer des Wortes. It has been said that Rahner’s theology bestows a very passive role on man; man as Geist in Welt does not find God, but is in advance given the natural predisposition towards God. This leads to the idea that the human existential of being-directed-at-God is basically a feature or capacity of man. If that is the case, one can wonder if interpreting is still a necessary thing to do in order to grasp the divine message. Another implication is that it becomes unclear whether man can accept or reject God’s grace in freedom, and whether or not one can be a nonbeliever, as the natural existential would automatically make anyone a believer – whether it be anonymous or not. Here it would have helped if Rahner had stayed closer to Heidegger, according to whom the revelation of Being is more dynamic, as it appears essentially in the happening of things to man and as it needs man’s response, rather than that it has already happened in directing us at something as is the case according to Rahner. Rahner does not deny that creation is static; he does address the tension between creation’s

74 Ibidem, p. 228. 75 Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens, p. 230.

29 static immutability and its dynamic converting powers and maintains it; on the one hand there is continuity in creation and on the other hand God’s generating power, according to Rahner.

30 Gianni Vattimo

Thus far, we have learned how Heidegger addressed modernity’s deficiency: we have lost a sense of Being and we are condemned to interpret reality instead of experiencing it. Rather than that we know ourselves grounded in and driven by something, we ‘relate’ to something. ‘Heidegger blames neo-Platonic Greek influence on theology for creating a basis of knowledge that cannot be conceptualized, namely God as an object of mere speculation instead of authentic understanding.’76 These observations appeal to theology for a reconsideration of theological thinking about the distinction between nature and supernature and about the possibility of knowing of God in an interpretative era. Rahner tries to do so when introducing the supernatural existential of the preapprehension of the divine that guarantees a certain directness of the connection between man and God. At the same time this supernatural existential makes his anthropology quite static and leaves no room for genuine openness. Moreover, since man’s preapprehension directs him at God, it remains unclear whether interpreting is still necessary or that the need to interpret is overcome by the directness of knowledge in the preapprehension. In order to overcome these matters, the ideas of the philosopher-theologian Gianni Vattimo may be useful; according to him, interpreting is today’s dealing with Being. Vattimo is clearly influenced by Heidegger and often refers to him or enters into a dialogue with his thinking; we might consider him a liberal-assimilationist of Heidegger (see paragraph 1.7; ‘Heidegger’s reception’). Vattimo was probably not familiar with Rahner and his thinking.

§3.1 Vattimo and Heidegger

Gianni Vattimo – born in in 1936, and still active as politician and philosopher – interprets the themes Heidegger addresses as closely related to Christian concepts. He states that the main concepts of appear unthinkable without reference to the Christian event. He argues that the link between Heidegger’s thinking and Christianity is ‘of a historical and destinal character, and cannot be deduced analytically from the “concept” of Christianity.’77 It needs to be said that when referring to Heidegger, Vattimo refers to his whole oeuvre. This thesis has mostly dealt with Heidegger’s early works, in the hermeneutics of which, as has shortly been noticed before, the primacy of the Dasein prevails; Being is looked upon from the there-being. His later works however exhibit the shift towards a hermeneutics in which Being is central and active; Being reveals and conceals itself to the Dasein. Due to the required extent of this thesis, I have not been able to

76 T. Guarino, Vattimo and Theology. London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009, p. 67. 77 G. Vattimo, After Christianity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 124.

31 elaborate on this comprehensively. However, the main ideas Vattimo refers to when discussing Heidegger (both early and late and mostly concerning Being’s nature to reveal and conceal) have been addressed before. Vattimo shares with Martin Heidegger his lament over modernity’s Seinsvergessenheit, arguing that while we are familiar with specific existing beings, we have forgotten about the Being that is and that lets the beings be. Modern thinking of Being as foundation and of reality as a rational system of causes and effects is but extending the model of scientific objectivity to the totality of being. Thus, all things are reduced to the level of pure presences that can be measured and manipulated. In the end even man, his interiority and his historicity, is reduced to that level.78 Modernity, in the spirit of Enlightenment, made a cult of the new and viewed history as a unilinear process of emancipation. When it no longer seems possible to regard history as unilinear and to maintain an objective world order, modernity ends, Vattimo observes. And this seems to have happened: in our postmodern era of the proliferation of Weltanschauungen, of world views, modernity’s beliefs have become untenable.79 Vattimo – clearly influenced by Heidegger – rejects the modern attitude in the first place because of its Seinsvergessenheit and accordingly because of its unsustainable belief in an objective world order. It is here that he comes to speak of metaphysics, as he analogously blames metaphysics for these exact same things. Metaphysics upholds an understanding of truth that springs from foundational thought (something he, Heidegger and Nietzsche try to break down): it seeks the essence of things, it presupposes all-embracing relations and it believes in its overarching . Features of essence and the relation between things are supposed to be unchangeable and universal, valid for all times and places. Vattimo insists that there is no final, ultimate, metaphysical structure to reality and he even accuses metaphysical thinking of causing violence, as the metaphysical mindset tries to get a fixed hold of the things and imposes a corresponding fixed order when the truth of Being is pinned down to the calculability, measurability and malleability of the object.80 Modern rationality, restraining reason to the limited canons of and positivism, attempts to reduce truth to methodology. Vattimo’s postmodern response is one of celebrating discontinuity and pluralism.81 He proposes a postmodern model of emancipation, based on oscillation and plurality and of rejecting universalizing tendencies. In that sense, Vattimo’s is post-metaphysical, too: it is not about having perfect knowledge of the necessary structure of reality and conforming to it, but instead about conceiving reality as disorientation by

78 G. Vattimo, The Transparent Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 8. 79 J. Caputo & G. Vattimo (ed. J. Robbins) After the Death of God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 22. 80 Vattimo, G., Groot, G. (ed.) Een zwak geloof. Christendom voorbij de metafysica. Kampen: Agora, 2000, p. 61. 81 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, p. 5-6.

32 virtue of the dissolution of reality.82 Obviously, the awareness that the world can no longer be thought of in terms of objectivity alters and weakens the sense of reality. This might lead to an arbitrary notion of every image of reality. This is in Vattimo’s eyes however not the case. Rather, he says again in an unequivocally Heideggerian spirit, it stresses the fact that our images no longer correspond to the objectivity of the object, since the object itself has disappeared from our (scientific) view.83 Here Vattimo indicates the relation with Christian faith and the parallel of Seinsvergessenheit with the Christian Gottvergessenheit.84

§3.2 Nihilism and weak thought

The rejection of the belief in an objective world order and our fidelity to its truth leads inevitably to nihilism, as the stress on the finite and fragmented nature of thought leads to accepting the proliferation of ‘individual truths’. (‘There are no facts, only interpretations,’ Nietzsche famously stated.) One may say this is relativistic – and it is so indeed – but above all it makes an effort to make clear that our age is an interpretative age. God is no longer a requisite for truth, order and objectivity. Nietzsche’s ‘’-declaration does not mean that God is inexistent, but rather suggests that the objective world can no longer be built on a transcendent foundation. Nihilistic hermeneutics caused a sense of contingency of thinking about truth and of reality, and an impossibility of society to maintain evaluative norms.85 Vattimo welcomes nihilism with open arms. According to him, nihilism is the destiny of our culture, descending from the very logic of metaphysics; Being withdraws from being caught; Being weakens; Being has a nihilistic destination. So Vattimo comes to speak of the weakening of reality and presents his philosophy of pensiero debole, weak thought. Weak thought renounces claims to any universal truth and the idea that there is any fixed order. What we can know is that we dwell in an entirely contingent and transitory web of society and culture.86 Analogously to how metaphysics causes nihilism, Vattimo explains how Christianity causes secularization. ‘Christianity is responsible for the secularization of the world,’87 he argues. His reasoning is as follows: The kenosis, the self-emptying of God, his weakening in the world – paradigmatically expressed in the incarnation and death of Jesus – ‘is not a one-time-only event occurring in the life and death of Jesus but the ongoing history or tradition inaugurated by this event.

82 Caputo & Vattimo After the Death of God, p. 22. 83 Vattimo, G. Belief. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, p. 3. 84 Vattimo, Groot (ed.) Een zwak geloof, p. 61. 85 Guarino, T. Vattimo and Theology. London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009, p. 6. 86 Ibidem, p. 44. 87 G. Vattimo, R. Girard, P. Antonello (eds.), Christianity, truth, and the weakening faith. A Dialogue. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010, p. 23.

33 This process Vattimo calls secularization: the transcription of God into time and history.’88 The weakening of Being realizes itself as God’s kenosis, the kernel of salvation history. ‘Therefore,’ Vattimo argues, ‘secularization shall no longer be conceived of as abandonment of religion but as the paradoxical realization of Being’s religious vocation.’89 The kenotic event is the weakening of the transcendental divine power and its metaphysical essence, because of which all truths become groundless. By incarnating and dying, the Christian God broke through the transcendental order and put an end to metaphysics and its absolute thinking. The fact that a transcendental act in history here is presupposed in order to overcome metaphysics, seems to be an internal contradiction. Vattimo however, deals with this in his own way. We will come back to this point shortly. In weak thought, truth is not understood as fixed; Vattimo distinctly rejects a fixed understanding of truth, which in his eyes would lead relentlessly to claims of certitude, limitations of human freedom and exclusionary violence, imposing truths that actually are interpretations and not being aware of other perspectives.90 Now, if every interpretation is hospitably welcomed as valid, what does this mean for actual common understanding? In After Christianity, Vattimo notes that concerning the proliferation of interpretations we cannot say that “anything goes”. In this respect, he also refers to the contemporary importance of notions like communication, consensus, democracy and dialogue in modern thinking, that ‘conceive(s) of truth more as consensus (we might, as we will see Vattimo does, say charity too) than as objectivity. To grasp and to develop the meaning of these signs is the task that today presents itself to those who profess to be openly Christian.’91 Vattimo’s weak thought has often been said to merely propose “a thinking without any content”, that is at best more conscious of its own boundaries. This reading of Vattimo discounts however his effort of indicating what is at stake after the death of God in modern society. Above all, it is a theory of weakening as the constitutive character of Being in the epoch of the end of metaphysics.92 It is weak thought, not mellow thought. In addition, blaming Vattimo’s thinking for lacking specificity ignores the effort of Vattimo most obvious in his book Belief (in Italian: Credere di credere; believing to believe), namely the importance of participating in the ongoing salvation, which also implies conversion. Vattimo regards ‘interpretation as a form of participational knowledge that transforms the interpreter. To listen to someone is an event that transforms the life of the one hearing it, or better, an event that is constituted completely in this transformation.’93 Something actually happens when openly participating in a discourse. Like Heidegger, Vattimo stresses the

88 Caputo, J. & Vattimo, G. (ed. J. Robbins) After the Death of God, p. 74 89 Vattimo, G. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 24. 90 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, p. 98. 91 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 82. 92 Vattimo, Belief, p. 35. 93 Vattimo, Belief, p. 9.

34 importance of actual participation of the believer in the revelation, namely the crucified God. Heidegger has argued how the participation in the happening of revelation (Offenbarungsgeschehen) is only to be accomplished in existing and faith. In his faithful existence, the faithful believer is born again. The actual meaning of faith is re-birth.94 In his lectures on religious life, Heidegger has also stressed the original importance of the authentic experience of concrete existence in radical change, the Christian conversion. In Heidegger’s eyes, this ‘does not affect the reality of the world around us, but rather how we relate to that world. In holding open the possibility of radical transformation, Christian life grasps human existence as a fundamental potential for becoming other than one is.’95 Vattimo takes up this thread of Heidegger’s account and incorporates it in his own thinking relating it to the Christian concept of the living word: Vattimo argues that revelation is ongoing salvation in the dynamics of the discourse with the living word. Man opens himself up for the discourse with the living word and he let himself be touched and influenced by it. This notion of Vattimo is closely connected to the thinking of the Bultmann school, of whom the most famous exponents are Ernst Fuchs, Gerhard Ebeling and Eberhard Jüngel. In their theologies language and the “being spoken to by God” are central issues. Each in their own way they state that the word of God has, through the Holy Spirit, the power to create faith, rather than to assume it; as it is a living word, it comes upon the readers as a “word event” and so it shapes the reader.96 Likewise, Vattimo argues for revelation to be ongoing salvation as it makes us open ourselves, it causes conversion and actual change.

§3.3 Conversion

The theme of conversion in Heidegger is best illustrated in Vattimo’s discussion of Heidegger’s Phenomenology of religious life, where the latter argues how early Christian life experience, namely living in the eschatological tension between the ‘already’ and the ‘not yet’, is an experience of authentic temporality. Reacting to this, Vattimo tries to explain in what sense ‘recognizing oneself in what one already is’ constitutes the basis of an authentic experience of temporality.97 This temporality is not linear, but rather circular; the egheneto, means the ‘already having happened of salvation’ in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Vattimo explains how this salvation is not ‘a past event in the horizontal-objective meaning of the term, in the sense that it is not completed and

94 P. Brkic, Martin Heidegger und die Theologie. Ein Thema in driefacher Fragestellung. Mainz: Gruenewald, 1994, p. 69-70. “Dieses nur im Existieren vollzogenen Teil-nehmen ist aber als solches immer nur als Glauben durch den Glauben gegeben.” 95 Elliott, ‘Existential Scepticism and Christian Life in Early Heidegger’ in The Heythrop Journal 45 (3), 2004, p. 275. 96 Thiselton, A. C., Hermeneutics: an Introduction. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2009, p. 191-193. 97 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 127.

35 must be awaited as the eschatological event of the parousia’.98 The parousia is seen not as an objectively announced fact, but rather as the thief in the night. Central to Heidegger is Paul’s stress on the significance of thlipsis,99 which can be regarded as a burden of the spirit, fundamental in Christian life; it is the watchfulness for the parousia, that will come unexpected, like a thief in the night, following Matt. 24:36. Vattimo says that the waiting of the Christian for the parousia is not the mere waiting for a future event within continuing time to happen. Rather, the point in Christian life is that neither the day nor the hour of Christ’s return is known and that temporality is thought of differently.

Christ’s return is understood not as an objective or past event of which we would be certain once and for all (…), nor as the given presence of mystical experience, nor as a predictable future occurrence located within the flow of time. The Christian language has changed the literal meaning of parousia, which in Greek means “presence”. The transformation of the concept, though, discloses another Christian life-experience. For Christians, parousia means the reappearance of the Messiah who has appeared once before; a meaning that is not literally in the words.100

Vattimo concludes that constant uncertainty is the basic meaning of the Christian factic life. As said before, Heidegger accuses contemporary Christianity of having lost this authentic factic life experience under the influence of metaphysics. Instead, contemporary Christianity has objectified time and has forgotten Being for the sake of beings, Heidegger observes. In Being and Time, ‘the factical ideal’ guides the description of authentic existence. To a certain extent, Heidegger’s understanding of Christian life furnishes this ideal. There is a pre-theoretical commitment to factical being of the Dasein, a primordial existential truth. Vattimo briefly discusses the ethic that corresponds with authentic Christian life experience. He argues that the meaning of existence in relation to Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode) is central; Dasein’s life is always facing the possibility of death. The endurance of this weakness is decisive for Christian ethics; renouncing that existence be meaningful (Sinnvoll) and enduring this weakness in uncertain but faithful thlipsis. Only then Dasein can constitute itself with a view to the ‘possible impossibility of possibility of life, which is constituted by the impending possibility of death. It is only by facing up to the possibility of death that the various, concrete possibilities of life appear in their

98 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 128. 99 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 129. Thlipsis is not so much a specific kind of temptation that Christians should resist or a suggestion of the saving function of suffering. Rather, it is watchfulness. 100 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 130.

36 true meaning as possibilities rather than hardening in their finality, and therefore let existence constitute itself as a discursus endowed with meaning.’101

§3.4 Truth and interpretations

In Vattimo’s eyes, truth is best conceived as a continuing event, as a transitory, historical message that needs to be interpreted over and over again, as there is no definite disclosure of truth. Rather, interpretations generate Being, open new possibilities for Being to disclose itself. Interpreting always occurs in the course of history. Since we live in a world of infinite interpretability, it would be rather gullible to affirm vast structures of reality. Vattimo presents Christ himself as ‘the agent of interpretation’; he did not only interpret the Scriptures, he also sent the apostles the Holy Spirit so that they could understand his teachings.102 Even his incarnation is a hermeneutical event and an archetypical occurrence of secularization; it reveals that Being is not a stable and objective ground, but rather an event that announces a certain language and divine engagement with historicity. It reveals no objective truth, but an ongoing salvation in which, through the abasement of God’s kenosis, objective reasoning and the transcendence of God are proven wrong.103 Vattimo does not mind the absence of foundations. Quite the opposite; he maintains what he calls himself an ‘optimistic nihilism’, an attitude of tolerance and modesty, even without the confidence of true knowledge.104 Vattimo is aware that when we speak of God and of Being in the same sentence, we are confusing the God of revelation with the god who is understood as identical with ground, act and actuality. He warns us that this one, particular understanding of Being becomes normative for understanding who God actually is, whereas God is beyond any unique sending of being.105 Comprehending Christian revelation – of which secularization has appeared to be a part – means having to read the signs of the times, aware of our own historicity, just as Jesus did in reading and realizing the Scriptures.106 The identity of Scripture as the foundation of the Christian religion already implies a religion of communication, of exegesis and consequently of unlimited interpretation. In order to overcome this impossible Babel-like situation of interpreters, Vattimo introduces caritas as

101 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 134. 102 Caputo, J. & Vattimo, G. (ed. J. Robbins) After the Death of God. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007, p. 34. 103 Vattimo, G. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 67 & Vattimo, G. Belief. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, p. 11, p. 48-49. 104 Guarino, T. Vattimo and Theology. London/New York: T&T Clark, 2009, p. 29. 105 Ibidem, p. 75. 106 Vattimo, G. After Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 36, 43 & Vattimo, G. Belief. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999, p. 53-54.

37 an answer to the practical problems weak thought causes. Caritas, charity (after all, the greatest commandment) is the tolerance of persistent plurality. It is important to notice that charity is posed as more than just an ethical solution to the abundance of perspectives; it is also an appeal made by the event of the incarnation and the nihilistic vocation of Being. Vattimo even says that ‘charity is the presence of God’107. The attitude of charity is an attitude that admits its own weakened structure in favor of the logos, the Word, which is shared in the dialogue constituting us as historical beings. In short: Vattimo proposes an attitude of hospitality instead of an attitude of universality with regard to interpreting reality.108 Vattimo is skating on thin ice when he introduces charity as a solution to the abundance of interpretations. He seems to admit, contrary to his own views, that there are some shared interpretations possible. Ultimately, even his notion that ‘the weakening of Being is one possible meaning – if not the absolute meaning – of the Christian message’109 and that this religion is all about God lowering himself and puzzling all the powers of this world, is an interpretation. Vattimo is very well aware of this; he presupposes the yet existing paradigm of Christianity and kenosis as a structure in which his interpretations have a place and can have their meaning. That the whole story of Christianity and kenosis need not be true remains a problem. This problem might arise out of the difference between philosophy and theology, as already outlined by Heidegger. Both for Heidegger and for Vattimo, Being and truth are to be understood as limited, manifesting themselves in events. Theology, according to Heidegger, cannot think prima philosophia and can never give ultimate answers. ‘Theology may claim to offer answers, but only philosophy understands how these answers are themselves granted over historicity.’110 Even though Vattimo tries to apply Heidegger’s thinking theologically, he, too, is unable to regard the Christian story as more than merely a Leitmotiv, a parable, of which the main ideas prevail in his time and place, but that can itself never be considered as ontological foundation. Christianity’s fulfillment lies rather in the reverse of such foundation, namely in weak thought.

§3.5 The event

Nonetheless, Vattimo is convinced that there is a very Christian aspect in Heidegger’s thinking, namely the emphasis on the event. Heidegger argues that ‘the main concepts of Being and Time remain unthinkable without reference to the Christian Event.’111 He focuses on Heidegger’s negative

107 Caputo & Vattimo (ed. J. Robbins) After the Death of God, p. 45. 108 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 100, 112. 109 Ibidem, p. 80 (own italics). 110 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, p. 106. 111 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 123.

38 notion of Being. ‘Being as a sort of apophatic theology, not something with a factual existence out there in three dimensional space’112, he says himself. He sees explicitly as his task to think faith without substance, perhaps without dogma and without theology as a science, therein pursuing the early Christian faith (elaborated by Heidegger in critiquing onto-theology).113 More than Vattimo, the theologian-philosopher John Caputo focuses on the event as the kernel in theology. Vattimo and Caputo, both liberal Heideggerians, collaborated a lot and at this point, discussing the event, Caputo cannot remain unmentioned. Caputo proposes a theology of the event and, following Vattimo, he proposes a weak theology. The event is not something that is present, nor should it be regarded as the occurring of something; rather, the event is what makes itself experienced in what is present. The event is in itself not being and it is not actual – as it is always on its way, it is coming as something promised. Thus, the event constitutes a covenant. Religion is the covenant that has been made between the event and man.114 Caputo considers it an appeal to man to answer to the event that is calling us and to be open for the truth of the event. The truth of the event, according to Caputo, is its nomadism. Our attitude is to be hospitable to the event, to welcome its coming and rejoice in its arrival. Here Caputo comes to speak of his weak theology, evolving out of radical hermeneutics and, obviously, Vattimo’s weak thought. It is a theology of the desert, of the not knowing, of the absence of any security; it is a theology of what is promised, but not yet realised. It is a theology of courage and hope. ‘We spend our lives (…) praying for the coming of the event. For the event does not quite, never does exactly – exist. If theology is the science of nonexistent entities, it is because theology is born in the space between what exists and the event, which means that theology is born in prayer.’ 115 As a religion of the incarnate Word (not of the book!), theology must be aware of a God that is coming when speaking; it is a theology of the event of the word. ‘Theology is a place where the energies of the event may be nurtured and released, its intensities cultivated and affirmed.’116

§3.6 The historicity of the kenosis

However convincing the interpretative nature of Christianity through the kenosis might seem, Vattimo fails to adequately deal with one very important thing: the historical fact of the kenosis – a transcendental act supposedly overcoming metaphysics. Vattimo makes clear that the kenosis should not be conceived as an actual event or an objective truth, stating that the historical event of the

112 Vattimo, Girard, Antonello (ed.), Christianity, truth, and the weakening faith, p. 77. 113 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 133-134. 114 Caputo & Vattimo (ed. J. Robbins), After the Death of God, p. 52. 115 Caputo & Vattimo (ed. J. Robbins), After the Death of God, p. 58. 116 Ibidem, p. 55.

39 incarnation ‘is historical not in the sense that it is a “real” fact but rather insofar as, in its Wirkungsgeschichte, it is constitutive of our existence.’117 Vattimo thus appears unable to completely overcome the subjective fallacy, as the kernel of his argument, namely the kenosis, cannot be regarded as a real fact (after all, that ‘metaphysical fact’ of God becoming human would imply an internal contradiction in his philosophy, as ‘metaphysics’ and ‘facts’ is exactly what he tries to combat) and is thus more of a thought experiment or symbol shared by many than an actual bedrock. Incarnation is taken as historical in as far as the arms of its effective Wirkungsgeschichte stretch. Here Vattimo inevitably clashes with Christian realism that firmly states that the incarnation generates meaning and does not become its own meaning. His view is comparable to that of Bultmann, who famously argued that for the resurrection to be preached, it didn’t actually have to have happened. Bultmann declared that ‘even if we found the bones of Jesus that would in no way change the truth of Christianity’.118 This is however an untenable position: if Christ be not risen, then our preaching is vain, and your faith is also vain (1 Cor. 15:14). If faith is not related to the actual life and death of Jesus Christ, then neither is salvation. The meaning of the (illusory) event then, is illusive, too. The same goes for the nearness that incarnation implies: if incarnation is not thought of as God’s actual nearness to the concrete suffering of people, but merely as a paradigmatic idea of nearness, it becomes a worthless notion, as we would be praying and crying to an idea. In the light of weak thought, also the actuality of the resurrection is a highly problematic concept for Vattimo; when the kenosis signifies God’s self-weakening, his leaving behind of transcendence, then the resurrection signifies Christ’s re-affirmation of his transcendence. The kenosis after all, is not only an event in the sphere of being, but is also constitutive for the thinking about history and the relation between history and theology. Vattimo leaves us with the question of what kenosis – if only an objective truth, a strong, but mere symbol – is worth. It seems that for Vattimo it means no more (and no less!) than living within the horizon of God, acknowledging that God is a part of Western existence. That it does on no account intend the affirmation of God’s objective existence remains a pitfall of Vattimo’s weak thought.119 His effort of understanding modernity as secularization however, has led to key notions about Christian revelation and the dissolution of metaphysics.

117 Vattimo, After Christianity, p. 112. 118 Caputo & Vattimo (ed. J. Robbins), After the Death of God, p. 99. 119 Guarino, Vattimo and Theology, p. 100.

40 §3.7 Evaluation of Vattimo’s thought, Heidegger revisited

Vattimo acknowledges the problem of pluralism and nihilism and has attempted to deal with it:

We live in a world without a center, a Babel-like plurality, with an irreducible number of differing Weltanschauungen. This kind of pluralism necessarily “weakens” and “lightens” our understanding of Being, truth and reality. And such lightening clearly enough, displays the very meaning of pensiero debole. It is the recognition that the world is a festival of multivalent plurality, that no one can claim privileged access to the ontos on.120

Vattimo’s response to pluralism (and to Heidegger, who blamed objectifying thinking to have caused the loss of the sense of Being) is that man is compelled to interpret reality: we have to interpret Being as we notice it is present and as we are being spoken to by it. The truth this clears is weakened, but that does not mean it is meaningless. Through interpretations we can discern truths. Being is still present, he responds to Heidegger who claims we have lost it, however in a different form. At this point, Vattimo accuses Heidegger of inconsistency. On the one hand, Heidegger addresses contemporary reality and blames it for its Seinsvergessenheit, but on the other hand Heidegger stands within this contemporary reality, participating in Being. There simply is no place outside of being, Vattimo argues. Even modernity’s ordering of reality cannot escape our being in Being. In Christianity, too, the sense of truth is weakened: the kenotic event is the weakening of the transcendental divine power and its metaphysical essence that makes all truths groundless. According to Vattimo incarnation is a constitutive experience. The event of the incarnation (a unique event) is with us, but also needs to happen to us when interpreting the Word.121 Incarnation and its weakening of truth reveal caritas (which might be regarded as Vattimo’s understanding of truth) in a reality without a center, without absolute truth. The stress on the ongoing constitutive experience of incarnation however overlooks some major important theological issues, namely Christ’s resurrection and accordingly Christ’s actual presence and generating power. In stressing the kenosis and not mentioning the resurrection, Vattimo does not do justice to the humiliation the kenosis is. In Vattimo’s eyes, Christ is ‘restricted’ to merely his incarnation or in other words: God becomes his own (interpretable) Word, instead of speaking it. To Vattimo it is unsure whether there is actually anything else than ourselves that can speak to us. Whereas Rahner posed the question of how and to what extent the Geist in Welt is spoken to by something beyond himself, Vattimo wonders if there is anything else to speak but ourselves. He

120 Ibidem, p. 26. 121 In a certain sense Vattimo can relate to the nouvelle théologie here: they share the notion that the incarnation has happened and that therefore we cannot think of a world without the incarnation.

41 argues that the only thing one can do is re-read his tradition with an attitude of caritas, but that nothing new will come, as it is always us who read it. A serious theological problem with Vattimo’s philosophy is that it causes the necessity of God’s presence to decline, and if that is the case, and our thinking of God is merely based on the event of incarnation, it becomes a theory itself: the theory, the principle of God’s kenosis, becomes the warranty. This is exactly what Heidegger blames metaphysics for, namely that it is inevitably inwardly bound and depends on its own theories. Theology must not do that; it would make the necessity of the presence of God a purely theoretical matter and the theoretical principle would surpass the very experience that it comes from. Heidegger’s thinking of presence can contribute here and challenge Vattimo’s theoreticism; Heidegger states that in order to gain insight in Christian religiosity one need not study the history of Christianity but rather the facticity and historicity of life experience. This, in combination with our thinking of Christ’s living presence in the world, gives us a new perspective on revelation. Vattimo’s thinking has shed a new and fruitful light on matters that remained problematic in Heidegger’s and Rahner’s thought. With his notions of ongoing salvation and ‘being spoken to’ he avoids a static anthropology and celebrates interpretation as the process in which Being clears. Thus, he does justice to our factical life: we do after all live in an interpretative world. However, he sees the kenosis as a principle, which causes theoreticism and he cannot think of Christ as present in the world. This is where Heidegger should come in again – stressing the importance of the facticity and historicity of life experience – combined with the theological notion of Christ’s presence. What factical life experience, and in particular art, can reveal, is what we are going to explore in the following.

42 Artistic representation

Both Heidegger and Vattimo stress that truth is not a fixed order, but rather an event. According to Vattimo a direct, unmediated dealing with it is impossible and therefore the event needs to be interpreted over and over again. Our interpretations open new possibilities for Being to disclose itself. Factic life experience makes us interpret and thus causes truth to happen and new meanings to be disclosed. Whereas according to Heidegger, the act of interpreting keeps us from experiencing Being directly, Vattimo argues that interpreting is our experiencing of Being. In the following we will try to show how art opens new perspectives and glimpses of truth and testifies theologically of reality. First, we will discuss both Heidegger’s and Vattimo’s art theories, so as to make clear what art does according to them. After that, we will argue what it is that art brings us when it shows us the world as a theological playground. Finally, we will put this into practice and let the literature of Italo Calvino speak.

§4.1 Heidegger: The origin of the work of art

In The Origin of the Work of Art, drafted between 1931 and 1936 and reworked for publication in 1960, Heidegger expresses the role of art with regard to the unconceilment of truth. It raises a whole new perspective on the relation between arts and truth – a perspective that might shed a new light on our understanding of revelation. Heidegger’s main aim in The Origin of the Work of Art is to explain the essence of art, and he seeks to do so in terms of the concepts of being and truth. Starting his argumentation with the tension between the artist and the artwork, that appear to be each other’s origins, he asks himself: ‘As the artist is the origin of the work in a necessarily different way from the way the work is the origin of the artist, so it is in yet another way, quite certainly, that art is the origin of both artist and work. But can, then, art really be an origin?’122 Art exists as the origin for both artwork and artist. Yet, we can only determine what art is from the work – equally, however, we can only determine what the work is from the nature of art. Hence, the argument moves in a circle. Instead of regarding this as a problem, Heidegger concludes firmly that ‘we must move in a circle. This is neither ad hoc nor deficient. To enter upon this path is the strength, and to remain on it the feast of thought.’123 He indicates two possible ways to continue this path: either in the direction of the essence of art or in the direction of the essence of the artwork. As the artwork is more concrete, he starts from the artwork, in which art is to be found.

122 Heidegger, The origin of the work of art, p. 1. 123 Ibidem, p. 2 (own italics).

43 Works of art, Heidegger states first, are material things; they have a thingly character. But what exactly is a thing? This seems easy to answer, as it is familiar and close to us. Yet, due to the forgetfulness or oblivion of the thing – which is a consequence of our perception that a thing always has its essence in its serviceability or equipmentality – it appears very difficult to answer. Heidegger finds that the pure thing remains so persistently hidden, that its density and strangeness might be part of the essence of the thing. Apart from the fact that the artwork is a thing that is made, it also expresses something other than the mere thing it is itself; it manifests something other than itself – it therefore is an allegory – and it brings together things via the thingliness – it is therefore symbol. In order to consider the distinction between artwork and other things, such as pieces of equipment, Heidegger takes an artwork as example: A pair of shoes by Vincent van Gogh. He asks himself questions about their form and matter and about the world they belong to. Taking the peasant shoes as an example, Heidegger demonstrates that the painting opens up a world; it unconceals the Being of beings and in that sense it lets truth appear. As said before, the ancient Greek word for truth is aletheia, which literally means unconceilment. ‘In the artwork, the truth of beings has set itself to work. Art is the setting-itself-to-work of the truth.’124 The artwork consists of the struggle between “earth” and “world”; “world” representing the disclosed meaning with all its connotations, “earth” meaning the essentially self-secluding, the hidden origin of the world and the background against which worlding can take place. World is always nonobjectual. To illustrate how truth is setting itself to work in the struggle between world and earth, Heidegger refers to a Greek temple. The temple work opens up a world and in doing so it sets this world back onto the earth. The beings appear as they are as the earth shelters everything that is set to work. World is associated with self-opening, earth with hiding, sheltering and coming- forth-concealing. World and earth need each other; the world rests on earth and uses earthy materials. Earth is revealed as earth by the world. This notion can be relevant in theological thinking about revelation, too; in the temple things that were already present are gathered; it all concentrates in the Gestalt of the temple and it gives back a new image to the world. Like that, it creates the world, it takes up the world and proceeds the world. The temple relates to the world and is apart from it. In temple-like places, the divine can reveal itself. In a work of art, the world is worlding. To be a work means: to set up a world. This world that is opened up takes us out of the ordinary and connects us directly and meaningfully to this different world so that we can see its truth and participate in it. The work of art causes the struggle between earth and world and thus lets truth set itself to work; in the combating of this struggle, truth

124 Ibidem, p. 19.

44 happens.125 The happening of truth in a work of art has nothing to do with the correct reproducing of a being, but with the whole world that is brought into unconcealment in counterplay with earth and ‘held’ (hüten; being watched over) there. In order to be able to stand within the openness of Being happening in the work, the work needs to be preserved. When the status of their world changes, that is when there is no engagement to their world anymore, artworks can become art objects. The artwork becomes passive as soon as the world changes and work nor world are preserved any longer. When meaning is given to the artwork, the struggle between world and earth is fixed and consequently truth cannot set itself to work anymore. The work-being of the work consists in two features: setting up a world and consecrating a work, in a sense of dedication, consecration and praise. In the workly construction, the holy is thus opened up as the holy and the god is called forth into the openness of its presence. ‘Why, however, is the setting up of the work an erecting that consecrates and praises? Because, in its work-being, the work demands it.’126 The creation of artworks requires a ‘making’; the activity of handicraft. Creation allows something to come forth in what has been brought forth. In Heidegger’s words: ‘The createdness of the work means: the fixing in place of truth in the figure.’127 The fact that the work is created is part of the thingliness of the work and therefore it is possible to experience its createdness; it belongs to the work in that it is created into what is created, so that it emerges from the work. ‘Createdness has revealed itself to be the strife’s being fixed in place through the rift in the figure. By this means, createdness itself is specifically created into the work.’128 Creating has nothing to do with an individual genius, but is to be seen as a drafting, that requires an Ur-sprung (a founding leap), openness and receptiveness. Art happens with a thrust that enters history and because of which history either begins or starts over. As Heidegger makes clear, art has no message to impose on the viewer – rather, it is significance in itself; art sets up a world that takes us out of the ordinary and connects us meaningfully to this different world so that we can see its truth and participate in it. In this modern era of crises of meaning, perspective and truth, we can find an opening in art, that is not trying to ‘solve’ these crises, but opens up a new world, in which truth can clear again. It makes something new exist; it creates something new from what already existed.

125 A.A. van den Braembussche, Denken over kunst. Een inleiding in de kunstfilosofie. Bussum: Coutinho, 2007 (4th reviewed edition; first edition in 1994), p. 243. 126 Heidegger, The origin of the work of art, p. 22 127 Ibidem, p. 38. 128 Ibidem, p. 40.

45 §4.2 Vattimo on art

Just as Heidegger’s philosophy has special attention for art, so has Vattimo’s. Both stress how art is exemplary for the manifestation of truth as disclosing and unstable. Art assembles, it collects new systems of meaning, it re-orders the existing, so that something new might light up. In art, existing signs cause new significances. Above all, art upsets and unsettles “objective thinking”. The meaning that is being brought to the fore by the work of art gives new insights and accordingly gives a glimpse of truth, in a highly primordial way. In Heidegger’s words after all, art is the setting-itself-into-work of truth. The truth occurring in the artwork cannot be thought of apart from the artwork. When truth happens, the work will remain inevitably connected to it, and likewise the truth remains connected to the work. This is a logical consequence of the fact that truth is not pre-given and not independent of the artwork. In Vattimo’s words: ‘The ontological concept of truth as event excludes every contingency of the incarnation of truth with regard to truth itself, and every possible Aufhebung. Truth is the truth of the work; therefore, once the work is removed or forgotten, the truth that happened in it is forgotten as well.’129 In the aesthetic experience that opens other possible worlds and perspectives, appears most clearly the distinctive character of existence, or as Heidegger says: the meaning of Being, as this very experience makes us see the contingency and relativity of the “real” world in which we are living.130 Following Heidegger, Vattimo argues that the aesthetic experience consists of the fundamental and continuing tension between belonging and estrangement, Verfremdung: the work of art consists of founding and unfounding; the setting up of the world (in bringing forth a network of signs) and the setting forth of the earth (in obscuring the roots of the work). The estrangement or disorientation that is central to the aesthetic experience is caused by the earthly obscured roots of the world of significance. Earth is not, like world, a system of signifying connections – on the contrary, ‘it is other, the nothing, general gratuitousness and insignificance’.131 Even though the work of art does not let itself be pinned down to some objective meaning, and even though its features are underivable, the artwork is definitely not outside the world. After all, it founds itself and opens itself by reshuffling the order of the world. Accordingly, the gratuitousness and the newness of the artwork correspond with the founding and disclosing of a world. The newness of the work cannot be reduced to some specific feature of the work, but lies rather in its instituting force, which consists of the way things are restructured in the artwork. It is this instituting force through which new meaning

129 Vattimo, G. Art’s Claim to Truth. New York: Colombia University Press, 1985, p. 156. 130 Vattimo, G. The Transparent Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, p. 9, 45. 131 Ibidem, p. 53.

46 can be expressed and that causes a Stoss, a shock.132 However elusive and obscure the meaning of a work might be, it does not have an arbitrary character, Vattimo argues. After all, the artwork’s constituting of a world is made possible because of the given lawfulness of things. Also the shock caused by the work of art is related to law: one encounters something new as it is coming into existence, one encounters it at the very same time as it is opening up itself. The happening in history of the shock, the experiencing of the event, the worlding of the obscure: all this may be caused by art. What Vattimo expresses very clearly here, is that we should not reflect on the mere things in the world nor consider the world as always already given (even though this might be the most familiar approach), because precisely then, when we take for granted that there be a world, we fail to spot it. Rather we should notice the refusal of things to situate themselves in the world as it is, unwrapping a new world and opening it in the moment of its disclosure.133 The aesthetic experience is first and foremost an experience of estrangement, for which recomposition and readjustment are required in order to see its meaning and truth. The aesthetic experience causes the estrangement to be maintained. The end is not to improve the insight in meaning and truth, nor to reach for an ultimate state of understanding and belonging. Rather, the very experience of the event is constitutive for its meaning. Here, Vattimo and Heidegger take slightly different stances (due to their different foci): even though he admits art expresses something completely new, Vattimo keeps stressing that it is always us who need to recognize the event of art and interpret its meaning. Heidegger however, saying that Being does not exist in stability or eternal definition, is primarily arguing that the event of Being expresses truth. The deconstruction of metaphysics and consequently of a static idea of truth, led to the idea of truth as event, both Heidegger and Vattimo argue. According to Vattimo this has caused Dasein to have become the interpreter of the event of Being; the event of Being discloses truth that is not fixed nor obvious and therefore consequently needs interpretation, dialogue, consensus – however perhaps only temporarily valid. As such, Dasein is forced to enter into dialogue with the work of art instead of merely conceiving some representation of a static order. The obscurity and estrangement it necessarily causes, makes it possible to conceive Dasein, being human, in a new way; to understand the Da with respect to the Sein.134 Vattimo explains this way of the self-understanding of Being as follows: If Dasein conceived itself on the basis of what is objectively present, this would imply it is finished, determined and completed as an object might be; instead Dasein, as long as it exists, always remains open for the future because it implies Möglich-sein; being possible.’135

132 Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, p. 68-69. 133 Ibidem, p. 69. 134 Vattimo, The Transparent Society, p. 10, p. 51. 135 Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, p. XV.

47 §4.3 Sacramental function of art

Heidegger and Vattimo have explained how in art, as an event, truth arises; truth is thus understood as an historical event. In a certain sense, this is similar to a Christian understanding of truth, that says that the logos, the word, incarnated, became man, dwelled on earth; God lowered himself in order to be able to reach us, man, in all our weakness and poorness. Incarnation indicates how truth is to be revealed in relation to history. From that appears that Christianity maintains truth as un- hiddenness and as happening in human history. Cases in which truth happens are pointed out in the life of Jesus, in the gospels. Out of the happening of Jesus’ death and resurrection it appears that in hiddenness, in absence, un-hiddenness and meaning clear. Christ, after his death and resurrection, remains present, which does not mean that he is omni-present, but rather that he “clears” in history. Artisitic representation seems to have a sacramental potential and as such the possibility to reveal; art makes present by presenting something different(ly). Its interpretation, following Vattimo, is the form of the presence of objectivity; only through subjectivity and plurality we come to reality. Art brings a certain view on reality to light and accordingly introduces an ordered and meaningful reality in each artistic expression. Artistic expressions do not only generate meaning, but might also participate in the meaning of divine creation, as they reveal what has not been noticed before. The openness and receptiveness to meaning is the dwelling place of religion. The arts depict a reality that is not ours, a world that is or is not as it should be. Where it is sensed that there is more to this world, there lies the sense of transcendence. And therefore art is a theological playground par excellence. In art the world is gathered and revealed. By presenting and restructuring aspects of ordinary reality art has the ability to reveal. In certain constellations in history, divine presence can show up. This does not mean that all of creation is intrinsically revealing; that would after all imply a limitation of God’s freedom to reveal, and moreover: it is contrasted by life experiences of radical absence of the good. Rather, it means that art can become ‘a real testimony to the real presence of God on earth’.136 Or even better: the divine is (or can be) present in what art brings about. Like Heidegger’s metaphor of the temple indicates: in art existing signifiers are gathered so that new meaning comes into being, and truth might clear. This is exactly what sacraments do: worldly things are used in a particular way so that something else can be made present. The work of art is the temple as Heidegger tries to explain: it captures reality without replacing it and in that sense the work of art “professes” or “theologizes”. The theological getting on

136 T.J. Gorringe Earthly Visions: Theology and the Challenges of Art. Yale: Yale University Press, 2011, p. 16.

48 with art consists not only of presenting a world that can be interpreted theologically, but rather it consists of the discovery of art as the temple that uncovers the world as a theological space. Thinking of art as sacramental instead of referential might be considered iconoclastic, as it combats the metaphysical binary subject-object and nature-supernature oppositions that maintain the distinction between what is depicted and what it refers to, which leads to an essential difference between the graven image and the reality depicted. Instead, the sacramental understanding of art focuses on the real presence of the divine in the work of art and its accomplishments. In line with Heidegger and Vattimo the sacramental conception of art indicates that art presents the divine and its nearness. What we know depends on what is uncovered “temple-wise”. The uncovery itself is a matter of understanding, which is a human activity that we cannot do without and that guides us in our knowledge; understanding is a basic condition for our In-der-Welt-sein. We understand even before we have any cognition. Understanding is not directed at something, but it rather is a direction itself – it is not transitive, but rather our way of being, namely grasping. What we know is dependent on what we understand and how we understand, and therefore we may say that epistemology is connected to, even dependent on hermeneutics. Since theology aims at understanding faith, reflecting the divine spirit as its origin, it is part of its tasks to lay bare the significance and role of religion within cultural expressions and to show what is revealed in these expressions, to articulate the nearness of salvation.137 Inspired by and responding to revelation, theologians examine salvation history. In doing so, theology not only considers the beginning and end of it – creation and redemption – but, perhaps more importantly, also what happens in between: redemption in the making. In order to grasp that, it is essential to do theology in a way that performs its task of reasoning about God and communicating faith without isolating itself from the culture to which it belongs; it is after all in one’s very own culture, in human creativity, that meaning in the making is evoked, not in the least in artistic expressions. In Heidegger’s words: we need to do it from factic life experience.

§4.4 Art, postmodern literature

What hasn’t changed is what I demand of a book that I write. I want to have a relationship with the reader. I don’t want to be a boring writer. At the same time, I want my books to have a meaning and have a meaning in the culture of our times; to say something that hasn’t already been said and to say it in a way that cannot be said except through literature. I believe more

137 S. van Erp The Art of Theology: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s and the Foundations of Faith, Leuven: Peeters, 2004, p. 2.

49 and more in literature as a language that says things that the other languages can’t say, that literature has full status as a form of knowledge.138

Literature may be sacramental, just like other art. It may be, because it is not said that each work called art necessarily presents the divine. Besides, whether an artwork gives rise to the divine has to do with the meaningful gathering of significations, not only of internal features, but also of environmental features. Contemporary, postmodern literature is often characterized by deconstructive movements and playing with meaning – yet even this kind of literature is a possible dwelling place of the divine (perhaps even pre-eminently), as we will see when dealing with Italo Calvino, who uses deconstructive stratagems, too. Deconstruction is the philosophy of literary theory that is connected to the thinking of Derrida, who argued that there is nothing but text, by which he meant that the references used to interpret a text are texts, too; none of the references on which interpretation is based, is truly non- textual and objective. Deconstructivists say a text is best understood when referring to its relations to different contexts. They seek to challenge a text’s frame of reference, its postulations and its ideology in order to show how a text can be interpreted in many – even contradicting – ways. In his works Calvino obviously plays with these insecurities and ambiguities of the meaning of texts; a main theme in his oeuvre is the addressing of the crisis caused by the insecurity of a text’s meaning through stressing the plurality of realities and the reader’s input in the constructing of meaning. We are about to examine Calvino’s literature to see whether, and if so: how, it presents the world as a theological world. In his works, Calvino addresses the problem of the absence of unambiguous meaning, the role of the reader and the many levels of reality. At first sight, this might not seem to be theological material. But Calvino’s literature reflects the current crisis of meaning. That’s why he is theological material, namely because he seeks to address a void and he refers to a world that has not yet been completed, but nevertheless appears in the artwork; he regards himself as standing in the tradition of Italian authors constructing an image of the world, moved by different forms of knowledge:

[…] anche Dante cercava attraverso l'opera letteraria di costruire un'immagine dell'universo. Questo è una vocazione profonda della letteratura italiana che passa da Dante a Galileo: l'opera letteraria come mappa del mondo e dello scibile, lo scrivere mosso da una spinta

138 Italo Calvino quoted in: T. Gabriele Italo Calvino: eros and language, Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1994, p. 33.

50 conoscitiva che è ora teologica ora speculativa ora stregonesca ora enciclopedica ora di filosofia naturale ora di osservazione trasfigurante e visionaria.139

[Dante, too, strived to construct an image of the universe through the literary work. That is a profound vocation of the Italian literature from Dante to Galileo: the literary work as map of the world and as a map of knowledge, writing it inspired by a knowledge-drive, at times theological, at times speculative, at times wizard-like, at times encyclopedic, at times scientific, at times of a visionary and transfigurating observation.] (Own translation.)

§4.5 Why Calvino?

I have decided on the literature of Calvino to cover in the case study. I am aware that not all literature presents the divine and consequently not all literature is suitable to illustrate what has been argued in the previous chapters – Calvino’s literature however, deals with existential and theological questions and shares some important concerns with contemporary theology. I have always experienced a theological sensitivity in his books. In questioning man’s ability to know things objectively and unambiguously, I feel he opens the way for an epistemology and creates theological space. I believe his literature and his literary theory can offer theological insights. Reading Calvino might contribute to a theology of presence and a dynamic theology, as presented in the previous chapters. Besides my belief that Calvino might be the perfect case study to finish this thesis with, I also just very much like to read and interpret his books, because he always asks of his reader to take nothing for granted and to take an extra look at reality, in which nothing really is what it seems. Calvino is an explorer; with his sensitive and amazed gaze he describes everyday and sheds an astonishing new light on reality. Even though his writing is humorous and lighthearted rather than serious, he does trouble his reader by presenting reality and at the same time showing that beneath this reality lies a world of ideas, grounds and fantasies that at times gives rise to new realities or at least to new perspectives on reality. In an interview he once said that ‘the conflict between the chaos of the world and man’s obsession with making some sense of it is a recurrent pattern in what I’ve written’.140 Whether (and if so, how) a sense of the divine comes in here, is to be examined in the following.

139 Calvino, I. ‘Due interviste su scienza e letteratura’, in Italo Calvino, Una pietra sopra, Milan: Mondadori, 1995, p. 226-227. 140 Italo Calvino in an interview with William Weaver in 1982, published as “Italo Calvino, the art of Fiction No 130” in Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino

51 Italo Calvino

§5.1 Biography, oeuvre and themes

In 1923 Italo Calvino was born in Cuba where his Italian parents were working at the time. They named their son Italo after their beloved home country, so that he would not forget his roots. However, it was only two years later that they moved back to Italy, more precisely to San Remo. During his childhood he was already writing stories, but it wasn’t until after his academic studies that he thought of publishing them. To please his parents, who were botanist and agronomist, he decided to enroll at the Faculty of Science of the to study agriculture. Yet, during his first years he would spend more time reading literature than studying agriculture. In 1943, being called into military service in Mussolini’s army, he had to interrupt his studies. As a convinced communist however, he ignored the government order and instead joined the Italian Communist resistance, together with his brother Floriano.141 After the war he decided to do a degree in literature instead of agriculture and he started to publish his novels. His first publication was Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Spider’s Nests) in 1947. It was awarded the Riccione Prize. During the years to follow, he was a journalist at Il Giorno and Corriere della sera, he worked as an editor for Einaudi, a prestigious Italian publishing house, and obviously, he wrote novels and short stories. Calvino lived in Paris for a while, where he joined a group of writers and mathematicians named OULIPO: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; workshop of potential literature. The workshop, that still exists, is meant for writers to learn new skills and to be inspired by the task the group has set itself, namely seeking new structures and patterns to apply to literature. Calvino has never produced a text reflecting OULIPO-practices; the exercises remained so to say theoretical in his case, even though the structuring of Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveler is obviously influenced by mathematical composition. When he died in 1985, Calvino had published some 15 novels, most of which are translated into several other languages, which makes him one of the most famous Italian authors of his time. 142 Calvino is known for his magic realism, blending the realistic with ‘fantasy’, most notoriously in his books Mr Palomar, Marcovaldo, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The nonexistent knight and Invisible cities. Themes he addresses are the different levels of reality within a text, the role of the reader in the constructing of a text and the tension between scientific rationalism and artistic

141 H. Bloom, Italo Calvino. Broomall: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002, p. 12. 142 M. L. McLaughlin, Italo Calvino. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998, p. xv-xvi.

52 representation when it comes to representing ‘the real’.143 Unsurprisingly then, his works also demonstrate a concern with metaphysical challenges and today’s groundlessness. Calvino’s literature is often described as meta- or hyper-literature: it is fiction about fiction; it is literature that discusses internally the fact that it is fiction. This is most obvious in his novel If on a winter’s night a traveler, in which the two central characters (the male reader and the female reader) read a book that is broken off abruptly, and, looking for the sequel, they accidentally obtain a new book that is broken off for some reason, instead of the sequel of the original book. This happens ten times. During their quest for the sequel, the two protagonists meet, find out about book-fraud, a deceitful translator, and many more things, and they fall in love with each other. The novel is self- consciously reflective and inventive. It is fiction about fiction and that causes both the self-awareness of the reader and the seemingly loss of his subjectivity. In his literature and in interviews, Calvino addresses the connection between hermeneutics and epistemology; in line with what we have seen before in the philosophies of Heidegger, Rahner and Vattimo, Calvino, too, advocates that epistemology be found in hermeneutics, but in a slightly different way. In his books – most notoriously again in If on a winter’s night a traveler, but also in Invisible Cities – he articulates how someone’s particular life-stance determines what he thinks to know and the crises this causes; the loss of objectivity, the impossibility of the writer to communicate his meaning in the text and the loss of the metaphysical subject-object relation. Calvino stresses the inevitability of interpreting, and not so much (as Vattimo does) the necessity of interpreting for the coming into being of meaning. Calvino argued how science and literature are two autonomous methods occupied with trying to face the confusion of contemporary man with respect to the world. They have in common the attitude of constructing interpretative models of reality concerning being. Yet, the literary method might deliver more fundamental truths than the scientific method, since the latter is based on metaphysical subject-object thinking that can only discover truths that always maintain a distance to the self. Calvino sees the effect of the blurring of the hermeneutics-epistemology distinction and articulates the consequences of the loss of foundational grounds of epistemology, but he is not trying to solve this matter other than just writing literature of which he hopes it offers fundamental truths. Calvino’s deconstruction consists of posing the question of ontological confusion. Offering a content that would somehow solve the issue would ignore the existential problem. At best he deals with the issue in his question-raising way of writing and his appeal to the reader to think about these questions, without dictating a theoretical statement.144

143 C. Markey, Italo Calvino: a journey toward postmodernism. Gainesville: Florida University Press, 1999, p. 3- 15. 144 Beno Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia: South Carolina Press, 1993, p. 93.

53 Calvino regards his books not so much as static entities, but rather as living words that enter into dialogue with the reader. The reader has a prominent place in Calvino’s oeuvre – and not only where he is mentioned explicitly. In fact, Calvino may be said to apply reader response techniques. Reader response theories focus on the reader’s activities and the interaction between text and reader, something Calvino obviously uses when anticipating the reader’s reactions and assumptions and being one step ahead of those reactions. In doing so, he deconstructs both his text (surprising with new insights) and the reader (catching his thoughts and its ambiguities, doubts and assumptions), while he is at the same time aware of the death of the author (note the parallel with the death of God as foundation for an objective order).145 I will interpret two books by Calvino: If on a winter’s night a traveler (IWNT) and Invisible Cities (IC), since those are his most appealing and outstanding books. I will try to show that Calvino in both books demonstrates the world as a theological space, in which theological matters are addressed – mostly so in his ideas about interpretation and meaning. When I chose for Calvino to be studied in this case study, I was not quite aware of how well-matched Heidegger, Rahner and Vattimo and Calvino are. Calvino addresses the problem of the plurality of interpretations; in his metafictional books Calvino addresses the reader and rhetorically points to his automatically interpreting of the meaning of the book. It raises questions; do we need to interpret from ourselves, or should we rely on either the author or the internal textual signifiers to guide us?

§5.2 If on a winter’s night a traveler: Plot

Let’s start with a short review of IWNT, a quite random review I found on the Internet:

This book is my new bible. It speaks to me on every level. It inspires and excites me. As a writer and a reader. Italo Calvino has awed me. Has stunned my eyes open. He illicits a delicious self-conciousness by showing his hand. By pointing out which devices and tools are at play here. And by doing so, mystifies and confounds me. […] Calvino has encrypted his world and has decoded it in surprising ways. So that even reading a translation of the work makes me question the wholeness and faithfulness of what I'm reading. His thoughtful deconstruction is a minor transgression as he pieces the ideas together, culminating in a cohesiveness and re-structuring of what I thought I had read. And the subtlety and skill Calvino uses to toy with and enlighten the reader is nothing short of divine. I have come away from this book a changed person. Viewing the world through his

145 Ibidem, p. 203.

54 cracked and distorted lens, but the ensuing patterns made make profound sense. I aspire to infect another, as Calvino has infected me.146

This appraisal of IWNT reflects some of Calvino’s style and technique, and a fascination for the book that I share with the reviewer. The notion that Calvino ‘encrypts and decodes the world’ and ‘the sense the world made through the book’s lens’ can perfectly be reconciled with Heidegger’s temple metaphor. Now what is it that makes sense? What do Calvino’s writings tell us?

The plot of IWNT has already shortly been described before: During their search for the sequel of the chapter they have read, the Reader (male, anonymous) and the Reader (female, Ludmilla) find out about a conspiracy of two opposite groups: on the one hand the group of the ones who want to separate true from false novels, fighting against false translations, against false covers and against ghost writers, and on the other hand the ones who believe that the true purpose of novels can only be reached by imitation, coincidence and mystery. The Reader is forced to take a stance, but his main concern is to obtain the complete versions of the books he had only come to read the first chapter of. In the end it appears that his library has all the ten books he had just been reading the introduction of. Those books are however lent out. In the library he starts a conversation with some readers and this conversation causes him to realize that the fiction does not matter anymore and he asks Ludmilla to marry him. The book is written in the second person; the two protaganists; the Reader (male) and the Reader (Ludmilla) are addressed. The use of this perspective makes the reader reflect on his reader’s perspective and his implicit assumptions. In chapter VII this is explicitly explained; ‘This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character [...] and so he has been kept a pronoun, in the abstracts condition of pronouns suitable for any attribute and any action.’147 Calvino’s aim here, is to let the reader deconstruct himself. He accomplishes this when the reader finds out the writer is deceiving him. Calvino questions every meaning, plays with reality, explains his own literary rhetoric and what it should accomplish – but in doing so, he does not accomplish that effect – and he mentions many different ways of dealing with fiction and reality.

146 http://www.amazon.ca/product-reviews/0679420258?pageNumber=8, review titled ‘Brilliant, concept- bursting writing’, uploaded on October 6, 1996, consulted 15 October 2011. 147 I. Calvino, Als op een winternacht een reiziger. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1982, p. 138 (translation by William Weaver).

55 §5.3 IWNT: a closer examination

Through books, through its written, solidified material, a reader is always also confronted with what is not present. Reading in that sense is a confrontation with what is developing, becoming present.148 Many of the issues Calvino raises regard the matter of interpretation of the ‘vast material’ and of how to see what is not present. He introduces several readers and even a non-reader, and their ideas about the confrontation with the text and its meaning. A first reader is Lotaria (the sister of Ludmilla, the female protagonist), who obviously represents the structuralist position. Lotaria is convinced that she does not need to read complete books, but that she can have computers determine the most frequent words in the book and then deduce what it was about.149 The words she finds however (like ‘you’ and ‘answers’), are meaningless. She tries to get to the meaning of the text with the help of objective computer outcomes, but in doing so it becomes meaningless. On the other hand there is Ludmilla, who is more of a receptive reader. She does not want to categorize books and their contents, nor is she looking for structures to lay bare the book’s meaning. What she does want is to be given entrance to another world; she wants to lose herself in the world of a book. She wants reading to be a primitive experience of being allowed to witness its story, without filling anything in.150 She does not even want to know anything about the writer. The difference between the two sisters is that Lotaria wants to appropriate the book, whereas Ludmilla wants to be appropriated by the book. According to Ludmilla, a book should not say what is already around; it should not fill in blanks, but instead maintain its emptiness and mere presence. The writer Flannery (the first-person protagonist narrator in the tenth chapter) describes Ludmilla’s reading attitude as follows: ‘For this woman (…) reading means to detach from any intention or prejudice, to be ready to catch a voice that makes itself be heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from somewhere, from an unknown source beyond the book, beyond the author, beyond the conventions of writing: from where the unsaid dwells and the things the world has not yet revealed about itself and for which she hasn’t got the words yet.’151 A third person, Irnerio, a friend of Ludmilla’s, does not read at all, because he does not want to become a slave to the books. He is not illiterate, but he taught himself how not to read, which was not easy.152 He looks at words until they have become mere ink marks. Instead of reading books, he

148 Ibidem, p. 71. 149 Ibidem, p. 181. 150 Ibidem, p. 29, 88. 151 Ibidem, p. 231-232 (own translation). 152 Ibidem, p. 47.

56 makes art objects out of them. Irnerio is the non-reader that only sees the material fact the book is, not the concepts it lays bare. These three persons have a different reading attitude and to all of them books mean something different. In introducing the writer Flannery, Calvino also mentions the writer’s perspective and consequently his own perspective on the meaning of reading: Flannery is easily recognized as Calvino’s alter ego. Through Flannery, Calvino mentions his perspective on the meaning of literature and the role of text, writer and reader. Should there be any place in the book where Calvino describes the meaning of his books and of what he wants to say, it must be here.

Chapter VIII consists of a fragment of Silas Flannery’s diary. Flannery writes about how he has not been able to write lately. He describes how he sits in his study, thinking about a yet to be written book and looking over the valley, spying on a woman (that happens to be the Reader (female)) with his binoculars. The valley symbolizes the writer’s view on the world: he sees how his books are read, he sees and interprets life. When he sees the Reader (Ludmilla), he is convinced that she is reading his true book, the book that he will never be able to write. He is thinking of this true book when struggling with his writer’s block: he describes how his writer’s aim is to give a voice to what lies beyond himself, but since he doubts whether language has the ability at all to communicate totality – since words always fall short and only communicate an individual truth – he can’t write. The only options he sees for himself is to write books of other writers, to combine all individual truths to one. Flannery wants to write a text that contains a ‘super truth’, that annuls all other texts and makes all other books redundant. Should this be impossible, then one other option is left, namely to write one book for one reader, which would communicate the purest individual truth. To Flannery, the reader is both condition and restriction. The writer exists because there is a reader. In order for his writings to be done justice, he expects a certain way of reading: he tells Lotaria that he hopes his readers read something in his books that he wasn’t aware of himself, but that he can only expect that of those who expect to read something they didn’t know themselves, which is in opposition to Lotaria’s attitude of already knowing what to read in a book (which is hineininterpretieren) 153. Flannery praises the beginning of books, as they always leave all possibilities open. Flannery wants to write a book that is basically one extensive beginning in that it always leaves open the possibilities of certain endings and in that it maintains the waiting for something yet unknown. It needs no explication that this is what Calvino does in IWNT: on a meta-level, Calvino does what he lets Flannery think about, namely writing books of other writers, publishing ten stories in IWNT by so- called other authors. The beginnings of each of the ten books (chapters in IWNT) form a sentence: If

153 Ibidem, p. 180.

57 on a winter’s night a traveler, outside the town of Malbork, leaning from the steep slope, without fear of wind or vertigo, looks down in the gathering shadow, in a network of lines that enlace, in a network of lines that intersect, on the carpet leaves illuminated by the moon, around an empty grave, what story down there awaits its end? This is again the beginning of a new book. It maintains the expectation the beginning of a book raises. Calvino states that all writing is incomplete and that it at best refers to what has not (yet) been written. A propos: having read the beginning of a book, the Reader (male) is desperate to find the rest of the book; that is what the whole book is about at first glance. When the Reader (male) finds out about the sentence the titles form, and when another reader asks him why he wants stories to have endings and beginnings, he decides to give up on finding the books and to marry Ludmilla. It illustrates how love is eternal, or rather: how love stops the running of time. Flannery mentions the imperfection of verbal communication when he brings up the story of Abdullah, the scribe of Muhammad: Once, the scribe suggested the ending of a sentence that Muhammad had not finished out loud. Muhammad, slightly absent for a moment, agreed and took those words for holy words. The scribe then loses his faith. Flannery disapproves with Abdullah, as it was after all his task to capture the fluidity of thoughts (that crosses the borders of any language as long has it hasn’t been transformed into words yet – and the words of a prophet is even more fluid!) It was his task to make written language coherent in grammar and syntax; Allah needed the cooperation of a scribe when he decided to express himself in written text. Abdullah was unaware of the dominant position he held. He lost his faith in Allah because he did not believe in scripture and not in himself as the one to realize scripture. Flannery struggles with the same sense of unbelief. His wish is to write about the objective world; to catch the unreadable world in his books, but he cannot write without his own subjective perspective. He ends up planning to write a book in which he manipulates reality (in which he runs off with Ludmilla).154 In the end, when Flannery decides it is impossible to write about the objective world, he wants to show the Reader that there is nothing behind the written page; the world is nothing but artificial, fiction, a lie.155 He feels that the text has no meaning – and neither does the real world. Calvino is making clear here that we, readers, have the power to realize scripture and meaning, but that that does not mean that scripture be false or subjective. Calvino encourages the reader to realize the scripture, to believe in scripture and in ourselves. After all, it is only the limited act of our reading or writing that makes clear the immensity of what has not been written. It is about the truth of the moment, that happens in a certain place and time and that lays bare meanings thus

154 Ibidem, p. 175-176. 155 Ibidem.

58 far undiscovered. The reader has the power to either take an active or a passive stance. Calvino obviously rejects the active reader, who wants to control and investigate truth instead of being absorbed by it, which is the more passive attitude. The text comes from the writer, but is always imperfect, as it is merely text. Yet, it shows something, it ‘clears’ meaning, as Heidegger would say. We will come back to that after the discussion of IC.

It needs to be said that I, reading this book again for my thesis, felt addressed in this book, too. Flannery, the writer, mentions how a girl, that appears to be Lotaria, came to visit him, who had been writing an academic thesis about his novels. He notices that his novels are perfect material for her to prove her theories, which is something positive (either for his novels, or for her theories). However, regarding his works through her eyes and theories, Flannery does not recognize the works he has written himself. He decides that she has read them only to find what she was already convinced of before reading them.156 As for me, however, I was not guided and blinded by some literary theory and I hope to have done justice to the concreteness of the text.

§5.4 Invisible Cities: Plot

In IC, too, Calvino addresses the interpretation of stories. In the book, Marco Polo describes to the emperor Kublai Khan the cities – 55 in total – he explored during his travels through his empire. As they do not speak the same language, they use objects and gestures. It turns out, however, that the cities he mentions are all made up and that all the fictional cities refer to Marco Polo’s city: Venice. The Khan then starts to describe cities and asks Marco Polo to go find them. He hopes to find a structure in the cities (comparable to the structure of a chess board) to that he can understand the structure of his empire and stop its decay. The book is structured around a pattern of numbered sections and the cities are structured after their ‘topic’: Cities and memory, Cities and desire, Cities and signs, Thin cities, Trading cities, Cities and eyes, Cities and names, Cities and the dead, Cities and the sky, Continuous cities, Hidden cities. The dialogues between the Khan and Polo and a series of five or ten city descriptions succeed each other. The dialogues address many of the topics also addressed in IWNT, for example the opposition between fact and fiction and original and imitation. The reader experiences the same insecurities about the truth of the text as in IWNT.

156 Ibidem, p. 180.

59 §5.5 IC: A Closer Examination

Even though the reader is not addressed explicitly, he does feel the appeal of IC; since the Khan and Marco Polo don’t speak the same language (figuratively and literally), it is up to the reader to interpret what is going on in their discourses. It is said that at first Marco Polo expresses himself in gestures and with auxiliary objects and that the Khan would decipher the connections between the gestures, but it remained always insecure what Polo would want to say and what the Khan thought he would say. When Polo starts to learn the language of the Khan (or it might just be that the Khan starts to learn Marco Polo’s language157) and when consequently the cities can be described more detailed, the communication between the two men seems to become less accurate. So they start to communicate non-verbally again and in the end they are silent and motionless during their conversations. They speak in silence, they communicate without communicating. Like in IWNT, Calvino addresses in IC the imperfection of verbal communication. Their rejection of words is similar to Irnerio’s rejection of words: they feel that words have no meaning in themselves, so they try to find other ways to communicate. Again, Calvino challenges the reader’s presuppositions and ideas of objectivity and certitude. In vain the reader seeks for an absolute ground for the conversations between the Khan and Marco Polo. Has Marco Polo learnt the Khan’s language or has the Khan learnt Marco Polo’s? Is Polo’s description ruled ‘by the voice’ (of Marco), or ‘by the ear’ (of the Khan)?158 Is the Khan interpreting Marco’s stories, or is Marco ‘incarnating’ the Khan’s illusions? Both the Khan and Polo are unreliable. Again, Calvino leaves the reader knowing that he cannot know anything for sure and that any meaning might just as well be the opposite. The book is not about characters, plots or events. It is about cities that don’t exist visibly. They might exist in Marco Polo’s mind, or in the mind of the Khan interpreting the city. Obviously, the book is about more than the cities: Marco Polo tries to explain the Khan the invisible structure of his empire, which might even be a metaphor for the order of human existence. He shows that there is a basic design, that there are some features to be deduced from it, but that it is so very complicated that it cannot be known by reason alone. 159 The Khan hopes to find objective truth about the cities in his empire that is falling apart. Knowing his empire, he thinks, might help him possess his empire. He wants to be able to have an objective overview of the totality of his reality. Marco Polo however, confronts the Khan with the fact that it is not possible to gain objective truth. When the Khan dreams about a city and asks Polo

157 Calvino, I. Onzichtbare steden. Amsterdam: Atlas, 2010, p. 48. 158 Ibidem, p. 141. 159 B. Weiss, Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia: South Carolina Press, 1993, p. 148.

60 to go find that city and confirm the truth of his dream, Polo does not give in to the Khan’s idea of being able to master reality; he responds that it is a city that knows only departures, no returns.160 The Khan wants to master the objective reality, but that reality appears not to exist – a notion that is also apparent in IWNT. Even though the Khan knows that Polo’s stories are made up, he keeps listening with greater attention and curiosity to Marco Polo than to his other messengers. Polo’s reports enable the Khan to discern a network, a structure, more than other reports.161 The Khan particularly appreciates Polo’s words, which enables him to fill in more of the cities without fixating them.162 That is exactly what Polo tries to accomplish: to give the Khan imagination, so that he can accept the limits of epistemology, the limits of human knowledge. The Khan has the illusion that he can comprehend everything if only he knows the rules and the models underlying reality. Like the structuralist Lotaria in IWNT, the Khan wants to find out the design and the structure that underlies reality in order to understand it. He compares reality to a game of chess with all its rules. However, in the end, he realizes that he has forgotten about the reason of everything, and in bringing down everything to its model and rules, only the ‘nothing’ remains, he concludes.163 It is not difficult to see the parallel with Lotaria, whose structuralist and factual interpretations are meaningless, too. After the Khan has concluded that only the nothing remains, Marco Polo teaches him (using again descriptions of the models of cities) that even the models and rules are subordinate to something. The passage that ended with the conclusion that only the nothing remains, is repeated entirely, but instead of with ‘nothing’ it ends with Marco Polo telling a story about the origins of the chessboard, and he leaves the Khan amazed.164 Why be amazed about the origins of the chessboard? Because it reveals that there is something underlying everything. It is not the reader, nor the writer, nor the described matter itself that generates meaning – rather it is the underlying principle that gives meaning to everything. IC ends with the Khan asking Marco Polo about his hopes for the future, about the perfect city. He answers that sometimes an opening perspective in the midst of an inconsistent surrounding clears a vision of the perfect city (an allusion to Augustine’s city of God?). Yet, everyday life mirrors the hell of our society. There are two ways to reduce the suffering from it; either participating in it, or studying it constantly, discerning what is, in the midst of this hell, not hell – and maintaining that and

160 Calvino, Onzichtbare steden, p. 63. 161 Ibidem, p. 11. 162 Ibidem, p. 47. 163 Ibidem, p. 128. 164 Ibidem, p. 137.

61 giving it space. Polo’s aim is to explore traces of the good that are still present.165 This view is not opposed, nor rejected, nor deconstructed. It is up to the reader to respond. The awareness of a broken world, of something good in it and the hope for a better future: all in all a very theological ending.

§5.6 Interpretation: Theological perspectives in IWNT and IC

IWNT and IC are about fact and fiction, text and context, reality and fable, original and imitation, autonomy and oppression – and mostly about the blurring between these binary oppositions because of the circularity of reader and text. The author shows how neither the author, nor the reader seems to be in charge of the text, instead it is the text and what is beyond the text that speaks to the reader. The text is nothing more and nothing less than the expectation of a story that awaits its end. Calvino makes clear that there is no objective meaning concealed in any text and that words are meaningless as signifiers. In IWNT this is most clearly illustrated in the persons of Irnerio and Lotaria. Irnerio, as non-reader, points out that the text is a merely physical thing and that the sheer words have no meaning in themselves. It is difficult not to read and not let the text take over and appropriate the reader with its false realities (something Flannery wants to do when he plans to write a book for Ludmilla alone). Lotaria’s position illustrates what Irnerio resists, namely the falling for the words and the being tricked by the words. Her structuralist analyses do not bring about new meaning, but rather confirm the meaning she had put in it before. The two protagonists (the male and female Reader) however, understand that they need to look for new words constantly – words that are meaningless in themselves, but that have their origin in something that is potentially meaningful. In IC the meaninglessness of words is expressed when the Khan and Polo find out that as they start to learn each other’s language, the communication becomes less accurate. In the end they communicate without words and even without gestures: during Marco’s description of the cities they remain silent and still. The impossibility of a text’s objectivity is not only expressed in the impossibility of words and texts to actually cover an objective reality, it is also expressed in the deception of both reader and writer. This causes the reader to be suspicious of the objective meaning he thinks to read in the book and the writer to doubt the contribution of his writings. From my own experience I can tell that every time the reader thinks he knows what the story is about, he is proven wrong when he turns the page. This is not only an experience of the reader of Calvino’s books, but also of the protagonists of his

165 Ibidem, p. 168-169, p. 66.

62 books: in IWNT the Readers run into false novels, false translations, false covers and ghost writers. Even the writer, Flannery, stresses that neither the writer, nor the reader knows what a book is about, as it is always also about everything that it is not about. In IC both the Khan and Polo describe cities that do not exist and understand the cities the other describes in their own way. Calvino also addresses the limits of human knowledge. Persons like Lotaria and the Khan try to discover the design that lies behind what they perceive. In the end however, their knowledge is meaningless; Lotaria’s words mean nothing and the Khan’s chess play means nothing: the rules may be understood, but the truth that sustain these rules are not – and can not. Marco Polo teaches the Khan that even the models and rules are subordinate to something. All of this does not mean that nothing remains. Calvino is not a nihilist, even though he is firm that language fails, readers fail, writers fail, the text fails, that we can know of an objective reality, but we cannot know it in its objectivity. But in the end he did write books. And those books are (re-)read – and even analyzed in academic theses… The passage in IC that ended with the conclusion that only the nothing remains, is completely repeated, but has an ending now: instead of with ‘nothing’ it ends with Marco Polo telling a story about the origins of the chessboard, and he leaves the Khan amazed.

Calvino articulates how someone’s particular life-stance determines what he thinks to know and the crises this causes; he articulates the loss of objectivity, of subjectivity, he articulates the impossibility of the writer to communicate his meaning in the text and the loss of the metaphysical subject-object relation. Yet, we cannot conclude that his books mean nothing and that Calvino proclaims nihilism. In the midst of deceit, fraude and misinterpretation, there remains something that is meaningful. And this is the theological perspective Calvino’s works offer: Calvino shows that the creating power of literature lies not in the writer, nor in the reader, nor in the text. It lies both in the foundations and in the direction of reality. Reality or what lies at the foundations of it cannot be plainly represented in literature. What (good) literature can do, is to show that the meaning of literature does not come from reader, writer or text. Additionally, literature might refer to and maybe even ‘present’ the foundations of reality. This is what Calvino has done: in his literature he has presented a constant expectation. He ends his books with love (IWNT) and hope (IC). Calvino warns us that texts cannot present an objective meaning or truth, that our interpretations might very well be false, that even writers, texts and reality may be false. At the same time, however, he maintains that his works do stem from a reality that sustains the broken reality we perceive or misperceive. What may be called his nihilism is actually his warning: Calvino warns us that it is dangerous to blindly believe in anything – for example in the power of words, for we will

63 drown in the meaning of the words instead of what sustains those words. That is how Calvino gives voice to what lies beyond human perception and that is why his literature has a theological appeal.

64 Conclusion

We shall not cease from exploration And at the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot Four Quartets

In our interpretative age, we are faced with pluralism, different co-existing Weltanschauungen and the loss of unambiguous truth. According to Heidegger, the cause of modernity’s lack of unambiguous truth has to do with the loss of a sense of Being. Because of our Seinsvergessenheit we are condemned to interpret reality instead of experiencing it: neo-Platonic metaphysical thought has created a distance between the knowing subject and the object being known and consequently it has made God into an object of mere speculation instead of an entity perceived by authentic understanding. These observations made theologians reconsider the distinction between nature and supernature and the possibility of knowing the divine in a metaphysical, interpretative age. Rahner, one of the theologians inspired by Heidegger, introduced the supernatural existential of the preapprehension of the divine: he argues that we can know of God, because of our preapprehenison, our supernatural existential that gives us an a priori transcendental openness towards God – comparable to how Heidegger presumed Dasein’s a priori openness towards Being. Because of the preapprehension, man has an immediate directedness towards the divine. Rahner’s ideas do try to overcome the distinction between nature and supernature, causes again new problems, such as he possibility of genuine openness, man’s liberty not to be directed at God and the question if interpreting is still necessary. Vattimo, inspired by Heidegger, too, sheds a new and useful light on these matters. He argues that interpreting is today’s dealing with Being. Interpreting does not cause a distinction between man and Being, but it rather is man’s experiencing of Being. This clears a truth that is weakened, but not meaningless: through interpretations we can discern truths. Christianity, too, has a weakened sense of truth, as the kenotic event of incarnation is the weakening of the transcendental divine power and its metaphysical essence. The kenosis makes all absolute truths groundless. According to Vattimo, incarnation is a constitutive experience. The event of the incarnation (a unique event) has happened and is in that sense with us, but also needs to happen to us when interpreting the Word. Vattimo’s philosophy presents kenosis as a real and entire

65 emptying – to the extent that nothing divine remains. In basing theology merely on the entire kenosis, he fails to do justice to the event of incarnation (which implies not only emptying, but also the divine becoming worldly) and to think of God’s actual presence. In Vattimo’s thinking of incarnation the incarnation has become a theory itself (as constitutive experience) and the principle of God’s kenosis has become the warranty. Vattimo falls into the trap of having theology relied on its own theory – a trap warned for by Heidegger repeatedly. Theology must not rely on its own theories, for it would make the necessity of the presence of God a purely theoretical matter, and the theoretical principle would surpass the very experience that it comes from. Now, on what knowledge and information should theology rely? Here, Heidegger’s thought is helpful again: Heidegger argued that in order to gain insight in Christian religiosity one need not study the history of Christianity but rather the facticity and historicity of life experience.

There are many ways to study the facticity and historicity of life experience and to possibly gain new theological insights from them. One of the ways is to study art, as both Heidegger and Vattimo have explained. They have argued how in art, as an event, truth arises and how truth is consequently a historical event. This is quite similar to the Christian tradition that says Christ is the incarnated word, ‘un-hiding’ truth. Jesus’ death and resurrection point out that meaning and truth clear in hiddenness and absence. Artisitic representation has a sacramental potential and as such the possibility to reveal; art presents something in a different way, and as such, it clears a new view on reality. Art can reveal new perspectives and thus far unnoticed realities and it makes people receptive to meaning. Art can be discovered as the temple that uncovers the world as a theological space. It captures reality without replacing it and in understanding that reality as a hiding place of the divine it “theologizes”.

Because of a personal fascination with the works of Italo Calvino and because of his modern, contemporary writing style, it was decided that a part of his literary oeuvre would be the art case to study in this thesis: his books If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler and Invisible Cities. The books share the topics of the tension between fact and fiction, text and context, reality and fable, original and imitation, autonomy and oppression. Using several rhetorical devices, the author shows how the text is not subject to a reader, author or reality – instead, it is what is beyond the text that speaks to the reader. The text consists of what precedes the text and of the expectation of a story that awaits its end. Calvino stresses that a text does not have the power to conceal ‘objective meaning’, as words and structures are meaningless in themselves. Besides, human knowledge is limited. Even though

66 Calvino shows how language, readers and writers fail to communicate things plainly, how the text fails because of the contexts and how objective reality is impossible to pin down, Calvino is not a nihilist. After all is said and done, something meaningful remains: Calvino shows that despite of the reader, author and text and their interpretations, there is a source of new meaning, which lies both in the foundations and in the direction of reality. The meaning of literature does not come from reader, writer or text – and that is what literature can elucidate: it can ‘present’ the foundations of reality. Rahner had posed the question of how and to what extent the Geist in Welt is spoken to by something beyond himself and Vattimo is unsure, too, whether there is actually anything else than ourselves that can speak to us. Calvino deals with these insecurities. He shows how, despite our interpretations, something new can speak to us, if only we are courageous enough to open ourselves for it. We should let go of our theories and not let our preconceived opinions get in the way of new experiences. Calvino constantly tells his readers to take nothing for granted in his books. His texts cannot present an objective meaning or truth, and our interpretations appear to be false over and again. Nonetheless, he does – be it very indirectly and carefully – point to an objective reality; a reality preceding the incomplete reality we perceive or misperceive. Not the mere things, but rather what sustains them deserve our attention, Calvino argues. Trying to direct his readers at what lies beyond human perception and letting them hear the voice from an unknown source: that is the theological appeal of Calvino’s literature.

67 List of sources

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Web pages http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2027/the-art-of-fiction-no-130-italo-calvino (consulted 4 October 2011) http://www.amazon.ca/product-reviews/0679420258?pageNumber=8 (consulted 15 October 2011)

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