The Existential Grammar of the Good News: Truth, Epistemology and Encounter James P. Godfrey B.A (Melb), B.Theol Hons (MCD) A thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Theology Melbourne College of Divinity November 2008 Abstract When a Christian notion of truth is understood as a life , rather than a fact, idea, or tenet of doctrine, the tools for delineation, or the grammar, must be revised. Existential philosophy assists in the development of a revised grammar by restoring to the concept of truth, the fact of existing. Drawing upon the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gabriel Marcel, and Søren Kierkegaard, an epistemological framework is developed that responds and reveals the fundamentally incarnate character of a Christian notion of truth. i Acknowledgments I owe a debt of gratitude for the generous support I have received from many people during the completion of this project. In particular, my supervisor, Prof Christiaan Mostert and my Associate Supervisor, Dr. Brian Scarlett have exceeded their obligations by challenging me intellectually, guiding me academically, and encouraging me emotionally. Prof Christiaan Mostert, supervisor and friend, has both challenged me to be intellectually rigorous in my theological questioning, and accompanied me through those aspects of Christian life where questions must be put aside. For this apprentice, he has been a dear Master. I am also very grateful to the staff of Dalton McCaughey Library who have been exceedingly generous in the access they have given me to research material, and shown to me a foreshadowing of the Kingdom where there will be no library fines! During much of the research and writing of this project, I lived in community within the Parish of St. Canice’s Catholic Church, Kings Cross. I owe an inexpressible debt of gratitude to the members of that parish, especially to the asylum-seekers and street people who gather around the Cross, and in particular to Fr. Steve Sinn, who made concrete for me a union of academic theology and Christian life, and guided me along this narrow path. My deepest sense of gratitude, however, is reserved for my wife, Domenique, who has and continues to show me the transformative power of steadfast love. She has been both my intellectual interlocutor, and my beloved, and has borne me two children, Joseph and William, during the writing of this thesis. In their sacred innocence, and the support and demands of my wider family, I now begin to understand what it is to experience the fullness of life . I dedicate this work to the greater glory of God. ii Preface The need for emphasizing the personal, experiential reality of Christian faith within a culture variably described as Christian, Secular, Post-Modern and Post-Christian is clearly evident. Given the popular distrust of institutional authority and the enshrinement of individual freedom, the relevance of the Good News will be heard most persuasively when it is heard personally, experientially, existentially. This movement is taking a variety of forms, including a renewed interest in Christian meditation and the wisdom of the Desert Fathers, a focus upon Christian spirituality and, within the Catholic tradition, an ongoing debate over the primacy of conscience. The hunger to engage with the realm beyond the facts, to that which exceeds the descriptive scope of doctrine and teaching, invites a revision of the scope and expectations of theological inquiry. Where previously the authority of Church Teaching could serve to provide the definitive or sufficient structure for a Christian way of life, post-institutional Western culture requires that the experiential realm of faith become a necessary feature of theological discourse. However, if theology is to be of service in the personal and experiential realm of Christian faith, that is to say, if theology can speak meaningfully of this domain, questions of theological method must be asked. To this end, an existential approach will prove most fruitful, for it generates the possibility that intellectual rigor and philosophical reflection can be meaningfully brought to bear on fundamental aspects of individual, subjective existence. In terms of formal academic disciplines, this thesis draws from both philosophy and theology, though its ultimate concern is theological. If it must be located, this thesis belongs within the stream of Philosophical Theology. While the claims are fundamentally Christian and explicitly theological, the discussion draws from writers of philosophy, two of whom are explicitly Christian and one ambivalently religious. Wittgenstein, though in no way a theologian, famously remarked, “I am not a religious man: but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view”.1 While I have drawn from an existential mode of philosophy that is often superficially assumed to be atheistic, the 1 Rush Rhees, ed., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Personal Recollections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 94. iii philosophical problems underlying existential philosophy are shown to posses an acute relevance to questions of christology and contemporary Christian discipleship. Though distinctive from popularised forms of twentieth-century French existentialism, the conjoining of existential philosophy and Christology is in perfect harmony with the thought of the so-called ‘Grandfather of Existentialism’, Søren Kierkegaard. iv Table of Contents Abstract i Acknowledgments ii Preface iii Table of Contents v Introduction 1 PART I 5 Chapter I - A Philosophical Background to Existential Inquiry 5 Existential Traces in the Pre-Socratics 8 Plato: Leaving the Cave 12 St. Augustine 15 Blaise Pascal 17 Hegel and the Kierkegaardian Backlash 20 Chapter II - Mystical and Existential Aspects of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 25 The Limits of Explanation 30 Ascending the Philosophical Ladder 32 The Final Rung of the Philosophical Ladder 34 Throwing Away the Ladder 35 The Mode of Silence: a Distinction between Saying and Showing 38 The Face of the Mystical 43 The Mystical and the Problematic 44 The Mystical and Manifestation 48 The Ethical and the Individual 51 The Mystical and the Shadowlands of Plato’s Cave 52 An Active Silence 53 Chapter III - Existential Philosophy and Incarnation: Gabriel Marcel on Mystery, Truth and the Call to Be 62 Encountering ‘the Mystical’ 63 A Delineation of the Concept of Mystery 64 Marcel’s Notion of Mystery 66 Mystery and Personal Experience 67 Mystery as Philosophical Context 68 Revising the Philosophical Aim 69 In Search of an Appropriate Methodology: Two Modes of Reflection 71 Ontological Exigence: ‘The call to be’ 79 Incarnation 85 PART II 92 Chapter IV - Subjective Truth and Objective Uncertainty 92 A Brief Survey of the History of the Notion of Truth 95 The Final Rungs of the Philosophical Ladder 102 Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Ineffable Truths of Existence 104 An Ethico-Religious Notion of Truth 106 Kierkegaard and Subjective Truth 109 v The Incarnate Truth of Christian Faith 120 Chapter V - Christ and Truth: Paradox, Offence and Contemporaneity 129 A Christology of Paradox 131 The Incarnation as Absolute Paradox 133 The Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith 138 Objective Uncertainty and Objective Absurdity 140 Truth Incarnate 144 Revealing the Offence 149 Contemporaneity with Christ 154 PART III 163 Chapter VI - The Existential Grammar of the Good News: Questions of Recognition 163 Aesthetic Criticism 166 Aesthetics Viewed From a Wittgensteinian Perspective 169 A Personal Point of Departure: Existential Aspects of Aesthetic Judgments 173 A Religious Frame of Reference 178 Recognizing the Language-Game 179 And Pilate asked, “What is truth?”: The Existential Grammar of Christian Truth 183 Aspect-blindness and the Gestalt Shift 190 Chapter VII - Living the Gospel: On the Embodiment of Christian Truth 195 From Language-Games to Form of Life 197 Form of Life and Justification 200 Understanding and Encounter 204 Appropriation, Subjectivity and a Christian Notion of Truth 209 The Way of Discipleship 213 Evoking a Framework for Practice 218 Conclusion 226 Bibliography 236 vi Introduction This thesis seeks to elaborate upon the central conviction of Christian faith – that God became human − and to consider the epistemological implications that follow when this claim is understood as defining a Christian notion of ‘truth’. To this end the discussion draws upon the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gabriel Marcel, while anchoring the exploration in the key works of Søren Kierkegaard, who was deeply concerned with the condition of individual existence and the demands of Christian faith. Drawing from these sources, I have attempted to develop a suitable methodology for speaking intelligently, critically and authentically of a Christian notion of truth. The theological necessity of speaking through analogy brings into discussion a reflection upon the function of criticism in aesthetic judgments. This provides the essential framework for discussing the epistemological issues that arise when speaking of a christologically grounded notion of truth. Consistent with the application of ‘existentialism’ within this discussion, the meaning of epistemology is taken in its most basic or etymological sense: as the study of the nature and grounds of knowledge, especially regarding its validity and limits. Similarly, the use of the term ontology in this discussion does not refer to any particular theory of ontology but simply to the dimension of being