What Theology Can Learn from a Philosophy Daring to Speak the Unspeakable

Abstract

The central aim of this article is to recommend to the attention of theologians William Desmond's most recent and most explicitly religious text, God and the Between. Desmond is, arguably, Ireland's most distinctive as well as distinguished philosophical voice, and has produced a prodigious body of work in philosophy in recent years. Continental in overall orientation, at once phenomenological and metaphysical, the crown of Desmond's philosophical achievement is the trilogy on the `Between.' God and the Between is the final volume of the series. One can think of Desmond's trilogy as being from the outset `God haunted.' This volume brings the concern to the fore and argues that the world of experience opens out to a transcendence that cannot be contained by any totality no matter how richly articulated. The incredibly rich positive articulation is contextualized, however, by Desmond's reflection that the removal of `God' from modern philosophical discourse has nihilistic consequences. Desmond's philosophical elaboration, which goes beyond Kant and Heidegger as well as Hegel and Nietzsche, presents a God that is neither an inference nor a theme. And yet for all that, this God is not a surd or the exhaustion of our speech: He is signified, but never adequately, in language that understands itself as metaphor and hyperbole. This is a rich philosophy, totally conversant with the philosophical tradition, but also with specifically Christian appropriations of this tradition. Without ever compromising the integrity of philosophical discourse, Desmond shows that the boundaries between philosophy and religion are fluid, thereby indicating the aptness of a fluency in the discourses of theology and philosophy which have the common signified that cannot be rendered adequately. Desmond's work displays a philosophy not only with which theology can do business, but also theologians of all stripes, Rahnerians as well as Balthasarians.