The title of this essay—“Enabling God”—can be read both ways. God enabling us, us enabling God. As such, it affirms the freedom that characterizes our relationship to the divine as a mutual act of giving. So doing, it challenges traditional concepts of God as omnipotence. The notion of an all-powerful, autonomous, and self-sufficient deity has a long history ranging from the self-thinking-thought of Aristotelian ontology to the self-subsisting-act (ipsum esse subsistens) or self-causing-cause (ens causa sui) of medieval scholasticism and modern rationalism (Spinoza, Leibniz). It is a powerful lineage pertaining to a powerful concept of a powerful God....

Richard Kearney displays an enviable range of concerns in the embarrassment of riches that he offers to us with his three most recent books.¹ Each book asks for careful attention in its own right, though each contributes in a distinctive register to a larger project which goes under the titlePhilosophy at the Limit. Not unexpectedly, there is some seepage among the three books, for the sense of limit that emerges is a porous one. Thus the emphasis on stories is evident in all three books, while the themes treated inStrangers, Gods, and Monstersappear in some of the...

InThe God Who May Be, Richard Kearney has given us a gift whose power to provoke thought is out of proportion to its small size. Its opening sentences read as follows: “God neither is nor is not but may be. That is my thesis in this volume. What I mean by this is that God, who is traditionally thought of as act or actuality, might better be rethought as possibility. To this end I am proposing here a new hermeneutics of religion which explores and evaluates two rival ways of interpreting the divine—theeschatologicaland theonto-theological.”¹

Before...

In a 1991 essay, Dominique Janicaud lamented a “turn” in recent French phenomenology “toward the theological,” toward the question of the nature of postmetaphysical divinity. In 1984, Richard Kearney had publishedPoétique du Possible: Phénoménologie Herméneutique de la Figuration, in which he had already mapped a new eschatological hermeneutics of God as possibility in critical comparison with Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics of being asVermögend-Mögende. Kearney continues to situate his own work within this turn, arguing that the dialogue between postmodern philosophy and religion is “one of the most burning intellectual tasks of our time.” InThe God Who May Be,...

I would have preferred not to speakofGod. I don’t deny the possibility of speakingtoGod; the great Judeo-Christian tradition has done it and still does. But speakingofGod is particularly risky in philosophy, by using ideas, concepts, and categories that might turn out to be irrelevant to God (or not worthy of Him).

I hope He will forgive me nevertheless, for speakingofHim in this chapter, taking into account the fact that this is a reply to a friend of mine whom I like and sincerely admire. Long before Heidegger asked, “How does the deity...

In the context of the reductive paradigm inspired by Husserl’s phenomenological method, Richard Kearney proposes a return (reducere) to the face-to-face encounter withexistencethrough, after, and indeed even in the preceding reductive stages that have highlighted a return to essence (Husserl), being (Heidegger), and the pure gift (Marion et al.). This “fourth reduction” advocates a new vision of transcendence (quaeschaton) in ordinary experience—but not simply a generic form of transcendence that cares not which finite forms it assumes. Rather, it makes an ethical claim through the face (prosopon) of the other revealed in every encounter with finite...

We do not yet know what it means to speak of the death of God, and not only because those who speak of it do not always have the same thing in mind. The simplest controversy is also the weightiest, and still the most painful: Is it only a persistent idol that dies, or must it be religion itself, as the practice of idolatry? Do the fires of suspicion only purify, or do they consume everything that touches them? What religion, if any, survives the fever of Sils Maria and Turin?

Even while many of us struggle with that sort...

Continental philosophy, since the work of Emmanuel Levinas, has been marked by a particular concern with otherness. Although this concern is expressed in a variety of ways—the Infinite, the Other, the impossible, and so on—each of these expressions orients itself around the absolute incommensurability of the other (autre) with the self:

[It] is of importance to emphasize that the transcendence of the Infinite with respect to the I which is separated from it and which it thinks it measures (so to speak) its very infinitude. The distance that separates theideatumand idea here constitutes the content of...

Divinity and alterity have haunted phenomenology since its beginnings. At phenomenology’s margins Rudolf Otto described God as the “wholly other.”¹ This otherness of God and the divinity of otherness came into sharp relief in Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, where God’s transcendence is bracketed as much as the alterity of the other in the reduction of intentional consciousness.² This is a move replicated in Heidegger’s “reduction,” to use the vocabulary of Marion which is employed in this volume by Kearney and Manoussakis, where the question of God depends on the analytic ofDasein.³ Arguably in both Husserl and the early Heidegger the...

Under a title that captures our attention and puts a question that will not go away, Richard Kearney offers a conception of the divine and of divinity that immediately strikes the reader by its extraordinary youthfulness. For youth, not only in its most current sense, but in its most philosophical as well, could be defined precisely by the two words in his title that open the new perspective to which he summons us:may be. How should we translate—in a way that allows us to dream, as if finding ourselves on Celtic ground—the “potency to be” indicated by...

“Of all points of faith, the being of a God is, to my own apprehension, encompassed with most difficulty, and borne in upon our minds with most power” (Newman,Apologia, chap. 5). The biblical idea of God as Judge and Redeemer is borne in on our minds by moral experience, our sense of sin and desire of forgiveness, and also by religious experience. But the old sturdy confidence in the reality of God as creator of heaven and earth, attested by cosmic order and the very movement of the rational mind, has been depleted. If God cannot be spoken of...

Matthew Arnold “objected to our carrying on a flirtation with mystic maybe’s and calling it Religion.”¹ Why should Augustine Birrill’s words, occasioned by the death of Arnold, come to mind when I read Richard Kearney’sThe God Who May Be?Perhaps because Arnold and Kearney share a common purpose: dissociating metaphysics and the Bible. InLiterature and Dogma(1873), Arnold seeks to show us that “when we come to put the right construction on the Bible, we give to the Bible a real experimental basis, and keep on this basis throughout.”² In so doing, he thinks, we distance ourselves from...

Richard Kearney and I have a common interest in Heidegger’s existential and ontological understanding of the “possible,” which moves far beyond the classical and modern logic of modalities and Nicolai Hartmann’s modal ontology. Heidegger’s statement that “the possible is more real than the real” (Being and Time, §31) could be augmented by Paul Celan’s beautiful verse, “Alles ist weniger als es ist, alles ist mehr” (Everything is less than it is, everything is more). If I understand Kearney correctly, this statement must not be restricted toDasein’s being-in-the-world and its finite self-understanding, but is also true of God’s divinity.

In...

Richard Kearney is a possibility thinker, a philosopher, novelist, and poet fired by a passion for/of God. For Kearney, philosophy links imagination and affectivity with reason in a rhetoric of persuasion aiming for individual and societal transfiguration. In other words, as I read him, philosophy is not an abstract-theoretical exercise dedicated to getting things straight, finding solutions for particular theoretic problems. Rather, for Kearney, philosophy is a way of life, a spiritual exercise¹ working toward the incitement of passion for visionary transformation and cultural change rather than the elaboration of grand systems and the elimination of paradoxes. Indeed, it is...

Theology is a cartography (that is, an attempt to create maps, to mark out, to graph, or to plot a course or courses) that will lead to a place, atopos, where divine revelation may occur and knowledge of God may be discovered. At these various places (topoi) and through its various topics, theology concerns the “way,” the right way, the proper way,theway, or one of many ways that can lead individuals to know something about God. Yet, as Gregory so honestly affirms, the journey to such knowledge, the progressing along various chosen ways to God, always occurs...

Throughout his trilogy Philosophy at the Limit, Richard Kearney leads us “on the sinuous paths through postmodernity and beyond.” Calling on the messenger god, Hermes, he pioneers a new way of interpreting three of the defining contours of our third-millennial profile: strangers, gods, and monsters, three different names for our experience of alterity and otherness. The three volumes, if you take them not in chronological order but in order of accessibility, could be said to follow a technique similar to that used by Kierkegaard. The latter’sJournal of a Seducerwas a best-selling page-turner available even in railway stations. It...

Aristotle, in distinguishing between actuality (ἐνέργεια) and possibility (δύναμις), undertook two crucial steps that have haunted the history of Western metaphysics ever since: he gave a qualitative priority to actuality over potency, and then he identified the former with pure essence. Possibility, for Aristotle, is a mode that denotes transition and corruption, and thus imperfection. However, the risk that he acknowledges and fears most is that potency is ambiguous and undecidable. In his words, “the possible could be both a being and a non-being … it could equally be both things and neither” (1050b10, 1051a1). It is thiscoincidentia oppositorum...