Philosophical Meditations

Introducing intellectual curiosity

This essay will pursue the notion that human intellectual reflections take various forms, all of which arise out of our wonderment and curiosity regarding our experience of the world and our desire to understand that world and apply what we have learned to our pursuit of human flourishing. I have a specific interest in bringing together my interests in philosophy, theology, and the Bible, with an awareness of the significance of history in these disciplines. The tendency of many students of history is to adopt a stance toward the past as that of moral judgment, pointing to its moral blindness. However, the significance of human temporality includes that the present can travel a path that the future will need to amend. My interests led to constant writing, both concerning what was happening in my life, but also to help me understand and think through what I have read. Writing is an important aspect of how I learn. I author this essay in the hope that it will assist my personal journey toward wholeness and may be of assistance to the journey of the one reading this text. 

Although I will briefly give an account of the universe in which we live from the perspective of science, and how Christians today can consider the universe described by science as having its source and destiny in God, the primary focus will be the development of a philosophical anthropology that will consider seriously the input of biblical and theological texts through a consideration of the hermeneutics of literary texts. One experiences temporality at a supratemporal level, that is, at the level of the dimension of time in its depth or inwardness. Persons are the basis for the human sciences, such as psychology, sociology, economics, politics. Persons develop art and religion, the two historically having a close connection. Thus, I am setting aside the model of the natural sciences for this study of humanity. Theories based upon that model tend to be implausible and lead to bad science. Part of their inadequacy is that they avoid interesting questions and must expend much energy defending themselves against the charge of irrelevancy. Its reductionism is well-known.[1]Other disciplines, especially the exploration of language, is a more fruitful direction. I do not think this meditation puts me in a philosophical family. What I have discovered about myself as I write is that Plato-Aristotle and the Enlightenment (Descartes, Kant, Hegel), process philosophy (Hegel, Whitehead) and existentialism (Heidegger), hermeneutic of narrative and religious texts (Gadamer, Ricoeur), are formative for this philosophical reflection. For reasons such as these, the solipsist and the skeptic will travel paths I do not find intriguing enough to explore with them. I have profited from reading Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, but have found in them slim resources for guidance in dealing with vital questions related to human flourishing.

Such pondering on human experience, the curiosity and wonderment that are a constant part of that experience, leads to some modest conclusions. 

We could conclude that our subjective desire or need will result in nothing more than a projection of human thought onto the divine. Thought of the divine may be nothing more than the human faith and hope that enough power exists within humanity to redeem humanity. In thinkers like Feuerbach, theology is nothing more than anthropology, for reflection upon divine essence reveals nothing other than the highest image of human essence. Humanity will heal its sickness, mend its brokenness, and liberate from that which binds, as it devotes itself to bringing more beauty, goodness, truth, and love into the world. If this were true, we could evaluate every religious belief based upon its ability to encourage humanity toward living such a life. 

The challenge for the theologian who respects the sacred text is that humanity can live quite well and responsibly without God. Humanity can be human apart from God. Such freedom and independence among human beings expresses their power. In this sense, God is not necessary being, in the same way that the presence of the universe itself or the presence of life are not necessary.^[2]

We are reflective beings who express ourselves in philosophy, religion, storytelling, poetry, history, morality, politics, and science. We care about the world in which we live and express this caring in the way we exhibit reflective curiosity by meditating upon our experience in the world. Engaging the world in these ways involves a love of truth, intellectual humility, having a teachable spirit, an independent mind, and most importantly, a spirit of pervasive wonder that shows itself in reflective curiosity. One can suppress this childlike wonder toward the world, but if one does so, one becomes a melancholy spectacle of idle unreflective sightseers, passing through life without ever internalizing and pondering the great questions of human life. Such persons forfeit the some of the best expressions of human worth and dignity. In removing the heart of humanity, this wonderment and attraction toward what is true, good, and beautiful, a wonderment that directs attention away from self, an aspiration toward something more than simple self-fulfillment, an aspiration expressed in an outward journey that also returns inward, but with an expanded and deepened self because of the journey, the risk is no longer developing the basic virtues and character necessary for a free society. Such wonderment regarding the world taps into the human imagination. Human knowledge begins in wonder. It begins with a form of learned ignorance, recognition that not knowing something, and the suspicion that what you do not know is both important and wonderful. Such wonder can lead to the exploration of the world to gain a better understanding of it. Science cares for the life-world of human beings by understanding the world in way that leads to learning techniques that improve the everyday lives of people and expresses the desire to know more about the world in which we live. Any of the forms of the expression of human curiosity can help move humanity that direction. The point of such endeavors is to push back the frontiers of ignorance regarding this world, presuming that to do so will lead to human flourishing. The search becomes participation in something infinitely greater. Such a search has an element of self-forgetfulness. Openness to others, submerging self in favor of truth, recognizes that truth is not our private possession. Such a search displays care or love for the world that freely gives. The seeker (subject, knower) becomes a lover of the object. Knowing is a creative act emerging out of encounter and mutual indwelling. Truth is in the hands of this encounter. Love is the reason disclosure occurs in encounter. If truth is a matter of disclosure, then the disclosure awakens trust.[3]

            This essay tests the notion that religious texts arise out of the type of imagination we find in meaningful stories, legends, fairy tales, and poetry, more so than the type of imagination used to pursue scientific theory or historical construction. This ordering of a narrative involves us in discerning causes for the actions represented and a sense that as the story moves along it is moving in a certain direction. This approach frees us as readers from the burden imposed by a literal reading of the Bible, freeing us to engage the world of the text and its movement in such a way as to move us toward the transformation of our experience of the world. Christian faith involves a unique affirmation about Jesus Christ, not only that he is the presence of God but also that knowing his identity is identical with having him present or being in his presence. If we say we believe something, but it does not affect the way we live, we do not really believe it, or it is so abstract as to have no life-changing dimensions to it. Identity and presence of Jesus are for the believer one. 

            The fundamental gesture expressed in the curiosity of reflective meditation upon human experience of the world is a humble one of acknowledging the historical conditions to which all human understanding is subsumed in the reign of finitude.

One of the characteristics of a narrowly understood scientific and technical approach to the world is "demystification," the loss of wonder, the dissipation of mystery and awe. Consistent with this is that among the effects of our secularity is the loss of religious language and knowledge. The Enlightenment of the 1700s elevated science and technology to the status of being the primary lens through which it viewed the world. Such techniques improved the ordinary lives of citizens. Thus, one expression of the secularity of modernity is the narrow view of modernity rooted in science and technology. However, I am going to be suggesting that people living in modern civilizations have deeper and broader sources worthy of reflection as they pursue a life worth living.

One can have no theology without interaction with philosophy and other disciplines developed in the modern/post-modern era. Yet, if a philosophical perspective or worldview dominates the theologian, the theologian has adopted a questionable authority. At the same time, interaction with philosophy will sharpen and clarify the thinking of the theologian and yield an improved theology.

A proper approach to the curiosity exhibited in human reflective and meditative endeavors will suggest that our human experience provides hints of the divine. If it finds too much of the preferred theology of the writer within human experience, then it goes too far. Such hints occur in the overwhelming context of human pain, suffering, and tragedy.  I will not want to minimize this reality. Amid so much random, meaningless suffering, human beings desire the truth in the sense of wholeness of life, the good in the sense of values and beliefs that guide one’s life toward human flourishing, and the beautiful in the sense of profound aesthetic experience. We express this desire in our personal lives in how we think and live. We also express the desire in the institutions we build. 

Behind such desires and their expression in personal and corporate life is a type of love for life. Our care for the world draws us out of ourselves and toward the desired fullness of life. We want to see the flourishing of life in general and of human life in particular. Each of these desires has a darkness as well, of course, and we will need to explore that darkness. Such is the nature of the dignity and misery of humanity. We have the capacity to turn that which is our gift into a curse we inflict upon self and others. Our creative reflection on experience discloses both the dignity and misery of humanity. Our experience reveals both our quest for wholeness and the brokenness that plagues our personal and corporate lives. Our human experience of openness to our world, which shows itself in our capacity to learn across time to improve the human condition, meets its counterpoint in our tendency to close ourselves off from world. The infinite horizon of life meets the resistance within us to close off questions and think we have reached the end of such explorations. 

We are questioning beings. A finite system would not have the ability to question itself as a whole. Thus, we have an orientation toward the Infinite and Eternal. We experience the Other of our lives in love and freedom, continuing the process of questioning. The Infinite draws our attention through such encounters. Such drawing remains implicit in our questioning. Such questioning also reveals our brokenness. At the most benign level, our questioning reveals us as doubters. We must live with doubt. We must live with ignorance. We feel the separation of our present with our true or authentic self. We feel our alienation from our destiny. Many of our questions seem to meet a deafening silence. Yet, our questioning also invites to perpetual openness to others, to the human journey, and to the future. Human life is a process of inquiry. In fact, the phenomenon of inquiry is an essential element of human existence. Our inquiry reveals that our present lack points to the possibility of totality and wholeness.^[4] Our inquiring and questioning reveals our freedom. Our questioning is a quest toward the true or authentic self, a response to the call embedded in us as human beings. 

Religion must fit itself into such a community of reasonable discourse. Religion has a right to expect others to respect its sacred texts. Religion has no right to assume their truth. The truths of religion originate in and receive validation from testimony. Testimony is notoriously subjective. Yet, I will suggest that testimony is a valuable element in a community of reasonable discourse. This means all views have the nature of a hypothesis that remains open to criticism. It means no one has the right to retreat to dogmatism, ideology, or revelation from God to avoid engaging discourse. It means all of us engage in the everyday learning process of trial and error.^[5]

Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn have shown that science is not as objective as many would like to think. The development of large hypotheses in physics and biology have the nature of providing a perspective that proves helpful in understanding the world combined with openness to new discoveries that may amend or overthrow the hypothesis. Such hypotheses provide coherence within itself as well as enable scientific engagement with the world. 

Let us consider this way of acting within science as a way of understanding what happens in other realms of human experience. If we think at this level, we become aware of a certain view of the world that guides us. If we approach these matters in a healthy way, we aim for a coherent view of the world that also helps engage the world in a way that leads to human flourishing. It will be a guide. It will also have openness to innovative ideas, insights, and experiences that allow for amendment or even an overthrow. We might call such an overthrow of a worldview a conversion. Such a worldview will cohere with other forms of human experience. I want to be quite clear that in this process, no religion, scientific theory, or theories in the human sciences of psychology, sociology, or philosophy, has a prior claim to truth. Given the historicity of human beings, we develop such views of the world while renouncing any prior claim to truth. This also means that appeals to authority are not enough in making the case. The process I have described seems like giving rational assent to a set of beliefs. Yet, such is not the case. Taking the risk of total commitment of one’s life recognizes that one place one’s trust in the wrong thing. Since none of us likes to admit we are wrong, conversion is rare. Yet, admitting one has lived in accord with wrong commitments is also part of why engage in this process of reasoning.

What I am sharing here is one way in which philosophy, sacred texts, and theological discussion, are partners in intellectual curiosity. This is not a small thing. It can even help the atheist understand how some intelligent people can be religious. It can help a secular society understand that the religious community is part of the rational community that builds upon tradition, beliefs, values, and institutions, expressing desire that all human beings have. Such communities have much to contribute to public discourse. However, it will do less than what many religious persons would like to see. It does not prove there is a religious dimension to which human beings must relate if they are to have a life of human flourishing.

I.              The Question Being

A.  Metaphysics and Ontology: Cosmic space-time

I begin with cosmic space-time, the basis of which is our account of chronological time. We can begin with the givenness of the universe. The accumulative evidence arrived at by the scientific method is enormous. It emphasizes the observable and testable. Although the history of the physical sciences is interesting, one does not need to know that history to be a good physicist, biologist, or chemist. 

The tension between theology and science does not need to continue. Scientific reasoning is like other forms of reasoning in its need for the scientist to use some faith and imagination to solve its puzzles, while theological reasoning about God is hypothetical in their character and open to testing. This approach presumes a form of critical realism in both disciplines.[6] The test of theological assertions is whether they aid us in understanding the whole of finite reality, a wholeness anticipated in ordinary experience. What we anticipate is the wholeness of meaning, of which we can only hypothesize now and that will come as a future gift of God. Having decided to have a stance of faith in the Father of Jesus, for example, could grant increased intelligibility of our experience of finite reality. The value of this approach is that it broadens the concern of theology beyond the God-humanity relation. Clearly, theology does not derive from scientific reasoning. When scientists study nature, what that study reveals is nature. Knowledge of God derives from another place from which God speaks and from which human beings hear. It derives from human the experience of awe and wonder, a place of imagination.[7] The tools of science have improved so much that it can explore the origin, sustaining, and end of this earth and even of the entire universe. Since God is not an observable object within the universe, theology would not expect science to discover God in its explorations. From the theological perspective, science is describing a work of God when it studies the planets as well as origin and end. Thus, the world science describes needs to be understood theologically as the world God has made in this way and for divine purposes. 

Science is the basis for this reflection on the metaphysical and ontological belief that reality consists of an ever-expanding system in which the patterns of existence and activity that exists between and among spatial-temporal finite material objects are more important than the parts.[8] This pervasive structure transforms the totality of beings into a cosmos. The cosmos has an intelligible structure, a logos, that satisfies the intuition that human beings have of a sense of the wholeness of life. Such intelligible structure shows itself in our quest for scientific knowledge of the universe. The existence of objects is the basis for the physical sciences. Physics and evolutionary biology suggest that this is the real universe in which human beings (and other minds we have not yet discovered) live, move, and have their being. The existence of living things is the basis for the explorations we find in biology and chemistry. The mediating position between logos and mystery is the power of Being to “be,” rather than allow nothingness to overcome it. Wonderment that there is “something” rather than “nothing” is at the root of human curiosity about the world. Such ontological surprise is the root of the religious and aesthetic experience.^[9]

We begin with the acknowledgment that the field of force provides a unitary and supreme concept that links together the special viewpoints of space-time. The field of force is unitary while allowing the multiplicity of finite-temporal objects. The body is a manifestation of the force field, while the force field is prior to the body. Body and mass are concentrations of force at moments and places. Action at a distance becomes possible. Field theory presumes priority of the whole over the parts.[10]

Finite things find their limit in their relation to other finite things. The plurality of finite things has its source in a big bang and the expansion of the universe. Such expansion requires space and temporality. It also carries with it the idea of openness to the future. Finite things develop their identity in relation to other finite things, out of which we observe the unity of the universe. The natural laws of science assume the contingency of natural events. The contingency of events expressed in the laws of quantum physics and thermodynamics are an exception to the laws of regularity. Yet, regularity is the basis for the emergence of enduring forms. The processes of nature are open and communal systems that allows new forms and therefore a new totality to emerge. The persistence and perishing of forms contribute to a new totality.[11]

The system of the universe consists of a hierarchical subset of systems consisting of local arrangements of galaxies and within galaxies the arrangement of various star systems and planetary systems. This suggests the metaphysics of substance (Aristotle, Aquinas) used to explain enduring objects is replaced by the interrelationships of finite-temporal objects within the system. This suggests a metaphysics of becoming, in contrast to a metaphysics of being, and an event ontology. This suggests that what common sense thinks of as enduring objects and persons is an illusion in the sense that all objects and persons are the result of or the byproduct of interrelated transient events. If everything is becoming, then there is always a tension between identity and difference, between presence of being and the absence of being. The same stuff can have mental and physical properties that have an information-bearing pattern within the metaphysical system. The body is a set of dynamically interrelated and hierarchically ordered processes that are constantly undergoing minor changes in their internal relations to each other and in their collective relation to an ever-changing physical environment.[12]

The universe exists as an open, unbounded, finite system. The principle of inertia is the basis for the laws of nature. However, even the laws are subject to time and is a contingent element. The striving of bodies to remain in their condition occurs against the background of the contingent uniqueness of each natural event. Such contingency places the uniformity suggested by the principle of inertia into question. Science has mapped out the history of the universe using cosmological decades, each decade representing a 10-fold increase in years. It does so because the number of years is so large. The Primordial Era includes the big bang to the fifth cosmological decade, the first 100,000 years, from the big bang and the formation of light elements such as hydrogen, helium, and lithium to the birth of the first stars and galaxies. We are presently in the Stelliferous Era - the sixth (one million) to 14th cosmological decades (100 trillion). Most of the energy in the expanding universe comes from nuclear fusion in the hearts of stars, and the universe is replete with galaxies. I assume the earth formed in the 10^th cosmological decade. It is 4.5 billion years old. Somewhere between 1.75 (6.2) billion and 3.25 (7.7) billion years from now, Earth will travel out of the solar system's habitable zone and into the "hot zone." As this era ends, galaxies run out of hydrogen gas, star formation virtually ceases, and the longest-lived stars, red dwarfs, slowly fade. Science projects a steadily declining universe, consistent with the entropic force of decay defined the second law of thermodynamics. The universe will go through the dominance of black holes, and finally, in the 100^thcosmological decade, the black holes will give way to a universe of electrons, 

positrons, neutrinos, and photons of enormous wavelengths. Yet out of this moribund expanse of space-time, new universes can emerge. Truly, all things must pass, everything has its time, even the massive, beautiful, expanding, violent, and chaotic universe, of which we are a small part. As an open system, the relation of spatial-temporal objects and persons is one full of opposition and tension (and therefore dialectical) in a way that has both creative and destructive possibilities. 

To exist is to be a finite temporal object within a system of finite-temporal objects, in which the process of the system determines success, regardless of what happens to individual entities. Each finite-temporal object is a momentary self-constitution in such a way that it looks like an enduring entity while the system of relations that constitute it remains hidden. Cooperation between the constituent actual entities of any given system, and cooperation between systems in the gradual emergence of an even more comprehensive higher-order system in the hierarchy of systems, is the way nature works. Organisms with parts or members that cooperate with each other will survive to pass on their genetic inheritance to offspring. This suggests a metaphysics of integrated systems of dynamically interrelated subjects of experience. Lower-order systems have their ontological value, but they exist to support the existence and well-being of the higher-order processes. 

The universe gives rise to beings like us. William James observed that we are children of the universe (A Pluralistic Universe), which suggests that this world is our home. It has given rise to beings like us through its internal regularities, but this requires a degree of irregularity. Its holistic features are irreducible, which suggests that within the regularity of the universe is an emergence of influences higher up the hierarchy of complexity, influence that reverberates from lower to higher and higher to lower. An emergent theory moves against the idea that random natural selection is sufficient to explain the complexity we experience on this planet and in the universe, while the notion of process of emergence allows for contingent newness, which belongs in the concept of emergent evolution. The process of emergence describes the productivity of life that continuously produces something new. Self-organization is characteristic of life on all levels of its evolution, accounting for the spontaneity in all forms of life. Self-organization is the principle of freedom and of superabundance in the creative advance of the evolutionary process, of which human self-consciousness is its highest manifestation, allowing humans to integrate experience in the on-going formation of self, a self that arises from the initial stages of development and moves through successive stages.[13]

Beings like us arise out of relation, with a perspective, and in a context, as do all other finite things. However, for us, values arise because we have a sense of what it means to be here, to have an angle from which to view and experience the world, and therefore a place from which to assess value. Given the rarity of life, we have every reason to value its emergence, value the context of the non-human world out of which humanity has arisen, and value its diversity and creativity. We can value its splendor, for its vastness, complexity, power, and beauty is the root of our aesthetic appreciation of nature. At the same time, there are reasons for us to withdraw from nature in horror. Death is one such reason. Life is sacrificed so that other lives may exist as well. For life to flourish, other life must be forfeited or given up. The fact that we can assess value suggests that suffering and evil will always be an issue for beings like us.[14]

Behind such an approach to a scientific description of the universe and the rise of life on this planet is an openness to interpreting the principle of inertia as a sign of the faithfulness of God and emergence as open to a non-interventionist notion of the activity of God. It does not establish such a notion but becomes an opening for such a notion. Religious naturalism would accept the discussion thus far, but would stop short of the divine, importing a view of the sacredness of the natural world from religious experience. This universe is unique, has primacy, is pervasive, has a rightness, has a permanence, and is its totality is hidden from us. These qualities call for a religious response from us. This perspective at least acknowledges the importance of religious experience to understanding the human condition, while understanding what they experience is a connection to Nature. Nothing real transcends this universe, so any claims to have experienced such transcendence are nothing but projections of human hopes and values onto that transcendent reality.

Taking this discussion into the philosophical realm, we will need to recover the connection between philosophical notions of time, the Infinite, and the Eternal. We will not truly grasp the significance of individual things or beings in the world without making this connection. We will not deal with death (finitude and temporality) until we make this connection. Rather, only a focus upon life will yield to us the significance of the awareness of our death. We have a general notion of Being; we have perception of the Infinite, even if not comprehension, prior to our grasp of individual things. Thomas Hobbes suggested that the notion of “infinite” arises from our frustration with trying to count individual things. Rather, “Infinite” is the way in which we express our awareness of the interconnected quality of reality. Individual things participate in this wholeness, and this participation is what we mean by “Infinite.”^[15] Thus, our perception of the Infinite is “in some way” prior to that of finite things. Since we perceive the passing away of the finite, and yet, the continuation of reality, the Infinite has more reality than do finite things.^[16]

Such reflections on the orientation of humanity may provide some basis for agreeing with Descartes (Meditations III) when he offered that the Infinite is the condition for the apprehension of all finite objects, including the self. Space and time are specific forms of the primordial intuition of the Infinite. [17] We carve out our experience of finite things from within the context of the Infinite. Yet, our grasp of the Infinite is unthematic and confused. The finite has its limit in the Infinite. If so, he is thinking of an intuition of the Infinite that precedes the contents of consciousness. We might think of this experience as a transcendent mystery or silent Infinity of reality beyond our control, but which also constantly presents itself to us as a mystery. We may think of the experience as unthematic and primordial, originating in our relation to the mother, but steadily expanding toward our openness to the world and to the Infinite.

Given that we have set aside ancient notions of the origin, sustaining, and end of the universe, all of which derive from the human imagination and are designed to explain philosophical and religious notions of the world and of humanity, we need to consider whether such ancient notions have anything us today. 

Given the ancient origin of both myth and religion, one ought not to expect them to have an account of the origin and end of all things that exist that would be consistent with the science of today. To approach such texts as we find in Genesis 1-3 regarding origins or various Jewish and Christian apocalyptic texts regarding the end literally, historically, or scientifically, is to approach them anachronistically. One will miss the point of the texts, which is not to address the questions of modern science. Rather, they address matters of human existence, such as the relationship between God and humanity, as well as human beings and the world of suffering and evil they experience. Approached in the way one might good poetry or a relevant story, one might have an encounter with the world of the text that will reshape your experience of your world. This would mean that the church will need to reinterpret what it means in the creed when it affirms: “We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” It will also need to rethink what it believes about the end of all things when it says of Jesus, now ascended to the Father, but “from thence he shall come again, with glory, to judge the quick and the dead … we look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.” My point is not that the faithful church cannot still affirm its belief because of science, but that the way believers today envision their fulfillment, which will require the use of imagination, would be quite different from that of the believers who formed the creed of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). 

We need to think critically about the divine actuality to which religion points.[18] We need to comprehend the meaning of the reality of God. There are classical and modern attempts to conceptualize this actuality. The concept of mediated immediacy is Hegelian, suggesting that all experiences of God is through self, other people, and the world. God is not an element in the world, but behind all these elements.[19] The experience of God to which many people give testimony is not proof for the reality, but one dares not dismiss the universality of such experience easily. Some persons also testify they have had no such experience, so one ought not to dismiss this easily either. Every person has the possibility of such experience.[20] One problem with the appeal to experience is that it opens the door to the psychoanalytical critique of such experiences, which will focus upon an infantile hatred of the father and the infantile sense of union with the world. Thus, religious experience is an infantile regression. It may well be neurotic, although given the healthy way in which many religious interact with the world, this would be hard to defend.[21]

The insight of Paul in I Corinthians 1:26-29, that God has chosen the weak things of the world to shame the strong, finds a witness in theory of evolution. It ought to humble us that we arose out of such weak and ignoble circumstances. Further, the image of a self-emptying and intimately relational God as an outpouring of goodness and love is the very essence of the Christian view of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. Surely that revelation has also disclosed the manner of the relationship God has with all of creation from its beginning.^[22] Advanced and increasingly complex forms of life arise out of simpler and weaker forms. Christianity has no reason to escape this modern picture of the world. Yes, God could have made the world that science describes.

Creation already suggests the desire of God to live in loving fellowship with that which is not divine. God is creative, continuing to create, recreating, and sustaining the covenant contained in creation. God works by persuasion, consistent with God being patient and kind as God leads creation toward its destiny. God enters a dialogue with rebellious and free human beings. God is the gardener in the vineyard of the world, fostering and nurturing its continuous evolutionary growth throughout all ages. God is companion and friend, inspiring us to achieve the best. God creates by persuading the world to move toward the best individual and corporate life possible. Coercive power is not a good in itself. Motivating people through persuasion is the way God has chosen to work in the world. This view of the action of God in the world is consistent with the traits of the patience and kindness of God in dealing with human beings as related in the Bible. God suffers with those who have gone astray. Divine persuasive power maximizes individual freedom, respecting the integrity of everyone in the very act of guiding the development of that individual toward greater freedom. Having called individuality into existence, God respects their independence through persuasion rather than force. Such actions are divine because they have their source in the love of God, who willed free and independent persons. The extent that God exercises coercive power, God would restrict the freedom of individuals and diminish the reality of the world and impoverish the divine experience. God abandoned angelic marionettes who merely thought the thought of God because they are extensions of the being of God. God has elected to enter a dialogue with sinful, yet free, humanity. God has seen value in a world that is not a mere echo of the being of God. The freedom of the divine origin of the world and the holding fast to creation belongs together. As we take seriously the science of our time and a proper reading of the Bible and Christian tradition, persuasion is an effective way to reflect upon divine activity in the world. One can properly call persuasive any divine power which so influences the world without violating its integrity, while the necessary self-activity of the creature insures the spontaneity of response. This spontaneity may be minimal for protons and electrons, but during the evolutionary advance, sustained until now, it has manifested itself in ever-richer forms as the vitality of living cells, the conscious activity of the higher animals, and the self-conscious freedom of humanity. Spontaneity has matured as freedom. On this level, it becomes possible for the increasing complexity of order to direct itself toward the achievement of civilization, and for the means of divine persuasion to become ethical aspiration. The believer will affirm that in the ideals we envision God is persuading us, but this self-conscious awareness is not necessary for its effectiveness. Not only we ourselves, but also the entire created order, whether consciously or unconsciously, is open to this divine persuasion, each in its own way. The smaller parts scientists study belong to a larger context out of which larger forms that are more complex emerge and science cannot reduce entities to their parts. The emergence of living entities depends on the total situation of the universe and its expansion. The emergence of humans is not simply a matter of chance, but part of the laws of nature. Living entities emerge in abundance and compete with each other for use of the energy in their environment. The wealth of new forms contains new possibilities of utilizing the conditions of life. The Bible (Psalm 104) testifies to the richness of life in its variety. God has given living entities the power to be fruitful. Sexual unions of individuals within a species acquire a historical dimension and creatively open up space within which life can expand. 

            Let us pause consider a religious notion of the end that seriously considers science. If God is the transcendent source and goal of the cosmic process, another picture emerges. As the source of the processes of the universe, God will redeem it from transience and decay. Persons have a destiny beyond their deaths in which all hurts will be healed and the purpose of God for them will reach fulfillment. In the transition from time to eternity in which this redemption occurs, there is sufficient continuity to ensure that individuals share in the life to come as their resurrected selves, but sufficient discontinuity to ensure that the life to come is free from the suffering and mortality of the old creation.[23] When human beings as complex systems die and are fully incorporated by God into the divine life, they experience themselves for the first time as a completed reality. The human experience of time is always an experience of perpetual perishing, a flow from the future in terms of what one sees as possible for oneself right now, into the present where one decides about what to do next, and from there into the past as a fully determined event in one’s life history. In contrast, eternity will be experienced as a dynamic togetherness of past, present, and future. In eternity one sees the fullness of one’s life-history as an integral part of a higher-order process that never ends in the inner trinitarian life of God. Time exits within eternity and time shapes eternity.[24] The dissolution of the universe through entropy means physical entities will not survive, but patterns of existence and activity will survive within the inner life of God as shared with finite creatures. The past universe exists within the divine memory as the sole non-temporal reality. Everything is preserved within the inner life of God. The end is a triumph of divine and creaturely activity. The end gives glory to God and satisfaction to finite creatures as they appreciate their role in being part of this end. Our personal end and the biblical vision of a last judgment unite in one event. As Genesis 1-3 are metaphors regarding the beginning, so biblical talk of an apocalyptic end are metaphors of human accountability to God. The end will be beautiful.[25]

Here is the point where science, philosophy, theology, and biblical study intersect. Such a view encourages reflection upon the responsibility that increasingly complex forms of life have for lower forms, and thus, encourages moral reflection. Theologically, it encourages reflection upon the logos or rational nature of the cosmos and its relation to God, and it encourages reflection upon the Divine Spirit as the energy that keeps moving creation toward new forms. 

The churches need to acknowledge that their sacred texts are not scientific texts, and that science has developed the technical tools by which we gain an understanding of the origin of all things and the end of all things. Doing so will free the churches from needless debates with science and engage the movement of the biblical text as it points toward God, the relationship between God and human beings, and the relationship human beings are to have with each other and with the world God has made.

B.  Space-time in the human life-world

We are now ready to consider a transition to the human.

Minds emerge from this system and become a system of relations as well. 

Such ontological objectivity is a presupposition. Without it, communication would be impossible. This mind-independent reality outdistances the range of human cognition. Real things have a cognitive depth we cannot reach. Realistically, this means the limits of “our” world do not define the limits of the real world. Such metaphysical realism is a presupposition or postulate for our inquiries that allows us to learn from our experiences. Such a view preserves the distinction between true and false regarding factual matters, it preserves the distinction between appearance (our picture of reality) and reality itself, it serves as a basis for intersubjective communication, it furnishes the basis for a shared project of communal inquiry, it provides for the fallibilistic view of human knowledge, and it sustains the causal mode of learning and inquiry and to serve as basis for the objectivity of experience. Such would be my statement of being as becoming in general. This would be my outline of an ontology of anticipation, which would show how at each level of finite-temporal objects, the previous level contains traces of what would become. Higher levels are not the necessary outcome, but higher levels necessitate the past out of which they arise.[26]

The nature of voluntary motion and consent create the possibilities, the undifferentiated keyboard, that is the human being. We need to explore how this is the case. We can pursue this theme best if we bracket the domain of human fault. This bracketing allows a focus upon the will. 

Self-identity as person emerges from moment to moment as already involved in various activities while we reflectively understand that identity over time, thereby learning what makes us unique in relation to others. Human cognition involves a community of inquiry concerning an objective order of reality. 

We can begin with the sense of space. Intentionality, which is a decision we make that relates us to an object or project in the world, means that humanity is not reducible to elementary actions in the brain or to genetics. This voluntary motion suggests that we have power. We become the agent of our intentions. 

We can then consider the sense of time. Each decision moves us toward a project that has a temporal structure, so to decide is to anticipate. Our intentionality moves us toward the future. Perception itself occurs in anticipation, through glimpses and clues. Anticipation retains the past. The future is the fundamental situation for the decision and project. The future is a condition for action. Future contingencies open possibility. The presence of consciousness means that the possible precedes the actual. Possibility requires the project and the power or ability to do it. Further, presence to my self is a condition for deciding and intentionality. I project myself into the action to be done. I throw myself ahead in anticipation of the completion of the project. I meet myself in my project. I cannot exile or isolate myself from the power of acting and willing. The self I will be is not already given from the past but opens before me as a possibility in action and decision.

Any discussion of human life begins with the reminder of the finite and therefore ambiguous quality of human life. Finite life has hurdles, riddles, unresolved problems, potential for growth, falling and so forth. Such a life has physical limitations, the most dramatic of which is the ultimate disintegration of our lives toward death. We have obvious external limits. The ambiguity of human existence includes the presence of natural and moral evil. Any attempt to express notions related to human flourishing is inseparable from the ambiguities of every-day life. One who passionately engages life will also experience the pain of life. The more one gives oneself in faith, hope, and love, the more intensely one experiences life and death.^[27]

Some persons will find the flatten and purposeless nature of the world described by science and technology as enough. For such persons, all they need to know in ontology is that atoms and cells exist. Such a naturalist and materialist view of ontology assumes that science is the only arbiter of truth. However, to return to our sense of wonder, many others find themselves amazed that something exists rather than nothing. If anything, science has heighted awareness of this amazement. After billions of years of a universe evolving lifeless matter everywhere, many are amazed that this blue planet exists in a way in which life emerged from lifeless matter. The existence of human beings who are conscious of their lives and the life around them, is amazing. Such beings who seek truth, evaluate goodness, and find themselves attracted to the beautiful in nature in in the things they create, is an amazing thing. Human wonderment of the world suggests a mystery that intrigues human beings enough to raise questions regarding the mystery within us and around us. Human awareness of this mystery hints there is something more to ponder than the reality of atoms and cells. As powerful as science is, it does not represent the totality of human curiosity and wonderment. Science and the technology it creates is empty without the further reflection upon the world as human beings experience it delivered through philosophy, religion, poetry, storytelling, morality, and politics. They do so by observing, analyzing, ordering, elucidating, and accounting for the contents of human experience. 

To anticipate the next stage of this essay, imagination expressed here is subjective. The use of metaphor in language is an expression of the imagination. The poet is an artisan of language, engendering and shaping images through language alone, producing a semantic shock, a sudden glimpse, a restructuring of the semantic field. The reference-effect of fiction is to redescribe reality. Both poetry and fiction have a mimetic or re-descriptive function regarding the world, allowing us as readers to see the world differently.

II.            The Shared Human World: Philosophical Anthropology and Religious Texts

The experimental aspect of this essay is to see if philosophical anthropology has something to learn from the notions of human fallibility, evil, sin, and guilt, that we find in religious texts. It may well be that religious texts, properly meditated upon, can provide the philosophers with insights into humanity that are as valuable as the psychological and sociological texts modern philosophers will use to express develop their philosophical anthropology.

1.    Human will, Initiative, Deliberative Action, and Language

The discussion of motion in space and time and consent leads us to consider the nature of the human will. We are considering the qualities that make humanity distinctive.

What separates humans from animals is the way hesitate, deliberate, and choose. Even when we do not realize it, even when we feel that circumstances have constricted us, we have room to choose. we create our lives. In having this space or freedom to choose, we are being distinctively human. Suppose someone has chosen the project of being a great waiter of tables. Each little movement of his eyes, each movement of his hands, the way he walks, all of this represents choice. He could have chosen other projects, but he is choosing to turn himself into a waiter. When making these choices, he is moving his life in one direction and not another. Let us suppose at one of the tables is a couple, discussing this and that over coffee. The young man reaches across the table and puts his hand upon the hand of the girl. She does not pull her hand away. She continues to talk. She has chosen, decided, to move toward a relationship with this man. The waiter and the woman are becoming certain sorts of people through their choices. They shut doors and open other doors. There is always another way. To walk down one road is to choose not to walk down other roads. Too much of our lives is an attempt to evade responsibility for and make excuses for these choices. We might convince ourselves that this was the only thing we could do in this situation. That is a lie. We may have chosen because it was the easiest, or it would cause les pain, or required less risk, but I made the choice. There were other paths I could have travelled, but some seemed unbearably difficult, so I chose the path I did. 

The ability to choose, even in the most horrendous of situations, is a gift human beings have. Our choices are a form of participating in creation. Creation is unfinished, and human beings are co-creators with God. We create through choices. We may think we are just letting our lives drift along, but that is also a choice. Such drifting is being unfaithful to the gift of our freedom to choose and create our lives. When we choose, we walk down one road and not another, particularly the difficult, demanding, risky road, it can be a response to the hope for the better possible life. People choose how to live through debilitating sickness: resentment, self-pity, and anger. People can also choose to so with dignity, cheerfulness, and gratitude. 

We have no excuses. We have chosen to live our lives the way we did rather than another way.[28]

Willing or choosing has its reasons. In justifying an action, I express value judgments. What I value appears to me in the projects of my life. A space opens in the possible. A gap appears in my personal history. Further, the body has many involuntary drives, but I still have responsibility. Wisdom or the lack of it is at the intersection of bodily need and choosing, where I might express that wisdom in sacrificing need for a perceived larger goal. Pleasure occurs in perception and is therefore the result of a choice or stance toward what we perceive. Pleasure is the achievement of the will and of deciding, of identifying what I have perceived as good. In perceiving the Other, justice suggests that the opinions and values, the perspective and values expressed in the choices of the Other, are of equal dignity with that of mine. This intersubjectivity suggests completion of my self occurs in community. It presumes humility and de-centering of myself.

Before the act of willing or choosing is hesitation as we consider what we shall decide. Hesitation suggests the capability for choice. Hesitation is seeking a choice through deliberation. Choice becomes fixing attention among various projects. Each decision is a judgment, designating one project or object and not others. Deciding is taking a position in relation to the world. We adopt a project to bring change in our world. Then one makes a choice that completes a process and breaks it off at the same time. Choice resolves deliberation (classical) or irruption of a project (existential). The latter emphasizes discontinuity and irrational. The act itself reconciles the two. The act of deciding, willing, and choosing, is both resolution of a deliberation and thus brings one into agreement with oneself and irrupts into a decision involving risk. 

Deciding is taking the initiative in the living present, which brings us back to responsibility for choices. We take responsibility for this position and for the project we adopt. We can do what we decide. The acceptance of responsibility is the basis of the consciousness of being cause, agent, or author. The concept of action in the sense of authorship presupposes the concept of responsibility.[29] Every initiative is an intention to do something and a commitment to do that thing, a promise that I make silently to myself and tacitly to another. In promising, I place myself intentionally under the obligation to do something. Commitment has the keen sense of being bound by my word. The promise is the ethics of initiative. The heart of this ethics is the promise to keep my promises. Being faithful to one’s word becomes a guarantee that the beginning will have a sequel, that the initiative will inaugurate a new course of things.

The present is the intersection of experience, the sum of personal history, with the horizon of expectation for a future possibility. The present, guided as it is by experience, is pulled forward by expectations toward a future full of novelty, that this novelty gives birth to a hope and impatience for a better life, and that individuals can make their history. The danger here is the seduction of utopian expectations. Expectation must still be consistent with the finite and temporal reality of human community. Utopia is “No-place,” for there is no path to get there because there is no basis in experience for the expectation, so utopian expectations lead to frustration, anger, and despair. Yet, the present is not a prison our personal history, our experience, has created, so narrowing expectation to match experience will also lead to the dread of everydayness, that nothing we do matters.[30]

A meaningful action is an action the importance of which goes beyond its relevance to its initial situation. Such meaning is addressed to a potential audience. The meaning of an event derives from its forthcoming interpretations. As much as the agent may desire to control responses, human action frees the action from the one who acts and develops consequences of its own, becoming a social phenomenon. Human deeds escape the agent and have affects the agent did not intend, suggesting a distance between the intention of the agent and the consequence of action. With complex actions some segments are so remote from the initial simple segments, which can be said to express the intention of the doer, that the ascription of these actions or action segments to an agent constitutes a problem. Human action is an open work, the meaning of which is in suspense, since it opens new references and receives fresh relevance from them, that human deeds are also waiting for fresh interpretations that decide their meaning. All noteworthy events and deeds are opened to this kind of practical interpretation through present praxis. Human action is opened to anybody who can read them.

Speaking-Writing is understood best as sharing in the qualities of other human actions. The act of speaking-writing frees what is said or written from the author, suggesting distance between the intention of the author and the meaning of a text. Listeners-Readers can take what is said-written to places remote from the initial intention of the author that can create a problem of the ascription of authorship in some cases of literary criticism. Contemporaries of the speech-text do not have a privilege status in the process of interpretation. Thus, what we want to understand is something disclosed in front of the spoken word or text. What one must understand is not the initial situation of discourse but what in it points toward a possible world. Understanding has less than ever to do with the author and his or her situation. It wants to grasp the proposed worlds opened by the references of the discourse. To understand a spoken word or text is to follow its movement from sense to reference, from what it says to what it talks about.[31]

Speaking-Writing has significance for the pursuit of meaning. The mode of being of the world opened by speaking or the text is the mode of the possible. Authentic self-understanding is something that can be instructed by the matter of what is said or written. To understand is not to project oneself into what is said or the text but to expose oneself to it; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the proposed worlds that interpretation unfolds. In sum, it is the matter of the word organized by language into a narrative that gives the reader his or her dimension of subjectivity; understanding is thus no longer a constitution of which the subject possesses the key. Pressing this suggestion to the end, the subjectivity of the reader is held in suspense and is in the realm of the potential, as is the very world the text unfolds. 

All this has significance for the place of religious texts. Religious texts are often in the form of narrative, although prophetic, ritualistic, hymn, and wisdom are also part of them. If religion points to the actuality of the divine, then the natural world, human experience of that world, and divine revelation, are harmonious and complementary. This means that reflective curiosity as expressed in our pursuits for understanding, whether in physical or human science, whether in philosophy or literature, examine who human beings are and describes the condition by which human beings receive any claim to divine revelation. A religion or any form of education that nourishes a love of truth also nourishes the spirit of philosophy. Given the obvious multiplicity of truth claims, there are no infallible interpreters of truth.[32]

2.    Subjectivity-Society: Dialectic of the Experience of the Shared Human World

            Assumed in such considerations is the tension between subjectivity and society.

These considerations will lead us to consider a phenomenology of the other person. I am in free play with them, which introduces an element of the aesthetic into the primordial experience of being human. Such enjoyment reinforces my egocentric attitude toward the world. The experience is that of having a home in and with the world. However, the experience also leads to that of being a stranger, and thus of alienation and separation. As I encounter the other face-to-face, I find myself existing in a world of alien things and elements that are other than myself. The “I” emerges out of this experience of the tension or dialectic of sociality. The self is moving toward self-expression.  The ambiguity of the term self is seen in the profound lack of self-identity. This unity of the self with self-expression is prior to the Cartesian method in distinguishing thought and objective existence.  This is because the self participates in life's events.  Existence is the initial gift given to the individual. The interplay of identity and difference of presence and absence plays out in the strangeness the other conceals and in the friendly intent of initial greeting and introduction. I experience distance and absence in the questioning glance of the other toward me. I may treat the other as another version of myself or seek to use the other for my purposes. The question raised by the other is how we can coexist and still leave our genuine otherness intact. 

Personhood and sense of self arises out of relatedness. Implicit in the mutuality of the personal is a principle of personal growth and the rhythm of withdrawal and return. The original field of interpersonal relatedness, the withdrawal of the individual from the field into the self to develop identity and individuality, in the return of the individual to the interrelation of persons to enrich it with the fruits of individuality and to endow individuality with its fullness and significance, is central to this rhythm. This suggests that we are first acting and engaged agents of relatedness, and thus, thinking follows this activity, which may well be rational, even if our action arises out of feeling and faith more so than conceptualization. Our withdrawal from relatedness provides the opportunity to reflect rationally upon our activity and thereby either verify or amend that behavior. Rational activity is self-transcendent in that it is both free and it reacts to the drives, impulses, and instincts of the other. Our capacity to act irrationally is part of our human rational nature, which in turn implies an agent who is free, finite, and fallible. Still, irrationality is a subordinate aspect of reason. For rationality ought to predominate over irrationality, keeping the latter in potency, we should always act rationally rather than irrationally. We apply rationality to matters involving action/behavior and the practical, feeling/emotion, and the intellectual/conceptual. Science is the obvious mode of conceptual rationality, the aesthetic is the mode of rationality in feeling, and morality is the mode of rationality in action.[33]

We consider self and world from the standpoint of our shared world. As social beings, human beings form self in a field of social relations, a process that develops self-consciousness and subjectivity. Identity formation involves the formation of trust toward the outside world and development of emotional life. These reflections will lead us to a hermeneutics of the shared world, and thus, to an ontology of the shared world. The world human beings share has never been a natural world. Their world is nature as they have interpreted it, shaped it, experienced its limits, and felt frustrated in their efforts. The shared world is the world of human relations. Although other forms of animal life have societies, the specifically human form of common life is culture.

The social world is the place where the exocentric destiny of individuals becomes a reality and where they establish their identity. The process of the development of the ego takes place in the social world. Subjectivity develops even while oriented toward cultural environments. Identity formation occurs in stages and through expanding social environments as one ages. Identity makes reliability and accountability.[34]

Self-identification occurs as we modify our social identity and integrate it into our projects that will become our identity. Our identity is something we create and define during social interaction. Basic trust opens us to the world. Self-identification involves us in trustful self-opening to the world. Identifying oneself always requires courage, appealing to Tillich’s notion of the courage to be. We do not decide to have basic trust; basic trust emerges from a process, the opposite of which is mistrust and anxiety that will lead to deformation of identity. Basic trust directs itself toward the wholeness of the self. Such wholeness is the goal of our development and therefore has a temporal structure. Freedom is the real possibility of being myself. Personality arises out of social interaction. The self arises out of the mirror of the expectations of others. Personal wholeness suggests transcendence of the self and the freedom involved in engaging the social setting. This relation frees us to be critically independent to any given social relation. The self-assertion of the individual against others and society may be the expression of a call to a more perfect fulfillment of the human destination to community. The person is not at the disposition of others.[35] The center or identity of any finite being is outside of itself. Individual finite things are always in community and thus experience elevation beyond what they would be as isolated individuals. We see this idea weakly in subatomic particles and in the community of cells. However, we see it strongly in the formation of consciousness. The future formation of self has its root in present encounters. In our joy, love, and care, the attention we give to the world around us will be crucial elements in the formation of self. The self is always on the way to wholeness. We are not now, what we shall be. Any experience of meaning and wholeness anticipates the wholeness that is ahead. Such anticipatory moments we humbly receive as gifts. Wholeness acknowledges the transcendent in the sense of the web of social life we encounter. Our self-transcendence is toward something rather than nothing.^[36] That movement is toward finding it within ourselves to recognize the value of the persons and institutions that are part of our experience and to experience recognition from the persons and institutions of which we are a part. We owe a debt to our destiny. However, we may well need to broaden this notion to include our debt to the Infinite and Eternal.^[37]

We could look at all this from the standpoint of human development. We have a symbiotic relation to life before we develop a difference between self and world. This difference will lead us to reflect upon a reliable basis of life in which we can put our trust. While we may give our trust to mother and then to father, we will need to learn trust while differentiating self from world and developing our identity. As we develop trust in reliable relationships, we engage in healthy and open relations with the world rather than taking flight from it. Every stage of human development involves acquiring a new actualization of that trustful self-opening to the world. Such decisions will require courage. Closing oneself off from such basic trust will lead to closing oneself from the world. Yet, openness to the world is basic to the formation of the self. Such a commitment involves love toward that which one places trust. Such considerations provide the basis for the religious commitment.^[38]

Learning the expectations of others is an important part of our maturing toward wholeness. This process begins early in our lives. Parents give us unconditional love as infants. As we mature through the first couple of years of life, they slowly expect us to accomplish certain simple things. Learning such expectations of others in this intimate setting prepares us for the expanding expectations others will bring into our lives. This will occur through teachers, religious organizations, and other settings. Slowly, we learn that culture has influenced us far more than we knew. The point is that the social matrix of the development of these expectations is natural and healthy. To continue to desire others to love us, regardless of our behavior, is the desire of an infant. As we mature, we understand that our words and deeds influence how they interact with us. If we want to receive love from others, part of our job as responsible agents of our lives is to become lovable. We need to learn to develop character and virtue for such lovable qualities to emerge.^[39]

What we have here is an evaluative metaphysic of morals. Person is extremely rare in this universe. The spatial-temporal quality of objects and minds has the practical effect that they exist in relation to other objects and minds. The existence of persons introduces a spatial-temporal being that experiences the ambiguity of the past, the tensions of the present, and the anticipations of the future. Human endeavor is purposive. Human projects are teleological. The purposive quality of human projects and enquiries provides them with a degree of rationality and objectivity. We are the sorts of rational beings who consider our obligation to the other. Be an authentic human being means doing your utmost to become the rational and responsible creature that a person is capable of being. The moral project of treating of other people as we would be treated is part of this. 

With this foundation of the shared world of human beings, we need to consider briefly an ontology of culture. Persons have a heightened sense of relation, moving beyond simple response to stimuli and beyond instinct, leading to the increased complexity of interpersonal relations, families, tribes, peoples, nations, economies, political entities, and cultures. Such society of human beings is broken by evil and suffering. Every type of social organization has its brokenness. The move toward technology in modern societies has its gifts in improving everyday life. It also creates further opportunities to treat the other as an object that advances science and technology. As we gain in civilizational complexity and organization, genuine community becomes increasingly scarce. The notion of togetherness and truly being with others is losing meaning. We can think of the increasing administrative machine of large corporations and a large federal government and the general bureaucratization of life that favors the abstract, depersonalized, uncreative tasks that maintain them. Creativity has many opponents. The complexity of modern social organization has challenges, but intimacy and community are possible if one reconciles oneself to the nature of economic and political freedom as the expression of faith, hope, and love that unleashes creative energies of capitalism and democracy. The question raised by this interplay of the presence of being and absence of being, of identity and difference, in human groups is how they can coexist and still leave the genuine otherness of the other group intact. 

Much exploration into the sociality of human beings suggests that human beings advance themselves individually as they learn to cooperate. As much as we struggle with ambition, learning to cooperate has been an important part of human societies. In fact, wisdom involves learning the appropriate place in our interactions for listening to divinely oriented ambition, learning the self-destructive dimension of ambition, and even learning the self-destructive dimension of serving. For example, ancient societies could be brutal. Yet, prehistoric men and women helped each other more than they harmed each other. Of course, they had some enlightened self-interest in doing so, but they did so, nonetheless. In all human societies, some individuals will come out ahead by harming others. Yet, most of the time, one maximizes personal good fortune by cooperating with others. Pre-historic human beings banded together for mutual aid. Hostile and destructive societies, such as Spartans or the Nazis, disappear while cooperative societies flourish. One could argue that good people do not finish last. Rather, they do better than bad people do. Most human interactions are win-win results, both parties coming out ahead. Of course, war is a “game” in which one party wins and the other loses, but most human interactions are not like that. The orientation of human beings is toward increasingly complex forms of social organization, thus moving away from imperial domination and war by the progressive adoption of interactions that provide the potential for win-win results. In fact, one could argue that the spread of global commerce brings a growing recognition of a common humanity.  One cannot do business with a people while executing them.^[40]

3.    Hermeneutics of the Shared Human Experience of the World

I exist in transcendence of my own life.[41] The lure of transcendence beckons individuals out of themselves to seek recognition of our worth and value that can only come from beyond them. The movement outward also means a return inward, throwing further light upon our lives. An important aspect of this lure toward transcendence is the fear that our lives will be wrapped up in the prison of everydayness, and self-transcendence, the movement outward toward the shared human world and culture, promises the recognition human beings crave. This movement outward de-centers the individual. Language itself commits people to an externally oriented mode of life that takes other people seriously. Vocation and the projects to which it commits also commits us to an externally oriented mode of life as it takes other people and other groups seriously. “We are” is the fundamental affirmation of our existence.

Since I have previously discussed the importance of vocation and the projects to which vocation commits human beings, I will now discuss language in the way it commits human beings to an externally oriented mode of life.

The only way identity and difference remain intact is through language. Yet, we must not allow language to deceive us. A heightened sense of community occurs through language. Language is the bridge between the person, other living things, and inanimate objects. Language gives persons a sense of distance from other objects in the universe but also seeks a bridge across the distance through understanding and knowledge. 

Through language we experience the strangeness and separation of the other and the revelation of the other to me. We gain the wisdom necessary for living through the strangeness and foreignness of the other. 

One can lessen the deficiency of human life by meaningful action. How are we to evaluate whether an action is meaningful? Language, myth, art, ethics, and religion share a common origin. This means that while suspicion of the “positive,” what history, tradition, or nature offers as a guide to value or action, is understandable, we must be discerning listeners to what we are taught. Pure self-activity, where my action is determined by nothing that is positive, but rather arises by own agency as a formulator of rational law, insisting on an autonomous generation of the forms by which we live, is not a worthy objective.[42] Such a form of alienated life from the shared world and culture in which one finds oneself is not a path toward human flourishing. However, the aspiration is present to combine the fullest moral autonomy of the subject with the highest expressive unity within a human shared world and culture and between humanity and nature.[43] The biological struggle for existence, the tendency toward self-preservation, is a real factor of human life, but it does not say all that needs to be said. Human life consists in what is beyond one’s bodily existence and moves toward that which is external, especially other persons. 

Hermeneutics leads us to explore narrative and what it says about the temporal shared human experience of the world. Narrative opens the way for meaningful human action. Narrative represents the world of action, the symbols in culture and the world of “as if,” that is, of fiction. History is a world on which human action leaves a trace. History may appear as an autonomous entity, as a play with players who do not know the plot. 

Hermeneutics leads us to consider fiction and history as paths to understand the shared human experience of the world.

The human experience of time results in history, which transposes historical events into a higher level of complexity in the narrative. Historians must give reasons for why they have developed the narrative they propose. The plot the historian develops needs to be coherent with the knowledge we have of the events. Historical events are framed by the historian into a plot. These events are the variable within the plot, for events occur within a structure of events. At the formal level, plots are rule-governed transformations in which we discern temporal wholes, bring about a synthesis of various circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. The reader has an expectation that some form of consonance will prevail. When our expectation of some order does not find fulfillment, we feel deceived. Every point of view is the invitation addressed to readers to direct their gaze in the same direction as the author or the characters. In turn, the narrative voice is the silent speech that presents the world of the text to the reader. Only the confrontation between the world of the text and the life-world of the reader will make the problematic of narrative configuration tip over into that of the re-figuration of time by narrative. 

Temporalization consists of coming towards, having been, and making present. The effort of thinking that is at work in every narrative configuration finds its completion in a re-figuration of temporal experience. Historical narrative claims to represent a real past. Human time stems from this interweaving in the situation of acting and suffering. The ambiguities of historical time mediates between lived time and cosmic time. Everything takes place as though historians knew themselves to be bound by a debt to people from earlier times to the dead. Philosophical reflection must bring this connection to light. Both history and fiction refigure time. Such re-figuration occurs at the level of human acting and suffering in both history and fiction. They borrow from each other. Historical intentionality becomes effective by incorporating into its intended object the resources of fiction stemming from the narrative form of imagination. Both history and fiction refigure time. Such re-figuration occurs at the level of human acting and suffering in both history and fiction. They borrow from each other. Historical intentionality becomes effective by incorporating into its intended object the resources of fiction stemming from the narrative form of imagination. The intentionality of fiction produces its effects of detecting and transforming acting and suffering only by symmetrically assuming the resources of historicization presented it by attempts to reconstruct the actual past. The inter-weaving of history and fiction gives us human or narrated time. The sign of the future is the horizon of expectation, which is broad enough to include hope and fear, what is wished for and what is chosen, rational calculation and curiosity; the sign of the past is tradition; the sign of the present is the untimely. Historical events and their narration are part of calendar time, which gives them their cosmological connection. Historical time mediates in a way that is open-ended, incomplete, imperfect mediation. Historical time demonstrates the network of interweaving perspectives of the expectation of the future, the reception of the past, and the experience of the present. Expectation tends toward the breaking open of perspectives. We cannot derive expectation from experience, for the previously existing space of experience is not sufficient for the determination of the horizon of expectation. We are affected by the past. We are the agents of history as we suffer it. The victims of history undergo history more than they make it are the witnesses to this major structure of our historical condition. Tradition reminds us that we are not absolute innovators, but rather in the situation of being heirs. We understand the things already said. The past questions us and calls into question before we question it or call it into question. Text and reader are both familiar and unfamiliar. What we receive from the past are beliefs, persuasions, convictions, ways of holding certain things as true. Yet, belonging to a pluralistic society, we cannot escape rival traditions, although ideology brings its own claim to universality. 

The historical present is the space in which the space of experience and a horizon of expectation come together under the concept of initiative. We must bring together the notions of making present and initiative. Merleau-Ponty stated that the I can is the root of the I am. The I can is the framework for taking up again an analysis of the theory of action. By doing something agents learn to isolate a closed system from their environment and discover the possibilities of development inherent in this system. Every speech initiative makes me responsible for what is said in my saying it. Some speeches are commitments or promises that bind me. The obligation made in the present engages the future. This initiative inaugurates a new course of things. Through the I can, initiative indicates my power. Through the I do, it becomes by act. Through interference or intervention, it inscribes my act in the course of things, thereby making the lived present coincide with the instant. Through the kept promise, it gives the present the force of persevering and enduring. By this last trait, ethical signification clothes initiative, announcing the more specifically political and cosmopolitan characterization of the historical present. The historical present is the lived through present (not point-like) and the sphere of initiative. Since the promise places the speaker under obligation of doing something, an ethical dimension is present. The present is a crisis when expectation takes refuge in an unrealizable utopia sought through political revolution and when tradition becomes only a dead deposit of the past, often through a view of divine revelation that binds the present to the past and withholds from the present the possibilities of human time. Initiative consists in the incessant transaction between these two tasks, by which we understand the force of the present.

Common to both history and fiction is their temporal background. The primary task of hermeneutics is to seek in the text the internal dynamic that governs the structuring of the work and to seek the power that the work possesses to project itself outside itself and to give birth to a world that would truly be the thing or matter referred to in the text.[44]All this prepares us for seeing the work of the historian, who will need to justify the plot they develop, with its events and actors, by giving reasons for including some and excluding others. The plot occurs within institutional roles and the duration of the community. Historians have a debt to the dead. Both history and fiction refigure time. Such re-figuration occurs at the level of human acting and suffering in both history and fiction. They borrow from each other. Historical intentionality becomes effective by incorporating into its intended object the resources of fiction stemming from the narrative form of imagination. The intentionality of fiction produces its effects of detecting and transforming acting and suffering only by symmetrically assuming the resources of historicization presented it by attempts to reconstruct the actual past. 

The inter-weaving of history and fiction gives us human or narrated time. Historical time has certain reflective instruments. One is calendar time, which as a cosmological basis. The succession of generations, as in contemporaries, predecessors, and successors, has a biological and sociological basis. Archives, documents, and traces (a mark left by a thing) compose a third reflective instrument. The trace helps us reckon with time, gives of duration in time, and moves us toward a public view of time as over against a purely private experience of time. Cosmic time, time as counted by science, makes human life insignificant. The re-figuration of human life occurs through the poetics of narrative by which we encounter the ambiguities of time. Human time stems from this interweaving in the situation of acting and suffering. The ambiguities of historical time mediates between lived time and cosmic time. Historical time mediates in a way that is open-ended, incomplete, imperfect mediation. Historical time demonstrates the network of interweaving perspectives of the expectation of the future, the reception of the past, and the experience of the present, with no taking up into a totality where reason and history coincide. Why should the present not be the time of initiative, the time when the weight of history that has already been made is deposited, suspended, and interrupted, and when the dream of history yet to be made is transposed in a responsible decision? Within this dimension of acting and suffering our thought about history will bring together its perspectives, within the horizon of the idea of an imperfect mediation.

The uniquely human experience of space-time requires narrative, which is meaningful if it portrays the features of temporal experience, narrative being the active process of representing temporal experience.[45] Time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a condition of temporal existence. Plot is a mediation between the individual events or incidents and a story taken as a whole. Further, plot brings together factors as different as agents, goals, means, interactions, circumstances, and unexpected results. Plot mediates through a temporal process. The plot transforms the succession of events into a meaningful whole, it imposes a sense of ending, where the end governs the flow of events. 

We can understand better the significance of narrative in the act of storytelling, which shows its temporal character in its organization of the plot, in its selection and arrangements of the events and actions that have a beginning, middle and end. Plots are rule-governed transformations in which we discern temporal wholes, bring about a synthesis of various circumstances, goals, means, interactions, and intended or unintended results. The reader has an expectation that some form of consonance will prevail. When our expectation of some order does not find fulfillment, we feel deceived. Frustration cannot be the last word. The story is a sophisticated form of understanding. The plot offers a mimesis, having a mediating role between time and narrative, which is a creative imitation of human action. The plot is a mediation between individual events or incidents and a story taken as a whole. Thus, both a proper hermeneutics of the text and of human action is an important contributor to philosophical anthropology.[46]

First, philosophical anthropology will need a hermeneutics of the text. We as readers who seek to understand, interpret, and apply such texts involve ourselves in a dialectical process of participation in and distancing from the text. We experience the power of language to disclose as we become aware of the horizon of our world intersecting with the horizon of the world of the text. Our world becomes open to the world disclosed by the text. The encounter can lead us to contract our world or enlarge our world.[47] The task of the reader in understanding a text is to discover that to which it refers. What we interpret in a text is the proposing of a world that we might inhabit and into which we might project our powers. Poetry re-describes the world. Making a narrative re-signifies the world in its temporal dimension. Interpretation and appropriation culminate in the reader gaining in self-understanding. The discourse of the text meets the discourse that is our lives. Such appropriation is the recovery of a movement and orientation already at work in the text.[48]

Second, philosophical anthropology will need to appropriate or apply the understanding of the text. The significance of any literary work finds its complement in the life-world of the reader. The interaction of the world of the text and the world of the reader is the point of application. We are in a world and are affected by situations. We try to orient ourselves in them by means of understanding. Narrative proposes a world that we might inhabit and into which we might project our powers. The role of literature in its various forms (poetry, myth, fairy tales, novels, dramas) becomes the occasion of moving toward liberation of our life-world or of our being-in-the-world. To interpret texts is to explicate the sort of being-in-the-world unfolded in the world of the text. The world of the text proposes a world I might inhabit if I project my possibilities toward the text. This encounter brings new possibilities for our being-in-the-world of everyday reality. 

Third, philosophical anthropology will need to reflect upon meaningful or good action. Consideration of the good moves from contemplation to action, such as universal human rights, the demand to reduce suffering, and the ideals of freedom, equality, and self-determination. We consider the realm of human flourishing. We consider the movement toward the true self and genuine freedom. Such a movement will require trust in the communal and temporal process. 

If we think of human existence in a shared world and culture as a drama, it might help us understand better what it means to engage in meaningful or good action. Human existence has complications, tensions, catastrophes, and reconciliations like what we find in drama and literature. Dramatic theory ponders what it means to have proficient writing, directing, characters, and plot. The play has elements of illusion and seriousness, frivolous and profound. The deterministic element of the play is the script. Yet, how the director interprets the script and how actors present it to an audience that receives it involve a dimension of freedom as well. The character has a role within the play, a role the director and actor consider together. Identity is important in such matters. Drama illuminates existence. It involves creativity. 

The horizon of the play is the nature and meaning of human existence. We see all of them wrestling with the good. Our struggle with the good often involves the good slipping away from the characters in tragic and comic ways. Continuing this line of thinking, we accept the role we have on stage, with its limits, considering a sense of mission. Thus, without a sense of mission, the role becomes a source of alienation. Weighing what is good and bad, we live in response to the event of encounter. The encounter reveals our freedom to respond to the call toward the good or to turn away from it. We accept the call to the mission and therefore accept the healing that the limits of our role can bring. Our role is finite. We enter the drama of human existence as part of an unfinished play and our role will end before the play ends. Accepting the role and the mission means accepting changes that such a response will bring. We shape our identity over the course of our lives. Human life always contains unfinished business, so it will always have a dimension of the tragic. However, interpretation of the meaning of a finite-temporal life will not be appropriate until the end of the totality of the play, which is the stage of world history. This will call for some humility and simplicity. 

Such a world stage may require the embrace of the Infinite and Eternal, which gave the finite and temporal space for discerning what is good and acting upon it. The latent and vague possibility of the finite and temporal connecting the fullness of the Infinite and Eternal gives hope for a meaningful whole. Yet, the tragic outcome of human existence remains possible. Death is a disruption of the human experience of time. If the drama that is our lives individually and as world history is to have anything other than a tragic outcome, it will need to come from the embrace of the Infinite and the Eternal.^[49]

The question of what kind of life is worth living is not one we can escape. Such an approach to questions regarding goodness moves us away from considering what we ought to do, the usual question in ethical and moral theory, and moves us toward what it is good to do, be and love. We might think of this as the fullness of a human life, the pattern of life, some sort of meaning (even if not ultimate), or some sort of connection with a greater reality or story. The reason is that as fragmented as our lives may appear, we strive for a narrative understanding of our lives. Orienting our lives to what is worthy is part of a journey, a quest, of which our lives become a narrative. We make such decisions within cultures or societies that vary in terms of their values. Weighing such cultural differences is an important process, although it will never have the certainty that an epistemological approach would require. Rather, narrative relies upon testimony regarding what it is like to live within a certain culture. It would focus on the story.[50]

Such a view of the hermeneutics of the text needs to be applied to religious texts. In the context of the concern of this essay, when applied to the biblical text, it moves against viewing it as sacred or authoritative. The word has a privileged status in biblical texts, but not in the sense that it is frozen. This view of the text leads to a desacralization of the text. Something revealing occurs as part of the historical process of engaging the text. We join the direction of the world of the biblical text in its pointing us to God, to the symbol of sacrificial love and a love stronger than death in the Christ, opening biblical faith to that of an ultimate concern receiving the power of a word of interpretation, the feeling of absolute dependence resulting from a response to the new possibilities opened by encounter with the world of the text, and an unconditional trust or hope that relies upon renewed interpretation of the sign-events of the liberation from Egypt and the resurrection of Jesus.[51]

 

4.    Aesthetic experience

 

Aesthetic experience is the realm of rationality expressed in feeling. It is already present in the free play of human beings in their sociality, their experience of the shared human world. It is already present in the human experience of wonderment in relation to nature, to the mystery of the Other, and to the mystery of who we are and why we are here.  

The significance of writing, of language, of storytelling, of our reflective curiosity, points us to the significance of the aesthetic experience in disclosing who human beings are. This experience points us to the depth and height of experience. Human beings are utilitarian in that they can see the way nature can become a tool to improve their lives. Yet, human beings can also pause and simply appreciate with a sense of amazement at what they see in nature. Such experiences refine our perceptions and develop our imagination. Such experience occurs in a moment. It becomes an event. It turns our attention away from everydayness to see anew something that has fascinated us. Something in our world has demanded and captured our attention. This something is outside the self. It bids us to pay attention to it, contemplate it, and meditate upon it. Such experiences remind us that nature is not just a tool of science. Nature is valuable in itself. It suggests the surplus of human experience. In contrast to drab everydayness, such experiences make life vivid, animated, and worth living. If the beautiful has demanded our attention, it invites us on a journey to become increasingly beautiful persons in our interior lives and in our conduct. We receive the life offered as a gift of that moment in a way that encourages us to bestow the gift of life upon others. Typically, such an experience relieves some of our tension and anxiety. They quiet our destructive impulses. They resolve lesser conflicts and assist in the integration of the self. They refine our discernment of what matters in this world. This event will disrupt normal consciousness, experience, and behavior. Whatever held our attention before recedes into the background, as the object or form of the beautiful has demanded our attention. We may even feel a loss of self as we lose ourselves in the experiencing this moment, this event, of a form outside ourselves. It may feel like intoxication. It may feel like a dream. If possible, the beautiful may physically stop us and invite us to revise our location in order to place ourselves along its path. It may disorient us for a while. Yet, we know we must return to daily life, even if we now have new longing and desire. Such a peak experience has intrinsic value. It may reveal hunger we did not know we had. It invites us toward wholeness and unity with life. In that moment, we may feel an intense integration of self with world. We savor the moment. Often, classifying and analyzing will only stifle the impact of the moment. The event anticipates the harmony, unity, and wholeness we seek. When the moment passes, we long for repetition. Yet, we are also aware that just seeing the form may not be enough, for part of the power of the event was our response to form in that moment. The exterior nature of the event has become an interior event as well. The objective form of the aesthetic experience stimulates the subjective aesthetic experience. The subjective experience is an anticipation of the fullness of the objective form. Such experiences occur in events. It was this sunset, mountain, beach, painting, symphony, poem, novel, and so on that has captured our imagination. The vivid and life-giving quality of the event gives us a sense of urgency and moving forward to experience anew the things and people of this world. They also invite us to look backward to rediscover our path to the moment that captured us. In beholding the beautiful, we have a new appreciation for our role in bringing new beauty into the world. Such aesthetic experiences are, therefore, lifesaving and life restoring. We receive the gift of life and seek to bestow such life upon others. Our weakness contributes to our failure to appreciate the beauty that surrounds each day.

            Such aesthetic experiences raise an important question for us. They may hint at the beauty, splendor, and glory of the created order that is its destiny. Philosophy itself may begin with a sense of wonder of the world, which includes an appreciation of its beauty. Religion will need to express and fulfill this desire for the aesthetic and the beautiful. The beautiful and aesthetic exist because wholeness and harmony exist. Even music represents our thirst for wholeness. It would be wrong to give too much content to aesthetic experience from the standpoint of a philosophy or theology. It would also be wrong to ignore its significance. The aesthetic and the beautiful are an important doorway to the metaphysical questions that have haunted humanity. It will require courage. We face the abyss of time and history as well. Nature and human history have a godless quality. Yet, in their midst, we have this harmonizing and integrating experience of the beautiful and the aesthetic that may well anticipate the destiny of nature and human history. 

To contemplate the beautiful is an act of love. Love awakens us to something beyond departure, abandonment, privation, disappointment, pain and death. It suggests the welcome of Being, to put it in metaphysical terms. Beyond Nothingness is the welcome of the Infinite and Eternal. The aesthetic guards metaphysical wonder. Our openness to the harmony and integration provided by Being places us in the service of this destiny of Being. It opens the door to a metaphysics of wholeness. Human beings are often in flight from such wholeness and integration. Yet, even this reality is one we best understand against the background of the hoped for destiny of Being to bring harmony and wholeness. Apart from that metaphysical destiny, nature becomes cruel and human history becomes random and empty, since the destiny of it all is Nothingness and Death. We must not trivialize such experiences. Yet, we must not forget the integrative and holistic moments that we find in the aesthetic and beautiful either. The world is not as it should be. We might further say that the world is not now what its destiny may be. We need to open our eyes to see the beautiful. The momentum of the aesthetic experience is toward a final revelation of Being as welcoming nature and history into its wholeness and harmony.

The aesthetic appreciation persons have for the world gives rise to the desire to create beautiful things, rather than just utilitarian objects. Our way life is that from which we live. What is that by which I live? What gives fuel to my life? We rise in our lives by our capacity for reflection on the flow of our lives. To live from is happiness and enjoyment of life. To live is to play. Enjoyment brings the aesthetic into our consideration of the patterns of human experience. The world of things calls for art. Enjoyment is in touch with the other person as the relation announces a future that is uncertain. Love of life is social and simply loves the happiness of being. Life loved is the enjoyment and contentment of life. Love reveals the aspiration we have toward the presence of being. Aesthetic creativeness is conceivable only on condition that the world is present to the artist in a certain way – present to heart and mind, present to the very being of the artist. If creative fidelity is conceivable, it is because fidelity is ontological in its principle, because it prolongs presence that itself corresponds to a hold that being has upon us; because it multiplies and deepens the effect of this presence unfathomably in our lives. Yet, the disquieting moods of anxiety/dread in the presence of suffering and death also arouse aspirations toward the desire for the presence of an absent being. As much as the modern scientific system of belief would like to be rid of them, they keep arising in new forms that seem viable to those who follow them. 

Development of systems of beliefs, becoming as comprehensive, coherent, and corresponding to as much of the world as one can, are key elements of what makes persons who they are. Such beliefs do not give us verifiable knowledge of the world. They do something potentially far more important in the way they provide a perspective or perception of the world that guides behavior as well. Even in their final form, they will have an aesthetic quality that attracts adherents. The ability to keep such systems open to further testing and engagement with other persons is the sign of a healthy system of beliefs. Closing oneself off from such openness is a sign of an ideological approach that is destructive of intellectual and personal growth. One may hold such beliefs strongly while showing regard and respect for strongly held differing beliefs of others. 

Meaning is more like music than words, more like poetry than prose, more like home than a hotel. It lives in stories, not scientific formulae. For meaning, we need an epiphany or insight as well as rationality. We need a sense of the sacred and a feeling, however incipient, for the purposes of God in history.

5.    From innocence to fault: the Contribution of Religious Texts

We need to reconsider this discussion of philosophical anthropology when we introduce the notion of human fault. Religious texts are suited for this discussion because they expose human feeling regarding the shared experience of the world to reflection. Philosophy can think too much like science and form the illusion that human life is rationally ordered. It can ignore the significance of feeling, the sense of alienation from and attachment to, the shared human experience of the world.

Moral reflection by persons has the goal of meaningful self-realization of the person toward a happy and fulfilled life of human flourishing. Given our spatial-temporality reality, even long-standing moral systems within religion undergo change regarding the content of a moral or ethical system. The answer to the question, “What do we owe each other,” is one that will change regarding specific rules. However, the basis of moral reflection is basic regard or respect for the personhood of the other. To see the face of the other is to confront a moral question of how one ought to treat the other. “Why should I be moral?” Such a question arises from one who either does not understand morality or does not care to be moral in their relation to others. We best avoid one who does not care to be moral. 

Morality is inherently something functional: the moral enterprise exists as what it is because it has a purpose to serve. It is the objective of morality to equip people with a body of norms, rules, and values that make for peaceful and collectively satisfying coexistence by facilitating their living together and interacting in a way that is productive of the realization of the general benefit of the wider community. As many people are concerned with adopting a physically healthy lifestyle, so we ought to have concern for the codes and values by which we live. Since we can deliberate about such codes and values, they are rational. Violations of moral principles are against the well-being and flourishing of the other. Such a life is a creative and artistic life.[52] It recognizes the value of the practical morality made in many religious and secular codes, while also recognizing the importance of developing personal excellences, such as listening to the tradition within which one finds oneself while accepting responsibility for applying that tradition appropriately in specific settings (self-direction), recognizing those who have shared ideals of the good life, knowledge of the tradition, and practice in applying its wisdom to the situations today (moral authority), treating others with respect and developing good taste (decency), approaching a human life with the realism of one who does not expect the contingencies of life to always be favorable, that suffering and pain will intersect with one’s life, but that one can still pursue one’s projects with hope (depth), and that one can develop loyalty to being the type of person one desires to be regardless of whether one will have a successful outcome (honor). We will choose our style of life through the projects to which we dedicate ourselves. An artful life chooses worthy projects. The classical virtues will accompany the artful life largely because the virtues keep us from making shipwreck of our lives. Love precedes the virtues, for without basic care for self and others we will not consider virtue. 

Aristotle will consider virtues as universal principles or values that “we” hold: courage, truthfulness (sense of duty), temperance (self-control, moderation) in our enjoyment of pleasure, liberality or generosity with our wealth, proper self-esteem or humility, good-tempered or gentle, tactful humor, wholesome ambition (duty of working honestly), and righteousness indignation. He will discuss justice as having a sense of proportion. I think it wise to add to his list with such virtues as compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, simplicity, tolerance, and purity (which adds a consideration of sexuality that Aristotle omits). As I began with love, it might be an appropriate addition to say that as we consider the ethical moment and these principles, the result will be a loving action. Such principles are guidelines to our moral development, educating our feelings to desire a life exhibiting the character of the good person. Such wisdom is practical and encourages development of proper insight into a situation. Such wisdom is not theoretical knowledge that we could prove through math or science, but rather, as we deliberate concerning the type of character we need to develop to arrive at the end, which is a happy, well-lived, and meaningful life. Proper philosophical reflection on ethics will keep bringing us back to the virtues necessary for a human being to experience the desired end. It will bring us back to the ordinary life most of us lead and help us to live it well.

Contrary to Aristotle in Book III of Nichomachean Ethics 1112b12-20, we can reason about ends. Cognitive deliberations regarding matters of information involving the issue of means is one type of deliberation, and evaluative deliberations regarding matters of value involving the issue of the merit of ends is another. Whether certain means are appropriate to given ends is a question whose resolution must be addressed in the former, informational order of deliberation. Whether the ends we have are appropriate, whether they merit adoption, is an issue that can be addressed in the latter, evaluative order of deliberation. Valuation is clearly something subject to reason once the matter of what is necessary for or advantageous to human well-being enters upon the scene. One cannot be rational without giving due care for the desirability of what one desires. If our ends are inappropriate then no matter how well we cultivate them, we are not being rational. A voyage to a foolish destination is a foolish enterprise, regardless of how efficiently conducted. There is inferential or logical reason that focuses on an instrumental or cognitive concern for effectiveness and efficiency in their cultivation and evaluative or axiological reason. Reasoning about ends is a matter of legitimation. It involves appraisal and evaluative judgment and focuses upon the appropriateness of ends. 

Political and economic belief systems ought to have (meaning that such systems are also moral systems) the goal of giving persons the freedom to pursue their vision of a flourishing human life in a reasonable and morally acceptable way. Such systems will show basic respect and regard for the personhood of their citizens. A well-ordered society will strive for political arrangements that coordinate morality with self-advantage. Everyone has a personal interest in so arranging matters that it comes to be in everyone’s interest to act as morality demands. Morality calls for working toward a social order where moral comportment is advantageous. Self-advantage will call for working toward the same end. The political and economic order do not have the tools to serve as the primary source of moral education, but they can provide a structure within which persons can fulfill their personal vision of their excellence. Such education must come from other institutions of society, including the faith community. Art shares these qualities but has regard for deeper dimensions of life in the formation of picture, myth, and story as it explores the depth of individual life.[53]

Religion shares these qualities, but they occur in a different sense of the word. That religion refers symbolically to truth and reality within our experience is always a possibility. For adherents, religion refers to transcendent reality that ought to affect our way of life. For adherents, religion will have an appreciation of the beauty of life and world through its image of the divine. The accountability of the life one leads is toward the understanding of the divine that the adherent has. Human history has seen many such belief systems rise and fall. Many are nothing more than antiques in a museum. Their belief systems met the realities of the world and could not adjust to the inevitable change that spatial-temporal beings encounter. Religious systems of beliefs will succeed or fail based upon their ability to adjust to such changes in ways that enable adherents to face new challenges that the historical moment presents to them. Religions with myth at their center have an increasingly difficult justification in the modern, scientific cultural setting. Religions that point to spatial-temporal events of revelation have a unique responsibility to test their systems of beliefs rationally to maintain credibility and to have adherents willing to live with a view of the world proposed by such an event of revelation. Religion senses that the uniqueness of persons suggests a connection with something more than simply a spatio-temporal world, which philosophically would be the Infinite and Eternal, and religiously would be God. If true, such a God would need to appear or would need to reveal in a paradigmatic event who this God is and what this God would desire for humanity. Such a God would respect the spatio-temporal setting of persons, while finding ways to communicate with them and relate to them. The gift offering at the heart of religion merges with another fundamental aspect of sacrifice.  For mediation between the divine and the human may well be called the universal meaning of sacrifice. It may well be that the only way to mediate the divine and human is for this God to make the sacrifice necessary in forming the bridge between the Infinite and Eternal on the one side and the spatio-temporal person on the other. In prayer, an expression of humility, and worship, one recognizes dependence upon a mysterious will of an incomprehensible power one cannot imagine, such adherents seek an immediate relation to the Infinite and Eternal. Such ways of devotion would recognize the manifestation of the divine special times and places as well as recognize this manifestation in the ordinary: love, family, work, nature, and society.

We best begin with a philosophical reflection on myth in religion, for this allows us to consider the passage from innocence to fault. The history of religions contains myths of fall, chaos, exile, and divine blinding. The philosopher cannot immediately insert them into philosophical discourse. Exegeting such myths prepares them for an insertion into human self-knowledge. Exploring the symbolism of evil is the initial step toward bringing myths nearer to philosophical discourse. Exploring the theme of fallibility, the constitutional weakness of humanity, allows us to explore how such fallibility is the path by which evil becomes possible. With the concept of fallibility, an understanding of humanity becomes intelligible. 

            The symbol gives thought. Any notion of guilt, for example, needs to pass through an encounter with psychoanalysis, criminology, and political philosophy. The theme of alienation we find in Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx is connected to the accusation made by the prophets of Israel. If thought starting from symbols unfolds by its encounter with these modern disciplines, philosophical discourse needs to lead to the speculative equivalent of the mythical themes of fall, exile, chaos, and tragic blinding, the notion of a free will that is bound and finds itself already bound. Such will be the theme that results in the philosophical consideration that the symbol gives to thought. 

This philosophy begins with belief and through reflection leads to knowledge. It is nourished on the fullness of language. Language and rationality are important to human existence and give humanity a distinct advantage over other creatures. Our possession of a rich system of consciousness, intelligence, capacity for language, capacity for extremely fine perceptual discriminations, capacity for rational thought, are all biological phenomena. To put a finer point on it, as Charles Taylor put it, the desire for cosmic connection, for an experience of joy, significance, and inspiration, suggests a higher and deeper than the everyday world around us. It hints that there is something more, that a well-lived human life is more than the abundance of the things one possesses. Such an approach opens the door for a religious conversation, although it cannot prove such a dimension to reality exists. The scientist who wants to close that door would not be pleased. This does away with the concern for finding a starting-point for philosophy. It recognizes the narrow perspective of modern science and technology as forgetting something important about humanity and the sacred. Some persons will find the flatten and purposeless nature of the world described by science and technology as enough. For such persons, all we need to know in ontology is that atoms and cells exist. Such a naturalist and materialist view of ontology assumes that science is the only arbiter of truth. However, there are good reasons to think its precise, univocal, and technical language needs to be recharged with the fullness of language. The symbol gives, but what it gives is something to think about.[54]

The myth of the fall is the matrix of all subsequent speculations concerning the origin of evil in human freedom. The exegesis of this myth brings out a tension between two significations. Evil comes into the world as far as humanity posits it. However, to it must be added the powerful myths of chaos, tragic blinding, and of the exiled soul. thus, humanity posits evil because humanity yields to the siege of the Adversary. 

            The task of philosophic reflection is to recapture the symbolism of evil, to extend these reflections into all the domains of human consciousness. What the symbolism of evil gives to thought concerns the grandeur and limitation of any ethical vision of the world. Humanity is as much a victim as it is guilty.

            Philosophical reflection considers the concept of fallibility as part of the innermost structure of human reality. Humanity is fragile and liable to evil. This means a certain non-coincidence of the human being with oneself. This disproportion of self to self would be the explanation of fallibility. To be clear, this way of considering the human condition allows us to avoid placing humanity in a fanciful domain, an intermediary place, such as between being and nothingness, between angels and animals. This suggests that humanity is the only being so unstable in ontological constitution that it is capable of being both greater and lesser than itself. The value of looking at humanity this way is that the existing individual is intermediate within oneself. Humanity is bounded by unlimited rationality, totality, and beatitude on the one hand and limited to a perspective, consigned to death, and riveted to desire on the other. This pathos of humanity involves a pre-comprehension of human misery. 

The origin of evil and wickedness is in the passage from the structure of human finitude to actual living through decisions of the will. The structure of human finitude includes the possibility of fall. Its irrational character means that only symbolic language makes it accessible. This is true because of the process of abstraction in which we have engaged, in which we have bracketed the notion of fallibility to develop a philosophy of the will. A structural element of the human form of life and behavior is marked by a tension between the centralist organization that human beings share with all animal life and the exocentric character that is peculiar to human beings. The human situation is characterized by the disproportion in the life of a being that is finite and oriented to an infinite destiny. This non-coincidence of humanity with itself is not yet evil, but points to fallibility of the condition. This suggests that the failure to achieve one’s destiny is inherently connected with the factual natural conditions of human existence. This modifies the notion that evil originates in an act of human freedom.[55]

The grandeur and limitation of an ethical vision of the world becomes the theme of this portion of philosophical anthropology. Truth, goodness, and beauty direct our attention away from self. They represent human aspiration. Yet, in focusing our attention on that which is beyond self, we return to the self, hopefully expanded and deepened by the journey. In all hypotheses, evil manifests itself through the constitutional weakness of humanity. Freedom that assumes the responsibility for evil is freedom that comes to a self-understanding filled with meaning. In this ethical vision, freedom is the ground of evil. The confession of evil is also the condition of the consciousness of freedom. In this confession one can detect the delicate connection of the past and the future, of the self and its acts, of non-being and pure action, which are at the core of freedom. Such is the grandeur of an ethical vision of the world. Reflection on the symbolism of evil reaches its peak in the ethical vision of the world.[56]

5a. The Finite and the Infinite

            The first stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage between our finitude and infinite possibility. “Infinite” is the way in which we express our awareness of the interconnected quality of reality. Individual things participate in this wholeness, and this participation is what we mean by “Infinite.”^[57]

All this occurs despite so much random, meaningless suffering. Any discussion of human life begins with the reminder of the finite and therefore ambiguous quality of human life. Finite life has hurdles, riddles, unresolved problems, potential for growth, falling and so forth. Such a life has physical limitations, the most dramatic of which is the ultimate disintegration of our lives toward death. We have obvious external limits. The ambiguity of human existence includes the presence of natural and moral evil. Any attempt to express notions related to human flourishing is inseparable from the ambiguities of every-day life. One who passionately engages life will also experience the pain of life. The more one gives oneself in faith, hope, and love, the more intensely one experiences life and death.^[58]

Amid all this, human beings desire the truth in the sense of wholeness of life, the good in the sense of morality, and the beautiful in the sense of profound aesthetic experience. We express this desire in our personal lives in how we think and live. We also express the desire in the institutions we build. Behind such desires and the expressions in personal and corporate life is a type of love for life. We want to see the flourishing of life in general and of human life in particular. Each of these desires has a darkness as well, of course, and we will need to explore that darkness. Such is the nature of the dignity and misery of humanity. We have the capacity to turn that which is our gift into a curse we inflict upon self and others. Our experience, as reflected in philosophy and psychology, discloses both the dignity and misery of humanity. Our experience reveals both our quest for wholeness and the brokenness that plagues our personal and corporate lives. Our human experience of openness to our world, which shows itself in our capacity to learn across time to improve the human condition, meets its counterpoint in our tendency to close ourselves off from world. The infinite horizon of life meets the resistance within us to close off questions and think we have reached the end of such explorations. 

We next need to examine the power of human knowing, especially as it allows us to reflect upon the human characteristics of action and feeling. My body opens me to the world by everything it can do. The world is a correlate to my existence. Human receptivity constitutes the openness of this finite one to the world. Our primary relation to the world is to receive. Such receptivity consists in our openness to the world. 

The emergence of individual identity out of social relations means that our “center” is outside of us. We see this social nexus in the family, the interaction of male and female (sexuality), and in the character of the political order. Personality has its ground in the destiny that transcends our empirical reality, especially in our experience of the other. The ground of our existence meets us in the person of the other. The body is the original “here” for us. This primal finitude consists in perspective or point of view, which affects our primary relation to the world. In recognizing that all perception is perspectival, I escape my perspective in my recognition that others have their perspective as well. I am so immersed in the world that I lose any attempted aloofness that is the principle of speech. The objective character of the objects in the world results from their ontological mode of things. The objects are thrown before me, given to my perspective and communicated in language. The objective character of the object consists in its expressible character. Thus, using imagination, I become a synthesis of speech and perspective. This synthesis between meaning and appearance, between speaking and looking, is consciousness, which has unity only outside of self in its reflection on the world. All this keeps us from simply beginning with a philosophy of the person, which will lead us to falling into the fanciful ontology of being and nothingness.

 

5b. Life-world and the Human

            The second stage of an anthropology of disproportion is the passage from the theoretical to the practical, from a theory of knowledge to a theory of will, from “I think” to “I will, I desire, I can.” Our philosophical reflection leaves the abstract, bare, and empty, and becomes practical in dealing with limitation of our life-world, dealing with values and counter-values, and thus make it difficult. The allure of a total philosophical reflection on the life-world is strong but deceptive, but we need to be willing to linger between what is and that total vision. 

First, character is how we will arrive at a practical finitude that we can understand based on the notion of perspective. All the aspects of finitude can be regrouped under the idea of finite perspective. By beginning with the affective perspective, we begin with things that appear interesting to me, through which we grasp the lovable, the attractive, the hateful, and the repulsive, which are the anticipatory stages of the project. In this case, desire brings clarity, for it brings intentionality that arises out of a lack of and becomes a drive toward, suggesting the elective character of desire. Desire illuminates its aim through the representation and elucidation of the absent thing, as well as the obstacles that block its attainment. It anticipates pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, in being joined to or separated from the object of desire. To find oneself in a certain mood is to feel one’s individuality as inexpressible and incommunicable. Every desire for an object involves a feeling, love, and choice, of oneself. The practical perspective leads recognizes that habit fixes our tastes and aptitudes and shrinks our field of availability, but that such hardening of life bids us to look for the new mode of finitude intermingled with the spontaneity of life and will. Character arises out of perspective, desire, the choice of self, and habit. Character is the finite openness of my existence to the life-world. Character is a limitation. In one sense, nothing human is foreign to me. I am capable of every virtue and every vice. Character is how I see humanity from somewhere, from a certain angle, and a partial wholeness of the life-world. In this sense, character does not change. No spiritual movement or radical conversion will not make us into different individuals, even if our lives may be oriented by a new constellation of fixed stars. 

Second, happiness is how we will arrive at a practical infinitude that we can understand based the notion of meaning. All the aspects of infinitude can be regrouped under the idea of meaning. A disproportion arises between character and happiness. A theoretical concept of meaning considers the supreme good, that for whose sake everything else is done. Happiness is a termination of destiny and not an end of desire. The encounters of our life that are most worthy of being called events indicate the direction of happiness. Happiness removes obstacles and uncovers a vast landscape of existence, an excess of meaning. Happiness directs me toward the very thing that reason demands.

Third, the constitution of the person by means of the moral feeling of respect is how we will arrive at the practical mediation that extends the mediation of the imagination. Respect is the fragile synthesis that constitutes the form of the person. The synthesis of happiness and character is found in the person, first of oneself and then of others. The forming of person is a life-long project. Human fragility arises again, which will lead to a phenomenology of fallibility. I set before me the formation of me as a person, and this becomes my project. This project is the formation of my humanity. Desire is directed toward happiness as a totality of meaning and contentment. The project of forming a person is an end that at the same tome be an existence. The self is given as an intention. Being human, learning to be human, is a path of treating oneself and others as human. The person is the synthesis of reason and existence, of end and of presence. All this suggests the fragile experience of forming a person. An ethical vision of the world presupposes a fallen sensibility of humanity. This suggests a loss of innocence that we can name as a lapse, a loss, or a fall. I am divided against myself, a disproportion that underlies the practical existence of human beings. The structure of fallibility makes this possible. Respect is rooted in a desire for rationality. 

 

5c. Myth, the Affective Life, and Fallibility

All this will lead to a new analysis that shows the fragility of this practical mediation of respect for which the person is the correlative. An important aspect of this philosophical reflection is that myth in religion anticipates a philosophical reflection on the misery of humanity.

Philosophically, the affective life relates people ecstatically to the world and the people around one. The orientation of human beings to a fullness of life that transcends them and manifests itself especially in the community of their fellow human beings finds expression in the positive effects and passions, especially in feelings of sympathy, but also in joy and hope. Such feelings draw individuals out of their isolation. However, a characteristic of negative moods and feelings, such as fear, anxiety, arrogance, sadness, envy, and hate, is to isolate individuals within themselves. The positive effects are expressions of an anticipatory expectation.

A philosophy of feeling leads us to an investigation of human fallibility. With feeling, we have the moment that reveals a new sense of human disproportion. Passion may well be the transition through which human beings must pass to move from physical life to a life of reason. Passion both unites and separates vital affectivity or desire with Eros. Modern philosophy needs to recover this insight of Plato (Symposium, Republic). This represents a move from the theoretical to the practical to the affective, developing a philosophical anthropology that is more inward and fragile. The restless heart would be the fragile moment of disproportion that culminates in the reflection on happiness and character. The paradox involved is that a philosophy of the heart needs to bring passion to the level of reason that faces the demands of our life world. It is a movement from an abstraction to the real. Philosophy needs to step out of the ivory tower and into life as human beings live it. A philosophy of feeling will express the fragility of the intermediate nature of our lives, deal with the gap between the intellectual sense of disproportion and the lived experience of misery. 

One question we must face is that of method, of whether a philosophy of feeling is possible. The primary point here is that feeling and knowing explain each other. They reveal themselves in intentional analysis. Feeling involves love or hate of something, which makes it intentional. The paradox of feeling is how the same experience designates a thing-quality and at the same time reveal the inwardness of the “I.” Knowing sets a cleavage between the object and the subject, while feeling manifests a relation to the world that restores our complicity with it. Feeling manifests itself through affective tones in the things our desires move us toward and from which we withdraw. Here are the lovable, the hateful, the easy, the difficult, the desirable, the loathsome, the sad, and the joyous. This shows the privileged status of feeling, as shown in both behavioristic and depth psychology. Feeling is the unity of an intention toward the world and an affection of the self. Feeling reveals the connection of my existence with beings and being through desire and love. 

A second question is that of substance, of a completion of the meditation on disproportion in the dimension of feeling. If feeling manifests aims, it adds a new dimension to human reality. Feeling manifests its meaning by contrast with the work of knowing, for its function is to interiorize the reality of the life-world we experience. Feeling divides in two through the mode of inner conflict. The reflection on disproportion comes to center itself on passion, which situates itself between desire and reason and whose specific desire is Eros. The disproportion of feeling is that of vital or sensuous desire and intellectual love, which we might call spiritual joy. The heart feels the discrepancy. A psychology of feeling is blind without the philosophy of reason. The infinitude of feeling gains clarity in a philosophy of discourse. The Heart is the realm of the interpersonal schemata of being-with as well as the super-personal schemata of being-for and the intention of being-in, which would express itself as greed without the polarity of Care, which is the openness or availability to the life-world. Feeling anticipates more than it gives, it promises more than gives an actual possession. Mood is the proper designation of such feeling. Schematized as delight, joy, exultation, serenity, they have formless character that denotes feeling and denotes the openness of the human being to the life-world. Heidegger focused upon the mood of anguish, the underside of absence and distance, while neglecting the power of beatitude and joy in and through anguish. In this gap we are confronted with the disproportion in the dimension of feeling and the source of human affective fragility. 

A trilogy of passion (Kant, Anthropology) shows how passion shows itself. 1) In the passion for possession or having. Having adheres to me through feeling. We can see the disproportion of the innocent quest for having, by which the “I” constitutes itself by designating that which is mine, with greed, avarice, envy, and so on. The mediation of the “we” and the “our,” the “I” joins itself to a “mine.” 2) The passion of domination or power shows itself in work and economic arrangements under the reflection of the human spirit we find in political realm. Feeling becomes human by making itself coincide with the objects of high order in which human relations crystallize. 3) The passion for honor or esteem is the quest for worth in the eyes of another. The deranging passion is vanity and pretension. The self is constituted at the limits of economic and the political spheres, and at the outer bounds of those feelings of belong to a We, and of devotion an Idea wherein we distinguish a kind of affective schematization of philosophic Eros. In the quest for esteem is a desire to exist through the favor of the recognition of another.  The fragility of this experience is that the esteem that establishes it is merely opinion.  An esteem experienced in a belief is what can err more than anything. Because one believes it, the worth of the self may be sham, feigned, or alleged. It also may be neglected, contested, disputed, as well as scorned, belittled, choked back, and humiliated. The lack of esteem may be offset by a self-overestimation or by a deprecation of others and their values. Esteem is incredibly fragile and easy to wound. 

We have been pursuing disproportion through knowing, acting, and feeling, this last revealing human fragility. The heart is what is restless in me. When will I have enough? When will I adequately ground my authority? When will another sufficiently appreciate and recognize me? The universal function of feeling is to bind together. It connects what knowledge divides. Feeling binds me to things, to others, and to self. Knowing sets a world over against me, while feeling unites intentionality to the affection through which I feel myself existing. It binds me to things, to beings, to being. Whereas the whole movement of objectification tends to set a world over against me, feeling unites the intentionality, which throws me out of myself, the affection through which I feel myself existing. Quite simply, the desire of desire has no end. 

Feelings reveal that at which one's life aims. They reveal the orientation of the tendencies that direct life toward the world. Feeling reveals its meaning by contrast with the more refined form of thinking proper to what we commonly call knowledge. Feeling makes interior what we objectify. In these tensions, we experience something of the misery of human life and the separation we experience within.

Feelings come and go quickly.  Moods dominate a person's life.  We can even imagine ourselves in certain circumstances and generate certain feelings.  Pleasure and desire play a significant role in the terminology of moral philosophers and of some schools of psychology. 

Our moods reveal, whether good or bad, our own sense of alienation and separation from the world in which we live, as well as our submission to it. Our moods are ways we evade ourselves as we submit to the world and let it matter to us.  Though we may tend to see moods as delusions, they reveal the world.  Among the ancients, this was viewed as feelings. Fear is one way mood shows itself. We feel ourselves threatened; it then matters to us.  Alarm, dread, and terror are ways fear reveals itself. If one remains in daily life, the experience of dread is submerged.  We cannot always experience life in this way.  A voice within makes one aware of how little it all matters.  Fear is a part of life, but dread takes us beyond those fears.  The burden of dread leads one to escape into the mass of society.  Yet, this very dread reveals that humanity is concerned about its own being, is concerned about the meaning of things.

The horizon of feeling is the original familiarity within which we live our personal lives. Feeling fills our interior lives; it will bring to our awareness the social relations in which individuals live their lives. Schleiermacher connected religious experience closely with the concept of feeling. His discussion of feeling anticipated many of the insights of modern psychology. For him, feeling indicates the totality of life. 

 

5d. From Fallibility to Fault

We have been moving toward an understanding of humanity as fallible, which means that the possibility of moral evil is inherent in the constitution of humanity. This possibility does not exist simply because human beings are finite (Leibniz), nor does it exist simply because of human weakness of bridging the gap between the possible and the real. The philosophical anthropology elucidated thus far has stopped short of taking the leap from fallibility to recognizing that humanity has already fallen. To catch sight of this leap we will need to explore the symbolism of evil. Fragility is the capacity for evil. To say that humanity is fallible is to say that the limitation peculiar to the human being, who does not coincide with oneself, is the primordial weakness from which evil arises. Evil arises from this weakness only because it is posited, a paradox we must explore.

We now need to consider the transition from the possibility of evil in humanity to its reality, and thus, from the reality of human fallibility to whether human fault is reality. We travel this path by re-enacting in ourselves the confession of human sin and evil that occurs in the religious consciousness. The reason that it is the most inarticulate expression of the confession of evil, and therefore, it is of philosophic interest. The experience of which the penitent makes confession is a blind experience embedded in the matrix of emotion, fear, and anguish. Confession expresses the emotion that without it would be shut within in itself. Language is the light of the emotions. Through confession the consciousness of fault is brought into the light of speech. The confession of sin reveals several layers of experience. Feeling of guilt points to the experience of sin, which includes all human beings and indicates the real situation of humanity before God, whether individuals know it or not. The original sense of sin is that of defilement, conceived of as a stain or blemish that infects human beings from the outside. The acknowledgement in the confession of sin is an experience of being oneself while also alienated form oneself. Sin is an alienation from oneself, an experience that is more astonishing, disconcerting, and scandalous than the spectacle of nature. Guilt, defilement, and sin is the living experience of fault put into language. Guilt arises as we focus upon a segment of truth, closing off ourselves from truth in its wholeness. Yet, this language, as primitive and as devoid of myth as it may be, is already symbolic language. The consciousness of self constitutes itself through symbolism. The elementary language of confession will be an important contribution to a philosophy of human fault. 

Three dimensions of symbolism are cosmic of nature, nocturnal dreams, and the poetic word. They are present in every authentic symbol. The philosophic significance becomes intelligible only if it relates to these three dimensions of symbols. The work of Eliade is helpful in the cosmic dimension. Freud and depth psychology of Jung is helpful in exploring symbolism in dreams. The poetic imagination is close to the word in that it puts language in a state of emergence. Symbols are signs. Every sign aims at something beyond itself. The literal meaning constitutes the symbolic meaning. Symbol precede interpretation, while allegories are already interpretation. Symbols are analogical meanings that form spontaneously and are significant. Thus, an analogue of stain is the symbol of defilement, the analogue of deviation is symbol of sin, and the analogue of accusation is the symbol of guilt. Such symbols give rise to thought. The religious consciousness discloses relations in depth, the thickness and the transparency of present motivations. The conception of fault as defilement is a good example of this. The lateral relation focuses upon likeness and unlikeness with other ways of thought, the retroactive relation re-considers the past, which can lead to restoration of lost intermediaries and later suppression of distance. 

Accusation is presumed in the Kantian ethical imperative. At the center of this symbolic system is the dominating figure of the paternal or Oedipus complex. The agency of accusation is the superego, representing the external world. If we are to demystify this dynamic, it will move from the morality of obligation to an ethics of the desire to or effort to exist. Obligation is not the primary structure of ethics. In locating ethical reflection in the identity of effort and desire, we acknowledge self-dividedness, lack, desire for the other. This desire would not project value into the heavens, where it becomes an idol. The kerygmatic moment of ethics needs to be recovered, and it can do so by focusing upon desire in ethics. Theology deals with relations of intelligibility in the domain of witness. Philosophy organizes in terms of the human desire to be. Philosophy recognizes at this point the ethical function of religion and the representative content of religion in the good principle as an archetype. The philosophical question is how human desire is oriented by this representation. This leads us to think of evil as a kerygmatic problem. Guilt is the result of accusation that occurs in the light of the promise in the kerygma. The religious dimension of evil is not transgression. Demystifying accusation leads us to the feeling of guilt. Guilt progresses over the threshold of injustice and the sin of injustice. This removes the sexual from the center of a reflection on guilt, away from the parental agency, and toward the figure of the prophet who is outside the family. Wisdom rectifies the guilt, taken up again and transposed into reflective thought. Behind accusation and consolation is the anger of love, a grieving the Spirit.[59]

 

5e. The Servile Will

The symbolism of evil in humanity results in the philosophic concept of the servile will, and in turn represents the concept of fallibility. It tries to raise the symbolism of evil to the level of speculation. It does so through the symbols of defilement, guilt, and sin. The attempt here is to re-enact in imagination and sympathetically the experience of fault.

Here is where an interaction with psychoanalysis can challenge us toward an insight regarding the symbolism of evil.[60] Psychoanalysis has a functional approach to symbols, it views the symbols as an illusion that deals with the harshness of life, which leads to understanding the symbols only in relation to their origin. It is a genetic explanation of religion. Religion is the reappearance of forgotten images of the human and individual past. This return of the forgotten, in the form of fantasy, is like the return of the repressed in the obsessional neurotic. In contrast, a phenomenology of religion will focus on the interpretation of its objects, it will explore the fullness of the symbols to reveal their truth, and it orients itself to a recollection of the sacred. We need to find our way toward the legitimacy of both approaches within their context. Exploring the relationship between the conscious and the unconscious might be one way to do this. Psychoanalysis is right in saying that we must arrive at consciousness, which demystifies the privileged status of consciousness. We do not know ourselves immediately, and the pretension that we do is a sign of our narcissism. Consciousness is a task in which we become increasingly conscious. The question becomes how the self emerges from childhood and moves through the successive stages of a human life. The best way to pursue this movement is not through the reductionism of Freud but through the phenomenology of Spirit we find in Hegel. This is a synthetic and progressive movement toward Spirit. Every figure receives its meaning from the one that follows it. The truth of one moment resides in the subsequent moment. Intelligibility proceeds from the end to the beginning, which supports the idea that consciousness is a task. The task of philosophic reflection is the work of deciphering symbols. For philosophy to discover itself, it must pass through an exploration of representations, actions, works, institutions, and monuments that are the works of the ego. The ego must lose itself in its works to find itself. Considering that reflection is a reappropriation of our effort to exist, it is practical and ethical rather than epistemological. Philosophy is ethical as far as it transforms alienation into freedom and beauty. We desire to be by means of works that testify to this effort and this desire to exist.  Such effort and desire are affirmed only by works whose meaning remains uncertain and revocable. We must conclude that the exploration of symbols immerses us in a hermeneutic conflict, for reflection both an archaeology and an eschatology of consciousness. Reflection requires a reductive and destructive interpretation because consciousness is at first a false consciousness. Yet, reflection also must also take the form of a restoration of the sacred. The meaning of consciousness is not in itself but in Spirit, in the succession of figures that draw consciousness forward away from itself. In contrast to Hegel, however, the end of reflection is only a promise, for the problem of evil will always form an obstruction for philosophical reflection. 

 

5f. Sin, Guilt, and Myth

Sin involves a violated relation, such as missing the mark, deviation, rebellion, straying from the path. It suggests error. Pardon leads to return or restoration of the relation. It leads to redeeming the narrative. One held captive by sin means the problem of human existence will be that of liberation, of salvation and redemption. 

Sin is treated lightly in culture, as in something being “sinfully delicious” or “the devil made me do it.” What theology speaks of as sin needs to be known apart from revelation. The loss of meaning as experienced by many in secular society is a place to begin. An awareness of evil is also part of the culture, as evidenced in the attempt to track down “evildoers” and even the “Walking dead” series, which recognizes that things are so evil that they can only be dealt with by killing them. 

Considerations of human life since the Enlightenment suggest an approach to sin that might be different from that which the ancients might pursue. The heart of that difference is the awareness of the social nature of the rise of our sense of self and individuality. Human destiny as exocentric or open to the world carries with it the awareness leads of humanity as a broken presence and therefore the ambiguous nature of human behavior in the world. Human beings could accept their responsibility in answering the question of themselves, their question as to the totality of the world, their question of human destiny, and the operation of mastery over nature, by expanding their self-interest to include responsibility for others and for nature. Yet, exploitation and oppression to the advantage of private self-interest is another direction of human behavior. Exocentricity continues to constitute the ego, but its presence to the other now becomes a means for it to assert itself in its difference from the other. Presence to the other becomes a means by which the ego can dominate the other and assert itself by way of this domination. When the setting of the ego against the other becomes total and everything else becomes a means to the self-assertion of the ego, the break of the ego from itself and its exocentricity becomes acute. The ego endeavors to implement this arrogant claim in its relation to the world. In all of this, the ego distorts its own makeup. The ego does all of this, when it could find its unity in the exercise of its exocentric destiny and allowing its particularity to be canceled out and rediscovered at a higher level in the process. In its anticipation of things and in its reaching out to happiness, the finite ego is constantly taking as definitive reality what is in fact only a finite perspective.  At that point, it becomes the expression of human fault. Egocentricity makes it appearance determines the whole way in which people experience the world. This relatedness of everything to the ego is in the form of self love. All of this suggests again that human brokenness is part of the natural condition of human existence.

First, the struggle between actualizing of our true self and finding a reliable basis for trust on the one hand with our anxiety and alienation from the world on the other, reveals a facet of human life that calls for our attention. 

Conscience is one facet of human life that arises out of this struggle. The emergence of the self out of the web of social life carries with it the rise of conscience, indicating that moral awareness is an important aspect of the formation of self. Moral awareness is the realm of conscience, out of which arises the call to become our true self and the shame and guilt we experience when we fall short of that calling. Conscience shows the conflicts between individuals and social forms and expectations. Conscience reveals shame and guilt. It also reveals the call to our potential or possibility. Such a call to action from the conscience presupposes a sense of responsibility for our lives. Our calling is toward authentically living our lives, while guilt reveals our failure to live authentically. Conscience arises out of our social connections, while maintaining independence from the social world.^[61] Conscience is awareness of fault, especially as we fall away from our true self and lose the self in the crowd. Guilt is awareness of obligation and our failure to fulfill the obligation. Guilt is the result of our anxious preoccupation with self, for we have failed to respond to the call toward the authenticity of self. Guilt is a specialized feeling proper when one has transgressed an established norm. The concept of conscience had its origin in the experience of guilt. Being guilty is an expression of an ought, the content of which is the authenticity of self. Guilt as transgression becomes intelligible in this sense. The concept of action presupposes the concept of responsibility. The capacity for action has its ground in the call to authentic selfhood.

Further, the emergence of self and the rise of conscience suggest that we are agents of our lives and are therefore free to accept or reject the circumstances of our lives. As we act, we make ourselves. We accept responsibility for our act. Guilt is our failure to be the true self that would bind us in a healthy way to the community. The rupture between the community and us gives birth to anger and sorrow. The path to healing of this relation involves a discussion of repentance and forgiveness, which are important to the formation of the anticipated true self.^[62] Despair can lead to isolation while joy can unite us to the community.

Second, we need to re-consider our presumed love of truth and knowledge. A sign of health in us is that we search for the truth. The opposite is also true. We human beings want to avoid people or events that deceive us. We do not want the deception of lies, distortions, and half-truths. A sign of sickness in us as human beings is that we try to avoid, distort or manipulate the truth. After I have shirked for a long time the recognition of a painful truth, I can find a real consolation in opening my mind to it. By opening my mind to the truth that hurts me, I have put an end to a long and exhausting inner struggle.[63]  The opposition to our natural striving for the true is the countervailing natural tendency to think we have reached the end of our explorations of the true. As important as knowing may be, knowledge has a dark side. It makes us prideful. Devotion to knowledge can make us forget that knowledge is not everything. Human knowledge is always partial. We are not completely in the dark, but we are in twilight. The things that matter to a human life are beyond what we can know. We need to discover who we are. Guilt arises as we focus upon a segment of truth, closing off ourselves from truth in its wholeness. The primary challenge to what I offer here is the contemporary use of ideology. Ideology is a fundamental closure in face of the wholeness of reality. It converts a partial aspect of reality into an absolute space that calls people to practical and usually political action. It seeks to determine the norm for the whole life of a society. It offers the appearance of a scientific interpretation of reality in the service of a practical and social orientation that it intends to legitimate. Religions need to guard themselves from becoming a tool of an ideology, for genuine religion serves a higher purpose. It cannot become the official bearer of specific imperatives contained in differing ideological formulations. A religion will tolerate, therefore, various political approaches to governance precisely because it refuses to turn a finite interpretation of reality into the infinite.^[64] At its best, religion in our secular historical setting is not a political ideology. Out of regard for their unique role in directing people to ultimate concern, to all-embracing reality, and to infinite disclosure, they affirm the relativity of all political agendas. They must refuse commitment to an ideology.^[65] Some religions have a belief system that requires political and cultural acceptance of their religious system, such as orthodox Judaism, political Islam, or Hinduism. Such belief systems are not compatible with secular, democratic, and scientific culture. Any ideology or belief system can blind one to the way things truly are in the world. One can even develop a fantasy ideology that exists only within the bubble created by true believers. 

Third, we need to re-consider the health, independence, and strength of the self. We reveal the brokenness of the human condition as we see clearly the anxiety and dread (Kierkegaard) with which human beings approach their lives. Anxiety is a form of bondage. Our anxiety about the future creates bondage in the present. It becomes a prison. Anxiety leads us to grasp at things that cannot give us the security we desire.^[66] Isolating the Infinite and Eternal as a context for our personal lives, our striving for self-fulfillment takes on a desperate character. Our legitimate striving for self-fulfillment becomes excessive desire and focus upon self. We care for self and security, but the striving then becomes an unhealthy form of self-love.^[67] Anxious striving for wholeness invites us to grasp at transitory and finite things to give us the wholeness for which we long.^[68] It becomes a deforming of our lives. It becomes the source of despair, care, and aggressiveness. We seek recognition by others at any price. Our brief time and limited space become our sole definition of any fulfillment we can expect to have in this life. Further, the uncertainty of the future leads to anxiety. Anxiety keeps us from a thankful and confident approach to life. It diverts our attention from the possible wholeness of life. It reflects our basic alienation from the world. We fall from our true and authentic life. Our experience of everydayness and idle talk reflect boredom of life. It shows itself in slothful approaches to life. It reveals our misery. It leads to seclusion and isolation. Anxiety reveals the basic alienation we have from our true and authentic self, from others, and from our world. The state of alienation makes itself known to us in feelings of malaise, discontent, anxiety, and general depression; alienation makes its presence known by means of such feelings. Such feelings reveal the attempt to find our identity through preoccupation with self. Our anxious striving for personal identity reveals the brokenness of human existence. Our anxious striving becomes dread when destiny discloses the real possibility that Nothingness is the end.^[69]  Mood discloses our brokenness and our striving toward wholeness.

Our alienation is a form of bondage that we experience in individual and corporate ways. Political power tends toward its absolute exercise over the lives its citizens. Money is a form of alienation in that it reduces humanity to an abstraction. Technology expresses the attempt to create a world that is exclusively human, betraying its spiritual implications. Religious ideology is alienating because it can dream up an illusory supreme being out of all that we think is best about us as individuals. It degrades itself toward formulas, dogmas, and morality. Religion becomes an opium at that point because it impedes action by causing individuals and groups to transfer human possibilities to another being. Religion becomes the moral sanction of this alienated world. Civilizations advanced in democracy, science, and technology still reveal alienation and therefore bondage. Socialism or capitalism do not change this situation. The tendency of each of these alienating forces toward totality makes them spiritual forces that seek to place people in bondage. Although humanity creates these forces, they develop a life of their own that places participants in bondage. As the struggle to provide the basics recedes into the background, questions regarding meaning and purpose assert themselves. We experience the alienation brought about by loss of ends or reasons for which we engage daily life. Science would focus upon the ways in which genetics and culture determine us. Human history has focused upon the constant profound needs for security, conformity, adaptation, happiness, economy of effort, and so forth. Many would gladly sacrifice freedom to gain these conditions. Little wonder that existentialism as a philosophy focused upon the experience of the absurd. The first step toward genuine freedom is the recognition of the forces of bondage.^[70]

Our anxiety and alienation heighten with the prospect of our death. We approach death with fear. True, birth and death have facticity to them. Yet, we wrestle with the meaning of both. We rarely take the time to reflect upon meaningfulness. Instead, we seem content with malaise, discontent, anxiety, and depression that express our alienation. We could receive the gift of our allotted time. We have received the loan of life (Barth). It has its limits. The loan is full of meaning. We need to receive the loan seriously and joyfully. The loan begins with birth and death removes the loan. The period in which we have the loan is our unique opportunity to seize and use the loan. The allotted time is a precious gift. The challenge is to use it fully. 

The Oedipal dilemma is an early form of this anxiety. Healthy children experience sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex. This desire reaches its peak around four or five. The romantic love of the child for the parent is a hopeless love. It requires enormous energy for the child to appear sexually desirable to the opposite sex parent. The child cannot maintain the energy. The resolution of the dilemma, and its accompanying anxiety, occurs as the child accepts the reality that it cannot have an adult relationship with its parent. It cannot sexually possess its parent and be a child.^[71]

We are examining the broken character of human existence. Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Heidegger have helped us see in a philosophical way this brokenness. The result may well be that guilt is pervasive and persistent. It may give birth to a sense of worthlessness or existential dread. The conscience may writhe in its pain as it struggles toward self-fulfillment. We struggle with mediocrity, conformity, and the unfulfilled potential of our lives. We are part of the herd or crowd (Nietzsche). We imagine we could do more with our lives. Yet, we follow the safe and quiet path of respectability rather than actualizing our potential true self. In our secular culture, isolating ourselves from the wisdom of tradition and embracing moral relativism, many have this vague sense of guilt in setting aside such wisdom. Thus, they embrace a newer moral ideology that carries with it its own authority from which one can judge others. If anything, setting aside tradition has opened the door for a new form of moralism without the humility that genuine morality and spirituality seeks. Far from becoming a moral wasteland, secularity has become full of itself in a new form of moralism and puritanical behavior that arises out of the finitude of political ideology. It seeks to shame those who do not agree with the absolute demands of their newly discovered enthusiasm for an ideology. Having proclaimed the death of God (Nietzsche), they have embraced a new god of the political ideology of the moment.

Fourth, we need to re-consider the way we think of evil. As much as modern life wants to think of human beings as good, it still wants to find a place for evil. A secular culture places responsibility for evil and its defeat upon human beings. It places the blame for evil on others, especially on anonymous structures and pressures in the social system. It localizes evil in others or in groups. In the process, it exonerates the group to which one belongs. If evil could find its localization in a group (the rich, the capitalist, a race, a gender) then all one must do is single out, isolate, or destroy the group. Of course, if we step back, even if we could destroy the group, evil will remain. George Orwell told this parable in Animal Farm, remaining a powerful reminder of this truth. 

One can try thinking of evil as monstrous and inhuman. Evil is very human. The subterranean stream of Western history finally came to the surface and usurped the dignity of western tradition. That subterranean stream of western civilization includes slavery, the suppression of women, anti-Semitism, colonialism, and imperialism, all of which arose with liberal democracy and capitalism. This shadow or darkness within western civilization gave birth to communism and fascism. The horrors of Hitler and Stalin were not accidents or monstrous abstractions. Rather, most who worked with them and implemented their policies were ordinary conformists and followers; the kind of people we can find all too easily in any time, leading to the controversial observation on the banality of evil. While we conveniently portray evil in monstrous ways, morons and imbeciles can embody evil just as well. One may be a diligent yet banal bureaucratic criminal. Out of power, most tyrants and serial murderers seem pathetic or ordinary, harmless, or even pitiful. Hannah Arendt saw the moral and intellectual shallowness of Eichmann. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. Others had emphasized the discrepancy between the personal mediocrity of monsters like Hitler or Stalin and the horrendous evil they unleashed on the world. That is the banality of evil. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. In this sense, thoughtlessness and evil are interconnected. That is the banality of evil. The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.^[72]

Fifth, we express our brokenness by seeking to possess the beautiful through lust. Lust clings to the finite and temporal out of the desire to make it yield a wholeness and meaning that no finite thing can give to us. Lust can have a perverted object, where we desire that which we ought not to desire. Lust can also have perverted means to attain a perfectly healthy object. In either case, lust closes oneself off from the beautiful by diminishing it and making it conform to our desire. We no longer appreciate the beautiful for its own sake. We desire to make it our own for our sake.

The solidarity of humanity in dealing with sin and its resulting evil highlights the social nexus of sin and evil. Sin will show itself in the idolatry we see in the excess of self-affirmation, in lust as a refusal to mature our love, in injustice as we make others serve us and in the despair that leads us to the failure to risk creative action. Yet, we cannot separate ourselves from sin. Thus, the roots of sin are not in society. Sin has its root in the heart, as Romans 7 makes clear, and thus, the social nexus fails to explain the universality of sin. Our anxiety leads us to prioritize self, which we disclose in the choices we make. The alienation that results is with our cooperation, even if sin usually arrives in an alluring and deceptive clothing. Sin promises a richer and fuller life, but it always leads to death. Our end threatens each moment of our living self-affirmation with nothingness. We lead our temporal lives under the shadow of death (Luke 1:79 and Matthew 4:16). Yet, our self-affirmation of life is an antithesis to our end in death. Fear of death pierces deep into life. It motivates us to unrestricted self-affirmation. It robs us of the power to accept life.

The deep root of egocentricity is clear in our natural organization and in our sensible perception. Our perspective shows itself in the actions of human life, including self-love, being an expression of human finitude that must be distinguished from actual fault. This position would be justified if the ego were constantly mindful of the limitations of its perspective at any given moment and thus, by the fact of admitting these limits, were at the same time to transcend them. The transcendental synthesis of object-perception the ego does at the same time transcend the limits of its perspectives in that it is set among the things of the world. This means that egocentricity makes its appearance in human life long before we can consider moral behavior. It determines the whole way in which we experience the world. Perspective and transgression are the two poles of a single function of openness. However, in its anticipation of things as well as in its reaching out to happiness the finite go is constantly taking as definitive reality what is in only a finite perspective, and this self-enclosed perspective, which is not aware of its own finitude, is an expression of human fault. Therefore, sin is intricately connected with the natural conditions of our existence.[73]

We can now return to a religious text and re-consider what they say about sin, guilt, defilement, infection, and punishment. 

What biblical myth does, and Christian theology that arises from it, is clarify that sin and the resulting evil resides in each of us. The solidarity of humanity in evildoing blocks any path toward moralism, adherents wanting to stress their separation from sinners while denying they are at one with them. If one is looking for genuine evil, one is likely to find it within synagogue and church, for evil hides among the good. Satan masquerades as an angel of light. One may recognize sin first as an act, but we have not seen it truly until we see it as influencing the structure of human existence. The structure of human desire is rooted in the over-valuation of self that wills. Our desperate striving for self-fulfillment results in anxiety and despair. Excessive focusing on our own identity is a deformation of the theme of human life. Anxiety becomes the source of despair, care, and aggressiveness. Need and desire characterize human life. However, the step to excessive desire that sin takes in anxiety leads to attempts to ensure the self by possession of what we desire. Anxiety and the related fixation on the self also are behind the search for confirmation from others. We want recognition by others. When we seek it at any price to secure own identity, the search springs from an anxiety about the self that expresses a self-fixation as we find in the self-love in Augustine. Uncertainty of the future and the incomplete nature of our identity feed the anxiety. Anxiety makes us cling to the self. Such everyday manifestations of sin are its true nature.

Guilt points us to the paradox of the idea of human fault in which one is responsible for being captive, which is the definition of a servile will. Guilt expresses itself through the indirect symbol of captivity, a symbol of derived from a theology of history in which a people are made prisoner through their sins. The symbol of the enslaved body in Romans 6 is an act and a state, which makes all human beings without excuse. In Plato (Phaedo, 82d-e), the bodily captivity is a sign of the servile will, the prison of the body being the work of desire and one cooperates in putting on the chains. To be lost is to be in the self-captivity of the bonds of desire. 

The principle that the concept of guilt presupposes a transgression of a norm is also documented in the history of culture, where the perception of this relationship precedes the development of guilt consciousness and the internalization of this consciousness. This origin for the guilt idea is important for the structure of its themes. The internalization of guilt is important, but the objectivity of the stain is retained in the idea of sin and is presupposed in guilt as well. Defilement and impurity are close to the Old Testament representations of sin and guilt, suggested in a continuity from act to consequence and from crime to disaster and death. Sin as a violation of provisions of the divine law is not everywhere as intensely personalized as it seems to be.[74]

Guilt places oneself before an invisible tribunal that measures the offense, pronounces condemnation, and inflicts punishment. It does so within the realm of the moral consciousness that watches, judges, and condemns. This interior tribunal incriminates the consciousness, mingled with the anticipation of punishment in the form of self-observation, self-accusation, and self-condemnation. Guilt arises with a scrupulous consciousness, which is a delicate and precise consciousness enamored by increasing perfection. I declare myself as being one who could have done otherwise. I recognize my obligation in my awareness that I should have done otherwise. It recognizes the obligation contained in the ethical demand upon my life. At this point, however, the freedom and obligation reflected in the experience of guilt receives an answer to resituate my existence in the light of hope, which becomes the passion for the possible (Kierkegaard), which strengthens the imprint of the promise on freedom. Freedom in the light of hope is a freedom that affirms itself despite death and is willing to even deny death. Repentance is already directed toward this future. Evil is not simply transgression of a law but a pretension of humanity toward being master of one’s life. Faith incorporates the hope of the end of evil, in the law of superabundance, that where sin abounded, grace abounded even more. Thus, faith leads to a benevolent view of humanity and its history. It takes the step from condemnation to mercy and enters the perspective of coming rule of God.[75]

Guilt also expresses itself through the indirect symbol of infection and lead to the notion of the servile will. Defilement is a power of darkness that needs to be taken way or expiated. Defilement is an objective event, for it infects by contact. This is why sexual expression is so prominent in discussions of purity legislation and in ethics. Purity and virginity have a deep connection for this reason. However, an ethics of justice and love will need to be pursued and then circle back to sexual expression. The point of expiation is to reaffirm order. Expiation aims at the restoration of the personal worth of the guilty person through a just punishment. Defilement is external to humanity and thereby freedom is taken captivity. Fearing defilement, humanity fears the negative judgment of the transcendent before which humanity cannot stand. This something that infects is a dread that anticipates the unleashing of avenging wrath. The infection is a symbol of the servile will in that it is a bad choice that binds itself. The seduction comes from the outside and is an affection of the self by the self, a self-infection, by which the act of binding oneself transforms into the state of being bound. Both symbols turn inward to express a freedom that enslaves itself. They are symbols when they reveal a situation that is centered in the relation of oneself to oneself. The symbol expresses the paradox of a captive free will. Deliverance from this situation is the central theme of salvation. Yet, to infect is not to destroy. It tarnishes but does not ruin. Regardless of how powerful and seductive evil may be, it cannot make humanity something other than itself. Evil may well be a radical evil (Kant), but it cannot undo primordial goodness. 

Punishment itself is a moment in the process of the cancellation of the stain or pollution of sin. In the judicial realm, punishment arises out of the idea of the free will and acknowledges the validity that one ought to be a person and respect others as persons. It acknowledges the contractual arrangement of the political order in which one lives. The violation of the rule is an injustice to which punishment responds. This punishment recognizes the criminal as a rational being who as acknowledged the ethical demand even while violating it. It separates the judging consciousness and the judged consciousness. This separation reveals the judging consciousness as hypocritical and hard, and it is the judging consciousness that must find its way out of the hell of punishment. This conflict can thus be resolved only as we move toward reconciliation and pardon. However, this means we are moving from the judicial sphere of the political order to the realm of morality and religion. This is why we cannot moralize or divinize punishment. Punishment sanctions distance between the judge and the judged, but transcending punishment leads to reconciliation and the language of forgiveness in religion or to community in the language of public morality. This leads to the law of superabundance (Kierkegaard). The late notion of covenant in ancient Israel can lead us to this law. The legal dimension of this covenant in Torah does not exhaust its meaning, as we can see in Hosea and Isaiah, as both prophets could refer to the conjugal metaphor for this covenant. The notion of justification in Paul reveals the absurd logic (Kierkegaard) of the gospel at this point. The law pretends to give life gives only death. The concept of law destroys itself and the whole cycle of notions that govern it: judgment, condemnation, and punishment, which are now under the sign of death. The logic of punishment contrasts with proclamation of the gospel, for the justice of God is manifested without the law (Rom 3:21). It is still justice, but the justice that gives life. Of anger, condemnation, and death we know that in Jesus Christ we have been delivered from them. When we have crossed the border into grace, we can look back on what we have been exempted from. This is the logic of superabundance. The logic of punishment is the logic of equivalence, for the wages of sin is death, but the logic of grace is a logic of surplus and excess shown in the folly of the cross. The gospel itself finishes the myth of punishment. Punishment is a memorial of a transcended past which does not have the status of illusion or that of an eternal law of truth. The theologies of vicarious satisfaction remain theologies of punishment rather than gift and grace. Punishment marks an epoch that remains a memorial in the preaching of the gospel, even while its myth has been shattered.[76]

What we can see is that the internalization of guilt consciousness means that the diminution of the value of existence that culprits experience calls by its nature for punishment in the sense of penance, or expiation that educates. Punishment acquires a new function in that of restoring the identity of the culprit. Conscience as a solitary experience becomes the measure of evil. However, we need to modify this with the notion that culprits must answer for the consequences of their actions. Blame is attributed to them independently of whether they admit their guilt and acknowledge their actions as faulty. Consequently, guilt in the sense of an attribution of blame exist prior to and independently of the development of a subjective consciousness of guilt. The history of Israel shows this, for it could distinguish between deliberate an undeliberate act in the Book of the Covenant, among its earliest documents, and the subjective internalization of the consciousness of guilt as a break in the relation to God coming only with the preaching of the prophets centuries later. The assignment of blame is for the sake of the community and its purification. Guilt consciousness is based on the readiness to answer for its consequences. The culprit accepts guilt, a process that begins in confessing fault, thereby becoming the author of the act. Analogous motives are present in Greek tragic poetry, which initiated the development leading to the formation of the idea of an individual conscience.[77]

 

5g. Symbolism of Evil

With the consideration of evil, we are pushing beyond boundaries of typical reflective considerations in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and political theory since the enlightenment. However, evil in ancient religious texts undergoes thoughtful consideration through myth. Even in recent history, as scientific, rationally ordered human beings, people seem comfortable dealing with evil with myth. Thus, stories include the zombie apocalypse, which arises mysteriously, and which one can face only by killing it. The Lord of the Rings also deals with evil with myth. Star Wars does so as well. It would be difficult to deal with it through clinical studies. 

The developed language of myth will make an important contribution of a modern understanding of human fault. Myth is already logos, although it is a false logos. Myth is a traditional narration that relates to events that happened at the beginning of time, and which has the purpose of providing grounds for the ritual actions of people of today and establishing all the forms of action and thought by which humanity understands itself in this world. Myth cannot be an explanation for the modern person. Modern humanity can recognize the myth as myth because this culture has reached the point where history and myth separate. However, myth reveals its exploratory signification and its contribution to understanding, which is its symbolic function, since it has the power to discover and reveal the bond between humanity and what humanity considers sacred. When myth is demythologized through contact with scientific history, and elevated in the dignity of a symbol, it can become a dimension of modern thought. Thus, mythical time can no longer be coordinated with the time of events that are historical as established by historical method and historical criticism, and mythical space can no longer coordinated with the places of our geography. As modern persons, we lose the myth as immediate logos, but we rediscover it as myth. The philosophical exploration of myth creates the possibility for a new reversal of circumstances out of which logos may reappear for the modern person. Myth does so through the way it speaks of the beginning and the end of evil. 

The externality of evil is important for the moments when human beings identify themselves with the good, which is likewise something objective in their eyes. The difficulty is that the identification is not a stable one. The image of contagion or contamination is vague at this point, for it surrenders too much to the thesis of the externality of evil, thereby suggesting that apart from this contamination human beings are in themselves healthy. We need to clarify at this point by affirming the power of the lie that says good is evil and evil good and deceptively offers us life as the reward for sin, when in fact the outcome of sin is death. This deceitful character of sin enables us to understand how human beings can nonetheless choose what is objectively evil by compulsion. This means the servile will consists in that human beings regard as good what is objectively bad for them and therefore choose it. This situation makes it clear that human beings are the kind of beings who can find pleasure in what is objectively evil.[78]

Are some people so broken they become evil? If we understand that healing is still possible for the evil person, I am not afraid of that designation. If we can assume that some human beings reach a large degree of wholeness in this life, we can assume that others may reach the maximum degree of destruction and failure. If so, such persons would have a remarkable degree of consistency in this destructiveness, largely because they would not tolerate a sense of the degree to which they are broken. They would scapegoat, lashing out at anyone who might confront them. They would sacrifice others to preserve their image of self-perfection. Since they are without fault, the world with which they are in constant conflict must be at fault. Such evil is destructive, even while they might attempt to destroy an evil in the world. Refusing to see the sickness of their lives, they project the sickness onto others or toward society. Hating evil outside themselves, they do not hate the evil within. They will want to maintain the appearance of moral purity, since it provides a cover for the evil lurking within them. Such concern for public image will contribute to respectability and stability in their lives. They would have a strong will to get their own way. Such persons take advantage of those they perceive to be weak and innocent. They use the power they have to prevent others from fulfilling their potential as human beings to defend their broken self. They cause suffering wherever they go. They would be narcissistic in a way that does not allow them to experience empathy. This is why such persons are dangerous. Empathy provides the healthy person with a normal restraint in times of stress and anger, a restraint the evil person would lack. They can ignore the humanity of the other person. To maintain it all, their intellectual deviousness will become clear.^[79]

Human behavior in groups can become strikingly evil. Groups are too often less than the sum of their parts. The specialization that occurs through refining our individual gifts and passions in a role we find within the group can lead to the fragmentation of conscience. People in a group can pass the moral buck to some other part of the group. Individuals can forsake their conscience. Groups can have an almost nonexistent conscience. Under stress, even as individuals, we tend to regress to a childish state of desiring others to serve us. Under stress, groups can regress as well. In certain types of stress, groups can anesthetize themselves from truly seeing the horror in which they may be complicit. Evil in groups is also a form of immaturity or regression. Yet, stress is also a test of goodness. Groups will also tend to depend upon a leader. Most people would rather take the comfortable and easier path of following the leader. The follower becomes like a child. Adults hand their choices and destiny over to a decision-maker. The adult becomes psychologically dependent upon the leader. By contrast, a healthy group encourages everyone to be leaders. Groups tend to be cohesive. Groups develop pride in their group. They also create enemies or even hate those outside the group. They become cliques. The group can easily deflect attention away from its deficiencies by focusing upon the far worse sins of those outside the group. Evil groups will flee self-examination and guilt, while healthy groups will see self-examination and criticism as a stimulus toward greater health and wholeness. Nations organized by democratic institutions, undergirded by basic respect and tolerance, have a regular opportunity to re-evaluate at every election. Such nations have also always had their enemies, such as communism, fascism, and Islamism.^[80]

Evil, defilement, or sin is the sensitive point, the crisis of this bond that myth makes explicit in its own way. Evil is the crucial experience of the sacred in which the threat of the dissolution of the bond between humanity and the sacred makes us most intensely aware of human dependence on the powers of the sacred. The myth of this crisis is that it places before human beings a complete understanding of humanity, giving both the orientation and the meaning of humanity from its narration. The completeness of the narration is that myth narrates a reminiscence and an expectation. Thus, it must embrace humanity in one ideal history, as does the Hebrew notion of Adam and the Christian understanding of the significance of Adam in Paul. One can refer to humanity as a unity because myth sums up the human type. This universality has the character of movement by narration, in recounting the beginning and the end of fault, thereby conferring upon this experience an orientation, a character, a tension. The narration encompasses beginnings and eschatology. Myth discloses essential history of humanity from its perdition to its salvation. The most significant aspect of myth is that it seeks to get at the enigma of human existence, the discordance between original innocence and the existence of human beings as defiled, sinful, and guilty. Myth accounts for this transition by its narrative. It points to the relation, the leap and the passage, between the essential being of humanity and the historical existence of humanity.

Myth is pseudo-rational for the modern person, but that is not fatal to myth, although it is fatal to knowledge. Plato provides an example in that he inserts myth into his dialogues without confusing myth with knowledge. The problem of evil is the occasion of the passage from myth to knowledge. The problem of evil presents a considerable challenge to think and a deceptive invitation to talk nonsense. In this case, the ends of reason exceed the means. The contradiction felt between the destination of humanity and the actual evil situation of humanity is acknowledged and confessed, giving rise to the gigantic question of why at the center of human existence. It was out of this question that the narratives of myth arose. 

The symbol opens and discloses a dimension of experience that would remain closed and hidden without it. It occurs in language and the symbol takes the form of narration. It expresses an inclusive mode of behavior relative to the life-world of human existence. It is in the rite rather than in the narration that this behavior is expressed most completely. Ritual action and mythical language point beyond themselves to a model or archetype that they imitate or repeat in gestures and verbal repetition, becoming the broken expressions of a living participation in the mythical time and space narrated. The significance of this mythical structure is that those participating in the ritual acknowledge the lost wholeness of human existence and seeks its recovery through re-enactment and imitation of the myth and the rite. Myth-making is an antidote to distress and anxiety that reflects the unhappy consciousness. The narration has the character of a drama because the mythical consciousness does not experience fullness to which the myth relates in its narration of the beginning and the end of this mythical history. The characteristics of the myths of evil include the universality conferred upon human experience through archetypal personages, the tension of an ideal history oriented from a beginning toward an end, and the transition from an essential nature of humanity to an alienated human existence. The myth performs its symbolic function by narration because it wants to express is already a drama. The totality of meaning and the cosmic drama are the two keys that will unlock the myths of the beginning and the end.

The primary myth is the Adamic myth and the eschatological vision of history, for the Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition still proclaim this myth. We do not consider this myth as if it is a mime of rationality, a rationalized symbol, rejecting the temptation of a dogmatic mythology that would interpret it is history or science. Such fundamentalism has done a great disservice to exploring the meaning of the myth. Such a view pursues the intellectually inconsistent idea of combining two universes of discourse, that of ethics and biology.[81] It represents the origin and the end of evil. The idea of a fall of humanity arises in an irrational event in a completed creation. It presents a cleavage between the irrational event of the fall the ancient drama of creation. Salvation becomes historical and presented as a temporal drama. Salvation is the sum of the initiatives of the divine and of the believer tending toward the elimination of evil. The eschatological representation means that the work of salvation is still pending until the Last Day. The fall supervened upon a perfect creation, meaning the event of the fall carries the weight of this mythology. As an etiological myth, it relates the origin of evil to an ancestor of humanity whose condition is similar with our time and space, which is why speculations about a supernatural perfection of perfection before the Fall are alien to the intent of the original narrative. It is the most extreme attempt to separate the origin of evil from the origin of the good. The radical origin of evil is distinct from the primordial origin of the goodness of things. The Adamic myth portends an evolution toward a speculation of a higher degree, in which freedom will be the power of humanity to defect, to undo, and to unmake itself after creation. It narrates the passage from innocence to sin as the status of humanity destined for good and inclined to evil. This drama has already happened. The Adamic myth subordinates to Adam some other figures that decentralize the story. The meaning of the myth resides in its power to evoke speculation on the power of defection contained in freedom. The symbol gives rise to this thought. The myth anticipates such speculation. The Adamic myth is the fruit of the prophetic accusation directed against humanity, for it makes God innocent and accuses humanity. Sin is located at a deeper level then the individual act or transgression. Repentance is not only for actions, but for the root of actions.[82]The way Israel recounted its history was the alternation between threat and promise, a dialectic of judgment and mercy. The ambiguity in humanity, created good and become evil, pervades all the registers of human life. The result is that the human condition is subjected to the rule of hardship. The hardship of being human makes the fallen state of humanity clear. The greatness and the guilt of humanity are mingled. The goodness of humanity is the result of creation in the image of God. The likeness appears as an absence of guilt, and therefore as innocence. I am created in a moment, and I fall in a moment. The event of sin terminates innocence. It is the discontinuity, the breach between my having been created and my becoming evil. The depth of the myth is in its telling of the fall as event, springing up from an unknown source, providing anthropology with the contingency of that radical evil that the penitent is always on the point of calling an evil nature. The myth proclaims the purely historical character of that radical evil. Innocence is older than sin. This one primordial event spreads out among other characters. In particular, the Serpent raises the evil infinite of human desire that animates the movement of civilizations, the appetite for pleasure, for possessions, for power, for knowledge. The restlessness that makes us discontented with the present is our true nature. The myth is the symbolic form of the critique of the illusion of appearance. The serpent is a part of ourselves which we do not recognize. The serpent represents the seduction of us by ourselves, projected into the seductive object. Each of us is tempted by our own lusts (James 1:13-14). The serpent is also outside, for evil is already there, ready to show indifference to the ethical demands of human relationships. And it symbolizes the chaos in me and among us, even though we remain destined for goodness and happiness. Human beings are not absolute evil, and thus, evil has this external quality, and to sin is to yield to its seduction. In the Bible, the Adamic myth is connected to the myth of the Son of man, a Messianic figure destined to end evil. He is the one who is coming, the Human One at the end. A savior establishes a new world. The interest is turned toward the future, toward the second creation, which will surpass the first creation even as it completes it. The eschatological judgment broadens and deepens the meaning of the notion of pardon in justification. Pardon is gracious initiative, movement from transcendence toward immanence. Humanity is acquitted. The symbolism of the judgment says that humanity is pardoned in the collective adventure of the history of salvation. The fulfillment of humanity is linked to a redemption of bodies and to the entire cosmos. The soul cannot be saved without the body, the inner cannot be saved without the outer, the subjective cannot be saved without the totality. 

The drama of creation is another mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. The divine creative act must struggle with chaos. Salvation is identical with creation, so the act that founds the world is also the liberating act. Ritual re-enactment of the combats at the origin enable participation in that liberating event. This type identifies evil with chaos, salvation with creation.

The tragic vision of existence is a third mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. Greek tragedy is the full manifestation of this type. Such a tragic vision of humanity shows that the fault is indistinguishable from the existence of the tragic hero, for he is guilty even though he commits no fault. Salvation consists in an aesthetic deliverance issuing from the tragic spectacle, internalized in the depths of existence and converted into pity with respect to oneself. Yet, the Adamic myth receives a new insight when one looks at it through tragedy. The Adamic figure is tragic. He thematizes a mystery of iniquity that is not reducible to the clear consciousness of an event act. It points to enduring dread. The tragic appears in the enigma of the serpent. The tragic theology that emerges because suffering is not explainable simply by ethical lapses. The book of Job is the supreme example of this enigma. The tragedy of the suffering servant goes beyond Greek tragedy.

The exiled soul is a fourth mythical type of representation concerning the origin and the end of evil. This myth has played a considerable part in western culture because it presided over the growth of Greek philosophy. It divides the human being into soul and body and concentrates on the destiny of the soul. The soul comes from elsewhere and strays here. This myth could merge with the myth of the fall and blend their influences in an indistinct myth. 

With these symbols, we can reflect upon the meaning of the theological work crystallized in a concept like original sin.[83] To reflect on its meaning is to deconstruct the concept. The concept will need to be destroyed as a concept to understand its meaning. The reason is that as a concept, original sin is false knowledge, a pseudo-concept. Yet, false knowledge is at the same time true symbol. This process can retrieve the orthodox meaning of original sin, which is nothing less than the concept that evil is the work of freedom. This concept is faithful to the biblical tradition, resisting the enormous pressure that Gnosticism would present to turn evil into substance. Evil is not world. Rather, evil comes from us. The orthodox tradition did this through the story of the Fall. Humanity is the point where evil emerges into the world. Augustine would formulate this view against both the Manichaeans and the Pelagians. Evil is the inclination of what has more being toward what has less being. It is an existential and negatively oriented consent, the opposite of conversion. However, when Augustine took the concept of original toward meaning a guilt of a personal character which juridically merits death and a taint inherited by birth, took it in the direction of indicting humanity for evil and exonerating God. The concept of original sin becomes a quasi-Gnostic concept because it became a rationalized symbol for reason. This train of thought does not differ from the friends of Job, who exonerated God from the evil that had fallen upon Job by presenting the suffering of Job as a just response to his act of sinning. As a rationalized symbol, original sin refers to analogous concepts that have their excess of meaning. It refers to the confession of sin. 

The symbol of the fall is irreplaceable because it makes it possible to combine the voluntary character of evil with its quasi-nature, which consists in the fact that evil is already there before we produce it. In the teaching of the church the failure to attend to the symbolic character of the biblical story of the fall has led to a monstrous combination of a juridical concept of imputation for evil to be voluntary, and a biological concept of inheritance for it to be involuntary, acquired, and contracted. [84]

The penitential experience of which original sin is the rational symbol has three traits. First, the realism of sin, for sin is my true situation before God, my wandering course of being. Second, the sinful condition of the individual has a communal dimension. The collective confession of sin expresses a trans-biological and trans-historical solidarity of sin that constitutes the metaphysical unity of humanity. Third, sin is a power that binds humanity and holds humanity captive, reflecting human impotence, and therefore the misery of the human condition. 

Thus, the story of the Fall has symbolic power because it condenses in an archetype of humanity everything that the believer experiences in a fugitive fashion and confesses in an allusive way. It universalizes the tragic experience of exile that Israel passed through historically and gave it universal application. The myth has a power to reveal the human condition. Something is discovered that would have remained covered and concealed. In this case, in the story of the Fall, each of us discovers evil, finds it already there in us, outside us, and before us. Christianity has harmed itself by a literal and historicist interpretation of the Adamic myth, plunging Christianity into an absurd history and into pseudo-rational speculations on the quasi-biological transmission of a quasi-juridical guilt for the fault of an early ancestor.

6.    Redemption: Beyond Sin and Guilt Through Forgiveness

 

If human beings are going to engage in redemptive behavior in dealing the unexpected consequences of human action, we need to turn to forgiveness, which serves to undo the deeds of the past, whose sins hang like Damocles’ sword over every new generation. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever. 

The essence of discourse is ethical. Human life is facing the fact of the supreme ordeal of freedom is suffering. The relation with the other does not move toward a totality, but rather, toward mutual regard and respect. I pause and recollect myself, proving I am one who is not at the mercy of the life process or that I have no hold upon my way of life. With the act of recollecting myself I take a position in the world. In my recollection, despair is always a possibility, even though this mood is always a betrayal. Life is deeply tragic. The will toward the negation of our life can overwhelm anyone. At the root of despair there is always the affirmation that there is nothing in the realm of reality to which I can give credit, security, and no guarantee. It is a statement of insolvency. In contrast, hope implies credit. Hope consists in asserting that there is at the heart of being, beyond all data, beyond all inventories and all calculations, a mysterious principle that is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact, willed by the whole of my being. Here is the center of the ontological mystery. Such hope has a prophetic tone. Hope is akin to courage. Courage faces danger with full recognition of the situation, but reduces that situation to nothingness, treating it as of no account. Yet, it fully appreciates the gravity of the situation. One who has hopes for a world of justice and peace has a prophetic stance toward a future that will come, giving one the courage to face the challenges to that hope. Hope and despair subsist until the end. They are inseparable. The opposite of hope is dejection, expecting nothing from self, others, or life. Life becomes immobilized, congealed, and frozen for such a person. Tragedy is behind hope. No matter how dark things may seem, my present intolerable situation is not final. Hope says there must be a way out. Hope does not close in upon oneself; it radiates toward and embraces others. Hope implies an expansion of time. A closed view of time is a form of despair in which one expects nothing from life. Closed time also shows itself in the boredom of fulfilling daily tasks as the sole task of one’s life. Hope is another name from the pressure of transcendence that becomes the driving force of the human pilgrim. Even weakened life has a sacred quality. Such considerations recognize the ambiguity of life, but also recognize the incomprehensible unity of what we thought might have no connection, such as being and death. As the myth of the phoenix shows, all life may hold within it the promise of resurrection. While the structure of the world in which we live permits despair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope. Despair can be the springboard to the loftiest affirmation. Speaking metaphysically, the only genuine hope is hope in what does not depend on ourselves.

Ethical alterity suggests that the other person is a positive moral force. Goodness consists in taking up the position that the other person counts more than oneself. The other person becomes one for whom I am responsible to know and share a world, but also to recognize the alterity of the other. The face of the other is an enigma from which comes a command. Goodness emerges as the responsibility I have for the other person. The command I hear in the other is the experience of the divine shining in the face of the other. Sacred history is not the journey of Odysseus, who ventures courageously on a journey only to return home, but the journey of Abram, who leaves his ancestral home never to return and never truly arrives at his destination.[85] The well-known statement by Plato in Republic 509 is that the good lies beyond being, which suggests that our basic philosophical questions are to be found beyond metaphysics in ethics.

At the feeling level, we are aware of a weakness and helplessness that continues with us in life. We are aware of Power beyond us that can generate awe and wonderment at the beauty, majesty, and beauty of our world. Our receptivity to experience in our world is our welcome to our world. Contemplation is a form of looking, and looking for, that takes the object, if there be an object, into oneself. Contemplation becomes an ingathering oneself in the presence of the object contemplated. It transcends the inner and outer world. Contemplation arises from an anxious self-questioning of the relation between me and my life. “Being in a situation” is the formation of the self we remain wanderers, itinerant beings, who does not come to complete rest. To be in a situation and to be on the move are two sides of the same human experience. Creative development occurs with being in a situation. The capacity to follow out a long, continuous thought is rare today. True intelligence is the enemy of the ready-made. One needs a distance or aloofness and refuse to immediately jump in to participate. One needs to be willing to live on the borderland, resisting the temptation to merge with the object. Living in this borderland helps one maintain a properly critical spirit. Failure to maintain this critical spirit toward one’s own ideas, opinions, and the groups to which one was joined oneself, is one of the worst calamities that threaten humanity. We can also experience dread of the world because of random suffering and pain in the world as well as the destructiveness of human beings to each other and the destructive qualities one has within. 

We are fearful people. We are afraid of conflict, war, an uncertain future, illness, and, most of all, death. This fear takes away our freedom and gives our society the power to manipulate us with threats and promises. When we can reach beyond our fears to the One who loves us with a love that was there before we were born, and will be there after we die, then oppression, persecution, and even death will be unable to take away our freedom.[86]

A surprising possibility is that refusal to forgive may be a moral act. Not forgiving may be a legitimate action, with its own progression, motivation, and justification. In many circumstances, the proper and most emotionally authentic course of action may be not to forgive. Such moral unforgiveness could be that of a truth-teller who refuses to pardon and avoids the temptation presented by reconciliation. Such a stand would say: Excuse me, but I will not reconcile with you until you acknowledge that you have abused me. You say: Thank you very much but I will not forgive you unless accompanied by the confession and repentance that I John 1:8-10 commends. Easy forgiveness makes for hard justice. Justice, in fact, will not happen through the path of easy forgiveness. When people persist in mouthing empty phrases and despising discipline, justice cannot happen. Thus, we may need to consider that forgiveness and unforgiveness are not opposites but points on a continuum. The same internal processes can lead to emotionally authentic resolutions in either direction. Anyone who has gone through the profound and punishing process of conscious forgiving or not forgiving emerges more self-aware, more related to others, and less burdened by the past. A famous saying is "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent," commonly translated as "To know all is to forgive all."[87] This is not quite right. Understanding need not lead to forgiveness, but it can lead to wisdom.[88]

However, in most cases, forgiveness is the path of redemption. Reflect upon the difference between karma and grace. What you put out comes back to you, as in “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”, or even “as you sow, so you will reap.” You know the law of physics that for every action is an equal and opposite reaction. Karma is at the heart of the universe. It seems like grace has come along to upend all of this on the level of personal relationships. Grace upends our relationship with God. It defies reason and logic. Grace interrupts the consequences of your actions. In my case, and I suspect in your case as well, that is good news. Most of us have done plenty of stupid things, and much worse. Grace does not excuse our wrongs. Grace acknowledges in personal relationships that none of us will live our lives perfectly. We need to give and receive grace to maintain relationships that matter. In our relationship with God, grace acknowledges that we will never be religious enough. Somewhere, probably where we least expect it, we will fall short. Fortunately, we do not have to depend upon our religiosity. We know of this grace because God has offered it in Jesus Christ. Because of Christ, grace defeats religiosity and replaces it with grace.^[89]

The letter to the Hebrews places so much emphasis upon forgiveness of sin. It does so based upon the Old Testament sacrificial system in the First Temple and the Jewish practice in the Second Temple. I would like to ponder for a moment why giving and receiving and forgiveness is so important. 

The focus of the sacrificial system was forgiveness of sin. The problem with this focus is that it is too narrow. The web of human relationships is so intricate that even when we act out of the best of intentions, our actions can negatively affect others as well as ourselves. We may not have all the evidence that we could have had. We may act too quickly. We may not act quickly enough. We may not have developed the insight necessary into ourselves, the nature of people involved, or the seriousness of this moment, to act appropriately and courageously. Human action is always open-ended and therefore ambiguous. We may be physically sick, and this causes us to act in a confused way. We may never learn of the harmful effects of our well-intentioned actions. 

The point is, there are many reasons to give and receive forgiveness that do not reflect the moral implications to which sin points us. Forgiveness helps to keep us going, not allowing a past act, whether a mistake or a sin, to define us. The human condition is such that we need forgiveness, and we need to extend forgiveness far more than we realize. We must not forget that we need to direct this redemptive activity toward ourselves.

The wearisome sequence of revenge for past wrongs that only provokes further revenge is a chain people can break only through forgiveness. Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover. We would remain the victims of its consequences forever. Yet, a path needs to become open human relationships that says that what is done is not always done, the broken can be fixed, that the ravaged can be restored. That you can have another swing, that you can wipe the slate clean, and you can go back to square one. Forgiveness is costly primarily to the one who forgives. The one who forgives gives up the right to justice or revenge and chooses mercy. Anyone who has truly forgiven another knows what this means. Respect for the person is sufficient to prompt forgiveness for the sake of the person. To think that we owe respect only where we admire or esteem the person constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life.

I direct your attention to a few sayings of Jesus.

Matt 6.12 And forgive us our debts, As we also have forgiven our debtors

Matt 6.14-15 For if you forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father also will forgive you; but if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Luke 11.4 and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us;

Mark 11.25And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone; so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses."

One who acts never quite knows what one is doing, and thus everyone becomes guilty of consequences they never intended or even foresaw, that no matter how disastrous and unexpected the consequences of one’s deed one can never undo it, that the process one starts is never consummated unequivocally in one single deed or event, and that its very meaning never discloses itself to the actor but only to the backward glance of the historian who does not act. All this is reason enough to turn away with despair from the realm of human affairs and to hold in contempt the human capacity for freedom, which, by producing the web of human relationships, seems to entangle its producer to such an extent that one appears much more the victim and the sufferer than the author and doer of what one has done. To condemn action, the spontaneous beginning of something new, because its results fall into a predetermined net of relationships, invariably dragging the agent with them, who forfeits one’s freedom the very moment one makes use of it. The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility — of being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could not, have known what he was doing — is the faculty of forgiving.

Jesus is consistent with his Jewish tradition in its emphasis of forgiveness. The entire sacrificial system was a way of helping people confront their need for forgiveness. That system dealt with sin, but also with unknown transgression. The story of Joseph in Genesis is a profound reflection on family relationships and the need for forgiveness in the realm of human affairs.[90] Jesus maintains against the “scribes and pharisees” first that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and second that this power does not derive from God — as though God, not humanity, would forgive through the medium of human beings — but on the contrary must be mobilized by men toward each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God also. Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Human beings in the gospel are not supposed to forgive because God forgives and they must do “likewise,” but “if ye from your hearts forgive,” God shall do “likewise.” But trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing people from what they have done unknowingly. In this respect, forgiveness is the exact opposite of vengeance. The alternative to forgiveness, but by no means its opposite, is punishment, and both have in common that they attempt to put an end to something that without interference could go on endlessly.

The most plausible argument that forgiving and acting are as intricately connected as destroying and making comes from that aspect of forgiveness where the undoing of what was done seems to show the same revelatory character as the deed itself. What was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. Jesus clearly recognized this as well. An example is Luke 7:36-50, “Her sins which are many are forgiven; for she loved much: but to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little,” and it is the reason for the current conviction that only love has the power to forgive. For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self - revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved person may be, with qualities and shortcomings no less than with achievements, failings, and transgressions. Love, by reason of its passion, destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.

The modern loss of respect, or rather the conviction that respect is due only where we admire or esteem, constitutes a clear symptom of the increasing depersonalization of public and social life. Respect, at any rate, because it concerns only the person, is quite sufficient to prompt forgiving of what a person did, for the sake of the person.

 

7.     Freedom

Our vocation as human beings is to actualize our freedom in our personal and corporate lives. This vocation will find expression in psychological health, morality, and family. It will find expression in cultural, economic, and political institutions, if they reflect the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty. This vocation involves a sacrifice or consecration of life, an event that involves living for something, of dedication to a cause, idea, or quest. Only from the depths of life can spring this inner need of self-dedication. We cannot speak of our lives without asking what the point is and or what direction our lives are taking. Asking such a question presupposes that individual lives have a point. Denying this assumption is the final estrangement from the authentic self we are here to discover and be and alienation from those with whom I have already developed bonds of family and friends. Others are already within me. They are a presence to which I need to be faithful. Even with their death, there remains within us a power to keep a likeness of their presence. Fidelity is creative in that sense, participating in a dialectic of hope. Some people reveal themselves as present and become available to the other. They make room in their lives for the other. They have a way of listening that is a giving of themselves. Presence reveals itself in a look, a smile, an intonation, a handshake. Alienation reveals itself in unavailability to the other. The structure of the universe may well be meaningless, but when we become available, we overcome or resist that meaningless structure. Such a person is devoted to the notion that freedom recognizes that one does not belong to oneself. We act with hope and courage.

At its best, philosophy will hold before it a love for truth, goodness, and beauty. It will do so by clarifying thought through reasonable dialogue. The dizzying array of philosophical schools unintentionally contributes to the journey to wholeness of truth, goodness, and beauty. Philosophy attempts to clarify by focusing upon ideas and concepts. Religion has a way of picturing to truth, goodness, and beauty to the imagination. Aesthetic expression in the arts presents to the senses, especially to the hearing and seeing, the special qualities of truth, goodness, and beauty. Our natural appreciation for the beauty we find in nature is not sufficient. The contemplation of the beautiful leads to the creation of the beautiful. In other words, the fine arts are an important part of the journey of humanity toward its wholeness. This also means that the fine arts are an important part of our journeys toward human flourishing. Philosophy will lead to better understanding of the true and good. Religion can lead to our subjective experience and embodiment of the true and good. The fine arts can lead to our seeing and hearing of that which is true and good. The point is that philosophy, religion, and the fine arts arise from the unique purpose of human life. Their disappearance would bring great damage to the human journey. The fine arts are a distinctive way in which human beings experience and express truth, goodness, and freedom. The fine arts allow us to contemplate, dwell with, and shape our minds and lives to, the contours of beauty. The fine arts, in their drive to express the beautiful, bring human freedom and vitality (liveliness, spiritedness) to the senses. If we lost our taste for beauty, we would lose our taste for that which sustains and nourishes us. We could make the same statement regarding philosophy and religion. Fine art has a history of close connection with mythology and religion. The modern era has opened the door for a secular presentation of beauty that arises out of daily life, embodying human freedom and liveliness. All of this suggests that, while philosophy may lead to a totalizing claim, especially as expressed today in science, religion and the fine arts will always act as resistance to such claims. Religion and the fine arts stand as resistance to the attempts to bring humanity under scientific control by reminding philosophy and science of the elusive nature of the human quest for truth, goodness, and beauty.^[91]

Behind the reflection on truth, goodness, and beauty is a light that has occasionally shined through. The light is the hidden influence of love. The opposite of love is indifference. Even hate demonstrates our care for something valuable to us. Life wants to continue. We are not apathetic about living. We care enough to arise in the morning and engage the people and task of this day. Love shines through in our care for life. Love is the beginning of our desire for the truth. Love is the beginning of our moral reflection and love is the goal of moral reflection. Love invites us to pause and hold the aesthetic moment in our imagination. Love suggests that something matters. Love heals the sickness that can invade us that nothing matters. It invites us to escape the prison of our aloneness. It helps us discover who we are. We are incomplete without it. We express love as we engage others in the search for the true and the good. We express love in friendship, compassion, and justice. It frees us from a legalistic approach to life. We love as we share the life giving quality of aesthetic experiences with others. Love pulls us out of our obsessive self-concern and focuses our attention on the other. Yet, love toward another means we also learn to have proper regard and respect for self. 

Such reflections on truth, goodness, and beauty, disclose the orientation of our lives. Despite the broken quality of human life, we orient our lives toward the true, good, and beautiful. Such feeling is close to the religious experience in that it indicates the totality of life. Such feeling indicates the fullness of life that transcends the individual and shows itself in the community of fellow human beings. Such feeling orients us to hope for the future. In feeling, we find the theme of the wholeness of human life. In its reaching out to the totality of life, feeling anticipates the distinction and correlation effected by the intellect, even though because of its vagueness feeling depends on thinking for definition.

Conclusion 

The constant presence of the questioning is itself an expression of divine grace in the sense it generates dissatisfaction with the finite things of our experience. Yet, actual knowledge of the divine will need to come from another sphere.

That sphere could result in a phenomenology of the sacred, which is the numinous experience as awesome, overwhelming, and powerful, is possible because its manifestation has a form, structure, and articulation. The experience of a dimension of human life that encounters the holy or sacred in a hierophany, which shows itself in ascribing things, powers, persons, and institutions as holy. The sacred has a spatial-temporal dimension. Such experiences arise out of the productive imagination, because the experience gives us something more to think about than what the rational presentation of a concept could do. The experience leads to consecration of the world through ritual and myth. The fetish, sacred power residing in a staff, scepter, spear, ark, the king, the priest, objects in a temple, and so on, arise from the experience of Power that shows itself in these ways. The feeling states belonging to such experiences range from bliss to despair as well as the nearness or remoteness of the divine. They lead to a position or stance toward the sacred of that of faith that would include awe and adoration or rejection of that experience. Love is the act through which one apprehends the value of the sacred, a love directed toward a person, even if that person is divine in some sense. Such experiences still arose out of the communal form of togetherness that will have a tradition of naming saints, genius, hero, priest, and so on.[92]

However, the sphere giving knowledge of the divine in the Judeo-Christian tradition places greater emphasis upon the word than the numinous experience, hierophanies withdraw in favor of doctrinal and ethical instruction, an historical trajectory runs through the time of repetition and making the remembered historical event actual in the present. We can see this in the Old Testament, where patriarchal narratives, the exodus from Egypt and journey to the Promised Land, the tribal federation, the formation of sacral kingship, exile and restoration, have a dominant un-mythical theme, while the myth it does have relates to origin and promised redemption, as well as to remembered acts of deliverance. While the story of Jesus includes myth (his infancy, vision at baptism, Mount of Transfiguration, calming the storm, miraculous catch of fish, feeding the multitudes), the story of Jesus of Nazareth can be read as that of a charismatic healer/exorcist, an apocalyptic prophet, and a wise rabbi forming a community of followers. His chosen distinctive form of teaching, the parable, is as un-mythical as one can imagine, while its telling sets us in the direction of the coming rule of God. He was an obedient servant-martyr for the cause his Father had given him. The point is that this desacralizing and demythologizing of the world we find in the Judeo-Christian tradition leads to an a-religious form of Christianity. It is not the secularity that dominates this age, but it does intersect with some of the concerns found in secularity. Contrary to the scientific-technological ideology of our time, humanity itself is not conceivable without the sacred, a feeling of absolute dependence.[93]

A theology arising out of such narrative texts as we find in the Bible will announce the God of Israel as the great actor in a history of deliverance. A focus upon the world of the text frees the reader from premature application of existential or ideological categories. Placing the subject matter of the text as primary frees us from the problem of its inspiration. This recognizes that what is at issue is a world involving cosmic, communal, and historical and cultural concerns, such as Israel and the coming rule of God. The projected world we find in the Bible proposes a new being that encounters our world as readers. When we find ourselves situated before the text, it opens another reality, another possible world. The existential category par excellence is that of appropriation, encounter, and application. It opens one to trust in what God has done in Israel and in Jesus of Nazareth, and this belief will lead to the transformation of the life of the one who believes. The self-understanding of faith provides a link with the critique of religion we find in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, a hermeneutics of suspicion, which deconstructs prejudices we have, the illusions of the subject, that prevent the world of the text from being allowed to be free to involve us as readers in the direction in which it is leading. A playful approach to the text frees the reader to the new possibilities of the world opened by the Bible, for it ties into the imagination, which is the place where the new being forms in the reader, thereby allowing new possibilities to encounter the reader. 

A Christian theology that respects the meaning of the biblical narratives must begin simply by retelling those stories, without any systematic effort at apologetics, without any determined effort to begin with questions arising from our experience. The stories portray a person -- a God who acts in the history of Israel and engages in self-revelation in Jesus of Nazareth. They help us learn about that person in the way that a great novelist describes a character or that a telling anecdote captures someone's personality. They provide insights that we lose if we try to summarize the narrative in a nonnarrative form. No abstract account of God's faithfulness adequately summarizes Exodus. The Gospels surpass any abstract account of God's love. Far from seeking merely to make us forget our own reality for a few hours, it seeks to overcome our reality: we are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history. Christians who tell these stories, stories that are rich, enigmatic, sometimes puzzling and ambiguous, can find that their lives fit into the world they describe -- indeed, that our stories suddenly make more sense when seen in that context.

If the event of revelation has occurred, the basic task of theology becomes shifting the ground from under the self and toward what the event of revelation says concerning God and humanity. This notion assumes that only God has the right to speak of God. Instead of finding so much fascination with the existing, thinking, and doubting self, God needs to become fascinating again in that the event of revelation is the source of our affirmation regarding the existence and essence of God. God becomes interesting for the sake of who God is. 

For the Christian, of course, the event of revelation is the word and deed of the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. Our reason will need a shift to acknowledging that in this event we find that which satisfies our drive toward beauty, goodness, and truth. The doubting self of Descartes takes the self into the world of experience. The person who acknowledges the event of revelation acknowledges God as the supreme partner in the journey of a human life. Such a person seeks to become part of the divine journey of renewing humanity after the image of God. Theology is always on the way and is thus a pilgrim theology. The journey becomes allowing the event of revelation to continually shape thought and life.^[94]

All of this properly places the analogy of being increasingly far from the theological task, for it assumes a distance and inaccessibility of the divine and thus seeks a middle term to bridge the difference. Such an approach seeks to show how the common experience of movement, for example, must derive from God. In contrast, the analogy of faith assumes correspondence between God and world in the event of revelation. The event announces a turning point in history, a language event that takes temporality seriously. The event of revelation invites us to ponder the way God has come near to us charismatic exorcist/healer, as apocalyptic prophet, as was rabbi of a community, and as obedient servant-martyr, as embracing the nothingness and death, and ultimately the divine address embodied in love.^[95]

Such a language event involves the telling of a story. The social structure of the self corresponds to the Trinitarian structure of the event of revelation. We must learn to tell our story. As we do, we gain an insight into the story of God. In fact, theology needs to continually re-tell the story of God for each generation. Narration of a story preserves the past for a future that remains undetermined. Thus, narration does not invent stories. It involves us in on-going discovery and engagement that can have a playful character. Jesus of Nazareth, for example, is about whom his followers told stories. They lead us to the affirmation that “God is love.” Love is the event of surrender, selflessness, affection, promise toward the beloved. Love distances us from self and orients us toward the other. Turning to this event with faith will mean that love and hope gain a victory.^[96]

Much of science has concluded that nature has an orientation toward complexity, a notion that invites a conversation with philosophy in its discussion of the Infinite and Eternal. If we understand time as occurring within eternity and that therefore eternity is the realm of the fulfillment of time, we open the possibility of the divine. In fact, it may well be that the future has more influence upon the present than does the origin of either the universe or life on this planet. To be bold, the future may well have more content than we dare to imagine on our own. Far from being empty, death-like, and nothing, the future may well be the divine becoming all in all, full of life, and meaningful. In that sense, religion becomes a death-defying act, the faith and the hope that the end is something rather than nothing, life rather than death, meaning rather than emptiness. To put it bluntly, a universe in which human beings are alone except for other slowly evolved intelligences is a quite different universe from one with an original guiding agent who guides the universe toward a divine and beautiful end.

Biblical scholars need to analyze the plot of biblical narratives, the way the literary forms work, the patterns of climax and tension. Christian theology ought to be descriptive in laying out a Christian view of the world. That view will reflect the enigmas and ambiguities of the biblical texts, and it will be a view of the entire world. Much of the most interesting recent work in Christian ethics discusses the way narratives shape our understanding of Christian life. We make decisions because of beliefs about what sorts of virtues seem important, what sort of human life we believe to be good. To answer that kind of question, a principle or a rule is often less helpful than a story. A Christian theologian will do ethics to indicate that this narrated, narratable world is at the same time open to and transforms the ordinary world of our experience. For example, the reawakening of political responsibility forms a link with the reanimation of traditional sources, into the most impressive tradition, that of liberating acts, of the Exodus and the Resurrection. There would be no more interests in emancipation, no more anticipation of freedom, if the Exodus and the Resurrection were effaced from the memory of humanity. Eschatology is nothing without the recitation of acts of deliverance from the past.[97]

The course of philosophic reasoning outlined in this essay has the character of a wager. It presumes that the participant will gain a better understanding of humanity and of creation by following the indications of symbolic thought. The intelligibility of the interpretation will verify the wager through coherent discourse. The symbols of deviation, wandering, and captivity, of chaos, mixture, and fall, all of which lead to the servile will under the guidance of a mythology of evil existence, then we have deduced the symbolism of human evil. The task of the philosopher guided by symbols would be to end the prerogative of self-reflection. The symbol gives reason to think that the “I think” is within being, so the being that posits itself in the “I think” has still to discover that the very act by which it abstracts itself from the whole does not cease to share in the being that challenges it in every symbol. The symbols of guilt found in deviation, wandering, and captivity, as well as the myths of chaos, blinding, mixture, and fall, speak to the situation of the being of humanity in the being of the world. The philosophical task is to start from the symbols and elaborate structures of human existence. The symbols are elevated to existential concepts.

 

---

[1] (C. Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 1985), 1, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Robert Wright.

[2] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), 20-34.

[3] (von Balthasar, Theo-Logic: Theological Logical Theory 1947, 1985, 2000, 2004). As a Catholic theologian, he will stress that God is truth, the Logos is the expression of the love at the heart of truth, Spirit continues to help see the disclosure and trustworthiness of truth in revelation.

[4] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 226-34.

[5] (Pannenberg, Theology and the Philosophy of Science 1973, 1976), 44-47. 

[6] The two core doctrines of positivism as summarized by Quine (20) in his famous Two dogmas of Empiricism, are:

One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which are synthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.

            An alternative is constructivism, which stresses that people construct their knowledge of reality, thereby stressing the significance of personal perspective and lessening the significance of objective reality.

            Critical realism in this essay is an attempt to do justice to both the objective and subjective aspects of human knowledge of the world.

[7] (Peters 1998), Ted Peters, “Science and Theology: Toward Consonance.

[8] (Bracken 2014), although he is expressing a view based on Whitehead, and which I incorporate throughout this part of the essay. This is also a brief way of re-thinking Pannenberg and his notion of field theory and the field of force.

[9] (Vaught 2004), 141-158.

[10] (Pannenberg, Toward a Theology of Nature: Essays on Science and Faith 1993), Editors Introduction, 13.

[11] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, 1988, 1990), p. 113-29. 

[12] (Bracken 2014) 220-4.

[13] (Peters 1998), Wolfhart Pannenberg, “Human Life: Creation Verses Evolution?” 

[14] (Crosby 2002), 106-114.

[15] Nicolaus Malebranche (The Search for Truth, Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 6, 1674-75).

[16] Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (Third Meditation, par. 24, 1641).

[17] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, 1988, 1990), 77-90. 

[18] I have incorporated notes from a course taught by Larry Wood, Philosophy of Theism at Asbury Theological Seminary. 

[19] John Baillie, The Experience of God, 89-97.

[20] C. D. Broad, The Argument From Religious Experience, 113-121.

[21] William J. Alston, Psychological Explanation of Religious Belief, 122-147.

[22] (Haught 2007), Kindle edition 1140

[23] These statements are consistent with John Polkinghorne. 

[24] (Bracken 2014) 225.

[25] (Bracken 2014) 225-30.

[26] (Rescher, Objectivity: The Obligations of Impersonal Reason 1997)

[27] (Karkkainen, Creation and Humanity: A constructive Christian theology for the pluralistic world 2015), Section 16, location 12855ff

[28] (Sartre 1943, 1956).

[29] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 302.

[30] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “Initiative,” 1991.

[31] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” 1971.

[32] James E. Hamilton, “Nineteenth Century Philosophy and Holiness: A Study in the Thought of Asa Mahan,” a paper presented at Asbury College in the 1970s.

[33] Walter G. Jeffko, “A Personalist Concept of Human Reason,” International Philosophical Quarterly XIV (June 1974), 161-80. 

[34] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 191-242.

[35] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 224-42.

[36] (Pannenberg, Basic Questions in Theology (2 Volumes) 1967, 1971), Volume I, 166-7.

[37] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 113-4.

[38] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 226-34.

[39] (Peck 1983), 161.

[40] Wright, Robert. Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000).

[41] (Scheler 1973, 1913-16) 289.

[42] (C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 1989) 364.

[43] (C. Taylor, Hegel 1975) 49.

[44] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “On Interpretation,” 1983.

[45] (Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 1984, 1985) is the basis for these reflections on the world of the text, narrative, and the application to life-world.

[46] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “Explanation and Understanding: On Some Remarkable connections between the theory of text, action theory, and the theory of history,” 1991.

[47] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 1973

[48] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “What is a Text? Explanation and Understanding,” 1991.

[49] (von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory 1976-1983)

[50] (Taylor, Sources of the Self:The Making of the Modern Identity 1989), Part One.

[51] (Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination 1995), “Philosophy and Religious Language,” 1974; “The ‘Sacred’ Text and the Community,’ 1979.

[52] (Kekes 2002)

[53] (Rescher, Ethical Idealism: An Inquiry into the Nature and Function of Ideals 1987)

[54] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,”, 287-8.

[55] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 104-5.

[56] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” 300.

[57] Nicolaus Malebranche (The Search for Truth, Book Three, Part Two, Chapter 6, 1674-75).

[58] (Karkkainen, Creation and Humanity: A constructive Christian theology for the pluralistic world 2015), Section 16, location 12855ff

[59] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), The Demythization of Accusation,” 335-353.

[60] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: II,” 315-324,

[61] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 295-312.

[62] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 301-3, 308-10.

[63] (Levinas, Totality and Infinite: An Essay on Exteriority 1961, 1969) Introduction by John Wild.

[64] Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations Volume VI, 43-45, 52-57.

[65] Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations Volume VI, p. 43-4, 52-57. 

[66] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67), Volume II.2, 598-9.

[67] (Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament 1951), I, 243-44 on fear in Paul and 241-42 on care.

[68] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 96-104.

[69] (Barth, Church Dogmatics 2004, 1932-67) Volume III.3 [50.3] 334-49.

[70] (Ellul 1976), 23-50, stressing again that writing of alienation and bondage in this way is a way to discuss the traditional doctrine of original sin in Christian theology.

[71] (Peck 1983), 154-5.

[72] (Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil 1963, 1977).

[73] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 106-7.

[74] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 289.

[75] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Guilt, Ethics, and Religion,” p. 425-439.

[76] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Interpretation of the Myth of Punishment,” 354-377.

[77] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 291-3.

[78] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 118.

[79] (Peck 1983), 36-84.

[80] (Peck 1983), 212-53.

[81] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I,” 299, 306.

[82] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 120; (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 1998, 1991), Vol 2, 239.

[83] (Ricoeur, Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, 1960-69, 1969, 1974), “Original Sin: A Study in Meaning,” 269-286.

[84] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective, 1985), 104-5.

[85] (Levinas, Time and the Other 1987), Introduction by Richard A.Cohen.

[86] Henri J.M. Nouwen, Our Greatest Gift: A Meditation on Dying and Caring (HarperOne, 2009).

[87] Madame de Stael, Corinne, Book 18, Chapter 5.

[88] Jeanne Safer, Must You Forgive, Psychology Today, 1999.

[89] Bono: In Conversation, inspired some of these reflections on karma and grace.

[90] Hannah Arendt says too much when she said that the discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs was Jesus of Nazareth.

[91] (Houlgate 2007), Stephen Houlgate, “Introduction: An Overview of Hegel’s Aesthetics.”

[92] (Scheler 1973, 1913-16), 108-9.

[93] (Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination 1995) “Manifestation and Proclamation,” 1978.

[94] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), Chapter III, sections 8-10, p. 34, Chapter III, Section 11, 12, 13.

[95] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), Chapter IV, Section 14-18.

[96] (Jungel, God as the Mystery of the Word: On the Foundation of the Theology of the Crucified One in the Dispute between Theism and Atheism 1983, 1977), Chapter V, Section 20-21.

[97] (Ricoeur, From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics, II, 1991), “Hermeneutics and the Critique of Ideology,” 1981.