The first step towards publicizing a new field of knowledge is writing a handbook about it. There is no smoke without fire. Likewise, it seems that the existence of a handbook implies 1) that there is something that can become an object of knowledge 2) that it is important to know at least something about it and 3) that the matter is so huge and complex that mortals could never fulfill their duty of learning about it unless being provided with introductory readings especially designed to match the modest dimensions of their ability to understand something about something. One should beware of smoke though. Sometimes the purpose of a fire is merely to produce smoke as is the case with smokescreens. Actually, the craze of the day for handbooks, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, could well lead to having them produced on matters that in actual fact have no existence beyond these handbooks themselves.
I am honestly left wondering whether the Oxford Handbook on Theology and Modern European Thought is not an example of such a handbook. Thickness (almost 700 pages) does not prove much regarding the existence of a real content. Nothing is easier than writing a lot about nothing. There are an almost infinite number of ways of describing an empty subset. Just think of it: what is empty is neither a, b….z nor the relationship between a and b, nor the relationship between a, b and c, etc. where a, b…z stand for positively existing elements. It is not that the editors of the handbook do not appear wary of delineating a subset that would correspond to some virtually existing object. The book is said to be neither about the philosophical aspects of theology nor about the theological dimensions of contemporary philosophy. Indeed, the area covered by the book does not lie within the scope of one of the two disciplines. It is located at their intersection as it investigates issues common to both while admittedly taking care of not privileging one type of approach above the other (p. 14). Chronologically loose though it is, Modernity is deemed to be a sufficiently clear notion when it comes to the global evolution of Western culture (pp. 2–6). As for European thought, it is (very) grosso modo limited to the sphere of continental philosophy (pp. 6–9). Whether the subset that appears at the intersection of Theology, Modernity and European thought contains more than a virtual object remains to be seen. It might as well stand desperately empty behind a smokescreen of concepts, names and pythic statements ‘à la française’.
The structure of the book itself hardly conveys some sense of inner necessity. There is nothing to be said against a thematic approach. But why thirty-one themes dealing with subjects that have as much in common as ‘Technology’ and ‘The Bible’, ‘Incarnation’ and ‘Nationalism’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Atonement’, etc.? Why not two or a hundred? Why giving preference to those themes rather than to a million other possible ones? The book offers no real explanation either for this selection of themes or for the grouping together of these themes according to a few allegedly more general areas of knowledge (‘Identity’, ‘The Human Condition’, ‘The Age of Revolution’ etc.). Besides, the limits fixed to the subset get blurred as one proceeds to the reading of the actual contributions. Some sort of German thread – Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger (together with a touch of ‘Frankfurter Schule’) - monotonously runs through the whole, very much in line with the dominant narrative of French post-World War II philosophy (Sartre-Beauvoir, Lévinas, Derrida, Badiou - why not the clear-minded Maritain, Aron or Ferry?) Still, Anglo-Saxon (Locke, Hume, A. Smith, MacIntyre, Milbank) as well as Russian (Dostoevsky, S. Bulgakov, Florovsky) thinkers pop up every now and then without previous notice. The same thing goes for Theology where Augustine, Aquinas, Duns Scot and Ockham (are they more modern than Gregory of Nyssa or Anselm?) put in several unexpected appearances in the midst of a small and predictable band of German theologians: Schleiermacher, Barth, Bultmann, Tillich, Moltmann and Pannenberg (the names of the Catholic Rahner and Balthasar come up much less often; those from French ‘nouvelle théologie’- Congar, De Lubac, Chenu - likewise). The vagueness that characterizes the limits of Modernity, Theology and Europe affects equally that of Thought. For instance, the focus of the article on ‘Sacramentality’ is on painting and fiction.
But, after all, it would be enough if one single article succeeded in fulfilling the tacit promise of the whole venture; namely, showing that some new intellectual horizon is to be discovered at the intersection between Theology and Modern European Thought. I am afraid this is not the case. Even if one forgives the author of the article on ‘Good Life’ for restricting the whole modern reflection on the subject to a study of the notion of habitus in Kierkegaard and…Ravaisson (!), one is at a loss to see the connection with Theology as a discipline (given the three sentences referring to Aquinas's treatment of habitus, it is probably better this way). The same thing can be said of the article on language that shifts to an inquiry on the death of God in the works of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida while making but fleeting allusions to contemporary theologians (yet this is the one context where the mention of Moltmann was imperative!). As for the author of the contribution on ‘Radical Philosophy and Political Theology’, he seems to assume that there is no salvation but in an umpteenth reflection on Heidegger´s philosophy in the light of his Nazi sympathies. The articles on ‘Tradition’ and ‘Divine Providence’ witness a similar imbalance but in a reversed proportion. The former does not depart from a surprisingly narrow Catholic standpoint while the latter bets on the eschatological significance of 19th-century British Empire (!). In general, the authors fly high above the base constraints of intellectual rigour. For example, showing that the terms ‘feeling’ and ‘experience’ have a place in Schleiermacher´s way of speaking about Berlin is hardly sufficient to argue that his theology owes about everything to a particular urban setting (‘The Making of the Modern Metropolis’). I am prepared to remain unfazed by such invincible pieces of evidence as ‘Catholicism has failed (…) to come to terms with the dilemma with which Continental Protestantism has contended since the Enlightenment’, but how should one react when this dilemma is described as the fact that in ‘a Post-Newtonian world of cause and effect, the claim that there has been a particularity of revelation – such as that on which the Abrahamic religions are predicated - must be ruled out of court’ (p. 137)? Should one weep over the loss of an illusion that continues to set the world on fire? Or laugh at the idea that Theology had to wait for Newton to reflect on causality? Both require too much energy methinks.
Lack of space will not have me re-tell a number of pseudo-rive gauche contortions on the ‘Other’ of the ‘Other’ which is but more of the ‘Same’, on Hegel´s dialectics of the Master and the Servant - read in a Kojevean key of course - which becomes at some point, thanks to Levinas, Beauvoir and Irigaray, a figure of women´s difficult emancipation from heterosexuality´s iron rule (‘The Other’), on the ‘language that speaks’ while ‘all speech says nothing’, on Atheism seen as the ultimate truth of Christianity while Christianity is defined as the ultimate word of Atheism (‘Nihilism and Theology’) and on so many similarly dazzling insights. The only opportunity for some amusement that these Oxonian devotees of the ‘pensée molle’ (Vattimo and Agamben are also naturally part of the show) are able to provide is the way they sometimes spell their favourite language: “nom de plum” (p. 261), “relecture sacramentalle de l´existence” (p. 628)…
True, in a few articles Theology does appear as something more than modern Philosophy´s old scarecrow, and modern Philosophy as something other than Theology´s unrepentant troublemaker. But pointing out some thematic similarities between the two fields is not enough to vindicate the project when it is the fundamental incompatibility of their approaches and conclusions that repeatedly comes forth (e.g. Barth vs. Hegel on ‘The Other’; Hegel vs. Küng and Pannenberg on ‘The Incarnation’). If the subset lying at the intersection of Theology and Philosophy during the modern era is shown to be as fruitful and exciting as a dialogue of the deaf, what contributors have managed to prove is merely the evidence one was suspecting from the start; namely, that their common undertaking was perfectly bereft of justification. By way of conclusion to the whole volume, the editors argue that its complexity and incompleteness reflect Modernity´s most essential character. But since the same authors have neglected to define the issues that Modernity is supposed to raise, it should come as no surprise that their readers are left by the end of the book with exactly the same amount of questions they had when they first opened it. Speaking of a handbook, I have seen handier.
