Sacredness and Aesthetics: Kearney and Desmond on Prayer

Heidegger famously asserted that one cannot pray to the God of onto‐theo‐logic. God is here made into a determinate concept, the highest idea of reason, and thereby loses its constitutive transcendence and personhood. To think of God appropriately after Heidegger means to think of God in a way amena...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inModern theology Vol. 37; no. 1; pp. 3 - 22
Main Author Vanden Auweele, Dennis
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.01.2021
Subjects
Aesthetics
Deconstruction
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Summary:Heidegger famously asserted that one cannot pray to the God of onto‐theo‐logic. God is here made into a determinate concept, the highest idea of reason, and thereby loses its constitutive transcendence and personhood. To think of God appropriately after Heidegger means to think of God in a way amenable to prayer. It is widely recognized that deconstruction does not fare well on this score as it turns prayer into some form of meditation/contemplation. In response, one ought to look for something between onto‐theo‐logic and deconstruction. In this article, I explore and assess two attempts to do so, by Richard Kearney and William Desmond respectively. I argue that Kearney does not manage to escape the trap of deconstruction because he does not allow for an intimation of God in prayer. This is achieved in a more metaphysical register by Desmond.
ISSN:0266-7177
1468-0025
DOI:10.1111/moth.12589