2 - Theology and the lure of obscurity

Summary

The widening rift perceivable between philosophy and the increasingly anti-philosophical outlook in large sectors of the human and social sciences in Britain, North America and France confronts theology with a peculiar set of challenges. The rift is becoming more clearly visible and distinct within the university setting itself, with the increasing emergence of departments and institutes for comparative literature, critical theory, and ethnography, as well as ‘hermeneutically’ predisposed approaches to the humanities and interdisciplinary studies. These disciplines can appear to be deeply philosophically rooted insofar as they engage heavily with philosophers, especially from Descartes onward. But they are most often resolutely anti-philosophical and even radically anti-rational in outlook. I will discuss presently what I mean to identify precisely by the terms anti-philosophical or anti-rational, but first I want to address generally the peculiar kind of pressure that these new developments exert on theology, whose relationship to philosophy has never been straightforward or univocal. On the one hand, theology has always engaged with the philosophical traditions of the day (or indeed helped to form them), appealing to the public authority of philosophy for the defence of its own intellectual and doctrinal integrity, especially to certain general principles of right thinking (logic, epistemology) or to the idea that things have ‘natures’ that are in some way scrutable (ontology, metaphysics). But theology also struggles heavily against the very philosophy to which it appeals for rational and doctrinal integrity.