I.
Transcendentality as Uncertain Hope: Between Rahner and Kant,

or: Searching for a transcendental point of departure for soteriology, which is not indifferent to the historical experience of negativity nor closed to the non-experiential or even contrafactical dimension of faith and hope.

A. Prolegomenon

The following lectures will all, in one way or another, explicate the thought of Thomas over and against the thought of Karl Rahner. This very fact demands some explanation, so as to avoid the unfounded suspicions of a simply pro-Rahnerian hermeneutic or a simply anti-Rahnerian polemic; I intend neither. I would like to define the situation of theology at the moment as "post-Rahnerian". I must ask for your patience, since this is the third "post-something" I have mentioned: there was talk of postmodernism, and earlier even the barbarism, "post-postconciliar". It is a sign of our times that we are more agreed about what we don't want from the past than about what we do want for the future. Postmodernism wants to flee out of the constraints, the violence, and the hypocrisy of modernism, but it isn't sure what it can put in its place which would be much different. Post-postconciliar theology is ready to go its own way, but it isn't at all clear or unanimous about the direction the new path could or should take. And in both these cases, the critique of what went just before is more convincing than the new synthetic suggestions of what should follow it; in many points, its new constructs are far less convincing than what it criticizes. This means that there is truth and falsity on both sides; we cannot be for just one side and against the other.

This is the case with our post-Rahnerian era of theology as well. Karl Rahner, who, as you know, died 10 years ago, was arguably the most prominent and proto-typical Roman-Catholic theologian of the post-conciliar period. Contemporary theologians now tend to define their positions as being different from Rahner's. Rahner remains a point of departure, and so we are not just "after Rahner", but "post-Rahner", that is to say, still with constant reference to his thought. "Political theology" wants to give more weight to culpable negativity than did Rahner. The theology of religions, even if it does not want to become pluralistic in a way which relativizes Christianity and Christ himself (though some do also argue explicitly for that kind of self-relativizing), tends to admit that Rahner's theory of "anonymous Christianity" did not adequately appreciate the otherness of other religions or world-views. In contrast to twenty years ago, no theologian today could find a consensus by simply repeating Rahner's theses of anonymous Christianity. "Ecumenical theology" shies away from Rahner's claim that self-redemption and redemption through the Other are one. And yet, as convincing as certain points of critique might be, there are reasons to feel almost nostalgic about Rahner's theology, because in retrospect we can see how profoundly rooted in classic traditions of faith Rahner's theology and spirituality were. At the center of his thought was the second person of the Trinity, incarnated as a human, and decisive for the future of all humankind. That is not so clearly the case with many of his critics' own counter-proposals, despite the legitimacy of several of their criticisms.

"Quid faciendum?" What I would like to suggest as an alternative, is that we continue to explore the possibilities opened up by Karl Rahner's general idea of a transcendental soteriology, but that we take the criticisms against Rahner seriously enough to suggest an alternative form of transcendental method, which might seem closer to Kant than to his idealistic critics. My thesis is that this emendated transcendental method will allow us to come closer both to the text of St. Thomas and to the contemporary context of a greater attentiveness to negativity.

Rahner's transcendental method can be understood as a single process in three movements: a philosophical phase, directed against Kant and Heidegger for apologetic reasons which no longer seem necessary; a theological movement, attempting to disclose common and heroic experiences as implicit moments of grace, especially uncreated grace closely connected to the hypostatic union; and finally another theological movement, but more per viam negationis, which tends to reabsorb dogma and cult back into everyday experiences. Each of these movements was stressed more at one time of Rahner's life than the others, but all are meant to complement each other in a kind of continuing dialectic. 

B. The Philosophical Phase of Rahner's Thought

Immanuel Kant knew the terms transcendent and transcendental from the Protestant reception of scholasticism, where they could mean concepts common to all knowable objects (as the "transcendentalia" being, the one, the good, etc.) or as the intellectual movement opposed to sensible experience. Kant coined the term transcendental philosophy, which as "transcendental analytic" stressed the spontaneous role of knowledge in knowing sensible objects, while the "transcendental dialectic" claimed that spontaneity, lacking receptivity or sensibility with regard to final truths, could not get beyond posing certain necessary questions. Here transcendentality, legitimately posing unanswerable but necessary questions, was the opposite of transcendence, as a proud attempt to answer more than it could. In one way Kant marked the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment, proving by reason that reason had limits. Yet in another way Kant was typical of the Enlightenment: he felt he could insist on the unanswerabilty of these "antinomies" of theoretical reason (regarding God, the soul, and an infinitely extended or infinitely divisible world), without endangering the moral or political confidence of practical reason. Kant thought that the "antinomies" of practical reason resolved themselves and thus strictly speaking were not antinomies for practical reason itself. The conviction that moral action makes sense implies a practical affirmation of God, freedom, and the likelihood of final happiness. What Kant did not foresee, Fichte and Hegel did: that if left to stand, these antinomies of non-absolute reason would undermine the conviction that moral obligation did make sense. Their attempts to root limited reason in absolute reason failed to prove convincing for long. Heidegger can be seen as drawing the consequence out of Kant's position: once self-doubt about the obligation and meaningfulness of moral action has arisen, as it did with the First World War, the practical antinomies cannot be ignored. Doubt about God, freedom and final beatitude becomes self-doubt about the supposed dignity of the human person and the supposed obligation of "moral" standards.

Rahner's philosophical answer to this situation was an attempt to revive Fichte's and Hegel's style of argument. While valuing the transcendental analytic and the role of spontaneity in finite transcendence, Rahner tried to show that finite transcendence always implies transcendence to the infinite (Spirit in the World). While valuing historicality, Rahner tried to show that every limited desire was made possible by an affirmation of the absolute good, God (Hearer of the Word). The first editions of these works name the opponents meant: Kant and Heidegger, offering a "transcending/transcendental" interpretation of Thomas Aquinas in reply. Unfortunately, Rahner, while appealing to Thomas, contradicted typically Thomistic positions such as: God is not "per se notum", the proper object of philosophy is "esse commune", that we discover God from the world and not the reverse, that the sense of being is produced in the intellectus possibilis rather than being productive as intellectus agens, etc.

Although we might be getting ahead of ourselves, I would like to note that the alternative to Rahner and Kant sought here will be that the antinomies are insoluble not as regarding God himself, but as regarding the God of grace. All will depend on being able to believe what is not evident: that God is a God of grace, that only therefore are we called to beatitude, that the "suspicion" of unconditioned dignity of the human person is founded not in evidence, but in hope also for the dignity of one's own person and the meaningfulness of one's own liberty, which is corrupted along with the practical denigration of the other. Experience teaches that faith and hope in these matters need not be true (against Rahner), but that their being false would change matters decisively (against Kant).

Please recall what we have seen so far of Karl Rahner's philosophical foundation of his transcendental theological method. Rahner was looking for a way to overcome the theoretical antinomies, those theoretical questions about God, the soul, and the world which Kant thought were neither capable of a solution nor urgently in need of one. The spontaneity or creativity of human knowledge, called transcendentality, was immanent, not transcendent. Humans were left to their own resources, but they could be expected to do well, if they could make universalizable moral judgements on their own and follow them. Kant spoke of practical "antinomies", questions about God, freedom, and beatitude, but he considered these capable of a practical solution. He noted that these doubts were overcome implicitly and pragmatically wherever moral action was seen as meaningful and a self-obligation. Kant had not foreseen that theoretical doubt about these questions would reinforce practical self-doubt about whether purposeful and binding moral judgment was an illusion, once the autonomous subjectivity had been overwhelmed by the destructive results of its actions. This was the experience of the 20th century. A restoration of the now broken self-confidence in meaningful moral aspirations was hindered by the abiding doubts about God, significant human freedom, and immortality. Karl Rahner attempted to restore some of that lost confidence in the meaningfulness of life by arguing that seemingly finite transcendentality was only possible, because it was implicitly transcendent from the start. Every judgment of reason and every choice of the will presupposed, without thematizing it, absolute truth and absolute goodness. Transcendence to the infinite is the condition of the possibility of transcendentality in the finite. That is true of everydayness, from judgements like "There is the newspaper" to choices like "Let me tie my shoe". What is even more apparent in heroic actions, is true here as well: God is always the background and the goal of every act of reason and will. Heidegger's philosophy of human finitude went wrong, argued Rahner, only when it failed to see that finitude was necessarily and always rooted in and aiming at infinitude: immanent transcendence is made possible by a transcendence transcending all limits from the very start.

Rahner works out his transcendental method through a reinterpretation of Thomas Aquinas, but he takes less seriously than Thomas the finite mode of the knower and the finite mode of the transcendentals as what is knowable by us both from the beginning and in reflection. In a more radical way than for Rahner, Thomas sees our own world as the horizon for thinking about God, not God as the horizon of having a world or a self. Even when the world, our selves, and our concepts, which we first assume are self-sufficient, finally reveal their finitude (not their infinity, but their finitude was at first implicit), we can think of the truly self-sufficient only per viam comparationis et negationis vis-a-vis our world. The basic field of orientation remains the implicitly finite positivity of our non-godly mode of knowledge. Our greatest speculative nearness to God comes in the realization of the finitude, not of some infinitude within us. 

C. Experience as Grace: The First Theological Movement of Rahner's Transcendental Theology

Although Rahner returned to theological work in 1936, his methodological breakthrough came in the 1950's as part of an attempt to mediate in the dispute between the magisterium and the nouvelle thÈologie. H. de Lubac, E. Delaye and others wanted to point out that the decision not to be a Christian could not be seen simply as the harmless refusal of a superfluous gift, unnecessary for our nature. They thought they saw a conflict, perhaps a paradox in the church fathers and in Thomas (Comp. Theol. I 104): on the one hand, they read the texts to say that, human beings, as God created them, desired the perfection of the visio beatifica so much, that if they did not obtain it, this would imply a kind of damnation. On the other hand, the visio was a free gift of a free God. The paradox was this: once God creates this thirst in humans, it would seem monstrous for him not to offer the means of satisfying it; on the other hand, it is true, that God remains free. But how is this possible? Rahner agreed with the magisterium that the instilled thirst would compromise the freedom of God, if the thirst for the visio were on of pure nature, but not if the thirst itself was a gift of grace. Without meaning to be, Rahner's position was further from the tradition than de Lubac's, because Rahner, in contrast to de Lubac, saw God as having factically bound himself over and against the factical nature, that is, vis-a-vis the universally, supernaturally elevated nature of humanity.

Once Rahner was convinced that human nature had been supernaturally elevated and that the experienced longing for perfection was the result, he drew the consequence: that transcendence, which apriori is at the root and goal of every transcendentality, is itself a supernatural transformation of pure nature. What factically exists in humans, is a supernaturally elevated nature, with "supernatural existentials" or structures of thinking and willing and living. In a series of closely argued steps, which cannot be retraced in detail here, Rahner explicated the dignity of the universal elevation he meant: that basic transcendence to the infinite, which he had worked out philosophically, is now seen as an initial, supernatural elevation of all humans; the supernatural transformation is initial grace; grace is something experienced, even when not recognized as grace; grace is first and foremost uncreated grace, a share in the divine life, thus a proximity to the hypostatic union in "asymptotical" approximation, a "quasi-formal" transformation into a being with the divine life quasi as its own form of existence at the most crucial level; the hypostatic union itself and its approximation not just as the assumption of the human to God (as a real relation only on the part of the human), but as God's very own becoming and change, not in himself but in what is other than himself, and yet with his own self, as his own change; a "self-communication" and a "sharing of himself/a sharing of his self" in a most realistic sense. Behind every concrete or "categorical" thought and choice this "transcendental" process of universal incarnation is at work. Philosophy and anthropology are always implicitly theology. Love of neighbor is always, usually non-thematically, love of God. All humans, at least those who are not damned, if any are damned (which is perhaps possible, but now more difficult than ever to imagine), are anonymously Christian, because they are unavoidably transcending to the absolute in all they are, and say, and do, having received apriori the transcendental revelation as the basis of every intentionality, even if they have not heard or accepted the "categorical" revelation, the revelation in words. They are anonymous Christians, because they are non-thematically an approximation to Christ himself, with God's own self as their own quasi-form, transforming all other operations. The appearance of the historical Christ and the preaching of his incarnation do not come unexpected: they confirm the most basic experience of humanity, the expectation of and demand for unsurpassable fulfillment. The categorical "word revelation" might help us understand what we had felt all along, but our acceptance of the explicit "Christology from above" is prepared for and made possible by the "Christology from below", the dynamic in one's own self. This universal approximative Christologization includes all of creation: As a result of transcendental causality from above, all matter reveals a tendency in itself, from below, to transcend itself, to become ever more than it is, to become spirit, the true actualization of its potency and its own self-transcendent tendency, to become graced and divinely transformed spirit. This infinitely close approximation to Christ is the central dynamic of the whole history of the cosmos. The whole world and especially the whole world of self-experience is the primal sacrament of the transcendental Christological God. It is noteworthy in this context that Rahner does not discuss creatio ex nihilo at any length: not because he would deny it, but because it would tend to force a different theology of grace, and a different Christology. Were the creature's lasting origin in nothingness present as a belief or, even, as an experience, grace could not so easily become quasi-identical with the self, as if sheer self-transcendence, where transcendence is experienced as the basic movement of and by the self through one's own active powers (rather than as passive or "obediential" receptivity). Universal Christology would then be possible only as the history of a doubt, asking itself whether perfection (or even salvation) would come from without, since perfection could not simply develop and grow from within. The lasting presence of nothingness in creation would be too powerful a reminder that grace, even when it becomes a quality of ourselves, remains a gift. Similar reasons lay behind Rahner's exclusion of the second law of thermodynamics from his theory of evolution of matter to spirit or of spirit to quasi-divine spirit. "Becoming" means for Rahner per definitionem "becoming more", although even Hegel, under the impetus of the Aristotelian tradition, granted to the concept of time the primacy of corruptiveness over constructiveness. No serious consideration of the general principle of entropy is included in Rahner's theory of evolution. 

D. Grace as Experience: The Second Theological Movement of Rahner's Transcendental Theology

Although the explication of the first theological movement received the most attention in the pre-conciliar, conciliar, and immediately post-conciliar years, another, dialectically contrary movement was always present. This other side of an intended dialectic came to be stressed more and more in post-conciliar years. Both sides are intended programmatically by Rahner, and the failure to note this dialectic has led to one-sided and contradictory interpretations of Rahner, both critical and positive, but equally inadequate. The second movement looks at the same relationship of transcendental and categorical, but from another perspective. Categorical "word-revelation", even the biblical and dogmatic traditions of Christianity, is merely an explication of the universal, apriori revelation in the transcendental self-experience of humanity. Historical, doctrinal, cultic Christianity is only an explication of common religiosity: and it is more difficult (though not impossible) to see the urgency of mission to achieve this explication; mission is no more and no less important than as a categorical thematization of what is already present in existence transcendentally and non-thematically. Similar reflections are possible regarding the practice of the sacraments instituted by Christ, which are explications of the basic sacrament of oneself and one's own world. Theology is only an explication of anthropology and philosophy; interpreters of Rahner's development have spoken of "re-absorbing theology into thinking in general". God is part, albeit a privileged one, of the process and world of becoming. Grace and divinization are so self-understood, so much a matter of a experience, that there is no experience of their being a gift: that is one deduction from categorical revelation which is not prepared for by experience itself. The gratuitous of grace appears stranger than the graced qualities I find in myself; it is as if I am suddenly told that I have only four toes by nature, while the fifth toe, the big one, is an extra gift. I have never known the foot as being other than designed for five toes. Similarly, I have never known the world and humanity except in the experience of its Christologization. The otherness of God, the interpersonal character of hope, the trans-transcendental face of the other is not denied, but becomes more difficult to imagine as an experience. Thus love and service of neighbor is a closer approximation to God than prayer, since prayer addresses the transcendent dimension occupied, at least at present, by my own dynamic goals and plans.

The following lectures will attempt to contrast Rahner's construction of a transcendental theology with an alternative different kind of transcendental reading of Thomas' soteriology, beginning with the question of death and proceeding to deal with the questions of evidence, theodicy, and theological hope (theologia crucis), of general religiosity and Christian sacramentality, and finally of Christian discipleship in similarity and difference to Christ (Mariology). They will all seek a transcendental method nearer to Kant than to Hegel. That means that the antinomies will not be overcome as quickly as in Rahner's work; indeed, the antinomies of practical reason will be taken more seriously than they are in Kant. Against Kant, it will not be assumed that the meaningfulness of moral activity, the unconditioned validity of moral norms resp. human rights, or the dignity of the human person are fully evident truths. They are at first questions, not just theoretical but practical, that is to say they are profound hopes and burning desires. Their answer cannot be reached by introspection, because their final answer depends upon the truth or falsity of whether God chooses to love humans in the intense way preached in the Gospel. The antinomy of whether we have a gracious God is the starting point and challenge for every act of strictly theological faith, hope, and charity. The transcendence of experience is a finite transcendence, ending not just in a question, but in an uncertain hope, the hope for the salvation of vital human values and aspirations. The unresolvable character of the question of theodicy, namely why God allows humans to suffer if he means to perfect them in happiness, will reveal the antinomian structure of uncertain hope, which is the abiding point of departure for strictly theological hope, decided hope in a gracious and salvific God.