Abstract
Balázs M. Mezei’s essay describes the outlines of the so-called non-standard radical philosophical theology, a newly developed philosophical approach to the problem of divine revelation. As Professor Mezei points out, the notion of revelation is merely presupposed but not properly conceived in theology, because theology considers revelation as its axiom and focuses on content-type analysis. In contrast, a radical philosophical theology raises the question ‘what is revelation?’ in its entirety and offers a description along the lines of philosophical and theological reflection. In this way, it outlines a philosophical theology which is termed ‘apocalyptic,’ not because of the popular and misleading meaning of ‘apocalypse’, but because its subject matter is revelation—in Greek, apocalypsis. It is a phenomenological approach to the problem, because its framework is the self-communicating fact of revelation. In this apocalyptic phenomenology, as the title of the essay suggests, a new form of philosophical reflection on Christianity becomes possible, a phenomenology pointing to the possibility of the elaboration of a full-fledged understanding of revelation-based philosophical theology, called here ‘apocalyptics’, which appears able to overview and analyze various branches of contemporary human knowledge with a special emphasis on the emerging understanding of personhood.
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Notes
- 1.
What is presented in this paper is based on my work entitled Radical Revelation: A Philosophical Approach (New York: T&T Clark-Bloomsbury, 2017).
- 2.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele. Studien zu einer Lehre von letzten Haltungen (Freiburg: Johannes Verlag, 1998), vol. 1, p. 4.
- 3.
Letter VII, 341c. In Plato, The Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), p. 1659.
- 4.
Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); and The Anatomy of Misremembering: von Balthasar’s Response to Philosophical Modernity (Chestnut Ridge, New York: Crossroad, 2014).
- 5.
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1074b. McKeon’s translation is ‘a thinking on thinking’, in Basic Works, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), p. 885.
- 6.
Michel Henry uses the same expression which shows the depth of his understanding of revelation. Yet I must maintain a critical distance from his views for a reason I will mention below: In his understanding, revelation is not defined by freedom and thus is in a fundamental sense spontaneous, i. e. non-revelational.
- 7.
The principle of correlation between the divine and the human, as the core of revelation, was exceptionally grasped and explained by Johann Sebastian von Drey in his Apologetik als wissenschaftliche Nachweisung der Göttlichkeit des Christentums in seiner Erscheinung, vol. 2 (Florian Kupferberg: Mainz, 1844). See for instance p. 251–2 where he describes the interaction between the divine and the human in a deep way. This text will be published in Balázs M. Mezei, Francesca A. Murphy, and Kenneth Oakes, Downhill all the Way: Religious Narrations of Unbelief in Modernity, Illuminating Modernity Series (New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
- 8.
Cf. Edmund Husserl, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), pp. 161–3.
- 9.
I.e., not only can we say that ‘revelation is, in a sense, everything’, but conversely we can also say that ‘everything is, in a sense, revelation.’
- 10.
Cf. Mezei, Radical Revelation, chapter 3, section 2.
- 11.
Balthasar, Apokalypse, vol. III, p. 125.
- 12.
Michel Henry, I am the Truth. Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emmanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 25.
- 13.
The term ‘apocalyptics’ is formed along the lines of ‘metaphysics’. Just as we have the term metaphysics from τὰ μετὰ τὰ φυσικὰ [βιβλία]—‘the books that come after the [books on] physics’—I propose the use of ‘apocalyptics’ based on ἀποκαλυπτικά with the meaning: ‘the study of things belonging to disclosure or apocalypse’. In the nineteenth century, the term ‘Biblical apocalyptics’ was already in use to denote the Biblical teaching on revelation, for instance in Terry Milton Spenser, Biblical Apocalyptics. A Study of the Most Notable Revelations of God and Christ in the Canonical Scriptures (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1898).
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Mezei, B.M. (2019). Apocalyptic Phenomenology: A Radical Philosophical Theology of Revelation. In: Mezei, B., Vale, M. (eds) Philosophies of Christianity. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 31. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22632-9_7
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