Telic Divinity and its Atelic Ground

Abstract

It may be claimed with unquestionable cogency that the Husserlian theology, embracing as it does a dipolar Deity, a God-in-process, a Divinity unintelligible apart from its endless teleological free-fall toward the ideal realization of the world’s absolute presence, must stand in frontal contradiction against an ontological vision which in principle excludes the self-subsistence and sempeternity of any god, a vision in which dispersion, duality and dipolarity are ontologically relative and derivative, a vision which rejects in any ultimate acceptation both telos and teleology. Over the preceding several years, as certain aspects of Buddhist thought have become increasingly satisfying and sensible for me as solutions or resolutions of theological quandaries, the incompatibility of the two views has come to demand, with ever greater insistence, either reconciliation or resolution. Is it possible, then, that the Husserlian God depicted in the Foundations for a Phenomenological Theology ¹ may be rooted in a non-polar, non-processive and atelic Ground, a Ground profoundly affiliated with the absolute “Emptiness” (sunyata) of Buddhist thought? I offer here an affirmative answer. And though my response will perhaps be exuberantly speculative, if I am able to show, not that Husserl himself actually adopted such a stance, but more modestly that Husserlian theology is at least logically tolerant of the Buddhist vision, then the transformation which my own thinking has undergone will be blessed with a certain degree of continuity and grace.