The Vice of "Philosophical" and "Theological" Readings

Towards a Unified Hermeneutic

In secondary scholarship on mystical or speculative texts (I am thinking primarily of Augustine, Eriugena, Eckhart, and Hegel), one frequently encounters - sometimes uttered with prideful disdain, at others as a half-apology - the claim to be offering a “theological” rather than “philosophical” reading of a text or vice versa.

The distinction can be an assertion of superiority over a rival hermeneutic, but it can also function defensively, as an excuse for avoiding certain issues and questions. In the native patois, they are “beyond the scope of this paper,” which justifies the wide berth given them in one’s safely delimited approach.

Whether thus deployed as shield, or lobbed like a grenade, such self-labeling erroneously presumes that a stable distinction can be made between “philosophical” and “theological” hermeneutics.

When it comes to such speculative texts, however, there is and can only be one way of reading: the self-involving (rather than “objective” disinterest) search for the structure and coherence of the thought the text stages and makes available. By definition, this is a holistic project which permits no narrowing of aperture.

Provisionally, one can enter from a particular angle, or with a particular motivating question, but these individual and contingent starting points are vindicated only if they can subsequently prove themselves to be immanent moments in the self-movement of the text’s thought, and thus show themselves capable of disclosing the whole.

In practice, “philosophical” and “theological” approaches to speculative texts, to the degree that they pick out something specific, pick out vicious reading habits - ways of one-sidedly failing to read well.

One can generalize with respect to these bad reading habits, keeping in mind that their unity is not constituted by a normative essence, but by a particular and contingent restriction of holism.

I will provide examples, paraphrased (with slight exaggeration) from secondary scholarship, using Meister Eckhart as a case in point.

“Theological” readings, in the pejorative and vicious sense, include:

1. Those that do not search understandingly for the holistic coherence of a text because they believe they know what the author is or must be saying, if the text is to belong to their particular tradition. They believe in a “whole” whose contours are already given and unrevisable. The author can only reduplicate or deviate from these; in either case the search for the text’s inner coherence is secondary at best. This is frequently referred to as “grammar.”

   Example: “As a good Dominican, Eckhart is loyal to the same non-competitive construal of the God-world relation as Aquinas and Dionysius before him; he just uses exaggeration and paradox as homiletic strategies.”

2. Those that only focus on the “religious” sections of a text, meaning essentially those that advertise themselves as such via scriptural vocabulary and doctrinal labels, as if their meaning and use were isolable from the system of which they form a part.

   Example: "The real basis of Eckhart’s thought, like any good scholastic, is his exegesis of Scripture.”

3. Those which exempt themselves from asking themselves the questions the text addresses because these questions have allegedly received an answer via extrinsic authority.

   Example: “Eckhart meant to be loyal to the Church, but his thought ultimately deviates from the persistence of the individual creature in beatitude and the merit of external works, as upheld by the Angelic Doctor and Josemaria Escriva.”

“Philosophical” readings, in the pejorative and vicious sense, include:

1. Those that do not search understandingly for the holistic coherence of a text because they believe they know one cannot be present, if the text or its author belong to a religious tradition, or cites scripture or a magisterium. These assume without proof that the aspiration for rational and self-validating coherence cannot co-exist with religious affiliation.

   Example: “Eckhart’s daring is ultimately incompatible with Christianity in its ecclesial expression.”

2. Those that exempt from their study any “religious” content (again, essentially whatever advertises itself explicitly as such), assuming such material must not form a part of the text’s coherence as rationally apprehensible.

   Example: “Eckhart’s Scriptural exegesis is always governed by his rational metaphysics; it is not load-bearing.”

3. Those that exempt themselves from asking themselves the question the text addresses because they either assume the topoi of philosophy are already given (and so one can scan a text quickly for its “position” within a preestablished schema of options) or because they perceive it to be asking a question which is “religious” (pre-defined as not rational or universal).

   Example: “Eckhart is a realist about universals”; “When Eckhart seems to be talking about the Trinity, as a philosopher, he is really thinking about the structure of thought’s return to itself.”

It should be clear by this point that rather than a stable distinction, “theological” and “philosophical” readings are mirrored iterations of the same error. What they have in common (although constitutively unable to recognize themselves in the other) is an artificially restricted aperture, based on extrinsic and restricted definitions of reason and system.

Augustine, Eckhart, Eriugena, and Hegel did not share such a view, and a hermeneutic governed by it cannot find its way to the heart of their thought.

But more than a mistake about these thinkers in particular, merely “philosophical” and “theological” readings fail to inhabit either of reason’s poles: the humility which effaces its presupposed distinctions to allow the whole to emerge, and the confidence that this whole is not inaccessible but can be born in us.