Summary: As we’ve discussed in the introduction, Kearney’s concern with anatheism seems to be the opening of a liminal space as a kind of portal to experience the divine. Accordingly, Kearney opens the first chapter of part 1, “In the Moment,” with a consideration of encounters with a divine stranger. In this chapter, he uses the Abrahamic religions as examples, citing the story of Abraham and three angels in Genesis 18 (Judaism), Mary’s encounter with the Angel (Christianity), and Muhammad’s message from God in the cave (Islam). For the sake of summary and to move on to themes, I’m not really going to explore Kearney’s details too much in the summaries.
The stories speak to a wager between compassion and hostility. Kearney says that monotheism is the history of this wager (pg. 22), and further, that the Bible can be read as a series of stories that struggle to respond to the alien. Here he cites Levinas that the epiphany of the face qua face opens humanity. Kearney: “The message is this: the divine, as exile, is in each human other who asks to be received in our midst. The face that serves as trace of transcendent divinity is also a portal to humanity in its flesh and blood immanence” (pg. 20).
Kearney makes the interesting point that the Hebrew Bible contains thirty-six commands to “love the stranger” and only two to “love your neighbor.” Citing several of these passages in Deuteronomy (10:18, 27:19, 24:17, 16:11), he pulls out three common themes related to the command to love the stranger. First, the stranger is associated with the name of God. Second is the close link between the stranger and the orphan or widow, ie the powerless, defenseless, without family. And third is that the commandments to love the stranger speak to a wide concept of justice; Kearney, polemically, notes that this justice goes way beyond homeland security.
The warnings to love the stranger suggest that our response to the irreducibly Other is fear, and that hospitality does not come naturally. The history of all three monotheistic religions (and even many passages in the Bible) shows us that each one can be guilty of hostility to the Other. Kearney makes no bones about this in the book, and it seems that part of the anatheistic wager is that it embraces this ambiguity and ambivalence. Western religion can be seen as the history of the either/or. Citing the linguist Emile Benveniste, Kearney argues that there is an inaugural ambivalence towards the strange; our words hostile and hospitality have a common root.
For Kearney, religion tells the “double story” of violence or compassion, genocide or justice, thanatos or eros. Often the double story happens at the same time. The challenge is to wrestle with both angels of dark and angels of light, and this double story is why Kearney admits that we must engage with critical and iconoclastic atheism. Although he doesn’t name names, here I take him to be referring to the “new atheists,” who are helpful insofar as they reveal the murderous potential of religion. The importance of the fact that these persons are also strangers is not lost on Kearney, and it is true that some responses to the new atheists have simply been dismissive. This says nothing, of course, of the content or quality of specific new atheist polemics, but Kearney shows a much different response than others.
This point aside, I don’t think Kearney is arguing for much more of a substantive engagement with the so-called new atheists. However, he is much more receptive of “open atheism” or what he calls a-theism, and even argues that it is essential to the anatheist wager. A-theism is a departure from God that struggles with God, and thereby leaves open the possibility of a return to God. As such, anatheism is impossible without a-theism, or the traversal through the dark of not-knowing.
Turning to the next chapter, we see five components that make up the anatheist wager. These are not to be understood as chronological or in some kind of pattern, because a wager occurs in an instant, although it is complex and has more that precedes and more that follows it. The five parts of this hermeneutic arc are imagination, humor, commitment, discernment, and hospitality. I will briefly try to spell out the importance of these five moves:
imagination – Imagination might be the inaugural move of anatheism, because it enables us to hear the call of the divine, or, in other words, to open our eyes and ears to the Stranger who comes. Imagination gives the freedom to be able to choose, which is necessary for any wager.
humor – Kearney does not comment much on humor, except to say that it is the ability to “encounter and compose opposites” or to see possible and impossible at the exact same time. Interestingly, he makes a connection with messianic time, arguing that messianic time is divinely comic in its disruption of history by turning past and future on their heads.
commitment – This part of the wager makes truth primarily a matter of existential transformation. “If God had truth in his right hand, as Lessing notes, and the striving for truth in the left, we should choose the left. In the anatheist wager, truth becomes possible as betrothal.” (pg. 44)
discernment – This is a key one, because until now there has been little that is critical of the Other. Not every stranger is welcoming, and its naive to assume that we can be unconditional towards every other who approaches. Further, there are countless examples in the modern imagination of those who claim to listen to some Other and thereby justify the awful things that they have done.
hopitality – Just to say, love – understood through compassion and justice – is what serves as the watermark of anatheism. Kearney advocates oneself as another, the “self [becoming] Other to itself as it encounters Others besides itself.” Otherwise selfhood is “brute repetition.” (pg. 48)
The theme of hospitality leads Kearney into a discussion of interreligious and interconfession dialog. His conclusion of sorts that we must reinterpret the “oldest cries of the religious heart in both our sacred and secular worlds” leads him to reject what some might see as classical theism. I’m not sure Kearney would go that far, but it isn’t clear in the text. He argues that a prerequisite of being radically attentive to these religious cries is that we abandon the “Master God” of sovereignty and theodicy.
Unfortunately, Kearney does not expound too much on conceptions of God, but he does clearly embrace the Incarnation as kenosis, and argues that anatheism opens up this alternative to theistic sovereignty:
The messianic way leads from Sovereign Self to excluded stranger, breaching the highest in the name of the lowest, the first in the name of the last. Which is why I keep insisting that interconfessional hospitality toward other faiths is not just an option for Christians but an imperative. Christian caritas, as a refusal of exclusivist power, is a summons to endless kenosis (pg. 55).
In the third and final chapter of part 1, “In the Name,” Kearney turns to the question of what we mean when we speak the name of God, and sets this in the context of the present day (the subtitle is “After Auschwitz Who Can Say God?”). Kearney deals briefly with several Jewish thinkers, including Etty Hillesum, Arendt, Irving Greenberg, Levinas, and Derrida (who he is pretty critical of, here and elsewhere) before turning to Bonhoeffer and Ricoeur, both of whom he explores at length. Each of these people has something to contribute towards answering how to say God after Auschwitz, and this I remember this chapter being very interesting, but my notes are really lacking (maybe because the chapter was so interesting). Still, I think that the heart of what Kearney gets at – and a central meditation of the anatheist wager – is encapsulated in this quote: “The only Messiah still credible after the death camps would be one who wanted to come into existence but could not because humans failed to invite the sacred stranger into existence” (pg. 61).
Comments/critique: I would like to see Kearney go into more details in some areas, such as when he is talking about theism. At one point, he does say that anatheism can be near antitheism nor antiatheism, which might clear up a little bit of confusion, but it seems that anatheism opens up the space for some kind of return to theism. Unfortunately, we never really seem to get more details about what that is. This is possibly an intentional move, and I do appreciate Kearney’s general posture of ambivalence towards theism in the book. I’m still trying to discern who the audience of this book is.
The reason that I say this is because there are quite a few parts in the opening chapters where he refers to various philosophers in an off-handed way. For some people who I am not familiar with at all, such as Merleau-Ponty, this was a bit frustrating, because I’d have like to looked at a citation and had it for future reference. In a way, the endnotes are fairly brief, but there are some topics that he deals with in extensive, multiple-page endnotes. Some of this could be a stylistic thing, and I think it decreases a lot in the second and third parts of the book, and if it didn’t I would probably say that it took a lot away from an otherwise excellent book. As it stands, it’s a bit frustrating, especially in returning to some chapters, but I don’t think it’s a major problem.
Finally, I would like to see more about dogma. His comments towards dogma are especially ambiguous. He is pretty much flatly against it when it is in service of the so-called Master God, but at another point, he holds open the possibility of some kind of dogma. I think a really detailed account is probably way outside the scope of the book, and perhaps the fact that this is one area I keep returning to when thinking about the book just means that I ned to do some more reading for myself.