An Ancient Mystery as Solution to a Contemporary Impasse: Reflections on Schelling’s Christology

Abstract

Schelling’s legacy to contemporary philosophy is neither fundamentally political nor social but theological and ontological. His work is chiefly concerned with the being of the Absolute, God, nature and freedom. Particularly the later philosophy of mythology and revelation rethinks the relationship between faith and reason, or, more precisely, between revelation and general ontology in this ontological context. Schelling, however, does not render faith compatible with reason, i.e. theology with ontology, but reason is instead brought in accord with faith and ontology with theology. Philosophy stands in service to revelation, not correcting it but explicating its truth, which is prior to philosophy. Should the revelatory event of Christianity, the decisive event that makes it Christian rather than Jewish or simply “theistic,” consist in the divine-human union in the person of Jesus, then there is no Christian theology apart from christology. Now, Christian philosophers, from the medieval to the contemporary, have typically started with a general ontology whose origins are not uniquely Christian but Aristotelian or Platonist only to ask how the revelatory event, namely, the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of the divine-human union, can (or cannot) be understood in light of that ontology. Two noteworthy, though surely not exclusive, exceptions to this way of proceeding include Anne Conway and Simone Weil, as each of them commences from the revelatory event in order to develop a general ontology from there. Conway, for example, a contemporary and critic of Descartes, rejects any difference in substantial kind between body and spirit, instead affirming a vertical and continuous spectrum between body and spirit. In Weil’s case, creation and creativity are radically reconceived in light of the revelatory event as kenotic, i.e. as divine contraction, weakness, subjection, suffering and inaction, rather than as abundance and overabundance, i.e. as an act that manifests God’s power outwardly. Schelling also drafted an ontology on the grounds of the revelatory event rather than the inverse. Departing primarily from Schelling’s philosophical Christology, I argue for a radically empirical and radically non-dualistic ontology, whose primary operation is habitual and kenotic rather than substantial and pleromatic.