“Have you reeaad Onto-Theological Turnings?” Joeri Schrijvers asks me, with more than just a little side-eyed smirk. As a first-year PhD student in the research group in which Schrijvers was my senior at KU Leuven’s Faculty of Theology, I had just posed to him the idea that perhaps onto-theology worked in philosophy much like original sin did in systematic theology. I was a few chapters into Schrijvers’ Onto-Theological Turnings, and once I got to p. 207, where he analyzes Emmanuel Levinas’ notion of God as a “fixed concept” within theology and ontology, I saw that he was ahead of me. That onto-theology, like original sin, is inevitable:

This stop (i.e., God as a fixed concept), then, is always and already there: there are others besides the others, being is in the neighborhood of otherwise than being, and ontotheology is haunting theology. . . . It is thus that Levinas makes room for the ontotheological mode of procedure, assuming that, taken in the sense of an improper appropriation of the divine, ontotheology is inevitable and belongs to the thinking of transcendence. Ontotheology, then, would amount to the unsurpassable idolatry of all conceptions of transcendence, whether it be on the part of an individual or a community. Furthermore, one should not pass easily over the fact that in the account of the third party, ontotheology is linked to politics, for is it not in the latter that divine power is all too readily turned into a power over the divine? (Schrijvers 2011, 207–8)

Here, Schrijvers begins his argument of onto-theology’s inevitability because of its link to politics, something he explores more in depth in his new book, Between Faith and Belief. It also follows my link to sin, as mentioned above. However, on p. 230, he took it further and recognized that such a link devalues the theological concepts I sought philosophically to justify:

Ontotheologically, the pair sin-redemption would appear as a perfect fit, an adequatio rei et intellectus if you like, and changes into a system where the relation between terms complete and complement one another. The point is that such a privative manner of conceiving sin and redemption would remain stuck in an immanent and negative conception of transcendence and would yield a false sense of certainty with regard to salvation: salvation as the adequate fulfillment of a certain need for redemption. (Schrijvers 2011, 230)

I will skip the argumentation for how Schrijvers arrived at this for the sake of time.1 But for me, at that moment, I knew that not only had he arrived at my inclination first, but that he had conceived of its problematic implications far better than I ever could have. We were already friends, but I realized then that he was the right person to mentor me through the myriad difficulties of phenomenology. And so he has.

I eventually became the English language editor for many of his articles, his book An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste, his second PhD dissertation in philosophy, and eventually Between Faith and Belief.2 I am not claiming to be an expert on his thinking, but I have seen throughout his work a nagging question concerning the critique of metaphysics and its implications to the relationship between theology and philosophy. This question had also played out in real time at KU Leuven. Although we both would certainly agree that our training there was exceptional, it was difficult to navigate the waters between theology and philosophy without being dismissed by either side. To be a crypto-theologian or a crypto-philosopher was an anathema. Schrijvers’ Onto-Theological Turnings was a book that held both titles, depending on who dictated the terms. Schrijvers’ next project turned to Jean-Yves Lacoste, an author he was already exploring throughout his research.3 Even though this project yielded international respect and praise through his various publications and speaking engagements, it was not well regarded in Leuven circles. Many valued the research output, few appreciated the research. When he turned to Jean-Luc Nancy, an author who reads (to me, at least) as an antipode to Lacoste, the reaction was similar.

This matters for us as readers of Between Faith and Belief because it reveals a searching throughout Schrijvers’s work, a searching for what I think is an intellectual foundation, or justification, for theology. Consider comments like this from Onto-Theological Turnings: “This nontheological account I am advancing here with (but perhaps also against) Lacoste thus need not be confused with an antitheological manner of looking at being-in-the-world, for such a nontheological account might be the appropriate way to configure the encounter between God and human beings as a free and singular, that is in each case mine, encounter” (Schrijvers 2011, 236–37). Once onto-theology became inevitable, for Schrijvers, I think he began to question how one could even do theology. Moreover, I think that he places himself alongside Jean-Luc Marion and Levinas when he argues that they “display a certain reluctance toward theology” (Schrijvers 2011, 272, emphasis in original). Questioning the grounds of your own discipline is popular in today’s academic world, but only if you arrive at an affirmative conclusion; at an apologetic defense of your discipline. Schrijvers’ work does not, it remains ambivalent.

Regardless of his Leuven colleagues, Schrijvers persisted and I have the inclination that this persistence motivates his appreciation for Lacoste’s phenomenology. Although Lacoste is a theologian, he is also a phenomenologist that knows the limits and scope of his method. This is something that Schrijvers readily appreciates, even though it still calls into question his own theological discipline: “One can, however, only applaud that, in a time where every link between phenomenology and theology has become suspect in advance, a thinker [meaning, Lacoste] remains contrary to this tendency and declares, without further ado, the appearance of God to be [only] a possibility” (Schrijvers 2010, 93). Through Lacoste, or one could say alongside Lacoste, Schrijvers is also appreciative of the phenomenological method and the question of onto-theology to approve the legitimacy of theology. However, he also cannot find the means to delegitimize it, likewise because of his appreciation of phenomenology.

An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste continues this thinking with a close reading of Lacoste on his own terms. In this way, the work is more reportage than argumentation. However, when one considers the last statement of the book in light of Onto-Theological Turnings and the current book, Between Faith and Belief, something jumps out:

It goes without saying too, that Lacoste’s latest position is at risk of the trouble of anarchy: the trouble with anarchy is that anarchy means trouble. The problem with ontological anarchy is the same as that of every anarchy: it unsettles order in such a way that all order becomes impossible. This is why I found it necessary at times to ask exactly where the difference is between the sacred of the earth and the saint of liturgical experience and how it would manifest itself. One might wonder too whether, with the “laying down” of spiritual experience within the flux of life, the difference between a sort of banal ontological divertissement and spirituality can still neatly be made. Liturgical experience, in other words, can evaporate in the realm of ordinary life and so dispose of its verticality.

If, finally, Être en danger is the optimistic counterpart of Expérience et Absolu, it is sure to arouse considerable debate. Lacoste’s increasing refusal of systematic theology and the eclipse of a certain kind of eschatology already makes one wonder whether a theology (and if so, what kind?) might be written in response to and in dialogue with Lacoste’s latest work. (Schrijvers 2012, 189–90)

Between Faith and Belief begins with such anarchy and Schrijvers explores it in the text’s first chapter through Reiner Schürmann’s understanding of philosophy after Martin Heidegger (Schrijvers 2016, see chapter 1). For Schrijvers, this anarchy is the source of theology’s unsettling and instability (and of philosophy’s, for that matter).4 Interestingly, Between Faith and Belief rarely ever mentions Lacoste, but one can see that Lacoste is far from ignored in spite of his textual absence (see Schrijvers 2016, 93, 168, 254, 301, 314). Consider this in the general conclusion:

Whether it be Schürmann’s ontological anarchism, resorting to the sovereignty of the philosopher overseeing the turmoil of everydayness or Caputo’s sacred anarchy, unable to escape the sovereign God lurking behind and subtly controlling the Christian reversal of values, the lesson to be drawn here is perhaps that nothing is easier than turning the anarchist strand of thinking, and its thinking without principle, into a principle after all. This is, in effect, what the chapter on Schürmann might have shown and what we have elsewhere concluded with regard to Lacoste’s latest work: the trouble with anarchy is that anarchy means trouble. Its being “without principle” all too easily resorts to a somewhat gnostic counter principle, where it is construed as an effort and struggle against the injustices and evils of institutions and powers. (Schrijvers 2016, 301, the “without” emphasis is in the original, the second emphasis is added)

Onto-theology’s political nature fuels this work, and this unsettling anarchy refuses to be tamed by any theologies or philosophies which attempt to overcome or surpass it. This is also what unsettles nearly every important text Joeri Schrijvers has written: first when reading Levinas and Marion’s response to the Heideggerian critique, then further explored but not satisfied in Lacoste’s phenomenological theology, and later examined and mined for its deeper unsettling within Jacques Derrida and his commentators Jean-Luc Nancy, John Caputo, and Peter Sloterdijk, amongst others.

Throughout them all, Schrijvers’ thinking has been an attempt to deal with the failure of overcoming, the failure of being “in default.” This is why Between Faith and Belief is constructed first and foremost as a secular phenomenology: “This work, then, is written somewhat in praise of secularization, as the academics of the day go a long way with what has been termed as the ‘postsecular’ and so perhaps are led astray” (Schrijvers 2016, 2; see also xi, xiv). Within this secular framework, he proposes a “minimalistic universalism of sorts,” which at first seems innocuous but I think actually unveils the importance of the text: Between Faith and Belief is a work which seeks to understand the conditions of possibility for any life with belief, for any religious life especially, and therefore for any future theology (Schrijvers 2016, 2). It does so by arguing that onto-theology’s inevitability reveals that trying to do away with metaphysics (and I am quoting myself here) “fails to see the problem for what it is. And it is here that [Schrijvers’] fidelity to secularism shines through: he is not trying to make an argument that one needs Christianity to proceed with everyday being-in-the-world, but one does need whichever tradition within which one resides or chooses. Christianity may not be necessary, but what makes it Christianity—the ‘between’ of ‘faith and belief’—is necessary” (Sands 2018, 120). Schrijvers sees that we must past through philosophy and secularism in order to establish the rationale behind why one would even turn to theology, why one would even desire a religious life, because he needs to show why anyone would even have or hold onto beliefs and, ultimately, a Weltanschauung. I would not go as far as to say that Schrijvers is trying to build the foundations for how Lacoste’s phenomenological theology can establish a liturgical experience that does not “evaporate in the realm of ordinary life,” but that nagging concern is hidden yet persistently present throughout Between Faith and Belief. Furthermore, Schrijvers trusts in the limits of phenomenology, reminding himself and others of the importance of beginning without the assumption that theology is possible in order to argue that it is.

Others in this symposium will write about the content and argumentation of this book, so I will set that aside for a moment and focus on the motives and movements Schrijvers takes to understand the conditions of possibility for a religious life and its subsequent theology (see, Sands 2017, 11–24). He begins with the anarchy created by, or perhaps without, metaphysics; he questions whether the so-called exhaustion of metaphysics (and Christianity in particular) is an exasperated state of what to do now. Nancy’s work, he finds, cannot do without the Christianity it seeks to live without. Likewise, and as a mirroring image, Caputo’s religion without religion cannot do without the religion that makes it possible. The anarchy remains, albeit occluded in the convoluted attempts to overcome a life without metaphysics.

The best option (and perhaps only, for Schrijvers) is to embrace the fault of onto-theology; to accept that it is always already a part of our being-in-the-world, especially so when we establish any and all beliefs. Regarding onto-theology, we are always already in default: “The human being, I suggest, is in default, like one can be in default when one fails to pay back a loan” (Schrijvers 2016, 303). Here, Schrijvers has a lot in common with Kierkegaard, that “in relation to God,” if there ever is such a thing (pace Schrijvers, appropriating Derrida), “we are always in the wrong” (Kierkegaard 1990, 423). However, Schrijvers does not take a leap of faith toward belief, nor does he see faith and belief in merely religious modes; his route passes through Binswanger’s concept of love as a critique of Heideggerian care, and it is love that traverses between the faith of being-in-the-world and our (defaulted) beliefs established within that world. This is why the “between” of Between Faith and Belief is of upmost importance: whether one finds Schrijvers’ account of Binswanger’s concept of love convincing, it alleviates the trouble of anarchy by accepting that we have to believe in something in spite of ourselves and our fallibility.

What Schrijvers has done is locate where our fallibility lies, and although it looks much like original sin, to suspect that they are one and the same, or at least adequate analogues, deflates both the theological and philosophical concepts in question. Being in default allows us to create understandings of our fallibility such as the concept of sin, but the facticity of this being in default cannot be sin itself. For then we have undervalued just how faulty we are by establishing an immanent, negative concept of transcendence for the sake of the certainty that the tandem notions of sin and redemption provide. Joeri Schrijvers has read Onto-Theological Turnings. Likewise, Binswanger’s concept of love cannot be an analogue to salvation, because, as Schrijvers states in different ways throughout the final third of the book, we sometimes love badly, and also sometimes love the wrong persons and things (Schrijvers 2016, 276). Schrijvers has maintained the limitations of a secular phenomenology to describe faith, belief, and what passes between them. In so doing, he has only recognized an “ontology incarnate” that opens us to understand how what we love in our everydayness establishes what we believe while pointing us back to the event of faith which provides the impetus for any love or belief in the first place (Schrijvers 2016, 291).

This is why I have mentioned, with a certain side-eyed smirk, that Schrijvers could have subtitled this book “A prolegomena to any future work in philosophy of religion and/or phenomenology” (Sands 2017, 11). One can tell in Between Faith and Belief’s conclusion that Schrijvers feels a bit more settled on how we come to have beliefs, how religion and theology is possible, even. However, he does not go further than that. He only stops at the conditions of possibility. After writing on and on about this nagging question of onto-theology, agonizing over its anarchic movements throughout postmodern or contemporary thinking, is he ready to move forward with theology, perhaps writing in his own words to where theology goes next? If so, then I would like to add another subtitle and ask Schrijvers if this work is also “A prolegomena to any future theology?” Lacoste is hidden throughout Between Faith and Belief, is Schrijvers now ready to incorporate the theological, in spite of his reluctance toward theology and his refusal, alongside Lacoste, of a certain type of systematic theology? Is he now ready to take up and engage the dialogue he locates at the end of An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste?

Even though his work was treated suspiciously as either crypto-theology or crypto-philosophy, it was not in vain. I do not think he would have arrived at the conclusions presented in Between Faith and Belief without this pressure, this pressing of doubt about where, exactly, he stood in regards to academic disciplines. This pushed him toward elevating method over a particular academic discipline, and his fidelity to phenomenology, having the discipline to remain within phenomenology’s scope, makes his work. If he were to write a theology, if there ever could be such a thing, I doubt it would satisfy his critics, but it might satiate a certain religious life, a desire for belief located just after being in default. The question is, then, after all his preparatory analysis, is he ready to write a theology?

Works Cited

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1990. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Edited and translated by Howard Hong and Edna Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Sands, Justin. 2018. Review of Between Faith and Belief: Toward a Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life, by Joeri Schrijvers. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 26, no. 1: 118–22.

Sands, Justin. 2017. “After Onto-Theology: What Lies beyond the ‘End of Everything.’” Religions 8, no. 98.

Schrijvers, Joeri. 2017. “Anarchism and Phenomenology.” In Brill’s Companion to Anarchism and Philosophy, edited by Nathan J. Jun, 484–504. London: Brill.

———. 2016. Between Faith and Belief: Toward a Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life. Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. 2012. An Introduction to Jean-Yves Lacoste. Farnham: Ashgate.

———. 2011. Onto-Theological Turnings? Albany: State University of New York Press.

———. 2010. “Note: God and/in Phenomenology; Jean-Yves Lacoste’s Phenomenality of God.” Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology 71, no. 1: 85–93.

In Joeri Schrijvers’ (2016) book Between Faith and Belief, Schrijvers discusses various answers to a deceptively simple and yet complex question: What can be said for religious faith “at the end of metaphysics?” Although Schrijvers engages a variety of thinkers in the elaboration of his thesis, he takes particular interest in Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss existential psychologist, whose contemporaries include Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Buber. Although Schrijvers does not discuss it in his manuscript, it is important to note that Binswanger was heavily influenced by the existential philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. This influence is particularly apparent in Binswanger’s understanding of the transcendental nature of human love. Demonstrating the degree to which Binswanger draws on Kierkegaard, Elisabetta Basso writes, “What is undeniable, in any event, is the fact that Kierkegaard is almost everywhere present in Binswanger’s work” (Basso 2011, 35). Anyone familiar with Kierkegaard’s authorship should also be able to see his ideas shining through Binswanger’s work; but what are as interesting as their similarities are their divergences.

In this engagement with Schrijvers’ book, I will attempt to think alongside him by presenting a Kierkegaardian response to Binswanger’s notion that love does not involve a uniquely religious stance towards the world. If Binswanger is right about the nature of human love, it is a transcendental being-beyond-the-world-in-the-world, which is essentially focused on the beloved, but where the beloved only happens to be the individual that she is. Furthermore, this stance makes us, as it were, more than ourselves, and while it is compatible with religion, it does not require any sort of religious stance. It is this notion of the beloved, however, which is at odds with Kierkegaard’s, otherwise similar, take on human love—which takes the identity of the beloved to be critically important to the transcending nature of the love, and where love between the lover and the specific beloved must be, at its core, uniquely religious.

Kierkegaard’s discussion of such transcendent relationships can be primarily found in Fear and Trembling. Therein, we encounter two parallel anecdotes describing a tragic case of love: the biblical Abraham and Isaac, and the Knight and the Princess. In each case, the two individuals find themselves caught in a paradox of love, which makes the continuation of the relationship appear impossible. The paradox takes the following approximate form: (1) true love between the lover and the beloved is impossible; (2) in order for the lover to become who he must be, he must have the beloved; (3) the lover will become who he must be. Silentio describes instances of such paradoxes as providing possibility conditions for a movement of faith, self-realization through this love is only possible with such a movement.

Schrijvers on Binswanger

Schrijvers presents Binswanger’s psychology of love as a response to certain features of Heidegger’s work. Specifically, Schrijvers understands Binswanger as coming up against Heidegger’s notion that Dasein is most authentic when it is being-toward-death. According to Heidegger, it is in being-toward-death that my being is most truly “my own” (Schrijvers, 223), such that I am transformed into an authentic mode of being-in-the-world. Binswanger, however, is concerned that Heidegger, in his focus on death, ends up neglecting human love as another source of transformation and self-creation. As Schrijvers notes, “Binswanger is looking for a tertium datur between the ontic preoccupations of everyday Dasein and the ontological heroism of authentic Dasein that faces (the possibility) of his or her imminent death” (Schrijvers 2016, 233). For Binswanger, alternatively, love between two humans, especially romantic or erotic love, allows one to “give [oneself] as an ‘I’” (Schrijvers 2016, 234).

Binswanger’s love also makes a funny thing of time. When the self becomes essentially oriented toward the other, time becomes either a tool to use for the benefit of the other (or, perhaps, a gift for her (Schrijvers 2016, 236)), or an irrelevant aspect of the world to which the two lovers are utterly immune. Schrijvers describes this aspect of love as not exactly a matter of timelessness, but of “worldlessness” (Schrijvers 2016, 234). Although not entirely outside of the world, the two lovers create their own haven within it, where time and space exist, not as limits, but only as tools to be used for their togetherness.

Finally, there are two more features of Binswangerean love that Schrijvers highlights: (1) for the lover, the particular beloved both is, and is not, the one who is loved; (2) this love is compatible with a stance of religious faith, but does not require it. Regarding (1), Schjrivers contends that, for Binswanger, while “empirically” the beloved is the particular person she is, and that particular person is who my love is directed toward, “factically” I could have fallen in love with anyone else (Schrijvers 2016, 239). My love for you does not “exhaust the essence of love,” and for Binswanger this seems to be an important feature of a sort of love which is essentially universal.

Regarding (2), Schrijivers points out that Binswanger “speaks not of God” in most of his work, remaining “admirably secular,” given his topic of choice (Schrijvers 2016, 7). Nonetheless, Schrijvers contends that Binswanger’s notion of love allows for, or perhaps even invites, a version of Christianity. This is because love for the beloved does not “exhaust the possibility” of love, but rather makes one into the sort of being who can enter into a universe of love. Still, Schrijvers admits that such a psychology of love does not require or entail a stance of religious faith. Schrijvers explains the situation as follows:

Recall that what I am seeking in and retrieving from Binswanger is a secularism that does not exclude something like faith, as this is perhaps the least bad way to proceed in a world where “secularism” still remains truthful to the current “state of affairs.” But for faith and religion, too, it is perhaps better to deal with a secular context, instead of assuming that the option of faith is as viable as any other. (Schrijvers 2016, 8–9)

Schrijvers thinks that Binswanger’s psychology of love will give him just that; and, perhaps, it does. But the idea of a radical, self-making love that is not essentially religious encounters pushback in the works of Kierkegaard upon which Binswanger drew so heavily.

On Kierkegaard

“It was my only wish, it was my bliss.” With these words, which refer to Isaac, Silentio imagines a possible Abraham speaking as he relinquishes hope (Kierkegaard 1941 [1843], 32–33). For twenty-five years Abraham anticipated the birth of Isaac, propelled not only by the natural longing of a father for a child, but by the promise of God that this son would be the first of innumerable descendants who would form God’s chosen people. Through Isaac, Abraham was to become the “father of many nations,” and the fulfillment of this promise hung entirely on the late and long-awaited birth of this son. Abraham loved passionately the child who was his promise, purpose, and joy. As Silentio phrases it, Isaac was the “whole content of his life” (Kierkegaard 1941 [1843], 57).

In the parallel tale, Silentio speaks of “a young swain [who] falls in love with a princess, and the whole content of his life consists in this love” (Kierkegaard 1941 [1843], 57). The Knight has fallen deeply in love with a woman he can never be with; she is the purpose of his life, though she can never be his. Like Abraham’s father love, the Knight’s love for the Princess goes far beyond ordinary romantic love and attachment. It is a “self-making passion” (Jech n.d., 21), a love through which the single individual can come to have a self. In both tales, we can see the form of the tripartite paradox played out:

(1) Love between the lover and the beloved is impossible.

Abraham must kill his son, and the Knight (for some reason) can never be with the Princess.

(2) In order for the lover to become who he must be, he must have the beloved.

Without Isaac, Abraham cannot become the “father to many nations.” Likewise, the Princess is the “whole contents” of the Knight’s life.

(3) The lover must become a self.

And not just any self—Abraham must become the father to many nations, and the Knight must become the lover of the Princess. In this way, Kierkegaard also diverges from Binswanger, as the lover does not just happen to love any particular individual. Indeed, the lover could not have such a self-making love with any other because no other person would make him into the self he must be.

That humans do not start out with a fully-formed self is a theme explored more fully in The Sickness Unto Death: “Man is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self” (Kierkegaard 1946 [1849], 147). The tripartite paradox of a self-making love creates the possibility conditions for what Kierkegaard calls the “double-movement of faith.” This double-movement is the combination of two different responses to the paradox: the movement of “infinite resignation,” and the movement of “faith.” In order to illustrate these two different responses to the paradox, Silentio famously introduces two characters: the Knight of Infinite Resignation and the Knight Faith.

The first Knight performs the first sort of movement, “infinite resignation,” which is a movement away from the finite incarnation of the beloved. Indeed, the Knight no longer has any need to bother himself with such a worldly thing. Instead of dismissing his love for the Princess (a weak move, and impossible), or longing after her finite form (a life of sorrow and futility), the Knight chooses to dwell on his love in the realm where nothing can touch it—the infinite. The Knight of Infinite Resignation remains in a state of having the beloved infinitely resigned. Accordingly, he spends the rest of his life loving this dream, perfectly preserved in the realm of Ideality. As Silentio explains:

So when he has thus sucked into himself the whole of love and absorbed himself in it, he does not lack courage to make trial of everything and to venture everything. He surveys the situation of his life, he convokes the swift thoughts, which like tame doves obey his every bidding, he waves his wand over them, and they dart off in all directions. But when they all return, all as messengers of sorrow, and declare to him that it is an impossibility, then he becomes quiet, he dismisses them, he remains alone, and then he performs the movements. (Kierkegaard 1941 [1843], 53)

Yet, the Knight of Infinite resignation does not have faith. He does not have a self that is able to relate to the world, having surrendered his ties to the finite, and he lacks this kind of self because he has surrendered his beloved. In order to have faith, in order to commune with God, it is necessary to have a self that is fully in the world. This is why the Knight of Faith must, after infinitely resigning the beloved, make a second movement: the movement to faith. Silentio admits that “the movements [of resignation and faith] are frequently confounded” (Kierkegaard 1941 [1843], 59). Accordingly, he goes on to note the difference between them:

In resignation I make renunciation of everything, everything. . . . By faith I make renunciation of nothing, on the contrary, by faith I acquire everything. . . . Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal . . . yet in such a way, be it observed, that . . . through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal. And yet faith is this paradox—or else . . . there never has been faith, precisely because it always has been. In other words, Abraham is lost. (Kierkegaard 1941 [1843], 59, 66)

It is clear, then, that the only way this self-making love can be realized (as opposed to relegated to the realm of Ideality via infinite resignation) is by making the movement of faith “by virtue of the absurd.” Faith, then, for Kierkegaard, is not merely compatible with such a self-making love, it is an essential feature of any such relationship.

So Kierkegaard and Binswanger agree on the initial, default condition of human selfhood as defined by a type of individualist lack. They also agree on the solution to such a lack—love. Additionally, they both put forth a view of love as a sort of transcendental experience, which makes us, to put it simply, more than ourselves. We become the relation that we come to have to our beloved—we become a lover. Yet, for Kierkegaard, such an experience requires—indeed, it essentially is—a stance of faith. But why?

The Paradox of Love and Necessity of Faith

The point of departure between these two figures is the place of religious faith in the phenomenon of self-making human love. While Schrijvers reads Binswanger’s love as leaving room for, though not requiring or entailing, religious faith, Kierkegaard finds the notion of this sort of love essentially to be the possibility condition for the movement of faith.

Kierkegaard’s take on the role of faith in love stems from the fact that human beings begin life in debt, in a state of lack—specifically, we lack a self. As previously noted, this essential human lack of self is a key point of agreement between Kierkegaard and Binswanger. As Schjrivers writes:

If being unfolds with lack, gaps, and holes (Heidegger), then it not only falls to the human being to “endure” (Aushalten) such ontological insufficiency, it also is such a lack. The human being, I suggest, is in default, like one can be in default when one fails to pay back a loan or return a borrowed item. If, for Binswanger, the world is what lacks love, this is so because the human being fails to love properly (just as Heidegger’s Dasein most often fails to be authentic). (Schrijvers 2016, 303)

Binswanger himself attributes this notion of lack to Kierkegaard. Indeed, Basso notes the attribution of such ideas to Kierkegaard in Binswanger’s works:

In this context, Kierkegaard is mentioned also―together with Heidegger again—in order to oppose to such an experience of “existential loss of the self” a “principle of the self” as “existential realization,” which consists in the awakening of the self from irresponsible and non-autonomous everyday life―that is, the “self as ‘they are [Man]’”―to the “authentic self.” (Basso 2011 40; citing Binswanger 1932, 25)

What Binswanger doesn’t seem to see, however, is that this essential lack, this “finitude,” in Kierkegaard’s words, makes the sort of love Binswanger describes impossible. That finite beings could expand beyond themselves, become whole through a very particular love which itself requires two whole individuals, is a paradox. Such a chasm of between us and the realization of this ideal can only be spanned by a leap to faith, a repetitive movement, of resigning the beloved and, in faith, receiving her back.

There are, perhaps, more similarities than divergences between the ideas of these two thinkers. Still, as it concerns the topic of Schrijvers’ book, it seems crucial to note Kierkegaard’s particularly weighty voice as concerns the role of faith in love. If Kierkegaard is right that a stance of religious faith is necessary to make sense of the possibility of love, then this might affect how plausible one finds Binswanger (Or religious faith! Or love!). In any case, perhaps Kierkegaard provides an option for those still looking for a notion of faith that can be grasped “at the end of metaphysics.”

Works Cited

Basso, Elisabetta. 2011. “Ludwig Binswanger: Kierkegaard’s Influence on Binswanger’s Work.” In Kierkegaard’s Influence on the Social Sciences, edited by Jon Stewart. Ashgate, 2011.

Binswanger, Ludwig. 1932. “Über Ideenflucht.” Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie 28, no. 2: 183–202.

Jech, Alexander. “The Cross of the Self: Reading Kierkegaard as the Single Individual.” Unpublished manuscript.

Kierkegaard, Søren. 1941. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

———. 1946. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Schrijvers, Joeri. 2016. Between Faith and Belief: Toward a Contemporary Phenomenology of Religious Life. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Joeri Schrijvers’ Between Faith and Belief is a formidable work that explores both well-known and overlooked thinkers in contemporary European thought: familiar figures such as Jean-Luc Nancy and John Caputo are given fresh readings; less studied thinkers (at least in the Anglophone word) such as Binswanger and Sloterdijk inject novel perspectives on the themes of metaphysics, religion, secularity, and love. The work as a whole is a response to a question posed by Reiner Schürmann, a philosopher to whom Schrijvers gives a critical, but sympathetic reading: “What is to be done at the end of metaphysics?” Schrijvers adds a phrase that turns out to be constitutive for the work as a whole: “once ‘being’ is unhinged from God” (Schrijvers 2016, xi).

This question is now well-tread. After a period of enthrallment with Jacques Derrida’s work in the nineties, and the emergence of Jean-Luc Marion toward the new millennium, philosophers of religion, theologians, and others have eagerly explored how “religion” might return to both philosophy and the public sphere. The unexpected pathways opened by deconstruction and post-Heideggerian phenomenology have led to considerable attention as to how the end of metaphysics might signal an opportunity, rather than a death knell for God in the postmodern context. John Caputo, Merold Westphal, Richard Kearney, Kevin Hart, Emmanuel Falque, Hent de Vries: these, among others, are the Anglophone figures who forged pathways over the last three decades in order to see what fruit the coupling of deconstruction or phenomenology (or both) and theology might bear.

In some sense, Schrijvers’ Between Faith and Belief is a retread of this path. The underlying motivation for the work seems to be how a “person of faith,” as in a religious person, might render belief, faith, and reason in coherent relations after God has been unhinged from being. If ontotheological modes of philosophical and theological discourse are no longer valid, then how to articulate faith and/or belief? In another sense, Schrijvers’ work adds a novel dimension to the debate by injecting new voices with new perspectives. One of the book’s most important contributions are Schrijver’s careful readings of Peter Sloterdijk, Ludwig Binswanger, and Schürmann—figures who are either overlooked or not yet prevalent in Anglophone circles.

After carefully examining how Schürmann, Nancy, Caputo, Sloterdijk, with reference to Derrida, Marion, and Martin Hägglund, view the state of faith, belief, and religion after metaphysics, Schrijvers arrives to his own answer to the question in Binswanger’s phenomenology of love. Before examining the contours of Schrijvers’ reading of Binswanger, it’s necessary to examine in more detail the positionality and context of the former’s questioning.

In the general introduction, Schrijvers links the unhinging of being from God to the decline of religion, repeating key—if now abandoned—assumptions from the secularization thesis prevalent in the sixties.1 He says that what he sees is not a return to religion, or institutional religion, but provides no data in regard to when (or if) religion declined and when or how it might be returning. Regardless, Schrijvers seems to agree with Karl Löwith that what is needed is “secularization and translation,” rather than what he takes to be the “sacralizing” of rigid theologies and the “particularism” of “apathetic pluralism” endemic to the postsecular context. As Schrijvers writes:

It not because one cannot “secularize” properly that all that one can do is postsecularuize, that is, it is not because there is not secular, neutral, and objective reason that the only option one has is to “sacralize” and “sanctify” the non-neutral presuppositions one is contingently “thrown into.” (Schrijvers 2016, 4)

Schrijvers points to Marion’s notion that one must believe in order to see as an example of a “sacralizing” theological conception. In doing so, he equates Marion’s phenomenology of revelation with something like Karl Barth’s non-correlationist neoorthodoxy. Schrijvers fills out the other side of the binary by painting postsecular discourse as a hapless fideism in which no presuppositions of any culture or tradition can be meaningfully criticized. Neither attain the kind of translation of religion into secular terms and retention of religious concepts that Schrijvers finds to be necessary after the collapse of ontotheology.

In response, Schrijvers seems to be after a postmodern correlationist theology—one that coherently retains concepts such as transcendence, infinity, and the Other after the end of metaphysics. Though he rightly sees Caputo’s “religion without religion” as an attempt at such a model, he concludes, and I agree with him on this point, that Caputo’s approach aims to have it both ways without admitting as much. That is, Caputo wants to retain the Christian ideals of hope, love, and peace without naming them as such, nor providing a bridge between the dogmas and praxis of religious traditions and the modern secular world. Schrijvers aims to correct this shortcoming by finding a suitable translator for Christian concepts without having to disavow their religious origins and relations.

The answer arrives in Binswanger’s phenomenology of love. For Schrijvers, Binswanger’s rewriting of Being and Time offers to “conserve something of the idea of an infinite love: the love of my lover, for instance, would not be ‘love’ if we both did not wish this love to last forever. It would be through love, then, that this finitude that marks us can first encounter and then conserve something of the possibility of infinite love” (Schrijvers 2016, 7). This is the hinge of Schrijvers’ own answer to the question of what can be done, or thought, after the separation of God from being. In a manner that recalls Marion’s The Erotic Phenomenon, the infinite is not banished. It has been relocated, or found elsewhere, in the phenomenon of love.

Schrijvers explains that Binswanger diverges from Heidegger on two main points in order to locate the window to the infinite in the phenomenon of love. First, Binswanger challenges Heidegger’s notion that death is the phenomenon through which Dasein might enact its authentic mode of being. Second, Binswanger challenges the very notion that it is death that is Dasein’s ownmost possibility:

Against this stress on finite, Jemeinig Dasein, Binswanger introduces the thought of love as an existence that, though not distinct from (Heidegger’s) being-in-the-world, does not coincide with the stakes of this being-in-the-world as outlined by Heidegger. The fullness of being, revealed through us in love, intimates a ‘being-beyond-the-world-in-the-world (‘über die Welt hinaus sein’) that overpowers and empowers the existential structures of care and concern. (Schrijvers 2016, 223–24)

Schrijvers rightly points out that Binswanger’s phenomenology of love echoes of Levinas’ attempts to take leave from Being, since Binswanger institutes an “originary coram,” or being before, “with or without Deo,” which is “to be seen as a fundamental salute to beings and of beings” (Schrijvers 2016, 232). In ways that recall Levinas’ notion of the “face,” according to Binswanger although what we love is in the world, “why and what we love is not (of) this world” (Schrijvers 2016, 233).

In ways that echo of Marion’s own break with Heidegger, and the erotic reduction the former outlines in The Erotic Phenomenon, according to Binswanger in the unique togetherness of lovers, time and space collapse under the erotic reduction (Schrijvers 2016, 234), thereby conquering the world (Schrijvers 2016, 235), since “love ecstatically gathers the present, the past, and the future” (Schrijvers 2016, 236). This means that, in perhaps the most jarring break with Heidegger’s phenomenology, Dasein’s being is no longer an issue when in love (Schrijvers 2016, 238). As Schrijvers explains,

This Sehnsucht, the passion for who and what is other, is for Binswanger primarily a longing “for oneness and wholeness” that will be satisfied only in the loving encounter where one is aware of and attuned to the fact of “how much we are,” all union has already passed through communion. (Schrijvers 2016, 248)

With this basic framework in place, my criticism of Schrijvers’ answer to the question of what to do after the unhinging of God from being through Binswanger’s phenomenology of love is twofold.

First, while Schrijvers provides a clear reading of Binswanger’s phenomenology, he provides no compelling reasons as to why one should buy into Binswanger’s claims. If one begins with the notions that (1) God is love, (2) God is infinite, and (3) God’s love pervades the world, then it might be a straightforward path to buying into Binswanger’s claims that love conquers the world, provides a fullness lacking in the default condition of human beings, and acts as a window into the infinite. However, if one does not begin with these theological presuppositions, it is not clear why one should believe that love overcomes space and time.

Furthermore, there is no compelling reason given as to why love must include the desire for permanence. When Schrijvers equates love with desire that it last forever, and then claims that love is a trace of the infinite in the finite, or the otherworldly in the world, he seems to use circular reasoning. What if I don’t buy into the notion that in order to call a lived experience “love,” it must be predicated on the desire for such an experience to last forever? While Schrijvers distances himself from Marion, these same criticisms have been made of the latter’s erotic reduction for some time. Thus, it seems that Binswanger’s phenomenology of love doesn’t offer the kind of translation of theological concepts that is persuasive to the non-Christian.

Second, Schrijvers’ motivation for instituting Binswanger’s phenomenology of love as a viable prism of the infinite rests on a desire to explicate a viable understanding of “religious life” after the demise of metaphysics. But Schrijvers never articulates whose religious life this might be and what would define such a life. It seems that the types of religious lives he’s referencing are those of European and/or North American or Oceanic intellectuals. This, in other words, seems like particular phenomenology of a particular religious set of lives. While I understand philosophy’s desire to be universal in scope, phenomenology is the analysis of lived experience. Neither Schrijvers’ investigation, nor conclusions seem to take into account the lived experience of all people (whether or not such a thing is possible, is up for debate; but it’s a question that bears pointing out).

Overall, Schrijvers’ Between Faith and Belief provides a bridge between a former generation’s (Caputo, Schürmann, Derrida, Nancy, Marion) reckoning with the demise of metaphysics with new voices (Sloterdijk, Hägglund), and in the process revives a thoroughly understudied phenomenologist (Binswanger). Despite my criticisms of the work, it represents a productive contribution to the ongoing development of the relationships among philosophy, theology, and religions in the postsecular world.

Works Cited

Schrijvers, Joeri. Between Faith and Belief: Toward a Contemoprary Phenomenology of Religious Life. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016.

The apparent impasse between phenomenology and deconstruction that Joeri Schrijvers seeks to overcome through a reasoned analysis of the underlying issue between these paths of inquiry is one that, to my mind, opens up a political conversation on just how such impasses—often conceived in overly simplified and frequently polarized dualistic terms—allow us to reread the field and operations of theology as a whole. What such a philosophical impasse parallels, I would argue, is nothing short of the basic coordinates for the field of political theology, much as Carl Schmitt had once sought to define it: sovereignty, on the one hand, and democratic-liberalism, on the other, locked in fierce opposition to one another and with neither seemingly willing to relinquish control for a moment to the other. For Schmitt, the apparent failures of democratic-liberalism meant that some form of monarchal (even perhaps papal) sovereignty needed to be reasserted in the modern era against the nation-state’s indebtedness to far weaker political forms. The strength of the sovereign was the only thing that could guarantee the continuance of the state in the face of its enemies. Though Schmitt’s choice for dictatorship (and consequently Nazism) was tragically flawed, his general analysis of the political field and its theological roots yields significant insight into how the fields of politics and theology alike are themselves structured.

Overlaying Schmitt’s formulations upon Schrijvers’ analysis, we can perhaps begin to see the same impasse located within theology wherein the anti-metaphysical side (“liberal-democratic”) engages in an “endless conversation” and espouses a tendency toward absolute secularization, while refusing to concede that there may yet be a need for onto-theology (“sovereignty”) in the end—something that theological communitarians either overtly or inadvertently support. I believe this overlay is justified, not only by the range of figures that Schrijvers has chosen to study (i.e., John Caputo, Jean-Luc Nancy, Peter Sloterdijk, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion, among others), but also because he concludes his work with an explicit call to avoid authoritative (authoritarian) and sovereign movements alongside the ever-present quests within continental philosophy to avoid the metaphysics that legitimates such positions (Schrijvers 2016, 297–302). Espousing such a position is not easy to do, however, and this is what elevates Schrijvers’ work above so much else that is out there already.

A major claim of the book is that one cannot wholly abstract oneself into the “endless conversation” that refuses to make a decision and arrive at an ontic form of existence. There must be some way to articulate the necessity of sovereignty without it becoming the “dictatorship” of tradition, as Schrijvers phrases things (Schrijvers 2016, 292). Keeping in mind the parallels I am suggesting, Schmitt’s failure had been to attempt a defense of monarchical sovereignty as a form of dictatorship. What Schrijvers illuminates is rather how, in the face of those who would simply strive to dismantle metaphysics entirely (and here his criticism of Caputo’s critiques of sovereignty are particularly interesting to follow), there is yet another possibility routinely overlooked by both sides: (abstract) faith needs (embodied) belief in order to be phenomenologically possible in this world. The problem, as he states it, is that the world has been severed from love and love from world by these, or similar, negative political theologies bent on the act of deconstructing only (Schrijvers 2016, 300). If it is possible to have something like a “faith without faith” in purely structural and abstract, even intellectual terms (much as Derrida or Caputo had put it), belief is the embodied side of life, what makes love a reality and a transformative one at that. Though Caputo himself has often seen a similar need to merge the concrete, historical with the abstract philosophical or theological (see his On Religion, for example), Schrijvers wants to deepen the relationship between faith and belief to more than an unexplainable reality; he wants to make a philosophical argument for why these two must coexist.

Relying on the writings of Ludwig Binswanger, Schrijvers develops an incarnational theology of love as a form of intersubjectivity that takes our ontic reality, our traditions, institutions and religions more seriously than the negative political theologians might typically concede. Binswanger’s openness to a form of existence between sovereignty and liberalism gives us another way to contemplate the political impasse that dwells at the heart of theological debate and exposes another avenue for the future of political theology in general. There will not be a “post-metaphysical” era envisioned as “post-Christian” in a Western context because we are not able to extricate ourselves from the ostensibly Christian onto-theological foundations that undergird every attempt to form a “religion without religion” or a deconstruction of Christianity. The anarchy, Gnosticism, antinomianism and apocalypticism of the negative political theologians such as Nancy, Derrida, Caputo and Sloterdijk (but one could also add Giorgio Agamben, Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey Robbins and a host of others) have a significant role to play in terms of deconstructing the onto-theological foundations of metaphysics in order to expose their potentially violent substructure. But it is also a substructure we cannot simply remove from existence altogether.

Schrijvers, for his part, is focused on a philosophy of incarnation that takes our material existence seriously and confirms how meaning does arise from matter, as he puts it (Schrijvers 2016, 304). There is in the mix a certain paradox of existence that refuses to yield absolute certainty—what makes us ultimately “beings in default”—and this is the very condition of what being immersed in both faith and belief is about: “Coming to terms with such a being in default may be the adequate response to the end of metaphysics: it is to recognize that we all share in this default and this lack and that this ‘knowing of not knowing’ is what turns philosophy, as the love of wisdom, into a wisdom of love: not to overcome the lack, but to love even the lack (of rationality, of ultimate meaning)” (Schrijvers 2016, 304–5). Trying permanently to overcome such a lack is the temptation of sovereignty, one that has certainly brought a fair share of totalitarian forms into our world. Failing to grasp that we need some form of metaphysics, and its accompanying sense of sovereignty, in material form is the temptation of the negative political theologians, one that exposes them to frequent charges of nihilism. Both extremes are to be avoided, of course, as the “being in default” that we are is an inescapable being in poverty (cf. Agamben’s work on an ontology poverty, which comes to mind for me here).

What results for Schrijvers is a theological agnosticism wherein one does not know if one is included (politically, theologically) in whatever community that surrounds them but knows only that they must not be involved in a “politics of being” that entails exclusion. The “politics of being” that he calls for is rather one that involves “the minute, meticulous and phenomenological assessment of the concrete differences between particular traditions, be they religious (Caputo) or ontological (Nancy)” (Schrijvers 2016, 300). In this politics, something like an intricate and complex network of relations becomes slightly more visible and just possibly more comprehensible (as in the work of Bruno Latour, I might suggest, which pursues the intricate networks of meaning bound up in the various “modes of existence” in our world). Such a politics of being, which perhaps shares a good deal with existentialism in some respects, might also open the door toward greater interreligious and comparative theological understandings. It also, if we can see nearly as far as Schrijvers projects, brings a renewed appreciation of secular, agnostic and pagan traditions vis-à-vis traditional theological ones. This possibility is what allows something like Nancy’s or Jean Yves-Lacoste’s focus on the “pagan residue in Christianity” to exist and take on renewed significance in that such a move dictates a reality wherein “each and every person who attempts to be Christian is first and foremost insufficiently Christian” (Schrijvers 2016, 315). Every identity is ultimately undone at the same moment that the person who held that identity realizes how they are so much more than whatever had previously claimed them.

I am not sure if Schrijvers would accept the overlay of political theology upon his analysis, but what I see unfolding in his work is a most insightful account of how we might address the historical field of theological (and political) operations anew, refusing the polarized dichotomies that often lump people into overly facile conservative and liberal, sovereign and democratic, counterparts. For laying out the theoretical groundwork for such a wholescale rethinking of the operations and deductions that comprise the lives of faith and belief, I am at least extremely grateful.