John Panteleimon Manoussakis: God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic.
Walter, Gregory
John Panteleimon Manoussakis
God After Metaphysics: A Theological Aesthetic.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2007.
Pp. 232.
US$39.95 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-253-34880-7).
This excellent volume contributes significantly to the exchange
between Christian theology, philosophy of religion, and phenomenology.
It will be of benefit to readers in any of these three areas.
Manoussakis argues in this book how God can be experienced, taking
sensation rather than beauty as the subject of aesthetics. He calls for
reconsideration of the exclusion of God
as an object of experience, whether in its critical or
phenomenological forms. Manoussakis makes use of Christian practices
central to Eastern Orthodox life and thought, in order to substantiate
his phenomenological method and thereby accommodate a theological
aesthetics. After devoting the first part of the book to a sustained
reflection on the method of phenomenology, Manoussakis invokes many
kinds of sensation and religious practices to demonstrate how God
appears in sight, hearing, and touch. In the course of the final parts
of the book, he examines time, language, and human embodiment in
relation to his phenomenological account of theological experience.
Manoussakis frames this volume with discussions of a series of
paintings on these themes by Jan Brueghel. He deftly integrates his
consideration of Brueghel's art with his phenomenological
reflections, continuing the fine tradition of phenomenologists attaching
themselves to particular painters. The chapters following this one (on
sight) examine the questions that confront any phenomenologist who
suspends the strictures against experiencing the divine. In other words,
they question how God might appear in sensation.
It should be noted that in any study like this, interweaving the
phenomenological and the theological draws sharp boundaries between
different camps in contemporary phenomenology. The first
(phenomenological) camp adheres to a traditional reading of
Husserl's bracketing of transcendence and excludes the religious
and theological. The second relaxes the strictures of the first but
remains coy about whether God can be experienced, affirming that
phenomenology must mark God's absence through traces and fragments.
Manoussakis puts his stake down in the third camp, alongside Marion,
Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Henry, Richard Kearney, and others who admit
God back into phenomenology. Manoussakis takes up the necessary
questions confronting this third collection of phenomenologists. He
refuses to develop a phenomenon that blinds or overpowers one's
subjectivity, but he also rejects the idea that taking any phenomenon as
a theophany is idolatry. This leaves him in a middling position,
requiring him to consider how such phenomena, since they are neither a
blinding divine vision nor a forbidden idol, give one the ability to
experience God.
Manoussakis' solution emerges from his novel construction of a
'prosopic reduction'. This reduction, which builds upon the
other reductions developed in the history of phenomenology, claims to
reduce a phenomenon to its relation with others, to their individuality
and singularity. This reduction further allows Mannoussakis to consider
phenomena in relation to their future, to the unseen. Taking this step
enables the visible to give appearance to the unapparent.
The remainder of the book demonstrates the virtues of this
reduction through an analysis of the senses of sight, hearing, and
touch. In each instance Mannoussakis considers how phenomena of
Christian liturgical experience bring God into view. Of particular
interest is the discussion of language. In the course of examining both
Wittgenstein's treatment of the unsayable and Derrida's use of
khora and difference--two important philosophical loci that bear
resemblance to a form of Christian theology called negative or apophatic
theology--Mannoussakis gives a remarkably insightful reading of
Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. His use of these
figures and the prosopic reduction allow him to consider liturgical
speech such as hymns to be understood as the proper way of speaking
about God. This, he claims, can avoid the dazzling saturated phenomena
of Marion or the dark night of the soul of Derrida.
Though Manoussakis has argued for it more strongly in places other
than this book, not every reader will accept the grounds for this
prosopic reduction. From its earliest roots to the present day,
phenomenology has remained haunted by what it has excluded. The
transcendent and transcendental remain the chief trials that
phenomenology continues to endure. Manoussakis' volume contributes
significantly and brilliantly to this tradition by its attention to the
experience of God.
Gregory Walter
St. Olaf College
