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CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY
Christian
Philosophy
Conceptions, Continuations, and Challenges
Edited by
J. A A R O N S I M M O N S
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In memory of David Kangas

Foreword
Nicholas Wolterstorff
When one speaks of philosophy one might have either of two quite different
things in mind: one might have in mind the social practice of philosophy, or
one might have in mind the thought and texts produced by those who engage
in that practice. So, too, when one speaks specifically of Christian philosophy
one might have in mind either a certain social practice or the thought and texts
produced by those who engage in that practice. When reflecting on Christian
philosophy, I think it is best to begin with the practice.
What is that practice? It’s the practice of Christian philosophy, of course.
But to describe it thus can easily prove misleading, misleading in the same way
that it can prove misleading to speak of the practice of naturalist philosophy.
Christians and naturalists engage together in the shared practice of philoso-
phy. Some of those who are Christians do so as Christians, qua Christians;
some of those who are naturalists, probably most, do so as naturalists, qua
naturalists. To engage in the social practice of Christian philosophy is to
engage in the shared social practice of philosophy as a Christian.
What is it to engage in the shared social practice of philosophy as a
Christian? The answer one gives to that question depends, in good measure,
on how one understands Christianity. Some writers on these matters under-
stand Christianity to be a certain worldview; they think of it as belonging to
the same genus as, for example, Kantianism and contemporary naturalism. To
be a Christian is to embrace a Christian worldview. On this understanding, to
engage in the shared social practice of philosophy as a Christian is to allow the
Christian worldview to contribute to shaping, in one way or another, one’s
practice of the discipline.
To my mind this is much too intellectualistic a way of thinking of Chris-
tianity. I think of it as do Kyla Ebels-Duggan and Bruce Ellis Benson in their
essays in this collection, namely, as a way of life of a certain sort; to be a
Christian is to be committed to a Christian way of life. It’s more like ancient
Stoicism than like contemporary naturalism.
There is, of course, enormous variation among discernibly Christian ways
of life; so, let me speak of what I see as typical. A Christian way of life typically
does include a Christian worldview. But ordinarily, it includes a good deal
more. It includes certain views as to what has transpired in history. It includes
participation in certain practices—such as worship—and convictions as to the
importance of such participation. It includes particular moral commitments.
It includes specific judgments as to what is good and what is not good, what
viii Foreword
is more important and what is less important. It includes certain virtues.
It includes regarding some texts as canonical and authoritative. It includes
what can best be described as key sensibilities.
On this understanding of Christianity, to engage in the shared social
practice of philosophy as a Christian is to allow one’s Christian way of life
to contribute to shaping, in one way or another, one’s participation in the
discipline. Importantly, I say, “contribute to shaping.” A philosopher’s com-
mitment to a Christian way of life is by no means the only thing that shapes
her participation in the discipline of philosophy. Questions being raised and
claims being made by other philosophers contribute to shaping her mode of
participation, issues arising in the culture contribute, developments in science
contribute, etc. At some points the shaping by her commitment to a Christian
way of life may be minimal, or even non-existent. Sometimes her Christian
way of life will lead her to discuss topics of interest to Christians and non-
Christians alike. Sometimes it will lead her to discuss topics of interest mainly
to her fellow Christians; for example, philosophical reflections on the Trinity.
There is a long and venerable tradition of Christian philosophizing, so
understood. Aquinas is an example of such an approach. Aquinas drew the
distinction between philosophy and theology more sharply than anyone
before him. Philosophy, he said, appeals solely to the deliverances of the senses
and “natural reason”; theology appeals, in addition, to the deliverances of
revelation. By this criterion, Aquinas’s two summae, Summa contra gentiles
and Summa theologiae are clearly works of theology. Within them, however,
there are extensive passages that, by his criterion, are philosophy rather than
theology—for example, the opening discussion in both summae concerning
the existence and nature of God. But though Aquinas does not, in these
opening discussions, appeal to the deliverances of revelation, his choice of
questions to address and of texts to engage clearly indicate that he was
engaging in philosophy as a Christian.
The history of modern philosophy is customarily taught as if the tradition of
Christian philosophizing ended with Descartes and Malebranche. But not so.
When one looks, for example, at John Locke’s work as a whole and not just at
selected passages that are of interest to present-day philosophers, it becomes
clear that Locke engaged in philosophy as a Christian.¹
By the mid-twentieth century the tradition of Christian philosophizing
was moribund, both in the analytic tradition and in the continental. The
popularity of logical positivism in the analytic tradition was certainly one
cause of the near-death of the tradition. But positivism proved to be a
flash-in-the-pan. I judge that the principal causes of its near-death were the
¹ See my contribution to The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought (Wolterstorff 2012).
Other essays in that collection make clear the persistence of Christian philosophizing in other
early modern philosophers.
Foreword ix
prominence in the modern and contemporary period of evidentialism
concerning religious beliefs, and the prominence of a certain view as to
how philosophy is properly practiced.
Evidentialism concerning religious belief is the thesis that one is entitled to
hold some religious belief only if one holds it on the basis of proper propos-
itional evidence. All by itself that doesn’t say much; one has to be told what
constitutes proper propositional evidence. John Locke, who has title to being
regarded as the father of modern-day evidentialism, was of the view that
proper propositional evidence consists of propositions that are certain for
one. Probably most adherents of evidentialism have worked with a less
stringent view of proper evidence than that; but it’s hard to tell, since most
writers don’t explain what they take to be proper evidence.
Explaining evidentialism was easy. It’s less easy to explain the view as to how
philosophy is properly practiced that I judge to have been prominent in the
modern and contemporary periods. The core idea is that philosophy, when
properly practiced, aims at a certain kind of consensus. Late in The Critique of
Pure Reason Kant drew a distinction between what he called revelational the-
ology (theologia revelata) and what he called rational theology (A631/B659).
Rational theology, he says, is based “solely upon reason.” Though he does not
explain what it is for a theology to be based solely upon reason, from his
subsequent identification and description of various forms of theology that he
regards as so based, in contrast to those not so based, I think we can make a
reliable inference. Theology is based solely upon reason, and is thus rational
theology, just in case it is based solely on premises and inferences that all
cognitively competent adult human beings would accept if those premises and
reasons were presented to them, if they understood them, if they possessed the
relevant background information, and if they freely reflected on them at suffi-
cient length. (What constitutes sufficient length is, of course, a nice question.) For
the sake of convenience, let me call this sort of rationality, Kant-rationality.
Though I have extracted the idea of Kant-rationality from the passage in the
Pure Critique in which Kant distinguishes various kinds of theology, it’s
obvious that the idea has application to the academic disciplines in general;
in particular, it has application to philosophy. A body of philosophical
thought, then, possesses Kant-rationality just in case it is based solely on
premises and inferences that all cognitively competent adult human beings
would accept if those premises and reasons were presented to them, if they
understood them, if they possessed the relevant background information, and
if they freely reflected on them at sufficient length.
I judge that a prominent view among philosophers in the modern and
contemporary periods has been that philosophers should aim at Kant-
rationality in their practice of philosophy, and that this aim is more or less
achievable. We should not expect that it will ever be fully achieved; but aiming
at it is not like banging one’s head against a wall.
x Foreword
It’s obvious—no need to argue the point—that the combination of eviden-
tialism concerning religious beliefs with the conviction that philosophers
should aim at Kant-rationality places severe strictures on engaging in phil-
osophy as a Christian. It does not make it impossible, however. One’s judg-
ments as to which questions are important to address might still be shaped by
one’s Christian way of life. Aquinas’s view as to how philosophy is properly
practiced is a variant on the view that philosophers should aim at Kant-
rationality; and as we saw a few paragraphs back, Aquinas’s Christian convic-
tions clearly did shape his judgments concerning which questions to address.
After a period of near-death, suddenly in the 1970s Christian philosophiz-
ing began once again to flourish, in part, no doubt, as the result of the attack
on evidentialism concerning religious beliefs by the so-called Reformed epis-
temologists. Alvin Plantinga’s inaugural address of 1983, “Advice to Christian
Philosophers,” was a manifesto for this resurgence. The essays in this present
volume are reflections on the state of Christian philosophizing after Plantinga’s
issuance of his manifesto. Rather than summarizing those reflections, let me
briefly offer a few of my own.
Plantinga’s address implied the rejection of the ideal of Kant-rationality. He
did not identify the ideal as such and subject it to criticism; he simply took for
granted that it should be rejected. I share the view that it should be rejected.
I think it is an illusion to suppose that Kant-rationality is achievable for any
substantial body of philosophical thought; over and over it turns out that
philosophers who are fully rational find themselves in deep disagreement.
It is my impression that the ideal of Kant-rationality is widely rejected by
philosophers nowadays. Of course, it is not rejected by all. I interpret Jürgen
Habermas, for example, as continuing to embrace the ideal (see Wolterstorff
2013); and it may be that some of the contributors to this volume continue to
embrace it in various ways. But it is not uncommon nowadays for a philoso-
pher to declare openly that he is thinking within the context of a certain
worldview that he knows is not shared by all of his fellow philosophers.
One enters philosophy as who one is, committed as one is committed,
believing what one does believe on matters religious and otherwise. Moreover,
one participates in the philosophical dialogue taking place from the basis of
those commitments and beliefs. The secular humanist participates as secular
humanist, the Jewish person as Jewish, the secular naturalist as secular natur-
alist, the Christian as Christian. One listens carefully to one’s fellow philo-
sophers who argue that one’s commitments are misguided, one’s beliefs
defective, one’s philosophical conclusions mistaken. On some matters, large
or small, one may find their arguments cogent; on other matters, large or
small, one will not. One then retains the commitments, beliefs, and conclu-
sions one had, perhaps refined by the fuller’s fire through which they have
gone. What else is one to do? One can’t just choose no longer to believe what
one does believe. And to those fellow philosophers whose commitments
Foreword xi
one finds misguided, whose beliefs one finds defective, whose philosophical
conclusions one finds mistaken, one offers them arguments to that effect. One
hopes that they will find those arguments compelling. But one expects that
often they will not. And so it goes, back and forth.
So what does one say to the philosopher who has listened carefully to the
arguments and counter-arguments and remains, or becomes, a convinced
secular naturalist? What else can one say but to your deepest commitments
and convictions be true as you engage in dialogue with your fellow philo-
sophers on philosophical issues? Be a naturalist philosopher. Show the rest of
us where naturalist thinking goes. Perhaps something will turn up that we can
appropriate in our own way. And what does one say to the philosopher who
has listened carefully to the arguments and counter-arguments and remains,
or becomes, a convinced Christian? What else can one say but to your deepest
commitments and convictions be true as you engage in dialogue with your
fellow philosophers on philosophical issues? Be a Christian philosopher. Show
those of other persuasions where Christian thinking goes. Perhaps something
will turn up that they can appropriate in their own way.
If the philosophical enterprise, on this way of thinking of it, does not aim at
Kant-rationality, what does it aim at? It aims at what one might call dialogic
rationality. Since I have worked this idea out elsewhere (see Wolterstorff
2011), on this occasion I will make no attempt to spell out what that is.
One of the contributors to this present volume criticizes Christian analytic
philosophers after Plantinga’s manifesto for what he calls their “self-certainty.”
It’s not clear to me what he has in mind by this term; but perhaps what he has
in mind is that these philosophers are not willing to open themselves up to
critique of their Christian orientation. Declaring, to use words attributed to
Luther, “Here I stand; I can do no other,” they freely employ their own
Christian orientation to criticize other philosophers but are not willing to
listen to the critique by others of their orientation.
Perhaps there are some present-day Christian philosophers to whom this
charge sticks—I’m not sure. But in any case, such a stance is not faithful to the
dialogic understanding of the practice of philosophy that I have just now
advocated. In true dialogue, each party listens seriously to what other parties
say by way of critique of one’s position.
A well-known part of Plantinga’s advice to Christian philosophers is that
they should set their own agenda rather than allowing others to set their
agenda for them. As Plantinga knows, I have never been happy with this
advice. When the Christian philosopher engages as a Christian in the shared
human practice of philosophy, does he set his own agenda? Yes and No. He
will make his own judgments about which issues it is important to address and
how to address them; only philosophy grad students and those who are
completely cowed do otherwise. But he will make those judgments not only
in the light of his Christian way of life but in the light of what is happening in
xii Foreword
the discipline of philosophy generally, what is happening in society, what is
happening in other academic disciplines, and so forth.
Several contributors to this present volume comment critically on the
relatively narrow range of topics discussed by Christian analytic philosophers
after Plantinga’s manifesto. I share that criticism. Apart from a good deal of
writing about ethics, I would say that the main topics dealt with have been the
epistemology of religious belief, the nature of God, the problem of evil, and
mystical experience.
What strikes me about these four topics is two things. First, they all fall within
the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion; apart from ethics, recent Christian
philosophy has mainly been Christian philosophy of religion. Remarkably little
has been written by way of a Christian approach to politics, by way of a Christian
approach to art, and so forth. Second, what strikes me is that these four topics
are focused entirely on the epistemic status and content of religious belief
and on religious experience. If someone who knew nothing about religion read
this literature, she would come away with the impression that, apart from the
mystical experiences of a few people, religion consists mainly of believing things
about God.
That present-day Christian philosophers have chosen these topics for
extensive discussion can be explained historically. The epistemology of reli-
gious belief was placed on our agenda by John Locke and has remained on our
agenda ever since; the religious pluralism of our societies makes the topic
inescapable. The nature of God was placed on our agenda by the confrontation
of Christianity with ancient Greek and Roman religious thought. The problem
of evil goes back into both Jewish and pagan antiquity. And issues raised by
mystical and other forms of religious experience go back, I would say, to
Schleiermacher and his fellow Romantics. In short, it’s easy to explain why
recent Christian philosophy of religion has chosen those four topics for
extensive discussion.
What I find inexplicable is why it has focused almost exclusively on those
four topics. Prominent in the lives of most adherents of most religions,
including the lives of most adherents of Christianity, is participation in the
liturgies or rituals of one’s religion. Why has recent Christian philosophy of
religion paid almost no attention to liturgy? And why, in spite of the centrality
of text-interpretation in lived Christianity, has so little been written by analytic
philosophers about the reading and interpretation of religious texts? Whatever
the cause, there is a serious misfit between lived religion and the preoccupation
of analytic philosophers of religion in general, and of Christian analytic
philosophers of religion in particular.
It is my judgment that enormous strides have been made, since Plantinga
issued his manifesto, in philosophical theology and the epistemology of
religious belief. My hope for the future of Christian philosophy is that it will
break out of its near-myopic preoccupation with ethics and philosophy of
Foreword xiii
religion. And my hope for Christian philosophy of religion is that it will break
out of its narrow confines and reflect not just on religious belief and experience
but on lived religion generally. In particular, it is my hope that there will be a
flowering of philosophical reflections on liturgy.
WORKS CITED
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2011. “Then, Now, and Al.” Faith and Philosophy 28, no. 3:
253–66.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2012. “God in Locke’s Philosophy.” In The Persistence of the
Sacred in Modern Thought. Ed. Chris L. Firestone and Nathan A. Jacobs. Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, pp. 112–48.
Wolterstorff, Nicholas. 2013. “An Engagement with Jürgen Habermas on Postmeta-
physical Philosophy, Religion, and Political Dialogue.” In Habermas on Religion. Ed.
Craig Calhoun, Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan van Antwerpen. Malden, MA:
Polity Press, pp. 92–111.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, this volume began due to the work of Stephen Lake and
Aron Reppmann, who organized a joint meeting of the Society of Christian
Philosophers and the Society of Continental Philosophy and Theology at
Trinity Christian College in March 2014. I want to express my deep appreci-
ation to them for their vision for that conference, which eventually led to the
possibility of this volume.
Let me also say thank you to the individual contributors for being part of
this project, to Tom Perridge at Oxford University Press for supporting it, and
to the excellent production team that brought it to completion.
There are always numerous other people who are also instrumental in the
work that goes into a project such as this. So, at risk of leaving out more than
I mention, let me say thank you to Brandon Inabinet, Bryan Bibb, David Fink,
Kevin Carnahan, Kevin Schilbrack, Mark Stone, Erik Anderson, John Sanders,
John Caputo, Terry Cross, Charles Davis, Martin Kavka, David Wood, Jeffrey
Tlumak, Robert Talisse, Scott Aikin, Fred Ablondi, Stephen Minister, Drew
Dalton, Jeffrey Hanson, Mike Kelly, Brian Harding, Ken Haynes, Christy
Flanagan-Feddon, and Brett Land for conversations throughout the years on
topics that are considered here. Were it not for their engagement and encour-
agement, I am sure that my own interest in these debates would not have
developed as it has.
A very special thank you to Sandi Annone for the tireless support on some
of the tasks involved in reprinting previously published essays. Also, Randall
Childree has been a tremendous resource and friend through the process and
has helped me to track down many of the original sources cited in the volume
and advised me on various technical issues that have arisen.
As always, I am more deeply indebted than words can say to my wife,
Vanessa, and my son, Atticus. I appreciate their patience during my late nights
at the office, their understanding when I missed tennis matches and basketball
games, and their tireless support in continuing to encourage me to think,
write, and speak about things that matter.
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to the editors at Faith and Philosophy
and Fordham University Press for allowing me to include the following essays,
which are reprinted here with permission (the essays have been slightly altered
to correct typos in the original publications, update the information for the
new volume, and adopt Oxford University Press style guidelines):
• Chapter 1—Alvin Plantinga, “Advice to Christian Philosophers”—Originally
published in Faith and Philosophy 1, no. 3 (1984): 253–71. This essay
was initially delivered November 4, 1983, as Plantinga’s inaugural address
xvi Acknowledgments
as the John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Notre Dame.
• Chapter 2—Jean-Luc Marion, “Christian Philosophy: Hermeneutic or
Heuristic”—English translation as published in Jean-Luc Marion, The
Visible and the Revealed, trans. Christina M. Gschwandtner and others
(New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), pp. 66–79, 167–69;
original translator of the essay itself is unknown.
• Chapter 4—Merold Westphal, “Taking Plantinga Seriously”—Originally
published in Faith and Philosophy 16, no. 2 (1999): 173–81.
• Chapter 5—Bruce Ellis Benson, “The Two-Fold Task of Christian Phil-
osophy of Religion”—Originally published in Faith and Philosophy 32,
no. 5 (2015): 371–90.
Contents
Notes on Contributors xix
Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 1

J. Aaron Simmons
PART I. CONCEPTIONS
1. Advice to Christian Philosophers 21
Alvin Plantinga
2. “Christian Philosophy”: Hermeneutic or Heuristic? 40
Jean-Luc Marion
3. Christian Philosophy and the Christian Life 55
Kyla Ebels-Duggan
4. Taking Plantinga Seriously: Advice to Christian Philosophers 73
Merold Westphal
5. The Two-Fold Task of Christian Philosophy of Religion 83
Bruce Ellis Benson
6. Christian Phenomenology 104
Kevin Hart
PART II. CONTINUATIONS

7. On Divine Dedication: Philosophical Theology with Jeremy
Taylor 123
Charles Taliaferro
8. Discerning the Spirit: The Task of Christian Philosophy 132
Neal DeRoo
9. Christian Philosophy and Disability Advocacy 153
Kevin Timpe
10. Teaching Evil 165
Meghan Sullivan
11. Advice for Analytic Theologians: Faith-Guided Scholarship 173
Trent Dougherty
xviii Contents
PART III. CHALLENGES

12. The Strategies of Christian Philosophy 187
J. Aaron Simmons
13. Christian Philosophy and Christ Crucified: Fragmentary Theory
in Scandalous Power 209
Paul K. Moser
14. Is Plantinga-Style Christian Philosophy Really Philosophy? 229
J. L. Schellenberg
15. Philosophy, Religion, and Worldview 244
Graham Oppy
16. Beyond Two-Valued Logics: A Jewish Philosopher’s Take on
Recent Trends in Christian Philosophy 260
Peter Ochs
17. Responding to Challenges 286
William Hasker
Index 305
Notes on Contributors
Bruce Ellis Benson is Senior Research Fellow, Logos Institute for Analytic and
Exegetical Theology, University of St Andrews. He serves as the Executive
Director of the Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology. He has been
Visiting Professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and was Professor of
Philosophy at Wheaton College. He is the author or editor of twelve books,
including The Improvisation of Musical Dialogue: A Phenomenology of Music
(Cambridge University Press), the award-winning Pious Nietzsche: Decadence
and Dionysian Faith (Indiana University Press), and (with J. Aaron Simmons)
The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury). He has
published more than ninety book chapters, articles, and reviews.
Neal DeRoo is Canada Research Chair in Phenomenology and Philosophy of
Religion at The King’s University in Edmonton, Alberta. He is the author of
Futurity in Phenomenology: Promise and Method in Husserl, Levinas and
Derrida (Fordham University Press), and has co-edited several books in
phenomenology and philosophy of religion, including Phenomenology and
Eschatology: Not Yet in the Now (Routledge), Cross and Khora: Deconstruction
and Christianity in the work of John D. Caputo (Wipf and Stock), and
Merleau-Ponty at the Limits of Art, Religion, and Perception (Bloomsbury).
He served previously as the Director of the Andreas Center for Reformed
Scholarship and Service and is the Founding Editor of In All Things.
Trent Dougherty (Ph.D. Rochester) is Associate Professor in the Philosophy
Department and a fellow of the Honors College at Baylor University. He
publishes and presents regularly in Epistemology, Philosophy of Religion,
and Philosophy of Language. He is the author of The Problem of Animal
Pain: A Theodicy for All Creatures Great and Small (Palgrave Macmillan). He
is the editor of Evidentialism and Its Discontents (Oxford University Press),
the co-editor (with Justin McBrayer) of Skeptical Theism: New Essays (Oxford
University Press), and author of numerous essays, reviews, and reference
works in his areas including the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, the
Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and Oxford Bibliographies. He tries to
bring non-binary perspectives to all his work. When not writing or on the
lecture circuit, he enjoys gravity sports, gardening, and gourmet cooking with
his wife and four children.
Kyla Ebels-Duggan is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern
University. She specializes in moral and political philosophy and their history
working in a broadly Kantian tradition. She has written on the reason-giving
xx Notes on Contributors
authority that one person’s ends or values have for others, both in political
contexts and in interpersonal relationships and on moral education, including
the implications of our dependence on upbringing for personal responsibility
and the appropriate role and limits of the state in forming children’s world-
views. She is working on a book exploring the central role that experiences of
value play in grounding our normative commitments. She has held fellowships
with the Experience Project funded by the John Templeton Foundation, the
Spencer Foundation, and Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.
Her work has appeared in Ethics, The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical
Studies, and Philosophers’ Imprint. Ebels-Duggan received her BA from the
University of Michigan in 1998 and her Ph.D. from Harvard in 2007.
Kevin Hart holds the Edwin B. Kyle Chair of Christian Thought in the
Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia where he also
holds Courtesy Professorships in the Departments of English and French.
His most recent publications include Kingdoms of God (Indiana University
Press) and Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry
(Bloomsbury). He is the editor of The Essential Writings of Jean-Luc Marion
(Fordham University Press). His poetry is collected in Wild Track: New and
Selected Poems (Notre Dame University Press) and Barefoot (Notre Dame
University Press).
William Hasker is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Huntington Univer-
sity, where he taught from 1966 until 2000. He was the editor of Christian
Scholar’s Review from 1985 to 1994, and the editor of Faith and Philosophy
from 2000 until 2007. He has contributed numerous articles to journals and
reference works, and is the author of Metaphysics (InterVarsity), God, Time, and
Knowledge (Cornell University Press), The Emergent Self (Cornell University
Press), Providence, Evil, and the Openness of God (Routledge), The Triumph
of God Over Evil (InterVarsity), and Metaphysics and the Tri-Personal God
(Oxford University Press).
Jean-Luc Marion is Professor Emeritus at Université Paris-IV (Sorbonne) and
the Greeley Professor of Catholic Studies and Professor of the Philosophy of
Religions and Theology at The University of Chicago. He works primarily in
the history of modern philosophy and contemporary phenomenology. Among
his numerous books are God without Being (University of Chicago Press),
Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenom-
enology (Northwestern University Press), Prolegomena to Charity (Fordham
University Press), The Crossing of the Visible (Stanford University Press), On
the Ego and God (Fordham University Press), The Visible and the Revealed
(Fordham University Press), Negative Certainties (University of Chicago
Press), and Givenness and Revelation (Oxford University Press).
Notes on Contributors xxi

Paul K. Moser is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago. He is
the author of The God Relationship (Cambridge University Press), The Severity
of God (Cambridge University Press), The Evidence for God (Darton, Long-
man and Todd), The Elusive God (Cambridge University Press), Philosophy
after Objectivity (Oxford University Press), and Knowledge and Evidence
(Cambridge University Press). He is co-author of Theory of Knowledge
(Oxford University Press), and editor of Jesus and Philosophy (Cambridge
University Press), The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology (Oxford University
Press), and A Priori Knowledge (Oxford University Press). He is co-editor of
Human Knowledge, 3rd Ed. (Oxford University Press), and The Testimony of
the Spirit (Oxford University Press), among other books. He has published
articles on religious epistemology in such journals as Religious Studies and
The Expository Times, and he is past Editor of the American Philosophical
Quarterly.
Peter Ochs is Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies at the
University of Virginia, where he directs the UVA Research Initiative on
Religion, Politics, and Conflict. Ochs co-founded the Society for Textual
Reasoning and The Society for Scriptural Reasoning; and is a senior editor
of the Stanford University Press book series “Encountering Traditions.”
Among his publications are 200 essays in the areas of Jewish philosophy and
theology, pragmatism and semiotics, the logic of Scripture, religion and
conflict, comparative Abrahamic scriptural traditions, and Jewish-Christian
theological dialogue. Among his books are Religion Without Violence: Teach-
ing and Learning Scriptural Reasoning (in press), Another Reformation: Post-
liberal Christianity and the Jews (Brazos), The Free Church and Israel’s
Covenant (Mennonite Press), Wording a Radiance: Parting Conversations on
God and the Church by Daniel Hardy with D. H. Ford, P. Ochs, and D. Ford
(SCM), Breaking the Tablets: Jewish Theology After Shoah, by David Halivni
with P. Ochs (Rowman & Littlefield), Peirce, Pragmatism and the Logic of
Scripture (Cambridge University Press), and Reasoning after Revelation: Dia-
logues in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy with R. Gibbs and S. Kepnes (West-
view). He is the editor or co-editor of The Return to Scripture in Judaism and
Christianity (Paulist), Understanding the Rabbinic Mind (Scholar’s Press),
Christianity in Jewish Terms (Westview), and Textual Reasonings: Jewish
Philosophy and Text Study (Eerdmans).
Graham Oppy is Professor of Philosophy at Monash University. His authored
books in philosophy of religion include Ontological Arguments and Belief in
God (Cambridge University Press), Arguing about Gods (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press), Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (Cambridge University
Press), Reading Philosophy of Religion (Blackwell, with Michael Scott), The
xxii Notes on Contributors

Best Argument against God (Palgrave Macmillan), Reinventing Philosophy of
Religion (Palgrave Macmillan), and Describing Gods (Cambridge University
Press). His edited books in philosophy of religion include The History of
Western Philosophy of Religion (Acumen and Oxford University Press, with
Nick Trakakis), and Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion
(Routledge). Forthcoming authored works include: Naturalism and Religion
(Routledge), Atheism and Agnosticism (Cambridge University Press), and
Atheism: The Basics (Routledge). Forthcoming edited works include: Inter-
Religious Philosophical Dialogues (Routledge, co-edited with Nick Trakakis),
Ontological Arguments (Cambridge University Press), and Companion to
Atheism and Philosophy (Routledge).
Alvin Plantinga is John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at the
University of Notre Dame. Among his many books are God and Other Minds
(Cornell University Press), The Nature of Necessity (Oxford University Press),
Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford University Press), Where the Conflict
Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press), and
Knowledge and Christian Belief (Eerdmans). He is also a 2017 Templeton Prize
Laureate.
J. L. Schellenberg is Professor of Philosophy at Mount Saint Vincent Univer-
sity and Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Graduate Studies at Dalhousie
University. Published in 1993, his Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason
(Cornell University Press) introduced a new argument for atheism and started
a debate that continues. In 2015 Oxford University Press published a shorter
book by Schellenberg about the debate called The Hiddenness Argument:
Philosophy’s New Challenge to Belief in God. But most of Schellenberg’s
research goes beyond theism/atheism discussions and into more fundamental
investigations in philosophy of religion. The main result is a set of three books
that make a trilogy: Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, The Wisdom to
Doubt: A Justification of Religious Skepticism, and The Will to Imagine:
A Justification of Skeptical Religion, all published by Cornell University
Press. A recent short book from Oxford University Press, Evolutionary Reli-
gion, aims to make the ideas of the trilogy easily accessible for a general
audience, placing them into an evolutionary framework.
J. Aaron Simmons is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Furman University.
Working primarily in philosophy of religion and political philosophy, Sim-
mons has published widely on issues concerning phenomenology, existential-
ism, religious existence, and democratic society. Simmons is the author of God
and the Other: Ethics and Politics After the Theological Turn (Indiana Univer-
sity Press), co-author (with Bruce Ellis Benson) of The New Phenomenology:
A Philosophical Introduction (Bloomsbury), and co-editor of Kierkegaard’s
God and the Good Life (Indiana University Press; with Michael Strawser and
Notes on Contributors xxiii

Stephen Minister), Contemporary Debates in Negative Theology and Philosophy
(Palgrave Macmillan; with Nahum Brown), Phenomenology for the Twenty-
First Century (Palgrave Macmillan; with J. Edward Hackett), Reexamining
Deconstruction and Determinate Religion (Duquesne University Press; with
Stephen Minister), and Kierkegaard and Levinas: Ethics, Politics, and Religion
(Indiana University Press; with David Wood).
Meghan Sullivan is the O’Brien Collegiate Professor of Philosophy at Notre
Dame and the Director of the University Philosophy Requirement. She teaches
courses at all levels, including large introductory courses in philosophy of
religion and ethics and specialized graduate seminars on metaphysics, philo-
sophical logic, and rationality. Sullivan’s research tends to focus on philosoph-
ical problems concerning time, modality, rational planning, and religious
belief (but rarely all four at once). Sullivan is the author of Time Biases (Oxford
University Press) and has published work in many of the leading generalist
philosophy journals, including Noûs, Ethics, and Philosophical Studies.
Charles Taliaferro is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department
of Philosophy at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. He is the author or
editor of over twenty-five books, one of the latest being The Image in Mind:
Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination co-authored with Jil Evans (Con-
tinuum). He is the Editor-in-chief of Open Theology, and serves on the
editorial boards of Religious Studies, Philosophy Compass, and Sophia.
Kevin Timpe presently holds the William Harry Jellema Chair in Christian
Philosophy at Calvin College, and is a former Templeton Research Fellow at
St Peter’s College, Oxford University. His research focuses primarily on the
metaphysics of agency, virtue ethics, philosophy of religion, and the philosophy
of disability. He is the author of Free Will in Philosophical Theology (Blooms-
bury) and Free Will: Sourcehood and Its Alternatives, 2nd Ed. (Bloomsbury). He
has edited a number of volumes, including The Routledge Companion to Free
Will (Routledge), Virtues and their Vices (Oxford University Press), and Free
Will and Theism: Connections, Contingencies, and Concerns (Oxford University
Press). He has published articles in The Journal of Ethics, Philosophical Studies,
American Philosophical Quarterly, Res Philosophica, Religious Studies, and Faith
and Philosophy.
Merold Westphal is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Ford-
ham University. His bachelor’s degree is from Wheaton (Illinois) and his
doctorate from Yale. He has held regular appointments at Yale University,
Hope College, and Fordham University, with visiting positions at Juniata,
Loyola (Maryland), Villanova, Fuller Seminary, and Harvard Divinity School.
He has served as President of the Hegel Society of America and the Søren
Kierkegaard Society, and as Executive Co-Director of the Society for
Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP). He has lectured widely
xxiv Notes on Contributors

in the United States and Europe as well as in China and Brazil. He is editor of
the Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion. He has authored thirteen
books as well as scores of articles and book chapters. His most recent books are
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Faith (Eerdmans) and In Praise of Heteronomy:
Making Room for Revelation (Indiana University Press).
Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor Emeritus of Philosophical
Theology at Yale University, Senior Research Fellow in the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and Honorary
Professor of Australian Catholic University. He graduated from Calvin Col-
lege in 1953 and received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University in
1956. He taught philosophy at Calvin College from 1959 to 1989, and then
joined the faculty of Yale Divinity School, with adjunct appointments in the
Yale philosophy department and religious studies department. He retired at
the end of 2001. During leaves of absence he has taught at the Free University
of Amsterdam, Princeton University, and the University of Notre Dame. He
has been President of the American Philosophical Association (Central
Division) and President of the Society of Christian Philosophers. He is a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the named lectures
he has given are the Wilde Lectures at Oxford, the Gifford Lectures at
St Andrews, and the Taylor Lectures at Yale. His publications include Art in
Action (Eerdmans), Lament for a Son (Eerdmans), Justice: Rights and Wrongs
(Princeton University Press), Justice in Love (Eerdmans), Journey toward
Justice (Baker), The God We Worship (Eerdmans), Art Rethought (Oxford
University Press), and Acting Liturgically (Oxford University Press).
Introduction
Why This? Why Now?
J. Aaron Simmons
W H Y T H I S BOOK?
Although it might seem that the topic of Christian philosophy should only be
of interest to Christian philosophers, or alternatively perhaps to atheist philo-
sophers who are intent on showing the falsity of the beliefs affirmed within the
Christian tradition, this is far from the case. When understood as raising a
variety of important meta-philosophical questions, the topic of Christian
philosophy presents much more than an in-group debate among those who
find themselves within the same religious or philosophical “family,” as it were.
Instead, the very idea of Christian philosophy requires us to reflect both on the
nature of philosophizing itself as a human practice and also on the epistemic
ramifications of the evidential commitments allowed to operate therein.
The notion of Christian philosophy is simply one instance of a wide variety
of different types of philosophies that could be presented for our consider-
ation: Jewish, Islamic, Buddhist, etc. Moreover, and this is important, the
possibilities for such determinate philosophies reach far beyond frameworks
that have traditionally been termed “religious.” It is common to find discus-
sions of different geographic contexts in relation to philosophical discourse:
Irish philosophy, American philosophy, Australian philosophy, Chinese phil-
osophy, etc. Additionally, we often see labels referring to particular belief com-
mitments attending to one’s identity: Feminist philosophy, African American
philosophy, Queer theory, etc. And we could take things even further in a variety
of directions. For example, as someone who was born and raised in the American
Southeast, I have long wondered about the possibility of “Southern philosophy,”
or as a fan of the Florida State University Seminoles, what about “FSU Lovers
Philosophy”?
2 J. Aaron Simmons
Before rejecting such ideas out of hand as a ridiculous overreach, consider
that in relation to the last suggestion, in particular, scholars of religion have
frequently offered collegiate sports (especially football in the American South)
as a possible contender for what might be viewed as counting as a “religion” in
many of the respects usually offered as definitive of the category. The point is
that asking into any sort of determinate adjectivally constructed philosophical
discourse requires us to take stands on what sorts of descriptors are or are not
appropriate modifiers of something generally termed “philosophy.” Drawing
on Jacques Maritain, we might say that “ . . . we must distinguish between the
nature of philosophy, or what it is in itself, and the state in which it exists in
real fact, historically, in the human subject, and which pertains to its concrete
conditions of existence and exercise” (Maritain 1955, pp. 11–12). Although
I would take issue with the disciplinary essentialism that Maritain seems to
encourage, his idea that philosophy is the underlying category being described,
such that “Christian,” or “Jewish,” or “Analytic,” or “Southern,” etc., would be
different historical “states” in which this category can be/has been deployed as
an historical project, is a helpful framework for our discussion here.
What makes this consideration of the appropriate contours of philosophical
discourse so difficult is that it often depends on prior conceptual demarcations
that are, themselves, at stake and yet at use in the very discussion. In other
words, what counts as philosophy’s “nature” is itself precisely something that
has already been articulated by some prior adjectivally demarcated commu-
nity. So, even though it seems that “Christian philosophy” is immediately
more plausible than “FSU Lovers philosophy,” it is not obvious why this is the
case. Indeed, both would be defined by an historical community that consists
of determinate commitments (“God loves me”; “FSU is better than Alabama”),
by propositional beliefs (“Jesus died for our sins”; “Bobby Bowden is the best
coach in history”), by enacted rituals (liturgical practice or the understanding
of sacraments; the “chop” or Chief Osceola and Renegade dropping the spear
at midfield), and by insider vocabularies (“In the name of the Father, the Son,
and the Holy Spirit”; “The Choke in Doak” or “Wide Right”).
One might object at this point that, especially in light of Maritain’s distinc-
tion, the key difference is not so much a matter of content, but of history.
In this way, FSU Lovers philosophy might be like Alvin Plantinga’s (1998,
pp. 149–52; see Chapter 1 of the present volume) example of “The Great
Pumpkin” such that the lack of an historical community committed deeply
enough to the idea to turn it into a philosophical subcategory is why it gains no
traction in our current context. Perhaps. But, if this is right, then are we really
willing, in principle, to allow that there are no constraints on philosophical
methodology, assumptions, and collective identity? Even if there is no extra-
social essence to philosophy’s “nature,” that doesn’t entail that philosophy can
mean just whatever one wants it to mean. As Jacques Derrida indicates at
various points in his authorship, being invested in the debate about what

counts as philosophy is probably one of the best indicators of one’s being a
philosopher. That said, are we really prepared to admit of an equivalency
between Christian philosophy and Toyota Truck Drivers philosophy, say? Or,
should we draw a line of legitimacy between Chinese philosophy and Metal-
head philosophy, for example?
As a Toyota truck driver, a lover of extreme heavy metal, and also a
professional philosopher, I might fit into these unlikely groups and yet such
ideas give me significant pause. But why? Would simply being a philosopher
who also loves FSU make me, by default, a practitioner of FSU Lovers
philosophy in the way that some have suggested that Christian philosophy is
not a distinct sort of philosophy, but more a recognition of a distinctive
characteristic of the philosophers doing it? Otherwise asked, would any
philosopher who drives a Toyota truck and is a metalhead foster immediate
identities in these other groups? Even if that were the case, we would imme-
diately face problems of ranking our own self-identifications. Consider, here,
that Plantinga (1998) suggests that Christianity, and a Christian’s loyalty to
the Christian community, should take precedence over other options, in
particular one’s loyalty to the “secular” philosophical community. Despite
his account on this front, though, there are good reasons not to be immedi-
ately convinced he is right about this. Namely, if I self-select to allow my being
a metalhead or a truck driver to be maximally definitive of how I self-identify,
then are there really no necessary conditions to be articulated regarding the
philosophical import of such orientations?
We must ask, again, then, can just anything count as a reasonable subcat-
egory of philosophical discourse? Should any assumption whatsoever be
allowed as an acceptable premise so long as there are enough other folks to
agree with you? Someone like Richard Rorty might provide good reasons to
think that perhaps such community definition is the right way to go, but
specifying the rationale for why or why not, and the conditions under which
some sort of threshold could be articulated is not clear cut. Indeed, lines might
be needed not in order to exclude others from participation in one’s own
philosophical community, but to foster coherence in the philosophical com-
munity, as such. Whether siding with Rorty or not, if we return to Maritain’s
distinction between nature and state, we can still rightly admit that regardless
of the adjectival descriptor, and irrespective of the social implications of such
descriptors, the primary thing that unites all such possibilities for philosoph-
ical categorization is that they are all presenting themselves as instances of
philosophy.
Maybe I am overstating the complexity of such issues, however. One could
rightly point out that, importantly, not all adjectival descriptions are indicators
of the same sort of community allegiance. Surely being a metalhead and being
a Christian are not the same sort of existential identity markers—regardless of
the degree to which one identifies with them. Alternatively, identifying as a
4 J. Aaron Simmons
particular gender or as from a distinct nationality, say, and identifying as an
FSU lover don’t seem to involve the same sort of ideological framework and
certainly don’t all face the same sort of social ramifications. So, am I guilty of
an equivocation here?
Well, if so, then it could be due to the suggestion that “religious” philoso-
phies are distinct, and perhaps legitimate, in ways these other examples are
not, precisely because “religion” is rightly considered as singularly different
from other sorts of cultural beliefs, identities, and practices. Yet, were philo-
sophers more often to read work occurring in critical theory of religion, for
example, the assumption that the category of “religion” is stable enough to
allow for such easy demarcation would likely be quickly challenged. Scholars
such as Jonathan Z. Smith (1982, 2004), Russell McCutcheon (1997, 2003),
Timothy Fitzgerald (2000), and Tomoko Masuzawa (2005), just to name a few,
have all offered important critiques of the very idea that the category of
“religion” is a helpful social designator for discrete phenomena. Alternatively,
even for those who do think that the category of “religion” does important
scholarly work as a social marker within broadly “realist” frameworks, as I am
inclined to do (see Simmons 2018), the specific way of conceiving that
category so that such critical work could be done remains a matter of sub-
stantive debate (see Schilbrack 2014).
I readily admit that we are not going to settle these definitional issues
regarding “religion” here, and the success of this volume does not hang on
being able to do so. Nonetheless, it is sensible to try to distinguish between
philosophies that are organized around different methodologies—e.g., process,
phenomenological, existential, feminist, queer theoretical, logical positivist,
etc.—and those that are defined by prior evidential authorities (such as the
Church, Revelation, or sacred texts) as seems to be the case with many
“religious” approaches. And yet, despite being a reasonable, and perhaps
necessary, way to understand things, it also appears to be the case that some
of what distinguishes these various methodologies is a disagreement about
what deeply held assumptions get to count as immediately authoritatively/
evidentially legitimate within a broader community of inquiry (e.g., what sorts
of experience, what voices, what perspectives, what sorts of understandings of
what counts as good, just, legitimate, etc., are already operative within such
spaces). In this way, Merold Westphal (2009) rightly presents the questions
“Whose community? Which interpretation?” as crucial not only for figuring
out how to move forward in conversation with others, but also for finding
out where it is that we already are ourselves. That said, I do think that
distinctions can be drawn between more and less legitimate starting points
for philosophy, and I contend that it is philosophically important to do so.
My point is simply that there is nothing obvious about how one does this and
this difficulty is at stake in the idea of Christian philosophy as a discursive
and disciplinary possibility.

Ultimately, then, the idea of any particular adjectivally determinate philo-
sophical community/approach confronts us as a decision regarding the task of
philosophy more broadly, on the one hand, and the specific content that
should be allowed to operate as evidentially authoritative for it, on the other
hand. Because Christianity, in particular, does so prominently get considered
as definitionally significant in distinct ways, indeed, in many ways it is this
cultural judgment that underwrites Plantinga’s prioritizing of Christian
identity, then we who find ourselves within the cultural tradition informed
by such a judgment are faced with a decision regarding the idea of Christian
philosophy. Étienne Gilson nicely expresses the historical contingency of this
situation:
All love of wisdom so understood is philosophy. There are, therefore, a great

many different ways of philosophizing, and many of them are unrelated to
Christianity. This simply is a fact. The whole body of Greek philosophical
speculation, from the fourth century B.C. to the beginning of the Christian era,
came too soon to be able to see the world in light of the Christian revelation. In
our own day, a great many men choose to philosophize, as they say, in the light of
natural reason alone, unaided by any sort of religious belief or revelation. The
ancient Greeks had no choice, so that problem does not arise in so far as they are
concerned; today we do have a choice, and there is for us a problem that deserves
to be investigated. (Gilson 1957, p. 177)
For Gilson, like Maritain, a specifically Christian philosophy is a product of a

specifically Christian history. Without this determinate revelational context,
this particular possibility for philosophizing would not arise. In this sense, we
can see that other philosophies are in similar situations: feminist philosophy
occurs as a result of a history of patriarchy, queer theory occurs in the context
of heteronormative culture, African American philosophy and critical race
theory depend on a history of racial marginalization, and even more straight-
forwardly methodological approaches, such as phenomenological philosophy,
operate in relation to those who have been historically named as significant by
that methodological approach (e.g., to do phenomenology is always to work in
the light of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, etc.). Such historical
location is, importantly, the case regardless of where one comes down in
relation to a specific tradition itself. Even a critic of phenomenology, for
example, would have to be working in light of the tradition as operative in
ways such that critique of it would be possible (for more on such issues, see
Simmons and Benson 2013; see also Simmons and Hackett 2016).
As trivial as it is to say this, often philosophers need to be reminded that no
determinate philosophical practice occurs outside of a social context in which
that practice is situated and framed as meaningful. Simply put, decisions are
never absolutely naïve. As Nicholas Wolterstorff notes, “we are all profoundly
historical creatures” (1984, p. 97). As such, our intellectual activities will always
6 J. Aaron Simmons
reflect those histories. In this sense, following Jean-Luc Marion’s (2002) account
of the “givenness” of reality, we might say that all inquiry occurs in light of a
specific revelational, or epistemic, context in which the world is presented,
interpreted, and engaged. Nothing about this conception of “revelation” needs
to be interpreted as determinately “religious,” but simply as a fact about the
epistemic dimensions of our social location as human inquirers. As just one
example, consider that within the United States, the Trump presidency
seems to expose not so much different social approaches to specific policies,
but instead fundamentally different conceptions of reality. Indeed, both his
supporters and his critics often seem to claim that their positions should be
obvious to any rational person. Yet, as Heidegger’s own life demonstrated in
problematic detail, hermeneutic circles are not politically innocuous.
Just because a particular tradition is only ever historically available as
situated in a specific revelational/epistemic context, as it were, this does not
mean that there should be a philosophy associated with it as a legitimate
option for professional discourse. Whatever the specifics of the case, argu-
ments are needed to justify starting in one place rather than in another.
Indeed, even the “Reformed epistemological” approach, say, which suggests
basic beliefs in God can operate immediately within one’s philosophical life
without additional reasons, still requires an argument that such immediacy is
appropriate in relation to “proper basicality.” Plantinga’s (1967) analogy
argument provided in God and Other Minds or William Alston’s (1991)
work drawing similarities between perceptional perception and Christian
perception are both examples of the argumentative requirements that might
attend any potentially legitimate starting point for philosophical inquiry.
Using a different example, we might note that fideism regarding religious
belief, whether in its strong or weak varieties, may eschew giving reasons for
those specific beliefs, but as a methodological commitment, it still requires
some sort of evidentialist support in order to stand as a serious contender for
how philosophically to view the epistemic requirements of religious belief in
the first place. Alternatively, an outright rejection of evidentialism, in order
not to be absolutely groundless—such that it amounts to not much more than
an expression of the same sort of preference that one would offer when
recommending a particular sort of jam for one’s toast—still demands some
sort of evidential support. Accordingly, wherever one comes down on the idea
of Christian philosophy, and crucially the contributors to this volume offer a
variety of views on this, it is important that one be able to give an account of
why that view, rather than some other view, is the best alternative. In this way,
regardless of our other self-identifying category commitments (I am a Chris-
tian, a Toyota truck driver, a metalhead, a Southerner, and much more),
philosophers at least owe each other argumentative support for how they
begin, and how they move forward, in the name of philosophy. It is in this
way that what counts as “philosophy” continues to get worked out, stabilized,

challenged, and revised in the course of our activities doing what has trad-
itionally been called “philosophy.”
According to Gilson, the idea of “loving wisdom” is perhaps the only non-
argumentative default-setting in relation to philosophy. For him, all other
assumptions seem to require evidential support (“I am able to assume x
because of y”), or conditional deployment (“if x is the case, then what
follows?”). Nonetheless, merely to start with x because one is an x-lover
seems problematic, and yet specifying exactly why and in what cases this is
more of a problem than in others requires that we are somehow already doing
philosophy in asking the question of what counts as philosophy. Indeed, even
the idea of “loving wisdom” only signifies due to a particular conception of
love and of wisdom that we have largely inherited from a specifically Greek
framework. What Gianni Vattimo says regarding religious belief, we should
say about philosophical inquiry more broadly: none of us starts from zero (see
Vattimo 1999, 2002). As a Sartrean might say, we are always already em-
barked. But, just because we find ourselves already at sea doesn’t mean that we
must, necessarily, continue to sail in the current direction. We can always
change course. C. S. Lewis was right to contend that sometimes the quickest
way to correct an error is to return to where you are confident about your
direction and then proceed differently from there. Interestingly, this is a basic
view that cuts across traditional philosophical oppositions. It can be found in
Heidegger’s (2010) attempt to return to the Greeks in the effort to rethink
Western ontology, Derrida’s (1978, 1982) account of deconstructing the
metaphysics of presence in order to figure out where we already find ourselves,
as well as Plantinga’s (1982) critique of the legacy of Kantian anti-realism, and
Marilyn McCord Adams’s (1999) encouragement that all philosophers be
historians. It is worth noting, here, as an important indication that historical
continental and analytic separations need not characterize contemporary
philosophy of religion, that Adams even mentions Heidegger in this regard:
“To paraphrase Heidegger, Christian philosophers who engage in but do not
study the history of Christian theology and philosophy are bound to repeat it!”
(McCord Adams 1999, p. 51). As it concerns Christian philosophy, McCord
Adams’s (and Heidegger’s) basic insight speaks to the fact that even though
the energy in recent years seems to be clearly in favor of a deepening and
expansion of Christian philosophy, we would do well, as philosophers, but also
for many of us as Christians!, not to be too quickly swept up in the currents
pulling at us.
Accordingly, from its inception, I have never understood the present
volume to be targeted at a particularly Christian audience (although some of
the individual essays are directed primarily to such readers), but instead as
aimed at all philosophers invested in careful reflection about the historical
context in which their philosophical activities not only occur, but also are
judged to be meaningful or not. In light of the increasingly subdivided
8 J. Aaron Simmons
categorization of philosophical practice and the proliferation of adjectivally
determinate approaches to that practice, often with deleterious results in an
increasingly splintered philosophical community, I find this book to be much
needed indeed. The goal is not to find some sort of unifying commitment
among Christian philosophers, or about Christian philosophy by all philo-
sophers, but to realize that the questions that underlie much of the divisions on
this topic are themselves largely shared within the philosophical community—
regardless of philosophical tradition, methodological approach, religious iden-
tity, or political orientation.
SO, WHY ANOTHER VOLUME ON CHRISTIAN

PHILOSOPHY?
A significant amount of work has historically been done in the direction of

meta-philosophical reflection about fundamental philosophical commitments,
assumptions, and loyalties under the guise of discussions regarding the task
and stakes of “Christian philosophy” (e.g., see Morris 1988; Vesey 1989; Beaty
1990; Ambrosio 1999). When taken alongside the increasing prominence of
Christian philosophy as a guiding rubric for so much work occurring in
philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, etc., it is worth
wrestling with the current state of Christian philosophy as a striking example
both of an historically determinate community, and also of the potential
dangers of allowing an adjectivally determinate descriptor to become taken
for granted within the play of historical contingency.
Even though there have always been critics of Christian philosophy, from
both inside the Christian community and also from outside of it (see Owens
1990; Sweeney 1997), the influence of such movements as “analytic theology,”
groups such as the Society of Christian Philosophers, and journals such as
Faith and Philosophy has entirely changed the situation faced by those who
would defend Christian philosophy as a determinate and distinct philosoph-
ical practice and identity. No longer is Christian philosophy under attack and
facing widespread exclusion, as is often presented as having been the case
during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Consider Thomas
V. Morris’s comment in 1988: “Little more than a decade ago, philosophy of
religion was a backwater. Moreover, you could count the number of known or
suspected Christian philosophers at the cutting edge of philosophical research
on one hand” (Morris 1988, p. ix). Today, however, as Plantinga himself
admits, Christian philosophy has become so prominent that “a potential
danger that it now faces is triumphalism” (Plantinga 2011, p. 268). This new
situation demands a new consideration of the tendencies of our professional

practice. As I suggest elsewhere, what was appropriate in one’s youth may not
be similarly appropriate in one’s middle age (see Simmons 2017).
The history of recent Christian philosophy is well known and often
recounted and so going into detail on this point is unnecessary here. But, to
situate the present volume, a brief account of some of the highlights of that
narrative might be helpful. Despite a long series of historical debates in this
area prominently featuring such thinkers as Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas,
Peter Damien, and many, many others (for a brief recounting of many
moves in this tradition, see Lynch 1968), perhaps we can identify three key
moments in the modern manifestation of this discussion. First, we could stress
the importance of the publication of Aeterni Patris in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII in
bringing the idea of Christian philosophy back to prominence among Catholic
philosophers and historians. Second, Émile Bréhier’s 1928 lectures in Brussels,
“Y-a-t-il une philosophie chrétienne” (cited as Bréhier 1931; see also Lynch
1968, p. 25), along with important responses by Gilson and Maritain, among
many others throughout the 1930s, served to lay out the key alternative views
of Christian philosophy that have largely remained the main options in play
today (see Sadler 2011). As just one example of the way in which Christian
philosophy was generally in the air at this time, consider that Leonard
Hodgson (cited as 1969) published Essays in Christian Philosophy in 1930
and presents the idea as if it were not entirely out of step with the general
philosophical discourse of the time. Third, in many ways, the contemporary
era of Christian philosophy can date its origin to the 1983 presentation of
Plantinga’s field-defining essay, “Advice to Christian Philosophers” (see
Chapter 1 of the present volume), which served as his inaugural address on
being appointed the John A. O’Brien Chair of Philosophy at Notre Dame.
Importantly, none of these events can be considered in isolation. They are
all part of broader trends and other important events that would take us too
far afield to survey here. Nonetheless, Plantinga’s “Advice” is of special note
because, according to his account, the situation in philosophy in the middle
of the twentieth century was such that the long shadows of classical foun-
dationalism, logical positivism, and strict evidentialism combined to make
the notion of confessional theological starting points for philosophical
reflection an untenable idea. Due to the work of thinkers affiliated with
“Reformed epistemology,” however, the period from the 1960s through the
early 1980s witnessed significant and sustained criticisms of these roadblocks
to the academic respectability of Christian philosophy as a distinct project.
As a result of the work of William Alston, Wolterstorff, Plantinga, and
others, things had begun to change such that Plantinga could deliver his
“Advice” in 1983 as a call to a generation of young philosophers not to hide
their Christian light under the bushel of philosophical legitimacy, but in-
stead to realize that they were well within their “epistemic rights” to inhabit
their confessional identity as a proper starting point for philosophical
10 J. Aaron Simmons
reflection. Not unimportantly, he offered this call upon being appointed to
an endowed chair in philosophy. The symbolic status of making such a
proclamation in that particular disciplinary context, and in light of Notre
Dame’s institutional history and religious tradition, should not be over-
looked. Even if no one had paid attention to what Plantinga said, that he
said what he said there and then is crucial. Importantly, though, people did
pay attention to what he said and that single essay, though certainly couched
within Plantinga’s overall influential authorship, has deeply marked the
received history of Christian philosophy as no longer being something for
which one must contend due to a perceived existential threat from the philo-
sophical establishment.
As testament to the sort of impact that this generally Reformed approach
has had in philosophy of religion generally, consider Wolterstorff ’s claim that:
Nowadays students in introductory philosophy of religion courses toss about with
great facility the terms ‘evidentialism’ and ‘properly basic,’ often to the puzzle-
ment of those outside the field; the terms now belong to the patois of the
discipline. It was not so before the early 1980s. (Wolterstorff 2011, p. 258)
Clearly, things have changed significantly between the 1950s when Plantinga
was in graduate school and the 1980s when he wrote that “we who are Christians
and propose to be philosophers” must not “rest content with being philosophers
who happen, incidentally, to be Christians,” but instead to “strive to be Christian
philosophers” who operate with “integrity, independence, and Christian bold-
ness” (Plantinga 1998, p. 315). Although having received serious criticism,
Plantinga’s approach to Christian philosophy remains the keystone to how
the debates in this area are framed and considered.
At least two generations of philosophers have subsequently inherited the
above narrative of Plantinga’s importance and of the resurgence of Christian
philosophy, so the potential triumphalism about which Plantinga worries is, in
many respects, a result of the fact that his own account of Christian philoso-
phy has been taken for granted by so many. Maybe it has won the day, and
maybe it should have. Yet, finding ourselves more than thirty years after
Plantinga’s “Advice,” we would do well to revisit the central questions that
animated the debates regarding Christian philosophy long before Plantinga’s
own intervention—indeed, his own account in many ways repeats the main
points of Gilson’s account of Christian philosophy over against Bréhier’s, or
alternatively we might say that Plantinga sides with Augustine and Anselm
rather than Aquinas regarding the porous distinction between philosophy and
theology. So, in the attempt to engage important meta-philosophical questions
about the idea of specific revelational/epistemic contexts as informing general
philosophical practice, the present volume is also devoted to exploring the
state of Christian philosophy today in light of where Christianity has been and
philosophy should go.
ALTERNATIVE A PPROACHES?
Alternatives abound regarding what sort of “advice” one should follow re-
garding the idea of Christian philosophy. Importantly, the history of recent
Christian philosophy of religion could look very differently were we to con-
sider alternatives such as those offered by Jean-Luc Marion in his essay,
“Christian Philosophy: Hermeneutic or Heuristic,” which was presented at
Georgetown University as part of a conference on “The Question of Christian
Philosophy Today” (originally presented in 1993, cited as in Marion 2008, and
included in the present volume as Chapter 2; for the volume emerging out of
that conference, see Ambrosio 1999). Or, as other options, we might consider
Merold Westphal’s (1973) “Prolegomena to any Future Philosophy of Religion
that Will Come Forth as Prophecy,” which predates Plantinga’s essay by a decade,
or D. Z. Phillips’s (1988) own “Advice to Philosophers who are Christians.”
Drawing heavily on Kierkegaard and phenomenology, respectively, West-
phal and Marion offer alternative visions for how to situate confessional
identities in academic philosophy. Yet, those texts have largely been over-
looked by the Christian (analytic) philosophy establishment. Similarly, Phil-
lips’s “advice” tracks more with Bréhier/Aquinas than with Gilson and yet has
not gained nearly the traction that Plantinga’s more Gilsonian/Anselmian
account has. However, like many other things, histories are most substantive
when contested. Maybe things could be otherwise than they are now? Perhaps
they should be? Asking such questions requires appreciating where one is—as
Heidegger suggests, it is important to catch up to where we are already so that,
if need be, we can go forward differently.
So, here we are, more than thirty years after Plantinga offered his “advice,”
nearly 100 years since the Bréhier/Gilson debates, and many centuries after the
medieval discussions that serve as the background for all of the contemporary
discussion. The situation has indeed changed as time has passed. A narrative
of exclusion in the 1950s has given way to a narrative of triumph in the 2000s.
Whereas in the early 1980s being a confessional Christian might have been
viewed as a liability in one’s philosophical career, which again speaks to the
importance of Plantinga’s own boldness, now it can sometimes seem to be a
requirement for those who would work primarily in academic philosophy of
religion. Whether this change of fortunes should be viewed as a positive
development or not depends on who you ask.
Although Christian philosophers find themselves empowered within aca-
demic philosophy, at what cost does such empowerment occur? Even if
Christian philosophy is no longer easily viewed as non-philosophy, exactly
how it is distinct from Christian theology is often difficult to tell. Indeed,
recent trends in Analytic Theology have not only further blurred the line
between philosophy and theology, but also further entrenched analytic phil-
osophy as the primary mode in which Christian philosophy is understood to
12 J. Aaron Simmons
occur (and perhaps ought to occur) (see, for example, Chapter 11 in the
present volume). Yet, this is a strikingly odd reality for those familiar with
continental traditions (especially existentialism and phenomenology) that are
often rich archives of Christian intellectual work.¹ But this general point
reaches far beyond a mere analytic/continental “divide.” At present, one is
hard pressed to find alternative philosophical traditions (phenomenology,
deconstruction, critical theory, pragmatism, process, etc.) on prominent dis-
play in the main journals in philosophy of religion or on the conference
programs for Society of Christian Philosophers meetings. Such lack may or
may not represent any vice, but could be merely a matter of diverse streams of
thought occurring separately. Indeed, the Society for Continental Philosophy
and Theology (SCPT), for example, offers sustained and significant oppor-
tunity for doing philosophy of religion in a more continental philosophical
framework. And yet, many members of the SCPT are confessional Christians
and so might be expected to be as active in the SCP as their analytic colleagues,
yet this is not the case with any regularity.
Moreover, the current situation is one in which not only analytic philoso-
phy is taken as normative for Christian philosophy, but also one in which
“Christianity” is understood rather narrowly and primarily assumes Reformed
or Catholic conceptions of confessional identity. Christian traditions such as
Pentecostalism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and those on display in global Liberation-
ist communities are infrequent participants in the main debates in what is
considered to be mainstream Christian philosophy (see Chapters 8 and 12 in
the present volume). Further, with some exceptions, engagement between
Christian philosophy and non-Christian religious traditions is surprisingly
rare within the philosophical literature. For example, although some philoso-
phy of religion textbooks do have chapters devoted to a variety of the world’s
religious traditions, usually these are separated out as surveys of those reli-
gions. Rarely is there a straightforward consideration of a philosophical issue
that draws on, or makes productive comparison among, religious traditions.
Indeed, usually the coin of the realm, as it were, are the assumptions attending
to classical theism as presented in the historical monotheisms. Although some
philosophical texts do at least take some steps in the direction of comparative
religious studies (see especially Bilimoria and Irvine 2009; Wildman 2010;
Knepper 2013; and Schilbrack 2014; see also, Meister and Copan 2007; Eshleman
2008; Taliaferro, Draper, and Quinn 2010), overall, one finds that the debates
¹ For a general survey of the philosophical possibilities of such work, see Simmons and
Benson (2013). As just a few examples of continentally-oriented Christian approaches to
philosophical topics in this area, see Alcoff and Caputo (2011); Chrétien (2015); and Wells
(2017). As in analytic thought, critiques of such work also abound. As just one especially
productive critical reading, see Schrijvers (2016).

are primarily dominated by analytic defenses and critiques of classical theism
understood according to only a few particular Christian expressions.
Given this situation, although Christian philosophy seems no longer to be
under existential threat, it is in need of careful self-reflection about the threat it
potentially poses to alternative strains in philosophy of religion that might
otherwise be able to flourish without the potentially problematic hegemony
that Christian philosophy can reasonably be understood to have cultivated.
The present volume attempts to engage in such self-reflection by inviting
scholars to think about the task and idea of Christian philosophy, today, and
the promising possibilities and dangerous temptations that await it, tomorrow.
Accordingly, the guiding questions that were put to the contributors to this
volume are: “What is Christian philosophy?” and “What should Christian
philosophy become?” Answers to both questions are wide-ranging and im-
portantly divergent from each other. Thus, this volume demonstrates that
these questions are still very much alive in contemporary philosophy despite
the tendency toward “triumphalism” about which Plantinga rightly worries.
ON THE ORIGINS AND AIMS OF THIS VO LUME
This volume emerged out of a very successful conference that was held in
March 2014 at Trinity Christian College. The conference was a joint meeting
of the Society of Christian Philosophers and the Society of Continental
Philosophy and Theology and organized by Stephen Lake and Aron Re-
ppmann. Were it not for the work of Lake and Reppmann, that conference
and, subsequently, this volume would never have happened. Focused on the
question “What is Christian Philosophy?” the conference marked the thirtieth
anniversary of the publication of Alvin Plantinga’s “Advice to Christian Philo-
sophers.” Importantly, though, this event was not merely a matter of looking
back, but of looking forward by taking stock of where we are as philosophers
and, for many though certainly not all participants in the conference, also
as Christians.
Unsurprisingly, at the conference, there was quite a bit of constructive, while
critical, conversation about what it even means to be a “Christian philosopher,”
whether such an adjectival determinate community even makes sense, and how
Christians ought to practice philosophy moving forward in light of these
debates. Hence, the question “What is Christian philosophy?” was answered
in a variety of ways and yielded a range of different visions for what Christian
philosophy is and might need to become. The event was remarkable in the way
that it fostered conversation across philosophical traditions, methodologies, and
cultural frames. This volume aims to do something similar for a larger audience.
14 J. Aaron Simmons
In summary, then, the broad aims of this volume are two-fold: (1) To
survey where Christian philosophy has been and what it has become in the
contemporary philosophical landscape; (2) To consider what Christian phil-
osophy should be and what role it should play in the future of philosophical
inquiry. In order to recognize the diversity of possible views on both the
identity and future of Christian philosophy, the contributors are scholars
from a wide range of backgrounds and orientations. Contributors include
non-Christians as well as Christians (including a broad range of Christian
identities), women as well as men, established as well as emerging scholars,
and analytic as well as continental philosophers. The volume as a whole takes
no unified stance on methodology or outcome, but merely on the importance
of critical reflection on the identity and task of Christian philosophy in the
contemporary world.
The volume proceeds in three movements, which are reflected in its subtitle:
Conceptions, Continuations, and Challenges. First, in Part I, “Conceptions,”
Alvin Plantinga, Jean-Luc Marion, Kyla Ebels-Duggan, Merold Westphal,
Bruce Ellis Benson, and Kevin Hart all offer reflections on what Christian
philosophy has historically been and, in its best instantiations, should be. The
specifics of such conceptions are wide-ranging, but all speak to the important
dialogical task of philosophy as inspired by one’s existential identity. The first
part, thus, collectively offers an important reminder that Christian philosophy
should never become so concerned with “objectivity” that it forgets that
Christianity is not simply about propositional affirmation, but also a matter
of lived trust.
In Part II, “Continuations,” Charles Taliaferro, Neal DeRoo, Kevin Timpe,
Meghan Sullivan, and Trent Dougherty all offer accounts of possible futures
for Christian philosophy in response to particular concerns—namely, the idea
of dedication, postmodern culture, disability studies, virtuous pedagogy, and
specific questions opened by analytic theology.
Part III, “Challenges,” features essays by J. Aaron Simmons, Paul K. Moser,
J. L. Schellenberg, Graham Oppy, and Peter Ochs. The challenges presented by
each of the essays in this final section are different in each case and respond to
specific worries about the state of contemporary Christian philosophy from a
variety of philosophical methodologies and religious orientations. In particu-
lar, the challenges stem from attending to the responsibilities of power, the
implications of Christocentric existence, the importance of delineating bound-
aries of disciplinary discourse, the specific historical identity of philosophical
inquiry, and the temptation to self-certainty. The volume concludes with a
response to these critical chapters in Part III by William Hasker.
It is quite plausible that what critical theorists of religion have said of
religion, more broadly, ought to be said of Christian philosophy more specif-
ically. Namely, perhaps there is no stable thing that Christian philosophy is
and no single future for Christian philosophy. Maybe Maritain was wrong to

suggest that philosophy has a “nature” and that Christian philosophy is a
particularly productive “state” in which that nature can then play out. Alter-
natively, perhaps Plantinga has been so widely embraced precisely because he
was right about things. Only time will tell, but we philosophers have a
responsibility not to be passive in relation to that time, but actively to invest
ourselves in offering good reasons that it should unfold in one direction rather
than in another.
All of the essays in this volume support the idea that Christian philosophy
reflects a plural conception that can invite a variety of possible interpretations.
Nonetheless, considering such dynamism offers important resources and can
stand as impetus for better understanding Christian philosophy here and
now. Whether or not one identifies as a Christian, this volume undertakes
the task of envisioning the philosophical stakes of starting with different
historical frameworks, revelational/epistemic contexts, and community iden-
tities as we all somehow engage in the shared practice of what has been
called “philosophy.”
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Gilson, Étienne. 1957. A Gilson Reader. Ed. Anton C. Pegis. Garden City, NY: Hanover
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Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh, with revisions by
Dennis J. Schmidt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Hodgson, Leonard. 1969 (originally published in 1930). Essays in Christian Philosophy.
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New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Sons.
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Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
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Religion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 2002. Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness. Trans.
Jeffrey L. Kosky. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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and others. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
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H. Flannery. New York, NY: Philosophical Library.
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University of Chicago Press.
Meister, Chad and Paul Copan, eds. 2007. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of
Religion. London and New York, NY: Routledge.
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University of Notre Dame Press.
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University of America Press.
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F. Sennett. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans.
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3 (July): 267–8.
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Part I
Conceptions
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being taken in at one glance. But already it appears heavier and
richer in the ornament of the Imperial Fora (Nerva’s, Trajan’s) and
that of the temple of Mars Ultor; the organic disposition has become
so complicated that, as a rule, it requires to be studied, and the
tendency to fill up the surfaces appears. In Byzantine art—of which
Riegl thirty years ago noticed the “latent Saracenic character” though
he had no suspicion of the connexion brought to light here—the
acanthus leaf was broken up into endless tendril-work which (as in
Hagia Sophia) is disposed quite inorganically over whole surfaces.
To the Classical motive are added the old-Aramæan vine and palm
leaves, which have already played a part in Jewish ornamentation.
The interlaced borders of “Late-Roman” mosaic pavements and
sarcophagus-edges, and even geometrical plane-patterns are
introduced, and finally, throughout the Persian-Anatolian world,
mobility and bizarrerie culminate in the Arabesque. This is the
genuine Magian motive—anti-plastic to the last degree, hostile to the
pictorial and to the bodily alike. Itself bodiless, it disembodies the
object over which its endless richness of web is drawn. A
masterpiece of this kind—a piece of architecture completely opened
out into Ornamentation—is the façade of the Castle of Mashetta in
Moab built by the Ghassanids.[268] The craft-art of Byzantine-Islamic
style (hitherto called Lombard, Frankish, Celtic or Old-Nordic) which
invaded the whole youthful West and dominated the Carolingian
Empire, was largely practised by Oriental craftsmen or imported as
patterns for our own weavers, metal-workers and armourers.[269]
Ravenna, Lucca, Venice, Granada, Palermo were the efficient
centres of this then highly-civilized form-language; in the year 1000,
when in the North the forms of a new Culture were already being
developed and established, Italy was still entirely dominated by it.
Take, lastly, the changed point of view towards the human body.
With the victory of the Arabian world-feeling, men’s conception of it
underwent a complete revolution. In almost every Roman head of
the period 100-250 that the Vatican Collection contains, one may
perceive the opposition of Apollinian and Magian feeling, and of
muscular position and “look” as different bases of expression. Even
in Rome itself, since Hadrian, the sculptor made constant use of the
drill, an instrument which was wholly repugnant to the Euclidean
feeling towards stone—for whereas the chisel brings out the limiting
surfaces and ipso facto affirms the corporeal and material nature of
the marble block, the drill, in breaking the surfaces and creating
effects of light and shade, denies it; and accordingly the sculptors,
be they Christian or “pagan,” lose the old feeling for the phenomenon
of the naked body. One has only to look at the shallow and empty
Antinous statues—and yet these were quite definitely “Classical.”
Here it is only the head that is physiognomically of interest—as it
never is in Attic sculpture. The drapery is given quite a new meaning,
and simply dominates the whole appearance. The consul-statues in
the Capitoline Museum[270] are conspicuous examples. The pupils
are bored, and the eyes look into the distance, so that the whole
expression of the work lies no longer in its body but in that Magian
principle of the “Pneuma” which Neo-Platonism and the decisions of
the Church Councils, Mithraism and Mazdaism alike presume in
man.
The pagan “Father” Iamblichus, about 300, wrote a book
concerning statues of gods in which the divine is substantially
present and working upon the beholder.[271] Against this idea of the
image—an idea of the Pseudomorphosis—the East and the South
rose in a storm of iconoclasm; and the sources of this iconoclasm lay
in a conception of artistic creation that is nearly impossible for us to
understand.
CHAPTER VII | | MUSIC AND PLASTIC
I
THE ARTS OF FORM
CHAPTER VII
MUSIC AND PLASTIC

I
THE ARTS OF FORM
I
The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of

higher mankind has found for itself is (if we except the mathematical-
scientific domain of presentation and the symbolism of its basic
ideas) that of the arts of form,[272] of which the number is legion. And
with these arts we count music in its many and very dissimilar kinds;
had these been brought within the domain of art-historical research
instead of being put in a class apart from that of the pictorial-plastic
arts, we should have progressed very much further in our
understanding of the import of this evolution towards an end. For the
formative impulse that is at work in the wordless[273] arts can never
be understood until we come to regard the distinction between
optical and acoustic means as only a superficial one. To talk of the
art of the eye and the art of the ear takes us no further. It is not such
things that divide one art from another. Only the 19th Century could
so over-estimate the influence of physiological conditions as to apply
it to expression, conception or communion. A “singing” picture of
Claude Lorrain or of Watteau does not really address itself to the
bodily eye any more than the space-straining music since Bach
addresses itself to the bodily ear. The Classical relation between art-
work and sense-organ—of which we so often and so erroneously
remind ourselves here—is something quite different from, something
far simpler and more material than ours. We read “Othello” and
“Faust” and we study orchestral scores—that is, we change one
sense-agency for another in order to let the undiluted spirit of these
works take effect upon us. Here there is always an appeal from the
outer senses to the “inner,” to the truly Faustian and wholly un-
Classical power of imagination. Only thus can we understand
Shakespeare’s ceaseless change of scene as against the Classical
unity of place. In extreme cases indeed, for instance in that of
“Faust” itself, no representation of the work (that is, of its full content)
is physically possible. But in music too—in the unaccompanied “A
capella” of the Palestrina style as well as a fortiori in the Passions of
Heinrich Schütz, in the fugues of Bach, in the last quartets of
Beethoven, and in “Tristan”—we livingly experience behind the
sensuous impressions a whole world of others. And it is only through
these latter that all the fullness and depth of the work begins to be
present to us, and it is only mediately—through the images of blond,
brown, dusky and golden colours, of sunsets and distant ranked
mountain-summits, of storms and spring landscapes, of foundered
cities and strange faces which harmony conjures up for us—that it
tells us something of itself. It is not an incident that Beethoven wrote
his last works when he was deaf—deafness merely released him
from the last fetters. For this music, sight and hearing equally are
bridges into the soul and nothing more. To the Greek this visionary
kind of artistic enjoyment was utterly alien. He felt the marble with his
eye, and the thick tones of an aulos moved him almost corporally.
For him, eye and ear are the receivers of the whole of the impression
that he wished to receive. But for us this had ceased to be true even
at the stage of Gothic.
In the actual, tones are something extended, limited and
numerable just as lines and colours are; harmony, melody, rhyme
and rhythm no less so than perspective, proportion, chiaroscuro and
outline. The distance separating two kinds of painting can be
infinitely greater than that separating the painting and the music of a
period. Considered in relation to a statue of Myron, the art of a
Poussin landscape is the same as that of a contemporary chamber-
cantata; that of Rembrandt as that of the organ works of Buxtehude,
Pachelbel and Bach; that of Guardi as that of the Mozart opera—the
inner form-language is so nearly identical that the difference
between optical and acoustic means is negligible.
The importance which the “science of art” has always attached to
a timeless and conceptual delimitation of the individual art-spheres
only proves that the fundamentals of the problem have not been
attacked. Arts are living units, and the living is incapable of being
dissected. The first act of the learned pedant has always been to
partition the infinitely wide domain into provinces determined by
perfectly superficial criteria of medium and technique and to endow
these provinces with eternal validity and immutable (!) form-
principles. Thus he separated “Music” and “Painting,” “Music” and
“Drama,” “Painting” and “Sculpture.” And then he proceeded to
define “the” art of Painting, “the” art of Sculpture, and so on. But in
fact the technical form-language is no more than the mask of the real
work. Style is not what the shallow Semper—worthy contemporary of
Darwin and materialism—supposed it to be, the product of material,
technique, and purpose. It is the very opposite of this, something
inaccessible to art-reason, a revelation of the metaphysical order, a
mysterious “must,” a Destiny. With the material boundaries of the
different arts it has no concern whatever.
To classify the arts according to the character of the sense-
impression, then, is to pervert the problem of form in its very
enunciation. For how is it possible to predicate a genus “Sculpture”
of so general a character as to admit of general laws being evolved
from it? What is “Sculpture?”
Take painting again. There is no such thing as “the” art of Painting,
and anyone who compares a drawing of Raphael, effected by
outline, with one of Titian, effected by flecks of light and shade,
without feeling that they belong to two different arts; any one who
does not realize a dissimilarity of essence between the works of
Giotto or Mantegna—relief, created by brushstroke—and those of
Vermeer or Goya—music, created on coloured canvas—such a one
will never grasp the deeper questions. As for the frescoes of
Polygnotus and the mosaics of Ravenna, there is not even the
similarity of technical means to bring them within the alleged genus,
and what is there in common between an etching and the art of Fra
Angelico, or a proto-Corinthian vase-painting and a Gothic cathedral-
window, or the reliefs of Egypt and those of the Parthenon?
If an art has boundaries at all—boundaries of its soul-become-
form—they are historical and not technical or physiological
boundaries.[274] An art is an organism, not a system. There is no art-
genus that runs through all the centuries and all the Cultures. Even
where (as in the case of the Renaissance) supposed technical
traditions momentarily deceive us into a belief in the eternal validity
of antique art-laws, there is at bottom entire discrepance. There is
nothing in Greek and Roman art that stands in any relation whatever
to the form-language of a Donatello statue or a painting of Signorelli
or a façade of Michelangelo. Inwardly, the Quattrocento is related to
the contemporary Gothic and to nothing else. The fact of the archaic
Greek Apollo-type being “influenced” by Egyptian portraiture, or early
Tuscan representation by Etruscan tomb-painting, implies precisely
what is implied by that of Bach’s writing a fugue upon an alien theme
—he shows what he can express with it. Every individual art—
Chinese landscape or Egyptian plastic or Gothic counterpoint—is
once existent, and departs with its soul and its symbolism never to
return.
II
With this, the notion of Form opens out immensely. Not only the
technical instrument, not only the form-language, but also the choice
of art-genus itself is seen to be an expression-means. What the
creation of a masterpiece means for an individual artist—the “Night
Watch” for Rembrandt or the “Meistersinger” for Wagner—that the
creation of a species of art, comprehended as such, means for the
life-history of a Culture. It is epochal. Apart from the merest
externals, each such art is an individual organism without
predecessor or successor. Its theory, technique and convention all
belong to its character, and contain nothing of eternal or universal
validity. When one of these arts is born, when it is spent, whether it
dies or is transmuted into another, why this or that art is dominant in
or absent from a particular Culture—all these are questions of Form
in the highest sense, just as is that other question of why individual
painters and musicians unconsciously avoid certain shades and
harmonies or, on the contrary, show preferences so marked that
authorship-attributions can be based on them.
The importance of these groups of questions has not yet been
recognized by theory, even by that of the present day. And yet it is
precisely from this side, the side of their physiognomic, that the arts
are accessible to the understanding. Hitherto it has been supposed
—without the slightest examination of the weighty questions that the
supposition involves—that the several “arts” specified in the
conventional classification-scheme (the validity of which is assumed)
are all possible at all times and places, and the absence of one or
another of them in particular cases is attributed to the accidental lack
of creative personalities or impelling circumstances or discriminating
patrons to guide “art” on its “way.” Here we have what I call a
transference of the causality-principle from the world of the become
to that of the becoming. Having no eye for the perfectly different logic
and necessity of the Living, for Destiny and the inevitableness and
unique occurrence of its expression-possibilities, men had recourse
to tangible and obvious “causes” for the building of their art-history,
which thus came to consist of a series of events of only superficial
concordance.
I have already, in the earliest pages of this work, exposed the
shallowness of the notion of a linear progression of “mankind”
through the stages of “ancient,” “mediæval” and “modern,” a notion
that has made us blind to the true history and structure of higher
Cultures. The history of art is a conspicuous case in point. Having
assumed as self-evident the existence of a number of constant and
well-defined provinces of art, one proceeded to order the history of
these several provinces according to the—equally self-evident—
scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern, to the exclusion, of course, of
Indian and East-Asiatic art, of the art of Axum and Saba, of the
Sassanids and of Russia, which if not omitted altogether were at
best relegated to appendices. It occurred to no one that such results
argued unsoundness in the method; the scheme was there,
demanded facts, and must at any price be fed with them. And so a
futile up-and-down course was stolidly traced out. Static times were
described as “natural pauses,” it was called “decline” when some
great art in reality died, and “renaissance” where an eye really free
from prepossessions would have seen another art being born in
another landscape to express another humanity. Even to-day we are
still taught that the Renaissance was a rebirth of the Classical. And
the conclusion was drawn that it is possible and right to take up arts
that are found weak or even dead (in this respect the present is a
veritable battle-field) and set them going again by conscious
reformation-program or forced “revival.”
And yet it is precisely in this problem of the end, the impressively
sudden end, of a great art—the end of the Attic drama in Euripides,
of Florentine sculpture with Michelangelo, of instrumental music in
Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner—that the organic character of these arts
is most evident. If we look closely enough we shall have no difficulty
in convincing ourselves that no one art of any greatness has ever
been “reborn.”
Of the Pyramid style nothing passed over into the Doric. Nothing
connects the Classical temple with the basilica of the Middle East,
for the mere taking over of the Classical column as a structural
member, though to a superficial observer it seems a fact of the first
importance, weighs no more in reality than Goethe’s employment of
the old mythology in the “Classical Walpurgis Night” scene of
“Faust.” To believe genuinely in a rebirth of Classical art, or any
Classical art, in the Western 15th Century requires a rare stretch of
the imagination. And that a great art may die not merely with the
Culture but within it, we may see from the fate of music in the
Classical world.[275] Possibilities of great music there must have been
in the Doric springtime—how otherwise can we account for the
importance of old-fashioned Sparta in the eyes of such musicians as
there were later (for Terpander, Thaletas and Alcman were effective
there when elsewhere the statuary art was merely infantile)?—and
yet the Late-Classical world refrained. In just the same fashion
everything that the Magian Culture had attempted in the way of
frontal portraiture, deep relief and mosaic finally succumbed before
the Arabesque; and everything of the plastic that had sprung up in
the shade of Gothic cathedrals at Chartres, Reims, Bamberg,
Naumburg, in the Nürnberg of Peter Vischer and the Florence of
Verrocchio, vanished before the oil-painting of Venice and the
instrumental music of the Baroque.
III
The temple of Poseidon at Pæstum and the Minster of Ulm, works

of the ripest Doric and the ripest Gothic, differ precisely as the
Euclidean geometry of bodily bounding-surfaces differs from the
analytical geometry of the position of points in space referred to
spatial axes. All Classical building begins from the outside, all
Western from the inside. The Arabian also begins with the inside, but
it stays there. There is one and only one soul, the Faustian, that
craves for a style which drives through walls into the limitless
universe of space and makes both the exterior and the interior of the
building complementary images of one and the same world-feeling.
The exterior of the basilica and the domical building may be a field
for ornamentation, but architecture it is not. The impression that
meets the beholder as he approaches is that of something shielding,
something that hides a secret. The form-language in the cavern-
twilight exists for the faithful only—that is the factor common to the
highest examples of the style and to the simplest Mithræa and
Catacombs, the prime powerful utterance of a new soul. Now, as
soon as the Germanic spirit takes possession of the basilical type,
there begins a wondrous mutation of all structural parts, as to both
position and significance. Here in the Faustian North the outer form
of the building, be it cathedral or mere dwelling-house, begins to be
brought into relation with the meaning that governs the arrangement
of the interior, a meaning undisclosed in the mosque and non-
existent in the temple. The Faustian building has a visage and not
merely a façade (whereas the front of a peripteros is, after all, only
one of four sides and the centre-domed building in principle has not
even a front) and with this visage, this head, is associated an
articulated trunk that draws itself out through the broad plain like the
cathedral at Speyer, or erects itself to the heavens like the
innumerable spires of the original design of Reims. The motive of the
façade, which greets the beholder and tells him the inner meaning of
the house, dominates not only individual major buildings but also the
whole aspect of our streets, squares and towns with their
characteristic wealth of windows.[276]
The great architecture of the early period is ever the mother of all
following arts; it determines the choice of them and the spirit of them.
Accordingly, we find that the history of the Classical shaping art is
one untiring effort to accomplish one single ideal, viz., the conquest
of the free-standing human body as the vessel of the pure real
present. The temple of the naked body was to it what the cathedral
of voices was to the Faustian from earliest counterpoint to the
orchestral writing of the 18th Century. We have failed hitherto to
understand the emotional force of this secular tendency of the
Apollinian, because we have not felt how the purely material,
soulless body (for the Temple of the Body, too, has no "interior"!) is
the object which archaic relief, Corinthian painting on clay, and Attic
fresco were all striving to obtain until Polycletus and Phidias showed
how to achieve it in full. We have, with a wonderful blindness,
assumed this kind of sculpture as both authoritative and universally
possible, as in fact, “the art of sculpture.” We have written its history
as one concerned with all peoples and periods, and even to-day our
sculptors, under the influence of unproved Renaissance doctrines,
speak of the naked human body as the noblest and most genuine
object of “the” art of sculpture. Yet in reality this statue-art, the art of
the naked body standing free upon its footing and appreciable from
all sides alike, existed in the Classical and the Classical only, for it
was that Culture alone which quite decisively refused to transcend
sense-limits in favour of space. The Egyptian statue is always meant
to be seen from the front—it is a variant of plane-relief. And the
seemingly Classically-conceived statues of the Renaissance (we are
astounded, as soon as it occurs to us to count them, to find how few
of them there are[277]) are nothing but a semi-Gothic reminiscence.
The evolution of this rigorously non-spatial art occupies the three
centuries from 650 to 350, a period extending from the completion of
the Doric and the simultaneous appearance of a tendency to free the
figures from the Egyptian limitation of frontalness[278] to the coming of
the Hellenistic and its illusion-painting which closed-off the grand
style. This sculpture will never be rightly appreciated until it is
regarded as the last and highest Classical, as springing from a plane
art, first obeying and then overcoming the fresco. No doubt the
technical origin can be traced to experiments in figure-wise treatment
of the pristine column, or the plates that served to cover the temple
wall,[279] and no doubt there are here and there imitations of Egyptian
works (seated figures of Miletus), although very few Greek artists
can ever have seen one.[280] But as a form-ideal the statue goes back
through relief to the archaic clay-painting in which fresco also
originated. Relief, like fresco, is tied to the bodily wall. All this
sculpture right down to Myron may be considered as relief detached
from the plane. In the end, the figure is treated as a self-contained
body apart from the mass of the building, but it remains essentially a
silhouette in front of a wall.[281] Direction in depth is excluded, and the
work is spread out frontally before the beholder. Even the Marsyas of
Myron can be copied upon vases or coins without much trouble or
appreciable foreshortenings.[282] Consequently, of the two major
“late” arts after 650, fresco definitely has the priority. The small stock
of types is always to be found first in vase-figuring, which is often
exactly paralleled by quite late sculptures. We know that the Centaur
group of the West pediment at Olympia was worked out from a
painting. On the Ægina temple, the advance from the West to the
East pediment is an advance from the fresco-character to the body-
character. The change is completed about 460 with Polycletus, and
thenceforward plastic groups become the model for strict painting.
But it is from Lysippus that the wholly cubic and “all-ways” treatment
becomes thoroughly veristic and yields “fact.” Till then, even in the
case of Praxiteles, we have still a lateral or planar development of
the subject, with a clear outline that is only fully effective in respect of
one or two standpoints. But an undeviating testimony to the picture-
origin of independent sculpture is the practice of polychroming the
marble—a practice unknown to the Renaissance and to Classicism,
which would have felt it as barbaric[283]—and we may say the same
of the gold-and-ivory statuary and the enamel overlaying of bronze, a
metal which already possesses a shining golden tone of its own.
IV
The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three

centuries 1500-1800, between the end of late Gothic and the decay
of Rococo which marks the end of the great Faustian style. In this
period, conformably to the persistent growth into consciousness of
the will to spatial transcendence, it is instrumental music that
develops into the ruling art. At the beginning, in the 17th Century,
music uses the characteristic tone-colours of the instruments, and
the contrasts of strings and wind, human voices and instrumental
voices, as means wherewith to paint. Its (quite unconscious)
ambition is to parallel the great masters from Titian to Velasquez and
Rembrandt. It makes pictures (in the sonata from Gabrieli [d. 1612.]
to Corelli [d. 1713] every movement shows a theme embellished with
graces and set upon the background of a basso continuo), paints
heroic landscapes (in the pastoral cantata), and draws a portrait in
lines of melody (in Monteverde’s “Lament of Ariadne,” 1608). With
the German masters, all this goes. Painting can take music no
further. Music becomes itself absolute: it is music that (quite
unconsciously again) dominates both painting and architecture in the
18th Century. And, ever more and more decisively, sculpture fades
out from among the deeper possibilities of this form-world.
What distinguishes painting as it was before, from painting as it
was after, the shift from Florence to Venice—or, to put it more
definitely, what separates the painting of Raphael and that of Titian
as two entirely distinct arts—is that the plastic spirit of the one
associates painting with relief, while the musical spirit of the other
works in a technique of visible brush-strokes and atmospheric depth-
effects that is akin to the chromatic of string and wind choruses. It is
an opposition and not a transition that we have before us, and the
recognition of the fact is vital to our understanding of the organism of
these arts. Here, if anywhere, we have to guard against the abstract
hypothesis of “eternal art-laws.” “Painting” is a mere word. Gothic
glass-painting was an element of Gothic architecture, the servant of
its strict symbolism just as the Egyptian and the Arabian and every
other art in this stage was the servant of the stone-language. Draped
figures were built up as cathedrals were. Their folds were an
ornamentation of extreme sincerity and severe expressiveness. To
criticize their “stiffness” from a naturalistic-imitative point of view is to
miss the point entirely.
Similarly “music” is a mere word. Some music there has been
everywhere and always, even before any genuine Culture, even
among the beasts. But the serious music of the Classical was
nothing but a plastic for the ear. The tetrachords, chromatic and
enharmonic, have a structural and not a harmonic meaning:[284] but
this is the very difference between body and space. This music was
single-voiced. The few instruments that it employed were all
developed in respect of capacity for tone-plastic; and naturally
therefore it rejected the Egyptian harp, an instrument that was
probably akin in tone-colour to the harpsichord. But, above all, the
melody—like Classical verse from Homer to Hadrian’s time—was
treated quantitatively and not accentually; that is, the syllables, their
bodies and their extent, decided the rhythm. The few fragments that
remain suffice to show us that the sensuous charm of this art is
something outside our comprehension; but this very fact should
cause us also
to reconsider our ideas as to the impressions purposed and
achieved by the statuary and the fresco, for we do not and cannot
experience the charm that these exercised upon the Greek eye.
Equally incomprehensible to us is Chinese music: in which,
according to educated Chinese, we are never able to distinguish gay
from grave.[285] Vice versa, to the Chinese all the music of the West
without distinction is march-music. Such is the impression that the
rhythmic dynamic of our life makes upon the accentless Tao of the
Chinese soul, and, indeed, the impression that our entire Culture
makes upon an alien humanity—the directional energy of our
church-naves and our storeyed façades, the depth-perspectives of
our pictures, the march of our tragedy and narrative, not to mention
our technics and the whole course of our private and public life. We
ourselves have accent in our blood and therefore do not notice it. But
when our rhythm is juxtaposed with that of an alien life, we find the
discordance intolerable.
Arabian music, again, is quite another world. Hitherto we have
only observed it through the medium of the Pseudomorphosis, as
represented by Byzantine hymns and Jewish psalmody, and even
these we know only in so far as they have penetrated to the
churches of the far West as antiphons, responsorial psalmody and
Ambrosian chants.[286] But it is self-evident that not only the religious
west of Edessa (the syncretic cults, especially Syrian sun-worship,
the Gnostic and the Mandæan) but also those to the east
(Mazdaists, Manichæans, Mithraists, the synagogues of Irak and in
due course the Nestorian Christians) must have possessed a sacred
music of the same style; that side by side with this a gay secular
music developed (above all, amongst the South-Arabian and
Sassanid chivalry[287]); and that both found their culmination in the
Moorish style that reigned from Spain to Persia.
Out of all this wealth, the Faustian soul borrowed only some few
church-forms and, moreover, in borrowing them, it instantly
transformed them root and branch (10th Century, Hucbald, Guido
d’Arezzo). Melodic accent and beat produced the “march,” and
polyphony (like the rime of contemporary poetry) the image of
endless space. To understand this, we have to distinguish between
the imitative[288] and the ornamental sides of music, and although
owing to the fleeting nature of all tone-creations[289] our knowledge is
limited to the musical history of our own West, yet this is quite
sufficient to reveal that duality of development which is one of the
master-keys of all art-history. The one is soul, landscape, feeling, the
other strict form, style, school. West Europe has an ornamental
music of the grand style (corresponding to the full plastic of the
Classical) which is associated with the architectural history of the
cathedral, which is closely akin to Scholasticism and Mysticism, and
which finds its laws in the motherland of high Gothic between Seine
and Scheldt. Counterpoint developed simultaneously with the flying-
buttress system, and its source was the “Romanesque” style of the
Fauxbourdon and the Discant with their simple parallel and contrary
motion.[290] It is an architecture of human voices and, like the
statuary-group and the glass-paintings, is only conceivable in the
setting of these stone vaultings. With them it is a high art of space, of
that space to which Nicolas of Oresme, Bishop of Lisieux, gave
mathematical meaning by the introduction of co-ordinates.[291] This is
the genuine “rinascita” and “reformatio” as Joachim of Floris saw it at
the end of the 12th Century[292]—the birth of a new soul mirrored in
the form-language of a new art.
Along with this there came into being in castle and village a
secular imitative music, that of troubadours, Minnesänger and
minstrels. As “ars nova” this travelled from the courts of Provence to
the palaces of Tuscan patricians about 1300, the time of Dante and
Petrarch. It consisted of simple melodies that appealed to the heart
with their major and minor, of canzoni, madrigals and caccias, and it
included also a type of galante operetta (Adam de la Hale’s “Robin
and Marion”). After 1400, these forms give rise to forms of collective
singing—the rondeau and the ballade. All this is “art” for a public.[293]
Scenes are painted from life, scenes of love, hunting, chivalry. The
point of it is in the melodic inventiveness, instead of in the symbolism
of its linear progress.
Thus, musically as otherwise, the castle and the cathedral are
distinct. The cathedral is music and the castle makes music. The one
begins with theory, the other with impromptu: it is the distinction
between waking consciousness and living existence, between the
spiritual and the knightly singer. Imitation stands nearest to life and
direction and therefore begins with melody, while the symbolism of
counterpoint belongs to extension and through polyphony signifies
infinite space. The result was, on the one side, a store of “eternal”
rules and, on the other, an inexhaustible fund of folk-melodies on
which even the 18th Century was still drawing. The same contrast
reveals itself, artistically, in the class-opposition of Renaissance and
Reformation.[294] The courtly taste of Florence was antipathetic to the
spirit of counterpoint; the evolution of strict musical form from the
Motet to the four-voice Mass through Dunstaple, Binchois and Dufay
(c. 1430) proceeded wholly within the magic circle of Gothic
architecture. From Fra Angelico to Michelangelo the great
Netherlanders ruled alone in ornamental music. Lorenzo de’ Medici
found no one in Florence who understood the strict style, and had to
send for Dufay. And while in this region Leonardo and Raphael were
painting, in the north Okeghem (d. 1495) and his school and Josquin
des Prés (d. 1521) brought the formal polyphony of human voices to
the height of fulfilment.
The transition into the “Late” age was heralded in Rome and
Venice. With Baroque the leadership in music passes to Italy. But at
the same time architecture ceases to be the ruling art and there is
formed a group of Faustian special-arts in which oil-painting
occupies the central place. About 1560 the empire of the human
voice comes to an end in the a cappella style of Palestrina and
Orlando Lasso (both d. 1594). Its powers could no longer express
the passionate drive into the infinite, and it made way for the chorus
of instruments, wind and string. And thereupon Venice produced
Titian-music, the new madrigal that in its flow and ebb follows the
sense of the text. The music of the Gothic is architectural and vocal,
that of the Baroque pictorial and instrumental. The one builds, the
other operates by means of motives. For all the arts have become
urban and therefore secular. We pass from super-personal Form to
the personal expression of the Master, and shortly before 1600 Italy
produces the basso continuo which requires virtuosi and not pious
participants.
Thenceforward, the great task was to extend the tone-corpus into
the infinity, or rather to resolve it into an infinite space of tone. Gothic
had developed the instruments into families of definite timbre. But
the new-born “orchestra” no longer observes limitations imposed by
the human voice, but treats it as a voice to be combined with other
voices—at the same moment as our mathematic proceeds from the
geometrical analysis of Fermat to the purely functional analysis of
Descartes.[295] In Zarlino’s “Harmony” (1558) appears a genuine
perspective of pure tonal space. We begin to distinguish between
ornamental and fundamental instruments. Melody and
embellishment join to produce the Motive, and this in development
leads to the rebirth of counterpoint in the form of the fugal style, of
which Frescobaldi was the first master and Bach the culmination. To
the vocal masses and motets the Baroque opposes its grand,
orchestrally-conceived forms of the oratorio (Carissimi), the cantata
(Viadana) and the opera (Monteverde). Whether a bass melody be
set against upper voices, or upper voices be concerted against one
another upon a background of basso continuo, always sound-worlds
of characteristic expression-quality work reciprocally upon one
another in the infinity of tonal space, supporting, intensifying, raising,
illuminating, threatening, overshadowing—a music all of interplay,
scarcely intelligible save through ideas of contemporary Analysis.
From out of these forms of the early Baroque there proceeded, in
the 17th Century, the sonata-like forms of suite, symphony and
concerto grosso. The inner structure and the sequence of
movements, the thematic working-out and modulation became more
and more firmly established. And thus was reached the great,
immensely dynamic, form in which music—now completely bodiless
—was raised by Corelli and Handel and Bach to be the ruling art of
the West. When Newton and Leibniz, about 1670, discovered the
Infinitesimal Calculus, the fugal style was fulfilled. And when, about
1740, Euler began the definitive formulation of functional Analysis,
Stamitz and his generation were discovering the last and ripest form
of musical ornamentation, the four-part movement[296] as vehicle of
pure and unlimited motion. For, at that time, there was still this one
step to be taken. The theme of the fugue “is,” that of the new sonata-
movement “becomes,” and the issue of its working out is in the one
case a picture, in the other a drama. Instead of a series of pictures
we get a cyclic succession,[297] and the real source of this tone-
language was in the possibilities, realized at last, of our deepest and
most intimate kind of music—the music of the strings. Certain it is
that the violin is the noblest of all instruments that the Faustian soul
has imagined and trained for the expression of its last secrets, and
certain it is, too, that it is in string quartets and violin sonatas that it
has experienced its most transcendent and most holy moments of
full illumination. Here, in chamber-music, Western art as a whole
reaches its highest point. Here our prime symbol of endless space is
expressed as completely as the Spearman of Polycletus expresses
that of intense bodiliness. When one of those ineffably yearning
violin-melodies wanders through the spaces expanded around it by
the orchestration of Tartini or Nardini, Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven,
we know ourselves in the presence of an art beside which that of the
Acropolis is alone worthy to be set.
With this, the Faustian music becomes dominant among the
Faustian arts. It banishes the plastic of the statue and tolerates only
the minor art—an entirely musical, refined, un-Classical and counter-
Renaissance art—of porcelain, which (as a discovery of the West) is
contemporary with the rise of chamber-music to full effectiveness.
Whereas the statuary of Gothic is through-and-through architectural
ornamentation, human espalier-work, that of the Rococo remarkably
exemplifies the pseudo-plastic that results from entire subjection to
the form-language of music, and shows to what a degree the
technique governing the presented foreground can be in
contradiction with the real expression-language that is hidden behind
it. Compare Coysevox’s[298] (1686) crouching Venus in the Louvre
with its Classical prototype in the Vatican—in the one plastic is
understudying music, in the other plastic is itself. Terms like
“staccato,” “accelerando,” “andante” and “allegro” best describe the
kind of movements that we have here, the flow of the lines, the
fluidity in the being of the stone itself which like the porcelain has
more or less lost its fine compactness. Hence our feeling that the
granular marble is out of keeping. Hence, too, the wholly un-
Classical tendency to work with reference to effects of light and
shade. This is quite in conformity with the principles of oil-painting
from Titian onwards. That which in the 18th Century is called “colour”
in an etching, a drawing, or a sculpture-group really signifies music.
Music dominates the painting of Watteau and Fragonard and the art
of Gobelins and pastels, and since then, have we not acquired the
habit of speaking of colour-tones or tone-colours? And do not the
very words imply a recognition of a final homogeneity between the
two arts, superficially dissimilar as they are? And are not these same
words perfectly meaningless as applied to any and every Classical
art? But music did not stop there; it transmuted also the architecture
of Bernini’s Baroque into accord with its own spirit, and made of it
Rococo, a style of transcendent ornamentation upon which lights (or
rather “tones”) play to dissolve ceilings, walls and everything else
constructional and actual into polyphonies and harmonies, with
architectural trills and cadences and runs to complete the
identification of the form-language of these halls and galleries with
that of the music imagined for them. Dresden and Vienna are the
homes of this late and soon-extinguished fairyland of visible
chamber music, of curved furniture and mirror-halls, and
shepherdesses in verse and porcelain. It is the final brilliant autumn
with which the Western soul completes the expression of its high
style. And in the Vienna of the Congress-time it faded and died.
The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of

its many aspects,[299] is a revolt against the spirit of the Faustian
forest-music of counterpoint, which at that time was preparing to
vassalize the whole form-language of the Western Culture. It was the
logical consequence of the open assertion of this will in matured
Gothic. It never disavowed its origin and it maintained the character
of a simple counter-movement; necessarily therefore it remained
dependent upon the forms of the original movement, and
represented simply the effect of these upon a hesitant soul. Hence, it

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Christian Philosophy: Conceptions,

Continuations, and Challenges J. Aaron

In memory of David Kangas

Notes on Contributors xix

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 1

PART II. CONTINUATIONS

PART III. CHALLENGES

Notes on Contributors xxi

xxii Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors xxiii

xxiv Notes on Contributors

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 3

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 5

All love of wisdom so understood is philosophy. There are, therefore, a great

For Gilson, like Maritain, a speciﬁcally Christian philosophy is a product of a

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 7

SO, WHY ANOTHER VOLUME ON CHRISTIAN

A signiﬁcant amount of work has historically been done in the direction of

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 9

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 11

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 13

ON THE ORIGINS AND AIMS OF THIS VO LUME

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 15

Introduction: Why This? Why Now? 17

MUSIC AND PLASTIC

The clearest type of symbolic expression that the world-feeling of

The temple of Poseidon at Pæstum and the Minster of Ulm, works

The corresponding stage of Western art occupies the three

The Art of the Renaissance, considered from this particular one of

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