1.3 Disclosure or What is Revealed?
1.3.2 Language of Faith
The question again is, “What does revelation reveal?” Smith’s answer to that question perhaps comes in the form of his own question, which he poses to Levinas: “But if knowledge is relegated to immanence – to comprehension and conceptualization – can transcendence or alterity be ‘intelligible’? Would transcendence be something we could ‘know’”?113 His question
109 The Greek language, particularly the Koine Greek of the New Testament, already has a word for revelation, apokalypsis. It seems clear that Smith is following Heidegger at this point.
110 Ibid., 159.
111 The example of a Japanese translation is an equivocation when it comes to putting something into words that transcends language. While no translation from one language to another is perfect in that there are nuances and subtleties of one language lost to another, that loss is surely not on par with the infinite entering into finitude. To suggest that God must take into account our finitude is surely descriptive rather than prescriptive, except that Smith’s allergy to Gnosticism requires him to assert that the fault is not in the capacity of finitude.
112 Ibid., 160. Arguably, this is true until we then inquire how we can put God’s revelation into words. Once language is introduced, so is violence. Additionally, God’s revelation is not salvific so long as it is understandable within the limitations of the ego.
113 Ibid., 31.
43
suggests that revelation reveals epistemic content and that intelligibility maps onto knowledge without remainder. Smith claims that revelation reveals a secret. The mode of revelation is incarnational – God condescends to meet us where we are. In that mode, God reveals what has been unknown, thereby making it known. The knowledge of revelation, however, is the
knowledge of faith rather than comprehension, he claims.114 The knowledge of faith is born from the ‘concept,’ which does not attempt to grasp or possess what is known.
In a footnote on Marion’s review of the ontological argument, Smith notes that “the very condition of Anselm’s ‘speculation’ is faith.”115 At stake is whether we understand faith to be a set of propositions or a condition of ‘believing without evidence’ or a mode of rationality itself or whether we consider faith to be a mode of relation: faithfulness or loyalty, themes that are prominent in the Greek pistis.116 Smith, to my knowledge, does not clarify his concept/‘concept’
of faith in any of his writings.117 That said, he often uses it as an alternative to philosophical reason, which leads the reader to perceive it as a non-rational cognition. But what kind of non- rational cognition? Smith’s lack of clarity around this topic is a limitation of his project.
However, if we conceptualize faith as faithfulness or loyalty – a relational concept – then faith acquires a non-cognitive, non-predicative, affective epistemological capacity. Faith is a
commitment, in this sense, to the Other – both to the divine and to the non-divine Other. We
114 Ibid., 163.
115 Ibid., 111, fn. 100.
116 Geoffrey W. Bromiley, Theological Dictionary of the New Testament: Abridged in One Volume, Kittel, Gerhard and Friedrich, Gerhard, eds. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1985): 1454. According to Bromiley, pistis means primarily faithfulness and then religious trust before then meaning faith. In Judaism, faith carried a
connotation of trusting obedience, with an emphasis often on ‘obedience’ (1462). The notion of belief derives from the root, pist. Arguably belief is necessary for trust or faithfulness, just as belief is necessary for knowledge.
However, neither faithfulness nor knowledge can collapse back into belief alone - fideism.
117 The need to clarify the concept of faith leads to another issue in Smith’s writing about whether there is a legitimate need for the content of concepts. Can we merely ‘point to’ faith? Or is the ‘concept’ that Smith is establishing only for that which is exterior to language, namely, God or human others?
44
might call it an ethical obligation to the Other. It seems justified, therefore, to conceptualize faith as faithfulness, trust, or loyalty given the coherence that we gain within Smith’s overall project.
Coming back to Climacus, and this argument is tricky due to the layers of pseudonymous work, faith seems to affect a personal, subjective connection with the god. This personal element of faith is why historical contemporaneity contributes no privilege in the Postscript. If we were dealing with the content of revelation, one would expect that the nearer one is to the source the more certain one could be of the reliability and truth of that content. But if we are dealing with something other than content, if we are dealing with a person or if we are working within an affective or, perhaps, a social epistemology, then the relation takes a certain primacy over content. Of course, it is not the case that content is irrelevant. We must know things about those with whom we have relations. But in another sense, things never deliver unto us the relationship.
Therefore, while content accompanies the relationship and might even be the occasion of the relationship, it never delivers the relationship.
Let us return to Smith’s claim that the “knowledge” of revelation is more in the nature of faith than comprehension.118 Smith uses scare quotes here, perhaps to indicate that knowledge is, after all, still about something epistemic. For Smith, this non-knowledge-oriented relation
becomes a relation of revelation, which is to say, of knowledge. It is not my intention to
explicate Climacus’s position here, let alone Kierkegaard’s. I am largely relying on Smith’s own reading of the Fragments and his response to those readings. Smith emphasizes the god’s
condescension to become the lowest possible human so that he would be above no human being.
Rather than seeing this as an example of relational passion and love, Smith sees this as the
118 Smith, Speech, 163.
45
structure of analogy within a participatory ontology. Ontological analogy alone allows the transcendent to reach down to the conditions of the receiver without ceasing to be transcendent119
At this point, Smith is able to state confidently, “Analogy is an incarnational account of knowledge.”120 Note the absence of the scare quotes used previously. Also, at this point, Smith is declaring this position to be Thomistic, despite the fact that Aquinas has not been referenced meaningfully in the text up to this point.121 However, Smith notes that Husserl appealed to the structures of analogy in his Fifth Meditation. Smith’s reference to Husserl’s own ‘reliance’ on Aquinas raises the question of whether all of this work has really been a justification of Husserlian phenomenology from the beginning.