A Philosophy of Prayer: Nothingness, Language, and Hope (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) - Hardcover

Pattison, George

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1531506828 ISBN 13: 9781531506827

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2024

Synopsis

Exploring the silence of prayer in Post-Kantian philosophy and traditional spirituality

A Philosophy of Prayer explores prayer within the perspective of post-Kantian philosophy. Against a background of traditional sources, including Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the seventeenth-century French school of spirituality, the book uses Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Berdyaev, Tillich, Marcel, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean- Louis Chrétien to provide an interpretation of what is meant by the passivity and self-annihilation of the praying self, suggesting an “apophatics of the personality.”

Pattison pays particular attention to the question of language and the implications of the role given to silence in traditional texts, arguing that language remains a defining element of the human–God relationship and that silence is not to be construed as the negation of language but as the revelation of the depth of language itself. The basic structure of prayer is shown to be implicitly eschatological, oriented toward a coming kingdom of justice and peace while, at the same time, expressing a deep desire for ontological homecoming, a tension manifest in, respectively, Levinas and Heidegger. On Pattison’s reading, prayer calls for and develops a particular orientation of the self toward existence, corresponding to the virtue of humility, long understood as the basic Christian virtue. This is shown to be in tension with modernity’s commitment to strong versions of autonomy. However, the choice of humility is not presented as the reinstatement of religious heteronomy but as a free choice of the praying self.

About this title

About the Authors

George Pattison is a retired Anglican priest and scholar. He has held posts in Cambridge, Aarhus, Oxford, and Glasgow universities and has published extensively on existential philosophy, especially Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Tillich, and Russian religious philosophy. His previous books include A Metaphysics of Love: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part III; A Rhetorics of the Word: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part II; and A Phenomenology of the Devout Life: A Philosophy of Christian Life, Part I.

John D. Caputo is Thomas J. Watson Professor Emeritus of Religion at Syracuse University and David R. Cook Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Villanova University. His most recent book is In Search of Radical Theology.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1531506828
• ISBN 13: 9781531506827
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192