I'm Sorry, What Was I Saying? 🧐

I have some bookplates from probably 40 years ago, illustrated with a man in Victorian dress standing on the middle rungs of a library ladder against a wall of bookshelves; one book in hand, another waiting in the left hand, a book between his knees, a few more on the shelves nearby obviously removed and laying where they can be turned to.  It's the most appropriate picture of what's going on here between two old friends and readers.  But I had to make do with cats.  It's okay, I like cats. And they love to sit on what you're reading.

 Starting with my grate gud friend (Molesworth; another literary reference, hem hem) Rick, who sets me jabbering:*

Among them was Karl Barth's commentary on St. Paul's letter to the Romans, which revealed anew how it's still possible at any age to be astounded by something not exactly new, but new to me, and the concomitant urge to read Tillich's Systematic Theology, Barth's mid-twentieth century dark twin which was, not unimportantly, the kernel of the thought that formed those who formed me among post-war mainline Protestants.

I've never finished Barth's Letter to the Romans, though I did go to school with a few holdover Barthians on the seminary faculty (he was quite out of fashion among the younger professors.  Sic transit gloria).  I did read Tillich's Systematic Theology, and all but literally tore it to shreds as both a failed gloss on Kierkegaard (far more Hegelian than the melancholy Dane would ever countenance, by which I mean SK railed against "systematic" thought (we would probably say "totalizing") as represented by Hegel, the dominant European philosopher of his day.  One reason SK insisted on the importance of "the individual" was to ground thought, and theology (he was a seminary graduate himself) in the person, not the Idea.) It was Tillich's effort that convinced me the pursuit of a systematic theology was as failed an enterprise as biblical theology, the latter being the effort to discern and decry a consistent theology based on as many of the biblical texts as would fit.  Even the strongest exponents of that effort admitted failure, something I always thought of as akin to logical positivism, which Wittgenstein and Godel destroyed, and which Whitehead abandoned to give modern theologians the basis for process theology, which also proved to be a dead end.

Come to think of it, I had to write a long paper on my systematic theology.  I scanned it a few months ago, the better to preserve it.  I suppose I could post it here....🤔  No, I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy.

I really do find Tillich wanting, and not just because of his failure to understand Kierkegaard.  I think SK was just Flavor-Of-The-Month at the time, a sort of religious counterbalance to Sartre, and Tillich wanted to be among the Kewl Kids.  I found Niebuhr's work more interesting and intellectually challenging, and more worthy of my attention.  I was kind of pissed when I got to the end of Tillich and realized he was the Wizard of Oz:  just a man behind a curtain. (The volumes get smaller and smaller, like he's running out of steam.)  Bultmann was a more interesting thinker, and his theology really isn't that good, either. "Demythologizing"?  Yeah; too much credence given to a crabbed and ignorant notion of what "myth" means (Hint:  myth =/= "Just so stories."), to begin with.  Even the story of Pandora's Box or Persephone returning from Hades to bring springtime have less to do with mechanistic relations between the stories and suffering or the seasons, and much more to do with the common function of literature:  what is going on here, and what is the human place in it, and understanding of it?

The function of the philosopher, in other words.

Yeah, Rick was a philosophy major, while I was an English major.  Our biases show.  So it goes.

But Hegel's Philosophy of History?  It is most correct that I have done little more than knock about in Hegel's work.  I did indeed read an English version of the Philosophy of History in college.  I took a Metaphysics course which emphasized Hegel and, oddly enough, in high school I had discovered, in my attic, a box of old books, of uniform size, black covers, with stiff yellow pages, printed around 1910, and one was Hegel's Philosophy of History.  We were each supposed to choose a work of Hegel's and do a report to the class on it, and since I already owned a copy I chose the Philosophy of History. 

Started it once; still have my copy.  Sometime after I finish Derrida on the death penalty (remarkable readable.  I've either cracked his nut, or my own, and just think I understand what I'm reading.  Pretty sure it's the latter, but then how do I know I don't understand, if my understanding is not yours?), and get back to Whiteheads' Process and Reality, and finally open Being and Time (Derrida, too, writes a great deal of his work in response to Heidegger.  Bultmann did, too; especially his great work on the Gospel of John, which I also need to finish.  Bultmann taught me to write two papers:  one the major text, a subterranean one in the footnotes.  Used that to good effect in seminary.), and probably finish Sartre's Being and Nothingness.  Oh, and read all the Kierkegaard I've accumulated and never finished (except for Fear and Trembling.  Read that three times, and need to go through it again along with Derrida's commentary on it, The Gift of Death, which I've also read at least twice.  I've promised myself to finally elucidate those two before I die, and time's a-wastin'!)

Can you tell Rick and I have known each other since first grade? 

*We are four days apart in age, and both grew up on Simon and Garfunkel's "Bookends."  I'm still waiting to use that line from "Old Friends" when we reach our 70th years.  It will be terribly strange.  I always knew it would.