The Call of Conscience

Although it is common to speak of the call of conscience, the specifically linguistic character of this call is frequently occluded in the history of thought. This is clear in the modern history of the idea, in which ideas of moral intuition or moral sentiment predominate, from Cambridge Platonism through to neo-Kantianism. This occlusion is flagged by Gerhard Ebeling, who emphasizes the word-event character of conscience. This is further developed through reference to Emmanuel Levinas and his distinction between Le Dit and Le Dire, and it is contrasted with the seemingly silent ethical demand proposed by K. E. Løgstrup. This difference is interpreted further through a discussion of an incident in writings of the Japanese poet Bashō and the Good Samaritan.

In the Beginning was the Word

Turning to the New Testament, the chapter examines the prologue to St John’s Gospel as an exemplary commentary on Christian vocation. However, this requires rejecting interpretations that have seen John’s logos in terms of Platonic ideas or ‘ratio’, as in much ancient and medieval commentary (Eckhart’s commentary is used for illustration). German Idealism (Fichte) refigures ratio in terms of will, and in the twentieth century, Michel Henry foregrounds ‘life’. A rediscovery of the word element is found in Ferdinand Ebner and Rudolf Bultmann. Their insights are used to develop an original interpretation of the Gospel, contrasting John’s existential focus on calling and the name with Platonizing interpretations.

Political Calling in an Age of Technology

The modern world has been marked by a recurring sense of the degradation of language. According to Hannah Arendt, for whom the possibility of politics is interdependent with the possibility of authentic speech, this generates a political crisis, connected to the role of science in contemporary society. The impact of science on the language of public discourse is further explored through Habermas and Uwe Poerksen. Their analyses receive added force through the development of new communications technologies that are proving fateful both for individuals and their personal relationship as well as for political life. Though acknowledging the optimism still associated with these technologies in some quarters, the chapter asks how we can protect against their negative effects. The thought of Byung-Chul Han is used to identify the need for attentive listening and a sense of the uniqueness of the human countenance and name to counter the digital shitstorm.

Conclusion

The conclusion sums up the argument of the book, explaining the interconnectedness of such key terms as vocation/calling, the name, and the promise and their essential coherence around the imperative of love. This prepares the transition to the third part of the philosophy of Christian life, A Metaphysics of Love.

Prophetic Calling: At the Burning Bush

The chapter looks to the Hebrew Bible for resources to respond to the modern crisis of vocation. Prophecy appears as a special focus of discussion, since the prophet is who he is by virtue of being called. This is not a matter of psychological experiences of auditions but of understanding the essence of the prophet’s God-relationship. A paradigm case of prophecy is the calling of Moses at the burning bush. Salient features of this event include God’s call to Moses by name and the revelation of the divine name itself. Rejecting the traditional Christian interpretation of this in terms of being (‘I am that I am’), the chapter follows Buber’s and Rosenzweig’s interpretation, which brings the God-relationship into the domain of vocativity, exemplifying also ‘Jewish nominalism’, that is, attention to the centrality of the name in the human God-relationship.This is connected to the image of God in human beings.

A Crisis of Vocation

The modern experience of the disenchantment of the world seems to count against the possibility of vocation/calling being anything more than an empty metaphor. The crisis of vocation in modernity is explored with reference to the Lutheran conception of vocation and its eclipse, Max Weber’s account of Protestantism and the application of the idea of vocation to a life in science, Heidegger’s attempt to reanimate philosophy through the idea of vocation, and Kierkegaard’s struggle to understand his own vocation. Each of Weber, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard proves unable to give positive content to the idea of vocation. It is seen by Weber as an irrational survival in a rationalized world, reduced in Heidegger to awareness of being thrown towards death, and fused in Kierkegaard with the creative impulse of the autonomous writer.

Introduction

The Introduction shows how the attraction to the devout life explored in Part 1 of A Philosophy of Christian Life can be further qualified as vocation. Doing so brings the issue out of the realms of ineffable experience into the domain of language. The foundational role of language in the constitution of the self is explored with reference to Helen Keller, who found that language itself set her free by giving her the possibility of a coherent and meaningful relation to herself and to her world. Its place in human beings’ God-relationship flags up the necessity of listening and hearing, as well as attention to the rhetorical performance of language.

Poetic Vocation

Like ethics, literature too is often envisaged as involving some kind of call or vocation. In lectures on Hölderlin, Heidegger provides a more positive account of calling than in Being and Time. Yet he remains unspecific as to what we are called to, and his account is therefore expanded with regard to its socio-political and theological dimensions, developed in the direct of a certain Messianism (Derrida, Caputo). This is further explored in terms of the relationship between prophecy and empire, focusing on the figure of Virgil, represented by Theodore Haecker as ‘father of the West’. In Hermann Broch’s novel The Death of Virgil, the poet epitomizes the transition from the classical world to Christianity and the relationship between poetry, empire, and messianism. This complex of ideas is seen as operative in the testimony of Ulrich Fentzloff, a parish priest whose blog gained national attention in Germany.

At the Name of Jesus

In this chapter the focus turns from God’s call to human beings to human beings calling upon God in prayer. This is especially exemplified in the practice of hesychasm or calling on the name of Jesus. This practice stimulated a series of philosophical and theological approaches to language among early twentieth century Russian thinkers: Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, A. S. Losev, and Gustav Shpet. Despite significant differences these converge on the fundamental importance of the personal name as the core of human beings’ capacity for language. These thinkers also share an emphasis on the social concreteness of language, a focus further developed in Bakhtin’s dialogism. Bakhtin shows how the prosaic everyday world can become a milieu in which to seek and express authentic personal being and therewith a spiritual life in the condition of secularity.