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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Stephen Mulhall has distinguished himself as one of the most rigorous and constructive contemporary thinkers on European philosophy and its complicated relationship to Christian theology. A prominent locus of that relationship in his work is the Christian doctrine of original sin, and its criticism but also structural recapitulation in the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and others. This article begins with an overview of relevant themes and their development in Mulhall's writings. I then offer an account of the internal tensions Mulhall identifies in Heidegger et al's ambivalent contestation of original sin, and of his own response. The centre of this response is a reconfiguration of the character of the divine, and of human participation in that divine, as radical self‐abnegation. I conclude with an appreciative critique of Mulhall's proposal as insufficiently responsive to the eschatological framework within which original sin has its doctrinal and ontological place in Thomist thought.
1 See also Wolfe, Judith, ‘Acknowledging a Hidden God: A Theological Critique of Stanley Cavell on Scepticism’, The Heythrop Journal 48, no. 3 (2007), 384‐405Google Scholar.
2 See especially Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary (OUP 1994)Google Scholar, ch. 12, and Inheritance and Originality (OUP 2001), 415‐438Google Scholar.
3 ‘Absolutely Paradoxical Finitude: Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre’ (unpublished paper, given in Oxford in 2007); ‘“The Presentation of the Infinite in the Finite”: The Place of God in Post‐Kantian Philosophy’ (Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy, 2007); ‘Theology and narrative: the self, the novel, the Bible’ (International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion 69, no. 1 [2011], 29‐43CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
4 ‘Wittgenstein on Religious Belief’, in Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar; The Great Riddle: Wittgenstein and Nonsense, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.
5 Delivered in 1927; published in 1970 (Freiburg: Klostermann).
6 Barth, Karl, ‘The Word of God as the Task of Theology’, in idem, The Word of God and Theology, trans. Marga, Amy (London: T&T Clark, 2011), 171‐198; p. 177CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 ‘Authority and Revelation: Philosophy and Theology’, being lecture 6 of the 2013‐14 Stanton Lectures [manuscript].
8 See Heidegger, , ‘Augustine and Neoplatonism’, in The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Fritsch, Matthias and Gosetti‐Ferencei, Jennifer Anna (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; see also Wolfe, Judith, Heidegger's Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chapters 3, 4 and 8.
9 Mulhall, ‘The Presentation of the Infinite in the Finite’, 509.
10 Cf. e.g. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 311.
11 Mulhall, ‘The Presentation of the Infinite in the Finite’, 510.
12 Matthew 16.24‐25 (NRSV).
13 Cavell, Stanley, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 352Google Scholar.
14 Philippians 2.5‐8 (NRSV).
15 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1‐2.114.2. The identification of beatitude and deification is most explicitly made in ST 1.12.2 and 3.9.3 ad 3.
16 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1‐2.110.1.
17 For more on the ways in which an account of original sin rooted in this explicitly theological ontology queries Heidegger's and Cavell's versions of ‘fallenness’, see Wolfe, ‘Acknowledging a Hidden God’, 400‐2, and Wolfe, , Heidegger's Eschatology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Conclusion.
18 Weil, Simone, Waiting for God (London: Harper, 2009), 74Google Scholar.
19 1 Corinthians 13.12‐13 (NRSV).