I. Overview of Mulhall's writings on Christianity

Stephen Mulhall has engaged with Christian faith and theology throughout his career. His earliest book, Faith & Reason (Duckworth, 1994), sets the tone of his understanding of Christianity by setting against a rationalist engagement with religion a reading of faith building on Kierkegaard and D.Z. Phillips. Like them, Mulhall queries the central aim of rationalist theism, namely to provide rational proof for the (probable) existence of God. This critique arises not from a scepticism about the efficacy of reason, but from a criticism of the rationalist demand for an ‘objective’ standpoint from which to achieve certainty about God's existence. On a Kierkegaardian (and, one might add, Cavellian) view, the attempt to discuss the existence or attributes of God from an independent, objective standpoint denies from the outset one of the primary implications of divine existence, namely that there is no such standpoint: that if there is a God, the questioner is claimed in his or her entirety by that God. Thus, Mulhall suggests, from a Christian perspective, to be ‘objective’ vis‐à‐vis the claims of faith is precisely to refuse to face them, and so, from the perspective of faith, to fall short of their claim.

This approach to faith is indebted to Kierkegaard and Phillips, as read by Mulhall, as well as to Stanley Cavell's Wittgensteinian reflections on acknowledgement, which serve Mulhall as a lens to examine the phenomenon of faith in several works. However, Mulhall is also aware that Cavell's understanding of human acknowledgement, particularly as embedded in his later perfectionist humanism, is also in significant tension with Christianity's demand of an acknowledgment of the claims of God.Footnote ¹ This tension is crystallized in the Christian doctrine of original sin, which, as Mulhall argues in both Stanley Cavell: Philosophy's Recounting of the Ordinary and Inheritance and Originality, stands as both an intellectual and a spiritual challenge to post‐Enlightenment philosophy's framing of the human as a fundamentally autonomous agent.Footnote ² This challenge is more fully articulated in Mulhall's lecture series Philosophical Myths of the Fall (published 2005), in which he deals with some of the classic European philosophers who oppose the Christian doctrine of original sin as a repudiation of full human selfhood: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Mulhall argues provocatively that these thinkers, while criticizing that doctrine, yet produce accounts of the human condition that reiterate the structure of the Christian ‘myth of the Fall’. Mulhall's own sense of the constructive place of the Christian idea of original sin in and vis‐à‐vis modern European philosophy – particularly Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre and Weil – is then developed in papers between 2007 and 2011.Footnote ³

In his most recent work, particularly the 2014 Stanton Lectures, Mulhall turns from Christianity's talk about humans to the form of religious language itself, developing a constructive account of religious language after Aquinas and Wittgenstein in conversation with Grammatical Thomism.Footnote ⁴ These lectures, especially the final one, are among many other things a rebuttal of Heidegger's lecture ‘Phenomenology and Theology’.Footnote ⁵ Mulhall, though of course in a very different philosophical register and vocabulary, fundamentally questions the independence of philosophy from theology that is at the core of Heidegger's conception. Following Cora Diamond's constructive interpretation of Wittgenstein on nonsense, Mulhall argues in the Stanton Lectures that not every instance of the ‘sheer nonsense and bruises’ incurred by ‘running up against the border of language’ is reducible to ‘language idling’ and failing to do any ‘work’ (PI §119). Nonsense may be something more specific, which is true to the inadequacy of language in the face of that with which religious language deals: its (or rather, God's) claim on us. As Karl Barth put it: ‘As theologians, we ought to speak of God. But we are humans and as such cannot speak of God. We ought to do both, to know the “ought” and the “not able to,” and precisely in this way give God the glory.’Footnote ⁶ Or in the words of Mulhall's final paragraph:

Throughout Mulhall's work, theology stands as a challenge to philosophy's basic sense of autonomy, both as a human endeavour and as a way of speaking about (and in) the world. His shifting areas of concern create two points of possible theological intervention, one of which Mulhall investigates in his early writings, and the other of which he cautiously begins to explore in his recent work. The critical argument of the present article is that Mulhall cannot drive the first very far without the second, but that pursuing the second seriously will force him to revise his deployment of the first.

The first entry point for theological intervention is the proximity of what might be called ‘philosophies of the ordinary’ to the Christian story of human fallenness. If Mulhall's Philosophical Myths of the Fall detects a functional parallel between the Christian idea of original sin and certain aspects of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein's descriptions of human existence, his Stanley Cavell and Inheritance and Originality argue that Christianity has better resources than these philosophers for describing what the philosophers intuit. Mulhall's starting point here is the shared claim by ‘philosophers of the ordinary’ such as Heidegger, Cavell, and others, that humans naturally but deleteriously strive for a transcendence that is both enduringly alluring and constitutively impossible. What is more, these philosophers regard this striving not merely as erroneous but also as morally ruinous: a self‐ and other‐destructive denial of what it is to be human. The Christian concept of original sin, thinks Mulhall, succeeds better than Cavell, Heidegger, and others in capturing both the universality and the moral valence of such human egomania: the fact that it is both ‘natural’ or universal and morally significant.

Before returning to Mulhall's arguments in this regard, I want to note the second possible theological intervention, which Mulhall does not pursue, or begins to consider only cautiously in his new work, as of yet without direct reference to his earlier writings. We have already said that Heidegger, Sartre, Cavell et al identify the temptation to transcend finitude as an enduring characteristic of finite human existence. However, Christianity not only (as Mulhall stresses) identifies this predicament by the concept of original sin, but also grounds it in a particular anthropology, namely the creation of humanity for the purpose of participation in the life of God (traditionally called theosis or deification). Mulhall understandably ignores this larger framework. But by doing so, he introduces distortions into his own account of original sin, making it – even on its own terms – both a less useful diagnostic and a less useful remedy. A less useful diagnostic, because it ends up seeming merely an alternative, not a more powerfully explanatory way of describing a condition that the philosophers also intuit; a less useful remedy, because Mulhall lacks criteria for establishing the limits of self‐denial. The call for self‐denial consequently becomes endless, endangering the intuition that motivated the adduction of the concept of original sin in the first place, namely that the desire for transcendence is ineradicable. We will return to this at the end.

II. The Problem of Transcendence in Philosophies of the Ordinary

Throughout his work, Mulhall is sensitive to the manifold ways in which Christian theology and European philosophy are intertwined – the ways in which their concerns are constitutive of but also fundamentally challenging to each other. A nodal point of these concerns is the problem of metaphysics. European philosophy since Kant has tended to see Christianity as the self‐serving rationalisation of an unbridled but ultimately incoherent desire for transcendence: a wish‐fulfilment fantasy that humans can overcome their inherent epistemic and ontological finitude, or at least that such transcendence is vicariously realized in the God whose images and viceroys they are.

Post‐Kantian European philosophers have engaged this problem of metaphysics in many different ways. Some, including Kant, Wittgenstein, and Derrida, diagnose the metaphysical impulse primarily as a structural epiphenomenon: an unwarranted extension (whether avoidable or not) of the structure of the human mind, human language, or signs in general. Others, including Heidegger, Sartre, and Cavell, identify the temptation to transcend finitude as a meta‐ethical phenomenon attendant upon the conditions of finite human existence. For Heidegger, for example, this is a function of the constitutive importance of possibility for human self‐realization: the human ability to shape their own essence rather than be pre‐determined by it. Humans strive for ‘authenticity’ in the sense of realizing a certain ‘wholeness’ of personhood: both to be themselves and to know themselves fully. At the same time, they are never fully defined or realized in the present moment, but depend for this personhood or wholeness on a future that they can neither fully foresee nor fully control. What is more, the ‘wholeness’ to which they aspire is not only contingently elusive but structurally impossible, not only because there are always unrealized possibilities, but also because the ultimate and inavertible possibility of human existence is death. If death marks the completion of one's life, and thus the point at which one might at last gain a full view of it, it also marks one's own cessation: at the very point when one might achieve wholeness, one no longer exists. For Heidegger, this leads to the realization that a realistically authentic life must, in an irreducible paradox, consist precisely in accepting the impossibility of wholeness and with it of authenticity in its full sense: human life, within the conditions that obtain, is most truly lived in conscious orientation towards one's own death – an attitude that Heidegger labels, after Luther and Kierkegaard, ‘being unto death’.

With Heidegger, Cavell and Sartre, Mulhall sees the temptation to transcend finitude as an enduring characteristic of finite human existence, not merely reducible (as for Wittgenstein) to the tendency of language, when removed from its native context, to idle. To some extent, to be a free but finite human being that can desire to shape its own destiny (rather than being wholly determined by a prescribed ‘nature’) just is to desire to transcend that desire and that finitude. Heidegger, Cavell, and Mulhall's projects can thus be described as ethical inflections of the (Kantian) problem of metaphysics, centring on a morally charged description of ‘the human’ as most vitally defined by the tension between ineluctable finitude and the equally persistent desire to transcend it. The aim of both speculative and moral philosophy is here no longer to aspire to a transcendent ideal, but to sustain an ‘authentic’ human existence by refusing to collapse this constitutive tension into either a metaphysical meta‐narrative or an (apathetic or ‘sceptical’) denial of its allure.

III. Christianity, Transcendence, and Original Sin

The relationship between this philosophical approach and that of theology is complex and shifting. ‘Metaphysical philosophies of the ordinary’ such as Heidegger's and Cavell's tend to caricature Christianity as paradigmatic of the metaphysical presumptuousness that it is the human task to resist. Heidegger, for example, locates this hubris in Christianity's approach both to origins and to ends – its doctrines of creation and eschatology. In his early work, the philosopher accuses Christianity (especially Paul and Augustine) of distorting the proper orientation of humans towards death by superimposing on it the assurance of a life after death which is free from uncertainty and vulnerability, and characterised by the static contemplation of God as the summum bonum.Footnote ⁸ In his later, post‐metaphysical work, Heidegger identifies the Christian doctrine of a Creator God as the origin or at least archetype of the modern impulse to ‘enframe’ humanity and the world as a whole within a scaffold of pre‐determined natures, set and surveilled by an omniscient creator. On this view, Christianity simply reinforces the problem of mortal longings, by metaphysically validating an ambition for transcendence which should in fact be acknowledged as problematic. The Christian concept of sin, Heidegger thinks, is merely an extension of this, vilifying the human failure to achieve perfection. For the philosopher, by contrast, it is the assumption of the possibility of perfection or wholeness, rather than inadequacy to it, that is indicative of a spiritual blindness.

Mulhall (like Husserl before him) contests Heidegger's declared emancipation from the Christian doctrine of original sin. In reality, he argues, Heidegger takes from that doctrine both the basic sense that the human condition is one of self‐alienation and deleterious desire rather than of internal harmony and potential fulfilment, and the claim that this predicament is propelled and perpetuated by a pursuit of perfection that is at once incoherent and ineradicable. This complex dynamic is already present in the biblical story of the Fall (Genesis 3), where it is with the suggestion that she might be ‘like God’ that the snake tempts Eve into eating the forbidden fruit of knowledge. The aspiration to be God‐like, in other words, is within the Christian story both an enduring ideal (humans are, after all, ‘created in his image’) and a practical temptation: the hubristic ambition to aspire to the status of God, whose mere creatures they are.

It is the appeal to God as a foil to human finitude, who embodies the ideals to which humans vainly aspire, that really distinguishes the Christian doctrine of original sin from Heidegger's Verfall, Cavell's scepticism, and Sartre's lure of the in‐itself. From the perspective of philosophy, this appeal betrays Christianity's failure to accept human finitude in its radicality. Mulhall, by contrast, repeatedly argues that the relation of the human agent to an absolute may turn out to be not extraneous but necessary to the philosophers’ own basic intuition that our desire to transcend finitude is both universal and morally problematic. ‘Secular ethics’, he argues, must ‘conceive…of the individual's ethical failings as essentially accidental modifications of a nature capable of guiltless integrity’.Footnote ⁹ This commitment, however, is incommensurate with these philosophers’ own basic intuition that the failures they identify are universal. It also causes them to posit as outwith moral questioning basic dispositions such as being‐unto‐death (Heidegger) and acknowledgement (Cavell), while in reality these should be further questioned.Footnote ¹⁰

As Mulhall observes, the Christian contextualization of human fantasies of totality within a relationship to the divine, by contrast, problematizes not merely certain dispositions but the subject's entire moral autonomy.

This yields something that is difficult to frame in Cavellian or Heideggerian terms: not merely a renunciation of certain desires for the sake of the integrity of the self, but the recognition of that self as itself problematic. The characteristic Christian ethic is one of self‐abnegation, classically expressed in Christ's words in the New Testament: ‘If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’Footnote ¹²

Mulhall, of course, is keenly aware of the Nietzschean critique of the classic Christian posture of self‐abnegation. On this critique, the Christian imposition of a morality of self‐abnegation on oneself and others is merely an underhanded bid to attain, as the reward of self‐denial in the next life, the self‐realization that is explicitly condemned in this. Mulhall's response to this Nietzschean threat is to insist that Christian faith be lived as a radical self‐abnegation that does not feed a clandestine ambition for self‐gratification after death. This self‐abnegation includes a radically apophatic ascesis: a resolute rejection of any notion of God as an ‘object’ of loving faith or eschatological hope which would provide a surrogate or Sicherung within the attempt to detach ourselves from our hubristic desires.

The model for this more radical self‐abnegation, for Mulhall, is Kierkegaard read through Heidegger. Mulhall argues that when Kierkegaard describes the Christian's relation to God as an absolute attachment to the absolute, which finds its correlate in a merely relative attachment (or relation) to anything relative, then this is phenomenologically indistinguishable from Heidegger's description of Dasein's authentic relation to itself as being‐unto‐death. There is, for Kierkegaard, no object (however remote or rarefied) that can be labelled ‘God’, and to which the Christian relates herself absolutely, concomitantly loosening her attachment to anything within the world (including her own desire for gratification or fulfilment). Rather, ‘God’ shows up in Kierkegaard's faith world (as Mulhall understands it) only as a negation: as a refusal, on the part of the Christian, to attach herself absolutely to anything relative, i.e. innerworldly. This is exactly equivalent to Heidegger's emphasis that to live authentically, Dasein must recognize its own and the world's radical contingency – in Heidegger's terminology, recognize itself as the null basis of a nullity –, and refuse to attach itself to anything, even its own continued existence and identity, as if they were in any sense absolute.

But this apophatic ascesis leaves or creates a number of unresolved difficulties as a philosophical adduction of the doctrine of original sin. Mulhall has appealed to that doctrine as capable of accounting for both the universality (or ‘naturalness’) and the moral significance (or ‘unnaturalness’) of our misplaced claims to absoluteness. Yet his own treatment does not always preserve that double insight. As for Heidegger, so for Mulhall after Kierkegaard, ‘fallenness’ just is the wrong comportment towards one's finitude. Consequently, to acknowledge that one's absolute claims to knowledge, resources, and other people are misplaced is already, in some sense, to have overcome them. Self‐abnegation, for Mulhall, is at once the acknowledgement and the cure of original sin.

But if – as traditional Christianity suggests in contradistinction to Heidegger's and Cavell's humanism – it is impossible to abnegate oneself by one's own power, then Stanley Cavell's criticism seems to stand that the imputation of ‘original sin’ perversely makes human nature out to be a dysfunctional encumbrance that both has to be overcome and is ultimately insuperable.Footnote ¹³ Conversely, if it is possible, then it is necessary to ask what the motivation for such self‐abnegation – such wilful abrogation of one's own will – might be; and the likeliest answer is a Nietzschean bid for reward, in which case we haven't really overcome our desires but only concealed them.

Mulhall addresses this conundrum by an elegant twist: The self‐denial first encountered as apophaticism turns out, in Mulhall's treatment of the Incarnation, also to be the inmost human mode of participating in God. The Incarnation, as well as the act of Creation read through the Incarnation, teach us that such a stance is not unrelated to God, but that on the contrary, it is God's own mode of existence. Creation, Mulhall thinks (in line with late twentieth‐century trends for ideas of kenosis), is an act not of divine power but of divine self‐abnegation: God empties himself to make room for something apart from himself. The Incarnation reiterates this pattern, as described in Paul's famous kenotic hymn in the Letter to the Philippians:

Self‐abnegation, for Mulhall (after Heidegger after Kierkegaard), is thus at once the acknowledgement of finitude and a participation in the self‐abnegating divine. This metaphysic, he suggests, pulls up the root of any residual desire for self‐sufficiency or ultimate gratification by removing the vision of God as ens realissimum as its anchoring point.

But this raises a second problem with Mulhall's account. Ingenious as his volta is, it is true, I believe, neither to the Christian texts it adduces nor to the existential problem for which it seeks to account. Regarding the first, though the Christian tradition certainly portrays God as selfless, even self‐emptying, in his love, this selflessness is always in the service of ultimate plenitude; specifically, the inclusion of created beings in the plenitude of the creator (see for example 1 Corinthians 15.28; Ephesians 2.4‐7; Hebrews 12.2). Regarding the second, Mulhall's solution seems to me to rely on an unwarranted connotative transfer of the desirability of participation in a God of plenitude to participation in a God of poverty. But self‐abnegation cannot be made into a desirable good by a mere act of theological will. Participation in divinity may be a motivating power, but not participation in such a divinity in such a way. By following the Christian tradition in framing the human desire for transcendence as a desire to participate in the divine, but departing from that tradition in re‐presenting transcendence as at its deepest self‐abnegation, Mulhall risks defining the problem of ‘mortal longings’ out of existence without actually addressing it.