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New Perspectives in Ontology

Unfinished GodThe Speculative Philosophical Theology of Ray L. Hart

Edited by Alina N Feld and Sean J. McGrath

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About this book

Eighteen essays by a team of distinguished philosophers and theologians examine and develop Ray L. Hart’s key contributions to theology

  • The first major analysis of Hart’s speculative philosophical theology as a whole
  • Reconstructs Hart’s thought and establishes new venues of exploration in theology and ontology
  • Defines and develops Hart’s vision of Godhead as the nihil that does not result in postmodern nihilism
  • Adopts an intra-religious frame of reference (drawing on Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism)
  • Brings philosophy, theology, hermeneutics, phenomenology and aesthetics into conversation with one another in homage to the greatness of Hart’s contribution


Ray L. Hart is one of the most radical and creative theologians active in contemporary speculative philosophical theology. Breaking on the scene with his immensely influential Unfinished Man in 1968, he published his magnum opus, God Being Nothing, in 2015.

This volume advances critical consideration of Hart’s theological thought. The nature of time, the meaning of personhood, the being of God, and the role of the imagination in Hart’s work are discussed with clarity and erudition. Hart’s deep rootedness in modern speculative theology, from Boehme to Schelling, comes to the fore. The wide scope and profound depth of Hart’s thought have never been more evident.

Reviews

No one has done more to transform the contemporary study of religion than Ray L. Hart. Deeply grounded in, but not limited by, the western theological and philosophical tradition, Hart sets the highest standards for mutual understanding and scholarly communication among people holding different worldviews. As this important collection of essays by distinguished scholars makes clear, God Being Nothing represents the culmination of his remarkable spiritual and intellectual journey. By rigorously rethinking the seemingly obsolete tradition of speculative metaphysics, Hart and his commentators create a redemptive vision for today’s nihilistic culture.
This is a moving tribute to Ray Hart that exhibits eloquently just how and why he is one of the most challenging as well as original theologians of our time. Eighteen eminent scholars bear out Hart’s genius for articulating a meontology in which God is conceived as Nothing in his very transcendence. A must read for anyone who cares about the future of theology in this deeply troubling moment.
Unfinished God is a worthy tribute to Ray Hart, an elder statesman and ground-breaking pioneer of radical theology in the United States. Hart’s bold thinking ventures into the Godhead beyond God of Eckhart, the dark powers described by Böhme and Schelling, speculatively exploring the genesis of God, world, and humankind. One after another, the essays in this superb collection show the much-needed shock Hart delivers to orthodoxy and the openings he has created for a theology to come.
Ray Hart’s theology is an underappreciated treasure, which these intrepid editors—Feld and McGrath—tirelessly labour to unearth. Assessing the trajectory of Hart’s work from Unfinished Man and the Imagination to God Being Nothing, Unfinished God charts a course for radical renewal of philosophical theology in our post-orthodox and post-secular world.
Unfinished God is a timely critical engagement with the original thought of Ray Hart. The editors, Sean McGrath and Alina Feld, have done a remarkable job in marshalling a robust series of reflections on the vital liaison dangereuse between philosophy and theology. It lights bonfires in the mind.
From the epistemological problem of revelation in Unfinished Man and the Imagination to the metaphysical theogony of God Being Nothing, Ray Hart has eloquently argued that God is neither fully present nor wholly absent. In this collection of essays his leading interlocutors develop this idea in fascinating ways.
Table of contents

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations

Foreword: Ex nihilo aliquid fit
Brian Schroeder

Preface: On God Being Nothing
Ray L. Hart
Introduction: Saving God Being Nothing or the Labour of Becoming
Alina N. Feld

Part I. From Fundamental Ontology to Meontotheogony
1. A Meontological Speculative Theology: God Being Nothing
Cyril O’Regan
2. The Creation of God Being Nothing
Andrew W. Hass
3. Nihilne Plus? God Being Nothing More
William Desmond
4. The Ontological Foundations of Hart’s Meontology
Jason Blakeburn
5. Beyond Transcendence and Immanence: The Hermeneutical Spiral
Carla Canullo
Translated from Italian by Marco D. Dozzi

Part II. Hart’s Thought in Context
6. Ray L. Hart and the Böhmian Tradition
Sean J. McGrath
7. Meontotheology and the Idolatry of Being: Hart and Schelling
Jason M. Wirth
8. The Wheels of Ezekiel: From Unfinished Man to Unfinished God
Douglas Hedley
9. Nihil without Nihilism: A Linguistic Model of Theogony
Agata Bielik-Robson
10. Questions for Ray Lee Hart
Robert C. Neville

Part III. Themes and Method
11. Hermeneutics, Imagination and the Temporality of the Helical Spiral: Reflections on Hart’s Phenomenological Theology
Elliot R. Wolfson
12. Between Two Nots: Human and Divine Turba
Nathan R. Strunk
13. Night Watches and the Work of Days: Learning Experiments and the American Existential
Thomas A. Carlson
14. The Arousal of Freedom or Danse libre with the Nihil
Alina N. Feld
15. Seeing From the Centrum: Theogony as Empirical Theology
Tyler Tritten
16. The Trinitarian Source of Freedom in the Thinking of Ray L. Hart and David G. Leahy
Michael James Dise
17. Not Speaking God, Speaking Nothing
Nicholas Genevieve-Tweed
18. On Hart on Afterthinking
Garth W. Green

Afterwords to Afterthinking God Being Nothing: Toward a Speculative Metaphysics of Ultimates
Ray L. Hart

The Poiesis of Place: Notes for a Biography of Ray L. Hart
Andrew D. Scrimgeour

Ray L. Hart Chronology
Edited by Andrew D. Scrimgeour

Notes on Contributors
Index

About the contributors

Alina N Feld

Alina N. Feld is Adjunct Associate Professor at the City University of New York and the author of Melancholy and the Otherness of God (Lexington Books, 2011), book chapters, and articles in philosophical theology. She received her MA in comparative literature from Stony Brook University and her PhD in theology from Boston University where she studied with Ray L. Hart. Her recent publications include: ‘Transparency of the Good’, in D. G. Leahy and the Thinking Now Occurring (SUNY Press, 2021), ‘Melancholia: Passing Through and Beyond’, in The Philosophy of Julia Kristeva (Open Court Publishing, 2020), ‘Thinking the Absolute Edge between Altizer and Leahy’ (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 19, no. 1, 2020), ‘Hinduism and Eastern Christianity’, in Palgrave Handbook for Radical Theology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), ‘Van Gogh’s Dark Illuminations: The End of Art or the Art of the End’, in Van Gogh among the Philosophers: Painting, Thinking, Being (Lexington Books, 2017).

Sean J. McGrath

Sean J. McGrath is Professor of Philosophy and Theology at Memorial University of Newfoundland and a Member of the College of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The Philosophical Foundations of the Late Schelling: The Turn to the Positive (EUP, 2021), Thinking Nature. An Essay in Negative Ecology (EUP, 2019), The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious(Routledge, 2012), Heidegger. A Very Critical Introduction (William B. Eerdmans, 2008) and The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy (Catholic University of America Press, 2006). He is editor of The Palgrave Macmillan Handbook to Schelling (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020), Rethinking German Idealism (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2016) and A Companion to Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Religious Life (Rodopi, 2010).

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