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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
A Philosophy of Prayer: Nothingness, Language, and Hope

A Philosophy of Prayer: Nothingness, Language, and Hope

Pattison, George
Caputo, John D.

Paperback

Series: Perspectives in Continental Philosophy

PhilosophyReligion General General Alternative Health

ISBN10: 1531506836
ISBN13: 9781531506834
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: Jul 2 2024
Pages: 192
Weight: 0.64
Height: 0.45 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Exploring the silence of prayer in Post-Kantian philosophy and traditional spirituality

A Philosophy of Prayer explores prayer within the perspective of post-Kantian philosophy. Against a background of traditional sources, including Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing, and the seventeenth-century French school of spirituality, the book uses Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Heidegger, Berdyaev, Tillich, Marcel, Simone Weil, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean- Louis Chrétien to provide an interpretation of what is meant by the passivity and self-annihilation of the praying self, suggesting an apophatics of the personality.

Pattison pays particular attention to the question of language and the implications of the role given to silence in traditional texts, arguing that language remains a defining element of the human-God relationship and that silence is not to be construed as the negation of language but as the revelation of the depth of language itself. The basic structure of prayer is shown to be implicitly eschatological, oriented toward a coming kingdom of justice and peace while, at the same time, expressing a deep desire for ontological homecoming, a tension manifest in, respectively, Levinas and Heidegger. On Pattison's reading, prayer calls for and develops a particular orientation of the self toward existence, corresponding to the virtue of humility, long understood as the basic Christian virtue. This is shown to be in tension with modernity's commitment to strong versions of autonomy. However, the choice of humility is not presented as the reinstatement of religious heteronomy but as a free choice of the praying self.

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