Martin Koci

This book examines the work of the Czech Philosopher Jan Patočka from the largely neglected perspective of religion. Patočka is known primarily for his work in phenomenology and ancient Greek philosophy, and also as a civil rights activist and a critic of modernity. He also maintained a persistent and increasing interest in Christianity, Martin Koci shows, and indeed his first and last publications concerned religion and theology. This book examines the theological motifs in Patočka's work, and brings his thought into discussion with recent developments in phenomenology, making a case for Patočka as a forerunner to what has become known as the theological turn in continental philosophy. Koci systematically examines his thoughts on the relationship between theology and philosophy, and his perennial struggle with the idea of crisis. For Patočka, modernity, metaphysics, and Christianity were all in different kinds of crises, and Koci demonstrates how his work responded to those crises theologically. Thinking Faith after Christianity thus provides new insights on theology understood as the task of thinking and living transcendence in a problematic world. It perceives the un-thought element of Christianity - what Patočka identified as its greatest resource and potential - not as a weakness, but as a credible way to ponder Christian faith and the Christian mode of existence after the proclaimed death of God and the end of metaphysics.

We have no other experience of God but the human experience, claims Emmanuel Falque. We – human beings – are in the world. Whatever we do, whatever we think and whatever we experience happens in the world and is mediated by the manner of the world. This also includes religious experience. Reflection on the possibility of religious experience – the experience of God – suggests that the world is interrupted by someone or something that is not of the world. The Christian worldview makes the tension explicit, which is perhaps why theology neglects the concept and fails in any proper sense to address the world. Through following the phenomenologist Jan Patočka, critiquing the theologian Johann B. Metz and exploring the theological turn in phenomenology, I will face the challenge and argue for a genuine engagement with the world as a theological problem.

Sacrifice, solidarity, and social decadence were essential themes not only for Patočka's philosophical work, but also for his personal life. In the "Varna Lectures" sacrifice is characterized uniquely as the privation of a clear telos, as counter-escapist, and as sutured to a comportment of finite life that is non-causal and non-purposive. In his Heretical Essays a similar hope is expressed to extract meaningfulness from use-value, and to deploy a Socratic and Christian "Care for the Soul" that can counteract the decadences of our age. These interests and developments of the practice and notion of sacrifice point to Patočka's double-hereticism, both of the post-industrial age of technological advancement, and of what had become the unthought-through of the Christian tradition. In both senses, his theory of sacrifice is not unlike that of St. Paul, who saw the necessity of counter-acting the decadence and pompousness of the Corinthians by calling them to become "scum of the earth." This helps reveal how sacrifice presumes, in general, an operative notion of waste, and this paper seeks to lend further understanding to the relation between solidarity and sacrifice by developing, from out of Patočka's own work, precisely how waste figures prominently in such a relation. Waste may be refused by merit of being deemed to have no value; waste can mark a layer of expenditure of using "something up" in a way that overlooks its societal surplus; and waste could depict whatever is, like a wasteland, uncultivable and barren. Waste then is employed in the essay as a heuristic tool for understanding how the normalization of the relation between solidarity and sacrifice is in need of being inverted, and how this inversion has consequences also for how solidarity can be considered in relation to atonement.

For decades now, the end of metaphysics has been heralded. Engaging with the issue at stake, first, I will present and critically discuss Jan Patočka’s prophetic reflection on the fate of metaphysics after metaphysical philosophy. This will show that the problem is far more complicated and that attempts devoted to overcoming metaphysics often unjustly reduce it. To be able properly address the complexities of the crisis of metaphysics, I will move beyond Patočka and will introduce the agent, which played a decisive role in the history of metaphysics and its development, that is, theology. I will point out that Patočka’s reconsideration of metaphysical thinking via the reinterpretation of the Platonic Idea correlates with the category of faith. Thus, I will argue that ‘a providential marriage’ between Athens and Jerusalem should not be divorced and that, despite numerous attempts to prove the contrary, the alliance of theology metaphysical thinking is unavoidable and even beneficial for both parts.

This paper is a critical account on Emmanuel Falque's project of the revision of the disciplinary boundaries between phenomenology and theology. Falque advices philosophers to embrace theology in order to philosophize better; and requests theologians to allow liberate themselves by philosophy. This proposal caused the earthquake in the field of the theological turn and earned heavy criticism. Firstly, I will contextualise and will present the background of Falque's thought. Secondly, I will engage with major objections to his project and I will argue that critics often misread it. The centre of gravity is the definition of theology. Despite using the same sources, namely Heidegger's radical distinction between the ontic science of theology and the ontological science of philosophy, Falque and his critics come to mutually exclusive conclusions. I will argue that critics employ a reductive definition of theology which results in the rejection of Falque's general revision of the boundaries between disciplines. However, as it will be argued, Falque contributes not only to a philosophically plausible enrichment of phenomenological thought but also to a credible revision of theological practice in a phenomenological fashion.