Michael Berman’s Merleau-Ponty and God: Hallowing the Hollow is part of the ongoing interest in religious themes in contemporary continental philosophy of religion. Though Merleau-Ponty died before the so-called ‘religious turn’ took place, his work has been inspirational for many thinkers who have emerged from the tradition of French phenomenology. Berman finds it surprising, however, that there has been little sustained attention to the question of God in Merleau-Ponty’s thinking. Although Merleau-Ponty was an admitted atheist, neither he nor Berman see that this should affect the philosophical attitude; “philosophy will proceed apace regardless of the religious leanings of the writer” (xiv). What is assessed in Berman’s book, then, is not related to Merleau-Ponty’s biography, but to how his thought pertains to “some traditional issues in the philosophy of religion” (xv). The eight chapters of this book are: faith, love, vision, soul/haunting, magic and miracles, judgment, evil, and hallowing, and together they provide the basis for examining “some of the traditional theological claims about God’s existence—e.g., omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-benevolence” (xv), and a factor against God’s existence: evil. Berman “use[s] Merleau-Ponty’s thought to develop a critique, grounded in his phenomenology” of these issues (xv).

In the first chapter, Berman examines faith as understood in two modes: perceptual and religious. He writes that “Merleau-Ponty’s perceptual faith stands in contradistinction to standard approaches to a religious faith that believes in things unseen, absolutes without evidence, and ideals that stand outside of experiential reality” (1). Perceptual faith is understood as a basic part of being human. Grounded in human experience, “perceptual faith is the openness that we have to the world as carnal beings” (5). Whereas religious faith breaks away from experience and leads to absolutes, perceptual faith remains tied to the ambiguity of experience and ongoing interrogation. Berman elucidates the ways in which Merleau-Ponty shows that perceptual faith is at the root of all religious faith, and that religious faith is deepened when it acknowledges this fact. Chapter Two examines the love of God, and highlights Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the objectivism and “high altitude thinking” (25) that have defined Western philosophy and theology. By looking at a passage from Phenomenology of Perception where Merleau-Ponty discusses God understood via the objectivist mindset, Berman highlights how his critique shows that “(this) God is impossible” (27). Human embodiment and perceptual faith displace the positions of power that reason and reflective objectivity have held, and so the ontological and cosmological arguments are rejected. Berman suggests that any God we could have faith in would be “apathos: No one is hateful or dear to me” (37).

The third chapter tackles the traditional characteristic of God related to vision: omniscience. By examining Merleau-Ponty’s writings on art, especially in relation to vision and perspective, Berman concludes with a radical statement: “painting shows that God does not exist” (54). The aesthetic experience of viewing a painting must be both perceptual and perspectival to be meaningful, and therefore must necessarily be the subjective experience of one embodied person (and not God accessing the experience through this person). The traditional characteristic of God’s omniscience would thus no longer hold, for there would be a dimension of human experience outside God’s purview. Chapters Four and Five, which look at the themes of haunting, and magic and miracles, continue to show the ways in which Merleau-Ponty’s emphasis on embodiment and seeing impacts the way that we understand God. Berman emphasizes that “Merleau-Ponty pushes us to consider the finite in the infinite” (72), beyond just thinking of the infinite in the finite. Drawing on the concept of reversibility, Berman highlights that “the haunting of the finite by the divine not only reverses into the haunting of the infinite by the finite, but the differentiation of the one from the other dynamically opens, closes, reforms, and adumbrates” (72). Reversibility is also key for Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of magic and miracles. “Magic and miracles serve as descriptors for understanding how both of these fleshy elements [appearances/visibility and concealments/invisibility] unfold in our experience” (88).

When examining the problem of evil, Berman shows that, again via the reversibility of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty sees both good and evil as contingencies and not as absolutes. They are never experienced in their fullness, but rather, due to the intertwining of absence and presence, and even of temporality itself, are seen and encountered in ways that will change over time. The aporia resulting from this ambiguity levels doubt against the traditional categories of God. The final chapter looks at how Merleau-Ponty’s thinking is a hallowing of the hollow. Humans are embodied and incarnated subjects, condemned to meaning in the world. However, part of the structure of reality is that things are never fully given. “What is present is presented with absence; immanence and transcendence, like activity and passivity, are bound together and diverge from one another in the continual écart of experience” (148). This gap or hollow that is at the centre of experience is the source of both the visible and the invisible, the source of their crossing over, or chiasm, in the flesh. As Berman writes, “to hallow the hollow is to faithfully adhere to perception, for through this we cannot but judge the world with a positive valence” (154-155).

With discussions of religion, embodiment, and transhumanism prevalent in both philosophical discourse and in society more broadly, Berman’s Merleau-Ponty and God is a helpful and timely resource. In addition to fascinating insights connecting Merleau-Ponty’s thought to questions of the divine, what this book offers is the opportunity for further questions to be addressed regarding God in the field of continental philosophy of religion. This, though, is Berman’s overall intent. He writes that Merleau-Ponty and God comes out of his own personal wrestling with the question of God, and hopes that it will be “both evocative and provocative” for readers, whatever their life journeys may be (ix).