The philosopher of religion Louis Dupré died in 2022 at the age of ninety-six. His career began in his native Belgium at Louvain, continued for decades in the United States at Georgetown and Yale, and ended back in Belgium. He published more than twenty books and close to two hundred articles, mostly in English. Thinking the Unknowable is a final statement, assembled by Dupré and edited by Duke professor Peter Casarella, who was one of Dupré’s doctoral students at Yale. It comprises fifteen essays on the major concerns of Dupré’s work (except Karl Marx, the subject of three of Dupré’s books, who is not mentioned). At least ten of the essays have been previously published, some of which have undergone substantial revision for the present volume.
The opening essay, “Philosophy and Faith,” sounds themes that characterized Dupré’s work since his classic The Other Dimension (1972). Religious faith has a natural drive toward philosophy, but philosophy cannot think the religious object or God. Rational arguments alone are inadequate for proving the existence of God. They can show the transcendent horizon of finite being, but they leave room for Heidegger’s conclusion that that horizon is nothingness. At best they allow for the transcendent to be given in religious experience. The contribution of philosophy of religion, Dupré concludes, “consists mainly in the awareness of another dimension in … Being, to which philosophy provides no direct access” (8). These themes characterize Dupré’s approach to the more specialized philosophical topics of the other essays.
The next three essays return to the themes of Dupré’s three-volume masterwork on the origin and development of Western modernity, Passage to Modernity (1993), The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (2004), and The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism (2013). As ancient and medieval thought gave way to modernity, the world moved from an intelligible cosmos, either divine in itself or given intelligibility by God, to an amorphous manifold in which intelligibility and meaning are imposed by the mind and from which God is absent. Modern atheism arose from the reduction “of all forms of causality to the efficient one conceived on the model of a mechanist theory of motion” (40) together with Newton’s principle that motion does not require an efficient cause. But glimpses of the transcendent remain possible in the fragmented symbolic world of modern literature and art.
In the fifth essay, Dupré concludes his career-long engagement with Hegel’s philosophy of religion. Hegel’s idea of absolute Spirit falls short of the religious idea of God in that for Hegel “all aspects of God’s nature must be intrinsically intelligible to the human mind” (54).
Essays follow on traditional themes of philosophy of religion: creation, theodicy, and immortality. Creation should be considered as a relation of dependency, not construed strictly as efficient causation or reduced to a one-time event. Concerning theodicy, Dupré argues that while standard philosophical justifications of belief in the goodness of God in the face of the reality of evil fail, it may be possible that “within a different, theological context, belief in God is compatible with a full awareness of the presence of evil” (61, emphasis in original). The possibility of evil may be inescapable if the infinite, perfect God gives rise to a free, autonomous being that is other than God. Regarding immortality, Dupré is not satisfied with any of the philosophical arguments for continuity of personal identity after death but holds that an event such as the resurrection of Jesus may provide empirical evidence for it.
Four essays narrow the focus to phenomenology of religion. Most phenomenological approaches do not go beyond the study of experience. In religion, however, the specific difference of the religious act is the “quality of fundamental givenness that adheres to” its object (97, emphasis in original). “The religious act intends its object as transcending the immanence of the experience” (111). A disclosure model of truth is best suited to understanding religious truth. Essays on religious art and ritual conclude this section.
The last three essays continue Dupré’s longtime study of mysticism. Philosophy can show “that the mind is open to the highest object of human desire and that the most intimate union with it may be strongly desired” (141), but it cannot show that that desire is satisfied, as it may be in mystical experience. Mystical enlightenment also “includes a unique and direct awareness of the self. The self is essentially more than a mere self,… a sacred character belongs to its nature” (150, emphasis in original). The book concludes with a study of the mystical theology of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464), who assumed increasing importance for Dupré as the “road not taken” in Western thought’s progression toward secularism. For Nicholas, “the cognitive ascent of faith” takes “the mind to a height that knowing alone will never scale. Only love of God may take that final step” (159–60), and that is the gift of the Holy Spirit.
These essays will be of interest to philosophers of religion as the final statements of a major figure in their field. Individual essays can be assigned in graduate or undergraduate classes in religious studies and theology.
