Issue #50

Abstract: This article is an attempt to summarize the main idea of the 450-page book “Covenant and Metaphysics” by Leon Chernyak and Mitchell Rocklin. The abstract for this attempt at a summary of the book’s idea is, in fact, a summary of this attempt at a summary of the book’s idea. The book raises the question of the metaphysical reasons for the gradual and progressive dying out of the theological component of Western culture, which has been going on for at least 400 years. The book primarily discusses the possibility of a purely philosophical formulation of the concepts of “sacred” and “sacred experience.” For the last 2000 years, the central religious factor in the formation of Western culture has been Christianity, i.e., a religion whose religious experience is most intimately connected with biblical texts. Accordingly, the book turns to the biblical specificity of understanding sacred experience. Since, according to the general belief, Hellenic culture and biblical religious experience served (and perhaps still serve) as the living roots of Western culture, i.e., its basic metaphysical components, the authors assume that the dying out of the theological component of Western culture is connected with a certain transmutation of this metaphysical alliance — the Hellenic with the Biblical. The authors go further with an attempt to show the “mechanism” of this transmutation. This task cannot but turn into a re-examining of the philosophical interpretations of man’s metaphysical constitution, i.e. what, for example, Heidegger called Dasein. In contrast to Heidegger’s Dasein, in “Covenant and Metaphysics”, sacred experience appears as the fundamental basis of the metaphysical constitution of man.