Sublime Apprehension: A Catholic, Rahnerian Construction

This dissertation shows how the thought of Karl Rahner presents the ethos of Catholic Christianity, which, since the dawn of modernity, one might call the Catholic sublime, and its late modern instantiation, called sublime apprehension. As a constructive effort, the dissertation re-places Rahner into an idiom proximate, though unequal to his ownÌ¢‰âÂ'the Heideggerian critique of modern subjectivity. The majority of the dissertation's work consists in uncoupling Rahner's difficult term, Vorgriff, from the metaphorical associations of grasping (greifen) latent within it. This uncoupling occurs in various phases, passing through Rahner's appropriations of Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola and his teachings on grace, mystery, and eschatology, Martin Heidegger's readings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Friedrich HÌÄå¦lderlin, and Rainer Maria Rilke, and the sublime-aesthetics of Jean-FranÌÄå¤ois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Luc Marion. The dissertation aims to retrieve a truly Rahnerian Rahner, and to show his, and Catholicism's, versatility for the future.