John D. Caputo

John D. Caputo (1940–)

John David Caputo was born on October 24, 1940, in Philadelphia, into a working-class Catholic family of Italian descent. The Catholicism of that city and that decade was not an abstraction to him but a total environment of parish, ritual, and catechism, and he has returned to it in his own published reflections as the soil from which everything else grew. At eighteen, in 1958, he entered the De La Salle Christian Brothers, the teaching order devoted to the education of the young, and spent the better part of a decade inside the religious life. He took the name Brother Hugh. The years in the Brothers gave him a discipline of reading and teaching that he never lost, and they also gave him, by his own account, his first sustained experience of how institutional religion can nourish and constrain at once.

His formal education was pursued largely within that world. He took a bachelor's degree at La Salle College in Philadelphia, then a master's degree at Bryn Mawr College, and in 1968 completed a doctorate in philosophy at Bryn Mawr with a dissertation on Heidegger. Shortly afterward he left the Christian Brothers, married, and began a career as a university philosopher. He has written, in his memoir-like reflections, that leaving the order was not a loss of faith but a change in the form of his religious life. The distinction matters for reading him: he never became an apostate, and he has been equally unwilling to become an apologist.

In 1968 he joined the philosophy department at Villanova University, the Augustinian university outside Philadelphia, where he taught for nearly three decades and rose to the Thomas A. Watson Chair in Religion. His early scholarly formation was in phenomenology and in the thought of Martin Heidegger, particularly Heidegger's late engagement with Meister Eckhart and mysticism, which produced his first major book, The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (1978). The turn that defined his mature work came through his encounter with the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, whose method of deconstruction he began to read not as the enemy of faith but as a way of thinking about it afresh. That reading, and the public friendship with Derrida that grew from it, set the direction of everything that followed.

In 1993 Caputo moved to Syracuse University to take the David R. Cook Chair in Philosophy, a post he held until 2004, and from 2004 until his retirement in 2012 he was the Thomas J. Watson Professor of Religion and Humanities at Syracuse, with a concurrent appointment as Maechler Professor of Philosophy at Villanova from 2004 as well. He served as president of the American Catholic Philosophical Association in the early 1990s and later held the Maechler Chair of Humanities at Villanova. Since his retirement from Syracuse in 2012 he has remained active as an author, lecturer, and emeritus professor, and he has continued to publish into the 2020s.

His relationship to church authority has been that of a Catholic who writes largely from the margins of formal ecclesial structures. He is not a theologian by credential, and he has never held a post in a seminary or chancery; his work lives in philosophy departments and in the open conversation between philosophy and theology. That position has drawn pointed disagreement from both directions. Some confessional theologians, among them figures in the Radical Orthodoxy movement, have argued that his theology dissolves the doctrinal content of Christianity into a vague hope. Some secular philosophers have found his appeal to the "religion without religion" he draws from Derrida either unnecessary or insufficiently rigorous. Caputo has answered both camps in print, and the exchange remains part of the public record of his work.

His Writing and Its Influence

Caputo began publishing in the 1970s, and his early books were careful works of scholarship in the phenomenological tradition. The Mystical Element in Heidegger's Thought (1978) traced the late Heidegger's debt to Eckhart and the language of letting-be. Radical Hermeneutics (1987) was the book in which he first gathered Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Derrida into a philosophy of interpretation that refused the comfort of final foundations. That refusal, which he called a "cold hermeneutics" in the sense of facing the flux of existence without consoling myths, became the ground on which his later religious writing stood.

The decisive works came in the 1990s. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997) argued that Derrida, often read as a thoroughgoing secularist, was animated by a passion for the impossible that Caputo described as a kind of messianic faith, a "religion without religion." Against Ethics (1993) pressed on the limits of moral systems. He then developed a theology of his own in The Weakness of God (2006), which proposed that God is not a sovereign power but a call, a claim without force, whose reality is the reality of an appeal rather than the strength of an agent. The Insistence of God (2013) carried the argument further, and On Religion (2001) gave general readers a brisk and accessible introduction to his views. Among his later books, Hermeneutics: Facts and Interpretation in the Age of Information (2018) and Cross and Cosmos (2019) extended his reflections on truth and on the theology of the cross, and he has continued to publish since.

Throughout, his sources have been a mixture of the philosophical and the devotional: Heidegger, Derrida, Kierkegaard, and Levinas on one side, Eckhart, Augustine, and the Christian mystical tradition on the other. He reads Augustine's confession of not knowing what he loves when he loves his God as a founding text of his own approach, and he returns often to the Pauline theme of the foolishness and weakness of God.

His influence has been considerable within a particular conversation. Caputo is a leading voice of what is sometimes called continental philosophy of religion, and his work, together with his editing of series and anthologies, helped establish deconstruction as a serious interlocutor for theology rather than its adversary. His book How to Read Kierkegaard (2007) and his engagement with younger thinkers, including those drawn to the "weak theology" he proposed, brought a generation of students into this field. He has also been a patient interlocutor in public debates, notably with the Radical Orthodoxy movement, whose theologians have charged that his position surrenders the creedal substance of the faith, and with analytic philosophers of religion, who have found his methods loose. He has defended his work as faithful to the Gospel's own scandal of a God who comes without power, and the disagreement remains unsettled.

Within the Catholic world his reception has been mixed and largely informal. He has not been formally censured, but neither has he been adopted as a teacher of the church, and his books circulate chiefly in university philosophy and religion departments, in the seminars of Protestant and Catholic divinity schools, and among readers drawn to what he calls the "event" harbored in the name of God.

Who should read Caputo: Readers who have been formed in confessional Christianity and find that its certainties no longer carry the weight they once did, yet who are unwilling to abandon the language of prayer, grace, and the kingdom of God. His books suit those with some patience for philosophy, since they assume a familiarity with Heidegger and Derrida that the introductory volumes, On Religion and The Weakness of God, do not fully remove. They are not for readers looking for doctrinal clarity, a defense of traditional orthodoxy, or a devotional guide. They are for those willing to ask whether faith can survive the loss of metaphysical guarantees and what it might mean to hope for what cannot be proven.