Kenosis, Charity, Love

AbstractThinking with the Christian mystery of kenosis (the self-emptying of God) in relation to divine motions of charity and love, this article sets out to recover a kenotic-mystical element in Greco-Judeo-Islamic Neoplatonisms. After rehearsing the postmetaphysical parameters of the term mystical (and ultimately of the term kenotic-mystical), and after identifying a “deep kenosis” (or “kenosis without kenosis”) in the postmetaphysical kenotics of Vattimo and Marion, the article identifies a ground of “kenosis-charity-love” in the Greco-Islamic Theology of Aristotle, a text whose unique lineage gives insights into Islamic, Greek, and Jewish Neoplatonic encounters with an irruptive and charitable Goodness-without-Being in the shadow of whose outpouring Being pales.