as strictly "from below" as contemporary thought might seem to expect.79 The admission of the difficulty to believe (the non facile) is arguably less outdated.80 Whether this particular initial, Rahnerian distantiation from many signs of the times and much of contemporary history and philosophy, seemingly more reminiscent of the decades prior to 1848 than to those following 1918, is in fact the one most suited to identify both the Gaudium et Spes and the luctus et angor of our day is a decision that should be left to the contest of theologies within the region of Catholic debates for the most coherent account of faith and experience. As the reception of the Second Vatican Council has shown, such a differentiated region must be given not only space but also time for the coherent synthesis of heterogeneous claims and loci to mature. The hermeneutic of reform for a synthetic reading of the compromise texts of the Second Vatican Council only gradually showed its superiority to strategies of one-sided continuity or one-sided discontinuity.81 This multidimensional sense of the space and time needed for the convergence of competitive regional theologies has the advantage ascribed by classical mereology to what was termed the "potential whole": the ability to acknowledge the need for heterogeneous parts (in as much as they are genuine parts of the same whole) without foreclosing debate about which parts more fully express the potentiality of the whole.82 N&V

79 Karl Rahner's programmatic criticism of Kant and Heidegger has often been downplayed or simply overlooked, made easier by the pseudonym attached in 1940 to his "Introduction au concept de philosophie existentiale chez Heidegger," Recherches de science religieuse 30 (1940): 152-71, now in Sämtliche Werke vol. 2 (Freiburg: Herder 1995): 319-46 and 473-75, and to the revisions by J. B. Metz in the second edition of Hörer des Wortes, which eliminated the references to Heidegger and Kant as the rare and unfortunate exceptions to the philosophia perennis running from Plato to Hegel (Sämtliche Werke, 4:94-95). Taken together, they help us recognize the programmatic critique of Heidegger, more obvious in 1936, informing already the overall argumentative direction of Geist in Welt.80 This long overdue reversal of the common pre-understanding of which epistemological starting point for the doctrine of God is more topical opens another field for applying Sander's recent metaphorical use of the Moebius strip (see note 19 above).81 See Kurt Koch, Das Zweite Vatikanische Konzil: Die Hermeneutik der Reform (Augsburg: St. Ulrich, 2012). For the critique of one-directional theology, see Koch, Universalität und Kirche: Zu einer notwendigen Beziehung mit Spannungen (Basel: Schwabe, 1999).82 For the ecclesiological significance of the mereology of the potential whole, see Richard Schenk, “Eine Ökumene des Einspruchs. Systematische Überlegungen zum heutigen ökumenischen Prozess aus einer römisch-katholischen Sicht," in Die Reunionsgespräche im Niedersachsen des 17. Jahrhunderts. Rojas y SpinolaMolan-Leibniz, ed. Hans Otte und Richard Schenk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 225-50.

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