The Placental Turn in the Crucifixion

In my previous post, I referred to the hypostatic union as an event within the event of  the Cross. The term itself refers to the orthodox expression of the relationship between the nature of the human and the nature of God as they exist within the single person of Jesus, the God-Man. From a contemporary Catholic perspective the appearance of Jesus in history is an evolutionary development in the history of humanity and represents the beginning of the final phase of human development. It is an irrevocable event, an event horizon--a point of no return, anthropologically speaking. For Christianity, it is a trajectory within a process of theosis. 

Hybridity is a metaphor for the union of the two natures, not its genetic actuality; for there is no fusion of the divine and human elements into a new single nature, which is the actual phenomenon of a biological hybrid.  Still, I like the metaphor because it keeps the conundrum alive and permits the outrageous assertions of monstrosity in play. The metaphor allows for the indictment of the modern turn's hatred of the hybrid and its implied miscegenation. Modernism wants purity, certainty, predictability and its mode of operation is alchemy: its worst kept secret is its desire to turn base metal into gold. The postmodern critique lays modernism's desire bare.

The placental turn I took in describing the communication of idioms, the transferability of the predicates of God and Christ, contextualizes how Caputo's insistence and existence can operate in the event of the Cross. In his first discussion of insistence and existence (I, 14ff), Caputo asserts the chiasmic relationship between these terms, and speaks of their co-dependency. It's not just an 'intertwining,' what I have called interdigitation and evagination, but he seems to be asserting something much more transgressive, more parasitic in the relationship. So, in the context of bringing something into being, a birth, an insistence landing on a fertile substrate---a positive response to the call---the placental relation to the womb is descriptive. The hybridity within the temporary relationship between the pregnant uterus and fetal placenta provides a locus for a creative parasitism operative in the hypostatic union as it comes into being in the death of God on Calvary.

While the New Testament is already grappling with the idea of the Incarnation, is does not know of anything like the hypostatic union. That is an event that must wait for another epoch; that call from the Cross must wait to be heard. The desolation of the day between the Death of God and the birth of God struggles with "Lema Sabacthani" like Jacob wrestles with God through the night until at dawn, God cries, 'uncle', hineni, and Jacob awakens as Israel.

The way Abram awakens as Abraham,  Kephas awakens as Peter,   Yeshua awakens as Yahweh, the disciples awaken as Christians, The Way awakens as church, church awakens as Catholicism, Vatican I awakens as Vatican II, the way Catholicism awakens...finally awakens. 

Hineni. 

Me Voici.

Is there a Hegelian Event in the Cross?

I am taking John D. Caputo's characterization of the event in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (henceforth, I) very seriously. Events are not merely things that occur, as the colloquial use of the term would suggest, but that which is 'going on' in what happens that is the event. Events beckon, call, insist from within the action that is happening (I have never heard Caputo say something like 'calendar of events,' but I have heard him say 'event' the way he means it here: he says it with a temporally long 'e' in the second syllable followed by a carefully articulated 't'). It is a different and inflected word, and it is always a technical term.

The Crucifixion of Jesus is a happening that perhaps proffers several events. So, I will ask: what is going on in, on, and around the Cross? And is Hegel there, too?

Caputo likes to begin in forsakeness, abandonment: Matt 27:46, so let's meet him there, say 3 o'clock:

And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [New American Bible Revised Edition].

What's happening is the death of Jesus and a shout of despair from the Cross. What's going on? The death of God. Well at least the little death of God, la petite mort. No patripassionism here, but an act of love. Eli seems unmoved. Jesus dies. What is God's response? Deaf transcendence, indifference? No, perhaps. Perhaps the response is silent presence. The hypostatic union is many things, but it is never less the than the communication of idioms. The Logos remains present to the suffering of the flesh; it interdigitates with it, evaginates human dying, bears a placental unity with the womb of the Logos-sarx, allowing for an accidental cross-over of suffering. It feels and acknowledges the dying qua dying. The soundtrack to the scene is the Song of Songs, and its sounds a little like the Liebestod whose libretto is now the Sermon on the Mount. La petite mort always refers to the transcendence in what just happened; the little death is the event in the climax. The call from the Cross, the call from this real presence, moves within death and despair, from within the loud cry that yields (And we have not even gotten to the Johannine spear that breaks into the Body of Jesus and releases the Church and its uncertain faith, oozing from the side of the man). It is as the April fool, Melito of Sardis, has said, "It was He because of whom the earth quaked. He that hung up the earth in space was Himself hanged up; He that fixed the heavens was fixed with nails; He that bore up the earth was borne up on a tree; the Lord of all was subjected to ignominy in a naked body-God put to death!" Communicatio idiomatum.

If Caputo's summary (execution) is right, that "[i]n Hegel and Altizer,the death of God is God coming to life in space and time, the death of the transcendent otherworldly God and the birth of the God with us, the immanent infinite womb of divine life that sustains us," (I, 137) then what we are recognizing as an event in the occurrence on Calvary (Hegel is there in the crowd, looking over Caputo's shoulder) is what invites faith into being: the response to the death of God is Christianity. God insists (from where Caputo knows not, but for the Christian from a presence coming into being) in the event in the Cross, and the answer to that call is an action, the birth of faith already moving to and fro. This is not a Hegelian totality, some final point of the Spirit, but a beginning---an irrevocable beginning---but a beginning of a process of the unfolding of a new reality and new way of thinking. The play of (syn)thesis and antithesis is a never-ending sequence of events--we chide Hegel for being a bad Hegelian when he suggests it all ever lands on some encyclopedic 'somewhere.'

In fact, there can only be Hegel's idea of the silhouette: an outline of a 'something' that can never be contained in any given Gestalt; but rather continues the process to knowledge and insights whose visions, decisions and revisions only precariously sit within their moment (Ray Brassier retrieves Hegel for the event when he opines that the change in reality and ideation make it impossible to say everything about anything). And it is here in the ever-provisional Gestalt that Hegel meets Rahner (they are old friends): in the theological anthropology of the hypostatic union, which for Christians is a trajectory. That trajectory is itself an event, because (if an event is doing what we are saying events do, then) this trajectory-as-event engages and drives the circumincession of past, present and future. This engagement is the trace of the event in Hegel eventuated in the Hegelian event of the Cross.

Of course, we are talking of the event of God's 'little death' here, the act of love in and through the suffering known so well to the Psalmist so many years before the crucifixion. Christianity does not know of the Grand Death of God, and so a small adjustment needs to be made to Caputo's assessment of Hegel and Altizer: Christianity cannot speak of the 'death of the transcendent' but it can and does and must speak of the kenosis of that 'otherworldly God,' the self emptying of divinity into Emmanuel ('God with us' [cf Matt 1:23]). Kenosis is all over I, single kenosis, a plastic 'double kenosis', a kenosis of annihilation and a kenosis of birth, and it is there through and through the event of the Cross.

Caputo's synthesis is instructive: "The au revoir of Father and Son are superseded in a final rendezvous in the Spirit,"  which is none other than the "movement that takes place within the Absolute." The trinitarian dance (perichoresis) continues to release the event kenotically, as everything empties from the Cross: the fiat of the annunciation, of overshadowing of the Spirit and the birth of Emmanuel. The infancy narratives are inaugurated in the issue from the side of Christ, but they are at once of the Nativity and Pentecost. The out-pouring of the Spirit through the event in the Cross is the same creative gesture of Genesis. On the seventh day God rested from his labors---Saturday is lost time that howls the 22nd psalm; God is exhausted, and it takes until the first day of the week, about as long as it takes Jesus to arrive in Bethany to seek out Lazarus, for the event to run its full course in the Resurrection. God again says yes to the void, to negation, to Saturday, and sees Sunday as very good. Sunday is Saturday's child who picks up the pieces of desolation and finds a way to go on; and the child is the Resurrection: God, born again and re-presented, puts on his own lips, Hineni, and answers the question, Eli, Eli...

For Caputo and Hegel, the actant of the call is anonymous, undecidable; there is no self-communication because there is no self to communicate. For the Christian, the self-communication of the caller is decided and decisive, even if there remains some anonymity in the absolute mystery that extends a most unexpected invitation, a most generous hospitality. It's rather something like grace.