ecce agnus dei---the Baptist
ecce homo---Pilate
ecce, ecce, read all about it, God without Sovereignty, ecce, ecce---anonymous
"Absolute omnipotence is a religious and metaphysical fantasy, but one that contains and displaces a powerful core truth, which is that by "God" we mean the possibility of the impossible." John Caputo, in The Weakness of God, (87-88)
The biblical warrant for a God without sovereignty is conveniently located in the 4th Gospel. Jesus is a lamb of a king, but a king nonetheless, for Pilate had written what he had written. He responds to the Baptist's ecce agnus dei with his own myopic ecce homo. The Synoptics have John baptize Jesus and Pilate baptize his own hands, which is as far as Pilate could see; the 4th evangelist essentially agrees, as his Pilate distances his vision from the whole affair.
The 'weak force of God' (Weakness, 94 ff.) is at work in the Johannine narrative.
“Are you the king of the Jews?”
“Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”
“Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”
Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. [John 18:33-38, NIV]
Pilate is able to conclude from his questioning Jesus's unconditional kingship without sovereignty in this here and now. Jesus is a sovereign without visible, effective power. No retinue; no rescue; nothing from 'another place.'
“Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?”
Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.
Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”
From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free [John 19:10-12, NIV]
Exousia is rendered in these verses as 'power,' but the gist of the term in context is its unconditionality, which drives Pilate's attempt 'to set Jesus free.' Apologetic in nature or not, this shift in Pilate's mood is an extraordinary narrative event. Exousia in the mouths of both Jesus and Pilate provides a micro-discourse on power-as-authority, as something unconditional in itself, something that insists, but only exists when brought into the realm of the here and now, the plane or stage of immanence where two forces-in-the-making face-off, the one the strong force of politics, the other, the weak force of God. In short, Jesus has been reduced to a plaything of the Pax Romana, and the only power at work on Gabbatha is Pilate's, and all this without prejudice to the exousia of unconditionality. The weakness of God, the possibility of the impossible, displaces what one might expect from divine omnipotence.
Pilate will allow Jesus this much: he is a sovereign, but a sovereign of nothing with nothing but the mock-up of a mock-epic. Politically, this is the only sovereign the Jewish people under Caesar will ever get, and Pilate writes as much. This is 'truth:' a king with a crown of thorns in a purple robe of Roman majesty mocking any pretension to Jewish sovereignty in 1st century Palestine.
When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”
As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”
But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.” [ John 19:5-6, NIV]
Behold the man: king of thorns, lamb of God, King of the Jews. This was a most crucifiable moment. Before his crowning, Jesus appeared to Pilate as the saturated phenomenon of the idol, whose gaze reflected the elusiveness of truth back upon the viewer. Pilate must look away, for any intentionality is completely drowned in the currency of impossibility. So, too, the chief priests can only say, "Crucify!" in response to the idolic gaze reflected upon them: that image of themselves is the idol they wanted dead as soon as [im]possible, which spills over their intentionality and betrays their intuition. The powerbrokers must be done with this Jesus, once and for all: he is too disturbing to the idols that maintain the status quo.
The thorns in Jesus's head pierce the sides of both Pilate and the chief priests. Jesus is the thorn that must be removed so that Pilate can move on to more pressing matters and the people to the Passover. And therein lies Caputo's displacement. The only omnipotence at play on Gabbatha is Roman, and Jesus has upstaged Caesar, who in turn, now must upstage Jesus, to set things right. It's a crucifixion of expediency. On Golgotha, the chief priests get their own fist in the face. They must gaze upon the "King of the Jews." Everybody from that morning gets a black eye.
There is too much complicity at the Johannine Crucifixion to allow abandonment to come forth, but the evangelist, too, enlists the 22nd Psalm (18), for its aleatory wit (John 19:24). The casting of lots shifts to another impossibility: what garments, and who would want them? the 4 soldiers gamble on the truth, or at least on what the truth came wrapped in. Truth is a game of chance.
What is truth? Truth is that which is orchestrated in the strains of Golgotha intoned on Gabbatha. The Johannine Jesus has all the company he needs.
“Jesus is a sovereign without visible, effective power. No retinue; no rescue; nothing from 'another place.'”
ReplyDeleteFor it is always in your power to show great strength, and who can withstand the might of your arm? Because the whole world before you is like a speck that tips the scales, and like a drop of morning dew that falls on the ground. But you are merciful to all, for you can do all things, and you overlook people’s sins, so that they may repent. For you love all things that exist, and detest none of the things that you have made, for you would not have made anything if you had hated it. How would anything have endured if you had not willed it? Or how would anything not called forth by you have been preserved? You spare all things, for they are yours, O Lord, you who love the living.
—Wisdom of Solomon, 11:21–26
Literary historian Chris Baldick concocts some insightful phrases in his intro to Gothic literature for an Oxford anthology. One in particular applies here. Caputo uses the gospels, and theology in general, because of the “imaginative freedoms and symbolic possibilities of [the gospels], not in any faith actually attached to them.” When Caputo uses theology and the Bible, he has “at the the same time placed them under strong suspicion.”
DeleteMuch like your use of Caputo in the case of raising Lazarus from the dead, you are using him in a very opportunistic way, leaving out that he does not believe Jesus worked miracles at all. And the “weak force” of God, too, is being used in a way that I can only describe as disingenuous.
There is little sense of where your commitments end and Caputo’s begin. This is a problem because they are not compatible.
Another problem in ignoring just what Caputo is doing is that his use of the gospels for their “imaginative freedoms and symbolic possibilities” are deeply suspicious of the manifest theological and historical referents of John’s gospel. Nor do they respect the theology and history of interpretations of that gospel that we find in the church’s history. Caputo has little interest in what John means in the context of Christian belief—again, Caputo is not a Christian and cannot be said to share Christian beliefs in any reasonable sense.
The interpretation you construct above, then, shares these conditions and cannot be said to be a Christian interpretation. It is an interpretation of a Christian text, but divorced completely from its religious, spiritual and intellectual history.
Your use of Caputo is against your own stated goals, and it can’t address problems of omnipotence and evil *as a Christian or Catholic* because the philosophy he is attempting rejects all omnipotence in a very literal sense. Caputo is trying to do something with the Christian scriptures without Christianity whatsoever.
Once you admit that you do indeed believe in a creator God and that Jesus did indeed work literal miracles, then religion without religion, the weak force, insistence and unconditionality without sovereignty—all of these concepts must be dismissed no matter how engaging or inspiring they might be. A Christian believer simply has no need for any of these concepts as long as they can continue to embrace Christian faith without the profound cognitive dissonance that Caputo (and I) experience when we think about the Christian religion, the dissonance that you sometimes seem to sympathize with but clearly do not experience yourself.
That’s the real question: If you find yourself agreeing with this interpretation above, one so clearly secular...why? Why do you feel the need to do this? Why do you find any value for yourself as Catholic in Caputo’s atheistic and rationalist project? You believe in a God that has true omnipotence and the power to meet and change or transform the world on the horizontal plane of our finite experience and physical existence. It is precisely this omnipotence that Caputo cannot accept. So... Why? Is it academic? Or is it that you turn to Caputo in these instances because you think it gives you an alibi when questioned about the omnipotence of God?
The weak force of God cannot raise children from the dead, turn water into wine, quell a dangerous storm, create entirely new matter and energy at will, exorcise real spiritual entities or cause the transubstantiation of the eucharistic elements. Neither can such a force subdue the chaos to form a cosmos, guide the world through mechanistic evolution to arrive at the human species, unite itself to a miraculously generated human nature. It cannot bring about ultimate justice at the end of time. It cannot sacrifice anything—it has nothing to sacrifice.
I think Caputo would reject "secular" and embrace "post-secular." In any event, my appropriation of Caputo is, in part, a way of putting into question the very question of theodicy. I think it's clear from the overall sense and tone of the blog that Caputo's 'religion without religion' is a little too religion-less; his weakness of God a little too weak; but he does strike at the heart of a very human hierarchy, and the usurpation of God's 'rights' by human power. We should bear in mind that most of Ecclesiastes 3 applies to God, not to humans.
ReplyDeleteNone of this, of course, has stopped Caputo from continuing to identify himself as 'a Catholic kid from Philly,' or for that matter, JJ Altizer from identifying hi8mself as a 'radical Catholic.'
I accept your critique. Still, Caputo's God is the God we seem to get; the biblical God seems weak in our world. But in what way is God not the possibility of the impossible? That question seems very fertile ground.
“But in what way is God not the possibility of the impossible? That question seems very fertile ground.”
DeleteBut why, though? What you see as fertility I see as confusion and mystification.
I am also confused by why you say you accept my critique. In what way do you accept it?
DeleteAnd are you saying that it is the world that has changed and so no longer allows Yahweh to “seem” effective and powerful? But how does that even work? And why do you say as a Catholic that the biblical God appears weak in the world when the church (along with many Protestant churches) does assert that God continues to work miracles through the intercession of Mary and the saints? And transubstantiation? If a God is in the mode of unconditional insistence without manifest sovereignty does that, then divine weakness is still greater than all the strength and power of creation in kind and not degree.
When I say I accept your critique I mean to say that I acknowledge your take on how I appropriate the work of John D Caputo, especially as that appropriation appears here on this blog.
ReplyDeleteI am not saying that the world has gone deaf and blind to God (others have claimed that and little gets done in that mode. I will say this much: there is no evidence for an omnipotent being in our lived world. And by saying that I don’t think I’ve said anything about God.
The dissonance you mention does not belong to non-believers alone but is also constitutive of belief in a post-secular world. Doubt doesn’t cancel faith; it lives alongside it.
And you never believed in an omniscient or supreme being. But you have spoken of signatures in the world of an absence, which implies more than just a blank nothingness, but a shape or impression of some other dimension that is not here.
DeleteI find the idea of a divine signature and a divine absence itself suspect. It leaves open the whole of mysticism and a virtually cabalistic language that sounds like the final refuge of a theistic faith threatened by the certainty that we live in a quantum mechanistic universe through and through. It is a universe that we would never have known without the power of the scientific method and the painstaking labor of meticulous experimentation. All the prayer and religion in the world would never have gotten us closer to the nature of this universe and ourselves. There is neither historical nor symbolic nor mythological truth in religion. It has neither the interest nor the methods capable of studying reality. There is no reason to think the authors of Genesis understood the human condition any more than it did human evolution. It’s pure fiction, all the way down. And it’s as simple as that.
I sent this comment without reading it twice to edit it. It partly responds to things you didn’t directly bring up. And I ought to have said that there is no *reliable* truth in the symbols and myths of the religions and that the content of their fictions contain dubious insights into our world and ourselves. Reliable, systematic knowledge of the ultimate realities is laborious to produce and rare to accomplish—and that is true despite STEM achievements. Much of our understanding of the religions—their evolutionary genesis, their specific historical causes, their cognitive and social behavior and benefits—is still speculative. But if I can’t trust myself to reliably access and understand the nature of my own immediate, conscious experience, why should I trust the religions to understand theirs?
DeleteOn the other hand, the literary theories you prefer sacrifice causality and nature for inspiration and those imaginative possibilities.
Neither religion, nor religious experience 'studies' reality. These are parts of reality. Phenomenology, on the other hand, attempts to speak of reality, while postponing definitive interpretations. By deferring a full-blown hermeneutic, it allows all sorts of things to 'appear,' to manifest themselves through themselves. Further, by its gaze, it allows for a robust givenness, not merely an acknowledgement and account of the data of nature, which is the noble task of STEM.
ReplyDeleteCausality! There's the rub. We can, after either a deployment of the ontic sciences (e.g., physics, biology) or even phenomenology, speculate on such metaphysical concepts. Only the latter, though, open upon a rich notion of causality. STEM gets us as far as the material and efficient causes (and, maybe, just maybe a glimpse into formal causality), but is slams the door shut on formal and final causality.
Because the gaze in phenomenology allow for the complete manifestation of things, it remains fertile, generative, and provides an opportunity for consideration of a richer metaphysics, if one were so inclined.
Phenomenology even allows for the appearance of phenomena that would otherwise overwhelm their intuition, and looks at such phenomena, as not nonsense (as pure science might), but all the more rich phenomena. Such phenomena would include events that are unspeakable, horrible, events of such enormity that they confound the intentional gaze. But instead of judging them as non-sense, opens upon them as real experiences that cannot enter the STEM space.
We have spoken of the matter of 'gratitude' in the context of the film, "Gravity." Is that 'thank you' simply a matter of material and efficient causes (the spacecraft and its operations) or is it looking elsewhere?
We would be in a much poorer place without the wonderful achievements of STEM. We needn't negate them to embrace philosophy. Do we limit the world to what STEM discovers about it, or can we free the world a bit more and let it be what it wants to be, let it manifest as it, itself, sees fit?
Phenomenology is not itself some kind of metaphysics; it might even be the opposite of metaphysics, but by allowing a real unfolding of givenness, it shows that the richness of the world is not out of reach. It therefore has a value, a value comparable to the ontic sciences.
That’s not richness. It’s a muddled confusion of experience that cancel each other out. And you’re just wrong that phenomenology is not metaphysics. You haven’t left metaphysical considerations behind, you’ve just called them something else. The labor that phenomenology is asked to perform is identical to the labor that metaphysics, specifically a Christian, theistic metaphysics, is used for. You want the church, the miracles, the incarnation, the sacraments, God, the trinity, you want all of that to be done with phenomenology now. In what way ISN’T this metaphysics? Phenomenology has become your metaphysics.
DeleteYou ask it—like you ask an unconditional, powerless divinity—far too much to pretend it is innocent of metaphysical, philosophical and even scientific pretension.
“Do we limit the world to what STEM discovers about it, or can we free the world a bit more and let it be what it wants to be, let it manifest as it, itself, sees fit?”
DeleteGraham Harman was right when he struck what he felt was the dismal heart of contemporary continental philosophy: rabid anti-realism. It’s certainly beating here.
GrahamHarman is far more generous to phenomenology than you let on here.
ReplyDeleteI would also point out that the deconstruction of metaphysics has been a stated goal of phenomenology since Heidegger.
Causality is a metaphysical concern, not a phenomenological one; to get there from phenomenology one must take a hermeneutical step, and that step is a choice made beyond pure philosophy.
No, you’ve retreated into phenomenology. That’s a step and a choice, too.
DeleteNot that I need to say it again, but, last time I checked, the Catholic church talks a lot about a god that works miracles. So does the Bible and every one of its books. So does Jesus. From the parting the Red Sea to the Miracle of the Sun. You can squirm your way out of having to believe these miracle stories are just that, stories—but why would a Catholic do that?
ReplyDeleteYou know what none of us can escape believing no matter how precious and clever our theology is? God may or may not have parted the Red Sea to liberate Israel, but Nazi Germany attempted the total destruction of every last European Jew. The Miracle of the Sun may boast hundreds of eyewitnesses of perfectly sane and reliable people. A few months later, the 1918 flu pandemic began. I wonder how many people who saw God play with our star were killed in the pandemic. Or saw their spouses, children and friends die. No one else in the world saw the sun dance. No other sources tell of the mass death of firstborns in Egypt and the total devastation of its military forces by the god of the escaping slaves.
But no one can doubt the reality of these great evils.
I hate that I was raised Catholic. I hate the formation it left on my mind. Because everywhere I look, I see only one thing: the absence of miracles. The mockery of miracles. The utter bullshit of God and Jesus Christ and his stupid cross and pathetic resurrection and cowardly disappearance. All I can see of life is one vast joke. That’s what Catholic thought does, it warps the mind into looking for God and now all I see is God’s miserable failure of justifying such a search.
The absence of evidence becomes evidence of absence. No one but the zealous, sincere monster hunters of the 20th century could have demonstrated the nonexistence of any exotic and unknown creature in Loch Ness. It’s bittersweet to be sure. They proved it is not there because their faith kept them searching for it.
An entire book could be written on the lessons of Loch Ness. It was nothing less than an informal, decades-long experiment on the folly and power of the human imagination.
ecce agnus dei
ReplyDelete—the Baptist
ecce homo
—Pilate
“...Yes—I let him run on,” Marlow began again, “and think what he pleased about the powers that were behind me. I did! And there was nothing behind me! There was nothing but that wretched, old, mangled steamboat I was leaning against...”
—Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness”