Of Principles and Phenomena

"...that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its "personal" actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there" (E. Husserl,  Ideas I, 44).





Another anthem for phenomenology might be "back to Husserl himself." His 'principle of principles' (as he described above) marks the points of departure for the deployment of the phenomenological method. Anyone wishing to comment coherently on the movements within phenomenology, especially within the 'new' phenomenology, does well to begin in Husserl's governing principle as it opens upon putting experience at hand. One does even better if one states one's own understanding of the principle, and restates it as an interpretation of it.

If I may restate and interpret, the 'principle' admonishes the excursions of method to have faith in the knowledge that what presents itself within the intuition 'writes' itself into consciousness with its 'own hand,' as it were, without or at least prior to any conceptual framework: nothing intercedes for phenomena as they enter consciousness. What is there is the thing itself, unencumbered by a traversal through an extraneous conceptual space that imprints a signature of its having been there before its arrival in the consciousness. Consciousness therefore only needs to traverse itself to lead itself back to the thing itself.

Having a handle on the principle assists in determining if an application of the method has violated it, as, for example,  Dominique Janicaud charges Jean-Luc Marion and others of doing (see his Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn"). I am uncertain if Janicaud is a maximalist Husserlian, as perhaps Eugen Fink seems to be; but if there is something worth protecting in Husserl's thought, something worth keeping from a contamination, it must be the principle itself. Fink himself protects Husserl's project from misunderstanding and at the same time suggests that what awaits the effective phenomenologist (one who deploys the method successfully) is nothing short of phenomenal (as in, 'he played a phenomenal game,' or 'the performance was phenomenal,' or 'it was a phenomenal film'). Nothing short of conversion or transformation awaits over the Husserlian rainbow (see Ronald Bruzina's Edmund Husserl and Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928-1938, Yale, 2004; and, of course, Eugen Fink's own Sixth Cartesian Meditation: the Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, trans. R. Bruzina, Indiana, 1995).

How ironic then is Marion's work, work accused of violating the principle of principles and lacking 'rigor', which proves the method (a special case of the exception[al] proving the rule), demonstrates how the method really can get at the very possibility of conversion and transformation. What should trouble us more is the principle's not-so-subtle post-Cartesian appeal to certainty, or at least confidence; Marion has rehabilitated both the principle and Descartes in this regard. In any event, nothing in Marion's work, especially The Erotic Phenomenon and In the Self's Place, eludes 'rigor;' in fact, the former work can be viewed as overwrought, and both viewed certainly as vigorous and exhaustive (if not exhausting).

The principle, nonetheless, provides a basis for moving into this new phenomenology of givenness. I have described the maneuver of this graduated method as the phenomenological moment in part to remind me that the method defies causality---the moment is a moment of simultaneity---and in part to remind me to resist the temptation to think the reduction as the result of a sequential process of 'epoche' followed by the 'reduction proper.' Despite Husserlian 'givenness' rooting itself in the mathematical, in the given of geometrical proof, Marion's givenness leads back to the fecundity of such 'originary' givenness and deconstructs it, leading the way to his third reduction.   

Hence, the phenomenological moment is a busy place, whether sonorous or cacophonous. The horizonal element of the principle which sets the limits at which the thing presents itself also sets the tone (the stage?) for the moment itself, where the thing, consciousness, and the horizon intersect upon the 'ground' of the moment, which is none other than a shape-shifting 'self,' or better, shape-shifting 'selves.' At the risk of participating in the seemingly endless talk sometimes construed as a meta-discourse of 'phenomenology', let me remind myself of why the method tends to work in productive and fascinating ways. While phenomenology 'proves' nothing and only points to possibility, its effects can have profound critical implications, especially for the critical approach generally employed in this blog.

The stakes are high: reality itself. The moment of method recreates the world. So long as we dot our "I's" and cross our "gazes" we should be OK and live to commit phenomenology another day. We should also bear in mind that temporal and spatial markers [I underline some of these below] are merely a convention in phenomenology, much like the trope of its presenting itself in the first person singular---all convention, all Darstellung, all stage-craft. All the world's a stage.

The enactment of the method begins as the thing surprises consciousness into a consciousness of 'something.' That consciousness is a consciousness of a self, and that self is a self in the flesh, and that flesh rests in its finitude and immanence. The very boredom (how's that for an electrified term in this business) of the natural attitude, the attitude that accepts the science of reality as, for example, a clockwork (choose a metaphor for the scientific worldview), an acceptance of the clockwork in all its magnificence and awe, breaks off---boredom experiences a disturbance, even astonishment, at a thing presenting itself, appearing in view, within a gaze. What gaze? When did consciousness get a gaze? The thing awakens the gaze resting dormant---waiting to be born---in consciousness---the intention born of the thing.

What next? What happens next is boredom already collapsed upon consciousness's [t]race leading back through itself to the thing that comes into view. The world of the self has just gotten a bit bigger, stretched out by the space cut by the thing itself; the thing births an enlarged self, a self become through a becoming, a turning toward, a conversion to the thing by the thing. The collapse of the natural attitude, boring as such, comprises the epoche which brings into relief what has just collapsed it: the reduction proper and the thing itself. To separate the two into sequential occurrences would be tantamout to tweezing out rhythm and time from pitch and tonality in music. Let's not do it.

Cacophony or symphony? If experience forms the self, then the epistemological problem presents fully formed. "We are our experiences." "We learn through experience." Certainly these are not difficult notions. Truth is, phenomenology, when its not masquerading as its own meta-discourse, happens every day to everybody. We are 'everyday' phenomenologists, just as we are everyday mystics (as Karl Rahner would have it, referring to Christians who otherwise would be nothing at all), who experience something.

It's a place to start, a place for me to remember that I said this and was going someplace with it. Perhaps it is a place to start again, restart, from where I viewed this through a parallax view, or through the Lacanian registers and the role of 'lack.' In a modified version here, Lack constitutes the self in the flesh and its opening upon the immediacy of the thing fulfilling the intuition. The loss/lack within the self experiencing itself (as itself) and the world through the epoche, points to a fall into the reduction, a 'leading back,' which inheres in the growth of consciousness, and therefore recreates it. In the play of the Real (the condition of the absence of intercession for the thing, its immediacy of presentation), the method enacts, in the Imaginary order, something actually going on in the ineffable Real.  Lack is loss, but loss as a space for something to enter, not merely consciousness, but of becoming.

Phenomenology and the Self: An Asymmetric Laterality of Phenomenality

In light of Jean-Luc Marion's critique, rehabilitation and appropriation of the Cartesian subject, especially as viewed through the lens of Christina M. Gschwandtner's discussion in her Reading Jean-Luc Marion ("Phenomenology of the Self"), I would like to revisit the relationship of the self to the given in the phenomenological moment. Previously, I have attempted to blunt the dialectical tension within the concept of 'polarity' of the 'self' and the 'given' which is prominent in the critique of Marion's work in this area, and I opted for a  more neutral notion of 'sidedness' or laterality, despite the asymmetry inherent in the relationship between either side of phenomenality. I have posited a concept of phenomenodynamics and phenomenokinetics (quite frankly, based on the analogy with the principles of pharmacodynamics and pharmacokinetics in medicine and drug therapy), where the former describes the effects on the given upon the gifted, and the latter describes the effects of the gifted upon the given.


Individuation and the formation of the 'self' are constituted by the 'given' in this moment. In order to maintain the utter freedom in which the given gives itself in its degrees of saturation, and to maintain the unconditionality and anonymity of any 'pure gift' or 'pure call,' there must be at the core of phenomenality a productive 'back and forth,' an oscillation (Schwebe, nach K. Rahner) between given and gifted that has the fortuitous effect of bringing the self into itself more fully, which increasingly opens the aperture upon the given which is always showing itself fully. The gaze of the viewing, receiving subject itself  remains  open to individuation, which is a response to the 'call' (i.e., interlocuted, interpellated), shaped by the given. Phenomenodynamically, the given opens into the subjectivity of a self that is always emerging, individuating it into something new. Phenomenokinetically, the widening  gaze of an emerging, individuating self opens the aperture upon the given. The nature of the aperture is problematic (is it 'really' a feature of the given, or of the gaze?), but practically speaking, in terms of the laterality of the phenomenological moment, the aperture seems to straddle either side, hence, it also seems to be constitutive of the relationality that inheres there.


This schematic flux of phenomenality has implications for how the given and gifted radiate their relationality. If the aperture works to show degrees of givenness, in which phenomena have the characteristic of presenting as simple objects or less saturated phenomena, or intuition-busting, intention-bending embarrassingly rich saturated phenomena par excellence, such types of givenness and saturation 'depend' on the recipient. The recipient/gaze cannot be constitutive of the unconditionality or anonymity of  the given, but only of how these enter experience. If I may bastardize Lacan's 'mirror stage' here, the glass dimly seen might be able to interrogate the gaze. Since one does not look into the face of the Gorgon and live, the gaze must either be reflected or refracted---the given is always privileged in givenness and objectivity (it 'is' there regardless of a gaze; it need not enter phenomenality).


Individuation, the gaze, the aperture, the given and the gifted play out upon a version of Lacan's mirror,  which for our purposes is a shape-shifting, property-altering, flexi-plexi-glass mirror. It distorts but it also represents; it reflects but also refracts the gaze; and behind the glass something beckons. The gifted can see its own image, but never in isolation: it is always upon the surface of the glass: it can see its wholeness as a differentiating flesh, but always surrounded by surfaces reflective and translucent, but never quite transparent. It sees, yet it sees within the possibility of being seen---interrogated, read, perhaps even received---loved. At times, it suspects that the mirror is a two-way mirror, like the one in police and FBI interrogation rooms. It might not be love at all.


This 'mirror' gives an account of saturation, which can be of several types, but certainly the icon and the idol. The icon saturates the intuition by bending the gaze through a translucency of the glass that allows for being seen (open to the other); the idol saturates through its massive reflection of the gaze back upon the subject, which knows its image is contextualized but declines the company and becomes isolated within a flesh that can only be seen by itself, and forecloses 'being seen' (solipsism). A self poised toward openness receives the gift as that gift individuates the subject and its gaze which can orient itself upon the aperture that determines the degree of givenness that can come into view, into phenomenality. The play on the mirror is a game of surfaces. The asymmetric laterality straddled by the aperture upon the given might add degrees of porosity of those surfaces into either side of phenomenological moment.

BVM: Mary, The Mother of the Lord---Part III

The Blessed Virgin Mary, theotokos, is the difference that keeps on giving. As some readers have doubtless noticed, I have stolen part of the title of this blog mini-series from Karl Rahner's treatise, Mary, The Mother of the Lord (London, 1963). While I would not so boldly state, as Rahner does, that Mary as the mother of Jesus "implies the whole substance of Christian belief" (54), I would be far less reticent to agree with him that Mary's maternity transcends the biological dimension, and unites all Catholics in a "partnership" with God, as she models the acceptance of grace for all (12). Rahner's Mariology is intensely Christological, as well as ecclesiological, and imbued with his theology of grace. In this sense, Mary is the human side of the Church, which, when it is at its best, flatters her by imitation.


The Ave Maria, at once an intensely biblical and theological excursion, derives its content from Luke and the 3rd ecumenical council of Ephesus (convened in 431 to confirm the validity of the ancient honorific, theotokos). The prayer is felt by some to be the essential Catholic prayer, uniting, as it does, Christology and the human cooperation in the on-going creation of the world. The Angelus, a prayer celebrating the Incarnation and Mary's role in its history, is also quite biblical and theological. It emphasizes a bit more the intercessory role of Mary than the Ave, but the theme of Christ's saving work always keeps his sole-mediatorship of salvation clear. The Magnificat, Luke's little masterpiece, might very well be the perfect Catholic prayer:




46 And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord,

47 And my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.

48 For he hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden: for, behold, from henceforth all generations shall call me blessed.

49 For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.

50 And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.

51 He hath shewed strength with his arm; he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

52 He hath put down the mighty from their seats, and exalted them of low degree.

53 He hath filled the hungry with good things; and the rich he hath sent empty away.

54 He hath helped his servant Israel, in remembrance of his mercy;

55 As he spake to our fathers, to Abraham, and to his seed for ever. (Luke 1:46-55, [KJV])






I deploy the King James Version for its sheer poetry, despite some archaisms. Luke, a master of the Septuagint, has created a truly inspired hymn that not only Catholicism, but all biblical faiths, and though not strictly biblical, Islam as well, can embrace. It could have been predicted that the liberation theologians would embrace the Magnificat as something of a manifesto, given how it situates Mary in her 'low estate' and 'puts down the mighty' and satisifies 'the hungry.' Perhaps it is the message of the Magnificat, that Islam has heard and felt, that brings it to its understanding of Mary with which I began this 3-part series.


I am neither a Marian maximalist nor minimalist, though my leaning is toward the latter. Despite a few historical chips on some papal shoulders, divisiveness can never be a role for Mary in the Church. Some are called to versions of Marian piety ordered to the life of the living Church (cf. Marialis Cultus, 1974). Others are called more to praxis, and still others are called to Mary as a reflection of themselves as authentic Christians, Christocentric believers, who demure from the niceties of speculative theologies of grace.


Finally, in light of this recent consideration of Mariology, I might review the placental turn that seems to drive things Marian. I first used the metaphor of the placenta to suggest the relation within the hypostatic union. The 'placental turn' might clarify the relation between the single divine person of the hypostatic union and his mother. Mary is united biologically to the placenta of the word made flesh. Like the presence of the Logos to the human that witnesses to the death of Jesus, Mary, in her body, witnesses to the unmerited grace within her that exposes itself to her, sanctifies her. Her sanctification therefore is through the eternal Word, which sanctifies her eternally. Through the very givenness of the Logos that takes maternal flesh from Mary, Mary is 'gifted,' just as those who receive the IM are 'gifted' through its very givenness. In terms of the event, the IM releases the event of grace in the reduction of Mary to her givenness to God, and God's givenness to her. Mary becomes, moves into her subjectivity and her selfhood, as God loves her before she is, because God loves before he is.

The Confessions: St. Augustine on the Borromean Knot

Several texts have been folding, unfolding and folding together in my imagination lately: Keller's 'planetary entanglements' in her Cloud of the Impossible, Lacan's "Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious," and Marion's In the Self's Place. Happily, both Tad DeLay and Slavoj Zizek, two powerful apologists of Lacan and his work, have provided provocative lenses through which Descartes' cogito comes into focus in Ecrits and in Marion's examination of Augustine's Confessiones.

Zizek rewrites, in my reading, Descartes' infamous cogito, ergo sum, in his rewriting of dialectical materialism in Absolute Recoil (Verso: NY, 2014):

What if total knowledge entails inexistence, and existence as such implies a certain non-knowledge? Such a paradoxical relation between being and knowing introduces a third term into the standard opposition between ordinary materialism...and subjective idealism---things exist insofar as they are unknown (209).

I read here a flux between thinking and being, a paradox resolving, or at least playing out, in an equilibrium reaction that flows in either direction---between reactants and products---depending on the presence of catalysts or other influences that favor one side the equilibrium. Neither side undergoes complete annihilation, yet undergoes aphanisis, a ghosting, an evacuation. The system here is certainly dialectical, even as Rahner might understand the term, but it is also a Schwebe, an oscillation that can never land on a midpoint between being and thinking, knowledge and existence. Hence, the system allows for a condensation of a subject. In this sense, the oscillations become a waveform that has potential for a phenomenological reduction in which something can make an appearance, even if that appearance must, paradoxically, also be a disappearance, not terribly unlike Luke's aphantos on the road to Emmaus.

Lacan's Borromean knot of the registers the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary (RSI) provides a place for the play of aphanisis. Delay's discussion of the RSI in God is Unconscious is instructive, and his intuitions are very interesting. 

The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real operate in a diachronic and synchronic fashion, that is to say, they cannot be entirely separated...[T]he three are not things qua regions of the psyche, and they are not meant to be understood with exactitude. Lacan's theory is always meant to be turned over and played with as a useful tool (8).


Lacan's triple register functions in synchrony. The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real are entangled in such a way that we cannot investigate one without invoking the other two. The unconscious should be analyzed as a language (17).



Delay has cited Ecrits here, in particular, "The Agency of the Letter," emphasizing that the unconscious is a language and the discourse of the other (16). I am more sympathetic to Delay's first insight that places RSI on 2 axes, than with his monaxial synchronic function; but I also embrace his suggestion of knotty entanglement of the RSI and a resultant spooky action at a distance.

Before letting Lacan speak directly to us from Ecrits, I now take the liberty of playing with the RSI 'as a useful tool.' The representation of the RSI as a 3-ringed circus, or a Borromean knot is helpful in grounding the observations of Lacan, Marion and Augustine. Taking as my point of departure Delay's flexible system of the registers, I want to re-imagine the RSI as regions in relationality that do not actually intersect, yet form a closed system, as a Mobius strip might be twisted, like a helix, into a knot, such that a single strand makes up the entirety. Further, the knot can be imaged as a looping track, something like a cloverleaf road work. There is a flexibility in the twists, such that the strand can be lifted into relief, like pulling on a slinky. There is no inherent overlap in the knot's structure, so that the are no actual Venn intersections, but if pulled out like a slinky, virtual intersections appear and can be viewed from above or below.

Keeping in mind this dynamic Borromean slinky-pretzel, Lacan's concepts from "Agency of the Letter" find a safe place to land, even as they are threatened by Zizek's aphanisis. Interestingly, Augustine haunts Lacan's essay. This hauntology will become clearer when we look at Marion's reading of the Confessiones, but Lacan is already in an Augustinian mood when he seeks to 'demonstrate that no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification..." that no language can 'cover the whole field of the signified (Ecrits, Norton:NY, 1977, trans. A Sheridan, p. 150; here referencing 'De significatione locutionis' of the De Magistro).

The word 'agency' in the title of Lacan's essay is the translator's choice, reflecting as it does Freud's 'agencies' of the ego, id and superego; but I prefer 'insistence' in place of 'agency,' mainly because of Lacan's own title in French (L'instance de la Lettre), but also because 'insistence' has nearly become a technical term for what John Caputo says God does, and for what Delay, following Lacan, wants the unconscious to do. We should therefore hold 'agency' and 'insistence' (and even instance in both French and English) in a dynamic tension of oscillation (Schwebe), if for no other reason than to keep things honest.

Lacan presents a rather passionate voice in "The Agency of the Letter" and that passion is amply demonstrated in his assertions for metaphor and metonymy.


...[I]f a symptom is a metaphor, it is not a metaphor to say so, any more than to say that man's desire is a metonymy. For the symptom is a metaphor whether one likes it or not, as desire is a metonymy, however funny people may find the idea (175).



Though it is somewhat 'old hat' to view metonymy and metaphor as on the same axes as syntagm and paradigm, respectively, I shall not depart from that wisdom here. In fact, I want to allow symptom and desire to reverberate on our Borromean slinky-pretzel, with all deference to Jakobsen and Saussure (cf "Agency," 154). Paradigm, symptom and metaphor play out when we pull the slinky in a vertical axis, while syntagm, desire and metonymy play on a horizontal axis of the natural attitude.

Lacan asks, "[i]s the place that I occupy as the subject of a signifier concentric or excentric [sic], in relation to the place I occupy as a subject of the signified" but that question is "of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak. And it is not at all inappropriate to use the word 'thought' here. The play of metonymy is here the decision "to be only what I am," which is in "fact that I am in that very act." The play of metaphor is that "if I dedicate myself to becoming what I am, to coming into being...I lose myself in the process" (165 f.). "This signifying game between metonymy and metaphor...the active edge that splits my desire between a refusal of the signifier and  lack of being...is played until...I ought to say...: I am not wherever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think" (166). Lacan introduces his own early version of aphanisis in this splitting 'game.' Yet, definitively, Lacan cedes to Freud: "Wo es war, soll Ich werden." I must come to the place where that was. This is one of reintegration and harmony, I could even say of reconciliation" (171).


Reintegration, harmony and reconciliation form an essential grammar in Augustine's Confessiones. Though it is a great error to attribute a proto-cogito to Augustine, Marion has discovered Lacan's 'process' of the play of refusal to know or to be, to think or exist within the thought of the Confessiones. The heart is restless until it finds rest in God. Such restlessness is a process of praise, of relationality, of discovery, of oscillation, and aphanisis.

According to Marion, 


confessio opens a space where the ego and its readers enter not only into a dialogue between themselves but especially into a place, where the charity of God can reach them. The model of the confessio, in fact, brings about a reduction of the natural attitude, which permits coming to the question of God, namely love. It therefore operates as an erotic reduction (In the Self's Place, trans. J. Kosky, Stanford Univ. Press: California, 2012, 54 f.).


In Augustine's hands, confessio as praise and reconciliation performs the phenomenological reduction that shifts from the simply mimetic to the semiotic gesture, in which the tension between being and knowing allows both the self and its place to appear. The waveform of Schwebe collapses in the relationality of the folding textures of the genre, bringing something new into focus.

Here is the crucial text that folds, Lacan, Descartes, Augustine and Marion into the reduction.

Saint Augustine is perfectly willing to admit the argument that connects thought to being; he even inaugurates it and will impose it upon posterity (including Descartes); but he refuses to let this same argument produce and consecrate any ego known by itself...[B]ut he...observes that, when I think and am (or think that I am), I do not take possession of myself as an ego that would say I myself...[I]n thinking, I am put at a distance from myself and become other than I myself, that in thinking, I do not enter into possession of any myself that could exactly and truly say itself is saying I, that the more I think myself (and the more I am by thinking), the more unknowing I become of who I am and alienated from myself. In a word, access to my Being in and through my thought, far from appropriating me to myself as for Descartes, for Saint Augustine exiles me outside myself...[T]he cogito, supposed to appropriate me to myself as a myself, expels me from myself and defines me by this very exile. I am therefore paradoxically the one who in thinking knows that he is not (belonging to) himself, does not know his essence and can never say (himself), rigorously, myself. (63)


Marion reading Augustine and Descartes uses language similar to Lacan reading Descartes and Freud. Though Marion seems to be describing something more static than Lacan is describing, Lacan's play of metonymy and metaphor merge with Marion's alienation and exile within Zizek's reading of Lacan's very dynamic aphanisis and the 'paradoxical relation' of being and knowing. In the disappearing of Marion's/Augustine's 'myself' in apophatic 'unknowing,' the myself/ego shifts from thought to being, whose expulsion is alienation and exile. Here, Marion seems to be putting on Augustine's lips (che vuoi?) Lacan's "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (Ecrits, 166).

In the chemical equilibrium reaction analogy given above, there are, in the movement from thinking to being, knowledge to existence, only reactants in the oscillating flow favoring one pole or another. In the erotic reduction of divine love, the ego "can enter into the distance that opens me in the self's place" (99). It is not therefore finally in alienation, but in the vita beata, that only the oscillation that collapses, and not the distance that opens me. And here is where Augustine enters the roller coaster of the Borromean knot. If, as Lacan notes, the divine is located in the ineffable Real, it is through the syntagmatic, metonymic ride that the self can find its place there. But we can only see the self's arrival from above and below, through the paradigmatic, metaphorical, vertical axis, where knowledge and being are finally understood as not on a collision course, but on a gliding above and below each other, passing one another safely, to play again another day.

The threat of an actual aphanisis dissipates, for it has always been an illusion perpetrated against reality by certitude, which is the symptom playing out on the axis of metaphor. Augustine could have never felt the threat, as Marion magnificently demonstrates, because the oscillations of exile and alienation always collapse in the place of the self, on a horizontal axis, in the metonymy of desire, where the ego and the divine come into view through praise and reconciliation in the erotic reduction, and the saturated phenomenon of the univocity of love, the untroubled rest in the vita beata. This movement is, as Dante would later illustrate, a transition from the Imaginary into the Real, where Vergil cannot go, and only Beatrice can lead.

Again, Reshith: Analogy and Oscillation

Reshith has undergone some modifications since I first employed the term to respond to Catherine Keller's 'tehomic' creatio ex profundis---not a creation from nothing/no-thing, ex nihilo---but from ruach's oscillations over the deep (Face of the Deep). My concept of reshith maintains the otherness of God, maintains his freedom from a chain of being, from a causation in the scheme of things, from being merely another being among other beings. This is an admittedly anti-metaphysical gesture, one that I had hoped would operate in the spirit of Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being, which  seeks to avoid conceptualizing God within the category of being. The goal is admirable enough, to prevent dissolving God into a hapless idolatry of ontological difference. Still, causality grips God in the metaphysical causa sui, which Marion demonstrates to be a 'conceptual idol,' an idol that locks God into an impoverished likeness of being. Instead, reshith situates the eternal giveness of God on the horizon of Love, through which creation itself must pass before it enters the horizon of being. Just as God loves before he is, creation is loved before it appears.

The very giveness of beings is democratic in precisely the manner Levi Bryant has suggested in his Democracy of Objects. Objects enjoy their being prior to their becoming known to sentient beings. While it is the very nature of the human mind to interpret objects ontologically, that has no effect onticologically upon them. Causality is an irrelevant category for the way things are in themselves, and the way God is in itself.  God's own giveness, his infinite nature, creates as love loves, bringing things into existence from absolutely no-thing. Love always already has its object, which makes its appearance ex nihilo as a new creation.

Creation ex profundis is a shaping; wonderful as it is, it binds the lover into causality: shaping through the hovering above the deep. What a tehomic creation has got going for it, is its self-evident relationality. But this relationality is also and already in reshith. Analogically speaking, reshith is there already, anterior, before (a temporal adverb, but meant atemporally) tehom, which is simply there to be acted upon to become what it will become. Analogically, God is the observer of the no-thing, giving appearance to the material world in an erotic reduction of pure will, act and love. God, therefore does not act within the created order upon some pre-existent substance, but a true creation from pure thought, yet in an image and likeness. This creation is one whose origin is in relationality apart from a causal nexus, not an origin in causality: creation without causality.

As reshith comes into focus, so does a creation that is itself atemporal and one in which conservation and concurrence is already a part. While the theory of rapid expansion of an occurrence in time 14 billion years ago is appealing for its suggestion that the beginning of the universe can be extrapolated to a singularity, that beginning is not reshith, which disabuses us of a God at the head of a moment, the first cause in a series of causes. Causation, like spacetime, is a function of the category of being, which in a strange way, tends to relocate, metaphysically, the notion of causa sui away from God and into the plane of existence.

Reshith, then, trumps tehom in the gentlest of ways. Analogically, it is the condition for the appearance of the there-ness of tehom that establishes the relation of ruach to matter. Indeed, analogy itself is the very oscillation between ruach and tehom. As Karl Rahner has noted in his Foundations of Christian Faith (57-80), analogy is the hovering (is hovering) that constitutes the finitude of creation. And, analogically again, Rahner identifies this hovering/oscillating (Schwebe) with the human creature itself, as the thing that oscillates between spirit and matter. As image and likeness, the human creature is already the analogy of God, and this event is the revelation of the first lines of Genesis. And though Rahner would not countenance a creatio ex profundis, he would likely marvel at the transformational and generative quality of Keller's 'tehomic' theology, and quite possibly delight in the shape his Schwebe has taken in her theological turn in general. Certainly the centrality of relationality and dialectical method to his entire theological project links him to the apophatic entanglements in the Cloud of the Impossible.

Catholicity and a Suffering God

‘The devout Christian of the future will either be a “mystic”, one who has experienced

“something”, or he will cease to be anything at all’.

---Karl Rahner, 'Christian Living Formerly and Today,' Theological Investigations, vol. 7, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 15.


One of our more eloquent contributors (see the comments to "Retreat of the Barron") to this blog has suggested that I depart from the teachings of the Church from time to time as it suits the topic. It is never my intent to subvert the fundamentals of Catholic dogma, doctrine or Tradition, though I am aware that sometimes I place a heavy tax on them. My goal is never to destroy, but it is often to deconstruct, and that makes some people very nervous. I am not St. Paul, however, and I do not know I am able to be all things to all people. My goal is to read scripture, dogmatics, doctrine and Tradition and see what wants to come to life in them, to see what events seek release from them, and then allow the event to unfold (that pretty much is deconstruction in a nutshell). I attempt to look past the statements-as-idols and try to land on their iconic element. My self-imposed caveat: avoid at all costs becoming a dogmatic fundamentalist--avoid committing idolatry of the word(s).

What I propose here is not novelty for novelty's sake, nor do I propose to usurp Catholic tradition and turn it into something it cannot become ( that is, foster an inauthentic development). What I am discovering is that the Tradition of the Church is rich with meaning, far from any possibility of being reduced to dead dogma that speaks to no one and ends up on the refuse heap of history. Dogma and doctrine are great gifts bestowed upon the religiously and theologically minded, and as in the parable of the talents, to be received so that they enrich and enliven that tradition. It is their very given-ness that opens up a horizon for their releasing of the event.

My assertions lately of a suffering God do not come hocus pocus from a magical hat. They are deeply embedded in the mystical traditions of the Church, and are part of the very tapestry of scripture. I recently paraphrased Rahner's axiom that the Trinity we see is the Trinity that is--the immanent Trinity is identical with the economic Trinity. And that has implications worthy of meditation and contemplation. Hans Urs von Balthasar has also closed the gap on the economic and immanent Trinity, and from that has allowed for an understanding of a suffering Godhead.

In a remarkable document completed before Rahner and von Balthasar died, we find a veritable Biergarten of  thinkers coming into consensus (the document was very likely finally redacted by Joseph Ratzinger).

I will quote a substantial portion here:

For historical or systematic reasons God’s immutability or impassibility is often called into question in today s Theology, above all in the context of a Theology of the Cross. In that way different theological conceptions of the suffering of God have arisen. It is necessary to know how to separate false ideas from elements in accord with the biblical revelation. Since discussion of this problem continues, we limit ourselves to a first approach, which nevertheless seeks to point to a solution to the question.

1. The supporters of this Theology assert that their ideas can be found in the Old and New Testaments and in some of the Fathers. But the influence of modern philosophy has certainly had a greater weight, at least in the systematic presentation of this Theology.

1.2. According to many of our contemporaries, this Trinitarian suffering is rooted in the very divine essence itself; according to others, it is based on a certain emptying of himself on the part of God the Creator, who in some sense binds himself to human freedom or, in virtue of a pact, freely forces himself to hand over his Son—a fact that they say makes the suffering of the Father deeper than all the suffering of creation.


In recent years a few Catholic authors have made similar suggestions, maintaining that the principal role of the Crucified consisted in manifesting the suffering of the Father.

3. Without doubt the Fathers underline (against the pagan mythologies) the “apatheia” of God, without denying in this way his compassion for the suffering of the world. For them the term “apatheia” indicates the opposite of “pathos”, a word that means involuntary suffering imposed from the outside or as a consequence of fallen nature. When they admit natural and innocent suffering (like hunger or sleep), they attribute these to Jesus Christ or to God inasmuch as he feels compassion for human suffering (Origen, Horn, in Ez. 6, 6; Comm. in Matt. 17, 20; Set. in Ez. 16; Comm. in Rom. 8, 9; De prin. 4, 4, 4). From time to time they use a dialectical form of expression: God has suffered in Jesus Christ in an impassible fashion because he has done it in virtue of a free choice (Greg. Thaum., Ad Theopompum 4-8).

... But the Christology of the Church does not allow us to affirm formally that Jesus Christ could suffer according to his divine nature (cf. DS 16, 166, 196f., 284, 293f, 300, 318, 358, 504, 635, 801, 852).

Despite what has just been said, the Fathers cited above clearly affirm the immutability and impassibility of God (e.g., Origen, Contra Celsum 4, 4). Thus they absolutely exclude from the divine essence that mutability and that passivity that would permit a movement from potency to act (cf. Thomas Aquinas, STh I, q. 9, a. lc). Finally, the following considerations have been taken into account in the Tradition of the Faith of the Church to clear up this problem.

4.2. The affirmation of the impassibility of God supposes and implies this way of understanding his immutability, but this is not to be understood as though God remained indifferent to human events. God loves us with the love of friendship, and he wishes to be loved by us in return. When this love is offended, Sacred Scripture speaks of suffering on the part of God. On the other hand, it speaks of his joy when the sinner is converted (Lk 15:7). “To suffer is a more sane reaction and closer to immortality than complete insensibility” (Augustine, En. in Ps. 55, 6). The two aspects need each other. If one or the other is neglected, the concept of God as he reveals himself is not respected.

5.1. Today man desires and searches for a Divinity that will be omnipotent and certain but that does not appear indifferent; one, moreover, that is full of compassion for the miseries of man and in that sense “suffers with them”. Christian piety has always rejected the idea of a Divinity indifferent to the vicissitudes of creatures. It is even inclined to admit that, just as “compassion” is among the most noble human perfections, it can be said of God that he has a similar compassion without any imperfection and in an eminent degree, namely, the “inclination of commiseration ... and not the absence of power” (Leo I, DS 293). It is maintained that this compassion can coexist with the eternal happiness itself. The Fathers called this total mercy toward human pain and suffering “the passion of love”, a love that in the Passion of Jesus Christ has vanquished these sufferings and made them perfect (cf. Greg. Thaum., Ad Theopompum; John Paul II, Dives in misericordia, 7; AAS 72 [1980]: 1199ff).

5.2. As far as the question of the “suffering of God” is concerned, there is undoubtedly something worth retaining in the expressions of Holy Scripture and the Fathers, as well as in some recent theologies, even though they require clarification as shown above. This should perhaps also be said with regard to the Trinitarian aspect of the Cross of Jesus Christ. The eternal generation of the Son and his role as the immaculate Lamb who would pour out his precious blood are equally eternal and precede the free creation of the world (cf. 1 Pet l:19ff; Eph 1:7). In this sense, there is a very close correspondence between the gift of divinity that the Father gives to the Son and the gift by which the Father consigns his Son to the abandonment of the Cross. Since, however, the Resurrection is also present in the eternal plan of God, the suffering of “separation” (see above, B, 1.1) is always overcome by the joy of union; the compassion of the Trinitarian God for the suffering of the Word is properly understood as the work of most perfect love, which is normally a source of joy[.]   from "Theology, Christology and Anthropology."

The voices of Rahner and von Balthasar are still perceptible in this fascinating treatise.

This God of sympathy, empathy, compassion, need not be conceived as one coming into his own Trinitarian reality in some process within the immanent relations of persons. Rather, as I have suggested, the compassionate God is presented the suffering of the eternal Son made flesh and receives it in sympathy through the hypostatic union. God has confirmed his solidarity with his creature by answering her suffering with his love and presence. God insists we do no less for each other.

The God of suffering has implications for the debunking of theodicy once and for all. Just as God turns the tables, changes the subject in the Book of Job, we, as beings who meditate on human suffering, must uncouple the power and mystery of God from the human condition. If Job teaches anything, it teaches that theodicy is not the right question, otherwise God would have given his answer. Instead, he enjoins Job and makes him present to creation and restores him to more and greater life. Even here in the older scriptures, God has declared his solidarity with mankind.

Genesis has also revealed, in mythical terms, that mankind, having chosen knowledge of good and evil over life itself, must take responsibility for that choice. He must look not toward God to justify or explain evil and suffering in the created world, but to humankind itself. This is the fire mankind has stolen from reshith, and a flame mankind must keep lit. And that work of addressing evil and suffering is hard work, and underscores mankind's preference for taking privilege without its attendant responsibility. After all, God, in the Incarnation has given the Tree of Life back to mankind even after it has claimed to own good and evil. This is the irrevocable self-communication of God as understood within the theological-anthropological horizon.

Redirection and uncoupling: redirect Job's question to explain the ugly side of the human condition toward creation itself, and uncouple God's potentia absoluta from his potentia ordinata, thereby uncoupling his omnibenevolence from suffering in this world. This hermeneutic strategy does not give God a pass on mankind's problem of evil and suffering, but instead underscores his delimiting his own omnipotence in order to respect the integrity of a created universe that lives and breathes in great viability according the his absolute creative gesture.

This challenge to the theodical gesture will no doubt be met with incredulity. Why didn't God in his potentia absoluta create a world already perfect; certainly he could have done that. Wouldn't that obviate his having to ordinate his power to his own creation? The Church has always taught that God, in his absolute goodness and freedom, could have created a world other than this one; but it does not teach that it would be any less imperfect. The aporia cuts an apophatic space of unknowing where all negative statements are true and all positive statements are inadequate (Nicholas of Cusa). He did not create another world: true. He did create this one: inadequate. Such is the aporia of life itself, the mind, and the human condition.

Rahner was right: a mystic or nothing at all.




 

On the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

As I am gathering my thoughts and sit to write this post on the most Catholic of Catholic topics, I am also mulling over Levi Bryant's poignant call for a transformation of our concept of phenomenality. Unless I am morbidly misreading Jean-Luc Marion, his project is nothing if it is not about transforming what we mean by phenomenality. His phenomenology ain't your father's phenomenology. His readings of Husserl and Heidegger are deconstructive to the bone, and his emerging phenomenology and certainly his theology have as their goals the systematic release of the event, which is the very heart of deconstruction.

The Real Presence, and how that comes about in the Eucharist, are indeed saturated phenomena of the event, and certainly of idol and icon. In this piece I intend to respect just how these Catholic realities present to the intuition that which is uncontainable in intentionality. While I will discuss the old categories used by the Church to cope with the greatest of mysteries, I hope  to side-step resting in the idol, and pursue the iconic, and thereby set the stage for the release of the event harbored in the sacred texts, the liturgy and the Eucharistic moment.

To begin, I want to imagine that moment in thanksgiving (that is precisely what eucharistos means), but also in reshith, in a beginning; for the Eucharistic moment is about something appearing that was not there before. And that moment is 'solid time,' time not in its ordinary sense, but a time that has presence and is present, and has matter. The Eucharist is a place to stand. Thanksgiving, beginning, thanks-beginning, be-giving. The solid time of the Eucharist is a theological moment playing out on the horizon of the mystical.

We must imagine the sacramental essence of the Eucharist moving on the stage of liturgy, which is itself anchored into the words of the Word-made-flesh. The Logos is love, and its sacramental, liturgical present makes its presence known to us on a horizon of charity. Bread and wine become for us the Body and Blood of Christ: the idol (more but not less than a symbol) passes into icon (more but not less than reality-the hyper-real). The idol, created by the gaze upon it and saturated as it is, is still a missed opportunity. The icon provokes the gaze upon it, but does not reflect back on the gaze, but lets the light through, and gazes upon the gazer. The sacrament is a gift to the gazer giving thanks.

The Blessed Sacrament, the sacrament par excellence of the Catholic faith, is the Eucharist and the Real Presence. It is the sacrament from which all the others flow, and which authorizes and authenticates the very sacramentality so central to Catholicism's self-understanding. As such, the Eucharist must be understood in terms of its sacramentality, its relationship to the Body of Christ, and its liturgical meaning in process and reality. The faith makes great claims for the phenomenon of the Eucharist; it proclaims the real presence of Christ in divinity and humanity (the hypostatic union persists in any of its manifestations) under the appearances of bread and wine, the imparting of grace, the remission of sins,and the assimilation of the whole Christ within the person of the recipient and the community of the faithful.

The claims the Church makes for the Real Presence trace their authenticity and authority to the Synoptic Jesus's words over the bread and wine at the final meal he shared with his disciples. The words of inauguration, consecration or more commonly, of institution, vary slightly among the 3 Synoptics, but they are nearly identical in their 'this is my body' and 'this is my blood' statements. The Church confesses that the words uttered by the Word (Logos) have the power to effect what they say. It is the power of is-ing: this bread is my body--so it becomes; this wine is my blood--so it becomes; for the Logos participates in creation by fiat. In this sense, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements is already understood in the work of the evangelists, and the Pauline corpus attests to the same (e.g., 1 Corinthians). Indeed, the Eucharistic celebration is already deeply liturgical (of course in a rudimentary way) in the 1st century, and both the epistolary NT and the Gospels depict this state of affairs. John 6 is constitutive of the liturgical reality of Christ's flesh and blood, despite and because of its perverse and dramatic language. A juxtaposition of all the Eucharistic texts of the NT is instructive and convincing in determining the self-understanding of the early Church and I invite the reader to undertake this rewarding venture.

Far more controversial than a growing understanding of the Real Presence in the NT is the explanation of just how the liturgical celebration effects the change in the bread and wine. It simply wasn't a problem for the disciples at the last supper: what Jesus said became reality. Speculatively, there was no process involved at the inauguration of the Eucharist, precluded as it must have been by the prerogative of the actus purus of the divine Logos. God said it, so it is was. But how does it happen at each celebration of the Eucharist?

Here the genius of the Church develops the concept of transubstantiation (T, henceforth) to describe the metaphysics of the conversion, under the words of consecration/institution as uttered by the celebrant in persona Christi, which is the liturgical role of the priest in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The clumsy term T has its roots in Aristotle and 'substance theory.' Unfortunately for us [post]moderns, we have no rapport with such roots and theory. Suffice it to say that in this theory, a substance (deepest reality, essence) was separate from its attributes (appearance, qualities, properties). So when we ask 'what's this substance?' we expect a response that answers 'what's it made of,' such as, metal, wood, plastic, water, alcohol, oil, etc. When that question is asked of Aristotle or of  the mediaeval theologians who appropriated his work to provide philosophical scaffolding to their theologies, the answer would be 'what makes it what it is,' whatever absolute reality inhering in the thing in question, what ever makes the thing the thing itself, its deepest meaning and reality. Furthermore, substance was not something accessible through the senses, but only through pure intellect (as Aquinas would put it). In this sense, substance can only be understood as idol.

If T is to speak to us at all today, we must learn 'substance' as a technical term. We use terms like essence, deepest reality, deepest reality that determines identity, meaning, signified of a sign (semiotics), finality, telos when we want to mean what the Tradition means by 'substance.' We should become sensitive to how 'substance' is meant in the theology of the Eucharist, and try to imagine 'substance' both as it is understood in the Tradition (without of course collapsing the icon into the idol), and as it is informed by the terms we have replaced it with today. We should adopt a less hostile attitude toward substance theory, without necessarily embracing it (especially if that means resting in the idol and falling asleep before reaching the icon). We should be open to the ideas of, for example, Schillebeeckx and Rahner, and to the use of the ideas they have named 'transignification' and 'transfinalization' (respectively),  not to supplant but to deepen our understanding of the conversion that takes place in the bread and wine during the liturgy as it is understood in the Tradition. These newer terms have their own clumsiness to be sure, but they are not to be understood in the idolatry of their concepts, but how they operate in the heart and mind, in short, as iconic, as lifting the mind over the idol to the icon.

T was intended not only as a dogmatic explanation of a liturgical event, but also as a fence built around the Real Presence in order to protect it from degradation. The dogmas of T and the Real Presence therefore go hand in hand from the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 through the sessions of the Council of Trent in the mid 16th century to the present. Simply stated (ha!), T is the process of conversion, grounded in the words of the Word made flesh, whereby the the deepest reality and meaning of bread and wine, in their literal and symbolic sense and existence, are converted completely into the deepest reality and meaning of the Whole Christ, that is, everything to do with Christ that makes him Christ. The process does not entail any transformation or conversion of the appearance, properties or qualities of the bread and wine, nor does it entail any change in Christ's body and blood. Bread and wine remain as signifiers, but their reality, their sign has changed because their signified has been completely converted into another signified, with an attendant conversion of all meaning and presence. The finality of the bread and wine have undergone a complete conversion into the finality that is the Christ. This process has nothing to do with physics or the horizon of Being. It cuts to the heart of liturgy and sacramentality, and to the release of the event of faith.

When we participate in the Eucharist, we take in what the senses know as bread and wine, but assimilate the whole Christ into our being in a sacramental manner. In this way, the reality of the bread and wine become 'un-symbols,' the actuality and the reality of the body and blood of Christ, even as their appearances continue to be symbols of that body and blood. The symbolic richness remains, even as Christ's actual presence is really real. This is the mystery of the Catholic faith, and to participate in the sacrifice of the Mass, the Divine Liturgy (as it is known in the East), is the sine qua non of catholicity--the Catholic experience.

Approaching the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI promulgated his Mysterium Fidei (mystery of faith), which countenanced his great anxiety that the high mood of the conciliar moment would result in a degraded understanding of the Real Presence and its guardian, T. He was already too late for the latter, but his trepidation regarding adding the layers of transignification and transfinalization into the magisterium was unfounded. There is more rampant misunderstanding of the Eucharist today, since the closing of the council in 1965 (the year of Mysterium Fidei). Perhaps allowing certain periti of the Council greater influence on its documents would have enriched the lives of Catholics with a more vibrant understanding of the Blessed Sacrament.

I have recently been challenged about my faith in the Real Presence and T, and my response then and now is simply that I have divine and Catholic faith in this profoundest of mysteries of the Church. I wonder if I could say that if I were not so theological a thinker, not so very sympathetic to post-structuralist, post-secularist ideas about this world and our reality; for it is my conviction that my faith in this matter reflects what the Church has always confessed.  It is unfortunate that T is generally not received into the sensus fidelium, such as it is; but neither has the Church worried itself with what it means to hand down the Tradition in a secular world.  The anxieties of a Papacy notwithstanding, such a central tenet of Catholic faith should be brought to each generation in the fullness of the Tradition and with respect to the signs of  the times.

An Abundance of Grace, Amazing Grace

So much depends on grace.

 Grace is the unmerited free gift of God to creation, to human nature; it is God’s free gift of himself, his self-communication, his overture to his seekers. Seeking is the response to the absolute mystery that is God,  the response to the moment of the experience of the abyss, where one meets God, or its opposite. Seeking is the expression of supernatural existential, which is the religious and existential space open to receive grace (cf. K. Rahner’s Foundations of Christian Faith). A human being can die of thirst in the cool and fresh sea of grace, if, as the hearer of the message, the reader of the signature, he is closed off---deaf to the message, blind to the sign. The human creature must drink from this abundance of grace: grace must get inside; it must be transformed, translated. The limitless abundance of sufficient grace must be (re)created into amazing, efficacious grace in the human person.

 I recently presented grace as both the signature of God and as predisposition of the human person to that signature. I also located God outside of creation and spoke of his radical absence, his ‘already been  there.” The link between this absence and vanishing presence, and the negative capability of the human person to be imprinted by God’s self-communication is sacrament. Sacramentality is the living principle of Catholicism; it is the reality that creates grace, or at least transforms, or better, translates, grace to the human agent. Because sacrament is first and foremost a sign, the concept has the potential to speak to postmodern discourse inasmuch as structural linguistics is in dialogue with the postmodern and post-structural impulse. Despite the postmodern dilemma of the unfixed sign and the problem of the instability of meaning, we can nonetheless begin in the linguistic sign. Indeed, the comprehensibility of the sign, especially of our example of sacrament, forms the crux of the discussion. First a brief definition: the sign is composed of a signifier and a signified, that is, a sensory input and its evocation, in the case of language, the sound image and its associated concept. Saussure’s famous example in his Course in General Linguistics is that of the sign, or word,  ‘tree’: the signifier is the sound ‘t-r-ee’ and the signified the mental picture/concept of the biological entity. The notion of sacrament is not much more elaborate, except, perhaps, in that it often involves more than language: physical matter, not merely the sounds of language. Still, the overall intelligibility or success of signification drives the sacramental experience.

 At this point I will side-step the 7 Sacraments of the Catholic Church properly so-called, and address my final remarks to other sacraments or sacramentals that nonetheless mediate meaning in the world and perhaps comment on the meanings that mediate the world. In a word, how can God’s ‘radical absence’ be reconciled with his ‘hidden presence’? These dialectical oppositions resolve in the synthesis of sacramental presence. God’s signature, then, is the diacritic of his self-communication, and it graces nature with his sacramental presence. That presence is certainly a real presence whose reality is mediated by grace. This grace is a ‘created’ grace, for the uncreated grace of the divine circumincession can never be contained, or trapped, in nature, in space-time.

 In the postmodern turn, signification creates the sensible world: there is no world that is not brought into practical existence by language. And as such, the world is an unstable place, created as it is by signifiers and signifieds which seem to be fleeing the signs that unite them, making meaning a thing in flux, tenuous and uncertain. Catholicism averts such instability because it admits of the Logos that brings the world into being from nothing by the fiat of the ‘word.’ It is in the word that belief meets the postmodern critique which is always looking to the sacrament through its hermeneutic of suspicion,  ultimately seeking a hermeneutic of faith, looking to slake its thirst in a sea of grace, amazing grace.