The Cross and the Womb of God

After an infant is born, passed through its mother's body, into my medicalized hands, gowned and gloved, after the cord is clamped and cut, cord bloods delivered in tubes, after the infant is into the living air and loving mother's arms and at the breast, one side of the chiasm of mother and child remains to emerge. The careful delivery of the placenta punctuates the birth of a new person into finitude.

 

Medicalized, gowned and gloves, I pass my hand into the womb and meet the fetal machine of life; I find a plane where womb and placenta meet, and slide, ever so gently, my body into the space where mother and child were separate only by molecules. My hand and my mind's eye traverse this space until the connection dissolves, as I lift the placenta off the maternal side, delivering into the air.

There is a violence in this separating of mother from the remnant of mutual gestation. For all its gentleness, my hand puts asunder what nature would have gotten round to, the dividing of the fabric of mother and child. In fact, the manual delivery of the placenta is quite passe. I no longer invade the womb; instead, I wait. I place my hand on the abdomen, and massage the womb, encouraging gentle contraction, and the womb releases the placenta. With gentle traction on the cord, the placenta delivers itself. Both mother and child are now completely in the world. I discover I am little more than a witness to a double individuation.

We must not miss the placental turn of the Cross. The Logos, united to the human flesh, witnesses at the level of personhood the suffering in that flesh, and in its chiasmic proximity, feels all that the flesh bears. In its placental relationship, the Logos give life but also separation: it is accomplished, completed--- the finitude of the human, embraced by the divine, finds itself within the womb of divinity. The Son calls to the Father, who, embracing his Son, suffers in Spirit what the Son suffers in the flesh, as the Son finds himself, and his human finitude, in the womb of the Father.

The double-womb-ing in the singular moment on Calvary points to the unexpected unities of Christ and the Trinity. The Incarnation comes crashing into history, into language and culture completely unprepared to receive it. We come to know it not by accounts of virgin birth or a ministry of wondrous deeds, but through the experience of the Passion-Resurrection, which alone issues the Gospel. From the side of the crucified Christ flows what the Tradition has named the hypostatic union, where the chiasm of the divine and human enter knowledge through a placental engagement of the womb of God and the flesh of the human. From the experience of the risen Christ flows the stirrings of the inner life of God, which the Tradition calls Trinity. The womb of the Father generates the Son, and delivers him to union with human flesh through the Spirit within the womb of the Theotokos: a 'trinity' of womb-ings.

The phenomenality of the Resurrection provides the point of departure between faith and nonsense. New Testament Greek cannot contain this phenomenon, neither can any language alone. The best it can do places the person of Jesus in a room with locked doors, describes an empty tomb, and dismisses visions of women as nonsense. The Resurrection is Christianity's greatest embarrassment, heightened by the further embarrassments of a God-Man and a triune God.

Yet what shall our response be to all this embarrassment? Why do we continue to inherit this Tradition, all this 'jewgreek', as Joyce and John Caputo might say? Even for the first witnesses to the Resurrection, the initial response was incredulity, so much nonsense. The very uncontainability of the experience gave way to the givenness of something new, something unexpected, something unforeseeable. All its saturating phenomenality haunts us, calls us, insists unconditionally but with no force but a weak force, an overwhelming unconditionality of the faintest whispers perhaps emanating from the womb of God, swerving in a placental turn.

Christianity embraces the birth of finitude, the realism of the body, the suffering and redemption of the flesh. Every Easter marks the active inheritance of a Tradition of life and a faith in the impossible. The paradox of Christianity reflects the paradox of the Cross and the saturated phenomenon of revelation. What do we do when we love God? With prayer and praise, tradition and Tradition, we respond to the call: hineni, Viens, Oui, Oui.

Bona Pasqua.

Marion, Kant, Keller, Cusanus, Phenomenality and Certainty

Marion carefully lays out the distinctions among phenomena, noumena, objects and the event. He painstakingly concludes that while Kant's phenomenon is what he is calling the 'object,' noumena cannot translate into the event, or other saturated phenomena. Though he holds with Kant that the status of 'things' vary according to the hermeneutical gaze, it is only through Heidegger's analysis of the tool that the manner of the gaze can be differentiated between Kant's analysis and phenomenology, in particular, the appearance of objects and richer phenomena (CN, 194-99). Hence, Marion can speak of the discoverability of saturated phenomena (204-5), and beyond this discovery and its hermeneutic, a critique of the privileging of certainty, which is a broadening of phenomenality to include the domain of 'negative certainty,' which is work yet to be done (206). He concludes that all such broadenings illuminate an "infinite finitude" (207).


For readers of Marion, the question must be asked: has our philosopher given us enough analysis to make affirmative statements about the relationships among phenomenality and certainty? I think he has, and no critique of Marion can continue to assert that, after his In the Self's Place, his body of work suffers from a poverty of hermeneutic adventure; yet here in Negative Certainties, Marion has closed at least the epistemological circle with his decisive conclusion, now axiomatic with regard to  his body of work: The gift cannot at the same time be possessed and manifest itself (153; italics Marion's; emphasis mine). The certitude of the axiom, whether it finally turns out to be either a negative certainty or a positive uncertainty, traces itself to his concept of the impossibility of impossibility of saturated phenomena, and the eventiveness of such phenomena and of the gift itself.


Indeed, Marion has found the antecedent of such impossibility in Nicholas of Cusa. Had Marion recourse to the work of Catherine Keller, especially her tour de force appropriation of Cusanus, Cloud of the Impossible, he would not find such an antecedent 'strange' (69). Marion has avoided Keller to his great detriment and peril (Keller's mind is a saturated phenomenon if there ever was one). Regardless, the Cusanian folds in Keller's work certainly have far-reaching consequences for the folds Marion has enfolded in NC; in fact, Marion might very well have introduced another fold in the fabric of the impossible, the replication of the gift in his discourse on forgiveness (the re-gifting of the gift).


It is the very impossibility of the event of the gift that cuts to the certainty that unfolds the 'uncertainty' of simultaneity of Marion's axiomatic possession and manifestation of the gift. I cannot but read this kind of uncertainty apart from the uncertainty of the physicist who confidently states that a photon or electron cannot be a wave and a particle at the same time. The simultaneity is governed by the gaze of an observer---the probe of the intentionality/concept. Marion is quite decisive in problematizing the gaze/probe. "What then is happening with the modification of my gaze so that it modifies the status of the thing?[...]The variation proper to my gaze must have an ontological status...the 'as-structure' is inscribed within the rank of the existentialia of Dasein. [The] variation of the modes of appearing and of being thus is played out in the one and only instance of the existential hermeneutic that the unique Dasein puts into operation...[the] distinction between the modes of phenomenality (for us, between object and event) can be joined to the hermeneutical variations that, as existentialia of Dasein, have (ontological) authority over the phenomenality of entities" (198-99).


What holds for the gift, especially in the happening of the "process of its givenness" (153), also holds for other events, such as the saturated phenomena of the flesh, idol and icon. The gaze, the very probe of the intention and the concept, determines the variations in phenomenalities such that they can appear as simple objects under one gaze, or as saturated phenomena under another gaze, the variations of which always have an ontological status preventing objects and richer phenomena from appearing at the same time. The great value of 'negative certainty' is its contiguity with scientific 'positive uncertainty,' if not its very identity. In this manner, Marion gets to close not only the epistemological circle, but the hermeneutic circle as well, dissolving the privilege of certainty, and collapsing all knowledge into knowledge itself. Docta ignorantia.