Miracles

What can a miracle do
but bring you back to me?




Miracles return us to memory, our own, our faith's, our religion's; miracles orient us toward the past made present, and protend to the advent of the miracle-for-us awaiting through hope for a future. Beyond any horizon of expectation, miracles surprise us by jarring the predictions of the natural world, or through uncanny synchronicity of events, those meaningful concurrences of the unexpected with presence.


Meillassoux's spectral dilemma compels him to remain open to the advent of [a] God, heretofore inexistent, now existent, whose effect instaurates past and present, resolves all death into life, all injustice into justice. Such a dilemma calls for a 'miracle' of sorts, one quite different from the Incarnation, which by Meillassoux's standard, accomplishes little more that a wrinkle in time that fails to point to anything. Incarnation as instauration: that would be something Meillassoux could sign on to; but that would be no miracle, but a mere prestige, a return to Eden on a magic carpet that whisks Eden to-us and for-us that's all a pocus which never knew a corpus. Eden brought back from the ruins would certainly make the past present, wiping away every injustice that occurred since its heyday; but how would that be real-for-us?


An all-immanent incarnation would not require a divine logos to unite to the human; the return of everything to immanence solves the spectral dilemma by simply starting again, ricorso. It fulfills a hope grounded in immanence and in a materialism that undermines and overmines the real object. Miracles simply do not happen that way. A miracle marries immanence with the wholly other. A miracle cuts a gap in immanence with an edge of reality that withdraws from its entry; it itself is tout autre. And if tout autre est tout autre, then the gift of death visited upon us in the Incarnation must go beyond immanence, perhaps to the transformation of immanence.


If we finally find God, we find him in the transformation of immanent existence, in the death of finitude as such, which is the gift of the death of death offered in the miracle of the Incarnation, the miracle of miracles that ground all miracles not within the horizon of being, but in the horizons of hope and love, in hoping and loving. Miracles provide the givenness of hope and love: a miracle is where hope and love are real.


The Incarnation is not the virtual god proffered in expectation of the solution to the spectral dilemma. The Incarnation does not eradicate all misery, suffering and injustice in an instauration of a decrepit 'justice.' Instead, the Incarnation is the inauguration of the advent of the justice to come. Christ comes to witness to injustice, to experience every injustice, not to eradicate finitude but to validate it, and open it up to transformation.


The miracles of Christ are the signs of the in-breaking of transformation of creation, not the transformation of the Creator. They open us up to metanoia, a change of heart, but do not alter us by fiat. For every miracle accomplished, a million miracles are left undone. But hope and love encounter us in the countless, nearly invisible miracles that occur in every moment where hope and love give themselves, grounded as they are in the other, the interpersonal and inter-Personal, which authenticates them on their own terms of vertical experience.


All miracles are saturated phenomena, and they are as banal and as precious and unique as there are encounters of the reversibility of the visible and the invisible.  Now you see them; now you don't. Hocus Pocus? Hocus Pocus declares verticality null and void in its idolatrous delimitation of the real. Is there any place in horizontal experience where the miraculous encounters the willful idolater? How broadly must horizontal experience spread before it discovers a productive, that is generative, synechism? How far down the horizontal plane must one go, how many metonymic signifiers down the road does it take to move, finally, paradigmatically, to the vertical? What syntagmatic occurrence loosens idolatry from the grip of delimitation, freeing into the vertical? Answer: a miracle. An impossible miracle made possible at the intersection of metonymy and metaphor, where a bump in the road calls the vehicle into being, and awakens idolatry from its ennui.

The Passion of the Flesh

καὶ ὁ λόγος σὰρξ ἐγένετο καὶ ἐσκήνωσεν ἐν ἡμῖν
The Word become flesh and dwelt among us [John 1:15]




We live in the body and suffer in the flesh. Our bodies can be broken, maimed, dismembered, but our flesh is the modality of our very selves that takes upon it the weight of the of inflicted body. One need go no further than deafferentation pain, for example, phantom limb pain, to appreciate the distinction between the body and the flesh ( I discern no clear relationship between this observation and Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the "phantom limb" and the "habitual body" however provocative the similar language). No body/flesh dualism inheres in this reality of a fixed tension within our diremptive experience of our lived bodies and our flesh; they are the obverses of the coinage of our finitude, and the flesh can suffer even where the body is not. The body is always in the present and the here; the flesh experiences not only the present, but the past and the future, in the here and there.


The flesh is redeemed and the body is resurrected in the transformation of finitude. The modalities of redemption and resurrection are suffering and death, respectively; for the flesh suffers death, and the body dies. The flesh suffers in the wholeness and integrity of the body, but the body might die in the absence of organs and appendages. Many discourses distinguish pain and suffering: legal remedies might compensate for both; medical treatments might be directed against both physical pain of the body and existential suffering of the flesh even without making such distinctions concretely.

The saturated phenomenon of the flesh is so because the self cannot be tweezed apart from the flesh. The relationship is one of immediacy, not necessarily one of identity, though thinking the flesh and the self as one and the same makes both intuitive and practical sense in a way that thinking the flesh and the body as  the same does not.  The flesh does not merely 'remember' the body; it lives the body as if it remembers the body. The flesh and the self live each other as if they were one and the same, though neither is reducible to the other.


Does  the Incarnation give us a window upon the body, flesh and self through which the gaze approaches their givenness? Logos-sarx/logos- anthropos  configurations do not reduce to, for example, the extremes of heterodox views, but can work in tandem to place the human creature within the relation to the Incarnation. As Emmanuel Falque has noted in The Metamorphosis of Finitude (NY: Fordham Univ. Pr., 2012), God the Father suffers in the Spirit what The Son suffers in the flesh through a process analogous to apperceptive transposition. The human creature lives this process out in the body and the flesh.  Logos-flesh and logos-body open into a 'self' given to itself (the Myself), a self-givenness given through the flesh and the body.


The 'interpersonal,' and even the 'inter-Personal' (as Anthony Steinbock deploys these terms), orients the self, the flesh and the body toward the 'other.' The Incarnation,  as religiously understood in Christianity, involves the union of the divine and the human in the unique person of Christ. If Falque has given us a valid point of departure, then the Logos-human union is already within the Father-Son-Spirit of the divine Godhead in the transpositions of the experience of suffering. I have suggested that the unique union of the Logos-Human, the 'hypstatic union',  is chiasmic in its structure, and in this sense, I do want to connect with Merleau-Ponty's fascinating notion of the chiasmus of 'reversibility' in his Phenomenology of Perception ( trans. C. Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, 93-108). Without diverting to a discussion of that work, I want to connect this 'reversibility' with chiasmic structures as noted in this blog, and certainly in John Caputo's work (cited elsewhere), and with the overall concept of 'porosity.'  




If we take as analogy from above the suffering of the Father in the flesh of the Son through the Spirit, then the aperture of the gaze upon the human self, flesh and body widens (through an inversion of 'metaphysics') to free givenness to present in verticality and upon the 'personal' and personhood.  Porosity speaks to the uncontainability of the event within categorical reality, and so it is only off the plane of the horizontal, 'natural' attitude, where such saturated phenomena appear--within vertical experience. The self-givenness within the flesh occurs then in an immediacy of saturation. The body, the lived body inhabited in and by the flesh, presents on the horizontal, and the flesh appears as a saturated phenomenon,  in verticality, yet unified with the wholeness of the reality of life of the human person. It would appear that a surmise is in order: the resurrection of the body is a phenomenon of the horizontal, natural attitude; and the redemption of the flesh, one of vertical experience.


Another surmise is in order: these thoughts are unfinished, these reflections insufficiently reflected, these concepts inadequately mastered. A blog entry is not a publication in a peer-reviewed journal, and they are made provisionally, open to critique that might bring them along, or steer them down another avenue. These are mere currents is a sea of religious thought and experience. I remind myself of this (my) predicament from time to time.