No Greater Love: A Reflection on the Triduum

For God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son...






οὕτως γὰρ ἠγάπησεν ὁ θεὸς τὸν κόσμον ὥστε τὸν υἱὸν τὸν μονογενῆ ἔδωκεν ἵνα πᾶς ὁ πιστεύων εἰς αὐτὸν μὴ ἀπόληται ἀλλ’ ἔχῃ ζωὴν αἰώνιον




(Please note an afterword below)

The gift of the Son defies any notion of giving on the side of being. Within being, the gift is wrapped as a ransom, a human sacrifice, a gift with all the strings that being can attach. The gift, what Christians call the Incarnation, does not unfold, finally, in being, in any ontological difference, in any fundamental or regional ontology. The aporia of the gift, this gift, can only unfold within the horizon of its givenness: love. Love bears the same structures of phenomenality as the gift. Love, like the gift, is an 'all or nothing' phenomenon. One does not love a 'little bit', partially, conditionally; whatever strong feeling of desire, affection or attraction might fall under the categories of love in a metaphysical system of prefabricated concepts, styles or fads, what we call here 'love' is nothing like such systems that pass for love in other contexts. The same holds for the gift: what is a gift if wrapped as a promissory note? The love we speak of here, the love of God, enjoys utter anteriority to being itself; love answers to its own givenness, prior to being.

The Incarnation---the Christ-event---by which we mean the nativity of Jesus, his life and ministry, his trials and tribulations, his judgment by the world, the way of the Cross and the Resurrection, while certainly historical and real, does not manifest itself in any fullness in justice within being. What on earth can the death of God mean in the rationality of metaphysics? Or for that matter, what does the impossibility of a God-Man, a Word-made-flesh, of any notion of a 'greater love', do within being if they do not first quicken in the priority of love, and its logic and rationality?

Try as we may, the Cross will always get twisted when we force it into ontology, into any metaphysics of presence, however rarefied a presence we can construct within systematic metaphysics. No rationale for the Cross plays out satisfactorily within the categories of being. No effort, however noble, or rational, or analogical gets us much past onto-theology's bugaboo: theodicy (0r at best, the onto-theological god that fell to his death off Nietzsche's tightrope). We have visited the notion of a theodicy without theodicy recently, and nothing seems to happen on the planes of theodical thinking; vectors of thought point outside such structures, but cannot escape them.

To begin to enter the logic of love, the unfolding of the erotic reduction and the release of the erotic phenomenon, all appeals to causality, empirical reasoning, and being itself must collapse; for love to appear categories and concepts must yield their place of honor in pure reason: the first critique has left the building. In the instance of this love we speak about now, we must allow the Father and the Son to appear, not within frameworks we have constructed for them, but as they appear to each other in the logic of love that can unfold in a practical reason. In the Johannine tradition "God is love". For God so loved the world, the logos gives up his life for a friend. Here begins the logic of love, and it provides the only lens through which to envisage the Father and Son in their face-off at the Cross. Only then can the gift of the Father and the Son manifest as the gift to the 'gifted', or the recipient---in short, to us.

What kind of fatherly love is this that allows the son to die? Why does the father not extricate the son, certainly a small task for the causa sui? The impotence of the verb 'to be' and references to causality underscore that what goes on in the Cross---the event harbored in the Cross---has nothing to do with being, and everything to do with what is prior to being: God loves before he is, and he so loved the world that only the release of absolute holiness through death and resurrection could ratify once and for all love's anteriority to all things related to being. Only the absolute abandon of the self without reservation, with absolute totality of self-emptying can the logic of love, in this case, the logic of the Cross, declare itself from itself, completely and irrevocably. The gift that gives its self, gives itself fully and with abandon to the recipient of the gift, the 'gifted', she who believes in order to see and to hear, she who receives kenotically, with an accommodating self-emptying, a making room for the gift. What is faith, what is belief if not a willingness to open oneself to the possible, to vacate a prejudice to make room for the truth?

This absolute abandon unites love and the gift. Love...gift. This is not really a sequence, for language does not allow representation of equality (or better, identity) here: love and the gift are not separate: they are the same, and as such they belie the differences among philos, eros and agape: for they are one and the same kenosis, the same event of kenosis. This is not the kenosis of Caputo or Altizer---the emptying of transcendence into immanence once and for all in the singular death of God. This is the kenosis of the univocity of love. The one and only univocal term---God loves as we love. We receive the gift in the same love in which it is given. We receive love, when it manifests against a screen of the structures of love.

Who is this friend, this beneficiary of no greater love than this? It is the other, the face of the other, the icon. The face that has me before I am even a self, before I am, in the elemental place that is otherwise than being. Are we helpless before the other? Is this even the right question? Can we then not also ask, is God helpless before the Cross? If these are the right questions, then they come from the seedbed of ontological difference, from being, as if being were absolutely prior, even prior to the nothing, prior even to the matrix from which the self is pulled by the horizon of being. But these are not the right questions, for this is the language of theodicy, theology's dead end and cause of death. To ask these questions is to force the uncontainable into a container.

Before God is before the Cross, the Father loves the Son. How does being fare before the absolute gift? If God is love, then this univocal love appears not merely as a love for the world but the selfsame love of the perichoresis within the immanent life of the Trinity. Being therefore has no standing before love, before the gift, before the kenotic movement that goes by the name, 'love'.

If faint strains of Jean-Luc Marion or Emmanuel Levinas echo in this little Lenten reflection it is because their work has entered my thinking, my seeing and hearing, through their signature ideas of the saturated phenomenon, the face of the other, alterity and the self-as-hostage, as these ideas gel across the shadow of the Cross (In another piece, I shall substantiate my gratitude to these thinkers in the more conventional form of citation). Catholic thinking places no premium on human suffering, a torturous death, or reciprocity of the gift. Instead, it offers its Tradition as a gift, and understands that gift within the absoluteness, the all-or-nothing, of love. What, ultimately, can this gift be, if not Christ himself?


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Afterword


I have heard, quite literally, from the four corners of the earth about the abysmal failure of this Lenten reflection. Perhaps in my haste to put something 'up for Easter' I have perpetrated both religious and philosophical sins. The gist of the critique runs something like this: the piece is too religious for something so 'phenomenological', and too phenomenological for something so 'religious'. Moreover, both the religion and phenomenology are suspect. I am grateful for the loyal readership and loyal opposition, and I should have exercised, in retrospect, better judgment in 'going ahead' with the piece. I will leave the piece up (it crossed my mind to delete it) for continued target practice, not that it didn't have enough holes in it already. I will chalk it up to a pitiful 'at bat', a strikeout, as it were.

We have all chosen to live and stay in the world, and so we exist with a ineradicable bond with existence itself. This piece was a distinctly wrong place to think existents and existence apart from one another. A logic of love and a propositional logic are not mutually exclusive; I do think it's difficult to think them simultaneously. To say that for one to appear the other must disappear misleads. To think the logic of love does not mean to leave one's brains at the door; the logic of love is no fantasy land.


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The Death of God and the Necessity of a New Phenomenology

God died at least twice, once on the Cross and at least once in the crosshairs of Altizer's (et al.) theology of the death of God. Perhaps in the last word, these are not two but simply the one death of the God who abandons the plaintive voices in the psalms and the God who does not arrive at the Cross to satisfy the sardonic and sadistic demands of the jeering crowd echoing the 22nd Psalm. The death of the God of being necessitates a phenomenology of a God without being, or at least one that might give an account of revelation. Jean-Luc Marion's project recognizes the death of this God, this ontotheological God, and strategizes just how a transition from theology to theology might occur; and, yes, even  how a phenomenology of the 'analogy of being' can move into a 'being of analogy'---an analogy from finitude (logos) to an analogy from infinity (theos).

What concerns me here is not so much the niceties of a pious development of a new phenomenology that somehow remains faithful to Husserl, but how religious phenomena can make an appearance in a similar way non-religious phenomena make their appearances. There should be a methodological continuity coursing through these kinds of experience. The genius of Marion's approach gives unprecedented priority (which is not to say privilege) to givenness. I wish to commit the great sin of conflating theology with phenomenology ( John Caputo, in his "Hyperbolization of Phenomenology" [in Kevin Hart's Counter-Experiences] has already charged Marion with just that intellectual, academic transgression---sin---and his argument is very sound on its own terms; so what the hell). I want to look at the givenness of revelation. I use the lower case 'r' here to underscore that my discussion will focus on the provisional character of the actuality of revelation (or simply the possibility of revelation) as opposed to the strictly theological actuality of Revelation (upper case 'R') in order to respect this crucial distinction that Marion maintains through the body of his work.

From time to time I float the idea of the 'hypostatic union' and I wish to examine that a bit more in this post. So, now, a little religion.

The disciples see Jesus for the very first time in the resurrection appearances, in which he is no mere Jesus of Nazareth, but the Christ. It is only in the experience of the risen Jesus that the Cross comes into focus, and it is from the Cross, the very blood and water issuing from the side of Christ, that Jesus can be constructed in the narrative novelty that we have come to call 'gospel.' A genre needed to arise that would 'contain' the good news that God had died. Mark, the likeliest candidate for the status of the 'first to write,' appropriates a political method of communication (the announcement of the sovereign) to communicate another kind of news of another kind of son of God; the evangelium takes on another kind of good.

I have always been fascinated that all four evangelists, despite their distinctive christologies, view the Cross through the kaleidoscope of the 22nd psalm. Of the four evangelists, only Luke sidesteps a direct quote from the 22nd Psalm. Mark and Matthew quote the line of abandonment (22:1); all four allude to the 'casting of the lots' for the garments, while John only quotes the incident directly (22:18). That all four evangelists appropriate the Psalm tells of the importance of this type of psalm in the psalter: the psalm of the deafness of God. Lamentation and complaint in these such psalms bring the holiness of God into relief: "yet you are holy and enthroned on the praise of Israel"(3). In these psalms, and of course in this 22nd psalm, the deafness of God is not a contradiction, but accepted as part of the mystery of holiness. For the evangelists, the resurrection has re-presented the psalter's holiness of God after the abandonment of the suffering servant. The difference is that for the psalmist the transition from plaintive abandonment to the holiness of God rests in hope for God to come; for the evangelists that hope is fulfilled in the event of the resurrection in an enactment of the mystery of holiness.


For our canonical evangelists, the content of the form characterizes the new genre and distinguishes it from its antecedent. Only the experience of the resurrection could power such memory. That power drives the making visible of Jesus, who until the resurrection, was invisible. Memory brings Jesus into focus, allowing him to appear in the flesh. Apart from  the resurrection, such memories could become lethal; dead messiahs must stay dead, which up to then, was the way of things. To remember a failed messiah, one whose fate and memory was forever sealed by Roman sovereignty, was not about resurrection but insurrection, which leads to more blood and the numbing boredom of the banality of crosses.

But this Cross inaugurated a kingdom unknown to contemporary sovereignty; it is the crux of memory, Eucharistic, liturgical, political, phenomenological. As I used to say back in my apologetics days, the gospels answer the question, "who was that masked man?" Not masked in the sense of persona, but in the sense of the hidden, the yet to be made unhidden, revealed, and true. The Gospels discover the truth of a God with us. It reminds us of something forgotten, something lost in memory. The river Lethe washes away memory, but aletheia, is the washing away of forgetfulness; it is the discovery of something once known: it is the truth.

The resurrection washes away what was forgotten about the resurrected one. So who did the masked man think he was? He was who memory of him says who he said he was. The gospels are the evangelists' discovery of Jesus within the memory jogged by the first Easter morning (allow me the anachronism's logical privilege). 'The Father and I are one' (John 10:30). The Johannine statement of the identity of the father with the son is the first theological formality of what would later emerge as the hypostatic union.

So what could the hypostatic union mean for us today? If the ontotheological God died with good riddance, then to what is Jesus united? He is fully human and fully divine united at the level of the single divine person of Christ Jesus. So here is my maneuever: substitute revelation or the revealed (aletheia) for divine in the Chalcedonian formula and see what makes an appearance. We are bracketing off 'divinity' so that ontotheology doesn't come in through the back door of the phenomenological moment of the saturated phenomenon of Christ, the union of the visible with the invisible in the visibility of Christ. The hypostatic union then sees in the single revealed person of Christ the unity of revelation with existent human flesh. "I and the Father are one" tells us that in the person of Christ a living Jesus understands himself to be in perfect relation to revelation as Revelation.

The hypostatic union understood in this way constructs theosis (an abbreviation of theopoeisis) as the approximation to Jesus' own self-understanding as being the one whose self is that self in perfect relation to the givenness of revelation. Theosis then can never mean the actually becoming 'divine' (it never meant this), but rather approaching asymptotically Jesus' reception of revelation as adonne receiving donation, but now writ as Revelation, the theology. The hypostatic union then is a crystallization of a phenomenological moment---the precipitating out of an existing entity from a saturated solution (the saturated phenomenon of the givenness of Revelation). But instead of a counter-experience of a saturated phenomenon, we have the crystallized, sui generis, God-man.

Caputo's critique looms large over this kind of formalization. He persuasively locates the phenomenological moment not in actual historical occurrences, but in the event harbored in the biblical narratives. He rightly distinguishes the experience of the first followers of The Way, from the experiences of the communities for whom our evangelists write. For the former, he posits a phenomenality of  [the Holy] Spirit; for the latter, he posits the event of faith released from the sacred narratives. Yet the horizons for each of these seemingly distinct experiences blur and transgress each other. Caputo could not articulate just how the Spirit was at work for the first disciples because he had not developed his memory-constituted hauntology of It Spooks. He might after all meet Marion in the mutuality of the 'pure call.'

The conviction the first disciples had of the resurrection was certainly of a different character than the convictions of faith experienced by the later communities united by their gospels, but they were not of a different order. The phenomena each group experienced was different, but not the phenomenality of the event. The Cross was already memory for the first disciples at the time of the resurrection. But the power of the gospel narratives to suspend time brings a phenomenological immediacy to both groups, and the discovery that issues forth from the Cross is an aletheia that is indistinguishable for either. Alethos anesti.

The Prodigal: Marion Returns from Khora to Luke

Marion's latest reading of 'The Prodigal Son' remains unintelligible apart from his analysis of 'fatherhood.' Fatherhood is the gift already reduced to givenness, and therefore without being, unconditional and without sovereignty. As such, this reduced gift of fatherhood exempts itself from reciprocity. "With fatherhood, the giver is manifested even insofar as he is absent, the recipient insofar as he defaults, and the gift in direct proportion to its unreality"(NC, 102; see the discussion in 98-114). The nexus between Caputo's thought on the weakness of the pure call, in its unconditionality and without sovereignty and Marion's analysis of a gift already and always reduced to givenness is striking here.

In his reading of Luke 15:11-32, Marion complicates his analysis of fatherhood with a "denial of the very fatherhood of the father" (149) and "lost...filiation" (150). Such denial and loss can only be reconciled to fatherhood in the death of the son. Indeed the death of the son results from his dissipation as his inheritance itself dissipates. Like Lear, the younger son yielded his ousia, but unlike Lear who crawls unburdened by being to the grave, the younger son crawls back to the father, who, through forgiveness, restores being to the son, who was dead but alive again. In this manner, all that fatherhood entails remains untouched by the son's loss and denial. Filiation is therefore just as unconditional, irrevocable and undeniable as fatherhood itself. The gift already reduced to givenness forgives the misinterpretation of the gift.

In a fascinating turn, Marion locates the operations of hermeneutics within the sons, whose conversions are prerequisite to their proper exercise of their hermeneutics. In order for the hermeneutics of the gift to interpret the gift of life and filiation correctly, the gift itself must operate as pure gift. The sons must see the gift as the gift already given in givenness without being, without causality and sufficient reason. The unconditional call of the father echoes within the son when he realizes that he has spent his inheritance and has become destitute. Dispossessed, the younger son, who has lost "the call" (150), rediscovers it as its response, which is the return from khora to the father. Forgiveness, "the gift given over again," allows the father and son, gift and gifted, to be unveiled: "the unveiling of the father as father coincides with the unveiling of the son as son" (150-51). This "complete phenomenon of the gift" dictates the operation of its hermeneutic in the hands of the son possessed of conversion, metanoia, but also a turn toward the father.

The elder son, feeling a bit disenfranchised by what seems to him to be an overreaction to his brother's return, disowns his brother by relinquishing him into filiation: "this son of yours has squandered your property" (Luke 15:30). But the father, in giving his fatherhood to his elder son ("you are always with me and everything I have is yours" [15:31]), unveils both sons' filiation, and restores brother to brother: "this brother of yours was dead and is alive again" (15:32). Hence, the gift already reduced to givenness, offers itself in love and life. The elder son's hermeneutics will receive the gift by accepting it in its givenness, or not.

Fatherhood lacks sovereignty because it cannot participate in the economy of the gift and reciprocity. This gift already reduced to givenness can make no claim on economic return, but in its unconditionality, effects a return nonetheless. The father of the two sons make no gift of property as Lear does. Lear, unable to forgive, fatally operates within the economy of an impure, inadequate gift, which he wants to give again but cannot because it is always arrested by reciprocity. Instead, the father in the parable merely passes what is already the son's to the son: "he only does him justice in an equal exchange" (149).

I wonder why Marion ignores the father with two sons in King Lear, Gloucester, and his sons Edmund and Edgar. In this famous sub-plot, the play of the natural attitude and the reduction to fatherhood provides a compelling version of a difference in filial hermeneutics.

Reason not the Need: Marion on King Lear

O, Reason not the Need
                                       ---King Lear  (II,vi)




In Negative Certainties, Marion problematizes the gift in King Lear. I continue with several preliminary observations about the tragedy through Marion's general approach.


Lear will be driven mad by reason as he discovers that he has divided his ousia and distributed it to Regan and Goneril, without remainder. In Lear's world, one's being is one's possessions, and he has dispossessed himself that he might crawl unburdened to the grave. In such a world, that would be a very short crawl: Lear finds himself suddenly without being. Regan and Goneril speak of reason and need and he is trying to speak of the untranslatable gift, which he seeks to retroactively give to his daughters, and in return get back a little of that ousia. These 'givees' have not received what Lear has given, so he must attempt to re-give his gift, this time not as his ousia, his propertied objectness, but the gift which cannot answer to 'need.' The gift, Lear has discovered too very late, is like the rose, 'without why.'

Marion, speaking of the event, actually extends the analysis of the givenness of the gift:

"The objective interpretation of the phenomenon masks and misses its eventiveness...because the concept of permanence has no pertinence for its description as the effect of a cause" (NC, 177).

The gift is without why and beyond interrogation by need. Lear's daughters have mistaken what they have received as permanent being, as a permanent and certain state of affairs within the categories of causality. Lear has experienced a most unhappy version of an event he thought would bring peace; but events cannot be choreographed, subjected to the conditions of design. The objectification visited upon what his daughters receive, prevents the event, diminishes the gift to sheer objectness, erases the possibility of the gift by rewriting it into the permanence of objects. The 'needs analysis' performed in Act II of Shakespeare's play, diminish Lear to non-being.

Marion touches upon the tragic confusion of divestiture with the gift, but pursues 'forgiveness' instead of the logical extent of this confusion: the inaccessibility of the gift by reason and need. Nonetheless, he powerfully concludes that "no forgiveness can take place except on the basis of a prior gift" (143). This formulation allows him to segue into another iteration of his reading of the Prodigal Son.

Polarity in the Phenomenological Moment: An Uneven Laterality of Phenomenality

If givenness, as the sole horizon of phenomena, drives the phenomenological moment, then the relationality between the given and the gifted provides a certain polarity that drives the very reduction that allows the given to show itself. The secondary literature on Marion's work often identifies either pole in the moment, and still more often marks an unevenness or asymmetry of the privilege enjoyed by the given and the receiving consciousness, the pure call (the gift) and the receiver (the gifted).


Though it is probably impossible to retrieve Husserl's noema and noesis, buried as they are in 100 years of critical sediment, they still might illuminate the polarity within the Marion's phenomenological moment. Despite Marion's apparent dissatisfaction with these terms because of their ultimate inadequacy, noema seem to belong to the given itself, and noesis to the gifted. In particular, noema embraces the self of the given within its essence---its act of meaning, and noesis embraces the self of the gifted, within its gaze of seeing---its mode of knowing. If we avoid becoming too dogmatic here, too structuralist, too dialectical, hold too hard to the correspondence between the two terms, or their tension, we might find an oscillation within the polarity in this moment---its inherent sidedness---where the given enters the intuition and the crosshairs of the intention.


To maintain the integrity of the unconditionality of the given giving itself, giving must remain anterior to showing. Giving then is the dynamic of showing---what it is doing to the consciousness. Showing is the revealing of a surface that appears within the gaze of the recipient whose response constitutes the kinetics of either ignoring or receiving---giving of the self to the call. The reduction to givenness allows for an oscillating play in which noema presents meaning and essence to the receptive noeisis through the gaze; for noema constitutes the self of the given, which through giving, shows itself in the noesis of the receiving self of the gifted. Both selves on either side of the phenomenological moment 'do' something to the other: the dynamic side of the given unconditionally calls the self on the other side, which in turn gives itself to what is shown through the kinetic gaze which either ignores or responds.


'Phenomeno-dynamics' maintains the initiative of givenness, while 'phenomeno-kinetics' maintains a limitless response to the gift without compromising its initiative. It might turn out that noema and noesis are simply probes that identify a polarity in the phenomenological moment and leave us with these ideas of phenomenodynamics and phenomenokinetics, which ensures the integrity of an (asymmetric) laterality that marks phenomenality itself. Perhaps we should avoid speaking of polarity and begin to speak of a constitutive laterality if that really turns out to be a distinction that makes a difference.

The Music of Givenness

According to Marion, that which is given gives itself wholly and unconditionally. The phenomenality of the given rests in its being given and in its reception into experience. A thing given therefore only becomes a phenomenon when a recipient experiences it, yet the attitude of the recipient cannot compromise the integrity or givenness of the given. Being given then is always anterior to phenomenality. These are the conditions of phenomenology: the given and the horizon of its appearance.


Some works of art give themselves more obviously than others. A painting or sculpture gives itself in a wholeness that is more immediate than a novel or symphony. Music presents a fascinating phenomenality. Certainly it is given wholly and unconditionally, yet its presentation to experience challenges the recipient in ways other art forms do not.


A symphony may present itself in partitura, in 'full score' as a text, and its recipient can turn its pages and hear the music play out in time as its being unravels in presentation. Recipients who do not read music or hear the notations of the score do not experience a symphony in partitura, but in performance. What is a performance if it is not an interpretation of a score heard by its composer and rendered symbolically? A conductor and each member of an orchestra read the text of what is before them and represent something akin to what a composer has heard.


What the composer has heard and written and what a musical ensemble performs are acts of creation whose givenness is whole, complete, and unconditional. In the performance (or realization) of the symphony sound and sense march through time and into being well after their givenness has breached its horizon to enter the experience of the recipient/hearer. Each voice of the orchestra cuts a gap in space and time to enter an emerging reality of hearing. Something new has appeared where it was not: music in its pure givenness realized as a gift of sound and sense.


The jazz musician cuts out the middleman and allows for even more reduction of givenness. She hears, improvises and performs in the uncanniest synchronicity. Sound and sense emerge instantaneously from depths of musical consciousness and then penetrate into the depths of musical consciousness of the recipient. This fascinating dislocation of creation underscores the givenness of the self that gives and the self that receives. The kenotic gesture of the giving self (music and musician are so entangled here as to confuse them) in the moment of 'jazz' opens up musical space-time that creates the very consciousness of the hearer.


The musical kenosis in jazz is also present in the composer of the symphony. The unity of the composer and her composition is less obvious in that instance perhaps because of an undeserved privileging of the partitura over the extemporaneous ownership of the jazz musician of her music. The analogy here between Derrida's argument that speech is privileged over writing witnesses to the bankruptcy of that view. Once we dispense with doubt about ownership, dispense with an infantile need for certainty, the sound and sense of language and music can speak for themselves, each self giving itself into givenness and into phenomenality without fear or prejudice.


The music of givenness allows the gift and the gifted to be themselves, the one appearing more and more in the experience of the other; the other truly experiencing from that which is given as given in its pure givenness---whole and unconditional---as it appears in the widening aperture of the receiving self, which empties itself to accommodate more and more of that which is given.

Credo in Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem

Well, you really can't get much more Catholic than putting the words of the ancient creeds in your mind and on your lips. The Tradition of the Church is a great gift, and dogma is a part of that tradition. Though today we really are suspicious of dogma, (its not really a good thing to be 'dogmatic'), understood as a gift of a living body of faith, understanding and belief, a gift bequeathed from the past to the present, we can accept and authenticate the gift. Yet, we might say to ourselves, 'beware of Nicaeans bearing gifts.' And therein rests our suspicion; where's the catch? what must we give back, what return is implied in the giving? Perhaps we should just say, 'thanks but no thanks.' Still, a gift is a gift, and some gifts, the really good and authentic gifts, have no strings attached. A gift is in its purest, holiest form when it is dissociated from reciprocation, even the possibility of reciprocation. I want to keep the tension between pure gifts and less than pure gifts in this discussion of omnipotence, an idea handed down not just from the 4th century, but from the formation of Christian identity in relation to God.

Sadly, the problems with omnipotence subvert any realism, falling prey to the inability to distinguish the univocal from the analogical, collapsing both into some impossible human ideal of what something 'all-powerful' can do, has done, and continues to do. The dogma of divine omnipotence is intended as a gift, but brings trouble in all the confusion. Even the dogma itself is troubled by speculation on the absolute power of God and the ordinated power of God. The distinction between these 2 manifestations of the divine omnipotence is intended to bring peace, but instead often brings discord. Peter Damian denies the potentia ordinata, while Thomas Aquinas holds this ordered power in tension with the potentia absoluta. Neither purveyor of the divine power gives a satisfying synthesis of what humans actually experience, both thinkers being entrenched in big-time onto-theology. Still, an omnipotence ordered to the world declared 'good' in Genesis makes more intuitive sense than holding the divine omnipotence to pleasing the desires and judgments of creatures. The simplicity in a strategy of restricting the absolute power of God to the choice of 'any world order,' and describing the ordinated power as the self-limiting realism attached to divine power in 'this world order' just accounts for the phenomena confronting creatures better than a strategy that draws no distinction at all.

In any event, the Catholic dogma of God's omipotence has always been more nuanced than an unqualified "God can do all things." It is a very Catholic notion that God cannot contradict, betray integrity, suspend the 'good' of himself or creation. So, against the good monk Damian, God is incapable of making occurences 'unhappen.' There is nothing capricious about the divine omnipotence, reports to the contrary in the bible and recent headlines notwithstanding.

I am certainly not arguing that the distinctions between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata have solved the riddle of the aporia of an omnipotent God. These distinctions do, however, show the traces of the way omnipotence haunts both dogmas and sacred texts, and how omnipotence is harbored in the name of God, how it is structured in texts (sacred and profane---and by 'text' I mean any locus [or circus] of signification). Everywhere God's power is in such texts, there will be found the creature wrapping its head and fist about it. Still, if we use Caputo's definition of 'theopoetics' as the discourse of what haunts theology, of what circumfesses within confessional theology, then Catholic dogma is the religion's first whack at a living theopoetics. The next developments in Catholic dogma might be to be less dogmatic about it; developments in doctrine might be to be less doctrinaire. A dogma without dogma seems to fit inside the notion of a religion without religion.

Indeed, each word of the ancient creeds is but an invitation, our four words in this post's title each a call to reflection. What is belief? God? A Father? Omnipotence? Pantokrator? Almighty? All-ruling ruler of rules? The creeds, traditions, and sacred texts of the Church are an invitation to read. But not only to read draped in a hermeneutic from which no one really emerges, but reading to release the events waiting to be born in these texts. What event is really harbored in the dogma of omnipotence if not that of love and freedom, integrity of creation and embrace of the good?

Not every event of human complicity with power in this world has its call in the divine insistence. The events released in the name of God, especially those events pried loose from the divine name with analogical claims of univocal omnipotence, are often just plain trouble. They visit the absolute upon the relative, totalizing in events what cannot be totalized; and trying to contain the uncontainable sends the event back to the harbor, even after the trouble comes, which is usually in the form of violence.

Violence results from gifts that are assumed to be asking for something in return. Only a real openness to the gift can discern the nature of the gift. If the gift is a contract, then thanks but no thanks. We see how those gifts are reciprocated in this world. If the gift is a gift of grace, then we know the tree by its fruit.