The Placental Turn in the Crucifixion

In my previous post, I referred to the hypostatic union as an event within the event of  the Cross. The term itself refers to the orthodox expression of the relationship between the nature of the human and the nature of God as they exist within the single person of Jesus, the God-Man. From a contemporary Catholic perspective the appearance of Jesus in history is an evolutionary development in the history of humanity and represents the beginning of the final phase of human development. It is an irrevocable event, an event horizon--a point of no return, anthropologically speaking. For Christianity, it is a trajectory within a process of theosis. 

Hybridity is a metaphor for the union of the two natures, not its genetic actuality; for there is no fusion of the divine and human elements into a new single nature, which is the actual phenomenon of a biological hybrid.  Still, I like the metaphor because it keeps the conundrum alive and permits the outrageous assertions of monstrosity in play. The metaphor allows for the indictment of the modern turn's hatred of the hybrid and its implied miscegenation. Modernism wants purity, certainty, predictability and its mode of operation is alchemy: its worst kept secret is its desire to turn base metal into gold. The postmodern critique lays modernism's desire bare.

The placental turn I took in describing the communication of idioms, the transferability of the predicates of God and Christ, contextualizes how Caputo's insistence and existence can operate in the event of the Cross. In his first discussion of insistence and existence (I, 14ff), Caputo asserts the chiasmic relationship between these terms, and speaks of their co-dependency. It's not just an 'intertwining,' what I have called interdigitation and evagination, but he seems to be asserting something much more transgressive, more parasitic in the relationship. So, in the context of bringing something into being, a birth, an insistence landing on a fertile substrate---a positive response to the call---the placental relation to the womb is descriptive. The hybridity within the temporary relationship between the pregnant uterus and fetal placenta provides a locus for a creative parasitism operative in the hypostatic union as it comes into being in the death of God on Calvary.

While the New Testament is already grappling with the idea of the Incarnation, is does not know of anything like the hypostatic union. That is an event that must wait for another epoch; that call from the Cross must wait to be heard. The desolation of the day between the Death of God and the birth of God struggles with "Lema Sabacthani" like Jacob wrestles with God through the night until at dawn, God cries, 'uncle', hineni, and Jacob awakens as Israel.

The way Abram awakens as Abraham,  Kephas awakens as Peter,   Yeshua awakens as Yahweh, the disciples awaken as Christians, The Way awakens as church, church awakens as Catholicism, Vatican I awakens as Vatican II, the way Catholicism awakens...finally awakens. 

Hineni. 

Me Voici.

Is there a Hegelian Event in the Cross?

I am taking John D. Caputo's characterization of the event in The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (henceforth, I) very seriously. Events are not merely things that occur, as the colloquial use of the term would suggest, but that which is 'going on' in what happens that is the event. Events beckon, call, insist from within the action that is happening (I have never heard Caputo say something like 'calendar of events,' but I have heard him say 'event' the way he means it here: he says it with a temporally long 'e' in the second syllable followed by a carefully articulated 't'). It is a different and inflected word, and it is always a technical term.

The Crucifixion of Jesus is a happening that perhaps proffers several events. So, I will ask: what is going on in, on, and around the Cross? And is Hegel there, too?

Caputo likes to begin in forsakeness, abandonment: Matt 27:46, so let's meet him there, say 3 o'clock:

And about three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [New American Bible Revised Edition].

What's happening is the death of Jesus and a shout of despair from the Cross. What's going on? The death of God. Well at least the little death of God, la petite mort. No patripassionism here, but an act of love. Eli seems unmoved. Jesus dies. What is God's response? Deaf transcendence, indifference? No, perhaps. Perhaps the response is silent presence. The hypostatic union is many things, but it is never less the than the communication of idioms. The Logos remains present to the suffering of the flesh; it interdigitates with it, evaginates human dying, bears a placental unity with the womb of the Logos-sarx, allowing for an accidental cross-over of suffering. It feels and acknowledges the dying qua dying. The soundtrack to the scene is the Song of Songs, and its sounds a little like the Liebestod whose libretto is now the Sermon on the Mount. La petite mort always refers to the transcendence in what just happened; the little death is the event in the climax. The call from the Cross, the call from this real presence, moves within death and despair, from within the loud cry that yields (And we have not even gotten to the Johannine spear that breaks into the Body of Jesus and releases the Church and its uncertain faith, oozing from the side of the man). It is as the April fool, Melito of Sardis, has said, "It was He because of whom the earth quaked. He that hung up the earth in space was Himself hanged up; He that fixed the heavens was fixed with nails; He that bore up the earth was borne up on a tree; the Lord of all was subjected to ignominy in a naked body-God put to death!" Communicatio idiomatum.

If Caputo's summary (execution) is right, that "[i]n Hegel and Altizer,the death of God is God coming to life in space and time, the death of the transcendent otherworldly God and the birth of the God with us, the immanent infinite womb of divine life that sustains us," (I, 137) then what we are recognizing as an event in the occurrence on Calvary (Hegel is there in the crowd, looking over Caputo's shoulder) is what invites faith into being: the response to the death of God is Christianity. God insists (from where Caputo knows not, but for the Christian from a presence coming into being) in the event in the Cross, and the answer to that call is an action, the birth of faith already moving to and fro. This is not a Hegelian totality, some final point of the Spirit, but a beginning---an irrevocable beginning---but a beginning of a process of the unfolding of a new reality and new way of thinking. The play of (syn)thesis and antithesis is a never-ending sequence of events--we chide Hegel for being a bad Hegelian when he suggests it all ever lands on some encyclopedic 'somewhere.'

In fact, there can only be Hegel's idea of the silhouette: an outline of a 'something' that can never be contained in any given Gestalt; but rather continues the process to knowledge and insights whose visions, decisions and revisions only precariously sit within their moment (Ray Brassier retrieves Hegel for the event when he opines that the change in reality and ideation make it impossible to say everything about anything). And it is here in the ever-provisional Gestalt that Hegel meets Rahner (they are old friends): in the theological anthropology of the hypostatic union, which for Christians is a trajectory. That trajectory is itself an event, because (if an event is doing what we are saying events do, then) this trajectory-as-event engages and drives the circumincession of past, present and future. This engagement is the trace of the event in Hegel eventuated in the Hegelian event of the Cross.

Of course, we are talking of the event of God's 'little death' here, the act of love in and through the suffering known so well to the Psalmist so many years before the crucifixion. Christianity does not know of the Grand Death of God, and so a small adjustment needs to be made to Caputo's assessment of Hegel and Altizer: Christianity cannot speak of the 'death of the transcendent' but it can and does and must speak of the kenosis of that 'otherworldly God,' the self emptying of divinity into Emmanuel ('God with us' [cf Matt 1:23]). Kenosis is all over I, single kenosis, a plastic 'double kenosis', a kenosis of annihilation and a kenosis of birth, and it is there through and through the event of the Cross.

Caputo's synthesis is instructive: "The au revoir of Father and Son are superseded in a final rendezvous in the Spirit,"  which is none other than the "movement that takes place within the Absolute." The trinitarian dance (perichoresis) continues to release the event kenotically, as everything empties from the Cross: the fiat of the annunciation, of overshadowing of the Spirit and the birth of Emmanuel. The infancy narratives are inaugurated in the issue from the side of Christ, but they are at once of the Nativity and Pentecost. The out-pouring of the Spirit through the event in the Cross is the same creative gesture of Genesis. On the seventh day God rested from his labors---Saturday is lost time that howls the 22nd psalm; God is exhausted, and it takes until the first day of the week, about as long as it takes Jesus to arrive in Bethany to seek out Lazarus, for the event to run its full course in the Resurrection. God again says yes to the void, to negation, to Saturday, and sees Sunday as very good. Sunday is Saturday's child who picks up the pieces of desolation and finds a way to go on; and the child is the Resurrection: God, born again and re-presented, puts on his own lips, Hineni, and answers the question, Eli, Eli...

For Caputo and Hegel, the actant of the call is anonymous, undecidable; there is no self-communication because there is no self to communicate. For the Christian, the self-communication of the caller is decided and decisive, even if there remains some anonymity in the absolute mystery that extends a most unexpected invitation, a most generous hospitality. It's rather something like grace.

The Call from the Cross

 "Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" [1 Cor. 22-24, NIV].

Paul could have barely calculated how his words would resonate today when theology must fend off secularism with one hand and rewrite the Cross in the postmodern world with the other. If the cross is not a scandal or foolishness for today's mind, many would find it at the very least peculiar. What kind of 'call' from the cross is heard today, from such a dim and remote past? Such a 'call' would have to be transhistorical to be heard in the din of the technological world, but what would make it so? Still, positivism's death knell to religion and faith is premature, and the cross limps through the desert of the real seeking out hearers of the 'call.'

This is a very strange kind of power here. The cross is the assertion of the secular power to keep the malcontents in check, and daydreamers in fear. Rome has no need to call anyone; Rome demonstrates, marches and executes the pax Romana. The cross is the symbol of Rome's reach, and of the impotence of its subjects. This power of the cross is of a different order.

A few years ago, John Caputo could write about The Weakness Of God, and the powerlessness of the cross even as the cross makes unconditional claims on those who respond to its 'call'. Certainly Catholicism is no stranger to a God for whom nothing is impossible that is real and possible, and a God who acts in the world through secondary causes, but Caputo's thesis does not hover over the palimpsest of Catholic theology comfortably. How could Caputo's theory of God be comfortable atop a theology of a triune God and dogmatics? No, that could not be the model.

Yet, a weak God and a weak theology does indeed speak to the postmodern world and post-structuralist thought. I am not certain that Caputo has not moved the theological dialogue forward in an authentic way.

Thought of as an event, the cross is a strategem within the Christ event. It is only through the lens of the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus that the cross can 'call' at all. Were it not for the resurrection, for example, what would have become of his life? Would he not be yet another failed messiah? How does hearing the call make such a man the 'power' and 'wisdom' of God?

My next post will engage Caputo's work in depth and attempt a synthesis with Catholicism. Or maybe not. Perhaps several posts, or several series of posts, will be required to engage this provocative thinker. A response to the call of the cross is what God intends by his invitation through the event. This conundrum is a struggle worth pursuing. Deconstruction calls as well, from its position at the foot of the cross. Such calls demand a response from those who hear them, from those who see a signature.

The Conscience of the King: Doing Good in the Cracks

One need not carry a diagnosis of OCD to skip over the cracks in sidewalks.  I remember the hops, skips and jumps over line, cracks and other marginalia in the Brooklyn sidewalks that grew me up. It was a great game of heroic feats and high athleticism. We all did it; sometimes we’d go back over the same strip of pavement just to do it better.

 Jumping over the cracks doesn’t always work out the way we intend; it is less heroic than we at first thought. It is missed opportunity. Nothing really happens on or in the matrix of the solid sidewalk. We often meet the monolith there, and when we meet others, we tend to find them about their business, behaving more like cyborgs than Buber’s thou . It’s where the matrix breaks, on the margins, in the cracks that we meet the other; and that’s the place where we can do some good: the crack’s the thing…

 Down in the cracks we walk dry-shod, the tentative walls of the matrix on either side; there we meet the other in meaningful purpose, and with no little sense of urgency. Safe from the gray thoughts of the boardroom, from the inane humming of people taking the wide roads, from the dull thinking of expedience at all cost, we come face to face with the other on the borders of willing the good. We are encouraged to walk a little faster.

 It is an interesting moment where conscience verges on an act of the will: liminality, on the precipice of doing good: something of a leap of faith. Walking faster  with each other to a purposeful destination clearly in sight opens us up to will the good, even if we have to grab a hand and pull a little. We do some good when we recall that will without love is coercion; will acting with insight toward the good of the other is righteousness. Fascinating things can happen on the margins, on the frontiers, in the cracks. I hope to meet many people there.

Let the Dead Bury the Dead: Con Mortuis in Lingua Mortua

Giordano Bruno is dead, dead as a door-nail; so is any Catholic apologetic that seeks to spin his death at the hands of the Church as anything but the result of the sinfulness and ignorance of its sons' actions.

How many Cardinals does it take to burn a heretic? Regardless, Bruno was burned at the stake for his arrogance and narcissism, and, I suppose for the heresies of apocastasis-ism, pantheism, neo-Platonism, Arianism as well. He was probably not executed for his Copernican-ism. Just a terminal case of other "-isms."

Because the Church did not send too many heretics to the secular power for execution does not really put any exonerating perspective on it beyond what might be placed on the secular authorities that carried out the sentence of the tribunal. Bruno is dead; he would have been dead by now anyway. Still, the Church holds itself to a different standard. It does not like finding itself in historical constraints. It sometimes wants to be infallible where even Pio Nono could not anticipate such infallibility. Did Bruno sin? Yes. Was the penance just? No.

I find John Paul II of happy memory to have hit the mark regarding human foibles masquerading as Catholic truths: regret and sorrow, seeking forgiveness. The sorrow and regrets are sincere, and it is highly unlikely the Church, in its human, wayfaring dimensions, is likely to perpetrate such poor judgements again.

We are sorry. Our apology is either adequate or inadequate for those whose sensibilities are offended. Our regrets and apologies are sincere, real, authentic. In hope and humility we pray they are accepted.

Nonetheless, there are cynics among the offended who, in the absence of any new critique, revert to Bruno. The charges are disingenuous, and the responses do not dissolve their venom.

I think we should call it a draw and move on.

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.

Signature and Worship

The ‘flying spaghetti monster,’ the marginalization of religion and faith in secular society, contemporary atheism and scientism, and the horrors of this world conspire against believers of the Word. Accused of childishness and other forms of psychological immaturity, believers are on the defensive to prove they are not mad, and to earn once again a place at the table of reasonable human discourse. The triumph of science as the standard by which all things human are measured and judged has limited all human knowledge to what can be accessed by the scientific method: humans can know only one way, and knowing in any other way is falsehood and a danger to the current world order. So, then, what  justification can believers give before the bar of science and empiricism for what they have judged to be knowledge of God? Aquinas was able to say that there is nothing in the intellect that is not first in the senses, but the angelic doctor admitted  that the intellect is capable of knowing beyond experimentation. Today’s atheists want to the know how God can be concluded from the evidence, how claims made for God are formulated, and how ‘worship’ is the response proper to the reality of God. They are unmoved by the analysis of Christian realism, and as such, cannot connect things human to divinity, nor are they disposed to recognize the categories of theology and psychology as compelling avenues to a God that creates nature but  exists outside it.

The problem of immanence and transcendence in Christian thought does not dissolve in the discourse of postmodernism. Perhaps the problem becomes even more acute as this binary opposition resists any kind of satisfactory synthesis in theological statements about God: there is no peace in thoughts such as ‘the hidden presence of God,’ ‘immanence in transcendence,’ “God is everywhere.” Indeed, the corollaries of such statements would seem to be, respectively, the hidden absence of God, transcendent immanence, and God is nowhere. Indeed, uncertainty is at work here. God cannot be located in space because, among other reasons, God is not physical. God is not in the universe, and does not answer to the laws of physics; nor is God contained in celestial bodies, taking a free ride courtesy of the laws of physics. As the creator of the universe, God is already not in creation; but this creation is, in effect, God’s signature.

 

We can illuminate the relation between God and creation with the analogy of a simple signature at the bottom of a letter, business document, rent check and the artist and her painting, with or without her signature at the bottom. Signatures confer originator status, authority and authenticity in the absence of the signer. Sometimes the signer exhibits an idiosyncratic appearance in his written signature, which confers its own kind of authority, authenticity and even security in the fact that the signature is 'real.' Idiosyncrasy in style or manner is not required: a bank teller will cash a check with a signature it has not seen before, even if it has a policy of keeping a 'signature on file' of its own members. Regardless, the signature empowers a transaction, authenticates a document, in the absence of the agent authorizing, authenticating, etc. The signature in a painting is interesting because painters, through the very nature of art, imbue their work with characteristics that are familiar to viewers: mannerisms, techniques, color patterns, etc., that are so closely tied to a particular painter that they identify, authorize and authenticate even in the absence of a signature at the bottom of a painting. When a painter signs her work, that signature certainly functions as a regular signature, but sometimes it is a marker of a built-in redundancy. Musical art can have similar effects: we can 'recognize' the authenticity of a work by a composer via a signature that is 'heard', even if we never heard the work before, or if the work was just discovered and performed for the first time.

 

These observations summarize several aspects of signatures that are familiar to us. The effects and consequences of signatures are conventionally understood, even when a signature is figurative. We expect authority, authenticity and guarantees of origin. These notions of the guarantee, authenticity and authority breed a kind of 'faith' in signatures, and in the reality governed by them. When we speak about God's signature, we are not speaking simply about matters of immanence and transcendence; we must transition to another problematic, albeit familiar, binary pairing: nature and grace. On the one hand, we can stipulate that nature is all that is good yet anterior to grace; on the other hand we can admit that nature is already poised to be graced, on the verge of grace, built to receive grace. Grace then is the freely given self-communication of the divine, imprinted, as it were, on a template already positioned to receive it. When we speak specifically of the rational subject as human person, ‘grace’ is the name of the divine signature within the human soul, the human psyche. God remains radically absent,  but grace inheres in the human person.

 

Creation—the natural world/universe--then, is imbued with the presence of its creator, who vacates each passing microsecond of the creative act. This presence is either simply hidden (traditional concept of grace), or truly absent yet authenticated by a signature pointing to the divine/creative authority/authenticity/bona fide-security of origin. If nature is intelligible, it is intelligible as signature, and as signature points to the rationality of the signer. I am not suggesting that such an intelligence is immanent in intelligibility, or the only possible outcome of the comprehensibility of nature. Instead, I am suggesting that nature bears a signature which authorizes and authenticates it, even as the signer remains both transcendent( 'absence') and in an immanence of ‘already’ been there, only the familiar signature remaining.

 

Nature is not so other that we see it as purely divine, and therefore outside the conceptual space of inquiry: to the contrary, nature's very intelligibility subjects it to human inquiry and reason. The signature itself is not open to the scientific method, which lacks the tools for proper inquiry and whose existing tools obscure rather than discover; and we must therefore  be careful not to confuse the apprehension of the intelligibility of nature with crass notions of 'intelligent design’ (the pseudoscientific theory of creationism). Metaphysics and physics cannot be synthesized in this or any other application. We can admit, however, that intelligibility's trajectory is the rational intelligence of the signer: the logos. The signature within the intelligibility of the natural world is the grace through which the logos is made known (I realize I have not been making the classical distinction between the universe as natural world and human nature (properly so called), but I do this not only at my own peril, but to underscore the fundamental connection between the human subject and the natural world; simply stated, human beings and the fundamental particles of the universe are made of the same stuff and share a common origin. As such the physical universe and human nature receive grace in a similar and gratuitous way).

 

God’s self-communication is given to us through the logos, in all its forms, even in revelation through the divine signature, grace. At creation, the signature is written throughout the universe; in revelation through human history, first in the theophany on Mt. Sinai, and finally and definitively in the incarnation of the logos itself: the signer itself appears in history in the flesh. For Christians, the Christ-event is the aperture on the truth of God. It is difficult to see much past the aperture, so the focus is on the in-breaking of God into creation---the second person of the trinity incarnate and historical. This is the historical moment that corresponds to psychological moment of the experience of being fully human and fully alive. It is the experience of God within us, yet not a part of us, even as he became one of us.

 

God's signature then is more than his hidden presence, which is tied more to grace than to ill-conceived ideas of God-in- nature, God ‘localized’ in nature. God is radically absent from the universe. Because God is radically absent, existing apart from creation, in eternity outside time, space and other physical, measurable entities, we become aware of him by his signature. In this sense signature is a sacramental, but not limited to the sacramental. But that we are predisposed to recognize his signature, suggests that we share that negative capability of nature to receive such self-communication.

That self-communication in and of grace opens us to the horizon of worship. What is worship if not the honor due the creator by the created. Poised always to seek our origin, we are oriented toward God through the signature. Believers honor the signature as anyone might honor a signature on a check or letter. We act in response, though, to the signer. Give a check to the bank teller and he disburses cash in response to the authority---the ‘worth-ship’---in the signature. Believers do that too, but in proportion to the profundity of the nature of that particular signer. They honor all the predicates of God not as abstractions but as the truth of God. This action in response to the  truth of God is worship. And though God did not create a perfect world, he did create an imperfect one for us in which we are responsible for cooperating in its perfection. Could God have created a finished world free of every evil? The answer is obvious. It would appear that he chose to create this world, and chose to partner with us in the work of finishing. Responding to the call to cooperate in the on-going creation of the world is also worship, and faith in action.

Writing Sacrifice into Postmodern Culture

In a recent video presentation on The Eucharist as Sacrifice, Fr. Robert Barron contextualizes 'sacrifice' within the culture of 1st century Palestine. He underscores how the biblical language of sacrifice is received in the religious communities of early Christianity. He also laments the results of his survey of Catholics who largely interpret the Lamb of God as a metaphor for Jesus' gentleness and meekness. He therefore puts in the strong corrective, that, for Jesus's contemporaries, the image of the Lamb could only mean the immolation of Jesus as a sacrifice unto the remission of sins through the agency of His own priesthood.

In colloquial English, 'sacrifice' has many meanings and usages: we can observe a sacrifice fly in baseball, the sacrifice of lab rats that prepares them  for study, the sacrifices some make to achieve their goals, the sacrifices parents might make to benefit their (usually ungrateful) children, the Lenten sacrifices of stuff that's probably not good for us anyway, the sacrifice of soldiers serving abroad during the holidays, and the ultimate sacrifice they might someday make. Sacrality eludes some of these metaphorical usages of 'sacrifice," others are perhaps more in step with it. Few Americans, upon hearing the term, think of the sacrifice on Calvary some 2000 years ago, and what that might have meant then or what that might mean today.

The postmodern turn often dislodges meaning from signs, and signifers from signifieds. This slippage is fundamental to the tenuousness of meaning in contemporary culture (I mean this in a purely descriptive way, and not at all prescriptively). Meanings are lost, found, altered, renewed, rebuilt. Meaning is as unreliable as the culture that creates it. But this postmodern fluidity is more akin to premodern sensibility than to modernism, which always pretends to certainty. It is fascinating that the earliest iconographic sign system of Jesus is not of his crucifixion, but that of a shepherd. In these images, Jesus is the first Christopher, as he bears his symbolic self on his own shoulders, the burden of his sacrificial destiny. It is perhaps ultimately the Johannine Jesus depicted here, the 'good shepherd' of Jn. 10. He is shepherd and lamb, God and man (cf. Ps. 23). I find it hopeful that the hypostatic union cannot be deconstructed, as the sign is uncannily irreducible, its signifier unfloatable.

The Divine Liturgy and Sacrifice of the Mass certainly is, as Scott Hahn has noted, the supper of the lamb. It is the sacred meal of the lamb, for the lamb, of the shepherd, for his flock. All the meanings of 'sacrifice' perichoretically mingle, without confusion, as those at the banquet sacrifice their embrace of all the petty evils that distance them from God, placing them on the shoulders of the lamb, who takes them away. The liturgical and sacramental re-presentation of the event at Calvary has many effects, but one of its more profound effects is the transhistorical sweeping of those participating to the foot of the Cross. The victim is the same, as is the event, as is its finality: one sacrifice, once and for all.  It is a violent effect, perhaps nearly lethal: this very disruption of history unravels the modern insistence on the possibility of history itself, and modernism's own metanarrative. This deconstruction of history and its metanarrative parses the postmodern world, which asymptotically approaches its premodern antecedents,  reinventing the sacred, and sacrifice.

A Matter of Irksome Emphasis

Fr. Barron’s wonderfully titled screed on Pope Francis’s becoming Time magazine’s Person of the Year, “Time’s Kantian Wedge” in Real Clear Religion (Dec. 12, 2013), focuses attention on the phenomenon of emphasis. As is his rhetorical wont, Fr. Barron gives his assent to many of the general observations of the current papacy; but then, characteristically (and I might add, effectively) slams on the brakes in hope of awakening a lulled public. Something about the media’s presentation of the pope has irked him.

 He decries the “tendency to distinguish radically between this lovely Franciscan emphasis on mercy and love for the poor and the apparently far less than lovely emphasis on doctrine so characteristic of the Papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. There is actually a good deal of dangerous silliness in this way of characterizing things.” While I am uncertain of just what a radical distinction is, or what is precisely undergoing this kind of distinguishing, certainly it has to do with the manner in which the secular press tries to embrace something about the pope’s message, while not embracing other aspects of the message---the religious stuff, the fundamentally Christian stuff. But what can the secular press embrace but the timeless humanism given a new face by the pope? The pope is evangelizing, not proselytizing: certainly Fr. Barron cannot have any real expectations of the secular press gettin’ religion. So, the secular press sticks to the secular; I don’t see that as an especially bad thing.

 Fr. Barron is also irked by the Kantian turn---the reduction of religion to ethics, especially as such a reduction sometimes reduces further to indifferentism: “ it doesn't really matter what you believe, as long as you are a good person.” It is perhaps a bit unfair to trace all that is lukewarm in contemporary culture to Kant, but I concur with the general point that people of good will need not collapse all they hold true into a false irenicism. Authentic religion certainly matters, and differences are to be respected and understood in authentic dialogue, not dissolved by political expediency into distinctions without differences. Fr. Barron will be glad to know that contemporary philosophers have critically engaged the Kantian turn, in their various versions of object oriented ontology and speculative realism, especially in their dressing down of correlationism.


Kant never meant to be ignorant of history, and his philosphy is the antithesis of indifferentism, yet culture tends to have its way with its giants. And history is always more complicated than the episteme that generates it. Truth be told it sometimes irks me when my co-religionists see Vatican II as erasing Trent, only to be shocked that the Church still celebrates the Communion of Saints, or when my fellow Christians view this pope as espousing fundamentals of Catholic doctrine somehow different from his predecessors, yet are dumbfounded by ‘liberal’ pronouncements on the idolatry of money  that have been in  the magisterium for a hundred years. The more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s just a matter of emphasis.

Sympathy, Empathy and Being-for-Others

As a palliative medicine specialist, I am often asked to comment on the human qualities of sympathy and empathy. In particular, the question is often how can we ‘teach’ those charged with caring for the seriously ill and dying to be more sympathetic, empathetic, or at least how to have these workers seem to be sympathetic, empathetic. There is the potential for great benefits here, benefits for all, especially if we work from a system in which we are most truly who we are as humans when we are being for the ‘other.’

 

First, I should define my terms: by sympathy I mean that human quality that enables us to participate compassionately in the feelings or suffering of another, to allow those feelings and suffering to resonate within and  between ourselves and the other person; by empathy, I mean that rather extraordinary human quality that enables us to experience the feelings or suffering of another. I do not wish to commit psychology here, but these terms cannot be synonymous, even though they both involve compassion and the ability to form a response to the suffering of ‘the other’. Further, making distinctions among the types of sympathy and empathy (e.g., affective and cognitive empathy), or discussing psycho-pathologies that eradicate the capacity for sympathy and empathy, are tasks for another place and time.

 

All human beings who are psychologically and spiritually intact are capable of sympathy and empathy, and these qualities are likely hard-wired into humanness itself. Still, unsympathetic and un-empathetic behaviors often come into play, and in clinical situations, can be detrimental to the well-being of patients, their families and co-workers. Certainly, when such behaviors occur during the care of the gravely ill and dying, the stakes are even higher, as time tends to subvert recovery. These behaviors often result from misapprehending the situation, poor prioritization of needs, and a shift away from the other to the self. Workers who display such behaviors are not psychologically ill or otherwise pathological, but often preoccupied with a distorted hierarchy of needs.

 

Apart from educating professional and family care-givers caring for the seriously ill and dying (hospice patients, for example) in a patient-centered value system, and prioritizing the needs of the sufferer other over and against the needs of a beleaguered worker who simply has to get to the next patient, what else can be done to bring such caregivers in touch with their innate capabilities to sympathize and empathize?

 

Permit me to borrow a concept from early Christian literature: kenosis. From the Christological hymn in Philippians 2, the concept is one of self-emptying; moreover, it is a directed self-emptying, an emptying whose purpose is to take on another nature. A brief consideration of the text would be helpful:

 

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves,  not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:

Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness. [NIV, Phl 2:3-8]

 

The phrase, ‘made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant’ captures the concept of kenosis nicely. Theologically, of course, the passage cannot be read as an exchange of the divine for the human, but rather as a divine accommodation of another nature. The Christological and soteriological richness notwithstanding, the process of kenosis can be utilized, at least metaphorically, to bring people in touch with their own capacity for sympathy and empathy.

So, then, can sympathy, empathy and compassion be taught? Perhaps: to the extent that a caregiver can participate in the metaphor of kenosis, he can conceptualize his own self-emptying to allow room for the participation in the feelings, emotions and suffering of the ‘other;’ more specifically, to make room for those feelings of the ‘other’ within himself. Through this confrontation with the suffering of the other within himself, an appropriate response can be formulated and expressed as a sympathetic/empathetic gesture or word. Thought of in this way, sympathy and empathy can be related by degree, or on a continuum, rather than by essence: the greater the emptying, the likelier it becomes to move from compassionate participation and well-wishing to actual experience of and responding to the suffering in the ‘other’. In this way, the move from sympathy to empathy is less paradigmatic, and more syntagmatic, less a change of scene, and more an extended viewing along the horizon. This process is of course easier to state than implement, but considering the task before caregivers and the needs of the seriously ill and dying, the process is well-worth the attempt.

 Coda: For non-religious caregivers, no theological point need be made, but rather a participation in the celebration of the wonder and beauty of being human. For religious caregivers, and perhaps especially for Christian caregivers, the theological, Christological and soteriological depths of this kind of imitatio Christi can be fulfilling beyond the joy of humanism. Indeed, self-actualization, emotional and spiritual growth, and participation in individual and collective humanity are merely the surfaces of being ourselves and being true to ourselves by being for others.