Praying the Transfiguration: Luke 9:28-36

About eight days after he said this, he took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray. While he was praying his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem. Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but becoming fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were about to part from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good that we are here; let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” But he did not know what he was saying. While he was still speaking, a cloud came and cast a shadow over them, and they became frightened when they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen. [ Luke 9: 28-36, NAB]

Praying scripture engages my very self as it opens into its being-in-the-world of the biblical word. Praying is 'religious,' and as the religious gesture par excellence, when I pray I pray in my flesh the sacred scriptures within the luminous, illuminating Spirit, who enfolds me in the Word. Spirit folds me into the sounds and senses of words and the space that suspends them in the visible and invisible, and directs my gaze in the enfolding, unfolding and refolding motions that rub against the edges of my flesh. I am before the word, alongside the word, within the word.

I pray the Transfiguration by entering Luke's world of a face changed by the light of God's gaze shining through, a raiment so white that white has never known, and a voice that can emanate only from cloud. I gaze upon Jesus praying, and his praying shows in the flesh of his face,  now transformed into a face showing the familiar and the strange, his face and the face of something completely other. What face is this that transforms my gaze into its own? How am I in these words, on these words, who show me only a visage that discovers me, names me, captures me? The face has become 'other' and by encountering me as other it names me, points to me, brings my presence within its gaze where I move into it.


This movement into the gaze prayerfully engages this other. I do not read; I become that which the face sees. This is the face of the face of God seeing me, given to me in ineluctable spectacle that only a prayerful gaze can view. Being seen takes me, seizes me, though I myself move into this gazing concealment, which, remaining concealed, un-conceals, dis-covers me to myself. I am discovered and self-disclosed---I give my self to myself-as-seen.


Behold (ἰδοὺ)! See! Luke gives me two others. The image is a prayer in itself. Moses and Elijah usher the Messiah into time and space as time cancels itself as the ushers come into view. Exodus (ἔξοδον). Exodus is a prayer in itself. I depart into the unheard words of exodus. Luke tells me that the three speak of exodus, of the exodus Jesus will accomplish at Jerusalem. I depart into what Luke tells me.


The cloud goes before me in my exodus. I watch it overshadow Peter, James and John; it envelopes them. I cannot see them bathing in the words of the voice: Sonship. Chosen. Listen to Him. He is mine. The voice gives the Son. I hear the words and the sound is the face made other that sees me. The face is the word made sound. I hear the face and see the voice. They are one and the same. In the one, in the gaze of this other, in the sound of a face and in a face of a voice, I cross a sea of faith to a shore of truth.


Praying the Transfiguration is standing in a dazzling gaze coming at me from an other whose unity of face and voice calls to ask, 'where are you,' and answering hineni.

Reading the Transfiguration: Luke 9

Reading enacts an experience of texts. One does not read oneself reading, for reading through 'distance' constitutes the very experience of reading, the very experience of placing oneself in relation to a text. In this piece I want to read one of the Synoptic versions of the Transfiguration, a theophany that in all 3 texts takes place on a mountain, or elevated space. I will not address the 'synoptic problem' but instead choose Luke because his narrative in particular sits well within my hermeneutic attitude. His problematizing, for example, 'saying' (lego) and 'seeing' (eido) precisely straddles the issues that interest me in general. Much hangs on this phrase:

μὴ εἰδὼς ὃ λέγει 



Which I read as 'he saw not what he said,' or, 'he said what he did not see.' A more general, 'he didn't realize (or know) what he was saying,' simply does not work. Words of saying and seeing complicate the play of the narrative which presents images, voices, and discussions. Luke, and what I mean by 'Luke' is a textual tradition, a tradition of textuality, not necessarily a particular human person who had something to do with the generation of this particular text we commonly call 'gospel,' the Gospel according to Luke. Luke presents the Transfiguration within a particular narrative strategy that shapes my experience of that narrative and its particular content. I will focus on what is said and seen as it structures my experience of the 'story.'

About eight days after he said this, he took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray. While he was praying his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem. Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but becoming fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were about to part from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good that we are here; let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” But he did not know what he was saying. While he was still speaking, a cloud came and cast a shadow over them, and they became frightened when they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen. [ Luke 9: 28-36, NAB]

Luke 9 is a most eventful chapter:  the commission of the 12, a snapshot of Herod, feeding the 5000, Peter's declaration of Jesus as Christ, the messianic secret, the prediction of the Resurrection, all these pericopes precede the pericope of the Transfiguration, not to mention the several that follow. For this reading, however, some narrative elements of the chapter are so decisively formative, that their texts must be given voice:

And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. [16]

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Messiah of God.” [20]

“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” [22]

 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed [26]

Luke puts Jesus, transfigured, in conversation with Moses and Elijah, discussing what will transpire in Jerusalem (exodus). Luke directs his narrative to me alone; I read as the apostles sleep. He places me in dramatic tension with the apostles who will soon awaken. I see and therefore know what is before me before (prior to) Peter, James and John become aware of what's before them. Luke and I share an experience of a change in the appearance of Jesus' face and his garments, though from very different, irreducible perspectives (our experiences are unique). Luke shares this moment with me to enfold me into the text, to invite me into the world of the text, a world not my own but a world I see through my eyes in my world now brought into the text.

Peter awakens; does he see what I see? Luke gives me Peter's view upon 'glory.'  He sees Jesus in glory and Moses and Elijah; but he will say what he had not seen, though he clearly has seen something (μὴ εἰδὼς ὃ λέγει ). Luke delivers Jesus' visage and raiment become totally other. He guides my gaze to Moses and Elijah: behold. I see (video) what Peter does not see (eido). What I behold---imagine, see, image differs from what Peter sees, imagines, images, because Luke structures my experience so that I may see more clearly than Peter. Luke constructs Peter's experience as something familiar to me: emerging from sleep, but he disallows a state of remaining in half-sleep (diagregoreo). Fully awake, Peter might just as well have stayed asleep: allow me to paraphrase,  'How wonderful is this, all of us here together in this one place; let's pitch a few tents that we can all tarry a bit.' Peter cannot distinguish moments from minutes.


Not that I can see much more. But what I see, what Luke has given,  I cannot place within tents, tabernacles or dwellings. Luke has shown me something that has saturating, overwhelming and uncontainable effect. It has not been time enough to forget, it has not been 8 days for me---I can read and hear the words Luke gives me. What I see in the transfigured face of Jesus, bedazzling as it is, is the visage that envisages me, that transforms my gaze to see a gaze coming at me: Luke builds for me an experience that allows me to see that I am seen. Peter has no experience of this transformation as yet (he has misspoken what he saw), but Luke will give it (again) in just a moment to both Peter and to me, an experience from which we both 'see' from within the cloud, what Luke has heretofore shown me alone.


This cloud is none other than the cloud of Exodus (what Moses and Elijah speak to Jesus about, albeit a different kind of exodus for Jesus than for Israel). Peter and his companions respond with fear as they enter the cloud. Luke remains silent about their experience once in the cloud, emphasizing their experience of a frightening liminality as they pass from one world into another. Once in the cloud, they presumably hear the same voice I do, coming from the cloud.


Luke has choreographed this moment to ensure that while I hear the voice as well as Peter does, we hear from different places. I do not pass through a veil of fear to the voice as Peter must because I saw the face of Jesus in a way that Peter did not. My experience is not a liminal one: givenness comes directly through my gaze gazed upon. What is given in the cloud is the very chrismation of Jesus by the voice of God: Jesus becomes Christ: "this is my Son, my chosen: listen to him." That is, hear his words, hear the one who is himself the Word, the one who gives himself as Word, and do not be ashamed. The 'voice' as word speaks Jesus as the chosen, as the one. Initially Peter says what he does not see, even though 8 days prior he saw enough to speak Jesus as the Christ of God. As soon as this voice speaks, the phenomenality changes. The experience of that moment is over, but a counter-experience remains, as the response to the voice (unlike the face) is an appropriate silence, much like Mark's frightened women at the tomb.

The Synoptic transfiguration/theophany pericopes are the only places in the Gospels where Jesus is depicted in his divinity within narrative proper (story). In this case, Luke positions me to see the invisible made visible. Jesus becomes the icon of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), the face of God. The face is given to me first, perhaps even differently than it is given to Peter. Luke gives me what no one else is given: Peter says what he did not see: he did not see what I saw, because Luke guides me to the face as it is,  the icon, not the idol, as it is for Peter, who, stricken by the idol, offers, in his counter-experience of the idol, the 3 'images' tents to stay in. Peter mistakes what he sees as something containable, and presents the 'idolatry of the concept' in the form of dwellings, perhaps within the frame of the 'tent of meeting.' I 'see' Peter seeing the idol because Luke has shaped my experience to allow the icon to appear to me. The distance between the divine and human is commensurate to the dwellings for Peter. That he recognizes Moses and Elijah at all underscores a certain clarity in his apprehension of the images; after all, Peter speaks matter-of-factly of his understanding of these two figures, and Luke never accounts for how these figures have become Moses and Elijah for Peter, yet Peter has lost the forest for the trees. Nonetheless, because Luke has given the face to me, that distance is immense, even if I can account for its non-traversiblity only in counter-experience.

Both Peter and I have had experiences of at least two saturated phenomena. Perhaps, in silence, Peter's counter-experience is indeed of the icon: the text is silent on the matter. Luke has presented the absurdity of containing the event, the divine, which informs Peter's first experience. He does not realize what his words were saying about his experience, about what he saw: he is unaware of the 'disconnect' between seeing and saying, that is, he is unaware of the distance; he has gauged the distance in idolatry, a very forgivable idolatry.
  

I experience a unity of the voice and the face within Luke's orchestration of the event of the transfiguration pericope. This union emerges like a voice from a cloud within the relationality of the voice and the person of the one who is transfigured. After the 'event,' he was alone: ecce homo. Jesus is human, and stands with Peter as two humans stand beside one another. Luke invites me to stand with them. The event, under erasure of cloud and prophet, face-as-other and dazzlingly white raiment, begins to seep through the porosity of the silence, which can contain nothing. Luke has given the visible face of Jesus a new look, that of the other, the face of the un-seeable, invisible face of the voice of the invisible one within the cloud that closes the gap between one exodus and another. I have been made aware of the truth of the things of which I have been informed (Luke 1:4) through the narrative (diagesis).

Giuseppe Sinopoli (1946-2001): A Note on a 15th Anniversary

On April 20th 2016, we acknowledge the legacy of the great musician, conductor and composer, Giuseppe Sinopoli, who, at age 54, died, fittingly I suppose, on the podium while conducting Verdi's Aida in Berlin 15 years ago. Some historians note that Sinopoli made his operatic debut with the same work in 1978. He was also an archeologist and physician, a man of intense interests, and a musical interpreter sui generis.


I have made a quasi-formal assessment of the conductor's recorded legacy. Sadly, I never heard him conduct 'live', even when he conducted the NY Philharmonic. Still, I've listened, critically I think, to nearly all his recordings.


To say that Sinopoli's recorded work is spectacular misses the point, the essence of his contribution to reading a musical score and giving it to posterity in digital clarity. This legacy seems to side-step the inevitable 'controversy' of his live performances and rehearsal style. There are reports and reviews of such happenings to satisfy anyone interested in such things.


I will avoid the encyclopedic approach that is more apropos a much deserved rigorous testament, and simply say a few things about Gustav Mahler, or more particularly, about Sinopoli's Mahler. It is very different from other great conductors' Mahler. Suffice it to say that I never 'heard' the Mahler 6th symphony before I heard Sinopoli's rendering on Deutsche Gramophone. That relentless irony that makes the symphony work for me was completely absent in any recording before or since. Sinopoli's attention to detail, especially Mahler's musical textures, bring this ironic element into what for me was sharp relief. Finally, the symphony made 'sense' to me. As I listen to the interpretations of other conductors, I do, now, hear something of that, but little of the dramatic clarity of the musical textures Sinopoli liberates from the score.


I imagine those who also admire his work find this freeing of the text as that which gives such identity to Sinopoli's interpretations of Mahler, or any other composer for that matter. Those who identify an aseptic intellectualism where I hear depth of sonority and living, breathing textures of artistic detail, very likely find Sinopoli 'idiosyncratic' and controversial.


15 years after the death of one of our finest musicians, a legacy remains for posterity. I wanted to remember, in this blog, this musician,  this physician and archeologist, this son of a Sicilian father,  this husband and father whose widow and sons are now 15 years older, before something distracts me, not only because he made a difference to me, but that by any standard, embracing or begrudging, he has made a difference in art, in music, in the world.

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.

Perchance to Dream What Dreams May Come: Day-Dreaming About Physician Assisted Suicide at the 2016 AAHPM Annual Assembly

What dreams may come after death frightened Hamlet to paralysis. Contemplating suicide, he explores realities far worse than death: a perpetual nightmare of greater terror than any in waking life

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.

                                            (Hamlet III, i)

In the context of Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) and euthanasia, a perpetual nightmare of decisions and revisions (which a minute will reverse) should give us pause to reflect on what physicians do for patients, what patients ask of physicians, and why both do either. Despite the shift in values from what doctors do 'to' patients to what they do 'for' them, doctors nonetheless must consider that whatever they seek to do for patients, they often achieve this end by doing something 'to' them. The issue generates passions on either side, and the language we use points to the ground on which we stand: shall we continue to say PAS, or shall we say, perhaps more neutrally, Physician assisted Dying, or Physician aid in Dying?



As I sit through the many presentations here at the 2016 Annual Assembly of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine and the Hospice & Palliative Nurses Association, I encounter choices considered and made, protocols considered and implemented (or not), discussions of collaborations and near-misses, issues of living and dying, and the intersection of medicine and death. As a physician-member of the Hospice and Palliative Medicine community, I share in a commitment to life, to life at the end of life, and in the perceived threat to that commitment by the process of legitimation of PAS. Certainly the formal venue the AAHPM provided for critical reflection on the matter was charged with tension and uncertainty, as genuine division played out, even if in a field of collegiality and palpable mutual respect.



What shall we do when our patients choose death and ask us for our help in achieving that goal? The choice for death in the face of illness is at once an expression of sovereignty and an expression of valediction. Yet, how are we of the good death, the death with dignity,  death and dying with compassion and comfort, to participate in the circumvention of the platform of our commitments?



Perhaps no case compels us more to consider the complexity of such matters than patients who suffer from neurodegenerative diseases, diseases where the 'body' disintegrates in the presence of a sound mind; the paradigm for such illness is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more familiarly known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease." In ALS, all the kinesthesias of the lived body cease; the body itself becomes the field of medical mayhem, from infection, tissue break-down and even multi-system failure. All the abandonments of the body confront a vibrancy of the mind.

Surely PAS, if it is to achieve full legitimation and broad reception throughout all cultures and sub-cultures, will achieve it in the context of the management of the end of life of those suffering in the provocative and poignant example of ALS. What compassionate spirit would not empathize with the unspeakable horror of awareness beyond the reach any instrumentality, beyond the kinesthesia of the lived body? Who but we providers of compassionate care can conjure an ear to hear the screeching silent scream of a vibrant mind howling 'hold enough'?



Moreover, that mind might present its concern to us in a full-blown personhood, well in advance of end-stage disease, in the form of a thoughtful consideration of its request for death couched in a sense of dignity and authentic values. Such values might privilege instrumentality in the hierarchy of the elements of personhood, and the human person before us might present a structure of autonomy and dignity that crumbles in light of foreseeable, total custodial care. The sheer desire of control over one's own lived life, or a desire to avoid becoming a burden to loved ones, or even to 'society' could buttress the sanest of arguments for such an exercise of personal liberty. All sympathy and empathy aligns with this projected view upon suffering, and instinctively understands the horror of being unable to influence one's world. To be clear, that deafening screech grates most profoundly in the context of a change of heart, a change from one decision, to hold the course of palliation, to another decision, where, once unable to communicate, another change of heart occurs, to abandon the palliative course and choose the pursuit of death.



Yet, something is incomplete here; things are less than resoundingly clear. The judgment that comes into view denies the possibility of an inner life within a body dying from ALS. When an attitude of the understandability of a locked-in vibrant mind detached from the body collapses, or becomes bracketed, and the inner life of the mind, spirit and the flesh appears,  another encounter sets the stage for experience. The vibrancy of mind surviving the devastation of the body might very well embrace a life of sight and sound, a life filled with music, visual arts, film, and sights and sounds, such as those of the voices and visages of loved ones, family and professional care-givers. Such values and possibilities haunt the natural attitude of the righteousness of asserting autonomy and even extreme expressions of freedom. The natural history of diseases like ALS does not occlude death, but neither does it occlude another version of quality of life that privileges the life of the mind and spirit.

Admittedly, the example of ALS has its limitations in grounding the suffering at the end of life, and is does not reflect the more immediate injury to the body that end-stage cancer does, or as heart failure or lung disease might do with their relentless dyspnea, anxiety, intense fatigue and asthenia. Yet, diseases like ALS can give a leading clue to what its sufferers think of it as they think of it in the flesh, in the self,  in the spirit and in personhood that all may be operative in the experience of other terminal illnesses. Though there might be many other points of departure here, two come to mind, and they come to bear on how one's own life is experienced in one's lived life. On the one hand, life can be thrust upon someone: I find myself thrown, without any say, power or will, into 'life' as a random event in absolute contingency. What I have not chosen I do not receive. On the other hand, my flesh gives my very self to myself, where life is given as a gift, which I do receive as a receiving self, a self 'gifted' with life. When I see myself as a random event, I have no given that brings my flesh to give a self to myself, and I can reciprocate the randomness of my facticity by rejecting life. When I am the recipient of life as a gift, I receive as the 'gifted' a gift outside any economy of exchange; I cannot return the gift. There are no givebacks when the given moves my flesh to give my self to myself.



As providers of compassionate care for patients with life-limiting and life threatening illness, we should remain open to a version of life that values life despite the loss of the body. Furthermore, as professionals treating patients whose lives are such that the stakes are so very high, we should explore, if not challenge the value systems of our patients whose suffering, or anticipated suffering, brings them to ask for death. The hospice movement and community embraces life, especially life at the end of life, and we should adopt an acutely analytical attitude when exploring the demand for death as an exercise of freedom in choosing how and when one dies. Such a critical approach cannot be limited to ruling out clinical depression, or adjustment disorder, or characterizing the various coping mechanisms that mitigate the onslaught of loss, devastation and suffering.

If our patients do indeed convince us of their judicious approach to their own autonomy, of their own critical process of evaluating their own personhood and freedom, and that their request for death is rational in their own system of judgment, then our response must, of course, be compassionate understanding and unwavering support. Still, as professionals in a discipline dedicated to the alleviation of the symptoms of suffering, we cannot choose to provide the means of death. We cannot remain true to our commitments to life at the end of life, and directly cause the end of life.

Respectful dialogue among physicians and patients in which all judgment is suspended and communication is radically free can lead to greater understanding of the issue of requesting death near the end of life. There must be a place between 'abandonment' and acquiescence in the relationship between a physician and her patient. All the legalizations and decriminalizations of physicians' acts upon their patients do not exonerate either party from their responsibility in their acts and interactions. The instant the phenomenality of the request for death enters upon the stage of medicine, we must already have seen it on the horizon. What shall we at the intersection of two selves do?

Some Books in Dialogue, but First, Habermas in the Vertical Turn

As usual, I am late to the party, but grateful nonetheless for Amazon's analytics of my purchases and browsing there. I recently came across Habermas's and Ratzinger's The Dialectic of Secularization (Ignatius, 2007) and was stunned to find Habermas moving toward an authentic communication between secular reason and religious thought. In part responding to the stagnation of European liberal democracies and the disillusionment of citizens as expressed as a growing apathy toward the democratic process, Habermas seems to be continuing his exploration of religion and theology as a voice otherwise absent in the discourse of the post-secular, post-metaphysical 'lifeworld,' and taking it to the unexpected terrain of legitimation. So long as that voice, it would seem, offers something distinctly absent and wanting in secular rationality, its presence at the table of reasonable conversation is welcome. Indeed, in what was to me a startling movement of ideas in his Between Naturalism and Religion (Polity Pr., 2008), I find that Habermas's program is not merely pragmatic and post-secular, but also generative, alive and on the move.

Well that sounds so much like a turn toward verticality, as that idea has floated in this blog but certainly as enunciated in the recent works of Anthony Steinbock, especially in his Phenomenology and Mysticism. In his critique of the 'vertical' element of the 1st generation of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Habermas had found a pessimistic messianism, for example, in the thought of Adorno and Horkheimer. Eduardo Mendieta has assembled a cross-section of Habermas' essays from the 1980s through the late 90s that traces the initial sojourn into this arena, in Religion and Rationality (Polity Pr., 2002), and the intimations of a theological 'turn.' How far down that turn goes remains to be seen, yet Habermas seems open to a real depth; but with a proviso: he has recently suggested, in light of his critique of Rawls (and Rorty), that religious language and its 'truth contents' that enter into the public sphere should be translated into a 'generally acceptable language' prior to their presentation to the bar of the democratic secular apparatus (The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, NY: Columbia Univ.Pr., 2011, 25).

I make these observations not to rehabilitate Habermas for a religious audience, but to underscore the vibrancy of one of the 2oth century's most interesting thinkers, one whose thought has not come to rest in the past, but actively engages the 21st century; and to underscore the relative deafness of many of the thinkers so central lately to this blog toward Habermas's transformations. Habermas, after all, is no stranger to Husserl and other phenomenological thinkers, and while his work is not of a phenomenological flavor, it does indeed speak of a lifeworld, and implicitly, how the homeworld and alienworld might interact to co-create the lifeworld and invigorate the level of discourse and value the experiences of all potential political participants. Habermas might not himself have moved off the horizontal plane, but he seems to have positioned himself toward the vertical realm by de-limiting what is proper to the public sphere.

I offer this post as something of a prolegomena to placing God, the Flesh and the Other (2014), In Excess (2002), and Phenomenology and Mysticism (2009)in a broad dialogue that would not be tone deaf to the social imaginaries as they appear in Marion and Steinbock, but also in Habermas and Falque. I will not chide our phenomenologists for their shyness toward Habermas, which I interpret as an uncertainty toward his place in the discourse of theology and phenomenology. I will simply keep Habermas 'out there,' poised to jump in,  similar to our engagement with Agamben not too long ago.

I am placing these books and their authors in dialogue because I seem them in such a dialogue already. Steinbock's discussion of "Individuation" in P&M and its far-reaching implications for the self, givenness, redemption, the flesh, has its resonances with Marion's discussion of the flesh, and with Falque's discussion of the flesh, haecceity, singularity and his presentation of Tertullian, Irenaeus and Duns Scotus.

I will be fleshing all this out in a subsequent post, but for now, I simply want to draw attention to the problem of individuation, especially as Steinbock dispassionately and painstakingly explicates it. Because Steinbock has remained within an orthodoxy of Husserlian phenomenology, despite bringing the founder's thought into a more robust 'generativity,' he still must confront the problem of essences, which leads him to distinguish individuation from 'individualization'. While this maneuver, remarkably, does no violence to his presentation of individuation per se, it does proffer a certain distrust of givenness, and in particular, a phenomenology of givenness. Steinbock distrusts, too, as does Merleau-Ponty, just how complete the 'reduction' can become. Both thinkers are therefore 'stuck' in Husserl's 'givenness' which translates in Steinbock's work as a necessary distance between 'verticality' and the 'saturated phenomenon,' and as a description of the inadequacy of the latter. So long as the description of verticality and individuation remains tied to even a muted Cartesian metaphysics, this version of generative phenomenology will maintain a jaundiced eye upon a full-blown phenomenology of givenness as Marion's oeuvre strongly evidences.

Falque's GFO struck me as another version of P&M, even if just superficially as doing for Irenaeus and others what Steinbock has done for his mystics. Both works accomplish remarkable feats of philosophy, but they are also marked by a suspicion towards Marion, his saturated phenomenon, his overplaying the anti-metaphysics card, and his description of givenness. But make no mistake about it, the language through which the 'truth content' of religion and religious language enters the public sphere is the language of phenomenology.

In my next post, I will be keeping Habermas's work in the natural attitude, while I look at the general swerve moving through some of the thought of Steinbock, Falque and Marion as suggested above.

Miracles II

By now it should be clear that no account of the most famous miracles, the miracles of Jesus, can ensue without first giving an account of the ground of the miraculous, those acts of creation given in the Creation proper, and in the Incarnation, and in an account of hope and love whose reality and nexus is the miracle-itself. Apart from the horizons of love and hope, and their orientations to the future and the other, miracles remain invisible. Hence, the appearance of the miracle depends on a special case of the gaze, the gaze of the vertical. Jean-Luc Marion has written extensively on the nature of the gaze and its relation to the visible and the invisible, but in The Crossing of the Visible (trans., James K.A. Smith, Stanford, 2004), a phenomenology ostensibly about art and the painting as image, idol and icon, as object and saturated phenomenon, he begins with the paradox and the miraculous, and provides for us a point of departure:

The paradox attests to the visible, while at the same time opposing itself, or rather, while inverting itself; literally, it constitutes a counter-visible, a counter-seen, a counter-appearance that offers in a spectacle to be seen the opposite of what, at first sight, one would expect to see. More than a surprising opinion, the paradox often points to a miracle---it makes visible that which one should not be able to see and which one is not able to see without astonishment...The paradox testifies...that what enters into visibility is that which one should not have encountered there: fire in water, divinity in humanity; the paradox is born from the intervention of the invisible in the visible...(1-2).

Visibility is not some chameleon that shape-shifts itself willy-nilly into the gaze of some, and not others. As Steinbock has noted, 'idolatry' emerges from within vertical experience, and takes the form of 'delimitation,' of foreclosing on verticality within the horizontal plane. The natural attitude, though, which is the posture within the horizontal plane, is already graced. Grace imbues all reality that presents on the horizontal plane with the possibility of verticality. The suppression of verticality then delimits grace, closes off the natural attitude to the grace that opens upon the vertical---idolatry---denies grace, denies that nature is imbued with grace, denies a 'graced nature.' When the posture of the horizontal 'will not see,' it denies the graced nature of the natural attitude and closes itself off from the paradox, which 'points to a miracle' that brings the invisible into visibility; such 'not-seeing' occludes the birth of the miracle, denying the appearance of the miracle-as-such.

This understanding of visibility, idolatry, and the horizontal would seem not to apply to the miracles of Jesus. Nearly everyone in the gospels acknowledged that something paradoxical and unusual was occurring in Jesus' presence. The event of the miracle was not questioned, but its source was questioned by some. That wondrous deeds were of God or the devil informed the natural attitude and the horizontal plane of the lifeworld in the Gospels. That God or the devil could work wondrous deeds required no 'departure' from the horizontal. That such deeds marked the inauguration of the Kingdom of God, the reality of the redemption through the God-man Jesus Christ, the reality of the Messiah already in the world certainly required the 'de-limitation' of grace, the discovery of graced nature that pointed to the vertical experience entailed in the miracle of the Incarnation.

As Marion points out, we should not, in the natural attitude normative for the horizontal plane, 'have encountered' the paradox of the Incarnation, the God-man, as evidenced by the miracles. Only in verticality, only where the invisible's 'intervention' makes visible the invisible, does one 'see' a miracle for what it is: a sign of the Kingdom, a sign of the Messiah, a sign of salvation and redemption. The pocketful of miracles (the finite number of miracles) that Jesus performs does not mark a fundamental change in nature, a fundamental change that the appearance of Meillassoux's virtual god would effect (that will have to wait for what comes after finitude). Rather, the semeia of the Gospels, the wondrous deeds of Jesus, are to be understood, not as the emergence of a new reality of a new universe with new laws and patterns, but as evidence within the vertical plane of experience of the Incarnation, that it is indeed the union, the solidarity of divinity with humanity, and the presence of salvation and redemption---the in-breaking of the divine into history.

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 Apotheosis of Suffering, the Trinity and the Cross---A Lenten Reflection

Lately I have referred to the Realism that pertains to Christianity rooted in the Cross as 'Catholic' or 'Christian' Realism.  These terms are interchangeable in the tradition but I will henceforth refer only to Christian Realism to avert any confusion and to confirm that this particular kind of realism does indeed have its roots the Gospels (certainly in their literary realism) and certainly in Aquinas, in the thought of Karl Rahner, in Karl Barth and in Bernard Lonergan's critical realism which itself is within the notion of Christian Realism. While Lonergan, and the like-minded Gilson, could not be mistaken for phenomenologists, the phenomenology considered in this blog is certainly rooted in Christian Realism, and offers its own kind realism; and Marion's vision of rationality is not foreign to the rational, intelligible universe of critical realism. At the center of this deployment of phenomenology is the flesh of Christ and the mystery of the Trinity.



Whatever suffers is redeemed. Because the endurance of the hypostatic union is fundamental for Christian realism, however 'mysterious' that is, the flesh that has taken upon itself all the capriciousness of the universe, all sources of suffering, is in turn taken into the Trinity itself, where it is 'cashed in', 'redeemed', for the absolute love that is the simplicity of God, the simplicity of the processions and relations within the Godhead. Capriciousness as suffering of the flesh is suffered by the Father in the Spirit as the Logos-sarx-Anthropos suffers it--- in the flesh--- 'once and for all' on the Cross. In a sense, there is nothing left of capriciousness in the Cross; it finally disintegrates in the Father's witness of the Son's flesh. The secular theme of 'redemption through love' as it courses through Goethe, Wagner and Mahler among other perhaps equally powerful currents, has this basis of its reality, its ground in the divine simplicity of love, in this analogy from 'above.'

No horizon searches with more urgency and immediacy for the horizon of meaning than the horizon of suffering. Suffering without meaning, or the hope for meaning, is not merely hopeless; it is absurd. A world of absurdity would have it that the words 'meaningful' and 'meaningless' mean the same thing. Not that the words would be synonymous, but that the thing would be either meaningful or meaningless willy-nilly in a world constituted by something other than meaning. For Christian thinking, the world is intelligible, imbued with a real rationality, and as such commands a posture of realism. For Christianity, the world makes sense.

The horizon of suffering seems to recede, withdraw endlessly into the deepest corners of reality as if it were constituted by receding and withdrawing. Because meaning is elusive, suffering become reflective, reduplicative, overwhelmed by the aporia of distance. The elusiveness of meaning holds suffering up to a mirror, and all it can see, it seems, is itself, its blinding self, its multiplying self, a self of pure suffering, unbearable and uncontainable. The horizon of meaning, just as powerfully real, also recedes and withdraws from the reality of suffering, at least from the perspective of a receding and withdrawing suffering.

Hope, oriented toward the future, envisions the intersection of the horizons of suffering and meaning at the infinite. For Christians, this infinite becomes historical in the Cross, the instantiation of suffering and meaning, the instantiation of the union of the human and the divine in the Incarnation whose purpose takes on and dissolves suffering in itself. The horizon of meaning is always on the threshold of the multi-layered chiasmus of the reality of the Trinity, where the logos-sarx-anthropos finds its nexus with the Father-Son-Spirit. Such chiasm defies articulation, but analogy can approach its description---logos-flesh/human::logos-father:/:spirit. As suggested above, the unity of the Logos provides the nexus for the entry of the flesh into the divine oikos. The inadequacy of this model, however, is at least partially addressed, and insightfully so, by Jean-Luc Marion, for whom the intersection of horizons might involve their dissolution, or perhaps their solubility, in faith, hope and charity.

Nonetheless, the union of all suffering in the Cross as enfolded within the Incarnation and the Trinity is the paradox of Christian faith itself. If a 'lesson' emerges from the experiences of the Christian mystics, it is that while one might initially strive to unite human suffering with the Cross, one discovers that the suffering flesh is already united to Cross of Christ. To seek union is therefore to find it already accomplished. The receding horizon of suffering finds its way forward, into the future foreseen by hope, by 'backing into' signification, into meaning.

Because hope (and love, too) orients itself toward the other, its motion is interpersonal and inter-Personal, as Steinbock has noted both in his Phenomenology and Mysticism and Moral Emotions. Because, as Steinbock has explicated, the Myself is not self-grounded, the suffering in the flesh (which itself is inseparable from the Myself) cannot rest in the idol as a self-reflexive suffering might indicate as noted above. The mirror held up by elusive meaning becomes translucent as the gaze catches a glimmer of the icon whose translucency refracts the gaze to what can be found beyond the reflective surface of the idolic mirror. In order, though, to find what already rests in the icon, the flesh must discover its porosity, the points where it bleeds. This uncontainability is the event of the flesh and the event of the redemption of the flesh, both saturated phenomena par excellence.

We experience this saturation and verticality in the experience of the Church as the body of Christ. This unity of our flesh with the flesh of Christ gives the flesh its meaning at the nexus of the horizons of suffering and meaning. There is no meaning of salvation beyond this: being 'saved' is finding our flesh united in the Cross and received into divinity itself. Phenomenologically, I hope with great effort to unite the suffering of my flesh to the Cross. At first,  I experience the saturated phenomenon of the idol: I am reflected back upon my self and the horizon of meaning recedes as my hope is disappointed; and I as 'subject' attempt but fail to constitute the meaning of my own suffering. Then I experience the icon: I hope for the givenness of the Cross as it gives itself as pure gift. I become the gifted when I find the Myself (as not self-grounded) in the flesh already there in the crucified Christ, who suffered the flesh once and for all. My flesh, subsumed into the flesh of Christ, discovers its meaning in the logos-sarx-anthropos, and therefore enters into the receiving breast of the mystery of the Trinity in its ever-dancing perichoresis.

The giving way of the idol to the icon perhaps play out in the phenomenal field of the body and flesh in the temptation of Christ in the desert, the pericope that traditionally opens the Lenten season.

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan
and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days,
to be tempted by the devil.
He ate nothing during those days,
and when they were over he was hungry.
The devil said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
command this stone to become bread.”
Jesus answered him,
“It is written, One does not live on bread alone.”
Then he took him up and showed him
all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant.
The devil said to him,
“I shall give to you all this power and glory;
for it has been handed over to me,
and I may give it to whomever I wish.
All this will be yours, if you worship me.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It is written:You shall worship the Lord, your God,
and him alone shall you serve.”
Then he led him to Jerusalem,
made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
throw yourself down from here, for it is written:He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,
and:With their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It also says,You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”
When the devil had finished every temptation,
he departed from him for a time. [Luke 4:1-13; NAB]



At each invitation to sovereignty in this world, Jesus responds with the unconditional call of God. This rejection of sovereignty presented in Christ's rejection of temptation underscores his being in the world and his not being of the world. The turning from the idol toward the icon, as the flesh suffers the thirst of the body through its mortification in the desert, structures metanoia and the turn from worldly sovereignty toward the unconditional call. This call for us comes from the completed work of Christ, from the Cross where the experience of the call does not locate a God who chooses omnipotence's flexing the power of sovereignty, but the unconditional: the saturation of divine love in the erotic reduction. All temptation offers the idol of sovereignty; in the change of heart commanded by the Lenten season that anticipates the Passion-Resurrection of Christ, Christians hearken to the pure call, to the starkly different invitation of the divine insistence to love, to redemption of the flesh and the resurrection of the body.

Such an invitation is also found in Matthew's goats and sheep, where the evangelist offers the possibility that the invisible Christ is made visible in acts of hope and love. Such transitions from the invisible to the visible share the grammar of the shift from one saturated phenomenon to another (idol to icon), as the flesh, the Myself, not grounded in the self, finds itself already grounded in the experience of the other. In this sense, the version of intertextuality finds its analogue in the Myself whose play as object and subject in its grounding in the interpersonal and inter-Personal, reveals a strange intersubjectivity, where subjects are now objects, at once recipients of givenness, hearers of the call, accused and chosen.

7 No-Trump: Catholic Realism, Phenomenology, Object-Oriented Philosophy and the 4-Suited Fourfold

Catholic Realism traces itself through the theological thought of Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan, through transcendental Thomism and back to the Angelic Doctor himself. Deeply rooted in the Incarnation, Catholic Realism rests in the goodness of the reality of creation, the goodness of the cosmos and upon the fundamental trust in God's judgment that matter is good. As would any philosophical realism, Catholic Realism understands the origin of a world before the emergence of the human creature, and the priority of 'objects' to human consciousness. God did not divide Creation between man and the universe, but saw that all of creation was good, before the man was, and after. The extinction of man negates nothing of the truth of the goodness of non-human creation. That reality is the reality of everything. God is no 'correlationist.' Catholic Realism, not a philosophy unto itself, but more posture toward the real, seeks Truth wherever it resides, and in whatever system of thought that addresses truth comprehensively.

It is no accident that phenomenology, as the philosophy of experience, the philosophy of the experiencing object or entity, has entered the Catholic imagination with such power and grace. Phenomenology offers the kind of realism discussed here a footing, a language and a method for understanding the love for things, for objects, and for how such objects interact with that special instance of objects, consciousness. It provides a way to explain how things declare themselves in their real presence, their reality, and how such presences and realities appear to human real presence and actuality.

Anthony Steinbock, Jean-Luc Marion and Graham Harman each in his own manner offer intense critiques of the phenomenologies of Husserl and Heidegger. Steinbock's 'generative' phenomenology of 'vertical experience' emerges from his rhizomatic critique of Husserliana; Jean-Luc Marion's critique of Both Husserl and Heidegger results in the discoveries of the saturated phenomenon, negative certainty and a phenomenology of givenness; Graham Harman's relentless and magnanimous critique of Husserl and Heidegger's results in something other than phenomenology properly so called, in what he calls object-oriented philosophy---a 'speculative' realism.

Harman's The Quadruple Object (Zero Books: Winchester, 2011) provides a succinct critique of both Husserl and Heidegger, whom Harman identifies as object-oriented idealist, and object-oriented realist, respectively. In fact, his project appropriates Husserl's 'intentional object' and Heidegger's real-present object (through an elegant critique of the 'tool analysis') into his own 'sensual' and 'real' objects, respectively (26; 35ff). Though he identifies a certain 'realist flavor' (20) to the work of the pioneering thinkers, Harman maintains that phenomenology remains 'idealist to the core' because, in his view, it does not adequately, if at all, address real objects (139). Instead of this inherent idealism, Harman wants to offer a metaphysics with refreshed categories, and he succeeds beyond his own intent; for what seems to emerge from his thought is the very 'inverted' metaphysics that so far has eluded Marion, that inversion of metaphysics that reverses the analogia entis from 'below' to 'above.' Indeed, Harman's metaphysics seems to be the metaphysics of absence that the postmodern turn has posited, like a hypothetical particle, but has not yet identified or elucidated.

Harman's metaphysics of objects presents a robust philosophy of the tensions between real and sensual objects and their real and sensual qualities, and it holds out the promise of being productive and advancing truth. In a series of ingenious diagrams depicting the interactions among objects and qualities, he lands upon the delightful analogy of a deck of cards. As an amateur cardist myself, I was certainly prepare to be delighted. Harman designates each suit ontographically (124ff.): there are always 10 permutations (4 tensions, 3 each of radiations and junctions; p.114) in a field of four basic poles of reality (78). In Harman's system of card-counting, there is no trump, no privilege of one suit over another: his ontography has a flat ontology. Despite all the counting and interacting of suits in the play of this realism, I take Harman at his word that we cannot count into his deck a reduction to mathematics. Harman's polarities play out not only in the fourfold structure of the quadruple object, but in the fourfold of his resurrection of Heidegger's Das Geviert: no longer earth, sky, gods and mortals, no longer 'something at all' and 'something specific' as event and as occurrence (87-91) but now space, time, essence and eidos, which now constitute the four tensions of the four poles of reality (99ff.).

Obviously, a complete analysis of Harman's system cannot occupy this piece. I offer it, though, as a productive system that seeks to unveil the truth of reality. The very uncontainability of the essences of real objects, and their indolent withdrawal from experience, suggests a sympathy to the saturation of phenomena and givenness as Marion describes it, and even Steinbock's verticality, though verticality describes 'vertical' experiences. Steinbock's rigorous descriptions of the tensions between the moral emotions, and even mystical experience, and their qualities also seems at home in the speculative realism of the quadruple/fourfold object as the center of Harman's project. Because Catholic Realism commands the most comprehensive account of truth that all these post-Husserlian, post-Heideggerian philosophies of reality offer, it should not surprise that Catholicism has gravitated in this general direction.

Marion's description of the disappearing object (181-88) as it follows from his own 'tool analysis'(197-200) in Negative Certainties reflects the phenomenality of two real objects approaching one another as described by Harman. The mutual withdrawal of each polarity is 'known' as withdrawal even if its 'content' remains unarticulated. Such 'knowledge' has a negative certainty as it plays out in counter-experience. Similarly, the moral emotions that play out against the question of pride in Steinbeck's work also play out as the interface of 'real objects' in their withdrawal. Indeed, the generativity of both Steinbeck's verticality and Marion's saturation and phenomenology of givenness stand (favorably) against the generativity of Harman's fourfold, even as they stand against his indictment of the false, inadequate, less than 'full blown' realism of phenomenology in general. Harman has not yet accounted for phenomenologies that describe phenomena that side-step noema and noesis---generative phenomenologies of givenness and verticality. For in these phenomenologies the objects on either side of the phenomenological moment are real, and give themselves to themselves prior to any other kind of givenness; and they give to themselves their own selves, each their own Myself in a way that is anterior to any givenness of or to an 'other.' In short, Marion's 'third reduction' has postulated a truly autonomous phenomenal object, whose self-sufficient givenness prefigures the inexhaustibility of phenomenality that Harman jealously guards.

Self-givenness supplies real objects with the autonomy of their very nature, their very essence. No other self is required for this self-givenness. No reception validates such a robust givenness; instead, the givenness of things is simply and purely given into reality, regardless of any real or sensual qualities that might inhere in such a moment. That there might be a special kind of object in the vicinity that might experience the reality of another object as a counter-experience of its withdrawal, is an interesting phenomenon in and of itself, but does not distort any reality of any qualities or essences (e.g., withdrawal). 

While Catholic Realism, at least in the hands of the discourse of this blog, places a premium on relationality as anterior to the being of a self, it can withstand the reification of such relation as the birth of another object within which objects, real and sensual, interact in a knowledge verified by negative certainty. Such a realism does not restrict saturation to real, withdrawing objects. Sensual objects, as they enter consciousness, have a saturation all their own. Yet the generativity, the productivity of all object oriented philosophies, whether phenomenologies of verticality, or of givenness and saturation and negative certainty, or the counter-experience of the speculation of the tensions, radiations and junctions of a fourfold structure of reality, find great favor in the special kind of realism I have called Catholic Realism. Whether the objects are real or sensual, whether they withdraw or find presence, whether they take the form of the sacraments, liturgies, morality, social justice, solidarity, subsidiarity, whether we can know them with positive or negative certainty, they either come before us as they present or as they withdraw in a vibrant reality. An example might suffice to illustrate the problems confronted by Catholic Realism.

The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist no longer finds adequate representation in a metaphysics of transubstantiation. Instead, the reality of the Eucharistic presence finds its better accounting in the saturated phenomenon, givenness, vertical experience, and in the tension between real and sensual objects and their qualities. Only among such approaches can the claims made for the Real Presence by Catholic Realism find full expression; for Christ in the Eucharist is no mere impanation or consubstantiation, but in the event of a real and sensual object in tension with its real and sensual accidents, and in the space, time, essence and eidos at play in this reality. Speculatively, the Eucharistic experience involves the withdrawal of the real object into the saturated phenomenon recollected in a counter-experience, which is none other that the stark confrontation with sacramentality itself, further enfolded in the verticality of love and hope.

Only the onslaught of an idolatrous materialism, the materialism of empiricism, scientism and naturalism, threatens to reduce all of reality to its own narrow gaze. Catholic Realism asks then this question: since such a materialism is inimical to all object-oriented philosophies, whether generative phenomenology or generative speculative realism, is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Catholic Realism seeks no synthesis of the object-oriented philosophies. If it asks Harman for real objects, he will respond in spades and a robust metaphysics; if it asks Marion for an account of the icon, or the idol or the flesh, he will respond with the saturated phenomenon and his philosophy of givenness; if it asks Steinbock for an account of hope, he will respond with the verticality of the self, the Myself and the tensions between these and pride, and their qualities. It might turn out that any one of these approaches to the Truth is ill-suited to the task; but in its self-understanding and self-givenness, the realism that inheres in Catholicism knows that it plays on the field of facticity and finitude, and play this hand at no-trump.