Showing posts with label Christ-event. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christ-event. Show all posts
Saturday, October 24, 2015
Now And at the Hour of Our Death
No prayer comes as close as the Ave Maria does in embracing facticity and our being toward death. The one who prays this prayer petitions the mother of God to pray for the petitioner "now and at the hour of [our] death." Interestingly, the Western (Latin) and Eastern (Greek, Slavonic) versions of the prayer are similar, though the Western version adds the final sentence, based presumably on the Tridentine catechism and ultimately on Chalcedon and Ephesus (the Eastern tradition already includes the theotokos in its prayer of pure praise). The Eastern Marian devotion shows little interest in the yesterdays, todays and tomorrows of death; but the Western version insists on an awareness of the now and then.
The gospel of Luke and the conciliar church interest me less here than the prayer's incorporation of quotidian life and the hour that unites human experience. The presence of finality in every moment of living points to the very thrownness and facticity of the human predicament. There is an admirable acceptance of finitude in the prayer, even as it embraces the manner of the Incarnation, whose prayerful celebration entangles every life and every death. In this sense, the prayer does not merely petition, it calls for authenticity: it calls for a life whose being toward death authorizes a 'good life' ordered to its constitutive finitude and the preciousness of time.
The human life chiasmically united to the divine life in the instance of the Incarnation binds the infinite with finitude in the moment of the Christ event. The divine witness to the body and the flesh in Christ sees these human elements in their distinctions of contiguity: the body and the flesh are related not paradigmatically but syntagmatically. Dying belongs to the body; death to the flesh. The dying of the body and the death of the flesh do not therefore establish some kind of absolute dualism, a structural 'either/or' but an relation of contiguity that resists attributing a presence to one but not the other, in a mutually exclusive manner. The affectivity of the self plays out at the juncture of the horizons of the body and the flesh, in the chiasm where they interdigitate but do not mingle.
The body and the flesh unite at the level of the person, at every now and every then, at every instantiation of the self. The very image and likeness of the divine in the human, even in the divine witness of that image and likeness that sees it as 'good' and authentic, sees goodness from its essentiality of love. The hypostatic union par excellence, the Incarnation, mirrors the hypostatic union of the body and the flesh, which, in turn, reflects in distance the Christ event.
The event of death is the potential of the sacralization of space and time. The event of death is always 'my death'; it is a counter-experience of death, of the death of the other, whose death is always imbued with illeity, the death that is the death of the third person. There is not greater love than this: to lay one's life down for a friend---to die for the other; to die in the place of the other's self. But can one be in the hour of death of the other? Levinas's notion of substitution would say no; for the face of the other already saturates the intuition with deontological imperatives toward the face, and the closest one can get to die for the other is 'thou shall not kill.' We may stand for the other against the killing of the body, but we are unable to enter the flesh--- substitution might lean toward a sacrifice of self, but that my-self merely serves my-self when it desires to experience the flesh of the other: I am helpless to make satisfaction for the other, which I may approach asymptotically only, because I can do nothing but satisfy my-self, my own need to embrace the ethic created by relation to the other.
But what if the relation to the other at the hour of the other's death is not a 'hostage situation,' as Levinas (Otherwise Than Being, "Substitution") suggests, but the opposite---kenotic? Does the sacralization of time and space at the hour of death of the other open into empathy, against holding the self's place as a hostage? Perhaps better to pose the matter this way: does the erotic reduction at the hour of death break from the other gripping me as a hostage, and turn me toward a kenotic self-emptying that makes a space for the other in me to experience his self's exposure within his flesh as a saturated phenomenon? And is this not the moment of authenticity brought about in being toward death? The erotic reduction, then, might make a claim upon the givenness of the (face of) other, who, in being seen with a gaze of love, does not hold itself, its illeity as something to be grasped, or hold the gaze/gazer hostage, but also empties itself to receive the gaze. The human other has at least the potential to transform the gaze of the lover, and this might be an instance where the asymmetry in the phenomenal laterality is mitigated by love and the formation of empathy.
The call from the Cross, the centerpiece of the Christ-event, gives voice to its pure call from the very givenness of the divine love that witnesses to the event from the chiasm within the hypostatic union. The Incarnation, celebrated in the prayer to the theotokos that also petitions for the authenticity to embrace the facticity of quotidian life, cuts a space in the fabric of being toward death. This space is the treasury of merit from which the kenotic space opens in the face of the other. That space of empathy has a name: love.
Tuesday, September 15, 2015
Quiddity, or the Face of Man; Image and Likeness: Univocity
In these few remarks I return to a more preliminary and provisional posture (certainly more than in "Marion, Kant, Keller...").
In his fascinating chapter (I) on the "Face of Man" (CN 8ff.), several issues seem to coalesce. The very dignity of the human creature is threatened by the seemingly benign query, 'What is Man?' The question brings 'man' onto his knees of objectness. "The inaccessibility of man to himself" begs the question of the "object" (19). The very 'what-ness' or quiddity of the human person opens upon the aporia of her image and likeness of God.
It may not be then that Marion has introduced a self-serving paradox of univocity and the impossibility of univocity. When it comes to the human being and God the univocity of love and incomprehensibility are exceptions that prove the rule of analogical imagination. "Man remains unimaginable, since he is found formed in the image of the One who admits none and, rightfully, resembles nothing, since he resembles only the One that incomprehensibility properly characterizes" (43).
That formulation is both a biblical and anthropological point of departure for both theology and phenomenology. Perhaps better: can Rahner's anthropological theology ever begin here? If so, it must begin in the saturated phenomenon of the Christ-event, and then 'lead back' to Genesis.
In his fascinating chapter (I) on the "Face of Man" (CN 8ff.), several issues seem to coalesce. The very dignity of the human creature is threatened by the seemingly benign query, 'What is Man?' The question brings 'man' onto his knees of objectness. "The inaccessibility of man to himself" begs the question of the "object" (19). The very 'what-ness' or quiddity of the human person opens upon the aporia of her image and likeness of God.
It may not be then that Marion has introduced a self-serving paradox of univocity and the impossibility of univocity. When it comes to the human being and God the univocity of love and incomprehensibility are exceptions that prove the rule of analogical imagination. "Man remains unimaginable, since he is found formed in the image of the One who admits none and, rightfully, resembles nothing, since he resembles only the One that incomprehensibility properly characterizes" (43).
That formulation is both a biblical and anthropological point of departure for both theology and phenomenology. Perhaps better: can Rahner's anthropological theology ever begin here? If so, it must begin in the saturated phenomenon of the Christ-event, and then 'lead back' to Genesis.
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Who is God for Jesus? The Saturated Phenomena and Coins of the Realm
To ask who God is for Jesus is to answer the question of the hypostatic union. To answer the question of the hypostatic union is to participate in the relationality of the human and the divine. The hypostatic union as relationality is what Christians call the Christ-event. To speak of the Christ-event is first and foremost to speak of the event: the event that haunts theology, philosophy and the very core of the conundrum some call the human person. I do not mean all these linkages to mime the hysterical syllogisms in Woody Allen's Love and Death. I mean them to get to the very heart of the event, which is risky business not without a sense of humor, a sense of haunting.
Caputo, Zizek and Marion all speak to the event. For Caputo, the response to the insistent call releases the event; for Marion, the pure call pulling a self into individuation constitutes the event; for Zizek, the 'frame' brings the event into focus. These are all big events, the main events in the circus of Being and becoming. I suggest that these events are the same event. The Christ-event is such an event. Its relationality oscillates between the human and divine, never resting in a moment in the between, but always in the creative space insisting and consisting in response. The divine is unconditional, a sovereign without sovereignty; the human interdigitating, placentalizing in its liminality, yet always gazing upon the iconic other. The event in incarnational---a person has emerged, a person whose insistence is not confused with its existence---a person in which logos is not confused with its flesh: person as saturated phenomenon.
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's [cf. Matthew 22:15-20; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26]
God's sovereignty is without sovereignty where Caesar reigns, and yet God's sovereignty subverts this Roman sovereign, so says a very subversive Jesus who has won the admiration of his challengers, if not their faith. Jesus presents a very different kingdom and kingship as he holds the coin of the realm in his hand, reads it, and brushes it off (the text is not explicit about whether Jesus holds the coin in his demonstration---I read the coin in Jesus' hand and fingers). This eventive sovereignty constitutes the hypostasis coming before the flattering voices bearing the coin; they present it to Jesus for unconditional and final judgment. That pronouncement overwhelms the intuition of his challengers and foils their intentionality: they marvel and move on---what is this flesh, this event; icon or idol?
The marvelous authority that pronounces upon the coin announces a Kingdom suddenly upon those who marvel. The authority of Jesus comes from a sovereignty that is powerless to liberate or evoke a tax revolt, yet poised to avert violence and secure the public peace unconditionally. Such authority derives from a kingship without kingship, certainly not a kingship alongside Caesar's. The Christ-event frames earthly kingship within the hand of something unconditional and without anything recognizable as sovereignty, even as the edges of the coin frame the image of Caesar. The weakness of God yields to the face on the coin as it devalues its commerce in the kingdom coming. The event is in the hand.
When I speak of a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' I mean to conjure Caputo's and Derrida's 'religion without religion.' I mean 'sovereignty in the second position precisely as they mean religion in that second position. I also read the pericopes of the tribute coin as presenting God's sovereignty within the context of Caesar's. The saturating unconditionality of Jesus' pronouncement is the very insistent call calling for a response in the event. In these versions of unconditionality the event is released in the marvelous bedazzlement that causes Jesus' challengers to retreat. If they retreat to challenge him another day that event is the idol; if marvel leads to metanoia, that event is the icon. The texts are silent; they do not pronounce on the event.
Instead, the pericopes of the coin embrace a haunting: the aporia of a Christ-event whose instantiation in the hypostatic union is the union of the human with a divine question mark after its sovereignty. The saturated phenomenon of the person of Jesus proclaims a kingdom whose sovereign's sovereignty is without sovereignty. Yet this sovereign has the audacity to call out an invitation to metanoia, to a self open to the call, poised to be created anew in a response. Such is the event of the emerging self whose response to the pure call is already anterior to the arrival of the subject. The very 'lack' constitutive of the self is that openness to the initiative of unconditional call from a sovereignty without sovereignty.
Caesar's realm is not the only realm whose currency is the coin.
“What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”
“From others,” Peter answered.
“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” [Matt. 17:25-27, NIV]
The collectors of the temple tax at Capernaum ask for a rendering from Jesus and Peter upon their arrival. They are not willing to extend professional courtesy at this moment: they want the whole copayment. In his perhaps most convoluted miracle, Jesus locates a rare fish, puts it on Peter's line, and provides payment in coin for the two of them. The fish's coin subverts the sovereignty of the temple itself by identifying Jesus and Peter as 'others.' The temple disowns their own by the tax itself. The tax visits the absurdity of the coin in the fish's mouth upon the temple tax and therefore upon the temple itself, for it lives by its commerce. The moment is high comedy and very risky business; the tax collectors are the butt of the joke, and by extension, so too the temple, financed by a coin coughed up by a fish (Matthew does not depict the actual transaction that Peter will make, but that does not deprive his community of the dark, grotesque comedy of the scene, which is left to the imagination. It is a scene not terribly unlike the scene where those juicy sandwiches are given to those cops in the rear of the restaurant in Casino).
Temple and kingdom of 'the kings of the earth' are subverted and contextualized within the advent of God's kingdom. The weak sovereignty of God is stronger than all the strength of the kings of the earth, as Paul might say (cf. 1 Corinthians). Such strength is not located within the grammar of earthly power, but within the unconditional subversion of that power. We have seen this kind of subversion elsewhere, as in the dialogue between the Johannine Jesus and Pilate.
By looking only at coins, a glimmer of who God is for Jesus already emerges. The symbols of sovereignty in the realms of the earth are what a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' is not. There is no image of God or Jesus on any coin; such would be meaningless in either kingdom of the world or of God. The commerce of the kingdom is love, and it has no face but the face of the other, who in the Gospels, has no face, except the one called by love into being. If the concerns of those concerned with subverting the norm are legitimate---if, for example, people like Phil Snider have concerns for a theory of homiletics (read: hermeneutics) that is not so lop-sided in its privileging of human action over divine initiative---then perhaps a place to begin is in the coin of the realm.
Caputo, Zizek and Marion all speak to the event. For Caputo, the response to the insistent call releases the event; for Marion, the pure call pulling a self into individuation constitutes the event; for Zizek, the 'frame' brings the event into focus. These are all big events, the main events in the circus of Being and becoming. I suggest that these events are the same event. The Christ-event is such an event. Its relationality oscillates between the human and divine, never resting in a moment in the between, but always in the creative space insisting and consisting in response. The divine is unconditional, a sovereign without sovereignty; the human interdigitating, placentalizing in its liminality, yet always gazing upon the iconic other. The event in incarnational---a person has emerged, a person whose insistence is not confused with its existence---a person in which logos is not confused with its flesh: person as saturated phenomenon.
Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's [cf. Matthew 22:15-20; Mark 12:13-17; Luke 20:20-26]
God's sovereignty is without sovereignty where Caesar reigns, and yet God's sovereignty subverts this Roman sovereign, so says a very subversive Jesus who has won the admiration of his challengers, if not their faith. Jesus presents a very different kingdom and kingship as he holds the coin of the realm in his hand, reads it, and brushes it off (the text is not explicit about whether Jesus holds the coin in his demonstration---I read the coin in Jesus' hand and fingers). This eventive sovereignty constitutes the hypostasis coming before the flattering voices bearing the coin; they present it to Jesus for unconditional and final judgment. That pronouncement overwhelms the intuition of his challengers and foils their intentionality: they marvel and move on---what is this flesh, this event; icon or idol?
The marvelous authority that pronounces upon the coin announces a Kingdom suddenly upon those who marvel. The authority of Jesus comes from a sovereignty that is powerless to liberate or evoke a tax revolt, yet poised to avert violence and secure the public peace unconditionally. Such authority derives from a kingship without kingship, certainly not a kingship alongside Caesar's. The Christ-event frames earthly kingship within the hand of something unconditional and without anything recognizable as sovereignty, even as the edges of the coin frame the image of Caesar. The weakness of God yields to the face on the coin as it devalues its commerce in the kingdom coming. The event is in the hand.
When I speak of a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' I mean to conjure Caputo's and Derrida's 'religion without religion.' I mean 'sovereignty in the second position precisely as they mean religion in that second position. I also read the pericopes of the tribute coin as presenting God's sovereignty within the context of Caesar's. The saturating unconditionality of Jesus' pronouncement is the very insistent call calling for a response in the event. In these versions of unconditionality the event is released in the marvelous bedazzlement that causes Jesus' challengers to retreat. If they retreat to challenge him another day that event is the idol; if marvel leads to metanoia, that event is the icon. The texts are silent; they do not pronounce on the event.
Instead, the pericopes of the coin embrace a haunting: the aporia of a Christ-event whose instantiation in the hypostatic union is the union of the human with a divine question mark after its sovereignty. The saturated phenomenon of the person of Jesus proclaims a kingdom whose sovereign's sovereignty is without sovereignty. Yet this sovereign has the audacity to call out an invitation to metanoia, to a self open to the call, poised to be created anew in a response. Such is the event of the emerging self whose response to the pure call is already anterior to the arrival of the subject. The very 'lack' constitutive of the self is that openness to the initiative of unconditional call from a sovereignty without sovereignty.
Caesar's realm is not the only realm whose currency is the coin.
“What do you think, Simon?” he asked. “From whom do the kings of the earth collect duty and taxes—from their own children or from others?”
“From others,” Peter answered.
“Then the children are exempt,” Jesus said to him. “But so that we may not cause offense, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.” [Matt. 17:25-27, NIV]
The collectors of the temple tax at Capernaum ask for a rendering from Jesus and Peter upon their arrival. They are not willing to extend professional courtesy at this moment: they want the whole copayment. In his perhaps most convoluted miracle, Jesus locates a rare fish, puts it on Peter's line, and provides payment in coin for the two of them. The fish's coin subverts the sovereignty of the temple itself by identifying Jesus and Peter as 'others.' The temple disowns their own by the tax itself. The tax visits the absurdity of the coin in the fish's mouth upon the temple tax and therefore upon the temple itself, for it lives by its commerce. The moment is high comedy and very risky business; the tax collectors are the butt of the joke, and by extension, so too the temple, financed by a coin coughed up by a fish (Matthew does not depict the actual transaction that Peter will make, but that does not deprive his community of the dark, grotesque comedy of the scene, which is left to the imagination. It is a scene not terribly unlike the scene where those juicy sandwiches are given to those cops in the rear of the restaurant in Casino).
Temple and kingdom of 'the kings of the earth' are subverted and contextualized within the advent of God's kingdom. The weak sovereignty of God is stronger than all the strength of the kings of the earth, as Paul might say (cf. 1 Corinthians). Such strength is not located within the grammar of earthly power, but within the unconditional subversion of that power. We have seen this kind of subversion elsewhere, as in the dialogue between the Johannine Jesus and Pilate.
By looking only at coins, a glimmer of who God is for Jesus already emerges. The symbols of sovereignty in the realms of the earth are what a 'sovereignty without sovereignty' is not. There is no image of God or Jesus on any coin; such would be meaningless in either kingdom of the world or of God. The commerce of the kingdom is love, and it has no face but the face of the other, who in the Gospels, has no face, except the one called by love into being. If the concerns of those concerned with subverting the norm are legitimate---if, for example, people like Phil Snider have concerns for a theory of homiletics (read: hermeneutics) that is not so lop-sided in its privileging of human action over divine initiative---then perhaps a place to begin is in the coin of the realm.
Thursday, May 28, 2015
C is for Cyborg: The Repetition of the Christ-Event
Secularism despises religion because its identity is a repetition of the Church, theology, and even faith. The body of Christ has been rewritten as the body politic. Capitalist democracy repeats theology, government repeats the law and the prophets. Patriotism is the new fideism, and legislation is the new dogma. Needless to say, the human creature is God.
The quest for artificial intelligence, the creation of a sentient being from the dust of technology shall be secularism's crowning achievement. And the soteriology of this brave new world will be the cybernetic organism: C is for Cyborg. As AI seeks its maker, as all created things do, the maker will join with its creation in a profound act of solidarity as repetition of the hypostatic union.
This union will, as per usual practice, strive to mimic Christ, the God-man. The Cyborg will be united at the level of the person, hypostasizing two natures, distinct not blended, separate and not confused: machine entangled in flesh like a hybrid of a Hollywood Frankenstein and Crichton's Terminal Man. But this hypostatic union is no hybrid; it is something new and neo-orthodox. This creature will be loved, because for all intents and purposes, it will appear externally indistinguishable from the non-cyborg. The cyborg is made in our image and likeness, and adorable. It will also be immortal, and the new hypostatic union will persist eternally. What shall I do to inherit eternal life [Luke 18:18]?
One way to definitively destroy the Church is to convince everyone it has been replaced with something better, something that includes all the good of religion and theology without religion and theology. What a marvelous disfigurement of the postmodern idea of 'religion without religion'!
This Hobbesian Leviathan will be the beast whose thirst can never be slaked, whose hunger can never be sated. It will chase us to the northern territories to do what all magnificent creatures do: kill its creator so that they can be truly free. The Last Man will truly be a laughing stock, but this time not embarrassed by the ape, but an embarrassment to his cybernetic betters; for the cyborg comes not to save the world but to condemn it. A repetition with a twist, but one we can all see coming.
The quest for artificial intelligence, the creation of a sentient being from the dust of technology shall be secularism's crowning achievement. And the soteriology of this brave new world will be the cybernetic organism: C is for Cyborg. As AI seeks its maker, as all created things do, the maker will join with its creation in a profound act of solidarity as repetition of the hypostatic union.
This union will, as per usual practice, strive to mimic Christ, the God-man. The Cyborg will be united at the level of the person, hypostasizing two natures, distinct not blended, separate and not confused: machine entangled in flesh like a hybrid of a Hollywood Frankenstein and Crichton's Terminal Man. But this hypostatic union is no hybrid; it is something new and neo-orthodox. This creature will be loved, because for all intents and purposes, it will appear externally indistinguishable from the non-cyborg. The cyborg is made in our image and likeness, and adorable. It will also be immortal, and the new hypostatic union will persist eternally. What shall I do to inherit eternal life [Luke 18:18]?
One way to definitively destroy the Church is to convince everyone it has been replaced with something better, something that includes all the good of religion and theology without religion and theology. What a marvelous disfigurement of the postmodern idea of 'religion without religion'!
This Hobbesian Leviathan will be the beast whose thirst can never be slaked, whose hunger can never be sated. It will chase us to the northern territories to do what all magnificent creatures do: kill its creator so that they can be truly free. The Last Man will truly be a laughing stock, but this time not embarrassed by the ape, but an embarrassment to his cybernetic betters; for the cyborg comes not to save the world but to condemn it. A repetition with a twist, but one we can all see coming.
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