Reshith has undergone some modifications since I first employed the term to respond to Catherine Keller's 'tehomic' creatio ex profundis---not a creation from nothing/no-thing, ex nihilo---but from ruach's oscillations over the deep (Face of the Deep). My concept of reshith maintains the otherness of God, maintains his freedom from a chain of being, from a causation in the scheme of things, from being merely another being among other beings. This is an admittedly anti-metaphysical gesture, one that I had hoped would operate in the spirit of Jean-Luc Marion's God Without Being, which seeks to avoid conceptualizing God within the category of being. The goal is admirable enough, to prevent dissolving God into a hapless idolatry of ontological difference. Still, causality grips God in the metaphysical causa sui, which Marion demonstrates to be a 'conceptual idol,' an idol that locks God into an impoverished likeness of being. Instead, reshith situates the eternal giveness of God on the horizon of Love, through which creation itself must pass before it enters the horizon of being. Just as God loves before he is, creation is loved before it appears.
The very giveness of beings is democratic in precisely the manner Levi Bryant has suggested in his Democracy of Objects. Objects enjoy their being prior to their becoming known to sentient beings. While it is the very nature of the human mind to interpret objects ontologically, that has no effect onticologically upon them. Causality is an irrelevant category for the way things are in themselves, and the way God is in itself. God's own giveness, his infinite nature, creates as love loves, bringing things into existence from absolutely no-thing. Love always already has its object, which makes its appearance ex nihilo as a new creation.
Creation ex profundis is a shaping; wonderful as it is, it binds the lover into causality: shaping through the hovering above the deep. What a tehomic creation has got going for it, is its self-evident relationality. But this relationality is also and already in reshith. Analogically speaking, reshith is there already, anterior, before (a temporal adverb, but meant atemporally) tehom, which is simply there to be acted upon to become what it will become. Analogically, God is the observer of the no-thing, giving appearance to the material world in an erotic reduction of pure will, act and love. God, therefore does not act within the created order upon some pre-existent substance, but a true creation from pure thought, yet in an image and likeness. This creation is one whose origin is in relationality apart from a causal nexus, not an origin in causality: creation without causality.
As reshith comes into focus, so does a creation that is itself atemporal and one in which conservation and concurrence is already a part. While the theory of rapid expansion of an occurrence in time 14 billion years ago is appealing for its suggestion that the beginning of the universe can be extrapolated to a singularity, that beginning is not reshith, which disabuses us of a God at the head of a moment, the first cause in a series of causes. Causation, like spacetime, is a function of the category of being, which in a strange way, tends to relocate, metaphysically, the notion of causa sui away from God and into the plane of existence.
Reshith, then, trumps tehom in the gentlest of ways. Analogically, it is the condition for the appearance of the there-ness of tehom that establishes the relation of ruach to matter. Indeed, analogy itself is the very oscillation between ruach and tehom. As Karl Rahner has noted in his Foundations of Christian Faith (57-80), analogy is the hovering (is hovering) that constitutes the finitude of creation. And, analogically again, Rahner identifies this hovering/oscillating (Schwebe) with the human creature itself, as the thing that oscillates between spirit and matter. As image and likeness, the human creature is already the analogy of God, and this event is the revelation of the first lines of Genesis. And though Rahner would not countenance a creatio ex profundis, he would likely marvel at the transformational and generative quality of Keller's 'tehomic' theology, and quite possibly delight in the shape his Schwebe has taken in her theological turn in general. Certainly the centrality of relationality and dialectical method to his entire theological project links him to the apophatic entanglements in the Cloud of the Impossible.
Showing posts with label Face of the Deep. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Face of the Deep. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Conformation and other Chaosmic Accidents
Proteins fold, enfold and unfold. And fold again. complicatio, explicatio, implicatio.
The theme of folding, unfolding and differentiated entanglement runs though Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep, and (its redux) Cloud of the Impossible. Nicholas of Cusa turns out to have been a very tehomic thinker.
Precisely what the ruach Elohim is doing over the face of tehom is the stuff of the mystic. It vibrates, oscillates, flutters (Deep, 232); as I have suggested recently in this blog, it osculates, too.
That the universe, space-time (what I have called solid time) might be 'folded' makes astrophysicists yawn and poets dream. Whatever Elohim had begun in reshith, the universe seems to continue to do: creative calisthenics. If I may paraphrase Lacan ("The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious"), the universe is structured like a protein in a living organism.
Hemoglobin, the good stuff in blood, is a complex protein molecule whose function is determined by the way its proteins fold and unfold to deliver oxygen to tissues (to quote the great American sage Yogi Berra, 'you can look it up in a book'). The iron-containing 'heme' group at the center of it all, oscillates in and out of its plane, picking up and dropping off air, breath, ruach, pneuma, spirit. The mechanism is so beautiful, so elegant, the only space in which a viewer can rejoice and express her joy is apophatic, the 'third space' of spirit and negative capability. I am really not going to discuss the quarternary structure of hemoglobin or any pulchritudinous polypeptides any further. I will, though, partake of the theopoetics of the via negativa of a living universe, whose entanglements with our deepest being bring us into the fold: enfolding, unfolding and implicating us in its deepest being: relationality.
The Cusanian theme that winds-down Face of the Deep revs- up Cloud of the Impossible, and for good reason. Keller's theopoetics presents the apophatic space in the living, breathing entanglements of the relationality of a rhythmic and ongoing creation of the world. Karl Rahner's notion of the hearer who can approach the 'absolute mystery that is God' only asymptotically finds a safe place to land in Keller's gymnastic relationality. Rahner's ontotheology is supple enough, tehomic enough, to adopt a conformation within a thorough-going process of transforming, creative relational attitudes in the chaosmic entanglements predicated of Cusanian creative 'unknowing,' docta ignorantia.
In the self-organizing process of the world, the oscillation between tehom and elohim, complication and explication, creates...Creation begins--continually--in this relation, this incipient incarnation...[And] that relation, "the relation of relations," may be called the implication of the spirit of God...[T]his spirit will not transcend or obliterate differences; rather differences are intensified precisely by being brought into relation. So the third capacity thus signifies the relationality itself... [Such] a definition sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit of the classical trinity (Deep, 232).
If I may paraphrase Rahner, the Trinity we experience is the Trinity that is. We learn in the 2012 film, Cloud Atlas, that our lives are not our own, that we are entangled in the past, present and future, in space and time, in a forever of reshith, a repetition of fluttering tehom, in an apophatic space of the Spirit, where we inhale and exhale inseparably within the divine insistence of intersecting planes of living.
The pneumatological reduction of Keller's strategy tends to enlarge the role of the third Person as it attempts to magnify the 'third capacity' within the divine perichoresis. I do not think she has collapsed the 'classical trinity' into Spirit, something that Roger Haight was accused of doing in his Jesus: Symbol of God . Instead, I think she has identified an analogical platform in language itself that provides a view to what is happening when ruach elohim shimmers above the deep in order to allow the release of the event. In retrospect, I think it is pretty clear that Haight was doing the same thing, though in language felt by some to be far more metaphysically threatening. But I digress.
There are no doctrinal issues for the Catholic understanding of Trinity in Keller's work. The very processions and relations of trinitarian theology come to life in Keller's work in wonderful and unexpected ways. That we could not really see it coming on the horizon of the deep speaks to the eventive instincts embedded in her process theology.
I personally come very late to the party when it comes to the remarkable theological gestures inaugurated by Caputo, Zizek, Keller, Marion, Levinas, Deleuze, and countless others. The speculative realists and object oriented on[tic]tologists have in their own way taken a theological turn in the turn away from the theological turn, in their response to Derrida and his disciples. The entanglements between the new realists and theopoetics are still to be elucidated. Things always seem to be on the verge of getting interesting. It is my hope that I have contributed the chaosmic accidents of proteins, hemoglobin and the view of the universe as something like an organism to the entanglements that Erwin Schroedinger so long ago anticipated. The cat, it seems, will simply not stay in the bag.
The chaosmos is quite a bit tent, too, you know.
The theme of folding, unfolding and differentiated entanglement runs though Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep, and (its redux) Cloud of the Impossible. Nicholas of Cusa turns out to have been a very tehomic thinker.
Precisely what the ruach Elohim is doing over the face of tehom is the stuff of the mystic. It vibrates, oscillates, flutters (Deep, 232); as I have suggested recently in this blog, it osculates, too.
That the universe, space-time (what I have called solid time) might be 'folded' makes astrophysicists yawn and poets dream. Whatever Elohim had begun in reshith, the universe seems to continue to do: creative calisthenics. If I may paraphrase Lacan ("The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious"), the universe is structured like a protein in a living organism.
Hemoglobin, the good stuff in blood, is a complex protein molecule whose function is determined by the way its proteins fold and unfold to deliver oxygen to tissues (to quote the great American sage Yogi Berra, 'you can look it up in a book'). The iron-containing 'heme' group at the center of it all, oscillates in and out of its plane, picking up and dropping off air, breath, ruach, pneuma, spirit. The mechanism is so beautiful, so elegant, the only space in which a viewer can rejoice and express her joy is apophatic, the 'third space' of spirit and negative capability. I am really not going to discuss the quarternary structure of hemoglobin or any pulchritudinous polypeptides any further. I will, though, partake of the theopoetics of the via negativa of a living universe, whose entanglements with our deepest being bring us into the fold: enfolding, unfolding and implicating us in its deepest being: relationality.
The Cusanian theme that winds-down Face of the Deep revs- up Cloud of the Impossible, and for good reason. Keller's theopoetics presents the apophatic space in the living, breathing entanglements of the relationality of a rhythmic and ongoing creation of the world. Karl Rahner's notion of the hearer who can approach the 'absolute mystery that is God' only asymptotically finds a safe place to land in Keller's gymnastic relationality. Rahner's ontotheology is supple enough, tehomic enough, to adopt a conformation within a thorough-going process of transforming, creative relational attitudes in the chaosmic entanglements predicated of Cusanian creative 'unknowing,' docta ignorantia.
In the self-organizing process of the world, the oscillation between tehom and elohim, complication and explication, creates...Creation begins--continually--in this relation, this incipient incarnation...[And] that relation, "the relation of relations," may be called the implication of the spirit of God...[T]his spirit will not transcend or obliterate differences; rather differences are intensified precisely by being brought into relation. So the third capacity thus signifies the relationality itself... [Such] a definition sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit of the classical trinity (Deep, 232).
If I may paraphrase Rahner, the Trinity we experience is the Trinity that is. We learn in the 2012 film, Cloud Atlas, that our lives are not our own, that we are entangled in the past, present and future, in space and time, in a forever of reshith, a repetition of fluttering tehom, in an apophatic space of the Spirit, where we inhale and exhale inseparably within the divine insistence of intersecting planes of living.
The pneumatological reduction of Keller's strategy tends to enlarge the role of the third Person as it attempts to magnify the 'third capacity' within the divine perichoresis. I do not think she has collapsed the 'classical trinity' into Spirit, something that Roger Haight was accused of doing in his Jesus: Symbol of God . Instead, I think she has identified an analogical platform in language itself that provides a view to what is happening when ruach elohim shimmers above the deep in order to allow the release of the event. In retrospect, I think it is pretty clear that Haight was doing the same thing, though in language felt by some to be far more metaphysically threatening. But I digress.
There are no doctrinal issues for the Catholic understanding of Trinity in Keller's work. The very processions and relations of trinitarian theology come to life in Keller's work in wonderful and unexpected ways. That we could not really see it coming on the horizon of the deep speaks to the eventive instincts embedded in her process theology.
I personally come very late to the party when it comes to the remarkable theological gestures inaugurated by Caputo, Zizek, Keller, Marion, Levinas, Deleuze, and countless others. The speculative realists and object oriented on[tic]tologists have in their own way taken a theological turn in the turn away from the theological turn, in their response to Derrida and his disciples. The entanglements between the new realists and theopoetics are still to be elucidated. Things always seem to be on the verge of getting interesting. It is my hope that I have contributed the chaosmic accidents of proteins, hemoglobin and the view of the universe as something like an organism to the entanglements that Erwin Schroedinger so long ago anticipated. The cat, it seems, will simply not stay in the bag.
The chaosmos is quite a bit tent, too, you know.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Image and Likeness
If gender means that female and male are realities, then gender has a descriptive purpose. Gender ordered to biology seems fairly benign, as it describes structural realities that are decisive for reproduction in many species. Grammatical gender has always fascinated me, but as it is of a piece with language, which is itself a culturally mediated phenomenon, I decline to do more with it than what's required for declension. I don't even have a particular problem with 'patriarchy' as it is historically verifiable, deeply ancient, and an artifact of many cultures. If gender means that my wife and daughters are inherently secondary or somehow inherently inferior in contemporary constructs of society, then I reject its hegemony as something grasping for something that, by today's values, or any sense of truth and justice, is ugly and hateful. Such a hegemony is invested in inequality and devaluation and is a harbinger of decadence for societies that anachronistically embrace the necessity of such sociological and historical patterns which may or may not have worked in the past.
Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her (again I date myself with books), and more recently Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep seek to express, in unique ways, theological ideas in terms of authentic, historical, female experience. The feminist approach has advanced biblical studies incalculably, not only within the historical critical model, but lately in post-structuralist models as well. No comprehensive approach to theology can move forward apart from these currents. My approach is to be sensitive to the accomplishments of biblical and theological feminism without devolving into ideology.
So, let this tiny prolegomenon be my disclaimer.
But how to approach ancient texts, understand their self-understanding, and read sensitively for illumination such texts that are so old?
The preceding blogpost looks at reshith (the title is in Hebrew and intended to be a bit jarring) in terms of what the Elohist says in going on when things get started. In that piece, I had no platform to assert that reshith also can translated as 'she who is,' 'wisdom' (sophia), and Logos. But isn't that what the Elohist is expressing? Creation occurs under conditions of divine fiat, but there seems to be a good deal of stuff making an appearance nearby. Making sense of what's there in the text is 'reading,' and making sense of sacred texts might even mean reading is praying.
Oremus:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them...
Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. [Gen 2:7; 18-19; 22, NIV]
The story is familiar. The narrative extravagance of the turn to image and likeness, pushes the reading from the purely mimetic (a good story) to the semiotic (a moment open to the event). The general creation of heaven and earth prefigures the creation of humankind, which recapitulates the motion from reshith to heaven and earth. It is from the earth itself that humans emerge as living beings, male and female. The image and likeness of God and humanity refer to their commonality, here not 'being' but loving. Love is willing the good to the other: first, Elohim to reshith, then God to the earth. The first beings are heaven and earth, and from the earth are brought forth living beings. The male and female are of the very same fleshly material, here symbolized by the rib, 'bone of my bones.' By bone of bones, I read deepest of depths (what was,once upon a time, called substance), of identity marked by difference. Male and female are identical in their image and likeness to God (and to each other) and are differentiated only to increase their likeness to God: the will and gift to generate, to create from their very selves in the unity of difference. The images and likenesses of God and humankind are reflections of each other. How is this not an event of a profoundly revealed truth of how God is in and of himself?
The text emphasizes not merely analogy of Being but the phenomenon of similarity that appears within the horizon of love. The text presents the core of the profound unity of God in relation to the differance of persons as the perichoresis of male and female ordered to creation. It is here that reshith finds its location within Elohim, even as Elohim creates in reshith (b'reshith, in the beginning, in solid time where moments are places and matter, which matter). And perhaps here on the horizon of love, reshith becomes the echo of Logos, sophia and the 'she who is,' which, collectively, is another way of saying 'I am who am,' and in so saying, I say so in memory of her.
Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her (again I date myself with books), and more recently Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep seek to express, in unique ways, theological ideas in terms of authentic, historical, female experience. The feminist approach has advanced biblical studies incalculably, not only within the historical critical model, but lately in post-structuralist models as well. No comprehensive approach to theology can move forward apart from these currents. My approach is to be sensitive to the accomplishments of biblical and theological feminism without devolving into ideology.
So, let this tiny prolegomenon be my disclaimer.
But how to approach ancient texts, understand their self-understanding, and read sensitively for illumination such texts that are so old?
The preceding blogpost looks at reshith (the title is in Hebrew and intended to be a bit jarring) in terms of what the Elohist says in going on when things get started. In that piece, I had no platform to assert that reshith also can translated as 'she who is,' 'wisdom' (sophia), and Logos. But isn't that what the Elohist is expressing? Creation occurs under conditions of divine fiat, but there seems to be a good deal of stuff making an appearance nearby. Making sense of what's there in the text is 'reading,' and making sense of sacred texts might even mean reading is praying.
Oremus:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. [Gen 1:26-7, NIV]
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. [Gen 1:26-7, NIV]
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them...
Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. [Gen 2:7; 18-19; 22, NIV]
The story is familiar. The narrative extravagance of the turn to image and likeness, pushes the reading from the purely mimetic (a good story) to the semiotic (a moment open to the event). The general creation of heaven and earth prefigures the creation of humankind, which recapitulates the motion from reshith to heaven and earth. It is from the earth itself that humans emerge as living beings, male and female. The image and likeness of God and humanity refer to their commonality, here not 'being' but loving. Love is willing the good to the other: first, Elohim to reshith, then God to the earth. The first beings are heaven and earth, and from the earth are brought forth living beings. The male and female are of the very same fleshly material, here symbolized by the rib, 'bone of my bones.' By bone of bones, I read deepest of depths (what was,once upon a time, called substance), of identity marked by difference. Male and female are identical in their image and likeness to God (and to each other) and are differentiated only to increase their likeness to God: the will and gift to generate, to create from their very selves in the unity of difference. The images and likenesses of God and humankind are reflections of each other. How is this not an event of a profoundly revealed truth of how God is in and of himself?
The text emphasizes not merely analogy of Being but the phenomenon of similarity that appears within the horizon of love. The text presents the core of the profound unity of God in relation to the differance of persons as the perichoresis of male and female ordered to creation. It is here that reshith finds its location within Elohim, even as Elohim creates in reshith (b'reshith, in the beginning, in solid time where moments are places and matter, which matter). And perhaps here on the horizon of love, reshith becomes the echo of Logos, sophia and the 'she who is,' which, collectively, is another way of saying 'I am who am,' and in so saying, I say so in memory of her.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)