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.
Showing posts with label Gospel of John. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gospel of John. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 11, 2015
Saturday, July 18, 2015
Grace, Sin and the Natural Attitude
I.
The 'natural attitude' works against phenomenology and other deconstructive gestures. This attitude survives because it is a useful adaptation for getting on with everyday life. It allows us to stop at red lights without reflecting on electrons and wavelengths or other gods of glowing. It allows us to hear thunder without fear of Zeus. It gives us the daily logic that allows us to make countless choices. We like the natural attitude. We will keep it.
I have no idea how many people think about grace and sin, or how many times a day these thoughts arise, or if they arise at all. Perhaps only religious people think of such things, and then perhaps not very often. Sin and grace live in the rarefied zones of human experience. The natural attitude, the pre-phenomenological attitude, tends to foreclose those zones. Not so for some religious people, certainly not for biblical personages.
Many Old Testament texts witness to the relation of sin to human suffering. The first human suffering is tied to sin in Genesis, and elsewhere sin, usually in the form of a departure from the covenant, explains individual and collective suffering. The OT is also of 2 minds about the transmission of sin---visiting the sins of the fathers upon the offspring. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Exodus 20:5; 34:6-7 seems to say yes, Deuteronomy 24:16, not so much. The prophets Jeremiah (31:34) and Ezekiel (18:20) look toward a 'no'. But the New Testament give a resounding response to sin in its relation to suffering. Sin does not lead to human suffering, certainly not necessarily, apart from the pangs of guilt, whether that sin rests with the fathers or the children.
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. (John 9:1-3).
The disciples ask their question from the natural attitude, from the OT normative condition. Jesus vacates the theory of suffering and sin, and posits mystery in its place. This is the Catholic position to this day. That we sin, and that we suffer is simply given; why we sin and suffer is unknown: sin is without why.
The natural attitude wants to know why. Yet, the very paradigm of knowing that creates the natural attitude has no access sin or suffering, except perhaps to describe them. To get anywhere at all, the natural attitude must be suspended, bracketed, to allow sin and suffering to appear in themselves, in their givenness. The authors of Genesis gave a mythological shape to their experience of the ubiquity and givenness of sin. In an imaginative and picturesque manner, they present the progenitors of humanity in a mythic topos, Eden. It's a great story, and I highly recommend it: its a truly inspired way to express why for something that is without why.
The Johannine Jesus also presents an explanation for something that is without why. Elsewhere I have noted how the man born blind assumes the very signature of divinity. The outcome of John 9 is the blind man 'becoming' Jesus. There are many ways of reading this pericope; I would recommend only those approaches of interpretation that avoid arguing that the text is trying to put itself out of business. For example, an exegetical, interpretative gesture that identifies a Jesus who made the man blind since birth in order to gratify his ministry and magnify his status among the people does not advance the interest or theme of the text, and in fact props up the text to assassinate itself by assassinating the protagonist. Better approaches allow the text to speak through such critical agendae.
The Greek text is more open to possibilities and more interesting readings:
καὶ παράγων εἶδεν ἄνθρωπον τυφλὸν ἐκ γενετῆς. καὶ ἠρώτησαν αὐτὸν οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ λέγοντες ῥαββί τίς ἥμαρτεν οὗτος ἢ οἱ γονεῖς αὐτοῦ ἵνα τυφλὸς γεννηθῇ. ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς οὔτε οὗτος ἥμαρτεν οὔτε οἱ γονεῖς αὐτοῦ ἀλλ’ ἵνα φανερωθῇ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ. ἡμᾶς δεῖ ἐργάζεσθαι τὰ ἔργα τοῦ πέμψαντός με ἕως ἡμέρα ἐστίν ἔρχεται νὺξ ὅτε οὐδεὶς δύναται ἐργάζεσθαι.
[Jesus passed by a man born blind. The disciples asked, 'Rabbi, was it because of his sins or his parents that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, neither this man nor his parents sinned. But for the appearance {phaneroothe} of the works of God, as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me; night comes, when no one can work. GNT, John 9:1-4; my rendering]
On the face of it, the disciples' question is absurd: sins do not send sinners back to the womb to be born punished. The real question is about the parents: they ask if the sins of the parents are visited upon the child. Jesus' reply is shocking: there is no connection between sin and suffering. That the man suffers blindness is simple fact, but in the face of this fact in the plain light of day, Jesus does the work of God. If Jesus were making an ontological statement, if he were saying that the man was born blind so that God could pat himself on his glorified back, he would have been saying nothing new; such was the status quo of sin, suffering and the retribution of God. But Jesus here authoritatively perfects the revolution begun by Ezekiel and Jeremiah: sin and suffering are without why, and the justice of God is love, not hate. Human justice, however, is always bent on violence and destruction, as the pericope successfully presents. It is only in the irony of the blind man who now sees saying to the authorities, ego eimi, "I am," that the justice of God's love comes to the fore, and the condemnation of the authorities comes from their own mouths.
The biblical authors share in the collective experience of humankind and identify its condition of violence, greed, suffering, and injustice, and they conceptualize this condition as sin. Their self-understanding further experiences sin as a rupture in the relationship with God. Why it sees it this way is a complicated question rooted in that relationship itself; that is sees it this way is self-evident: res ipse loquitur. The prophets, nonetheless, are already speaking of a healing of that rupture, and a freely given forgiveness, a relief for time served, a totally gratuitous gift: grace.
II.
The ties that bind in any relationship have as their only determinants the individuals in that relationship. Such ties can be deontological, moral, ethical, and so on, but some can be of a different order and determined to something more essential than even those ties. A soldier and her superior officer has a relationship built upon, among other things, duty and obedience. So too, might an employee have a relationship based on these determinants, but perhaps also, ethical and moral ones. The case of of people who love one another, is of yet another order. That love itself is more essential than any other determinants that might also inform the relationship. Parents and children command simple determinants, but also the determinant of love. Lovers are bound by love before they are lovers.
Jean-Luc Marion makes the case beautifully for lovers in his The Erotic Phenomenon. In this fascinating study, love between humans and love between God and the human is carefully articulated in an intense meditation.
The erotic phenomenon, as it arises through the advance that makes the lover make love, paradoxically offers death no hold---precisely because it breaks free from the horizon of being. Contrary to the anticipatory resolution in the ontological reduction, which only reaches possibility according to being (which is the say according to death, which highlights the possibility of being through the possibility of impossibility), in the erotic reduction the anticipatory resolution opens a measureless possibility---a possibility that being, and therefore death, never limits. This possibility is defined as the impossibility of impossibility. The erotic phenomenon, as such, has no motive to succumb to death because it does not belong to the horizon of being (193).
The movement in this passage exemplifies the movement of the entire work, which is more symphonic than philosophical. It is a movement sweeping the relationality of love off the ontological horizon and onto the erotic. Between lovers, love is more essential than being. Love is eternal in its own horizon and levels the Heideggerian motion toward death. Death has no truck within the horizon of love. Instead, love offers a perpetual, eternal, calling of the lover, which brings the lover to her self. Lovers do this for each other every day. When God is a lover in such a relationality, the other lover is called into itself as a self. Love therefore is anterior to being. God himself loves before he is, and he loves the other before that other is, before individuation.
It was necessary that I enter into the erotic reduction and that I advance under the form of the lover in order that the logic of love lead me insensibly, but ineluctably, to comprehend that another loved me well before I lover her. It was enough that I accept the possibility for it to become actual (215).
The erotic reduction allows relationality to appear to the lover. This is true of human lovers, as it is true of God as he loves the other.
Grace has been called many things, but in its most neutral expression it commands relationality: grace is friendship with God. Phenomenologically, we now know that this friendship is determined by a freely given love before the other even comes to be. But love, even as a mode of grace, is certainly available outside of the phenomenological reduction. The natural attitude, the attitude of science, of structuralism, of empiricism cannot close off such grace. It can ignore it, bracket it off to accomplish its own version of phenomenology, but it cannot resist it: this is the sufficient grace that infuses itself in all the world.
For grace to appear, the grace that sanctifies, the natural attitude must be suspended in deference to the supernatural existential. In order to enter the horizon of the sacred, of love, one must side-step the ontological reduction, which always disallows the divine. The attitude open to God is within sufficient grace, and the experience of a relationality between the hearer of the call and the call which calls the self into itself, opens upon the horizon of love, the love that essential to the relation of God as love.
The self is not something that emerges in a finality, once and for all time. The self is always emerging, pulled into itself by God the lover in relationality. Religious people intuit that all relation with God comes with the ties that bind. The turning away from God in this relationship causes a rift in its matrix. The rift is not an irrevocable sundering; it is an injury to the relationship. It is an injury against what it means to be in a relationship with God whose horizon is love. It is an injury to love and the lovers. There is a disruption on either side of the relationship, and the self, always emerging and constantly created in the relationship, is damaged. Injury to the relationship with God is called sin, but so to is the injury to the self also sin. Sin injures the self by rupturing is on-going emergence and creation which is constitutive of the relationship.
It is this profound sense of emerging that the self seeks. Even as it precipitates out as a subject with intuition and intentionality, in knows its self in relationship to God whose essence is love. The self loves the self when it wills for itself the good, which is love, the self-love that is only the good when grounded in the relationality of love which is God. The self always wants to return to its self-emerging, to which it is properly ordered by the ties that bind it in the relation to God.
Sanctifying grace then is the grace that returns one lover to the other, the self to God. That grace is freely given as love from the God who is love to the lover. It is also the grace that keeps the lover in the relationship. So why is it that some lovers fall out of lover with their lover? The choice to love is always radically free; it is always a free act of the will. The freedom to resist sanctifying grace is what makes the relationship a real relationship: vulnerable to a self seeking the self to its own ends and even its own detriment. Freedom is all bound up in the will's ability to choose to resist the grace that sanctifies---the grace that holds the self in its relationship to God.
III.
The man born blind in John 9 is a self called into something new, a new self so in love with God that he dares utter the Exodus ontology, the divine name, "I am." Is this a usurpation of the divine calling card, the divine signature? The Johannine pericope witnesses to the place of the self in the new paradigm of the Incarnation. "Before Abraham was I am (John 8:58)," says the Christ. The man born blind, comes into himself from the ambiguous identity experienced by the crowd and says, "I am" (9:9). A self is born out of a sea of ambiguity grounded in the erotic reduction: it is he who is speaking to you: I see and I believe. And he worshiped him (9:37-38). Worshiped? What can worship be but a self in relation to a God who has pulled that self into a brand new thing: a self in relationality with its lover and creator?
What Rahner has called the absolute mystery that is God is the selfsame God who appears in the erotic reduction, and finally in the reduction to givenness. Rahner's supernatural existential is written into to potential space that Lacanian psychoanalysis calls 'lack,' which is the apophatic place of the emerging self being pulled into itself through the creative agency of relation to God. Lack is not a loss, or an emptiness, a fault, a depravity or a deprivation: it is constitutive of an ever-emerging self within its relationality with God. Rahner's, Marion's and Lacan's positions coalesce around the givenness of the absolute mystery, Vorgriff, lack and the place of the self. I am most myself in the erotic relationality that is the relation with God. I return to that place of the self where I continue to emerge as my self, which I experience in the erotic reduction as a person who loves in love and in grace. Lack is never filled, but always apophatically and kenotically vacated, to keep creatively renewing that place. In this manner the on-going creation of the world is forever entangled with the on-going creation of the self: generatively and regeneratively.
Why would a rational creature exercise its freedom by injuring its relationship with the lover par excellence? Why does any lover cheat? Where does a lover think he is escaping when he seeks freedom from his lover? The Catholic response to these questions is fairly straight-forward. When we cheat we escape into bondage, into the idolatry that insults the good. It is an escape into the self, which directs its gaze into its own reflection. So bedazzled by its object, the self is blinded by its own distorted, fun-house mirror reflection whose very bizarreness entices the injudicious exercise of freedom. But all is not lost: the icon is always behind the idol, awaiting the return of the prodigal.
The 'natural attitude' works against phenomenology and other deconstructive gestures. This attitude survives because it is a useful adaptation for getting on with everyday life. It allows us to stop at red lights without reflecting on electrons and wavelengths or other gods of glowing. It allows us to hear thunder without fear of Zeus. It gives us the daily logic that allows us to make countless choices. We like the natural attitude. We will keep it.
I have no idea how many people think about grace and sin, or how many times a day these thoughts arise, or if they arise at all. Perhaps only religious people think of such things, and then perhaps not very often. Sin and grace live in the rarefied zones of human experience. The natural attitude, the pre-phenomenological attitude, tends to foreclose those zones. Not so for some religious people, certainly not for biblical personages.
Many Old Testament texts witness to the relation of sin to human suffering. The first human suffering is tied to sin in Genesis, and elsewhere sin, usually in the form of a departure from the covenant, explains individual and collective suffering. The OT is also of 2 minds about the transmission of sin---visiting the sins of the fathers upon the offspring. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Exodus 20:5; 34:6-7 seems to say yes, Deuteronomy 24:16, not so much. The prophets Jeremiah (31:34) and Ezekiel (18:20) look toward a 'no'. But the New Testament give a resounding response to sin in its relation to suffering. Sin does not lead to human suffering, certainly not necessarily, apart from the pangs of guilt, whether that sin rests with the fathers or the children.
And as Jesus passed by, he saw a man which was blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, saying, Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he was born blind?
Jesus answered, Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents: but that the works of God should be made manifest in him. (John 9:1-3).
The disciples ask their question from the natural attitude, from the OT normative condition. Jesus vacates the theory of suffering and sin, and posits mystery in its place. This is the Catholic position to this day. That we sin, and that we suffer is simply given; why we sin and suffer is unknown: sin is without why.
The natural attitude wants to know why. Yet, the very paradigm of knowing that creates the natural attitude has no access sin or suffering, except perhaps to describe them. To get anywhere at all, the natural attitude must be suspended, bracketed, to allow sin and suffering to appear in themselves, in their givenness. The authors of Genesis gave a mythological shape to their experience of the ubiquity and givenness of sin. In an imaginative and picturesque manner, they present the progenitors of humanity in a mythic topos, Eden. It's a great story, and I highly recommend it: its a truly inspired way to express why for something that is without why.
The Johannine Jesus also presents an explanation for something that is without why. Elsewhere I have noted how the man born blind assumes the very signature of divinity. The outcome of John 9 is the blind man 'becoming' Jesus. There are many ways of reading this pericope; I would recommend only those approaches of interpretation that avoid arguing that the text is trying to put itself out of business. For example, an exegetical, interpretative gesture that identifies a Jesus who made the man blind since birth in order to gratify his ministry and magnify his status among the people does not advance the interest or theme of the text, and in fact props up the text to assassinate itself by assassinating the protagonist. Better approaches allow the text to speak through such critical agendae.
The Greek text is more open to possibilities and more interesting readings:
καὶ παράγων εἶδεν ἄνθρωπον τυφλὸν ἐκ γενετῆς. καὶ ἠρώτησαν αὐτὸν οἱ μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ λέγοντες ῥαββί τίς ἥμαρτεν οὗτος ἢ οἱ γονεῖς αὐτοῦ ἵνα τυφλὸς γεννηθῇ. ἀπεκρίθη Ἰησοῦς οὔτε οὗτος ἥμαρτεν οὔτε οἱ γονεῖς αὐτοῦ ἀλλ’ ἵνα φανερωθῇ τὰ ἔργα τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν αὐτῷ. ἡμᾶς δεῖ ἐργάζεσθαι τὰ ἔργα τοῦ πέμψαντός με ἕως ἡμέρα ἐστίν ἔρχεται νὺξ ὅτε οὐδεὶς δύναται ἐργάζεσθαι.
[Jesus passed by a man born blind. The disciples asked, 'Rabbi, was it because of his sins or his parents that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, neither this man nor his parents sinned. But for the appearance {phaneroothe} of the works of God, as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me; night comes, when no one can work. GNT, John 9:1-4; my rendering]
On the face of it, the disciples' question is absurd: sins do not send sinners back to the womb to be born punished. The real question is about the parents: they ask if the sins of the parents are visited upon the child. Jesus' reply is shocking: there is no connection between sin and suffering. That the man suffers blindness is simple fact, but in the face of this fact in the plain light of day, Jesus does the work of God. If Jesus were making an ontological statement, if he were saying that the man was born blind so that God could pat himself on his glorified back, he would have been saying nothing new; such was the status quo of sin, suffering and the retribution of God. But Jesus here authoritatively perfects the revolution begun by Ezekiel and Jeremiah: sin and suffering are without why, and the justice of God is love, not hate. Human justice, however, is always bent on violence and destruction, as the pericope successfully presents. It is only in the irony of the blind man who now sees saying to the authorities, ego eimi, "I am," that the justice of God's love comes to the fore, and the condemnation of the authorities comes from their own mouths.
The biblical authors share in the collective experience of humankind and identify its condition of violence, greed, suffering, and injustice, and they conceptualize this condition as sin. Their self-understanding further experiences sin as a rupture in the relationship with God. Why it sees it this way is a complicated question rooted in that relationship itself; that is sees it this way is self-evident: res ipse loquitur. The prophets, nonetheless, are already speaking of a healing of that rupture, and a freely given forgiveness, a relief for time served, a totally gratuitous gift: grace.
II.
The ties that bind in any relationship have as their only determinants the individuals in that relationship. Such ties can be deontological, moral, ethical, and so on, but some can be of a different order and determined to something more essential than even those ties. A soldier and her superior officer has a relationship built upon, among other things, duty and obedience. So too, might an employee have a relationship based on these determinants, but perhaps also, ethical and moral ones. The case of of people who love one another, is of yet another order. That love itself is more essential than any other determinants that might also inform the relationship. Parents and children command simple determinants, but also the determinant of love. Lovers are bound by love before they are lovers.
Jean-Luc Marion makes the case beautifully for lovers in his The Erotic Phenomenon. In this fascinating study, love between humans and love between God and the human is carefully articulated in an intense meditation.
The erotic phenomenon, as it arises through the advance that makes the lover make love, paradoxically offers death no hold---precisely because it breaks free from the horizon of being. Contrary to the anticipatory resolution in the ontological reduction, which only reaches possibility according to being (which is the say according to death, which highlights the possibility of being through the possibility of impossibility), in the erotic reduction the anticipatory resolution opens a measureless possibility---a possibility that being, and therefore death, never limits. This possibility is defined as the impossibility of impossibility. The erotic phenomenon, as such, has no motive to succumb to death because it does not belong to the horizon of being (193).
The movement in this passage exemplifies the movement of the entire work, which is more symphonic than philosophical. It is a movement sweeping the relationality of love off the ontological horizon and onto the erotic. Between lovers, love is more essential than being. Love is eternal in its own horizon and levels the Heideggerian motion toward death. Death has no truck within the horizon of love. Instead, love offers a perpetual, eternal, calling of the lover, which brings the lover to her self. Lovers do this for each other every day. When God is a lover in such a relationality, the other lover is called into itself as a self. Love therefore is anterior to being. God himself loves before he is, and he loves the other before that other is, before individuation.
It was necessary that I enter into the erotic reduction and that I advance under the form of the lover in order that the logic of love lead me insensibly, but ineluctably, to comprehend that another loved me well before I lover her. It was enough that I accept the possibility for it to become actual (215).
The erotic reduction allows relationality to appear to the lover. This is true of human lovers, as it is true of God as he loves the other.
Grace has been called many things, but in its most neutral expression it commands relationality: grace is friendship with God. Phenomenologically, we now know that this friendship is determined by a freely given love before the other even comes to be. But love, even as a mode of grace, is certainly available outside of the phenomenological reduction. The natural attitude, the attitude of science, of structuralism, of empiricism cannot close off such grace. It can ignore it, bracket it off to accomplish its own version of phenomenology, but it cannot resist it: this is the sufficient grace that infuses itself in all the world.
For grace to appear, the grace that sanctifies, the natural attitude must be suspended in deference to the supernatural existential. In order to enter the horizon of the sacred, of love, one must side-step the ontological reduction, which always disallows the divine. The attitude open to God is within sufficient grace, and the experience of a relationality between the hearer of the call and the call which calls the self into itself, opens upon the horizon of love, the love that essential to the relation of God as love.
The self is not something that emerges in a finality, once and for all time. The self is always emerging, pulled into itself by God the lover in relationality. Religious people intuit that all relation with God comes with the ties that bind. The turning away from God in this relationship causes a rift in its matrix. The rift is not an irrevocable sundering; it is an injury to the relationship. It is an injury against what it means to be in a relationship with God whose horizon is love. It is an injury to love and the lovers. There is a disruption on either side of the relationship, and the self, always emerging and constantly created in the relationship, is damaged. Injury to the relationship with God is called sin, but so to is the injury to the self also sin. Sin injures the self by rupturing is on-going emergence and creation which is constitutive of the relationship.
It is this profound sense of emerging that the self seeks. Even as it precipitates out as a subject with intuition and intentionality, in knows its self in relationship to God whose essence is love. The self loves the self when it wills for itself the good, which is love, the self-love that is only the good when grounded in the relationality of love which is God. The self always wants to return to its self-emerging, to which it is properly ordered by the ties that bind it in the relation to God.
Sanctifying grace then is the grace that returns one lover to the other, the self to God. That grace is freely given as love from the God who is love to the lover. It is also the grace that keeps the lover in the relationship. So why is it that some lovers fall out of lover with their lover? The choice to love is always radically free; it is always a free act of the will. The freedom to resist sanctifying grace is what makes the relationship a real relationship: vulnerable to a self seeking the self to its own ends and even its own detriment. Freedom is all bound up in the will's ability to choose to resist the grace that sanctifies---the grace that holds the self in its relationship to God.
III.
The man born blind in John 9 is a self called into something new, a new self so in love with God that he dares utter the Exodus ontology, the divine name, "I am." Is this a usurpation of the divine calling card, the divine signature? The Johannine pericope witnesses to the place of the self in the new paradigm of the Incarnation. "Before Abraham was I am (John 8:58)," says the Christ. The man born blind, comes into himself from the ambiguous identity experienced by the crowd and says, "I am" (9:9). A self is born out of a sea of ambiguity grounded in the erotic reduction: it is he who is speaking to you: I see and I believe. And he worshiped him (9:37-38). Worshiped? What can worship be but a self in relation to a God who has pulled that self into a brand new thing: a self in relationality with its lover and creator?
What Rahner has called the absolute mystery that is God is the selfsame God who appears in the erotic reduction, and finally in the reduction to givenness. Rahner's supernatural existential is written into to potential space that Lacanian psychoanalysis calls 'lack,' which is the apophatic place of the emerging self being pulled into itself through the creative agency of relation to God. Lack is not a loss, or an emptiness, a fault, a depravity or a deprivation: it is constitutive of an ever-emerging self within its relationality with God. Rahner's, Marion's and Lacan's positions coalesce around the givenness of the absolute mystery, Vorgriff, lack and the place of the self. I am most myself in the erotic relationality that is the relation with God. I return to that place of the self where I continue to emerge as my self, which I experience in the erotic reduction as a person who loves in love and in grace. Lack is never filled, but always apophatically and kenotically vacated, to keep creatively renewing that place. In this manner the on-going creation of the world is forever entangled with the on-going creation of the self: generatively and regeneratively.
Why would a rational creature exercise its freedom by injuring its relationship with the lover par excellence? Why does any lover cheat? Where does a lover think he is escaping when he seeks freedom from his lover? The Catholic response to these questions is fairly straight-forward. When we cheat we escape into bondage, into the idolatry that insults the good. It is an escape into the self, which directs its gaze into its own reflection. So bedazzled by its object, the self is blinded by its own distorted, fun-house mirror reflection whose very bizarreness entices the injudicious exercise of freedom. But all is not lost: the icon is always behind the idol, awaiting the return of the prodigal.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Water and Wine: A Tincture of Time
The 4th Gospel (4G) has a logic all its own. The Logos, after all, becomes flesh, and has its way with words (certainly with the Word), and its way of destabilizing time and causality in its representation of a reality fleshed out with irony. In the Johannine world, picking up the phone causes it to ring, and adverbial signage yields to a theo-logic in which 'before' and 'after' live in the same moment.
The message of the Baptist is a message that time is out of joint, that the present is presence in which the past and future merge: "A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me" [John 1:30, NIV]. That man, Jesus, the word become flesh, will later say, "before Abraham was I am" [8:58]. The logic of 4G is the logic of a late mediaeval painting depicting 'before' and 'after' events, such as Adam and Eve at once basking in the Garden of Eden and being cast out.
This tincture of time, or better, atemporal time, even the causality-defying atemporal sequencing of events, sets up the wonderful Wedding at Cana [John 2]:
On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there,
The message of the Baptist is a message that time is out of joint, that the present is presence in which the past and future merge: "A man who comes after me has surpassed me because he was before me" [John 1:30, NIV]. That man, Jesus, the word become flesh, will later say, "before Abraham was I am" [8:58]. The logic of 4G is the logic of a late mediaeval painting depicting 'before' and 'after' events, such as Adam and Eve at once basking in the Garden of Eden and being cast out.
This tincture of time, or better, atemporal time, even the causality-defying atemporal sequencing of events, sets up the wonderful Wedding at Cana [John 2]:
On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus' mother was there,
and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.
When the wine was gone, Jesus' mother said to him, "They have no more wine." "Dear woman, why do you involve me?" Jesus replied. "My time has not yet come."
His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."
Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.
Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water"; so they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet." They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew.
Then he called the bridegroom aside and said,
"Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now."
This, the first of his miraculous signs, Jesus performed at Cana in Galilee. He thus revealed his glory, and his disciples put their faith in him.
The salient features of the pericope (a parable given realism by the use of current time and place) include:
1. The 3rd day: the 1st and second decribing the testimony of John the Baptist and the gathering of the disciples.
2. The location of Cana in Galilee, and the family affair elements: Jesus' mother is there, demonstrating that the logos taking flesh is born of a woman.
3. The transfinalization of the water jars and their excess of contents.
4. The reversal of time in the sequencing of wine-events; the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom?
5. The identification of this reversal as semiotic and the birth of faith.
This second chapter of 4G follows Jesus, whom John has dubbed the 'lamb of God,' from his inaugural in the Prologue, through his distinction from John, to his identification as the one who baptizes with the holy spirit, someone already in the midst of the Pharisees. Things are happening very fast. Two of John's own disciples transition to God's chosen One [1:34], followed quickly by Peter, Philip and Nathanael. In head-spinning time compression, Jesus and his disciples are invited to the Wedding at Cana (which takes place on the 3rd day) where Jesus' mother awaits their arrival from Bethany.
The next scene is at the Wedding and in medias res. The is no more wine; the celebration is apparently in danger of winding down, or missing the mark of its purpose. Jesus' mother intercedes on behalf of the bridegroom or wine-steward, and approaches Jesus with the dilemma. Jesus' wristwatch is synchronized neither to his mother's or the wedding's. The dearth of wine is of no concern to either him or his mother, at least according to his understanding of his 'hour,' which he locates in the future. Yet it seems that mother knows best, for Jesus commands the servants to fill the empty ritual containers with water.
He commands the servants to take a sample from the brimming jars to the master of the banquet, whose astonishment prompts him to compliment the bridegroom: you have saved for last that which comes first. Far from throwing pearls before swine, the best wine will not be wasted on this crowd. The nearly endless volume of wine will not intoxicate, even though it is the best, and it might well lead to a palace of wisdom. That which has come after has surpassed what has come first, because it has come 'before 'in the 'after' of what the wedding has inaugurated. The brimming uncontainability of wine demonstrates the transfinalization of the jars as the vessels of the uncontainable event of the Messiah. The 'sign' at Cana is the saturated phenomena.
What issues from the ablutions of the past is the future of the Messianic banquet, a marriage not of heaven and hell, but of past and future. This is not therefore a moment of supersessionism, but of new self-understanding emerging from the phenomenality of the transformation of water into wine. Here in the language of Cana is the theo-logical moment, the birth of faith in the iconic event of Christ released from the ritual waters that are now become real drink, real wine. Here in the present time of the wedding, the 'before' and 'after' meet in the Christ already in the midst of everything, in medias res.
The historical kernel of the pericope is forever lost in the evangelist's sense of time and timing. Whether the Johannine community is privvy to an authentic tradition of a wedding in or near Galilee during the ministry of Jesus shall remain an open question open to conjecture. Still, 4G is after after something bigger than history; it want to locate the truth, the way and the life (not necessarily in that order). While the wedding at Cana might be simulacra to us today, it is Jesus' first foray into semiosis, or at least the Johannine Jesus' first foray.
The wedding at Cana depicts a Christ already in the midst of things, already upon the scene, shaping and being shaped by the discourse in which he moves. His own time moves the narrative of 4G while the narrative moves Jesus to move his own time. His hour remains in the future until the wine situation dictates otherwise. The brimming ablution jars take on water on one side of the event and spills out wine on the other. This sign is a semiotically reduced saturated phenomenon. Only Jesus, his mother and disciples know the legend by which the action must be read: they have the hermeneutic that allows the event to be released in the icon. For the master of the banquet, the bridegroom has merely held the best for last. At best, they are merely perplexed, and perhaps somewhat grateful (what Jean-Luc Marion might call 'bedazzlement'). For those who are open to the event, what issues from the jars is new time, a time of 'faith' and 'glory.' The messianic wine heralds the beginning of wine-tinctured time, even as it announces the second half of the celebration, lubricated with the best wine, a libation bereft of even an ounce of hangover. A new time within time.
At Cana, events release other events. The Messiah appears in the outflowing of wine, which iconically redirects the intuition of the disciples to the person centering the Christ-event, the logos dwelling with us. The wine lets their gaze pass into miracle, and into the divine within and through the icon. It is a saturated phenomenon that breeds another saturated phenomenon: the event. It is true, that the master of the banquet shares in a saturated phenomenon as well---that of the idol---the very excess of the best wine. But in this moment, his gaze is overwhelmed with only the idolic excess. It remains to be seen if that idol of excess will yield to the icon for him and those of his moment.
The historical kernel of the pericope is forever lost in the evangelist's sense of time and timing. Whether the Johannine community is privvy to an authentic tradition of a wedding in or near Galilee during the ministry of Jesus shall remain an open question open to conjecture. Still, 4G is after after something bigger than history; it want to locate the truth, the way and the life (not necessarily in that order). While the wedding at Cana might be simulacra to us today, it is Jesus' first foray into semiosis, or at least the Johannine Jesus' first foray.
The wedding at Cana depicts a Christ already in the midst of things, already upon the scene, shaping and being shaped by the discourse in which he moves. His own time moves the narrative of 4G while the narrative moves Jesus to move his own time. His hour remains in the future until the wine situation dictates otherwise. The brimming ablution jars take on water on one side of the event and spills out wine on the other. This sign is a semiotically reduced saturated phenomenon. Only Jesus, his mother and disciples know the legend by which the action must be read: they have the hermeneutic that allows the event to be released in the icon. For the master of the banquet, the bridegroom has merely held the best for last. At best, they are merely perplexed, and perhaps somewhat grateful (what Jean-Luc Marion might call 'bedazzlement'). For those who are open to the event, what issues from the jars is new time, a time of 'faith' and 'glory.' The messianic wine heralds the beginning of wine-tinctured time, even as it announces the second half of the celebration, lubricated with the best wine, a libation bereft of even an ounce of hangover. A new time within time.
At Cana, events release other events. The Messiah appears in the outflowing of wine, which iconically redirects the intuition of the disciples to the person centering the Christ-event, the logos dwelling with us. The wine lets their gaze pass into miracle, and into the divine within and through the icon. It is a saturated phenomenon that breeds another saturated phenomenon: the event. It is true, that the master of the banquet shares in a saturated phenomenon as well---that of the idol---the very excess of the best wine. But in this moment, his gaze is overwhelmed with only the idolic excess. It remains to be seen if that idol of excess will yield to the icon for him and those of his moment.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Discovery and the Beloved Disciple
John 9 tells a story of a man born blind, a story of discovery, a story of not seeing and seeing, a story of the seen and unseen. Elsewhere, I have written about the special case of the man born blind (MBB), not only because his was the first case of someone being 'born' blind and then given sight, but because he is the only other character apart from God in scripture to use the divine signature, ego eimi (ἐγώ εἰμι): I Am . Though no historical critical scholar has suggested it, I would fancy the MBB to be not only the 'beloved disciple' but also Jesus himself. This kind of discovery is the grammar of apocalypsis in the 4th Gospel.
That the MBB is Jesus himself (or at least a profound reflection of him) hangs on the purloined signature, ego eimi. It is a provocative phrase in the mouth of the MBB, and in the hand of the 4th evangelist. Unlike those hearing Jesus himself utter the phrase in the previous chapter (8:58), the MBB's audience misses it, as they are more interested in some detective work of a different sort. The MBB's sight is given in short order, but the crowd and the Pharisees undergo a slower process of discovery, of finding something out, finding a truth: the 'light of the world' [9:5]. Who is this light? Jesus has just said it is he, but, narratologically, the MMB, in a Jesus-like manner, opens the eyes [9:10;17;21;26;30;32] of the Pharisees, though they refuse to see, despite their reluctant acknowledgement that the man was indeed born blind.
Interestingly, this eye-opening pericope is the only instance in the NT where both parents of someone given a sign by Jesus appear, and here, as witnesses. They testify to their son's history, but take flight in Egypt: they defer to their son to tell his story. In the face of the Pharisees, the MBB tells them how amazed he is that he now sees and they still cannot see whence Jesus came [9:30]. That remark is nearly as biting as Jesus's own account of the Pharisees whose sin remains because they will not see [9:41].
This ironic merging of Jesus and the MBB is perhaps something of a Johannine 'infancy narrative.' It is the 4th evangelist's account of Jesus's own emergence, his coming into his own as the 'lamb of God' [1:29-36], taking on his mission: seeing all that must come to pass, and what must become of him, as the Baptist saw of himself before Jesus came to fulfill his own ministry of signs. The Johannine Jesus is a remarkable figure, one very different from the Synoptic Jesus (the 3 synoptics in the 4th Gospel are, of course, Jesus, the MBB, and the evangelist himself). There is never really any question about how the Logos operates in the 4th Gospel. Whatever it does not imbue with itself it brings to itself. Ego eimi, the shape of the Logos in Jhn. 9, is the light and lens, sound and sense of the Johannine literary project. "I Am" informs every trope, every image in this narrative. Indeed, the Gospel itself is system of surfaces and predicates in liminal interface, its logic that of borders grazing and tracing each other (cf. Mark C. Taylor's Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, especially pp. 116-118 , where he characterizes all of scripture as a "divine milieu" of time-space bending, liminal logic).
Could the evangelist have manipulated time and space in Chapter 9 as I have suggested here? Do Taylor's remarks on the divinity of scripture apply here? I think so; the evangelist seems to have no difficulty using time and terrain in his service of his community (e.g., the Lazarus pericope). If so, there would be no better candidate for the Beloved Disciple than the MBB. That would put a wrinkle in Beloved Disciple investigations, and would go a long way in explaining the stunning visuals in the 4th Gospel, especially in the passion narrative, where every visual sensation is shocking and new to recently opened eyes.
That the MBB is Jesus himself (or at least a profound reflection of him) hangs on the purloined signature, ego eimi. It is a provocative phrase in the mouth of the MBB, and in the hand of the 4th evangelist. Unlike those hearing Jesus himself utter the phrase in the previous chapter (8:58), the MBB's audience misses it, as they are more interested in some detective work of a different sort. The MBB's sight is given in short order, but the crowd and the Pharisees undergo a slower process of discovery, of finding something out, finding a truth: the 'light of the world' [9:5]. Who is this light? Jesus has just said it is he, but, narratologically, the MMB, in a Jesus-like manner, opens the eyes [9:10;17;21;26;30;32] of the Pharisees, though they refuse to see, despite their reluctant acknowledgement that the man was indeed born blind.
Interestingly, this eye-opening pericope is the only instance in the NT where both parents of someone given a sign by Jesus appear, and here, as witnesses. They testify to their son's history, but take flight in Egypt: they defer to their son to tell his story. In the face of the Pharisees, the MBB tells them how amazed he is that he now sees and they still cannot see whence Jesus came [9:30]. That remark is nearly as biting as Jesus's own account of the Pharisees whose sin remains because they will not see [9:41].
This ironic merging of Jesus and the MBB is perhaps something of a Johannine 'infancy narrative.' It is the 4th evangelist's account of Jesus's own emergence, his coming into his own as the 'lamb of God' [1:29-36], taking on his mission: seeing all that must come to pass, and what must become of him, as the Baptist saw of himself before Jesus came to fulfill his own ministry of signs. The Johannine Jesus is a remarkable figure, one very different from the Synoptic Jesus (the 3 synoptics in the 4th Gospel are, of course, Jesus, the MBB, and the evangelist himself). There is never really any question about how the Logos operates in the 4th Gospel. Whatever it does not imbue with itself it brings to itself. Ego eimi, the shape of the Logos in Jhn. 9, is the light and lens, sound and sense of the Johannine literary project. "I Am" informs every trope, every image in this narrative. Indeed, the Gospel itself is system of surfaces and predicates in liminal interface, its logic that of borders grazing and tracing each other (cf. Mark C. Taylor's Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology, especially pp. 116-118 , where he characterizes all of scripture as a "divine milieu" of time-space bending, liminal logic).
Could the evangelist have manipulated time and space in Chapter 9 as I have suggested here? Do Taylor's remarks on the divinity of scripture apply here? I think so; the evangelist seems to have no difficulty using time and terrain in his service of his community (e.g., the Lazarus pericope). If so, there would be no better candidate for the Beloved Disciple than the MBB. That would put a wrinkle in Beloved Disciple investigations, and would go a long way in explaining the stunning visuals in the 4th Gospel, especially in the passion narrative, where every visual sensation is shocking and new to recently opened eyes.
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