What's In a Name?

Juliet:
Deny thy father and refuse thy name...
...O, be some other name! What's in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet...
Romeo:
I take thee at thy word: Call me but love, and I'll be new baptized (Romeo and Juliet, II,ii)




The hegemony of the name destroys life and love in Shakespeare's play. The patriarchy of the name game imbues the name with history and the tyranny of lineage, and the death of Juliet and her Romeo. Neither dramatic baptism, nor sacrament can withstand the tragedy of the name, can re-name a given name, can avert the tragedy of the name. In Romeo and Juliet, the ousia of the name is the stuff of tragedy and tragic irony. Re-naming is just not in the stars for these star-crossed lovers.

Hashem.

It's probably time Catholicism takes some responsibility for the name of God, or what's harbored in 'the name.' Hashem is beyond being, beyond the Exodus ontology (Ex. 3:14); Hashem is the event that this name harbors. Judaism has always known this point about the name, and reserves pronouncing the proper name of God for the rarest occasions, when the event harbored in the name is released as the event. Hashem harbors the saturated phenomenon in the name of God, the event of revelation, of God's self-communication, despite the saturation of that self.

Relationality is beyond family lineage. "Hello, we're the Christs; I'm Joseph. This is my wife, Mary, and this is Jesus." Neither is the Trinity about family. "Hello, we're the God: I'm the Father; this is my Son, and this is Ruach." There is not a single happy family in all of Shakespeare; even Prospero and Miranda cannot be said to prosper as a family. Names tend toward ruination; relationalities tend toward life.


God, theos, deus.


What have I accomplished in that list? Hashem...now there's an accomplishment. The tetragrammaton, lovingly substituted by Adonai, is best left as a placeholder for the name. Even 'Jehovah,' the name, the proper name, in itself, forecloses on the event apart from a liturgy of the event. God, theos, deus. These are code for the name or they are nothing. The rabbis tell me that "G-d" is a bizarre concoction, and cannot possibly do the work intended by such a hieroglyphic gesture; some rabbis tell me the gesture is just a 'fad.' If so, it's a long-lived one.


Theos, of course, gives us theism and atheism (and now it seems, even anatheism). Since theos accomplishes little or nothing, I can no longer imagine what 'atheism' and 'theism' are able to accomplish any more. The words seem to me the emptiest of signifiers, and by that conclusion I do not mean to deny their histories, their often violent histories. The words do signify in the past, but their future is dubious. What can the difference be between opposing empty signifiers, because, after all, that is what these terms do best: oppose. Both terms tell tales told by idiots and signify nothing. Even the blood spilled in their historical significations no longer signifies. Such blood is lost in the din of distant sound and fury. Sanguinity laps silently upon desolate shores; oed und leer das Meer.


There is no difference between atheism and theism; zero does equal zero, but that's all. In this blog I have referenced what 'serious theists' and 'serious atheists' think, but now it's time to get serious and call the game what it is: pure extortion. No one is really serious about the empty signifiers they have committed to. There can be no choice, after all, between evidence and phenomena:  they simply do not answer the same question, and the metaphysical blackmail that keeps propping up the choice races to surpass the desolation and bankruptcy of its offspring empty signifiers.


In the distant past when atheism and theism referenced the same onto-theological "God" the battles were joined and the blood invaded the secret shores of being, rendering green seas incarnadine. Now, as the 3rd phenomenological reduction to givenness has concluded metaphysics and has gone beyond that approach to reality, the onto-theology embedded there has also yielded to otherwise than being, leaving theism and atheism ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas, mindlessly, purposelessly reaching, tearing, snapping for they know not what. The phenomenological self has once and for all surpassed the constituting Cartesian self whose only abode is solipsism. Oceanic metaphysics has strained out a gnat and swallowed a camel---its own project. Theism's only referent has been shown to have no clothes, and its negation, atheism, not only has no referent, but has lost its opposition. There are no longer any theists or atheists; seriousness has obviated these gamesters. They have been torn from a body of knowledge that no longer sustains them.


As the remnants of the theists and atheists continue to have at each other's empty set, hope rises from a sea of faith.


                      ...the world which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams, 

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain

But what hope can this be except a ghostly, spectral hope in a

future yet to come? What solace is there really in the

irrationality of denying the existence of something that does

not exist? Is something so various, so beautiful and so new

as that which is to come really without joy, love, light,

certitude and peace? That something to come, so new,

beautiful and various, haunts memory and imagination. It is

the heart of a heartless world, that which quickens the pure

gift and the pure call,and it calls from a nameless place, a

place that cannot be named.

Atheists say the Darndest Things

I rarely engage the atheist narrative in this blog, though sometimes that point of view emerges in the comments section. The problem with engaging atheistic world views, and by this I mean the so-called naturalist, materialist, positivist vision of reality, is that it flirts dangerously with apologetics, which I gladly abandoned many years ago. Besides, there will always be Christian apologists, and even if I were interested again, what more could I offer than the work of a Robert Barron or a David Bentley Hart? They pull out all the metaphysical stops, assuring once and for all that the stalemate continues. Apologetics is about winning arguments, not changing hearts; apologetics is about foreclosure, not disclosure. Either 'side' remains committed to an entrenched position and a perpetual extortion of ideas, which blackmails (as John Caputo notes time and again)  the hearer to choose between evidence and phenomena, between the empirical and phenomenological.

The perennial problem does not dissolve in the adamantine binarities of physics and metaphysics, method and truth, spirit and matter, theist and atheist.

OK, let's say I'm gonna be an apologist just one more time, and I am a very good one. I've convinced my atheist interlocutor that what theists call God is the ground of all being, of all contingency, being itself.  How do I move from the metaphysical God to the God of religion, the God of theism? She asks an inevitable question: how is she to move from this God to worship? She is as committed to the truth, truth-telling, truth-seeking as I am. Do I simply tell her that such acts are already devotional, already an act of love, already worship? Will she simply acknowledge that the metaphysical God, the God of the philosophers already is the God of theism?

I add that God is not just the ground of being and being itself, but also the ground and condition of all other metaphysical corollaries, the transcendentals of truth, beauty and good.

She is unmoved. She wonders if I am an atheist. We have agreed to eradicate this true God from the order of being---that God is simply not the superlative being among other beings. She complains that my argument is every bit as positivistic as her own materialist dogma, even though I'm a bit more generous than that dogmatic position, granting that her reality is part of a larger more complete and intellectually honest one, one disregarded by the materialist dogma as nonsense. She liked, at first, that my reality is a patchwork quilt of many patches, and her reality was a very nice patch in the larger reality of theism. The question persists: how does one worship the 'ground of being,'  the 'ground of contingency?' She does not experience the connection between this rarefied God of our newly found common ground and the response of genuflection. She determines that our positivisms, however generous or ungenerous, are intellectually and even morally equivalent, and she retreats. I overreached.

I'm a rotten apologist. Hart might be better. Though he does not admit that his brand of metaphysics and phenomenology is positivistic, he invites an empirical approach to the God problem: while the scientific method is appropriate to investigations of the natural world, only a method of contemplation is appropriate to investigate God; or so runs his closing argument in his The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). I hesitate to recommend the book for its final diffuseness, despite clear intentions of being pointed. It's a terrible and wonderful book, with its ontology from below (he keeps directing the reader to what follows 'below') and its interesting conceits of satchidananda and a half-waking sleeper-dreamer, coming to consciousness; of course these are metaphysical conceits. Still, the book has its charms, such as its occasional fall into the abyss of the pleonastic fallacy, which Hart derides sporadically.

But what if Hart is right, that the solution to the Bazooka Joe comic from a previous post, is seeking God through a method appropriate to God's own nature? Contemplation is not the truth of God, but perhaps it is the method that steers the seeker to the proper horizon on which God makes an appearance to the seeker's experience. There is certainly a tacit nod to Jean-Luc Marion in Hart's treatise, though a formal citation is relegated to a bibliographical entry in which Marion appears in a title. Of course, Hart would have none of Marion's God without being, or the erotic phenomenon appearing in the phenomenological reduction. I imagine, though, that Hart would accept Marion's conclusions, as I find Hart's conclusions quite satisfactory even though I find his argument at times suspect.

Indeed, contemplation, in the form of Marion's neo-phenomenological reduction is proper to positioning oneself to experience God. Would that Hart worked with that method earlier in the course of his presentation. It would have braced his argument and made more palatable his generous observations, for example, of the equal wonders of beings, and of consciousness that receives, onticologically, the democracy of objects. The reality for which he argues so poignantly rings so very true, embracing as it does all knowledge and being.

Atheists say the darndest things, and so do theists.