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,

References for John 2:1

• Cross References

• 12:1 - Jn 4:46 ; 21:2
• 22:1 - S Mt 12:46

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."

 

References for John 2:4

• Cross References

• 32:4 - Jn 19:26
• 42:4 - S Mt 8:29
• 52:4 - S Mt 26:18 ; Jn 7:6

His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

 

 

References for John 2:5

• Cross References

• 62:5 - Ge 41:55

Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.

References for John 2:6

• Cross References
• Footnotes

• 72:6 - Mk 7:3,4 ; Jn 3:25

• a2:6 - Greek "two to three metretes" (probably about 75 to 115 liters)

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,

                             

References for John 2:9

• Cross References

• 82:9 - Jn 4:46

"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.

 

 

Again, Reshith: Analogy and Oscillation

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.

The Dilemma of Causation

I immediately regretted posting my last piece, "Creation without Causality." Part of my dilemma is that I found myself playing in metaphysical categories I simply dislike, either because I lack the depth of understanding necessary to navigate them or because they are simply and inherently unnavigable from my seat on the postmodern bark. Perhaps the problem is that I've overtaxed the quantum trope, and I find myself trapped in language.

Do we really need to recover the angelic doctor when speaking of causality? Can we speak of causality with a relative casualness unthinkable within classical metaphysics? In my attempt to interrogate the relationality that inheres in creatio ex nihilo I tried to sidestep the little storm brewed in Robert Barron's recent lecture, the rogue waves of Thomistic causal series per se and per accidens (with their unspoken attendant bugaboos of instrumentality and simultaneity, in light of causes in esse and causes in fieri). I simply wanted to focus on a pure intellect, a pure will, a pure act---God---and how a relation can come to be without God entering the cosmic order that comes about in the relation of the beginning: reshith. 

The issue of relationality struck me as essential to the discussion of creation and the 'creative causality.' What if the creation is a single unified act of God from which conservation and concurrence cannot be dissected out and dogmatized? An utterly simple God would seem to create in such a way: by loving the other into existence from no thing, in such a way that no causal nexus plays a role. The quantum trope opens the apophatic place for such a serene creatio ex nihilo: creation by the instantaneous unity of thought at the very ground of being with its object appearing in the horizon of being. The relationality that begets beings (creatures) is of the continuity of the entanglement between being and its ground. Quantum simultaneity is not quite identical with metaphysical simultaneity. Creation then is not merely the bringing into being of a thought but of an eternal grounding 
(and this notion includes conserving and concurring) of everything brought into existence by fiat, by which we mean the analogical saying of the word: the entangled turn from the Real to the Symbolic and Imaginary registers of reality (for those of a more Lacanian stripe). 

 The idea of a creation without causality subverts Thomistic metaphysics as it attempts to free God from any occasion of entering any series of causality. Because we (post)moderns tend not to think of causality systematically at all, we miss out on the beautiful and treacherous formal and final causes that flesh out a robust Aristotelian/Thomistic theory of reality. To some thinkers this is a tragedy that explains an impoverishment of modern intellectual endeavors; to others it frees up scientific method to make progress without getting bogged down in pursuits it can barely conceive and can simply not gain access. Science is far less concerned with purposes and the conditions of intelligibility than it is with the concrete objects of purposeful investigation. As such, it would seem that the delimited metaphysics that currently rules scientific views of the world forecloses on a reality that is far more robust than they can comfortably accommodate.

Creation without Causality

Fr. Robert Barron may have given his most cogent and sustained presentation of what serious theists mean by God in a recent lecture at the University of St. Thomas. The discussion is essentially Thomistic, and addresses the serious matters of the metaphysical problem, the search for God on the horizon of being, and 'creative causality.' His foil for the lecture is the thesis of the 'new atheists,' that God is a delusion without evidence on the plane of reality. His point of departure is that the new atheists are 'right' in their assertion that God is not some hyper-being among other beings. He then launches into the body of Thomas's metaphysics.

Barron points out that God is not simply the first cause of things that exist on the plane of Being, instead locating God as the condition and ground of being itself and as such within a concept of special 'creative causality.' This approach is provocative because, as we all know, causes are physical; and for God to be a cause in a chain of causality within the horizon of Being, God would have to be physical and therefore an entity within the created order---something he clearly is not. So, Barron Thomistically locates God outside the created order as the 'creative causality.' The maneuver, deft as it is, defies the conceptual space of Thomas's metaphysics, and so we make sense of this localization as nonlocality---within the trope of quantum mechanics where causality is problematic.

Neither Barron nor, of course, Aquinas, is able to articulate the impossible construct here, namely that 'creative causality' is tantamount to creation without causality. The metaphysical claims for God play elegantly in this scenario: actus purus, the inseparability of God's will from his knowledge and love, etc. The notion of nonlocality in the quantum trope provides the conceptual space for such metaphysical categories to play out within the relation between God and creation. Nonlocality allows for both the instantaneous, simultaneous thought of God and the  appearance of creation, thereby dispensing with causality, for cause and effect as we understand these terms dissolve within the simultaneity of the events of thought and creation (if 2 events occur simultaneously there can be no physical cause and effect between the 2 events).

Barron spends some time on creation as a relation in which something new appears. The relation can be thought of in terms of synchronicity, as non-causal coincidences nonetheless involved in the will, in this case, the will of God. Such a concept does not advance the idea of an ex nihilo creation, if by nihilo we mean the absence of properties. I am admittedly so outside the pale of the Tradition and transgressing the border into heterodoxy here, I might as well continue with my idea of reshith as pertaining to nihilo.

Reshith is the ante-tehomic (but still female) locale of Thomas's creation, the relationality that brings about the new. Thomas does not have the language to describe a relation without a cause, so he must make a distinction between creative and physical causality. Reshith is outside the creature of timespace, yet a 'place' for the relation between God and the 'nothing' to bring forth creation. "B'reshith God created the heavens and the earth." The language here can only be analogical, and so reshith is where God stands when he creates.

This synthesis will not please many: Barron, I presume will reject it out of hand as it dispenses with causality; the quantum physicists (even though they would concede I am using quantum theory as a trope) , I presume will reject it out of hand because reshith smacks too much of the 'quantum vacuum,' which (I can already hear them saying) is far from 'nothing.' I respond to them both: a trope is a trope, and it lets ideas play out in a safe space. In this case, quantum mechanics has allowed relationality to appear without causality, causality to be uncoupled from creation, and implicitly allow God's will, thought, love to appear in relation to the other---the other for whom God's own good is willed.

Have at it.