Reading the Transfiguration: Luke 9

Reading enacts an experience of texts. One does not read oneself reading, for reading through 'distance' constitutes the very experience of reading, the very experience of placing oneself in relation to a text. In this piece I want to read one of the Synoptic versions of the Transfiguration, a theophany that in all 3 texts takes place on a mountain, or elevated space. I will not address the 'synoptic problem' but instead choose Luke because his narrative in particular sits well within my hermeneutic attitude. His problematizing, for example, 'saying' (lego) and 'seeing' (eido) precisely straddles the issues that interest me in general. Much hangs on this phrase:

μὴ εἰδὼς ὃ λέγει 



Which I read as 'he saw not what he said,' or, 'he said what he did not see.' A more general, 'he didn't realize (or know) what he was saying,' simply does not work. Words of saying and seeing complicate the play of the narrative which presents images, voices, and discussions. Luke, and what I mean by 'Luke' is a textual tradition, a tradition of textuality, not necessarily a particular human person who had something to do with the generation of this particular text we commonly call 'gospel,' the Gospel according to Luke. Luke presents the Transfiguration within a particular narrative strategy that shapes my experience of that narrative and its particular content. I will focus on what is said and seen as it structures my experience of the 'story.'

About eight days after he said this, he took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray. While he was praying his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white. And behold, two men were conversing with him, Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of his exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem. Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep, but becoming fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. As they were about to part from him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good that we are here; let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” But he did not know what he was saying. While he was still speaking, a cloud came and cast a shadow over them, and they became frightened when they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. They fell silent and did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen. [ Luke 9: 28-36, NAB]

Luke 9 is a most eventful chapter:  the commission of the 12, a snapshot of Herod, feeding the 5000, Peter's declaration of Jesus as Christ, the messianic secret, the prediction of the Resurrection, all these pericopes precede the pericope of the Transfiguration, not to mention the several that follow. For this reading, however, some narrative elements of the chapter are so decisively formative, that their texts must be given voice:

And taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. [16]

He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Messiah of God.” [20]

“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” [22]

 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words, of them the Son of Man will be ashamed [26]

Luke puts Jesus, transfigured, in conversation with Moses and Elijah, discussing what will transpire in Jerusalem (exodus). Luke directs his narrative to me alone; I read as the apostles sleep. He places me in dramatic tension with the apostles who will soon awaken. I see and therefore know what is before me before (prior to) Peter, James and John become aware of what's before them. Luke and I share an experience of a change in the appearance of Jesus' face and his garments, though from very different, irreducible perspectives (our experiences are unique). Luke shares this moment with me to enfold me into the text, to invite me into the world of the text, a world not my own but a world I see through my eyes in my world now brought into the text.

Peter awakens; does he see what I see? Luke gives me Peter's view upon 'glory.'  He sees Jesus in glory and Moses and Elijah; but he will say what he had not seen, though he clearly has seen something (μὴ εἰδὼς ὃ λέγει ). Luke delivers Jesus' visage and raiment become totally other. He guides my gaze to Moses and Elijah: behold. I see (video) what Peter does not see (eido). What I behold---imagine, see, image differs from what Peter sees, imagines, images, because Luke structures my experience so that I may see more clearly than Peter. Luke constructs Peter's experience as something familiar to me: emerging from sleep, but he disallows a state of remaining in half-sleep (diagregoreo). Fully awake, Peter might just as well have stayed asleep: allow me to paraphrase,  'How wonderful is this, all of us here together in this one place; let's pitch a few tents that we can all tarry a bit.' Peter cannot distinguish moments from minutes.


Not that I can see much more. But what I see, what Luke has given,  I cannot place within tents, tabernacles or dwellings. Luke has shown me something that has saturating, overwhelming and uncontainable effect. It has not been time enough to forget, it has not been 8 days for me---I can read and hear the words Luke gives me. What I see in the transfigured face of Jesus, bedazzling as it is, is the visage that envisages me, that transforms my gaze to see a gaze coming at me: Luke builds for me an experience that allows me to see that I am seen. Peter has no experience of this transformation as yet (he has misspoken what he saw), but Luke will give it (again) in just a moment to both Peter and to me, an experience from which we both 'see' from within the cloud, what Luke has heretofore shown me alone.


This cloud is none other than the cloud of Exodus (what Moses and Elijah speak to Jesus about, albeit a different kind of exodus for Jesus than for Israel). Peter and his companions respond with fear as they enter the cloud. Luke remains silent about their experience once in the cloud, emphasizing their experience of a frightening liminality as they pass from one world into another. Once in the cloud, they presumably hear the same voice I do, coming from the cloud.


Luke has choreographed this moment to ensure that while I hear the voice as well as Peter does, we hear from different places. I do not pass through a veil of fear to the voice as Peter must because I saw the face of Jesus in a way that Peter did not. My experience is not a liminal one: givenness comes directly through my gaze gazed upon. What is given in the cloud is the very chrismation of Jesus by the voice of God: Jesus becomes Christ: "this is my Son, my chosen: listen to him." That is, hear his words, hear the one who is himself the Word, the one who gives himself as Word, and do not be ashamed. The 'voice' as word speaks Jesus as the chosen, as the one. Initially Peter says what he does not see, even though 8 days prior he saw enough to speak Jesus as the Christ of God. As soon as this voice speaks, the phenomenality changes. The experience of that moment is over, but a counter-experience remains, as the response to the voice (unlike the face) is an appropriate silence, much like Mark's frightened women at the tomb.

The Synoptic transfiguration/theophany pericopes are the only places in the Gospels where Jesus is depicted in his divinity within narrative proper (story). In this case, Luke positions me to see the invisible made visible. Jesus becomes the icon of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), the face of God. The face is given to me first, perhaps even differently than it is given to Peter. Luke gives me what no one else is given: Peter says what he did not see: he did not see what I saw, because Luke guides me to the face as it is,  the icon, not the idol, as it is for Peter, who, stricken by the idol, offers, in his counter-experience of the idol, the 3 'images' tents to stay in. Peter mistakes what he sees as something containable, and presents the 'idolatry of the concept' in the form of dwellings, perhaps within the frame of the 'tent of meeting.' I 'see' Peter seeing the idol because Luke has shaped my experience to allow the icon to appear to me. The distance between the divine and human is commensurate to the dwellings for Peter. That he recognizes Moses and Elijah at all underscores a certain clarity in his apprehension of the images; after all, Peter speaks matter-of-factly of his understanding of these two figures, and Luke never accounts for how these figures have become Moses and Elijah for Peter, yet Peter has lost the forest for the trees. Nonetheless, because Luke has given the face to me, that distance is immense, even if I can account for its non-traversiblity only in counter-experience.

Both Peter and I have had experiences of at least two saturated phenomena. Perhaps, in silence, Peter's counter-experience is indeed of the icon: the text is silent on the matter. Luke has presented the absurdity of containing the event, the divine, which informs Peter's first experience. He does not realize what his words were saying about his experience, about what he saw: he is unaware of the 'disconnect' between seeing and saying, that is, he is unaware of the distance; he has gauged the distance in idolatry, a very forgivable idolatry.
  

I experience a unity of the voice and the face within Luke's orchestration of the event of the transfiguration pericope. This union emerges like a voice from a cloud within the relationality of the voice and the person of the one who is transfigured. After the 'event,' he was alone: ecce homo. Jesus is human, and stands with Peter as two humans stand beside one another. Luke invites me to stand with them. The event, under erasure of cloud and prophet, face-as-other and dazzlingly white raiment, begins to seep through the porosity of the silence, which can contain nothing. Luke has given the visible face of Jesus a new look, that of the other, the face of the un-seeable, invisible face of the voice of the invisible one within the cloud that closes the gap between one exodus and another. I have been made aware of the truth of the things of which I have been informed (Luke 1:4) through the narrative (diagesis).

The Apotheosis of Suffering, the Trinity and the Cross---A Lenten Reflection

Lately I have referred to the Realism that pertains to Christianity rooted in the Cross as 'Catholic' or 'Christian' Realism.  These terms are interchangeable in the tradition but I will henceforth refer only to Christian Realism to avert any confusion and to confirm that this particular kind of realism does indeed have its roots the Gospels (certainly in their literary realism) and certainly in Aquinas, in the thought of Karl Rahner, in Karl Barth and in Bernard Lonergan's critical realism which itself is within the notion of Christian Realism. While Lonergan, and the like-minded Gilson, could not be mistaken for phenomenologists, the phenomenology considered in this blog is certainly rooted in Christian Realism, and offers its own kind realism; and Marion's vision of rationality is not foreign to the rational, intelligible universe of critical realism. At the center of this deployment of phenomenology is the flesh of Christ and the mystery of the Trinity.



Whatever suffers is redeemed. Because the endurance of the hypostatic union is fundamental for Christian realism, however 'mysterious' that is, the flesh that has taken upon itself all the capriciousness of the universe, all sources of suffering, is in turn taken into the Trinity itself, where it is 'cashed in', 'redeemed', for the absolute love that is the simplicity of God, the simplicity of the processions and relations within the Godhead. Capriciousness as suffering of the flesh is suffered by the Father in the Spirit as the Logos-sarx-Anthropos suffers it--- in the flesh--- 'once and for all' on the Cross. In a sense, there is nothing left of capriciousness in the Cross; it finally disintegrates in the Father's witness of the Son's flesh. The secular theme of 'redemption through love' as it courses through Goethe, Wagner and Mahler among other perhaps equally powerful currents, has this basis of its reality, its ground in the divine simplicity of love, in this analogy from 'above.'

No horizon searches with more urgency and immediacy for the horizon of meaning than the horizon of suffering. Suffering without meaning, or the hope for meaning, is not merely hopeless; it is absurd. A world of absurdity would have it that the words 'meaningful' and 'meaningless' mean the same thing. Not that the words would be synonymous, but that the thing would be either meaningful or meaningless willy-nilly in a world constituted by something other than meaning. For Christian thinking, the world is intelligible, imbued with a real rationality, and as such commands a posture of realism. For Christianity, the world makes sense.

The horizon of suffering seems to recede, withdraw endlessly into the deepest corners of reality as if it were constituted by receding and withdrawing. Because meaning is elusive, suffering become reflective, reduplicative, overwhelmed by the aporia of distance. The elusiveness of meaning holds suffering up to a mirror, and all it can see, it seems, is itself, its blinding self, its multiplying self, a self of pure suffering, unbearable and uncontainable. The horizon of meaning, just as powerfully real, also recedes and withdraws from the reality of suffering, at least from the perspective of a receding and withdrawing suffering.

Hope, oriented toward the future, envisions the intersection of the horizons of suffering and meaning at the infinite. For Christians, this infinite becomes historical in the Cross, the instantiation of suffering and meaning, the instantiation of the union of the human and the divine in the Incarnation whose purpose takes on and dissolves suffering in itself. The horizon of meaning is always on the threshold of the multi-layered chiasmus of the reality of the Trinity, where the logos-sarx-anthropos finds its nexus with the Father-Son-Spirit. Such chiasm defies articulation, but analogy can approach its description---logos-flesh/human::logos-father:/:spirit. As suggested above, the unity of the Logos provides the nexus for the entry of the flesh into the divine oikos. The inadequacy of this model, however, is at least partially addressed, and insightfully so, by Jean-Luc Marion, for whom the intersection of horizons might involve their dissolution, or perhaps their solubility, in faith, hope and charity.

Nonetheless, the union of all suffering in the Cross as enfolded within the Incarnation and the Trinity is the paradox of Christian faith itself. If a 'lesson' emerges from the experiences of the Christian mystics, it is that while one might initially strive to unite human suffering with the Cross, one discovers that the suffering flesh is already united to Cross of Christ. To seek union is therefore to find it already accomplished. The receding horizon of suffering finds its way forward, into the future foreseen by hope, by 'backing into' signification, into meaning.

Because hope (and love, too) orients itself toward the other, its motion is interpersonal and inter-Personal, as Steinbock has noted both in his Phenomenology and Mysticism and Moral Emotions. Because, as Steinbock has explicated, the Myself is not self-grounded, the suffering in the flesh (which itself is inseparable from the Myself) cannot rest in the idol as a self-reflexive suffering might indicate as noted above. The mirror held up by elusive meaning becomes translucent as the gaze catches a glimmer of the icon whose translucency refracts the gaze to what can be found beyond the reflective surface of the idolic mirror. In order, though, to find what already rests in the icon, the flesh must discover its porosity, the points where it bleeds. This uncontainability is the event of the flesh and the event of the redemption of the flesh, both saturated phenomena par excellence.

We experience this saturation and verticality in the experience of the Church as the body of Christ. This unity of our flesh with the flesh of Christ gives the flesh its meaning at the nexus of the horizons of suffering and meaning. There is no meaning of salvation beyond this: being 'saved' is finding our flesh united in the Cross and received into divinity itself. Phenomenologically, I hope with great effort to unite the suffering of my flesh to the Cross. At first,  I experience the saturated phenomenon of the idol: I am reflected back upon my self and the horizon of meaning recedes as my hope is disappointed; and I as 'subject' attempt but fail to constitute the meaning of my own suffering. Then I experience the icon: I hope for the givenness of the Cross as it gives itself as pure gift. I become the gifted when I find the Myself (as not self-grounded) in the flesh already there in the crucified Christ, who suffered the flesh once and for all. My flesh, subsumed into the flesh of Christ, discovers its meaning in the logos-sarx-anthropos, and therefore enters into the receiving breast of the mystery of the Trinity in its ever-dancing perichoresis.

The giving way of the idol to the icon perhaps play out in the phenomenal field of the body and flesh in the temptation of Christ in the desert, the pericope that traditionally opens the Lenten season.

Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan
and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days,
to be tempted by the devil.
He ate nothing during those days,
and when they were over he was hungry.
The devil said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
command this stone to become bread.”
Jesus answered him,
“It is written, One does not live on bread alone.”
Then he took him up and showed him
all the kingdoms of the world in a single instant.
The devil said to him,
“I shall give to you all this power and glory;
for it has been handed over to me,
and I may give it to whomever I wish.
All this will be yours, if you worship me.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It is written:You shall worship the Lord, your God,
and him alone shall you serve.”
Then he led him to Jerusalem,
made him stand on the parapet of the temple, and said to him,
“If you are the Son of God,
throw yourself down from here, for it is written:He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,
and:With their hands they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”
Jesus said to him in reply,
“It also says,You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test.”
When the devil had finished every temptation,
he departed from him for a time. [Luke 4:1-13; NAB]



At each invitation to sovereignty in this world, Jesus responds with the unconditional call of God. This rejection of sovereignty presented in Christ's rejection of temptation underscores his being in the world and his not being of the world. The turning from the idol toward the icon, as the flesh suffers the thirst of the body through its mortification in the desert, structures metanoia and the turn from worldly sovereignty toward the unconditional call. This call for us comes from the completed work of Christ, from the Cross where the experience of the call does not locate a God who chooses omnipotence's flexing the power of sovereignty, but the unconditional: the saturation of divine love in the erotic reduction. All temptation offers the idol of sovereignty; in the change of heart commanded by the Lenten season that anticipates the Passion-Resurrection of Christ, Christians hearken to the pure call, to the starkly different invitation of the divine insistence to love, to redemption of the flesh and the resurrection of the body.

Such an invitation is also found in Matthew's goats and sheep, where the evangelist offers the possibility that the invisible Christ is made visible in acts of hope and love. Such transitions from the invisible to the visible share the grammar of the shift from one saturated phenomenon to another (idol to icon), as the flesh, the Myself, not grounded in the self, finds itself already grounded in the experience of the other. In this sense, the version of intertextuality finds its analogue in the Myself whose play as object and subject in its grounding in the interpersonal and inter-Personal, reveals a strange intersubjectivity, where subjects are now objects, at once recipients of givenness, hearers of the call, accused and chosen.

NT Parables as Perlocutionary Acts: A Prodigal Son Returns

I have recently begun a discussion of how Jesus' parables place their characters within a type of vision, a type of seeing, which can open upon the saturated phenomena of the idol and the icon. By identifying the parables and parabolic language as an example of Marion's 'perlocutionary act,' this NT rhetoric can enter a phenomenological moment in the erotic reduction and then the reduction to givenness. The parables become songs of love that give themselves to the 'gifted' (or perhaps the 'devoted'-to-be). I will present the well-known 'parable of the two sons' through the lens of Marion's work to demonstrate how his phenomenological approach can release the event harbored in this familiar rhetorical device of the parable.

The parable of the 'Prodigal Son,' unique to Luke's Gospel (15:11-32), contains several elements that constitute the perlocutionary act.

¹¹ Jesus continued: “There was a man who had two sons. ¹² The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
¹³ “Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. ¹⁴ After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. ¹⁵ So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. ¹⁶ He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.
¹⁷ “When he came to his senses, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! ¹⁸ I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. ¹⁹ I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants.’ ²⁰ So he got up and went to his father.
“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
²¹ “The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
²² “But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. ²³ Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. ²⁴ For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
²⁵ “Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. ²⁶ So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ²⁷ ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
²⁸ “The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. ²⁹ But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. ³⁰ But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!’
³¹ “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. ³² But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’” [NIV]




In the previous chapter (Luke 14), the evangelist had just presented a somewhat uncomfortable meal with some Pharisees in which Jesus was under intense scrutiny. At the meal, he spoke of healing on the Sabbath, and saving an ox or a child fallen in a well. His healing of someone meets silence. Who will break the tension? Finally,  "one of those at the table"(14:15, my emphasis) responds joyfully to the advice Jesus gives his host about hospitality. The grammar of the parable already leads back to what might be going on in the 'one.' Afterwards, when he is with the crowds, and again with the 'tax collectors and sinners' (Luke 15:1) Jesus discusses the needs of the one over the many (4-7; 8-9) through a reduction, and finally illustrates the event: the 'rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents' (7;10). 

The 'Prodigal Son' (through the prodigal 'one') speaks to the event of an inversion of reward, of what is due, and when it is due. In Luke 14, hospitality, outside the economy of reciprocity, had its reward in another order, the order of resurrection (Luke 14:14). The father's gift of hospitable reward in this parable is displaced from the order of expectation. Here, a change of heart is a matter of life and death, and a 'coming-back-to life' warrants the event of celebration and rejoicing. The father's hospitality can in no manner require reciprocity, for the prodigal has nothing because of his sin against God and his father (15:19;21).

Marion's own reading of this Lucan pericope focuses on property (and indirectly, expectataion) as instantiation of ousia (15:12-13). While his task in God Without Being is to displace metaphysics and being itself, he links the displacement of ousia with property in the prodigal's demand for cold cash (pp. 95-100). This is precisely how ousia works parabolically: as expectation, great expectations (pace Dickens and Pip), and an eye that looks to dispose of an inheritance. Indeed, a large portion of the family goods and property, translated into currency, is disposed of rather quickly as the very ousia that brackets itself into epoche is dissipated. These great expectations are the same for both sons, though one seems to prefer to wait a bit longer for the will to be read, even if he will complain that a little breaking of the family treasure would be welcome.

The second displacement of expectation begins in the fascinating verse in which the father recognizes his son from a distance. Makran (μακρὰν) often suggests very great distance (especially as it is appears in Luke-Acts) that would make such a recognition difficult, yet here it seems to describe a running distance, though a parabolic running distance. Given the situation, the father might not recognize his son, for example, by some article of clothing, as the son has become destitute, disfigured by ousia. He must have looked to the horizon every day in hope that his son would come over it so poised and ready he was to receive that moment, that gift; and so he does recognize him---see him--- from afar as his son returned, returned from the dead. Through overflowing emotions of hope and joy masked as a 'gut feeling,' esplangchnisthe, (ἐσπλαγχνίσθη), the prodigal son comes into view. Seduced by the very horizon of love, the father is overwhelmed, overcome in his very bowels, which constitute his reception of the gift that is the his son brought into being through love: the father's expectant hope and love produces the appearance of his lost son on the horizon of love---he comes into view as love pulls him into existence, from the dead into new life and new being. The existential horizon of the parable (itself pulled into being by love), the horizon of being and the horizon of love meet in the event.

Premonition or very good vision brings a saturated phenomenon into the experience of not only the father but also the auditor of the story. The devoted 'gifted' sees the 'return' as metanoia, and therefore as iconic. Clearly this is not the only response, as the older son responds with incredulity and perplexed anger. The splendor of his robed and ringed brother presents to his gaze as the bedazzling idol of ousia, and reflects his gaze back onto himself, and only onto his own bedazzled perception of deprivation and an experience of injustice. He presents his brother to his father as 'this son of yours' as not only a disowned brother, but as the faceless other, a face defaced and erased by wanton living and sin against the father. The elder brother still sees the younger as 'dead' and not 'alive again.' Metanoia is invisible to him, and his gaze has foreclosed on the icon that presents an offer, an unconditional gift, to see him---that he be seen by a change of heart, that a change of heart sees him as the accused direct object of the 'to see,' the refracted gaze bending back, leading back, toward him. The father says, in effect, 'look at yourself, everything you see is yours.' He then reorients his elder son toward the icon, inverting the elder son's rhetoric of distance and expectation: "this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found." The father directs his elder son to the face of the [br]other. In this reading, ousia can ride behind the chant of love, at least for a time, a time for celebration and the fatted calf. Ousia is reborn and rewritten after the song of the parable is sung, and love has uttered its lyric. Being always follows love.

The parable has therefore the same rhetorical thrust, the same perlocutionary (performative) action as the parable of the sheep and goats. It is an invitation to placing the self within view of metanoia, the pure gift, and within the phenomenological moment that releases the event of seeing the face of the other in love, with a gut feeling of compassion that sees the other viscerally, that sees the other as if it were within its very flesh, as if the gaze were coming from that flesh. This self is not only the self of  the elder brother who receives the invitation to the icon, but to Jesus' hearers of his words, those who stand in relation to the parable and its actors.

The Play of Icon and Idol among the Sheep and Goats: What is Seen and Unseen in the Kingdom of Heaven

³¹ “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. ³² All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. ³³ He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
³⁴ “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. ³⁵ For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, ³⁶ I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
³⁷ “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? ³⁸ When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? ³⁹ When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
⁴⁰ “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
⁴¹ “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. ⁴² For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, ⁴³ I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
⁴⁴ “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
⁴⁵ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
⁴⁶ “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” [Matt. 25:31-46, NIV]




I have commented on this passage recently, in light of John Caputo's recent presentation at Peter Rollins' Belfast bash in April 2015. In this post, I would like to pursue how vision, the gaze, works in a dialectic of Marion's saturated phenomena of the idol and icon. The gaze upon either phenomenon leads to bedazzlement, as such phenomena cannot be grasped within the intuition, nor can the intention take aim. Instead, these saturated phenomena saturate the gaze, the intuition, and overcome the receiving self. The idol reflects the gaze so overwhelmingly that the self is overcome by its own reflection; the icon refracts the gaze and overcomes the self not with its own reflection but by bending back toward the self which is itself now seen.


The phenomenological reduction of Matthew's parable of the sheep and goats takes a good amount of air out of the tires of the 'muscle car' that drives the receptions of the inheritance of the sheep and the punishment of the goats. By collapsing the glory, the assembled nations, the seat of judgment, and the economy of reward and punishment (25:31-32; 46), we are left with an animal farm whose versions of vision release the event (25:34-45). The Matthean Jesus has already spoken of the parables and of vision:




¹³ This is why I speak to them in parables:

“Though seeing, they do not see;
    though hearing, they do not hear or understand.

¹⁴ In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:

“‘You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
    you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.
¹⁵ For this people’s heart has become calloused;
    they hardly hear with their ears,
    and they have closed their eyes.
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
    hear with their ears,
    understand with their hearts
and turn, and I would heal them.’

¹⁶ But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear. ¹⁷ For truly I tell you, many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it. [Matt. 13: 13-17, NIV]

The hermeneutics of the parable is the self coming to a new heart in metanoia. Jesus places quite a premium on the breaking or softening of a thickened, hardened heart. In these lines of Matt. 13, Jesus invites his audience to don Isaiah's healing lenses.



"When did we see you," say the sheep and goats to the Lord. What is seen and unseen depends on whether one sees through Isaiah's eyes or other eyes. Some eyes discern the idol and others, the icon. Neither the sheep nor the goats saw the Lord in the face of the other, yet the sheep respond to something, a call, heard or unheard, that haunts the face of  the other: they act upon something insisting, bringing something into existence. The sheep see the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger iconically. The Lord, though invisible to them, is made visible in the event of their acts of mercy. The light of the other shines upon them, and they are seen by something in the face of the other. They act from their very selves opened up and emptied to receive---in a play of kenosis and apophasis---an unconditional call, a pure call and pure gift. The sheep grow a pair of eyes in the newness of their emerging selves, which are now poised to respond to the phenomenality of the self of the given.


The goats are also overwhelmed; they, too, ask 'when did we see you?' But here, the hungry, the thirsty and the stranger remain invisible in the glaring, bedazzling light of the idol. Their vision is blinded by the gaze reflected back upon them. They do not see the other, but merely a version of themselves that never enters the flesh of the other. The goats are not seen; no light shines upon them, as so they are left in the dark, clueless that they have missed the appearance of the invisible Lord and a opportunity to make visible the invisible. They do not hear the call because they do not see the hungry, the thirsty and the stranger, even though could speak about them matter-of-factly. It was not only the Lord that was invisible to the goats, but their brother in the other, their selves before the selves of a phenomenality that never enters experience.


Do goats therefore diminish the saturated phenomenon to mere object, or an impoverished phenomenon? Shall we reframe the story like this: when phenomenology sits on its throne of judgment it will separate the see-ers of saturated and poor phenomena, gather all the universities and churches, and take them to task for mistaking phenomena for mere objects. There is something to this preposterousness. Whether we privilege the given which gives itself unconditionally, or the recipient whose gaze is constituted by givenness, such a phenomenology invites hierarchy on either side of the phenomenological moment. Are all saturated phenomena 'better' than less saturated phenomena? Are the selves within the given ordered to degrees of givenness? Are some 'gifteds' more gifted than other 'gifteds': are some recipients better prepared than others to have their selves opened and replenished? Are there degrees of negative capability, of the gaze to see?


The economy of the gift that outrages Caputo in the natural reading of  the frame of Matt. 25:31-46 is either read through the play of the icon and idol, animal and flesh of the stranger or it is not. If it is, then it plays out in the justice-to-come. The acts of mercy visited upon the hungry by the sheep, do not seem to be visited upon the goats by the king. Yet, in the kingdom, the mood is subjunctive, not performative. Verses 41 and 46, viewed from the icon, do not condemn, but warn and invite. If we translate 41 as "continue, if you like, on the path (πορεύεσθε) of the idol, to the fire prepared for the devil and his angels," then it is an invitation to metanoia, a change of heart, and an opening of the vision past the idol into the icon. Similarly, v. 46 depicts a choice between the idol and the icon, a choice between penalty (κόλασιν) and life. 


Thematically, the sheeps and goats follow the virgins with their oil and the servants with their talents. The kingdom is suddenly upon all of them, and they all get an invitation to life. Parabolically, the king that separates the animals according to the flesh does so with the same voice as the Lord of the wedding banquet (25:11) and the master of the servants (25:19). Silly virgins and judgmental servants are invited on the same journey as the goats of the idol. Unless their fates are sealed in a divine predestination, sealed off against hope, sealed off from metanoia, a crossroads awaits them all.


Finally, all parables in the NT demand the erotic reduction that opens unto these crossroads. Despite the disconcerting content of some, especially those in Matt. 25, they are prayerful and non-judgmental; they are loving. Neither performative (in the Austin/Searle sense) or declarative speech acts, their subjunctive moods create the mood for their "perlocutionary" acts. Indeed, Marion has given us a remarkable means for evaluating the event of parables in his discussion on the discourse of love in "What Cannot be Said" (The Visible and the Revealed, Fordham Univ. Pr., 2008, 110-118). "The perlocutionary act produces its effect...beyond the dictum...to overwhelm, and possibly seduce someone...[P]erlocutionary acts prove to be nonconventional...it is difficult to say where convention begins or ends...I can predict this effect" (111-12). Conventional parables and other parabolic locutions, acts of love all, are the perlocutionary acts that dictate their own hermeneutics. The event of love harbored in each parable receives its voice between the voice of their speakers and their hearers; for in the song of the parables, seeing is a way of loving, and loving is a way of knowing. Both are food for the heart, the food of love that moves it to metanoia. If such music be the food of love, play on.

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.