Showing posts with label reshith. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reshith. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 1, 2015
World Enough and Time: Emmanuel Falque on the Flesh
In The Metamorphosis of Finitude, Falque presents the flesh as always bearing traces of finitude (152). Indeed, we carry "indestructibly" within us both 'immanence and temporality.' I interpret Falque to mean here a necessary return to ourselves (in the flesh), regardless of our projects. Though he roundly rejects, in a rather spectacular way, Nietzsche's 'eternal recurrence' in favor of a rehabilitated 'resurrection,' Falque always seems to be suggesting that we always end up where we start, though we are transformed, transfigured and metamorphosed. It's almost as if, when we go to grandmother's house for Sunday dinner, as if when we leave at a certain time and traverse a certain space, that is, when we live through a time and a travelled distance, arrive, and then repeat in reverse, we never really left, at least not without a trace of never having left.
What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from. And every phrase
And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together)
Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph.[...]
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well... ('Little Gidding,' Four Quartets, V, TS Eliot)
Falque's reduction certainly leads us back, perhaps to the beginning, however transformed; perhaps to the historical critical bodily resurrection (e.g., R. Brown, J. Fitzmyer, etc.); perhaps to Stanley Kubrick's 'star-child'.
The metamorphosis of finitude begins and ends in finitude, and traces the resurrection of the flesh to traces of finitude finally transformed and transfigured. This flesh in MF is of a piece with the flesh in the work of Michel Henry (see CM Gschwandtner's Postmodern Apologetics? "Michel Henry: A God of Truth and Life" as well as her Degrees of Givenness) and Jean-Luc Marion. This "phenomenology of birth"... is a "way of talking about our resurrected relation to mankind as well as to ourselves" (128). We are born in the flesh in the world and in time, even in our worlding of our world. It is interesting that even here Falque avoids the flesh as a saturated phenomenon as overwhelming 'relationality;' yet as he argues, such avoidance is not a contradiction, but as a strategy to be taken as complementary (19).
There is world enough and time for the flesh, a lived body. That is a central point in the argument of MF. In order for a phenomenology of the resurrection to ensue, a commitment must be made to what is resurrected. And, if I may resurrect a concept that enjoyed some currency in this blog not so long ago, reshith also entails resurrection as a substrate in the creation. "The resurrection...must be placed...as the transcendental condition of every entry into Christianity...There is no (Christian) creation outside this new creation..."(24).
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
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 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.
Thursday, April 16, 2015
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.
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.
Sunday, March 1, 2015
Conformation and other Chaosmic Accidents
Proteins fold, enfold and unfold. And fold again. complicatio, explicatio, implicatio.
The theme of folding, unfolding and differentiated entanglement runs though Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep, and (its redux) Cloud of the Impossible. Nicholas of Cusa turns out to have been a very tehomic thinker.
Precisely what the ruach Elohim is doing over the face of tehom is the stuff of the mystic. It vibrates, oscillates, flutters (Deep, 232); as I have suggested recently in this blog, it osculates, too.
That the universe, space-time (what I have called solid time) might be 'folded' makes astrophysicists yawn and poets dream. Whatever Elohim had begun in reshith, the universe seems to continue to do: creative calisthenics. If I may paraphrase Lacan ("The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious"), the universe is structured like a protein in a living organism.
Hemoglobin, the good stuff in blood, is a complex protein molecule whose function is determined by the way its proteins fold and unfold to deliver oxygen to tissues (to quote the great American sage Yogi Berra, 'you can look it up in a book'). The iron-containing 'heme' group at the center of it all, oscillates in and out of its plane, picking up and dropping off air, breath, ruach, pneuma, spirit. The mechanism is so beautiful, so elegant, the only space in which a viewer can rejoice and express her joy is apophatic, the 'third space' of spirit and negative capability. I am really not going to discuss the quarternary structure of hemoglobin or any pulchritudinous polypeptides any further. I will, though, partake of the theopoetics of the via negativa of a living universe, whose entanglements with our deepest being bring us into the fold: enfolding, unfolding and implicating us in its deepest being: relationality.
The Cusanian theme that winds-down Face of the Deep revs- up Cloud of the Impossible, and for good reason. Keller's theopoetics presents the apophatic space in the living, breathing entanglements of the relationality of a rhythmic and ongoing creation of the world. Karl Rahner's notion of the hearer who can approach the 'absolute mystery that is God' only asymptotically finds a safe place to land in Keller's gymnastic relationality. Rahner's ontotheology is supple enough, tehomic enough, to adopt a conformation within a thorough-going process of transforming, creative relational attitudes in the chaosmic entanglements predicated of Cusanian creative 'unknowing,' docta ignorantia.
In the self-organizing process of the world, the oscillation between tehom and elohim, complication and explication, creates...Creation begins--continually--in this relation, this incipient incarnation...[And] that relation, "the relation of relations," may be called the implication of the spirit of God...[T]his spirit will not transcend or obliterate differences; rather differences are intensified precisely by being brought into relation. So the third capacity thus signifies the relationality itself... [Such] a definition sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit of the classical trinity (Deep, 232).
If I may paraphrase Rahner, the Trinity we experience is the Trinity that is. We learn in the 2012 film, Cloud Atlas, that our lives are not our own, that we are entangled in the past, present and future, in space and time, in a forever of reshith, a repetition of fluttering tehom, in an apophatic space of the Spirit, where we inhale and exhale inseparably within the divine insistence of intersecting planes of living.
The pneumatological reduction of Keller's strategy tends to enlarge the role of the third Person as it attempts to magnify the 'third capacity' within the divine perichoresis. I do not think she has collapsed the 'classical trinity' into Spirit, something that Roger Haight was accused of doing in his Jesus: Symbol of God . Instead, I think she has identified an analogical platform in language itself that provides a view to what is happening when ruach elohim shimmers above the deep in order to allow the release of the event. In retrospect, I think it is pretty clear that Haight was doing the same thing, though in language felt by some to be far more metaphysically threatening. But I digress.
There are no doctrinal issues for the Catholic understanding of Trinity in Keller's work. The very processions and relations of trinitarian theology come to life in Keller's work in wonderful and unexpected ways. That we could not really see it coming on the horizon of the deep speaks to the eventive instincts embedded in her process theology.
I personally come very late to the party when it comes to the remarkable theological gestures inaugurated by Caputo, Zizek, Keller, Marion, Levinas, Deleuze, and countless others. The speculative realists and object oriented on[tic]tologists have in their own way taken a theological turn in the turn away from the theological turn, in their response to Derrida and his disciples. The entanglements between the new realists and theopoetics are still to be elucidated. Things always seem to be on the verge of getting interesting. It is my hope that I have contributed the chaosmic accidents of proteins, hemoglobin and the view of the universe as something like an organism to the entanglements that Erwin Schroedinger so long ago anticipated. The cat, it seems, will simply not stay in the bag.
The chaosmos is quite a bit tent, too, you know.
The theme of folding, unfolding and differentiated entanglement runs though Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep, and (its redux) Cloud of the Impossible. Nicholas of Cusa turns out to have been a very tehomic thinker.
Precisely what the ruach Elohim is doing over the face of tehom is the stuff of the mystic. It vibrates, oscillates, flutters (Deep, 232); as I have suggested recently in this blog, it osculates, too.
That the universe, space-time (what I have called solid time) might be 'folded' makes astrophysicists yawn and poets dream. Whatever Elohim had begun in reshith, the universe seems to continue to do: creative calisthenics. If I may paraphrase Lacan ("The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious"), the universe is structured like a protein in a living organism.
Hemoglobin, the good stuff in blood, is a complex protein molecule whose function is determined by the way its proteins fold and unfold to deliver oxygen to tissues (to quote the great American sage Yogi Berra, 'you can look it up in a book'). The iron-containing 'heme' group at the center of it all, oscillates in and out of its plane, picking up and dropping off air, breath, ruach, pneuma, spirit. The mechanism is so beautiful, so elegant, the only space in which a viewer can rejoice and express her joy is apophatic, the 'third space' of spirit and negative capability. I am really not going to discuss the quarternary structure of hemoglobin or any pulchritudinous polypeptides any further. I will, though, partake of the theopoetics of the via negativa of a living universe, whose entanglements with our deepest being bring us into the fold: enfolding, unfolding and implicating us in its deepest being: relationality.
The Cusanian theme that winds-down Face of the Deep revs- up Cloud of the Impossible, and for good reason. Keller's theopoetics presents the apophatic space in the living, breathing entanglements of the relationality of a rhythmic and ongoing creation of the world. Karl Rahner's notion of the hearer who can approach the 'absolute mystery that is God' only asymptotically finds a safe place to land in Keller's gymnastic relationality. Rahner's ontotheology is supple enough, tehomic enough, to adopt a conformation within a thorough-going process of transforming, creative relational attitudes in the chaosmic entanglements predicated of Cusanian creative 'unknowing,' docta ignorantia.
In the self-organizing process of the world, the oscillation between tehom and elohim, complication and explication, creates...Creation begins--continually--in this relation, this incipient incarnation...[And] that relation, "the relation of relations," may be called the implication of the spirit of God...[T]his spirit will not transcend or obliterate differences; rather differences are intensified precisely by being brought into relation. So the third capacity thus signifies the relationality itself... [Such] a definition sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit of the classical trinity (Deep, 232).
If I may paraphrase Rahner, the Trinity we experience is the Trinity that is. We learn in the 2012 film, Cloud Atlas, that our lives are not our own, that we are entangled in the past, present and future, in space and time, in a forever of reshith, a repetition of fluttering tehom, in an apophatic space of the Spirit, where we inhale and exhale inseparably within the divine insistence of intersecting planes of living.
The pneumatological reduction of Keller's strategy tends to enlarge the role of the third Person as it attempts to magnify the 'third capacity' within the divine perichoresis. I do not think she has collapsed the 'classical trinity' into Spirit, something that Roger Haight was accused of doing in his Jesus: Symbol of God . Instead, I think she has identified an analogical platform in language itself that provides a view to what is happening when ruach elohim shimmers above the deep in order to allow the release of the event. In retrospect, I think it is pretty clear that Haight was doing the same thing, though in language felt by some to be far more metaphysically threatening. But I digress.
There are no doctrinal issues for the Catholic understanding of Trinity in Keller's work. The very processions and relations of trinitarian theology come to life in Keller's work in wonderful and unexpected ways. That we could not really see it coming on the horizon of the deep speaks to the eventive instincts embedded in her process theology.
I personally come very late to the party when it comes to the remarkable theological gestures inaugurated by Caputo, Zizek, Keller, Marion, Levinas, Deleuze, and countless others. The speculative realists and object oriented on[tic]tologists have in their own way taken a theological turn in the turn away from the theological turn, in their response to Derrida and his disciples. The entanglements between the new realists and theopoetics are still to be elucidated. Things always seem to be on the verge of getting interesting. It is my hope that I have contributed the chaosmic accidents of proteins, hemoglobin and the view of the universe as something like an organism to the entanglements that Erwin Schroedinger so long ago anticipated. The cat, it seems, will simply not stay in the bag.
The chaosmos is quite a bit tent, too, you know.
Saturday, February 28, 2015
In the Merry Old Land of Uz
Ha, ha, ha
Ho, ho, ho
And a couple of tra - la - las
That's how we laugh the day away
In the Merry Old Land of Oz
Uz.
It's where Job is from.
Idea for a 3 Stooges short:
It starts out merry, and ends up merry (all's well that ends well); but in this tale the boys meet a man named Job and all hell breaks loose.
Title: A Job's a Job, but that ain't my Job
Moe, Larry and Curly play Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar (they are affectionately called Eli, Bil and Zo in our treatment). I'm wondering if this should really be a Shemp. I'll leave it to casting.
Closing scene (theme music): Eli, Bil and Zo riding into the sunset on Leviathan, who's spurting out sparks and fire from his mouth and nostrils as the boys squeal wo-wo-wo-wo-wo.
Cut. Print.
***********************************************************
The Book of Job presents a problem of genre. Wise people place it among the Wisdom literature. But there is nothing in the Wisdom literature that contains this level of burlesque. God and [the]Satan, the one not so bright, the other a cunning knave, conjure several challenges for an unflappable Job. This is the stuff of comedy: financial catastrophe, violent death, horrific disease. God and [the]Satan--just what will those guys come up with next?
The standard reading of the book emphasizes the inscrutable knowledge, power, will of the Lord, and the smallness of human comprehension in the face of such a Lord. This reading is known as 'theodicy,' from the Greek roots, theos and dike, God and justice: God's justice. But what justice is this that abuses Job to show [the]Satan, the mischief-maker, just how just Job is?
Job never asks God to justify himself (he does ask audaciously for an explanation, but this never rise to the level of theodicy). He wonders what he or his family could have done to deserve such divine wrath, but cannot discover any guilt. Job wishes he had never lived, and he despairs in his profound loss and unspeakable suffering.
Job receives visits from his 'friends' who heighten his suffering through their presentation of traditional belief in retributive 'justice.' Talk about salt in the wounds. Job is grief-stricken beyond human endurance, though he does indeed endure. There must be something to Job's complaint, as the whirlwind appears, and God himself enters the fray. But this is not the Yahweh who held court in the opening lines of our text. This is no blow-hard: at this climax of the comic opera, we do not get the pompous ass promised in the overture. We do indeed get the inscrutable God.
Job 38 contains some of the most magnificent poetry in the library we call 'the bible.' Yehovah, speaking in his own name, recapitulates the beauty and terror of creation. Beginning in the cosmic order, God recounts the architecture of the world, all phenomena visible and invisible, the sentient and non-sentient universe. God underscores Job's absence from the terrible beauty of the world, from the dew to the fiery breath of Leviathan. Job, of course, acknowledges his absence from the events of creation and the reality of the created world (40:4-5). Finally, God humiliates Job with the imagery of Behemoth, the river horse hung like, well, a horse. Completely broken, Job surrenders to mystery of the world and its creator (42:2-6). Still, God makes Job present to the process of creation in the redux: he is made present to his absence, and present to a slightly widened aperture upon the wonders of the world. Job therefore retreats to a more strategic place, the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance of apophatic space that, as Catherine Keller has pointed out in her Cloud of the Impossible, Nicholas of Cusa will carve out from the infinity of God.
None of God's words address Job's complaint. There is no explanation for the capricious treatment visited upon Job's existence. God does not want to speak to the suffering he has allowed to be inflicted on his servant. God changes the subject[ivity] into intersubjectivity. Job gets a tour of the universe, and receives final vindication for his investigations; his friends are convicted for their 'theodicies,' pay their retribution to Job, and in good comic fashion, Job is restored to his rightful place in the land of Uz.
All's well that ends well.
The traditional reading of Job will forever stand in its incoherence. The farcical elements of this book, its dark and dreaded humor, have no place amongst the so-called 'wisdom literature.' Job is sui generis, a comedy bordering on a satyr play that breaks the tension of a full day at the amphitheater.
The book's 3 stooges want to make the matter one of theodicy. God and Job want it to be one of growing closeness between the human and the divine. God gives no answer to Job's suffering because there is no answer. But Job's restoration to even greater existence and fulfillment is telling. Is it just that some redactor couldn't stomach some original version of the text where Job simply dies of grief and disease? I think not. Job is about the reality of the horrors of life, the ugliness embedded within a good world. These things cause immense suffering, but they are generated within a world made with intelligibility and integrity. The restoration is something of a resurrection for Job, an allotment of more time, of more sacred space. The apophatic position is the winner in this comedy, and this deepening relationship between God and Job comes to fulfillment in another act of creation, of reshith. 'Where were you' becomes you are with me. The times of presence and absence blur into something new moving into another horizon.
The answer to Job is the Christ-event. I am with you always until the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). God comes to man as man, and interdigitates his nature with the human. Why do we suffer in this world? God says I suffer with you. There are no more Jobs after Christ because such Jobs will have their answer before they even ask: the Cross of forsaken suffering witnessed in the first person by God. So where is the consolation in that? It is no consolation at all if such forsaken suffering stays on the Cross. The insistence from the Cross is a call from a distance to the hearer of the message. It is an invitation to release the event of love in the presence to the Other, a presence of human contact. Job's restoration is his contact with the divine. Suffering asks us to knock on the door of the neighbor who suffers. Visit, stay awhile. That is sacred time and sacred space. Solid time: reshith. It doesn't make suffering less painful, or less mysterious. It does make it a little less incomprehensible, in a learned ignorance kind of way. And it may lighten the burden of suffering by sharing in its presence through presence, for a sacred moment.
Ho, ho, ho
And a couple of tra - la - las
That's how we laugh the day away
In the Merry Old Land of Oz
Uz.
It's where Job is from.
Idea for a 3 Stooges short:
It starts out merry, and ends up merry (all's well that ends well); but in this tale the boys meet a man named Job and all hell breaks loose.
Title: A Job's a Job, but that ain't my Job
Moe, Larry and Curly play Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar (they are affectionately called Eli, Bil and Zo in our treatment). I'm wondering if this should really be a Shemp. I'll leave it to casting.
Closing scene (theme music): Eli, Bil and Zo riding into the sunset on Leviathan, who's spurting out sparks and fire from his mouth and nostrils as the boys squeal wo-wo-wo-wo-wo.
Cut. Print.
***********************************************************
The Book of Job presents a problem of genre. Wise people place it among the Wisdom literature. But there is nothing in the Wisdom literature that contains this level of burlesque. God and [the]Satan, the one not so bright, the other a cunning knave, conjure several challenges for an unflappable Job. This is the stuff of comedy: financial catastrophe, violent death, horrific disease. God and [the]Satan--just what will those guys come up with next?
The standard reading of the book emphasizes the inscrutable knowledge, power, will of the Lord, and the smallness of human comprehension in the face of such a Lord. This reading is known as 'theodicy,' from the Greek roots, theos and dike, God and justice: God's justice. But what justice is this that abuses Job to show [the]Satan, the mischief-maker, just how just Job is?
Job never asks God to justify himself (he does ask audaciously for an explanation, but this never rise to the level of theodicy). He wonders what he or his family could have done to deserve such divine wrath, but cannot discover any guilt. Job wishes he had never lived, and he despairs in his profound loss and unspeakable suffering.
Job receives visits from his 'friends' who heighten his suffering through their presentation of traditional belief in retributive 'justice.' Talk about salt in the wounds. Job is grief-stricken beyond human endurance, though he does indeed endure. There must be something to Job's complaint, as the whirlwind appears, and God himself enters the fray. But this is not the Yahweh who held court in the opening lines of our text. This is no blow-hard: at this climax of the comic opera, we do not get the pompous ass promised in the overture. We do indeed get the inscrutable God.
Job 38 contains some of the most magnificent poetry in the library we call 'the bible.' Yehovah, speaking in his own name, recapitulates the beauty and terror of creation. Beginning in the cosmic order, God recounts the architecture of the world, all phenomena visible and invisible, the sentient and non-sentient universe. God underscores Job's absence from the terrible beauty of the world, from the dew to the fiery breath of Leviathan. Job, of course, acknowledges his absence from the events of creation and the reality of the created world (40:4-5). Finally, God humiliates Job with the imagery of Behemoth, the river horse hung like, well, a horse. Completely broken, Job surrenders to mystery of the world and its creator (42:2-6). Still, God makes Job present to the process of creation in the redux: he is made present to his absence, and present to a slightly widened aperture upon the wonders of the world. Job therefore retreats to a more strategic place, the docta ignorantia, the learned ignorance of apophatic space that, as Catherine Keller has pointed out in her Cloud of the Impossible, Nicholas of Cusa will carve out from the infinity of God.
None of God's words address Job's complaint. There is no explanation for the capricious treatment visited upon Job's existence. God does not want to speak to the suffering he has allowed to be inflicted on his servant. God changes the subject[ivity] into intersubjectivity. Job gets a tour of the universe, and receives final vindication for his investigations; his friends are convicted for their 'theodicies,' pay their retribution to Job, and in good comic fashion, Job is restored to his rightful place in the land of Uz.
All's well that ends well.
The traditional reading of Job will forever stand in its incoherence. The farcical elements of this book, its dark and dreaded humor, have no place amongst the so-called 'wisdom literature.' Job is sui generis, a comedy bordering on a satyr play that breaks the tension of a full day at the amphitheater.
The book's 3 stooges want to make the matter one of theodicy. God and Job want it to be one of growing closeness between the human and the divine. God gives no answer to Job's suffering because there is no answer. But Job's restoration to even greater existence and fulfillment is telling. Is it just that some redactor couldn't stomach some original version of the text where Job simply dies of grief and disease? I think not. Job is about the reality of the horrors of life, the ugliness embedded within a good world. These things cause immense suffering, but they are generated within a world made with intelligibility and integrity. The restoration is something of a resurrection for Job, an allotment of more time, of more sacred space. The apophatic position is the winner in this comedy, and this deepening relationship between God and Job comes to fulfillment in another act of creation, of reshith. 'Where were you' becomes you are with me. The times of presence and absence blur into something new moving into another horizon.
The answer to Job is the Christ-event. I am with you always until the end of the age (Matthew 28:20). God comes to man as man, and interdigitates his nature with the human. Why do we suffer in this world? God says I suffer with you. There are no more Jobs after Christ because such Jobs will have their answer before they even ask: the Cross of forsaken suffering witnessed in the first person by God. So where is the consolation in that? It is no consolation at all if such forsaken suffering stays on the Cross. The insistence from the Cross is a call from a distance to the hearer of the message. It is an invitation to release the event of love in the presence to the Other, a presence of human contact. Job's restoration is his contact with the divine. Suffering asks us to knock on the door of the neighbor who suffers. Visit, stay awhile. That is sacred time and sacred space. Solid time: reshith. It doesn't make suffering less painful, or less mysterious. It does make it a little less incomprehensible, in a learned ignorance kind of way. And it may lighten the burden of suffering by sharing in its presence through presence, for a sacred moment.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Human and Divine: Genesis in Quadragesymmetry
Yuletide, Easter, Lent...pagan words for pagan festivals...remnants, I suppose of a certain syncretism. I prefer Quadragesima for Lent; at least it tells us what's going on. So, too, with Natale, and Pasqua, which tell us about events, as opposed to seasons. The Germanic, pagan terms are all about kairos, but the Italian terms are about chronos, and the things that happen in time. But that's just me.
The time of Quadragesima puts us in Genesis. We are beginning, making a path, making inroads into creation. Like the breezy beginning of it all, we hover above the deep, the face of discernment. It is a time of penitence and a time for understanding origins. The mythos of Genesis presents religious truths in simple and picturesque language, and these truths place us in relation to the way things are for us. In earlier posts I spoke of reshith, a beginning, and of 'image and likeness,' a relationship etched in reality. I would like to continue with those meditations.
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
The time of Quadragesima puts us in Genesis. We are beginning, making a path, making inroads into creation. Like the breezy beginning of it all, we hover above the deep, the face of discernment. It is a time of penitence and a time for understanding origins. The mythos of Genesis presents religious truths in simple and picturesque language, and these truths place us in relation to the way things are for us. In earlier posts I spoke of reshith, a beginning, and of 'image and likeness,' a relationship etched in reality. I would like to continue with those meditations.
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground."
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. [Gen. 1:26-27, NIV]
The language here is of analogy; it is a grammar of the similarity and continuity between God and the human. God and man share in 'dominion,' and by this term I mean stewardship, over living creatures and the breathing earth. History has appropriated this analogy of dominion as political power anchored into a 'great chain of being;' but such an interpretation speaks more to man creating God in the image and likeness of man, than to what the plain sense of the biblical language authorizes. Creatures do not participate in the univocality ( I apologize for this term, but I want to suspend any commitment to Scotist-Deleuzean univocity, and keep a door open for Aquinas) of God, but they do participate, as creatures, in the creative impulse that keeps the world in the process of creation. We gain analogical knowledge of God in this passage, but I cannot stress enough that I am not suggesting that humans are anatomically or even psychologically similar to God. To allow the event of revelation to take place, we must remain free from any crass notions of identity with the Godhead. We must settle for likeness as concept, without placing the materiality of the divine and human on the same plane.
When we keep image and likeness in this kind of creative tension, we are better positioned to partake of the release of the event in Genesis 2:18-23.
The LORD God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."
The Hebrew words for 'suitable helper' (the roots of the words ezer and neged )can also be rendered, without torturing the text too much as 'image and likeness.' The Genesis mythos tells us that God has created all creatures from the earth, but he did not rest until he had caused the appearance of his image and likeness. This is indeed a suitable place to rest, for God could see himself in the human. It is not good for God to be without a suitable creature to continue the work of creation along with him. So, too, it is not good that the human should be alone. But a suitable helper would not be found among non-human creatures. Only when the human saw himself in another creature could he rejoice: this creature is of my very self, my very image and likeness; she shares the human's name because she shares in his humanity. Ish and Ishah, a distinction in names, a difference created to bring the likeness of God all the closer: the likeness of creating, of making.
There are two trees in the center of Eden: the fatal one, and the tree of life. To know is to live and die. The human chose first to know, and then to live; of course God would have none of that. Adam and Eve get the boot before they can marry knowledge with immortality. Still, their choice is instructive. To be human is to want to know: knowledge often trumps humanity's best interests, even when given a choice ( sometimes we glow in the things we could do, as we neglect glowing on what we should do). If the humans of Eden had chosen the fruit of Life before they chose the fruit of Knowing, I imagine we'd have a very different book. Nonetheless, we are left with what has come to be known as Original Sin---the breach between the human and the divine that nonetheless maintains the status quo of the static symmetry between God and man.
Original Sin begs the question of 'originality' here, but perhaps its best to think of 'original' simply as 'first;' after all, we're immersed in a book of firsts. I'll certainly not present a theology of sin here, but I will suggest that sin is a departure from the order of creation. This kind of originality pokes at reshith itself, and that's why it's such a big deal (something like Myron Cohen stealing from Milton Berle stealing from Henny Youngman stealing from Jack Benny). Man in his mythic disobedience walks his originality back to the beginning itself, to the plane where he was not, and effectually begins again in that Joycean moment of a thunderous hundred letter word. This is man's nature: to know. to know he will fall, and like many-a-Finnegan, begin again. But God is in on this chaosmic joke, and Genesis lets the cat out of the bag: God brought all the animals to the man to see what he would name them. He already knew man was a creature who names, who knows by naming, and by extension, boxing, categorizing. He knew already than there is nothing that a human will not attempt to know and own by naming, not even the naming of God (witness the Exodus ontology, Ex. 3:14). The naming of cats is a difficult matter.
This is the human condition, and Genesis is its mythos. So why, then, redemption? While the symmetry between creator and created remains intact, the relationship itself has been injured. This much all people of the book acknowledge. This problem is not a matter of hurt feelings and anger, but it is a matter of the symmetry itself. It is inadequate to contain the relationship released through the revelation to come. That will have to wait in time, until a new symmetry can be rewritten on another horizon of love--in time--where it will breathe according to the ruach (the Spirit) to come. The historical moment of the Incarnation is the event in which God insists on a definitive symmetry in the interdigitations of the human and divine.
Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man's ribs and closed up the place with flesh.
Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
The man said, "This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called 'woman,' for she was taken out of man." [NIV]
The Hebrew words for 'suitable helper' (the roots of the words ezer and neged )can also be rendered, without torturing the text too much as 'image and likeness.' The Genesis mythos tells us that God has created all creatures from the earth, but he did not rest until he had caused the appearance of his image and likeness. This is indeed a suitable place to rest, for God could see himself in the human. It is not good for God to be without a suitable creature to continue the work of creation along with him. So, too, it is not good that the human should be alone. But a suitable helper would not be found among non-human creatures. Only when the human saw himself in another creature could he rejoice: this creature is of my very self, my very image and likeness; she shares the human's name because she shares in his humanity. Ish and Ishah, a distinction in names, a difference created to bring the likeness of God all the closer: the likeness of creating, of making.
The symmetry at work in creation is one of analogy, of suitability, of appropriateness of relationship. This is the symmetry of the good, not of crass geometry. This symmetry has no shape or dimension: it is a state of relationships, in their relationships to materiality: analogical materiality. God is a maker of things; humans are makers of things. The sharing of image and likeness is in the making, and in the spiritual depths (tehom) that make each recognizable to the other. The human creature had a share and stake in the same ruach that oscillated on the horizon of reshith, beginning.
It is easy to understand how such likeness and familiarity could be misappropriated into a notion of a great chain of being. Perhaps if its conception and execution were fluid and untainted by human greed and power, the great chain could have had some ethical value. But it is corrupt in its origins. Even its repetition in the tenets of the Age of Reason does not extricate it from its inherent intent on domination and power. Some ideas are just born bad to the bone of its bones, which is what the Great Chain of Being said to the Enlightenment. But I digress....
It is easy to understand how such likeness and familiarity could be misappropriated into a notion of a great chain of being. Perhaps if its conception and execution were fluid and untainted by human greed and power, the great chain could have had some ethical value. But it is corrupt in its origins. Even its repetition in the tenets of the Age of Reason does not extricate it from its inherent intent on domination and power. Some ideas are just born bad to the bone of its bones, which is what the Great Chain of Being said to the Enlightenment. But I digress....
The status of symmetry in which God has revealed himself does not change when the man and woman ascend into history in their own process of becoming sentient creatures distinct from God. Many a homily these forty days and nights will characterize the human appropriation of knowledge of good and evil as a usurpation of the divine prerogative of being the arbiter of good and evil---as distinct for the human disposition, in its inevitable self-serving relativism, of what is good and evil. This is a fair reading of an important level in our texts. I would bracket that reading off to allow for another event to emerge from Genesis. The event of creatures realizing their own natures. Genesis has revealed something uncanny about the human creature: it is blinded by thirst for knowledge, and fallible in its pursuit.
And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground--trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. [Gen. 2:9, NIV]
There are two trees in the center of Eden: the fatal one, and the tree of life. To know is to live and die. The human chose first to know, and then to live; of course God would have none of that. Adam and Eve get the boot before they can marry knowledge with immortality. Still, their choice is instructive. To be human is to want to know: knowledge often trumps humanity's best interests, even when given a choice ( sometimes we glow in the things we could do, as we neglect glowing on what we should do). If the humans of Eden had chosen the fruit of Life before they chose the fruit of Knowing, I imagine we'd have a very different book. Nonetheless, we are left with what has come to be known as Original Sin---the breach between the human and the divine that nonetheless maintains the status quo of the static symmetry between God and man.
Original Sin begs the question of 'originality' here, but perhaps its best to think of 'original' simply as 'first;' after all, we're immersed in a book of firsts. I'll certainly not present a theology of sin here, but I will suggest that sin is a departure from the order of creation. This kind of originality pokes at reshith itself, and that's why it's such a big deal (something like Myron Cohen stealing from Milton Berle stealing from Henny Youngman stealing from Jack Benny). Man in his mythic disobedience walks his originality back to the beginning itself, to the plane where he was not, and effectually begins again in that Joycean moment of a thunderous hundred letter word. This is man's nature: to know. to know he will fall, and like many-a-Finnegan, begin again. But God is in on this chaosmic joke, and Genesis lets the cat out of the bag: God brought all the animals to the man to see what he would name them. He already knew man was a creature who names, who knows by naming, and by extension, boxing, categorizing. He knew already than there is nothing that a human will not attempt to know and own by naming, not even the naming of God (witness the Exodus ontology, Ex. 3:14). The naming of cats is a difficult matter.
This is the human condition, and Genesis is its mythos. So why, then, redemption? While the symmetry between creator and created remains intact, the relationship itself has been injured. This much all people of the book acknowledge. This problem is not a matter of hurt feelings and anger, but it is a matter of the symmetry itself. It is inadequate to contain the relationship released through the revelation to come. That will have to wait in time, until a new symmetry can be rewritten on another horizon of love--in time--where it will breathe according to the ruach (the Spirit) to come. The historical moment of the Incarnation is the event in which God insists on a definitive symmetry in the interdigitations of the human and divine.
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Image and Likeness
If gender means that female and male are realities, then gender has a descriptive purpose. Gender ordered to biology seems fairly benign, as it describes structural realities that are decisive for reproduction in many species. Grammatical gender has always fascinated me, but as it is of a piece with language, which is itself a culturally mediated phenomenon, I decline to do more with it than what's required for declension. I don't even have a particular problem with 'patriarchy' as it is historically verifiable, deeply ancient, and an artifact of many cultures. If gender means that my wife and daughters are inherently secondary or somehow inherently inferior in contemporary constructs of society, then I reject its hegemony as something grasping for something that, by today's values, or any sense of truth and justice, is ugly and hateful. Such a hegemony is invested in inequality and devaluation and is a harbinger of decadence for societies that anachronistically embrace the necessity of such sociological and historical patterns which may or may not have worked in the past.
Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her (again I date myself with books), and more recently Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep seek to express, in unique ways, theological ideas in terms of authentic, historical, female experience. The feminist approach has advanced biblical studies incalculably, not only within the historical critical model, but lately in post-structuralist models as well. No comprehensive approach to theology can move forward apart from these currents. My approach is to be sensitive to the accomplishments of biblical and theological feminism without devolving into ideology.
So, let this tiny prolegomenon be my disclaimer.
But how to approach ancient texts, understand their self-understanding, and read sensitively for illumination such texts that are so old?
The preceding blogpost looks at reshith (the title is in Hebrew and intended to be a bit jarring) in terms of what the Elohist says in going on when things get started. In that piece, I had no platform to assert that reshith also can translated as 'she who is,' 'wisdom' (sophia), and Logos. But isn't that what the Elohist is expressing? Creation occurs under conditions of divine fiat, but there seems to be a good deal of stuff making an appearance nearby. Making sense of what's there in the text is 'reading,' and making sense of sacred texts might even mean reading is praying.
Oremus:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them...
Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. [Gen 2:7; 18-19; 22, NIV]
The story is familiar. The narrative extravagance of the turn to image and likeness, pushes the reading from the purely mimetic (a good story) to the semiotic (a moment open to the event). The general creation of heaven and earth prefigures the creation of humankind, which recapitulates the motion from reshith to heaven and earth. It is from the earth itself that humans emerge as living beings, male and female. The image and likeness of God and humanity refer to their commonality, here not 'being' but loving. Love is willing the good to the other: first, Elohim to reshith, then God to the earth. The first beings are heaven and earth, and from the earth are brought forth living beings. The male and female are of the very same fleshly material, here symbolized by the rib, 'bone of my bones.' By bone of bones, I read deepest of depths (what was,once upon a time, called substance), of identity marked by difference. Male and female are identical in their image and likeness to God (and to each other) and are differentiated only to increase their likeness to God: the will and gift to generate, to create from their very selves in the unity of difference. The images and likenesses of God and humankind are reflections of each other. How is this not an event of a profoundly revealed truth of how God is in and of himself?
The text emphasizes not merely analogy of Being but the phenomenon of similarity that appears within the horizon of love. The text presents the core of the profound unity of God in relation to the differance of persons as the perichoresis of male and female ordered to creation. It is here that reshith finds its location within Elohim, even as Elohim creates in reshith (b'reshith, in the beginning, in solid time where moments are places and matter, which matter). And perhaps here on the horizon of love, reshith becomes the echo of Logos, sophia and the 'she who is,' which, collectively, is another way of saying 'I am who am,' and in so saying, I say so in memory of her.
Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her (again I date myself with books), and more recently Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep seek to express, in unique ways, theological ideas in terms of authentic, historical, female experience. The feminist approach has advanced biblical studies incalculably, not only within the historical critical model, but lately in post-structuralist models as well. No comprehensive approach to theology can move forward apart from these currents. My approach is to be sensitive to the accomplishments of biblical and theological feminism without devolving into ideology.
So, let this tiny prolegomenon be my disclaimer.
But how to approach ancient texts, understand their self-understanding, and read sensitively for illumination such texts that are so old?
The preceding blogpost looks at reshith (the title is in Hebrew and intended to be a bit jarring) in terms of what the Elohist says in going on when things get started. In that piece, I had no platform to assert that reshith also can translated as 'she who is,' 'wisdom' (sophia), and Logos. But isn't that what the Elohist is expressing? Creation occurs under conditions of divine fiat, but there seems to be a good deal of stuff making an appearance nearby. Making sense of what's there in the text is 'reading,' and making sense of sacred texts might even mean reading is praying.
Oremus:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. [Gen 1:26-7, NIV]
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. [Gen 1:26-7, NIV]
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them...
Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. [Gen 2:7; 18-19; 22, NIV]
The story is familiar. The narrative extravagance of the turn to image and likeness, pushes the reading from the purely mimetic (a good story) to the semiotic (a moment open to the event). The general creation of heaven and earth prefigures the creation of humankind, which recapitulates the motion from reshith to heaven and earth. It is from the earth itself that humans emerge as living beings, male and female. The image and likeness of God and humanity refer to their commonality, here not 'being' but loving. Love is willing the good to the other: first, Elohim to reshith, then God to the earth. The first beings are heaven and earth, and from the earth are brought forth living beings. The male and female are of the very same fleshly material, here symbolized by the rib, 'bone of my bones.' By bone of bones, I read deepest of depths (what was,once upon a time, called substance), of identity marked by difference. Male and female are identical in their image and likeness to God (and to each other) and are differentiated only to increase their likeness to God: the will and gift to generate, to create from their very selves in the unity of difference. The images and likenesses of God and humankind are reflections of each other. How is this not an event of a profoundly revealed truth of how God is in and of himself?
The text emphasizes not merely analogy of Being but the phenomenon of similarity that appears within the horizon of love. The text presents the core of the profound unity of God in relation to the differance of persons as the perichoresis of male and female ordered to creation. It is here that reshith finds its location within Elohim, even as Elohim creates in reshith (b'reshith, in the beginning, in solid time where moments are places and matter, which matter). And perhaps here on the horizon of love, reshith becomes the echo of Logos, sophia and the 'she who is,' which, collectively, is another way of saying 'I am who am,' and in so saying, I say so in memory of her.
Monday, February 9, 2015
בְּרֵאשִׁית
Solid time.
t ~(E/m)^-2/d
Read that as: time is directly related to the square root of a quotient, expressed as Energy and mass, and this as another quotient, related to distance. It's a way of getting time by itself algebraically. This could be bad algebra, but after Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, I want to walk on time's surface through a distance to reshith: בְּרֵאשִׁית
Translated variously as 'beginning,' 'firstfruits,' 'origin,' reshith bears feminine gender, gerundive sense, and describes a place in time. It is the place where and in which Elohim creates. It is distinctly not participial, not an accompanying activity, so, Gen. 1:1 reads, "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth;" not, "in beginning, God created...," or "when God began to create..." As Caputo is fond of pointing out, Genesis begins with a Bet, not an Aleph, a prepositional 'in', not a vocalic sound. Genesis begins in a place, not in a moment, at least not a moment understood on a horizon of Being, but on a horizon of eros, where moments are places, solid time. God is in, within a horizon of Beginning, not Being.
Already in this ante-tehomic verse, the masculine plural finds itself in a feminine place. The female is already there, because, in Elohim's simplicity, actus purus reifies the thought of the good, in an act of love: creation in the erotic reduction. In creation God loves because is it not good to be [alone], and the good drives the whole shebang. Love in locality precedes Being in essential solitude (ens). Though I began mathematically, math is too ontic to really hold sway in this kind of eroticism. The face of love is after all iconic, and algebra an idol.
The feminine reshith, and tehom, too, oscillate[osculate?] harmonically with the Elohim, humming creation along. Only in an algebra of the highest order do these osculants touch, bringing forth heaven and earth; but even so, the moment of place saturates any mathematical category, and collapses into the good and love. The trace of God in the ruach that hovers over what is forming traces itself in love, in touching, in the kiss.
In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion suggests that God loves just as we do, and that we love as God does. God made man in his image and likeness, male and female he created them. Though God gives prerogatives to his creatures that he himself does not have (e.g., radical freedom of will), it is here, in eros, that 'image and likeness' become asymptotic, on this horizon of Love, where the phenomenality of reshith and tehom play out for God and us. It is not good that the man should be alone, and it is not good for Elohim to be without reshith. There is no mythos of a divine consort here (cf. Raphael Patai's The Hebrew Goddess; Enuma Elish, Hesiod's Theogony, Catherine Keller's soujourn in the Babylonian pantheon in Face of the Deep), but rather the hyperreal locus of beginning, of solid time, where a God of actus purus and an omnipotence ordered to love creates: in Greek, genesis.
In the phenomenology of the divine, to say that 'God is love,' is to say that God loves, and he loves before he 'is.' God creates within the horizon of Beginning, not Being. Beginning is loving. What comes into being, within a horizon of Being, began in another horizon anterior to Being; this horizon has the name Love, and her other name is reshith. The calculus of reshith is phenomenology in the making, the reshith of phenomenology, and it allows God to appear.
A Lenten reflection on solid time, reshith:
The liturgical calendar is but a kind of poetry that reminds us of cycles that are not cyclic, of seasons that are not seasonal. Kairos, is all Vorstellung, but chronos is time reduced to the moment in the phenomenological reduction to the event. Advent reminds us that every day is Advent; Lent reminds us that every day is Lent. Make straight the path of the Lord: melt sklerokardia into metanoia: this is our daily bread. Beginning is always creating, and in Lent we create a way in and a way toward. We open ourselves up upon a horizon of love for forgiveness and reconciliation, yes, but better, for the gift, for the given-ness with which we are gifted. The sheer given-ness of the Christ.
t ~(E/m)^-2/d
Read that as: time is directly related to the square root of a quotient, expressed as Energy and mass, and this as another quotient, related to distance. It's a way of getting time by itself algebraically. This could be bad algebra, but after Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, I want to walk on time's surface through a distance to reshith: בְּרֵאשִׁית
Translated variously as 'beginning,' 'firstfruits,' 'origin,' reshith bears feminine gender, gerundive sense, and describes a place in time. It is the place where and in which Elohim creates. It is distinctly not participial, not an accompanying activity, so, Gen. 1:1 reads, "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth;" not, "in beginning, God created...," or "when God began to create..." As Caputo is fond of pointing out, Genesis begins with a Bet, not an Aleph, a prepositional 'in', not a vocalic sound. Genesis begins in a place, not in a moment, at least not a moment understood on a horizon of Being, but on a horizon of eros, where moments are places, solid time. God is in, within a horizon of Beginning, not Being.
Already in this ante-tehomic verse, the masculine plural finds itself in a feminine place. The female is already there, because, in Elohim's simplicity, actus purus reifies the thought of the good, in an act of love: creation in the erotic reduction. In creation God loves because is it not good to be [alone], and the good drives the whole shebang. Love in locality precedes Being in essential solitude (ens). Though I began mathematically, math is too ontic to really hold sway in this kind of eroticism. The face of love is after all iconic, and algebra an idol.
The feminine reshith, and tehom, too, oscillate[osculate?] harmonically with the Elohim, humming creation along. Only in an algebra of the highest order do these osculants touch, bringing forth heaven and earth; but even so, the moment of place saturates any mathematical category, and collapses into the good and love. The trace of God in the ruach that hovers over what is forming traces itself in love, in touching, in the kiss.
In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion suggests that God loves just as we do, and that we love as God does. God made man in his image and likeness, male and female he created them. Though God gives prerogatives to his creatures that he himself does not have (e.g., radical freedom of will), it is here, in eros, that 'image and likeness' become asymptotic, on this horizon of Love, where the phenomenality of reshith and tehom play out for God and us. It is not good that the man should be alone, and it is not good for Elohim to be without reshith. There is no mythos of a divine consort here (cf. Raphael Patai's The Hebrew Goddess; Enuma Elish, Hesiod's Theogony, Catherine Keller's soujourn in the Babylonian pantheon in Face of the Deep), but rather the hyperreal locus of beginning, of solid time, where a God of actus purus and an omnipotence ordered to love creates: in Greek, genesis.
In the phenomenology of the divine, to say that 'God is love,' is to say that God loves, and he loves before he 'is.' God creates within the horizon of Beginning, not Being. Beginning is loving. What comes into being, within a horizon of Being, began in another horizon anterior to Being; this horizon has the name Love, and her other name is reshith. The calculus of reshith is phenomenology in the making, the reshith of phenomenology, and it allows God to appear.
A Lenten reflection on solid time, reshith:
The liturgical calendar is but a kind of poetry that reminds us of cycles that are not cyclic, of seasons that are not seasonal. Kairos, is all Vorstellung, but chronos is time reduced to the moment in the phenomenological reduction to the event. Advent reminds us that every day is Advent; Lent reminds us that every day is Lent. Make straight the path of the Lord: melt sklerokardia into metanoia: this is our daily bread. Beginning is always creating, and in Lent we create a way in and a way toward. We open ourselves up upon a horizon of love for forgiveness and reconciliation, yes, but better, for the gift, for the given-ness with which we are gifted. The sheer given-ness of the Christ.
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