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."

References for Genesis 1:26

• Cross References
• Footnotes

• 671:26 - Ge 3:5,22 ; 11:7 ; Ps 100:3 ; Isa 6:8
• 681:26 - Isa 45:18
• 691:26 - ver 27; Ge 5:3 ; 9:6 ; Ps 8:5 ; 82:6 ; 9:6 ; 1Co 11:7 ; 2Co 4:4 ; Col 1:15 ; 3:10 ; Jas 3:9
• 701:26 - Ac 17:28-29
• 711:26 - Ge 9:2 ; Ps 8:6-8
• 721:26 - Ps 8:8

• b1:26 - Hebrew; Syriac "all the wild animals"

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."

References for Genesis 2:18

• Cross References

• 322:18 - Pr 31:11 ; 1Co 11:9 ; 1Ti 2:13

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.

References for Genesis 2:19

• Cross References

• 332:19 - Ps 8:7
• 342:19 - S Ge 1:20
• 352:19 - S Ge 1:5
• 362:19 - Ge 1:24

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.

References for Genesis 2:20

• Cross References
• Footnotes

• 372:20 - Ge 3:20 ; 4:1

• h2:20 - Or "the man"

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.

References for Genesis 2:21

• Cross References
• Footnotes

• 382:21 - Ge 15:12 ; 1Sa 26:12 ; Job 33:15

• i2:21 - Or "took part of the man's side"

Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

References for Genesis 2:22

• Cross References
• Footnotes

• 392:22 - 1Co 11:8,9,12 ; 1Ti 2:13

• j2:22 - Or "part"

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....

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.

                   

References for Genesis 2:23

• Cross References
• Footnotes

• 402:23 - Ge 29:14 ; Eph 5:28-30
• 412:23 - S Ge 1:5
• 422:23 - 1Co 11:8

• k2:23 - The Hebrew for "woman" sounds like the Hebrew for "man."

The Postmodern Critique: Phenomenality and Materiality

While we are all moderns, that is, we exist in this universe, in this world, on this planet, in this environment of a natural earth under siege, technological achievements that saturate the human mind, bending it toward boredom to video games and hover boards, we nonetheless adopt a posture critical of the modern turn as a matter of survival, of assuring that what is human stays that way even as the inevitable march into the future offers few alternatives. The heady humanism that drives modernity's project creates for it the illusion of order, or better, the illusion that humans can and do impose order in our world.

Modernity's great gesture is the invention of containment, which bends the knees of those who blindly follow the big project. The invention states that we can know a thing so well as to create borders around all things that justify the essence of those things. We gather data about stuff, and determine the qualities and attributes of stuff, then tend to group stuff together in boxes, categories, that pretty much says everything about that stuff in the category, so that we can move on to put other stuff in other categories.

So, we adopt a critical posture that analyzes this rather grand gesture, the power to categorize and know. Modernity's first attempt at the grand move was political, and was designed to contain trouble. The rise of the mercantile phenomenon became the category of the 'middle class.' Science and the sciences became reason, and religion became bracketed off as the stuff of private thought (none dare call it reason), of something called faith. This strategy seemed to pay off--it worked, as the privatization of religion took its arguments off the streets and into homes and churches, and the discourse of the streets became that of commerce and economy, power and politics, and above all, scientific reason. Who can argue with success? Progress erupted and accomplished more in the new domains of the public sphere than what was accomplished in 50,000 years of homo sapiens prior to The Age of Reason. The juggernaut of modernity had buttressed its stay in human life.

The problem is this: the categories that empower the modern project are inventions whose purpose is to dominate. They say little or nothing about the objects in these categories, so long as objects behave according to the shape of the category. The very materiality of objects goes on, indifferent to the categories in which modernity has located them. The illusion of knowing trumps the freedom of objects to be what they are in themselves. The category imposes the will on materiality. A thing is what it is only in accordance with its category.

Now that effect certainly simplifies the world, and imposes digestible chunks of stuff for the sciences to investigate. The emergence of the disciplines provide ample evidence of this phenomenon. This is the driving force of progress, and we would have it no other way. Except maybe to take some wind out of those sails of hegemony over objects. The great modern shift to the subject has justified its invention of categories (even the concept of category itself), but at the expense of objects and their materiality.  Postmodernism wants to show the categorical impulse for what it is: invention and a figment of the imagination, a very useful one to be sure, but one whose imperial subjectivity tends to get caught up in itself. Where would objects be were it not for the categories dreamed up for them?

An interesting development in the categorical imagination has occurred famously in physics. Observation would have it that light behaves sometimes like a wave and sometimes like a particle (photon). This ingenious conclusion has proven to be very descriptive of general patterns observed in the universe. Nature is discrete: it seems to do things in packets and units. The computer technology that has analyzed these phenomena is itself poised to see its own reflection: its binary system, its digital configuration. Our observations of the physical universe, that is, its phenomenality, suggest that, alas, the universe, in its discrete units of energy, mass, quanta, are digital. Physics wants to tell us that the universe in and of itself is digital.

Of course, this conclusion is either true or false, but 'digital' is just another category that seems to describe the objects within it. It remains to be seen if  the very materiality of the universe is the way it is because of its phenomenality (that which appears in the experience of the observer). Either phenomenality is reduced to materiality or materiality is reduced to its phenomenality. This would mean that what we see is what it is.

At this time, I am more comfortable saying that what we see is what we see, and that which is, is what it is. We cannot conflate materiality and phenomenality without doing violence to either. We need to think of phenomenality without power if we are to allow objects to be objects, to allow the natural world to be free, if indeed it is free. Such a new phenomenology would seek out the margins of categories and look for signs of saturation and events which cannot be contained within them. What is presented to observation is certainly presented to the intuition, but the materiality of objects already saturates the categorical imagination, and the very event of materiality, of objects, cannot be released under the illusion of the hegemony of an encyclopedic modern project. Postmodernism must demonstrate that the perforations modernity has etched in reality are not real themselves. They are simply the convenience of dividing and conquering: ok for what it is, but impotent in the face of the real.

On the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

As I am gathering my thoughts and sit to write this post on the most Catholic of Catholic topics, I am also mulling over Levi Bryant's poignant call for a transformation of our concept of phenomenality. Unless I am morbidly misreading Jean-Luc Marion, his project is nothing if it is not about transforming what we mean by phenomenality. His phenomenology ain't your father's phenomenology. His readings of Husserl and Heidegger are deconstructive to the bone, and his emerging phenomenology and certainly his theology have as their goals the systematic release of the event, which is the very heart of deconstruction.

The Real Presence, and how that comes about in the Eucharist, are indeed saturated phenomena of the event, and certainly of idol and icon. In this piece I intend to respect just how these Catholic realities present to the intuition that which is uncontainable in intentionality. While I will discuss the old categories used by the Church to cope with the greatest of mysteries, I hope  to side-step resting in the idol, and pursue the iconic, and thereby set the stage for the release of the event harbored in the sacred texts, the liturgy and the Eucharistic moment.

To begin, I want to imagine that moment in thanksgiving (that is precisely what eucharistos means), but also in reshith, in a beginning; for the Eucharistic moment is about something appearing that was not there before. And that moment is 'solid time,' time not in its ordinary sense, but a time that has presence and is present, and has matter. The Eucharist is a place to stand. Thanksgiving, beginning, thanks-beginning, be-giving. The solid time of the Eucharist is a theological moment playing out on the horizon of the mystical.

We must imagine the sacramental essence of the Eucharist moving on the stage of liturgy, which is itself anchored into the words of the Word-made-flesh. The Logos is love, and its sacramental, liturgical present makes its presence known to us on a horizon of charity. Bread and wine become for us the Body and Blood of Christ: the idol (more but not less than a symbol) passes into icon (more but not less than reality-the hyper-real). The idol, created by the gaze upon it and saturated as it is, is still a missed opportunity. The icon provokes the gaze upon it, but does not reflect back on the gaze, but lets the light through, and gazes upon the gazer. The sacrament is a gift to the gazer giving thanks.

The Blessed Sacrament, the sacrament par excellence of the Catholic faith, is the Eucharist and the Real Presence. It is the sacrament from which all the others flow, and which authorizes and authenticates the very sacramentality so central to Catholicism's self-understanding. As such, the Eucharist must be understood in terms of its sacramentality, its relationship to the Body of Christ, and its liturgical meaning in process and reality. The faith makes great claims for the phenomenon of the Eucharist; it proclaims the real presence of Christ in divinity and humanity (the hypostatic union persists in any of its manifestations) under the appearances of bread and wine, the imparting of grace, the remission of sins,and the assimilation of the whole Christ within the person of the recipient and the community of the faithful.

The claims the Church makes for the Real Presence trace their authenticity and authority to the Synoptic Jesus's words over the bread and wine at the final meal he shared with his disciples. The words of inauguration, consecration or more commonly, of institution, vary slightly among the 3 Synoptics, but they are nearly identical in their 'this is my body' and 'this is my blood' statements. The Church confesses that the words uttered by the Word (Logos) have the power to effect what they say. It is the power of is-ing: this bread is my body--so it becomes; this wine is my blood--so it becomes; for the Logos participates in creation by fiat. In this sense, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic elements is already understood in the work of the evangelists, and the Pauline corpus attests to the same (e.g., 1 Corinthians). Indeed, the Eucharistic celebration is already deeply liturgical (of course in a rudimentary way) in the 1st century, and both the epistolary NT and the Gospels depict this state of affairs. John 6 is constitutive of the liturgical reality of Christ's flesh and blood, despite and because of its perverse and dramatic language. A juxtaposition of all the Eucharistic texts of the NT is instructive and convincing in determining the self-understanding of the early Church and I invite the reader to undertake this rewarding venture.

Far more controversial than a growing understanding of the Real Presence in the NT is the explanation of just how the liturgical celebration effects the change in the bread and wine. It simply wasn't a problem for the disciples at the last supper: what Jesus said became reality. Speculatively, there was no process involved at the inauguration of the Eucharist, precluded as it must have been by the prerogative of the actus purus of the divine Logos. God said it, so it is was. But how does it happen at each celebration of the Eucharist?

Here the genius of the Church develops the concept of transubstantiation (T, henceforth) to describe the metaphysics of the conversion, under the words of consecration/institution as uttered by the celebrant in persona Christi, which is the liturgical role of the priest in the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The clumsy term T has its roots in Aristotle and 'substance theory.' Unfortunately for us [post]moderns, we have no rapport with such roots and theory. Suffice it to say that in this theory, a substance (deepest reality, essence) was separate from its attributes (appearance, qualities, properties). So when we ask 'what's this substance?' we expect a response that answers 'what's it made of,' such as, metal, wood, plastic, water, alcohol, oil, etc. When that question is asked of Aristotle or of  the mediaeval theologians who appropriated his work to provide philosophical scaffolding to their theologies, the answer would be 'what makes it what it is,' whatever absolute reality inhering in the thing in question, what ever makes the thing the thing itself, its deepest meaning and reality. Furthermore, substance was not something accessible through the senses, but only through pure intellect (as Aquinas would put it). In this sense, substance can only be understood as idol.

If T is to speak to us at all today, we must learn 'substance' as a technical term. We use terms like essence, deepest reality, deepest reality that determines identity, meaning, signified of a sign (semiotics), finality, telos when we want to mean what the Tradition means by 'substance.' We should become sensitive to how 'substance' is meant in the theology of the Eucharist, and try to imagine 'substance' both as it is understood in the Tradition (without of course collapsing the icon into the idol), and as it is informed by the terms we have replaced it with today. We should adopt a less hostile attitude toward substance theory, without necessarily embracing it (especially if that means resting in the idol and falling asleep before reaching the icon). We should be open to the ideas of, for example, Schillebeeckx and Rahner, and to the use of the ideas they have named 'transignification' and 'transfinalization' (respectively),  not to supplant but to deepen our understanding of the conversion that takes place in the bread and wine during the liturgy as it is understood in the Tradition. These newer terms have their own clumsiness to be sure, but they are not to be understood in the idolatry of their concepts, but how they operate in the heart and mind, in short, as iconic, as lifting the mind over the idol to the icon.

T was intended not only as a dogmatic explanation of a liturgical event, but also as a fence built around the Real Presence in order to protect it from degradation. The dogmas of T and the Real Presence therefore go hand in hand from the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 through the sessions of the Council of Trent in the mid 16th century to the present. Simply stated (ha!), T is the process of conversion, grounded in the words of the Word made flesh, whereby the the deepest reality and meaning of bread and wine, in their literal and symbolic sense and existence, are converted completely into the deepest reality and meaning of the Whole Christ, that is, everything to do with Christ that makes him Christ. The process does not entail any transformation or conversion of the appearance, properties or qualities of the bread and wine, nor does it entail any change in Christ's body and blood. Bread and wine remain as signifiers, but their reality, their sign has changed because their signified has been completely converted into another signified, with an attendant conversion of all meaning and presence. The finality of the bread and wine have undergone a complete conversion into the finality that is the Christ. This process has nothing to do with physics or the horizon of Being. It cuts to the heart of liturgy and sacramentality, and to the release of the event of faith.

When we participate in the Eucharist, we take in what the senses know as bread and wine, but assimilate the whole Christ into our being in a sacramental manner. In this way, the reality of the bread and wine become 'un-symbols,' the actuality and the reality of the body and blood of Christ, even as their appearances continue to be symbols of that body and blood. The symbolic richness remains, even as Christ's actual presence is really real. This is the mystery of the Catholic faith, and to participate in the sacrifice of the Mass, the Divine Liturgy (as it is known in the East), is the sine qua non of catholicity--the Catholic experience.

Approaching the end of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI promulgated his Mysterium Fidei (mystery of faith), which countenanced his great anxiety that the high mood of the conciliar moment would result in a degraded understanding of the Real Presence and its guardian, T. He was already too late for the latter, but his trepidation regarding adding the layers of transignification and transfinalization into the magisterium was unfounded. There is more rampant misunderstanding of the Eucharist today, since the closing of the council in 1965 (the year of Mysterium Fidei). Perhaps allowing certain periti of the Council greater influence on its documents would have enriched the lives of Catholics with a more vibrant understanding of the Blessed Sacrament.

I have recently been challenged about my faith in the Real Presence and T, and my response then and now is simply that I have divine and Catholic faith in this profoundest of mysteries of the Church. I wonder if I could say that if I were not so theological a thinker, not so very sympathetic to post-structuralist, post-secularist ideas about this world and our reality; for it is my conviction that my faith in this matter reflects what the Church has always confessed.  It is unfortunate that T is generally not received into the sensus fidelium, such as it is; but neither has the Church worried itself with what it means to hand down the Tradition in a secular world.  The anxieties of a Papacy notwithstanding, such a central tenet of Catholic faith should be brought to each generation in the fullness of the Tradition and with respect to the signs of  the times.

On the Materiality and Phenomenality of the Body

Levi Bryant has presented the case for the importance of materiality in philosophical discourse in much of his work, but he has just posted an interesting short version on Larval Subjects , "Critical Reflections on the Humanities and Social Sciences." In a brief response, I suggested that Heidegger has already begun the work of maintaining a distinction between materiality and phenomenality, but Levi balked at this assertion, and reaffirmed the primacy of materiality, while maintaining the validity of experience. From an example he provides, Levi concludes that the "material body is not the phenomenal body" and that a "substantial transformation of our concept of phenomenality" is called for. I have always found Levi an original and provocative thinker (our acquaintance began several years ago on a YahooGroup on Lacanian psychoanalysis), and even more-so lately. He is the author of the fascinating Democracy of Objects and other works in the 'object oriented ontology' field of inquiry. I have written what I have written on Larval Subjects in response to Levi's recent post, and my purpose here is not to engage his thesis any further, but instead take his conclusion as noted above as a point of departure for this blogpost.

I do not take the distinction between 'materiality' and 'phenomenality' as some irreducible dualism. That strategy is dead in the water and does nothing to release the event harbored in the application of these terms to the human body. I do want to interrogate how medical therapeutics ('medicine' henceforth) approaches materiality and phenomenality in the management of diagnoses. Let us look at cancer from this perspective.

While cancer presents itself as symptomatology within the experience of the patient, it also acts upon the material body by invading tissue and causing a cascade of biochemical occurrences that conduct the appearance of the symptoms which the patient experiences as disease. At first blush, 'cancer' has both its material and phenomenal dimensions that conspire in its appearance. Symptoms are said to be subjective (what the patient experiences and communicates) and Signs are said to be objective (what the investigator observes). These terms are not construed to be in competition.

I cannot fathom a scenario in which any method worthy of its name would privilege one term over another. If materiality and phenomenality are even temporarily placed in binary opposition, the 'bar' would regardless be the locus of treatment. The oncologist (cancer specialist) diagnoses the particular cancer affecting the patient and directs treatments determined to be effective in eradicating or controlling the cancer process with an eye to symptom resolution as the cancer milieu dissolves under treatment. The experience of symptoms such as pain, fatigue, depressed mood, shortness of breath resolves as their causes are quelled.

For patients whose cancers are cured symptoms may still persist. Survivorship medicine is based on the need to address symptoms that can no longer be traced to an existing materiality. Pain, which during the active disease process traces its materiality to the cancer milieu, persists in phenomenality in the absence of materiality. This pain is certainly a consequent of the materiality now absent, but its appearance is located only in its own phenomena. It is purely subjective (pain is solely determined by its subjective presence by definition). Some oncologists are reluctant to treat that which has no objective reality in materiality. The subjectivity of pain has not changed from the active cancer milieu to the survivorship phase. What is the diagnosis?

Similar observations can be made for disease processes other than cancer. But a certain kind of pain might drive home my point more dramatically. "Phantom pain" is a deafferentation pain many patients locate in amputated limbs. Barring from the discussion that patients still experience pain located in limbs that no longer exist (they have been incinerated), just what kind of pain is this? The experience of the pain is of burning, lancinating, electrical sensations in the space where the limb 'was.' All materiality of the body-part is gone, only the symptom of the diseased limb presents itself to the experience to the patient. Here the diagnosis is 'neuropathic pain,' and the treatment is an appropriate dose of an anti-convulsant drug, most often the drug 'gabapentin,' but also 'pregablin' and 'duloxetine' within a program of rehabilitation and interdisciplinary support and management.

Some neuroscientists, armed with their functional MRIs, suggest that such pain has its locus in the play of neurotransmitters in neural tissues, and that the subjective experience of such 'phantom pain' is all a function of mind. Such a conclusion at least tends to collapse phenomenality into materiality, or the converse. I resist the reduction of the body to the mind in this scenario, though I am open to further elucidation, even if this entails Levi's call for a transformation of the concept of phenomenality.

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.”

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]

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.

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. 

Theodicy's Collapse into Solidarity

Fr. Robert Barron's homily for Sunday, February 8, 2015, "The Spirituality of Pain," reads the theodical element of the Book of Job through the lens of the Christ of Mark 1.

The lectionary provides 4 texts, but the homily speaks to the problem of suffering and pain through 2 of these texts:



Is not life on earth a drudgery,
its days like those of a hireling?

Like a slave who longs for the shade,

a hireling who waits for wages,

So I have been assigned months of futility,

and troubled nights have been counted off for me.

When I lie down I say, “When shall I arise?”

then the night drags on;

I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.

my skin cracks and festers;

My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle;

they come to an end without hope.

Remember that my life is like the wind;

my eye will not see happiness again. [Job 7:1-7 NAB]

On leaving the synagogue he entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John. Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever. They immediately told him about her.He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up. Then the fever left her and she waited on them.

When it was evening, after sunset, they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons. The whole town was gathered at the door.He cured many who were sick with various diseases, and he drove out many demons, not permitting them to speak because they knew him.

Rising very early before dawn, he left and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed. Simon and those who were with him pursued him and on finding him said, “Everyone is looking for you.” He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages that I may preach there also. For this purpose have I come.”So he went into their synagogues, preaching and driving

out demons throughout the whole of Galilee. [Mark 1:29-39, NAB]

Dispensing quickly with the argument from finitude in the face of the infinite and omnipotent, that Job's perspective is not after all God's, and that Job just doesn't have the proper view of the 'big picture,' Barron moves into the very phenomenon of the Incarnation, and focuses on the healings of the Marcan Jesus who has brought the good news that the "where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth" response to the human condition might not hold in the coming of the Kingdom. Barron names this biblical transformation: God's response of 'solidarity' with the human creature. 

Though he doesn't state so explicitly, 'solidarity' is very fertile ground, and the idea brings into sharp relief a God who is affected by the human condition, a condition determined by the realities of living in this particular world God creates. Jesus's relation to the crowds that seek him, is very like his relation to the Logos in the hypostatic union (see "The Placental Turn in the Crucifixion" in this blog). As Barron suggests, "Jesus knows" that the where were you rhetoric will not do in a world where the Christ-event is unfolding. Solidarity kicks theodicy in the knees, where it collapses onto the horizon of love: God so loved the world that he worlded it and joined himself to it in union with the human body, which suffers.

Despite the many instances of rhetorical chiasmus in biblical texts, they do not coalesce into metaphor until the actualization of the chiasm of the hypostatic union whose finality brings history into an irrevocable moment. There are no Jobs after Jesus. The Christ is the instantiation of God's irrevocable solidarity with the human condition. The Logos does not share the divine person and remain aloof: it is involved in humankind. There is no solidarity with God on the horizon of transcendence, but on the horizon of agape. And none of this 'solidarity' is in a position to challenge God's simplicity or immutability; such analogical language has no place in the lexicon of the phenomenon that presents itself to human experience on this horizon of love. Those terms live and die on the horizon of Being and by the language of metaphysics, which cannot admit of the idea of God's solidarity with us.

Kudos to Robert Barron for loosening God from Being so that He might be with us.

Horizon of Love, Horizon of Desire

 And man, being a part of Your creation, desires to praise You, man, who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin, even the witness that You resist the proud, — yet man, this part of Your creation, desires to praise You. You move us to delight in praising You; for You have formed us for Yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find rest in You.

---The Confessions of St. Augustine, Chapter I.


 Jean-Luc Marion's translators are both gifted and talented, perhaps even sainted, in heeding their call to render such French into English. I have been eating Marion's books lately, and his project has become something of a blur to me. I've eaten too much and digestion is slow and, it would seem, inefficient. It occurs to me, though, that in my early synthesis, Marion moves from metaphysics to his version of phenomenology, not so much by changing the rules of the game, but by changing the field of play. He moves from Baseball to Football, even if the players still have caps and gloves while the new field calls for pads and helmets. This shift from the horizon of Being to the horizon of Love is his signature gesture, and that creative gesture is one of love and praise. By relocating God from the horizon of Being to the horizon of Love, Marion begins the creative turn from Jerusalem to Mecca, leaving metaphysics behind to embrace the vision of a new development in phenomenology, one that absents the causa sui and the great via negativa and places the phenomenality of God in only the horizon(s) that allow(s) God to be God.

On first blush, I am not at all surprised that the subject of St. Augustine would occupy Marion in his book, In the Self's Place: the saint doesn't have a metaphysical idea in his head. Though I am unprepared to declare my suspicion about Marion's project in an official 'reading' of it, I am mulling over the probability that it is highly invested in what the apologists call the 'argument from desire.' Though the argument has its rhizomes in the Confessions, its most recent iterations come from C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity and Peter Kreeft's Handbook of Christian Apologetics.

The argument runs something like this: natural desires 'prove' the existence of their objects because of their participation in those objects. So, the human gut proves the existence of food, because it participates in the existence of food by is very structure (the absorptive structure of the gut are absurd if food didn't enter it). So, too, the soul, which desires its object: God. The soul participates in the existence of God through its very structures,  which are built to receive the divine and supernatural. So goes the classic explanation of what Augustine meant by the 'restless heart' remaining restless until it rests in its object. In psychological terms, natural desire (as opposed to artificial desire, e.g., desire manufactured during a Super Bowl commercial), comes not from a fundamental 'lack,' but from jouissance itself (there is a wholesomeness to this Lacanian inversion). At this moment I am rather pleased with myself in that it has been over 20 years since I abandoned apologetics.

I would also suggest that 'desire' can be understood as saturated phenomena, even as 'idol' and 'icon.' For Marion, there is no privileging of one of these terms over another: they merely present themselves as themselves. Desire as idol sees itself as the object of its own gaze, fulfilled, as it were, in its own fullness. It absorbs, even gets satisfied, but completely reflexively and effectively delimited. Desire as icon projects the gaze from itself---provoking a gaze much more critical, inquisitive, open, desirous of what is not merely reflected back but what's behind what Marion calls an 'invisible mirror' (God Without Being). Only the icon can release the event of the experience of the object of desire, because it frees that object to present itself as it is in itself; it is free because it locates that object on the horizon of love, yes, but also of praise. This relocation is not a metaphysical maneuver designed to recover God from the horizon of Being, but a paradigmatic shift from essence to phenomenality.

It would be amazing if it turns out that Marion's project is an extended expatiation and appropriation of desire, praise and love. The possibilities for phenomenology would be inexhaustible. This is not to say that such a discovery would not have its dangerous and unsavory side. It would certainly fuel the flames of the 'theological turn' railed against by the anti-continental critics. It would be yet another example demonstrating how the onto-theological God of the old metaphysics comes onto the postmodern stage from the rear of the theatre, barely noticed until it does its metamagical pouncing. Still, moving the phenomenality of God off the stage of Being and onto the stage of Love has got some purchase, and makes for quite a drama, even if in French. The gesture would be akin to John Caputo's strategy of side-stepping the humongous onto-thelogical God in favor of the 'event' harbored in the name of God. Both strategies allow God to be God and revelation to freely present to human experience as phenomena.

For the time being, Marion has burdened my intuition beyond any effectivess of my intentionality. The reading continues, as these books never cease to fascinate and illuminate. I hope to engage these ideas more fully as my understanding breaks the surfaces of their depth.