God is Unconscious: A Review

Psychoanalysis is structured like a religion. It is a coffee-table book about coffee tables, and turns itself into a coffee table if one is needed. Christianity is structured like a cup of coffee.

A man approaches an analyst asking if there's anything he can do to help his brother who thinks he's a chicken. The analyst responds, 'why don't you bring him in?' The man replies, 'because we really need the eggs.' No, not that Marx.

What that anecdote excludes is the jealousy of the analyst, who would like a brother like that, because he really needs the eggs, too. The analyst's desire is for eggs in perpetuity.
The analyst is the subject-who's-supposed-to-know. He just doesn't know Foucault. The original Ovaltine (or better yet, 'Roundtine') determines just what knowledge is. That's right: that Marx. Seinfeld, Groucho, Allen--I get them all confused, but not so confused as to miss out on my secret decoder ring, which, when it comes to Lacan...

We can add up Lacan, Zizek, and perhaps Delay, then divide by Lyotard, and you're left with a religion without a metanarrative. But what is psychoanalysis without its metanarrative of power, its hegemony over real, symbolic and imaginary registers poking its nose through the unconscious into consciousness? While it allows the analysand to dig deeper, psychoanalysis will not discover its own difficulty with things that don't work in the image of the discoveries of the analysand. It is blind to see that the reflection of the knave is the fool, and the fool's reflection is the knave. "And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind..."

When psychoanalyts leave the bedside (couch-side? In any event the traditional clinical setting) to become culture critics, yet bring the same tools (bag of tricks?) to the game, we should expect some electricity. Cultures must undergo a reduction to organism whose narrative is not told in the first person, but always in the 3rd. The relationship between the critic and the subject is dramatically transformed. Against Lacan's protestations, the analyst, far from interrupting too soon, tells the whole story (at least when they give seminars or write books); but, of course, the master has endorsed the creative shift away from the altar, away from ritual, to the vox populi.

Tad DeLay's wonderfully written book on the interface of theology/religion and psychoanalysis, God is Unconscious: Psychoanalysis & Theology (Wipf and Stock, 2015) is a fascinating recollection and meditation of the discipline's unfolding into the intellectual worlds of the 20th and 21st centuries. I identify the work as a 'book' because I have not decided just what genre the book should be received into; and that could be a good thing. I recall that Michel Foucault once said his major works were more like novels than philosophy. I'll therefore stick with 'book,' though genealogy, novel or rhapsody would work just as well.

The book opens with an anecdote recalling a conversation between Jung and Freud, who upon sailing into NY Harbor and viewing a statue guarding an impressive city, recognized that they were delivering a 'plague,' not unlike the way the USS Indianapolis delivered the 'bomb.' Either way, an explosion can't be far off, or at least something that goes 'bang.' DeLay writes about an invasion, a cathectic advance of an occupying force that electrified the world with currents buzzing to this very day. Freud and Jung were no lads from Liverpool, but they were bigger than Jesus Christ.

Or so the story goes. Cathexis is the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king. In his introduction, DeLay promises a dose of rage with a sense of irony (xxiv) that will result in a "materialist protest against theologies that do no work" (xxii). He offers an anti-cathexis on nearly every page, allowing the book to breathe, enfold, unfold, then fold together. No doubt this is why religion emerges triumphant: the registers of subjectivity are charged and discharged in rhythmic but unregulated apophatic space, in the movements across the unguarded frontiers of the real, symbolic and imaginary by disembodied spirits of the hysteric, the obsessive, the psychotic and the neurotic, searching horizons of anxiety, resistance and repression. It's a religion of a mystic.

Still, if psychoanalysis is to 'unsettle theology,' it must relinquish the analyst-as-subject-supposed-to-know and rely on differance. Intepretation must be deferred and differentiated from imagination, for the truth must be reloaded in manageable aliquots (27). The process is very tenuous, of course, because repetition is irresistible in its thirst for the 'new' (39). "Wherever there is theology, there is anxiety...[T]he relation of theology is fluid and produces a back and forth experience of the negative and the positive" (43). Apparently, theology is unsettled by exposing its undulations of apophatic and cataphatic moods, its claim that anything gets done, that something is working in the bipolarity of mood swings.

Even an unsettled, perhaps haunted, "[t]heology is at its best when it acknowledges itself as a nexus around a void" (47). And here is where DeLay discovers but does not annouce the incestuous relations between psychoanalysis and its cognate siblings. Cathexis masquerades as a drive encircling a void that must momentarily be filled by any of the cognates (47). Here is a great irony with no little rage: all the cognates love to build fences, and that these fences spin and oscillate around the objects taking turns in the center: the cognates are the objects of their own desire, and results in an excess of jouissance for its own sake. The more things change the more they stay the same: that's the trick of any cognate dreaming of hegemony.

The problem of desire is foundational for Lacan, and DeLay's exposition of it in his Chapter 4, "Psychopathology" positions his critique of "American Evangelical," "fundamentalist," Christianity, especially his exposition of perversion (122 ff.) He remains faithful to the axiom that 'one's desire is the desire of the Other.' "[T]he pervert is primarily defined by the mechanism of fetish disavowel and his fantasy that he is the object of the Big Other's desire" (77). Simplified to its basic term, perversion is delusion (78). Here is DeLay at his most meticulous, and he must be read cautiously and deliberately. Let him hold his reader's hand very closely, through his articulation of 'transference' to his disclosure of an essential "pattern: perversion pressures neurosis to reorient specifically as obsessionalism, often through hysteric or psychotic language," which is, like any other language, conventional, "exchangeable" and "irrelevant" (123). The only thing that matters is "that things work smoothly."

And things work smoothly until they don't work smoothly. And then we must begin again. Not in Zizek's nightmare Hegel where 'again' is more of the same, but in a hope that repetition has a rebirth, and something actually changes, something psychoanalysis might call a cure, but in its religious version would call a cura pastoralis. And this is why I predict that the authorial intelligence at work in the synthesis of God is Unconscious cannot rest until it rests in the heart of Keller's Cloud.

DeLay's book deserves a 2nd printing, and not just to rid the book of its distracting and escalating typographical errors and frank word omissions. God is Unconscious deserves a second hearing. DeLay writes pleasantly, with clarity and controlled enthusiasm as he takes his reader on a search where he himself searches. We must allow him to steer us on the never-intersecting edges of the rope of the Borromean knot, through subjectivity and into his enthralling subject, which he admits is not deconstruction, but certainly not indeconstructible.

Unconditional and Without Sovereignty

ecce agnus dei---the Baptist

ecce homo---Pilate

ecce, ecce, read all about it, God without Sovereignty, ecce, ecce---anonymous

"Absolute omnipotence is a religious and metaphysical fantasy, but one that contains and displaces a powerful core truth, which is that by "God" we mean the possibility of the impossible." John Caputo, in The Weakness of God, (87-88)


The biblical warrant for a God without sovereignty is conveniently located in the 4th Gospel. Jesus is a lamb of a king, but a king nonetheless, for Pilate had written what he had written. He responds to the Baptist's ecce agnus dei with his own myopic ecce homo. The Synoptics have John baptize Jesus and Pilate baptize his own hands, which is as far as Pilate could see; the 4th evangelist essentially agrees, as his Pilate distances his vision from the whole affair.

The 'weak force of God' (Weakness, 94 ff.) is at work in the Johannine narrative.



“Are you the king of the Jews?”
“Is that your own idea,” Jesus asked, “or did others talk to you about me?”

 “Am I a Jew?” Pilate replied. “Your own people and chief priests handed you over to me. What is it you have done?”

Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. [John 18:33-38, NIV]



Pilate is able to conclude from his questioning Jesus's unconditional kingship without sovereignty in this here and now. Jesus is a sovereign without visible, effective power. No retinue; no rescue; nothing from 'another place.'


“Don’t you realize I have power either to free you or to crucify you?”

Jesus answered, “You would have no power over me if it were not given to you from above.

Therefore the one who handed me over to you is guilty of a greater sin.”

From then on, Pilate tried to set Jesus free [John 19:10-12, NIV]



Exousia is rendered in these verses as 'power,' but the gist of the term in context is its unconditionality, which drives Pilate's attempt 'to set Jesus free.' Apologetic in nature or not, this shift in Pilate's mood is an extraordinary narrative event. Exousia in the mouths of both Jesus and Pilate provides a micro-discourse on power-as-authority, as something unconditional in itself, something that insists, but only exists when brought into the realm of the here and now, the plane or stage of immanence where two forces-in-the-making face-off, the one the strong force of politics, the other, the weak force of God. In short, Jesus has been reduced to a plaything of the Pax Romana, and the only power at work on Gabbatha is Pilate's, and all this without prejudice to the exousia of unconditionality. The weakness of God, the possibility of the impossible, displaces what one might expect from divine omnipotence.


Pilate will allow Jesus this much: he is a sovereign, but a sovereign of nothing with nothing but the mock-up of a mock-epic. Politically, this is the only sovereign the Jewish people under Caesar will ever get, and Pilate writes as much. This is 'truth:' a king with a crown of thorns in a purple robe of Roman majesty mocking any pretension to Jewish sovereignty in 1st century Palestine.


When Jesus came out wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe, Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

As soon as the chief priests and their officials saw him, they shouted, “Crucify! Crucify!”

But Pilate answered, “You take him and crucify him. As for me, I find no basis for a charge against him.” [ John 19:5-6, NIV]


Behold the man: king of thorns, lamb of God, King of the Jews. This was a most crucifiable moment. Before his crowning, Jesus appeared to Pilate as the saturated phenomenon of the idol, whose gaze reflected the elusiveness of truth back upon the viewer. Pilate must look away, for any intentionality is completely drowned in the currency of impossibility. So, too, the chief priests can only say, "Crucify!" in response to the idolic gaze reflected upon them: that image of themselves is the idol they wanted dead as soon as [im]possible, which spills over their intentionality and betrays their intuition. The powerbrokers must be done with this Jesus, once and for all: he is too disturbing to the idols that maintain the status quo.

The thorns in Jesus's head pierce the sides of both Pilate and the chief priests. Jesus is the thorn that must be removed so that Pilate can move on to more pressing matters and the people to the Passover. And therein lies Caputo's displacement. The only omnipotence at play on Gabbatha is Roman, and Jesus has upstaged Caesar, who in turn, now must upstage Jesus, to set things right. It's a crucifixion of expediency. On Golgotha, the chief priests get their own fist in the face. They must gaze upon the "King of the Jews." Everybody from that morning gets a black eye.

There is too much complicity at the Johannine Crucifixion to allow abandonment to come forth, but the evangelist, too, enlists the 22nd Psalm (18), for its aleatory wit (John 19:24). The casting of lots shifts to another impossibility: what garments, and who would want them? the 4 soldiers gamble on the truth, or at least on what the truth came wrapped in. Truth is a game of chance.

What is truth? Truth is that which is orchestrated in the strains of Golgotha intoned on Gabbatha. The Johannine Jesus has all the company he needs.

TAD, Tad DeLay, Sclerocardia, Cathexis and Events of Repression and Anxiety

Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomypathy (ARVC) results from derangements in cellular and electrical structures in cardiac muscle. The heart quite literally hardens as its normal myocardial cells are replaced with fibrotic, fatty infiltrates. One of the minor diagnostic criteria is a Terminal Activation Delay of greater than 55 milleseconds (TAD > 55ms). If we think of cathexis as any focal investment, such as saturated phenomena or charged meanings (charged particles) attached to items in the symbolic register, we effect change and charge at a distance: when the symbolic and imaginary realms are so charged with content something is let loose or perhaps discovered within the Real itself, such as when anxiety is discovered in the pre-linguistic domain of the Real upon reflecting on the ripples on the surface of the symbolic.

Electric charge (the cathectic accumulation of charged particles such as ions) in biological systems lead to action potentials and the performance of work in the enfolding and unfolding of depolarizations and repolarizations of excitable tissue, such as heart muscle or the brain. The surplus of charge, whether configured in tissues of the body electric or psychic energy, push reactions in one direction or another. Surpluses of charge or meaning share in their properties of excess, which insist on their moments.

Do not expect a review of Tad DeLay's warmly and enthusiatically written nexus of psychoanalysis and theology, God is Unconscious, any time soon. I'm afraid the book, slender in appearance but dense in substance, requires living with it for a while; therefore a review in this blog will be a tad delayed.  But DeLay has digested Lacanian psychoanalysis in a manner most palatable, and even a cursory reading (NOT recommended) gleans a healthy dose of how Lacan's registers of the Real, Symbolic and Imaginary conspire to betray the play between anxiety, repression and the (Big) Other. The Delay of God is Unconscious is poised for the Cloud, with its rhythm of folding, unfolding and folding together. Truth be told, everyone likes a (really) good conspiracy theory.

Anatomical sclerocardia and its attendant dyscrasias are difficult to treat, and treatments focus on preventing sudden cardiac death. At the nexus of psychoanalysis and theology, metanoia remains challenging but amenable to manipulation. Still, a broken heart can mimic ARVC, and a change of heart often beckons from the dyscrasias of the Lacanian trinity, the Cusanian-Deleuzean manifold, or from Galen's humors, which may or may not have anything to do with jokes and their relations to the unconscious. After all, not everything is spooky, just most things; not everything that has yet to unfold is repression cutting a gap in the Real.

Sometimes we just need to take a deep breath in the Cloud.

Gravity

Joseph C. Goodson has provided an incisive and poignant critique of my meditation on the Crucifixion. His critique is all the more searing by its deep authenticity, anchored as it is, in experience. I do not have the words of response to such a profound experience of this world, yet I would offer my presence and witness to this experience. I cannot physically stand by Joseph, but I can provide a poor surrogate to stand next to his critique, clearly nothing of a point by point response, but perhaps a response of...solidarity...



If anyone needs proof that brevity is the soul of wit, then I would recommend the 90 minute film Gravity. I am strangely attracted to this work, and rarely miss an oportunity to watch it again on any occasion of its cableTV reprises. The setting is orbital space and the routine interface of humans and technology. Ordinariness, though, is quickly overcome by the impossible. When stripped of a cooperating technology, the human becomes very human.

The film focuses its interrogations on the person of Ryan Stone, a mission specialist, biomedical engineer and mother who has lost her 4 year-old daughter, Sarah, to a senseless death. The disaster that befalls her in space reflects the profound loss she still very much experiences. Indeed, the disaster is a metaphor of the failure of everything (and anything) to make sense. To restore any sense, Ryan must rebuild the technology from scratch by revitalizing what was dormant.

Rather than re-present my earlier thoughts on the film, I am now looking it at through the lens of the crucifixion, my reflections on it, and Joseph's critique. So, I am now seeing in Gravity Ryan Stone's crucifixion. She hangs on the Cross, abandoned by everything she has taken for granted in its grand betrayal. Though she perseveres, she eventually despairs in her abandonment, and chooses death by asphyxiation. Then something else impossible happens: in her hypoxic stupor, her wits sharpen through an encounter with a most unexpected visitor, her dead co-worker, Matt Kowalski, who reminds her of her knowledge and skills, which she then puts to work forthwith.

Now things get interesting. Through a series of impossible events, Ryan is hurtling back to earth as a mob of wreckage and other flotsam chase her, bent on her destruction. She emerges from her harrowing of hell as atmospheric light flashes through the window. The capsule's parachute deploys, and she descends into the watery womb of some nondescript body of water. The treachery of the waters also tries to kill her, so she must now divest herself of all the technology holding her down into the water; she must break free to be born. The scene is primordial as she struggles to live, to become. She comes face to face with ontogeny, a freely swimming frog, as she finally breaks through the surface of the water.

Here is resurrection, entangled as it is with death. She has crossed into the Cross and out the other side into reshith, from tehom, the deep. She reifies the feminine beginning. In stunning visuals, she recapitulates genesis, humanity's emergence from the praemeval waters. We witness the first human thought: gratitude. We know not its object, but we are made present to the thought. Etching a hieroglyph into the ground with her fingers, she whispers, "thank you." The moment suspends the direction of the utterance. She slithers from the water,  becomes a quadra-ped,  then struggles to stand as the first bi-ped; and we hear a faint laugh, perhaps Sarah's laugh (for nothing is impossible with God).  

Gratitude is a problem. Ryan has lost so much: her daughter, her co-workers, her faith (in everything). After such knowledge, what forgiveness? If Zizek were to have had a hand in the film, I imagine a final scene in which the camera pans the calmest surface of the water and finally rests under the surface---on Ryan, face down, still in her murderous spacesuit, quite dead with a quizzical expression on her face, perhaps a smile in final recognition that she had freed herself of the Big Other.

But of course that is not the final scene, and we are left with the mystery of gratitude. Impossible gratitude.

Other films come to mind here, Ray Kinsella's epiphany that Iowa is heaven (Field of Dreams), Ellie Arroway's (Contact) conviction that her experience was real and filled with hope, non-abandonment, and the preciousness of the rarity of life, even Edward Jessup's (Altered States) assertion that the 'first thought' was the violence of eating. Each of these films depicts some evocation of gratitude.

Who would ever think that gratitude could be the response to the real?

The Crux of the Crucifixion IV

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

“I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”

Where is the wise person? Where is the teacher of the law? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe. Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,  but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.  For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength. [1 Cor. 18-25, NIV]

 

 

We Preach Christ crucified.

 

Paul is pretty tough on Wisdom here, and this distresses me no little bit, as I have been essaying a distinction between knowledge and wisdom in this blog. Of course, Paul is contrasting the wisdom of God with the wisdom of man, and the latter is found wanting while the former goes unrecognized. So, God in his wisdom, does not hold divinity hostage, and becomes man:

 

 

he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! [Phil. 2:7-8, NIV]

 

 

Christ crucified and death on a cross. Foolishness to some, wisdom to others. It's a matter of reading. There is something Johannine going on in these passages. Those who are 'in' share something wonderful; those who are 'out' were never in and share in something false (cf. 1 John). In the Pauline version, 'in' has the power and wisdom of God, and 'out' has a stumbling block and foolishness. But foolishness and and wisdom go hand in hand; for God's foolishness is wiser than human wisdom and his weakness is stronger than human strength.

 

The weakness of God. Repetition. Reading the Cross finds the weakness of God. We have noted earlier that confronting the reality of the Cross entails stripping divinity of analogical strength and power, the self-indulgent imposition of human characteristics upon God, the human intellectual, physical and emotional likeness upon God. The jeering crowd sums many of those characteristics up:

 

 

Those who passed by hurled insults at him, shaking their heads and saying, “You who are going to destroy the temple and build it in three days, save yourself! Come down from the cross, if you are the Son of God!” In the same way the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders mocked him. “He saved others,” they said, “but he can’t save himself! He’s the king of Israel! Let him come down now from the cross, and we will believe in him.  He trusts in God. Let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, ‘I am the Son of God.’”  In the same way the rebels who were crucified with him also heaped insults on him. [Matt. 27:39-44, NIV]

 

 

The crowd betrays their embrace of a God that would swoop down from heaven and take Christ off the Cross, rescuing from his persecutors. This is the God that dies on the Cross of Christ. That death is sealed with the words of the 22nd Psalm, whose quotations began in the bitterly ironic 'wisdom' of the crowd. The Psalm, though beginning in abandonment,

moves from abandonment to union with the God who is, the God finally free of all anthropomorphism and anthropopathism and released into his nature of relationality. Christ's antiphon to the foolishness of the crowd is the wisdom of God. "God, God, why have you abandoned me?" Christ starts the psalm again to exonerate the crowd from their God, to displace that God with 'the Lord' God. The very weakness of God does not lower Christ from the Cross, but punctuates that weakness with death. The Lord 'God who is,' is the God of resurrection.

 

 

future generations will be told about the Lord.
They will proclaim his righteousness,
declaring to a people yet unborn:
He has done it! [Psalm 22:30-31, NIV]

 

 

 

As I have noted earlier, all themes of the Gospel find their trajectories through the Cross. The foolish mockery of 'sonship' from the passing crowds becomes the relationality within the Trinity itself. Here, too, the Cross cuts an apophatic space: the space made between Father, Son and Spirit, and the very relationality that comprises the triune Godhead. In this way, it is Christ who unfolds the mystery of the Trinity as relationality that cannot remain enfolded in the gender of Father and Son. The event released in the Cross, the truth of God revealed in the Crucifixion, is whats going on between the human and divine. And part of that truth is that God made humans in his image and likeness, male and female he created them, and he saw that it was good, as good as it was when the man saw the woman and saw himself as other in the Other.

 

The Cross is the threshold to new life. By sharing in the experience of the Crucifixion, we undergo a kenotic release, creating the negative space to receive the spirit of Christ, who has commended it to God and everything that is. It is the liturgical movement of the Mass that moves us to cross into the Cross, partake of the Body of Christ, and move into a new life in the future. It is true that we leave the 'God that is us'

behind, but we have opened ourselves to the space for the

'God who is.'

 

 

The Crux of the Crucifixion III

The event of the Cross is the human in the presence of the divine, where human understanding finds the insight that the only experience of God occurs in the negative space of unknowing entanglements. The chiasmic folds, with their enfolding and unfolding within the hypostatic union, are the sites of apophatic negation, constantly emptying and expanding space where the contacts of knowing withdraw into unknowing wisdom, the learn-ed ignorance, the docta ignorantia bequeathed by Nicholas of Cusa.

In the Cross, something new is brought forth: the right relationship between God and Man, as it is presented in the suffering God-Man.


You are my Son. Today I have begotten you. (Ps. 2:7; Heb. 5:5; Acts 13:33)

This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him. (Matt. 17:5)

The hypostatic union is born in the Cross and stretches out in all directions in the Gospel. The Church teaches that it becomes a reality at the Annunciation and continues to this day and will endure forever. It is part of the symmetry between the human and divine. The Christ-event as symmetry and mystical relationality between man and God seals the promise of the theological anthropology of the God-Man as the evolutionary finality that stands before every human creature.

We enter the future through theo[poe]sis, a divinization, in hope and faith, in the divine insistence. It is a future of complicatio and explicatio, of being and becoming, of coming into and out of existence. The Cross is at the threshold of entering into the entanglements of everything that is. Once we unmake ourselves at the solid time of reshith, and open up the space for God in the act of painful expunging of ourselves from the God who is us, we die to that God, and  that God dies to us in the very Love and Being of  the God who is.

The Crux of the Crucifixion II

The meaning of Christ's abandonment can be disclosed only through the hermeneutic of the Cross itself. Crucifixion is humiliation, violence, death, horrific solitude untouched by any number of witnesses to this execution by the Roman state with the consent of the religious authorities. Narratologically, the execution is rooted in betrayal, betrayal of someone close and betrayal of religion itself; for it is better that one should die than the whole nation perish (John 11:50). Jesus could see it all coming, but it was not the occasion of his death, but the event that would be released, that moves the story to the Cross, which reads the occasion as the death of the religion that brings death to God: not 'a' religion, but the machinations of religion. We are not to read the Cross as the death of Judaism, but as the event of the death of the anthropomorphism and anthropopathism of God in all religion. The Cross cuts a vast apophatic space that negates the insinuation of the human into God, the space of not human being, not human feeling, in God.

Love is not a reification or a feeling. It is not a possession or an emotion. It is not something one feels but something that one does. It is like this for God when he is free from the human. God is, apophatically, not Love, but God loves. The very phenomenality of God presents to us on a horizon of Love before he can present to us on a horizon of Being. In a compressed synthesis of what concerns this blog lately, I suggest that Jean-Luc Marion's saturated phenomenon of revelation presents in Love, for God loves before he is; Catherine Keller walks us through the space of unknowning entanglements, bringing us to the call of the insistence of God, who through the enfolding and unfolding of the Cusanian cloud, enters John Caputo's plane of existence on the horizon of Being (God's call insists, that God might be). It is all 'spooky action at a distance,' it is real, and enfolds and unfolds everything that is real. We know its wholeness only by its nickname, "God."

The apophatic space cut by the Cross is the space of negation created by Christ's experience of abandonment. It is a vast and sacred space from which the human projections onto God are vacated, thereby releasing the event of God coming into view on the horizons that displace those that had prevented God from being God. It is the space of unknowing because it is the space God enters as he is in himself. He comes in the luminous darkness where we can see only dimly, for darkness had come over the land (Matt. 27:45).

Cut loose from the Big Other wrapped in anthropomorphic and anthropopathic 'borrow'd robes,' the abandoned Christ is left in the loving mercy that moves the Psalm. The Marcan and Matthean final, wordless cry, [re]unites Jesus to the Father, or so Luke would have it (23:46). It would be an injust theology of the Cross, were it to empower abandonment to Leave Jesus orphaned. It has been my contention that God witnesses the suffering of the Cross hypostatically: God's nature, united in the single divine person of Christ, witnesses to the suffering in the human nature in the closeness of solidarity. This solidarity redeems the human creature.

The Resurrection can never mean less than the total affirmation and vindication of the life and death of the Christ. His Sonship was so integral to his mission that the Cross would be absurd were Christ's forsakeness to eradicate the relationship with the Father. The Cross, therefore, does not read the abandonment of the human projections onto God as the abandonment of God as he is in himself, the God revealed in the Cross. After the evacuation of the human from God--the Big Other--there is remainder: the God who is.

The Crux of the Crucifixion I

The vividness and vitality of story-telling comes forth in the Crucifixion narratives in a way quite different from other parts of the gospels. The infancy narratives, ministry narratives certainly tell a story, but the telling of the Crucifixion contains closer attention to detail, setting, physical and emotional, and a starkness of power unutilized outside the death of Jesus. All four evangelists want this climactic event to radiate and thereby illuminate  what has come before, and what will shortly happen. The Crucifixion is the lens through which the evangelists write and through which we read their gospels.

All the gospels begin with the Cross. For Catholicism, it is not too much of a stretch to say that the bible begins with the Cross. Catholics read the entire library it has preserved with a hermeneutic of the Cross. It is a hermeneutic of urgency that lays open the sacred texts, a hermeneutic that rises from the narrative of the Crucifixion itself. The Logos itself is reading, writing, interpreting, for it is a Logos made flesh, suffering in the flesh, witnessing to the human. The alpha and omega, the creation of the world and the death of God, hang on the Cross, bleeding, humiliated, dying and abandoned.

Though the life, death and Resurrection of Christ cannot be tweezed apart, disentangled into discrete quanta of meaning, we can still begin with the evangelists, in the Cross, where the gospel story has its genesis. On the Cross is a human being, known by other human beings, who lived a human life. The crucifixion is witnessed by the victim's friends and enemies, in short, by those who knew him.

Christ brings with him to the place of the skull all his human experience, a religious life lived of and for God. All the scriptures he knew were with him. What does the Logos say from the Cross? Luke and John each record several utterances, none of which overlap, while Mark and Matthew records the same single utterance. The postmodern turn is enthralled by Mark and Matthew, and in the new theology of the Cross, abandonment infatuates the imagination. While it would be a poor theology of the Cross indeed to discard Luke and John, the stark power of abandonment would very likely be what overpowered those at the foot of the Cross. For the purpose of this current meditation, I will focus on this central theme. This will not be bad theology if we bear in mind this arbitrary focus and that Christian tradition itself locates 'abandonment' at the center of the "Seven Words."


My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

[Mk. 15;34; Matt. 27:46]


We are confronted immediately by an authentic saying of Jesus (based on the criterion of embarrassment) and by his reference to the 22nd Psalm. Jesus really felt it, and preached it, from the anguish of the Cross. In this moment, Christ is living and dying the words of institution: this is my body...this is my blood, forsaken. We are reminded here of Jesus question to his disciples after his 'hard teaching' of eating his flesh and drinking his blood (John 6): 'do you want to abandon me?' (6:67).

What does it mean for Christ, the epicenter of Catholicism, to feel and preach abandonment by God?

Catholicity and a Suffering God

‘The devout Christian of the future will either be a “mystic”, one who has experienced

“something”, or he will cease to be anything at all’.

---Karl Rahner, 'Christian Living Formerly and Today,' Theological Investigations, vol. 7, trans. David Bourke (New York: Herder and Herder, 1971), 15.


One of our more eloquent contributors (see the comments to "Retreat of the Barron") to this blog has suggested that I depart from the teachings of the Church from time to time as it suits the topic. It is never my intent to subvert the fundamentals of Catholic dogma, doctrine or Tradition, though I am aware that sometimes I place a heavy tax on them. My goal is never to destroy, but it is often to deconstruct, and that makes some people very nervous. I am not St. Paul, however, and I do not know I am able to be all things to all people. My goal is to read scripture, dogmatics, doctrine and Tradition and see what wants to come to life in them, to see what events seek release from them, and then allow the event to unfold (that pretty much is deconstruction in a nutshell). I attempt to look past the statements-as-idols and try to land on their iconic element. My self-imposed caveat: avoid at all costs becoming a dogmatic fundamentalist--avoid committing idolatry of the word(s).

What I propose here is not novelty for novelty's sake, nor do I propose to usurp Catholic tradition and turn it into something it cannot become ( that is, foster an inauthentic development). What I am discovering is that the Tradition of the Church is rich with meaning, far from any possibility of being reduced to dead dogma that speaks to no one and ends up on the refuse heap of history. Dogma and doctrine are great gifts bestowed upon the religiously and theologically minded, and as in the parable of the talents, to be received so that they enrich and enliven that tradition. It is their very given-ness that opens up a horizon for their releasing of the event.

My assertions lately of a suffering God do not come hocus pocus from a magical hat. They are deeply embedded in the mystical traditions of the Church, and are part of the very tapestry of scripture. I recently paraphrased Rahner's axiom that the Trinity we see is the Trinity that is--the immanent Trinity is identical with the economic Trinity. And that has implications worthy of meditation and contemplation. Hans Urs von Balthasar has also closed the gap on the economic and immanent Trinity, and from that has allowed for an understanding of a suffering Godhead.

In a remarkable document completed before Rahner and von Balthasar died, we find a veritable Biergarten of  thinkers coming into consensus (the document was very likely finally redacted by Joseph Ratzinger).

I will quote a substantial portion here:

For historical or systematic reasons God’s immutability or impassibility is often called into question in today s Theology, above all in the context of a Theology of the Cross. In that way different theological conceptions of the suffering of God have arisen. It is necessary to know how to separate false ideas from elements in accord with the biblical revelation. Since discussion of this problem continues, we limit ourselves to a first approach, which nevertheless seeks to point to a solution to the question.

1. The supporters of this Theology assert that their ideas can be found in the Old and New Testaments and in some of the Fathers. But the influence of modern philosophy has certainly had a greater weight, at least in the systematic presentation of this Theology.

1.2. According to many of our contemporaries, this Trinitarian suffering is rooted in the very divine essence itself; according to others, it is based on a certain emptying of himself on the part of God the Creator, who in some sense binds himself to human freedom or, in virtue of a pact, freely forces himself to hand over his Son—a fact that they say makes the suffering of the Father deeper than all the suffering of creation.


In recent years a few Catholic authors have made similar suggestions, maintaining that the principal role of the Crucified consisted in manifesting the suffering of the Father.

3. Without doubt the Fathers underline (against the pagan mythologies) the “apatheia” of God, without denying in this way his compassion for the suffering of the world. For them the term “apatheia” indicates the opposite of “pathos”, a word that means involuntary suffering imposed from the outside or as a consequence of fallen nature. When they admit natural and innocent suffering (like hunger or sleep), they attribute these to Jesus Christ or to God inasmuch as he feels compassion for human suffering (Origen, Horn, in Ez. 6, 6; Comm. in Matt. 17, 20; Set. in Ez. 16; Comm. in Rom. 8, 9; De prin. 4, 4, 4). From time to time they use a dialectical form of expression: God has suffered in Jesus Christ in an impassible fashion because he has done it in virtue of a free choice (Greg. Thaum., Ad Theopompum 4-8).

... But the Christology of the Church does not allow us to affirm formally that Jesus Christ could suffer according to his divine nature (cf. DS 16, 166, 196f., 284, 293f, 300, 318, 358, 504, 635, 801, 852).

Despite what has just been said, the Fathers cited above clearly affirm the immutability and impassibility of God (e.g., Origen, Contra Celsum 4, 4). Thus they absolutely exclude from the divine essence that mutability and that passivity that would permit a movement from potency to act (cf. Thomas Aquinas, STh I, q. 9, a. lc). Finally, the following considerations have been taken into account in the Tradition of the Faith of the Church to clear up this problem.

4.2. The affirmation of the impassibility of God supposes and implies this way of understanding his immutability, but this is not to be understood as though God remained indifferent to human events. God loves us with the love of friendship, and he wishes to be loved by us in return. When this love is offended, Sacred Scripture speaks of suffering on the part of God. On the other hand, it speaks of his joy when the sinner is converted (Lk 15:7). “To suffer is a more sane reaction and closer to immortality than complete insensibility” (Augustine, En. in Ps. 55, 6). The two aspects need each other. If one or the other is neglected, the concept of God as he reveals himself is not respected.

5.1. Today man desires and searches for a Divinity that will be omnipotent and certain but that does not appear indifferent; one, moreover, that is full of compassion for the miseries of man and in that sense “suffers with them”. Christian piety has always rejected the idea of a Divinity indifferent to the vicissitudes of creatures. It is even inclined to admit that, just as “compassion” is among the most noble human perfections, it can be said of God that he has a similar compassion without any imperfection and in an eminent degree, namely, the “inclination of commiseration ... and not the absence of power” (Leo I, DS 293). It is maintained that this compassion can coexist with the eternal happiness itself. The Fathers called this total mercy toward human pain and suffering “the passion of love”, a love that in the Passion of Jesus Christ has vanquished these sufferings and made them perfect (cf. Greg. Thaum., Ad Theopompum; John Paul II, Dives in misericordia, 7; AAS 72 [1980]: 1199ff).

5.2. As far as the question of the “suffering of God” is concerned, there is undoubtedly something worth retaining in the expressions of Holy Scripture and the Fathers, as well as in some recent theologies, even though they require clarification as shown above. This should perhaps also be said with regard to the Trinitarian aspect of the Cross of Jesus Christ. The eternal generation of the Son and his role as the immaculate Lamb who would pour out his precious blood are equally eternal and precede the free creation of the world (cf. 1 Pet l:19ff; Eph 1:7). In this sense, there is a very close correspondence between the gift of divinity that the Father gives to the Son and the gift by which the Father consigns his Son to the abandonment of the Cross. Since, however, the Resurrection is also present in the eternal plan of God, the suffering of “separation” (see above, B, 1.1) is always overcome by the joy of union; the compassion of the Trinitarian God for the suffering of the Word is properly understood as the work of most perfect love, which is normally a source of joy[.]   from "Theology, Christology and Anthropology."

The voices of Rahner and von Balthasar are still perceptible in this fascinating treatise.

This God of sympathy, empathy, compassion, need not be conceived as one coming into his own Trinitarian reality in some process within the immanent relations of persons. Rather, as I have suggested, the compassionate God is presented the suffering of the eternal Son made flesh and receives it in sympathy through the hypostatic union. God has confirmed his solidarity with his creature by answering her suffering with his love and presence. God insists we do no less for each other.

The God of suffering has implications for the debunking of theodicy once and for all. Just as God turns the tables, changes the subject in the Book of Job, we, as beings who meditate on human suffering, must uncouple the power and mystery of God from the human condition. If Job teaches anything, it teaches that theodicy is not the right question, otherwise God would have given his answer. Instead, he enjoins Job and makes him present to creation and restores him to more and greater life. Even here in the older scriptures, God has declared his solidarity with mankind.

Genesis has also revealed, in mythical terms, that mankind, having chosen knowledge of good and evil over life itself, must take responsibility for that choice. He must look not toward God to justify or explain evil and suffering in the created world, but to humankind itself. This is the fire mankind has stolen from reshith, and a flame mankind must keep lit. And that work of addressing evil and suffering is hard work, and underscores mankind's preference for taking privilege without its attendant responsibility. After all, God, in the Incarnation has given the Tree of Life back to mankind even after it has claimed to own good and evil. This is the irrevocable self-communication of God as understood within the theological-anthropological horizon.

Redirection and uncoupling: redirect Job's question to explain the ugly side of the human condition toward creation itself, and uncouple God's potentia absoluta from his potentia ordinata, thereby uncoupling his omnibenevolence from suffering in this world. This hermeneutic strategy does not give God a pass on mankind's problem of evil and suffering, but instead underscores his delimiting his own omnipotence in order to respect the integrity of a created universe that lives and breathes in great viability according the his absolute creative gesture.

This challenge to the theodical gesture will no doubt be met with incredulity. Why didn't God in his potentia absoluta create a world already perfect; certainly he could have done that. Wouldn't that obviate his having to ordinate his power to his own creation? The Church has always taught that God, in his absolute goodness and freedom, could have created a world other than this one; but it does not teach that it would be any less imperfect. The aporia cuts an apophatic space of unknowing where all negative statements are true and all positive statements are inadequate (Nicholas of Cusa). He did not create another world: true. He did create this one: inadequate. Such is the aporia of life itself, the mind, and the human condition.

Rahner was right: a mystic or nothing at all.




 

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.