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.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Tuesday, February 10, 2015
Image and Likeness
If gender means that female and male are realities, then gender has a descriptive purpose. Gender ordered to biology seems fairly benign, as it describes structural realities that are decisive for reproduction in many species. Grammatical gender has always fascinated me, but as it is of a piece with language, which is itself a culturally mediated phenomenon, I decline to do more with it than what's required for declension. I don't even have a particular problem with 'patriarchy' as it is historically verifiable, deeply ancient, and an artifact of many cultures. If gender means that my wife and daughters are inherently secondary or somehow inherently inferior in contemporary constructs of society, then I reject its hegemony as something grasping for something that, by today's values, or any sense of truth and justice, is ugly and hateful. Such a hegemony is invested in inequality and devaluation and is a harbinger of decadence for societies that anachronistically embrace the necessity of such sociological and historical patterns which may or may not have worked in the past.
Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her (again I date myself with books), and more recently Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep seek to express, in unique ways, theological ideas in terms of authentic, historical, female experience. The feminist approach has advanced biblical studies incalculably, not only within the historical critical model, but lately in post-structuralist models as well. No comprehensive approach to theology can move forward apart from these currents. My approach is to be sensitive to the accomplishments of biblical and theological feminism without devolving into ideology.
So, let this tiny prolegomenon be my disclaimer.
But how to approach ancient texts, understand their self-understanding, and read sensitively for illumination such texts that are so old?
The preceding blogpost looks at reshith (the title is in Hebrew and intended to be a bit jarring) in terms of what the Elohist says in going on when things get started. In that piece, I had no platform to assert that reshith also can translated as 'she who is,' 'wisdom' (sophia), and Logos. But isn't that what the Elohist is expressing? Creation occurs under conditions of divine fiat, but there seems to be a good deal of stuff making an appearance nearby. Making sense of what's there in the text is 'reading,' and making sense of sacred texts might even mean reading is praying.
Oremus:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them...
Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. [Gen 2:7; 18-19; 22, NIV]
The story is familiar. The narrative extravagance of the turn to image and likeness, pushes the reading from the purely mimetic (a good story) to the semiotic (a moment open to the event). The general creation of heaven and earth prefigures the creation of humankind, which recapitulates the motion from reshith to heaven and earth. It is from the earth itself that humans emerge as living beings, male and female. The image and likeness of God and humanity refer to their commonality, here not 'being' but loving. Love is willing the good to the other: first, Elohim to reshith, then God to the earth. The first beings are heaven and earth, and from the earth are brought forth living beings. The male and female are of the very same fleshly material, here symbolized by the rib, 'bone of my bones.' By bone of bones, I read deepest of depths (what was,once upon a time, called substance), of identity marked by difference. Male and female are identical in their image and likeness to God (and to each other) and are differentiated only to increase their likeness to God: the will and gift to generate, to create from their very selves in the unity of difference. The images and likenesses of God and humankind are reflections of each other. How is this not an event of a profoundly revealed truth of how God is in and of himself?
The text emphasizes not merely analogy of Being but the phenomenon of similarity that appears within the horizon of love. The text presents the core of the profound unity of God in relation to the differance of persons as the perichoresis of male and female ordered to creation. It is here that reshith finds its location within Elohim, even as Elohim creates in reshith (b'reshith, in the beginning, in solid time where moments are places and matter, which matter). And perhaps here on the horizon of love, reshith becomes the echo of Logos, sophia and the 'she who is,' which, collectively, is another way of saying 'I am who am,' and in so saying, I say so in memory of her.
Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is, Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza's In Memory of Her (again I date myself with books), and more recently Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep seek to express, in unique ways, theological ideas in terms of authentic, historical, female experience. The feminist approach has advanced biblical studies incalculably, not only within the historical critical model, but lately in post-structuralist models as well. No comprehensive approach to theology can move forward apart from these currents. My approach is to be sensitive to the accomplishments of biblical and theological feminism without devolving into ideology.
So, let this tiny prolegomenon be my disclaimer.
But how to approach ancient texts, understand their self-understanding, and read sensitively for illumination such texts that are so old?
The preceding blogpost looks at reshith (the title is in Hebrew and intended to be a bit jarring) in terms of what the Elohist says in going on when things get started. In that piece, I had no platform to assert that reshith also can translated as 'she who is,' 'wisdom' (sophia), and Logos. But isn't that what the Elohist is expressing? Creation occurs under conditions of divine fiat, but there seems to be a good deal of stuff making an appearance nearby. Making sense of what's there in the text is 'reading,' and making sense of sacred texts might even mean reading is praying.
Oremus:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. [Gen 1:26-7, NIV]
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. [Gen 1:26-7, NIV]
Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them...
Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man. [Gen 2:7; 18-19; 22, NIV]
The story is familiar. The narrative extravagance of the turn to image and likeness, pushes the reading from the purely mimetic (a good story) to the semiotic (a moment open to the event). The general creation of heaven and earth prefigures the creation of humankind, which recapitulates the motion from reshith to heaven and earth. It is from the earth itself that humans emerge as living beings, male and female. The image and likeness of God and humanity refer to their commonality, here not 'being' but loving. Love is willing the good to the other: first, Elohim to reshith, then God to the earth. The first beings are heaven and earth, and from the earth are brought forth living beings. The male and female are of the very same fleshly material, here symbolized by the rib, 'bone of my bones.' By bone of bones, I read deepest of depths (what was,once upon a time, called substance), of identity marked by difference. Male and female are identical in their image and likeness to God (and to each other) and are differentiated only to increase their likeness to God: the will and gift to generate, to create from their very selves in the unity of difference. The images and likenesses of God and humankind are reflections of each other. How is this not an event of a profoundly revealed truth of how God is in and of himself?
The text emphasizes not merely analogy of Being but the phenomenon of similarity that appears within the horizon of love. The text presents the core of the profound unity of God in relation to the differance of persons as the perichoresis of male and female ordered to creation. It is here that reshith finds its location within Elohim, even as Elohim creates in reshith (b'reshith, in the beginning, in solid time where moments are places and matter, which matter). And perhaps here on the horizon of love, reshith becomes the echo of Logos, sophia and the 'she who is,' which, collectively, is another way of saying 'I am who am,' and in so saying, I say so in memory of her.
Monday, February 9, 2015
בְּרֵאשִׁית
Solid time.
t ~(E/m)^-2/d
Read that as: time is directly related to the square root of a quotient, expressed as Energy and mass, and this as another quotient, related to distance. It's a way of getting time by itself algebraically. This could be bad algebra, but after Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, I want to walk on time's surface through a distance to reshith: בְּרֵאשִׁית
Translated variously as 'beginning,' 'firstfruits,' 'origin,' reshith bears feminine gender, gerundive sense, and describes a place in time. It is the place where and in which Elohim creates. It is distinctly not participial, not an accompanying activity, so, Gen. 1:1 reads, "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth;" not, "in beginning, God created...," or "when God began to create..." As Caputo is fond of pointing out, Genesis begins with a Bet, not an Aleph, a prepositional 'in', not a vocalic sound. Genesis begins in a place, not in a moment, at least not a moment understood on a horizon of Being, but on a horizon of eros, where moments are places, solid time. God is in, within a horizon of Beginning, not Being.
Already in this ante-tehomic verse, the masculine plural finds itself in a feminine place. The female is already there, because, in Elohim's simplicity, actus purus reifies the thought of the good, in an act of love: creation in the erotic reduction. In creation God loves because is it not good to be [alone], and the good drives the whole shebang. Love in locality precedes Being in essential solitude (ens). Though I began mathematically, math is too ontic to really hold sway in this kind of eroticism. The face of love is after all iconic, and algebra an idol.
The feminine reshith, and tehom, too, oscillate[osculate?] harmonically with the Elohim, humming creation along. Only in an algebra of the highest order do these osculants touch, bringing forth heaven and earth; but even so, the moment of place saturates any mathematical category, and collapses into the good and love. The trace of God in the ruach that hovers over what is forming traces itself in love, in touching, in the kiss.
In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion suggests that God loves just as we do, and that we love as God does. God made man in his image and likeness, male and female he created them. Though God gives prerogatives to his creatures that he himself does not have (e.g., radical freedom of will), it is here, in eros, that 'image and likeness' become asymptotic, on this horizon of Love, where the phenomenality of reshith and tehom play out for God and us. It is not good that the man should be alone, and it is not good for Elohim to be without reshith. There is no mythos of a divine consort here (cf. Raphael Patai's The Hebrew Goddess; Enuma Elish, Hesiod's Theogony, Catherine Keller's soujourn in the Babylonian pantheon in Face of the Deep), but rather the hyperreal locus of beginning, of solid time, where a God of actus purus and an omnipotence ordered to love creates: in Greek, genesis.
In the phenomenology of the divine, to say that 'God is love,' is to say that God loves, and he loves before he 'is.' God creates within the horizon of Beginning, not Being. Beginning is loving. What comes into being, within a horizon of Being, began in another horizon anterior to Being; this horizon has the name Love, and her other name is reshith. The calculus of reshith is phenomenology in the making, the reshith of phenomenology, and it allows God to appear.
A Lenten reflection on solid time, reshith:
The liturgical calendar is but a kind of poetry that reminds us of cycles that are not cyclic, of seasons that are not seasonal. Kairos, is all Vorstellung, but chronos is time reduced to the moment in the phenomenological reduction to the event. Advent reminds us that every day is Advent; Lent reminds us that every day is Lent. Make straight the path of the Lord: melt sklerokardia into metanoia: this is our daily bread. Beginning is always creating, and in Lent we create a way in and a way toward. We open ourselves up upon a horizon of love for forgiveness and reconciliation, yes, but better, for the gift, for the given-ness with which we are gifted. The sheer given-ness of the Christ.
t ~(E/m)^-2/d
Read that as: time is directly related to the square root of a quotient, expressed as Energy and mass, and this as another quotient, related to distance. It's a way of getting time by itself algebraically. This could be bad algebra, but after Christopher Nolan's Interstellar, I want to walk on time's surface through a distance to reshith: בְּרֵאשִׁית
Translated variously as 'beginning,' 'firstfruits,' 'origin,' reshith bears feminine gender, gerundive sense, and describes a place in time. It is the place where and in which Elohim creates. It is distinctly not participial, not an accompanying activity, so, Gen. 1:1 reads, "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth;" not, "in beginning, God created...," or "when God began to create..." As Caputo is fond of pointing out, Genesis begins with a Bet, not an Aleph, a prepositional 'in', not a vocalic sound. Genesis begins in a place, not in a moment, at least not a moment understood on a horizon of Being, but on a horizon of eros, where moments are places, solid time. God is in, within a horizon of Beginning, not Being.
Already in this ante-tehomic verse, the masculine plural finds itself in a feminine place. The female is already there, because, in Elohim's simplicity, actus purus reifies the thought of the good, in an act of love: creation in the erotic reduction. In creation God loves because is it not good to be [alone], and the good drives the whole shebang. Love in locality precedes Being in essential solitude (ens). Though I began mathematically, math is too ontic to really hold sway in this kind of eroticism. The face of love is after all iconic, and algebra an idol.
The feminine reshith, and tehom, too, oscillate[osculate?] harmonically with the Elohim, humming creation along. Only in an algebra of the highest order do these osculants touch, bringing forth heaven and earth; but even so, the moment of place saturates any mathematical category, and collapses into the good and love. The trace of God in the ruach that hovers over what is forming traces itself in love, in touching, in the kiss.
In The Erotic Phenomenon, Marion suggests that God loves just as we do, and that we love as God does. God made man in his image and likeness, male and female he created them. Though God gives prerogatives to his creatures that he himself does not have (e.g., radical freedom of will), it is here, in eros, that 'image and likeness' become asymptotic, on this horizon of Love, where the phenomenality of reshith and tehom play out for God and us. It is not good that the man should be alone, and it is not good for Elohim to be without reshith. There is no mythos of a divine consort here (cf. Raphael Patai's The Hebrew Goddess; Enuma Elish, Hesiod's Theogony, Catherine Keller's soujourn in the Babylonian pantheon in Face of the Deep), but rather the hyperreal locus of beginning, of solid time, where a God of actus purus and an omnipotence ordered to love creates: in Greek, genesis.
In the phenomenology of the divine, to say that 'God is love,' is to say that God loves, and he loves before he 'is.' God creates within the horizon of Beginning, not Being. Beginning is loving. What comes into being, within a horizon of Being, began in another horizon anterior to Being; this horizon has the name Love, and her other name is reshith. The calculus of reshith is phenomenology in the making, the reshith of phenomenology, and it allows God to appear.
A Lenten reflection on solid time, reshith:
The liturgical calendar is but a kind of poetry that reminds us of cycles that are not cyclic, of seasons that are not seasonal. Kairos, is all Vorstellung, but chronos is time reduced to the moment in the phenomenological reduction to the event. Advent reminds us that every day is Advent; Lent reminds us that every day is Lent. Make straight the path of the Lord: melt sklerokardia into metanoia: this is our daily bread. Beginning is always creating, and in Lent we create a way in and a way toward. We open ourselves up upon a horizon of love for forgiveness and reconciliation, yes, but better, for the gift, for the given-ness with which we are gifted. The sheer given-ness of the Christ.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
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?
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.
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.
Monday, February 2, 2015
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
---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.
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.
Wednesday, January 28, 2015
Credo in Deum, Patrem Omnipotentem
Well, you really can't get much more Catholic than putting the words of the ancient creeds in your mind and on your lips. The Tradition of the Church is a great gift, and dogma is a part of that tradition. Though today we really are suspicious of dogma, (its not really a good thing to be 'dogmatic'), understood as a gift of a living body of faith, understanding and belief, a gift bequeathed from the past to the present, we can accept and authenticate the gift. Yet, we might say to ourselves, 'beware of Nicaeans bearing gifts.' And therein rests our suspicion; where's the catch? what must we give back, what return is implied in the giving? Perhaps we should just say, 'thanks but no thanks.' Still, a gift is a gift, and some gifts, the really good and authentic gifts, have no strings attached. A gift is in its purest, holiest form when it is dissociated from reciprocation, even the possibility of reciprocation. I want to keep the tension between pure gifts and less than pure gifts in this discussion of omnipotence, an idea handed down not just from the 4th century, but from the formation of Christian identity in relation to God.
Sadly, the problems with omnipotence subvert any realism, falling prey to the inability to distinguish the univocal from the analogical, collapsing both into some impossible human ideal of what something 'all-powerful' can do, has done, and continues to do. The dogma of divine omnipotence is intended as a gift, but brings trouble in all the confusion. Even the dogma itself is troubled by speculation on the absolute power of God and the ordinated power of God. The distinction between these 2 manifestations of the divine omnipotence is intended to bring peace, but instead often brings discord. Peter Damian denies the potentia ordinata, while Thomas Aquinas holds this ordered power in tension with the potentia absoluta. Neither purveyor of the divine power gives a satisfying synthesis of what humans actually experience, both thinkers being entrenched in big-time onto-theology. Still, an omnipotence ordered to the world declared 'good' in Genesis makes more intuitive sense than holding the divine omnipotence to pleasing the desires and judgments of creatures. The simplicity in a strategy of restricting the absolute power of God to the choice of 'any world order,' and describing the ordinated power as the self-limiting realism attached to divine power in 'this world order' just accounts for the phenomena confronting creatures better than a strategy that draws no distinction at all.
In any event, the Catholic dogma of God's omipotence has always been more nuanced than an unqualified "God can do all things." It is a very Catholic notion that God cannot contradict, betray integrity, suspend the 'good' of himself or creation. So, against the good monk Damian, God is incapable of making occurences 'unhappen.' There is nothing capricious about the divine omnipotence, reports to the contrary in the bible and recent headlines notwithstanding.
I am certainly not arguing that the distinctions between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata have solved the riddle of the aporia of an omnipotent God. These distinctions do, however, show the traces of the way omnipotence haunts both dogmas and sacred texts, and how omnipotence is harbored in the name of God, how it is structured in texts (sacred and profane---and by 'text' I mean any locus [or circus] of signification). Everywhere God's power is in such texts, there will be found the creature wrapping its head and fist about it. Still, if we use Caputo's definition of 'theopoetics' as the discourse of what haunts theology, of what circumfesses within confessional theology, then Catholic dogma is the religion's first whack at a living theopoetics. The next developments in Catholic dogma might be to be less dogmatic about it; developments in doctrine might be to be less doctrinaire. A dogma without dogma seems to fit inside the notion of a religion without religion.
Indeed, each word of the ancient creeds is but an invitation, our four words in this post's title each a call to reflection. What is belief? God? A Father? Omnipotence? Pantokrator? Almighty? All-ruling ruler of rules? The creeds, traditions, and sacred texts of the Church are an invitation to read. But not only to read draped in a hermeneutic from which no one really emerges, but reading to release the events waiting to be born in these texts. What event is really harbored in the dogma of omnipotence if not that of love and freedom, integrity of creation and embrace of the good?
Not every event of human complicity with power in this world has its call in the divine insistence. The events released in the name of God, especially those events pried loose from the divine name with analogical claims of univocal omnipotence, are often just plain trouble. They visit the absolute upon the relative, totalizing in events what cannot be totalized; and trying to contain the uncontainable sends the event back to the harbor, even after the trouble comes, which is usually in the form of violence.
Violence results from gifts that are assumed to be asking for something in return. Only a real openness to the gift can discern the nature of the gift. If the gift is a contract, then thanks but no thanks. We see how those gifts are reciprocated in this world. If the gift is a gift of grace, then we know the tree by its fruit.
Sadly, the problems with omnipotence subvert any realism, falling prey to the inability to distinguish the univocal from the analogical, collapsing both into some impossible human ideal of what something 'all-powerful' can do, has done, and continues to do. The dogma of divine omnipotence is intended as a gift, but brings trouble in all the confusion. Even the dogma itself is troubled by speculation on the absolute power of God and the ordinated power of God. The distinction between these 2 manifestations of the divine omnipotence is intended to bring peace, but instead often brings discord. Peter Damian denies the potentia ordinata, while Thomas Aquinas holds this ordered power in tension with the potentia absoluta. Neither purveyor of the divine power gives a satisfying synthesis of what humans actually experience, both thinkers being entrenched in big-time onto-theology. Still, an omnipotence ordered to the world declared 'good' in Genesis makes more intuitive sense than holding the divine omnipotence to pleasing the desires and judgments of creatures. The simplicity in a strategy of restricting the absolute power of God to the choice of 'any world order,' and describing the ordinated power as the self-limiting realism attached to divine power in 'this world order' just accounts for the phenomena confronting creatures better than a strategy that draws no distinction at all.
In any event, the Catholic dogma of God's omipotence has always been more nuanced than an unqualified "God can do all things." It is a very Catholic notion that God cannot contradict, betray integrity, suspend the 'good' of himself or creation. So, against the good monk Damian, God is incapable of making occurences 'unhappen.' There is nothing capricious about the divine omnipotence, reports to the contrary in the bible and recent headlines notwithstanding.
I am certainly not arguing that the distinctions between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata have solved the riddle of the aporia of an omnipotent God. These distinctions do, however, show the traces of the way omnipotence haunts both dogmas and sacred texts, and how omnipotence is harbored in the name of God, how it is structured in texts (sacred and profane---and by 'text' I mean any locus [or circus] of signification). Everywhere God's power is in such texts, there will be found the creature wrapping its head and fist about it. Still, if we use Caputo's definition of 'theopoetics' as the discourse of what haunts theology, of what circumfesses within confessional theology, then Catholic dogma is the religion's first whack at a living theopoetics. The next developments in Catholic dogma might be to be less dogmatic about it; developments in doctrine might be to be less doctrinaire. A dogma without dogma seems to fit inside the notion of a religion without religion.
Indeed, each word of the ancient creeds is but an invitation, our four words in this post's title each a call to reflection. What is belief? God? A Father? Omnipotence? Pantokrator? Almighty? All-ruling ruler of rules? The creeds, traditions, and sacred texts of the Church are an invitation to read. But not only to read draped in a hermeneutic from which no one really emerges, but reading to release the events waiting to be born in these texts. What event is really harbored in the dogma of omnipotence if not that of love and freedom, integrity of creation and embrace of the good?
Not every event of human complicity with power in this world has its call in the divine insistence. The events released in the name of God, especially those events pried loose from the divine name with analogical claims of univocal omnipotence, are often just plain trouble. They visit the absolute upon the relative, totalizing in events what cannot be totalized; and trying to contain the uncontainable sends the event back to the harbor, even after the trouble comes, which is usually in the form of violence.
Violence results from gifts that are assumed to be asking for something in return. Only a real openness to the gift can discern the nature of the gift. If the gift is a contract, then thanks but no thanks. We see how those gifts are reciprocated in this world. If the gift is a gift of grace, then we know the tree by its fruit.
Tuesday, January 20, 2015
The Theological Moment: Lex Orandi Lex Credendi
A sage once said that we shall know the tree by its fruits; perhaps, in matters of religion, fruits and trees problematize beliefs and prayers. In my previous blog entry, I suggested an intimate relationship between authority and authenticity, and further, that the Marcan Jesus interrogated these religious attitudes by interrogating the priests, scribes and elders who challenged the foundation for Jesus' actions. Though the Jesus in Mark 11 does not state so explicitly, he seems to locate the discernment of authority within the human conscience. In the context of the New Testament themes of 'hardness of heart'(sklerokardia) and a 'change of heart'(metanoia), a heart open to the call, God's insistence, perhaps, we can think of the former as a poorly formed conscience, and the latter as a properly formed conscience. The elders response of feigned ignorance comes from sklerokardia, a closing off of the event. In the case at hand, the event of authentication is a matter of conscience.
Today the world finds itself in a theological moment. Depending on the degree of its dogmatism, its openness to the event is a smaller or larger aperture. Depending on the intensity of its secularism, its openness to the call, to the insistence of Joycean 'chaosmos,' is a smaller or larger moment. The world is more or less deaf to the call, depending on its conscience. The world might not even know that a theological moment is upon it, because it might not even know the language of the call.
In the news today we learn that ISIS holds for ransom 2 Japanese journalists. They are already wearing the orange vestments, kneeling in desert sands at the feet of the high priest of the black vestments. Another celebration of the liturgy of murder lurks on the altar of the internet; another sacrament of ISIS is before the world in a moment of very public prayer. The law of prayer is the law of belief. See how yet another pair of journalists are made to kneel, to genuflect to this god of violence. See how the 'word' suffers before the prayers in the desert. See how freedom is bound from behind and paraded before the world.
U.S. president, Barack Obama, has recently adopted a public strategy (foreign policy?) that denies religious status to extremists who murder in the name of God. Is this because U.S. policy has determined that ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram are not religious in nature? Have U.S. policy makers done some theological homework, and concluded that these groups are no longer recognizably Islamic or religious at all? If so, the American people should know how their representatives have interpreted for them the theological moment the world faces today. If not, perhaps these policy makers have recreated these groups in their own militantly secular image, reducing self-proclaimed religious zealots to terms it understands.
Violence is a self-replicating event. It comes from hardness of heart raised to action, action grounded in poorly formed consciences. Its victims are the innocent. See how the high priests, scribes and elders of secularism and religion hurl us into the deep gashes of faith. The more things change, the more they stay the same. More of the same: radical secularism and radical religion do the same thing: they reduce each other to the simplest terms they collectively understand, and divide by blood and death.
The intersections of religion, faith, secularism, politics, realism and theology are dangerous places indeed. I am distinctly uncomfortable commenting on 'the news' and the digests of the 'talking heads.' It is my conviction, though, that great and self-serving misunderstanding is being perpetuated under the names of religion, secularism, God and justice, resulting in the visitation of violence and slaughter upon the innocents. I do not believe, as some would have it, that there are no innocents. There are innocents. To declare them complicit in the rage and assault on the world is an ugly and evil strategem whose only hope is to make violence 'acceptable' tender in the commerce of beliefs.
Violence will not hold. This is my hope, prayer and belief.
Today the world finds itself in a theological moment. Depending on the degree of its dogmatism, its openness to the event is a smaller or larger aperture. Depending on the intensity of its secularism, its openness to the call, to the insistence of Joycean 'chaosmos,' is a smaller or larger moment. The world is more or less deaf to the call, depending on its conscience. The world might not even know that a theological moment is upon it, because it might not even know the language of the call.
In the news today we learn that ISIS holds for ransom 2 Japanese journalists. They are already wearing the orange vestments, kneeling in desert sands at the feet of the high priest of the black vestments. Another celebration of the liturgy of murder lurks on the altar of the internet; another sacrament of ISIS is before the world in a moment of very public prayer. The law of prayer is the law of belief. See how yet another pair of journalists are made to kneel, to genuflect to this god of violence. See how the 'word' suffers before the prayers in the desert. See how freedom is bound from behind and paraded before the world.
U.S. president, Barack Obama, has recently adopted a public strategy (foreign policy?) that denies religious status to extremists who murder in the name of God. Is this because U.S. policy has determined that ISIS, Al Qaeda, Boko Haram are not religious in nature? Have U.S. policy makers done some theological homework, and concluded that these groups are no longer recognizably Islamic or religious at all? If so, the American people should know how their representatives have interpreted for them the theological moment the world faces today. If not, perhaps these policy makers have recreated these groups in their own militantly secular image, reducing self-proclaimed religious zealots to terms it understands.
Violence is a self-replicating event. It comes from hardness of heart raised to action, action grounded in poorly formed consciences. Its victims are the innocent. See how the high priests, scribes and elders of secularism and religion hurl us into the deep gashes of faith. The more things change, the more they stay the same. More of the same: radical secularism and radical religion do the same thing: they reduce each other to the simplest terms they collectively understand, and divide by blood and death.
The intersections of religion, faith, secularism, politics, realism and theology are dangerous places indeed. I am distinctly uncomfortable commenting on 'the news' and the digests of the 'talking heads.' It is my conviction, though, that great and self-serving misunderstanding is being perpetuated under the names of religion, secularism, God and justice, resulting in the visitation of violence and slaughter upon the innocents. I do not believe, as some would have it, that there are no innocents. There are innocents. To declare them complicit in the rage and assault on the world is an ugly and evil strategem whose only hope is to make violence 'acceptable' tender in the commerce of beliefs.
Violence will not hold. This is my hope, prayer and belief.
Sunday, January 18, 2015
Authenticity and Authority
They arrived again in Jerusalem, and while Jesus was walking in the temple courts, the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders came to him.“By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you authority to do this?”
Jesus replied, “I will ask you one question. Answer me, and I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John’s baptism—was it from heaven, or of human origin? Tell me!”
They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin’ …” (They feared the people, for everyone held that John really was a prophet.)
So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.”
So they answered Jesus, “We don’t know.”
Jesus said, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”
[Mark 11:11-32, NIV]
Following Mark's fig sandwich (temple-cleansing between 2 slices of ficus), the evangelist reports this discussion of authority. While the pericope calls into question the prevarication of the elders, we ought not slide past Jesus' interrogation of the authentication of authority. The elders' question is twofold: they want to know what authority, and who is doing the authorizing. Jesus restricts any response he might have to the what, as he poses his twofold query: was John's baptism authentic (of heaven), or not (of human origin).
This is a fascinating rhetorical moment. Jesus masterfully turns the tables on the elders, hinging his own response on theirs. The elders do not reproach him for his impudence, but instead cower under political correctness. We are privy to their dilemma: they cannot say authentic, lest they condemn themselves by admitting to disparaging the power of heaven; then cannot say inauthentic, because the people are convinced of the authenticity of John's baptism. They reach the decision to feign ignorance: ignoramus et ignoramibus. Jesus, sensing their insincerity (or their subterfuge), declines to respond to their challenge. We do not know with what mood the elders leave the scene. Some of them will be more assertive at Jesus' trial.
Jesus' transgressive rhetoric not only reduces the elders to weak argument, but queries their authority to ask their questions in the first place. The immediate antecedent to their questions is, of course, the cleansing of the temple (did they hear of the withered ficus?), but all of Jesus' activity to this point is in play. Perhaps some of them witnessed his authority in action as recorded in the previous chapters. Perhaps they are still licking their wounds after Jesus rebukes them for embracing human tradition over the command of God (Mk. 7:8-9 ff.). Jesus still awaits their response to his questions about their authority, about the authenticity of their traditions vis a vis the authenticity of the divine commandments. Do their challenges to his authority and authenticity arise from their human traditions or from heaven?
The questions about John's baptism are surrogates for Jesus' own authority: and here is Jesus' effectiveness in this pericope--he provocatively asks the elders to answer their own questions; they seem to know the answers. The authority of Jesus has the same authority and author as John's baptism: the divine, of heaven, of God.
Violence stirs in their hearts.
Jesus' transgressive rhetoric not only reduces the elders to weak argument, but queries their authority to ask their questions in the first place. The immediate antecedent to their questions is, of course, the cleansing of the temple (did they hear of the withered ficus?), but all of Jesus' activity to this point is in play. Perhaps some of them witnessed his authority in action as recorded in the previous chapters. Perhaps they are still licking their wounds after Jesus rebukes them for embracing human tradition over the command of God (Mk. 7:8-9 ff.). Jesus still awaits their response to his questions about their authority, about the authenticity of their traditions vis a vis the authenticity of the divine commandments. Do their challenges to his authority and authenticity arise from their human traditions or from heaven?
The questions about John's baptism are surrogates for Jesus' own authority: and here is Jesus' effectiveness in this pericope--he provocatively asks the elders to answer their own questions; they seem to know the answers. The authority of Jesus has the same authority and author as John's baptism: the divine, of heaven, of God.
Violence stirs in their hearts.
Sunday, January 11, 2015
Footnotes to Paris: Sacramental Violence
Some of this blog's lurkers have preferred not to leave comments but have expressed some of their thoughts to me in other forms of communication. Generally, these concerns are directed at 'poetic' elements in my previous post, "Paris Reduced to Terror," and how those elements come across as 'arcane' and even 'elitist.' I appreciate this critique, and I suppose my own review of that blog entry also discovers some (perhaps unintended) cleverness and subtlety.
In my discussion of the West and Jihad, my use of the imagery of sand and ocean to house secularism and religiosity seems to obscure as much as illuminate. My thought was simply that the West's response to sectarian Islamic fundamentalism with its sense of Jihad and Sharia, is to attempt to inundate it with more radical secularism, which in turn, fuels rage and violence. I further characterized this technique as self -indulgent and nihilistic on both sides of the antagonism.
It is important to always note the sectarian nature of Islam, and one need look no further than Sunni and Shi'a Islam for a poignant demonstration. To this end, I restrict my remarks to the sect of Islam that has adopted violence as its sacramental expression. In this sacramentalism, blood, murder and destruction comprise the matter, and Jihad and Sharia, the form. In "Paris Reduced to Terror," I suggested that Christianity, in its monstrous compound of Church-State, eventually evolved (in both the Reformation and the rise of the nation-states) its self-understanding: its violence was not of its own substance, but instead adopted from the strong force of governance, of the secular. In the sectarian Islam that visits 'terror' on the West, violence derives from something inherent in Jihad: it is religious in nature, in its reading of Islam.
The hylomorphism of Jihadist sacramentalism is deconstructed by its violence. The ritualistic murders of jounalists in the sands of the desert, complete with the sacramentals of black and orange vestments, knives, and the backdrop of the desert itself, take place upon the altar of the internet. The murders in Paris were accomplished on the altar of freedom, or the mockery of freedom, its matter the fire of automatic weapons, and its form, the words, victims' names and statements of the vindication of the Prophet.
This extreme expression of religiosity under the aegis of justice, cannot be effectively met with extreme secularism. Like the world of Star Trek: The Voyage Home, the secular world finds itself needing great whales to find its redemption. "Paris Reduced to Terror" was meant to underscore the need for a response to 'terror' and 'justice' that leads to effective engagement. Today's unprecedented march of Western solidarity in Paris is but a first step. The violence of ISIS and its continued threats against the West, promise to be a saturated phenomenon that will precipitate a political state predicated on sectarian violence and destruction from its very substance, its fermenting solution of sectarian hatred and intolerance. The next steps the West takes must seek to alter that saturated solution before something hideous crystallizes out of solution in an event of enormity.
The West needs to recover its great whales. Saturated secularism has the tendency to engender more of the same.
In my discussion of the West and Jihad, my use of the imagery of sand and ocean to house secularism and religiosity seems to obscure as much as illuminate. My thought was simply that the West's response to sectarian Islamic fundamentalism with its sense of Jihad and Sharia, is to attempt to inundate it with more radical secularism, which in turn, fuels rage and violence. I further characterized this technique as self -indulgent and nihilistic on both sides of the antagonism.
It is important to always note the sectarian nature of Islam, and one need look no further than Sunni and Shi'a Islam for a poignant demonstration. To this end, I restrict my remarks to the sect of Islam that has adopted violence as its sacramental expression. In this sacramentalism, blood, murder and destruction comprise the matter, and Jihad and Sharia, the form. In "Paris Reduced to Terror," I suggested that Christianity, in its monstrous compound of Church-State, eventually evolved (in both the Reformation and the rise of the nation-states) its self-understanding: its violence was not of its own substance, but instead adopted from the strong force of governance, of the secular. In the sectarian Islam that visits 'terror' on the West, violence derives from something inherent in Jihad: it is religious in nature, in its reading of Islam.
The hylomorphism of Jihadist sacramentalism is deconstructed by its violence. The ritualistic murders of jounalists in the sands of the desert, complete with the sacramentals of black and orange vestments, knives, and the backdrop of the desert itself, take place upon the altar of the internet. The murders in Paris were accomplished on the altar of freedom, or the mockery of freedom, its matter the fire of automatic weapons, and its form, the words, victims' names and statements of the vindication of the Prophet.
This extreme expression of religiosity under the aegis of justice, cannot be effectively met with extreme secularism. Like the world of Star Trek: The Voyage Home, the secular world finds itself needing great whales to find its redemption. "Paris Reduced to Terror" was meant to underscore the need for a response to 'terror' and 'justice' that leads to effective engagement. Today's unprecedented march of Western solidarity in Paris is but a first step. The violence of ISIS and its continued threats against the West, promise to be a saturated phenomenon that will precipitate a political state predicated on sectarian violence and destruction from its very substance, its fermenting solution of sectarian hatred and intolerance. The next steps the West takes must seek to alter that saturated solution before something hideous crystallizes out of solution in an event of enormity.
The West needs to recover its great whales. Saturated secularism has the tendency to engender more of the same.
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Paris Reduced to Terror
Though politics is one of my interests, it has not been a subject addressed in this weblog, which is dedicated to the implications of Catholicism and theology. Therefore, this comment, something of a 'public theology,' shall be interested in the events harbored in the names of justice and God, and how these events might be unfolding in the recent occurrence of devastation in Paris.
The West receives the news from Paris with horror and terror, and tends to define the killing of journalists as terrorism, and further proof that Islam wishes to impose Sharia law wherever it pitches its tent. While terror might properly characterize the emotional response to this occurrence, terror might not be the most effective way it is finally interpreted. It seems to me that, at least from some perspective and for a moment, Sharia law was in force in Paris, enforced by 3 agents authorized by jihad to exact, for that moment, justice, a justice served by the deaths of journalists exercising the Western idea of freedom.
The West has not gained much from interpreting the enforcement of Sharia law as acts of international terror. The West's mode of response has been to take its collective head out of the sand in order to use that sand to fill up all the oceans of trouble, an act which it thinks will eradicate that trouble. But the West continues to drown and jihad continues to drink sand. The West asks 'what justice is this?' and jihad asks 'what freedom is this?' Indeed, to ask the questions is to answer them. There is no calculus satisfactory to both Islam and the West, no equations of 'terror' with 'justice;' for in this collision of cultures, 'terror' sees itself on the one hand as 'freedom' and 'justice'; and on the other hand, 'justice' sees itself as 'freedom' and the absence of 'terror.' All meanings are lost in translation.
The events that are released by highly charged terms such as God, justice and freedom are always already troubled, if not just plain trouble. All too often, people die and the earth is scorched in the violence of the crusade, carried out in the names of God, justice and freedom. The crusade is troubled by the antagonists who both hold to acting in the names of God, justice and freedom, and Islam and the West seem quite satisfied with themselves to embark on a strategy in which the only survivors of their antagonism will be these names for whom there will be no one left to utter. The nihilism and insufferable self-indulgence of these antagonists make the same claim to truth, justice and the [choose your metanarrative] way.
Perhaps the problem is one of a poor memory. The antagonists have forgotten that a God that is not love is not God; that the only justice is the justice to come and that justice is the justice of the God to come. And that God to come will be a God of love for whom violence is a very peculiar choice, a very odd exercise of free will.
There are short term memory deficits at work as well. All three monotheistic faiths preach that God made humans in his image and likeness. So, when the enforcer's of Sharia law looked into the faces of their own image and likeness and called out their names, they also called out the names of justice, freedom and God and shot them all in the head (witnesses to the massacre agree that the executioners called out the names of each victim before meting out the justice of Sharia). Murder in these names is the murder of the events harbored in these names. The murder of a single human being is the murder of God, which is the distancing of humanity from the event of the God to come.
What has violence to do with God? The Christian crusades ended when Christianity finally looked to the log in its own eye before removing the speck in the other before it. Christianity saw that its violence was not authentic; was not of its own substance, but a contamination from without that had entered its very fabric. It pulled out many fibers, but, apparently, Christianity is not immune to memory problems; strands of violence wreak scandalous havoc to this day. Is this, I wonder, what we really mean by 'Christian realism?'
The calls from justice, freedom and God, the calls from the justice, freedom and God to come, are difficult to discern when the strands of violence remain in the grand tapestries of religion (and politics, too). And it is clear that the only justice, the only God we will ever get is the God and justice that visited Paris, so long as the names we give God and justice are our own names. So long as the images and likeness we see in each other are fear, hate, terror and horror, then our justice and our God will be the God and justice of fear, hate, terror and horror.
What can be the resolution to such hardness of heart? Metanoia. The tilling of the earth in the heart, its softening, its readying to receive the other, will open hearts to receive the image and likeness of God. When we look into each other's faces and call our names, we must look more deeply through the surface of the deep, into waters from which we all come. It is here that we meet the God to come in the ongoing creation of the world. We really need to begin again, and start a new story. Viens, oui, oui.
Paris reduced to terror gives us nothing new, more of the same; that story is old. The West has not visited atrocities upon Islam and Islam is not exacting justice in the face of the injustices of the past. That's the narrative gasping for air. Paris needs to be raised to the power of the infinity of God, through and despite the finitude of the human. When the crusaders of yesterday wielded swords, the world had the luxury of time to discover its engines of violence. The crusaders of today wield weapons very unlike swords. Jihad knows no borders, knows no sovereignty but Sharia, knows no limits on the force of Sharia. Time is running out: God and justice hang upon the discovery of the engines of violence conspiring to reduce God and justice to the cinders of empty names, and the rest of us to the nothing before creation.
The West receives the news from Paris with horror and terror, and tends to define the killing of journalists as terrorism, and further proof that Islam wishes to impose Sharia law wherever it pitches its tent. While terror might properly characterize the emotional response to this occurrence, terror might not be the most effective way it is finally interpreted. It seems to me that, at least from some perspective and for a moment, Sharia law was in force in Paris, enforced by 3 agents authorized by jihad to exact, for that moment, justice, a justice served by the deaths of journalists exercising the Western idea of freedom.
The West has not gained much from interpreting the enforcement of Sharia law as acts of international terror. The West's mode of response has been to take its collective head out of the sand in order to use that sand to fill up all the oceans of trouble, an act which it thinks will eradicate that trouble. But the West continues to drown and jihad continues to drink sand. The West asks 'what justice is this?' and jihad asks 'what freedom is this?' Indeed, to ask the questions is to answer them. There is no calculus satisfactory to both Islam and the West, no equations of 'terror' with 'justice;' for in this collision of cultures, 'terror' sees itself on the one hand as 'freedom' and 'justice'; and on the other hand, 'justice' sees itself as 'freedom' and the absence of 'terror.' All meanings are lost in translation.
The events that are released by highly charged terms such as God, justice and freedom are always already troubled, if not just plain trouble. All too often, people die and the earth is scorched in the violence of the crusade, carried out in the names of God, justice and freedom. The crusade is troubled by the antagonists who both hold to acting in the names of God, justice and freedom, and Islam and the West seem quite satisfied with themselves to embark on a strategy in which the only survivors of their antagonism will be these names for whom there will be no one left to utter. The nihilism and insufferable self-indulgence of these antagonists make the same claim to truth, justice and the [choose your metanarrative] way.
Perhaps the problem is one of a poor memory. The antagonists have forgotten that a God that is not love is not God; that the only justice is the justice to come and that justice is the justice of the God to come. And that God to come will be a God of love for whom violence is a very peculiar choice, a very odd exercise of free will.
There are short term memory deficits at work as well. All three monotheistic faiths preach that God made humans in his image and likeness. So, when the enforcer's of Sharia law looked into the faces of their own image and likeness and called out their names, they also called out the names of justice, freedom and God and shot them all in the head (witnesses to the massacre agree that the executioners called out the names of each victim before meting out the justice of Sharia). Murder in these names is the murder of the events harbored in these names. The murder of a single human being is the murder of God, which is the distancing of humanity from the event of the God to come.
What has violence to do with God? The Christian crusades ended when Christianity finally looked to the log in its own eye before removing the speck in the other before it. Christianity saw that its violence was not authentic; was not of its own substance, but a contamination from without that had entered its very fabric. It pulled out many fibers, but, apparently, Christianity is not immune to memory problems; strands of violence wreak scandalous havoc to this day. Is this, I wonder, what we really mean by 'Christian realism?'
The calls from justice, freedom and God, the calls from the justice, freedom and God to come, are difficult to discern when the strands of violence remain in the grand tapestries of religion (and politics, too). And it is clear that the only justice, the only God we will ever get is the God and justice that visited Paris, so long as the names we give God and justice are our own names. So long as the images and likeness we see in each other are fear, hate, terror and horror, then our justice and our God will be the God and justice of fear, hate, terror and horror.
What can be the resolution to such hardness of heart? Metanoia. The tilling of the earth in the heart, its softening, its readying to receive the other, will open hearts to receive the image and likeness of God. When we look into each other's faces and call our names, we must look more deeply through the surface of the deep, into waters from which we all come. It is here that we meet the God to come in the ongoing creation of the world. We really need to begin again, and start a new story. Viens, oui, oui.
Paris reduced to terror gives us nothing new, more of the same; that story is old. The West has not visited atrocities upon Islam and Islam is not exacting justice in the face of the injustices of the past. That's the narrative gasping for air. Paris needs to be raised to the power of the infinity of God, through and despite the finitude of the human. When the crusaders of yesterday wielded swords, the world had the luxury of time to discover its engines of violence. The crusaders of today wield weapons very unlike swords. Jihad knows no borders, knows no sovereignty but Sharia, knows no limits on the force of Sharia. Time is running out: God and justice hang upon the discovery of the engines of violence conspiring to reduce God and justice to the cinders of empty names, and the rest of us to the nothing before creation.
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