“On Religion” by John D. Caputo

In preparation for the 2007 Theological Conversation, here is the first of several accessible (hopefully) summaries and reflections on the various reading for the theological conference.  This will run congruently with the posts investigation why EC is drawn to deconstructive theology (if such a thing exists...see this and that).

On Religion: Chapter 1: The Love of God
by Gail Wiggin: the mother of two awesome college kids and the full-time Ignition Director of a 19-year old brand strategy and design firm.

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Caputo establishes his voice and asserts his sense of humor right from the start. Without hesitation, he declares a deeply entrenched fascination for people who are “unhinged lovers….and worth their salt” – men and women of passion. Religion is for them. But woe is he who is not worth his salt, mediocre and “not worth sowing”. Best for such sorry sorts to leave this book on the shelf. In fact, these “irreligious sorts” deserve his abuse and can rant as they see fit. However, should they criticize his love of God one bit, he will cup his ears.

Repetitive at times, Caputo tends to fall in love (after all, he is a lover) with his phraseology and word usage but as it turns out, rather than a writer’s conceit or a tendency to avoid editorial drudgery, this pattern defines him as more of a poet than a prose writer and thesis postulant. The writer is, in fact, a bard. And he speaks straight as an arrow into the hearts of those who understand a thing or two about themselves. After all, such hearts are the seekers of a “love without measure”, per his great teacher, Saint Augustine. 

The chapter frames up Caputo’s definition of religion and the paradox of Godly love. His thesis: defined as the “old-fashioned, open-ended love of God”, religion may be found with or without  “Religion” -- institutional and determinate faith communities that open their doors to some but not all. He sets the stage by carefully describing the agonizing space in which we live straddled between the “future present” and the “absolute future”—and names “impossible” as a defining religious category. He then tours us through our hunger for God’s realm, this “kingdom of the impossible” towards the slightly sanctimonious-sounding, slightly vacuous-sounding question for which we seek the “secret” answer: “What do I love when I love my God?”

Now passion must be for something other than taking profits. Caputo’s “God lovers” are people who believe in something, who hope like mad in something and who love with a love that surpasses understanding. There is no merit in loving moderately. The mark of really loving is unconditionality, excess, engagement and commitment—all fire and passion. In short, it is a deeply religious, mysterious, not-of-this-present, silent and screaming aloud “yes” to God. And why must we say yes? Because deep in our DNA is a profound yearning for the impossible and with God, unbelievable things are possible—plain and simple.

The present needs no introductions. It’s this business of the absolute future that confounds us and pushes us to the limits of the possible: the shoreline of the religious, the domain of “God knows what”. We’ve got a fundamental problem with “terra incognita”. No matter how we fuss and rant and do our best to “manage risk”, we fail. But this is not necessarily bad news. Caputo contends that the impossible is actually something for which we pray and weep and long for with a restless heart. In fact, as we lose our grip (or better still, let go) we are transformed for the impossible is what makes experience to be Experience: an occasion that really happens! As Caputo triumphantly puts it, the impossible is what gives life its salt. It follows, then, that Experience itself has a religious character and edge. The notion of life at the limit of the possible constitutes a religious structure—without a church or a steeple or tight-lipped instructions.

Needless to say, in this religious life, this out-of-control absolute future world of the impossible, we expose ourselves to radical uncertainty. But never fear, smiles Caputo, “If safe is what you want, forget religion and find yourself a conservative investment counselor”. This is why faith, hope and love have to kick in.

We don’t take easily to living in a cloud of unknowing and have a tendency to start asking lots of questions—mostly along the lines of “hmmm, I admit to being unhinged; have apparently said Yes to the impossible; don’t know where I’m going, and, wonder who the heck knows the secret to who I am? As Augustine put it, “I have been made a question unto my self”.

Well, Caputo doesn’t hesitate to comfort us. It’s best to be upfront about our confusion (an attitude of upbeat minimalism) and not put too high a spin on things. In fact, the secret is that there is no secret. Now, this is not going to be a popular answer with hip, academic skeptics who embrace “phallic, modish nihilism” but rather because in the long run, this answer “pays the best returns”. There is simply no way for us to know “The Way” or “What I love when I love my God”  and, as a consequence, we find ourselves trafficking in inescapable interpretations. The best and most enduring interpretation is Truth, but that hardly solves matters since there isn’t a soul around who knows with certainty what is coming next. No one has a finger on “Being’s button. (So what do we do? Caputo takes this up in Chapter 5, when he hypothesizes that the inescapability of interpreting Truth will force a shift into “doing” the Truth, which is rather like “doing” the impossible.)

Saint Augustine believed that we are driven by a deep desire towards God, even if we don’t know it and try to curb our innate thirst via substitutes such as lust and greed. Caputo contends that in the relative present, the passion for God has an even wider sweep and that we must commit to live in confusion and give the passion of our doubts full throttle. Rather than speculating non-stop about the nature of God, we have certain responsibilities: real things that we can do. We can choose to take action—to do the truth, to do justice and to “make the mountain move”. When the love of God calls, we had better answer. We break the spell of self-love when we assent to “Yes”, as did Mary with “Here I am.” In this fashion, something unknowable and better takes its place—something to which we bind ourselves self passionately. We are beset by love.

Bottom line, if the secret is that there is no secret “Way”, then clearly we are called upon to “let ourselves be re-invented, overtaken by the impossible”. As he can no longer skirt issues surrounding the meaning of Holy Scriptures, Caputo situates them firmly within the “element of unknowing” – and within the embrace of this book, his psalm to “learned ignorance”. He wishes that religious institutions and confessional faiths were more disturbed from within by a radical non-knowing and makes a “brief’ against their closure towards those of other faiths or un-faith.  He yearns for them to acknowledge that “faith is always inhabited by unfaith” and that, in fact, the opposite of faith is not doubt but certainty—a headset that certain organized religions have in spades.

Finally, though, Caputo sees no need to choose between a determinate religious faith and this faith of unknowing that he has been describing but rather, to inhabit the space between them—to “let each disturb and unhinge the other and by disturbing, to deepen the other.” In the meantime, he urges us to find temporary respite in the determinate faiths, as desert wanderers seek shelter from the desert’s scalding sun and numbing cold.

-- Gail Wiggin

Comments

[Ken Archer]

Gail provides here a very helpful summary that presented Caputo's 1st chapter perhaps more clearly than did Dr Caputo!

Sometimes I wonder if the theological upshot of Caputo's philosophical privileging of absence and impossibility (so clear in Gail's presentation), and of my (and many others') philosophical privileging of presence as a blinding light, are not in many ways similar. It follows from both positions that the person must be open and receptive (whether to 'overflowing presence' or to 'the other') instead of seeking to master what is presented to him (as the early moderns against which Caputo and I both react sought to do). And, inasmuch as the results of philosophy can establish the preludes of theology through another route, both approaches establish philosophically the proper attitude of persons as open and receptive, though this proper attitude is also revealed in reflection on actual acts of faith (the only starting point for theology).

As Dr Raschke observes, this was an observation of the later Derrida, just as a very similar observation was made of the later Heidegger, and Heidegger and Derrida scholars well know that accounts of the turn in either thinker are elusive. Is it possible that acts of faith, which faithful people realize over time require openness and receptivity, provide the moments of discovery to philosophy, and that Heidegger, Derrida and I are trying to then ground this discovery within philosophy? Is this why so many reactions against modernity arrive at the same theological conclusion (openness and receptivity is the proper attitude to...), yet take very different philosophical paths?

[Josh Burns]

I wonder what happens if one decides to be passionate and transformed by a perverted and abusive religion as the 'Impossible' is beyond definition or substance. When I watch al Queida martyrdom videos on TV I am struck on how passionate and committed the martyr is to die for his cause in the name of his religion. If all religious belief systems about the nature of God are equally valid as we have no standard to measure them against in the world of the 'impossible' what happens where beliefs about God lead to violence etc.

[Josh Burns]

My thanks Gail for such a clear, lucid and well written post.

Josh

[Scott Roberts]

(responding to Ken Archer's comment)

I think it is not so much that both approaches (privileging presence and privileging absence) lead to openness, but that openness is realizing that neither approach works without the other. Emphasizing presence forces a response from the voice for absence, and emphasizing absence forces a response from the voice for presence. Or as Buddhist logicians would put it: one can't just privilege presence, one can't just privilege absence, one can't privilege both presence and absence, and one can't stop the question by ignoring both presence and absence.

[Tim McGee]

I must confess I have not read Caputo, but the summary strikes me as quite Kantian (philosophical critique of reason, which leads to the dismissal of particularized dogma in favor of a universalized notion of religio-ethical action), and hence, quite modern, and hence, beset by all of the problems of modernity.

The problem we face isn't our disordered loves (sin) that can only be reordered by being brought back to the God of Israel through Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit within the Church. The fundamental human problem is a passion that must be expressed despite our epistemic limitations. The solution--a personal commitment, perhaps under our own power, to embrace the uncertainty and doubt, and to combine this experience of the impossible with a commitment to concrete actions of justice. (A side question: is Caputo analyzing "the" human situation, or just the situation of a certain group of educated, postmodern westerners?)

Notice how things like sin, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Church, the Eucharist become displaced. They are relativized and reinterpreted in light of some neutral or more basic terms ("impossible," "love," "religion," "faith," "uncertainty"). These terms are seen as being present in and providing the basis for a variety of faiths/traditions.

I know I am making huge leaps and perhaps unfounded criticisms. My reason--I am hoping for someone to tell me that I am wrong and that as Christians, courting Caputo isn't simply a return to the structures of liberal protestantism.

To put it differently: in reading the summary, I had to ask: in courting Caputo, are we ignoring Karl Barth?

[Geoff Holsclaw]

tim,

I think you have express a concern that many have regarding Caputo, and indeed, he won't entire eschew the claim that he is seeking to continue the Enlightenment by other means.

When you say that the doctrines of Incarnation, etc. become interpreted by some neutral or more basic term, it seems to me that this is what Caputo is doing.

In response to Josh's question about potential fundamentalist violence, Caputo's quasi-Enlightenment approach is meant to protect against fundamentalism, i.e. his 'religion w/o religion.' but I have to ask if it is not this very attempt at 'religion w/o religion' (or the continuation of the Enlightenment) which might be the cause of these fundamentalisms?

[Jason Hesiak]

I was with Tim in my previous questioning of Carl and Derrida...and implicitly Caputo, it looks like. Except Tim knows much better what he's talking about, lol. Sorry Carl to subect you to my bad questions! Please in the future consult Tim for any further questions from me, lol.

I'm also with Geoff in wondering if our quest for a "religion without religion" isn't actually the cause of our fundamentalisms when religion is blamed for our fundamentalisms. Actually, I just think that's true. That issue isn't even really so much of a question in my mind. This is because part of what makes humans humans is that they live in the fundaments (Arendt takes this a bit far for me when she says "The earth is the quintessence of the human condition", but I'm with the point she makes). This is why I was guessing that Caputo and Deleuze aren't having an actual conversation with an actual person, like Socrates and whomever. Philosophers don't do that anymore. Of course though it isn't some important hidden fact that humans live in the fundaments until humans want "religion without religion" in the first place (requiring a flight to the firmanents in thinking, and maybe even in identification of self). So whose to say whether the problem or cause of fundamentalism is fundamental or firmanental? I'm no scientist, but a painter and a builder. I just paint pictures and build houses.

Additionally, I know about as much about Karl Barth as I do about Derrida, which isn't much. I merely intuit from my fun pilgrimages on canvas with paint or through buildings with all of my various senses (including the works that already exist, such as those magnificent (concrete) stone Cathedrals). So I shush now.

[Jason Hesiak]

I just said: "...it isn't some important hidden fact that humans live in the fundaments until humans want "religion without religion" in the first place (requiring a flight to the firmanents in thinking, and maybe even in identification of self)." To make myself a small bit less obsure, I will share some of my lunch time reading of Marshall McLuhan. Humans are made of the stuff of both firmanents and fundaments. "James Joyce put the matter very simply in Finnagans Wake (p. 81, line 1): 'As for the viability of vicinals, when invisible they are invincible.' By 'vicinals' Joyce alludes to [Giovanni Battista] Vico whose Scienza Nuova asserts the principle of the sensory and perceptual changes resulting from new technologies throughout human history."

Well, humanity's cogitification isn't exactly a "sensory change", but it certainly reflects a change in his environment due to his own discourses and artifices, causing invisible (invincible?) changes in himself...changes which reflect that he himself is made both of stuff of the firmanents and fundaments. Roman speak for Roman religious concern. Can't beat 'em, join 'em. "The same principle is stated in the I Ching that when any form reaches the end of its potential, it reverses its characteristics." I think Carl was talking about how Derrida predicted a coming surge in religion.

[Carl]

Since my name is invoked above in various contexts above, I'm not sure exactly what to say to whom, but allow me to offer one or two observations.

I think Geoff and Jason appropriately recognnize that Jack's project of "religion without religion" (though I think right now he's moving in a slightly different direction) is Enlightenment-based. In fact, the mid-to-late Derrida (which Jack picks up on) is fascinated with Kant and his project for a "cosmopolitan" community anchored in universal moral reason, which in political theory in many respects grounds twentieth century internationalism. Note that Derrida pushed Kant prior to the shock of 9/11. Derrida's (and Jack's) "religion without religion" is a "deconstructive" take on Kant's RELIGION WITHIN THE LIMITS OF REASON ALONE.

Now, in a post-911 world, we have to take religion - and fundamentalism - seriously, even if we are horrified by it. In my new book GLOBOCHRIST I begin by citing Derrida in FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE as a kind of "prophetic" essay anticipating 911 and its aftermath.

Derrida BTW in that essay does not use the word "fundamentalism", although he is talking about (among other things) what we call fundamentalism. It is my own view that the word is overused because it is a word originally referring to an anti-modernist and anti-Enlightenment strain in modern Christianity that has now been extended to all forms of "resurgent" religion throughout the world.

These religious "insurgencies" - e.g., Islamism - do not really resemble Christian fundamentalism. Our use of the word "fundamentalism" is really just a late Enlightenment "politically correct" slur for dismissing anything that seems doesn't meet our own parochial Western standards. Derrida was on to something in FAITH AND KNOWLEDGE when he used the term "return of religion." The metaphor of course is drawn from Freud's language of "the return of the repressed." Religion is the "repressed" under the regime of late Enlightenment Euro-American "liberalism" that has "returned."

Classic Christian fundamentalism and liberalism - as I argue in THE NEXT REFORMATION - are simply two sides of the same coin, the currency of Enlightenment. But the global genie of post-Enlightenment and post-liberal religiosity is out of the bottle.

Those who are now in this country jumping out of the frying pan of Christian fundamentalism need to be admonished about easing into the fire of late liberalism. When one has "deconstructed" the pretensions of the Enlightenment, as the early Derrida does, one does not "reconstruct" a less hard-edged, "humane" and "compassionate" world of social and moral justice and reason, a theological Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

I offer a long quote from Nietzsche to make my point about what deconstruction really means. After all, Nietzsche was the great, arch-deconstructor, something which Jack's own history confirms. The quote is from aphorism 124 of THE GAY SCIENCE, the one just before the parable of the madman announcing God's death. There is always a "rhizomic" connectivity between Nietzsche's aphorisms.

"In the horizon of the infinite - We have left the land and have embarked. We have burned our bridges behind us - indeed, we have gone farther and destroyed the land behind us...Beside you is the ocean...But hours will come when you will realize that it is infinite and that there is nothing more awesome than infinity...Woe to you who feel homesick for the land...there is no longer any 'land'".

The Christian does not "belong," especially to the Enlightenment project, no matter how it parses itself. Like Abraham, he is a nomad and a wanderer, waiting for the land that God says he will show us.

[Jason Hesiak]

Although I identify strongly with what Neitche was saying about the land, I don't think I can agree that there isn't any. Its there, we just don't know what on earth to do with it (literally, lol). I mean, I was telling someone recently about a statement made by a Shaman one night about the Iraq war: "pray to the god of war, my friends, and you get war." Pray to the god of madness, and you get madness, no?

My "home" might not be that stupid suburban house I grew up in made of sticks covered up with synthetic materials that virtually look almost somewhat like things that once made reference to the land that makes our buildings, but...I don't know about you guys, but I stand with two feet on the ground and a pair of eyes in front of my head. Its one thing for man's world to point to the kingdom rather than be the kingdom; its another for man's cogito-identity to be pointing at Nowhere like a broken compass (yes, that's supposed to induce laughter).

I mean, I'm still made of dust and earth. I am still Adam, who wasn't always a hardened criminal. "You are what you eat"...even these days. Although what we eat isn't what it once was exactly :) The mind can be everywhere and see everything at once; this is to "be like a god, knowing..." (that's not meant to be a definition). But Neitches wasn't interested in being human, was he? And he succeeded; we still talk about the guy. He's of the "posthumous people", which is different from being of the people of God.

[Carl]

Well, now, c'mon Jason. You can't think Derrida is cool and Nietzsche a schlepp if you want to take your pomo seriously. Why is an atheist Jew who wrote absolutely abstruse prose and rediscovers "religion" (in some marginal sense) after 60 better than an angry ex-Lutheran philologist who wrote in some of the most poetic German ever written and basically perfected the aphorism? Nietzsche didn't write any philosophy during his late madness anyhows, which most historians agree was probably medical (syphillis or early dementia?).

We talk a lot about Nietzsche because he and Kierkegaard made postmodernism possible.

If it's all about simply being human, we don't need to read philosophy, or have blog conversations. Beer and bass-fishing will do the trick.

[Tim McGee]

Carl (and anyone else),
Part of the reason I wanted to bring out Caputo's connection to Kant was to raise the following question: from a specifically Christian viewpoint, what does Caputo offer us? To put it even more broadly, I am curious as to why people--again, from a Christian perspective--want to embrace postmodernism. Just as many of us are now critical of the continuation of Kant's project by liberal protestantism, should we not be wary of repeating this mistake by appropriating Caputo?

I want to move beyond modernism, but to paraphrase Hauerwas on this topic: being the enemy of my enemy does not necessarily make you my friend.

With Caputo, courting his project seems to offer a new version of liberal protestantism. As I said on my first response, I am hoping to be shown wrong--but I am concerned that this is where the dialogue will end up.

[Jason Hesiak]

Carl,

First of all, I like both Neitche and the little about-Derrida that I've heard about-about Derrida. Don't get me wrong, I like common activities...beer, watching football, things like that. But philosophy, culture, history, and art are things that are just in me...and I can't really relate to lots of folk about those things.

In my mind, though, what is in question here isn't so much beer and bass fishing as religion. My good friend turned lesbian who recently left the church would probably, from what I've seen so far, really enjoy Caputo and his "religion without religion". Especially since Caputo is advocating "relationships"...without relationships (Although Kierkegaard was not, I'm assuming both you and Caputo are church goers...that's not what I mean). Her and her screwed up self who is so longing for the approval of others would think, "HEY, I get to have my cake and eat it too."

I will quote myself from a recent blog conversation with a recently aquired friend:

"And like my professor said, these days man is freer than he's ever been (he certainly had a point). So why all the talk of a lack of individual freedom? I think its a valid point...a lack of individual freedom. Its funny...I'd say the things that give him his freedom are his own artifices...modern political machines, technological machines. Yet these very things that give us our freedom are what take it away, we say. The same things both give and steal our freedom."

"These things that give and steal our freedom are our artifices. 'They have ears, but they hear not...They have mouths, but they speak not...Those who put their trust in them will be like them.' Is the issue with the artifice or with our trust?"

Although they may awaken in us deeply-seeded images of what it means to be human (the Garden), the philosophies that strip us of our clothing do not help us be become most fully human, but on the contrary are artifices built by the anthropocentric.

"The horizon of possibility for us really is more open than it ever has been. And yet Deleuze [and Caputo here, it sounds like] speaks of the solution that sounds like an opening of the horizon. Or maybe he just takes that to be a precondition in which he operates and from which he speaks, I don't know. It seems to me maybe that if the solution to a stifling of freedom that comes from too much freedom is not more freedom. Here we are swimming in an open frontier asking for more opening."

A house is an extension of the man that lives in it. It is appropriate that he must have a wall before he can have a window. An opening, for man, is an opening IN SOMETHING. An orphus....orpheus....mortality as a defining limit that sets the conditions of man's life.

We don't just still talk about Neitche because he perfected the aphorism and influenced later thinkers. Although partially because he influenced later thinkers. There's something much deeper there going on in the web of relationships between morality and immortality, finite existence of men and infinity, land and infinitely open frontier. The very thing that drove the life of the Greek polis, of which Neitche was so fond, was the quest for the glory of "immortality", which is much different from the glory of actual life everlasting offered by the Resurection of the first born son of God allmighty who is presently with and in us through the church itself!

And regarding Neitche again, I wasn't trying to suggest that his work sucks, it reflects his madness, so we shouldn't listen to a word he says. I'm saying that the above referenced "nakedness", "religion without religion", man's own living in an infinitely expansive horizon...IS madness...precisely BECAUSE its not human! "...you will become like a god, knowing..."

That still doesn't change the proverbial wisdom to seek wisdom. And that itself doesn't make all wisdom-seeking a committment to modern pragmatism. What it does mean though is that doing philosophy doesn't give you any more right to take your clothes off in public than you would have if you were just drinking beer and bass fishing with a buddy. Don't take that too literally; I am speaking of how things aquire and have meaning for humans, and how that refelcts who man is.

:)

Jason