I. Redux
In light of the non-theistic characterization of grace I've developed thus far, I
want to say a few words this week about how porting grace into such an ontology may affect or clarify our
conception sin and salvation.
You may recall that last week employed Bruno Latour's "principle of irreduction" as a key to describing those characteristics of a non-theistic ontology that would distinguish it from a more traditional approach. I summarized this principle as follows:
Given an original multiplicity:
(1) no multiple can be entirely reduced (without remainder) to any other multiple or set of multiples, and (2) no multiple is a priori exempt from being reducible in part to any other multiple or set of multiples.
I summarized this principle in terms of "resistant availability." Because an assemblage cannot be exempt from the possibility of reduction to other multiples, it is characterized by an unavoidable availability. However, because it can also never be entirely reduced to other multiples (even those that compose it), it is also characterized by an unavoidable resistance.
It is my claim that grace, in a nontheistic ontology, should be understand primarily in terms of this "resistant availability."
Finally, I deduced several consequences from this identification of grace with resistant availability, one of which is particularly important for what follows: to say that grace unfolds as the exceptionless universality of resistant availability is to say that grace guarantees the universality of passibility or suffering.
To be is to suffer, and this in two senses. Outside of theism, suffering characterizes both activity and passivity. Unavoidably available for relation, every assemblage passively suffers its passibility to being enlisted, entrained, or re-distributed by other assemblages. Second, even in actively influencing other multiples, an assemblage suffers their irreducible and unmasterable resistance.
II. Suffering
With respect to soteriology, my thesis is this: understanding the nature of sin and
salvation depends on understanding the fact that suffering is the universal mark of grace.
In short, grace is the name for that which we suffer.
To get a handle on this, I need to first more precisely
define suffering. To this point, I have used the word “suffering” as synonymous
with a more general, ontological passibility. However, in order to make sense
of sin, I will hereafter use the term “suffering” only to refer to that kind of
passibility that is unique to human beings. Sin is a uniquely human affair and it
is rooted in the uniquely human experience of suffering.
What is unique about human suffering? While all beings
(alive or not, sensible or not) are subject to the double-bind of resistant
availability, only human beings appear to be aware of this bind and experience
it as such.
Let’s give this definition. Suffering: the uniquely
reflexive experience of passibility
that is peculiar to human beings.
Another way to say this is that humans are flesh. Now, I
don’t want to entirely set aside the provocative resonances of the term “flesh,”
but I want to use it here with some precision. By “flesh” I mean the human
capacity for auto-affection, the human capacity to not only feel but to feel
ourselves feeling. Flesh names our human ability to not only receive but to
receive ourselves as receptive and
receiving.
For example, when undergoing a minor medical procedure, we may
not only feel the cool, thin blade of a surgeon’s scalpel when she makes a small
incision, but we will also feel ourselves feeling this feeling as we respond
with fear, indifference, or relief. Human suffering is unique in that it bears
this compoundable reflexivity. Love, joy, peace, compassion, gratitude, agency,
etc. all depend on the way that human experience folds over in such a way as to
touch its being touched. Flesh names the site of our human reception of grace
as a grace.
III. Sin
What, then, of sin?
Sin is possible only for those who have flesh. It intervenes precisely at the
site of this reflexivity. Sin is a refusal to feel ourselves feeling our own
passibility.
Sin: a refusal of
suffering, and, hence, a refusal of grace.
Sin does not want to be unavoidably available and it does
not want to experience the world as irreducibly resistant. Sin, as pride, wants
mastery. It does not want to be impinged upon by a grace that it did not
request and it does not want to be dependent on a grace that it cannot control.
Sin, afraid to suffer the grace of life, attempts to
withdraw from feeling. In particular, it attempts to withdraw from feeling
itself feeling, from a reception of itself as that which receives, or, in other
words, as that which is graced.
We could say a great deal about the nature of sin’s attempt
to withdraw from the double-bind of resistant availability and the strategies
it employs to this end, but it will be suffice for our purposes to sketch in a
very broad way what is at stake.
In general, sin attempts to refuse grace and suffering by screening
experience in terms of its perceived “desirability.” Some things are reflexively
marked as desirable and so we hunger for them and fantasize about them. Some
things are reflexively marked as undesirable and so we flee from them and worry
over them. Some things are reflexively marked as neither, and so we ignore
them. Sin refuses to suffer by dividing the real up into what it wants, doesn’t
want, and doesn’t care about.
The results are predictable: cut off from bulk of what is
real, we are filled with dissatisfaction, fear, and anxiety and we,
intentionally past feeling, are effectively dead
(or, at best, “undead”). Zombie-like, striving after the gnat of pleasure,
straining away from the sting of pain, we ignore the bulk of life and wonder at
our own morbidity. Failing to be where we are, to feel what we are feeling, we fantasize instead about what has not
come, fret over what has already passed, and are bored to tears by the grace of
what is actually given.
Fantasy, fear, and boredom: the hallmarks of sin.
IV. Gratitude
In this light, we might further characterize sin in relation
to gratitude.
Let’s say that gratitude is a name for the positive affect
that grace ought to produce in our experience of it.
Gratitude names a particularly powerful reflexive affect because
it arises precisely in connection with our willingness to feel ourselves
feeling. Gratitude is the auto-affect par excellence: it not only feels itself
feeling, it affirms with a solemn
“amen” its reception of itself as available for receiving — even when what it
receives is painful, undesirable, unexpected, or “uninteresting.” Gratitude
affirms what is given as whatever
kind of grace it is — even if the only thing gracious about it is its confirmation
of our availability for reception.
It is obvious, then, that gratitude is precisely what sin
forgoes. As a refusal of grace, sin refuses to affirm (via gratitude) its unavoidable
availability. As a refusal of suffering, sin refuses to affirm the ubiquitous
resistance of everything around it, overlapping with it, or internal to it.
Forgoing gratitude, life denies the double-bind that is constitutive of the
real and condemns itself instead to the lifeless prison-house of its own,
endlessly empty fantasies of mastery, exceptionality, and control.
A final definition of sin. Sin: the correlation of grace
with any reflexive affect other than gratitude in the absence of gratitude.
It is simple enough, then to alternatively define the nature
of salvation.
Salvation: the correlation of grace with — minimally, though
not exclusively — the affect of gratitude.
Gratitude frees us from sin because it affirms our
availability for relation and rejoices in the graciousness of our flesh.
Grateful, life feels itself feeling. Grateful, we are born again, we come back
to life, and we are begotten sons and daughters of a God who is himself filled
to overflowing with gratitude. Here, no longer confined by the impassibility of traditional theism, God himself
would be free to gratefully affirm his own unavoidable availability, the world’s
ubiquitous resistance, the absolute requirement of work, and the reception of
grace.
V. Summary
Allow me to conclude with a brief summary of some of the key points I've worked out over the past few weeks. Even granted that the above experiment
is relatively rough, compressed, and schematic, what can we say about grace in
a non-theistic context?
1. Grace, rather than being associated with God’s theistically
exceptional supernatural transcendence, is associated instead with the diffused
plurality of transcendences that characterize the world’s differential
immanence.
2. Grace, rather than naming an unknowable macro-force
operating mysteriously behind the scenes, is operationalized as the
self-organizing work of everything that is.
3. Grace, in light of
the principle of irreduction, is the double-bind of resistant availability that
characterizes without exception the being of every multiple or assemblage, God
included.
4. Grace is not opposed to but identified with the resistant
availability that is characteristic of work.
5. Grace is unavoidably intertwined with passibility.
6. Grace, because there are no exceptions to passibility,
guarantees the universality of suffering.
7. Grace, as the double-bind of resistant availability, is
the mark of the real.
8. Grace, with respect to human experience, unfolds in the
auto-affective reception of ourselves
as receiving what is given. That is, grace unfolds for humans in connection
with the flesh.
9. Grace, as what prompts sin’s refusal of suffering, is
anterior to sin. Grace is not a response to sin. Rather, sin is derivative and
secondary with respect to grace.
10. Grace, in order to avoid sin, must always be minimally
correlated with the affect of gratitude.
11. Grace, in relation to the compoundable reflexivity of
human experience, can be infinitely amplified by our grateful affirmation of
whatever has been given.
This list, then, though brief, is, I think, good evidence
that the experiment begun here may be worth pursuing with greater care, rigor,
and attention to detail.
Grace, wherever and however it may arise, calls for
our attention.
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