Chris Huebner and Tripp York have co-edited a new book that might be of interest to churchandpomo readers: The Gift of Difference: Radical Orthodoxy, Radical Reformation from CMU Press.
The book includes a Foreword by John Milbank and contributions from D. Stephen Long, Craig Hovey, C. Rosalee Vellosa Ewell, Peter Dula, and others. You can download a media kit that includes the Table of Contents and excerpts. The book enacts an unlikely but mutually illuminating dialogue.
A friend recommended E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Cioran is a kind of 20th century, Romanian Nietzsche who "denounced systematic thought and abstract speculation in favor of indulgence in personal reflection and passionate lyricism."
"I've invented nothing," he said, "I've simply been the secretary of my sensations."
It will come as no surprise that On the Heights of Despair is not light reading and that, at first approach, it provides little obvious sustenance for those of us practicing fidelity to the good news. Nonetheless, the book is short and worth some effort because it addresses some crucial aspects of the path that often get little attention from the pulpit: if you are serious about God, then you must be prepared to have your idols - those perpetually iterated simulacra of your ego - smashed. That is, if you are serious about God, then you must be prepared to live without the comfort and commiseration of your gods.
In this sense, Cioran's work is an endlessly circling meditation on that "dark night of the soul," of a world emptied of idols. It is a study of caducity and a dogged reflection on the world's failure to meet our measure.
But, above all, it is a probing - the sensitivity of our fragile, ruined teeth be damned - of the vast silence that arises when we stop begging and complaining long enough to actually listen for God's reply.
What happens, Cioran asks, when we "let the waters flow faster and the mountains sway threateningly, the trees show their roots like an eternal and hideous reproach, the birds croak like ravens, and the animals scatter in fright and fall from exhaustion"? What happens when we "let ideals be declared void; beliefs, trifles; art, a lie; and philosophy, a joke"? (52)
What happens when we settle, without escape through memory or fantasy, into the indefensible immediacy of the present moment? Or, as Cioran puts it, when, for a moment, we stop being "indirect"?
All men have the same defect: they wait to live, for they have not the courage for each instant. Why not invest enough passion in each moment to make it an eternity? We all learn to live only when we no longer have anything to expect, because we do not live in the living present but in a vague and distant future. We should not wait for anything except the immediate promptings of the moment. We should wait without the consciousness of time. There's no salvation without the immediate. But man is a being who no longer knows the immediate. He is an indirect animal. (111)
What happens when indirection fails and the tangent of my life, for once, not only touches but crosses this moment?
After having struggled madly to solve all problems, after having suffered on the heights of despair, in the supreme hour of revelation, you will find that the only answer, the only reality, is silence (123).
There is something to be said for Cioran, for the way he impugns the vanity of our hopes and expectations, rails at the mute impotence of our idols, and preaches silence.
But, in the end, I find him too melodramatic, too Romantic. Perhaps this is inevitable given that I am comfortable, happily employed, well-fed, in excellent health, and in love with my wife.
Still, even despite my shortcomings, I suspect that Cioran simply gives the world's idols too much credit because in those rare moments when my indirections cease, when I stop ventriloquizing my gods, and a divine silence settles, I always still here my children calling.
It's been said that reformations and revolutions in Christianity begin with a re-reading of Romans.
That is certainly true of the Protestant Reformation with Luther's epoch-shaking insight into the meaning of the phrase "the righteousness of God."
It is true as well of Barth's commentary The Epistle to the Romans, which in the words of a Catholic commentator "burst like a bombshell on the playground of the European theologians." Barth's leveraging of Paul's argument in Romans served, in the shocking aftermath and disillusionment of the First World War, to turn the scholarly, cozy, and complex arguments of 19th century Protestant thinkers on their head and usher in the relatively long era that we today know as Neo-Orthodoxy.
The long-tenured regime of Neo-Orthodoxy collapsed - quite quickly really - in the mid-to-late 1960s with the cultural revolution of that period, which coincided with the rise of both religious studies as an "alternative", at least in America, to the intellectual cartel of Barthianism and the Barth-based mainline Protestant establishment and the emergence of so-called "secular theology," which gradually morphed into a new establishment with its own signature and features. Much of today's Christian postmodernism has this latter development as both its source and heritage, although it is also fair to say that its initial impulse in the form of applied Derrideanism was derived from the sense of a thoroughgoing "gappiness" in conventional liberal constructions of God along with the realization that there was room for postulating a "holiness" that could be glimpsed in all the holes of the not-so-monolithic text. That is the genealogy of all "religion without religion."
Secular theologies, whether they be grounded in the grand narratives of 19th century bourgeois progressivism or the "apocalypse now" and "destruction of metaphysics" themes of the post-Sixties decades, are always the products of good economic times and social stability. The varieties of "crisis" theology" - the original terminology for Neo-Orthodoxy - find fertile soil in political or economic anxiety and social upheaval. All the current discussion of what may be coming "after postmodernism" may be setting the stage for the emergence of a 21st century crisis theology, though one completely and obviously unlike what reigned from the 1930 up to the 1960s.
Besides Romans, crisis theologies - if that's really the word we want to use - always turn out to carry the genetics of a previous and hitherto marginalized philosophical movement. Luther relied indirectly on nominalism for his critique of Thomism, indulgences, and Catholic sacramental theology. Barth "discovered" Kierkegaard. If a new crisis theology is in the making - most likely with its own re-appropriation of Romans - what might that be?
The word "postmodern," as we have known for years, carries way too much freight if it is to be intelligible in a serious philosophical or theological setting. The term itself was deployed by Jean-Francois Lyotard in his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge during the mid-1980s to provide a label for the Zeitgeist of the time, although it has been applied a bit retroactively to the thought of the early Derrida and proleptically to much in the history of philosophy since then. The feeling that "postmodernism" is now slowly fading from the picture may have more to do with a general weariness in the face of our recent past, not to mention a growing recognition that things have significantly changed in the past few years. One needs, however, to put aside the strife over labels and ask what is happening on the broader intellectual, philosophical, and theological levels.
There has been a larger major trend since the late 1990s in Continental philosophy, especially on the French side, that has not yet gained traction in the American theological world which may be the key to the beginnings of a new "crisis theology." The trend is closely associated with the prevalence of two special words nowadays in our postmodernist discourse - "singularity" and "event." The nomenclature on the main can be traced back to the writings of Gilles Deleuze (though ultimately as far back as the middle and late Heidegger) But these words have become staples in the work of Alain Badiou and Slavoy Žižek.
Without delving extensively into the technical usage of these words in postmodern philosophy, we can make the general observation that they focus our attention on the productive power of certain nameable "phenomena" in our struggle to signify the unsignifiable. Events are "singular" incidences within our narratives and articulations of what we experience that have both broad-ranging origins and consequences, though we cannot "say exactly" what the event is "all about." The singularity of the event both derives, and derives from, chains, complexes, and assemblages of potentially meaningful, yet inherently indiscernible, moments of signification that run invisibly back into the past and forward into the future. The event itself, however, is unnameable.
Deleuze talked about the singularity of the event in terms of what he called the "virtual." This kind of talk has deep affinities with the stock, but non-mathematical, language of theoretical physics - e.g., virtual particles, virtual states. The event, however, is unnameable. The visible phenomenon, which from Husserl through Heidegger to contemporary "phenomenological" theologians such as Nancy and Marion, can be named by philosophy. But the event itself surpasses the horizon of everything that is even potentially nameable. Just as "black holes" in physics are "singularities" with their own "event horizons" that point, without signifying, beyond the laws of nature, so events in the philosophical sense indicate, without naming, beyond the horizon of our syntax and linguistic iterability.
For Žižek the event can be associated with the irruption of the "real" in the endless, but futile, formation of the psychological subject. For Badiou the event is always identifiable and locatable, yet not "explicable," within history. It is a "singular truth" that cannot be achieved by philosophical discussion and controversy, yet arises as a surprising and fruitful breakage within the perceived "flow of events" to be seized by thought, which then makes it meaningful through the rigorous application of "truth procedures."
For most post-Sixties French intellectuals the genuine event - l'eventement as Badiou and others call it - was the sudden and fateful inbreaking of the student protests, worker strikes, and the crisis of the Gaullist state in 1968. For America - at least in recent memory - it might be considered 9/11. In one's own life, if we go with Žižek's take, the event can be a breakdown of all the cognitive and the "symbolic" routines of processing our experience in accordance with our own personal imago that we suddenly name as a collapse or "failure" in the generation of a sense of selfhood. From the Christian point of view the latter is close to the unexpected profound awareness of brokenness and the need of grace. "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, to save a wretch like me." And so forth. The event is the moment of "crisis" and redemption that has ramifications far beyond its own horizon of nameability.
But what does all the foregoing have to do with theology? Much of the appeal of the earlier version of crisis theology rested on its unabashed Biblicism as well as the implicit cry of "back to the Reformation," where shibboleths like sole fide and sola scriptura resonated strongly with the fast-growing, implicit critique of secular authority. If we are living in a time of religion's return, we are also witnessing a rapid collapse of confidence, not just in America but throughout much of the Western world, in political and secular authority. Some kind of "Biblicism" - because of the intrinsically iconoclastic register of the Biblical canon itself, which elevates the singularity of the ancient Judaic faith experience over the would-be universality of the Greek sophrosyne or the Latin ratio, the principle of measured and "enlightened" thought in keeping with harmonious living that supposedly is a mandate for all human beings.
The Pauline indictment of such "measured thought" is most concentrated in his dialectic of "wisdom" and "foolishness", or "vanity", that are found in Romans. The same dialectic, of course, appears in l Corinthians. "For though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking...Claiming to be wise, they became fools; and they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles." (Rom. 1:21-23).
This kind of dialectic is very familiar to theologians, but what remains unspoken is the implications of Paul's repeated use of variants on the Greek term mataioites (those things that are "futile" or "vain"). The Greek word commonly suggests idolatry, but it has the primary meaning of "lacking force" or "unproductive of sense". In other words, Paul is contrasting the emptiness or fecklessness of Greek dianoia, or discursivity, which from Plato onward was supposed to lead under the direction of sophia (i.e., "wisdom") to the pure eidetic, or ideal, vision of universal truth. The dianoia of philosophy, which yields a specious wisdom, results in what Nietzsche termed nihilism, the "twilight of the idols." "What does nihilism mean? That the highest values devaluate themselves. The aim is lacking; 'why' finds no answer." (Will to Power, 2).
In contrast, Paul goes on throughout the rest of Romans to explicate the mystery of the Cross, the importance of what he calls the "obedience of faith" in the gospel that is "the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith (Rom. 1:16)," and the subtle and rather complicated of the relationship between the Jews, "entrusted with the oracles of God", and the role of Christ followers. What makes Christians special? It is not that they have a "knowledge" of God (gnosis), which is reserved for the "Greeks", or a special relationship to God through the Torah, which is reserved for the Jews. The "obedience of faith" specific to Christians consists in a complete re-orientation of our lives and the formation of our hopes around a once-and-for all event, the event for which the horizon is Christ death and resurrection. This event can be discerned neither through sophrosyne, which leads to futility, nor as part of the (Jewish) awareness of one's own distinctive election in the economy of God's Heilsgeschichte, which leads to "boasting" and arrogance. It can only be discerned through the "weakness" (astheneia) of both our philosophical and religious understanding that finds the Cross intelligible only as a pure singularity that remains otherwise impervious to the inferential capacity of our computative minds (dianoia). "But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." (1 Cor. 1:23)
For the event Paul, of course, employs the term kairos to indicate this singular and infinitely productive event, which can never be named per se. "For while we were still weak, at the right time (kata kairon) Christ died for the ungodly." (Romans 5:6). The kairotic character of the event is only perceptible to the "weak", who experience overwhelming "power" while right-minded Greeks sense futility and conscientious Jews a total humiliation, which was the Roman aim in crucifying their victims. A crucified messiah? How absolutely insulting to the divine majesty! Indeed, the Cross signifies not just abject failure, but absolute nihilism so far as Western "ontology" is concerned. "God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not (ta me onta), to reduce to nothing things that are." On the face of it, what Paul is saying is the most shocking thing that the "onto-theological" version of Christianity can beard - God himself is the author of a strategic historical nihilism that is totally necessary to reveal the "power of the Gospel" in all its fullness and immensity.
The fascination of today's would-be "atheistic" French philosophers like Žižek and Badiou with the singularity of the crucified Christ is not accidental. So much of postmodern thought is not merely an "overcoming of metaphysics" and ontology, but a quest to penetrate to the singularity that is neither logical, ethical, nor ontological, but (as Heidegger would put it) the "origin" of the intelligibly determinative. Beginning with Heidegger himself, whom Derrida never really understood and who inaugurated the quest itself, we find a struggling to find some kind of "name" for this origin. Heidegger calls it the "Being" that can "be" only by crossing it out. Derrida names it khora, Deleuze the virtual, Badiou the event. It is a quest for the name of the origin of the "universal." As Badiou the tells us, however, the event can be discerned, though not named, in the very "name" of Jesus - not the historical Jesus, not the Jesus of Christology qua onto-theology, but the event to which we give that name, and from which all names emanate. "He is the name for what happens to us universally" (Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, 60).
A "crisis theology" would be concurrent with a new explication of the original sense of the Christ event. But postmodern thinking has already brought us to that crisis.
Hence, we need to re-read Romans.
Carl Raschke
I. Short Version
Speculating this week - with one eye on Lacan, one eye on the Buddha, and one eye on Paul - about the nature of sin.
In brief:
1. Say that sin is "the compulsion to repeat." Or, perhaps better, the necessity of repetition experienced as a compulsion.
2. Conversely, then, salvation involves freedom from this compulsion to repeat.
3. Salvation depends on being free from the compulsion to repeat, but it doesn't mean being free from the necessity of repetition.
Or, salvation depends on coming to relate non-compulsively to the necessity of the repetition that nonetheless and unavoidably constitutes the stuff of life.
4. A common misunderstanding of salvation from sin: that freedom from the compulsion to repeat = freedom from repetition itself (i.e., novelty).
II. Long Version
With this definition of sin as "compulsive repetition," I'm after something more basic than the characterization of any particular sin. Rather, I'm interested in what it means to be "in sin." I'm interested in the "disposition" that is sinful-ness, a disposition that is rooted in a mis-relation to the compulsive and repetitive character of experience itself.
Two general aspects of human experience are important for me here:
1. The unavoidable dimension of passivity involved in every experience.
2. The unavoidable inadequacy of every experience.
Every experience involves my being affected, impinged on, perturbed, irritated, or pressed upon by things (sensations, thoughts, objects, feelings) that are both impermanent and impersonal, things that are both passing and, in some respect, "not me." In this sense, every experience always involves an unavoidable dimension of passivity. In short, every experience - no matter how "active" I may be - unconditionally involves my being passively conditioned.
This is what it means to be a human being: to be in open relation with the world such that - good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, willful or submissive - we suffer it.
The passivity involved in every experience (a passivity that constitutes it as an ex-perience, even if it is just an ex-perience of "myself") is unavoidable because we are neither self-sufficient nor autonomous. In "open" relation with the world, we are conditioned by and dependent upon it. This interdependence is unavoidable and ongoing.
Sensation, thought, respiration, digestion, affection, etc. (i.e., Life) all depend on constant and never-ending processes of exchange. Every experience (every sensation, every thought, every meal, every breath), no matter how satisfactory or sublime or perfect or morally impeccable, will pass. And another sensation, another thought, another meal, another breath, will arise. None of them will be "adequate" in such a way that, in general form, it will not be necessary to repeat them.
All experience, then, is in general defined by compulsive repetition.
1. Compulsion: the unavoidable passivity involved in every experience.
2. Repetition: the unavoidable inadequacy of every experience.
As a disposition, sinfulness is a rejection of our passivity and inadequacy. It is a rebellion against the compulsion of experience and a disavowal of its repetition.
Classically, this is why sin is defined as wanting to be God. Classically, God is the one who is never passive, never compelled, never inadequate, always complete, and thus never in need of repetition.
Or we could say: sin is a rejection of our vulnerability. Vulnerability in what sense? Vulnerability to stuff we can't control and vulnerability to our ongoing dependence on stuff outside of ourselves. That is say, vulnerability to compulsion and repetition.
Or, again: sin is a kind of "self-assertion." As self-assertion, sin is exactly the kind of rejection of or rebellion against our passivity, inadequacy, and interdependence that I'm interested in articulating.
If the flavor of righteousness is a willingness to lose ourselves in (never-ending and ongoing) service to others - and I think it is - then it will require us to surrender wholeheartedly to the imposition of their claims on us and it will require us to perpetually confess that our response is insufficient to their need and, thus, in need of repetition. Such humble service will also require that we perpetually confess our own need for the care and response of others.
Salvation, contra sin, depends on affirming the (compulsory) necessity of such endlessly (repeated) service such that, in my affirmation of it, I now welcome the very thing I once loathed as the milk and marrow of life itself.
In this affirmation, what-cannot-be-avoided liberates me from the disaster of my trying to avoid it.
Behold the practical operation of this internal slave trade—the American slave trade sustained by American politics and American religion! Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market. You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our southern states. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human-flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie-knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field and the deadly sugar-mill. Mark the sad procession as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives. There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes, weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn. The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength. Suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul. The crack you heard was the sound of the slave whip; the scream you heard was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains; that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on. Follow this drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude.[1]
This is simply one among many scenes depicting the hardships African American slaves endured on a daily basis as a result of the institution of chattel slavery. Enslaved by the love of money, the master’s vision becomes distorted. Not only does he see human beings as things, but the sounds of suffering fall silent to his ears. Deafened to the wailing of mothers’ torn from their children, he transposes the dissonance of clanking chains into gold-en keys, which like the dual cut of a double-edged sword open the door to his future and secure the bonds of his brother.
To add to their humiliation and degraded status as mere property of the white man, slaves were subjected to public auctions where they were ordered to stand, often naked or nearly so, and allow the potential buyers to examine their bodies to ensure their suitability for long-term servitude. If a slave’s body showed signs of illness, disease, or possible weaknesses, they were passed over as bad investments, unprofitable for the master’s business. Scar tissue on a slave’s back—the number of scars, whether the scar was old or relatively fresh—became the subject of a mythology employed to determine a slave’s character. Too many scars indicated a rebellious spirit, whereas having few scars meant that the slave possessed a docile, obedient spirit. “As they worked their way from inflicted scars to essential character, buyers fixed slaves in a typology of character according to the frequency, intensity, and chronology of the whipping apparent on their backs.”[2] While the slaves stood humiliated, exposed and wondering what kind of master might purchase them on that particular day, the slave buyers paraded themselves before the crowds as augurs who “could read slaves’ backs as encodings of their histories.”[3]
Undeniably, the United States has come a long way from the days of chattel slavery, and we can be encouraged by the positive strides made in racial relations and equality; yet, it is important to remember whence we came in order to avoid repeating past mistakes and so that we might become critically alert to new manifestations of racism. Here we would do well to heed the words of Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Having accepted an invitation to speak to a largely white audience in celebration of Independence Day, Douglass, as master orator and rhetorician, turns to a Psalm of lamentation—a passage with which his audience was thoroughly familiar—and interprets it as analogous to the situation of American slaves.
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down. Yea! we wept when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there, they that carried us away captive, required of us a song; and they who wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” [Psalm 137]. Fellow-citizens, above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions, whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are to-day rendered more intolerable by the jubilant shouts that reach them. […] To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world.[4]
Although chattel slavery and slave auctions are no longer part of America’s daily routine, in what ways do we continue to act as augurs de-coding and constructing the Other? What kinds of actions can we, as Christians, take to change, subvert, or expose such practices?
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