Tuesday, June 07, 2005
(5:17 PM) | Brad:
Another Log (Er, Make that a Tree) On the Fire
I realize this is far too long for blog format. But, dammit, I'm gonna post it anyway.* * *
It is because of the centrality of the Subject in modern philosophy, i.e., its endeavour to re-think the role and limits of subjective imagination and spontaneity, that I wish to affirm the declaration of long-forgotten death-of-god theologian Thomas Altizer: 'We must be prepared to accept the paradox that modern philosophy has been more deeply theological than modern theology, which is perhaps not so paradoxical if our greatest modern imaginative vision has been more fully theological than has our theological thinking.' For Altizer, this is true because it is the modern philosophical vision that allows theological thinking to rethink its own deepest grounds, that of subjectivity, 'a re-thinking which is initially an unthinking of every established theological ground' -- only then is truly theological thinking possible. Such is, he concludes, 'the first goal of radical theology', and is the mark of truly imaginative theology.
Altizer is, I think, representative of a type of theologian -- bad theologian or otherwise -- who allows himself to be consumed by a singular question: what the character of theology? This question, of course, is riddled by its equivocality: is it the question asked theology; or is it the question theology asks? When one dares to think about the character of theology theologically, a 'transcendental' analysis in so far as we are thinking about the beginnings and endings that condition our understanding of subjectivity and objectivity, how do we begin at all, when the questions we ask in and of this enquiry proliferate beyond their Kantian tether? Divorced from metaphysical verity, the question of theology can only ever beg that it be asked again. Such is the cathartic consideration of theological reflection's problematic beginning. As such, theology is an engagement -- a violent battle as much as it is a formal promise of marriage -- but with/to whom?
Again, though, is theology's character? The polyvalence of the question, identifying where it might begin and end, is as dizzying as are its implications. Might we strip them bare, the question and theology, to get beneath their textual, textile surfaces, and behold them in their natural glory? Might we yet behold this question of character, the fundamental problem of theology, in its truth and origin, in its naked nature, as it strives to understand all it can of, amongst other things, God? What, though, would be the character of this undressing? Would it be rape or consent, this theological undressing; would such love be violence or foreplay? When surfaces are compound, when theology's flesh is textual and textile -- i.e., published, bound, and disseminated in an endless array of monographs -- its undressing cannot go simply skin-deep. Pierced and tattooed, theology bleeds, as it is riddled anew with innumerable cuts beneath the surface that go beyond the quick, to the blood and the bone and the sinew. The theological ego, as it were, apropos of Freud, 'wants to incorporate this object into itself, and . . . it wants to do so by devouring it. Unable to escape the ontological and perspectival dilemma, the theologian's attempts at its meticulous dissection of theology, be it through systemising, narrating, or even deconstructing, crack open the its object's breast plate and reveals a voluminous blood flow of ink.
Unable to free itself fully from these beginnings and endings, the peculiarities of what Gordon Kaufman has described as its 'imaginative construction' cannot be lost on or in theology. He writes:
Although it may be obvious to us that the constructive work of the imagination has in this way always been constitutive of theological activity, theologians have seldom understood themselves to be engaged primarily in imaginatively constructing a theistically-focused worldview; on the contrary, they have largely regarded themselves as attempting to express in human words and concepts what the divine King had objectively and authoritatively given the church or synagogue in revelation. The fact that their work was thoroughly imaginative and constructive in character was simply not recognized.And yet, on the contrary, the more common modern tendency has been for the theologian to peek inside and g(r)asp, as though an exact science? Eschewing aesthetics and embracing the methods of the natural sciences, post-Cartesian theology became, according to Hans Urs von Balthasar, yet another 'specialisation' devoid of sensu spiritualis. As such theology has become not unlike an infant, as observed by Friedrich Schlegel in Lucinde?
It lies deep within human nature that it should want to eat everything it loves and put every novel thing that appears to it directly in its mouth, in order, if possible, to reduce it to its constituent parts. The healthy craving for knowledge desires to seize its object entirely, to penetrate to its innermost core and chew it up.It is as though the object of theology's desire whispers to its spectator, 'All this I did for you. Pulled myself apart so that you might see, and touch, and taste the blood, all that blood and pain for you. You didn't know a heart could pump so much blood, did you? It's endless?' After all, in the Christian tradition, has not the theologian's desire to 'know' God often taken on a sexually euphemistic tone. In his study of depictions of the Crucifixion in medieval Europe, for instance, Richard Trexler notes that it was customary for Jesus' crucified body to be regarded as a 'volume to be penetrated'. Thus one might find Jesus appearing and quickly embracing Rupert von Deutz in a dream, kissing him, and then opening his mouth, 'so that I could kiss him more deeply'. Battista Varani is even more literal with his desired penetration when he expresses the wish to wriggle into Christ's dying body in search of his heart. At this point, violence and foreplay seem to have masochistically merged in theology, from which the theologian can only pull away a bloody, ink-stained member.
Tyler Roberts is describing Hegel's philosophical method, but, as we've already hinted, he may very well be describing theology as well when he writes:
Its method, tacitly supposed to be plastic or protean, adaptable and therefore free a priori, sacrifices itself in taking on as exactly as possible the imprint of what it helps to describe, its "object", in order to maximize the object's phenomenon unto noumenal reception. Like any power of mediation philosophical method invites being thought of as a virtue, since it gives itself up for the sake of what it mediates, as though it had a free will and, as such, one that might have been less altruistically trained. . . .. Hence the oblique ontological make-up of 'method', existing only to the extent that it vanishes in fulfilling the task that makes it what it is -- disappearance would be the greatest scope of its being.
Similarly theology, too, becomes like a sacrament: a spectacle upon and into which, traditionally, the theologian cannot help but attempt to gaze or probe; but, paradoxically, from which the theologian cannot be fully differentiated.
Significantly, though, the negativity of Hegel's 'pure being', the self-creative end of self-emptying, is always an act of autopoesis, a self-becoming, which always projects the possibility and desire of the very immediacy it must also necessarily avoid. Hegel writes:
But this pure being is not an immediacy, but something to which negation and mediation are essential; consequently, it is not what we mean by 'being', but is 'being' defined as an abstraction, or as the pure universal; and our 'meaning', for which the true [content] of sense-certainty is not the universal, is all that is left over in face of this empty or indifferent Now and Here.In this way, Hegel takes the perspectival inadequacy mentioned above and shows it to be in fact ontological -- i.e., that the limit or inadequacy is itself constitutive of the Subject.
It is only when theology, i.e. the theological Subject, takes seriously its unthought self-becoming, what Foucault calls 'the aesthetics of existence', that it becomes radical. Altizer's vision of radical theology, as such, is unthinkable without 'aesthetic theology', that is, a theology attuned both to the constitutive inadequacy and miraculous potential of the Subject. Aesthetic theology attends to the suffering / ressentiment wrought by the sovereign presence of some Ding an sich or transcendental determination of Being beyond the limits of phenomenal experience, and the attendant desire that maintains subjective attachment to the status quo and existing horizons of expectation. It is not a philosophical denial of theological discourse, or the differences between philosophy and theology; it is, rather, a rethinking of theological grounds in general. For aesthetic theology, there is truly nothing behind or beyond the mask of phenomenal experience; and this is why, paradoxical though it may seem, something new, something miraculous because it is impossible and free, is possible.
Furthermore, an aesthetic theology cannot be silent or abide in the immediacy of 'pure being', for, as Theodor Adorno argues in Minima Moralia, such 'authenticity itself becomes a lie the moment it becomes authentic, that is, in reflecting on itself, in postulating itself as genuine, in which it already oversteps the identity which it lays claim to in the same breath.' An aesthetic theology, rather, marks the possibility of the prophet or the genius, whose word and work continually do and/or create something new out of that which is always already old/existing. -- in a language, a genre, etc., the horizons of possibility are, first, breached, and then broadened. With regard to religion, the genius / the prophet informs the particularity of the universal religious aim to attend to suffering; which is to say, in the fine terms of Mahâyâna Buddhism, the myriad forms and rituals of religion, at their best, are 'skilful means' (upâya) of actualising the apocalyptic intensity of experience that theological thinking seeks to re-think. Without the genius / the prophet, theological thinking is (and has been) too readily appropriated, in order that it might then be repressed, by the intellectual / political / economic / confessional regimes of the status quo.
