I am hoping to eventually post more thoroughly on my current reading of Marion's God Without Being but for now I have impressions. The resurrected Christ has been given all. And in turn all has been given to the church,
"so that the church may return it to the Word. . . . In theology it is not a question, any more than elsewhere, of working to a completion yet to come: completion, for the Church, is accomplished definitively at Easter, hence at the origin. Accomplishment occurs at the origin and moreover alone renders it possible, fertile, pregnant with a future. . . . Theology cannot aim at any other progress than its own conversion to the Word."
What came to my mind with regards to 'all' and origins was the notion of conversion. A few months ago I had one of my rare spurts of inspiration around writing fiction. I have been keeping loose journals from around the end of high school. The beginning of my journal writing corresponds exactly with my conversion experience (not to be read in the aorist). I thought that I could use some of those entries as fodder for a character that was a little naive and misguided. So I began to read my entries. They were short, pointed, lacking in style or in poor style but as I read them I began to be moved by a person who I no longer was. A sense of wanting to be converted by him emerged within me. I don't think this is nostalgia and I have no interest in going back but there is something operative in those writings that speaks of an all. I would not become that person if I did convert but perhaps there is a returning to that site or a navigating that site for understanding how the 'all' embraced the particular and remained particular in relation to the 'all'. Are there conceptions of conversion that avoid a static evanglicalism or a banal 'journeying'. Can we understand our conversion as orientation to the One who now orients us? You have abandoned your first love . . . repent and do the things you did at first. (Rev 2:4-5). Marion looks to the Eucharistic site (as so many of the theologians I have been reading do) but I do not find it there yet . . . I am not sure I ever will. Perhaps I will eventually be found there but something is missing.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
All at Origin
Monday, May 17, 2010
Patmos Idol
I think that unconsciously I hope to have the opportunity for a death bed repentance. Not so that I can have my fill of carousing (though I love saying carousing) and still guarantee safe passage to the next party but rather that I can be able to have some sort of 'fullness of vision' over my life so that I see more clearly the errors and ditches I was too often face down in. I have the unhelpful view that I will actually have greater clarity at the end than I do now.
In the middle of the final chapter in the Book of Revelation we have John making himself explicitly visible as the recipient of the vision for the last time in the text. He says,
I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I had heard and seen them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who had been showing them to me. But he said to me, "Do not do it! I am a fellow servant with and with your brothers the prophets and of all who keep the words of this book. Worship God!"
Oops! Maybe John should have glossed over that embarrassing little detail. It could have stayed between him and the angel (maybe the angel put the screws to him though to keep it in . . . if you take away one word . . . ). Even at the very end and perhaps especially at the very end idolatry lurks over the entire vision of God's new heaven and new earth. What would it have meant had John ignored the angel or that the angel would have accepted John's worship? The book of Revelation is about worship and how it orients the realities of heaven and earth. And yet the one who receives the closest taste of true heavenly worship, this one ends up on the brink of idolatry (twice; cf. 19:10). With this little illustration it is hard to deny that from beginning to end the Bible is riddled with people confused or plain ignorant over what worship is. Jesus said in John's Gospel that "a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth." Was this ever not the case or plan of God?
Have you ever tried to think about something that literally made your head hurt? (most worthwhile books perform this upon me at some point) We prefer to have our thinking resolved (or at least I do . . . that's why my head starts hurting). We tend towards the possession of understanding rather then the act of understanding. But if we have any interest in thinking about God our thinking cannot come to rest. Because wherever our thinking rests will be the place that an idol is built. For the most part we are fairly clear what our idols are. There is money (or whatever symbol of economic control you choose . . . oh say a 7000 lb bronze bull outside of Wall Street will do!). There is our nation (I am sure you have heard of the issues at Goshen College). There is our coffee cup our laptop case our library shelf our clothing labels our hood ornament our theologies our rituals our ornate crosses our Bibles our . . . So we know these things, for the most part. But still we gather our idols at the cost of the new heavens and new earth. We continue to carry on commercial trade in the great whore of Babylon (she is pretty damn sexy riding that beast and all). We know these things, maybe even John knew it at that moment as well but we are so pathetically desperate in the hopes that we can get a piece of the pie, a little bit of God. That is the idol right, a little bit of god. Everyone knows its not God but its my piece of God. My piece of God's power. My piece of God's pleasure. My piece of God's wrath. My piece of God's protection. My piece of God's status. My piece of God's love. My piece of God's truth. That's what happened to John. He was (rightfully) overwhelmed with a piece of God's truth and so he was willing to take hold of that as God, complete, final, praise God
So what can keep us from being carried along in the relentless torrent of idolatry which is as much as anything the unifying strand of biblical theology. We are the prodigal children seeking to own the gift of God at the cost of abandoning our relationship with the ever-giving God (H/T Jean-Luc Marion). How can we worship in spirit and in truth? What is true worship? It is simple. It is right there in the text of Revelation. Maybe, in the end, like the angel reaching over to stop us from yet another idolatry, worship is a gift. This may be our way out from the endless construction of idols.
Friday, July 25, 2008
Marion on the Visible
I quite struggled through chapter 2 of Jean-Luc Marion's In Excess where he establishes some of his methodological framework. There was however a decisive shift in mood in the third chapter as Marion appeared to me to be now expressing his project for which he has considerable passion. The chapter on the idol and paintings begins,
The visible surrounds us. Wherever we turn, it is unveiled, ready, brilliant, iconic. When I open my eyes, I fall on it, unfolded from head to foot all across the horizon. Does it seep through the sides? But there is no place for anything 'on the side' of the visible, since it faces me with the envisageable breadth of space. Would I escape from it in turning my back on it and fleeing? But if I turn around I always run into it, as it preceded me and gets around me in advance. When I raise my head, it is already hanging over me. When I lower my eyes, it always still expects me. The visible obsesses us because it lays siege to us. Wherever I turn, it surrounds me.
Marion goes on to establish the reality of the painting as offering pure visibility, something greater than its 'original'. In a painting all is visible. "The painting adds presence to presence, where nature preserves space and thus absence. At this point Marion introduces the work of Paul Klee who I had never heard of. Marion then offers an interpretation of one of his paintings. I am still not quite sure what to make of it. I have never heard a reading with so much serious drama. The interpretation is of Klee's Ad Marginem.
It is a well-named painting: the red sun, which, a little raised from the center, would have to crush with its dense, nodal mass and its dark, explosive heat the greenish marshland which, spread out, surrounds it - crush it to the point of draining it, even fade it to the point of whitening it - this quasi-atomic sun seems impreceptibly, but indisputably, to be narrowed under the pressure of the green that lays siege to it, turning it yellow and digesting, so to speak, its redness, as if asphyxiated by the exponential growth of the quasi-plants that push on the margins of the painting . They buttress themselves there all the more visibly as the painting is narrowing in on itself in sketching an ocher frame, already wood, on the inside of its physical, material frame. The redoubling of the frame renders visible, almost foreseeable, even inevitable, that the clash of the elementary forces of the sun and of the magma, both in fusion, ends in the implosion of enormous energy - the same energy of the visible struggling in the rarified space to rise, in spite of it all, to the day. The painting imposes itself like a double-armored casket, which tries to hold back the explosion of the immense visible, which will end inevitably by taking it apart and dispersing it. The painting attains the highest saturation possible of the visible in such a restrained frame. The saturation of the visible becomes, to the one who knows how to look at it as it gives itself really unbearable.
It is perhaps that final line that really set me off. I had not thought too much of the hermeneutics of sight. I considered interpreting a painting as looking and then internally processing its meaning as opposed to how I might look at it.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
When it Rains it Pours
I am on holidays and so I began a fistful of books that have been sitting on my shelf waiting their turn. The three that have emerged this summer are,
Slavoj Zizek, In Defence of Lost Causes
Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge
and my first Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess
I will offer a few excerpts shortly. However, yesterday I was inundated with more books that will have to wait.
I received an order from Amazon which included,
William Cavanuagh's Theolopolitical Imagination and John H. Yoder's The Politics of Jesus (which I read about 10 years ago after which I lent out the copy never to return).
Yesterday I was also out a used bookstore and corralled the following,
Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialetic of Enlightenment
Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis
Then to top it all off as I was walking to where I parked my car there was a little Thrift Store that I went into where I perused their bookshelf and for 50 cents I picked up,
Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory
I need more holidays!
So what summer reading have you picked up?
Zizek's In Defense continues to be an enjoyable read. It is starting to get a little old the way he "turns the tables" on popular conceptions. You have heard it said that Hitler was too violent, well I say to you that he was not violent enough. You have heard it said that Stalinism was immoral, well I say to you that it was too moral . . . and so forth. This however, does not take away from insights into capitalism as the infinitely revolutionary model that can absorb almost all influences. Here is quotes Brian Massumi on the erratic excess of contemporary capitalism saying that,
the more varied, and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simply liberation. It's capitalism's own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it's capitalism's power to produce variety - because markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay - as long as they pay. . . . It's very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me that there's been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance.
Zizek eventually comes to his question and asks, "How, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing?" The chapter ends with a quote from Beckett, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
Jean-Luc Marion's In Excess is the third in a trilogy of books (which I did not know when I bought it). It is, however, somewhat accessible having not been up to speed with his prior work. Marion asks the question whether the rejection of all transcendence by phenomenology forbids it from engaging constructively with religion. Here Marion looks at metaphysical theology and revealed theology. In as much as metaphysical theology (first philosophy) is based on "real transcendence, causality, substantiality, and actuality" phenomenology could engage in no speculative arguments beyond what is given. However, "for revealed theology, by the very fact that it is based on given facts, which are given positively as figures, appearances, and manifestations (indeed, apparitions, miracles, revelations, and so on), takes places in the natural field of phenomentality and is therefore dependent on the competence of phenomenology. What is surprising here is that phenomenology should disqualify that theology called 'natural' and rational, but it cannot deny further interest in revealed theology, precisely because no revelation would take place without a manner of phenomenality."
The opening chapter of Rowan William's The Wound of Knowledge is worth quoting in full but I will quote one of the final paragraphs after Williams has outlined the paradox and contingent nature of faithful spirituality. He then talks about hope,
The presence of this hope is what makes us alive with 'newness of life' (Rom 6.4) in the sharing of Christ's risen life. Christ's risen life is a life free from the threat of death and annihilation ('Christ's being raised from the dead will never die again' - Rom 6.9), the 'threatenedness' that is part of the human condition of human sin and distance from God. In sharing this life, we share his freedom from 'threatenedness,' it is never - as is perfectly clear in all Paul's epistles - a freedom from exposure to suffering or from fear, but it is a decisive transition to that new level of existence where God is the only ultimate horizon - not death or nothingness. 'From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer' ( 2 Cor 5.16). The 'human point of view,' for which death is the final horizon, is put away, so that we are free with Christ's freedom. We have, in John's terms, 'passed out of death into life' (1 John 3.14).
