Entering Mystery

Why? For example, why am I writing? Why read? Reading for escape and pleasure, sure—why but theology! I’m just completing a collection of essays that … and as I draft this line, my screensaver answers:

Excuse the interruption (although it is the answer in cryptic form, appropriately).

     To resume, I just finished reading Thinking Through the Death of God, edited by Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder. The excellent volume is subtitled A Critical Companion to Thomas J.J. Altizer, and it consists of essays by 12 leading theologians, followed by a response from Altizer. My engagement with Altizer has been noted in the three previous blogs; and his provocative soul-searching continues to nourish the journey and to tease the way providing critical bits of understanding along with lots of intriguing not-yet-getting-it. Most, if not all, of the contributors acknowledge that reading Altizer can be difficult, and yet each proves the ultimate value of the effort. Altizer himself, three pages from the end, confirms

“… this is not a challenge to an elite few; it is rather a challenge to us all, and just as each of us has been hurled into a condition of ultimate emptiness, each of us must find a way through that emptiness…” (p. 227)

A helpful comment on this challenge comes in David Jasper’s chapter, “In the Wasteland: Apocalypse, Theology, and the Poets.”

The Self-Embodiment of God has been described by Altizer as a gratuitous gift, the result of a long and deep struggle, and it is perhaps for this reason that its reader—though this is also true of most of his writing—must transcend the author himself, enacting a genuine communion that is nothing short of a liturgical experience. This may well explain why a critical reading of Altizer’s work is so difficult, perhaps ultimately impossible: certainly it evokes a religious reading that, at best, is participatory or even celebratory, rather like his own readings of poets such as Blake or Dante. To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…

Altizer’s writing…as a poetics that yearns in its very language for a ‘total presence,’ which is, in fact, nothing other than true prayer—a voice of silence experienced as such an intensity that it is everything and nothing. Such total presence in Altizer’s theology is a suspension that explains his profound acknowledgement of Dante’s vision of Purgatory, the place (which is no place) where opposites meet and the possibility is held out for redemption and purification. (p. 185, 187)

     As Jasper articulates, I read (and write) as a means to reach toward the sacred, that is, to pray. Let’s return to his lines: “To read is to speak, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation…” We might substitute “to write is to listen” in place of the first phrase: To write is to listen, which becomes a self-embodiment realized in a silence that is the heart of prayer and celebration. . . in the form of a meditation. When I write, usually as a meditation with material from reading, and when this infuses with the gift of images, the photos provided by “total presence” (as much as I am capable) of beauty in nature, when these “gratuitous gifts” flow in, around and through—well, it’s prayer. And in the silence, grace brings peace, reconciliation of opposites, insight into mysteries, manna for the journey.

A recent, if not ever-present, question/concern for a “solitary dreamer” (a phrase used in Alphonso Lingis’ chapter on “Kenosis” that I accept as apt for me) relates to whether the [solitary] journey must engage community and, if so (as often asserted by writers I admire), how and how much? This band of searchers that crowd my study and demand my time, these theologians, poets, story tellers, and a few walking/talking/loving close friends—Isn’t that the church of today? Consider Lingis on the visionary:

The visionary language makes us see what the visionary has seen. But for us to see what the visionary has seen is for a visionary to awaken in us. It is indeed a visionary in us that alone makes contact with the visions in visionary literature and receives from the visions the writers have received. Thomas Altizer affirms that it is through knowing a primal vision of one’s own time and world that one can open one’s own vision to the infinitely deeper vision of our great visionaries. (p. 205)

     The final word belongs to Altizer. In his concluding page, he returns to a frequent and central theme: the crucified/resurrected body of Christ. As I’m reading this conclusion, my mind echoes, “the body of Christ” as “the church,” the gathering of two or more who compose the profane/sacred mystery incarnate.

If we do not yet know a resurrected body, or do not do so either fully or decisively, we can know a crucified body, and can know the full actuality of that body, and most clearly know it in the ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, a suffering that can be known as a renewal of the Crucifixion. But if it is a renewal of the Crucifixion it is a renewal of the passion of God, a passion inseparable from an apocalyptic transfiguration, a transfiguration only possible through the death of God, or only possible through an absolute self-emptying or self-sacrifice of the Godhead, a sacrifice that is the sacrifice of the Crucifixion, and a crucifixion that is itself the consequence of an absolute genesis or an absolute beginning. But if the Crucifixion is the most ultimate realization of the body itself, it is so only as an absolute breaking of the body, a breaking that is renewed in the Eucharist, and comprehensively embodied in the most ultimate suffering of the body of humanity, then body as body is absolutely real, and finally real only as the body of Christ. This is certainly not the ‘spiritual body’ of Christ, not a mystical body that is an other-worldly body, it is the very reversal of every possible other-worldly body, indeed, a reversal ending every other-worldly body, a reversal that is the totality of incarnation, and only thereby the totality of resurrection itself.

     And as I complete Thinking Through the Death of God, re-reading Altizer’s final lines, this image appears on the screen: 

Wonder-ing

Sunday, April 13, ~4AM

I’m wondering when and how I got nudged (catapulted?) into a recent focus (near-obsession?) around a theme that I’d as soon not be caught in and yet seem unable (unwilling?) to get myself out of. Although the phrase may be more confusing than clarifying, the gravitational source for this orbit (wobble? whirlpool?) seems to be around “the death of God.” Yikes! Some exploration of that phrase is forthcoming, so have patience but also abandon all hope for a satisfactory clarification.

While I recall a sense of being struck at some point when reading (probably on the essential and unequivocal crux of Christianity that must be known in the cross/crucifixion), I’m not finding a specific place or even the text that threw me into this “flow” and therefore splash about supposing that maybe this location/focus/muddle might be more like a crest of a wave that developed over the past year or so than that it happened in an isolated passage. And (staying with the water metaphor), my motion feels more as treading than like swimming with a purposeful, well-defined target in sight. Maybe a dimly-detected direction developed rather gradually as I was being drawn to read some seven books by Stanley Hauerwas, three by Don Cupitt, and five by Rowan Williams.

Whatev-ah, to borrow the summary term effectively voiced by younger friends. Perhaps that tone works because some things in life just refuse focus. Like that shape-shifting form that Odysseus wrestled, these moments (decades?) are not meant to be confined to one stable meaning or center. Still, a bit of review across the terrain/sea might add insight or at least ease frustration.

Moon Setting, April 13, ~6AM

Likely the most compelling writer over the past year has emerged as Thomas J.J. Altizer (1927-2018). In his “theological memoir,” Altizer offers one interpretation of the key phrase:

Why is it not possible to understand the death of God as occurring in the Crucifixion itself? Is the sacrifice of Christ not finally the sacrifice of God? Is this why the cross is the most offensive symbol in the history of religions, one wholly unique to Christianity, and yet profoundly resisted by Christianity itself, as can be seen not only in Christian theological thinking but in Christian art and iconography… Even Dante could not envision the Crucifixion, and when this first fully occurs in Western poetry in Paradise Lost, it occurs only through a revolutionary vision of both God and Christ, one in which an uncrossable chasm separates the absolute sovereignty of the Father from the humiliation, suffering, and death of the Son. This is a chasm that only deepens in the further evolution of a uniquely modern Christian vision. And when the death of God is first called forth in Western vision and thinking, in Blake and Hegel, it is inseparable from a pure vision or a pure thinking of the Crucifixion. Is not the very ultimacy of this offense a decisive sign of the presence of an ultimate faith? Is a truly profound offense possible apart from the depths of faith? Is not an ultimate offense only and wholly within? pp. 106-7 in Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir by Thomas J. J. Altizer, 2006 

Altizer’s synthesis of his own work is stated: “my deepest theological goal eventually became one of discovering a coincidentia oppositorum between [Satan and Christ]. Elaborating on this, Mark Taylor comments in his foreword to Living the Death of God:

It is important to understand that the ‘coincidence’ of opposites is not the ‘union’ of opposites. When opposites coincide, they are not reconciled but juxtaposed to create a tension, which is simultaneously the most profound suffering and its overcoming. As Altizer’s thinking matures, he comes to understand this passion in terms of the death of God. Far from an abstract philosophical concept or literary trope, the death of God is, for Altizer, an actual historical event first enacted in the person of Jesus and then actualized in the course of history, which culminates in the ‘absolute abyss or total darkness’ of modernity… p. xiv

A search for meaning in this “abstract philosophical concept or literary trope” requires considerable willingness to enter the expanses of paradox, parabola, mystery, and suchlike. While wading/sinking into the depths of “the death of God,” I’ve also found it helpful to move back and forth into “fiction,” particularly the novels of Walker Percy, and across into theology, especially the work of Altizer. Helpful also is interpretation of Altizer’s work offered by his colleagues: Lissa McCullough (e.g., her chapter “Theology as the Thinking of Passion Itself” in Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer; and Robert Detweiler, Breaking the Fall.

Altizer affirms the importance, the vital necessity, of the role of literature and art in our moving forward.

I found that it was literary scholars who were most deeply unveiling this [‘that ultimate crisis which had become our destiny, a crisis shattering modernity itself, and therefore dissolving modernity’s comprehensive negation of theology’], discovering in our most profound literature a religious or ultimate vision that is simply inexplicable through our given theological categories… p. 24, Living the Death of God.

Sun Rising, April 13, ~7AM

As noted above, reading Walker Percy’s novels provide a very helpful weaving from the theological into the fabric of life. For example, in Second Coming, the protagonist searches for God traumatic experiences of suffering, physical/mental/emotional illness, death, and suicide.  In particular, he struggles in knowing the names of “death” (pp. 272-3) and in confronting the ways people seem to be “living death” (p. 324). 

Altizer’s work also contributes to finding peace and presence of the divine even in the times when we feel abandoned:

…the very disappearance of God, or the pure invisibility of God, could make possible a total presence of God. [Monet , Water Lilies… only seen with pond  totality… we can only see these paintings by actually seeing the pure emptiness of God, for only that emptiness makes possible a seeing of the invisibility of God.

    Nor is there even an echo of a mysterium tremendum . Now every mysterium tremendum is absolutely silent and invisible, and only thaat invisibility and silence makes possible such a pure mysterium fascinans , a mysterium fascinans which here undergoes an epiphany as totality itself … an epiphany of the sacred, and perhaps most so because it is not an epiphany of God. Is this a genuine  coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and the profane, and one in which both the sacred as sacred and the profane as profane are dissolved, or in which each fully passes into the other… Thereby we actually see a pure moment of incarnation, and a moment which here and now is all in all, so that now Earth itself is actually paradise, and paradise in this absolutely joyous moment

(pp. 80, 81, Living the Death of God.)

Morning, April 13

        I think this has something to do with my attraction to photography of Nature and the editing that moves toward the invisible. For now, let’s close with a sense of opening:

While ultimately faith is a gift of grace, humanly it is an ultimate struggle, and the absence of struggle can be understood as an absence of faith, but the struggle itself can only be a truly individual struggle. Hence this is a struggle transcending any possible guidelines or rules, and wholly inseparable from one’s unique condition and situation.  (p. 155, Living the Death of God.)

April, full of Spring!