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!