Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy 2016043510, 9781472478610, 9781315597133

Citation preview

Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy

Exploration of the interface between mystical theology and continental philosophy is a defining feature of the current intellectual and even devotional climate. But to what extent and in what depth are these disciplines actually speaking to one another; or even speaking about the same phenomena? This book draws together original contributions by leading and emerging international scholars, delineating emerging debates in this growing and dynamic field of research, and spanning mystical and philosophical traditions from the ancient, to the medieval, modern, and contemporary. At the heart of which lies Meister Eckhart, perhaps the single most influential Christian mystic for modern times. The book is organised around significant historical and contemporary figures who speak across the intersections of philosophy and theology, offering new insights into key interlocutors such as Pseudo-Dionysius, Augustine, Isaac Luria, Eckhart, Hegel, Heidegger, Marion, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Žižek. Designed both to contribute to current trends in mystical theology and philosophy, and elicit dialogue and debate from further afield, this book speaks within an emerging space exploring the retrieval of the mystical within a post-secular context. David Lewin is Lecturer in Education at Strathclyde University. His recent publications include articles in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, Ethics and Education, and the European Journal of Special Educational Needs. He is co-editor of New Perspectives in Philosophy of Education (Bloomsbury, 2014) and has recently published a monograph for Routledge entitled Educational Philosophy for a Post-Secular Age. Simon D. Podmore is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Liverpool Hope University and co-convenor, with Louise Nelstrop, of the Mystical Theology Network. He is author of Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Indiana University Press, 2011) and Struggling With God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (James Clarke & Co., 2013). He is currently writing a monograph entitled Dark Night of the Holy, exploring a theological account of the Negative Numinous in Mystical Theology. Duane Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies Department at Liverpool Hope University. He is editor of the journal Medieval Mystical Theology, a trustee of the Eckhart Society, and a co-facilitator of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. He is the author of the monograph The Linguistic Christ, and is soon to publish a new monograph titled Language and Being: Heidegger's Linguistics.

Contemporary Theological Explorations in Christian Mysticism Series Editors: Patricia Z. Beckman, Oliver Davies, Mark McIntosh and George Pattison

This series facilitates new points of synergy and fresh theological engagements with Christian mystical traditions. Reflecting the plurality of theological approaches to Christian mystical theology, books in the series cover historical, literary, practical, and systematic perspectives as well as philosophical, psychological, and phenomenological methods. Although the primary focus of the series is the Christian tradition, exploration of texts from other traditions also highlight the theological, psychological and philosophical questions that Christian mysticism brings to the fore. Titles in the series: Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy Interchange in the Wake of God Edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore and Duane Williams Mystical Anthropology Authors from the Low Countries Edited by John Arblaster and Rob Faesen Mysticism in the French Tradition Eruptions from France Edited by Louise Nelstrop and Bradley B. Onishi Exploring Lost Dimensions in Christian Mysticism Opening to the Mystical Edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology Between Transcendence and Immanence Edited by Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore

Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy Interchange in the Wake of God

Edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore , and Duane Williams

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore and Duane Williams; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, & Duane Williams to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Lewin, David, (educator), editor. Title: Mystical theology and continental philosophy : interchange in the wake of God / edited by David Lewin, Simon D. Podmore, & Duane Williams. Description: New York : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Contemporary theological explorations in Christian mysticism | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016043510 | ISBN 9781472478610 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315597133 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Philosophical theology. | Mysticism. | Continental philosophy. Classification: LCC BT40 .M97 2017 | DDC 261.5/1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016043510 ISBN: 978-1-4724-7861-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-59713-3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Taylor & Francis Books

Contents

List of contributors Introduction: Mystical theology and continental philosophy: interchange in the wake of God

vii

1

PART I

Receiving mystical tradition in post/modernity 1 Learning presence: the mystical text as intimate hyper-communication across time

11 13

OLIVER DAVIES

2 The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling: the divine contraction and the modern metaphysics of finitude

32

AGATA BIELIK-ROBSON

3 From text to presence: Ricoeur and medieval monastic biblical contemplation

51

JOSEPH MILNE

PART II

Apophasis and continental philosophy 4 Different deserts: deconstructionism and Dionysian apophaticism

69 71

MARIA EXALL

5 The apophatic dimension of revelation

91

MIROSLAV GRIŠKO

6 Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion RICO G. MONGE

111

vi

Contents

PART III

Revisiting Eckhart through Heidegger 7 The role of mysticism in the formation of Heidegger’s phenomenology

129 131

GEORGE PATTISON

8 Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what: beyond subjectivistic thought to groundless ground

147

DUANE WILLIAMS

9 Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar: a foreshadowing of Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund?

164

CHRISTOPHER M. WOJTULEWICZ

10 Pay attention!: exploring contemplative pedagogies between Eckhart and Heidegger

179

DAVID LEWIN

PART IV

Re-readings and new boundaries

195

11 Mysterium secretum et silentiosum: praying the apophatic self

197

SIMON D. PODMORE

12 Becoming mystic, becoming monster: the logic of the infinite in Kierkegaard, Cusa and Deleuze

217

STEVEN SHAKESPEARE

13 Non-philosophical immanence, or immanence without secularization

231

ALEX DUBILET

14 ‘Not peace but a sword’: Žižek, Dionysius and the question of ancestry in theology and philosophy

245

MARIKA ROSE

Index

258

Contributors

Agata Bielik-Robson received her PhD in philosophy in 1995. She works as a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. She has published articles in Polish, English, Russian and German on philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis, romantic subjectivity, and the philosophy of religion (especially Judaism and its crossings with modern philosophical thought). Her publications include books: The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (in English, Northwestern University Press, 2011), Erros. Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (Cracow, 2012), In the Wilderness. Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity (Cracow, 2008), Romanticism. An Unfinished Project (Cracow, 2008), The Spirit of the Surface. Romantic Revision and Philosophy (Cracow, 2004) Another Modernity (Cracow, 2000) and On the Other Side of Nihilism (Warsaw, 1997). Together with Adam Lipszyc she coedited the collection of essays: Judaism in Contemporary Thought. Traces and Influence (Routledge, 2014). Her new book, Philosophical Marranos. Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity was published with Routledge in September 2014. She is also a co-editor of Bamidbar. The Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy, which appears in English three times a year in Passagen Verlag, Wien. Oliver Davies grew up in South Wales, before pursuing undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford, where he specialised in contemporary German religious literature. He spent two years teaching at the University of Cologne before returning to lecture in theology in the University of Wales. He joined King’s College, London as Professor of Christian Doctrine in 2004. Oliver Davies lectured at the University of St Petersburg in 1998 and was Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia in 2002 and 2003, and at the Pontifical Gregorian University at Rome in 2006–7. He is presently Distinguished Visiting Professor at Renmin University of China, Beijing. From 2007–8 he was President of the Society for the Study of Theology from 2007–8. He is coordinator of the Transformation Theology project based at King’s College, London. Alex Dubilet is a Lecturer in the Program for Religious Studies and the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley. His primary research and teaching

viii List of contributors interests encompass the fields of philosophy and religion, contemporary continental philosophy, history of Christianity (with an emphasis on medieval mysticism), critical secular studies, history and theory of religion, and political theology. Maria Exhall has a PhD in Philosophical Theology from King's College London. Her research interests are the interface between modern rationalist philosophy and apophaticism and the relationship between egalitarian ethical and political theory and the Christian tradition of spiritual poverty. Miroslav Griško is an independent researcher in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Ljubljana (2013). His main research interest is the metaphysics of eschatology. David Lewin is Lecturer in Education at Strathclyde University. His recent publications include articles in the Journal of Philosophy of Education, Ethics and Education, and the European Journal of Special Educational Needs. He is co-editor of ‘New Perspectives in Philosophy of Education’ (Bloomsbury, 2014) and is currently working on a monograph for Routledge entitled Educational Philosophy for a Post-Secular Age. Joseph Milne originally studied music but later turned to theology and won a British Academy award for his PhD research in theological anthropology. He taught for many years on the renowned MA in the Study of Religion and Mystical Experience at the University of Kent. He is a Fellow of The Temenos Academy, a trustee of The Eckhart Society, and The Henry George Foundation. He is author of The Ground of Being: Foundations of Christian Mysticism, Metaphysics and the Cosmic Order, and The Mystical Cosmos. His main interests are Greek philosophy of nature, medieval Christian mysticism, Shakespeare and renaissance Christian Platonism. In modern philosophy, he is interested in the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur and the ontology of Martin Heidegger. Currently he is writing a book on Natural Law, based on research into the Greek and medieval understanding of Nature and the place of society within the cosmic order. Rico G. Monge is Assistant Professor of Comparative Theology at the University of San Diego. His teaching and research focuses on comparative theology, continental philosophy of religion, and the history of Christian theology (including Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox theology). As a comparative theologian, Monge specializes in Christian and Islamic mystical and ascetic traditions, as well as the mystical element in continental philosophical thought. George Pattison has held posts in the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, and Aarhus (Denmark) and is currently 1640 Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively on Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and philosophy of religion in the continental tradition. His books include

List of contributors

ix

Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (1999), God and Being (2011), Heidegger and Death (2013) and he is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought. Simon D. Podmore is Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology at Liverpool Hope University and co-convenor, with Louise Nelstrop, of the Mystical Theology Network. He is author of Kierkegaard and the Self Before God: Anatomy of the Abyss (Indiana University Press, 2011) and Struggling With God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (James Clarke & Co., 2013). He is currently writing a monograph entitled Dark Night of the Holy, exploring a theological account of the Negative Numinous in Mystical Theology. Marika Rose is Research Fellow in Digital Discipleship at the CODEC Research Centre for Digital Theology. She was recently awarded a PhD at Durham University for her thesis, A Theology of Failure: Ontology and Desire in Slavoj Žižek and Christian Apophaticism and has published articles in a number of journals, including Sophia, New Blackfriars and Studia Patristica. She is reviews editor for the journal Theology and Sexuality. Steven Shakespeare is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University. He is a co-facilitator of The Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. He has published work on Kierkegaard, Derrida, philosophy of music and other issues in contemporary philsophy of religion and theology. His most recent book is Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Duane Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the Theology, Philosophy, and Religious Studies Department at Liverpool Hope University. He is editor of the journal, Medieval Mystical Theology, a trustee of the Eckhart Society, and a co-facilitator of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion. He is the author of the monograph, The Linguistic Christ, and is soon to publish a new monograph titled, Language and Being: Heidegger's Linguistics. Christopher M. Wojtulewicz is Research Associate in Philosophical Theology and Palaeography at King’s College London. His interests include medieval metaphysics, thirteenth and fourteenth century Trinitarian debates and Christian mysticism, as well as continental philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. His books include Meister Eckhart on the Principle (Leuven, 2015) and two edited volumes Meister Eckhart in Paris and Strasbourg and Meister Eckhart and Thomas of Erfurt (Leuven, 2015).

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction Mystical theology and continental philosophy: Interchange in the wake of God

O love, were I love And with love to love you, love O love, for love grant that love May know love wholly as love.1

Combining literary, theological, and spiritual insight, the thirteenth century Flemish mystic Hadewijch understood love (Minne) as both action and divine being: God is the object of love, the act of love, and the source of love. Her conceptual fluidity is suggestive of the kinds of poststructural interventions that have interrupted a certain positivist culture in the wake of modernity. Although the construction ‘continental philosophy’ is less taken for granted today than it has been in recent decades, the relative absence of, and sometimes even hostility to, literary, poetic, and mystical affirmations or interruptions within more analytic approaches is striking. Yet even Jean-Luc Marion has claimed that love has become, at best, a derivative modality in relation to ontology, that philosophy, encompassing continental and analytic strains, might even be said to have come to hate love.2 But is Marion himself engaged in an ironic and erotic poetics in making this claim? Perhaps. More importantly, is continental philosophy better equipped to hear the resonances of the literary, poetic, and spiritual synthesis of Hadewijch and the mystical theology of her time? The apparently postmodern capacity to take language in multiple modalities, to fuse the aesthetic and spiritual, the literary and theological, the rational and symbolic, seems to characterize the ongoing intersections and divergences between mystical theology and continental philosophy that bring us to the central concern of this volume. Yet we must ask why have the affinities between mystical theology and continental philosophy both been so strong, and gone largely unnoticed? While the encounter between these fields has become, for some commentators, common intellectual currency to the point of being conventional, or even banal, this book thematises the intersection in a way that is, in fact, surprisingly rare. Issues surrounding the appropriation, elaboration, and re-contextualisation of mystical theology in continental philosophy have risen to prominence through recent engagements with apophaticism from the perspectives of both

2

D. Lewin et al.

deconstruction and theological critiques of onto-theology. But these influences and appropriations should not lead us to assume that the direction and inclination is one-way, from a historically bounded mystical theology to contemporary issues addressed by continental philosophers, by way of the much-vaunted theological turn within contemporary continental philosophy. We might ask, therefore, whether continental philosophy is the ‘handmaiden’ of mystical theology? Or is mystical theology a fresh resource for continental philosophers? Is there a mutual two-way dialogue between continental philosophy and mystical theology (often in the one scholar) producing a dialectical inter-disciplinary hermeneutic circle? Or does the postsecular consummate philosophy through an awareness and acknowledgement that something is missing, or by bearing witness to that which is beyond thought? It is likely that each of these scenarios is at play. But this wider landscape of intersection and influence, of tension and divergence, has itself received little scrutiny. How might these philosophical and theological strands interweave with one another and how coherently or creatively do they relate back to mystical thinkers from antiquity, the medieval period, and the modern era? To what extent is it possible to articulate cogent negative philosophies and post-onto-theological mystical theologies? Moreover, are there points at which a turn to the mystical might disguise an appeal to mystification? And to what extent is the post-metaphysical apophatic turn being challenged by a renaissance of speculative thinking in both philosophy and theology? In light of such questions, this book brings together original essays from leading and emerging international scholars, examining the historical and contemporary developments of continental philosophy’s relationship with mysticism alongside theology’s own renewed engagement with mystical traditions, particularly as it enters into dialogue with this comparable turn in philosophy. By exploring points of intersection and divergence, this book traces the nature of the relationship between these two fields in the hope of moving towards a new awareness of their complementarity, tension, and integrity. Furthermore, the essays in this volume seek to deepen our understandings of the enduring core of the mystical and the contemporary revival of some ancient and liminal voices. The essays mostly derive from a conference on Mystical Theology and Continental Philosophy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, held at Liverpool Hope University, 11–13 July, 2014. The conference, a collaboration between The Mystical Theology Network, The Association for the Continental Philosophy of Religion, and The Eckhart Society, attracted speakers and delegates from Western, Central, and Eastern Europe, Australia, South Africa, Israel, Canada and the United States. The essays gathered here are a select group of fourteen taken from over forty presented papers at the conference, chosen according to principles of originality, academic rigour, contribution to the field, and with a view to overall coherence and synchronicity. Organised around significant historical and contemporary figures who speak across the intersections of continental philosophy and mystical theology, the book aims to present essays which define and delineate key and emerging debates in this growing field of research. The essays offer new insights into key interlocutors, such as Pseudo-Dionysius,

Introduction

3

Augustine, Isaac Luria, Eckhart, Hegel, Heidegger, Marion, alongside innovative explorations of less canonical figures in the field, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, Laruelle, and Žižek. As such, the volume is designed both to contribute to current trends in mystical theology, as well as elicit dialogue and debate from further afield. The intersection between the domains of mystical theology and continental philosophy is of particular significance at the present time since it offers postsecular interests variegated entry points into religious discourses, both in terms of post-critical theory and new directions in theological thought.

Organisation and content of this book The four themes around which this book is organised reflect key developments within this interdisciplinary field. Part I, ‘Receiving mystical tradition in post/ modernity’, raises historical and hermeneutical questions that inevitably present themselves as the mystical tradition is juxtaposed with the post-modern. From monastic cultures to the modern spaces of hyper-communication, from the transcendent to immanent framing of the world, or from the pious to the postsecular, reflections on the relationships between religious reading and experience provide important considerations that cut across the book and the field as a whole. The apophatic remains a key site of convergence between mystical traditions and recent continental philosophy, and most chapters within the volume engage with the dialectics of apophatic and cataphatic theologies in varied ways. Part II, ‘Apophasis and continental philosophy’, addresses this relation in particular and specific detail. Part III, ‘Revisiting Eckhart through Heidegger’, revisits and develops the continuing discussions that derive from Heidegger’s appropriation of mysticism as well as Eckhart’s significance for a theology in the wake of God. This is followed by Part IV, which presents the most novel encounters between varied thinkers who are less often treated in relation to mystical theology: Kierkegaard, Žižek, Deleuze, Laruelle, and others. This section takes up questions around the complex influences of such figures on our understandings of mystical thought, and casts the discussion in new critical directions, exploring some of the boundaries that shape disciplines, raising questions about the constitution of fields. Decisions to include certain traditions and debates inevitably entail some kind of exclusions, omissions, and elisions. Readers may find, in particular, the relative absence of the discussion of female mystics disquieting. As editors we have been unsettled by this, especially as the process of developing the book has unfolded. We are conscious of a gender-imbalance in terms of both contributors and content. The weighty presence of Eckhart, Dionysius, Cusa, and Heidegger also invokes an absence of Hildegard, Margery Kempe, Mechthild, Kristeva, and Irigaray. It is possible to appeal to very pragmatic mitigations to explain this. Recognising that, as editors, we could only consider that which was put before us in the conference does not validate the structures that enforce certain sets of discourses and relations. That being said, if the conference were to be done again, what might be done differently? Perhaps the call for papers

4

D. Lewin et al.

could have been more explicit in seeking greater gender range and balance. Perhaps invited speakers should be sought in different ways. However, more philosophical and theological lessons also arise concerning this imbalance. Is this interface between mystical theology and continental philosophy ultimately about each seeing its face in the other? Is it about the assimilation of the image of the other to the same? Are we thinkers and writers, searching for threads with which to weave some union between mystical theology and continental philosophy? Might not the Apophatic, perhaps our greatest thread, risk becoming the new master-discourse which makes handmaidens once more of the other? Might the apophatic technique of difference ultimately become a way of elevating, or reducing, all else to the silence of the mysterium – even to the aphasia of mystification? Yet there are others who have escaped the great gravitational pull towards assimilation in this book. As such, that which remains here unexplored has been taken up in different ways. Essays from the conference focusing on, or significantly referring to, female mystics (but without engaging continental philosophy) have subsequently been published in the journal, Medieval Mystical Theology (Volume 25, Number 1). Moreover, the burgeoning interest in, and influence of, female mysticism suggests the need for future events and research whose focus is on this area. We are encouraging these ideas through exploring future research opportunities, conferences, symposia, themed publications, etc. As this process of editing and publishing has shown us, we proceed mindful of the exclusions alongside that which, in this collection at least, is included.

Chapter overviews Part I, ‘Receiving mystical tradition in post/modernity’ begins with Oliver Davies’ chapter ‘Learning presence: the mystical text as intimate hyper communication across time’. Davies’ central theme is the question of how it is that mystical texts are both dislocated from our modern world and yet seemingly so intimate. The intimacy of mystical texts, illustrated by reference to Meister Eckhart and Julian of Norwich, may be a feature of our experience, but Davies argues for credible and objective reference for their powers of intimacy by reference to advances in evolutionary anthropology and social neuroscience or the neuroscience of social cognition. Davies’ radical argument draws continuity from the ‘hyper-cooperation’ that evolved from human social life, and the ‘hyper-communication’ that enables intimacy across space and time, suggesting that there exists a convergence between our early biology and our later culture, in concrete acts of communication. Mystical texts enable intimacy because they invite a kind of presence that sustains the wholeness of human beings summoned to love by encounter with another. The relationship between the mystical and modernity also occupies Agata Bielik-Robson’s essay, ‘The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling: the divine contraction and the modern metaphysics of finitude’. Here Bielik-Robson elaborates the esoteric, even heretico-mystical impulses of early modernity

Introduction

5

through a detailed and provocative study of kabbalistic motifs in German Idealism. In particular, Bielik-Robson identifies and explicates the notion of Tzimtzum, the divine self-withdrawal which initiates the process of creation, as ingeniously devised by Isaac Luria and subsequently integrated, to perhaps dubious extents, within the Christian kabbalah of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, and the syncretic theosophical system of Jakob Boehme. Both are Lutheran mystics who – along with Reuchlin, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Oetinger, and others – represent transition points for the varieties of Tzimtzum uncovered in Hegel and Schelling. However, Bielik-Robson’s aim is not an historical excavation but a profound philosophical outworking in the logic of ideas of the tensions and implications of this Lurianic motif in Hegel’s and Schelling’s enduring conflict on the importance of the negative. Bielik-Robson asks: What is the very nature of this translation which turns theosophical imaginary into philosophical concept? And, can we endorse Hegel’s project of a full sublation of the religious content in the philosophical form? Key to this is ‘the modern metaphysics of finitude’ invoked in the essay’s title. Through a deftly sophisticated and compelling narrative, Bielik-Robson demonstrates, among other insights, the transfiguration of Tsimtsum (critically utilising the lens of Gershom Scholem) into Hegel’s ‘death of God’ philosophy. What is at stake is the possibility of realising the ‘New Age’, modernity (nova era) itself, in the wake of God’s retreat. This divine creative kenotic crisis, Bielik-Robson suggests, affirms the world, not only in becoming itself, but as the place which God needs to get back into existence. The possibilities of reading medieval mystical texts through a modern hermeneutic are examined further in ‘From text to presence: Ricoeur and medieval monastic Biblical contemplation’ by Joseph Milne. In this essay Milne responds to the following question: What light may be thrown on the devotional mystical literature of the medieval monastic tradition with the aid of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics? The contemplative approach to Scripture of the medieval monastic tradition, as distinct from the later scholastic tradition, involved a spiritual practice that transformed understanding and illumined the soul. In this essay, Milne brings Ricoeur’s hermeneutic approach to biblical texts into dialogue with this monastic tradition, and in particular with Aelred of Rievaulx and Hugh of St Victor. Milne attempts to show that light may be cast in either direction, from Ricoeur to monastic contemplation, and from monastic contemplation to Ricoeur. Part II, ‘Apophasis and continental philosophy’, begins with Maria Exall’s essay titled, ‘Different deserts: deconstructionism and Dionysian apophaticism’. Jacques Derrida’s critical analysis of the negative theology of positive transcendence, found in the texts of Pseudo Dionysius, is that it is a reversal which merely repeats, by inverting, key ontological and epistemological principles of Western thought and culture. Instead Derrida proposes an alternative understanding of negation, a model of alternating being and other, a non-dialectical third way that is neither being nor non-being, a place beyond absence and presence that is irreducible. Exall questions Derrida’s understanding of the Dionysian tradition from a dialectical theist position. She outlines the

6

D. Lewin et al.

dialectical, teleological, and thoroughly atheistic nature of the negative theology we find in the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names based on a Plotinian understanding of non-being as a beyond being that is a radical negation, both truly other to being, and other to the other to being. So, notwithstanding contemporary attempts to seek a dialogue between deconstructionism and apophaticism, it appears we are talking about very different deserts. The irreducibility and inaccessibility of Derrida’s desert does not appear to fit with the ‘nothing’ and ‘empty place’ of the apophatic mystics. The atheological, and ahistorical ‘third place’ seems very different from a Dionysian concept of the unknowing. Exall suggests that as there is no place in the Derridean understanding of Dionysian apophaticism for human participation in the telos of the intellect, nor for direct knowledge of the divine through absolute immanence, its potential for radical ethics and politics is extremely limited. Myroslav Griško, in his essay, also challenges recent readings of the Apophatic by returning to Pseudo Dionysius within Eastern Orthodox tradition in order to affirm ‘the apophatic dimension of revelation’. Griško maintains that reduction of the apophatic to a form of epistemic limitation neglects the apocalyptic (in both revelatory and eschatological senses) dimension of apophasis inherent to Orthodox theology. Readings which omit this inherent aspect are, Griško claims, ‘counterfeit’ forms of apophaticism, complicit with a postmodern relativity that is the inversion of the absolute truth of revelation. This Absolute constitutes an apophatic denial of the world, not to be confused with the immanent denial of the world, but as a ‘totalising’ of the world from a point of absolute transcendence. In other words, being cannot ground itself – being arises through creation ex nihilo. Being is neither necessary nor contingent. Being is nothing. In this fallen world, the Incarnation occurs in order to save and end the world. Among other profound and provocative conclusions, Griško asserts that, in light of Christ’s revelation, it is precisely on the basis of a lack of ontological necessity that the fallen world may become deified (theosis). Questions of the status of metaphysics and apophasis in relation to Pseudo Dionysius continue in Chapter 6, ‘Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion’. Rico Monge here addresses the creative retrieval of mystical theology, particularly of Pseudo Dionysius and Augustine, by Jean-Luc Marion. Marion sees in Augustine a particular resource for the attempt to overcome metaphysics. Monge outlines some of the provocative moves in the recent work by Marion which argue that Augustine is not concerned with the questions of metaphysics at all. Monge argues that the turns Marion takes in recent works risk undermining the Dionysian foundations of his earlier work and allow for the possibility that Marion’s attempt to escape metaphysics is, in fact, threatened both by Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity and also Derrida’s critique of Marion. Monge concludes by revisiting resources in Marion’s earlier work that point towards a possible reconciliation between metaphysics and phenomenology through further exploration of the apophatic dimensions of both Dionysian and Augustinian theology. Focus shifts in the next part from contemporary readings of Pseudo Dionysisus to those of another central mystic (Meister Eckhart) and one of his key modern

Introduction

7

interpreters (Martin Heidegger) in the interface between mystical theology and continental philosophy. Part III, ‘Revisiting Eckhart through Heidegger’, begins with George Pattison’s chapter, ‘The role of mysticism in the formation of Heidegger’s phenomenology’. Pattison examines the influences of the early Heidegger (around 1919), and provides powerful indications of Heidegger’s intellectual and spiritual grounding in the mystical tradition. Central to Pattison’s argument is the question of why Heidegger saw mysticism as an important topic in the first place and why he did not follow through on this, moving instead to Paul and Augustine before turning away from theological texts altogether. Answers to this question are complex but Pattison patiently draws together the historical threads indicating how Heidegger’s reading of scholastic theology as continuous with mystical theology led him to reframe questions of ontology as rooted in theology, even though those roots were not always visible. The argument suggests that the phenomenology of Heidegger never lost touch with its theological and mystical beginnings. In Chapter 8, ‘Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what: beyond subjectivistic thought to groundless ground’, Duane Williams addresses the nature of the interrogative mood through an analysis of key questions in Eckhart and Heidegger. The fundamental concern here is to show how our questions frame, and are framed by, a set of ontological conditions. The shift to an ontological register is realised by way of a movement through and beyond ‘why’ to Eckhart’s ‘without why’, a move with which Heidegger had much sympathy. Williams traces the argument that Leibniz’s ‘Principle of Reason’ (nothing is without reason) has reinforced a certain set of positivist assumptions, with important implications for our conceptions of subjectivity. Williams shows that the detachment (Gelassenheit) realised through being ‘without why’ takes us to Heidegger’s question of being elaborated in a lecture from 1955, ‘What is Philosophy?’, demonstrating that Heidegger’s interest in mysticism was not only an early flirtation, but remained a consistent presence within the question of being as such. In his essay, ‘Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar – a foreshadowing of Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund?’, Christopher M. Wojtulewicz explores the connection between Heidegger’s series of lectures titled, ‘The Principle of Reason’ (Der Satz vom Grund) and the work of Meister Eckhart. One of the most significant, and yet understudied, concepts in Meister Eckhart’s thinking is his use of the term principium. As a result of the received tradition of its use in Trinitarian theology, principium (and what has been suggested as a potential Middle High German equivalent, ‘grunt’) is often translated as ‘principle’ or ‘beginning’. Eckhart’s use of the term, however, fits more into the picture of the mystical nature of ‘grunt’ that we understand from his German works. The context in which this concept of principium is formed and used in Eckhart stems, at least in part, from the modist tradition. We now know that Heidegger commented extensively on what he thought was a work of Duns Scotus, but in fact was the Speculative Grammar of Thomas of Erfurt, a major figure of the Modistae who possibly even knew Eckhart personally. Potentially a link to Eckhart arises when Heidegger expressed great delight in the concept of ‘Der

8

D. Lewin et al.

Satz vom Grund’ (‘The Proposition of the Ground’), which he discovered in Leibniz. Heidegger understood it to be a ‘most mysterious’ (rätselvollste) proposition, and, thinking it to be such an important concept, was puzzled by its absence prior to Leibniz. Certainly it must have appealed to his thoughts which had been so immersed in the works of Thomas of Erfurt. This essay therefore presents the relation between the modist tradition (Thomas of Erfurt and Boethius of Dacia) and Eckhart’s thinking on the principium in order to consider whether this is perhaps a foreshadowing of Heidgger’s ‘Der Satz vom Grund.’ In Chapter 10, ‘Pay attention! Exploring contemplative pedagogies between Eckhart and Heidegger’, David Lewin examines the nature of attention by drawing together strands from mystical theology, particularly Meister Eckhart, and continental philosophy, that of Martin Heidegger. The argument explores some of the problems around conceiving of attention as a faculty of human agency. While these considerations are of general philosophical interest, Lewin applies them to concrete contexts of educational theory and practice, contexts which illustrate the ways in which attention is both conceived and misconceived. The pedagogical context provides Lewin’s account with a strong practical motivation for needing to consider the extent to which attention can be managed and controlled, and the anthropological suppositions present in such considerations. Lewin’s argument relies upon mystical theology insofar as it draws on negative strategies for undoing some of the conventional ways of framing attention. This is the kind of theological framing that the post-metaphysical Heidegger might wish to develop. Part IV moves away from some of the more ‘canonical’ dialogue partners to explore some ‘Re-readings and new boundaries’. This movement begins with Simon D. Podmore’s ‘Mysterium Secretum et Silentiosum: praying the apophatic self’ which by also drawing on Eckhart provides a transition towards the frontiers explored in the final three essays. This essay re-examines notions of silence and the secret in relation to apophasis in contemplative prayer and Kierkegaard’s contentious reading of the Akedah (the binding of Isaac, Genesis 22). Podmore explores the potentially scandalous impasse between self and other generated by a silent and secretive inner relation to God which is inexpressible to the exterior. Amidst a recent revival of interest in Kierkegaard’s relation to the mystical, Podmore explores an apophatic reading of Fear and Trembling’s problem of silence in hermeneutic dialogue with the self-other relationship transfigured through mystical prayer. Engaging Kierkegaard with Derrida and Levinas, along with Eckhart, Theresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross, Podmore proposes the importance of ineffable apophatic interiority, in spite of problems of secrecy and exclusivity. Ultimately, this essay suggests that an apophatic prayer of unknowing might help to interrupt the boundaries between self and other which make secrecy problematic; while also containing and affirming an essential discrete space for the restless apophatic self to find its sanctuary, ‘resting transparently in God’. Steven Shakespeare’s essay, ‘Becoming mystic, becoming monster: the logic of the infinite in Kierkegaard, Cusa and Deleuze’, draws Kierkegaard’s thought

Introduction

9

into creative critical dialogue with both mystical theology and recent continental philosophy. Central to this is the Deleuzian notion of Paradox, the simultaneity of opposite affirmations, traced in the radically different thought worlds of Nicholas of Cusa and of Kierkegaard. Shakespeare offers a penetrating reading of texts (Of Learned Ignorance and Philosophical Fragments) which engage with the logic of infinity and its attendant paradoxes. Both Cusa and Kierkegaard, as Shakespeare shows, articulate the logic of what it is to think the infinite in terms of unavoidable paradox: a paradox that is not merely a contingent barrier to the finitude of our thinking, but is in some way constitutive of infinity itself. What is at stake is not merely a thought project but a question of destabilising the self in order to signify the monstrosity of the divine. The figure of Deleuze recurs in the following essay, ‘Non-philosophical immanence, or immanence without secularization’. Alex Dubilet begins here by looking at philosophy and immanence through the thought of Gilles Deleuze who seeks a clear theoretical distinction between immanence and transcendence. We see that, for Deleuze, in contrast to what is understood as religion’s imposing of transcendence, it is philosophy’s specific task to articulate immanence. An account of how religious theology and secular philosophy each distinguish the merits and value of its own outlook from the faults and scorn of the other is then provided. Turning to Meister Eckhart, Dubilet interprets but then questions Deleuze’s view that Eckhart’s notion of immanence is conditionally circumscribed by its Christian theological framework. Arguing that Eckhart is a thinker of unrestrained immanence, he challenges the tendency to interpret Eckhart as a negative theologian and adds that there might be the temptation to propose a modified Deleuzian reading of Eckhart with a philosophical bias, or that one may understand there to be a theological and a philosophical Eckhart. Some of the inherent problems these views have are explored, leading to a criticism of the close association between immanence and philosophy that is in the grasp of secular modernity. This is followed by an explanation of what is meant by non-philosophical immanence in the title, and in doing so the thought of François Laruelle is brought in to show how first this contrasts with that of Deleuze and second compares to that of Eckhart. Finally, Marika Rose’s essay, ‘“Not peace but a sword”: Žižek, Dionysius, and the question of ancestry in theology and philosophy’, returns us to the wellspring of Pseudo Dionysian mystical theology in dynamic relation to the contemporary philosophy of Slavoj Žižek. Rose begins by critically exposing the obsession in both theology and philosophy with patriarchal genealogy, tracing the wedding of Neo-Platonic and Christian thought in Pseudo Dionysius and its line of descent to Žižek, who takes this inheritance and mutates it in ways which are potentially generative for theology and philosophy, both in relation to one another and to desire. Here Rose critically identifies the problematic yet powerful role of eros in mystical theology with respect to three consequent issues contaminated by a gender exclusivism: freedom, materiality, and universalism. Finally, Rose addresses the mutation of this tradition, occurring somewhere between Descartes and Kant, as received through Žižek’s erotic

10 D. Lewin et al. account of the rupture of the material world. As Rose skilfully presents him, the work of Slavoj Žižek is best understood as an attempt to move beyond certain impasses of the post-metaphysical turn by rejecting the desire to escape metaphysics and instead attempting to repeat metaphysics differently, transforming metaphysical ontology by bringing together eros and ontology not around Platonism but around a distinctive materialism which draws crucially on psychoanalysis, German Idealism, and quantum physics. This results in an account of ontology and desire as processes of newness and emergence which make it possible to re-imagine the relationship of theology and philosophy not only to mysticism but also to one another. *** The appeal of the aesthetic and the poetic, the erotic and the mystical, which suggest particular motions between continental philosophy and mystical theology, also reminds us that love transfigures. Eros is itself undergoing a revision, a revival, in light of some of the failures of modernity that continue to become all-too manifest. From the cracks in the secular, to the limits of relativism, a new ground is sought, one upon which we have, perhaps, always stood. But if this volume bears witness to the apophatic power of eros to recover the subsistence of our being, it does so also by way of the cataphatic, the intellectual, and the hermeneutical. Presence and absence, the cataphatic and the apophatic are interwoven in subtle movements which exceed any simple reduction or equation of ‘cataphatic-presence’ and ‘apophatic-absence’. Cataphatic and apophatic discourses testify to both presence and absence in both God and the world. Taken together these essays represent the ongoing movements and dialectics of apophatic and cataphatic where God’s presence seems stricken by something aporetic – an unfulfilled, yet not broken, promise. Thus God’s presence through absence within these essays reveals something of our condition: being in the wake of God.

Notes 1 Hadewijch, Poem in Couplets 15: 49–52. Hadewijch: The Complete Works, translated by Mother Columba Hart, The Classics of Western Spirituality (London: SPCK, 1981). 2 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, translated by Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), Chapter 1.

Part I

Receiving mystical tradition in post/modernity

This page intentionally left blank

1

Learning presence The mystical text as intimate hyper-communication across time Oliver Davies

Few texts present us with such challenges, though also potential resources, as those chiefly medieval works which have attracted the designation of ‘mystical’ in our modern age. We must include within these a whole range of different types of text, and genres, reflecting different cultural and linguistic contexts. Moreover, the personalities of the authors also seem widely divergent, such as is the case with the two mystics represented here: Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart. And yet, for all their variety, there also seems to be something instantly recognizable for the reader about a ‘mystical’ text. Somehow it imposes itself upon us, or finds its way into us, suddenly opening up new horizons or layers of awareness in us. These can multiply and converge to the extent of engendering within the dedicated reader a sense of being now differently in the world. We can experience something very intimate, formative, and distinctive then, in the reading of a mystical text.

I The structure of ‘hyper-communication’ The contours of intimacy But it is precisely this intimacy which creates a major obstacle for us in the objective analysis of mystical texts. The nature of this obstacle becomes clearer when we consider the background of a hermeneutic of reading which Paul Ricoeur developed in the mid-1970s.1 If, for Schleiermacher, the hermeneutical task was to lay bare the author who stands behind the text, with her or his particular intentionalities, then, for Ricoeur, it is to allow the ‘unfolding of the world’ from ‘before the text’ or ‘in front of the text’. This refers to a more general concept of reference: reference as the evocation of a world. More specifically, it potentially allows a true ‘critique of ideologies’ where the reader’s own pre-thematic ‘belonging to the world’ (which is where our prejudices lie) is interrogated by the collocation of a different way of ‘being in the world’ which the text communicates.2 This ‘being-in-the-world’ is communicated by the text not through ‘the referential function of ordinary discourse’, which Ricoeur calls ‘first degree reference’, but rather by ‘second degree reference’, in which, for Ricoeur, ‘the world is no longer manifested as an ensemble of

14

O. Davies

manipulatable objects, but as the horizon of our life and project, in short as a Lebenswelt, as being-in-the-world’.3 It is this level which is pre-thematic, lying at a point prior to the subject-object divide. It sits within the pre-conceptual mode of our belonging to the world. Ricoeur’s view is that only a hermeneutics (or phenomenological hermeneutics) which is in medias res can map this recalibration of our pre-thematic ‘being-in-the-world’, which the Husserlian phenomenological method as such, with its presupposition of the priority of the subject-object divide, cannot do.4 Ricoeur acknowledges however that his phenomenological hermeneutics of the text cannot itself thematise the focal point of our human intimacy. In the immediacy of oral encounter, which is the face-to-face of live presence, the binary of distance and proximity required for reflexive philosophical thought is lacking: there, in the mutual recognition of presence, all is intimacy. Ricoeur’s turn to the text, and so to the distancing of language from the live person or author who is its source, is his embrace of the possibility of a critical philosophical hermeneutics which can work with objectified language within the oscillation of ‘proximity’ and ‘distance’ that marks out the hermeneutical space of the text. But this objectification already indicates the limits of Ricoeurian hermeneutics. Human intimacy may be pre-thematic, but it is also the dynamic and transformational centre of human social life, the locus of which lies precisely in the interfacial encounter. The argument we are making here, then, is that an analysis of ‘mystical texts’ may offer a new opening within the hermeneutics of intimacy. Such texts constitute a specific genre of communicative intimacy. The ingression of the mystical text, as the productive representation of another person’s interiority of heart and mind, into our own interior space, constitutes a moment of intimate communication. Such an analysis shows, we shall argue, that despite the distance which separates medieval author and modern reader, these specific kinds of texts allow this to be a real communication of interfacial intimacy. A claim of this kind has to find a robust underpinning within a new kind of objectivity if it is to be credible. And, as we shall argue, recent advances in evolutionary anthropology and social neuroscience or the neuroscience of social cognition offer just such an objective grounding of what is, after all, the focal point of our subjectivity (interfacial encounter with the live human other). In combination, these two modes of reflection on our primary sociality as human beings combine to point to a set of anthropological constants or ‘species-wide’ characteristics in our embodied communicativity. These are a substrate of (biological) responses which are constitutive of our social embodiment as human beings at any time and place. These include affectivity, empathy, reflexivity and evaluation. We can call these our operative social constants. In effect, they predate the radical linguistic-cultural diversity which is also constitutive of who we are today. We shall argue in this paper that the combination of a species-wide set of early biological communicative structures, with the variability and diversity of more recent cultural response, opens up the identification of a further, key, human constant. This concerns the relation that obtains between

Learning presence

15

our early biology and our later culture, in each and every concrete act of communication. We can call this ‘convergence’ and define it as a functional social constant. Convergence occurs where our late advanced linguistic consciousness and our early social cognition (in its operative functions) combine, in the production of human wholeness. As we shall argue, for this to happen, a process of ‘disarming’ language needs to take place, whereby the inheritance of language in more recent tool-making and tool-use needs to give way to its more ancient inheritance in the bonding systems of our early ancestors. ‘Convergence’ requires a renunciation of the paramountly controlling and instrumentalizing aspects of language in favour of its paramountly expressive and inter-communicative dimensions. Convergence is supported also by non-linguistic forms of interactive expression and communication (such as dance and music). Finally, we need to note that neuroscience identifies the biological substrate of our operative constants to be self-organizing in themselves and so to be not just ‘me’ and ‘you’ but also world. ‘Convergence’ not only leads to integration and wholeness in our personhood as both body and mind. It also allows our detached, linguistic self to be ‘in the world’. Combining as consciousness with the operative constants of the human body is at the same time our being rooted and at home in the world. We shall argue that the diversity of culture is constrained by the fact that any culture – through convergence – can reflect the basal sociality of our embodiment which precedes it. It can re-present that biology in ways that effect the communication of the interfacial at a distance and across time. Furthermore, culture can powerfully enhance the bio-energy of the human body in its primary sociality (as well as suppressing or distorting it). The thesis sketched out here, then, is that those cultural artefacts which we know today as ‘mystical texts’, can be shown – in their distinctive use of language – to be a particular kind of cultural product which exemplifies this re-presentation of our fundamental, interfacial social biology, in ways that ground powerfully expressive and intimate forms of communication across space and time: not just the communication of intimacy in fact but also, and more directly, intimate communication. Mysticism as a project in human self-understanding If intimacy is a human universal which is both dynamic and socially creative, then we should be deeply interested in the survival of medieval texts into the modern period, as intimate communication. These are texts, moreover, which appeal to a much broader audience than those who would place themselves within the same Roman Catholic tradition, for instance. In fact, as ‘spirituality’, mystical texts find readers far beyond the borders of institutional religion in any shape or form. But they also have a certain illegibility for us in the modern period in the sense that they were created under different skies and reflect a different cosmology. In this context, cosmology includes the modes of being both body and mind together (our embodied practices of living) which are inevitably influenced by what we think matter is, with implications for how we

16

O. Davies

can be in the material world around us as embodied, mobile, intelligent form. Cosmology here becomes cultural.5 To read texts as a modern reader, which were produced by authors with pre-modern assumptions about what matter is, how the world is constructed and what the nature and role of language is within that world order, is inevitably to encounter a communicative mode of being human in the world which will in subtle and important ways escape our own conceptions and experiences of this. Through such texts, we may receive communicatively a mode of being human in the world which we could not ourselves produce. This parallels Ricoeur’s belief in the possibility of a ‘critique of ideologies’ where our pre-thematic ‘being-in-the-world’ is challenged by an alternative ‘being-in-the-world’, as this is communicated through Ricoeur’s ‘second reference’ of the text.6 It is not the same as Ricoeur’s ‘second reference’ however, since in the mystical text, as we shall argue, it is not the world that is represented as something beyond the text (to which the text ‘refers’). Rather, the operative constants – our primary sociality – of interfacial encounter are embodied in the text. This means that the text at some level communicates the intimacy of interfacial encounter participatively, not as world to be referred to, but as the experience of world, indeed of a shared world, across space and time. The notion of ‘presence’ in the title of this paper points to the further possibility of the reproduction of a ‘convergent’ mind–body relation or wholeness in concrete human caritative acts. As we shall argue, a new legibility of medieval texts as intimate communication may significantly contribute to developing shared, critical philosophical understandings of our common human capacities for bond-formation, across the significant cultural and religious boundaries which divide us. Fullness of presence In fact, it makes sense to preface a new analysis of mystical texts with a brief evocation of early twentieth century France, when medieval philosophy, modern philosophy and modern science first came together around questions of mystical ‘presence’. Intimacy denotes presence, which is a key theme in the work of the French Jesuit Joseph Maréchal. In 1908/9, Maréchal published ‘On the Feeling of Presence in Mystics and Non-Mystics’ in which he argued that the mystical sense of the presence of God is cognate with our perception of reality. On this account, mystical knowledge is a direct intuition of the divine.7 Here Maréchal is creatively harnessing elements in modern psychology to the medieval Thomist account of the judgment of actuality or the concrete real. Mystical knowledge then emerges as the unparalleled cognition of the reality of God (though without concretisation). The mystic grasps the presence of God through direct intuition, but grasps God as non-objectifiable. For us today, the word ‘presence’ is likely to evoke Heidegger’s reductive reformulation of Christian metaphysics (noting, in fact, that in 1909, Heidegger entered and left the Jesuit novitiate, completing a doctorate in 1913 on the

Learning presence

17

Maréchalian theme of ‘The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism’). But another term from this period intriguingly offers a quite different perspective: the more participative and cognitive theme of Thomist ‘connaturality’. Pierre Rousselot draws out this dimension in Thomas’ work, developing the idea that there is a symmetry between self and world, inner and outer. Since there is a deeply grounded ‘sharedness’ between how we are and how the world is, which grounds our capacity for true perception, we can say that we belong in the world, as cognizing, percipient subject, and are not merely observers of it. For Rousselot, ‘connaturality’ contributes to a ‘thick’ account of faith as involving more than just cognition. In The Eyes of Faith and against the rationalists, he develops a powerful account of the dependence of cognition, in faith, on the operation of the will which, where it is ordered to God in love, makes faith, as true cognition, possible.8 The ‘connaturality’ of Rousselot’s Thomism found its way also into the thought of Maurice Blondel and Henri Bergson. For Blondel, philosophy is consummated in the loving act, and his notion of mysticism is one which reflects this structure. For Bergson, mysticism leads to ‘a world of confident, productively concrete and forwardly-looking action’.9 In both Blondel and Bergson then, connaturalitas – with its implications of knowledge through our belonging in the world – became associated specifically with mystical knowledge, which led to a certain kind of committed and transformed life of loving action. Here we can find an outline of a philosophical route into intimacy, against the background of a thomistically participative account of cognition, one moreover which expressly grounds itself in these later French writers within mystical discourse. Science and the face-to-face It is this same theme of ‘connaturality’ as our participative belonging in the world which comes into view in recent science of the social nexus of the faceto-face, or what Peter Sloterdijk calls ‘the species-wide, interfacial, greenhouse effect’.10 Most human beings are highly adept at interfacial bonding by which we build and maintain proximate relationships, with friends, relatives and partners. We all understand the practice of the face-to-face; what we have so far lacked is a theory of that practice. Such a theory would need to rely on a process of objectification of what is most intimate to us, drawing upon new sources of knowledge concerning the social practice of intimacy which is the bedrock of close relations. This will need to be hermeneutical, but also phenomenological: concerned with meaning but also with letting something new be seen and understood that presents itself to the senses. The phenomenological moment is required within this theory since its objectivity will lie in the new visible objectification of our internal brain activity in the intimacy of face-to-face bonding through the fMRI scanner. Any new hermeneutics will have to engage with what exactly this new appearance means. The neuroscience of social cognition, which is concerned with our encoding, storage, retrieval, and processing, of information about other people, began to

18

O. Davies

develop in the late 60s and 70s. It is concerned with the immensely dense range of reflexes that take place between human bodies in encounter and which are so fast as to be ‘invisible’ to consciousness. Nevertheless, it is this very rapid exchange of information about ourselves in interaction with the other which constitutes our bonding. The human body is as it were fine-tuned through our long evolution to ‘resonate’ with another human body and thus to discover through an extended engagement whether we can ‘harmonize’ with each other sufficiently to be able to work together for common social goals. We are generally aware of this as a ‘conversation’ but in fact the work is done at a pre-linguistic level, in the early motor-system of the human body which is associated with gestures, expressive sounds and dance. Konvalinka describes this in the following way: When we interact with another person, our brains and bodies are no longer isolated, but immersed in an environment with the other person, in which we become a coupled unit through a continuous moment-to-moment mutual adaptation of our own actions and the actions of the other.11 As ‘complex, multi-layered, self-organizing’, these ancient reflexes involve sets of mutual responses ranging from eye movement, facial expression, posture and gesture to the synchrony of brain waves, breathing and pulse: a subtle and pervasive ‘alignment of behaviour’ which includes ‘synergies, co-ordination and phase attraction’.12 They occur at speeds well below the threshold of conscious perception, but communicate as a sense of ‘rapport’.13 This new knowledge about the ‘in-between’, which is the in-between between human beings, also gives us new knowledge about the source of consciousness itself, in the reciprocal mutuality of our motor-coordination in which, in our live encounter, multiple, reflexive but pre-thematic forms of selfmonitoring, monitoring of the other and of ambient others take place. According to Kai Vogeley, such a ‘cognitive system’ is ‘a system which in its reaction to environmental stimuli shows some degree of flexibility, a factor that is made possible by internal information processing’.14 This is a participative, live or ‘on-line’ form of intensive information exchange which is so dense that it has even attracted metaphorical descriptions in the scientific literature, such as Schilbach et al. with their ‘dark matter’, or di Paulo and de Jaegher’s ‘enactivism’: the ‘in-between’ as ‘enactment of a world’.15 More formally, this is the site of the dispute between the advocates of Theory-Theory, who define the ‘in-between’ as the root of a cogito learning to infer the existence of another person from within interactive physical processes (in a classically Husserlian phenomenological mode), while advocates of Simulation-Theory, on the other hand, see this interactive place as the root of ourselves as self-aware subject, prior to the subject-object divide. Here the other is encoded in the reflexes that we spontaneously imitate in the complex, self-organizing, pre-thematic exchange of inter-facial encounter as ‘cognitive system’. Of course, much hangs on how we see that core relation, from the perspective of how we understand the human more generally, whether as primarily

Learning presence

19

individual, or social, or some combination of the two. In itself, the question seems at this level irresolvable: which self do we want to see in the ‘in-between’? It is clear that the human person who comes to this judgment will already be tacitly committed to an answer in terms of their habituated linguistic, cultural and social practices which will already define a more individualistic, ‘closed’ life-orientation or values, or a more communitarian, ‘open’ one. Gender and ethnicity will also be in play here. In order to use this significant new knowledge about ourselves objectively, in a way that may contest our pre-judgments (cf. Ricoeur’s ‘critique of ideologies’), we shall need to gain a more objective understanding of the advanced language which defines our consciousness as an informational system. But this is not a straightforward task. For the human observer, language is itself ubiquitous. Our advanced linguistic consciousness, which is the very ground of our subjectivity and at the centre of where we sit, is a porous global interface with the world. For us, language colours everything. How can we objectify language when language is itself the primary mode by which we objectify the world, as consciousness? How can we objectify objectification? A history of language Perhaps unsurprisingly, since language is itself the mode of objectification, philosophy of language appears to be particularly subject to the effects of ‘cosmological culture’ (where embodied practices and reflections are shaped by the cosmology of the day). To borrow Charles Taylor’s terms, the philosophy of language of the ‘porous’ self of pre-modernity and of the ‘buffered’ self of modernity are very different, in ways which follow more general distinctions of the time in philosophy of mind, generally reflecting the rise of the scientific method at the onset of the modern period.16 In an Aristotelian age, medieval accounts of language stressed the material nature of the sign, against the background of a Christian, Jewish or Islamic theological cosmology which had divine communication at its heart.17 In the Enlightenment period, philosophies of language tended to stress the extent to which language is the overcoming of contextual materiality by universal mind, reflecting the scientific method itself.18 Today there is a struggle in the science of language between those who envisage human language as a kind of ‘computerese’ and those who, once again, emphasize the material nature of the sign. Within the terms of this debate, the question about our human consciousness and the human ‘self’ – communitarian or individualistic – seems finally to resolve into questions about language itself: what is distinctive about human language, where does it come from, what is it, and when did it arrive?19 Tecumsah Fitch, in his magisterial study of human language, refrains from dating its arrival in distinctively modern form.20 Modern human language arises from the merging of a combination of elements, rather than the long evolution of something new. It could have happened quite suddenly therefore, and could be very late.21 On the other hand, signs of human representative cognition are being found further and further in our hominin past. Questions of dating are

20

O. Davies

dogged by the more fundamental question of what is distinctive to our modern human language: how are we to define it? Fitch sides with Chomsky in the belief that it is ‘recursion’ which most defines modern human language, distinguishing it from – extensive – chimp communications in acquired sign language, for instance, or from the virtuosic linguistic performance of some species of birds.22 Recursion is a linguistic structure of non-identical repetition which is found in computer and mathematical languages, and in natural language, and which can be defined as the capacity recursively to turn a previous output into a new input. Recursion points to the seemingly inexhaustible semantic possibilities of human speech or writing. But as in the case of the ‘in-between’, the question also arises as to how we can avoid the influence of our own prior commitments to the practices of language as we come to define it? We have to acknowledge that the scientific enterprise as such involves training in a very particular form of linguistic expression, which involves systematic decontextualisation. On the other hand, we all require precisely this degree of objectivity which can flow from such a decontextualisation. We need to go beyond simply seeing our own, subjective image in language, as mathematician, poet or pragmatist. At the heart of the debates around language is the question of the priority of the material nature of the sign, which is precisely what the turn to recursion seems to de-emphasize. But importantly there are other voices here. Both Andy Clark and James Hurford stress the centrality of the material nature of the sign, so that words are ‘material objects’ which ‘ground the neural wetware’.23 Mathematics itself presupposes the material nature of the sign. Following Stanislas Dehaena, Clark argues that there is no biological ground for advanced numerical calculation.24 If we ask the question what is ‘ninety-eight’, then we can only say that it denotes the space marked out by the words ‘ninety-seven’ and ‘ninety-nine’; without material culture, precise numeration disappears. James Hurford, for his part, asserts that it is not recursion so much as the number of individual lexical items each individual human being has to acquire, in a Herculean task of memory, repeated billions of times in each generation which distinguishes the linguistic capacities of chimps from those of genus Homo.25 If we give due weight to the particularity of each individual learning act, then science begins to move closer to a Humanities-based understanding of language as particularity, originality and creativity, grounded within community. Where does our advanced linguistic consciousness come from? In order to address the question of when modern human language, and so also our advanced linguistic consciousness, arose, from perspectives that combine both science and the arts, we can be greatly helped by the application of fundamental evolutionary theory which allows a place to cognition, imagination, symbolism and culture. According to niche construction theory, all forms of life shape or frame an environment through modes of behaviour which in some degree function independently of processes of natural selection. All kinds of

Learning presence

21

behavioural effects among organisms are already at work within an environment before natural selection occurs. Advocates of niche construction theory point to a wide variety of species whose behaviour leads to long-term effects in the environment, which then constitute an inheritance for succeeding generations.26 As Agustín Fuentes has argued, in the human case, language itself forms part of a trans-generational, behavioural inheritance of a symbolic, informational and imaginative kind.27 At the centre of the construction of our human niche, a primary motor is our capacity for ‘hyper-cooperation’, according to modern evolutionary theorists, which enables us to collaborate effectively and to pool resources. Long-term, human hyper-cooperation in turn is driven by our capacities to bond, to empathize and to communicate with others. In this context, the origins of advanced human language have to be seen against the ancient background of human-like, primate calls, lip-smacking, dexterity and mutual grooming,28 as well as our capacity to produce musical sounds and to dance.29 All of these inheritances are factors within our social bonding. But there is a second, more recent history of language which comes into view particularly in what Peter Hiscock calls the ‘lithic’ landscapes of Mousterian and Levallois flint-knapping cultures, from around 70,000 years ago in the Upper Pleistocene.30 Here we begin to see evidence for ‘amodality’, or the transferability of tools across contexts, which is such a marked feature of words (the same words can be applied in different contexts).31 The preparation of transportable flint cores suggests new levels of dexterity and precision, with their fine motor coordination, in parallel with the percussion of the strike, but also temporal distention which we associate with stronger forms of memory and shared attentiveness to longer term goals. The ‘lithic’ landscapes of the times also suggest that high value tool production may have been public and may have included dimensions of apprenticeship, with its associated additional communicative demands.32 Words, like highly worked flints, are transgenerational, material, informational artefacts with which we have learned productively to shape our environments. But words affect the social environment, since these are social, inter-personal tools for shaping relationships, underpinning and extending hyper-cooperation.33 We use words to function together, cooperatively, and for the identification and pursuit of common goals, in the construction of our human niche. But it is evident too that words can be used to break down or destabilize our ‘niche’; like tools, they can be used to slash and hurt and to drive away. They can function as ‘de-humanization markers’ for discrete groups who become our enemies and are tagged for annihilation. As ‘tools of meaning’, words can be used to delude and mislead, so affecting our understanding of what is constructive or destructive for the viability of our human niche. Our capacity for human bonding can be as much corrupted as it is fostered by our use of words. On a social level, words can be used to create cultures of reciprocal particularity, allowing us to express and recognize each other by responsibly elaborating a distinctive point of view within our community. But words can also be used

22

O. Davies

repressively, through ideological motivations or greed, to ‘de-particularize’ or homogenize the chequered fabric of our public and political common life. Vittorio Gallese has pointed out that the ability to deny another’s humanity is ‘probably one of the worst spin-offs of language’.34 The child of our ancient ‘grooming’ and more recent sophisticated tool-use, our advanced linguistic consciousness (our cultural consciousness today) must have arisen relatively late in our long evolutionary history. It may indeed have been triggered very suddenly, through socio-cultural rather than biological factors, such as the changes in population size and new settlement patterns which are associated with the turn to agrarian economy following the end of the last ice age and the rise of the Neolithic. In this case, our advanced linguistic consciousness may be a high-performance though also unstable prototechnology which can enhance and project our deep-seated sociality (as would be required in the larger settlements of the Neolithic). But since our basal sociality identified by neuroscience is species-wide and humanly inclusive (as we see in the young child), while language is ordering, controlling and hierarchalizing (part grooming repertoire and part weapons-system), there can also be strong cultural and personal factors in play which lead to the generation of negative stereotypes, disfiguring that inherited sociality precisely in its human inclusivity. Mysticism, language and the productivity of the text As a form of intimate communication, surviving through tradition or the ‘handing on’ of stable texts across space and time, medieval mystical texts can be viewed as sustaining our distinctively human hyper-cooperation within the human niche. As such, they are performative and projective instances of ‘hyper-communication’. ‘Hyper-communication’ names strong, niche-building communication across space and time (the dynamic underlying our human ‘hyper-cooperation’). Arguably this kind of communication takes place where ‘convergence’, or other-centred wholeness, occurs in the author herself, through a process of ‘disarming’ language, where the predominantly controlling, hierarchalizing and instrumentalizing functions of language are replaced by its open, receptive and bonding functions. In the case of mystical texts, we can suppose that this structure of ‘convergence’ is magnified through its dynamic performance in the genesis of the mystical text itself (which necessarily stands within an other-orientated communicative genre, such as spiritual instruction or preaching, as in this paper). In such instances, we can then say that the text itself communicatively re-presents linguistic ‘convergence’, making possible what we can call a ‘correspondence’ between author and reader. Such a correspondence becomes the point of the text’s productivity of niche formation, through its communication of human intimacy across space and time as an engaged, other-centred ‘disarming’ of linguistic instrumentalization and the institution of a ‘corresponding’ linguistic productivity as openness and hospitality. The communicative sharing of human intimacy in

Learning presence

23

this sense supports the production of concrete loving acts, as human resource over time. In summary, we are arguing that mystical texts show the linguistic encoding of ‘convergence’. The efficacious transfer of that ‘convergence’ through the text is ‘correspondence’, where the human possibility of the unity of our linguistic consciousness with the pre-thematic, social self and with ‘world’ which is accomplished in one person at a specific point in space and time, is re-produced in another, at a different point in space and time. Religions thematize this moment of intimacy in distinctively religious terms as a ‘heavenly’ reality, pointing in the case of Christianity to the communion of saints. In the same way, religions tend to thematize our basal sociality not only as the separate operative constants but also from a unified perspective as the containing cosmos or world. Whether or not we share this religious way of locating the phenomenon, an understanding of ‘correspondence’ nevertheless may have a critical importance for developing a better understanding of our basal sociality as genus Homo. The key point here is that these texts are shaped by distinctive, all-encompassing forms of ‘cosmological culture’ which are very different from the forms of our own contemporary scientific ‘cosmological culture’. The ancient cosmology of medieval texts is not presupposed in modern Christian faith (cf. Taylor’s contrast between the ‘porous self’ of pre-modernity and the ‘buffered self’ of modernity35). The differing cosmologies in the human record have allowed the emergence of different forms of implicit and explicit self-understanding which have then differently shaped the possibilities of our common human sociality. The typically religious genres, such as ritual, prophecy, prayer or mystical texts, all arose under ancient cosmologies and are expressive of the resources of those cosmologies in terms of the encoding of ‘disarmed’ language which they contain. For us today, therefore, they point to the utmost potential and possibilities of our human sociality. They show that where linguistic consciousness ‘converges’ with the primary, pre-thematic structure of our being in the world, in the production of human wholeness through open sociality, this convergent relation can be communicated, through ‘correspondence’, to another human being at a very different point in space and time. The creativity of the mystical text re-produces human wholeness at a distance. The resources of interfacial human intimacy can be shared over space and time.36 In the analysis of texts in the following section, we will be concerned to identify the basic elements of our pre-thematic, basal sociality of the face-to-face (principally empathy, emotion, reflexivity and evaluation), which we have called the operative human constants, together with the functional constant of convergence. Convergence occurs where our linguistic consciousness, through linguistic ‘disarming’, conforms to this pre-thematic structure. In this way we shall seek to identify the phenomenon of correspondence which is the communicative capacity of the text to re-produce human intimacy over space and time, with its implicit commitment to joint action, through the re-presentation of convergence in the body of the mystical text.

24 O. Davies

II Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart Julian of Norwich and Meister Eckhart stand at opposite poles of the mystical spectrum in terms of content. Julian is intensely devotional, discursive and Christological, while Eckhart is cerebral and philosophical. But they have key formal points in common. Julian’s texts fall into the genre of spiritual instruction, of the kind that was commonplace among enclosed orders during the Middle Ages. The texts by Eckhart which we use here fall within the genre of the sermon, as was typical in particular of Dominicans. But in each social context there is intimacy and interfacial encounter, and in each case there is a particular emphasis upon the distinctive language used. It is also the case, of course, that both Julian and Eckhart are using the vernacular which releases new possibilities of expression. Both figures develop highly imaginative ‘openings’ within language too, such as Julian’s ‘motherhood’ or ‘kindness’ of Christ, or Eckhart’s ‘birth of God in the soul’ or his radical understanding of ‘detachment’. Julian of Norwich There is a case for the view that Julian’s work is openly dialogical and recognitional at two levels, through its primary structure. First, it is structured deliberatively and analytically around two texts, the Short and Long Text, the former of which dates from 1373 while the latter was written ‘fifteen years or more’ later, though extensively including the former.37 But, second, we understand that the generation of these texts is itself the result of Julian’s ‘bodily sight’ of Christ’s passion, for which she prayed.38 In the Long Text, she will point to the threefold character of her revelations: ‘all of this was shown in three parts, that is to say, by bodily vision and by words formed in my understanding and by spiritual vision’.39 From the outset then, Julian’s language is understood to be informed by the ‘bodily’ presence of Christ in her vision, which is itself the result of her desiring prayer. Here her language is already radically ‘disarmed’. But if Julian’s language becomes saturated with divine presence and the bodily form of Jesus throughout her work, then the devotional energy that precedes, surrounds and informs her reception of the vision is also matched by the rational clarity of her dialogical reasoning. She seeks to ‘read’ the body of Jesus. Nor is the body of Jesus inert here, as something ‘seen’. His body communicates in ways that reflect the interactive and dialogical structure of cognition, although always in ways which prompt Julian’s constant questioning and selfquestioning – her reasoning as open process – as she moves more deeply into this interactive, cognitive encounter of the interfacial. In the Tenth Revelation we read: With a kindly countenance our good Lord looked into his side, and he gazed with joy, and with his sweet regard he drew his creature’s understanding into his side by the same wound; and there he revealed a fair and

Learning presence

25

delectable place, large enough for all mankind that will be saved and will rest in peace and in love […] and as he rejoiced, he showed to my understanding a part of his blessed divinity, as much as was his will at that time, strengthening my poor soul to understand what can be said, that is the endless love which was without beginning and is and always shall be. Here the themes of bodily communicativity, somatic discernment (or ‘evaluation’), discursive rationality, empathy and love are all pressed closely together. This intensification is matched by the immediate appearance of the theme of world, or cosmos, with its complex unity. And with this our good Lord said most joyfully: See how I love you, as if he had said, my darling, behold and see your Lord, your God, who is your Creator and your endless joy.40 The theme of the creation will occur repeatedly, as the primary site of God’s love. In Chapter 5, she comments on the small object, like a hazelnut, she sees in her hand: I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.41 As Julian’s reflections unfold, her own pre-thematic being in the world increasingly comes to the fore, in the context of the possibility of a human wholeness, as body and mind, and as a unity with the world, through a dynamic of love. The key terms of ‘substance’ and ‘sensuality’ are used in ways that suggest the transformation of our basal somatic communicativity: sensuality points to our sensate embodiment, while substance is in God. But both terms, or levels, can combine through divine grace, as we read in the Fourteenth Revelation: And when our soul is breathed into our body, at which time we are made sensual, at once mercy and grace begin to work, having care of us and protecting us with pity and love, in which operation the Holy Spirit forms in our faith the hope that we shall return up above to our substance, into the power of Christ, increased and fulfilled through the Holy Spirit. So I understood that our sensuality is founded in nature, in mercy and in grace, and this foundation enables us to receive gifts, which lead us to endless life.42 In a line which precedes this passage, Julian sums up her position: ‘Our faith comes from the natural love of our soul, and from the clear light of our reason, and from the steadfast memory which we have from God in our first creation’.43 In the final chapter of her Long Text, Julian re-emphasizes the unity of

26 O. Davies both love and reason, as cognizing elements: ‘So I was taught that love is our Lord’s meaning’ (Ch. 86, p. 229). Julian moves from the dialogical discursivity of her visionary Christological encounter to an engagement with what it is to be a created human being in a created world. This means to say, what it is to be a creature in a world which becomes available, or accessible to us, in a new way in and through the body of Jesus. It is love that grounds the possibility of this deeper level of wholeness which lies beyond the grasp of discursive reasoning. But still discursive reasoning remains a priority for Julian since it is a fundamental, if not the fundamental, level of our linguistic consciousness which must remain fully open and active if it is to be truly receptive to the wholeness of ‘convergence’. Meister Eckhart Following Clement IV’s injunction in 1267 to the Dominican order to provide pastoral guidance to the flourishing orders of religious women, Meister Eckhart preached to large and vibrant congregations of women in the German language. Following the condemnation of Aristotelianism at Paris in 1277, Meister Eckhart (like Duns Scotus, his Franciscan counterpart) was obliged to seek to restore the unity of love (will) and reason within faith in his theology.44 The combination of ethics and reason, and the priority of the linguistic creativity which makes a dynamic sermon, were central to his work. Unlike Julian, Eckhart does not begin with the discursive, the visible and the Christological dimensions of human interrelation, and then move towards their ground in a unified creation. Eckhart begins rather with the ground of that interrelation, which is world as it exists in us and beyond us. His motif of the ‘ground of the soul’ or the ‘divine image’ in the soul is central to this focus on the meeting of heaven and earth within us, though he carefully speaks of it in ways that disrupt any sense we may have that this is an idea which can be brought under our own linguistic control: I have sometimes said that there is a power in the soul which alone is free. Sometimes I have called it the guardian of the spirit, sometimes I have called it a light of the spirit, sometimes I have said that it is a little spark. But now I say that it is neither this nor that; and yet it is a something which is more exalted over ‘this’ and ‘that’ than are the heavens above the earth.45 Eckhart specifies that this ‘image’ is prior to both will and reason, which ‘burst forth’ from it as from their source.46 He states: Some masters have said that blessedness lies in knowing, some say that lies in loving: others say that it lies in knowing and loving, and they say better. But we say that it lies neither in knowing nor loving: for there something in the soul from which both knowledge and loving flow: but does not itself know or love in the way the powers of the soul do.47

it it is it

Learning presence

27

Having specified such a fundamental ground or image within us, Eckhart emphasizes that it is also here that the ‘birth of God in the soul’ takes place. This is a strongly dynamic and devotional image: God’s chief aim is to give birth. He is never content until He begets His Son in us. And the soul too is in no way content until the Son of God is born in her. And from that there springs forth grace. Grace is thereby infused. Grace does not work: its work is its becoming.48 The ‘birth of God in the soul’ leads to the state of ‘detachment’ which is the capacity to live a life without self-referential ‘ownness’: ‘if I detach myself fully from what is me, and have one equal love, then I shall love all things equally’.49 At the centre of Eckhart’s communicative textuality is his understanding of the relation between our human language and the world, or cosmos, of which we are – as creature – intrinsically a part. Medieval theorists of language had a strong sense of the materiality of the sign, which resonates with the contemporary scientific thinking of Clark and Hurford.50 With his physicalist account of language, Eckhart can present language as transformational: the key transformative factor which governs how we are in the world as body and mind. Eckhart understands the origins of language to lie within the Trinity itself (‘All words have their power from the first Word’51). This leads to an account of creation also as the Word ‘spoken’ by God and of our consciousness as arising from our ground as the divine Word in us. Within such a structure, the words preached can themselves be the communication of the divine outflow as creative Word. But for this to be the case, something needs to happen to our human words. They need to be purified, freed from their material and sensual connotations or references in order that the capacity of speech to change other human beings can be realized. If we speak of earthly things, he says, then our minds will engage with those, while if we speak of angelic or spiritual things, then our minds will engage with spiritual realities.52 Here Eckhart is concerned with the capacity of words to flow from and reflect the unity of the world rather than its multiple diversity. His constant deconstruction of words, through negation and disruption, should not be taken as an attempt to escape from material reality. Eckhart is not a modern; he is a medieval thinker and has no conception of escape into a non-material transcendence. For Eckhart (as for Dante) all is cosmic and so transformational, and what is at stake in how we use language is the potential capacity of language, and the words preached, through the materiality of the sign, to make present the source of language, world and reality, as the connectedness of God’s creation. The apophatic strain in Eckhart’s sermons is a device which allows the ‘highest point’ of the creation, its very source, to flood the materiality of the words preached, and so to effect substantial change in the listeners who receive these words into themselves, as a form of the ‘birth of God in the soul’, leading to a detached and selfless life.

28

O. Davies

Eckhart’s decision to begin with the transformational unity of the world in us (cf. the identification by the enactivist school of neuroscience of the ‘selforganizing’ world that is in us) contrasts starkly with Julian’s point of departure in discursivity and encounter with the ‘embodied’ Christ of her visionary experience. But the work of each is based in the same fundamental principle that it is the ‘disarming’ of language as a system for controlling the world, and other people, which is central in the communication of divine revelation. In each case of spiritual teaching and preaching, the chosen genre is one of interfacial intimacy. We may or may not share Eckhart and Julian’s belief in the reality of divine revelation; that is not the point. The point here is that in each of their surviving textualities there is the effective communication of interfacial presence, with implications also for how we shall act, in the light of that trans-temporal and trans-spatial communication of human intimacy.

Conclusion We have argued here that the knowledge we have today of an identifiable structure within our species-wide social cognition unlocks the possibility of new understandings of human interfacial intimacy. Our cultures are of course highly diverse. But the late origins of language as an interactive and reflexive communicative system which sits astride the early ‘cognitive system’ of our basal social cognition, together with the contemporary neuroscientific emphasis upon the simultaneity of body and mind within an overarching non-reductive physicalism, suggests the possibility that the operative constants of our social cognition may ground a further, recognizable human ‘universal’. For all its irrepressible fluctuations and variables, culture – as the internal and external environment of our feeling, empathising, reflexivity and social reasoning – can ‘converge’ with the structure of our basal sociality. This will be the convergence of our linguistic consciousness, with its capacity for judgment and decision-making, with the pre-thematic structure of our social embodiment, in a way that makes possible an integration or wholeness between mind and body. At the point of this convergence there comes the possibility of harnessing and projecting the bioenergy of our basal sociality along cultural vectors, in ways that ground or project human intimacy beyond the immediate proximity of a shared space and time. Language, with its potential to be shared and to be reciprocally internalized, and with its origins – through the material nature of the sign – in our pre-thematic belonging in the world, is the key transformational factor in this process. By undergoing a process of being ‘disarmed’, language can transmit the energy of our human intimacy in ways that extend and deepen the viability of the human niche, through its transformational creativity. That this moment of human wholeness can also be called ‘presence’ in its communication is significant, evoking the earlier tradition of Maréchal and Rousselot, Bergson and Blondel. We are, as human beings, most present to one another when we come to the other as one in need, or as one who comes to the need of the other. ‘Presence’ captures the force of this cooperative

Learning presence

29

interactivity. ‘Presence’ indicates that the dynamic wholeness of the human being summoned to love by encounter with another through the intimacy of hyper-communication, already begins to take on the shape of the loving act.

Notes 1 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, Nous 9, no. 1, 1975, 85–102 and idem, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, The Harvard Theological Review 70, no. 1/2, 1977, 1–37. 2 Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 94–96. 3 Ibid., 93. 4 Ibid., 93–96. 5 See Charles Taylor’s distinction for instance between the ‘porous’ self of pre-modernity and the ‘buffered’ self of modernity. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 6 Ricoeur, ‘Phenomenology and Hermeneutics’, 93. 7 Joseph Maréchal, ‘On the Feeling of Presence in Mystics and Non-Mystics’, in idem, Studies in the Psychology of the Mystics, A. Thorold, trans. (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927), 55–146. 8 The key text here is Pierre Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). 9 Pamela Sue Anderson, ‘An Eruption of Mystical Life in Feminist Action’, in Louise Nelstrop and Bradley B. Onishi, eds., Mysticism in the French Tradition. Eruptions from France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 37–57 (here 42). See also Pamela Sue Anderson, Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion. Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 10 Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles (Los Angeles: Semiotext, 2011), 169. 11 I. Konvalinka, and A. Roepstorff, ‘The Two-Brain Approach: How Can Mutually Interacting Brains Teach Us Something About Social Interaction?’, Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, no. 6 (July, 2012), art. 215, 2. 12 Schilbach et al., ‘Toward a Second-Person Neuroscience’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences 36, no. 4 (August, 2013), 393–414; E. di Paolo, and H. de Jaegher, ‘The Interactive Brain Hypothesis’, Frontiers of Human Neuroscience, no. 6 (July, 2012), art. 163, 1. 13 Linda Tickle-Degnen and Robert Rosenthal, ‘The Nature of Rapport and Its Nonverbal Correlates’, Psychological Inquiry 1, no. 4 (1990), 285–93. 14 Vogeley et al., ‘Soziale Cognition’, in M. Herrgen and G. Hartung, eds., Interdisziplinäre Anthropologie (Heidelberg: Springer VS, 2014), 16 (my translation). 15 Schilbach et al., ‘Toward a Second-Person Neuroscience’, 394; E. di Paolo and H. de Jaegher, ‘The Interactive Brain Hypothesis’, 2. The prepositional form of the ‘in-between’ is my term. 16 See note 5 above. 17 Oliver Davies, The Creativity of God: World, Eucharist, Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 75–94. 18 Oliver Davies, ‘“Love Was His Meaning”. On Learning from Medieval Texts’, in Eric Bugyis and David Newheiser, eds., Desire, Faith and the Darkness of God (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), 242–67. See also notes 21–23 below. 19 See M. D. Hauser, N. Chomsky, and W. T. Fitch. ‘The Faculty of Language: What Is It, Who Has It, and How Did It Evolve?’ Science 298, no. 5598, (22 November, 2002), 1569–79. 20 W. Tecumsah Fitch, The Evolution of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

30 O. Davies 21 See for instance the comparative work with bird species in K. Suzuki, H. Yamada, T. Kobayashi, and K. Okanoya, ‘Decreased Fecal Corticosterone Levels Due to Domestication: A Comparison between the White-Backed Munia (Lonchura Striata) and Its Domesticated Strain, the Bengalese Finch (Lonchura Striata Var. Domestica) with a Suggestion for Complex Song Evolution’, J Exp Zool A Ecol Genet Physiol, 317, no. 9 (November 2012), 561–70. 22 See note 19 above. 23 Andy Clark, Supersizing the Mind. Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 56. 24 Stanislas Dehaena, The Number Sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). See also Andy Clark, ‘Language, Embodiment and the Cognitive Niche’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 10, no. 8 (2006), 370–74. 25 James Hurford, ‘Human Uniqueness, Learned Symbols and Recursive Thought’, European Review 12, no. 04 (2004), 551–65. 26 F. John Odling-Smee, Kevin N. Laland, and M. W. Feldman, Niche Construction: The Neglected Process in Evolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 36–115. 27 Agustín Fuentes, ‘Human Evolution, Niche Complexity, Emergence of a Distinctly Human Imagination’, Time and Mind,7(3), 2014, 241–257. 28 On these themes, see for instance Vitor Nóbrega, and Shigeru Miyagawa, ‘The Precedence of Syntax in the Rapid Emergence of Human Language in Evolution as Defined by the Integration Hypothesis’, Frontiers in Psychology 6 (March, 2015); Ghazanfar et al., ‘Cineradiography of Monkey Lip-Smacking Reveals Putative Precursors of Speech Dynamics’, Current Biology 22, no. 13 (2012), 1176–82; Cartmill et al., ‘A Word in the Hand: Action, Gesture and Mental Representation in Humans and Non-Human Primates’, Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 367, no. 1585 (Jan 12 2012), 129–43; R. I. M. Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). 29 N. Masataka, ‘The Origins of Language and the Evolution of Music: A Comparative Perspective’, Physics of Life Reviews, 6, no. 1 (Mar 2009), 11–22; I. Hagendoorn, ‘Dance, Language and the Brain’, International Journal of Arts and Technology 3, no. 2–3 (2010), 221–34. 30 Peter Hiscock, ‘Learning in Lithic Landscapes: A Reconsideration of the Hominid “Toolmaking” Niche’, Biological Theory, 9(1) (2014), 27–41. 31 Clark, Supersizing the Mind, 44–60. 32 Hiscock, ‘Learning in Lithic Landscapes’. 33 Agustín Fuentes, ‘Integrative Anthropology and the Human Niche: Toward a Contemporary Approach to Human Evolution’, American Anthropologist 117, no. 2 (2015), 302–15. 34 Vittorio Gallese, New Scientist, 221 (2952) (2014), 1. 35 See note 5. 36 This is not the ‘fusion of horizons’ of Gadamerian hermeneutics (Hans Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979)) any more than it is the ‘genotext’ of Kristeva’s ‘revolutionary poetics’ (Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)), but it does have significant continuities with both. It may however have greater ‘portability’ than either, allowing it more diverse application within different human contexts and discourses on account of the structure of the biological substrate which informs it. 37 Translations from the Long Text cited from Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, Julian of Norwich. Showings (Mahwah, NJ.: Paulist Press, 1978), here ch. 86, p. 229, based on their edition (Edmund Colledge and James Walsh, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 vols. (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1978)). 38 Ch. 2, pp. 64–66.

Learning presence

31

39 Ch. 9, p. 79. This threefold hermeneutic may have analogues in the scriptural hermeneutics of the times; see Oliver Davies, ‘Transformational Processes in the Work of Julian of Norwich and Mechthild von Magdeburg’, in Marion Glasscoe, ed., The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, V (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992), 39–52. 40 Ch. 24, 107–108. 41 Ch. 5, 70. 42 Ch. 55, 174. On this theme, see Tarjei Park, ‘Reflecting Christ: the Role of the Flesh in Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich’, in Glasscoe, The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, 17–38. 43 Ch. 55, 173–174. 44 Jan A. Aertsen, Kent Emery Jr., and Andreas Speer, eds., Nach der Verurteilung von 1277. Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzten Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2001), 3–19. 45 M. O’C. Walshe, Meister Eckhart: German Sermons and Treatises, 3 Vols., (London and Dulverton: Element Books, 1979–85); Vol. 1, Sermon 8, 76. 46 Walshe, Meister Eckhart, Vol. 2, Sermon 72, 189. 47 Walshe, Meister Eckhart, Vol. 2, Sermon 87, 272. 48 Walshe, Meister Eckhart, Vol. 2, Sermon 68, 157. 49 Walshe, Meister Eckhart, Vol. 2, Sermon 74, 204 (translation slightly adapted). 50 See notes 21–23. For Dante on the specific theory of the materiality of the sign, see De vulgarii eloquentia, Steven Botterill, trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 1.3, 7. 51 See Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und die lateinischen Werke, J. Quint and G. Steer, eds (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1936–), DW I, Sermon 18, 306. 52 Here Eckhart draws upon Augustinian principles of preaching. See Oliver Davies, ‘Die Rhetorik des Erhabenen: Sprachtheorie bei Meister Eckhart’, in G. Steer and L. Sturlese, eds, Lectura Eckhardi: Predigten Meister Eckharts von Fachgelehrten gelesen und gedeutet, (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1998), 97–115.

2

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling The divine contraction and the modern metaphysics of finitude Agata Bielik-Robson The feeling that God himself is dead is the sentiment on which the religion of modern times rests. G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge1 Jacob Boehme says: divine freedom vomits itself into nature. Hegel says: divine freedom releases nature. What is one to think of this notion of releasing? This much is clear: the biggest compliment one can pay to this notion is to call it ‘theosophical’. F. W. J. Schelling, the lectures from 1830

These two epigraphs show in a nutshell what I intend in this essay: I want to demonstrate how the heretico-mystical impulses of early modernity, both Jewish and Christian, gave a theosophical stimulus to the modern philosophy of historical being, represented here mostly by Hegel and Schelling. The ‘theosophy’ implied by Schelling does not limit itself here just to the Boehmian influence; it goes further and deeper into the Judeo-Christian esoteric lore which, at the very beginning of modernity, introduced a bold motif of the ‘death of God’. In one of his books on kabbalistic thought, Gershom Scholem postulates a strong connection between the theosophic kabbalah of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth century founding father of Jewish Modernity, and German Idealism, Hegel especially. He immediately adds that he cannot prove a direct influence (a rather improbable hypothesis), but suspects that Hegel was exposed to the so called Christian Kabbalah which fused the kabbalistic divine manifestations, later called by Isaac Luria partsufim, into the Christian trinitarian context of The Father, The Son and the Holy Spirit.2 Indeed, the Christian Kabbalah, from Ramon Lull to Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, can be seen as an ingenious synthesis of kabbalistic and millenarist influences, where the static Neoplatonic scheme of emanation collides with Joachim da Fiore’s dynamic vision of the Trinity as a historical sequence of three Ages (Age of the Father, Age of the Son, and finally nova era, die Neuzeit, or the ‘New Age of the Spirit’). Scholem wants to claim the birth rights of the typically modern mysticism of history (seen as die Heilsgeschichte, the history of redemption) for the

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

33

Jewish-Lurianic origin against Karl Löwith and his thesis on German Idealism as firmly grounded in the metahistorical trinitarism of Joachim da Fiore, but there is no need to maintain this distinction.3 It is easy to see how both these earlymodern formations, fluently crossing the borders between Christian and Jewish mysticism, equally influence the development of modern philosophy, strongly marked by the unique historiosophical interest. Yet my purpose here is not historical: I do not want to track down all the traces of early modern esoteric doctrines in the most paradigmatic philosophy of modernity, i.e., German Idealism. This job has been done very successfully by others: already in the nineteenth century by Ferdinand Christian Baur, one of the Young Hegelians, who wrote a seminal book on his master and his intellectual milieu, Die Christliche Gnosis; then Karl Löwith in Meaning in History; and more contemporarily, Cyril O’Regan in Heterodox Hegel and Glenn Alexander Magee in Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition (to name just the few most important works). My goal is different: I want to demonstrate how these esoteric influences truly work within the philosophical systems they parented. I will thus be concerned with the following questions: What is the very nature of this translation which turns theosophical imaginary into philosophical concept? And, can we endorse Hegel’s project of a full sublation of the religious content in the philosophical form? In what follows I will try to answer these questions by analysing the confrontation of the two main champions of German Idealism, Schelling and Hegel, at the very peak of their life-long conflict concerning the importance of the negative. This is the first decade of the nineteenth century; Hegel is composing his Phenomenology, where ‘tarrying with the negative’ will be the main activity of the Spirit, and Schelling is about to write his famous essay on the essence of human freedom, where he will introduce the ominous notion of the Real. Later, old Hegel will partly denounce Phenomenology of Spirit as lacking the proper philosophical beginning and thus worthy merely to be put under the heading of the ‘subjective spirit’. But this is indeed an adequate self-diagnosis, if not exactly a fortuitous palinode; Hegel’s self-criticism is unjustified. The real greatness of Phenomenology consists precisely in its emphasis on the finite being which later on, at the stage of Hegelian Logic, and particularly his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, will once again be swallowed by the overwhelming powers of the Absolute Idea – which was precisely young Hegel’s critical point against Schelling. To repeat, my argument is not historical: what I try to prove here, namely the crucial influence of Isaac Luria on Hegel, cannot be demonstrated in terms of a direct impact. None of those who ever commented on Hegel’s indebtedness to esoteric milieu of thought – Scholem, O’Regan or Magee – would go any further than to suggest that Hegel knew Luria only second-hand, mostly from the Christian kabbalah of Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, the prominent representative of Swabian Lutheran mysticism, and from whatever has been left of Luria in the writings of Jakob Boehme. Yet, this diffused influence can nonetheless be shown as a logical sequence and consequence: the

34

A. Bielik-Robson

transfiguration of one very specific Lurianic motif of tsimtsum, into the ‘death of God’ philosophy, which leads to Hegel’s unique messianic investment in the world of actual history – something we still find missing in Hegel’s friend and rival, Schelling, who was equally exposed to the esoteric teachings of Reuchlin, Boehme, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, Oetinger et consortes. My argument, therefore, belongs not so much to the history of ideas as rather to the logic of ideas – in which it resembles a similar manoeuver executed by Deleuze in his reading of Spinoza, where he sees the Spinozist system as a logical development of Duns Scotus’ thesis on the univocity of being.4 Even though Deleuze cannot prove a direct influence of the Scotian writings on Spinoza, he is right in insisting that the very logic of univocity informs the latter’s expressive philosophy and leads to an analogical modification of the Neoplatonic doctrine of emanation: the motif which we can also encounter in Hegel. The analogy, therefore, is stronger than it might have appeared prima facie: the same early modern logic which pushes Spinoza towards the affirmation of material reality can also be detected in Luria and then in Hegel, and this is indeed the Scotian logic of univocatio entis. The only difference here is historicity which dramatizes the initial impulse of Duns Scotus’ doctrine. While in Spinoza, God and world exist equally strongly as two parallel aspects of the same substance, in Luria and Hegel this ontological equality takes the form of the historical sequence – in order for the world to exist in the univocal way, God has to make room for a new existence, that is, to fade away. Univocity properly and strictly understood – that is, in contrast to analogia entis, where God and world can coexist because of their ontological difference – requires that God and the world must occupy exactly the same ontological plane; if the existence of the creation is not to come out paler than the being of its creator, they must belong to the same metaphysical register. Thus, unknowingly, Luria makes a lasting contribution to the logic of univocity inaugurated by Duns Scotus: though seemingly he only repeats the Gnostic motif of the ‘crisis in the Godhead’, the very fact that he repeats it in the conditions of nascent modernity changes its meaning from negative to – at least, potentially – affirmative, by paving way to a new metaphysics of finite being. And then it also serves Hegel as a springboard for his critique of Spinoza’s thought as not fully consequential: despite the latter’s open affirmation of the individual modifications of the substance, it must remain merely a declaration. Only when God truly – literally – disappears for the sake of the world, and the time of the world becomes the time of God’s reconstitution, does the univocity thesis become complete. Yet none of these thinkers would dare to formulate it that way; not even Hegel at the peak of his spiritual boldness coinciding with his most fruitful years in Jena, and certainly not Luria who couched his potentially path-breaking vision in the pessimistic idiom of more or less traditional Gnosis. What I attempt to do, therefore, is a quite aggressive sublation of theosophy into philosophical discourse, which will discard most of the theosophical lament about the Fall, Sin and Evil, as an archaic garment of new intellectual intimations concerning

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

35

the nature of the nascent modernity, inherently pressing towards a much more affirmative notion of ‘tarrying with the negative’ (however paradoxically this expression might seem at the first glance). Once again, Deleuze’s interpretation of Spinoza comes in quite handy as the example of a deliberately strong latemodern misreading of an early modern thinker, still partly confused and lost in his half-articulated forebodings of what is to come. Just like Deleuze tries to distil the essential ‘new Spinoza’ from the dross of stoico-scholastic idiom, we will try to isolate the new philosophical message of the ‘confirmation of finite being’ out of the theosophical narrative, weighed down by the Gnostic imaginary in which finitude routinely emerges as the ‘root of all evil’. The thesis on the derivation of the Hegelian philosophy out of the sources of Judeo-Christian esotericism has to be taken, therefore, in a qualified manner: just as much hermetic thought is an inspiration here, it is also a hindrance. Because it harbours revolutionary ideas – the ‘death of God’, which Hegel himself calls ‘the most frightful of all thoughts,’ leading to the necessary reversal of roles, where the World is bestowed with the redemptive power5 – it has to conceal them in the conservative religious language which still paints the created world in the dark ‘Luciferic’ colours of Fall, Sin and Evil. But such is the rule of all esotericism which otherwise would not be esoteric, hermetic: in other words, it would not be recondite and clandestine in the things that matter most and, precisely for this reason, would not find open articulation. When we deal with the hermetic form of expression, we simply cannot take all its formulations at face value; we must press towards their inner secret core. For, as Scholem says in his Ten Unhistorical Theses on Kabbalah: ‘The authentic tradition remains hidden.’6 In our case, the genuine tradition of what Hegel dares to call the ‘new modern religion’, or what I would like to name modern cryptotheology, is the secret opposite of the overt Gnostic idiomatics of the Fall: a bold new thinking which wants to confirm finite being as finite without inscribing it automatically into a divine tragedy, where it figures as the central catastrophe. The vicissitudes of the Absolute may indeed form a fascinating ‘theo-drama’,7 but it does not need to be a tragedy: the infinite may yet recognize itself in all things finite without dooming them as a merely ‘disappearing moment’, or a passing evil. Hegel’s philosophy, which often spontaneously falls into the Boehmean imaginary of the Fall, tarries with the negative also on the formal level: by philosophically working through the theosophical material, it struggles with the Gnostic negativity in order to procure its own notion of the negative which suddenly flips and then shows the other, no longer so purely ‘negative’ face: the one of ‘seriousness’, ‘true labour’, and ‘real being’ as opposed to ‘playfulness’ and unreality of der Schein, the mere appearance of being which never gives proper birth to itself. Thus, while in the overt esoteric dialect ‘the finite world is outside the truth’ (LPR, 435), its deeper hidden message wants to tell us precisely the opposite: that ‘Truth is the whole,’8 and that this whole cannot be conceived without the affirmation of the finite mode of existence without which there would be no difference and thus no totality to talk about.

36 A. Bielik-Robson Philosophically speaking, therefore, Hegel’s project constitutes one of the first modern attempts to ‘overcome Gnosis’ (in Hans Blumenberg’s understanding of the term), and a quite successful one at that, precisely because it is from the beginning steeped in the Gnostic imagery. For, after all, as Hegel’s dialectical wisdom has it: ‘the wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it.’9

Luria’s tsimtsum Not only Hegel ‘tarries with the negative’ of the Gnostic origin. The same already applies to Isaac Luria whom I will attempt to misread here in exactly the same ‘aggressive’ manner, by penetrating into the hidden philosophical potentialities of his thought (which, I admit, is mostly a pure conjecture since Luria has not left any of his ideas in the written form and all we know about kitvei ha-Ari, ‘The Lion’s legacy’ is mediated by his two pupils, Hayyim Vital and Israel Sarug, who strongly disagree with one another). At stake in this interpretation is seeing Luria and Hegel as two analogical figures who vacillate at the threshold of the ‘New Age’, alternately thrusting forward – towards the new metaphysics of finitude – and then retreating again, back into the familiar matrix of the Gnostic-Neoplatonic negativity. In explaining the innovative nature of the Lurianic kabbalah and most of all its concept of tsimtsum, I will rely mostly on Gershom Scholem, partly because it is already precursorial to my intention: Scholem, far more philosophical and non-historical than he himself ever wanted to admit, paves the way to the reading of Luria, which takes into account the esoteric ‘double-speak’ and exposes bold intellectual topoi that remain hidden for those who approach him bona fide. Scholem would always insist that, in Jewish theology, the act of creation is primarily a separation: that is, a creation of something emphatically and truly other than God himself. Kabbalah offers two versions of the creation out of nothing, which constitute two opposing answers to the fundamental question concerning the nature of the first sephira, ‘Ayin [nothingness]: does it belong to the En Sof, the Infinite, or is it already something separate from God? The earlier solution, beginning with the speculations of Moses de Leon, which decides for the participation of ‘Ayin in En Sof, is, in fact, a very sophisticated variation of pantheism in disguise, which, as Scholem rightly points out, troubles all Neoplatonism, either Christian or Jewish: it claims that ‘nothingness’ is a secret name of the Infinite which is beyond being as we know it, and thus is a superesse, a hyper-being which can be known to us only as nothing. According to this logic, creation is not at all separate from the nature of God, for it continuously participates in ‘the fountain of all life’: the secret transformation of shapeless nothingness into particular beings. It is only the later solution, created by Isaac Luria, which gives true meaning to the notion of creatio ex nihilo as radical separation. In his ground-breaking theory of tsimtsum, meaning literally ‘contraction’, Luria attempted to square the circle of the creaturely status of things, simultaneously different from God and yet linked to him by the very fact of creation. Tsimtsum, God’s self-reduction, was

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

37

to account for this paradox and present nothingness (‘Ayin) not as a divine attribute but as his first creative act. In the beginning, therefore, God created nothing – that is, he made room for something else to emerge: Creation out of nothing, from the void, could be nothing other than creation of the void, that is, of the possibility of thinking of anything that was not God. Without such an act of self-limitation, after all, there would be only God – and obviously nothing else. A being that is not God could only become possible and originate by virtue of such a contraction, such a paradoxical retreat of God into himself. By positing a negative factor in Himself, God liberates creation.10 This ‘negative factor’ involves an even more dramatic image of the interplay of emanation and withdrawal, presence and absence, participation and refusal: the metaphor of ‘breaking of the vessels’, shevirath ha-kelim, according to which the vessels prepared by God to contain his creational word were too weak, too tinged with nothingness, to withhold its power. The image of shevirath ha-kelim constitutes the most antagonistic and destructive theological model of the clash between transcendence and immanence: the moment of the most intense violence and incompatibility in the very extremes of their paradoxical ‘relation without relation’. Everything that issues afterwards, the whole later dialectics of the post-traumatic reparation, devoted to the gathering of sparks of the divine light scattered through the material realm, belongs to the redeeming work of tikkun (restoration). Yet there is also a possibility to see the breaking of the vessels in more optimistic and promising light: not as the nostalgic motif of galuth, the universal dispersion-diaspora of all things which can never find its right place in the created world, but as an act of what Nietzsche, already a modern philosopher, calls die schöpferische Zerstörung, creative destruction, in which the pre-established order of the universe disappears, paving way to a more liberated idea of creaturely life. The theosophical image of the broken vessels parallels thus the philosophical notion of the nominalistic demise of the universals, i.e. the destruction of the perennial divine order giving shape but also keeping in check the lower material spheres of emanation. As long as this leash – or the umbilical cord – exists, maintaining the intimate link between God’s creationist design and the actual created world, the latter can never become fully separate, fully emancipated. In order for the free world to be born, the vessels must break – and this is why, in this less pessimistic reading, the shevirath resembles more the violent ‘birth pangs’ than the Fall of all being resulting from the sudden death of God’s providential plan. For the world to be properly born, God’s perfect order must die – which also means that God must die as God the Father, God the Provider, God the Sovereign, who watches over his creation and keeps it according to his plan. When vessels break, time is truly out of joint – but that, too, indicates that this released temporality, now seen positively, becomes the proper element of the created being. Not something merely relative to the divine eternity, but a

38

A. Bielik-Robson

separate quality of the finite realm with its own metaphysical role to play: the History. The world, discharged from all divine leashes, now stands on its own but it does not mean that it is all perfect. Far from it: all things are still to find their right place in the ultimate rearrangement of being; they are all set on the move to form new configurations; and they cannot stop until one of these constellations will finally manage to reproduce the lost Face of God. This is Luria’s theosophical symbol for encrypting the simultaneously troubling and exciting novelty of the modern era: the new historical dynamics in which all that was solid melts into air and all that seemed so eternally sacred becomes temporal, earthly, and profane. We will find something similar also in Boehme who calls this ambivalent mobility of all things turba: chaos, trouble, but at the same time, pains of delivery. When overwhelmed by turba, the world is in the labour of nativity: it is literally being born. We could thus complement Scholem’s claim that Luria’s vision of the cosmic diaspora of all things mirrors the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the motherland of kabbalistic speculation, by adding to it a more philosophical spin: galuth could also be a reflection on the nascent period of early modernity, this exciting-troubling New Age marked by both high hopes and deep unrest.

Self-effacement or jealousy? Scholem’s description of Lurianic tsimtsum accentuates the moment of God’s kenotic self-effacement. He defines Luria’s tsimtsum through the reversal of its original Talmudic meaning where it is occasionally used in reference to kodesh kodashim, the Holiest of Holies, in which God concentrates his presence (Shekhinah) into a single point: Here we have the origin of the term tsimtsum, while the thing itself is the precise opposite of this idea: to the Kabbalist of Luria’s school tsimtsum does not mean the concentration of God at a point, but his retreat away from a point.… One is tempted to interpret this withdrawal of God into his own Being in terms of Exile, of banishing Himself from His totality into profound seclusion.… The first act of all is not an act of revelation but one of limitation.11 The significance of this reversal cannot be overemphasized. We can imagine God’s auto-reduction in terms of withdrawing into the circumference (as in Hayyim Vital), or even without this striking visualization as simply God’s withdrawal from being (as in Levinas and Jonas), but the most important aspect here is what Christian theologians would call the act of kenosis: tsimtsum is not a concentration of the divine presence, but the disappearance, deactivation, and weakening of God’s power to be. Yet, Scholem’s understanding of Luria’s tsimtsum is, to say the least, tendentious.12 He clearly selects only one possible meaning of God’s compression as

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

39

retreat and withdrawal: away from the point, so that God can make a room – nothingness – for the world to emerge as the true other of God. This solution was favoured by Hayyim Vital, the founder of the ‘Eastern School’ in Lurianic Kabbalah, who interpreted the oral teachings of his master on tsimtsum as the voluntary act of the Infinite One who first gathers in himself and only then vacates himself, by evacuating to the circumference and creating a vacuum in his midst. In Vital’s Ets Haim, it is stated: And when it arose in the Simple Will to create worlds … then the Infinite tsimtsem itself at the central point within itself, at the exact centre of its light, and tsimtsem that light, and withdrew to extremities surrounding the central point, and then a vacant place and environment, and an empty space remained.13 In Israel Sarug’s version, which founded the ‘Italian School’ of Lurianic Kabbalah, the movement of tsimtsum is simpler and more ‘mechanical’: it is the cathartic compression of the Infinite which, by using the wrathful power of Din, the sephira of Judgment, withdraws into himself in order to release the ‘irritant’ and impure elements that disturb his inner bliss, and thus creates the opposition of inside and outside – the self-contracted transcendence, which gathered itself in itself, and the dispersed immanence made of the rejected ‘alien’ substance. Moreover, Sarug tends to see tsimtsum merely as a metaphor – lo ki-feshuto, i.e. figuratively – and not a literal event marking a true crisis in the Godhead. For him, God does not create nothingness as a free space for another being, but maintains his presence in the creation; this decision of reading the tsimtsum in a metaphorical manner indicates, in fact, a step back towards the traditional Neoplatonic model of emanation. And even though both hereditary lines talk about God’s contraction in the traditional midrashic sense of the word tsimtsum, it is only Vital’s variant which contains also its reversal, so strongly emphasized by Scholem; here, if God gathers himself into the point, it is only for the sake of literally giving himself away in the final movement. God, as it were, has to pull himself together from the vast expanses of the Infinite in order to give up on himself as God – the sovereign, the omnipresence, the centre – and marginalize himself as nothing more than a ‘circumference’. He thus contracts in his divinity only in order to create a non-God, and then to lend this non-divine otherness all his being.14 So, despite all the technical complications, which Scholem’s image of pulling ‘away from the point’ omits (at least in this crucial quote), the very thrust of Scholem-Vital’s speculation is clear: God contracts only in order to recede. God first becomes the point only to subsequently pull away from the point. And, unlike in Sarug’s version, where contraction is a cathartic self-purification of God who, as it were, shakes off from himself everything that bothers his inner state of harmony, Vital emphasizes God’s intention: tsimtsum is the act of the divine good will – and this is only one step away from assuming that it was indeed God’s self-sacrifice. If we read this story through the Hegelian lenses, Vital’s

40

A. Bielik-Robson

dual movement (first ‘into’, then ‘away’) would signify the Idea-Intention-Will retreating into itself from the indifferent vastness of Substance and thus positing itself as the subjective pure negativity, which simultaneously indicates ‘becoming empty’ (Leerwerden): the Subject evacuates all being outside itself, in ‘giving up’ on its own subsistence. But the Subject also leaves the trace of itself in the alienated being – yet not in the form of theosophic ‘sparks’ scattered all over the world, but in the form of the memory which governs the movement of Erinnerung, i.e. the Spirit’s coming back into itself: being ‘remembers’ that it came into being only thanks to the sacrificial self-emptying of the divine kenotic subjectivity. But why does Scholem choose Vital’s rather than Sarug’s version? There may be three reasons, all interconnected. The first has to do with Scholem’s limited tolerance for theosophy: just like Hegel tarries with the theosophical idiom of Boehme, Rosenroth and Oetinger, Scholem tarries with the theosophical ‘darkness’ of Luria and tries to distil from his heritage what he finds philosophically most original and illuminating – and this is tsimtsum as withdrawal, going-awayfrom-oneself (the prototype-equivalent of the Hegelian Aussichgehen). Second, Scholem’s philosophical temper is modern which, in terms of his kabbalistic theory, means moving away from the Neoplatonic henotheism towards a more daring vision of creation as truly standing on its own – and which, in terms of Christian theology, means the same as moving away from the realm of analogy, where tsimtsum, as well as the crisis in the Godhead, remains merely metaphor, into the realm of dialectics and univocity, where the divine crisis is presented as literally real (even up to ‘deipassionism’ or ‘Death of God theology’). What Sarug’s school regarded as Luria’s non-philosophical barbaric literality, Scholem sees as Luria’s greatest speculative achievement, securing him a precursorial place in the modern avant-garde, championing the thesis on univocatio entis. He immediately senses that the Gnostic motif of God’s self-destruction, present in Western thought since Basilides, can be reused in a completely different context, i.e. as the foundation for the modern univocal metaphysics – which also bestows it with a new, fully original significance, unknown in the times of Alexandrian Gnosticism.15 But Scholem may also have an additional agenda: by overemphasizing the self-effacing moment of tsimtsum, he can be seen as attempting to conjure away the ‘Marcionite’ spectre, which has been constantly hovering over the ‘Jewish God’ in the German Protestantism since Martin Luther, only to gather strength in the Weimar theology of crisis, represented by Karl Barth and Adolph von Harnack. In our context, it is essential to remember that this ‘Marcionite’ line was very strongly informed by Schelling and his rival adoption of tsimtsum: not as the kenotic self-effacement of the Infinite, but as the wrathful contraction of God-in-Anger, the hidden, irrational and jealous God the Father who forms the ‘dark ground of being’ and only then, in the second instance, becomes capable of the saving grace and love, taking the form of Christ the Redeemer. The following quote from Schelling’s Ages of the World perfectly demonstrates his ‘Marcionite’ predilection to see the ‘holy and ancient one’ – that is, atika

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

41

kadisha, the first of the divine partsufim – in dark, zornig, colours (the only difference being that, unlike the openly dualistic Marcion, Schelling does not believe that we cannot do with love alone, for we also need the hard ground of being in order to demonstrate the true power of love): Every single system acknowledges that the force of contraction is the real and actual beginning of every thing. The greatest glory of development is not expected from what easily unfolds. It is expected from what has been excluded and which only decides to unfold with opposition. Yet many do not want to acknowledge that ancient and holy force of Being and they would like to banish it straightaway from the beginning, before it, overcome in itself, gives way to Love.16 Although Scholem does not mention the word ‘kenosis’ in reference to Lurianic tsimtsum, his reading may indeed be a provocation against the Protestant milieu; while Sarug’s interpretation lends itself as a possible canvas for Schelling’s ‘Marcionism’, Vital’s rendering, to the contrary, ruins the convenient representation of the First Person of the Trinity as the severe and hidden SovereignCreator who disposes of being ‘jealously’. Scholem’s insistence on ‘withdrawal from being’ as the kenotic version of creation imputes loving grace and good will already to the original ‘Jewish God’, thus relieving him of the Schellingian label of ‘irrationality’, even ‘madness’ – which happens to coincide with Hegel’s intentions in Phenomenology, but remains at odds with Schelling’s later philosophy, where kenosis is reserved always only to the Second Movement of the revelatory love. In the end, therefore, tsimtsum as ‘compression’ lends itself to two very different imaginary understandings: either hardening or diminution. Putting all kabbalistic technicalities aside, and their often contradictory interplay between concentration and retreat, what really matters is the ultimate meaning of this gesture: either ‘kenotic love’ or ‘wrathful jealousy’, which may also be regarded as the most fundamental difference between Hegel and Schelling. However, in the motto to this essay, which comes from Schelling’s 1830 lectures, Schelling dismisses this difference, treating Hegel as just a minor commentator of Boehme, possibly lesser than himself. He refuses to acknowledge the difference between ‘God vomiting himself into nature,’ which may indeed derive from Sarug’s version of tsimtsum, and ‘God releasing nature [from himself],’ which, closer to Vital (and Scholem), talks about the self-limitation of the divine freedom and the emergence of the autonomous Freiraum of being.17 Yet, the difference is absolutely essential. In the former case, the world is simply removed from the self-contracting Godhead and enjoys a dubious independence of a spittle, called by Schelling der Ab-fall, the garbage falling off from the Absolute. In the latter case, the world is granted ontological autonomy and importance, completely and literally univocal with the existence of God and as such indispensable in the history of his self-transformation. Perhaps, then, it is because of the ‘Marcionite’ leaning of Protestant esotericism that, in the translation of Luria’s ambivalence into the idiom of Christian

42 A. Bielik-Robson kabbalah, from Boehme up to Schelling, the kenotic aspect of God’s selfwithdrawal becomes underplayed at the expense of God’s Zorn. Even Hegel, who in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History quotes kabbalah apparently only according to its Lurianic version (as related by Brucker), explicitly repeats the same misreading. Yet it may also be shown that implicitly he follows the logic of the other Luria he had never known directly: the logic of which is much more in harmony with what he himself calls approvingly ‘modern age and its religion’ (PS, 14).18 In his unique, kenotic, vision of God’s self-contraction – not at the point, but away from the point – Luria, as reconstructed by Scholem, pioneers the new modern religious sensibility of Shekhinah-Spirit which, as Hegel puts it in the preface to Phenomenology, abides only in and through its externality (Entäusserung), by restlessly ‘tarrying with the negative’, that is, with extreme otherness of sheer finitude and materiality, which exposes it to constant risk: But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself … Spirit is the power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. (PS, 19) This new religion, therefore, is something else than the traditional Christianity of love, which inspired Hegel in his early theological writings – just like in the case of Luria, it is no longer the orthodox Judaism of law. The new concept emerges here as pivotal: the heavy labouring of the Spirit which has a work to do and will not cease its mental fight until it transforms the world which had arisen as God’s other but also, simultaneously, as God’s new identity in the making, his new realm of becoming. The purpose of the Spirit is to convert what ‘barely is’ (PS, 19) – the immediacy of finitude – into proper being and thus to complete the act of creation. The Spirit, therefore, has to storm through the dispersed and disoriented material realm in order to turn it into a free, conscious and self-assertive mode of existence. This work – this serious task as opposed to the inner play of love within the Absolute conceived ‘analogically’ – is announced by Hegel in the following way: Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative. In itself, that life is indeed one untroubled equality and unity with itself, for which otherness and alienation, and the overcoming of alienation, are not serious matters. But this in-itself is abstract universality, in which the nature of the divine life to be for itself, and so to the self-movement of the form, are altogether left out of account … the

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

43

divine essence is not to be conceived and expressed merely as essence, i.e. as immediate substance of pure self-contemplation of the divine, but likewise as a form, and in the whole wealth of developed form.… The True is the whole. But the whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development. Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end it is what it truly is. (PS, 10–11) The Absolute, therefore, is in the process of becoming – as Ernst Bloch would have said, in his Lurianic variation on Hegel: it is not-yet. Yet the vehicle of this becoming is not love, not the immediate and easy reconciliation, for which Trinity delivers the first and most paradigmatic model – it is rather the labour of overreaching which includes into this playful threesome the fourth, more recalcitrant element: the World as the Otherness itself. The Spirit thus leaves the eternal pleromatic circle of the triune God and enters the risky path of working-through the worldly alterity: ‘For Spirit is the knowledge of oneself in the externalization of oneself; the being that is the movement of retaining its self-identity in its otherness’ (PS, 459).

Two contractions: Hegel versus Schelling The best way to demonstrate the crucial difference between Hegel and Schelling – which here serves as the synecdoche of the difference between the first truly modern philosopher of the World and the last premodern philosopher of the Absolute – is to compare their respective interpretations of tsimtsum. For Schelling, contraction is the manoeuvre of God making room for himself as God; it is God’s attempt at self-creation, of God’s hiding-in-himself, into his concealed ownmost identity. Following closely the original misreading committed by Jakob Boehme, Schelling envisages tsimtsum as a contraction to the point: pulling in of the primordial abyss, the Ungrund, which creates the initial ground of all existence, der dunkle Grund des Seins. This ground, constituting the dark stuff (one is almost tempted to say: dark matter) of the irrational Real, is a true ‘fury fused’: made of the congealed wrath of God frustrated with his own indefiniteness and non-existence. In the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, Schelling defines the ‘terrible’ Real as follows: After the eternal act of self-revelation, everything in the world is, as we see it now, rule, order, and form; but anarchy still lies in the ground, as if it could break through once again, and nowhere does it appear as if order and form were what is original but rather as if initial anarchy had been brought to order. This is the incomprehensible base of reality in things, the indivisible remainder, that with which the greatest exertion cannot be resolved in understanding but rather remains eternally in the ground. The understanding is born in the genuine sense from that which is without understanding.

44

A. Bielik-Robson Without this preceding darkness creatures have no reality: darkness is their necessary inheritance.19

The difference between Boehme-Schelling and Luria-Scholem lies, therefore, in the nature of the sacred bereshith: while in Luria’s system in the beginning God creates nothing, in their system, in the beginning God creates being. Being as such, the hard, sour principle of the naked Real; the that of bare existence (or quodditas in Duns Scotus’ vocabulary) which later on will find its most uncompromised critic in Levinas and his conception of ontologism: the way of being dictated solely by the merciless laws of being as such. This is an enormous difference, followed by the most fundamental implications, one of which is the position which denies nature, which carries in itself the principle of the Real, a proper redemption. Nature cannot be saved; the Real, turned into a separate principle acquires a Manichaean flavour of absolute evil – though, structurally speaking, it is not an evil per se – because it remains forever beyond the apocatastatic grasp of the redemptive transformation. Despite its double movement of contraction and expansion, this image is, in fact, static, which goes against the very idea of ‘dramatic ontology’: God is eternally trapped in the Marcionite aporia between his sovereign power, which asserts itself in the Old-Testament principle of being, and his mercy, which asserts itself in the New-Testament principle of love. The world, which is caught in this aporetic game, can only be helped – but it cannot be thoroughly, internally, completely healed. It can only be offered a palliative therapy, but it can never be fully redeemed. Thus, even if the second creation is superior to the first one, its very priority hurls an eternal obstacle towards the saving grace of love. While in Luria tsimtsum weakens God and depletes his vital potentialities, in Boehme and Schelling the contraction only asserts God in his omnipotent, all-present and never relinquished, might. As if in the inverted image of the analogical Trinity, where every crisis is immediately healed by the ‘play of love’, here the crisis itself becomes a permanent, defining, and irremovable feature of the Godhead. But why did they read the Lurianic tsimtsum in this way? Why did they choose to strengthen God’s sovereign power manifesting itself in the inscrutable Real? The answer may indeed lie in the implicit ‘Marcionite’ leaning of the Protestant mysticism orbiting around the tremendum et fascinans of deus absconditus, the Hidden God. On the surface, it would seem to strike the familiar cord with the Judaic doctrine of hester panim [hidden face], yet in fact, these two motives could not be further removed from one another. The Jewish hester panim is ‘hiddenness of promise’: it is proleptic, future-oriented and still germinative of the yet unfulfilled messianic rearrangement of all being. But der verborgene Gott of the Protestant formation is pure ‘hiddenness of power’: angrily selfcontracted, determined in the past-perfect of his ‘first deed’ which forms the eternal hard ground of existence. The latter is the terrifying Master of Creation, which constitutes the dark abyss of ‘nothingness’ behind the revelation of Christ the Redeemer – the former is a still hidden and unrealised possibility of the divine itself, the promising not-yet of God in the process of becoming: not

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

45

the powerful God of the Old Testament, but the arriving messianic God of olam ha ba (the world to come). But Hegel is different. He does not share in this, so common to Protestant thinkers, quasi-Marcionite predicament which bestows the hidden powerful God-Father of creation with such mistrust and puts all his faith in the revealed, fully manifest figure of Christ the Redeemer. Hegel’s solution to the Christian closure of the messianic game is indeed very ingenious: he opens it again by forcing the gap between what he calls the absolute content of the Christian revelation and its philosophical meaning which is still in the process of revealing itself through the patient historical labouring of the Spirit. This is Hegel’s ‘Judaising’ moment, making him akin to Joachim da Fiore (who, nota bene, was also accused by the Church of turning Christianity Jewish again). Though the Christian religion may indeed be fully veroffenbart and made sonnenklar to everybody who has eyes to see and ears to hear, the message incarnated in a living body of Christ, the very meaning of this message, still eludes its followers. The absolute content of Christianity is also a monstrous enigma which lends itself to the restless task of its deciphering. It is as if History, therefore, has two ends: one is given with the embodiment of the absolute truth; the second, still coming, will happen once this truth is universally understood. In this way, Hegel manages to mediate between Christian, already fulfilled, and Jewish, not yet fulfilled, messianisms; the result of this mediation is the unique vision of history as a dynamic working-through and interpretation of the absolute content which is already present in the world, but not yet fully operative. History, therefore, is a time of work humanity must put into making the Christian antinomian message of love, friendship, brotherhood and freedom truly workable in the material conditions of the world which – in its very nature and as nature – is not spontaneously prone to accept it. Thus, if the history of creation is being drawn into a holy process of divine self-reflection and self-transformation, it is because only humanity can tear itself away antithetically from the thesis of natural being and press towards the highest synthesis in which God will be able to see himself in All. This emphatic ‘confirmation of being’, which bestows history with utmost theological importance, makes Hegel – logically speaking – much closer to Luria and his peculiar vision of prohistorical messianism (as reconstructed by Scholem) than he ever was to Schelling or Boehme, even despite his often expressed admiration for the latter. It would not be possible without the Lurianic tsimtsum being understood as the depletion of God’s infinite power, almost to the point of its disappearance, total deactivation, even death. It is not true, therefore, as Žižek claims (by borrowing heavily from Bloch but also distorting him in the crucial moment), that Hegelian Christianity is simply atheistic.20 Just like Lurianic messianism, it is indeed inner-worldly, but it adds to being a special flavour of an emphatic surplus ‘confirmation’ which can result only from the dramatic reversal of roles, where, after the divine reduction, the world as the divine tselem (image) becomes God himself in the process of self-making. The absolute novelty and uniqueness of Luria’s invention consists in shifting

46 A. Bielik-Robson the kenotic aspect of the deity into the domain of creation. In Christian, and particularly Protestant framework, kenosis, as the self-humbling of the incarnate God, belongs only to the sphere of revelation and redemption; creation, on the other hand, tacitly assumed to be almost ‘Marcionite’ in contrast, is an expression of God’s power and sovereignty, the very height of heights from which the kenotic Christ must fall. But Luria makes creation itself an act of divine kenosis – and this move, though made also within the essentially Gnostic doctrine, is at the same time the furthest possible move away from the Gnosis of Marcion. It would thus seem that the true overcoming of Gnosis, which is implied in Hegel’s system, can only happen with another Gnosis for, indeed, the wound can only be healed by the same spear that smote it.21 This line of interpretation is fully confirmed by the last pages of Phenomenology, where Hegel openly resorts to the Lurianic image of the primordial creative ‘self-emptying’ (Entäusserung) and compares it to the kenotic passion of Christ: the ‘Golgotha of the Absolute Spirit’ (PS, 493), the crowning picture-thought of the Idea’s ‘tarrying with the negative’ refers to the ‘sacrifice’ God submitted himself to in order to create the world of finitude: The self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit: to know one’s limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself. This sacrifice (Autoopferung) is the externalization (Entäusserung) in which Spirit displays the process of its becoming Spirit in the form of free contingent happening (freies zufälliges Geschehen), intuiting its pure Self as Time outside of it, and equally its Being as Space. This last becoming of Spirit, Nature, is its living immediate Becoming; Nature, the externalized Spirit, is in its existence nothing but this eternal externalization of its continuing existence and the movement which reinstates the Subject. But the other side of its Becoming, History, is a conscious, self-mediating process – Spirit emptied out (entäussert) into Time; but this externalization, this kenosis, is equally an externalization of itself; the negative is the negative of itself. This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfilment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawing into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection (Erinnerung). Thus absorbed in itself, it is sunk in the night of its self-consciousness; but in that night its vanished outer existence is preserved, and this transformed existence – the former one, but now reborn of the Spirit’s knowledge – is the new existence, a new world and a new shape of Spirit. (PS, 492) Just like Schelling, Hegel also uses two versions of tsimtsum – self-withdrawal as self-offering and as self-concentration – but in the reversed sequence, which gives the first one both priority and superiority. First movement is kenotic and

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling

47

creates Nature as the radical Anderssein, the ‘other’ of the Infinite who limits himself through the self-sacrifice. Only the second movement, in which the Spirit pulls itself back from the Substance to create the ‘pure I’ of the finite consciousness, indicates contraction, in which the Idea remembers itself (Erinnerung), thus counteracting the original movement of sacrificial self-forgetfulness (‘the negative of the negative’, or the tsimtsum of tsimtsum). The issuing history is thus propelled by the dynamics of synthesis in which the self-sacrifice, creating the pure extension of in itself, and the concentration-recollection, creating pure punctuality of for itself, will come into reconciliation and all these separate points (Lurianic sparks) will form a constellation covering and connecting the dispersed vast expanses (Ausdehnung) of being: ‘the two together, the Golgotha of the absolute Spirit (die Shädelstätte des absoluten Geistes) and the Recollection (Erinnerung), form alike the actuality, truth, and certainty of his throne, without which He would be lifeless and alone’ (PS, 493; translation modified). For, says Hegel travestying Schiller: ‘Only from the chalice of this realm of spirits foams forth for Him his own infinitude’ (ibid.). From the leblose Einsame to the rich living ‘organization of the realm of finite spirits,’ which dwell in recollection and grateful remembrance of Absolute Spirit’s self-sacrifice, thus ‘resurrecting him daily’ (PS, 299): such is the passage from the infinite to the finite, from play into seriousness, and from Schein into reality, in which the Absolute loses itself in order to find itself again in the life of the commemorating community (das Geisterreich). The ‘death of God’, therefore, is not undone magically: it is only undone by living memory which faithfully clings to the traces of the by-gone deity and, as if in a puzzle, puts them back together. God resurrects only in the community of believers, in the constant effort of their commemoration. Once the passage is made, it cannot be traced back: the only possible restoration of ‘His throne’ is in the foaming chalice of the multitude of living finite beings, oozing the dreamy smoke of infinity together, in the gentle and non-coercive Miteinander der Verschiedenen (as Adorno used to call this messianic type of gathering, also drawing on Luria’s vision of the redemptive kneset Israel). If this, therefore, is indeed atheism, then only with one indelible modification: the non-sublatable memory of the ‘death of God’, which counteracts the dispersion of all beings by allowing to ‘raise him daily again.’ Thus, if the nominalism of Duns Scotus, with its thesis on the univocity of being, already paves the way for modernity, Luria and Hegel go even further in their anti-analogical literalism, demanding the most literal – real and serious – interpretation of God’s kenotic crisis: they not only see the existence of God and the existence of the world as equal, but they strongly confirm the latter as the only ontological medium in which God, weakened and depleted, can ‘rise again’. The world, for so long overshadowed by God’s more powerful being, can finally assert its full metaphysical autonomy: cut the umbilical cord and get properly born. Yet, the whole trick consists in keeping the memory of the whole process of ‘nativity’ which bestows the newly liberated world with the sense of a ‘secret obligation’. And if modernitas deserves its true esoteric name, nova era, which was given to it by Joachim da Fiore, it is precisely due to this

48 A. Bielik-Robson absolute novelty which revolutionized modern metaphysics; now it is not the world which needs God to sustain its fragile mode of being, but God who needs the world to get him back into existence. For Nietzsche, ‘death of God’ is a straightforward declaration of atheism, but there can also be a religion of the ‘death of God’: a ‘subtler idiom’ of faith consonant with the genuinely modern religious sensibility, demanding the most radical version of univocatio entis, which can be secured only by the ‘going-down of the sun’ – the demise of God in the sphere of metaphysical analogy.

Notes 1 G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977, p. 134. 2 In the section on Isaac Luria, Scholem writes: ‘At the same time, side by side with the Gnostic outlook, we find a most astonishing tendency to a mode of contemplative thought that can be called ‘dialectic’ in the strictest sense of the term as used by Hegel. This tendency is especially prominent in attempts to present formal explanations of such doctrines as that of tsimtsum, the breaking of the vessels, or the formation of the partsufim’ (Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, New York: Meridian, 1978, p. 143). Also Derrida makes a similar claim in Dissemination, where he states that the idea of tsimtsum is ‘linked to the mythology of “Louria,” but it can also arise by way of “Hegel,” “Boehme,” etc.,’ and although he does not dwell much on this topic, he nonetheless confirms this link implicitly elsewhere, namely in his book on Hegel, Glas, the last part of which is devoted to the contraction of the divine Lichtwesen [light-being] as the originary self-offering of God for the sake of the world’s existence: ‘In order to become a subject, in effect the sun must go down’ (Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, p. 344; Glas, trans. John P. Leavey, Jr. and Richard Rand, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986, p. 239). 3 On the discussion concerning the ‘birth right’ of modernity, see my essay ‘The Identity of the Spirit: Taubes between Apocalypticism and Historiosophy,’ in Agata Bielik-Robson, Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity. Philosophical Marranos, London: Routledge, 2014. 4 See Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin, New York: Zone Books, 1992. 5 Compare Hegel’s notes on the ‘death of God’ from the 1831 lectures: ‘God has died, God is dead – this is the most frightful of all thoughts, that everything eternal and true is not, that negation itself is found in God. The deepest anguish, the feeling of complete irretrievability, the annulling of everything that is elevated, are bound up with this thought’ (G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (The Lectures of 1827 – One Volume Edition), trans. R. F. Brown, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, p. 465 (later on as LPR)). 6 Gershom Scholem, ‘Zehn Unhistorische Sätze über Kabbala,’ in Judaica 3, Studien zur jüdischen Mystik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973, p. 264. 7 To use the concept of Hans Urs von Balthasar, himself deeply influenced by the same esoteric millieu which also formatted Hegel. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama. Theological Dramatic Theory, vols. 1–3, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988. Yet it must be remembered that Balthasar, although fond of ‘theo-drama,’ was very much opposed to Hegel’s deipassionism which, as he claimed, overemphasized the crisis in the Godhead and approached the idea of the ‘death of God’ too literally. We shall yet see that the same objection was issued against Luria by the

The God of Luria, Hegel and Schelling 8 9

10 11 12

13

14

15 16 17

49

kabbalistic school of Israel Sarug who can be seen as the Jewish equivalent of the Thomistic ‘party of analogy’ represented by Balthasar. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, p. 11 (hereafter PS). This famous sentence from Eschenbach’s Parsifal (later on repeated in Wagner’s libretto) has been very rightly spotted by Žižek as the best aphorism summing up the dialectical work of the negative in Hegel: ‘The Fear of Four Words: A Modest Plea for the Hegelian Reading of Christianity,’ in John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011, p. 71. Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser, New York: Schocken Books, 1976, p. 283 (my emphasis). Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York: Shocken Books, p. 260–1(my emphasis). On the history of the concept of tsimtsum and the differences between two Lurianic schools, see: Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism, trans. Batya Stein, Albany: SUNY Press, 1993, pp. 84–90 (where Liebes, elaborating on Scholem’s hint, also makes a reference to the second century Alexandrian Gnosticism of Basilides and his image of the ‘non-existent God’ as the possible origin of the idea of the God who has withdrawn from being); Moshe Idel, ‘On the Concept Zimzum in Kabbalah and its Research,’ Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 10, 1992 (Hebrew); as well as Christoph Schulte, Zimzum. Gott und Weltursprung, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, Jüdischer Verlag, 2014. Hayyim ben Joseph Vital, The Tree of Life: Chayyim Vital’s Introduction to the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria – The Palace of Adam Kadmon, trans. Donald Wilder Menzi and Zwe Padeh, Northvale, N.J. and Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, 1999 (Heykhal 1, Sha’ar 1, Iggulim ve-Yosher). I am very grateful to Paul Franks for drawing my attention to this fragment and for the whole discussion we had on Scholem’s preference for Vital. It is possible that the ‘gentler’ version of tsimtsum, in which God ‘takes in his breath’ and restricts his glory for the sake of something else to emerge, derives already from Isaiah, as described by Elliott Wolfson in his interpretation of one of the bahiric texts: ‘The notion of withdrawal, itself withdrawn and thus not stated overtly, is a secret exegetically derived from the verse lema‘an shemi a’arikh appi u-tehillati ehetam lakh le-vilti hakhritekha, “For the sake of my name I will postpone my wrath and my glory I will hold in for you so that I will not destroy you” (Isa 48:9). The plain sense of the prophetic dictum relates to divine mercy expressed as God’s long-suffering, the capacity to restrain his rage. The expression tehillati ehetam, literally “my glory I will hold in,” is parallel to a’arikh appi, “I will postpone my wrath.” One may surmise that at some point in ancient Israel the notion of a vengeful god yielded its opposite, the compassionate god who holds in his fury’ (Elliott Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau. Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006, pp. 132–3). On the modern revolution in theological imagination see Jacob Taubes, ‘Dialectic and Analogy,’ in From Cult to Culture. Fragments Towards a Critique of Historical Reason, ed. Aleida Assmann, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, (version 1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth, Albany: SUNY Press, 2000, p. 107. Quoted in Glenn Alexander Magee, ‘Hegel’s Reception of Jacob Boehme,’ in An Introduction to Jacob Boehme. Four Centuries of Thought and Reception, eds Ariel Hessayon and Sarah Apetrei, London: Routledge, 2014, p. 262. In Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition, Magee in fact fully confirms the Sarug-Boehme-Schelling lineage, where contraction becomes the root of all evil: ‘Given that Din is the origin of evil, God’s contraction is the root of all evil. Luria’s follower Israel Sarug … speaks of Ein-Sof before the tsimtsum in a way which is even more strikingly Böhmean’ (p. 229). Vital,

50 A. Bielik-Robson

18

19 20 21

on the other hand, either does not mention the ‘roots of Din,’ or reinterprets this motif by suggesting that, in accordance with Isaiah, God not so much withdraws in anger as withdraws his anger, so the creation can come out as an autonomous being and enjoy the divine tolerance. ‘[i]t is not difficult to see that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era. Spirit has broken with the world it has hitherto inhabited and imagined, and is of a mind to submerge it in the past, and in the labour of its own transformation. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward’ (PS, 6). F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt, Albany: SUNY, 2006, p. 29 (hereafter PI). See Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf. The Perverse Core of Christianity, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003, as well as Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, trans. J. T. Swann, London: Verso, 2009. It is crucial to remember that all basic Hegelian terms – Aufhebung, Entäusserung, and Erinnerung – derive from Luther’s translation of Saint Paul. According to Catherine Malabou, Entäusserung is certainly ‘kenosis,’ but it also adds an additional meaning – of alienation and separation – which is not present in the traditional ‘analogical’ understanding of the divine self-sacrifice as the gift that does not deplete God’s superabundance, and which I try to trace back to the Lurianic influence: ‘In the Encyclopedia Hegel makes the point that the world as created is ‘separated by its Entäusserung from the divine being.’ For the theologians, this dialectical interpretation of Entäusserung introduces lack into God and ruins the superabundance of the Father’ (Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel. Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 91).

3

From text to presence Ricoeur and medieval monastic biblical contemplation Joseph Milne

The central question I would like to raise in the following discussion is: What light may be thrown on the devotional mystical literature of the medieval monastic tradition with the aid of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics? I have in mind here the devotional approach of the Cistercian tradition and its particular mode of allegorical reading of Scripture. Unlike the later scholastic tradition, where the allegorical interpretation of Scripture takes on an intellectual and systematic emphasis, the Cistercian reading is grounded in ecstatic love and spontaneous response to Scripture, and is essentially affirmative or cataphatic. The purpose of scriptural contemplation is not so much for the sake of mystical knowledge as for blissful union, in which knowledge is a means to love rather than the reverse. In this tradition, scriptural exegesis becomes an internal spiritual exercise aimed at purifying the soul and fulfilling its yearning for union with God through love. It is a specifically devotional or affective form of mysticism, grounded in biblical exegesis. In terms of modern critical methods, such a manner of reading Scripture appears to be wholly subjective, and therefore unamenable to objective or critical scrutiny. In the light of the medieval monastic understanding of the soul and its modes of knowledge, modern methods of biblical scholarship are rendered largely redundant, and so the whole question of scriptural exegesis is reopened. Can Ricoeur’s hermeneutical approach to Scripture throw any new light on medieval exegesis, specifically on devotional exegesis? Or is Ricoeur’s work relevant only in the context of modern and post-modern concerns? His main work in biblical interpretation has been to seek a way back to symbolic, mythic and metaphorical understanding, which, he believes, was lost with the rise of modernity. Under the weight of historical criticism and the various other modern methods of biblical analysis, what Ricoeur calls the ‘testimony’ of the Bible has become almost entirely obscured.1 From his earliest work, Ricoeur has grappled with this problem. In Symbolism of Evil, he proposes a hermeneutic approach to the symbol through which we may regain our lost understanding: But if we can no longer live the great symbolisms of the sacred in accordance with the original belief in them, we can, we modern men, aim at a

52 J. Milne second naiveté in and through criticism. In short, it is by interpreting that we can hear again. Thus it is in hermeneutics that the symbol’s gift of meaning and the endeavour to understand by deciphering are knotted together.2 If Ricoeur’s proposal applies to the Bible, how far might it also apply to understanding medieval exegesis where these modern problems have not yet arisen? Can we hear and be led where the medieval exegete beckons us, or are we irrevocably barred from that route and forever detained within critical approaches that can never arrive there? In terms of Ricoeur’s questions about hermeneutics generally, can we come to a horizon of new being through Scripture as once the devout medieval exegete could? Can we learn from the medieval exegete? To help us explore these questions with some precision I will focus attention on the short treatise of Aelred of Rievaulx entitled On Jesus at the Age of Twelve. It is a meditation on the episode in Luke 2:42 in which Joseph and Mary take Jesus at the age of twelve to Jerusalem and afterwards leave without realizing they have left him behind. One of the reasons I have chosen this text, apart from its distinctly Cistercian devotional beauty, is because it is divided into a sequence of three interpretations: the historical, the allegorical, and the moral or mystical. The treatise is written in response to a request from the monk Yvo, the novice who was to become a lifelong friend of Aelred, and so has a special note of warmth, typical of Aelred, running through it. Speaking first of the historical sense, Aelred asks why Mary and Joseph allowed Jesus to be lost, and why Jesus took no pity on their distress. He answers, But let us consider please, why it was that the Lord Jesus was born in Bethlehem, went into hiding in Egypt, was brought up at Nazareth and from there went up at the age of twelve to the temple and the capital.… Because my Lord Jesus is a leader, a doctor, a teacher. As our leader he exulted like a giant in the course he had run, from the heights of heaven he came forth and to Bethlehem he came down. Leaving traces there full of heavenly fragrance, he made darkness, that is to say Egypt, his hiding place. Then, when he had shed the light of grace from on high on men sitting in darkness and the shadow of death, he ennobled Nazareth too with his holy presence. In this way made a Nazarene he comes into the temple not as a teacher but as a boy who learns, who listens and asks questions, and in all this he does not withdraw himself from the control of his parents. So, Lord, do you lead the way for wretched men, so do you heal the sick. This is the way you point out to those who are astray, this is the ladder you place for those who would mount on high, this is the return you indicate to exiles.3 We see immediately that Aelred reads the historical events not simply as history, even though they are history, but as themselves exemplars revealing a path for us to follow. The history itself teaches us and leads us. History has an

From text to presence

53

inner spiritual sense as part of its natural or literal meaning, prior to any allegorical interpretation. Therefore, Aelred says, ‘Who will grant me, good Jesus, to follow in your footsteps and so run after you that eventually I may overtake you?’4. He then likens himself to the prodigal son who cried out to the Lord to lead him to the right path to a city where he could dwell. The reply is the ‘House of Bread’, Bethlehem. ‘You have filled it with that bread indeed which came down from heaven and was laid in the manger to become the food of spiritual animals.’5 Here Aelred is not simply reading the sense of Scripture, but sees himself as addressed by the events unfolding in the text and in a dialogue with them. Furthermore, as typical from the Church Fathers onwards, he treats the entire Scriptural canon as a single corpus of interconnected meaning, so that no clear line is drawn between the historical events and their spiritual or salvific significance. In particular, the historical places, such as Jerusalem and Egypt, take on their full symbolical sense, yet without leaving behind their historical sense. The literal or historical sense of Scripture is not a bare report of facts but a narrative that assumes a shape and destiny in events. In his essay on the Song of Songs, Ricoeur observes that the historical sense of Scripture is never superseded by the allegorical or spiritual senses but remains rooted in the historical sense. The key to the different orders of meaning is not by way of ‘Platonic dualism of the sensible and intelligible, but rather than in terms of the duality of Pauline typology’. This typology places into relation two historical economies, not two ontological levels, and requires the reality of the first term, without any reduction of it to appearance or illusion, at least if the ‘type’ is really to function as the basis of meaning. Hence the spiritual sense is not substituted for the carnal sense.6 Thus, the literal sense of Scripture already has a double sense, historical and typological, and these in turn open out to the allegorical and spiritual senses without discarding any of the various senses. Ricoeur further observes that ‘[w]hereas for Platonic philosophers, the intelligible world has its own language, its own concepts, its own dialectic, within the setting of the Christian Church, the spiritual lacks a means of expression’.7 Since Biblical language relies upon multiple levels of meaning, yet remains grounded in the literal sense, and these meanings are more akin to ‘events’ than to the metaphysical realities and language of the Platonic philosophers, it would seem perilous to attempt to translate one into the other. The events are themselves a spiritual language. Yet Origen and the early Church take this risk when attempting to reconcile biblical revelation with Platonic philosophy. Aelred, however, avoids this danger by always remaining with the dramatic or poetic language of Scripture in each of his three levels of interpretation. It is clearly a feature of Aelred’s devotional or affective mysticism that it has no tendency towards Platonizing language.8 On the contrary, it sees the highest mysteries made visible or incarnated in the

54

J. Milne

manifestation of the natural world, which in turn makes visible a sacred cosmic history. We see how Aelred reads Luke in this way as he proceeds to draw parallels with our spiritual growing up to adulthood with the journey of Jesus from the darkness and uproar of Egypt, which he likens to the hardness of our hearts that makes us cry out to our Lord for help and guidance. This leads us to Nazareth, so that we may be raised under the guidance of our elders amid the flowers of the Scriptures and the fruits of the virtues. There the delights that come at twelve years of age will be our lot. For just as the Lord is born and conceived in us, so he grows and is nourished in us, until we come to perfect manhood, that maturity which is proportioned to the complete growth of Christ.9 This introduces a powerful theme of Cistercian devotion. The historical birth and growth of Christ is interiorized and made a model of our spiritual growth, so that, as Aelred says, we in some sense participate in Mary’s maternity when we nurture this life within ourselves and others.… For just as the Lord Jesus is born and conceived in us, so he grows and is nourished in us, until we come to perfect manhood, that maturity which is proportioned to the complete growth of Christ.10 For Aelred there is a direct correspondence between the historical events of Scripture and the spiritual journey of the soul. What takes place exteriorly in history also takes place interiorly for the individual soul – a correspondence to be highly elaborated a century later by Meister Eckhart. This correspondence is not yet an allegorical meaning of Scripture, but rather a way of interpreting history as disclosing in visible events the inner life of the soul, and in the unfolding life of Jesus the participation of all humanity in the journey of salvation. This way of understanding things is not confined to the interpretation of Scripture. It is typical of the twelfth century approach of the Cistercians, as well as the Victorines, to understand the natural world in a similar way and to see all things as having meaning in themselves yet also signifying other things. Speaking of this, Hugh of St Victor writes: The diligent examiner of Sacred Scripture should never neglect the meanings of things. Just as our knowledge of primary things comes through words, so too through the meaning of these things we come to understand what is perceived in a spiritual way and our knowledge of these things is made complete. The philosopher, in other kinds of writings, comes to know only the meaning of words, but in Sacred Scripture the meaning of things is much more excellent than the meaning of words.

From text to presence

55

The first is established by usage, but the second is dictated by nature. The first is the voice of human beings, but the second is the voice of God speaking to human beings. The meaning of words is established by human convention, but the meaning of things is determined by nature; and, by the will of the Creator, certain things are signified by other things. The meaning of things is much more manifold than the meaning of words. Few words have more than two or three meanings, but a thing can mean as many other things as it has visible or invisible properties in common with other things.11 Scripture takes the natural world itself as a sacred vocabulary, as ‘the voice of God speaking to human beings’. Therefore, the ‘literal’ sense of Scripture must never be discarded for the sake of seeking an allegorical sense. The ‘things’ spoken of in Scripture have ‘manifold’ meanings, all of which belong to them by nature. As Louis Dupré remarks, ‘To understand the book of nature fully we need the key of Scripture. Yet nature communicates meaning in its own manner. Scripture conveys meaning to nature; nature content to Scripture.’12 Nature and language are bound together: ‘Language and nature constitute two complementary parts of one divine creation, of which one articulates the manifold meanings inherent in the other.’13 In this way, the historical life of Jesus extends itself to embrace the spiritual journey of all humankind. Aelred next launches into quite extravagant speculations on what Jesus did in the three days he was missing. He wonders who fed him, who bathed him, but then realizes he had no need of these things because he had begun to manifest his power. He no longer needs Mary and Joseph. Aelred now wonders if Jesus conformed himself to be a beggar to experience the human lot and share human suffering. However, he thinks it best not to follow such rash speculations, attractive as they are. Yet there is something about these rash speculations that is typical of the freedom and humanism we find in the devotional exegesis of this time, and how this confirms the dialogical and prayerful engagement with Scripture that sharply distinguishes it from the later more dialectical scholastic approach that relies on logical demonstration and the support of authorities, addressing the reason rather than the heart or symbolic understanding. Leaving these thoughts behind, Aelred ventures a loftier hypothesis for each of the three days. On the first day Jesus perhaps ‘presented himself before his Father’s gaze’ to ‘consult his wishes as to the ordering of the redemptive work he had undertaken’, acting as the Son of God but as man, in ‘his human littleness’ consulting the greatness of God, offering his complete obedience to God in all the things that would follow in his life up to the Passion and the Resurrection.14 Next, he considers that on the second day he granted the sweetness of his face to the choirs of angels and archangels. By (through) informing them that the losses

56

J. Milne incurred by heaven’s citizens were shortly to be made good he brought joy to the whole city of God.15

On the third day Aelred imagines that he ‘visited the ranks of the Patriarchs and Prophets and confirmed, by showing them his face, what they had already heard some time previously from the holy old man Simeon’.16 Through these contemplations of the three days, Aelred discerns the whole work of the life of Jesus intimated. Such a way of reading Scripture assumes that every part of Scripture illumines every other, even to the point where a single pericope can contain within itself the whole story of creation and redemption, the two great works of grace. This extends what we usually take to be typological reading, where an event in the Old Testament signifies a correspondence in the New Testament. Such a manner of reading seems to arise spontaneously with the devout scholar deeply familiar with the whole of Scripture, where Christ becomes the key to every detail. So it was that when Joseph and Mary found Jesus in the temple those wise in the Scriptures were amazed at the wisdom of his answers. Aelred ends his meditation on the historical sense by laying aside speculations about whether Jesus grew in wisdom as he grew in his human life, which some speculate on, content that Jesus in his divine Sonship was perfect in wisdom, justice, beatitude and virtue. He closes these remarks saying we are not seeking ‘theological speculation but devotion, not something to sharpen your tongue but something to arouse your affections’.17 This remark indicates an awareness of the dangers that can lie hidden in ‘theological speculation’ where clever conjectures can easily become a form of indulgence and intellectual pride. This danger of ‘sharpening the tongue’ is countered by the devotional approach, where love is held to be a surer guide than the elaborations of reason, yet which has a certain latitude where speculation springs from devotion or arouses affection. Here Aelred proposes to leave the historical sense and pass on to the allegorical sense. Before discussing the allegorical sense, it is worth briefly summarising how Aelred regards the historical sense. He is certainly not concerned with the kind of historical facts or textual analysis of modern historical criticism. Rather he sees the historical narrative as unfolding a spiritual history, or a spiritual meaning illuminating and shaping history. We, as modern readers, gain a glimpse of a cosmos in which everything reveals a meaning of some kind, beyond its mere facticity, both within the world of Scripture and the natural world. Yet this is not an allegorical reading of history, which we explore next, but simply how, for the medieval mind, all things communicate meaning in the created cosmos. For Aelred, the historical events recounted in Scripture are in some sense revelatory events in a quite direct way which does not require a symbolic or allegorical interpretation, provided one stands reverently before them and allows the heart to be moved by the divine goodness unfolding through them. This devotional approach also illuminates the typological connections between the Old and New Testaments, which Aelred continually makes in this short

From text to presence

57

treatise. While seeing history in this manner, Aelred also sees an exemplar in the events of the life of Jesus of the interior life of the soul in its mystical ascent. History, seen in its sacred aspect, provides wisdom and guidance through its recapitulation in the journey of the soul from darkness to light. It is, in a sense, the spiritual journey of the soul writ large, indicating a correspondence between the order of the soul and the order of the cosmos – themes that will be richly elaborated later in the twelfth century. It is a considerable challenge for us to put ourselves in the position of those addressed by Aelred, so strong is our cultural habit of standing outside the orbit of texts springing from an orientation to truth different from our own. As Ricoeur observes, our critical stance has become a kind of desert for us from which it is hard to escape. This is especially the case with regard to our encounter with Scripture, where we have a huge cultural distance to overcome in order to hear the manner in which the fundamental question of salvation is posed: Cultural distance is not the only altering of the vehicle, but also the forgetting of the radical question conveyed by the language of another time. It is necessary to undertake, therefore, a struggle against the forgetting of the question, that is, a struggle against our own alienation in relation to what operates in the question.18 So a question arises with Aelred’s approach to biblical interpretation: does it belong to what Ricoeur calls ‘first naiveté’, a kind of innocence of understanding we have lost, or is there a wisdom behind its straightforwardness that comes of a purified heart? Does Aelred’s exegesis stand at the beginning or the end of Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle?19 We shall return to these questions after looking more closely at Aelred’s approach to the allegorical and mystical senses. What is clear, however, is that Aelred ‘hears’ the Scriptures in a very different manner to the way we hear them in our age. Aelred begins his exposition of the allegorical sense by seeing Joseph and Mary as representing the Jews, which is to say those of the Old Testament who seek the saviour while all the time he is present before them, in the temple in Jerusalem. At the same time, the temple becomes an allegory of the Christian church. Speaking of the Jews in this allegorical sense is common in Cistercian writings and we should not see it as ant-Semitic.20 Aelred’s meaning is subtler. It applies, for example, to any who look for Jesus in the Scriptures but fail to see him there. The temple is the inner sense of Scripture, and Aelred draws upon the Prophets and Psalms to illustrate this: You look for him in Isaiah, but he says: ‘The ox has known its owner and the ass its master’s crib, but Israel has not known me, my people has not understood’, and therefore you do not find him. You look for him in holy David, but according to him too: ‘Your table has become a snare for you’ and therefore you do not find him.21

58 J. Milne Aelred is calling upon the typological and allegorical reading of Scripture here, in which the inner sense of Scripture reveals the presence of Jesus, not simply his typological prophecy. They look in vain who read Scripture typologically but do not proceed to reading allegorically. Aelred next likens Joseph and Mary finding Jesus in the temple after three days to the final salvation of Israel, which is to say all those who inherited the Word but did not find it because they wandered in blindness. But also, they did not find Jesus because it was for them to enter the temple, not for Jesus to come out to them. Interpreting the first day, Aelred says The first day, on which the Lord Jesus, after entering our Jerusalem, hid himself from his mother, the Synagogue, and his brethren, the Jews, was the Apostles’ preaching to the Gentiles, as Paul tells the Jews themselves: ‘Since you judge yourselves to be unworthy of eternal life behold we turn to the Gentiles.’ Then indeed light from heaven shone upon the darkened hearts of the Gentiles, the gloomy shades of their former unbelief were scattered and the splendour of faith shed the rays of its brightness upon the minds of men who had been lost.22 The night of this first day, Aelred says, also represents the persecution of the Church and great suffering. This is overcome on the second day with the bright light of God’s compassion, when kings of the world were converted to Christ, the temples of the heathen were thrown down, the shrines of devils were dedicated to the memory of the martyrs and, as truth gradually made its way into men’s hearts, the confused night of unbelief was dispelled.23 But the second day is itself eventually darkened by ‘the clouds of perverse heresy’ until orthodox teachers dispelled error through reasoning and brought back the Sun of Justice.24 Aelred reads the allegorical sense as a vision of the times that have been and are to come. This is emphasized by his vision of the third day coming to a darkened close, which is our times, in which ‘charity [has] grown cold’25 and we now await the day when Jesus will be found again by his mother, which is the end of the world. In many ways this eschatological interpretation of Scripture is the most strange and challenging for our age. As Ricoeur observes,26 such a view of history belongs to a way of understanding which can have real meaning only within a community of understanding, in which a religious or mythical vision of the unfolding of a sacred history shapes and orders daily life and transforms profane history and time. The narrative of profane time overwhelms our culture and its symbols and it would seem practically impossible to cross the boundary into what Mircea Eliade calls sacred time in which alone true or real being exists.27

From text to presence

59

In his Figuring the Sacred, Ricoeur takes up Eliade’s treatment of the cosmos and the natural elements as heirophanies, in which the cosmos assumes a double aspect of sacred and profane time. The natural symbolism of the cosmos reveals itself ‘dramatically’, as ‘events’, thus revealing a sacred history in sacred time parallel with profane time. It is from this dramatic sacred history that mythic narratives arise into speech. All these traits attest that in the sacred universe the capacity for saying is founded in the capacity of the cosmos to signify something other than itself. The logic of meaning here thus proceeds from the very structure of the sacred universe. Its law is a law of correspondences.28 Human history stands at the threshold of sacred time exemplified in ritual remembrance. Yet the universal symbolism of this threshold into sacred time is precisely the threshold of the temple. The temple situates the human story into the sacred cosmic drama and ‘the true temple always conforms to some celestial model’.29 This, I suggest, reminds us of Ricoeur’s insistence that we do not know ourselves without the mediation of a narrative that locates us within the world, and that the Cartesian ‘transparency of the self’ and its autonomy is an illusion that modern philosophy is especially called to overcome.30 With Christian eschatology we are confronted with a mystical narrative of dwelling in the cosmic unfolding of sacred time, and that it is only through this narrative that we may come to self-knowledge. Now we must give a brief summary of Aelred’s elaboration of the mystical sense of the passage in Luke, or what he calls the moral sense. The moral sense leads to the contemplation of spiritual mysteries which, Aelred says, are ‘not so much in books as in experience’.31 Here Bethlehem is the beginning of the good life in poverty, characterised by renunciation. Nazareth is the practice of the virtues, principally temperance, prudence and justice. Jerusalem is the contemplation of heavenly secrets. Contemplation, he says, raises the ardent soul to the heavenly Jerusalem itself, unlocks heaven, opens the gates of paradise, and reveals to the gaze of the pure mind the Bridegroom himself looking out as it were through the lattice-work, is more comely than the sons of men.32 The spiritual visions that come with this contemplative experience, though diverse, are of three characteristic kinds and belong to God’s power, his wisdom, or his goodness. Aelred says of these, It pertains to his power that without him no creature exists. It flows from his wisdom that without him no teaching imparts learning. It is the effect of his goodness that without him no activity is of any advantage.…

60 J. Milne Therefore in the creation of things we contemplate his power, in their form his wisdom, in their use his goodness.33 Aelred urges in particular the contemplation of goodness, giving many instances from Scripture in which ‘sin is consumed by burning love’.34 Imagining the sinful woman in the house of Simon the Pharisee, he implores her to kiss the feet of Christ: Kiss, I say, those feet, press your fortunate lips to them, so that after you no sinner may be afraid of them, no one, no matter what crimes he has committed, may flee from them, no one may be overcome by the consciousness of his unworthiness. Kiss them, embrace them, hold them fast, those feet venerated by angels and men alike.35 Such impassioned devotion is typical of Cistercian mysticism, in which the works of God are to be seen in Christ’s ‘human’ presence as well as his divinity. But this contemplation belongs not just to Jerusalem but specifically to the temple: For Jerusalem has a courtyard, it has gates, it also has a temple. While the courtyard sometimes lies open even to enemies, the gates are open only to friends and entrance into the temple is granted only to the perfect. The man who is able to see the eternal in the things of time, the heavenly in the earthly, the divine in the human, the Creator in the creature, may exalt as if admitted to Jerusalem’s courtyards.36 Aelred observes that the philosophers were able to enter the courtyard through the power of the intellect, but anyone, with veil removed, can look upon God’s glory in sacred Scripture and may say he has entered Jerusalem’s gates. It is the vision opened up through love alone that sees ‘the eternal in the things of time, the heavenly in the earthly, the divine in the human, the Creator in the creature’. The vision of love embraces all things in both their heavenly and earthly aspects, unlike the intellectual Platonizing forms of mysticism, which tend to displace one order with another. For Aelred the ‘earthly’ is never for one moment discarded. But if upon the altar of your heart the flame of heavenly desire has set on fire the fatness of interior love and the marrow of your affections so that the fragrant smoke mounts up from your burning prayer and your mind’s eye extends its gaze in heaven’s secret places while the palate of your heart tastes the blessed savour of God’s own sweetness, then you have been in Jerusalem’s temple and offered there a most acceptable holocaust.37

From text to presence

61

This ecstatic mystical contemplation in the temple, we recall, is in the context of Joseph and Mary seeking Jesus who must return with them to Nazareth. So, likewise, with the contemplative who would stay forever with the divine mysteries, he must return to Nazareth, which is to say to care for the souls of men or for the neighbour.38 Thus, one moves from toil in Nazareth to rest in Jerusalem, from the ‘fruits of good works to the secrets of contemplation’, and then back to Nazareth for the sake of the neighbour, so that neither neighbour nor contemplation are neglected.39 Aelred’s mysticism of love thus embraces all things through joining good works and contemplation, so that love of God and love of neighbour truly become one. Far from negating the created order, his mysticism transforms and sanctifies it. It is a mysticism of community in which friendship, grounded in the common love of God, flourished and was held in highest esteem. Thus, Aelred gives us three senses of the episode in Luke in which Jesus at twelve is found after three days in the temple. Much of his interpretation is informed by traditional exegesis, though with a distinctly Cistercian emphasis on mystical love. Aelred is not so much concerned with giving an interpretation of the Gospel episode as he is with describing and commending its use as a spiritual exercise, of leading the soul through the stages of renunciation, virtue, and finally contemplation. The sacred text becomes a means of spiritual transformation, and through that transformation it reveals ‘heaven’s secret places’. He ends his treatise saying, ‘Realize that we have been concerned not so much to give an exegesis of the Gospel passage as to draw from it, as you asked, some seeds for meditation’.40 In that final statement we see that, for Aelred, exegesis, understood as concern for the sense of Scripture, is of secondary importance, and that the real purpose of reading the Scriptures is to be led to meditation or contemplation. While exegesis exercises the intellect and the tongue, as he puts it, contemplation involves the whole will and beckons the heart to rise up through created things and come into the presence of heavenly mysteries. The threefold senses of Scripture become a path of purification through which the reader passes, a discipline that lifts the gaze by stages from the ‘facts’ of history to their inner meaning, and from their inner meaning to the divine dispensation of the cosmos, and finally to the presence of the eternal mysteries. Yet this journey through the ascending senses, as we have observed, does not negate the created world. Rather it illuminates it spiritually, and this is a particular characteristic of twelfth century monasticism, not only the Cistercian. As Aelred says, ‘The man who is able to see the eternal in the things of time, the heavenly in the earthly, the divine in the human, the Creator in the creature, may exalt as if admitted to Jerusalem’s courtyards’.41 This journey has a certain similarity with the stages of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc as mentioned previously.42 What Aelred calls the historical sense roughly corresponds with the initial holistic grasp of the episode, with prefiguration. This understanding arises from participation in a tradition, along with all the presuppositions of one’s tradition. It is engaged and uncritical, or rather,

62 J. Milne pre-critical. No real distinction is drawn between literal and symbolic sense, but meaning is taken as a whole. As Stiver observes, this initial phase of interpretation is the same with Ricoeur, Heidegger and Gadamar.43 It is only when we come to the allegorical sense that any distinctions are made between historical and symbolic meaning. This second stage, however, is not ‘critical’ in the sense that Ricoeur defines modernity, in which various methods of analysis are brought to a text. Ricoeur makes an allowance in his hermeneutic arc for modern critical methods in what he calls the ‘long route’ to understanding, here going beyond Heidegger and Gadamar. He believes that we cannot return to a ‘pre-critical’ reading of texts and so must make a detour through critical methods – even if this means no more than seeing their ultimate limitations.44 Yet there is a discipline of another kind at work peculiar to the pre-modern biblical tradition, a stage peculiar to the reading of Scripture that opens a way to the universal sense from the local or historical sense. This arises out of the typological approach to the text in which one episode acts symbolically in relation to another, opening up the ‘local’ narrative event to a cosmic event or sacred history. It is here that Aelred draws out the eschatological meaning of the episode in Luke. This leap of symbolic imagination is not random or arbitrary, even though the Church has often looked upon it with suspicion. In Ricoeur’s terms this step into the symbolic sense is equivalent to entering the ‘world of the text’, in which ‘meaning’ now arises from within the realm of the text itself, extending the horizon of understanding of the reader. It is here where the question of ‘subjective’ reading arises, or as to whether the reader is projecting meaning onto the text. There are countless instances throughout the middle ages where examples of allegorical interpretations are condemned for being the mere inventions of the interpreter. The concern was not that there is no allegorical sense, but rather that an interpretation is given with a view to proving the interpreter’s own opinions rather than what is truly disclosed.45 Such eisegesis was regarded as the work of intellectual pride, and therefore as obstructing the revealing power of Sacred Scripture. The medieval exegete was expected to follow a moral rigour while reading Scripture where modern scholarship follows types of intellectual rigour. This means that, rather than standing outside the text in some neutral position – as the structuralist, sociologist or historian aims to do – the medieval exegete submitted himself before the text in order to be transformed by it, and the discipline for this was the practice of the virtues. This moral submission to Scripture brings about not only individual transformation, but also a reflective participation in the sacred history of the religious community. The notion of ‘private exegesis’ is completely foreign to the medieval exegetical tradition. The contemplation of Scripture means entering into the community of understanding. The third stage of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc corresponds more closely with Aelred’s moral or mystical sense of the episode in Luke. Here we arrive at what Ricoeur calls ‘appropriation’, where the text again becomes holistic, but now the ‘world of the text’ is fully entered into, where the meaning of the text

From text to presence

63

becomes part of oneself and opens up a new realm of being, accompanied by new self-understanding. ‘The subjective concept that corresponds to the world of the text is the concept of appropriation. By this I mean the very act of understanding oneself before the text.’46 In Aelred’s terms, this is to enter into ‘heavenly mysteries’, a realm of infinite meaning which may only be affirmed but never fully understood. It is here that we enter into what Ricoeur calls the domain of poetic language: My deepest conviction is that poetic language alone restores to us that participation-in or belonging-to an order of things which precedes our capacity to oppose ourselves to things taken as objects opposed to a subject. Hence the function of poetic discourse is to bring about this emergence of a depth-structure of belonging-to amid the ruins of descriptive discourse.47 Poetic language involves both symbol and metaphor, yet symbol is the more primordial, where, for example, a stone, a tree or a star convey meaning as part of a sacred, living order of nature beyond simple ‘descriptive discourse’. Metaphor occurs in the already purified universe of the logos, while the symbol hesitates on the dividing line between bios and logos. It testifies to the primordial rootedness of Discourse in Life. It is born where force and form coincide.48 Also, poetic language is ‘freed, above all, from the intended references of both ordinary and scientific language, which, we may say by way of contrast, are bound by the facts, empirical objects, and logical constraints of our established ways of thinking’.49 It is on this point of the difference between purely ‘descriptive’ language and poetic or symbolic language that the central questions of biblical exegesis really arise, and where there is the greatest difference between the medieval and modern exegetical methods or approaches.50 Ricoeur here follows the insights of Northrop Frye in his The Great Code.51 Frye argues that purely descriptive language, which begins roughly in the sixteenth century with Francis Bacon, is where language attempts to represent a purely objective world. Following Vico, Frye takes this to be a ‘vulgar’ or ‘demotic’ use of language, while poetic, metaphorical and mythic language is the more naturally human language, grounded in a primordial participation in the order of things. This is the language of the Bible.52 In his essay ‘Pistis and Mythos’ Frye writes: Myth is the language of the present tense, of ‘confrontation’, of events assumed to start operating within the reader as he reads. The historian tries to place us in the past with what he describes; Biblical writers convey events to be ‘spiritually discerned’, which we, had we experienced them, would have misinterpreted them as ordinary experience. Myth and metaphor express what language is primarily equipped to express, and only

64

J. Milne myth and metaphor can evoke the deeper world of identity in which different things are one thing, and all men the same man.53

Biblical events ‘spiritually discerned’ belong to salvation history or to heilsgeschichte, which can speak only in myth and metaphor, belonging to a wholly different order of understanding than world history or weltgeschichte. Frye observes that this distinction is drawn by Aristotle in the Poetics where he says that history conveys only particular events, while poetry conveys universals.54 ‘The Gospels are myths, and any attempt to “demythologize” them will disintegrate them to nothing.’55 That is to say, any attempt to translate them to a different order of language or knowledge destroys their essential meaning. What has been apprehended poetically or mythically can be comprehended only poetically and mythically as ‘true’ on its own terms. We may observe that Aelred never really leaves the poetic or metaphorical mode of understanding as he progresses through the three levels of interpretation. Indeed, his progress from the ‘historical’ to the ‘mystical’ becomes more poetic as he proceeds. Jerusalem, for example, takes on more meaning as Aelred moves from its historical to its mystical meaning, but it always remains ‘sensory’ in his mind’s eye. It never becomes an abstraction or ‘stands for’ something different from Jerusalem. Rather, Jerusalem unfolds and manifests itself more fully. This follows because everything ultimately derives its meaning from its highest mystical sense being made visible, through the presence and redeeming activity of Jesus. In ‘Pistis and Mythos’ Frye argues that all the kinds of imagery of the Bible, oasis imagery, pastoral imagery, agricultural imagery, and city imagery, are gathered and taken up and rendered meaningful in Jesus. In the New Testament Christ becomes the metaphorical key that identifies all these images. He is (a) the tree and river of life, (b) the Lamb of the sheepfold, (c) the bread and the wine, the vine of which his followers are branches, (d) the temple is his body and the city his bride.56 Biblical imagery operates across Scripture as a whole and reveals meaning by accumulative self-reference, so that the images become the vocabulary speaking beyond the words and independently of authorial intention. In other words, they place before us what Ricoeur calls the ‘world of the text’, that to which the text refers. ‘The world of the text designates the reference of the work of discourse, not what is said, but about what is said. And the issue of the text is the world the text unfolds before itself.’57 Further, ‘The proposed world that in biblical language is called a new creation, a new Covenant, the Kingdom of God, is the “issue” of the biblical text unfolded in front of the text.’58 It is only when we arrive at the ‘issue’ of the biblical text that we engage with its referent as a participant, as the one addressed. This means going beyond any objective analysis of the text that we can deploy – the critical methods of modern scholarship – and permitting the text to disclose itself from its own revelatory power, which comes not from the words but from the referents of the words.

From text to presence

65

There is a striking similarity here between Ricoeur’s ‘referent of the text’ and Hugh of St Victor’s statement, mentioned earlier, that ‘in Sacred Scripture the meaning of things is much more excellent than the meaning of words’. The transformation of understanding through hearing the scriptures as the one addressed, as the one called to ‘new being’, must bear fruit in action. For Aelred this means one must descend from the contemplation of the heavenly order into the temporal world, the human realm, and work in love of neighbour and for the good of all. The meaning of the text is transformed through meditation into action, or the mysteries of the temple in Jerusalem become the good works in Nazareth. Through this, a reconciliation is realized between the eternal and the temporal, the Creator and the created. This reconciliation is not through a metaphysical insight, as perhaps we find in Aquinas or Meister Eckhart, but rather through the outpouring of divine goodness. For Aelred, as for Bernard of Clairvaux, goodness and love provide the key to human existence and to the cosmic unfolding. As Ricoeur observes, an economy of love or grace has no bounds, and it is to this ‘new being’ that the Scriptures call us through action.59

Notes 1 For a general discussion of this, see D. Stiver, Ricoeur and Theology (Bloomsbury, 2012), Chapter 2. 2 Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper Row, 1967), 351. 3 Aelred of Rievaulx: Treatises & Pastoral Prayer, Introduction by David Knowles (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Cistercian Publications 1971), p. 5. 4 Aelred p. 7. 5 Aelred p. 7. 6 André LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 283 7 LaCocque and Ricoeur, Thinking Biblically, p. 284 8 Emero Stiegman draws a useful distinction between ‘monastic’ and ‘scholastic’ theology in the twelfth century, showing that the monastic approach to Scripture aimed at ‘experiencing’ the presence of God, as distinct from ‘understanding’ God with the scholastic approach. The monastic approach placed greater emphasis on the deep meaning of the literal sense. The Medieval Theologians, edited by G. R. Evans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), Emero Stiegman ‘Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St Thierry, the Victorines’ p. 130. 9 Aelred p. 8. 10 Aelred p. 8. 11 Hugh of St Victor ‘On Sacred Scripture and its Authors’, in Interpretation of Scripture Theory edited by Franklin T. Harkins and Frans van Liere, New York: New City Press, 2013 12 Louis Dupré Louis, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), p. 68. 13 Louis Dupré Louis, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection, p. 68. 14 Aelred p. 10. 15 Aelred p. 11. 16 Aelred p. 11. 17 Aelred p. 13.

66 J. Milne 18 Ricoeur, ‘The Language of Faith’ in Charles E. Reagan & David Stewart, editors, The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), p. 224 19 The hermeneutical circle or arc traces a movement in stages from pre-understanding (prefiguration) to appropriation (refiguration), passing through naive understanding to a writer-reader encounter, to methods of critical reading and historical contextualisation, to final encounter with the referent of the text. This encounter with the referent leads the reader into a new realm of being, or way of being in the world. This is refiguration, which now serves as a new beginning for further encounters and appropriations of meaning, not only of the text but of the world. 20 In ootnote 17 on page 18 of Aelred of Rievaulx we read ‘This chiding of the Jews was not uncommon in the writings of the Cistercian Fathers, who were very much men of their own times.… In this they were not anti-Semitic in the sense we would understand it today; indeed Bernard staunchly defended the Jews in 1146 against the anti-Semitic persecution of Rudolph of Saxony. The approach, rather, was theological and their desire was to increase the Gentile Christian’s appreciation of that which he had so gratuitously received.’ Here we should bear in mind that Aelred is reading Scripture allegorically, where different people – Samaritans, Seduces, or nations such as Egypt – are ‘types’ signifying different spiritual conditions. 21 Aelred p. 19. 22 Aelred p. 20. 23 Aelred p. 20. 24 Aelred p. 21. 25 Aelred p. 21. 26 See ‘The “Sacred” Text and the Community’ in Figuring the Sacred in which Ricoeur discusses the how the sacred text defines the community and its selfunderstanding, and how the modern critical approaches to the Bible of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have tended to remove the sacred text from its community, or else redefine it as belonging to the scholarly community instead where it is no longer ‘sacred’. 27 See Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1959), Chapter 2. 28 Ricoeur ‘Manifestation and Proclamation’ in Figuring the Sacred (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), p. 54. 29 Ricoeur ‘Manifestation and Proclamation’, p. 54. 30 For a clear overview of Ricoeur’s questioning of the Cartesian transparency of the self, see Dan Stiver Ricoeur and Theology (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), p. 21. 31 Aelred p. 25. 32 Aelred p. 27. 33 Aelred p. 32. 34 Aelred p. 34. 35 Aelred p. 34. 36 Aelred p. 36. 37 Aelred p. 36. 38 It is characteristic of Cistercian teaching that one must return from the highest contemplation to love of neighbour. Bernard of Clairvaux ends the fourth stage of his On Loving God in the same way, fulfilling the great commandment to love God and neighbour. 39 Aelred p. 37. 40 Aelred p. 39. 41 Aelred p. 36. 42 For a full discussion of Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc, see Dan Stiver ‘A Hermeneutical Arc’ in Theology after Ricoeur (London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), pp. 56–78.

From text to presence

67

43 Dan R. Stiver, Ricoeur and Theology (London: Bloomsbury 2012), p. 37. 44 Stiver, Ricoeur and Theology, p. 37. 45 For a detailed and most illuminating discussion of the controversies over the uses and abuses of allegorical interpretation of Scripture, from Origen till the twelfth century, see Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis, Volume 3, Chapter Two, ‘Subjectivism and Spiritual Understanding’. 46 Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’ in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press 1985), p. 108. 47 Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’, p. 101. 48 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 59. 49 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p. 59. 50 For a full discussion of the primacy symbols see Ricoeur, ‘The Hermeneutics of Symbols and Philosophical Reflection: I’ translated by Denis Savage in Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations (Eventston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), pp. 287–314 51 Ricoeur, ‘Salvation Myths and Contemporary Reason’ in Hermeneutics: Writings and Lectures, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 160. 52 Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), p. 13. 53 Northrop Frye, ‘Pistis and Mythos’ in Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 200), p. 13. 54 Northrop Frye, ‘Pistis and Mythos’, p. 7. 55 Northrop Frye, ‘Pistis and Mythos’, p. 6. 56 Northrop Frye, ‘Pistis and Mythos’, p. 4. 57 Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’ in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, edited by Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985) p. 100. 58 Ricoeur, ‘Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation’ in Essays on Biblical Interpretation, edited by Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), p. 103. 59 Ricoeur, ‘The Logic of Jesus, the Logic of God’ in Figuring the Sacred, translated by David Pellauer, edited by Mark I. Wallace (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1995), p. 279, also ‘Love and Justice’, p. 315.

This page intentionally left blank

Part II

Apophasis and continental philosophy

This page intentionally left blank

4

Different deserts Deconstructionism and Dionysian apophaticism Maria Exall

Jacques Derrida’s critical analysis of the tradition of negative theology is that it is a reversal which repeats, by inverting, key ontological and epistemological principles of “Western” thought and culture.1 Derrida proposes an alternative understanding of negation, a model of alternating being and other, a non-dialectical third way that is neither being nor non-being – an atheological, ahistorical place beyond absence and presence, and irreducible to either. The irreducibility and inaccessibility of Derrida’s conception of negation is, in many ways, at odds with the “negative way” of Christian mysticism, rooted in the works of Pseudo-Dionysius. In what follows I shall critique Derrida’s understanding of the apophatic tradition from a dialectical theist position, in line with key principles of the Dionysian tradition. I will explain the thoroughly a-theistic nature of the negative theology we find in the Mystical Theology and the Divine Names – a Neoplatonic understanding of non-being as a beyond-being that is a radical negation, both truly other to being and other to the other to being. Building upon this critique of Derrida’s reinterpretation of negative theology, I will go on to argue that his interpretation actually precludes a “this-worldly” mysticism, as found in the works of mystics in the apophatic tradition such as Meister Eckhart, and hence, in his deconstructionist understanding, the contribution of negative theology to political theology is severely limited. I will conclude by suggesting certain other priorities for a contemporary apophatic approach to politics and religious renewal.

I The Derridean interpretation of negative theology Despite his positive engagement with the negative theology of PseudoDionysius in works such as How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,2 Derrida rejects both the dialectical relation between presence and absence and the radical negation of apophaticism. In the sections below I will consider Derrida’s understanding of “something secret”, contrast his understanding of denegation with the Neoplatonic conception of non-being, and then move on to explain key criticisms of Derrida’s interpretation of negative theology made by apophatic theologians.

72

M. Exhall

Something secret? Something hidden? Derrida distinguished between the apophasis of negative theology and its relationship to revealed religion and his own understanding of “something secret”: There is something secret. But it does not conceal itself. Heterogenous to the hidden, to the obscure, to the nocturnal, to the invisible, to what can be dissimulated and indeed to what is non-manifest in general, it cannot be unveiled.3 His view that “there is something secret”, which neither conceals itself “nor can it be unveiled”, contrasts with the central epistemological claim of The Divine Names that all things both reveal and conceal God, for God is known in all things and apart from all things.… He is All Things in all things and Nothing in any, and is known from all things unto all men, and is not known from any unto any man.4 Derrida distinguishes his understanding of the “something secret” from the initiation rituals of the mystery cults which contributed (through the Greek contemplative tradition) to the development of the Dionysian apophatic tradition. He also distinguishes his concept from the “learned ignorance” of the practice of contemplation found in the negative way of the Christian mystics, and from other esoteric practices. In short, he states, “the secret is not mystical”.5 Bernard McGinn sees the Dionysian principle that “all things reveal and conceal God” as resulting from the conception of the “double status” of the transcendence and omnipresence of the One in Neoplatonic thought.6 The manifestation of the One in the empirical world is necessarily connected to the nature of the One as non-being. Deirdre Carabine argues that it is the tension between manifestness and hiddenness which results from this double status that represents the key feature of the Dionysian tradition of negative theology.7 The tension between the One’s own manifestation through the One’s presence in the universe, and the One’s being that is beyond being, is between absence and presence, between simplicity and multiplicity, and is expressed in Dionysian epistemology as a dialectical relationship between knowing and unknowing. The conception of “double status” explains the link between the total transcendent “otherness” of the One and the absolute immanence of the One.8 Cristina d’Ancona Costa suggests that, despite the different theological backgrounds of Plotinus and Dionysius, the First Principle of Dionysian philosophy operates in the same way as the Plotinian One. Dionysius makes explicit the connection between transcendence and omnipresence, and Dionysian texts use the same Plotinian metaphors of “overflowing” and “remaining” to describe the process of procession and return.9 The Plotinian One is totally transcendent but, equally, universally present.10 The transcendence of the One calls us to turn away from the world, but is at

Different deserts

73

the same time the means of direct knowledge of the divine, available here and now. The Plotinian concept of transcendence, whilst necessitating a negation, is also the source of all being, life and thought: in other words, all beings owe their being to the One, which is in all beings but not one of them.11 The transcendence of the One, then, is necessarily of a piece with its creative power and presence.12 This teleology of non-being can, in this context, be described as a negative naturalism, a dynamic system that includes human participation. Human action is part of the Plotinian system, though not in the way we understand the individual agency of modern thought. There is a tension within Platonism between the positive striving of ascent and the negative turning away from the world, and a differing relative emphasis on these two aspirations can be seen in the philosophical difference between Platonic desire and Plotinian desire. Whilst the idea of the desire for the Good is present in Plato’s thought, Pierre Hadot has pointed out an important distinction between the Platonic model of love and the Plotinian one. Hadot notes that whilst Plato saw the desire for the Good as something that moves from the carnal to the pure, for Plotinus the desire for the Good is always focused on the Good.13 Hadot sees in Plotinus a valuing of the virtue of passivity, that is, of preparing oneself for the coming of the Good, something he argues is less evident in the Platonic conception of love. He also sees this emphasis on passivity as evidence of the more “feminine” character of Neoplatonism compared with Platonism.14 It is through a negative “turning away” that the One is reached, rather than through a positive, active ascent. Andrew Louth has written of our “dual” understanding that we human beings and the world came into existence and are sustained by the One, and that at the same time we yearn for the One. The Plotinian model of procession and return, and the twofold, transcendent and immanent, status of the One, speaks to our spiritual experiences of the divine as both beyond us and within us, and articulates how these two human experiences are necessarily related. As well as constituting the metaphysical explanation of the origin of the universe, it makes sense of subjective experiences of the connectedness of all things and, at the same time, of our inner alienation, and the contradictory feelings that sensible embodiment is both a path to the divine and a distraction from it.15 But the dialectical relation between the negative transcendence of the One and its immanence, and the spiritual experiences that Louth suggests flow from this, are refuted by Derrida.16 Instead, he posits a non-dialectical model that “flickers” between absence and presence. Hent de Vries explains this “flickering” as “a certain alternation or oscillation that goes beyond the either/or of affirmation or negation, continuation or interruption, fidelity or antinomism, reverence for icons or iconoclasm”, a “belonging without belonging”.17 Denys Turner, however, maintains that the ultimacy of postponement and the postmetaphysical rhetoric of difference that result from Derrida’s non-dialectical “flickering” model is a poor substitute for the radical a-theism of Dionysius who asserts that “God is to be found only on the other side of every possible assertion and denial”.18

74 M. Exhall Before discussing further the nature of this radical a-theism as interpreted by apophatic theologians such as Turner, I will consider the nature of the “God beyond being” in Derrida’s understanding of apophaticism – a focus of much attention and some contention amongst philosophers and theologians. God beyond being The use in the Dionysian texts of the word hyperousious to describe the nature of beyond being has been subject to differing philosophical interpretations. Whilst Jean-Luc Marion has interpreted hyperousious as a hyper-essence, Derrida has read it as otherwise than/without being.19 Underlying these different interpretations are different models of the relationship between “being”, “other” and “non-being”. Marion argues that the transcendence of the One includes an absolute negation of being, whereas Derrida’s interpretation indicates that the non-being of the One is not absolute, as it is always compromised by a positive transcendence. Kevin Hart supports Marion’s view in the disputed understanding of hyperousious.20 He believes that the prefix hyper has a negative connotation that Derrida does not take on board and is, ironically, analogous to the deconstruction of metaphysics that Derrida himself supported.21 Hart sees the negative theology of Dionysius as more than a secondary apophatic foil to a primary cataphatic theology. Rather, he suggests, Dionysian apophaticism places positive theology in the context of a radical negative theology.22 Hart and Marion’s interpretation seems to follow more closely a Plotinian understanding of non-being as a beyond-being that is a radical negation, truly other to being, and other to the other to being. As John Rist points out, the Plotinian “not being” that is beyond being does not contain the otherness of the One.23 The One is other than finite beings, even though its otherness resides in the finite beings because the One is not related to any other things: all things relate to it and it has no contrary.24 Toby Foshay has characterized Derrida’s concept of denegation as “inverse apophatics”, but this is not strictly accurate, for Derrida denies the supercessive nature of the “negation of the negation”. Derrida’s understanding of negation is as alternating being and other, a non-dialectical third way that is neither being nor non-being, a place beyond absence and presence, irreducible to either.25 Mark C. Taylor has described Derrida’s analysis of this non-dialectical third as a repressed “tropic of negativity” in Platonic thought that is “neither being nor non-being”. This non-dialectical “third” of Derrida’s thought is based on the concept of the khora, as found in Plato’s Timaeus, as a “repressed” negativity. This “third place”, which Derrida insists is a desert within the desert, a place that will “never permit itself to be sacralized, sanctified, humanized, theologized, cultivated, historicalized”,26 is a place that cannot be reached or touched, a place that is neither being nor non-being. Derrida insists that the khora is a radically atheological and radically nonhuman place that has nothing to do with negative theology.27

Different deserts

75

We can perhaps agree with Thomas Carlson when he says that the core difference between the positions of Marion and Derrida is that for Marion “God’s presence is overwhelmingly given”, while Derrida posits the “endless deferral of presence by the different trace of language that cannot be inscribed within the circular closure of any economy”.28 Negative theology and the “creative mistake” of Neoplatonism It seems important to explore further the theological criticisms of Derrida’s interpretation of negative theology from those who support a classical interpretation of the Dionysian apophatic tradition, and therefore a dialectical relation between God’s distinction and God’s indistinction. As a prolegomena to this it is necessary to recognize, as I have already suggested above in discussing the difference between Platonic and Plotinian desire, how the Neoplatonic categories of Dionysian thought differ from earlier Platonic conceptions. Neoplatonic ontological categories represent what Bernard McGinn has described as a new direction, based on what scholars such as Pierre Hadot have called a “creative mistake”. This “creative” evolution in the history of ontotheology had consequences for the development of negative theology as well as Neoplatonism.29 Pierre Hadot maintains that this creative evolution came about as a result of the pressures of exegetical thought, which presumed a particular Neoplatonic understanding of participation whereby participation in being transcends the participating subject. In response to the perceived ontological problem contained within the second hypothesis of the Parmenides, Davidson explains that Porphyry was focused on the question “if the one is, how is it possible that it does not participate in being [ousia]?” Hadot argues that as a consequence of engaging with this apparent problem, a distinction was made by Neoplatonic philosophers between “being” as an infinitive and “being” as a participle. As Davidson says: Being as an infinitive came to characterise the first One, pure absolutely indeterminate activity, while being as a participle is a property of the second One, the first substance and first determination that participates in this pure activity. This distinction arises from the formulation used by Plato at the beginning of the second hypothesis of the Parmenides, joined to the Neoplatonist exegesis of the Parmenides and the need for Porphyry to try to explain, from within the system of exegesis, why Plato said what he did.30 McGinn has described how Dionysius applied this Neoplatonic interpretation of Parmenides – i.e. the derivation of transcendental plurality from absolute unity – to the Christian God, by articulating the negation of the first hypothesis, the One, and the affirmation of the second, the procession of the One, as negative and positive expressions of a single creative source.31 The One described by Plotinus in the Enneads is neither at rest nor in motion, nor indeed in time or place (but in contrast to Derrida, this is not

76

M. Exhall

because of any oscillation or alternating between these two states).32 In Plotinus we see a break from Platonic orthodoxy. Rather than the coexistence of the single One and multiplicity (and rest and motion) of earlier Platonic thought, in Plotinus both multiplicity and motion are seen as resulting from the One.33 Like McGinn, A. H. Armstrong sees the concept of the Neoplatonic unknowable and negatively transcendent One as without a source in Plato.34 He too read Plotinus’ interpretation of Parmenides as an original philosophical development, whereby the ideas of Parmenides were given a new theological meaning. The Neoplatonic One, then, is everywhere and nowhere, neither limited nor unlimited, and in all things and in no things.35 Apophatic criticism of Derrida’s interpretation of negative theology Both Paul Fiddes and Denys Turner have challenged the omission, in Derrida’s interpretation of Dionysius, of some of the main characteristics of the apophaticism that arose from this new direction/creative mistake. For these theologians, the hyper-essence is both beyond being and that which is other to being. This allows for a radical otherness of total transcendence and hence the radical a-theism of negative theology. For the God of negative theology is recognizably an extension of the Plotinian concept of the Good, of an otherness so unlike anything in the created order that everything must be denied, everything, that is, that we think God to be. We allow him his existence, and that alone, for he does not possess anything of the things which come later and are lesser than him, and that includes being, the One simply is.36 Mary-Jane Rubenstein has also discussed the epistemological implications of the dispute between Derrida and Marion on the nature of hyperousious in her article “Unknow Thyself: Apophaticism, Deconstruction, and Theology after Ontotheology”. She seems to suggest a middle way between the epistemological consequences of deconstructivist interpretations and those of traditional negative theology.37 Rubenstein sees the “relentless neither/nor” of negative theology as in some ways similar to the denegation of deconstructionism. Rubenstein asserts that Dionysius arrives at a “proto-post-structuralist moment” when he says that apophatic negations are beyond every denial and assertion. But she sees apophaticism as distinct from both the motionless confidence of ontotheology and the aimlessness of différance. Apophatic desire, she asserts, “is neither unresolved nor atheological”.38 In his essay “The Quest for a Place Which is Not-a-Place”, Paul Fiddes39 too discusses the arguments of the deconstructionists against conventional negative theology, particularly the view that because we cannot establish full presence or full absence, neither transcendence nor immanence as understood in traditional theology is possible. The theologians’ response to the “challenge” of the khora, he suggests, should be to articulate hidden presence. Fiddes says that apophaticism is one model for explaining the idea of the “hiddenness” of

Different deserts

77

God that we find in the scriptures. He describes the apophatic model as assuming that there is a place in the self that is inseparable from (but not identical with) the being of God. This inner self is experienced as emptiness/silence/ desert. God is so near to us that normal subject/object distinctions do not apply. Fiddes argues that it is the accessibility of the other and the promise of presence that distinguish this apophatic model of hidden presence from Derrida’s view of alternating presence and absence. Fiddes’ suggested response to the dilemma of absence and presence does fit with the Plotinian understanding of the necessary link between transcendence and immanence, without reifying the subject. In contrast with the deconstructionist problematizing of the relation between being and presence, and denial of the possibility of self-present self-knowledge without a divine ground, Fiddes’ conception of the hiddenness of God, whilst indicating presence rather than absence, does not legitimize the “subjective project” of the self. Denys Turner has also rejected the idea that the Derridean alternating model of presence and absence41 bears much relation to negative theology in the Dionysian tradition. In a more positive development of the apparent contradiction between absence and presence in negative theology, he describes an apophatic tradition that can express both absence and an excess of presence.42 The Neoplatonic One possesses an excess of being, and so when Dionysius was describing the nature of the Super-essence he was not so much affirming the existence of God as asserting that God is more than those things that exist.43 In The Divine Names, Dionysius says “Not Being is an excess of Being”44 and he further tells us that “He is not an Attribute of Being, but Being is an Attribute of Him” and that “He is not contained in Being, but Being is contained in him”.45 Turner suggests that the epistemological implications of this mirror the ontological implications. And like Marion, he sees the unknowability of God as a result of God’s excess of actuality: “God is not too indeterminate to be known; God is unknowable because he is too comprehensibly determinate – too actual”.46 Turner actually criticizes Derrida for failing to take on board the radical a-theism of negative theology. For whilst Dionysius insists that “there is no kind of thing which God is”47 Derrida subsumes the “no-thing” in our understanding of the divine to a “meta-rhetoric of the ultimacy of postponement, the divine ‘defined’ by the impossibility of definition, destabilising therefore all possibility of definition … reducing all alterity to indeterminacy”.48 Turner concludes that Derrida’s concept of otherness/difference is, in the end, incompatible with the negative way rooted in the Dionysian texts. Turner goes further in his Faith, Reason and the Existence of God where (echoing Fiddes) he explains that “Derrida’s generalised apophaticism of ‘otherness’ seems to have roots in a view of the ‘otherness’ of persons which takes to a point of absurdity their irreducible inaccessibility to my subjectivity, to my ego”. He continues, “Derrida’s principle, ‘every other is completely other’ is not only a straightforward logical absurdity, it is also an ethically offensive one, for all its apparently benign origins in Levinas’ less radically stated ethics of ‘alterity’”.49 40

78

M. Exhall

Kevin Vanhoozer too has questioned the ethical implications of the Derridean concept of the “other”, comparing the Derridean “other” unfavourably with the Christian naming of the other as “neighbour”. Postmodern thinkers typically view the other as so different from anything our categories can name, so resistant to categorisation as to be unable to say anything positive about it. The other virtually dissolves. Lacking substance the other becomes easy to ignore. For how can one care for or love that whose nature is unknown to us? Is it possible genuinely to love without knowing? Christianity too, of course, seeks to protect the “other”, but it does so by naming the other: neighbour.50 Paul Janz accepts the Levinasian enterprise as a worthy attempt to revive an ethical orientation as fundamental for philosophical questioning, an orientation that eschews the “egoistic spontaneity of the same”, but despite this he too maintains that we cannot understand God’s transcendence in terms of “alterity” or “the Wholly other”.51 Janz explains: “Levinas … pushes the exteriority and alterity directed in its ‘ethical’ focus to radical lengths when he speaks of the ‘absolute remoteness’ of God’s transcendence as Other”, for52 God is not simply the “first other”, the “other par excellence”, or the “absolutely other” but other than the other, other otherwise, other with an alterity prior to the alterity of the other, prior to the ethical bond with another and different from every neighbour, transcendent to the point of absence, to the possible confusion with the stirring of the there is.53 Notwithstanding Levinas’ consistently radical understanding of alterity, Janz makes an important criticism of alterity as such when applied to theological understandings of God’s transcendence. For, he points out, whilst it is commonly accepted that a conjunctive connection between the Creator and the creation would lead to an inappropriate comparative ordering or continuum, (pantheism, if you like) the “totalising” language of disjunction is also a cognitive mechanism that brings entities into a comparative relation (and just as true if the disjunctive comparison is expressed in terms of opposition or over-againstness).54 Janz therefore questions the appropriateness of alterity within theology, and specifically the use of alterity by postmodern theologians to construe Christian transcendence as a series of infinite disjunctions. He believes that using alterity in this way leads to qualitative comparisons as erroneous as quantitative ones.55 For the significance of God’s transcendence, for Janz, as for Turner, (and indeed for Augustine), is that it is actually “closer to my creatureliness than it is possible for creatures to be to each other”.56 Thus notwithstanding contemporary attempts to seek a dialogue between key concepts in deconstructionism and apophaticism, it appears we are talking about very different deserts. Derrida maintained his criticism that the apophatic understanding of negative theology justifies conventional theological and

Different deserts

79

philosophical norms without an acknowledgement of the truly radically a-theistic and dialectical nature of apophatic thought in the Dionysian tradition. I wish to conclude this part of my discussion with an explanation of the doctrine of divine indistinction in Meister Eckhart’s theology and its role in providing grounds for ethical and political motivation, i.e. as a necessary basis for a genuinely dialectical “this-worldly” negative theology. God’s indistinction, action and contemplation McGinn has identified two broad understandings of union with God in the history of Christian mysticism, the first being the uniting of wills of the divine and human lovers, and the second the indistinct identity between God and human beings.57 The apophatic approach to mystical union is in the second category, an indistinct identity between the human and the divine, which allows for a non-exclusive mutuality between divine freedom and human will, and divine will and human freedom. This indistinct identity is based on a Neoplatonic understanding of God’s presence in all things as esse indistinctum, as their true reality, and our becoming aware through “unknowing” of that presence.58 This apophatic conception of mystical union predominates in the intellectual stream of the Dionysian tradition.59 In thinkers such as Eckhart, the concept of union is “an unmediated and direct intellectual grasp of God and the soul as one with God”. It is an intellectual act, but not one which is reflexive as in usual acts of knowing.60 This Eckhartian model of union goes beyond a union of wills, for the created will must be annihilated in order to clear the way for the action of the divine will, and union is achieved through our passive intellect.61 Markus Vinzent explains Eckhart’s understanding of divine indistinctiveness as resulting from his conception of God “as rational intellect … the universal cause of being, his own being and the being of everything”, but also God as rational intellect and therefore above being. God (the One in Plotinian terms) is an essentially detached First Principle, which means God is an enabler of otherness by being itself this other.62 McGinn explains the doctrine of God’s indistinction in terms of the model of procession and return, the two important principles of Neoplatonic thought found in the Dionysian texts, where “God is unknown, always remaining super-eminently identical with Godself, but ‘overflowing’ into a multiplicity of differentiation in his effects”.63 Because of this the Neoplatonic One “cannot be opposed to anything in the intelligible world because it is itself known by negation”.64 McGinn emphasizes (as Turner also does, as we have seen above) the importance of understanding that the non-being of the One, that is beyond being, is actually an excess of being.65 Marcus Vinzent has explained how Eckhart followed through this philosophical idea of the excess of God’s being and mutuality in a conception of love whereby it is linked to inclusiveness and abundance, to such self-giving and intimacy that God wants to “snuggle with the soul”.66 The mutuality in the conception of indistinct union is the focus of Eckhart’s famous metaphor of the eye – “the eye in which I see God is the same eye in

80

M. Exhall

which God sees me. My eye and God’s eye is one eye and one seeing, one knowing and one loving”.67 There is a universality and present-ness in this concept of union, though Eckhart’s understanding of indistinct union as dialectical retains our distinction from God in our formal being, as ens hoc et hoc [being this or that] as McGinn explains.68 According to McGinn, the roots of Eckhart’s conception of indistinct union are found in both pagan Neoplatonism and the Christian Neoplatonism of Dionysius.69 Whilst some female mystics of the thirteenth century, most notably Marguerite Porete, had similar understandings of mystical union to Eckhart, it was Eckhart who explained the concept in greater detail and in more daring fashion. Building on his theological conceptions of the divine ground (grunt), and breaking with the traditional distinctions in spiritual tradition between the active and contemplative life in his explanation of the Martha and Mary story, Eckhart was able to articulate what McGinn has described as a “spirituality of the active life”, a this-worldly mysticism.70 McGinn defines Eckhart’s concept of indistinct union as “a mutual and continuous state of nonabsorpative ‘awareness’ of identity in the grunt”. This union, he says, is a “form of deification which, in the ultimate analysis, goes beyond knowing and loving, at least as we experience them in ordinary conscious states”. The capacity to become “unknowingly” aware of the grunt, a focus of Eckhart’s preaching, represented a universalizing of the call to mystical union, and was one of a series of important changes within Christian mysticism of the thirteenth century.71 This awareness, as explained by Eckhart, was open to all believers and compatible with a life in the world of service and activity. The result of such awareness was transcendent activity, a welling-up (bullito), which was connected by Eckhart with his conception of “living without a why” (sunder warumbe).72 In the dialectic between the human and the divine within the divine ground in Eckhart’s theology, then, God is the only true “actor” and we are empty existence. We have to reject, says Michael Sells, any form of attachment to our good works or own will to follow God; in other words, we must reject “human” work.73 But, Sells points out, the rejection of “human” work is not a rejection of activity, but rather of the identification of the agent with the ego-self: “the true actor is the divine who works in the soul”.74 In this way we are free from God the creator, we are beyond loving and knowing and are like God who is free of all things and therefore in all things.75 But, as Sells explains, the proper context of Dionysian apophaticism is directional – for it is in the moment of radical detachment, the moment of abandonment of the self, of the will, and of all good works, that we find the deity at work within the soul.76 Relevant to this understanding of radical detachment based on the doctrine of divine indistinction is the dispute on the nature of charity (specifically the exact nature of God’s work in the soul to produce acts of charity), a matter of great contention in Medieval theology. Turner has explained that the question of whether charity was the created work of the spirit acting through the soul’s natural powers, or was uncreated spirit displacing human agency, was a matter

Different deserts

81

77

of dispute between Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas held that the charity by which we love our neighbour was our creative participation in the uncreated life of God; significantly, in his model the will of the creature belongs to the creature. Lombard, however, saw charity as the work of the spirit: it is not created, for it is God Godself.78 Nevertheless, in contrast to the presumptions of many modern theologies, Aquinas (along with Lombard) regarded the distinction between creator and creature as non-exclusive.79 Tangential, but also relevant, to this was the fear, prevalent in later Medieval theology, of an antinomianism which rejected the need for the cultivation of virtues, and the ordinary forms of holiness such as prayer and the sacraments as well as asceticism and good works. The condemnation of Marguerite Porete for coming close (while not actually proposing) that the annihilated human will is identical in nature with the divine will in the Mirror of Simple Souls is, as Turner has pointed out, evidence of the subversive nature of apophaticism. Whilst Porete advanced views that were thoroughly orthodox in the thirteenth century, they became dangerous in the fourteenth.80 Her assertion that perfect charity in the liberated soul possesses all virtue, as identity with the divine will, meaning that it can live as freedom what appears to be obligation,81 was too similar to the negative theology within whose parameters Medieval positive theology was still positioned, to be allowed to continue.82 An understanding of mystical union as an indistinct identity between the human and the divine, which allows for a non-exclusive mutuality between divine freedom and human will, and divine will and human freedom, leads to a form of “this-worldly” mysticism, an ethical praxis with “detachment” as a central feature.83 Such an understanding is, however, a challenge to the accepted parameters of much modern positive theology, and indeed modern intellectual thought, where the “human” and the “divine” are considered competing “territories”.84

II Religious renewal, political theology and the negative way The debate on the dialectical or non-dialectical nature of the relationship of the One and Many, Unity and Multiplicity, Universalism and Diversity, has important political implications. The differences in ontology and epistemology I have identified above between deconstructionist interpretations and traditional negative theology lead to even greater divergence on matters of ethical and political theory, though this is rarely discussed in contemporary analysis of this subject. As Mary-Jane Rubenstein has pointed out, “the peri-theological conversation between deconstruction and apophaticism has been almost entirely linguistic; that is to say, it has never quite entered the terrain of the ethicopolitical”. This, she argues, “is striking, considering in Derrida’s later work, the political implications of deconstruction become clearer”.85 Derrida’s rejection of the traditional “negative way” interpretation of Dionysian apophaticism has to be seen in its own context, that of an anti-universalism characteristic of the continental philosophy of 1960s–1980s. Thinkers such as Deleuze, Lyotard and Foucault identified universalism not only with metaphysics,

82 M. Exhall but with the whole of “Westernisation”, including the politics of colonialism and neoliberal globalization,86 and the non-dialectical interpretations of the relationship between the One and the many in the thought of Derrida I have discussed above can also be found in their works. There has been a turn back to the idea of the universal in such contemporary philosophers and political theorists such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, but not to a dialectical approach.87 But there are, within theology, interpretations of apophaticism that can lead to a questioning of the status quo in religious and political power. In their introduction to the collection of essays on the apophatic tradition Silence and the Word, Oliver Davies and Denys Turner mention three distinct currents of contemporary thinking to which the apophatic tradition can contribute. One is, of course, the dialogue with continental philosophy, through the affinities with an intellectual environment where “negation – as difference, absence, otherness” are significant foci. But Davies and Turner also identify two other key currents of thinking which I believe have greater potential to inform the present challenges we face within religious traditions and in society. An updated “thisworldly” apophaticism has, I suggest, a role to play in movements for religious renewal, and in providing a justification of religious motivations for ethical and political activity in our “secular” age. First, Davies and Turner identify a resonance in classical apophaticism with the strong contemporary trend towards the internalization of religion, the turn to “religious experience” which is “indifferent or even hostile to traditional religious beliefs and practices”.88 Derrida himself pointed out apophaticism’s role as “aiming to unsettle/destroy”,89 and Davies and Turner hold that mystical texts can speak to our modern context, in which disruptive discourse about God “challenges the conventions of religion … and the dull rehearsal of moribund and formulaic beliefs”.90 And, second, Davies and Turner suggest there is potential within classical apophaticism to engage with the “widespread scepticism about traditional religious belief and values”: in other words, it is “a point of contact” with denials of God, feelings of God’s absence.91 To conclude, I briefly consider both of these possibilities: how the tradition of Dionysian apophaticism can contribute to a questioning of existing religious institutional structures; and how a “negative” understanding of the role of political theology in our “secular” society may overcome the scepticism, if not actual hostility, to religious belief as a motivation for political activity. In the first instance I will outline a recent reinterpretation of Dionysian concepts of hierarchy by Sarah Coakley.92 In the second, I shall make reference to the potential of a “negative way” of doing political theology as an “unpowering” that parallels Dionysian apophatic “unknowing”. Hierarchy or equality? Challenging religious power Apophaticism has always had a role in Christian history as a challenge to formulaic belief systems and “religiosity”. This function is both negative and

Different deserts

83

positive, what Michael Sells describes as the “relentless critique of religious traditions [and/or] a realisation of the deeper wisdom within such traditions”.93 However, a significant stumbling block to the application of the Dionysian tradition to contemporary ethical and political concerns has been an apparently rigid (and implicitly socially reactionary) concept of hierarchy at the heart of the Dionysian texts. Sarah Coakley has considered the criticism (including feminist criticism) of the inherent inequality of hierarchy.94 She has established an authentic interpretation of the use of hierarchy by Pseudo-Dionysius which is more complex and paradoxical. In God, Sexuality and the Self, Coakley argues for a way beyond current impasses in Church thinking on gender and sexuality. She suggests we should reject a mapping of divine power with worldly male power – a fallacy of both those who argue for a “masculinist” approach to divine power and those who oppose such an approach.95 Instead, she asserts a “God of infinite ontological difference, of ecstasy and of endless divine creativity”, and argues for an interpretation of Dionysius’ hierarchy as from “the Source of all that is, the One who places ‘order’ of being precisely where it is destined to flourish in ecstatic response to the Spirit’s own ecstatic lure”.96 Coakley urges us to think of the paternal divine in the Trinity as an ecstatic goal as well as source, and argues that, though Dionysius did indeed have an idea of a “layered universe”, this ordering is actually about our ordering of our own values and desires through practice. She believes that radical ecstatic equality is possible, and is the result of a transformation by ecstatic participation in the Spirit, and maintains that false patriarchal hierarchies based on egological97 dualities can continue to be challenged in relationships, in the Church and in the world whilst maintaining the right sort of primary submission to the spirit – which is both a purgative cost and a source of joy.98 A similar conclusion is drawn by Rubenstein, when she considers the implications for justice of the cosmic hierarchies, teleology and the political order in Dionysius. The political vision that emerges from the work of Dionysius, she concludes, is “either radically elitist or radically welcoming”.99 Apophaticism, praxis and dialogue with atheism There is within the apophatic tradition the possibility of a radical approach to engagement with “secular” society and atheistic thought. It would not, as a negative way, begin from any assertion of Christian uniqueness or distinctiveness. Nor would it necessarily embrace political theologies of Virtue Ethics or even make the case for the Common Good – or only in so far as this was in accord with a universalist perspective. Equally, it would eschew liberal conceptions of human rights merely limited to a defence of individual autonomy, and would rather support a radical equality between all people. Its aim would be the achievement of a political “disinterestedness” towards our own activity and the structures of political power in line with Eckhartian principle of acting “without a why”.

84 M. Exhall Such an approach would, I suggest, be based on a praxis of “unpowering” that would parallel the “unknowing” of Dionysian apophatic epistemology. Such praxis would take into account aspects of Eckhart’s metaphysics relevant to a theology of human action in the world, most particularly his understanding that there is no opposition between spirit and flesh, body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and God and creation.100 Not only would such an approach reject positive theological or ecclesiological justifications, it would also not claim a privileged place for spirituality or belief as “interior” motivations. Turner has explained that, for Eckhart, there is no “inner” or “outer” within the soul; there is instead what he terms a “paradox” of interiority.101 Turner’s understanding of Eckhart’s paradox is similar to that of the political theologian Dorothee Soelle, who argued against the distinction between a mystical internal and a political external, and for a contemporary “this-worldly” mysticism that eschews the private, the esoteric, and indeed the quietist and irrational.102 I seek to erase the distinction between a mystical internal and a political external. Everything within needs to be externalised so it does not spoil, like the manna in the desert that was hoarded for future consumption. There is no experience of God that can be so privatised that it becomes and remains the property of one owner, the privilege of a person of leisure, the esoteric domain of the initiated.103 In her understanding, Soelle, like Turner, avoids the conventional polarization of the active and contemplative parts of the soul, claiming instead a thisworldly mysticism for Christian spirituality in the Eckhartian tradition.104 Adopting a political disinterestedness based on a “this-worldly” mysticism would lead us to consider the advantages of embracing a negative ecclesiology in our time, what Edward Schillebeeckx called “church theology in a minor key”.105 An open acknowledgement that the Church does not exist for itself, but rather for the salvation of the whole world, would be a fitting and healthy balance to “ecclesiocentrism”. It would also fit with the recognition (for those who are believers) that “salvation from God comes about first of all in the secular reality of history and not primarily in the consciousness of believers who are aware of it”.106 This would allow us to stand in solidarity with the excluded and the powerless in our society, acting together with non-believers – “without a why” – for progressive political change.

Notes 1 As Mark C. Taylor explains, “The via negativa traditionally turns out to be a reversal that changes nothing but merely repeats, by inverting, the ontological and epistemological principles that lie at the foundation of Western thought and culture”. Mark C. Taylor, Nots (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 3. 2 Taylor explains that Derrida identifies two strands of negative theology in the Greek tradition – one dominant and one repressed. It is the repressed one – a non-dialectical third, neither being nor non-being, negativity without negativity – which he identifies with the Platonic khora. Taylor, Nots, especially 47–53.

Different deserts

85

3 See “Passions: An Oblique Offering”, especially the section “There is something secret”, in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 20–22. 4 The Divine Names, chapter 7.3, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987). Compare this with Derrida, “Passions”, 21. 5 Derrida, “Passions”, 21–22. The secret is “as mute and impassive as the chora and as such resists history and narrative”. 6 See Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 1) (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 174. 7 Deirdre Carabine, The Unknown God: Negative Theology in the Platonic Tradition; From Plato to Eriugena (Louvain: W.B. Eerdmans, 1995). 8 See Denys Turner’s essay “Apophaticism, idolatry and the claims of reason” in which he asks: “What is it the atheist denies that the negative theologian does not also deny?” Denys Turner, “Apophaticism, idolatry and the claims of reason”, in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11–34. 9 Cristina d’Ancona Costa, “Plotinus and Later Platonic Philosophers on the Causality of the First Principle”, in The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, ed. Lloyd Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 356–385. 10 Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen McKenna (London: Penguin, 1991) 8.1.44–54. 11 Enneads 5.2.1.1–2. See also d’Ancona Costa, “Plotinus”, 362. 12 Enneads 5.2.1.1–2 and 3.8.9, 44–54. 13 Pierre Hadot, Plotinus or The Simplicity of Vision, trans. Arnold Davidson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 55. See also Enneads 5.5.12, where in contrast to the “stirring of passion towards (Beauty)” which is a perception of “those already in some degree knowing and awakened”, the Good is seen as “earlier, the prior” and “the Good, as possessed long since and setting up a natural tendency, is inherently present to even those asleep”. 14 Pierre Hadot, Plotinus, 56–57. 15 Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1989), 12. 16 Jacques Derrida “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials”, in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 167–190. 17 Hent De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 30. De Vries explains that in Aporias Derrida describes this as “belonging without belonging”. 18 Turner, “Apophaticism”, 19. 19 This is discussed by de Vries in Philosophy and the Turn, especially pp. 53–95. See also Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking”. 20 Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 21 Hart, Trespass, 202. 22 “Negative theology plays a role within the phenomena of positive theology but it also shows that positive theology is situated with regards to the radical negative theology that precedes it”. Hart, Trespass, 201–202. 23 “The One has no otherness, the others are other than the One”. John Rist, Plotinus: The Road to Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 37. 24 Rist also makes the point that commentators on Plotinus, including Porphyry and Victorinus, confused the “indeterminent being of unqualified matter with the non-being of the One”. Rist, Road to Reality, 35–36. 25 See Toby Foshay, “Denegation and Resentment”, in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 1–24.

86 M. Exhall 26 De Vries, Philosophy and the Turn. See especially de Vries’ discussion on the khora/ chora, pp. 108–115. See also Graham Ward’s introduction to Postmodern Theology, where he explains the “unstable, mysterious, ungrounding origin” of the khora that is found not only in the work of Derrida but also in Irigaray and Kristeva as something irreducible, that which is repressed. 27 Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking”, 167. 28 Thomas Carlson “Postmetaphysical Theology” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 74. 29 See Arnold Davidson’s introduction to Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 6–7. 30 Pierre Hadot “Philosophy, Exegesis, and Creative Mistakes”, in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 71–77. 31 See McGinn, Foundations, 58. 32 As opposed to Derrida’s alternating presence and absence. See Enneads 5.11.9. 33 In her discussion of modern phenomenological approaches to Parmenides, Jussi Blackman points out the contrast between such readings, with their correlation of inter-subjective structures and intending consciousness, and the “transcendental” in Parmenides’ Poem, where “every possible awareness of determinant being is potentially accompanied by the awareness of the very accessibility of beings to awareness. It is intelligibility as such that is ‘transcendental’ in the sense of transcending all particular determinations or instances of presence”. Jussi Blackman, “Unity in Crisis”, in Politics of the One: Concepts of the One and the Many in Contemporary Thought, ed. Artemy Magun (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 92. See the section on pp. 90–97, and note 26 referring to the modern phenomenological readings of Reinhardt and Schwabl. 34 “It seems, then, impossible to find a source for the ‘negative theology’ of the extreme transcendence and absolute unity of the Plotinian One in Plato or Xenocrates … the most distinctive characteristic of Neoplatonist theology (is) the unknowable, negatively transcendent One”. A. H. Armstrong, The Architecture of the Intelligible Universe in the Philosophy of Plotinus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 21. 35 See Carabine, The Unknown God, 146. 36 Carabine, The Unknown God, 134. 37 However, in her 2009 paper “Dionysius, Derrida and the Critique of Ontotheology” Rubenstein seems to suggest a more critical position for theology toward the dialogue between deconstruction and apophaticism. She warns of the “wistful” hope of some contemporary theologians: “if only the gap between these post- and pre-modern negatives could be closed, contemporary theology seems to say wistfully, then we could be assured once and for all that the Trinity is not the transcendental signified; that the God of revelation is not ‘the God of the philosophers’; that the dead God was never God to begin with. And yet, the sheer proliferation of these studies indicate that neither Derrida nor Dionysius provides such assurance.” Mary-Jane Rubenstein “Dionysius, Derrida and the Critique of Ontotheology”, in Re-thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, eds Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2009), 197. 38 Mary Jane Rubenstein, “Unknow Thyself: Apophaticism, Deconstruction and Theology after Ontotheology”. Modern Theology 19(3) (2003), 356. 39 Paul Fiddes, “The Quest for A Place Which is ‘Not-a-Place’: The Hiddenness of God and the Presence of God”, in Silence and the Word: Negative Theology and Incarnation, eds Oliver Davies and Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 35–60.

Different deserts

87

40 Fiddes, “The Quest”. Fiddes describes several models to explain hiddenness. Firstly, the apophatic idea where there is a continuity between the divine and the human; secondly, the Jewish idea of Zimsum, whereby God has left a space within God’s own being for created being; thirdly, Levinas’ model of Other-God whereby we find traces of God in the face of our neighbour; and fourthly with revealed religion, where God is present but mediated through objects in the world. Fiddes believes that what negative theology has in common with these other approaches that deal with the hiddenness of God is the emphasis that “God is not an object of desire but the one in whom we desire the Good”. 41 See discussion of this in Coward and Foshay, Derrida and Negative Theology, 74. 42 Denys Turner discusses the idea that the Eucharist represents a dialectic of presence and absence in his book Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67. 43 See W. J Sparrow-Simpson, “The Influence of Dionysius in Religious History”, in Dionysius the Areopagite: The Divine Names and the Mystical Theology, trans. C. E. Rolt (London: SPCK, 1940). Carabine also remarks: “To think of the One as either Mind or God is to think too meanly”. Carabine, Unknown God, 123. 44 The Divine Names, 89. 45 The Divine Names, 139. 46 Turner, Faith, 188–189. 47 The Divine Names, 98. 48 Turner, “Apophaticism”, 21 49 See Turner, Faith, 167. 50 Kevin Vanhoozer, “Theology and the Condition of Postmodernity: A Report on the Knowledge (of God)”, in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 24. 51 Paul Janz, Command of Grace: A New Theological Apologetics (London: Continuum 2009), 68. Janz’s fundamental philosophical criticism of Levinas is that Levinas, as he himself admits, confines himself to the analysis of “notions in the horizons of their appearing” i.e. his project of alterity is an essentially phenomenological cognitive exercise despite the radical lengths he goes to express this alterity. 52 Janz, Command of Grace, 71. 53 Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), 165–166. 54 Janz, Command of Grace, 72. 55 Janz quotes Kierkegaard saying “God is not a ‘more’”, and explains that “the being of creation and the ‘being’ of the Creator could not simply be added together cognitively as ‘commensurate’ quantities … and … God is not a qualitative ‘other’ either as if the transcendent reality of God and the reality of creation could be brought together cognitively as merely ‘incommensurate’ disjuncts”. Janz, Command of Grace, 73. 56 Janz, Command of Grace, 75. 57 See the discussion “Union with God and living without a why” in Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart; The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing (New York: Crossroad, 2001), 147–161 58 McGinn, Meister Eckhart, 147. This is an awareness that arrives through a process of detaching, birthing and breaking through. 59 Following the thirteenth century interpretation and rewriting of Dionysian texts by Thomas Gallus of the Victorine School, the influence of Dionysian ideas took two different directions. The narrative of the Dionysian tradition, according to Paul Rorem, “can be simplified by distinguishing the line that followed the Victorine synthesis of love and knowledge from the line that did not. In the first category are Bonaventure, The Cloud of Unknowing, and many later authors; in the latter, Albert the Great and Meister Eckhart”. Rorem, Sheldrake and others have

88 M. Exhall

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82

83

labelled these two streams of the Dionysian tradition “affective” and “intellectual”. See Paul Rorem, Pseudo Dionysius, A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). McGinn,Meister Eckhart, 151. McGinn, Meister Eckhart, 152. Markus Vinzent, The Art of Detachment(Leuven: Peeters, 2011), 32–37. “[An] unknown God always remaining super-eminently identical with himself, whilst overflowing into differentiation in his effects, in order eventually to regain identity by reversion”. McGinn, Foundations, 162–163. McGinn, Foundations, 162–163. McGinn Foundations, 162–163. Vinzent, Art, 39–40. McGinn explains that from the perspective of the soul’s created being there is no mutuality, but from the perspective of the soul’s ground there is a meeting of equals.Meister Eckhart, 148. McGinn, Meister Eckhart, 148. According to McGinn, Eckhart insists that this distinction will remain in heaven. McGinn, Meister Eckhart, 148. Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany 1300–1500. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, vol. 4 (New York: Crossroad, 2005), 188. McGinn sees grund as Eckhart’s “master metaphor”. McGinn, Meister Eckhart,150. McGinn, Meister Eckhart, 151, referring to Eckhart’s sermon “The just will live forever”. Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 193. Sells Unsaying, 193 Vinzent, Art, 32. Vinzent explains how God is also “without a why” – i.e. God does not need a reason for creation. Sells,Unsaying, 193. Denys Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 22. Turner, Aquinas, 162–163. Turner, Aquinas,164. Turner, “Why was Marguerite Porete Burned?” unpublished text of lecture to Oxford Medieval Society, 18 February 1999. McGinn explains the coexistence of freedom and pure spontaneity of mystical union in Eckhart’s thought as following from his view that “Goodness stands in the interior act”, not in anything external. The intention of the soul still exists, but it is purely interior. McGinn argues that Eckhart’s understanding was different from that of Aquinas, though Eckhart cited Aquinas in his defence at trials in Cologne and Avignon. See the discussion in McGinn,Meister Eckhart, 155. Turner asks why the theology of Porete, so similar to that of Lombard and William of St Thierry, was so threatening to the ecclesiastical authorities of the day. After considering the wider context, he suggests that its prima facie orthodoxy was, “in the contingent junctions of the early fourteenth-century ecclesiastical politics, more subversive than any straightforward heresy could have been”. He concludes: “Perhaps what William Humbert [her inquisitor] perceived was that it was safer to condemn the Mirror as heterodox than to concede the subversive potential of its orthodoxy”. Turner, “Porete”. To be clear, this conception of detachment in the apophatic tradition is not the remote impersonality or aloof impartiality, abstract and unconnected with real life, understood in the common usage of the term. Rather, in Eckhart and other apophatic mystics, it is the principled grounding for the process and practice of

Different deserts

84

85 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100

101

89

our ethical motivation, the source of our motivation to create a more equal society. See Maria Exall, “Reason, Detachment and Political Egalitarianism: A Critically Analytical Exploration in Thomas Nagel and Pseudo-Dionysian Apophaticism”, PhD thesis, Kings College London, 2015. See Denys Turner’s discussion, in the introduction to his Faith, Reason and the Existence of God, of “parasitical theism” – i.e. theisms which form their doctrine of God in response to certain grounds for atheism. One such version of parasitical atheism that Turner has in his sights is that of Karl Barth. He views Barthian theism as the polar opposite of a Feuerbachian atheism, in the sense that it is a theism that assumes we must displace the human in order to have God. See also Turner, Faith, pp. 229–231. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida”, 207. Keti Chukhrov, “Genesis of the Event in Deleuze – from the multiple to the general”, in Politics of the One: Concepts of the One and the Many in Contemporary Thought, ed. Artemy Magun (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 51. I am using “dialectical” in the Hegelian sense here, i.e. a relationship that allows the transition of opposites into each other. See the discussion of Badiou’s apparent dialectical position as actually a dualist fixation between the one/multiple, thesis/ antithesis, and ultimately a logical formalism, in Vitaly Kosykhin’s essay “Suspension of the One: Badiou’s Objective Phenomenology and the Politics of the Subject”, in Politics of the One: Concepts of the One and the Many in Contemporary Thought, ed. Artemy Magun (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 71–83. Kosykhin discusses Badiou’s non-monist position and the balance he gives to the negative and affirmative (see p. 73). See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) for a neo-Marxist explanation of the relationship of dialectics to “universal order” of globalization. Davies and Turner, “Introduction”, in Silence and the Word, 3. Carlson, “Postmetaphysical”, 71–72. Carlson explains that Derrida saw apophaticism as “a parasite” neither fully included nor excluded by the (religious) tradition it lives off. Davies and Turner, “Introduction”, Silence and the Word, 3. Davies and Turner, “Introduction”, Silence and the Word, 1. Sarah Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self: An Essay on the Trinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Sells,Unsaying, 13. In both Coakley, God, Sexuality and the Self and in Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Coakley, God, 320–321. Coakley, God, 321. Coakley adopts the term egological from Luce Irigay’s insight that the Spirit is an interruption of any delimited duality inherent in human erotic relationships. Coakley, God, 318. Coakley sees the paradoxical approach to hierarchy in Dionysius as mirroring the paradoxical approach to naming God. Coakley, God, 322. Rubenstein, “Dionysius, Derrida”. Turner identifies the following Eckhartian metaphysical assumptions as significant: first, there is no real opposition between my “true self” and my empirical self, or between the uncreated and created parts of the soul – they are a continuum such that there is an absence of distinction between them; second, the divine does not exist over or against the human; third, there is thus no opposition between spirit and flesh, body and soul, interiority and exteriority, and God and creation. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chapter 6, especially 146–147. Denys Turner, “Eckhart and The Cloud on Detachment, Interiority and Paradox”, Eckhart Review 1 (1992), 9–26.

90 M. Exhall 102 Kees Waaijman maintains that modern instrumentalist understandings of spirituality actually aim to “eliminate mysticism– precisely to the degree that mysticism lays bare man’s inner powerlessness” [my emphasis]. Modernity, he says, often views mysticism as an unproductive element that it falsely labels as “quietist, irrational and occult”. Kees Waaijman, “Toward a Phenomenological Definition of Spirituality”, Studies in Spirituality 3 (1993), 5–57. 103 Dorothee Soelle, The Silent Cry: Mysticism and Resistance, trans. Barbara Rumscheidt and Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 3. 104 Soelle, Silent Cry, 59–62. 105 Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus in our Western Culture: Mysticism, Ethics and Politics, trans. John Bowden (London: SCM, 1987), 31. 106 Schillebeeeckx, Jesus, 9.

5

The apophatic dimension of revelation1 Miroslav Griško

In the human form of Christ, that which is above being showed itself, not that in this manifestation he would no longer be hidden, or if I phrase this in a more divine manner, in this same manifestation he remained hidden. With regard to the incarnation of Christ theology has with this formulation called attention to the following, that he, who is above being, in his humanity became being, and therefore emerged from hiddenness into the visibility of our world. Yet he remains hidden after his appearance, or if I phrase this in a manner more appropriate to God: he is hidden also in his appearance. (Dionysus the Areopagite, Epist. III, PG, 3, 1069B)2 For Eastern Orthodoxy, Christian theology is fundamentally a mystical and apophatic theology. The orthodoxy of the apophatic means that apophaticity is contained within revelation. All Orthodox theology begins from the reversal of the revelation that is theology’s immediate ground into that which Dionysus the Areopagite calls in the above passage hiddenness. If revelation is, in the last instance, hiddenness, then revelation is not primarily kataphatic, but apophatic. The initial kataphaticity of revelation is, in Dionysus’s words, only the ephansis or appearance, of incarnation. That God becomes man does not annul the hiddenness of God, but instead deepens it. Apophasis becomes theology, insofar as revelation becomes hiddenness.3 The logic of hiddenness at once does not imply an epistemological limit. Lossky describes the mystical and the apophatic as the ‘crown of all theology’;4 the apophatic dimension of revelation gives the entirety of doctrine its unity and coherency. Apophatic theology is the contemplation of the apophatic moment within all aspects of Orthodox thought, from Christology to Soteriology, from the creation to the eschatological end of the world Accordingly, when apophaticity is injected into the heart of revelation, the decisive consequence cannot be a restriction of what may be known about God. The interpretation of the apophatic and the mystical as a form of epistemological limit omits the depth of the metaphysical commitments of apophatic theology.5 The separation of God from any conflation with the world that lies at the

92

M. Griško

centre of apophatic language motivates rigorous and interconnected claims about ontology, epistemology and ethics. Against its reduction to an epistemological stricture, apophatic theology becomes a systematic metaphysics, both in a broader sense of content, following the scope and the extent of its commitments, as well as in terms of its logic of hiddenness, which brings together fields such as cosmology and ethics into a comprehensive model. This systematic character does not elide the mystery of apophatic theology, but instead supports interpretation of this mystery as an exploration of thought; the apophatic as mystery ‘does not prevent thought, but invites it’.6 The following essay will introduce the systematic character of apophatic theology according to the development of three interrelated premises: 1

2

3

The apophatic confers an absolute status to a non-ontological concept: the nothingness of God as expressing the extreme transcendence of the absolute initiates a break, whereby ontology is not foundational within an apophatic metaphysics. The non-ontological absolute may be approached from the perspective of the lack of the world’s necessity, i.e. a total contingency underlying ontology, which at once is a symptom of a non-ontological necessity. In other words, we can illustrate the systematic metaphysical claims of apophatic theology through the relationship between a metaphysics of modality (the modal cases: e.g. necessity and contingency) and meontology, that is, a metaphysical model where ontology is not foundational. The split of contingency and necessity along ontological and meontological lines informs the ethical mission of the human being on a cosmic scale, insofar as the exercising of freedom according to that which is necessary overcomes the contingent fallen state of the creation. It is precisely on the basis of a lack of ontological necessity that the fallen world may become deified (theosis); in the eschatological and ultimately ethical mobilisation of ontological contingency at the root of the world ends a fallen world that, in a fundamental sense, is not.

The apophatic logic of ontological limit God is always a mystery. He declares his natural hiddenness in a manner with which he renders it more mysterious in revelation. (St. Maximus the Confessor, Capita Theologiae et Oeconomiae 1.97)

The fact of revelation dissolves the solitude of the world. Yet the reduction of revelation to a loss of ontological solitude fails to fully recognise revelation. The kataphatic dimension of revelation as the affirmation that God is, and, in consequence, that both God and the world are, does not mean that being is somehow fundamental for God or the world. The apophatic does not distinguish between being and the world; yet it does maintain – and this is the entire basis of its struggle with language – the separation of ‘God’ and ‘being’. With the

The apophatic dimension of revelation

93

reversal of revelation into hiddenness, the apparent kataphatic affirmation of revelation now demands to be approached through the precision, rather than inchoateness, of apophatic concepts. Whereas the hiddenness, nothingness, and darkness of God prima facie suggests that the apophatic invokes a limit, Dionysus instead initiates a distinct conceptual armature which both follows from and develops a clear metaphysical axiom: the absolute is irreducible to ontology. Accordingly, the nature of this separation of God and being is ultimately not relational, as only one side of this duality is absolute. From this it follows that the nothingness of God is not determined by a relation to being; apophaticity ruptures the traditional philosophical reciprocity between metaphysics and ontology. The metaphysics of apophaticity namely entails the development of the question: what kind of metaphysics is produced by the separation of metaphysics from ontology? If revelation as divine hiddenness is, as Maximus writes, ‘natural’ to God, then the ascription of hiddenness to God, irrespective of the world, intends to protect this separation, to take it as axiomatic, despite its apparent transgression by revelation. From the apophatic position, because revelation is an interruption into the world from that which is not of the world, the immanent appearance of revelation does not exhaust revelation. Whereas revelation is the most explicit instance of God’s immanence within the world, the world cannot appropriate revelation, even though revelation is intended for it. The immanence of revelation, following the Church Fathers, is always more fundamentally the transcendence of a revelation which is undetermined by the world. The apophaticity of revelation confronts the world with an absolute that is unilaterally beyond it. Revelation is this hiddenness and darkness, which becomes light insofar as it makes visible the world’s end. The thought that ‘this world’ is not the only ‘world’ eviscerates this world. On the basis of its origin in revelation apophasis begins from an end that is not the world’s own end. Revelation is accordingly always apocalyptic, in the eschatological sense, insofar as it discloses the world’s end. In Taubes’ study of eschatology, the apocalyptic is described as follows: ‘God’s world, by virtue of being defined as the absolute beyond, outside this world, reduces the world, to a closed system, which dizzyingly encompasses all that is contained and lost in it, but which is still exposed as finite.’8 In the eschatology of revelation, which is also the apophaticity of revelation, since the latter also draws a limit to the world, the analogues of creation, world, being, are now conceived as a total minimum. The ‘absolute beyond and outside’ of the apophatic, in its hiddenness, darkness and nothingness, emphasizes the strictness of this delimitation. Apophaticism, as with eschatology, is the exceptionless reduction of ontology to this total minimum, according to a beyond that is absolute with regard to it. The apophatic dimension of revelation indicates a cosmic depth of apophaticity which totalises the creation, reducing it to what Taubes describes as a finite and closed system, whilst also evoking an absolute transcendence beyond the creation. The apophatic denial of the world is accordingly not the immanent denial of the world, but, ontologically parsed, entails the premise that being cannot

94 M. Griško ground itself. The apophatic indicates an ontological rather than epistemological limit. The apophaticity of revelation discloses a finitude of the world and of being: it initiates contemplation of the mystery that is not of the world or of being. The apophatic surpasses ontology, according to which the latter becomes ineffectual with regard to the absolute qua God. The metaphysical break that is instantiated in apophatic theology, whereby it is no longer the case that ‘knowledge of the Cosmos gives us knowledge of God’,9 means that whereas being tout court is essentially a trivial instance within a greater metaphysics, epistemology is not constrained by ontology. In other words, thought is informed by an anagogic vector which transforms rather than constricts knowledge (as shown in the unknowing of the Areopagite). Mysticism can be therefore understood as a term that recapitulates this transformation. If knowledge is no longer recognizable as knowledge, then an immanent perspective of the world becomes inadequate. The suffusion of the apophatic into epistemology engenders a vertiginous epistemology which, in the first instance, breaks from ontology or any restrictions imposed upon it by some imputed general concept of being.10 In mystical language, this is the gnoseology of the heart.11 ‘The first task of theology is to recognize the distinction between God’s incomprehensibility and revelation, and recognize this distinction as fundamental, as theology’s starting point.’12 Yet, following the patristic logic, this distinction omits the deeper hiddenness of revelation. The ontological beyond is also present in revelation; an apophatic dimension appears on both sides of the division, This doubling of what Bulgakov terms incomprehensibility is also constitutive of revelation, such that the distinction of God from the world becomes fundamental. If the apophatic were not the basis of revelation, apophatic theology becomes merely another form of epistemology, whereby the selfsufficient creation autonomously contemplates its limits. Apophaticism, in this generic immanent epistemological form, even though it may be oriented towards transcendence, arrives at the threshold of God and then waits for revelation as the addendum to its entirely immanent thought. In consequence, revelation becomes a supplement. This is a type of transmogrified parousia without any initial revelation. Accordingly, it is the clandestine assertion of the world’s self-sufficiency and, in a more fundamental sense, its necessity, as it makes revelation now dependent upon the world. In the apophaticity of revelation, the entire world collapses around the cross. Revelation confronts the creation with its non-necessity. In Florovsky’s words, crucifixion was not the necessity of this world … the mystery of the Cross begins in eternity … this ‘Divine necessity’ of the death on the Cross passes all understanding indeed. And the Church has never attempted any rational definition of this supreme mystery.13 The necessity of the cross opposes the necessity of the world and in this sense is the extinction of the world and all that is. Crucifixion is precisely this claim

The apophatic dimension of revelation

95

from the side of the world of its necessity, as it is the subjugation of the absolute to the ‘necessary’ law of the world. Yet in the last instance crucifixion, through resurrection, reverses itself against the world, so as to disclose this ‘divine necessity’ that is irreducible to the world. Although there is no ‘rational definition’ of divine necessity within doctrine, this does not entail that doctrine is uninformed by divine necessity. Even if doctrine does not define necessity, it is nevertheless entirely motivated by necessity. ‘Necessity’ cuts across doctrine from the ethics of the person – what is necessary to be done? – to, in Florovsky’s words, the mystery of the necessity of crucifixion. A concept of necessity is also present in the cosmology of doctrine, which opposes the creation’s necessity with the dogmatic formula creatio ex nihilo – the instantiation of being is precisely out of nothing, such that primordial ontogenesis has no ontological ground – but also with the eschatological finitude of the world, which, as an exceptionless cosmic end, reiterates the contingency of the creation. The explicit absence of a purely ‘rational’ formulation of necessity mirrors the apparent ‘irrationality’ of the apophatic. The apophatic evokes the divine form of necessity, whilst necessity also evokes the apophatic. Necessity, in turn, may be used to illustrate the basic metaphysical commitments of the apophatic. When Florovsky locates the necessity of the Cross in transcendence, necessity is excised from the world and the putative reciprocity of divine economy is overcome by a one-sided (non)relation. The traditional Orthodox form of a hierarchical division of the transcendent and the immanent is a vertically structured divine economy which maintains a unilateral form of determination, according to which the concepts of necessity and contingency are also distributed. The Marxist formula ‘determination in the last instance’, further developed by Althusser14 and Laruelle,15 can be used to clarify how the transcendenceimmanence (non)relation operates in the apophatic model (a similarity which lends support to the interpretations of the communist project along theological and eschatological lines16). Determination in the last instance allows for a relative autonomy that is nevertheless trivialised when considered in terms of the ‘base’ of determination. Whereas superstructure possesses a relative autonomy, because the base unilaterally determines the superstructure, relative autonomy registers no effect on the base and therefore does not reciprocally determine it.17 Relative autonomy names the ultimately trivial nature of this autonomy when viewed from the position of the base that occasions it. In theological terms, the relative autonomy of the superstructure is accordingly the freedom of the creation; this freedom, however, is trivialized from the position of the absolute qua God, which determines the creation, without any reciprocal determination from the latter. This unilateral form is maintained by the apophatic separation of God from being: at once it abstracts the logic of the anagogic vertical vector of apophatic mysticism, which requires the radical form of world denial so as to approach the absolute. Apophatic mysticism is the disclosure of relative autonomy as relative and therefore trivial. World denial reflects the determination operative in this metaphysics, which follows from the structure of the relation and ultimately

96

M. Griško

non-relation of transcendence and immanence, according to the fundamental dependency of immanence upon that which it is not.18 Apophaticity is in this sense the positing of this that which is not in its most radical form, an absolute without any ontological status. The apophatic structure of transcendence and immanence is accordingly not an instance of dialectic as reciprocal co-determination. Transcendence is undetermined by immanence, although the former does determine the latter. Apophatic thought is anti-dialectical because the apophatic denial and rejection of the world is not engendered by the world.19 The dialectical formulation of transcendence and immanence misconstrues the contingency of ‘relative autonomy’, that is, of the creation, taking it as fundamental to this metaphysics pace the unilateral form of the apophatic separation between transcendence and immanence. The latter avers the contingency of the creation, but in the strongest sense of this contingency, whereby contingency must be separated from necessity, which at once maintains the necessary as necessary. The apophatic gap between transcendence and immanence opposes the dialectical reversibility between contingency and necessity. The contingency of being is not the immanent contingency of being – if this were the case, then being is necessary for its contingency – nor is the necessity of being its contingency (Meillassoux’s formula), for contingency becomes necessity. As Ibn Sina argued, the world cannot ground its own contingency; the world is not contingent in virtue of the world, since the world becomes necessary for the explanation of its contingency and this, in turn, pacifies the concept of contingency as such.20 The contingency of the world in its strongest sense entails an exteriority to the world. The gap between contingency and necessity, which is the negativity of their non-dialectical character, i.e. the negativity that establishes a gap which prevents the dialectical reversal from one concept to another, is this exteriority itself. But this exteriority at once is this necessity, insofar as the non-dialectical character of contingency and necessity is itself necessary (i.e. the absolute is not determined by the world), namely, the nondialectical aspect is the corollary of the necessary as the absolute, which at once reiterates the contingency of the world.21 According to the apophatic separation of being from the absolute, this exteriority to the world is an exteriority to being, the inscription of an ontological limit

Necessity as exteriority On this basis the metaphysics of apophatic theology may be developed through the affinity it posits between modal and meontological concepts. The modal here refers to what contemporary literature calls the modal cases, such as necessity and contingency, possibility and impossibility.22 The meontological denotes that being is not ‘primitive’, that is to say, fundamental in this metaphysics. The modal aspect and the meontological aspects recapitulate the lack of necessity conferred to being that is at once the separation of the absolute from being. In this same way the apophatic dimension of revelation sunders

The apophatic dimension of revelation

97

necessity from being according to that which is beyond being. Apophatic theology of the divine economy is a metaphysics wherein the arrangement of meontology and the modal is seamless. If being is not primal in this metaphysics, the modal cases confirm or rather reiterate the annulment of a primal status to any ontological concept. The claim of the apophatic, when approached from this conceptual language, is that being is not necessary since its absence of necessity is determined by a necessity outside itself. If the apophatic structure of the God and the world’s (non)relation may be parsed as the absence of necessity in being, the latter possesses conceptual analogues in the philosophical tradition, from Plato to contemporary metaphysics of modality, which, in turn, can clarify the logic of an ontological lack of necessity. The cosmology of Plato’s Timaeus is based on a series of relationships between necessity (ananke) and reason, the demiurge and the physical or material order that is the substance of the world. The modal case of necessity is, however, distinguished in this cosmology in that it is only necessity which Plato describes as an ‘errant’ or ‘variable’ cause (planomene aitiaai). Plato introduces necessity in this negative sense after recounting the demiurge’s rational ordering of cosmos: Thus far in what we have been saying, with small exception, the works of intelligence have been set forth; and now we must place by the side of them in our discourse the things which come into being through necessity … if a person will truly tell of the way in which the work was accomplished, he must include the other influence of the variable (or errant) cause as well.23 (15a) ‘The things which come into being through necessity’ as opposed to through the demiurge must be distinguished: the latter are the works of intelligence or reason, but this in itself does not entail their necessity. The errancy or variable nature of necessity namely follows from the non-necessity of that which is brought into being, despite their being brought into being. Necessity is variable or errant to the extent that it is posited in antagonism to the work of the demiurge. Brisson and Meyerstein summarize the role of necessity in the Timaeus as follows: a cause called ananke perpetually resists the order which the demiurge attempts to introduce in the world. The term ananke in ancient Greek is generally translated as ‘necessity’. But the way Plato uses the term ananke in the Timaeus refers to a very different meaning from the one intuitively given to ‘necessity’: constraint regarded as a law prevailing throughout the material universe. Plato holds ananke to be a cause, but a negative one, qualified as an errant cause (planomene aitia), since it represents a non-rational element permanently resisting the ordering effort of the demiurge.24 The demiurge inaugurates rational arrangements of matter and order into the world. But necessity, against its intuitive definition, is that which abrogates these same laws. If necessity subverts order, Plato’s claim is that the arrangements of the cosmos of the demiurge possess no immanent necessity. Necessity is absent from the cosmology that Plato describes, when this cosmology only

98

M. Griško

includes the work of the demiurge and the order of the world, as in the Timaeus’ initial account of the cosmos. Yet when the cosmological order of the demiurge is viewed through the lens of necessity, the former becomes trivialized, as how the cosmos is, is no longer fundamental for cosmology. Later variations of this lack of necessity are found in, for example, Sextus Empiricus’ scepticism, Hume’s problem of induction, and, more recently, the necessity of contingency proposed by Quentin Meillassoux25 and the plurality of possible worlds of David Lewis.26 Cosmological descriptions on the level of law and relation do not encompass the deeper metaphysical claim about their necessity. Yet Plato does not reduce necessity, as do Meillassoux and Lewis, to these arrangements of matter, or in other words, to the plurality of ways in which the world could be. The Timaeus does not derive from the world’s lack of any endemic necessity the endemic contingency of the world. Necessity is not folded into the contingency of the world; necessity is not reduced to contingency, such that contingency and necessity are ultimately inter-definable, but rather is preserved as a primordial and irreducible negativity in this cosmology: For, in truth, this Cosmos in its origin was generated as a compound, from the combination of Necessity and Reason. And inasmuch as Reason was controlling Necessity by persuading her to conduct to the best end the most part of the things coming into existence, thus and thereby it came about, through Necessity yielding to intelligent persuasion, that this Universe of ours was being in this wise constructed at the beginning. Wherefore if one is to declare how it actually came into being on this wise, he must include also the form of the Errant Cause, in the way that it truly acts.27 Reason persuades necessity in the sense that a rational description of the cosmos is based on the precondition that reason suspends the question of the necessity of the cosmos. The descriptions of demiurgic or the rational ordering of the cosmos are the result of the initial abjuration from the negativity of necessity. This is what Plato terms the ‘irrational’ character of necessity. The rational account of, for example, causality, is entirely distinct from the question of the necessity of the causal relationship; there is no principle of sufficient reason that can ground the necessity of these arrangements. Accordingly, the demiurgic order emerges on the condition of necessity’s exclusion, or, in Plato’s terms, persuasion by reason. On the basis of this exclusion, necessity indicates an exteriority to the cosmos, which from the position of cosmology must remain exterior so as to secure its coherency. The negative relation of necessity to the cosmos is accordingly not premised on the former’s reduction to the latter, but rather is premised in terms of its primordiality with regard to the cosmos. This is why necessity threatens the reciprocity between ontology and metaphysics. Necessity is alien to the arrangements of matter, and in a deeper sense, is alien to any general concept of ontology. Necessity effaces the primordiality of any type of ontological question, as it approaches being from the question of being’s necessity, which being

The apophatic dimension of revelation

99

itself cannot resolve. If the Platonic claim is that there is no wholly immanent ontological source of this necessity, this does not only imply that being lacks any endemic necessity, but also that necessity is not reducible to being. When necessity is not reduced or persuaded, it countermands any primacy to that which is, was, or may be. Necessity resembles a form of epekeina tes ousias, as its irreducibility to being suggests a concept of transcendence which requires a different form of thought (what Plato in the Timaeus terms irrational). Necessity is the epekeina that appears as ‘errant’ from the position of the physical world. Accordingly, if necessity first appears in the Timaeus in the form of its opposition to the cosmological design of the demiurge, the thought of this necessity as such forces the break from the fundamental elements of this cosmology. Necessity discloses the transience of this cosmology, yet also subsists without this cosmology. The problem of necessity evokes what may be termed a meontological element in the sense of its alienness to any general concept of being.28 In its apophatic fundament, Orthodox cosmological doctrine follows the Platonic insight to its end. There is neither a commitment to ascribe primordiality to being alongside the modal nor to suspend the question of modality so as to cordon the modal and, more specifically, avert the modal case of necessity’s subversion of ontological ground. The apophatic character of doctrinal metaphysical concepts mobilizes necessity against being without any simultaneous concession of some minimal ontological concept which must be retained in order to render the metaphysics coherent. It is this lack of obligation which evinces the complicity of the meontological and the modal within doctrine as well as the revelatory source of apophaticity. The apophatic as the evacuation of necessity from the world is determined by meontological transcendence. The depth of abyssum or the nothingness of being recapitulated in its lack of necessity is an apophatic breaching of illusory ontological depth. The imperative to breach ontology motivates the formation of doctrinal cosmological and metaphysical concepts. For Philo of Alexandria, there is no instance of matter that subsists eternally alongside God from which the creation is formed.29 The creation is also not an idea in the mind of God, since this implies some degree of necessity to this idea.30 The formulation of creatio ex nihilo follows from this same commitment. An absolute nothingness precedes the world and the creation, so as to annul any potential inference of the creation’s necessity. In eschatology, finitude is also employed to abrogate the world and thereby link beginning and end in this same vitiation of ontological necessity. The doctrinal approach to cosmology eliminates forms of the latter which leave unthought the modality of the constituent parts or primitives of cosmology. Apophatic theology takes as fundamental that which is beyond the world, but this at once allows it to draw even closer to the creation. The hiddenness of revelation instantiates a transcendent anagogic which is ultimately more immanent to the world than its own immanence, as with the problematisation of cosmological necessity, the question of why the world is emerges. In Islam, this metaphysical principle is recapitulated in the sixteenth ayah of

100 M. Griško the Surat Qaf: ‘And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to him than [his] jugular vein.’31

Transcendence and totality Deleuze and Guattari describe the metaphysics of modern philosophy as one where immanence ‘engulfs’32 transcendence. For Heidegger, with Nietzsche’s death of God ‘the name God, thought essentially, is posited as the supra-sensible world of ideals which contain the goal established beyond earthly life for that very life, which determines it from above and therefore in a certain manner from the outside’,33 such that the Death of God is the annulment of determination from the outside. This straightforward ‘countermove’34 is the reversal of the apophatic, whereby a general ontological concept (i.e. immanence, matter, etc.) is no longer extinguished in the non-ontological transcendent Outside, but rather transcendence is now extinguished in immanence.35 This inversion confers hegemony over the ontological to the ontological; in another sense, it is the modern realisation of a classical philosophical principle, that of the complete ontology of being qua being, whereby the latter Aristotelian formula is not only an imperative to think being in terms of ‘what properly and exclusively pertains to it’,36 but, moreover, that the matrix of being qua being exhausts metaphysics. From the position of apophatic theology these movements are anticipated and, by extension, lose their force and novelty. The apophaticity of the absolute, which maintains the unilateral non-relation between the absolute and the world, is now dissolved. The conceptual analogues of immanence, world and ontology – i.e. the concepts of anti-transcendence – are introduced as foundational in this metaphysics and the corollaries of this basis are drawn out. But the dissolution of the meontological nature of the absolute is precisely the vector of eschatological fall. The dominant positions of philosophies after the death of God are inverted eschatologies, according to which the world subsists after God’s death. Although the death of God proposes the falsity of transcendence and therefore may be considered apocalyptic in its transformative cosmology, the death of God, in one sense, remains only another mundane death. If God also dies as anything else dies, the apocalypticism of the death of God is the false apocalypticism of any other mundane death according to the world. Certainly, in the Crucifixion there is this same instance of common death. But this common death does not leave the world to subsist unchanged, but instead marks the world’s lack of necessity, its finitude, such that the logic of Crucifixion shows itself as thoroughly eschatological and soteriological in its transformation of the world. The contrasting thanatology of the nihilistic death of God is a caricature, in that it abolishes any sense of total ontological finitude, which is contained in the eschatological vision of the finitude of the world. This is why Nietzsche and Deleuze can move intuitively from the death of God to the affirmation of being or the immanence of life. If finitude is particular and discrete, the reversal at the heart of this pseudo-eschatology – despite its prima facie status as a model

The apophatic dimension of revelation

101

where ‘the spatial, temporal, historical, erotic, and volitional dimensions of finite existence have become more than contingent, more than accidental – these hazardous dimensions have become absolute’37 – ultimately pacifies the problem of the instability of deeper ontological ground. Whereas philosophies after the death of God promote forms of this instability, these are ultimately symptoms of the emphasis on surface as opposed to depth, since they are inscribed within a wholly ontological fundament. Variations such as ontologies of becoming, multiplicity, difference and contingency, heighten the chaos of being, but at once preclude the breaching of being. The expansion of some type of ontological heterogeneity never violates a more foundational ontological concept, which is univocal and, by extension, exceptionless. It is on the basis of this ontological primitive that a question such as the necessity of being in any non-ontological sense, as proposed by Plato’s Timaeus (and thus in a non-reductive sense) becomes a pseudo-problem. It is not the premise of ontological univocity itself (taken as ‘All being is said in the same sense’) that determines the illegitimacy of this problem, but rather the reciprocity between ontological univocity and ontological primitivism. From the apophatic position, the theological error is not in the concept of ontological univocity,38 but rather in the latter’s collaboration with an entirely ontological absolute. Such critiques of univocity (e.g. Scotus) function as strategies to safeguard the overtly ontological language of Aquinas, i.e. the emphasis on Aristotle over Plato.39 With its apophatic commitment, Orthodoxy rejects this ontological language and its mechanisms, such as the analogia entis, insofar as they maintain an ontological absolutization. The ontologically equivocal also takes as fundamental an ontological concept: in this sense, it contains within itself the univocal as opposed to the apophatic’s strict conception of a non-ontological or meontological absolute. A delimitation and exteriority to the ontological is that which is prohibited; this rejection repeats the rejection of modality’s attenuation of a purely ontological primitive. In other words, ontological univocity qua ontological primitivism does not permit a transcendence to or totalisation of being. A common tendency of philosophies after the death of God is to oppose both concepts. Transcendence suggests a stronger and weaker form. The weaker form denotes this ontological equivocity. A distinction subsists within being; transcendence accordingly indicates one side of the equivocal distinction. This form of transcendence is weak in that it remains determined by some substratum of being. The equivocal distinction is immanent to being; a relation to being immanent to being defines transcendence. Ontological equivocity thus prefigures the death of God. According to the persistence of this substratum, God is eventually dragged into being and annihilated just like anything else, ‘subtracted’ from being; being as the fundamental concept of this metaphysics remains intact. To the extent that transcendence is annihilated, philosophies after the death of God do not interpret the nihilistic moment of thought as some variant of ontological limit, but rather the opposite. It is in this sense a counterfeit ‘nihil’ that affirms ontological ubiquity – the concession of nothing is nothing as privation, as absence of

102 M. Griško something. The something here becomes unlimited in that it also entails its absence. Even in philosophies that posit the inter-definability of being and nothingness, such as in Hegel or Badiou, whereby being is described as nothing or void and vice versa, the strategy of a dialectical reciprocity functions as an extension of being into an absolute nothingness, in contrast to a conception of the latter which could alternatively operate as a preliminary name for the limitation of being. This non-dialectical nothingness is a form of transcendence which opposes ontological primitivism – that is, transcendence as a non-relational absolute – which is both undetermined by and indefinable according to being. The stronger form of transcendence, which is the sense of transcendence present in the apophatic, maintains a concept of ontological univocity – it is precisely the world that is reduced to this minimum and ‘all being is said in the same sense’ – but at once it rejects the primitive status of an ontological concept. The opposition to transcendence is recapitulated in the logic that opposes totality. The inscription of totality bears the threat that it may introduce a form of transcendence and thereby subvert ontological primitivism, insofar as totality functions as a boundary or limit-concept. Accordingly, for Badiou, totality is opposed by the complicity of set theory and ontology.40 From a Deleuzian perspective, totality violates the infinite plane of immanence through the illusory inscription of that which is alien to immanence.41 For Laruelle, philosophy’s unlimited pretence to think the Real functions as the former’s pseudo-totalization of the latter: that is, a failure to rigorously think the Real, since the precondition of this philosophical operation is the denial of a radical immanence’s primitive and untotalizable status vis-à-vis thought.42 Whereas totality in these strategies is viewed as always imposing a tyrannical restriction on, in general terms, that which is, was or can be, they at once practice their own arrangement of first principles according to which entirely similar operations of reduction may be prosecuted. The reduction in this case amplifies a general heterogeneity of the ontological, but ultimately on the basis of the univocity and primitivism of a concept of being, which precludes a breach of the ontological. Totality and transcendence are, in an apophatic sense, two sides of a cut into being, a profane side and a sacral side. As opposed to the death of God which places God within being, with this cut being is enclosed (the profane) according to an outside (the sacred). This division does not entail a reciprocity or a dialectical co-determination between an inside and an outside, but rather it is only the outside that, as it were, contains and determines this wholly transient (contingent) inside. The epekeina tes ousisas of classical philosophy, which is arguably completed in the absolute meontological transcendence of apophatic theology, does not posit this outside in relation to being. Epeikeina indicates that which cannot be reduced to being and thereby shatters the ontological substratum. In other terms, according to a transcendent meontological outside, the creation is posited as finite in a radical sense. This finitude is not immanent to the creation: that is, ontological finitude is not a finitude of being in the form of the subjective genitive. This means that the finitude of being recapitulated in eschatological end is not immanent to being; the eschatological death of the

The apophatic dimension of revelation

103

world is exterior to the world. For Maximus the eschatological death of the world is ‘super natural’; in the words of S. N. Bulgakov: ‘the end of the world is not physical, but metaphysical’.43 On the basis of the exteriority of the death of the world, the world loses all residuum of a putative necessity, in that it is not even necessary for its own death. Death is taken in its strongest sense, as a radical form of ontological non-necessity. The contingency of being is a symptom of the outside necessity to which it is irreducible (i.e. Ibn Sina’s proposition). The inadequacy of ontology as the separation of necessity from being is mirrored in the separation of being from its end. Being is in the last instance nothing, yet nothing is not being. Criticisms of godless modernity evoke the nihilism of the modern world in terms of the nothingness to which the world has been reduced. But from the apophatic position, the reverse is the case. The death of God implies a counterfeit nothingness. This counterfeit nothingness is played out against the ultimately secure background of an ontological ubiquity, which, although presented as open system (i.e. becoming, heterogeneity, multiplicity, contingency, difference, democracy) still maintains an entirely immanent ontological primitive that precludes the apophatic breach of the world. In this sense, the modal and meontological metaphysics of apophatic theology may be described as more nihilistic than nihilism, since in the last instance the nothingness of the world becomes an unnecessary propaedeutic to the transcendence of a non-ontological absolute (abyssus abyssum invocat).

Eschatological mission of the human The apophatic at once is not only a general cosmological claim about the transience of creation qua ontological lack of necessity. If the apophatic logic may be described as presenting a more nihilistic version of ontology than nihilism on the level of its basic cosmological and metaphysical concepts, apophasis clearly also opposes nihilism, in that it does not take this conclusion to imply the trivialisation of ethics, or in other terms, the devaluation of meaning. Rather, its ethics is consistent with this same abrogation of ontological necessity. The apophatic breaching of being is precisely the ethical mission of theosis, which begins from the eschatological premise that the fallen world, since it is fallen, is not – it is only in the end of being (the ontological limit of apophatic theology) that being can be said to be, since at this end, in the eschaton, is the deification of the creation. Insofar as nihilism does maintain an ontological primitive, its simultaneous commitment to the contingency of being ramifies two major options for its conceptualization of ethics and meaning. Either being is somehow to be affirmed in the style of Nietzsche’s myth of eternal recurrence (phenomenological references to a ‘gift of being’ or a wholly immanent ‘affirmation of life’), or the contingency of being is intuitively taken as the a fortiori elimination of meaning entirely (e.g. Brassier44).45 When the apophatic is posited as present in revelation, this engenders the counter-intuitive proposal that although there is a foundational contingency to the creation, there is nevertheless a simultaneous

104 M. Griško meaning to the creation. The origin of the creation is a contingent event, e.g. creatio ex nihilo; that which is contingent may also have meaning. For eschatology, which is a re-iteration of the apophatic limitation of being in that it maintains a radical concept of ontological finitude, this meaning is an ethical meaning. Whereas the Cappadocians’ formulation of the apophaticity of God perhaps could be said, to a certain degree, to pacify the extreme transcendence of the apophatic, it also provides a model which links the basic metaphysical premises of the apophatic with ethics. The Cappadocians posit a threefold division of the ontological/non-ontological status of God in terms of the categories ‘That God is’; ‘How God is’; and ‘What God is’. The apophatic appears only in the latter category ‘What God is’. ‘That God is’ is the revelatory affirmation that God is. ‘How God is’ is the divine revelation of the triune hypostatic God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. ‘What God is’ is the apophatic X, which, in its challenge of traditional quiddity, proposes the meontological character of the absolute.46 The application of the Cappadocian model to the human establishes an asymmetry with regards to where the variable of the unknown is located according to these same categories. This asymmetry, on the one hand, reaffirms the apophatic separation between God and the world and, on the other, problematises the existence of the human in a manner that prioritizes the question of ethics. ‘That the human is’ is the brute fact of the created world, the starting point of what may be provisionally termed one’s immanence; ‘What the human is’ is the created non-necessary being; whereas ‘How the human is’ is the obscurity of human freedom, namely, the eschatological and soteriological question of the freedom of the creation as problematic ethical core. In one sense, this unknowability of freedom and ethics reiterates the creation’s lack of necessity. With freedom, on a purely intuitive, but ultimately superficial level, nothing is necessary; freedom is the unilateral and non-dialectical force of exceptionless ontological non-necessity. With the exercising of freedom, the human being repeats the lack of necessity of how things may be and as such transforms the entire cosmos: ‘The first man formed out of the earth brought in universal death’ (St. Cyril of Jerusalem).47 Yet for Orthodoxy, freedom is inseparable from a concept of ethics qua the total transformation of the cosmos; that is, the deification of the entire creation which freedom effectuates away from the unnecessary fallen state. The depth of freedom is only reached when it is set in the ethical context of deification. This is the eschatology and soteriology of theosis and the anthropological prototype established by Christology. In the vocabulary of St. Maximus the Confessor, the transformative effect of freedom and the ethical aspect of freedom are brought together in the related concepts of logoi and tropos. Whereas the logoi indicate God’s ‘divine plan’48 – not only the divine plan for humanity, but for the entire creation – tropos denotes the radically contingent status of existence, a status which can always be susceptible to, in Zizioulas’, terms an ‘adjustment’.49 With the location of the logoi in the absolute, separate from the world, Maximus maintains the necessity of an ethical principle: at once, with tropos he is able to conserve the

The apophatic dimension of revelation

105

freedom of the creation. When set in an eschatological context – i.e. in the postlapsarian world of the fall to which the narrative of Christology speaks – the ethical mission becomes the transformation of the fallen yet contingent tropos of existence through the exercising of the freedom of humanity in accordance with the greater ethical mission as defined by logoi. On the basis of the latter’s structuring of the entirety of the creation, the complete transformative cosmic mission is the overturning of the fallen state which is introduced with the ultimately contingent decision for universal death. With the placement of freedom and ethics in conflict with the fallen world, the universal introduction of death shows itself to be a counterfeit form of freedom; the ethical mission can be abstracted as the identification of the distorted exercising of freedom and its corrective. The paradox of freedom is that its apparently most explicit enactment is found in the decision for death of the First Adam (e.g. the exertion of a freedom against God), whereas this decision at once vitiates freedom. If the creation is unnecessary in a radical manner, the decision for death takes this lack of necessity in terms of death – its nonnecessity as death – yet this is a covert decision for the necessity of being. Death effaces freedom with the introduction of necessity into being; the irreconcilability of death with freedom is the former’s obfuscation of the non-necessity of being. The decision for death is the limiting of freedom itself, as the cosmic transformative effect of freedom now confronts a necessity within being, which perforce distorts the fundamental ontological non-necessity of the creation. The ‘free’ introduction of death into the world by the world reconfigures freedom according to the latter’s emaciation through death. The ontological necessity initiated by the decision for death and the metaphysics this creates for humanity is corrected through the apophaticity of the revelation of Christ; however, not as the reversal of the decision for death, which would essentially be a form of Origenism which validates the beginning as opposed to the eschatological emphasis on end. In the incarnation, Christ, in an act of agape that repeats the agape of the origin of the creation as the being of the non-necessity of being, also decides to die. Yet in resurrection the apparent subjection of Christ to the law and logic of the world of death is at once the annulment of the necessity of the world.50 The decision for death that obscures ontological non-necessity is now through Akra Tapeinosis [the man of sorrows] dispersed, as the abyss of freedom and truth of death is rearticulated to the human. The world’s singular, as well as chimerical, necessity is death; this is the only necessity it can maintain, since the world lacks necessity. The world can therefore only offer this counterfeit necessity; the world can only maintain an absence of itself as its necessity. The world becomes a distorted or counterfeit form of itself. But this distortion is vitiated in the apophatic anagogy which reorients the world away from the world. ‘The Cross is the gate of mysteries; here the entrance of the mind unto the knowledge of the heavenly mysteries takes place’51 (St. Isaac the Syrian). The mystery of the cross confronts the contingency of the world with an alternative logic of contingency. Christ’s overcoming of the world through

106 M. Griško suffering and death is both a justice for the world and a limit for the world. When death is overturned, this articulates the contingency of the creation’s decision, effacing the necessity of death which the decision for death has apparently introduced. The truth of death, much like the truth of being, instead of a necessity, becomes the contingency of death. Christology places the problem of necessity at its centre; resurrection after death dispossesses necessity from the world, The Incarnation of the Logos as the immanent historical communication of the transcendent logoi crystallizes the ethical mission of the eschatological and soteriological theosis in terms of the re-appropriation of the tropos at the heart of being, thereby transforming the fallen creation into that which, as fallen, it is not, yet which in the last instance is its absolute truth. The eschatological, from which the apophatic is inseparable, does take as axiomatic the fall of the creation and the end of this fall. But this axiom resembles what Žižek would term a ‘contingent necessity’.52 For Maximus, the fall is a contingent event, but the eschatological metaphysical model develops precisely from this same contingency, which is entirely equivalent to the contingency of being which is central to the apophatic. According to this eschatological dimension, apophatic metaphysics now includes an ethics within its cosmology. The Fall as contingent necessity clarifies the precise mission of ethics and therefore the obligation of the human, not as a form of anthropomorphism, but rather as an eschatological project of deification – the transformation of the cosmos away from its fallen state. On this ethical level, which is entirely symmetrical to the cosmological and metaphysical levels, apophatic world denial is the denial of the fallen world. The realism of apophaticity with regard to the immanent world is an ethical realism which takes death, suffering and injustice in the world as a given axiom. But its apophatic commitments entail that there is no necessity to this world. This creates a razor-sharp and militant ethical vector for the human as the overcoming of the fallen world, where ethical lack is the principle of the world’s realism. When Maximus defended the Chalcedonian Christology and distinguished between the natural and gnomic will, eliminating the latter from the humanity of Christ, he made the ethical militant. The definition of Christ’s human freedom in terms of the natural will (i.e. the will according to God) functions as the prototype for human deified freedom. The authentic freedom of humanity is not the worldly fallen gnomic will qua the wholly immanent ‘deliberation between one thing and another’,53 but a freedom that is opposed to the world. The postlapsarian conception of the freedom of the human is extinguished by an absolute clarity of ethics, of a freedom against the fallen world, but also at once a freedom ‘for’, which is the soteriological transformation of the cosmos. The Incarnation occurs within the fallen world, one that is entirely gnomic, and thereby ends it, eschatologically, soteriologically and apophatically. This is the Orthodox ‘spiritual war’ at the heart of ethics, which is at once an eschatological war. Ethical conflict as eschatological war means that the world must end, as the apophatic separation of the absolute from the being of the world, which is ethically recapitulated in eschatological war, entails

The apophatic dimension of revelation

107

both the lack of necessity of the world and its total soteriological overcoming as the deification of the cosmos, theosis.

Notes 1 Thank you to Simon D. Podmore and Philipp Valentini for their comments on this paper. 2 Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, Complete Works (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987), Epist. III, PG, 3 1069 B. 3 The Greek terms for apophatic and revelation share the same etymological root: ‘The word “apophatic”, in Greek apophatiki, comes from apophasis, which has two basic meanings, namely, revelation and negation’ (Ivana Noble, ‘The Apophatic Way in Gregory of Nyssa’, in Philosophical Hermeneutics and Biblical Exegesis, ed. Petr Pokorny and Jan Roskovec (Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 323). 4 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1976), 9. 5 According to their apparent similarities, postmodern thought has engaged the apophatic primarily on the level of epistemological limit, e.g. ‘Negative theology means (to say) very little, almost nothing, perhaps something other than something. Whence its inexhaustible exhaustion’ (Jacques Derrida, ‘Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices’, in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1992), 295). ‘Derrida thinks of negative theology as a kind of “hyperessentialism,” faced with the problem of how not to speak of a “transcendent” being beyond being’ (Jacques Derrida and John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 103). 6 John D. Zizioulas, Lectures on Christian Dogmatics (London: Continuum, 2008), 46. 7 Maximus the Confessor, Opuscula Theologica et polemica in Philokalia, vol. 2 (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), Capita Theologiae et Oeconomiae 1.9. 8 Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 27. 9 John D. Zizioulas, Lectures on Christian Dogmatics, 41. 10 This position has philosophical analogues such as, for example, the work of Fernando Zalamea (cf. ‘Borders and Creativity: Perspectives from an Expanded Reason‘, in Razón de la frontera y fronteras de la razón(Bogota: Editorial Universidad de Colombia, 2010, 107–122), retrieved from www.academia.edu/3078638/Bor ders_and_Creativity_perspectives_from_an_expanded_reason_by_Fernando_Zalam ea_, translated_by_Nathan_Coombs_2013), who proposes that modernity possesses an impoverished conception of reason, such that an ‘expanded’ concept of reason becomes necessary, and Graham Priest (Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)), who argues against traditional Aristotelian logic in favour of paraconsistent logic. 11 Donald Ostrowski (‘Parallels of Mysticism: The Hesychasm of Nil Sorski and Sufism’, inNil Sorskii v kulture i knizhnosti Drevnei Rusi. Materialy konferentsii, 12 maia 2008 g., eds A. I. Alekseev, S. A. Davydova, E. V. Krushel’nitskaia, Zh. L. Levshina, and T.P.Lënngren (St.Petersburg: Rossiiskaia natsional’naia biblioteka, 2008), 41– 52) defines five common points between Hesychast and Sufi mysticism: ‘(1) the importance of repeated prayer that invokes the divine name; (2) breath control; (3) heart as an epistemological organ; (4) anti-philosophical views – that is, opposition to the mind that is not contained within the heart; and (5) the idea of being born again after degradation’ (41). With the movement of epistemological centre from mind to heart in conjunction with the invocation of the divine name, mystical somatism re-arranges the co-ordinates of standard epistemology, so as to dissolve the body into a type of ‘exploratory vector’ (Reza Negarestani, ‘The Matheme of the

108 M. Griško

12 13 14 15 16

17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29

Universal’, unpublished paper delivered at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, July 2014), which, free from its trivial (i.e. local and particular) ontological conditions, may contemplate an absolute that is beyond any ontological concept. S. N. Bulgakov, ‘Hypostasis and Hypostaticity: Scholia to the Unfading Light’. St. Vladimir Theological Quarterly, 49:1–2 (2005), 12. Georges Florovsky, The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky. 3. Creation and Redemption (Belmont, MA: Nordland Publishing Co., 1976), 137. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. (New York: Monthly Review Books, 1971). Francois Laruelle, ‘Determination in the Last Instance’, The Dictionary of NonPhilosophy (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2013), 49–52. See, for example, Berdjaev, The Origin of Russian Communism(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960), who suggests that communism is the secularised variation of Orthodoxy and therefore gives an Orthodox answer to Lenin’s ‘weakest link’ concept so as to explain the historical emergence of the USSR. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 135. Mysticism from the Orthodox perspective is described by the Palamite energy/ essence distinction. As Zizioulas and others have maintained, the energy/essence distinction does not introduce a fissure in Godhead but is rather a conceptual mechanism which reconciles God as fundamentally absolute and non-relational with a personal God that is in relation to the contingent creation: the Palamite concepts make this prima facie contradiction rigorous. The usage of modal concepts such as necessity and contingency further illustrate the logic of these theological concepts and how relation is possible in a metaphysics that is fundamentally non-relational. The latter is consistent with the ethics of theosis and the overcoming of the contingent fallen world (see the final section in this essay). Hence, Brassier’s description of Laruelle’s determination in the last instance as anti-dialectical (Nihil Unbound: From Enlightenment to Extinction (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2007), 141–142). This is why Meillassoux can evoke the ‘necessity of contingency’, but from the position of Ibn Sina, this undermines true contingency. Cf. Avicenna Ibn Sina, Avicenna on Theology (Abu ‘Ali al-Husain ibn ‘Abd Allah) (Chicago: Kazi Publications Incorporated, 2007). Cf. John Divers, Possible Worlds (London: Routledge, 2002). Plato, The Timaeus of Plato. With Introduction and Notes (Salem, NH: Ayer, 1988), 15a. Luc Brisson and Walter F. Meyerstein. Inventing the Universe: Plato’s Timaeus, the Big Bang and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1995), 23. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2008. Cf. On the Plurality of Worlds (London: Wiley, 2001). Plato, The Timaeus of Plato. With Introduction and Notes, 48a. The problem of the reduction of the modal cases to an ontological concept informs contemporary metaphysics of modality, for example, David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds, 2001), who wishes to preserve an ontological concept, but in order to do so must admit the ontological univocal status of all possible worlds. The minority position in this tradition is that of a modal non-reductionism, such as the variation proposed by Yagisawa, who nears the Platonic insight when he denies the total reducibility of modality and accordingly introduces a modal dimension to his metaphysics, which subsists alongside the dimensions of space and time: Yagisawa crucially describes this modal dimension as ‘metaphysical’ (‘Primitive Worlds’, Acta Analytica, 17: 28 (2002), 22) in that modal concepts do not imply a physical or in broader sense ontological status as do the dimensions of space and time. Cf. John D. Zizioulas, Lectures on Christian Dogmatics, 84–86.

The apophatic dimension of revelation

109

30 Zizioulas, Lectures on Christian Dogmatics, 84–86. 31 Reza Negarestani, in his essay on the absolute exteriority of Islamic monotheism (‘Islamic Exotericism: Apocalypse in the Wake of Refractory Impossibility’ in Collapse II(Oxford: Urbanomic, March 2007), 273–311) refers to this ayah: ‘Externality is diagrammed by a simultaneous formidable closeness and externality of a function, a concertization of “closer to you than your jugular vein”’ (306). 32 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 45. 33 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead”’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977), 64. 34 Ibid., 64. 35 The ubiquity of the concept of immanence from this perspective detracts from any radicality it may have: the application of immanence by diverse thinkers such as Deleuze, Laruelle, Henry, etc., implies that one may maintain a phenomenological, materialist, non-philosophical, Spinozist, etc., position and remain committed to immanence. Although this does simplify the clear distinctions in these positions, from this greater historical perspective, immanence becomes something to the effect of an innocuous concept, a commitment to the validity of everything that philosophy has said in one form or another over the last few centuries. 36 Jean-Toussaint Desanti, ‘Some Remarks on the Intrinsic Ontology of Alain Badiou’, in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2004), 59. 37 Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 20. 38 See, for example, Milbank inter alia, cf. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock and Graham Ward, eds, Radical Orthodoxy (London: Routledge, 2002). 39 Hence, if for Aquinas, the creation of the world out of nothing becomes an act of faith, because creatio ex nihilo cannot be explained through his theology, mutatis mutandis, it can be said that God does become explainable. This is the exact inversion of apophatic theology, whereby it is the existence of the world that becomes some type of absolute outside. 40 Cf. Alain Badiou, Being and Event (London: Continuum, 2005). 41 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) 35–60. 42 Francois Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 43 S. N. Bulgakov, The Bride of the Lamb (Edinburgh: Eerdmans, 2002), 401. 44 Cf. Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: From Enlightenment to Extinction (London: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2007), xi. 45 Options which do not fit this straightforward typology include: a) Meillassoux’s formulation of divine inexistence: there is no meaning, justice, ethics, etc., at the moment, yet this does not preclude the possibility that they could arise. However, this divests the ethical engagement from ‘this world’, which problematizes this type of future-oriented messianism. However, even this could perhaps be salvaged by adapting a Russian cosmist position in the style of Fjodorov’s ‘common task of humanity’ as the resurrection of the dead through the collection of dust, the exploration of cosmos etc. Namely, the ‘common task’ of Meillassoux becomes the monumental science fiction-like dedication of the human being to changing the contingent laws of nature through direct scientific intervention so as to introduce justice into the world. b) Badiou’s separation of being and event is in a concession of the difficulties of reconciling a concept of truth with ontology, i.e. in particular, with Badiou’s political concerns, the ethical difficulties this creates against postmodern relativism, and moreover, since for Badiou, the equation of ontology and set theory reflects the logic of capitalism (Manifesto for Philosophy (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1992), 58), this entails that an anti-capitalist position must in a fundamental manner reject ontology. In this sense, Badiou’s solution resembles Maximus the

110 M. Griško

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Confessor’s tropos–logoi distinction: the tropos is the contingent mode of existence, whereas the logoi as the absolute truth and order of the world are in conflict with the contingent mode of the fallen world. Cf. John D. Zizioulas, Lectures on Christian Dogmatics, 54–64. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, The Catechetical Lectures of S. Cyril, Archbishop of Jerusalem (Oxford, UK: John Henry Parker, 1839), 143. Torstein Tollefsen, The Christocentric Cosmology of St. Maximus the Confessor (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2. John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (London: T&T Clark, 2007), 24. Cf. Florovsky The Collected Works of Georges Florovsky. 3. Creation and Redemption, for an account of the Fall, Crucifixion and Resurrection illustrated through a use of the concept of necessity. A. J. Wensinck, Mystic Treatises of Isaac of Nineveh (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2011), 544. Cf. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Interview (with Ben Woodard)‘, in L. Bryant, N. Srnicek and G. Harman, The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism (Melbourne, Victoria, S. Australia: repress, 2011). Maximus the Confessor, Opuscula Theologica et polemica. OTP 14 (PG 91:153A–B). Maximus’ definition of gnomic will takes on a prescient character from the perspective of a historicist eschatology: namely, the gnomic conception of freedom anticipates neoliberal definitions of the human being with its emphasis on individual choice. This furthermore recalls Schmitt’s criticism of liberalism, to the extent that Schmitt’s work is ultimately also a historicist eschatology: if the neoliberal project proclaims peace in this world according to its definition of the human being qua individual, this becomes the (pseudo)Antichrist peace of a peace entirely achieved by the human (cf. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political Theology and Political Philosophy (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press), 23–25) according to the inverted concept of gnomic freedom in the Maximian anthropology. The neoliberal model’s distortion of freedom is the gnomic version, insofar as it emphasizes individual choice and seeks to preserve and perpetuate individual choice, at once restricting the radical transformative effect of freedom (the Maximian natural will), thus offering a counterfeit concept of freedom, which is the inverse of the freedom of the natural will as the freedom of deification.

6

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion Rico G. Monge

In his early and groundbreaking works, The Idol and Distance and God without Being, Jean-Luc Marion retrieved the mystical theology of Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, thus furthering the Heideggerian critique of the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics, while also liberating God from the status of an idolatrous concept that serves the needs of the human ego. This work proved to be of landmark significance, as it sparked new lines of inquiry in what has come to be known as postmetaphysical theology. In addition, it sparked lively debate between Marion and Jacques Derrida concerning the relationship between negative theology and the overcoming of metaphysics. It is no surprise, therefore, that Marion’s recently-translated In the Self’s Place: The Approach of St. Augustine, holds the promise of opening up similarly exciting new avenues of inquiry for both theologians and phenomenologists alike. Moreover, his reading of Augustine, which brings the greatest of Latin Church fathers into greater unison with Dionysius and his inheritors in the Greek East holds potentially monumental importance for ecumenical dialogue between Eastern and Western Christians. At the same time, Marion’s study will undoubtedly raise red flags with those who already detect a “theological turn” in Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology.1 Unnoticed, however, is the manner in which Marion’s recent works straddling the boundary of theology and phenomenology appear to represent an unintentional departure from his earlier theological works. In addition to his study of Augustine, the phenomenology of love Marion articulates in The Erotic Phenomenon makes moves wherein he attempts to free humanity from the horizon of Being in the same manner in which he has previously used PseudoDionysius and Heidegger to free divinity. In doing so, Marion undercuts his previous work in The Idol and Distance and God Without Being, both of which rest on the understanding that God’s mode of Being and humanity’s are incommensurable. The end result paints a portrait in which divinity appears only as a projection of human nature into the infinite – a portrait that might be characterized as “Feuerbachian.” Marion explicitly states that his goal is to “read and interpret the Confessions of Saint Augustine in a resolutely nonmetaphysical mode, by using to this end the major concepts that I had just elaborated in a logic of radically

112 R. G. Monge phenomenological intent.”2 Reading Augustine in a phenomenological mode and not in a metaphysical one is a daring and intriguing endeavor, especially when one considers that Augustine regularly explores themes that have traditionally been classified under the general heading of metaphysics. Marion’s bold reading promises to open up ways of understanding Augustine that have been ignored as a result of the philosophical and metaphysical and even theological orientations of many of Augustine’s interpreters. Perhaps most provocative is that Marion is not interested in a merely non-metaphysical reading of Augustine, but rather in demonstrating that Augustine himself has no interest in anything resembling metaphysics. Marion alleges, “Philosophy such as Saint Augustine understands it is opposed to philosophy in the sense of metaphysica.”3 Marion therefore is not simply giving attention to the phenomenological aspects of Augustine’s thought and ignoring the metaphysical, nor is he merely emphasizing the phenomenological over the metaphysical – Marion is declaring that Augustine is not a metaphysician, does not speak the language of metaphysics, and is not concerned with the questions of metaphysics at all. The goal of this essay consists of four main elements: first, to identify the problematics of Marion’s “erotic turn” in The Erotic Phenomenon; second, to elaborate on how and why Marion reads Augustine in a non-metaphysical, phenomenological mode; third, to identify key questions that arise from this reading; and, fourth, to gesture towards a possible solution to these questions, pointing perhaps towards a reconciliation between metaphysics and phenomenology.

What’s wrong with metaphysics? As metaphysics is a nebulous term, even within philosophical circles, it is useful here to revisit what then metaphysics has meant for Marion in his prior work and identify key aspects of what he finds problematic about it. Marion argues that metaphysics, and thus philosophy in general, “considers first and last the question of being or not being, or the question that asks what beings are, which is to say, what οὐσία (essentiality) is.”4 Metaphysics therefore is the attempt to discover what is at the essence of all existence and to provide an account of how and why things are. In previous works, Marion follows Martin Heidegger by arguing that metaphysics imposes on what it still designates under the disputable title of ‘God’ a function in the onto-theo-logical constitution of metaphysics: as supreme being, ‘God’ assures the ground (itself grounded according to the Being of beings in general) of all other derived beings.5 To account for the how and why of the existence of things, metaphysics has turned to the concept of God as the “supreme being” in order to provide a foundation for existing beings. The purpose of metaphysics in this respect is to grant coherence to the world; the metaphysical God thus becomes the supreme

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

113

concept – the cause of all – that provides for the needs and desires of human thought to construct a coherent understanding of the existence of the universe and all that is within it.6 The problem, then, with this metaphysical understanding of God is that it ultimately does not deal with God at all, but merely with a concept that has been constructed in the place of God. The metaphysical concepts of God are thus idols … the making available of the divine in a face, which one names the god. Therefore, the philosopher or, better, the metaphysician names the divine: he fixes it.… He introduces between the divine, or later the God of Jesus Christ, and naming a simple, banal – and formidable – equals sign.7 Here we see that it does not matter what concept one identifies with God – whether it be Goodness, self-contemplative thought, Unity, or anything else; any concept, so long as it is made equivalent with God, becomes a concept which is less than God and thus an idol. Marion spells out most clearly what is at stake in his theological position in the preface to the English edition of God Without Being. Concerning his opposition to a God defined by Being, Marion explains, with respect to God, is it self-evident that the first question comes down to asking … whether he is?… No doubt, God can and must in the end also be; but does his relation to Being determine him as radically as the relation to his Being defines all other beings?8 Marion challenges the notion that Being determines God the way that it defines all other beings, while remaining emphatically clear that Being is absolutely determinative of all that is not God, and in this he remains Heideggerian. Thus, Marion draws a radical distinction between God and humanity in which he claims, “To be or not to be – that is indeed the first and indispensable question for everything and everyone, and for man in particular,” while clarifying that he is attempting to “bring out the absolute freedom of God with regard to all determinations, including, first of all, the basic condition that renders all other conditions possible and even necessary – for us, humans – the fact of Being.”9 For human beings, Marion indicates that Being is the condition that makes it possible for the human being to encounter any other conditions at all. God alone is free from this condition, and as such God enjoys a freedom that makes him radically other than any being manifest within the world. This radical otherness is most apparent in the inverse relationship that God and humans have to love and to Being. This is “because, for us, as for all the beings of the world, it is first necessary ‘to be’ in order, indissolubly, ‘to live and move’ … and thus eventually also to love.”10 With humanity, Being is what makes possible the human ability to love because Being is the horizon of all possibility for human beings. With God, on the contrary,

114 R. G. Monge are not all the determinations that are necessary for the finite reversed for Him, and for Him alone? If, to begin with, “God is love,” then God loves before being, He only is as He embodies himself – in order to love more closely that which and those who, themselves, have first to be.11 In absolute opposition to the human mode (where Being makes loving possible), in the divine realm it is loving that makes Being possible. In other words, one might say that only by giving himself in Christ, because he is love, does God become embodied in the world and enter into its “to be.” In this opposition that he sets up between God and humanity, Marion appears to be sticking quite closely and consistently to Heideggerian phenomenology. However, Marion believes that Heidegger’s “theology of faith falls within the domain of Dasein and, directly through it, of Being, as the ‘God’ of metaphysics falls within the domain of onto-theo-logy and hence indirectly through it of Being.”12 For Marion, the theology of faith that Heidegger suggests implies a God who is determined by Dasein and its Being. Such a God would show up according to human terms, and this would necessarily imply a subjugation of God to humanity. Marion’s goal, then, is to allow God to dominate human thought and prevent any condition of humanity, including the most fundamental one, Being, to dominate God. This is why, as Marion has already explained, he is aiming for God according to the name of love, or charity, because “charity belongs neither to pre-, not to post-, nor to modernity, but rather, at once abandoned to and removed from historical destiny, it dominates any situation of thought.”13 Marion’s engagement with Thomas Aquinas also demonstrates this point. Marion asserts that the “Being” of the metaphysical tradition “no longer has anything to do with the esse that Saint Thomas assigns to the Christian God.”14 How can this be so, when Thomas so famously defines God as esse? The answer lies in what Marion argues is the impossibility of drawing a strong analogy between God’s Being and man’s in Thomistic thought. Accordingly, Marion explains, [Aquinas] does not chain God to Being because the divine esse immeasurably surpasses (and hardly maintains an analogia with) the ens commune of creatures, which are characterized by the real distinction between esse and their essence, whereas God, and He alone, absolutely merges essence with esse.15 In other words, there is a difficulty in drawing an analogy between God’s Being and ours because there is a qualitative difference between them and not merely a quantitative difference. As Marion puts it, “if esse characterizes God in Thomism, esse itself must be understood divinely, thus having no common measure with what Being can signify in metaphysics – and especially in the onto-theo-logy of modern metaphysics.”16 Such a reading of Thomism, regardless of how plausible or implausible one may find it, remains consistent with what we have already seen from Marion – that God and humanity stand on opposite sides of the questions of Being and of love.

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

115

The erotic turn In The Erotic Phenomenon, however, there is a decisive shift. Having previously established humanity’s dependence on Being in order to love, and, furthermore arguing that this is the fundamental difference between the divine and the human, Marion now changes direction and wishes to free humanity from the same conditions of Being from which he has previously freed God. This concern decisively drives the argumentation of The Erotic Phenomenon, for the “search for a concept [of love] must … describe the erotic phenomenon in its own proper horizon – that of a love without being.”17 Thus, Marion takes issue with how philosophy has relegated love to the position of derivative modality, which means, in turn, that “to love would not belong to the first modes of thought and, therefore, would not determine the most original essence of the ego.”18 One can certainly understand Marion’s concerns here, especially when we consider the Cartesian underpinnings of what he is trying to battle against.19 For with Descartes Man, as ego cogito, thinks, but he does not love, at least from the outset. Yet … we are, insofar as we come to know ourselves, always already caught within the tonality of an erotic disposition … and … can never, without lying to ourselves, claim to arrive at a fundamental erotic neutrality.20 Marion is troubled by the fact that Descartes’ ego is only insofar as it thinks and thus he instead argues that it is actually the case that the ego can come to know itself only when “always already” grounded in the context of love. The use of the “always already” here is surely not coincidental as it is one of the most characteristic phrases of Heidegger. And this should not be surprising when one considers that construing love as constitutive of the ego would resonate quite well with Heidegger’s understanding of “care” as constitutive of Dasein.21 Here one of the greatest difficulties occurs in the direction Marion is heading. Rather than building upon Heidegger’s understanding of care as the Being of Dasein by arguing that such care might be best understood as love, Marion instead collapses Heidegger’s understanding of Being together with Descartes’. This is implicit in his assertion that “of all the supposed errors for which Descartes has been taken to task, this one alone – doubtless his only error – has remained unnoticed for nearly four centuries.”22 While it is Heidegger who turned the Cartesian notion of Being on its head and argued that Dasein’s Being is care, Marion seems to ignore this and to act as though notions of Being have remained practically untouched until now. Central to Marion’s contention that not much (or, at least, not nearly enough) has changed with Heidegger’s understanding of Being is the role “vanity” plays in Marion’s quest to understand the erotic phenomenon. Marion wishes to be “freed from vanity, released from the suspicion on inanity, indemnified against the question ‘What’s the use?’”23 Being, whether in the mode of Descartes or in the reworked understanding of Heidegger, cannot deliver this indemnification. Thus, Marion

116 R. G. Monge explains that he cannot accept Being unless someone loves him, because he can “only resist the assault of vanity under the protection of … love, or at least its possibility.”24 As a result, Marion wishes to engage in an “erotic reduction” that moves past the “epistemic reduction” of Descartes, and the “ontological reduction” of Heidegger. The epistemic reduction is insufficient because it “keeps in a thing only that which stays repeatable, permanent and as if permanently under the mind’s regard or gaze,” while the ontological reduction likewise fails because it only keeps in a thing its status as being in order to lead it back to its Being, or indeed, eventually, to track it to the point of catching a glimpse of Being itself (I as Dasein, the being in which what is at stake is Being).25 Neither Descartes nor Heidegger therefore give an account of the human that allow for it to be “a given (and gifted) phenomenon, assured as a given that is free from vanity.”26 Having made this break from Heidegger, and thereby from the difference he established between the divine and the human in his theological works, Marion draws conclusions about love that potentially undermine the Pseudo-Dionysian underpinnings of his theological works and thus reveal his theology and phenomenology to be moving in a Feuerbachian direction. In a critical passage, Marion asks the question: Consequently, if love is only said like it is given – in one way – and if, moreover, God names himself with the very name of love, must we conclude that God loves like we love, with the same love as us, according to the unique erotic reduction?27 Recognizing that something momentous is at stake in posing such a question, Marion admits that “clearly, one may hesitate” to answer affirmatively, but nevertheless goes on to proclaim that “we cannot avoid this conclusion.”28 In making this daring assessment, Marion suggests – in direct contrast to his assertion that God’s Being is not analogous to human Being because it is of a qualitative difference – that human loving is analogous to divine loving. This is made even clearer by his explanation of this assertion: “God does not only reveal himself through love and as love; he also reveals himself through the means, the figures, the moments, the acts, and the stages of love, the one and only love, that which we also practice.”29 Thus, Marion argues that God reveals himself through the very same love that human beings practice. Summarizing his understanding of the human erotic phenomenon, Marion asserts: [God] plays the lover, like us – passing through vanity (idols), the request that one love him and the advance to love first, the oath and the face (the icon), the flesh and the enjoyment of communion, the pain of our suspension and the jealous demand, the birth of the third party in transit and

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

117

the announcement of the eschatological third party, who ends up by identifying himself in the incarnated Son, up to the unilateral promulgation by him to us of our faithfulness.30 As a result, God “practices the logic of the erotic reduction as we do,” and Marion wonders “if we do not learn it from him and no one else.”31 By drawing such a strong analogy between God’s loving and human loving, does Marion not imply that divine and human Being might also be of the same order? Moreover, does not such a correlation between divine and human love subject God to a category of human experience – a subjection, which Marion has previously identified as an idolatry, which abolishes distance?32 Is it at all possible to reconcile this analogy with a Pseudo-Dionysian theology that would negate such an analogy and ultimately declare God to be ὑπέρ- (hyper-), or “beyond” any thought, concept, or experience of love?33 It would appear that Marion believes that such reconciliation is possible and, indeed, it is almost unthinkable that he would intentionally break away from Pseudo-Dionysius. For this reason, perhaps, he qualifies his analogy between human and divine love by stating that between God’s love and ours there lies “an infinite difference.” This is because when God loves (and indeed he never ceases to love), he simply loves infinitely better than do we. He loves to perfection without a fault, without an error, from beginning to end. He loves first and last. He loves like no one else.34 The problem, however, is that this difference, while infinite, is of a purely quantitative and not qualitative order. God’s love is not ultimately “beyond” love, as Dionysius would put it, but simply a perfect version of human love. Rather than God as Supreme Being, an entity that is unfailing (a notion Marion adamantly eschews), Marion presents us with God as Supreme Lover, one who loves in exactly the same way we do – he just does it better. Having examined the ways in which Marion attempts in The Erotic Phenomenon to free human beings from the same horizon of Being from which he had previously freed God (an attempt which has ultimately led to his conclusion that God loves exactly the way we do, only perfectly), we may now see the ways in which it is possible that this shift has made Marion’s project Feuerbachian, or perhaps at least vulnerable to a Feuerbachian critique. This is especially significant if one considers how Marion engages with Feuerbach in both The Idol and Distance and God Without Being. In his own attack upon conceptual idols, Marion declares that “Feuerbach’s judgment stands: ‘it is man who is the original model of his idol.’”35 Likewise, he maintains that Feuerbach, following Hegel, indicates the supreme proximity of the divine only by carrying to its highest point the suspicion that the divine, here, coincided with the

118 R. G. Monge human only inasmuch as it was never distinguished from it, and never offered anything other than its image reflected by infinity.36 It is this “image reflected by infinity” that Marion so vigorously works to free God from in these earlier works and, likewise, a main reason that he employs Pseudo-Dionysian negative theology is in order to free God from Feuerbach’s “strictly idolatrous destruction.”37 This is because for Feuerbach, “Theology is Anthropology,” which means that “there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human subject.”38 Yet is this not what Marion has done by stating that divine love is no different from human love, except that it is infinite and perfect? Feuerbach would almost certainly see Marion’s conclusions as a direct proof of his thesis, for Feuerbach specifically discusses the ways in which the divine is a projection of human love. Feuerbach argues that “it is impossible to love, will, or think, without perceiving these actions to be perfections – impossible to feel that one is a loving, willing, thinking being, without experiencing an infinite joy therein.”39 For Feuerbach, it is indeed love that “identifies man with God and God with man.”40 Moreover, Feuerbach believes that what ennobled Christ was love; whatever qualities he had, he held in fealty to love; he was not the proprietor of love, as he is represented to be in all superstitious conceptions. The idea of love is an independent idea; I do not first deduce it from the life of Christ; on the contrary, I revere that life only because I find it accordant with the law, the idea of love.41 It is not difficult to see therefore how a Feuerbachian would see Marion’s discussion of God and love as a “superstitious conception” that makes God the “proprietor of love,” when in fact it is actually our high esteem of love that enables us to ennoble the Christ of Gospels as divine. In Feuerbach, “Christ, as the consciousness of love, is the consciousness of the species.”42 Has Marion’s phenomenology of love therefore said anything significantly different from Feuerbach? Accordingly, we are left asking, has the “theological turn” in Marion’s phenomenology itself turned in an anthropological direction?

Marion’s non-metaphysical Augustine With this in mind we can begin to better understand Marion’s claim that Augustine is neither a metaphysician nor is he interested in metaphysical questions. A central aspect of Marion’s claim is that most interpreters of Augustine take his writings out of their proper contexts, purging them “as much as possible of their biblical environment and their theological implications, obviously in opposition to the explicit declarations of Saint Augustine himself.”43 Marion’s argument is that Augustine is interested only in theological questions and their biblical bases; when he enquires into “origins,” he is not interested in discovering the “Being of beings” or in producing a coherent

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

119

understanding of the world – he is interested only in understanding God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. Augustine is not after what is “commonly called philosophy,” a synthetic explanation of the world, and therefore he is not concerned with the questions of the Greek philosophers who came before him – from the pre-Socratics to Aristotle – or after him: he is not concerned with a rational understanding of the world that gives coherence to it.44 That Augustine is not primarily about metaphysics is not a novel idea, and Marion readily admits that he is not the first to set forth such an argument.45 The historian of philosophy, Frederick Copleston, for example, explains that “Augustine never sat down, as it were, to develop a theory of knowledge and then, on the basis of a realist theory of knowledge, to construct a systematic metaphysic” but rather “emphasized the fact that knowledge of the truth is to be sought, not for purely academic purposes, but as bringing true happiness, true beatitude.”46 For Copleston, and for Marion, Augustine cannot rightly be said to be a metaphysician because he is ultimately concerned with salvation – with obtaining a life that is full of beatitude. For this reason, Marion asserts that Augustine is even less concerned with metaphysical questions than the Greek fathers are, because unlike them, in his Confessions, “Saint Augustine does not so much speak of God as he speaks to God.”47 Augustine speaks to the God who has brought him a redeemed life, not about a God that assures him of the world’s coherence and meaning. What then do we make of Augustine’s doctrine of creation? Does not engaging in the question of creation engage in the question of the origins of beings and therefore engage in metaphysics? Marion acknowledges this challenge and notes that, for Heidegger at least, “creation offers an inept, or rather in-apt, response, because theologically based, to an ontological question, that it masks and misses” an answer which posits a God who “would intervene as the most perfect subsistent being … instituting, by way of efficient causality, all the other beings, here understood as creatures.”48 Creation, in Heidegger’s thinking, is a poor concept because it is a theological response to an ontological question that operates by asserting that God, the perfect being, is the efficient cause of all other beings. According to Marion, however, Heidegger’s criticism of creation doctrine does not hold with Augustine for whom creation does not assure the ground of the world nor does it function to grant rational coherence to it. Instead, Marion argues that for Augustine, [c]reation appears – or, more exactly, heaven, earth, and all things appear – as created only starting from the confessio of the believers, who assume in the flesh (constituting and constituted) the interpretation of creation as praise rendered to God, acknowledged as such because invoked to the figure of the creator.49 Marion is thus establishing that Augustine’s thought functions in the same nonmetaphysical way that Dionysian thought does in Marion’s earlier works. Creation is not part of an explication of the universe, it is part of the discourse

120 R. G. Monge of praise that is rendered to the Creator. Augustine is not, according to Marion, predicating something of God when he repeatedly emphasizes that God is the cause of all things, but is rather praising him in such a way as to receive creation as a gift. Just as Marion uses the idea of a “discourse of praise” to explain why Dionysius’s focus on God’s causal goodness does not make Dionysius into a metaphysician concerned with explanatory origins, so also Augustine’s doctrine of creation is not about explanation but about the thankful reception of God’s gifts. The similarities between Dionysius’s non-metaphysical theology and Augustine’s do not end there, however, since Marion contends that Augustine is as thoroughly apophatic in his theology as Dionysius. Speaking about Confessions 1.4.4, where Augustine praises God through various names, many of which are paradoxical, Marion argues that Augustine employs both the cataphatic (affirmative, predicatory) and the apophatic (negative) modes of speaking of God in much the same manner that Dionysius does.50 And, like Dionysius, Augustine recognizes that neither predication nor negation are suitable means of speaking because in the end it is necessary to speak to God in the discourse of praise; it is only that in speaking to God in prayer and praise that one can actually aim at him without fixing or freezing God as an idol. This concern with aiming at God therefore bolsters Marion’s overall point, that God is not a concept to be apprehended, but a someone to be received, praised, and loved as Creator. Therefore, if Augustine speaks of God as “Being” or as the “Good,” like Dionysius he is not fixing God as a concept that can serve the needs of human thought; he is loving God. Marion pushes his point further by claiming that Augustine is not interested in the concept of God as “Being” – in any way remotely related to metaphysics. Referring again to Confessions 1.4.4, Marion points out that in the midst of the multiplicity of names with which Augustine praises God, Augustine never uses the name “Being.”51 Nevertheless, Marion recognizes that Augustine does quite frequently link God and Being.52 However, he argues that Augustine’s linkage of God and Being does not come from Greek and Roman philosophical categories, but from the Bible – especially Exodus 3:14. Second, he argues that when God is referred to as ipsum esse, as “Being itself,” it does not relate to an attempt to comprehend the “Being of beings,” but signifies the human desire for “Being itself,” which particular beings are not themselves. In short, we see here again the core of Augustine’s thought – he is not concerned with comprehending the universe so much as he is with yearning for God himself. Perhaps most provocative is Marion’s desire to demonstrate that Augustine is one of the greatest apophaticizers of the name “Being” for God, and that it is only as a result of persistent and consistent mistranslations of Augustine that we have developed the erroneous notion that Augustine enthusiastically employs “Being” as the preferred name of God. Through meticulous analysis of numerous translations of Augustine, Marion discovers that translators have almost universally confused ipsum esse (“Being itself”) with idipsum (“the thing itself”), an error that arises due to translators having imposed a metaphysical sense on the term idipsum.53 Marion’s contention is that rather than functioning as a synonym for ipsum esse, idipsum functions as a term “radically and

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

121

54

definitively apophatic.” Idipsum is Augustine’s preferred name for God and its apophasis lies in its null content – “the thing itself.” It does not refer to “Being” or “non-being,” and thus, Augustine’s preferred name for God emerges as an eminently non-metaphysical one.

Augustine and metaphysical questioning Marion’s phenomenological, non-metaphysical reading of Augustine is compelling, especially due to its reorientation of our focus on those issues that were nearest and dearest to Augustine. Nevertheless, along these same lines, we are left with significant questions concerning the status of metaphysics as such for Augustine himself. The Confessions appears at several points to be quite concerned with metaphysical questions – and satisfactory answers to those questions. Prior to his conversion to Christianity, Augustine details the many metaphysical questions that had played a role in keeping him from God. In 3.7.12, for example, Augustine explains, “I did not know that other being, that which truly is, and I was as it were subtly moved to agree with those dull deceivers when they put their questions to me.” Because Augustine was ignorant of the being “which truly is,” he was incapable of solving certain metaphysical questions. Augustine is manifestly concerned with questions of being and origin and makes clear that he was unable to come to God until these questions were resolved. Ironically, Marion’s insistence that idipsum refers primarily to God’s immutability creates one of the greatest problems for his argument, as it is precisely mutability which distinguishes all of the beings of the world from Being itself. For example, there seems to be no engagement here with Nietzsche’s critique of Greek philosophy (and Christianity) in The Twilight of the Idols, where Nietzsche charges that due to horror at the never-ending flux and becoming of the world the Greek philosophers posited the realm of the ideal – the realm of the eternal.55 In what way does suggesting that idipsum primarily refers to immutability solve this problem? For Nietzsche, at least, the problem is that Greek philosophy (and Christianity) posited eternal being (or immutability) in the face of its repugnance towards becoming (or mutability), and that metaphysics has been dominated and defined by this age-old presupposition. It is therefore unclear, to this reader at least, what Marion gains from casting Augustine as concerned with immutability rather than Being. Does this not inadvertently inscribe Marion’s erotic soteriology within a metaphysical horizon? Isn’t Marion implying that the desire for God is a desire for immutability akin to Plato’s desire for the realm of the ideal? How exactly is immutability different from the Greek conception of “being” or “the real”? Augustine is furthermore ashamed of the erroneous metaphysical understandings that he possessed when he was a Manichean. Speaking of his views on theodicy when he was a Manichean, Augustine explains, In my folly I thought that in the division of irrational life there was some kind of substance and nature of the highest evil. This would be not only a

122 R. G. Monge substance but actual life, and yet it did not come from you, my God, from whom are all things.56 Moreover, Augustine also indicates that he left the teachings of Mani due to their metaphysical insufficiency. This is because, Augustine affirms, “in [Mani’s] works I found no explanation of solstices, equinoxes, or the eclipse of the greater lights, and nothing such as I had learned in the books on natural philosophy.”57 Manichaeism was metaphysically lacking, and this lack actually tormented Augustine intellectually and emotionally. Augustine claims that he “began to despair that [Mani] could ever explain and solve the things that perplexed” him.58 The resolution of metaphysical problems not only helped Augustine to be delivered from the errors of Manichaeism, but they also aided Augustine in coming to the Christian faith. Indeed Augustine credits the conversion of his mind to Christianity in Book 7 of the Confessions to Christian doctrine’s ability to resolve his metaphysical questions. Perhaps the most important of all, for Augustine, is the problem of theodicy. Augustine expresses that he was plagued by his inability to understand the origins of evil. He laments repeatedly that he “still had no explicit and orderly knowledge of the cause of evil.”59 Fortunately, however, he had already discovered a metaphysical truth from Greek philosophy, “that the incorruptible is better than the corruptible,” and accordingly, Augustine was able to confess to God, “you, whatever you are, are incorruptible.”60 Despite this progress in metaphysical understanding, Augustine still longed to comprehend more. He thus asked God, “Whence is evil?” and exclaimed to him, What torments there were in my heart in its time of labor, O my God, what groans! Still were your ears turned to me, although I knew it not! When I sought an answer, bravely but in silence, the unspoken sufferings of my soul were mighty cries for your mercy.61 Augustine sees the answer in God’s mercy, but a key part of that mercy is that Augustine is granted a comprehension of God that does in fact provide a metaphysical solution to the problem of evil. Augustine is now able to see more clearly, saying, I beheld other things below you, and I saw that they are not altogether existent nor altogether non-existent: they are, because they are from you; they are not, since they are not what you are. For that truly exists which endures unchangeably.62 As a result, Augustine is able to conclude that “whatsoever things exist are good,” that “evil … is not a substance, for if it were a substance, it would be good,” and therefore that evil is no thing, but merely a “privation of,” or parasite upon “the good.”63 Thus the solution to the problem of evil, for Augustine (as well as for Dionysius) is that all things that exist come from the existing God, who is

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

123

64

good, and therefore all things that exist are good. Evil, on the other hand, is a non-entity and therefore only a corruption of God’s inherently good creation. This metaphysical solution to the problem of evil, which directly relates to the question of being and non-being, satisfies Augustine immensely. He praises God, stating, No more did I long for better things, because I thought of all things, and with a sounder judgment I held that the higher things are indeed better than the lower, but that all things together are better than the higher things alone.65 The conversion of Augustine’s mind finds rest in the answers that a metaphysical understanding of God provides. The concept of God as the source and ground of all that is (and that is therefore good), without doubt provides a much needed coherence to Augustine’s fractured understanding of the origins of good and evil in the world and paves the way for the later conversion of his heart. Last, but not least, another question arises concerning Marion’s contention that Augustine’s doctrine of creation solely concerns the praise of God and the reception of the world as gift – and does not serve to provide a metaphysical answer to the question of being. In a critical passage (10.6.9), Augustine addresses the various entities of creation, whose beauty spurs Augustine to seek the God who made them. Marion’s argument is that this passage highlights how the doctrine of creation demonstrates that the status of the world as created serves to direct our attention to God in praise, rather than to think of God as the prime substance and efficient cause of all. It seems quite right that this is Augustine’s primary purpose. But it also seems problematic to argue Augustine has nothing in mind akin to metaphysical inquiry into the substance of all things. This becomes apparent when Augustine addresses the wind and air: “I asked the winds that blow: and all the air, with the dwellers therein, said, ‘Anaximenes was wrong. I am not God!’” The invocation of Anaximenes here is curious, especially in that it implies that Anaximenes taught that the “air” was God. In fact, Anaximenes did not teach that the air was God, but rather that air is the primary substance from which all things that have ever been, are, and will be, whether divine or mortal, derive their being.66 Is this merely a gross confusion concerning Anaximenes teaching on the part of Augustine? This is unlikely. So what then is the implication here? It would seem that by claiming that “air” is “not God,” Augustine is asserting that Anaximenes was wrong to posit air as the source of all being, as the “stuff of the world” that causally grounds it and grants it coherence to our understanding. Anaximenes’ error was that he put air in the place where God belongs, and, accordingly, Augustine implies that God, in fact, is the metaphysical principle that the pre-Socratic philosophers (like Anaximenes) sought in order to explain the origins of all beings. Augustine praises God, in part, because he feels fortunate to have discovered the metaphysical ground that the philosophers could not!

124 R. G. Monge

Conclusion: Towards a reconciliation of metaphysics and phenomenology – metaphysics as cataphasis and the conversion of the mind Having examined the ways in which Marion attempts in In the Self’s Place and The Erotic Phenomenon to free human beings from the same horizon of Being from which he had previously freed God (an attempt which has ultimately led to his conclusion that God loves exactly the way we do, only perfectly), we may now see the ways in which it is possible that this shift has made Marion’s project more vulnerable to Derrida’s critiques. Derrida had long been suspicious of Marion’s reading of Dionysius. One of the primary areas in which Derrida objected to Marion’s reading concerns “the status of ‘hyperessentiality,’” in the Dionysian corpus.67 Derrida’s first concern is his suspicion that Dionysius’ mystical theology is not concerned with freeing God from traditional categories of Being, but rather to express how great God’s Being actually is. Derrida sees a significant gap between his own postmodern project and that of Dionysius, arguing that the projects part ways, “in the measure to which ‘negative theology’ seems to reserve, beyond all positive predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being.”68 Likewise, Derrida states, “I would hesitate to inscribe what I put forward under the familiar heading of negative theology, precisely because of that ontological wager of hyperessentiality that one finds at work … in Dionysius.”69 In other words, Derrida believes that Dionysius’s use of “hyper-” terminology does not indicate, as Marion would like it to, that God is without being, but rather that God is on an incomparably great level. As a result, Dionysius would still be attempting to fix “God” definitively within a concept and thus would remain true to the Western attempt to think “God” in terms of “Being” on some level.70 This is precisely what Derrida suspects all negative theology is attempting to do – to predicate something of God through a process of affirmation and negation. He argues, “it is to this end that the negative procedure refuses, denies, rejects all the inadequate attributions. It does so in the name of a way of truth and in order to hear the name of a just voice.”71 In other words, Derrida believes that negative theology intentionally makes inadequate positive attributions so that by negating them it can assert the truly incomparably great measure in which one can properly speak of God. As a result, Dionysius might stand, for Derrida at least, within the Western onto-theo-logical tradition of defining God in terms of the concept of Being. It would therefore seem that Marion has, albeit inadvertently, finally given in to Derrida’s reading of Dionysius (or else has sacrificed the insights of Dionysian mysticism by trying to make it identical to Augustinian mysticism). In arguing that God simply loves on an infinitely better level, Marion admits that it is adequate to predicate love of God and that it is possible to understand God as love by projecting human love into the realm of infinity and perfection. It would further appear that Marion’s God therefore is on an incomparably great level analogous to human Being, because Marion is now arguing that just as

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

125

God’s Being is derived from his love and not the reverse, so also human Being is derived from love and not the reverse. If Marion’s project remains Dionysian (which in the opinion of this author is doubtful), then Derrida’s criticism of Marion’s previous reading of Dionysius looks quite valid. Does this mean that Marion’s erotic/Augustinian turn has eviscerated his phenomenology and rendered him yet another unwitting metaphysician (just as Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas, and others have been accused of being)? What should we make of Augustine’s metaphysical questioning in light of Marion’s non-metaphysical reading? I suggest that a productive approach may be to look at the ways in which Marion’s erotic phenomenology and phenomenological reading of Augustine (and his earlier reading of Dionysius) might perhaps be built upon by forging something of a reconciliation between metaphysics and phenomenology. Let us return to Marion’s biggest objections to metaphysics. First, metaphysics serves the needs (or desires) of human beings to have a coherent, synthetic understanding of the world. In this regard, Augustine, as demonstrated above, most certainly engages in and values metaphysics. However, Marion’s greatest problem with metaphysics is the activity he sees in it which “name[s] the divine” and “fix[es] it” in a concept, thus rendering it an idol. This, we might well argue, Marion is correct in asserting that Augustine does not do. For Augustine does not wish to stay on the level of metaphysics, but to proceed to the praise and the love of God – and to the reception of God, creation, and salvation as gift. This is where it is helpful to elucidate what at first might appear to be contradictory thrusts in Marion’s thought that revolve around the role of the “concept” and thus the role of metaphysics. On the one hand, Marion is grateful to Nietzsche, for “Nietzsche not only proclaimed the ‘death of God,’ he brought the grounds for it to light: under the conceptual names of ‘God’ only metaphysical ‘idols’ emerge, imposed on a God who is still to be encountered.”72 On the other hand, concepts (especially love) are not always idolatrous, but can also be in the service of the icon, of which Marion approves, for “the icon also can proceed conceptually, provided at least that the concept renounce comprehending the incomprehensible, to attempt to conceive it, hence also to receive it, in its own excessiveness.”73 As a result, the “concept” is not necessarily idolatrous and can function as an icon, which preserves distance between itself and that at which it aims. So long as distance is preserved, can one not engage in all sorts of metaphysical speculation without engaging in the conceptual idolatry to which metaphysics lends itself? Is there not a way, as it seems there is in both Dionysius and Augustine, to ask and answer metaphysical questions pertaining to God without becoming an idolater? If the answer to these questions is in the affirmative, then it would seem that we might admit a space for metaphysics, and that it would take its rightful place, and an important one at that, at the beginning of the cataphatic, apophatic, mystical movement of Dionysian (and, according to Marion’s reading, Augustinian) theology. In this movement, engagement in metaphysics would belong to the cataphatic mode. Although it is always ultimately negated, the cataphatic

126 R. G. Monge mode, so neglected by many interpreters of Dionysius, is that upon “which everything else depends” according to Dionysius himself.74 For Augustine, as we have seen, his very conversion of the mind (which preceded his conversion of the heart) depended upon metaphysical questions and satisfactory answers to them. Augustine (arguably) ultimately moves beyond this point, but that by no means indicates that metaphysics is not important to him (just as the apophatic mode does not indicate that the cataphatic is unimportant to Dionysius). Rather, metaphysics (here identified as falling under the realm of the cataphatic) is that upon which everything else in some sense depends. Recognizing this role for metaphysical questions and answers that thinkers like Augustine and Dionysius are engaging may actually prove indispensable for avoiding the conceptual idolatry from which Marion has so tirelessly worked to help us remain free. For, as Heidegger asserts, “Metaphysics belongs to the ‘nature of man.’ It is neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the basic occurrence of Dasein. It is Dasein itself.”75 One cannot help but engage in and proceed from metaphysics. Only in recognizing this fact can Marion hope to properly apophaticize the metaphysics within which even he remains firmly entrenched (albeit unintentionally), and thereby avoid merely substituting one idolatrous horizon (the erotic) for another (the ontological). Moreover, such an approach might lead us forward into areas Marion has long been reluctant to tread – namely, the question of comparative religious phenomenology. Fortunately, thinkers like Anthony J. Steinbock have been able to make significant contributions to comparative mystical phenomenology among religious traditions through engagement with Marion’s thought.76 While Steinbock’s approach stresses the verticality of religious experience (and hence is resolutely phenomenological), might we not also move forward in exploring horizontality together with verticality? Might we not discover a path in which the dogma and cataphasis of particular religious traditions are incommensurable (horizontality), while the phenomenology of religious experience in particular traditions is the locus of commensurability (verticality)? And if we discover this path, we will also be strengthening the underpinnings of the subdiscipline of comparative theology as pioneered by Francis X. Clooney – a discipline in which one respects the particularities and differences of other religious traditions, while remaining vulnerable to the religious experience of others.77 In doing so, we might escape the metaphysical absolutes sought by “theology of religions,” while continuing to develop avenues for engaging in meaningful comparison.

Notes 1 See, for example, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn: The French Debate, ed. Dominque Janicaud et al. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 2 In the Self’s Place, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), xiv. 3 Ibid., 7. 4 The Erotic Phenomenon, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 5.

Augustine, Dionysius and Jean-Luc Marion

127

5 God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), xxi. 6 Cf. Carlson’s analysis, “L’advenue de Dieu,” Revue de métaphysique et morale, 3 (2009): 339. 7 The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 10. 8 God Without Being, xix-xx. 9 Ibid., xx, emphasis mine. 10 Ibid., emphasis original. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 69. 13 Ibid., xxi-xxii. 14 Ibid., xxii. 15 Ibid., xxiii. 16 Ibid., xxiv. 17 The Erotic Phenomenon, 5–6. 18 Ibid., 7. 19 Marion’s extended and insightful wrestling with Cartesian metaphysics is perhaps best expressed in his On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 20 The Erotic Phenomenon, 7, emphasis mine. 21 See, for example, §41 of Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962; Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 2008), 235–240. 22 The Erotic Phenomenon, 7. 23 Ibid., 20. 24 Ibid., 21. 25 Ibid., 21–22. I have modified Lewis’ translation of Marion in an attempt to maintain a distinction between “being” (an entity), and “Being” (the “to be” of an entity) that has characterized previous translations of both Heidegger and Marion. 26 Ibid., 22. 27 Ibid., 221. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 221–222. 31 Ibid., 222. 32 See The Idol and Distance, 4–5. 33 See Dionysius’s The Mystical Theology, especially §2.1 in which Dionysius argues that in regard to God “we deny all things,” §3.1 in which it is made clear that even God’s goodness (linked directly in Dionysius with love) is among those things that must be denied, and §5.1 in which Dionysius specifically states that God is “neither one nor oneness, divinity nor goodness,” because he is “beyond assertion and denial.” In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987). 34 The Erotic Phenomenon, 222. 35 God Without Being, 16. 36 The Idol and Distance, 12, emphasis mine. 37 Ibid., 76 n45. 38 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (Mineola, NY: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2008), x. 39 Ibid., 5. 40 Ibid., 203. 41 Ibid., 219, emphasis mine.

128 R. G. Monge 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Ibid., 221. In the Self’s Place, 5. In the Self’s Place, 7. Ibid., 26. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Medieval Philosophy(London/ New York: Continuum, 2003), 51. In the Self’s Place, 9. Ibid., 231–232. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 290. Ibid., 292. Ibid., 292. Ibid., 295–298. Ibid., 299. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols, in The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin, 1990). Cf. the section “What I Owe to the Ancients.” 4.15.24. 5.3.6. 5.7.12. 7.3.4. 7.4.6. 7.7.11. 7.11.17. 7.12.18, 3.7.12. 7.15.21. Cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names 4.18–4.35. 7.13. See the discussion of Anaximenes in Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Vol. I, 26–27. Cf. Carlson’s analysis, in Indiscretion: Finitude and the Naming of God, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 214ff. Jacques Derrida, “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” trans. Ken Frieden, in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 77. Ibid., 78. Carlson, Indiscretion, 215. Derrida, “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways, and Voices,” trans. John P. Leavey, Jr., in Derrida and Negative Theology, 310. God without Being, xxi. Ibid., 22–23. The Mystical Theology, 3.1. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” 109. Anthony J. Steinbock, Phenomenology and Mysticism: The Verticality of Religious Experience (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009). See Francis X. Clooney, Comparative Theology: Deep Learning Across Religious Borders (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 3–22.

Part III

Revisiting Eckhart through Heidegger

This page intentionally left blank

7

The role of mysticism in the formation of Heidegger’s phenomenology George Pattison

Introduction Thanks to a generation of scholarship researching Heidegger’s work prior to Being and Time in 1927 and to the publication of key materials relating to this ‘early Heidegger’, it is now generally acknowledged that, despite the technical atheism of this breakthrough work, religion, specifically Christianity, was central to his intellectual development. Heidegger himself amended Bultmann’s article on his work for the encyclopaedia Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart so as to make Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard not merely ‘influential’ (thus Bultmann) but ‘philosophically essential’ for the ‘development of a more radical understanding of Dasein’.1 However, whilst these are, undoubtedly, ‘philosophically essential’, they do not exhaust Heidegger’s theological reading-list in the relevant period. In a sense theology was unavoidable for a young scholar, such as Heidegger, setting out on a career in ‘Catholic philosophy’ and, the biographical evidence suggests, ambitious for an early promotion in this field. It is not to the point of this chapter to debate the personal motives that led Heidegger away from this path via a period of non-confessional ‘free’ Christianity to his later position of avowed methodological atheism, but simply to focus on one moment in this development and to consider how this moment throws light on the development as a whole and, in particular, on what Heidegger understood by the phenomenology of religion. This ‘moment’ is August 1919, when Heidegger makes notes for a series of lectures on ‘The Philosophical Bases of Medieval Mysticism’.2 In the event, these lectures were never given but, instead, Heidegger’s Winter Semester lectures of 1919–1920 were dedicated to ‘Basic Problems of Phenomenology’ and he only returned to religion the following year when he lectured in the Winter Semester 1920–1921 on ‘Introduction to the Phenomenology of Religion’ (focussed on St Paul), followed by Summer Semester lectures on ‘Augustine and Neo-Platonism’ (1921). Whilst the latter clearly could have provided an occasion for the discussion of mysticism, this is not in fact the aspect of Augustine’s thought on which Heidegger chose to focus. Thus we are faced with a twofold question: why did Heidegger see mysticism as a suitable topic for treatment in the first place and why did he not

132 G. Pattison follow through on this, switching instead to Paul and Augustine before moving away from sustained reflection on theological texts altogether? To answer these questions, the larger part of this chapter will offer an interpretative summary of the lecture notes – and, because of the fragmentary nature of these notes, any summary has to be interpretative. However, we shall also need to contextualize these in relation to Heidegger’s engagement with religious sources prior to summer 1919 and, likewise, to the religious aspect of the 1920–1921 lectures. In 1919, Heidegger was thirty-three years old, and a full account of his theological (as opposed to his personal religious) biography up to this time would involve too great a digression. As a student of Catholic philosophy who had written a Habilitation thesis on a text presumed to be by Duns Scotus, theology was a constant accompaniment of his development. In point of fact, the preliminary and postscript material provided for the published version of the thesis on Scotus go some way towards indicating just how Heidegger at this time sees philosophy and theology hanging together.

Following a thesis The thesis itself is focussed on what could be seen as a strictly philosophical problem. As Heidegger wrote in the author’s prefatory notice, ‘the problem is the doctrine of categories and the goal is its fundamental grounding and organic completion, which has today become one of the clearly recognized tasks of philosophy’.3 At its heart, as he goes on to say, this is a problem ‘of logic as such’, but he also adds that what he will present runs counter to ‘the current evaluation of medieval scholasticism and its logic’.4 The published conclusion of the thesis expands on these introductory comments by showing how the study of medieval thought in general might be of service to contemporary philosophy. This is first and foremost the philosophy of Neo-Kantianism, and Heidegger is at the heart of the Neo-Kantian milieu. As in relation to Kant’s own thought, a central and persistent problem here was precisely how the categories of knowledge and value might relate to reality, that is to say, how we might become sure that the way in which we represent the world and the value-judgements we make about it really do relate to the world as it is. As Heidegger would later come to see the question: how is mental life disclosive of the being of beings? In turning to scholasticism, Heidegger is already making a choice that will prove characteristic of his mature approach to philosophy in general, namely, to understand the questions of philosophy in relation to their historical development but to do so in such a way as to make these historical case-studies systematically relevant. In this regard, Scotus’ exemplary status has to do with the way in which his theory of signification permits ‘some access to subjectivity (by which we do not mean individuality, but the subject in itself)’.5 As he immediately glosses this, expanding the point to include scholasticism in general, Precisely the existence of a theory of signification within medieval Scholasticism reveals a fine disposition for accurately giving ear to the

The role of mysticism 133 immediate life of subjectivity and the nexus of meaning immanent to it without having acquired a refined concept of the subject.6 Heidegger’s interest, then, is in arriving at an understanding of the categories that are operative in the subjective self’s own immediately experienced interpretation of the world prior to philosophical reflection. In other words, it is aimed at discovering the categories that life itself produces. As he will further argue, so-called ‘objective’ judgements cannot ultimately be understood if their ‘subjective’ basis is not taken into account, a point he develops by speaking also of the form/matter relationship. The outcome is that logic cannot be construed as a fully autonomous sphere of mental life but, instead, must be interpreted ‘from a translogical perspective’, which, in the first instance, indicates the need for metaphysical supplementation. ‘For a theory of truth, this means that we must ultimately provide a metaphysical and teleological interpretation of consciousness. Value originates primordially in consciousness, insofar as consciousness is a “living deed” that is itself meaningful and actualizes meaning’.7 But what is this ‘living deed’ and how can we get to know it? Negatively (but importantly), Heidegger asserts that the theoretical attitude is only one of ‘the wealth of formative directions of the living spirit’.8 This leads him to criticize the then current interest in seeing philosophy in terms of a series of world-views, where a ‘worldview’ is something like a synthetic combination of a presumed whole of knowledge, so that ‘A Catholic worldview’ or ‘A Scientific worldview’ represents what Catholic teaching and the community of science respectively regard as the sum of all that can be known (although, as these examples indicate, the content of different worldviews can be quite diverse and even antithetical). In Heidegger’s words, such worldviews are never more than ‘an ever-provisional summary of what is knowable’ but what is needed is ‘a breakthrough to true actuality and actual truth’.9 And (whether or not the use of the term ‘breakthrough’ is a deliberately Eckhartian gesture), Heidegger then goes on to say that the epistemological approach of contemporary philosophy (i.e. Neo-Kantianism) ‘does not’ (and it’s clear he means ‘cannot’) ‘explain the metaphysically most significant sense of spirit, to say nothing of its full content’, immediately asserting that ‘the living spirit is as such essentially historical in the broadest sense of the term’.10 However, whilst this provides a broad justification for turning to scholastic philosophy as a resource for thinking through contemporary philosophical problems, Heidegger also has more particular reasons for choosing, precisely at this point in his development, scholastic philosophy rather than, say, renaissance philosophy or classical philosophy (though the latter will soon come). These reasons also illuminate how medieval mysticism could come to seem of potential importance for his overall project. Importantly, whereas many commentators saw scholasticism and mysticism as two opposite poles of the medieval spirit, Heidegger saw them as essentially unified: ‘For the medieval worldview,’ he says, ‘scholasticism and mysticism stand essentially together’.11 In other words,

134 G. Pattison it is not a case of scholasticism = rationalism and mysticism = irrationalism but of scholasticism and mysticism each representing a particular and common combination of rationalism and irrationalism. Unlike we moderns, post-Cartesian beings that we are, the medieval individual loses himself in the ‘matter at issue’, ‘the material’ and ‘the universal’. The medieval thinker is not a ‘subject’ in the modern sense and has no clear sense of method or of the ‘what’ or the ‘that’ of knowledge, but is concerned only with the ‘how’. Even though Scotus is a logician, he is also concerned with real life, which Heidegger sees as the thrust of the renowned Scotist ‘haecceitas [thusness]’. And whilst modern text-book scholasticism has reduced the doctrine of analogy to ‘a totally diluted concept’ it can be seen to have originated as the conceptual expression of the qualitatively imbued, value-laden, and transcendently related world of experience of medieval humanity. It is the conceptual expression of that specific form of inner existence [Dasein] that is anchored in the transcendent, primal relationship of the soul to God – an inner existence as it was alive in the Middle Ages with rare concentration.12 As Heidegger puts it, confronting the medieval and modern approaches, The possibility and fullness of experience that results from this for subjectivity is thus conditioned by that dimension of the spiritual life that reaches out for the transcendent and not, like today, by the breadth of its fleeting content. The possibilities of growing uncertainty and complete disorientation are far greater and even limitless for this way of life of a fleeting surface existence [i.e. modernity], whereas the basic development of the form of life of medieval humanity from beginning to end does not in any way lose itself in the breadth of sensory reality and anchor itself there, but rather subordinates itself, as something in need of anchoring, to a transcendent and necessary goal.13 The conclusion ends by proposing a thorough-going philosophical confrontation with Hegel, whose system offers a similar plenitude of depth, experience, and concept formation and does so by taking up into itself and recapitulating the entire previous history of philosophy. This, he implies, will be a necessary step for any future reformulation of a ‘philosophy of living spirit, of deedful love, [and] of revering intimacy with God’ that would, he implies, restore to modernity what the Cartesian break with medieval thought had caused to be lost.14 In the light of this conclusion it is perhaps surprising that it is then fifteen years before Heidegger begins to engage with Hegel in a sustained fashion, although from the late 1920s and on through the 1930s Hegel and Schelling in particular, and German Idealism in general, become constant points of reference in his thinking. In the meantime, he will occupy himself with a sequence of texts from the history of philosophy that he sees as exemplary for preparing the breakthrough that he believes philosophy needs. Whether this is a turn away from Hegel or whether it can be read as a way of approaching the

The role of mysticism 135 ‘philosophical confrontation’ promised in 1915 are, perhaps, open to question. At any rate, Hegel goes, as it were, underground as Heidegger now turns to other texts, amongst them medieval mysticism. Seen in relation to comments about mysticism and scholasticism at the conclusion of the Scotus thesis, Heidegger clearly sees medieval mysticism as providing a means of approaching what he has variously called the experiential fullness and orientation towards transcendence of the medieval outlook – although it does not, as he has emphasized, mean turning from the rational to the irrational. Rather, or so we may presume, it means attempting to locate the point at which the rational finds its ground in the irrational in such a way that the categorial structure of subjective consciousness reveals the life that supports and informs it.

Some notes for lectures We are now in a position to see something of the philosophical point at issue when, a couple of years later, Heidegger turns to preparing his lectures on medieval mysticism. ‘The driving problematic’ of these lectures, he states at the outset, is the ‘phenomenological investigation of religious consciousness’,15 although in the light of the foregoing comments, it is striking that a couple of pages later he restates this in terms of ‘religious life [my emphasis]’: ‘What basic levels, forms, movements give themselves there [in religious life]? How does this life constitute itself?’ he asks.16 However, Heidegger’s approach is now – as was not the case in the thesis – explicitly phenomenological and, in this regard, these notes offer an early example of how Heidegger understands phenomenological method. Indeed, he himself gives a number of explicit methodological indications in this regard. At the same time, we can see how this turn to phenomenology arises out of his earlier criticism of the limitations of epistemology and also relates to his concerns about the ‘fleeting’ cultural condition of ‘modern man’. Because of the character of the material a merely serial exegetical account would soon prove tedious and hard to follow. I shall therefore re-arrange the material under three main headings: (1) the phenomenological approach; (2) key concepts of medieval mysticism; and (3) medieval mysticism and modernity. The phenomenological approach At the start of the notes are several pages of methodological comments that reflect significant continuity with the conclusion of the thesis from five years previously. ‘The driving problematic’, as we have heard him say, is ‘the phenomenological researching of the religious consciousness’. This requires the ‘(negative) renunciation of constructive philosophy of religion’, refraining from purely historical enquiry (also described as ‘negative’), and ‘tracing the phenomena that have been genuinely clarified and genuinely seen to be primordial back to pure consciousness and its constitution’.17 Consequently, the enquiry has a primarily metaphysical, ethical, and epistemological character and it is this that determines the choice of historical examples rather than being guided by

136 G. Pattison historical examples that have been chosen without any clarification of what, in this case, ‘mysticism’ is actually taken to mean. This task (deciding what mysticism actually means) requires a number of preliminary observations that centre on the notion of Erlebnis or lived experience (we recall Heidegger’s 1915 appeal to ‘living spirit’ as the ultimate point of reference for philosophical enquiry), which at one point Heidegger glosses simply as ‘life’.18 But we must then distinguish (in this case) the lived experience of the mystic from the theorizing of what has been lived, which is mystical theology and the metaphysical evaluation of mysticism. This, we might say (although Heidegger doesn’t do so explicitly) might be done within the sphere of theology. Philosophically, however, this then requires the clarification of what is actually meant here by Erleben, living experience. However, the aim of such clarification is not simply to arrive at a theory of lived experience, but (to paraphrase) the directing (Führung) of lived experience in a manner appropriate to life itself and it is this, firmly distinguished from (mere) ‘theory’, that constitutes phenomenological understanding. But, Heidegger asks, why should focussing on medieval mysticism help us in this task and which particular aspects of mysticism are relevant to such an enquiry? His answer is that mysticism shows religious life as concentrating itself on ‘the movement brought about by the specific lived experience of finding God in detachment from self (die Bewegtheit des spezifischen Erlebens des sich abscheidenden Gottfindens)’.19 However, the point is not to try to awaken such an experience and the scientific researcher will be in the position of having to presuppose a kind of experience that, in a certain sense, only a religious person can have. Yet if he is to engage the topic in an urwissenschaftlich, a ‘primordially scientific’, manner then he has to feel at home (auf echtem Boden) with the subject matter – which, Heidegger implies, is in any case a desideratum of all genuinely scientific work. If all we are aiming to achieve is an analysis or rational account of the logical component in a reported experience, we will not reach an understanding of the experience itself – but that is just what we must try to understand. In other words, the kind of understanding that phenomenological research is aiming at is not just any old understanding but is what Heidegger calls Urverstehen – ‘primordial understanding’. It is worth commenting that here and throughout the notes, Heidegger relies massively on the rhetorical force of the prefix Ur-, implying as it does a kind of qualitative primacy. We have already noted urwissenschaftlich and, as he now emphasizes, it is not just theory he wants but the Urtheoretische, something that involves an Ursprungs-sehen, a ‘primordial seeing’, within the theoretical. Indeed, although I have mentioned the ‘rhetorical force’ of this prefix, it seems clear that Heidegger believes it is more than merely rhetorical and that it gestures towards a kind of intellectual operation of a distinctive and previously undeveloped kind – that is, previously undeveloped not only by Heidegger himself but by the history of philosophy. We shall, in any case, encounter other examples. Heidegger’s hope is thus that by proceeding from the phenomenon of the religious life itself (and recalling the remarks about subjectivity in the

The role of mysticism 137 conclusion to the Scotus treatise) we will arrive eventually at a fully adequate understanding of what is originally intended in a basic expression such as ‘I can’, that is, at a new and more adequate understanding of the subject, the ‘I’ itself (GA60, p. 306) – more adequate, we are perhaps to assume, than the ‘I’ of the Cartesian cogito or the morally autonomous ‘I’ of modernity. But all of this, as Heidegger had already indicated at the outset, is ‘without prejudice’ regarding the truth claims of mystics or of mystical theology. What a philosophical (phenomenological) approach is interested in is how the articulation (Gestaltung) of the experience occurs, what he calls ‘the means of the ways of Erleben itself’ (i.e. how lived experience happens), and, third, the means of systematically conceptualizing this experience. Medieval mysticism is a form of expressing a lived religious experience but for the philosopher what counts is, ultimately, what it shows us about the relationship between experience and the structuring of experience in their most intimate conjunction. What the philosopher seeks to do is to extract the constitutive moments of the experience, to distinguish it from the, for example, Thomist or Augustinian interpretations that shape the mystic’s own account of his experiences, and thus seek the motivation, the moving force, behind the experience, which Heidegger refers to as the Ursachen-Lehre, the doctrine of the Ursache, normally (and not incorrectly) translated as ‘cause’ but here probably bearing the full implication of the prefix and indicating something like the ‘primordial matter or thing at issue’ (recalling, as we should, Husserl’s definition of phenomenology as attention to die Sachen selbe, ‘the things themselves’, now outbid by Heidegger as he wants to move beyond even the Sachen to the Ur-Sache, the primordial ‘thing’). The point is not to achieve some kind of taxonomy of mystical experience (such as Heidegger could have seen in other contemporary studies of mysticism20) but to see ‘the concrete fullness precisely in the eidos’, as both concrete and yet as relating to ‘universal experiential structures and possibilities of modification’.21 In a comment that Heidegger does not follow up on in these notes but that is clearly of extraordinary significance for his later development (and which, I shall suggest, is connected with the reasons for his abandoning the mysticism project) time is addressed ‘freed from its linear spatial conception, not just as a framework for constructing [mental life] but as “Motiv”’,22 which, in this context, we might take as meaning motive power: time, that is, precisely as part of the expressive structure that will be seen when we arrive at an Ur-verstehen of the ‘primordial thing’ at issue.23 As we shall see, Heidegger does not arrive at a clear articulation of this claim in these notes and there are reasons why he does not do so. For now, he turns back to examining ‘the constitution of religious objectivity’ (Gegenständlichkeit not Objektivität), but this immediately confronts us with the fundamental challenge of the relationship between experience and interpretation. Let us say that prayer is taken to be the defining feature of mystical life – we then have to ask whether God is, in fact, ‘constituted’ in prayer. Does God exist for us because we pray to Him? Is ‘God’ simply the name of the One to whom we pray? Or is God already ‘given’ in some way in faith or love so that the act of prayer

138 G. Pattison already presupposes some pre-understanding of who it is to whom we are praying? And, with regard to addressing such questions in relation to medieval mysticism, how are we to disentangle the material from its scholastic colouring? These are genuine questions that phenomenological enquiry will have to face, but the same cannot be said of a number of non-problems that have largely defined the field of philosophy of religion. These include, first, the problem of faith and knowledge as traditionally construed. This is a false problem when it is seen in merely epistemological terms (as it normally is). But for Heidegger, the problem is not how we might know the religious object but how we interpret it as it is given in experience. Theological problems in fact presuppose particular philosophical or scientific assumptions. In this regard, the concept of faith in Catholicism is very different from that developed by Luther. For the former, faith is essentially true belief – i.e. holding the doctrine to be true – whereas for the latter it is fiducia or trust. But neither of these are given in experience. Rather they each presuppose a certain structuring of experience in the light of a presumed knowledge regarding the nature of faith. That is, they have a secondary rather than an 'Ur-' character. The same can be said about the distinction between rationalism and irrationalism as that is deployed in the philosophy of religion. Just because mysticism is not theoretical it does not follow that it is formless or irrational. What phenomenology engages with is not the sublimation of experience into concepts but is a kind of Zerstörung that dismantles all sublimated conceptual interpretations of experience so as to ground them in what primordially motivated them.24 And, once more, Heidegger returns the question of history and whether and how history can illuminate the question as to the essence of a given phenomenon – a Hegelian question that Heidegger once more asks but leaves unanswered. Having identified these non- or (as yet) un-answerable problems, he once more turns back to consider the distinctively religious phenomena themselves, singling out silence and worship (Anbetung), characterizing the latter as a twofold wonderment involving both Bewunderung, the admiration of what is ‘higher than’ me and Verwunderung or amazement. In relation to these, he says, each Dasein is a locus of illumination, being what and as it is through specific illuminations, calling for a ‘concept of primary luminosity’25 that is presupposed in any evaluative ordering of experience. Is what Heidegger is seeking, then, something like a religious a priori? Perhaps, but such an a priori can only be understood in the horizon of transcendental philosophy: not in psychology of religion and not in Catholic theology (which he refers to as pseudo-philosophy, indicating that he has now come some way from his own previous position as an aspiring Catholic philosopher). In fact, we have to get rid of systematizing in theology in order to address the sphere of genuine experience and action, which is subjectively determined. And whereas he had, in 1915, seen scholasticism and mysticism as both expressive of the medieval world’s pre-Cartesian realism, he now asserts that under the influence of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism (completing a process already begun in

The role of mysticism 139 early Christianity) forgot religion and replaced it with theology and dogma. Nevertheless, he does concede that the problem of subject and object thrown up by scholasticism led to the search for a new mystical basis for understanding the subject and that this understanding is carried forward in the notion of the ethical ‘ought’, that is, a determination of the subject that cannot be derived from worldly experience and thus corresponds to the ‘detachment’ of the medieval mystic. The notes indicate the intention to offer a digression on contemporary Neo-Kantian approaches, especially Wilhelm Windelband’s then muchdiscussed work The Idea of the Holy. Windelband sought a naturalistic explanation of what, in religion, contravenes norms of reason, i.e. the Holy: ‘The holy is the normal consciousness of the true, the good, and the beautiful, lived as transcendent reality’,26 as Heidegger cites Windelband. But although Heidegger does not develop this further in the notes, we can perhaps assume that he would have ultimately found Windelband’s construction too rationalistic27 and even as moving in the opposite direction from his own phenomenological Zerstörung, directed as that was to the ‘Ur-’ experience of religion rather than to its ‘highest’ forms. Nevertheless, he does later comment that, in comparison with Rudolf Otto (whose similarly titled Idea of the Holy seems, according to Heidegger, simply to beg all the key questions regarding the relationship between categories and experience), Windelband is correct to see that ‘what is decisive is the principle of posing the problem in the right way and that its division into groups of problems and the methodical points of departure are subordinate [to that]’.28 The key concepts of medieval mysticism In point of fact, the lecture notes contain relatively little that draws specifically on medieval mystical texts themselves, at least in comparison with the more general methodological discussions. However, what Heidegger does say does enough to indicate the main lines along which he approached the primary material. In an early comment specifically addressing the actual character of medieval mysticism, Heidegger defines the mystic’s relation to the world as essentially one of detachment, that is, the Eckhartian Abgeschiedenheit [detachment], which Heidegger sees as the primordial (another Ur-!) motivation of this kind of religiosity and which is also to be found in, for example, Luther. But the relationship between such detachment and the vision of God is unclear: is the negative form of detachment the constitutive element in a positive vision of God or is it the other way round, such that the positive relationship to God is what causes the mystic to become detached from the world? Heidegger seems undecided at this point, although he remarks that detachment is not in the first instance a theoretical category but an emotional one, though, as such, genuinely religious. But how is the lived experience of God (Gotterleben) or what mystics call mystical birth in God (Gottesgeburt) constituted (remembering that, for Heidegger, this requires attention to how those living the religious life themselves experienced and understood it instead of subjecting it to some kind of external interpretative framework such as, for example, psychology or logical analysis)?

140 G. Pattison For the mystics themselves, he suggest, their experience of this divine birth presupposed the incapacity of nature, and required a humble Gelassenheit, a term to which Heidegger will return many years later. All of this raises questions as to agency, such as how far mystical experience is to be ascribed to the sole agency of God working in the soul and how far divine grace is co-operant with the soul. On the back of this comment, Heidegger seems to answer one of his own previous questions: mystical experience precedes faith, a claim that, historically, is warranted by Luther’s own formation in late medieval mysticism. Both in medieval mysticism and in Luther, humility and tribulation become the ‘expression of personal certainty of salvation’.29 Granting the occurrence of such a religious experience of mystical salvation, we see it becoming manifest in such ‘basic forms’ as revelation, tradition and community. And, again, Heidegger pauses to comment on what is distinctive about a phenomenology of religion. What phenomenology seeks is an ontology of religion: it is ‘no high-falutin’ religious philosophy’ but an attempt to understand what happens at the very origins (die echten Anfänge) of religious life (GA60, p. 309). But this is not the same as the originary experience of a religious person (although, as we have seen, the phenomenologist has to have a certain hermeneutic sympathy with the religious person), since it is an attempt to gain an ‘absolute view’ (Schau) of that experience, whereas, for the religious person, ‘life produces only life’ and no external view on life is called for. In these terms, Eckhart describes religious experience as immediate, as the uninhibited life of devotion to the holy, which, Heidegger says, is a historically distinct and new approach to what is at issue in the Christian life. What is decisive here is not that Eckhart added a new layer of theory, but that he radically excluded reference to all particularities from the form of religious experience: the primordial object (Urgegenstand) of this experience is utterly without determination or specification (bestimmungslos). Glossing Heidegger, we could say that Eckhart is distinctive precisely in the way that he does not go into what we might call the affective-somatic accompaniments of mystical experience, that is, that he offers no accounts of the tears, tremblings, burning sensations, or other emotional characteristics that some other mystics emphasize, but his utter detachment from such specificity leads to new insights into the nature of the ‘I’. For if like can only be known by like, the same must hold true for the soul: it must be detached from everything that is multiple, so that subject and object may be united: I am it and it is I. As Heidegger will say, this also has an ethical aspect in that it countermands the restlessness of the soul. God and the ground of the soul are alike nameless and there is no contradiction between them. There is not even a question as to whether intellect or will is primary since the ground of the soul is prior to the separation of willing and knowing. And (versus Windelband) it has nothing to do with the good, the true and the beautiful! Even the distinction between realist and nominalist breaks down: Eckhart is an extreme realist, but he is atheoretical and the living subject is the driving force of the mystical theoretical construction. The object is the highest value, but it is the highest value only for the mystical subject and

The role of mysticism 141 not in itself. The one who is detached from contradictions knows the object without contradictions. Likewise, the eternal now of mystical experience means detachment from the multiplicity of time and place. The form of objectness as such without attributes is the absolute object: God-in-the-soul/the-soul-inGod ‘as such’. Medieval mysticism and modernity Heidegger’s notes do not account for the reasons behind his transitions from one subject to the next, but having focussed (as the title of the lecture series suggests) on medieval mysticism, he now turns to Schleiermacher. Thinking back to the contrast between the medieval and modern worlds given in the conclusion of the Scotus thesis, it seems that Heidegger’s implicit question here is whether such an experience and such a view is possible within modernity. For as he sees it, modernity is marked by the constant interaction of multiple world-views, making it hard to hold fast to what is essential. Religion is seen either as a kind of theory or as a kind of practice – i.e. in terms of its value for metaphysics or morals – and in both of these forms its distinctive sui generis nature is challenged. Schleiermacher (and Heidegger refers specifically to the second of the speeches On Religion) rightly sees the need to separate religion from these and focus on what is exclusive to it, thus paralleling the phenomenological epoche-.30 ‘Piety’, as Schleiermacher understands it, is not interested in ‘knowing’ God: piety wants only to withdraw from contemplation of the external in order to develop the inner sense and taste for the infinite. Infinite Being is not experienced conceptually but ‘in the innermost sanctuary of life’ where we find an ‘original relation of feeling and intuition’. Everything individual is experienced in its uninterrupted continuity with the whole. The noetic moment is constitutive of the noematic ‘total content of experience’ (Gesamtgehalt des Erlebens). There is no privileged object of religion, but it is most fully realized in a living community of individuals as a holy music accompanying life. The notes suggest that the discussion of Eckhart and Schleiermacher is to bring Heidegger to a position from which he can develop a more overarching account of the ‘phenomenology of the religious Erlebnis and religion’ in which he will discuss ‘the typical forms and developed figures of religious life and historical consciousness’.31 As both Eckhart and Schleiermacher suggest, religion has an entirely original and unique intentionality that can only be grasped from the perspective of the religious consciousness itself: it is a totality rather than a universality. Integral to this religious experience is historicity – i.e. it is historically lived and only as historically lived is it meaningful (Sinn). If faith is Vertrauen (fiducia, not ‘belief’), then it can only be understood by a phenomenological approach that focusses on the essence or Wesen – though not in the sense of some supra-historical essence but rather as an essence that is actual only in the reality of lived historical life. Only a phenomenology that holds fast to the ‘radical moment of origin (Ursprung)’ and refrains from theorizing its

142 G. Pattison founding intuition or rationalizing the concept of essence in terms of universal validity can, Heidegger claims, answer to this philosophical need. If faith in this sense is constitutive for the religious understanding of God, then God qua absolute cannot be adequately understood as ‘the highest value’ but the Absolute has to be understood in terms of its historicity, as that is disclosed by phenomenological enquiry. Here, Heidegger finds inspiration in the work of Adolf Reinach, an Assistent of Edmund Husserl who had been killed in the war. Reinach, as Heidegger notes, speaks of ‘inwardly motivated transitions in the lived experience of diverse absolutes … in contrast to the usual logical development of these from each other’.32 This presupposes what Reinach calls ‘[kinds of] knowledge that are immanent to lived experience’.33 In the case of God, this is the feeling of being hidden (Geborgensein) in God, which he (Reinach) also glosses as ‘the lived experience of an absolute dependence on God’. But this immanent knowledge is neither logical nor knowledge of a fact (Tatsache). Heidegger finds this very significant, but (he remarks) this only brings us to the point at which the analysis needs to begin. I mentioned before that Heidegger effectively deferred for fifteen years the thorough-going engagement with Hegel trailered in the conclusion of the Scotus thesis. At this point, however, he did propose to bring Hegel into the picture, noting the decisive Kantian element in Hegel’s ‘early theological writings’ (then only relatively recently published for the first time). But precisely this Kantian element excluded a primary relation to the holy since it sees religion solely as a means to morality (and Jesus as a teacher of morality). This reduction of religion as a means to a non-religious end remains decisive for Hegel’s whole approach to religion. And, Heidegger’s notes imply, this is not unconnected with the limitations in Hegel’s idea of the historical although (the notes are ambiguous here) this may also have to do with how, in Hegel (or perhaps for us, reflecting on Hegel), the historical becomes a philosophical question in its full originality (Ursprünglichkeit). How far Heidegger might have developed this debate with Hegel and how he might have done so must remain matters of conjecture. After two brief paragraphs he turns instead to a series of short discussions entitled ‘Problems’, ‘Faith’, and ‘Piety/Faith cf. Psalms of Confidence’, before returning again to Schleiermacher. In many ways these transitional sections reprise questions with which we are by now familiar. Lived religious experience can only occur in historically specific life-worlds – but how do these inform and how are they informed by that lived experience itself? Similarly, how is the Urdoxa (which Heidegger does not explain but which we may take to be the primordial lived experience of worship) modified in any given articulation of faith (cf. his earlier comments about how Catholic and Lutheran ideas of faith as, respectively, belief and trust already bear the stamp of theoretical assumptions)? Or how does the lived experience of waiting on God to which the psalms bear witness relate to the then current Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart definition of faith as ‘the distinctive mythical-symbolic-practical religious forms of thought and knowledge, proceeding from historical personal impressions, believing in the

The role of mysticism 143 [communal] myth for the sake of the practical religious powers dependent on [that myth] and that is only capable of articulating these powers, representing them and communicating them through that myth’?34 Heidegger is highly critical of this definition, although he does not fully explain why. By this point, however, we can, of course, see that such a definition precisely fails to address what Heidegger sees as the problem, namely how an articulated view of faith (whether the Israelite’s faith in Yahweh or the Greeks’ faith in their manifold deities or the mystic’s ascription of his experiences to divine grace) relates to the immediacy of lived experience. The lectures then return to Schleiermacher and reformulate the question that we have now heard Heidegger ask many times: if piety is a determination of feeling or immediate self-consciousness, what is its Sinn-moment? The self, Heidegger says, is not a tabula rasa but has a certain orientation towards sense; religious life precedes the interpretation of life as religious as we have seen. However, although Schleiermacher’s second speech aims precisely at raising awareness of this lived moment prior to the separation of feeling and intuition, the feeling of absolute dependence on God that his later theology develops is already an over-interpretation, objectifying what is given in primordial experience in the direction of a theory of Being (Seinsteoretisk). Why should the unknown on which we experience ourselves as dependent be identified with God? Instead of such a theological interpretation, what we need to find is the structure on the soul that allows for possibilities of fulfilment of various kinds. But such a fulfilment, qua historical, is not the pure reflection of the transcendental ego. It is the Urform der Geöffnetheit für Wertvolles überhaupt – the primordial form of openness towards whatever has value as such. Schleiermacher is right to reject Fichte’s account of the ‘I’ as constituting itself through its own selfpositing activity, but his own counter-claim that it is God who calls us is unwarranted by the phenomenological data. Schleiermacher reveals that the I exists as ‘called’ (a theme that will be of abiding concern to Heidegger’s ongoing philosophical work and that he had already pinpointed as central to his project in a letter to Elfride35). Calling reveals the possibility of a form of consciousness that is both historical and fulfilled and that can only be understood from the perspective of a living consciousness. A concluding section on St Bernard, beginning with the Abbot’s exhortation that today we are to read in the book of experience (Hodie legimus in libro experientiae), returns us yet again to the persistent question that runs through the notes: ‘Life as religious is already there’, so what is the ‘I’ that it can always already find itself constituted in just this way and without having constructed itself as such.

Conclusion: the lectures that never happened The lectures were never delivered. Why not? We have seen that, in many respects, they touch on a wide range of what will prove to be continuing issues in Heidegger’s subsequent development. Many of the claims about what phenomenology can do seem to point quite directly to the kinds of analyses of

144 G. Pattison human Dasein he will offer in Being and Time. Perhaps his change of mind is to do with the fact that whilst he has arrived at a consistent articulation of the question, he is unable to reach any kind of resolution? Kisiel suggests that such methodological concerns were practically instrumental in the abandonment of the lectures, along with the privileged role given to Luther (which would not have found favour in the Catholic environment in which Heidegger was preparing to teach) and simple lack of time.36 Yet there was, I suggest, another and, in some ways simpler reason. One of the guiding questions for Heidegger was the question as to the relationship between the given yet changing historical forms in which thinking is developed (Platonism, Aristotelianism, scholasticism, etc.) and the essentiality at which thinking aims. He seeks to address this question by tracing the historical form, in this case textual attestation to mystical experience, back to the primordial lived experience out of which it emerges. The emphasis on immediate experience that we find in both Eckhart and Schleiermacher seems to make mysticism a privileged locus for such an effort. Here, as opposed to, let us say, Mannerist religious painting, we have an authentic expression of lived religious life prior to its submersion in conventional religious forms determined by the external requirements of ecclesiastical culture. Of course, we have grown suspicious of this kind of claim for mystical literature, but in this regard Heidegger seems to be very much a man of his own generation. However, even if we accept this view of mystical literature at face value, it seems to have a notable lack and one that is directly relevant to Heidegger’s project, namely time. For although Heidegger emphatically acknowledges that the way in which the mystic articulates his experience is shaped by the historical circumstances of his time, the God-relationship that comes to expression in mystical writing is, typically for the sources to which Heidegger turns, an experience of unity with a God who is timelessly eternal. In other words, mystical detachment is not only a matter of becoming detached from sense experience and earthly desires, it is also a matter of becoming detached from the changes and chances of this passing world. That is to say, it is an experience in which the subject’s own experience of himself as a temporal being is radically occluded. To my knowledge, Heidegger himself never comments on this shortcoming in mystical literature. It is, however, telling that when he does return to religion in the 1920–1921 lectures on Paul, it is precisely to texts that place the apostle’s temporal experience of (as Heidegger interprets it) living in a time of tribulation between the crucifixion and the Parousia. In these lectures, Heidegger will interpret Pauline Christianity as the lived experience (now called the faktische Lebenserfahrung37) of time as such.38 ‘Mysticism’, then, enabled Heidegger to take a significant step beyond the impasse of Neo-Kantianism, even if it did not enable him to take the next step of relocating transcendence itself in time. In these terms, his criticism of Schleiermacher for pre-empting the outcome of a deeper enquiry into the ‘Whence’ of our being by naming this ‘Whence’ as ‘God’ identifies the point at which his own account of this ‘Whence’ will be directed, namely, the account of Dasein as thoroughly temporalized thrownness

The role of mysticism 145 towards death. In relation to this, Heidegger’s insistence on avoiding interpreting time by means of its relation to eternity becomes a distinctive feature of the de-theologizing of those same theological sources that he acknowledged as ‘philosophically essential’. Whether there remain opportunities for refiguring eternity otherwise than as the negative other of time and whether, as in Kierkegaard’s ‘moment’ that is an ‘atom of eternity in time’ or in Tillich’s formula ‘the eternal now’, there might be a kind or even kinds of existential mysticism that are as thoroughly temporal as they are ‘eternal’ is a question I have addressed elsewhere.39 That Heidegger himself may, in the end, have come to allow for such a mysticism might be inferred from his own late return to Eckhartian Gelassenheit. But whether this is still in any significant sense a religious concept remains debatable or whether it has been de-theologized beyond all recognition would require consideration of a different array of texts.40 Our concern here has been not with Heidegger’s ends, but with his beginnings, and if his ends in some ways and in some respects echo those beginnings, that is no surprise. In any case, it has been the burden of this chapter to show how those ‘theological’ and ‘mystical’ beginnings played directly into what would become central and abiding features of his future philosophical trajectory.

Notes 1 See Theodor Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (eds), Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of his Early Occasional Writings, 1910–27 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 331. This is a collection of shorter writings by Heidegger that are not included in the German complete works. 2 The notes are to be found in Vol. 60 of the collected works. See M. Heidegger, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (Phenomenology of Religious Life) (Frankfurt a. M.: Vittorio Klostermann, 1995). Further references will be given as GA60. 3 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 77. 4 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, pp. 77–78. 5 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 79. 6 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 80. 7 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 82. We may parenthetically remark that Heidegger’s proximity to the philosophy of life of the early twentieth century may be read between the lines here, although he will subsequently take pains to differentiate his own position from such philosophies. 8 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 82. 9 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 82. 10 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 83. 11 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 85. 12 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 84. 13 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, pp. 84–85. 14 Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, p. 85. 15 GA60, p. 303. 16 GA60, p. 305. 17 GA60, p. 303. 18 GA60, p. 304. 19 GA60, p. 304.

146 G. Pattison 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

Such as those of William James or Rudolf Otto. GA60, p. 307. GA60, p. 307. GA60, p. 307. We might compare this with the idea of a philosophical Destruktion of concepts that Heidegger will propose in Being and Time as a way of bringing philosophical concepts back into relation to the being that they are ‘about’. GA60, p. 312. GA60, p. 315. Cf. GA60, p. 334. GA60, p. 334. Cf. interpretation of Paul, Luther, and, in BT, ‘angst’. On Heidegger’s interest in this speech see Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, pp. 86–91; see also Alexander S. Jensen, ‘The Influence of Schleiermacher’s Second Speech on Religion on Heidegger’s Concept of Ereignis’ in The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. LXI, Issue 244 (June 2008), pp. 815–826. GA60, p. 322. GA60, p. 326. GA60, p. 326. GA60, p. 329–330. See, for example, Gertrud Heidegger (ed.), ‘Mein liebes Seelchen!’ Briefe Martin Heideggers an seine Frau Elfride 1915–1970 (Münich: Deutsche-Verlags-Anstalt, 2005), p. 87. For further discussion see my Heidegger on Death. A Critical Theological Essay (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 129–145. Theodor Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 111. This formulation evidences Heidegger’s continuing desire to distance himself from the ‘philosophies of life’ that lacked philosophical rigour. GA60, pp. 67–125. See, for example, G. Pattison, God and Being: An Enquiry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 113–140. Whether this ‘return’ is to be interpreted as ultimately secularizing the idea of the mystical or as itself a kind of turn to mysticism is contestable. For the former view, see John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), especially Chapter 4, ‘Heidegger and Meister Eckhart’, pp. 140–217. For a more positive view of Heidegger’s relation to Eckhart see Reiner Schürmann, Wandering Joy. Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher (Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books, 2001), pp. 188–209.

8

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what Beyond subjectivistic thought to groundless ground Duane Williams

Asking ‘why’ something is and ‘what’ something is and then providing answers to such questions is arguably philosophy’s reason for being. But what are those answers after? New answers by nature question older ones and even seek to replace them for good. But can philosophy in any of its branches of thought ever reach a stage where one answer supersedes another even if that is the philosopher’s intention? The fact that to this day there are Platonists, Aristotelians, Cartesians, Hegelians, Kantians, Heideggerians, and so forth, would suggest not. And even individual philosophers have changes of view about their own work – Wittgenstein, for example. However, where an answer is posited as true to the extent that it is no longer subject to question, it arguably serves to justify the basis and value of the knowledge provided. This is perhaps the case in modern times where philosophy’s emphasis on questioning without end is for some a sign of its inadequacy, and why it has been unseated by what is judged to be science’s more convincing manner of producing reliable answers.1 This, however, overlooks that science is also a practice providing answers that are always open to revision. But where in any discipline certainty is sought, the question becomes merely an adjunct to the all-important answering. And where a question has not been answered, it is either because the answer has not been found yet or because the question is unanswerable and so meaningless. But what is overlooked here is that the approach and aim of the questioning itself remains unquestioned. Furthermore, such answers may, as a consequence, cease to be philosophical. And this, I wish to argue, conceals limitations with ominous consequences. Thus the aim of this essay is to question the prevalent way we look to answer why or what, and to propose an altogether different kind of questioning as thinking. I will seek to show, drawing from Martin Heidegger’s insights, that our desire to explain and rationalise circumscribes the nature of philosophy as speculative knowledge, which is always on the lookout for reasons. In the place of questioning as the interrogation of an inquisitor who follows the demand of a decree to give answers to, there is offered questioning as the correspondence of a mystic who follows the response to an appeal to be answerable to. I will begin by putting into context and then exploring a key theme in the work of Meister Eckhart, namely, acting without why. I will then explore this

148 D. Williams theme in Eckhart’s thought further as it is taken up by the poet Angelus Silesius (Johannes Scheffler), whose thinking is in turn employed by Heidegger. This is with a view to critically evaluating Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’, which argues that ‘nothing is without a reason’. Heidegger’s challenge and rethinking of this principle will lead me to another area of his thought where, by asking ‘what is philosophy?’ Heidegger deliberately assesses what philosophy has become and in the process forgotten. I will conclude by eliciting the central themes in these three sections, and encapsulating the overriding message gleaned from this study.

I Meister Eckhart makes it clear throughout his works that if we are to know God it must be for God’s sake and not our own. This means that God cannot be known on our own terms for our own benefit, or in the way that other things are known by us. If we seek God for what we ourselves can gain from God, then Eckhart says we are no more than merchants. Eckhart has in mind here those people who avoid sin and wish to be virtuous and therefore do good works, such as, fasts, prayers, and vigils, but they only do these things with a view to getting something back from God. Such people, Eckhart says, wish to: ‘give one thing in exchange for another, and so to barter with our Lord‘.2 It is this bartering that makes them merchants. This is why, for Eckhart, Jesus cast out those who bought and sold in the temple, which he understands to mean the soul. Eckhart adds that these people are foolish if they think they can bargain with God, and so Jesus drives them away. The reason being that Jesus wanted to have the temple cleared so that God could be there all alone. This is because, says Eckhart, light and darkness cannot exist together. Darkness in the form of ignorance is driven out so that God can reveal Himself in truth and light. If in our doings we desire anything that God can give, we are no more than merchants looking to trade with God. Only when we are free of such trading can God enter the temple. This happens when all our works are dedicated to God’s glory alone, so that we ask for nothing in return thus driving the merchants out of the temple. Eckhart continues: The man who considers neither himself nor anything else but God alone and God’s glory, he is truly free from all taint of commerce in his deeds, and seeks naught of his own just as God is entirely free in all His works and seeks not His own.3 This last point means that God is perfectly free in His acts and does what He does out of true love, and thus free of any why and wherefore. Alongside the merchants who have been cast out of the temple are those who sell doves. These people are not cast out, says Eckhart, but are told to take the doves away. Explaining why in his German tongue, Eckhart says it is because these people work with eigenschaft. In modern renderings this points to quality,

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 149 property, characteristic, or capacity, but Eckhart, it seems, is trying to say that these people work with a sense of possessiveness, attachment, or own-ness. This, says Eckhart, is not deemed by Jesus to be wrong, as ignorance is wrong, but is nevertheless seen as a hindrance to the pure truth. Those who sell doves in the temple are all good people working purely for God’s sake rather than themselves, but they are attached in the sense that they possessively appropriate what is God’s and not their own. They are thus guilty of own-ness. This ownness also occurs, says Eckhart, according to time and number [mit zît und mit zal] or before and after. This suggests that the acts are not done in the eternal Now and thus without a temporal awareness that hampers, shackles, or limits the highest truth. Being this empty and free would make us like Jesus who ‘conceives himself ever anew without pause and out of time from his heavenly Father’.4 It would also remove the doves: ‘that is the hindrance and the attachment to works, good in themselves, in which a man seeks anything of his own’.5 A helpful example of what Eckhart might mean is, I believe, found in the Gospel of Mark. Here somebody runs up to Jesus and kneeling before him asks: ‘Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?’6 Jesus replies: ‘Why callest thou me good? there is none good but one, that is, God’.7 What is interesting here is that while the person kneels humbly before Jesus their question nevertheless revolves solely around them, thus betraying the intention in their request in that it concerns what they must do in order that they may inherit eternal life. The word ‘inherit’ here (Greek, kle-ronomeo-) stems from the word ‘heir’ [kle-ronomos], which refers to getting by apportionment and so becoming a sharer by lot.8 Hence one becomes an inheritor and by implication the possessor of an acquisition. It is precisely this kind of thinking that Eckhart is questioning, while the approach he is advocating is the one established in Jesus’ response. Jesus does not appropriate goodness to himself despite being good. When all obstructions, i.e. ignorance and attachment, are gone, only then can God enter the temple. The reason being, that nothing else is like this temple other than the uncreated God Himself.9 This means that the soul is above the whole of God’s creation, for neither the angels nor anything below the angels are equal to the soul – although the soul is not equal to God because the soul is created. This means that both God and the soul share the same ground, although the soul must be careful not to appropriate that ground as its own. Consequently the pure truth is only found in this eternal ground, and not in anything created in time.10 Capturing all I have said thus far, Eckhart asserts: Some people want to see God with their own eyes as they see a cow, and they want to love God as they love a cow. You love a cow for her milk and her cheese and your own profit. That is what all those men do who love God for outward wealth or inward consolation – and they do not truly love God, they love their own profit. I truly assert that anything you put in the forefront of your mind, if it is not God in Himself, is – however good it may be – a hindrance to your gaining the highest truth.11

150 D. Williams Only when the temple is emptied of buyers and sellers can God enter. Or put another way: ‘Where creature stops, God begins to be’.12 Eckhart thus shows that even the very smallest creaturely image that takes shape in us is as big as God. This is because it is able to deprive us of God. If any obstructing image is formed within us, then God has to leave. Only when the image goes out, says Eckhart, can God come in. Thus God desires us to go right out of ourselves as creatures for His sake.13 This brings us to one of the most frequent and significant themes in Eckhart’s work, wherein he says that just like God we too must be ‘without why’. There must be no ulterior motive in our work just as there is no ulterior motive in God’s work. To have an ulterior motive, such as reward or blessedness, is to be a thrall or hireling, while to have no ulterior motive prevents any ‘why’ in the form of this or that taking shape in us. But what exactly does Eckhart mean by ‘why’? He tells us that everything in time has a why. This implies that there is some other reason for doing whatever we do, rather than doing it for its own sake. Eckhart gives the example of why we eat. We do not eat for eating’s sake, but for the sake of strength.14 The same is true for why we sleep. We do not sleep to sleep, but to gain strength for the next day. Eckhart says that it is the same with all things in time, that is, we do them with an ulterior motive in mind. He argues: All your works should be without Why. I say truly, as long as you do works for the sake of heaven or God or eternal bliss, from without, you are at fault. It may pass muster, but it is not the best. Indeed, if a man thinks he will get more of God by meditation, by devotion, by ecstasies or by special infusion of grace than by the fireside or in the stable – that is nothing but taking God, wrapping a cloak round His head and shoving Him under a bench. For whoever seeks God in a special way gets the way and misses God, who lies hidden in it. But whoever seeks God without any special way gets Him as He is in Himself.15 The person who seeks God without any special way and gets Him as He is in Himself, Eckhart variously refers to as: the just man, the good man, or the genuine man. Ask him why he loves God and he will say, ‘for God’s sake’.16 But it is a common mistake for people to ask God for this or that, and to therefore worship him with the ulterior motive of a why. The unfortunate consequence of this, says Eckhart, is that people get what they prayed for. He tells us: Alas, how many are there who worship a shoe or a cow and encumber themselves with them – they are foolish folk! As soon as you pray to God for creatures, you pray for your own harm, for creature is no sooner creature than it bears within itself bitterness and trouble, evil and distress. So they get their deserts, these people who reap distress and bitterness. Why? They prayed for it.17

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 151 Despite the uncharacteristically austere language used here, a significant point is being made that is easily overlooked. This is that merchants preoccupied with ulterior motives, and who trading with God get their deserts, are actually robbing themselves. The reason being that they only receive what it is they prayed for, and yet lose God in the bargain, so to speak. Eckhart says: I have sometimes said whoever seeks God and seeks anything with God, does not find God; but he who seeks God alone in truth finds God but he does not find God alone – for all that God can give, that he finds with God.18 While elsewhere Eckhart tells us: If you could naught yourself for an instant, indeed I say less than an instant, you would possess all that is in itself. But as long as you mind yourself or anything at all, you know no more of God than my mouth knows of colour or my eye of taste: so little do you know or discern what God is.19 Similarly, in another of his sermons which, I believe, echoes Jesus being tempted by the devil in the wilderness, Eckhart asserts: The just man does not love ‘this or that’ in God. If God were to give him all His wisdom and all that He can perform outside of Himself, that man would not care for it or have any taste for it, because he wants nothing and seeks nothing; for he has no why for which he does anything, just as God acts without why and has no why. In the same way as God acts, so the just man acts without why; and just as life lives for its own sake and asks for no why for which to live, so the just man has no why for which to act.20 For this reason Eckhart notes that for the person who has for an instant looked into this ground, a thousand marks of red minted gold are the same as a brass farthing.21 This is because that person heeds nothing but God, and does not seek anything with God.22 They turn away from all things and realise themselves in their naked essence, knowing that whatever is outside of this essence is accidental and makes for why.23 Such a person understands that gaining a thousand worlds plus God is not any more than gaining God alone.24 Hence when shown and offered all the kingdoms of the world and their splendour if he bows down and worships the devil, Jesus says: ‘Away with you, Satan! For it is written, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him”’.25

II It is fairly well known among scholars of his work that Martin Heidegger also explored Eckhart’s notion of ‘living without why’. It is understood that he knowingly drew indirectly from Eckhart through the mystical poet, Angelus Silesius, a pseudonym for Johannes Scheffler. In his poem, The Cherubinic

152 D. Williams Wanderer, Silesius famously writes: ‘The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms; it cares not for itself; asks not if it’s seen’.26 Heidegger explores this line in a course of 13 lectures given at Freiburg in 1955–56, and later published as, The Principle of Ground [Der Satz vom Grund]. I will draw here from John D. Caputo’s study of these lectures in his work, The Mystical Element of Heidegger’s Thought. Heidegger’s lectures focus on Leibniz’s famous ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’ [principium sufficientis rationis], that states: ‘nothing is without reason’, or as Heidegger translates it: ‘nothing is without ground’. This means that for: ‘any occurrence, a being with sufficient knowledge would be able to explain why it is as it is and not otherwise’.27 The principle of ‘reason’ or ‘ground’ that nothing is said to be without is understood to be ‘propositional’ or ‘axiomatic’. But more than this, Leibniz characterised his principle as a principium grande or ‘principle of great power’ [grossmächtig]. This essentially means that ‘for every truth, a reason can be given’, which makes the principle of ground the ground of every truth.28 Caputo adds: ‘The power [Macht] of the Principle of Ground lies in the fact, then, that all knowledge [Erkennen], all representations, are subject to its demand’.29 Important here is the word ‘demand’, for as Caputo notes: When Leibniz enunciated this principle, he was expressing something that was already being sounded forth. He ‘heard’ an address which was already there but had never been articulated before. The important thing which Leibniz heard, according to Heidegger, is the ‘claim’ [Anspruch] which the Principle of Ground makes upon us, the ‘demand’ it puts upon us. In the saying [Spruch] ‘nothing is without reason,’ Leibniz heard the demand [Anspruch] which it contains.30 The crucial point here is that this unconditional demand on the subject to deliver a reason is, according to Heidegger, still being made today and shapes our thinking. Thus under the influence of Leibniz’s principle, we are everywhere searching for reasons.31 In short, ‘nothing is without reason’, which we might translate as, nothing is without why. This is not simply a basic proposition, says Caputo, but a decree laying claim to our thought.32 Hence our living in ‘the atomic age’, where we are: ‘driven by a desire to explain and rationalize, i.e., to give grounds’.33 Interpreting Heidegger, Caputo writes: In the present age, the great power of Leibniz’s principle is not merely ‘felt’; it has been ‘unleashed’ [entfesselt] upon us. Its effect has been so great as to have provoked an enormous upheaval in human existence. The demand we live under today to give grounds has taken away from us the ground and basis of our human dwelling, robbing us of our rootedness [Bodenständigkeit] in the ground and soil upon which we have always stood. The more we pursue grounds, the more we lose our footing. The more energy we harness, the less we know how ‘to build and dwell’ [zu bauen und zu wohnen]…. The more we search for grounds, the more groundless our existence becomes.34

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 153 In our search for grounds and thus a footing for truth, we are always responding to the edict that ‘nothing is without why’. The answer to the question ‘why’ provides the grounds for this or that being so. But Heidegger wants to re-root what he sees as our uprootedness from the true ground of human existence, or put another way show us where our roots remain, which for him is in Being itself, and to lead us away from our preoccupation with this or that being so according to the dictates of reason. It is here that Heidegger turns to the line from Silesius, which says: ‘The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms; it cares not for itself; asks not if it’s seen’.35 Where Leibniz in essence argues that ‘nothing is without why’, Silesius suggests that on the contrary: ‘the rose is without why’. But Heidegger is aware that level-headed reason and prudent common sense tell us the poet is mistaken here. The botanist can tell us much about the why and wherefore of a rose. However, the poet acknowledges, says Heidegger, that the rose has a reason or ground, and in this sense a why, but: ‘it does not consider [achtet nicht] it, nor does it question [fragt nicht] it’.36 What the mystical poet means to point out, then, is that the rose is not like men. Men are continually considering reasons and asking questions, deliberating and calculating. But the rose blooms without reflecting upon the grounds of its blooming. Men never act without motives, however illconceived they may be. But the rose is not like that: it blossoms without concern.37 In short, the rose in itself is not subject to the subjectivistic principle of Leibniz, which demands that a reason be provided to the thinking subject. Thus Heidegger writes: ‘It is valid of the rose, but not for the rose; of the rose insofar as it is an object of our representing; but not for the rose insofar as this stands in itself and is simply a rose’.38 The gist of this is that the principle of Leibniz is true in the rationalistic terms that constitute ‘representational’ thinking: ‘Every object which “stands before” [gegen-steht] “consciousness” must have a ground’.39 But the crucial difference identified by Heidegger is that the mystical poet: speaks of the rose not as it stands before the representing subject, but as it stands in itself [in sich selber steht]. The poet lets the rose be the thing which it is, without reducing it to the status of an ‘object’.40 The rose then is in a different region outside representational thinking where it does not stand before a subject as an object. It rather stands on its own grounds where it is under no demand to provide grounds for its being so, either to itself or to any observer. Thus the rose as a rose blooms because it blooms – not because it wishes to attract bees in order to pollinate, or because it wishes to makes seeds and reproduce. The latter may be so of the rose represented as an object to our thinking, but not for the rose which rests on its own grounds and cares not for itself; it asks not if it is seen.

154 D. Williams There may lurk the suspicion that this Silesian vision does not entirely divest itself of subjectivity, but rather shifts it to a different register. While this is not the enframing of representational thinking, we may still ask, how does the poet frame the flower? Thus to blossom without why might enact a romanticism.41 It would seem that the poet, compared to the botanist, values or appreciates the rose and its blossoming differently. The difference stems from the significance of the ‘because’ over and above the ‘why’. For the poet the rose is without why, and blooms because it blooms. Sure the rose blooms for a reason that the botanist determines, but for the poet the esteemed worthiness of the blooming is the blooming in recognition that the rose blooms because it blooms. Here then the ‘regard’ of the botanist and the poet is different. And I would suggest that where the former is subjective and gives answers to the rose, the latter is not subjective and is moreover answerable to the rose. The botanist regards the rose in terms of conferring a value upon it, whereas the poet regards the rose in terms of it standing forth of itself. Now the point of recognizing that the rose is in a different region outside representational thinking, is not simply for Silesius or Heidegger to identify the different ways in which a rose and a human are what they are. Rather the rose is a metaphor for the human soul, so that the line of Silesius says: ‘that man, in the most concealed depths of his being, first truly is when he is in his own way like the rose – without why’.42 A person is like the rose when they surrender all questioning and are rooted in their ground, i.e. Being itself, which they simply let be. This letting-be or releasement [Gelassenheit], like the phrase ‘without why’, is a term that originally comes from Eckhart. Caputo writes: The poet, for Heidegger, is inviting us to enter this other region outside representational thinking where the Principle of Rendering a Sufficient Ground does not hold. This is an invitation which it is hard to accept because man has, from of old, been conceived of as the animal rationale, i.e., as the being which gives reasons and engages in representational thinking. The region in which representational thinking is suspended will seem to him a strange and forbidding place.43 Thus Heidegger, through Silesius’ line of mystical poetry, wants to return our footing to what he sees as a more genuine ground. Heidegger does this in an ingenious way. Not by dismissing and removing Leibniz’s Principle of Ground, but by hearing it in a completely different sense. Heidegger tells us that we have so far heard the Principle in a routine and conventional key: 1 2

3

Nothing is without ground. But if we want to hear what the customary intonation tends to prevent us from hearing, then we must, says Heidegger, change the key so that we hear it in the following way: Nothing is without ground.

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 155 Caputo writes: In the second version, something is sounded which we did not hear before, viz., the ringing together of the ‘is’ and ‘ground.’ In the first version, the logico-grammatical subject of the proposition is the ‘thing,’ the ‘being’ [ein Seiendes]. The proposition speaks about the being, not about ground. It does not seek to determine what ‘ground’ is, but what the being is, which it determines as something which, needs to be ‘grounded.’44 In the second key the ‘is’ comes to the fore. Here the ‘is’ points to the Being of all beings, rather than acting as a mere copula. The new key tells us that nothing is, i.e. has no Being, without ground. For anything to be, it must be grounded in Being. Put another way, the key says: No ground without Being. Being and ground are to be understood in terms of one another. Heidegger asserts: ‘Being and ground belong together. Ground receives its essence out of its belonging together with Being as Being. Conversely, Being as Being holds sway out of the essence of ground’.45 Caputo notes that Heidegger does not mean here that Being ‘has’ a ground, but rather that Being ‘is’ ground.46 Being is not grounded in anything else, but serves as the ground of all things. Being itself is thus ground-less [grund-los], a word that is loaded with negativity in representational thinking, and because it is without ground Heidegger refers to it as the Abyss [Abgrund]. The etymology of the word ‘abyss’ refers to the ‘bottomless’ or ‘unfathomed’. It thus indicates the lowest depths in terms of a profound groundless ground.47 For Heidegger the new key is something sudden and reveals a leap of thought that brings it into a different region outside representational thinking. Here the rose is not an object of our thinking, rather as Heidegger writes: ‘The blossoming of the rose is grounded in itself; it has its ground in and by itself. The blossoming is a pure emerging out of itself, pure shining’.48 Thus the rose blossoms because it blossoms. The ‘because’, says Heidegger, does not refer us to something else other than the blossoming, but refers the blossoming back to itself tautologically.49 The blossoming is founded and grounded in itself.50 Heidegger understands this to be more genuinely axiomatic, with regard to the original force of the Greek word, axiomata, which means: that which is thought worthy.51 The Greek axiomata stems from axio, meaning to value or appreciate something. Hence an ‘axiom’ is that which is held in the highest esteem, and ‘axiology’ is the science of values. For Heidegger, valuing to the Greeks meant: ‘To bring something into that regard [Ansehen] in which it stands, to bring it to appearance, and to preserve it in this’.52 Caputo says of the word ‘regard’ here: It means at once the way in which a thing looks from a certain point of view (‘in this regard’), and also the esteem with which it is held (‘in high regard’). Now for the Greek a thing stands in the highest regard, not because man has conferred a value upon it, as in modern theory, but rather because it stands forth of itself.53

156 D. Williams In order to make a leap of thought, then, beyond representational thinking, Heidegger appears to want us to take the poet or mystic as our model. In his work, The Principle of Ground, Heidegger’s model is Angelus Silesius directly, and therefore Meister Eckhart indirectly in that Silesius was inspired by Eckhart. Aware of the significance of Eckhart and Silesius, Heidegger argues that: ‘The most extreme sharpness and depth of thought belong to genuine and great mysticism’.54 But this insight into Heidegger’s view of mystical thinking also leads us to another area equally respected by Heidegger. Hence Caputo notes: The ancient Greeks – before Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – knew what the mystical poet Angelus Silesius also knew – that things lie forth of themselves, that they emerge from out of their own grounds, and that there is no need for the ‘ego’ to ‘supply’ grounds for them. In hearing the ringing together of Being and ground in the new intonation of Leibniz’s principle, and in hearing the saying of the mystical poet, we were, it turns out, listening to the resonances of the ancient Greek word logos to which Heraclitus beckons us to listen: If you have heard not me, but the logos, then it is wise to say accordingly: all is one.55 Philosophy, says Caputo, ‘as a thing of reason’ [eine Sache der ratio], is thus seen by Heidegger as the result of an oblivion.56 This is because philosophy does not recognise that a thing stands forth of itself on its own grounds, as did a more primordial pre-Socratic thinking. Echoing Heidegger, Caputo argues: Philosophy is an oblivion of the fact that things do not depend on human justification but that they emerge before us on their own. Philosophy is a tyranny over things, which insists that nothing is unless human reason has certified its existence. What is needed instead of philosophy is a thinking which learns from the mystical poet to be like the rose, without why, i.e., to let things be.57 This brings us to our final section where we must leave the aid of Caputo’s study, and move into another area of Heidegger’s thinking that explores the pre-Socratic thought of Heraclitus. This stems from Heidegger’s analysis of the word ‘what’, which I will show is as significant to his mystical thinking as the word ‘why’ has been in his study of Leibniz and Silesius. It will also provide us with another angle of approach through which to re-think the meaning and direction of philosophy, and to rediscover our rootedness in the groundless ground or abyss of Being.

III It is a response to the sheer wonder of Being’s isness, that early thinking endeavoured to think upon the mystical tenet ‘all is One’. George Steiner writes: ‘This insight is founded on and makes sovereignly explicit the fact that

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 157 “all being is in Being. To put it more pointedly, being is Being”’.58 Yet, this is perhaps more difficult to understand today because modern thinking reduces Being to no more than the being of beings in general. Heidegger writes: All being is in Being. To hear such a thing sounds trivial to our ear, if not, indeed, offensive, for no one needs to bother about the fact that being belongs to Being. All the world knows that being is that which is. What else remains for being but to be? And yet, just this fact that being is gathered together in Being, that in the appearance of Being being appears, that astonished the Greeks and first astonished them and them alone. Being [small ‘b’] in Being – that became the most astonishing thing for the Greeks.59 Crucial to Heidegger’s thought is the assertion that we have forgotten Being. Part of the reason for this is owing to the misapprehension of the verb to be. This has been translated over the course of time as that which is simply, presently present. Persuaded by trite grammar that there is nothing else to being besides the concrete, present participle, we limit, for example, a piece of chalk’s being to no more than say, substance. Consequently, Being is diminished and furthermore taken for granted. But for Heidegger, philosophy, in its more genuine sense, seeks being with respect to Being. Thus Heidegger himself sought Being in so far as it Is. He therefore asked the question: ‘What is “Is?”’. To do this he had necessarily to begin the question with the word, what. But what is meant by the word ‘what’, even in this very question I am now asking? Why ask the question, ‘What is “Is”?’ at all? What are we after? And have we already missed the isness of ‘Is’ in doing so? Heidegger was well aware of this problem. He realized that our asking, ‘what is “Is”?’, or, ‘what is “Being”?’, may already frame and anticipate a preconceived determinable answer, owing to that which is already implied in the meaning of the word what in the question. For example, he writes: ‘In the Who? or the What? we are already on the lookout for something like a person or an object’.60 Traditionally, the word ‘what’ concerns quiddity; that is, it enquires into the inherent nature or essence of something. But the sense of what quiddity itself is changes over time.61 Heidegger argues that we might ask: ‘“What is that over there in the distance?” We receive the answer, “A tree.” … We can, however, ask further, “What is that which we call a tree?”’62 In so doing we approach the Greek, ‘What is it?’ [ti estin]. This is the form of questioning that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle developed. With these thinkers not only is delimitation sought in terms of the answer to ‘What is it?’, but also a different interpretation of what the ‘what’ means as the nature or essence of something is given by each subsequent philosopher (and all philosophers thereafter). Heidegger is conscious of these differences in asking, ‘What is …?’, but by seeking an answer to his own question, ‘What is philosophy?’, he specifically endeavours to uncover what it is to ask what something is. He argues that for Heraclitus the word philosophia did not yet exist, rather Heraclitus coined the adjective philosophos. Heidegger wants to show that the philosophos of Heraclitus

158 D. Williams is not the same as what will later become philosophia, rather the person doing the former is not a philosophical person [aner philosophos], but he who loves the sophon [hos philei to sophon].63 For Heidegger, the distinctive feature of loving [philein] in the Heraclitean sense is a correspondence in accord with the sophon. This corresponding accordance points to ‘harmony’.64 For Heidegger the individual loves, that is to say, is in harmony with the sophon. Heidegger next explores the word sophon, and writes: The sophon means, Hen Panta, ‘One (is) all.’ ‘All’ means here, all things that exist, the whole, the totality of being. Hen, one, means, the one, the unique, the all-uniting…. All being is united in Being. The sophon says – all being is in Being. To put it more pointedly – being is Being. In this instance ‘is’ speaks transitively and means approximately ‘gathered together’, ‘collected.’ Being gathers being together in so far as it is being. Being is the gathering together – Logos.65 However, over time the loving as a harmony with the sophon was altered to a different kind of loving. The reason for this, Heidegger argues, is because the Greeks: ‘Had to rescue and protect the astonishingness of this most astonishing thing against the attack of Sophist reasoning which always had ready for everything an answer which was comprehensible to everyone and which they put on the market’.66 This rescue of the most astonishing thing, namely, being in Being, was accomplished by those who now strove for the sophon, and thereby kept alive the yearning of others for the sophon.67 Consequently the loving of the sophon as ‘harmony’ becomes a ‘yearning’ or ‘striving’ for the sophon. Now the sophon is especially sought, effecting a subtle yet colossal switch of attention from ‘all being is in Being’ to ‘the being in Being’. This is because the loving is no longer an original harmony with the sophon, but a particular striving towards it.68 Thus this new way of loving the sophon becomes philosophia. Heidegger explains: This yearning search for the sophon, for the ‘One (is) all’, for the being in Being, now becomes the question, ‘What is being, in so far as it is?’ Only now does thinking become ‘philosophy.’ Heraclitus and Parmenides were not yet ‘philosophers.’69 As a ‘thing especially sought’, being is now ardently pursued by way of questioning. Philosophy now seeks what being is, in so far as it is. With this move the nature of philosophy was circumscribed. Philosophy, says Heidegger, became ‘speculative knowledge’ [episteme theôrêtikê].70 This means it is a kind of competence that is capable of speculating, that is, ‘of being on the lookout for’.71 Here thinking comes to an end and: It replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself as techné, as an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom matter and later a cultural

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 159 concern. By and by philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes.72 Even philosophy itself can be held in its own glance as an object of speculative knowledge. Thus with regard to Heidegger’s question ‘What is philosophy?’ Steiner writes: To ask in ‘philosophic’ terms – i.e. in Platonic, Aristotelian, or Kantian terms – ‘What is this thing – philosophy?’ is to guarantee a ‘philosophic’ answer. It is to remain trapped in the circle of the dominant Western tradition, and this circle, in contrast to what Heidegger takes to be inwardcircling paths of thinking, is sterile. We must therefore attempt a different sort of discourse, another kind of asking. The crucial motion turns on the meaning of Ent-sprechen. An Ent-sprechen is not ‘an answer to’ … but a ‘response to’, a ‘correspondence with’, a dynamic reciprocity and matching such as occur when gears, both in quick motion, mesh. Thus, our question as to the nature of philosophy calls not for an answer in the sense of a textbook definition or formulation, be it Platonic, Cartesian, or Lockeian, but for … a response, a vital echo, a ‘re-sponsion’ in the liturgical sense of participatory engagement. And this response or correspondence will answer to the being of Being.73 We get a sense here then of Heidegger’s return to the harmony with ‘all being is in Being’ rather than the yearning for ‘the being in Being’. Importantly, the English phrase ‘to answer to’ captures what Heidegger is trying to convey because it contains a sense of both ‘response’ and ‘responsibility’.74 Rather than simply give an answer to, we are moreover, answerable to the question of Being, as the phrase ‘to answer to’ implies. We must become answerable to, that is respond to, the call or appeal of Being that astonishes us with the existential mystery that it is, and in this way we will in turn become more genuinely philosophers, or rather, thinkers. This ‘response to an appeal’ is very different from the ‘demand of a decree’ explored in Leibniz earlier. The astonishing fact that things are in Being is the common centre where philosophical answer corresponds, accords, or attunes with philosophical question. Heidegger writes: Philosophia is the expressly accomplished correspondence which speaks in so far as it considers the appeal of the Being of being. The correspondence listens to the voice of the appeal. What appeals to us as the voice of Being evokes our correspondence. ‘Correspondence’ then means: being de-termined, être dispose by that which comes from the Being of being. Dis-posé here means literally set-apart, cleared, and thereby placed in relationship with what is.75 For Heidegger, ‘questioning’ is not the interrogation of an inquisitor, but is based on a ‘correspondence’ with the question of Being, or the Being-question

160 D. Williams [Seinsfrage]. And so, rather than give an answer to, we are answerable to the question of Being. This I suggested earlier is what distinguished the poet from the botanist with regard to the rose. Mindful of the difference between ‘answering to’ and being ‘answerable to’, Heidegger makes a distinction between the ‘questionable’ [fraglich] and the ‘worthy of being questioned’ [fragwürdig]. The questionable is based on positivistic investigation and gives terminal answers that leave the question settled. We do not need to ask again, ‘what is the mileage to the moon’ or ‘the formula for hydrochloric acid?’76 This is because we: ‘know the answers, and finality of this knowledge has, according to Heidegger, demonstrated the in-essentiality or, at the last, smallness of the original question’.77 However, that which is ‘worthy of questioning’, is on the contrary, inexhaustible: There are no terminal answers, no last and formal decidabilities to the question of the meaning of human existence or of a Mozart sonata.… But if there can be no end to genuine questioning, the process is, nonetheless, not aimless.78 For Heidegger, the most worthy of being questioned is Being, and the question of Being makes us travellers or wanderers who come home to the unanswerable. Throughout his career, Heidegger tried to think and say Being. This is a significant point – he tried to: The imperative is, strictly one of attempt. Heidegger knows this, and says it over and over again. ‘Auf einer Stern zugehen, nur dieses’ [‘to proceed toward a star, only this’]. ‘Alles ist Weg’ [‘all is way’] or ‘under-wayness’, as in the word tao.79 To conclude, we have seen that, for Eckhart, God cannot be known on our own terms and for our own benefit. In order for God to enter the temple that is our soul, we must be without why in the sense that there must be no other reason for what we do, no ulterior motive, other than it be for God’s sake. All the while we concern ourselves with anything at all we will never know God, simply because we are acting with a why. Heidegger examines Leibniz’s ‘Principle of Sufficient Reason’, which argues that ‘nothing is without a reason or ground’, or put another way, ‘nothing is without a why’. But Heidegger challenges this claim by elaborating the line of poetry from Silesius that says, ‘the rose is without why’. Here the rose simply blooms because it blooms and is not contingent on the subjectivistic principle which demands that a reason be provided to the thinking subject. The poet speaks of the rose not as it stands before the representing subject, but as it stands in itself and on its own grounds. Philosophy as a thing of reason is the result of a forgetting because it does not recognize that things stand forth of themselves. Philosophy is therefore a tyranny over things, insisting that nothing is unless human reason has certified its existence. What is needed instead of philosophy is a thinking that lets things be.

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 161 The questionable approach of philosophy is explored from another angle when Heidegger asks ‘What is philosophy?’ Heidegger’s intention is to show the delimitation resulting from philosophy’s answer to ‘What is it?’ Where the early thinking of Heraclitus was a harmony with the One is all, subsequent philosophy is a striving towards it as a thing especially sought in so far as it is. This move circumscribes the nature of philosophy as speculative knowledge on the look-out for something. Heidegger looks to a different kind of asking more akin to the harmony with the ‘One is all’ that recognises all being is in Being. This approach is clearly mystical in nature, and I have tried to show how Heidegger’s thinking with regard to ‘why’ and ‘what’ is influenced by different facets of mysticism. In all three sections of this essay the limits of subjectivistic representational thought have been discussed, and the desire to give grounds undermined by the recognition of, and need to reconnect with, a more fundamental ground. To close, it is the case that, for both Eckhart and Heidegger, a releasement or letting-be [Gelassenheit] is necessary. For Eckhart this serves in letting God be God as the highest truth, while for Heidegger it lets Being be in its own truth.

Notes 1 See, for example, the Round Table Debate: Science versus Philosophy? This Round Table brought together four distinguished scientists and philosophers and about 170 members of the public who gathered at Waterstones Bookstore in Piccadilly, London, on 22 March 2000. This was the second in a series held by Philosophy Now and Philosophy For All to examine how philosophy relates to other ways of seeing the world. The central question was: Given the success of science, do we really need philosophy? The panel consisted of David Papineau, Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London, Mary Midgley, author and ethicist, Lewis Wolpert, Professor of Biology at University College London and Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester University. The Chair was Anja Steinbauer, President of Philosophy For All. For related interest also see, Bertrand Russell, Ch. XV, ‘The Value of Philosophy’, in The Problems of Philosophy (Home University Press, 1912; Oxford University Press, 1959); and, Roger Trigg, Ch. 1, ‘What is Philosophy’, in Philosophy Matters: An Introduction to Philosophy (Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002). 2 Maurice O’Connell Walshe, trans. and ed., Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises, vol. 1 (Element Books Limited, 1987), 56. 3 Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 57. 4 Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 58. 5 Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 58. 6 Mark. 10:17 (KJV). 7 Mark. 10:18 (KJV). 8 See James Strong, Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007), p. 1641. 9 Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 58. 10 For example, Eckhart says: ‘What is truth? The truth is such a noble thing that if God were able to turn away from truth, I would cling to truth and let God go; for God is truth, and all that is in time, and that God created, is not truth‘. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 97. 11 Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 127.

162 D. Williams 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46 47

48 49

Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 118. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 118. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 98. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 117–118. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 98. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 97–98. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 98. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 144. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 2, 2–3. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 1, 117. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 2, 4. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 2, 101. Walshe, Eckhart, vol. 2, 4. Matt. 4: 10. Die Ros ist ohn’ warum, sie blühet weil sie blühet, Sie acht’t nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet, Angelus Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, in John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986), 61. William L. Reese, Dictionary of Philosophy and Religion: Eastern and Western Thought (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980), 299. See Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 54–55. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 55. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 56. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 57. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 56. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 57. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 57–58. Silesius, The Cherubinic Wanderer, in Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 61. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 62. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 62. Heidegger, ‘The Principle of Ground’, in Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 64. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 64. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 64. This critical reading stems from a helpful discussion with David Lewin for which I am grateful. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 65. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 65. Incidentally, Caputo adds that Laszlo Versényi, in his work, Heidegger, Being and Truth, believes this region to be ‘an absolutely uninhabitable land in which no human can dwell’. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 65. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 67. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 69. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 69. Ernest Klein, Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Elsevier Scientific Publishing Company, 1971), 4; and Walter W. Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Oxford University Press, 1879–1882), 3. Heidegger, ‘The Principle of Ground’, in Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 72. For a study that focuses on the importance of Heidegger’s mystical understanding of tautology, see Duane Williams, ‘Between the Apophatic and the Cataphatic: Heidegger’s Tautophatic Mystical Linguistics’, in Christian Mysticism and Incarnational

Eckhart’s why and Heidegger’s what 163 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence, Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore (eds) (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 131–154. Heidegger, ‘The Principle of Ground’, in Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 190. Klein, Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary, 64. Heidegger, ‘The Principle of Ground’, in Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 53. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 53. Heidegger, ‘The Principle of Ground’, in Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 73. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 79. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 79. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 79–80. George Steiner, Heidegger (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 25. Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, Jean T. Wilde and William Kluback (trans.) (Albany: NCUP Inc, 1956), 49. Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Basic Writings, David Farrell Krell (ed.) (London: Routledge, 1993), 230–231. See, for example, C. S. Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge University Press, 1960), 24–42. Heidegger, What is Philosophy, 35–37. The Greek word aner tends to mean ‘a male human being’. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 47. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 47–49. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 51. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 51. See, Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 51. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 51–53. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 57. Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, 57. Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, Basic Writings, 221. Steiner, Heidegger, 29. Steiner, Heidegger, 29. Heidegger, What is Philosophy, 75–77. Steiner, Heidegger, 56. Steiner, Heidegger, 56. Steiner, Heidegger, 56–57. Steiner, Heidegger, 80.

9

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar A foreshadowing of Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund? Christopher M. Wojtulewicz

In the foreword to the first edition of Der Satz vom Grund, Heidegger states something which initially appears rather odd: ‘The thoughts imparted here concerning the principle of reason belong to the broader horizon of an endeavor whose exposition requires other forms.’1 In other words, in a full consideration of the principle of reason, one is not to expect a straightforward discourse. No expression could capture better the quiet abandon to the limits of the discourse that runs through these thirteen lectures, which Heidegger gave during the academic year 1955–1956 at the University of Freiburg. What Heidegger considers here as ‘the principle of reason’ takes one immediately into a subject which becomes very difficult to speak about. This is why in the foreword Heidegger has drawn the reader’s attention to the need for ‘other forms’ to express and explore it. But this is more than just a case of it being difficult to speak about; it is really a question of the relationship that Being has to reason, and to what extent thinking and reason can access the raw data of Being, when Being is the ground of everything. To put it rather crudely, it is to say what happens if we seek to take thinking and language beyond its grounding, into an unfamiliar territory where the structure afforded by grounding breaks down. One immediately thinks in this moment of Derrida, of deconstruction, of Levinas and violence; but it would be a mistake to read this back into Heidegger’s objective, and give us reason also to potentially miss the connection with Eckhart, which is our intention here. The connection between Eckhart and Heidegger’s Der Satz vom Grund is made explicit in John D. Caputo’s insightful study of Heidegger,2 in which he examines principally the critique of metaphysics. Here, we shift focus to the influence of modism on the problems of language which both thinkers address, and hope to speak somewhat to Caputo’s call for a ‘tertium quid’ in philosophical thinking.3 That the principle of reason is something which needs exploring also by ‘other forms’, that is, within the ‘broader horizon’, Heidegger presumably means to speak of what is beyond the structure of lectio, and possibly even of thinking and the explanation of one’s thinking through writing and speaking. This is not to say that language will fail us, more that we will fail language if we do not consider and make a decision about the foundation or principle behind the principle of reason. Because the consideration of which Heidegger

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar

165

speaks belongs to the foundation of all that in any way is, it is only right that to think and write and speak about it in the way that we are used to doing with anything else in philosophy, is only one consideration among many that could be taken with respect to this immanent element. What does this mean? Heidegger’s fundamental insight in Der Satz vom Grund can only be encountered by absorbing his whole argument across the lectures, and this comes about by opening up a way of thinking, rather than proposing a concrete concept to be absorbed. In this sense Heidegger is operating from a particular understanding and use of language which has its roots in the speculative grammar of the Modistae in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Meister Eckhart presents us with a similar particularity of language use when we confront his understanding of the nature of principium,4 and he too encountered the influence of the Modistae in the person of the final figure of the movement, Thomas of Erfurt.5 In this sense I want to explore the idea that both Eckhart and Heidegger were operating under the influence of the modistic emphasis on the relationship between language and reality, and that this yielded for both of them an attentiveness to what I will here call the principium or principle of reason, whilst acknowledging that one’s awareness of its meaning must of necessity take a certain non-conceptual form. To begin with, let me contradict myself and express conceptually what is of specific relevance to this discussion: this principium is the foundation of everything, the principle behind the principle of reason. The following sections will make it clear why this kind of contradiction is possible and even necessary. With this in mind one must seek in a certain sense to unravel this as a concept, and try and look to it by other means – this is the essence of what Heidegger tries to point out to us. This is by all accounts a negative or apophatic move; but it is important to stress that it be understood only as a starting point, as a sort of widening of the horizon, rather than the conclusion. To be clear, what we consider in the following to be the very foundation of everything – what Heidegger seems to understand, in his own way, as the ‘mighty Principle’ (though not necessarily in exactly the same way that Leibniz speaks of the principium grande)6 – I call (following Eckhart) the principium; but this is not to be confused with Heidegger’s problem with the term principium with respect to the principle of reason, which really stems from its use generally in Western thinking.7 Eckhart’s use of the term does not enjoy its own treatment, but is understood from its use throughout his works, and in being attentive to its place within the spiritual-metaphysical economy of his thought we will return later to a more considered placement of Eckhart’s principium.

A problem of expression In Lecture One Heidegger clearly understands the linguistic and conceptual difficulties that lie at the heart of the emerging formulation of the principle of reason. Moreover, from the perspective of reason it becomes even a matter of necessity to accept inevitable conclusions about the relationship the principle

166 C. M. Wojtulewicz will thus have with everything of which it is the principle. On the one hand, the language problem is identified, for the ‘principle never lets itself be reduced to the level of commonplace sentences, nor even to the level of scientific principles. However, at first sight … [it] seems like all other sentences’.8 In other words, Heidegger quite clearly identifies both the linguistic elusiveness and yet the inherent obviousness of the principle: it is there in sentences and scientific principles, and yet it is also not identifiable with these things. On the other hand, there is a certain primary positivity or assertiveness about the principle of reason, in that one cannot give an account of it like any other thing, for to do so would require an explanation of its progeny; yet, de facto, the principle has no progeny. In this line of thinking it is hard not to sense the same rationale one finds among the medieval discussion about the Father as the ‘principle without principle’ (principium sine principio),9 or to (provocatively) express this in an Eckhartian fashion, as groundless ground. The context in which Eckhart developed his concept of principium was, for the most part, out of Trinitarian debates. As an ‘analogical notion’, Thomas Aquinas was able to make use of the indeterminacy of principium not only for the purposes of best signifying the order of origin of the divine persons where ‘causation’ would introduce an error, but also because it carries no connotations of ‘inequality’ between the persons.10 These elements of the concept, in their most general sense, were Eckhart’s point of departure, for the development of his Trinitarian thinking with respect to the principium demonstrates the same compenetrative relationship between the divine persons that he would go on to articulate between God and man with respect to the ‘ground’.11 In fact, Eckhart’s ‘groundless ground’ has much to do with God’s speech-act, as he highlights in his German Sermon 42: ‘what is this “speaking” of God? It is the work of God … [that] God alone works’, and it is to be found ‘in the ground that is groundless’.12 There is a subtle and important point to be found in this link between the elusive ground, or principium, and language: at that foundational level language is not excluded. Indeed, Eckhart’s discourse has very little to do with anything we would be happy to call ‘exclusion’, for what exists sine principio, Eckhart says, is truly alive.13 Heidegger’s argument is no less attentive to the concept of groundlessness, which he illustrates more as a problem, stemming from the somewhat dangerous approach, so to say, of searching for a ground. But, most importantly, Heidegger is ambivalent towards the problem: one either stands on the edge of uncovering a ‘deep truth’, or else one makes a ‘pathetic defense against the claim of thinking’.14 The development of his thought through the remaining lectures shows his ambivalence to be true, for he seems to hold that in fact both seem to be the case: one apprehends the meaning of the foundation of all things (perhaps one could venture so far as to call this apprehension of ‘deep truth’ intuitive?) and yet finds oneself destabilised by the attempt to think it through.15 Either way, the horizon of language has to be broadened (just as, it is worth noting, the notion of ‘reason’ has to be broadened from mere ratiocination)16 which Heidegger succinctly summarises in Lecture Six:

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar

167

What the principle of reason says does not come to language, namely, not to that language that corresponds to that about which the principle of reason speaks. The principle of reason is an uttering [Sagen] of being. It is this, but in a concealed manner. What remains concealed is not only what it says; what also remains concealed is that it speaks of being.17 The hero of Heidegger’s argument is Leibniz. One of the most important connections this makes to Eckhart is that Leibniz, like Hegel, was a reader of Angelus Silesius, and was attentive to mysticism.18 Now modistic form begins to takes shape: no longer is there a matter just with expression in language, but the principle or foundation is ‘[c]ertainly not in thinking, but perhaps before thinking.’19 This belongs to Heidegger’s thoughts on the famous epithet of Silesius about the rose that is ‘without a why’, which yet ‘blooms because it blooms’.20 There is a problem: there is no ‘why’, and yet there is a ‘because’. Heidegger understands the significance of the grammatical structure – the ‘without a why’ and the ‘because’ set up, in Silesius’ formulation, a conflict at the heart of reality, solved only by the admission that the conflict truly arises from the ‘principle of reason re-presented [in cognition]’ (principium reddendae rationis),21 which is to say, in the self-reflexive cognitive exercise relative to Silesius’ formulation, which yields an awareness of the ‘two different tonalities’22 in the contemplation of the principium. Those two ‘tonalities’ – one overt, the other hidden – betray the structural relation that grammar bears to reality: the relation, so to say, between the modes of understanding (modi intelligendi) and the modes of being (modi essendi). In this case the two must not be confused, for one concerns the principle of reason which belongs in thinking, the other concerns that ultimate principle before thinking. The conflict is not an error of speech, but a faithful rendering in language of the difficulties encountered in contemplating the principle of reason. What Heidegger is describing here, and what Eckhart describes when he makes use of the term principium, cannot be put down to apophasis, because both are attempting to facilitate an encounter rather than prioritise one form of language over another.23 At any rate, it belongs to an apophatic ethos to express one’s disappointment in the temptation to describe this as a kind of ‘third way’. Yet one is struck by this as one of the few places in the discussion of negative theology, relative to cataphatic statements also, that acknowledges, as Denys Turner does in his experimental Eckhartian expression of the nature of rational man, that there exists a sort of third way, which is neither negative nor positive, achieved by Eckhart in his ‘negation of negation’.24 And yet in terms of speech, this is no ‘third utterance’25 at all; it is rather the exclusion of the ‘disjunction’ that appears between the negative and the positive.26 In a sense the matter now has taken on a different tone. The apophatic and the cataphatic are somehow ‘levelled off’ in their value. If the negation of negation has the function of breaking language down, it must do so by means of first having something to break down. Grammatically we have to see whether in and through the constructio, the syntactical shaping, language survives all that takes place as a result of this negation of negation. This is to say, as Rowan

168 C. M. Wojtulewicz Williams wants to put it, that although there is a certain implicit priority given to the apophatic because the apophatic gives the space necessary to loosen one’s grip on conceptual necessity (at least with respect to God) nevertheless one must distinguish between what he calls ‘formal apophaticism of any kind’ and what, as he says, Edith Stein calls ‘the self-revelation of God in silence’.27 This distinction seems necessary to understand the relationship of God and man ‘in the principle’ (in principio) according to Meister Eckhart. The distinction introduces language as expressing the pursuit for the limits of human knowledge, as ‘formal apophaticism’, and the transformation of the intellect in an encounter with the divine, in the ‘self-revelation of God in silence’. The apophatic and cataphatic nevertheless act as a kind of two-way pressure on a delimited human cognition, such that there is not, on the one hand, complete abandonment of language yet, on the other hand, there is an acknowledgement that it is necessary, with an implicit priority to it, to abandon certain forms of conceptual formation. It seems essential, then, to say that in fact where the distinction truly lies here between ‘formal apophaticism of any kind’ – that is to say, our formulation of statements of apophatic thought, and Edith Stein’s ‘self-revelation of God in silence’ – seems to be from the fact that the former can only ever yield the limits of human cognition, whereas the latter facilitates true encounter. In investigating the depths of the principium, the principle or ground of the principle of reason, this distinction effectively accounts for the fundamental difference between Eckhart and Heidegger. Where Eckhart seems to view the principium as the primary compenetrative encounter between God and man, Heidegger finds a repeated return to Being.

Language in modism The speculative grammatical element we consider here plays a subtle but important role. The relation of language to reality that underpins modistic or speculative grammatical theories is certainly key to understanding the direction of argument within Eckhart and Heidegger; but we turn more to the strain placed on language thus conceived, when one tries to speak about the reality of the foundation or principle of all things. What is paramount is the acceptance of a particular relationship between reality and semantics. Among other things, Heidegger wanted to term the connection between the principle about which language (that is, regular discourse) somehow fails, and the way in which one is to think about it (what we just discovered to be ‘tonality’) as a ‘leap’.28 By the same token, the focus of Der Satz vom Grund is far from the nature of reason itself, but that place from which that reality ‘demand[s] to be rendered’.29 Where our focus moves with respect to Eckhart and Heidegger on this point is that both seem to stare the apophatic in the face, and share a retention of confidence in language’s ability to survive the conceptual strain that the ‘leap’ to the ground places on it.30 What I want to suggest most of all is that this point in particular is decidedly modistic.

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar

169

The influence of modism is to introduce change in the way one thinks about the relationship between language and reality. In fact, as Elena Lombardi expresses it: the modi reinvents the relationship between language and reality: it is no longer a matter of how this thing is signified by this word, but of the way in which the properties of things, ‘passively’ constructed in reality, are actively constructed by language.31 What this must include is not only the syntax of one sentence or another, but even in the larger ‘grammar’ that governs the interior life of an argument in a text. If one understands a concept that emerges from the construction of an argument, not from the articulation of the thing per se and directly, then the modes of signification (modi significandi) have done their job, for only what can ‘have a mode of being in the mind’ can be signified.32 From John of Dacia onwards, Lombardi argues, ‘mere signification’ is not considered ‘the plenitude of expression’ – only ‘articulated discourse’ achieves that.33 In other words, it is the essence of the grammatical construction that is of the greatest importance. In fact, ‘articulated discourse’ is so strikingly related to reality that it seems to look more like life itself than a sentence or argument.34 This is because, as Lombardi rightly argues, the binary necessary in modistic constructio is hylomorphic in origin35 – it reflects more broadly a medieval eschatological consciousness, a concern for the relation between language and reality, between matter and form.36 For Eckhart a fault line is introduced here because his theory of matter–form relation depends almost entirely on the sporadic model of Moses Maimonides.37 The result is that great emphasis is placed on the desire of matter (which, following Maimonides, he terms an ‘adulteress’)38 although, ironically, this lays the foundation for a strong conception of the capacity of language, and facilitates an ease with respect to the principium where Heidegger had expressed concern for its destabilising effect. That matter and form relate in the way that they do comes from Eckhart’s understanding of the parabolic nature of language (in this case Scripture). The hidden meaning within the text is what allows us to understand key metaphysical truths, such that matter-form relation is communicated to us in terms of adultery, from Proverbs 5:2.39 As matter–form relation is so key to the grammatical structure of language, it means in fact that all language has a sort of metaphysical, parabolic capacity. Because matter–form relation is necessarily (not incidentally) expressed parabolically in Scripture, it invites this parabolic capacity into all speech-acts.40 It is also not without note that Heidegger suggests that principium, at least on its own, is not a valid rendition of the ‘principle of reason’. This is because to speak of principium, ‘principle’, is to speak about something which veritably represents our unthinking assumption of various principia or axioms. Principium in this particular sense, therefore, is never alone, it is the first in a successive line of principles and axioms; it at once denotes as its two basic functions: ordering

170 C. M. Wojtulewicz and the exclusion of contradiction.41 On account of this, as Heidegger puts it, axiom, principle and also the German Grundsatz (‘fundamental principle’, to be distinguished from Grund-Satz, ‘principle-reason’) ‘speak from out of completely disparate conceptual domains’.42 The specific meaning of each is not particularly important; rather, one needs first to note that ‘principle’ refers to the concept as developed in the Latin West generally (distinct from Eckhart’s conception), and second that there are ‘disparate conceptual domains’. This is distinct from Eckhart’s principium in a number of ways: 1) order suggests sequence, priority, logical or otherwise; 2) exclusion of contradiction suggests the determination of a possibility, the opting for this over that, rather than the suspense of possibility necessary to be the condition for reason. But it is not Heidegger’s ‘mighty Principle’ or principle of reason either. If Eckhart’s concept of principium admits of the relationship of origin between the principle and the principled thing (the principium and the principiatum), it does so only in a way which reflects the internal meaning of its use in Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1, which is to say, capturing both the producer and product and a ‘remaining in’.43 The point here is that the principium as foundational cannot be aligned with any one, but is necessarily the condition present to all three. In this sense it can be referred to, though somewhat imprecisely, as ‘ubiquitous’. Just in the same way the principium is not a ‘beginning’, but neither is it nontemporal; rather, it somehow condenses within itself the threefold nature of past, present and future, such that it can be present to all these three as an eternal now.44 It belongs to the opening questions of his first Commentary on Genesis to ask what this principium is in which God was able to simultaneously create all things.45 These are two examples of the overarching paradigm of the principium which serves to facilitate the interpenetration of God and the world. There is no doubt that what Heidegger is treating philosophically, Eckhart is treating theologically;46 and although they at times sound different in their tone or emphasis, it should also be clear that they are striving to refer to the same thing in the principium or principle of reason.47 There are two ways we can speak about the ubiquitous nature of Heidegger’s principle of reason: first according to the dictum ‘nothing is without reason’ (nihil est sine ratione), which he appeals to constantly in the lectures on the subject. This ‘double negation’ he says, ‘yields an affirmation’ which asserts its presence in all that is: ‘nothing that in any manner is, is without a reason’.48 In this case, Heidegger asserts, we prefer the definition to show itself by way of double negation, and this is because what we are speaking about demands a different register of language. It cannot be simply and positively stated that ‘every being has a reason’ because this is too much like an assessment, and that is not the sense of the relationship of anything to its ground or reason that Heidegger wants to emphasise. Such an emphasis on double negation is an obvious point of connection with Eckhart’s aforementioned principle of ‘negation of negation’ (negatio negationis) – a process that achieves an immediacy of affirmation of a kind that the cataphatic is unable,49 but which retains that implicit priority of apophasis, without being apophatic. This ‘most pure and saturated affirmation’

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar

171

brought about by his negation of negation concerns the returning back again that belongs to Heidegger’s principle of reason, but which, above all, is achieved in language.50 The second way Heidegger can speak about the principle of reason being ubiquitous is that relationships exist to it even if it is absent, for ‘a relationship can exist precisely in its lack.’51 Heidegger takes the example of homesickness, which demonstrates that a relationship constituted according to absence is possible. This belongs to Heidegger’s commenting on the text of Angelus Silesius, which we considered earlier. The rose example, Heidegger asserts, shows us that it is possible for something to exist without a ground, without a reason, and yet still have a relationship to a ground ‘in view of the “because”’.52 This indicates not only that relationship is possible in absence, but that this different kind of relation necessarily belongs to a consideration of the principle of reason. The sense of ubiquity is not the only element Heidegger and Eckhart encounter in a linguistic exploration of the principium. Eckhart also concerns himself with the relationship between ‘fixity’ (by which we render in English Eckhart’s concept of fixio) and that which sits on the other end of the spectrum, namely fieri or ‘becoming’. Fieri is key to the semantic desire of the Modistae and the speculative grammarians more generally, for it is in syntactical construction – the coming together of the sentence – where the essence of the grammar, the essence of the reality-relation, is to be found. This is why in modism ‘the verb is … indirectly promoted’.53 Here we find the modistic split between the pars orationis of the fixed noun or pronoun, and the becoming of the verb or participle.54 The play of these two concepts of ‘fixity’ and ‘becoming’ in Eckhart’s thought is important, and easily pushed into a polarity which says Eckhart asserts that, as a matter of spiritual necessity, all should enter into one over the other: for instance, that we should retreat from any sense of ‘becoming’ and ‘change’ and head towards the ground, the fixed, immobile dimension of the soul. This is essentially because God himself is described as taking such a place in creatures: he is, so to say, ‘inactive’ or ‘at rest’ in them.55 But the ‘principial’56 nature of the relation between God and creatures is not quite so straightforward: man enjoys the fixity of already being a son of God, whilst also becoming one.57 This is more the reality of life in principio for Eckhart, and much more consistent with Heidegger’s principle of reason. It is worth, at this point, recapping somewhat the place of this observation. We have observed how discussing the principium or principle of reason is a challenge for language, simply because it is operative at a level at which language functions differently: we want to say that the principium is present to everything, and everything to it, but for various reasons we cannot assert this, and so we can appreciate it at least via the affirmation of double negation, or by the relationship of absence. What does it mean to say we cannot assert it if both Eckhart and Heidegger are committed to supporting the use of language, and not abandoning it? It means that one has to allow other discourses, other syntaxes beyond the construction of sentences. This is not to say that language is incapable, but that a broadening of the conception of language necessarily

172 C. M. Wojtulewicz follows as a result of a modistic-informed exploration of the principium or principle of reason. If we can accept a mode of understanding (modus intelligendi) of the reality of principium, then we can also accept a mode of signification (modus significandi). According to modistic thought, nouns are fixed and stable as they refer to concrete things; verbs, of course, denote becoming and change. This makes for an uncomfortable conclusion for one who wants to apply a verb to God. But this is exactly what Eckhart thinks language is capable of doing, and his justification is John 14:10: ‘the Father remains in me’. Here the verb ‘to remain’ paradoxically signifies the fixity of a noun. This is the same ‘remaining in’ of the principium we noted earlier. The verb here is not only necessary modistically to ensure the completion of the sentence construction (and therefore its relation to reality) but even takes on the same hylomorphic nature, for to ‘remain in God’, Eckhart says, is like the relationship between the body and the soul (matter and form).58 It is in the eventual development among the grammarians, by the late thirteenth century, of the modus quietis – the ‘quiet’, ‘inactive’, or ‘at rest’, which Eckhart himself seems to favour – that we see this desire at least to capture more of the motus than just movement or becoming,59 to the point where, with tempus (‘time’), they are both ‘signified under permanence, as nouns’.60 Eckhart gives us to consider how fixity and becoming are not incompatible, even if contradictory, in the relationship between the Father and the Son.61 Whilst it is true that the Father generates the Son, this act does not dilute the fact that the Son ‘remains’ permanently in the Father: the Son remains permanently ‘in principio’. This is to return to the problem of speaking about the principium, and how the sort of discourse which sets one thing against the other in contradiction, is not the sort of language applicable at this level. Nevertheless, the application of certain modistic principles seems to at least permit language to accurately represent reality by containing within itself the possibility of modification or being turned back in upon itself. This is why for his own purposes Heidegger displays sympathy for Hegel’s position when he says: Hegel … shows that contradiction and conflict are not reasons against something being real. Rather, contradiction is the inner life of the reality of the real.… So within the context of our considerations of the fundamental principle of reason in many respects it remains an overhasty procedure if, without hesitation and without reflection, we appeal to the fundamental principle of contradiction and say that the principle of reason is without reason, that this contradicts itself and therefore is impossible.62 On this point Heidegger and Eckhart are both sensitive to the demand that this places on language, particularly with respect to the constant sense of return that this involves (for Heidegger the principium reddendae rationis, for Eckhart the meaning of ‘remaining’ in principio and the ‘negation of negation’) for which a modistic conception of language seems to leave room.63

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar

173

Spiral-vortex metaphor Heidegger acknowledges that the turning inward or doubling back that belongs to the consideration of the principle of reason is the necessary reflection on the reality of the nature of the principle or ground of the principle of reason – one ‘eternally sinks from nothing to nothing’, as Eckhart would put it.64 But he does this by way of the metaphor of a coil. What the principle induces is not a closing off, but a spiralling which both coils and uncoils simultaneously.65 It is an interesting choice of analogy, and one which cannot go unnoticed for its resemblance of Pseudo-Dionysius’ spiral of theology, which Denys Turner applies also to the theology of Julian of Norwich.66 In the same way, later on, Heidegger refers to the ‘vortex’ or ‘whirlwind’ of the pursuit of the principle because of its disorienting pulling motion – one advances by an eternal return to the starting point.67 The sentiment is expressed in modism in the following way: The wheel of language is also a wheel of desire: the final completion of the sentence is the culmination of a circular movement propelled by two kinds of desire: the linear appetite that unites matter and form, and the circular, recapitulative desire of the mind – the pleasure and fulfilment of language that takes place in communication.68 In a certain sense, then, the apprehension about the disorienting nature of the vortex is really an apprehension that language will fail to capture the reality, will fail to see itself fulfilled;69 but the anxiety is, so to say, the collateral damage of a necessary project. Regarding modism, Lombardi says: ‘Language as a movement of desire revolves, in the end, around itself’.70 This self-revolution can perhaps be seen as another way of expressing the ‘tautophatic’ nature of language that Duane Williams perceives in Heidegger.71 At any rate, it does not seem to be quite the right emphasis to say that Heidegger seeks a language to express ‘meditative thought’ which is ‘liberated from the traditional grammatical categories’.72 In Eckhart the consideration of principium does not involve a spiral or vortex as Heidegger describes it, but nevertheless makes use of Ecclesiastes 1:5 and 1:7 as the images of the ‘return’ (and even ‘rebirth’) involved in remaining in principio – the sun which returns to the spot whence it rises, and the river which flows back to its source.73 Here the grounding is in the Word, and it is this – or rather He – that guarantees the constant return to the principium, for there and only there does one find the foundation or ratio of all things.

Concluding remarks The influence of the speculative grammar of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries seems vital in the conception of the relationship between language and reality both in Eckhart and Heidegger, and must relate at least in part to the exposure both figures had to Thomas of Erfurt. Because of that

174 C. M. Wojtulewicz fundamental relationship between language and reality, the influence of modism is perhaps put in greater relief by the mutual pursuit of the principium or principle of reason. Although Heidegger seems to rely principally on Leibniz for the construction of his argument about the principle of reason, he does nevertheless make a point of highlighting the sharpness of Eckhart’s thinking.74 It is difficult not to take that as an awareness, however implicit, of Eckhart’s mutual interest in the principle; but there is quite a strong sense throughout his lectures that Heidegger resists entering into the ‘deep truth’ of his considerations, which may be indicative of a certain anxiety about thought and language, attested to principally in his ‘vortex’ or ‘whirlwind’ metaphors. Heidegger expresses openly the darkness and dizziness induced by the consideration, but Eckhart does not seem particularly disturbed by it.75 When we consider the coiling/uncoiling or whirlwind motif we see that Heidegger also expressed his desire to enter the calm of the eye of the storm. Perhaps a more interesting question, then, is to ask what it is that mitigates any of the differences between Eckhart and Heidegger in their quest to render in language the principium or principle of reason. Something has to be said for the fact that for Eckhart this is essentially the pursuit of an encounter with God, and that God’s self-revelation does indeed stabilise considerably his thinking, as he draws his metaphysical and spiritual insights from the parabolic nature of Scripture. For Heidegger it is a matter of precision of argument, and the limits of human thinking and reasoning, inevitably resulting from the coiling and uncoiling, or double-negating return, which the principle of reason demands of language and thought. Perhaps without that grounding in the logocentricism of the Word – something genuinely other – such a pursuit has an inevitably anxious form.76 If calmness of approach can be an indication of anything in all this, one might want to suggest that Eckhart had indeed succeeded in entering that eye of the storm; but it seems this results from the revelatory encounter with God that both guides his pursuit and increases his linguistic confidence.

Notes 1 Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington, IL/ Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991; reprint 1996), 1. All further references to the text by Heidegger will be referred to as Principle of Reason, and will indicate the lecture number, then the paragraph numbers, and then the page numbers of this English edition. All references to texts by Meister Eckhart are taken from the critical edition Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke, hg. im Auftrag der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer), where ‘LW’ will refer to the Latin works, and ‘DW’ to the German works. The title of the text by Eckhart will be indicated, followed by the number, the volume (with editors and year(s) of publication), the page number, and the line references. 2 John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 1986; reprint 1990). 3 Ibid., 269.

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar

175

4 For a study of the concept of principium in Eckhart’s works see my forthcoming Meister Eckhart on the Principle: An Analysis of the Principium in his Latin Works, Eckhart: Texts and Studies, vol. 5 (Leuven: Peeters, 2016). 5 Caputo, The Mystical Element, 145–54 gives a helpful and succinct summary of Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift (on Thomas of Erfurt) relative to the kinds of things we consider here, but does not detail the specific influence of modism. 6 One must carefully consider the relationship between the argument towards the end of Lecture Three and towards the end of Lecture Five. Heidegger seems to hold, on the one hand, that the principium grande and the principium rationis equate (Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Three, §46–47, 23), and yet, on the other hand, later seeks to separate out as quite different their abbreviated referents ‘without a ground’ and ‘without a why’ (ibid., Lecture Five, §72–74, 38). 7 See Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Two, §31–32, 14, and Lecture Three, §39–41, 19. The problem consists not only of principium generally, but its relation to Grundsatz and its placement in the difficult concept of history as Geschick. 8 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture One, §19–20, 7. 9 Augustine refers to the Father in these terms in De ordine II, v, 16, 46–50 (Contra academicos, De beata vita, De ordine, De magistro, De libero arbitrio, W.M. Green and K. D. Daur (eds), Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 29, Aurelii Augustini Opera Pars II, 2 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970), 116), and for medieval discussion it is most importantly discussed in Peter Lombard, In Sent. I, d. 29, cap. 3. 10 Gilles Emery, The Trinitarian Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Francesca Aran Murphy (Oxford: University Press, 2007), 156–7. 11 See Meister Eckhart, Sermo II/I, n. 6, LW IV (Ernst Benz, Bruno Decker, and Josef Koch (eds and [German] trans.), 1956; 1987), 8, 4–9. This is to propose that the concept of principium differs somewhat from Caputo’s description, see Caputo, The Mystical Element, 114. 12 Eckhart, Predigt 42, DW II (Josef Quint (ed. and [German] trans.), 1971; 1988), 309, 1–5: ‘Und waz ist daz sprechen gotes? Daz ist daz werk gotes … daz ez got aleine würket.… in den grunt, der gruntlôs ist.’ 13 Eckhart, Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem n. 19, LW III (Karl Christ, Bruno Deckher, Josef Koch, Heribert Fischer, Loris Sturlese, and Albert Zimmerman (eds), 1994), 16, 13: ‘Hoc enim proprie vivit quod est sine principio.’ See also Caputo, The Mystical Element, 247. 14 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Two, §28–29, 12. 15 Ibid. 16 Although this is not Heidegger’s point, it is expertly argued as the position of Thomas Aquinas in Denys Turner’s book, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 17 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Six, §89–90, 46. 18 Ibid., Lecture Five, §67–69, 35. 19 Ibid. 20 Angelus Silesius, Der cherubische Wandersmann, Will-Erick Peudert (ed.) (Leipzig: Dieterich’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Sammlung Dieterich), vol. 64, p. 37, no. 289 [The Cherubinic Wanderer, trans. Maria Shrady (New York: Paulist Press, 1986), p. 54]’, as cited in Heidegger, Principle of Reason, 132 n. 22. 21 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Five, §72–74, 38. Translation of the phrase here is my own. 22 Ibid., §74–75, 38, emphasis original. 23 See Rowan Williams, Wrestling with Angels: Conversations in Modern Theology, Mike Higton (ed.) (London: SCM, 2007), 3. 24 Turner, Existence of God, 189. 25 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge and New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22.

176 C. M. Wojtulewicz 26 Turner, Existence of God, 189: ‘to exclude the disjunction between them, and thus contain the notions of both in some non-exclusive way: by, to use an expression of Eckhart’s (though not of Thomas’) “negating the negation” between them’. 27 Williams, Wrestling with Angels, 4. 28 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Seven, §95–96, 53. 29 Ibid., §100–101, 56. 30 See Caputo, The Mystical Element, 166–7, 225, and later 239, where he considers Eckhart’s influence on the German language and the connection to Heidegger. 31 Elena Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire: Language and Love in Augustine, the Modistae, Dante (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 99. 32 Ibid., 100. 33 Ibid., 101. 34 One should not be entirely surprised therefore that Heidegger’s much earlier work Der Idee der Philosophie und das Weltanschauungsproblem seems to put forward the idea of broadening conceptual discourse out, on the basis of the phenomenological insights of Husserl – see the analysis in William Blattner, ‘Ontology, the A Priori, and the Primary Practice: An Aporia in Heidegger’s Early Philosophy,’ in Transcendental Heidegger, Steven Crowell and Jeff Malpas (eds) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 10–27, here 24–25. See also Caputo, The Mystical Element, 151–2 and 190–1. 35 Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 114. See also G.L. Bursill-Hall, Grammatica Speculativa of Thomas of Erfurt (London: Longman, 1972), 24. 36 With specific reference to Meister Eckhart on this point see my ‘Embodied Immediacy and Eschatological Transparency. An Introduction to Meister Eckhart and Taery Kim’ in Jutta Vinzent and Christopher M. Wojtulewicz (eds), Performing Bodies. Time and Space in Meister Eckhart and Taery Kim, Eckhart: Texts and Studies, vol. 6 (Leuven: Peeters, 2016), 1–23. 37 Tamar M. Rudavsky,Maimonides (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 87–8: ‘Unlike many of his Islamic and scholastic contemporaries, Maimonides does not develop the notions of matter and form into a cohesive theory.’ 38 See Eckhart, Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem n. 176, LW III (Karl Christ, Bruno Decker, Josef Koch, Heribert Fischer, Loris Sturlese, and Albert Zimmermann (eds), 1994), 144, 8–145, 4. 39 Ibid. See also Sermones et Lectiones super Ecclesiastici n. 42, LW II (Heribert Fischer, Josef Koch, Loris Sturlese, Konrad Weiß, and Albert Zimmermann (eds and [German] trans.), 1992), 270, 8–272, 7. 40 On this point one must consider the meaning of the ontological shift achievable by language, intimated in Eckhart’s Predigt 109, DW IV/2 (Georg Steer with Wolfgang Klimanek and Freimut Löser (eds with [German] trans.), 2003), 774, 20–1: ‘Enwære hie nieman gewesen, ich müeste sie disem stocke geprediget hân.’ 41 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Three, §39–41, 21. 42 Ibid. See also Lecture Two, §32–34, 15. 43 Eckhart, Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem, n. 137, LW III (Karl Christ, Bruno Decker, Josef Koch, Heribert Fischer, Loris Sturlese, and Albert Zimmermann (eds), 1994), 116, 10–12: ‘hoc erat in principio apud deum; hoc, scilicet principiatum, erat a principio, id est semper, apud deum, principium suum scilicet.’ 44 Eckhart,Expositio libri Genesis n. 7, LW I/2 (Loris Sturlese (ed.), 2015), 64, 7–9 [ECT] and 65, 8–10 [L]. 45 Ibid., n. 2, LW I/2, 60, 5–12 [ECT], 61, 4–12 [L]. 46 It may seem relevant to discuss mysticism here, but this is avoided because of problems of defining it. For its use in Heidegger see S.J. McGrath, The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 2006). Problems are particularly pronounced due to a later shift in Heidegger against the ‘symbiosis of Scholasticism and mysticism’

Meister Eckhart’s speculative grammar 47

48 49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63

64 65

177

(ibid., 121), where this could not feasibly be held for Eckhart, whose Parisian academic life shows every sign of full integration with his vernacular works. Caputo summarises Reiner Schürmann’s argument about the relationship between Heidegger and Eckhart in saying that Heidegger bequests us ‘a language which is suited to understand Eckhart’. Although this has its appeal, it must take into account the theological dimension of Eckhart’s thought as a fundamental difference for language. See Caputo, The Mystical Element, 200. Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture One, §15–17, 5. Eckhart, Prologus in Opus propositionem n. 15, LW I/2 (Loris Sturlese (ed.), 2015), 48, 16–18 [ECT], 49, 18–20 [L]: ‘Propter quod de ipso ente, deo, nihil negari potest nisi negatio negationis omnis esse. Hinc est quod unum, utpote negationis negatio, immediatissime se habet ad ens.’ The manuscript witnesses vary at this point, but not in a way that bears significance for the meaning here. Eckhart, Expositio libri Exodi n. 74, LW II (Heribert Fischer, Josef Koch, Konrad Weiß, Loris Sturlese, and Albert Zimmermann (eds and [German] trans.), 1992), 77, 11–78, 1: ‘Negatio vero negationis purissima et plenissima est affirmatio: “ego sum qui sum”. Super se ipsum “redit reditione complete”, sibi ipsi innititur, se ipso est, ipsum esse est.’ Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Six, §78–79, 42. Ibid., §77–78, 41. Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 103. Bursill-Hall, Grammatica Speculativa, 23–4. Eckhart, Expositio libri Gensis n. 174, LW I/2 (Loris Sturlese (ed.), 2015), 202, 21–2 [CT, om. E] and 203, 26–27 [L]: ‘deus quiescere in omnibus creatis et eorum creatione’. This is a deliberate neologism which seeks to express Eckhart’s principium in English, without carrying the connotations that ‘principle’ as amassed in the history of its use. Eckhart, Predigt 76, LW III (Karl Christ, Bruno Decker, Josef Koch, Heribert Fischer, Loris Sturlese, and Albert Zimmermann (eds), 1994), 312, 6–315, 5. Eckhart, Expositio libri Sapientiae n. 46, LW II (Heribert Fischer, Josef Koch, Konrad Weiß, Loris Sturlese, and Albert Zimmermann (eds and [German] trans.), 1992), 371, 5–8: ‘pater in me manens ipse facit opera.… in manu dei … sicut corpus cum anima adeo unum et idem opus operantur’. Louis Gerard Kelly, The Mirror of Grammar: Theology, Philosophy and the Modistae (Amsterdam/Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2002), 204. Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 101. Eckhart, Liber parabolarum Genesis n. 112, LW I/2 (Loris Sturlese (ed.), 2015), 389, 12–14: ‘His igitur praemissis patet manifeste quod pater caelestis id quod est et sui ipsius essentiam pandit, manifestat, dicit et loquitur verbo et actu interiori, qui est dicere et “verbum”, quod est filius intus manens “in principio”, apud patrem.’ See also his whole section dedicated to John 14:10 in Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem nn. 578–586, LW III (Karl Christ, Bruno Decker, Josef Koch, Heribert Fischer, Loris Sturlese, and Albert Zimmermann (eds), 1994), 506, 10–513, 13. Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Three, §38–39, 18. Interestingly, Reiner Schürmann notes something similar in commenting on Eckhart’s and Heidegger’s thoughts with respect to the work of translation – not in terms of modism, but in terms of the sense of return to the ‘ground of God’ in Eckhart, and the reuniting of ‘man to being (or to language) … in which forms of life, ever-renewed, are possible.’ See Reiner Schürmann, Wandering Joy: Meister Eckhart’s Mystical Philosophy (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne, 2001), 201. Eckhart, Predigt 83, DW III (Josef Quint (ed. and [German] trans.), 1976; 1999), 448, 9. Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Two, § 31–32, 14.

178 C. M. Wojtulewicz 66 Denys Turner, Julian of Norwich, Theologian (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 4. 67 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Three, §39–41, 18–19. 68 Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 80–1. 69 For an excellent study on how the question of the foundation of grammar and reason relates to the unconscious, see Charles R. Elder, The Grammar of the Unconscious. The Conceptual Foundations of Psychoanalysis (University Park, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 70 Lombardi, The Syntax of Desire, 120. 71 Duane Williams, ‘Between the Apophatic and Cataphatic: Heidegger’s Tautophatic Mystical Linguistics,’ in Christian Mysticism and Incarnational Theology: Between Transcendence and Immanence, Louise Nelstrop and Simon D. Podmore (eds) (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 131–54. 72 Caputo, The Mystical Element, 264. 73 Eckhart, Expositio libri Sapientiae n. 193, LW II (Heribert Fischer, Josef Koch, Loris Sturlese, Konrad Weiß, and Albert Zimmermann (eds and [German] trans.), 1992), 528, 9–529, 3: ‘Et hoc est quod signanter dicitur ubi supra, Eccl. 1: “oritur sol et occidit et ad locum suum revertitur ibique renascens gyrat” etc.; et infra: “ad locum unde exeunt flumina revertuntur, ut iterum fluant”. Necesse est enim reverti et renasci ipsi fini adepto ad hoc quod fluat. Hinc est quod de verbo, per quod “facta sunt” “omnia”, Ioh. 1, dicitur quod “erat in principio”. Non enim per ipsum quidquam fieret, nisi esset in principio et haberet ipsam rationem principii, et quasi seposita et exuta ratione principiati.’ 74 Heidegger, Principle of Reason, Lecture Five, §71–72, 37. 75 In this sense I agree with the analysis set forth in Caputo, The Mystical Element, xvii. 76 Caputo considers ‘The Danger of Heidegger’s Path’ in terms of the same sort of plunge by which one characterises mysticism (which includes Eckhart). Here I want to entertain more the anxiety induced by a self-referential approach, which in fact distances Heidegger from Eckhart. See Caputo, The Mystical Element, 245–54.

10 Pay attention! Exploring contemplative pedagogies between Eckhart and Heidegger1 David Lewin

Attention is a mysterious faculty. It seems to knit together experiences, attitudes, histories, skills, dispositions, intuitions and manifold other aspects of lived experience such that discussions of it cut across a range of domains, from, for example, cognitive neuroscience and educational theory to ancient philosophies of Vedanta and Buddhism. Taking its cue from the title of the volume, this chapter examines attention by drawing together strands from mystical theology, particularly Meister Eckhart, and continental philosophy, that of Martin Heidegger. The argument will explore some difficulties of conceiving attention as a faculty of human agency. While these considerations will be, I hope, of general philosophical interest, I will apply them to concrete contexts of educational theory and practice. Educational contexts illustrate well the ways in which attention is both conceived and misconceived, as well as providing a strong practical motivation for needing to consider the extent to which attention can be managed and controlled, and the anthropological suppositions present in such considerations. The argument relies upon mystical theology insofar as it draws on negative strategies for undoing some of the conventional ways of framing attention. This is the kind of theological framing that the postmetaphysical Heidegger might wish to develop. I begin with the primary moment in which education is enacted: the moment in which student, teacher, and world are gathered. Behold: this may be the educator’s essential word. Whatever else teachers do, they draw the attention of students to things. As in the Platonic allegory, the teacher drags the student from the cave of ignorance and, standing in the light of truth, gestures or speaks the essential word. To say behold recognises the autonomy of the student in the apprehension of being, and the agency of the world in the presence of things. It is to show more than to speak, to address being more than knowing. The teacher is not the source of the light, nor does she enforce its apprehension, even if she can support its comprehension. Although an archaic sounding word, behold is still used in a way that denotes giving regard or attention to something, holding it in view. It can also connote being caught by something as though beheld by it. More often where we come across the word these days it can sound ornamental, rhetorical, or comical. But this impression is mistaken. Behold is related to the German halten to hold,

180 D. Lewin originally meaning to keep, watch over, hold firmly or restrain. It calls us to attend, but also holds or restrains that attention. Maggie Ross calls it the ‘most important word in the Bible,’2 where the chronicles of Scripture begin and end. As the translation of the Hebrew hinneh, it is the first word God says to Adam and Eve after creating and blessing them: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.’3 The Greek word Idou, also often translated as behold, is the last word that the risen Christ speaks to his disciples: ‘Behold, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.’4 Other Biblical terms also have similar resonance and perform similar roles: ‘lo’, ‘yea’, ‘see’, and ‘suddenly’. It is the performative capacity of language that places mystical language at some distance from propositional or doctrinal discourse. In other words, language has the capacity here to disclose or reveal, not simply to point out. To behold places one firmly in the present. It is often understood as a moment both temporally and ontologically prior to interpretation, explication, or analysis. It speaks at the point of world-disclosure: it can be said to speak the world. It is, as Ross puts it ‘a liminal word; it signals the threshold of contemplation, where the self-conscious mind stops analysing and becomes attentively receptive, open in an ungrasping and self-emptying way to irruption from the deep mind.’5 Can beholding resist the temptation towards representational thinking and its relation to the ‘vulgar’ conception of time?6 Is beholding the point at which all images (of the divine, for example) are abandoned? Can beholding release us from the prison of our subject/object relation by opening up the ground zero of pure awareness, removing us from any and every projection of the mediating subject?7 I suggest such ambitions rely upon a rather unhelpful decontextualized and dehistoricised conception of identity that I will explore a little more later on. Certainly for Heidegger, the conception of time as the three-dimensional gathering of the facticity of the past and the projections of the future into the ‘fallenness’ of the present, seems at odds with any notion that we could be released into the pure presence of an immanent now. For the tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology that came in the wake of Heidegger’s revolution of twentieth century thought, there can be no ‘short route’ to an ahistorical now.8 So we do not escape our ecstasis (our standing outside of ourself) by some kind of entry into silence and attention. Even if some ‘pure consciousness’ conception of beholding was at all plausible (and I do not find that it is), is education not concerned more with the comprehension and explanation that follows apprehension or immersion? This question reflects the epistemological tensions emerging in the Continental hermeneutical tradition between phenomenological experience (Erlebnis) and hermeneutical understanding (Verstehen), while also reaching further back to the foundations of philosophy where Parmenides announced the unity of thinking and being. For now such wider perspectives will have to remain on the horizon. But the extent to which education should be concerned with the boundless present prior to analytical and critical scrutiny is a complex practical

Pay attention! 181 question for those involved in educational practice. Schools, colleges, and universities could do more to encourage quiet times, pauses, reflections, and silences, to create spaces for attention and contemplation. Reading could draw less on basic literacy or conceptual familiarity and more on lectio divina. Speaking and writing could be as much about bearing witness as clear expression. Many schools structure silence and contemplation, some, like Quaker, Maharishi, and Krishnamurti schools, in quite distinctive ways. These schools often break up the frenetic activity of the school day with deliberate pauses, or longer sessions of quiet sitting or meditation. Helen Lees has provided a survey of the significance of silence in schools where she undertakes the task of distinguishing forms of silence beyond simply the absence of noise, arguing for ‘strong silence’ as a positive force in education, as distinct from the forced negative silences that too often structure school experience.9 This work could draw more upon the philosophical and theological traditions in which the phenomenology of silence is so richly developed.10 While it has often been noted that silence is not just the absence of noise,11 the notion that silence is constituted as a positive achievement by attention – that it cannot exist without attention – is less often discussed.12 From this point of view, the call for silence in schools could be helpfully recast in terms of a call to attention. But it is hardly surprising that it is not, since a call to attention is generally conflated with the teacher’s vain repetition: pay attention!

Paying attention ‘Pay attention’; these words that have become hollow prescriptions. The words in fact mean ‘pay attention to this’. Since attention is, one might say, the gift that keeps on giving, the problems for teachers arise when students do not direct attention sufficiently to the task at hand, often a technical, decontextualized, ‘problem’ to be solved within a prescribed and assessable scheme. These are not actual problems, but representations of what real problems look like. Hence, as John Dewey famously noted, students have the feeling that education is not living, but only a preparation for it. The difficulties in directing the attention of students are familiar to most teachers, but they suggest a failure to understand the phenomenon of attention. In 1890 William James bemoaned the fact that philosophers had largely ignored the faculty of attention arguing that ‘an education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.’13 Simone Weil similarly argued that the central concern of pedagogy ought to be the development of attention. Much contemporary research continues to assume that attention is something to be trained14 particularly where attention is identified with concentration or mindfulness. But this, as Masschelein and Simons have recently noted, seems to confuse attention with therapy.15 James recognised that although improving attention might be desirable, it is not necessarily practical: it is easier to define this ideal [of improving attention] than to give practical directions for bringing it about. The only general pedagogic maxim

182 D. Lewin bearing on attention is that the more interest the child has in advance in the subject, the better he will attend. Induct him therefore in such a way as to knit each new thing on to some acquisition already there; and if possible awaken curiosity, so that the new thing shall seem to come as an answer, or part of an answer, to a question pre-existing in his mind.16 With a similar structure in mind, Dewey accounts for the distinctive aspects of agency in relation to attention by distinguishing involuntary attention (characteristic of children up to the age of seven) with voluntary attention (which is directed at some particular, often abstracted, end) and reflective attention (where the goal is not just an abstracted end, but is an answer to a particular question within the learner).17 This reflective moment characterises progressive education’s interest in letting the student answer their own question, a concept which strongly resonates with Heidegger’s educational ideal of ‘letting learn’.18 These are helpful distinctions to make, but they do not ultimately answer the question of origins, the fundamental aetiology of curiosity or attention. More specifically, James indicates the problem that there are no methods to bring about curiosity or attention, and that this practical problem is not easily solved. The practical issue is surely related to the theoretical problem of radical origins. These practical and theoretical considerations are often obscured by the assumption that attention is the sine qua non of education. If contemporary educational thinking considers the wider role of attention in education, it tends to be concerned with deficits of attention and the attendant problems of diagnosis and treatment. This ‘deficit model’ of attention assumes an unverifiable norm: that students are able to direct, control, and manage attention. As such, attention is the tacit ground of education, something we assume to be available if not always present. From this perspective it seems self-evident that teachers are able to command students to pay attention. And, of course, in the everyday sense of the word, this is true. Teachers do expect students to pay attention or concentrate, and educators have a range of strategies to manage the attention of their students. But there are at least two philosophical problems with this idea. First, as has already been noted, attention is always already present. From a phenomenological perspective, human identity can be interpreted as effectively constituted by attention. Heidegger’s notion of care (Sorge) entails the gathering of attention, a gathering that Dasein cannot avoid since it constitutes the thereness of Dasein. From this perspective it is not the case that the student fails to pay attention, but rather that the attention is gathered (or scattered) elsewhere. It is important to observe that attention is never absent, although it might be otherwise engaged.19 This is an important point but I will discuss a second related problem in more detail. There is something about attention that cannot be demanded, still less coerced. Meditative practice amply demonstrates that attention is capable of involuntary wandering as much as voluntary control. Our attention is caught by the cry of the infant, by the beauty of the melody, the glance of the beloved, or by the pain when we stub a toe. Advertisers expend vast resources

Pay attention! 183 within the ‘attention economy’ seeking effective means for capturing and trading on attention. Of course we can resist corporate efforts to manipulate attention, but very often we follow our attention, not the other way around.21 Dewey offers an interesting account of the transition from involuntary to voluntary control of attention. Although Dewey’s developmental account of education moving from the involuntary to the voluntary (at around the age of seven) is somewhat helpful, it does not engage the question of agency in philosophical terms and seems too straightforwardly developmental to do so.22 In the classroom, the autonomy of attention is similarly porous: the student is not simply commanding their attention, but often following it. The will of the student can, no doubt, intervene to direct matters and here we might say that the student can choose whether to offer the teacher their attention. Yet the skill of teaching is significantly defined as the art of engaging attention, a skill which cannot be reduced to a managed competency or teaching standard. The gathering of attention is perhaps the essence of education and what Heidegger’s pedagogy is really all about (whether as Sorge or Denken). Some of Heidegger’s writings on poetry, for example, are studies in pedagogy in that they demonstrate the process of thinking the difference between being and representation. In the opening page of his book on Hölderlin’s hymn Der Ister Heidegger says, 20

We must first become attentive to this poetry. Once we have become attentive, we can then ‘pay attention to,’ that is, retain, some things that, at favourable moments, will perhaps let us ‘attend to,’ that is, have some intimation of what might be said in the word of this poet.23 To discover what is said in the word of the poet seems to require a doublemovement of attention, hence the circuitous, or paradoxical, manner in which attention is possible only after we have become attentive. An orientation of attentiveness (which is not directly controlled by the will) is the precondition of paying attention as an action of will. But even this second moment of paying attention involves a ‘letting’ which undermines the notion of a clear agent engaged in straightforward action. Heidegger goes on to reflect on the nature of interpreting poetry. Why is poetry in need of interpretation? Does interpretation help us behold the poetic word, or does it merely mediate and represent? Are we transported into the dwelling place of the poetic, or is the poetic word translated and domesticated into the digestable curricula and schemes of work appropriate to educational outcomes? Heidegger is ambivalent: ‘At the risk of missing the truth of Hölderlin’s poetry, the remarks merely provide a few markers, signs that call our attention, pauses for reflection.’24 This is Heidegger’s pedagogy: to be an accompaniment that draws attention through markers and signs, to open spaces for reflection. Any other more directive or explicative move would not teach through a kind of bearing witness, but would represent and thereby deface or replace.

184 D. Lewin Heidegger’s pedagogy is characterised as a kind of gathering of attention that acts in a participative way. This is quite different to the concentration or trained mindfulness that is sometimes associated with attention (mindfulness in schools, for example, being a very fashionable topic right now).25 More specifically, this raises questions of identity: who is in control and who is responsible? Very often the question of identity is problematically structured by a polarised conception of agency as either simply active or passive. Elsewhere I have argued that the obsolete linguistic mode of the middle voice reflects a mode of being which is some way between activity and passivity, and that this mode of being has been unable to resist the sedimentation of the modern subject.26 Modern English no longer uses the form of the middle voice (apart, perhaps, from the equivocations of peculiarly political linguistic constructions whereby responsibility can be acknowledged to a point: e. g. ‘mistakes were made’) reflecting the fact that our modern conception of subjectivity assumes and reinforces an unequivocal sense of agency and responsibility. This connection between linguistic identity and subjectivity preoccupies much of Heidegger’s later work and so we find ways to explore the relation between attention and the will. The anthropology developed by Heidegger, whether as early Dasein or later conceptions such as the clearing of Being, reflects the grammatical cleavage of the middle voice by locating Being and human being in the space between activity and passivity.27 Heidegger’s contribution to the hermeneutic project is in part his conception of ‘revealing’ or ‘disclosive looking’28 in which agency is not to be found at the polar regions of identity, but rather in the mediate gathering of the middle voice. Earlier I said that this mediation is a doublemovement of attention, entailing a primary orientation of attentiveness that precedes and structures the possibility of the (secondary) act of letting attention into itself. This porous even ambiguous notion of agency has left Heidegger open to the criticism that he equivocates on his philosophical (and political) commitments; that, for example, the destiny of technological thinking is paradoxically both determining us, and determined by us leaving no clear statement of what is to be (or indeed can be) done.29 We are left without a clear method of approach to the problems of our age. I suggest the same equivocation would be detected were we to seek a stable Heideggerian conception of attention. I have tried to suggest that Heidegger’s understanding of agency here is not incidentally related to the question of attention but centrally so. His philosophical movement can be interpreted as an elaboration of the nature of attention, whether in terms of the care structure of Dasein’s being-in-the-world from Being and Time, of thinking as thanking from What is Called Thinking? and the meditative thinking of his Discourse on Thinking, or man as the ‘shepherd of Being’ in the Letter on Humanism;30 the complex double-movement of attention mirrors the complex double-nature of identity itself because attention is significantly constitutive of Dasein. The thereness of Dasein’s being appears as the opening of being onto itself: i.e. as attention. We could take this further if we consider how language constitutes Being and human being. In a certain sense, all speech grants the world in terms of structuring our orientation to it,

Pay attention! 185 and so speech intimates the tripartite gathering of the beholding which involves Being, Dasein, and mediation (teacher).31 This is because speech requires a speaker, a hearer, and a world, and is therefore ‘the clearing-concealing advent of Being itself.’32 Speech too entails a transcendental condition, namely being. This path into Heidegger’s thinking locates the question of attention within mainstream philosophical discourse. Nevertheless, it is the religious traditions that offer an equally rich account of the dynamics of attention to which I now turn.

The paradox of intention What has been called the ‘paradox of intention’33 describes the dynamics of the call for attention rather more simply: that we may reach a goal only by giving up the attempt to reach it or, conversely, that we may be prevented from reaching a goal by our intentional efforts to achieve it. Religious traditions often warn of the propensity on the part of the novice to become preoccupied with the observance of ritual which can be the very thing that prevents the attention that is central to ritual itself. This is why Christian theologians are often ambivalent about structured religious practices. Meister Eckhart extols the pilgrim: Leave place, leave time Avoid even image! Go forth without a way On the narrow path, Then you will find the desert track.34 Here the track that the novice walks along becomes an aspect of projected will that must be subverted. But to ‘do’ this, to set upon this via negativa is always in tension with itself. This subversion of will can, on some readings, engage attention, since all aspects of self must be abandoned to what presents itself in total darkness. That this might entail the pure attention of a timeless moment, an escape from the temporal into the eternal is an attractive yet problematic idea. A typical reading of Eckhart as fundamentally neo-Platonic would see the negation of time and history in Eckhart’s via negativa. This could be seen as a clear contrast with Heidegger’s rehabilitation of temporality and history. Despite the important resonances between Eckhart and Heidegger, Caputo draws a clear distinction here in the following summary: Eckhart’s attitude toward time is in keeping with traditional mysticism: he wishes to see God in all things so that one ‘day’ – in eternity – he may see all things in God. But for Heidegger such ‘mysticism’ is ‘metaphysical’ because it moves within the distinction between time and eternity.35 But does this interpretation not see Eckhart as a rather dualistic figure, reading in Eckhart a valorisation of the eternal over/against the temporal? Caputo goes on ‘it is profoundly uncharacteristic of the mystic to be concerned with the

186 D. Lewin historical; it is profoundly characteristic of him to identify his experience as an experience of a timeless now.’36 While Caputo does go on to complicate this rather simplistic binary between the mystic and the philosopher, this broad characterization speaks to the very core of the question of attention that I am trying to address. Our constructions of attention often do draw upon assumptions around being fully present as a denial of historicity and temporality. There are subtler readings of Eckhart in which the non-dual relation between the temporal and eternal does not appear to imply such a straightforward neo-Platonic negation of temporality.37 The question of Eckhart’s non-duality cannot be fully elaborated here but the significance for my argument should be stressed: a view of the eternal over/against the temporal (in denial of the temporal) is a product of the failure to see the non-dual nature of Eckhart’s theology and anthropology.38 Consequently Heidegger’s thinking (which I have identified with attention), and Eckhart’s prayer do not need to be as opposed as Caputo suggests: at least the point of divergence need not be the hackneyed emphasis on the temporal in contrast to a mystical disavowal of the temporal in favour of the eternal. Neither Eckhart nor Heidegger allow us to deny the world, time or existence. It is important to understand that a significant part of our thinking about pedagogy is structured by this tension between seeing attention as a negation of, or an engagement with, the temporal. The divergence of progressive educational traditions from traditional formal pedagogy, for example, could be identified with the recognition of the complexity of will and attention. This is because progressive educators, as we have already noted Dewey in this regard, highlight the spontaneous, organic, or ‘non-directive’ forms of learning, where the goals, as well as the agency, of the educational processes are less than clear. Progressive educators tend to emphasise the facilitative role of the teacher in contrast to a more directive approach associated with traditional pedagogy. From a progressive point of view directing attention is not a straightforward intentional act that we can employ to the disciplined appropriation of the facts, or a cognitive tool at our disposal. Rather, genuine attention involves a submission of the self to the other which cannot be simply structured or enforced. I wish to now draw in the philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti who, although explicitly and publically disavowing any association or affiliation with a school of thought or tradition within either philosophy or education, speaks from a broadly progressive educational perspective. Krishnamurti calls truth a ‘pathless land’39 echoing the paradox of intention at the heart of pedagogy. There are no paths, ways, or hows, when it comes to the matter of attention, since attention is pure act. Indeed, the desire to focus attention is peculiarly susceptible to the delusions of intention since what we think we are harnessing when we ‘focus the mind’ can itself be a representational or analytical construction that inhibits the freedom of total attention. Of course, this difficulty pertains to meditation more generally. We project our intention to achieve a goal which results not in the goal itself, but in the image or projection of the idealized goal. The danger here is that we inadvertently displace or extinguish the ‘flame

Pay attention! 187 of attention’. Krishnamurti has much to say about the significance of attention in education: Learning in the true sense of the word is possible only in that state of attention, in which there is no outer or inner compulsion…. It is attention that allows silence to come upon the mind, which is the opening of the door to creation.… How is the state of attention to be brought about? It cannot be cultivated through persuasion, comparison, reward or punishment, all of which are forms of coercion.… You can teach concentration, but attention cannot be taught … attention arises spontaneously when around the student there is an atmosphere of well-being, when he has the feeling of being secure, of being at ease, and is aware of the disinterested action that comes with love.40 In my experience,41 Krishnamurti schools generally do endeavour to create this atmosphere of wellbeing in which students can feel at ease. But here Krishnamurti seems to set up a structure in which attention leads to silence, a silence which then opens up to creation (we must be careful not to fall into the temptation to construct a system out of an approach that is very clearly antagonistic to the pervasive tendency to structure what can only be beheld). This is interesting to educators because the process of engaging the attention is ultimately concerned not with silence for its own sake, but contact with, and contemplation of, the other. If we can speak of the goal of attention then surely it must be related to the idea of being taken up by what Krishnamurti – rather oddly given his antipathy towards doctrinal religiosity – here calls creation. Perhaps Krishnamurti intends something like the hermeneutic structure of disclosive looking or world disclosure that is, as I suggested earlier, an expression of beholding. There is a common sense view of this attention in which awareness is fully present to itself in an ahistorical and groundless way. In speaking of ‘behold’, it is tempting to think of attention as a kind of ground zero, a Cartesian or Archimedean point from which the world emanates. This disclosure is in danger of being framed as some sort of ahistorical singularity along the lines of another more modern Eckhart, Eckhart Tolle, who speaks of the ‘power of now’. There is a range of other problems introduced when we consider the field of attentional research within the psychological sciences which begin with the metaphor of attention as a spotlight which casts the light of awareness and thereby illuminates the world.42 The spotlight model is prone to assume a subject/object binary. How are we to avoid this idolatry of attention in a moment of pure awareness, or the nowness of the now?43 Krishnamurti’s focus on the ‘choiceless awareness’ of pure attention which is associated with what he has called the ‘ending of time’ and ‘total freedom’44 do not seem to help. They appear to arise out of just such a naïve ahistorical attitude in which all conditioning falls away and we see not shadows or reflections (Krishnamurti often speaks of how our conditioning leads us to see only images), but we behold what is. It would require another essay to explore how Krishnamurti’s

188 D. Lewin conception of attention avoids the naiveté of assuming we should escape our historicality. In essence his concern is to perceive human conditioning itself thereby achieving something of a freedom in relation to it, rather than seeking to escape entirely conditioning itself, but this is a delicate issue which is beyond the scope of the present chapter. There are other conceptions of attention that would move us away from a ‘natural attitude’ that sees attention in these foundationalist terms – and I use the term ‘foundationalism’ here to echo the tradition of Cartesian foundationalism that might seek the cogito in a moment of pure attention where the self, and nothing but the self, is evident to itself. The tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics, offers a range of different but related conceptions of attention as always already constituted and formed through historical, social and psychological contexts. As I tried to show earlier, accounts of being-in-the-world are explicitly engaged with the temporality and historicity of existence. Heidegger’s ecstasies of temporality are clearly significant in avoiding a vulgar concept of time. More recently, Bernard Stiegler has wanted to include our technological apparatus into the constitution of attention, suggesting that the short route to self-awareness (by way of some self-certifying Cartesian foundationalism) is misconceived.45 For Stiegler, attention itself is historically contingent, dependent upon the evolutionary story of human emergence. We have seen that there is a problem with suggesting that the will can directly command attention. Elements of the continental philosophical tradition, of Christian mysticism, and of progressive education have been somewhat helpful in sketching out a conception of will that undercuts some of the difficulties here. I now want to turn to some other ways in which educators understand attention beyond the deficit model.

Intended attention Over recent years, mindfulness techniques have become increasingly appealing to educators. Mindfulness in schools projects such as ‘.b’, and the research undertaken by the Oxford Mindfulness Centre have responded to a recognition that too narrow a conception of education cannot be healthy. In part because the movement of mindfulness generally presents itself as religiously and ideologically neutral, it has been the natural partner for broadly secular, public institutions like schools. Perhaps mindfulness is believed to remedy the social ills that were once more widely treated (or suppressed) by institutional religions. But the range of differing techniques, philosophies, and attitudes that are placed under the banner of mindfulness should give us pause. The sense that a specific mindfulness practice can be employed to address individual and social ills such as stress or social instability, or that it might enhance creativity or generally provide a sense of fulfilment, should be questioned not least for appearing reductive or utilitarian.46 But equally problematic is the idea that mindfulness practice is within the direct compass of the will. For Ross, it is this intentional aspect of mindfulness that places it apart from beholding.47 If the emergent

Pay attention! 189 discourse of secularized mindfulness is incomplete, what can our religious traditions offer instead? This is not an easy question to answer, but I offer some suggestive remarks. In De Magistro Augustine says that the student ‘is taught not by words, but by the realities themselves made manifest to him directly by God revealing them to his inner self’.48 Augustine’s Platonic disposition seems evident in his conception of education as a form of bearing witness. The idea that teaching is bearing witness and learning is beholding would sit well with an Augustinian pedagogy. The emphasis shifts between these understandings: bearing witness emphasises the role of the teacher, while beholding places the student (along with creation) centre stage. More broadly, the Christian mystical tradition associates silence and contemplation with a relinquishment of self more widely relevant to education. Evelyn Underhill who articulates the threefold pattern of prayer as recollection, quietude, and union,49 makes the connection between pedagogy and education quite explicit: ‘It is the object of contemplative prayer, as it is the object of all education, to discipline and develop certain growing faculties.’50 From this perspective, the religious subject undergoes a transition from their activity and concentrated efforts in recollection, to a mode of relinquishing that activity and submission of the self to the darkness, or emptiness of God in quietude. The transition from the concentrated power of recollection to the submissive attention of quietude entails the relinquishment of the self as subjective agent. This tradition (or range of traditions) has often sought to educate the novice into the recognition of his ultimate impotence before God. Yet the subject must take that step along the path to relinquish the path. The Christian mystical tradition, from Augustine to Eckhart and beyond, has suggested something like a structure in which the religious subject comes to know God through a process of apophaticism.51 Turner shows that the dynamics of apophatics should be applied both to God and the religious subject: that there is a correlation between negation of God and the negation of self. At the end of the via negativa, are we left with nothing? Yes and no. What is left in the contemplative desert of the mind is nothing human made: nothing but God who is nothing. In other words, in attention we become nothing. As Simone Weil puts it, ‘Once we have understood we are nothing, the object of all our efforts is to become nothing.’52 And for Weil those efforts must be attentive and prayerful, since, as she puts it, ‘absolutely unmixed attention is prayer’.53 But are we not, then, back to the problem of conceiving attention as an ahistorical singularity. Can becoming nothing take account of who we are in our historicity? As discussed earlier, for Eckhart the eternity of time does not negate its temporality but divinises it because the eternal is the ground of time itself. Despite his Augustinian and Neo-Platonic inheritance, for Eckhart, time rests in eternity rather than being a realm to escape from. We do not escape history in eternity but rather find the eternal as the ground of history itself. It would, perhaps, be stretching things too far to relate this idea too directly with Heidegger’s concern to awaken Dasein to temporality, but it need not be read as wholly

190 D. Lewin inconsistent with it as Caputo tends to do.54 So rather than understand the eternal in terms of the temporal (the eternal now being understood as a supreme and enduring form of a moment in time), we should seek to understand the temporal in terms of the eternal.

Conclusion The task of pedagogy is to call attention to the world, and thereby to attention itself. Attention may well be a contemplative activity at its core. In essence attention involves looking at – or better, being with – the other, whether that other is some aspect of the world calling to be borne in mind, the student, or God. It has been tempting to speak of this attention as involving a self-emptying or self-negation. In this moment of pure consciousness we might imagine that the historical and temporal self must be denied so that our eternal identity can be realised. The dualistic framing of this elevation is redolent of neo-Platonism. Practically speaking, such negations of self often become the object of attention and lead, paradoxically, to inattention, and religious traditions have their own strategies to deconstruct the idolatries and misconstruals implicit in spiritual ascent. In the end it has been easier to negate popular constructions of attention than offer a clear alternative view. This may be because this chapter is concerned more with drawing attention that encourages encounter, than with offering explanation.

Notes 1 This chapter is based on my article ‘Behold: Silence and Attention in Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 48:3, 2014, and I am grateful to John Wiley and Sons for permission to reproduce parts of that article. The argument is similar in places, though in this chapter the emphasis on Heidegger and Eckhart is drawn out and developed in greater detail, and the context in educational philosophy is less developed. 2 Maggie Ross, ‘Behold Not the Cloud of Experience’ in: E. A. Jones (ed.), The Medieval Mystical Tradition VIII, (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer 2013), p. 30. 3 Genesis 1: 29. All Biblical quotations are taken from the King James Bible. 4 Matthew 28: 20. 5 Ibid, pp. 29–30. 6 In What is Called Thinking? Heidegger reflects on Nietzsche’s highest hope that man will be delivered from ‘revenge’. In Nietzsche’s Zarathustra this revenge is seen as ‘the will’s revulsion against time and its “It was.”’ Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York, NY: Harper and Row 1976), p. 93. 7 The idea that the projections of the subject provide grounds for atheism has been compelling ever since Feuerbach made the argument. However, mystical theology has since shown that the projecting subject does not preclude an encounter. As Henri Duméry put it: ‘Consciousness is projective, because it is expressive, because its objective intentionality cannot fail to express itself, to project itself on various levels of representation. This does not mean that these representations themselves become projected upon the objective essence, or upon the reality which this essence constitutes. When contemporary phenomenologists write that the thing itself becomes invested with anthropological predicates and becomes known through

Pay attention! 191

8 9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21

22 23

those predicates, they merely allude to the need to represent the object in order to grasp its intrinsic meaning with all the faculties of the incarnated consciousness. But they do not deny that the object, the objective meaning, the “thing itself,” orders, directs, rules the course of these representations’(Louis Dupré, Religious Mystery and Rational Reflection, 1998, pp. 10–11). The emphasis on history has been an important part particularly of the work of Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Helen Lees, Silence in Schools (Stoke on Trent: Trentham Books, 2012). Silence has all sorts of significations within education. A phenomenology of silence within education would be a fascinating project: the silences of exam halls, detentions, or classes engaged in focused activities; the many awkward silences as tutors invite comments from seminar students upon a reading that few students may have read; there are those silenced by the political or social conventions and customs in societies; there are moments of mindfulness so popularly evoked in many schools around the country; occasional prayers and reflections where groups of students perform remembrance of, for example, the war dead. At a completely different level exist forms of silent teaching, or direct instruction, of the sort traditions in the far East are more familiar with. I am thinking of particularly of Zen Buddhist traditions, though Indian religious culture has some similar processes with such figures as Sri Ramana Maharshi or Mother Mira, for whom the enlightened state could only be taught though silent transmission. Max Picard, The World of Silence (Washington DC: Regnery Pub, 1972); Ann Caranfa, ‘Silence as the Foundation of Learning’, Educational Theory, vol. 54, no. 2, 2004, 210–230. Jiddu Krishnamurti, Total Freedom (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1996). William James, The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1 (Dover Publications, 1890), Chapter 11. See, for example, Antoine Lotz, Heleen Slagter, Nancy Rawlings, Andrew Francis, Lawrence Greischar and Richard Davidson, ‘Mental Training Enhances Attentional Stability: Neural and Behavioral Evidence’, The Journal of Neuroscience, 21 October 2009, vol. 29, no. 42 pp. 13418–13427. Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simons, In Defence of School: A Public Issue. Available online at http://ppw.kuleuven.be/ecs/les/in-defence-of-the-school/massche lein-maarten-simons-in-defence-of-the.html Ibid., p. 9. John Dewey, ‘The Development of Attention’. Chapter 7 in The School and Society (University of Chicago Press, 1915), pp. 141–152. Ibid., p. 4. This is reminiscent to the Augustinian idea that our love for God is never absent rather it is misdirected. The connection with education is developed in James Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009). Thomas Davenport and John Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). The recent critical theory of Bernard Stiegler understands the marketization of attention as a kind of proletarianization of the consumer. This is basically because the kinds of passive attention encouraged by the proliferation of digital cultures, short circuit the active and critical aspects of attention. For Stiegler this is an existential threat partly because it corrodes the capacity of judgement that allows for a fuller sense of agency to resist this proletarianization. See Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, translated by Daniel Ross (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2010). Dewey, ‘The Development of Attention’. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’ (Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 1.

192 D. Lewin 24 Ibid., p. 2. 25 See for example, Terry Hyland, ‘On the Contemporary Applications of Mindfulness: Some Implications for Education’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2015, 49, 2, pp. 170–186; Aislinn O’Donnell, ‘Contemplative Pedagogy and Mindfulness: Developing Creative Attention in an Age of Distraction’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2015, 49, 2, pp. 187–202; David Lewin ‘Heidegger East and West: Philosophy as Educative Contemplation’, Journal of Philosophy of Education, 2015, 49, 2, pp. 221–239. 26 David Lewin, ‘The Middle Voice in Eckhart and Modern Continental Philosophy’, Medieval Mystical Theology, 20:1, 2011, pp. 28–46. 27 Bret Davis, Heidegger on the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit (Northwestern University Press, 2007). 28 Richard Rojcewicz, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (State University of New York Press, 2006). 29 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1977). 30 Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1970); Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1976); Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1977); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, A Translation of Sein and Zeit (State University of New York Press, 1996). 31 This discussion of language is meant to include all forms and levels of language, not only speech. The point is perhaps clearer with the concrete example of the pedagogical role of speech, but the essential point need not assume a priority for the spoken word. 32 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Letter on Humanism’, in Basic Writings: Second Edition, Revised and Expanded (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 230. 33 Marvin Shaw, The Paradox of Intention: Reaching the Goal by Giving Up the Attempt to Reach It (Oxford University Press, 2010). 34 Quoted in Bernard McGinn, The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart (New York, NY: Crossroad Publishing, 2001), p. 114. 35 John Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Fordham University Press, 1986), p. 226. 36 Ibid., p. 227. 37 See, for example, Michael Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press, 1994), chapter 6; Joseph Milne, The Ground of Being: Foundations of Christian Mysticism (Temenos Academy, 2004). 38 See Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge University Press), Chapter 6. 39 Jiddu Krishnamurti, Total Freedom (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1996), p. 257. 40 Jiddu Krishnamurti, Life Ahead: On Learning and the Search for Meaning (Novata, CA: New World Library, 1963), pp. 13–14. 41 I spent 2 years living and working at Brockwood Park School, the only Krishnamurti school in the UK. I have also visited a number of Krishnamurti schools in India, as well as Oak Grove, the Krishnamurti school in California. For many years Brockwood Park has committed all staff and students to a morning meeting which usually, though not always, would involve sitting quietly for 15 minutes. 42 Charles Eriksen and James St James, ‘Visual attention within and around the field of focal attention: A zoom lens model’, Perception & Psychophysics, 40 (4), 1986, pp. 225–240 43 Heidegger ecstasies of temporality offer one option here. 44 Jiddu Krishnamurti, Total Freedom (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1996); The Ending of Time (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1985).

Pay attention! 193 45 Bernard Stiegler, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations (Stanford University Press, 2010), p. 18. 46 Max Picard, The World of Silence, pp. 2–3. 47 Maggie Ross, ‘Behold Not the Cloud of Experience’, p. 33. 48 St Augustine, ‘On the Teacher’, Augustine: Earlier Writings, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster John Knox, 1979), 40. 49 Evelyn Underhill, Mysticism: Third Edition (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2012). 50 Ibid., p. 310. 51 Turner, The Darkness of God. 52 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (London, Ark, 1987), p. 30. 53 Simone Weil, Waiting on God (London, Fontana, 1959), p. 106. 54 John Caputo,The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (Fordham University Press, 1986), pp. 216–217; pp. 225–226.

This page intentionally left blank

Part IV

Re-readings and new boundaries

This page intentionally left blank

11 Mysterium secretum et silentiosum Praying the apophatic self Simon D. Podmore

Mysterium et silentium: the dark secret of mystical theology In the middle of the night when all things were in a quiet silence, there was spoken to me a hidden word. It came like a thief by stealth (Wisdom 1 8:14–15). (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1)1

Apophatic communion takes place ‘in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence’,2 in a silence ‘beyond assertion and denial’3; in other words, in secret. But where is it that this union ‘takes place’? As Eckhart’s sermon quoted above continues, ‘[W]here is the silence, and where is the place where the word is spoken?’4 It is a ‘place’, metaphorically speaking, which is beyond all affirmation and denial of ‘place’. This ‘place’ is the desert, the abyss, the place where there is no-thing, nothing but God beyond ‘God’. It is beyond place, and beyond experience; and yet, as explored further below, the union within apophasis and contemplative prayer takes place, metaphorically, in a secret interior sanctum, unknown to both self and other. A sanctuary in which God dwells but which ‘no door is required to enter’.5 Apophasis therefore connotes a secret, a silent wisdom incommunicable between self and other, unknown between interiority and exteriority. This secret is even held in unknowing within the ‘self’. It is the secret of the self: the hidden abyss in which God dwells and in which the true self dwells. It is beyond ego or self-will, the Eigen wille (‘own-will’) of Eckhartian tradition; it breaks open the despairing ‘inclosing reserve’ (Indesluttethed) of what Kierkegaard inscribes as the demonic locked-in self, reminiscent of Jacob Boehme’s notion of the demonic will turned-in-on-itself, a melancholy dark fire devouring itself in wrath.6 Yet while this ‘place’ of union may lie beyond all creatureliness, I suggest that there nonetheless remains significant affirmation of a ‘centre’ or ‘ground’ to the self (albeit de-centred and ungrounded). This ‘desert’ and ‘abyss’ is also spoken of as a ‘spark’, a ‘castle’, as well as a ‘ground’. While the self-will is emptied out to the point of death – articulated by Eckhart in terms of detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and releasement (Gelassenheit) – there still remains a ‘place’, somehow ‘apart’ from the world, in which the restless soul, the apophatic self, is able to find itself resting in God. While I

198 S. D. Podmore take this as an affirmation of attention to a form of interiority which is dangerously disregarded in much of contemporary post/modern culture, I am also mindful of the scandal and threat (even offense) the secret of such interiority poses to exteriority. In light of this, one might ask to what extent is it possible to affirm such mystical interiority in the face of post/modern philosophy’s privileging of alterity? Or might apophasis actually offer, as I intimate here, a potent resource for disentangling the problematic divisions between ‘self’ and ‘other’ which render the notion of the secret, particularly a ‘religious secret’, such a threat? Exploring the apophatic dimension of contemplative prayer alongside the controversial presence of ‘secrecy’ surrounding Kierkegaard’s treatment of the Akedah in Fear and Trembling, this essay attempts a theological and philosophical reflection upon the problematic forms of Silence both before God and before the other (about God). In doing so, I attempt to broach ‘the mystical’ dialectically in terms of both interiority and exteriority: that is, as at once revealed and concealed, hidden and disclosed, as a disruption of ego/alter-centric relations between self and (Wholly) Other. In other words, I shall explore the ‘space’ of the mystical relation (between self and God; between self and other) through the hermeneutic lenses of secrecy and (inter-)subjectivity. With reference to Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), as well as to Meister Eckhart (c.1260–1328), Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582) and John of the Cross (1542–1591), I question the extent to which the apophatic self, in secret mystical relation to the Unknowable, can be disclosed to itself and to the other. Key to this is the notion of silence as an expression of the inexpressible secret of the self before and (hidden) in God.7 Ultimately I suggest that some form of apophatic prayer of unknowing might help to interrupt the boundaries between self and other which make secrecy problematic; while also containing and affirming an essential discrete space for the restless apophatic self to find its sanctuary, ‘resting transparently in God’.8

Mysterium et secretum: the unspeakable and the uninitiated Etymologically, as is well known, the notion of the mystical is derived from silence (Mystikos – from myein, ‘to be silent’). The ‘mystic’ is one who has been initiated (mystes) into a secret (secretus, ‘set apart, withdrawn, hidden’), like one who is hermetically held within the ancient mystery religions, about which the mystic must keep silent (as early Christian vowed silence concerning the secret rite of baptism). In this sense, the mystical might denote a secret esoteric gnosis (‘Knowledge’) in relation to which the mystic becomes an initiate and an illuminatus – one who has been enlightened but who holds silent about the unspeakable content of their secret wisdom. Mystical theology, in its hermetic form, thus implies a hierarchy (Hierarkhia, ‘rule of a high priest’; from hierarkhes, ‘high priest, leader of sacred rites’; from ta hiera, ‘the sacred rites’ – plural of hieros, ‘sacred’) of knowledge: hence, the purported gnostic gospels comprise a ‘higher’ form of gnosticism (gnostikos, ‘learned, intellectual’) which intensifies

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 199 one’s salvation from ignorance, a secret interior wisdom intended for the spiritually advanced and preserved from mass consumption by being enciphered within obscure symbolic expression.9 In contrast to such problematically constructed ideas of cultures of sacred elitism, however, Christian mystical tradition also expresses a relationship to un/knowing grounded in the humility of what Kierkegaard calls an ‘infinite qualitative difference’ between creature and Creator – though mystical theology remains orientated to enlightenment in ways in which, as explored below, secrecy also performs a central function. Perhaps the most prominent early account of an ostensibly ecstatic Christian10 vision in which a secret gnosis is bestowed is found in 2 Corinthians 12. Paul writes, enigmatically and autobiographically, of a man in Christ who was caught up in the third heaven, ‘whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knows’ (12:3); ‘How that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter’ (12:4). The content of the vision is preserved in the secrecy of silence – unspeakable words which are forbidden for a human to speak. According to Eckhart, ‘God was made known to him and he beheld all things’, but when Paul returned from the third heaven, this secret was buried so deep with his ground that it was veiled even from his intellect. As such, he had to search deep within himself to reconnect with it.11 Exposure to such heavenly secrets does not, however, rouse the initiate to the status of an illuminatus above all others. While Paul cannot share his secret, his reflection upon its presence is notable for being marked by a ‘thorn in the flesh’ which prevents the visionary from becoming exalted. ‘And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure’ (12:7). Paul’s thorn in the flesh therefore illustrates how rather than privileging the silence of the enlightened before the other – the ‘uninitiated’ who is unworthy or unprepared – Christian mystical theology commends a silence before God which nurtures a secret space of intimacy and interiority which, in turn, gives birth to an unknowing wisdom in the humility (humus, ‘earth’) of the creature’s relationship of Love with its loving Creator. In other words, mystical theology carves a ‘space’, inaccessible to exteriority, in which, in Kierkegaard’s terms ‘the self before God’ comes to rest ‘grounded [grunder] transparently in God’.12 Inevitably, however, problems again arise in the scandalous implication that the devotional silence of the individual before God in solitude exacts a secondary aporetic silence – held as an inexorable secret – before the other about the wisdom which transpires secretly between self and God. Yet this mysterium, as Rudolf Otto has suggested, is not the veiled prize of a higher gnosis which must be withheld, according to a hierarchy of enlightenment, from the unworthy other. Rather, as Otto states: A religious mystery is not something obscure for the time, capable, like the mysteries of chemistry, of ultimate solution; nor is it an ‘arcanum’,

200 S. D. Podmore mysterious only for the lower orders, the ‘profane’, and convertible for the adepts into Gnosis.13 The ‘religious mystery’ is the inexpressible secret of the mysterium which pertains to a Wholly Other, essentially unknowable (beyond that which can be shared between us within language), rather than to a secret gnosis which is forbidden to be known by those who are judged to be unworthy to know. This is the mysterium tremendum which joins fear and trembling to fascinosum: the erotic numinous longing evoked between the self in its ‘creature-feeling [Kreaturgefühl]’ and the augustum of ‘the Wholly Other [das Ganz Andere]’.14 In contrast to the self-apotheosis of the illuminatus, the self before the numinous is drawn out of itself in becoming conscious of its own nothingness, a kenosis-inekstasis of ‘self-transcending and self-forgetting’ which through intimate contact with the numinous Wholly Other initiates an ‘overcoming’ of ‘the boundaries of mutual exclusion that define individuals over against each other’.15 Such ‘creature-feeling [Kreaturgefühl]’ also affirms the value of the creature, even in its own initial nothingness before its Creator. One who is ‘but dust and ashes’ (Genesis 18:27) takes upon oneself to speak unto the Unspeakable God – to open oneself in prayer, even if that prayer entails struggling with God. It is in such prayer, apophatic and agonistic, that one finds the heart of mystical theology as ‘that which cries out of humanity’s deepest place to the divine’.16 Out of these depths (de profundis), deep calls unto deep (abyssus abyssum invocat), and the self is emptied within the abyss of God (being ‘nowhere bodily’ and ‘wrestling with that blind nought’, in the words of The Cloud of Unknowing). But where and what unspeakable secret abyss is this in which the ‘self’ empties itself? Where is this silence, in which place is secret word spoken?

The secret prayer of apophasis ‘In the midst of silence there was spoken within me a secret word.’ – ‘But sir where is the silence, and where is the place where the word is spoken?’ (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1)17

Is the place of silence the same place where the word is spoken? In seeking an intimate space of communion with God, mystical tradition appeals to Jesus’ injunction to ‘go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you’ (Matthew 6:6). This incitement to humble interiority rather than conceited exteriority inspires the eremitic practice of Hesychasm in Eastern Orthodox tradition (ἡσυχασμός, hesychasmos, from ἡσυχία, hesychia, ‘stillness, rest, quiet, silence’). Such a form of prayer involves a process of retiring inwardly into the body (‘the cell for anyone seeking Christ in the silent depths of the heart’18), withdrawing from the world of the senses (though not necessarily from all created matter) in desire for theoria or contemplation: a visionary experiential intuition of God derived from the wisdom of love and faith.19

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 201 Analogous valuations of such silent and secret interiority can be found throughout mystical theology, affirming prayer as the common heartbeat of Christian mystical tradition. In Western tradition, the analogous practice of the prayer of Recollection (Recogimiento) seeks to address the soul’s desire for sacred solitude, withdrawing from the senses in order to recover itself, aspiring towards centred union with the divine.20 Countering the impulse which Kierkegaard identifies through the pathology of ‘inclosing reserve [Indesluttethed]’21 as the silent, even demonic, solipsistic despair of the self that is locked within itself, the self-enclosure of Recollection requires collecting one’s self, over and over, returning or gathering oneself to a pure interiority, as a self-emptying (a kenosis) which seeks to recover itself before a Wholly Other (in ekstasis) – in the silent secret abyss of self-God relationship. This Recollection involves an active withdrawal of the external senses (analogous to Eckhartian detachment: Abgeshiedenheit) in order to clear space for a passive centring of interiority’s attention on the Divine (somewhat akin to Eckhart’s releasement: Gelassenheit). Such withdrawal goes deeper than practices of active mental ascesis22 in expressing a form of passive prayer as focussed receptivity to God – as a resting or waiting upon God for a response to one’s prayers of petition, as the silence of listening which follows the practice of speech and restless struggle. Such silent prayer seems to take one ever deeper within the abyssal heart of Christian mystical tradition, from which the whole being cries in silence de profundis.23 In this respect, prayer provides an apposite expression of the marriage between devotion and contemplation, between spirituality and theology, between speech and silence. ‘Theology is light, prayer is fire’, as Clément observes. ‘Their union expresses the union of the intellect and the heart.’24 But if the light of theology derives from the flames of prayer, how might theology translate the prayer of silence? As Marion claims, it is theology’s responsibility to attempt a discourse on this silent mystery which is worthy of this silence.25 Yet how can the light return to its source in order to speak meaningfully of its secret?

Breaching the silent sanctuary in Fear and Trembling [J]ust as the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom [Proverbs 9:10], so silence is the beginning of the fear of God. Kierkegaard26

If fear of God begins in silence, is such silence left behind once fear gives birth to Wisdom? We are faced with a paradox, even perhaps the ‘madness’ of this venture: the ostensibly impossible possibility of speaking of silence without breaking it, without in some sense violating its sanctity.27 And yet this is precisely what theology demands of itself: to speak of that Wholly Other which is at the same time closer to me than the self is to itself.28 In the interweaving of the kataphatic and the apophatic we find both theology’s almost blasphemous presumption and its deepest humility. A theology of silence perhaps manifests – even confesses – this tension more than any other. Silence evokes the mysterium

202 S. D. Podmore tremendum et fascinans of both the intimacy and the distance between the human and the divine, of the creature and the Holy: Silence is ‘a spontaneous reaction to the feeling [Gefühles] of the actual numen præsens’29 – a presence confirmed in its absence, its ineffability. Many of the most abyssal and offensive theological and philosophical aporiae of silence are elicited within Kierkegaard’s (under the pertinent pseudonym Johannes de Silentio) melancholy meditation on God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac (the Akedah: Genesis 22), the appositely titled Fear and Trembling.30 Here Abraham is presented as an anxious ‘Knight of Faith’ whose secret command from God excludes him, through his silence, from ‘the universal’ and isolates him as a singularity, a ‘single individual’ in a secret relation to ‘the Absolute’ that sacrifices ‘the ethical’ for the sake of a religious mystery. Abraham himself becomes an unknowable source of ‘horror religiosus’ compared by the author Silentio to Israel’s dread before the cloud of God’s presence on Mount Sinai31 (also the cloud of unknowing of Dionysian mystical tradition). Abraham himself becomes numinous as he is encrypted within his secret relation to God: a relation which can only be discerned in terms of the ‘absurdity’ of faith: and ‘Faith is this paradox, and the single individual simply cannot make himself understandable to anyone’.32 Referring to this as the self’s ‘aparté’ or aside with God, Agacinski elaborates how Abraham’s ‘relation to God is a secret link’, a ‘relation to God that takes place in silence and darkness’ and which constitutes ‘the most difficult attachment’.33 This attachment is also a detachment from Isaac, a sacrifice of relation to the other demanded by Abraham’s anxious and secret communion with God. In this ‘monstrous, outrageous, barely conceivable’34 yet hidden call to sacrifice his only son, Abraham is confronted by what Derrida, evoking the Ottonian numinous, calls the ‘Mysterium tremendum. A frightful mystery, a secret to make you tremble.’35 God’s very identity as ‘wholly other [tout autre]’ is concomitant with secrecy: ‘if he were to speak to us all the time without any secrets, he wouldn’t be the other, we would share a type of homogeneity.’36 In light of this hermetic alterity, one is called to ‘Work out your salvation in fear and trembling’ (Philippians 2:12), in silence, or in secret, in the absence of the hidden God or of a distant Messiah who has not yet come, or who delays his return.37 Pertinently, Derrida makes several reference to the gospels’ notion, as referred to at the end of Fear and Trembling, of the God ‘who sees in secret’38 – a view also invoked in inspiring the inward journey into silence of contemplative prayer. In contemplative prayer, however, the notion of a God who is ‘Wholly Other’ by virtue of the withholding of secrets gives way to the God who shares the deepest secret of presence in the abyss of divine union. There are as many varieties of secret as there are varieties of silence. Let all the earth fall silent before God (Habakkuk 2:20); Heaven itself falls silent (Revelation 8:1). Heaven and earth hold their breath. What is this apocalyptic silence of God – of the whole angelic hierarchy? What does it mean when God is silent? What is it to be silent before God? For Kierkegaard, insofar as ‘God is in heaven and the human being is on earth and therefore they

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 203 can hardly converse’, it is ‘only in much fear and trembling’ that ‘a human being is able to speak with God, in much fear and trembling’.39 Fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom (Proverbs 9:10); and for Kierkegaard silence is the beginning of fear.40 Yet Kierkegaard also acknowledges the polyvalence of silence. Through silence one becomes ‘a divine child’, resting in silent contemplation of one’s ‘divine origin’.41 But Kierkegaard recognises that silence is also demonic as well as divine. Silence belongs both to the despair of ‘inclosing reserve’ and to the self resting secretly in God. Silence is both ‘the demon’s trap’, and also ‘divinity’s mutual understanding with the single individual’.42 This ‘mutual understanding’ is a secret of ‘the self before God’ which cannot be conveyed to ‘the other’. Fear and Trembling speaks about this silent secret between Abraham and his God, but it does so under the anxious confession that it cannot reveal it, that the author himself, Johannes de Silentio, cannot understand Abraham. Insofar as the book attempts, whilst at the same time contemplating its failure, to speak about the silence which preserves the secret between Abraham and God – even the secret between Abraham and Isaac – Fear and Trembling also evokes the sacrificial scandals implicit in apophatic silence. Mystical silence entails not only a releasement (Gelassenheit) but also a sacrifice, a kenosis of speech in recognition of the inadequacy of all creatureliness. But in doing so, can unknowing silence before God serve as a prohibition against speaking out against God in defence of the other whose sacrifice God may demand? In other words, why does the same Abraham who spoke out against God’s vow to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah – ‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes’ – now remain silent before God’s command to sacrifice his only son? Is such silence the only possible acquiescence of the selfwill to the Will of the Unknowable God? Does such silence merely render the cry of protest voiceless in the face of ostensible evil? Or might a more apophatic reading disclose that Abraham’s silence holds a deeper secret? By its refusal or inability to declare itself, silence concerning one’s Godrelationship remains consciously open to the possibility of multiple readings. Perhaps Abraham’s silence is one of self-enclosed despair before a God who now reveals the darkness of His shadow-side? Or perhaps, following a more apophatic reading, Abraham’s silence does struggle with this dark aspect of God, while also uniting the will to the abyss of the Divine Will. I suggest that such an apophatic reading becomes possible if Abraham’s silence is read according to the one word he does speak to Isaac, the secret of his faith: ‘God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering my son’ (Genesis 22:8). This secret word, which says both everything and nothing, might be read in an apophatic sense as a negation of the negation between God’s promise for Abraham’s seed and the divine command to sacrifice that seed. Kierkegaard elsewhere acknowledges that ‘[t]he terrifying thing in the collision is that; that it is not a collision between God’s command and man’s command but between God’s command and God’s command’.43 Once understood in the light of God’s reprieve on Mount Moriah, the fulfilment of the secret is revealed as having already reconciled the coincidentia oppositorum of God’s seemingly antinomous will.44

204 S. D. Podmore Contrary to initial impressions, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling also suggests that Abraham did in fact struggle with God, even to the point of ‘overcoming God’ in his weakness.45 The text therefore proposes that there is more than a dichotomy between silence and protest in operation. It suggests another way, a more apophatic way, in which Abraham’s silence both submits to and simultaneously struggles with God. It is acknowledged that Abraham ‘did not challenge heaven with his prayers’.46 Yet there is a quiet, even secret, suggestion that Abraham’s (contemplative?) silence actually challenges Heaven, challenges the God who ‘sees in secret and recognizes the distress and counts the tears and forgets nothing’.47 ‘How gripping,’ Kierkegaard elsewhere observes, ‘God says to Moses: Why are you shouting so loudly – and Moses was being silent. Silence can be that heaven-scaling.’48 There is, as I am seeking to elicit, a hidden suggestion that Abraham’s silence scales heaven: in paradoxical obedience/protestation, longing for God to reveal Godself as, after all, a God of Love – perhaps even to the point that God sends an angel to prevent the final irremediable moment of tragic sacrifice. In other words, Abraham’s silence before God and before the other is transfigured by the ‘dazzling darkness’ of his secret word: ‘Abraham said, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together’ (Genesis 22:8).

Exteriority and interiority: the scandal of self and other Lord, let no one confide in Your silence, for truly Your silence will soon be turned to dreadful thunder. (Henry Suso; 1295–1366)49

Anticipating Kierkegaard, Suso discerns a fear of God emerging from divine silence. No apophatic secret word negates the fact that Abraham and Isaac no longer remain together after the Akedah. Isaac vanishes from the narrative, memorialised as a symbol of divine fear (paḥad yis.ḥa-q; Genesis 31:42). Father and son do not speak again. Abraham and God do not speak again.50 There is no unio mystica; only the solitary individual – without God. In this wake of solitude, Abraham’s apophatic secret might be read as mere mystification. There is little sense of the mystical union of wills as apophasis gives way to estrangement. We do not read of Abraham’s prayers. We are left, perhaps, to speculate once more upon silence: the silence of God and the silence of Abraham’s state of desolation, abandonment, even God-forsakenness. In the visceral imagery of the Akedah, it is shown how silence, the secret of the self before God, provokes the scandal of offense and demands the sacrificial moment of estrangement in relation to the other. In this, Fear and Trembling also intersects with related problems concerning mystical silence: the silence which enshrouds a secret sanctum between self and God which is inaccessible to exteriority and which, as ineffable, cannot even be fully shared through inter-subjectivity. This sacred space suggests, as Abraham evokes, troubling differences between silence before God; silence before the other; and silence before

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 205 the other about God. Such a silent, secret sanctuary of interiority is scandalous, even offensive, to exteriority (the world) and to inter-subjectivity (the self-other relationship). Where is ‘the other’ within the apparent solipsism of the mystic’s secret self before God? The hermetic sanctum of the interior self-God relationship seems to threaten exteriority and inter-subjective relationships with the other, even to the point of sacrifice. Seen from the exterior, however, all interiority becomes secret and inaccessible – insofar as it might be said that ‘every other is wholly other [tout autre est tout autre]’.51 The self and the other, as Levinas observes, cannot be reduced to ‘the same’: the alterity which exists between interiority and exteriority is irreducible to a totality; but a welcoming of ‘the other’ – rather than the exclusion of the other in God – nonetheless forms the primal basis of true ethical relationship. Such inter-subjectivity, rather than sheltered interiority, is for Levinas the mode through which the God-relationship is experienced.52 Levinas’ valorisation of exteriority awakens us to the truth of the wholly other’s holy appeal to me in the face of ‘the Stranger, the widow, the orphan’53 whose ‘primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder’’.54 This ethical epiphany of the face of the other rouses us from our transcendent dreaming – from the other-worldly secrecy of hermetic, mystical and metaphysical longing. This means that God, for Levinas, ‘is not numinous: the I who approaches him is neither annihilated on contact nor transported outside of itself, but remains separated and keeps its as-for-me’.55 The epiphany of God is therefore revealed, not in mystical ekstasis, nor in direct private revelations of secretive commands, but in the ethical primacy of the human face. ‘It is God that I can define through human relations and not the inverse … when I say something about God, it is always beginning from human relations.’56 In this sense, Levinas remains horrified by what he reads (somewhat dubiously via the lens of Fear and Trembling) as the message of Kierkegaard’s solitary self before God. Levinas is appalled by the sense of ‘violence’ which he regards as the implication of the ‘isolation of the individual relationship with the being to which, for Kierkegaard, no other kind of relationship is possible: that is to say, with God’.57 Levinas offers a vital corrective against the other-worldly temptations of a mystical-religious relation to God which circumnavigates the ethical relation to the other. But might such an obdurate insistence upon alterity risk its own form of totalising: one in which interiority’s self-God relationship must always be denied by, or at least rendered accountable to, the demands of exteriority? The problem is that ‘the other’ may not always appear as ‘the Stranger, the widow, the orphan’ in whose face one’s beholds the epiphany of the ‘primordial expression: “you shall not commit murder”’. For Kierkegaard, ‘the other’ is Isaac, the sacrificial victim; but ‘the other’ is also ‘the crowd’, ‘the public’, even ‘the church’, which represent the embodiment of ‘untruth’ – in contrast to which stands ‘a solitary person’ in the secret struggle of ‘spiritual trial [Anfægtelse]’.58 Yet both Kierkegaard and Levinas seek to transcend the self-other relation so potently elucidated in Hegel’s dialectic of the struggle for recognition

206 S. D. Podmore between the Master and the Slave. In Hegel’s vision, the other interrupts the self’s relation to itself with an intrusive gaze which desires to master, to know, to possess it. The reciprocity of this gaze between two subjects elicits a life and death struggle in which ‘each seeks the death of the other’.59 While in the Levinasian ethical model, the face of the other should ideally evoke the intersubjectivity of empathy, the presence of secrecy and silence – even in the mystic – risks eliciting the suspicion, paranoia, and hetero-phobia of the other. This is a particular tension when silence preserves the secret and ineffable interiority of a self-God relationship: an autonomous relation to a theonomy which cannot be subjected to the heteronomy of the other – even if the other is as formidably sublime as the State, or even the Church. As the dark history of our ‘mystics’ and ‘heretics’ informs us, whether through subjection to suspicion, ridicule, censorship, imprisonment, torture or death, the other cannot fully possess this secret interior freedom of the self before or resting in God. This interior, inviolable, and sacred space – an interior holy of holies in which ‘self’ is unknown in Love – is a silent and secret inner sanctum of divinity which cannot be desecrated. While there remains within each of us an interior sanctuary, external physical space is more vulnerable to desecration. Mount Moriah, the place of the Akedah, is, as Derrida observes,60 also traditionally the place of Ibrahim’s sacrifice of a complicit Ishmael,61 the culmination of Muhammed’s night journey, and the place of his ascent to Heaven. It is also regarded as the site of the first and second Jewish Temples: within which the Holy of Holies dwells. In Jerusalem, this highly contested numinous space is presently known as both the Temple Mount (Har Habayit) and the Noble Sanctuary (Haram esh-Sharif). It is occupied by the Al-aqsa mosque and the imperialist shrine, the Dome of the Rock (Qubbat al-Sakhrah), which purportedly contains the high point of Mount Moriah itself – the site of the Akedah for some; for others, the ground above the forbidden Holy of Holies. The Western Wall of the compound operates as the Wailing Wall: the place of prayer and lament for the absent Temple. This currently volatile and contested space has recently been the setting for a government enforced prohibition against prayer by any non-Muslim. Mount Moriah is a place of prayer for Muslims; a place of visitation only for every other. Inevitably, this law, enforced both by Israeli and Palestinian security (and vigilant Muslim observers), invites violation, aptly insofar as it seeks impossibly and degradingly to violate religious interiority. Prayer in this space, for the non-Muslim, becomes a matter of interest for the other. Prayer may break out in the more liturgically expressive and provocative exterior prayers of those who wish to claim a right to pray in this holy space. In these cases, prayer provokes conflict. But there are also numerous silent, secret prayers spoken internally to God, without obvious relation to exteriority. However, such silent prayers are also the subject of suspicion and interrogation. Such a secret (secretus) becomes the business of security (secures: etymologically, and ironically, ‘free from care’). One who walks this sacred space evoking any suspicion of silent secret prayer is interrogated by security, both official and self-appointed.

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 207 Confronted by the impossibly unknowable possibility of a secret prayer, the suspicious other demands to know ‘are you praying?’, ‘what is your silence hiding?’ The other desires interrogation of this silence and possession of its secret for the sake of its security. The secret of the praying self disturbs and provokes the other’s desire to reduce the one who prays to an object of power and control. The irresolvable problem for this policy is that interiority, in its alterity, is impossibly inaccessible to the other. It is a secret which the other cannot tolerate, though this intolerance is incapable of possessing the secret. However, while prayer in this space of conflict is often directed to exteriority as an act of provocation, I suggest that mystical silence can also subvert the attempt to infiltrate and dominate the heart and mind of the other. More than this, I wish to suggest that interior apophatic prayer, insofar as it is grounded in a sanctuary of peace (Gelassenheit) between God and the soul, might provide inspiration for greater exterior peace between self and other. In other words, by affirming the inalienable individual right to be in secret before or in God, apophatic prayer can help cultivate the sense of freedom and peace required in letting the other be other, while also recognising that the ‘self’ and ‘other’ are united in the communion of God’s presence which transfigures the world in its entirety.

Praying the apophatic self In the midst of silence there was spoken within me a secret word. (Meister Eckhart, Sermon 1)62

By passing through the presence and absence of speech, apophatic prayer pursues a dialogue which moves beyond the dialectics of speaking and listening, to a secret space in which the notion of secrecy is itself transfigured. The secret is no longer determined by the inclusion and exclusion of self and other, but by the revelation of God’s presence within all creation.63 To elaborate what might be understood by a silent prayer of unknowing I will draw upon key figures in the Western apophatic tradition: specifically Meister Eckhart, Teresa of Ávila, and John of the Cross. Vital roots for this Western tradition of negative theology are, of course, to be found in the East: in ‘the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence’ evoked by Pseudo Dionysius’ central claim concerning ‘God’, or ‘the ray of the divine shadow’,64 that ‘There is no speaking of it, nor name nor knowledge of it.… It is beyond assertion and denial.’65 In Turner’s terms, Pseudo Dionysius desires to behold the face of God, ‘but under the condition imposed by Exodus: “no one may see me and live”’.66 It is not here claimed that God is simply approached via negationis, but that God is beyond both assertion (Kataphasis) and denial (Apophasis): that is, beyond the reductions of either positive or negative language. Apophatic theology, as Derrida has astutely discerned, thereby develops a multiplicity of language – a continual linguistic deferral of its ‘object’ through proliferative statements concerning what God is not.67 However, as has been contended, Negative Theology is distinguished from Derridean Différance insofar as it is not

208 S. D. Podmore only concerned with the im/possibilities of language, but with a ‘God’ who has given Godself to be ‘un/known’ through Love.68 Apophasis is therefore drawn by a longing for a God that is already in some deep sense present. In silence a ‘secret word’ is spoken. For Eckhart this Word is primarily a question of location as well as locution. The first question is where in the soul God the Father speaks His Word, where this birth takes place and where she is receptive of this act, for that can only be in the very purest, loftiest, subtlest part that the soul is capable of.69 This ‘where’ is the pristine part of the soul in which Christ is to be born. It must be kept ‘absolutely pure … all in turned and collected and in the purest part – there is His place; He disdains anything less’.70 Rather than labouring towards such a birth of the Word in the Soul, by exertion, merit, and kataphatic imagining, ‘one should shun and free oneself from all thoughts, words, and deeds and from all images created by the understanding, maintaining a wholly God-receptive attitude, such that one’s own self is idle, letting God work within one’.71 God’s work is done in the ‘place’ where this Word is spoken: ‘in the purest thing that the soul is capable of, in the noblest part, the ground – indeed, in the very essence of the soul which is the soul’s most secret part’.72 In the ground of being ‘is the silent “middle”’ where ‘God enters … the ground of the soul’ which no one may touch, only God.73 One finds one’s true dwelling ‘in the essence and in the ground’, where ‘God will touch you with His simple essence without the intervention of any image’.74 While God surpasses all understanding, the ‘soul’s spark’ wants nothing but God, naked, just as He is … it wants to get into its simple ground, into the silent desert into which no distinction ever peeped, of Father, Son or Holy Ghost … for this ground is an impartible stillness, motionless in itself, and by this mobility all things are moved, and all those receive life that live of themselves, being endowed with reason.75 Reason (Fornuft) itself is restless in its desire to find rest in the Godhead which is prior to all notions of ‘goodness’, ‘wisdom’ or ‘truth’. Reason thus desires God as the hidden root and the seed of such things: it desires the ground, the ‘in principio’ which is prior to names, to abide in ‘one knowing with God’s knowing’.76 One is therefore restlessly driven by reason’s insatiable desire to rest in the deepest abyss of the Godhead – a naked absolute, before all naming. He desires to abide in the God beyond God, or the God deeper than God – the inscrutable (unergründlich) abyss (abgrund) of ‘the hidden darkness of the eternal godhead, which is unknown and never has been known and never shall be known’.77 For Eckhart, the pure God is nameless: God is transcendent Being and super-essential Nothingness, and therefore silence is the greatest one

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 209 can attain to concerning speaking about God – since to speak erroneously of God is to fall into sin. Yet, despite this ineffability, the soul longs to let go of self and rest completely in God, in a state of detachment (Abgeschiedenheit) and releasement (Gelassenheit) – an emptying of the self-will into the divine will in which God also rests in the soul.78 In loving attachment the soul is united with God in vision, in the releasement (Gelassenheit) of the will to the divine will, but not in essence itself. God’s essence does not become our own essence, though it may become the life of the soul. God is in the soul, like the rays of the sun reflected in a mirror, but God ‘is not the soul’.79 This ineffable union is achieved through the divine gift of God’s Love, the fire of the Holy Spirit, by which the soul loves God with the divine love which proceeds from and returns to God. ‘God works in love transcending the soul’, transfiguring the likeness of the soul as the image of God.80 Such desire takes the soul into a secret, hidden space beyond, or prior to, all names of God. In prayer, Spirit prays through the soul, as God unto God, in a silence beyond, or even before, all language. The metaphorical notion of a secret ‘space’ of loving union with the divine is also given prominent expression in Spanish Carmelite tradition: specifically in the writings of the founder of the Discalced Carmelites Teresa of Ávila and her fellow reformer John of the Cross. In Teresa’s Interior Castle, she describes how God ‘secretly shows us He hears our prayers’, whereupon ‘it is well to be silent, as He has drawn us into His presence’.81 In the divine presence, graces are bestowed on the soul, given in peace and silence, like the building of Solomon’s Temple where no sound was heard. It is thus with this temple of God, this mansion of His where He and the soul rejoice in each other alone in profound silence.82 In this great secret interior castle are many rooms, but at the centre of them all ‘is the principal chamber in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse’.83 Such moments of intercourse, or prayers of union, may be transitory, ‘but the soul in a secret manner sees to what a Bridegroom it is betrothed; the senses and faculties could not, in a thousand years, gain the knowledge thus imparted in a very short time’.84 In this union the soul is given life through ‘secret intuitions too strong to be misunderstood, and keenly felt, although impossible to describe.’85 This is the ‘spiritual marriage’ in which a ‘secret union takes place in the innermost centre of the soul where God Himself must dwell: I believe that no door is required to enter it’.86 In this secret union God also reveals the soul to itself as the image of God, thus disclosing to the soul the hidden secret of its sacred worth.87 The secrets of this union are not solely secrets of God, but also of the many ‘transcendental mysteries within us’ which are beyond explanation – though ultimately ‘[i]f by God’s mercy we enter heaven we shall understand these secrets’.88 The silent prayer of union thus also holds the secret of the self’s true value – secrets which even the devil cannot penetrate.89 Silence and secrecy therefore preserve

210 S. D. Podmore private mystical space from external interference. Teresa is not only hidden from the devil but also from others who would be unable to understand a sacred union with God that she herself is unable to explain. As such, she is thankful when God sends this rapture in secret, for when others see it the shame and confusion she feels are so great as somewhat to diminish her transport. Knowing the malice of the world, she fears her ecstasy will not be attributed to its proper cause but may give rise to rash judgment instead of the praise due for it to God.90 The themes of silence and secrecy also feature prominently in Teresa’s The Way of Perfection. Teresa observes how we weep in secret;91 how no matter how much one seeks to enclose oneself, our good and bad deeds do not remain secret to God;92 how God may show or refrain from showing to the soul the secrets of the Kingdom of God, in accordance with its progress;93 how in the state of rapture, God not only loves and unites with the soul, God also reveals secrets to it;94 how God will protect those who serve God from secret and hidden snares and temptations;95 and how keeping silent preserves the secret of our sufferings between the self and God.96 What is more, keeping silent when one is ‘unjustly condemned’ requires ‘great humility … and to do this is to imitate the Lord Who set us free from all our sins’.97 Related insights into silence and secrecy are echoed in the mystical writings of Teresa’s contemporary, John of the Cross, in whom the debt to the mystical theology of Pseudo Dionysius is rendered more explicitly. In the poem and treatise which comprise his Dark Night of the Soul (partly written in solitary imprisonment), John of the Cross outlines the purgative journey of the soul on its way to union with Christ. The soul receives divine blessings which are bestowed upon it ‘passively, secretly and in silence’.98 As Teresa also observes, such ‘very intimate and secret spiritual communications’ occur in silence and secrecy and, as such, beyond the reach of the devil’s knowledge.99 Once the faculties and bodily desires have been silenced through the dark night of the senses – ‘Dum quietum silentium contineret omnia [when peaceful silence encloses all]’ – then ‘Divine Wisdom immediately unites itself with the soul by making a new bond of loving possession’.100 The soul reciprocally burns with love in ‘dark and secret contemplation.… For contemplation is naught else than a secret, peaceful and loving infusion from God, which, if it be permitted, enkindles the soul with the spirit of love’.101 The soul thus journeys to God, though this road whereby the soul journeys to God is as secret and as hidden from the sense of the soul as the way of one that walks on the sea, whose paths and footprints are not known, is hidden from the sense of the body. The steps and footprints which God is imprinting upon the souls that He desires to bring near to Himself, and to make great in union with His Wisdom, have also this property, that they are not known.… It follows,

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 211 then, that this contemplation which is guiding the soul to God is secret wisdom.102 Such a journey of contemplation is further symbolised by the secret ‘ladder of contemplation’ which Jacob beheld ‘by night, when Jacob slept, in order to express how secret is this road and ascent to God, and how different from that of man’s knowledge’.103 Ascending this ‘secret ladder’ by this mystical theology and secret love, the soul continues to rise above all things and above itself, and to mount upward to God. For love is like fire, which ever rises upward with the desire to be absorbed in the centre of its sphere.104 This notion of mystical ascent through love is further elaborated in John’s Ascent of Mount Carmel (comprising an allegorical poem and theological exposition resonant with the Dark Night). In the poem, the soul sings in joy of passing through ‘the dark night of faith, in detachment and purgation of itself, to union with the Beloved’.105 The soul proceeds to its beloved ‘In darkness and secure, By the secret ladder [la secreta escala].… In the happy night, In secret [en secreto], when none saw me’.106 This ladder is secret because it is ‘hidden from all sense and understanding’ – while the soul itself is also hidden from the gaze of the devil by the night of faith.107 Secrecy and night are often the domain of the devil, who works furtively in the conscience, enticing the soul to secret compacts and to secret sins committed in hidden solitude – even tempting the most pious souls to secret spiritual pride and self-esteem. But for apophatic mystics darkness and secrecy are divine rather than demonic motifs, recalling the night when Nicodemus visits Jesus for secret instruction (John 3). Darkness and secrecy pertain to contemplation, whereby the understanding has the loftiest knowledge of God, [which] is called mystical theology, which signifies secret wisdom of God; for it is secret even to the understanding that receives it. For that reason Saint Dionysius calls it a ray of darkness.108 In preparation for this holy darkness, ‘the understanding … must be pure and void of all that pertains to sense, and detached and freed from all that can clearly be apprehended by the understanding, profoundly hushed and put to silence, and leaning upon faith’, for only faith unites the soul with God: ‘as God is darkness to our understanding, even so does faith likewise blind and dazzle our understanding’.109 Again, though traditionally associated with the demonic, darkness is God’s true hiding place (Psalm xvii, 10–12)110; it is only in darkness that God revealed divine secrets to Job.111 God is unknowable to the understanding but is revealed in dazzling darkness, more luminous than all light, to faith and to love – which are enabled to behold the hidden secrets and mysteries of wisdom. John describes such a journey as entering ‘the abyss of

212 S. D. Podmore faith, where the understanding must remain in darkness, and must journey in darkness, by love and in faith, and not by much reasoning’.112 In love and faith the soul learns to hear the voice of God – ‘Wherefore it is best to learn to silence the faculties and to cause them to be still, so that God may speak.’113 A prayer of unknowing not only withdraws into secret solitude, it also dissolves the self-will within a dark night of silence. All exterior things are actively silenced; while the interior voice itself also falls silence and moves into the passivity of listening – in order that the self-will becomes united with the divine will. At such a moment there is not only taciturnitas (relative silence) towards the senses but also silentium (absolute silence) within the soul. But has the soul now withdrawn completely from exteriority into interiority? Does it thereby revisit the temptations of a gnostic flight from ‘materiality’? While mindful of the solipsistic dangers of mystical silence, it is vital to be mindful that apophatic prayer does not merely represent a withdrawal into the self but a self-emptying in which the voice of interiority is stilled and awakened through taciturnitas and silentuim to an otherwise secret space in which it is opened out beyond itself into relationship with a Holy Other. This interior withdrawal ultimately opens the self to a previously hidden exteriority. As the hidden source of love, the Holy Other is related to as Creator of all creatureliness, embracing and transubstantiating materiality, transfiguring all relationships with interiority, exteriority, and inter-subjectivity through love. Beyond even silence itself is the still, small voice of God (1 Kings 19:12), calling the soul back to the world with the now deeply instilled command ‘thou shalt love’, not only God, but the other and the world. In apophatic union, contemplative prayer offers a different model of secrecy alongside that of Abraham’s tortured Knight of Faith: one in which unassailable alterity between self and God, and between self and other, is transcended and transfigured. The mystical union of contemplative prayer therefore potentially inscribes a form of selfhood which, like Abraham, eludes ‘the Universal’ in its ‘singular’ relation to ‘the Absolute’. However, the apophatic nature of the selfGod relation in mystical prayer is one which, in contrast to Abraham, transfigures relations between self and o/Other, interiority and exteriority, such that praying discovers a deep secret interior space which transfigures all space, the world itself, as resting grounded in God (the Ungrund). All is grounded in Love, and it becomes the task of the contemplative to extend this interior peace to the restlessness of the exterior. By being in the world, grounded in the presence of God in the soul and the soul in God, the apophatic self strives to manifest inner peace in the outer world of enmity and suspicion. In this respect, I suggest that the mystic’s secret is none other than the grounding of peace in the world in the inner peace (or Gelassenheit) of prayer. This silence is also a beginning for the birth of the Word of peace in the world.

Notes 1 The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, trans. Maurice O’C. Walshe (New York: Crossroad, 2009), 34.

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 213 2 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 135. 3 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Mystical Theology, The Complete Works, 141. 4 The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 30. 5 Theresa of Ávila,The Interior Castle or The Mansions, trans. The Benedictines of Stanbrook (London: Thomas Baker, 1921), 7th Mansion, Chapter 2, paragraph 2, 120. 6 See further Chapter 4 of my Struggling With God: Kierkegaard and the Temptation of Spiritual Trial (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 2013). 7 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 82. 8 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 110. 9 See further Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, ‘Chapter VI Gnosis: SelfKnowledge as Knowledge of God’ (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). 10 While comparable to accounts of ekstasis in Greek religion, this passage evokes a potential presence of Jewish mystical tradition (Hekhalot – ‘palaces’; and Merkabah – ‘chariot’) into Christian scripture. See, for example, Christopher Rowland and Christopher Morray-Jones, The Mystery of God: Early Jewish Mysticism and the New Testament (Compendia Rerum Judaicarum ad Novum Testamentum 12; Leiden: Brill, 2009). The potential relationship between early Christology and Jewish Merkabah (chariot) mysticism is also helpfully elaborated in Timo Eskola, Messiah and the Throne: Jewish Merkbah Mysticism and Early Christian Exaltation Discourse (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). 11 The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 35. 12 Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 110. 13 Rudolf Otto, The Philosophy of Religion: Based on Kant and Fries, trans. E. B. Dicker (London: Williams and Norgate, 1931), 124–125. 14 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, trans. John H. Harvey (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 8–11. 15 Rowan Williams, ‘Eastern Orthodox Theology’, ed. David Ford, The Modern Theologians (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 579. 16 Louis Nelstrop et al., Christian Mysticism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 256. 17 The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 30. 18 Olivier Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism (New York/London: New City, 1993), 202. 19 See further Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 202–209. 20 See particularly the final chapter on the fourth dwelling of St Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle, which was significantly influenced by the Franciscan Francisco de Osuna (1492–1540); see his own views on Recogimiento in The Third Alphabet, trans. Mary E. Giles (New York: Paulist Press, 1981). In the context of a controversy between interior prayer as Recollection and the practice of Abandonment [Dejamiento] of the will to God (which became identified as heretical), De Osuna urges one to non pensar nada – think of nothing – in “the silence of love” when the understanding falls silent, as the silence between two lovers who dwell in their mutual presence without the need for words (The Third Alphabet, ‘The Twenty-First Treatise’, 3). See further Paul Mommaers, The Riddle of Christian Mystical Experience: The Role of the Humanity of Jesus (Louvain: Peeters Press, 2003), 62–63. See also Peter Tyler, The Return to the Mystical: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Teresa of Avila and the Mystical and the Christian Mystical Tradition, (London/New York: Continuum, 2011) ‘Chapter 5: The Emergence of the Spanish School: Mystical Theology as “Recollection”’, 105–130. Tyler notes that Teresa prefers the term Recogimiento, with Dejamiento only occurring once in her writings (136n5).

214 S. D. Podmore 21 The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 123 22 See further Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 130–148. 23 Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 182. 24 Clément, The Roots of Christian Mysticism, 183. 25 Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors Texte, trans. Thomas H. Carlson (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 54. 26 Kierkegaard, Without Authority, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 11. 27 This is meant in the sense that Derrida speaks of the “madness” of Michel Foucault’s attempt in L’Histoire de Folie, to speak meaningfully of madness itself without subjecting it to the discourse of psychiatry (while also acknowledging that madness makes non-sense of the sanity of reason). At this point Derrida suggests that “The history of madness is therefore the archaeology of a silence”. Jacques Derrida, ‘Cogito and the History of Madness’, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978), 35. 28 Augustine, Confessions, Book 3, Chapter 7/11, I, 63. Meister Eckhart: “God is closer to me than I am to myself: my being depends on God’s being near me and present to me”, Sermon 69, The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 352. The Qur’an also states that God is closer to one than one’s own jugular vein (Surah 50. Qaf, Ayah 16). 29 The Idea of the Holy, 68. 30 Fear and Trembling and Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983). 31 Fear and Trembling, 61. 32 Fear and Trembling, 71. 33 Sylviane Agacinski, Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Kevin Newmark (Tallahasee: Florida State University Press, 1988), 92 34 Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67. 35 The Gift of Death, 53. 36 The Gift of Death, 57. 37 See further Derrida’s The Gift of Death. Strictly speaking, however, Derrida’s notion of the secret is not intended in the mystical (the hyperousios of negative theology) or esoteric (the mysterium of gnosticism) sense. Rather it pertains to the polyvalence of meaning within language which cannot be absolutely determined. Nonetheless, for an illuminating exploration of convergences between Derrida’s deconstruction and kabbalah, with particular reference to secrecy see Elliot R. Wolfson, ‘Assaulting the Border: Kabbalistic Traces in the Margins of Derrida’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2002, Volume 70, Number 3, 475–514. 38 The Gift of Death, 88, 90–91, 96, 98, 105. 39 Søren Kierkegaard, ‘The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the Air’, Without Authority, 11. 40 Without Authority, 11. 41 Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967–1978), 4:3978. 42 Fear and Trembling, 88. 43 Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 1:908. 44 I also explore this in ‘The Sacrifice of Silence: Fear & Trembling & the Secret of Faith’, International Journal for Systematic Theology Volume 14.1 January 2012, 70–90. 45 Fear and Trembling, 16. 46 Fear and Trembling, 22.

Mysterium secretum et silentiosum 215 47 Fear and Trembling, 120. 48 Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 4:3984. 49 Henry Suso, A Little Book of Eternal Wisdom, trans. Richard Raby (London: Thomas Richardson & Son, 1866), Chapter VIII, 51. 50 Kenneth Seeskin, Jewish Philosophy in a Secular Age (Albany: State University of New York, 1990), 130. 51 Derrida, The Gift of Death, 68. 52 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969). 53 Totality and Infinity, 78. 54 Totality and Infinity, 199. 55 Totality and Infinity, 77. 56 ‘Transcendence and Height’ in Basic Philosophical Writings, Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi (eds) (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 29. 57 ‘Existence and Ethics’ in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, J. Reé and J. Chamberlain (eds) (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998), 29. For an effective critique of Levinas’ misreading of Kierkegaard see Merold Westphal, ‘Commanded Love and Divine Transcendence in Levinas and Kierkegaard’, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl, The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). 58 For Self-Examination, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 19. 59 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, B, IV, 187, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 113 60 The Gift of Death, 69–70. 61 Qur’an, Sura Al-Saffat 37:102–110. 62 The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 29. 63 The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 86, 134–135, 446. 64 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 135. 65 The Complete Works, 141. 66 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 47. 67 See further Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York: 1992). 68 See Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 139–195, where Marion offers an extensive analysis of the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius. See also Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Saturated Phenomenon’, in Dominique Janicaud et al. (eds), Phenomenology and the ‘Theological Turn’: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 176–216. See also Jean-Luc Marion, ‘In the Name: How to Avoid Speaking of “Negative Theology”’, in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds), God, the Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 20–53. Marion’s essay responds to Derrida’s critique of negative theology, and Derrida’s reply follows. For a helpful comparison of Marion’s and Derrida’s view see John D. Caputo, ‘Derrida and Marion: Two Husserlian Revolutions’ in Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, 119–134. Milem also interprets Jean-Luc Marion as expounding a more philosophically sophisticated version of this theory as the attempt of theology to “de-nominate” or “unname” a God who – given in some way through “saturated phenomena” – exceeds all comprehension, even that of theological description, which must inevitably acknowledge its apophatic limits and resort to praise and prayer (195– 196). Bruce Milem, ‘Four Theories of Negative Theology’, The Heythrop Journal XLVIII (2007), 187–204. For a critical account of theological appropriation of

216 S. D. Podmore 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113

Derrida see Ian Almond, ‘Derrida and the Secret of the Non-Secret: On Respiritualising the Profane’, Literature and Theology, Vol. 17, No. 4, 2004, 457–471. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 29. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 29–30. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 30. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 30. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 31. The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart, 32. Sermon 60, The Complete Mystical Works, 310–311. See also Sermon 63, The Complete Mystical Works, 318–319. Sermon 63, The Complete Mystical Works, 319. Sermon 53, The Complete Mystical Works, 283. For example, Sermon 51,The Complete Mystical Works, 270–273; Sermon 57, 298. See Sermon 56, The Complete Mystical Works, 293. Sermon 62, The Complete Mystical Works, 315. Teresa of Ávila,The Interior Castle, 4th Mansion, Chapter 3, paragraph 5, 49. The Interior Castle, 7, 3, 9, 126. The Interior Castle, 1, 2, 4, 18. Eckhart refers to the bridal chamber of God and the soul as “the silent darkness of the mysterious Fatherhood” (Sermon 53, The Complete Mystical Works, 283). The Interior Castle, 5, 4, 2, 65. The Interior Castle, 7, 2, 7, 121. The Interior Castle, 7, 2, 2, 120. The Interior Castle, 7, 1, 1, 116. The Interior Castle, 7, 1, 16, 119. The Interior Castle, 5, 1, 5, 54. The Interior Castle, 6, 4, 20, 87. The Way of Perfection, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1964), Chapter 3, 27. The Way of Perfection, Chapter 15, 56. The Way of Perfection, Chapter 31, 98. The Way of Perfection, Chapter 32, 102. The Way of Perfection, Chapter 41, 125. The Way of Perfection, Chapter 11, 47. The Way of Perfection, Chapter 14, 54. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1959), Book 2, Chapter XIV, paragraph 1, 73. Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter XXIII, paragraph 4, 91. Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter XXIV, paragraph 3, 92. Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter X, paragraph 6, 35. Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter XVII, paragraph 8, 81. Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter XVIII, paragraph 4, 82. Dark Night of the Soul, Book 2, Chapter XX, paragraph 6, 87. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, trans. E. Allison Peers (New York: Image Books, 1962), Stanzas, 60. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Stanzas 2 & 3, 60. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 2, Chapter 1, paragraph 1, 94. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 2, Chapter VIII, paragraph 6, 113. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 2, Chapter IX, paragraph 1, 113. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book, 2, Chapter IX, paragraph 1–3, 113–14. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 2, Chapter IX, paragraph 4, 114. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 2, Chapter XXIX, paragraph 5, 180. Ascent of Mount Carmel, Book 3, Chapter III, paragraph 4, 195.

12 Becoming mystic, becoming monster The logic of the infinite in Kierkegaard, Cusa and Deleuze Steven Shakespeare At the beginning of The Logic of Sense, Deleuze discusses the idea of ‘pure becoming’. Plato, he argues, distinguishes between two ‘dimensions’. The first is that of fixed and measurable qualities, of essences which can be named and understood in and through Ideas. The second dimension is more slippery: a becoming which never occupies a fixed point. When something is in the process of becoming hotter, for example, it is arbitrary and false to attribute fixed measure to it. So far, so obvious, perhaps. But, for Deleuze, this pure becoming is something wild, paradoxical and mad. For here, the direction of change and time is no longer unilinear. When Lewis Carroll’s Alice drinks the magic potion and starts to grow, she is getting bigger than she once was, but at the same time she is smaller than she will be. Deleuze’s comment on this is worth quoting at length: This is the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once. Alice does not grow without shrinking, and vice versa. Good sense affirms that in all things there is a determinable sense or direction (sens); but paradox is the affirmation of both senses or directions at the same time.1 Becoming cannot be captured by the fixed Idea, or even by the direction of time’s arrow. Common sense protests: if Alice gets bigger, then the direction of her becoming is determined. However, this misses the significance of the paradox. There is no rest in Alice’s becoming. It refers itself simultaneously to what lies behind and before, but there is no defined moment in which those categories of behind and before stay still, and in which they are located outside the boundaries of the present moment. No, it is in the moment itself that pure becoming happens. Alice can say: ‘I am, right now, in the process of becoming smaller than I will be’. Deleuze is trying to unearth a reality which lies below the surface of things, a ‘subterranenan dualism’ between what is able to receive the fixity of the Idea, and what does not: ‘even beneath things, is there not still this mad element

218 S. Shakespeare which subsists and occurs on the other side of the order that Ideas impose and receive?’2 Language is placed under strain here – unless we see also in language that which exceeds any fixed definition and puts things in motion once more. Paradox, the simultaneity of opposite affirmations, is where the subterranean force of language breaks through to the surface of discourse. Here, the self (and God) are destabilised, since ‘personal uncertainty is not a doubt foreign to what is happening, but rather an objective structure of the event itself, insofar as it moves in two directions at once, and insofar as it fragments the subject following this double direction’.3 My aim in this essay is to trace this paradoxical logic in two radically different thought worlds: those of Nicholas of Cusa and of Søren Kierkegaard. In each case, I wish to suspend certain interpretative contexts. Cusa is often read through the lens of what he owes to Neoplatonism. Kierkegaard, for all he lives in a more clearly post-nominalist modernity, is still frequently understood in terms of a Lutheran-inflected orthodoxy. The value and fertility of these readings aside, I propose to offer a modest alternative: a reading of certain texts which engage with the logic of infinity and its attendant paradoxes. By necessity, this is a very limited exercise, since I am more concerned with elucidating a problem than with crafting overarching readings of either figure. Cusa and Kierkegaard are selected for two reasons.4 First, in different ways, they articulate the logic of what it is to think the infinite in terms of unavoidable paradox. And my thesis is that this paradox is not merely a contingent barrier to the finitude of our thinking, but is in some way constitutive of infinity itself. The second reason is to explore in a specific way the possibility of communication between the discourses of mystical theology and existentialism. Without merely comparing Cusa to Kierkegaard, according to a homogenising logic (because to compare is to assume a common measure), what happens when these singular forms of thought encounter one another? What new possibilities can they induce for thinking the relationship between the absolute and the singular individual? Are the labels ‘mystical’ and ‘existential’ any longer adequate for such intensities of thought and experience? I begin with Kierkegaard, and what I take to be key passages from his Philosophical Fragments on the passion of thought to think the unthinkable. I will argue that the paradox he offers is immanent to thought itself, in its process of becoming, and that there is a strange union being offered here between the individual, subjective thinker, and the eternal, one in which the identity of each of these elements is suspended and overtaken by something like Deleuze’s pure becoming. I then turn to Cusa, and to the famous passages on the Maximum and the Minimum from Of Learned Ignorance. I offer a reading of this in terms of the text’s own immanent movement, in both directions at once, between these opposite poles. I thus seek to recognise a dynamism in Cusa’s paradox, one which contests analogical and hierarchical ontologies (even those of his own Neoplatonism) in a turn to a kind of univocity of being. Finally, through these two sections I sketch an argument for a ‘logic of the infinite’ which resists being subsumed by analogical or dialectical mediation. Here, Cusa’s and

Becoming mystic, becoming monster 219 Kierkegaard’s references to the equivalence between the human, the animal and the divine are taken at face value: the mystical and the existential signify paradoxical states of pure becoming, in which the human is decentred. The problem is no longer one of how to purify the human soul as it approaches divine simplicity, or how to enact a transparently authentic movement of will. It is, instead, a question of destabilising the self in order to signify the monstrosity of the divine.

Kierkegaard: thinking the unthinkable Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments (published under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus) proposes a thought experiment. What if the Socratic model of learning the truth is not the only one? Socrates, in this text at least, stands for the position that truth is recollected. In other words, the truth is already in us, and we simply need an appropriate stimulus or catalyst to help us discover what we already know. The teacher of truth is more like a midwife. She does not give us the truth from the outside; she enables us to produce it from within ourselves. The teacher’s importance is therefore limited. She becomes a ‘vanishing occasion’ for us to become aware of truth we already possess. The thought experiment in Fragments offers an alternative to this model, one which hardly bothers to disguise its Christian character. On this approach, the truth is not within the learner. The teacher must give it to her afresh. What is more, since the learner is in a state of untruth, the teacher must give her even the capacity she lacks to recognise and receive the truth. In this model, the teacher becomes of intrinsic importance, and the historical moment in which the learner encounters her is decisive. As the scenario is developed in the book, the teacher takes on more and more the characteristics of a divine saviour. The key for this alternative model, then, is that a historical point of departure is decisive for an eternal happiness. The learner cannot retreat from temporality into an inner sanctum of eternal ideas. Rather, she must encounter the eternal truth in and through the finitude and temporality of existence. The move from the Socratic to the Christian takes place between two forms of the paradox. For Socrates, the fact that the existing individual can relate to the eternal is already paradoxical. The Christian alternative makes the paradox more radical by saying that the only way the divide between the learner and the teacher can be overcome is when the teacher – who is the eternal god – actually enters into time and becomes a historically existing individual. This difference should not obscure fundamental continuities, however. In a chapter on ‘The Absolute Paradox’, Climacus depicts a Socrates unsure of his own humanity, ‘whether he (a connoisseur of human nature) was a more curious monster than Typhon or a friendlier and simpler being, by nature sharing something divine’.5 This paradoxicality of Socrates – a simultaneous pulling in two opposing directions – should not be despised, since ‘paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow’.6

220 S. Shakespeare Love is itself a paradox: a love for another which is rooted in a love of self (I love, and in loving, want to be lovable; it is only as radically other that the beloved can complement me).7 Paradox is thus inherent in love as it is in thought: as a passion which pulls in opposite directions simultaneously, and only in this pure becoming has any ‘identity’. Love changes the lover out of recognition, replicating that contradictory Socratic alignment between the monster and the god. The way in which passion inhabits thought is especially telling. Passion’s highest expression is to will its own downfall. The passion of thought is ‘to want to discover something that thought itself cannot think’.8 This is a thinking which encounters the genuinely unknown, a border which it cannot cross using its own conceptual resources. The unknown is dubbed ‘the god’. The text goes on to argue that, despite the use of this label, the unknown remains ‘the absolutely different in which there is no distinguishing mark’, a difference which ‘cannot be grasped securely’.9 Any attempt to specify the nature of the unknown is arbitrariness, an arbitrariness which produces an image of the god. In the context of Fragments, this appears to be a straightforward rejection of the Socratic position. Socrates holds that we can discover what is unknown to us because it is in fact already hidden within us and we have only to recollect it. Against Socrates, Climacus puts forward an alternative, radically theistic perspective. There is no truth in us, he suggests. It must come to us from the outside, from the side of the god. Returning to our passage on the unknown, it seems we are dealing with the same issue. Reason cannot know the god, and any attempt to do so must result in a kind of idolatry, a reduction of the absolutely different to terms we can grasp. However, there is another possibility lurking within these lines. Climacus sets it out in this way: ‘If the difference cannot be grasped securely because there is no distinguishing mark, then, as with all such dialectical opposites, so it is with the difference and the likeness – they are identical’.10 This is presented as an instance of the understanding confusing itself with the difference. The issue appears to be this: in order to know the absolutely different as such, the understanding must be able to recognise it as absolutely different. But as soon as it does this, it has specified it, determined it, and annulled its absolute difference – putting understanding (itself) in the place of what should be absolutely other. The way therefore seems clear for Climacus to argue that any knowledge of the absolutely different must come to us from the god, from the unknown. However, this solution is itself problematic: how would we ever even recognise a communication from the unknown to be from the absolutely different? There seems to be no way beyond this paradox: that in order to know what is absolutely different – whether by my understanding or through a revelation – its absolute difference must be denied. It is here that the discussion takes a more obviously Lutheran turn. The difference between us and the god, Climacus claims, must come from us. This is because anything that puts us into a positive relation to God, must have its basis

Becoming mystic, becoming monster 221 in what is ‘akin’ between us and the divine. The difference, therefore, must be produced by us, a process of active self-alienation from the divine for which Climacus uses the well-worn term ‘sin’.11 The logic here is thin. There are other grounds upon which to establish the absolute difference of God, not least those of God’s simplicity or infinity. By referring it to individual sin, Climacus sidesteps a host of objections: how does ‘sin’ produce what is ‘absolutely different’? Hasn’t Climacus arbitrarily shifted the debate from ontological categories to those of volition and vice? If thinking genuinely has this passion to think the unthinkable, and if the unthinkability of the absolute difference is to do with its non-determinate, non-finite refusal of any distinguishing mark, how can this consistently be something produced by the individual thinker? Perhaps, then we should go back, and take seriously Climacus’ reflection that any specification of the absolutely different is arbitrary. I suggest that, in his invocation of sin as the source of difference, Climacus is himself being arbitrary. The justification for his move is not logical, but existential: it is by means of this assumption of sin that the difference between us and the god is dramatized and intensified, so that it becomes a motivating problem for the individual, whose absolute interest in their own eternal happiness is thereby awakened. The individual is stretched between the problematic (but real) experience of absolute difference and the impossible (but promised) experience of absolute equality with God. The effect of this dramatization, however, is that the individual participates in a pure becoming, in which the identity of self and God is confused. As Climacus notes, the paradox is already present in the understanding, or it is produced by the individual will. In one sense, therefore, the finite individual is capable of producing the infinite. The identity between the paradox inherent in the understanding, or love, or will and that inherent in the individual’s relation to the unknown cannot be securely distinguished. The absolute difference runs through the individual’s own passions. So when Climacus states that ‘the difference has so confused the understanding that it does not know itself and quite consistently confuses itself with the difference’, we should read this literally.12 The confusion is entirely consistent. The Danish reads ganske conseqvent: the confusion follows on wholly from the relationship between the understanding and the absolutely different. Wholly consistent, and yet wholly mad: this is the situation that the individual finds themselves in. They are within a pure becoming, a becoming wholly indistinguishable from the absolute. But, as this is a pure becoming, any attempt to ‘fix’ it metaphysically (for example, in terms of an analogical relation between the soul and God) is refused. There are only more or less arbitrary narratives and dramatizations of this becoming, like that of the king who loves the lowly maiden, which plays such an important role in Fragments.13 Repeatedly, Climacus is accused of plagiarism by an anonymous interlocutor in the text. He is, so the charge goes, passing off as a thought experiment what is actually just the familiar Christian story and doctrine. Of course, Climacus is

222 S. Shakespeare well aware of this, and it becomes part of the irony of his presentation: passing off as his own invention what, on his own grounds, could not have arisen in any human heart. However, what if we simply read the text literally? What if this whole account of the need for revelation and God’s initiative is indeed an invention, an experiment with thought, designed to ramp up the passion of thought and hasten its collapse? The logic of the indeterminable, of the eternal and the infinite is that, by definition, it cannot be determined, bounded, localised. It is experienced in and through a pure becoming, an infinitisation of the individual’s passion, even as that passion has to surrender its dreams of grasping and comprehending the absolutely other. It is noteworthy that, at the moment of the understanding’s downfall, Climacus again invokes the Socratic dilemma. The person experiencing the paradox ‘now no longer is sure whether he is perhaps a more complex animal than Typhon or whether he has in his being a gentler and diviner part’.14 The Socratic is no longer held at a distance from a more ‘authentic’ paradox, but becomes its model. The paradox is an experience of becoming monstrous/divine in such a way that the individual affirms all these directions at once.15 The inhuman dimension of this is underlined when Climacus mocks the pretensions of the age to understand what a human being is: We shall not be as malicious as Sextus Empiricus, nor are we as witty, for he, as we know, quite correctly concluded from this that man is a dog, for man is what we all know, and we all know what a dog is, ergo – .16 The logic of this should be followed both ways: in fact, we do not know what a dog is either. The encounter with the absolutely different rebounds upon the understanding, for it cannot be an encounter with a determinate field or object which we can localise outside of ourselves. We must become one with the absolute different, and simultaneously strange to ourselves. The encounter with the absolute is simultaneously a giving way of the fixed human ego, a release into paradoxically pure becoming. There is no longer anywhere to go, no teleological schema to follow. Equality with the divine cannot be an approximation to a determinate object, moving along a measurable scale. It can only be now, in the simultaneity of the understanding’s passion and its infinite breakdown. Here is paradise.17 Ontologically, the basis for this is laid in Climacus’ implicit commitment to the univocity of being. Rejecting a priori arguments for the existence of God, Climacus states that reasoning is always from existence, never towards it. Reason cannot determine what there is. The most it can do is develop the definition of a concept. This leads to his denial of the idea of an ontological hierarchy, of different ‘levels’ of being: ‘When it comes to factual being, to speak of more or less being is meaningless. A fly, when it is, has just as much being as the god’.18

Becoming mystic, becoming monster 223 At the level of being itself, then, there is an indeterminacy. Being is not qualitatively distinguished by the entity which instantiates it. Even across the gulf between a fly and the god, a strange continuum persists. This appears to be very different to the Neoplatonism with which someone like Cusa is associated, which would appear to orient itself around the notion of ascent and descent through an ordered ontological hierarchy. However, matters are not so simple. As the logic of the absolute, the infinite and the indeterminate confound notions of human identity and separation from the divine in Fragments, so we find related dynamics at work in Cusa’s On Learned Ignorance. In turning now to that text, we may be able to tease out further the ‘pure becoming’ of mystic knowledge.

Cusa: the repetition of unity Cusa is committed to the incomprehensibility of the absolute truth. He approaches this by first arguing that precise truth about anything is unattainable for the finite intellect. We approach truth by means of proportion, comparing what we know to what we do not know. But truth itself cannot be arrived in this manner, since truth is ‘indivisible’.19 When we turn to knowledge of the infinite, the problem is even more acute: ‘Because the infinite escapes all proportion, the infinite as infinite is unknown’.20 Nevertheless, we desire to know the infinite. Cusa assumes that our desire for knowledge cannot simply be in vain, but it must take a paradoxical form: ‘it is our desire to know that we do not know’.21 This qualification of this Socratic formulation by desire is important. It is not simply that we should recognise the limits of our knowledge and maintain intellectual humility. It is that unknowing – this constantly stimulated, denied and paradoxically satisfied passion – is the perfection of knowledge. The knower is not left at a distance, but occupies the very place of the paradox: ‘For nothing more perfect comes to a person, even in the most zealous learning, than to be found most learned in the ignorance that is uniquely one’s own.’22 Knowledge is thus qualified by desire, a singular desire which is perfect in its kind precisely because it exceeds, or breaks with all proportion. Like the Socratic paradox invoked by Climacus, therefore, this desiring knowledge has a touch of the monstrous about it. David Williams explains the importance of monstrosity for medieval language about the ineffable, in a tradition derived from Pseudo-Dionysius. As God is beyond all signification, so God is best referred to through negation. This includes the use of deformed signifiers which interrupt the seamless continuum between sign and thing: The best way of escaping the otherwise inevitable error of taking the sign for the thing was to construct signs so deformed and transgressive of the process of signification itself that confusion of the real with its language construct was impossible, even scandalous.23

224 S. Shakespeare For Cusa, this monstrosity is implicit in the notion of the maximum, defined in Anselmian terms as ‘that beyond which there can be nothing greater’.24 This maximum cannot be conceived in relative or proportional terms as the top of a cumulative scale, since such a scale could only ever be finite. Cusa turns to number to explain this. Number underlies the fact that anything finite is ‘subject to more or less’.25 Number is the abstract expression of the plurality and distinction of all things; without it, all would collapse into indistinction. Moreover, there can be no maximum number, since any number can always be exceeded by another higher one. If we travel in the opposite direction, we seem to arrive at the minimum number, which Cusa defines as unity, beyond which we cannot go. However, he quickly affirms that ‘Unity … cannot be number, for number, which admits a greater, can in no way be either simply minimum or simply maximum’.26 The argument concludes: ‘Therefore, absolute unity, which has no opposite, is absolute maximumness itself, which is the blessed God. This unity, because it is maximum, cannot be multiplied for it is all that can be. It cannot, therefore, become number’.27 The beginning and end of number cannot itself be counted. Readers of the text will already have learned that the maximum is free from all relation and opposition.28 Since there can be no greater or lesser than the maximum, it coincides with the minimum. Maximum and minimum are both ‘superlative’ terms, conveying an absoluteness which cannot be conceived via proportional connection with any finite, countable or measurable thing. This coincidence of opposites is ontologically necessary, but can only appear to the discursive mind as paradox. Thus, ‘maximum equality, which is neither other than nor different from anything, surpasses all understanding’.29 The maximum is ‘above all opposition’ and is ‘absolutely and actually all that can be’.30 These statements are driven by a logic of infinity: ‘Absolute maximumness could not be actually all possible things, unless it were infinite and the limit of all things and unable to be limited by them’.31 The reasoning is clear: the infinite cannot by limited by anything. It must therefore coincide with all things. Nor can the infinite be mere potentiality, since that would imply that it is limited by the actual. When Cusa draws out the implications of his analysis of number, he can therefore state that ‘God is so one that God is actually all that is possible’.32 This is the unity that number – standing for the potentiality, particularity and measurability of all things – necessarily presupposes.33 The way in which the transcendence of God is affirmed is thus coterminous with the identification of God with all things: not merely the world as actual for us, but the actuality of all possible things. Transcendence is defined by indistinction: not the indistinction of lack, the absence of number which would cause all finite things to merge, but the indistinction of an affirmative infinity, in which everything paradoxically counts as itself and as one.34 Of course, it is quite possible to read Cusa here as reproducing standard Neoplatonic tropes, in which ontological hierarchy and the transcendence of

Becoming mystic, becoming monster 225 the One is affirmed, and in which finite things achieve their relative degree of perfection via participation in the One. However, as Dermot Moran reminds us, Cusa was something of a dilettante in philosophy. Although a conservative Platonist at heart, Cusa is willing to experiment in his quest for unity with the infinite One: Cusanus’ specific originality consists in his use of nominalist claims about God’s infinite and unlimited power, combined with the scholastic claim that God is pure esse, pure actuality, actus purus, ‘maximal actual being’ … to make the claim that God is the infinite actualization of all possibilities.35 Moran notes that, as far as numbers were concerned, ‘Cusa’s ‘allegiance to nominalism was half-hearted at best’; nevertheless, this kind of philosophical openness suggests the viability of interpretations of Cusa’s Learned Ignorance in ways that depart from Neoplatonic orthodoxy. This is not least because, arguably, Neoplatonism does not actually resolve the problem of how the simple, uncountable One both generates and relates to the Many.36 In this case, Cusa’s flirtation with nominalism connects with his rejection of analogy and proportion as viable ways to refer and relate to the infinite One. There is an intriguing connection with Deleuze. As Joshua Ramey argues, nominalism displaces the cosmic hierarchy according to which Neoplatonic schema of participation made sense.37 For Deleuze, writing with Guattari, this is part of a ‘struggle or contestation for immanence within religious ideas’, which they seek to take further.38 Specifically, Ramey claims that ‘Deleuze derives his theory of ideas from Cusan insights, according to which the world can never be fully revelatory of God, even though God is the real content of every idea’.39 A full exploration of Deleuze on ideas and their expression is beyond our scope here. The key insight is that God’s transcendence is rearticulated so as to involve an immanent identification of God and all things: ‘An equality of being is substituted for a hierarchy of hypostases; for things are present to the same Being, which is itself present in things. Immanence corresponds to the unity of complication and explication, of inherence and implication’.40 As Eugene Thacker puts, it, Cusa offers us a ‘non-synthetic’ or ‘disjunctive’ monism.41 The coincidence of opposites of which Cusa writes is not the sublation of contradictions into undifferentiated unity, but their paradoxical unityin-singular-difference.42 This means that God cannot simply be set over against or above the world; nor can God and the world simply be absorbed into an anonymous mass. Thacker argues that Cusa wishes to hold together the immanence of the divine in all things with a dynamic picture of the divine being expressed, unfolded or explicated in and through all things. The tension inherent in this pairing of static immanence with dynamic unfolding is taken up by Deleuze, who seeks to radicalise it, identifying immanence with pure becoming. But, in Cusa, we already see him pushing the logic of his position in this direction. Note how he prepares for the Trinitarian interpretation of the maximum, by arguing that unity is also the principle of equality, preceding all inequality and otherness. Cusa has to find a way of

226 S. Shakespeare distinguishing unity and equality without making them ‘other’ to one another. He does this by claiming that equality is generated. In finite things, ‘generation is the repetition of unit or the multiplication of the same nature’, as when a parent passes on their nature to a child. However, when applied to the absolute unity of the maximum, ‘the generation of unity from unity is a single repetition of unity’.43 Repetition is not a merely finite operation, but a quality of the infinite itself – a single repetition which is the realisation of all possibility, that which precedes all specific differences without absorbing them or grounding them in a transcendence. The unity which precedes all things is always already a repetition. The One does not first exist and then express or repeat itself. A dynamic form of expression is constitutive of the One. Here, Deleuze’s pure becoming may be invoked again, since this paradoxical repetition moves in both directions at once, unfolding and enfolding the infinite in the finite. The fact that the finite is the potentially infinite destabilises the Neoplatonic cosmos of participation.44 When Cusa states that Equality of being is that which is in a thing as neither more nor less, as nothing too much and as nothing too little. If it is too much in a thing, the thing is monstrous; if it is there too little, the thing does not exist he perhaps unwittingly betrays this thought: the reality is that the finite always contains more than itself, is always monstrous.45 It is precisely this monstrosity of all things, their refusal to stay in place, which expresses the infinite. Cusa maintains, in traditional fashion, that finite things participate in the infinite unequally.46 But he then goes on to pull the rug out from under this assertion by arguing that no one can understand this participation.47 And he is prepared to advance his immanent, univocal logic of the infinite to quite radical degrees: For who could understand infinite unity, which infinitely precedes all opposition, where all things are enfolded, without composition, in simplicity of unity; where there is neither other nor different; where a human does not differ from a lion and sky does not differ from earth?48 Remember that, without difference, there is nevertheless repetition. This is how unity is the acutalisation of infinite possibility, in a dynamic, pure becoming, whose moments cannot be ranked in a hierarchy. A little later, Cusa writes: Who could understand how all things, though different contingently, are the image of that single, infinite Form, as if the creature were an occasioned god, just as an accident is an occasioned substance and a woman is an occasioned man? The infinite form is received only in a finite way; consequently, every creature is as it were, a finite infinity or a created god, so that it exists in the way in which this could best be.49

Becoming mystic, becoming monster 227 The Latin occasionatus could be used (as it was by Aquinas) to suggest an inferior (and, in the case of woman, misbegotten) relationship to the primary term. However, Nancy Hudson argues that this is not the case, that the context suggests that difference in creation is a result of divine ‘fecundity’, not slotting creatures into a fixed hierarchy.50 Every thing is ‘a finite infinity or a created god’, and so exhibits something of the unruly monstrosity which attends the becoming unfolded of the divine. Cusa can plausibly be read as articulating the classic problems of transcendence and immanence, the One and the Many, while drawing upon a dynamic, univocal ontology to undercut hierarchical notions of transcendence, and to release immanence from stasis. The end of this endeavour is also its origin: the becoming one of the infinite and the finite. As Hudson states, for Cusa ‘deification is an original condition for all things’, a theosis which is ‘an already realized destiny’.51 The practical, mystical aim of Cusa’s work is therefore inseparable from his experimentations in ontology. He contests – at least partly – on behalf of a dynamic and infinite immanence against the world as ordered by hierarchies of analogical participation.

Conclusion Now I say that God, so far as he is ‘God,’ is not the perfect end of created beings. The least of these beings possesses in God as much as he possesses. If it could be that a fly had reason and could with its reason seek out the eternal depths of the divine being from which it issued, I say that God, with all that he has as he is ‘God,’ could not fulfil or satisfy the fly. So therefore let us pray to God that we may be free of ‘God,’ and that we may apprehend and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal – there where I was established, where I wanted what I was and was what I wanted.52

As I stated at the outset of this essay, I am not claiming to offer exhaustive interpretations of each thinker, nor account for all the nuances of their thought, but to use their work to focus a problem: the constitutive paradoxicality of the infinite. For both Cusa and Kierkegaard, this question cannot be divorced from the (itself paradoxical) practical question of how we relate to the infinite – of how we measure up to the immeasurable. What makes this connection more than superficial is a shared commitment to a univocal, non-analogical ontology of dynamic immanence. Deleuze’s notion of ‘pure becoming’ is suggestive here, since it denotes an unconditioned reality which is neither ontologically transcendent nor static, and which is constituted by a paradoxical repetition prior to all (limited) identity. Such an infinite immanent becoming defies conceptual capture. It is figured by the monstrous identity Kierkegaard attributes to the Socratic thinker, and which Cusa locates in the indistinction-without-sublation of human, lion

228 S. Shakespeare and sky in the maximum. Such figures find an echo in Eckhart’s words at the opening of this conclusion. Teleology, and the hierarchy upon which it depends, are set aside. There is an affirmation of the radical ontological equality of beings, one which invites us to jettison certain notions of transcendence as inimical to the infinity of the divine life unfolded in all things. None of this is to suggest a seamless compatibility between Kierkegaard’s and Cusa’s work, not least because the reading offered here is partial and contentious. Nevertheless, it proposes a concept of infinity as inherently paradoxical without reference to a transcendence secured via analogy or participation in a hierarchy. Cusa may show little interest in the drama of subjectivity; Kierkegaard’s antipathy to speculation (and the co-option of mystical figures by his idealist contemporaries) leads him to explore more obviously existential idioms. Nevertheless, the mystical and the existential communicate, and they communicate though the paradoxes of language and understanding. They discover, within the finite, a monstrous equality with the infinite and divine. Letting go of the determined ‘God’ releases the infinite repetition of the divine and the infinite passion of the understanding in their mutual complication. Kierkegaard’s and Cusa’s texts inhabit simultaneously the language of pure transcendence and the language of pure immanence. The former language is disarmed and the latter is complicated: it is the expression of the infinite. In neither case is there a pre-existing experience which is then, inadequately, put into words.53 That would only reproduce the alienation which is precisely the problem to be avoided, since it would continue to portray the infinite as negatively determinable by its being other than us, or other than language. Such a move, for all its apparent humility, is in fact a form of idolatry, since it assumes a standpoint above existence which can determine the infinite in opposition to the finite. In contrast, Kierkegaard and Cusa insist on the paradoxicality of the infinite. The resulting emptiness of determination is the way to the mystical production of happiness as the flipside of the existential encounter with the void. Where there is no-thing, the infinite occurs. One thing needs to be clarified. The point is not to abandon the (religious) transcendent whilst keeping the (secular) immanent the same as it was (which is the strategy of those atheists who mock Nietzsche’s madman when he proclaims the death of God in the marketplace). Ironically, it is when we abandon a transcendent telos that we are exposed to the unassimilable real: the unconditioned pure becoming that is neither elsewhere nor other than what/where we are. This unconditioned becoming is never exhausted by what is or defined in relation to a pre-existing (secular) human subjectivity: ‘So God and the self are united at last, in their mutual dissolution’.54 The paradox of being makes us strange to ourselves: the monster and mystic together in the equality of God.

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 3. 2 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 4.

Becoming mystic, becoming monster 229 3 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 5. 4 Little if any knowledge of Cusa is directly evident in Kierkegaard’s work. See David Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 33–4. For a creative reading of Kierkegaard in dialogue with Eckhart, see David Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant: On Beginnings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 5 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 37. 6 Ibid. 7 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 39. 8 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 37. 9 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45. 10 Ibid. 11 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 47. 12 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 45. 13 Cf. Steven Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 71–5. 14 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 39. 15 Cf. Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence, 101ff. 16 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 38n. 17 Cf. Nicola Masciandaro, ‘This is Paradise: The Heresy of the Present’, in Sufficient Unto the Day: Sermones Contra Solicitudinem (Schism Press, 2014), 145–153. 18 Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 41n. 19 Nicholas of Cusa ‘On Learned Ignorance’, in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence Bond (New York: Paulist Press, 1997), 90. 20 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 88. 21 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 89. 22 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 89. 23 David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996), 7. 24 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 89. 25 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 92. 26 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 93. 27 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 93. 28 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 90. 29 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 91. 30 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 92. 31 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 92. 32 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 93. 33 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 94. 34 See Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 107: ‘the maximum infinitely and completely transcends all opposition’. 35 Dermot Moran, ‘Nicholas of Cusa and modern philosophy’ in James Hankins (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 173–192; 181. 36 Moran argues that the relationship between God and the multiplicity of creation ‘is a typically Neoplatonic problem, and in his approach to it Cusanus simply restates the problem rather than solving it’ (Moran, ‘Nicholas of Cusa’, 186). This does at least raise the possibility that Cusa’s willingness to draw on philosophical conceptualities outside of Neoplatonism might bear more fruit. 37 Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 34. See also Karsten Harries, Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 50. 38 Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze, 37. 39 Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze, 45.

230 S. Shakespeare 40 Deleuze’s Expressionism, quoted in Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze, 45. 41 Eugene Thacker, After Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 199–200. 42 See Wilhelm Dupré, ‘Lines of Convergence – Some Remarks on Spirit and Mind in the Work of Nicholas of Cusa’, in Thomas M. Izbicki and Christopher M. Bellitto (eds), Nicholas of Cusa and His Age: Intellect and Spirituality (Boston: Brill, 2002), 15–16. 43 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 97. 44 See Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 103. 45 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 97. 46 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 109. 47 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 132–3. 48 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 122. 49 Cusa, ‘On Learned Ignorance’, 134. 50 Nancy J. Hudson, Becoming God: The Doctrine of Theosis in Nicholas of Cusa (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007), 72–3. 51 Hudson, Becoming God, 5. 52 Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises, and Defense, (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), 169. 53 Cf. Don Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 74–5. 54 Cupitt, Mysticism After Modernity, 132.

13 Non-philosophical immanence, or immanence without secularization Alex Dubilet

I Immanence and philosophy If immanence lies at the heart of contemporary theoretical reflection, it is in large part due to the work of Gilles Deleuze. He returned immanence back to theoretical reputability, freeing it from its accrued associations with enclosure, totality, solipsism, and sameness. What makes Deleuze’s theorization of immanence – from his early Expressionism in Philosophy to his late co-authored What is Philosophy? – so significant is that it is does not render as simply equatable with the world or interiority of the human subject. In his articulation, immanence no longer denotes simply what is enclosed and opposed to transcendence outside and beyond it. As he writes: “Immanence is immanent only to itself … whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent to Something, we can be sure that this Something reintroduces the transcendent.”1 Immanence does not remain immanence if it is immanent to something, it becomes a property, something possessed, or attributed to a unity. If it is contained within a delimited terrain, it necessarily becomes appropriated, subjugated, deformed – made beholden to transcendence yet again. Whenever immanence is taken to be a characteristic of the subject, a world, or even the divine, it becomes a property, and thus becomes compromised with transcendence. The key conceptual division that emerges is no longer simply between the human and the divine, the subject and transcendence, this world and another. Rather what is enacted is the critical diagnosis that God and the human have always been correlated, two parts of the same conceptual matrix that partitioned out and foreclosed the plane of immanence. Rather than simply being the affirmation of the human subject or a secular world (which in turn would tacitly stand in opposition to theological transcendence), immanence names a plane that precedes and exceeds the structured separation of subject–world–god, a plane out of which can arise not only multiplicity of gods, but also a diversity of subjects and worlds. First and foremost, immanence theoretically concerns the nature of causality. It was in Spinoza’s thought that Deleuze found and reactivated a model of immanent causality, in which not only does the cause remain in the effect, but the effect remains in the cause, and in turns affects it. As Deleuze formulates it,

232 A. Dubilet A cause is immanent … when its effect is “immanate” in the cause, rather than emanating from it. What defines an immanent cause is that its effect is in it.… The effect remains in its cause no less than the cause remains in itself.2 The significance of this definition is visible in its contrast to the Neoplatonic schema of emanative causality, where the ultimate Cause – the One – is what produces and remains in the effects, but also at the same time remains hierarchically separated, transcendent to all those effects. Emanation, in which the cause remains above its effects, is the principle of a hierarchical cosmology. Additionally, this hierarchical emanational schema entails with it a logic of conversion, in which “an effect comes out of its cause, exists only in so coming out, and is only determined in its existence through turning back toward the cause from which it has come.”3 But what stands opposed to immanence is as much Neoplatonic models of emanation as Christian models of creation, because both retain a logic of analogical participation or external imitation (however partial or analogical that participation or imitation might be), as well as an apophasis that points to the transcendent beyond, to a Good beyond Being (as in Levinas) or God beyond being (as recently recovered by Jean-Luc Marion). There: “The giver is above its gifts as it is above its products, participable through what it gives, but imparticipable in itself or as itself, thereby grounding participation.”4 What Deleuze is after is a clear theoretical distinction between immanence and transcendence, between equality and hierarchy, and ultimately, between univocity and analogy. At stake ultimately is an equality of Being, one that renders hierarchy and superiority a false ontological organization that constrains and maims life lived in its theoretical grasp and under the reality it materializes. In contrast to this: “Immanence is opposed to any eminence of the cause, any negative theology, any method of analogy, any hierarchical conception of the world. With immanence all is affirmation.”5 Being free from a transcendent exemplar or a super-eminent cause, immanence names a plane of experimentalism and freedom. When immanence is articulated absolutely, it necessarily becomes divorced from closure and totality with which it has been repeatedly imbricated throughout the twentieth century. Rather it is posed or instituted as the plane of absolute experimentalism, openness, and constructivism of thought and life. Indeed, replying to such false associations of enclosure with the category of immanence, Deleuze (along with Guattari) notes in What is Philosophy?: “The reversal of values had to go so far – making us think that immanence is a prison (solipsism) from which the Transcendent will save us.”6 The formulation suggests that it is intended as a retort to Heidegger’s infamous remark late in his life that only a god can save us,7 but the point holds true for all discourses that valorize transcendence, and do so by caricaturing what is possible for and within immanence. It is a response to any position that upholds the values of transcendence by associating immanence with a drive towards essentiality, closure, with so-called “immanentism.”8 What Deleuze’s thought suggests is a possibility of articulating immanence without necessarily associating it with totality,

Non-philosophical immanence 233 essence or closure – and thereby without being forced to appeal to transcendence, be that transcendence ethical, divine, or messianic – as a way of exiting that closure.9 Despite the profound possibilities that such a rearticulation of immanence contains, it remains inscribed, in Deleuze’s thought, within the traditional cleavage separating philosophical and religious discourses. Throughout his work, Deleuze identifies immanence with the proper task and drive of philosophy, a fact troubling in itself, but one that is made even more problematic by the fact that it is repeatedly done so in direct opposition to religion and theology, which for him always retains an essential linkage with transcendence. In short, the first philosophers are those who institute a plane of immanence.… In this sense they contrast with sages, who are religious personae, priests, because they conceive of the institution of an always transcendent order imposed from the outside…. Whenever there is transcendence, vertical Being, imperial State in the sky or on earth, there is religion; and there is Philosophy whenever there is immanence, even if it functions as arena for agon and rivalry.10 The operations, tasks, and domains are contrastive and determinatively so: the institution of immanence is the task, even the raison d’etre, of philosophy, and the imposition of transcendence is the proper mission of religion. Despite a nuanced hermeneutic and a speculative approach, Deleuze charges philosophy alone with the task of articulating immanence, relegating theological discourse to essentially and necessarily defending transcendence. In the shorter book on Spinoza, Deleuze offers the most direct version of this association: Any organization that comes from above and refers to a transcendence, be it a hidden one, can be called a theological plan[e]: a design in the mind of a god, but also an evolution in the supposed depths of nature, or a society’s organization of power.11 A convergent set of defining traits appears clearly in the earlier works, like Logic of Sense, where Deleuze articulates the nature of the division between philosophy and theology as follows: “Philosophy merges with ontology, but ontology merges with the univocity of Being (analogy has always been a theological vision, not a philosophical one, adapted to the forms of God, the world and the self).”12 Here, we see one side of the polemical parallelism, the other side of which is performed by diverse group of thinkers that include Emmanuel Levinas, JeanLuc Marion and John Milbank, who variously reactivate an inverse lineage – a lineage of religious and theological transcendence that undermines and disparages the philosophical possibilities of immanence. For Levinas, the connection between philosophy and immanence is so strong that he can write: “it is not by accident that the history of Western philosophy has been a destruction of transcendence.”13 But when Levinas writes, “[p]hilosophy is not only

234 A. Dubilet knowledge of immanence, it is immanence itself,”14 the inflection he gives such statements is directly opposite to Deleuze’s: for Levinas immanence is not a liberation, but a foreclosure or even a destruction of the possibility of transcendence, alterity as well as ethical relationality.15 One should diagnose here a persistent, though often unacknowledged and disavowed, collusion between philosophy and theology (in their enmity) that has led to theoretical partitions and purifications: transcendence to the religious thinkers and theologians, immanence to the secular philosophers. It is as though each disciplinary tribe has its own axiomatic axis mundi around which it is fated to remain structured. From the point of view of philosophy, such a division is heard in the following key: to philosophy – immanence, freedom, creativity; and to theology – transcendence, hierarchy, and oppression. But from the opposing point of view, now sympathetic to theology itself, the same distinction can be made to sound quite differently: an openness, an affirmation of finitude of the human for theology, and for philosophy – totality, the grasping and possession of objects, the production of illusory self-standing masterful subjects.16 So the judgment of value alternates, but the boundary itself is constantly reasserted, cultivated, and maintained – from both sides: to philosophy – immanence; to theological and religious discourses – transcendence.

II Eckhart’s unrestrained immanence I want to problematize these neat distinctions and distributions by turning to the figure of Meister Eckhart, who articulates immanence as unrestrained and absolute, and does so within the discourse of theology itself, deploying theological materials of the Christian tradition for the task. Such an interpretation stands in contrast to Deleuze’s own assessments of Eckhart. For Deleuze, Eckhart was either a Christian theologian who though articulating expressionism and immanence was chained within the framework of divine transcendence, which he had to, in the final instance, uphold. This is the portrait offered in his early book on Spinoza, Expressionism in Philosophy, where he writes that immanence was encouraged by Christianity, by its theory of the Word, and above all by the ontological requirement that the first principle be a Being. But Christianity also repressed it, through the still more powerful requirement that the transcendence of the divine being be maintained.17 Or – and this is the second portrait, offered in What is Philosophy? – Eckhart becomes a kind of subversive proto-philosopher who surreptitiously introduces immanence where it does not properly belong, but still always within the dominant framework of transcendence. There he writes: It gets worse with Christian philosophy. The positing of immanence remains pure philosophical instituting, but at the same time it is tolerated only in very small doses; it is strictly controlled and enframed by the

Non-philosophical immanence 235 demands of an emanative and, above all, creative transcendence. Putting their work and sometimes their lives at risk, all philosophers must prove that the dose of immanence they inject into world and mind does not compromise the transcendence of a God to which immanence must be attributed only secondarily (Nicholas of Cusa, Eckhart, Bruno).18 Despite their difference, both characterizations partake in Deleuze’s overall genealogy of immanence, in which we have to wait for modern philosophy (most centrally Spinoza – “the Christ of the philosophers” – but also Nietzsche and Deleuze himself) to articulate immanence as absolute, free “from any subordination to emanative or exemplary causality.”19 So immanence as absolute immanence, in principle is reserved properly for philosophy, for modernity, and ultimately for secularity. In contrast to this interpretation, I want to propose that Eckhart’s thought was centered precisely on the articulation of immanence, a fact rendered invisible by the narratives of secularization that imagine a historical movement of transition, however complex and theoretical, from a pious middle ages to a liberated modernity. To be clear, what I mean by secularization in this context is less the persistence of Christian or theological forms in putatively secular guises, a secularization theory associated with thinkers like Carl Schmitt, and more the general narrative that sees modernity as the necessary fulcrum and telos of liberation and freedom, and, in this particular case, of the full liberation and articulation of immanence. From the start, such a take on Eckhart is rendered illegible and implausible by the entrenchment of discursive divides discussed above: there is something so obvious about assigning transcendence to theological discourse and immanence to secular or philosophical ones. To defend my reading of Eckhart with full rigor would entail a much deeper hermeneutic engagement, so what I want to offer here is a number of points in the form of interrelated theses. And though I provide textual citations for these points, they are meant more as clarifying indicators rather than sites of close reading.20 1 Eckhart’s sermons repeatedly thematize the questions of self-annihilation, detachment, poverty, and self-dispossession. Indeed, they generate a veritable kenotic lexicon.21 That the self is undone, emptied, humbled could reasonably be expected of a spiritual or a mystical author writing within the Christian spiritual tradition. What is noteworthy about Eckhart’s discourse, however, is that these operations that emphasize the letting go of the self never produce (or seek to produce) an experience of God, never offer foretastes or visions of beatific heavenly afterlife, nor do they move the soul towards an experience of mystical union or open a dialogical experience with alterity. Rather, they repeatedly open onto what Eckhart terms the ground, or, alternatively, the innermost, or the spark. 2 This ground is univocal: it is said of the soul and God absolute the same way. Sermon 5b famously puts it: “Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground is God’s ground.”22 The ground names an identity that

236 A. Dubilet

3

4

5

6

precedes and exceeds and remains ultimately indifferent to the hierarchical distinction between creature and creator. The ground is an affirmation of the oneness of the soul with God, before all process, prior to all difference, scission, or diremption. It is not that difference is overcome into unity, but that identity is speculatively declared. The Oneness precedes and exceeds all operations of division, all transcendence and separation. In Sermon 12, we hear precisely such a stress: “I have often said that there is something in the soul that is so closely related to God that it is one [with him] and not just united.”23 It is not a matter of schema emphasizing an exit and return or a conversion, but a speculative affirmation of the One. What the ground articulates is not only an affirmation of identity and immanence, but also a radical uncreated, ante-ontological equality. In the ground, as Sermon 52 notes, “the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal.”24 Eckhart’s sermons do not oscillate between the finitude of the creature and its transcendent source, but rather diagnose the complicity between finitude and transcendence and seek to subvert that entire correlation. The ground is not an exception or an experience, but a speculative insistence that the immanence of the One precedes and exceeds (and, ultimately, deactivates) the relation between finitude and transcendence, the kind one finds in traditional Neoplatonism, for example. This is why, on one side, it is necessary to let go of the created self, but on the other, to let go of God as God. As Sermon 52 insists, there must be no transcendence left, no differentiation between self and other; what is revealed is an existence under the condition of the not, to live as one did when one did not exist. To be clear, I am not suggesting that Eckhart did not deploy Neoplatonic concepts and operations, but rather that when he does so he puts them to quite novel and subversive ends. And, more broadly, Eckhart’s deployment of various preexistent vocabularies, be they Neoplatonic, Aristotelian, monastic, scholastic, or mystical, do not indicate an allegiance to an extant tradition, but merely a use of extant conceptualities – a use that I would argue repeatedly emphasizes an unrestrained immanence. The resulting life as not, the life out of the ground, is a life “without a why.” The subject is troubled in Eckhart not to experience transcendence, but in order to open an impersonal, generic life, a life that is dispossessed, no longer creaturely nor lived towards an afterlife. It articulates, in a distinct way, the equation that Deleuze proposed at the end of his life “Immanence: a Life”: not the life of the subject, not a life possessed, but an impersonal life on the other side of good and evil, below the separation of self from other, the effect from the cause.25 A life without a why is absolutely immanent precisely because it is no longer posed as a regulative ideal: to conceive it in this way would render it once again transcendent, something to be achieved – a life that is actually an after-life. Rather it is precisely what denotes the deactivation of the imperatives of teleology, salvation, and instrumentality. As Sermon 5b has it:

Non-philosophical immanence 237 It is out of this inner ground that you should perform all your works without asking, “Why?” I say truly: So long as you perform works for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, or for God’s sake, or for the sake of your eternal blessedness, and you work them from without, you are going completely astray.26 There is no transcendence left, not even the seemingly theologicallyapproved transcendence of God, of salvation, or of heaven. There is nothing that can tether life to make it work. There is no longer a beyond (trans) to which one can climb (scandere). To subvert the primacy of the subject and its correlation with transcendence is to subvert both the agent and the destination, and open onto an immanence of life. 7 This life out of the ground is one of absolute equality with God. It upends cosmo-theological hierarchies. As Sermon 6 puts it: “So should the just soul be equal with God and close beside God, equal beside him, not beneath or above…. Who are they who are thus equal? Those who are equal to nothing, they alone are equal to God.”27 “With” and “beneath” refer to a technical distinction, which Eckhart explains in his Commentary on John: being “with” is a univocal relation of equality, while being under is analogical or partial, a hierarchical relation. In other words, there are two distinct models of causality, with Eckhart’s discourse explicitly pushing towards a univocal, immanent causality, in which the effect is fully immanent to the cause. 8 First and foremost, Eckhart attributes univocal relationality of absolute equality to the Word and the Son who are “with God.” This is the primary theological site for the articulation of a generation of difference without degradation or subservience, of, that is, immanent differentiation without hierarchy. Here we see the significance of Eckhart’s recurring rhetorical intransigence that in becoming nothing one does not become like the Son, but becomes the very same Son. Sermon 10: “Now man should so live that he is one with the onlybegotten Son and that he is the only-begotten Son. Between the only-begotten Son and the soul there is no difference.”28 Or again in Sermon 6: He must do it whether he likes it or not. The Father gives birth to his Son without ceasing; and I say more: He gives me birth, me, his Son, and the same Son. I say more: He gives birth not only to me, his Son, but he gives birth to me as himself and himself as me and to me as his being and nature.29 Here it is not a question of external imitation or modeling oneself on a transcendent exemplar, but the affirmation of the inhabitation of divine auto-differentiation (into the Son, into the Word) immanently, in absolute identity with it. 9 In Eckhart, the articulation of immanence as divine self-differentiation does not render that immanence a property of a divine subject, ascribable to a

238 A. Dubilet transcendent locus. Rather it makes immanence itself absolute. Such an interpretation, I would suggest, is justified and even necessitated by two repeated assertions by Eckhart. The first is the rhetoric of what can be called “divine compulsion” found in Eckhart’s sermons (visible in expressions like God “must do so whether he likes it or not”), which speaks precisely to the fact that there is no will, no transcendent subject beyond immanent divine generation, which is a process without cessation and without an outside. The second is Eckhart’s dictum on the nothingness of the creature. For example, Sermon 4 states: “All creatures are a pure nothing. I do not just say that they are insignificant or are only a little something: They are a pure nothing.”30 In asserting the nothingness of everything created, Eckhart eradicates the very site from which transcendence can be asserted: creatures are not something small, in contrast to which something super-eminent can be exalted. They are absolute nothing and as nothing they partake in the immanence of life. Moreover, one should add that the assertion not a relative nothingness but a pure nothingness of the creatures suspends the primacy of the paradigm of creation, which, as we saw earlier, is one of the historically dominant theoretical frameworks through which transcendence has been operative. 10 In offering Meister Eckhart as a thinker of unrestrained immanence, I am trying to recover quite a different version of his thought than has made him a rather prominent figure at the intersection of continental philosophy and mysticism. I seek to break the tendency of reading Eckhart as a negative theologian that has been dominant in deconstructive thought and continental philosophy of the so-called religious turn.31 Instead of reading Eckhart as a thinker who valorizes the finitude of thought, apophatic predication, and the affirmation of transcendence beyond all names and determinations, thereby seeing him convergent with the general line of Christian theologians that includes Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius and Bernard of Clairvaux, I want to suggest that he is rather a thinker dedicated to the affirmation of immanence, infinite life “without a why,” and speculation.32 There is no doubt that Eckhart’s sermons and treatises do in fact deploy negative theological language, but they do so in ways that directly oppose the hierarchical schema and exaltation of transcendence that negative theology classically entails – elements most clearly visible in the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, but ones that are all too often overlooked in contemporary deployments of his thought. Eckhart’s apophasis targets not only God, but also the soul, thereby subverting their very distinction, and doing so in order to articulate a univocal life open equally to all through a speculative re-writing of the movement of divine auto-differentiation. The affective and theoretical results are quite distinct: not a prostration towards the (divine) Other or self-abnegation in relation to that (divine) Other, but a disclosure of a dispossessed, common life. It should be noted that this subversion of hierarchical negative theology as a way to affirm the primacy of speculative immanence should not be read as simply a form of conceptual idolatry:33 It is not an improper naming of God. Rather, it

Non-philosophical immanence 239 offers a critical diagnosis of the unacknowledged ways that the traditional schema of negative theology dissimulates its own production of what can be called a negative idolatry, in which God is defined as the negative beyond of human finitude, as its ineffable transcendence, and as such is defined precisely in relation, even if a negative relation, to the human perspective.

III Non-philosophical immanence Everything I have stated might be accepted, and still one may be tempted to propose a modified Deleuzian reading of Eckhart – saying that perhaps he was truly a subversive philosopher in theologian’s garb. One thus would simply see in Eckhart, as a number of German readers do, a philosopher who deploys theological language to philosophical ends. Or one may propose, as Eugene Thacker recently has, that there is a division between a philosophical and a theological Eckhart, the former interested in nothingness, aridity, the desert and the latter in kenosis, Trinity, Person-oriented mysticism.34 Each approach would preserve the accepted disciplinary and discursive identities discussed earlier, but also, in that very gesture, render unintelligible Eckhart’s challenge, which is simply the fact that he theorized an unrestrained immanence and did so not within the field of philosophy, but on the terrain of and using the concepts of medieval mystical and theological discourse. Only our secular (or secularizing) prejudices about what constitutes the proper division between and distribution of religious and philosophical discourses render Eckhart a philosopher. The strict division between a theological upholding of transcendence and analogy and the philosophical construction of immanence and univocity renders invisible the fact that no single discourse or discipline has (or has had) primacy or monopoly in articulating the immanence of the real, and that historically theological or mystical discourses have succeeded at this no less powerfully and imaginatively than the philosophical one. In other words, Eckhart can help us break the intimate association of immanence with philosophy, and release it from the grasp of secular modernity, whose illusions philosophy all too often underwrites. Reading him in this way helps us see that critiques of transcendence do not necessarily have to be anti-religious, whatever the united voices of theologians, philosophers and common sense might tell us. For both philosophy and religious discourse have the capacity to be articulated immanently and speculatively. In turn, this suggests a different mode of organization, no longer between the religious and the philosophical, but precisely between conceptual schemes, texts, and modes of thought that articulate and give voice to immanence, and those that enshrine the primacy of transcendence. This, in turn, means that we never have to wait for the process of secularization to take course to encounter immanence, and, complementarily, there is no necessity to battle the religious and the theological if the task is to disclose and affirm immanence. When I refer to non-philosophical immanence in the title, I engage in an equivocation. It is meant to invoke that immanence can be articulated in fields other than the philosophical, that immanence is not necessarily the property or limited to the philosophical domain, but can be and has been articulated

240 A. Dubilet elsewhere. But it is also meant to evoke more particularly the non-philosophical thought of François Laruelle, which has argued that a democracy within thought must be instituted and that it requires “the abandonment of philosophical sufficiency,” the rejection of philosophy’s megalomaniacal illusions about and appropriations of the Real.35 Part of Laruelle’s critique entails showing that philosophy repeatedly appropriates immanence for itself, putting it to work in the name of philosophy.36 To read Eckhart in this context, then, results neither in exalting immanence and philosophy as Deleuze did nor in denigrating them as Levinas did, but affirming immanence while dissociating it from philosophy. Immanence can be articulated within any discourse, theology, and mysticism no less than philosophy itself. This, it should be noted, of course, does not mean that they do it all the time – far from it – but the failures to do so are present in philosophy no less than in other discourses, as Deleuze himself acknowledged happening in various forms from Descartes to Kant. A key element of Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought has been his articulation of the radical immanence as foreclosed to all operations of mediation, project, achievement, and transcendence. As he, for example, writes in Principles of Non-Philosophy, “The One or radical immanence (without any transcendence, thought, movement, etc.) excludes division, the production of the doublet or the philosophical kind of reflection, always double and divided.”37 Noteworthy is Laruelle’s intransigence in thinking immanence not determined even negatively, through exclusion, by concepts or operations of transcendence. The power of such formulations entails the rejection of conceptualizations that make externality, transcendence, and mediation primary and inescapable theoretical orientations. Laruelle formulates this in Philosophies of Differences as follows: that the One would still be thought as capable of sur-mounting or amounting to a return, that is, of operating an immanence in the mode of transcendence, is the most certain sign of the failure of philosophy, whether contemporary or otherwise, to think the essence of what the One’s immanence really is.38 The immanence of the One is not what is to be worked for, achieved, or synthesized, but rather it is what precedes and exceeds the operations of mediation, project, and transcendence. I would suggest that this line of thought is precisely in line with Eckhart’s insofar as the latter articulates an immanence of thought and life “without a why,” that is not to be achieved, experienced or received from above.39 It should be noted, given the framework of this chapter, that Laruelle explicitly distinguishes his radically immanent thought from Deleuze’s absolute immanence by noting that non-philosophy entails thinking immanence not on the basis of the One-All but the One-without-All.40 As he writes, critiquing Deleuze: The One that is at issue here [in non-philosophy], the radical immanence in terms of which we define it, is above all not the One-All, whether “close” to Spinoza or not, but rather a One-without-All, or even a Onewithout-Being, which we call the One-of-the-last-instance, the better to

Non-philosophical immanence 241 contrast it to the convertibility which it refuses, of the One with Being, as well as to the Spinozist reversibility of the One with the All.41 Indeed, this positioning of the One as a “suspension of the One-All” and not being “alienated in it”42 is one of the distinct characteristics of the non-philosophical perspective. Laruelle’s articulation of the One has been one source for thinking outside of the intractable divisions set up between neo-orthodox theological reflections of transcendence and secularist philosophies, or between worldly ontologies and transcendent alterities.43 What is useful for the current context is the way the distinction Laruelle draws allows for a thinking of radical immanence as not simply equivalent with ontology, the world or the cosmos.44 This is relevant to the reading of Eckhart, because, as I have argued more fully elsewhere, it does not propose a univocal ontology (as has been done by Deleuze, building on his reading of Spinoza), but a univocity of life out of the ground that in fact entails a creaturely dispossession, becoming nothing, the annihilation of being. In other words, Eckhart’s immanence is not ontological or creaturely, but precisely of a dispossessed, common life that is below and in excess of ontology. Or, to put it slightly differently, univocity for Eckhart is not ontological as much as it relates to the nothingness of Being or to beings as not (as indicated by theses 1, 6, and 7, elaborated in the previous section). Moreover, Eckhart’s theory of univocal divine differentiation, which is the theological site for the production of what can be called his univocal vitalism of ante-ontological equality, remains radically indifferent to any possible analogical severance or inscription within the logic of onto-theological difference. It is in these facets that I would say that an interpretation of Eckhart benefits from the understanding of radical immanence separated from ontology as proposed by Laruelle. As a concluding remark, I would note that Laruelle’s critical characterizations of Deleuze’s thought do not necessarily exhaust its conceptions of immanence. Indeed, I would suggest that one could be much more hermeneutically generous towards the ways immanence functions in it, especially when it is articulated as a life – an immanence that is hardly one of a towering and allencompassing One-All, but rather one that marks a dispossession of subjectivity and its worldly determinations.45 As Deleuze writes: “We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life.”46 Even if we agree that immanence should be divorced from ontology and the world, it is unclear whether Deleuze cannot, at times, provide us some of the tools to accomplish this, along with Laruelle and Eckhart himself.47 This would be part of a larger engagement, one that would use materials from divergent discourses to articulate immanent thought and immanent life – life that would not always already be assumed to be subjectivated, split between the self and the other – and this engagement would go against the grain of the established disciplinary divides that not only govern, but also distort and maim our thought as it currently exists.

242 A. Dubilet

Notes 1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 14. 2 Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 172, and more generally, 169–86. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 171. For a particular powerful critique of analogy from a perspective of Deleuzian immanence, see Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 5 Deleuze, Expressionism, 173–4 6 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 47. 7 Martin Heidegger, “Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, eds Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, trans. Lisa Harries (New York: Paragon House, 1990), 56–7. 8 On immanentism, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). For a powerful representative of the critique of immanence as closure that comes directly from a theological perspective, see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990). 9 This distinction also brings into light the difference between Deleuze and deconstructive modes of thought, which repeatedly reconfigure and rearticulate transcendence as a way of resisting closure. The divergence between, on the one hand, the path that emphasizes negativity and the critique of closure and sameness and, on the other, an articulation of absolute immanence, is clandestinely attested to in Derrida’s remark, on the occasion of Deleuze’s death, that he would like to question Deleuze further about “the word ‘immanence,’ which he always held on to, in order to make him or let him say something that is still for us undoubtedly secret.” See Jacques Derrida, “I’m Going to Have to Wander All Alone” in Works of Mourning, eds Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 195. The remark reveals a certain fundamental divergence, if not a constitutive blockage of understanding, between Derrida and Deleuze, precisely because Deleuze already had discussed immanence incessantly across several decades of writing. 10 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 43 11 Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Light Books, 1988), 128. 12 Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and ed. Constantin B. Boundas (New York: Columbia, 1990), 179. 13 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Idea of God” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford, 1998), 56. 14 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy” in Of God Who Comes to Mind, trans. Bettina Bergo (Stanford: Stanford, 1998), 61. 15 See, for example, Levinas, “God and Philosophy” 55–67. 16 As, for example, Karmen MacKendrick recently put it, philosophy grasps and attempts to know, while theology has the genuine ability to listen. See Karmen MacKendrick, Divine Enticement: Theological Seductions (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). Or again, slightly differently, Jean-Luc Marion has maintained that philosophy has had the tendency to enclose and produce autonomous subject and idols of thought, while a theological approach has the capacity to retain a certain opening of the self towards transcendence. Most recently see Jean-Luc Marion, In the Self’s Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012). The general contours of this position

Non-philosophical immanence 243 17 18 19 20

21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34

were already powerfully articulated in God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Deleuze, Expressionism, 177 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 45. Deleuze, Expressionism, 180 These thoughts are part of a book-length project that I am nearly finished entitled Kenosis of the Subject and the Immanence of Life. I have articulated a set of related thoughts on Eckhart and immanence in Alex Dubilet, “Freeing Immanence from the Grip of Philosophy: On Univocity and Experimentalism in Meister Eckhart” in Speculation, Heresy, and Gnosis in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion: The Enigmatic Absolute, eds Joshua Ramey and Matthew Haar Farris (Rowman & Littlefield, Forthcoming). Alois Haas produces a useful list, showing there are near to two dozen terms in Eckhart’s lexicon: Abegescheidenheit, armout, bereitschaft, blôzheit, enpfenclicheit, îtelkeit (Leerheit), laere sîn, gelâzenheit, ledic, vrî, lûter, reine sîn, grundtôt sîn, zenihte worden sîn, swîgen, ûzgân, vergezzen, versmâhen, verzîhen sîn selbes, ze nihte werden. Alois M Haas, “‘das Persönliche und Eigene verleugnen’: Mystische vernichtigkeit und verworffenheit sein selbs im Geiste Meister Eckharts,” in Mystik als Aussage: Erfahrungs-, Denk- und Redeformen christlicher Mystik (Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2007), 370 and passim. Meister Eckhart, The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatises and Defense, trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1981), 183. Meister Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, ed. Bernard McGinn (Mahwah: Paulist, 1986), 269. Brackets in the original. Eckhart, Essential Sermons, 200. Gilles Deleuze “Immanence: a Life” in Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Book, 2005), 25–33. Eckhart, Essential Sermons, 183–4, emphasis added. Eckhart, Essential Sermons, 187. Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, 264 Eckhart, Essential Sermons, 187 Eckhart, Teacher and Preacher, 250 On my articulation of the dominant paradigms in continental philosophy of religion in relation to immanence, see Alex Dubilet, “Speculation and Infinite Life: Meister Eckhart and Hegel on the Critique of Finitude” in Logos: Philosophical and Literary Journal (Russian) Special Issue: “New Life of German Idealism” (Forthcoming, early 2016). One of the few readers who interprets Eckhart as a thinker of immanence, though doing so exclusively within a phenomenological framework, is Michel Henry. In his Essence of Manifestation, Henry deftly identifies the correlation of finitude and transcendence, and displays the way Eckhart affirms the primacy of a pure immanence to the exclusion of all exteriority. See Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 309–35. A classic articulation of the concern with idolatry is offered in Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). A perspicacious reader of Eckhart, Thacker interprets him according to this divide between theology and philosophy when he notes, “any careful reading of Eckhart must acknowledge that this talk about divine nothingness, the immanent Godhead, and the arid, empty, unhuman desert is always doubled by an equal commitment to the Trinity, the kenosis or self-emptying of Christ, and a Person-oriented mysticism of Father, Son and Human. Put simply, the ‘philosophical’ Eckhart is always correlated to the ‘theological’ Eckhart.” Eugene Thacker, “Wayless Abyss: Mysticism, Mediation and Divine Nothingness,” Postmedieval: a Journal of Medieval Cultural

244 A. Dubilet

35

36

37 38 39

40

41 42 43

44 45 46 47

Studies 3, no. 1 (2012): 90. Although the relationship between divine nothingness and the immanent generativity of the Trinity requires further theoretical elaboration, there simply is no easy way to separate the supposedly philosophical Eckhart from the supposedly theological one. The immanent Godhead cannot be taken unproblematically as a pure philosophical concern, nor, more significantly, should we ignore that for Eckhart, the Word, the Son, and the Trinity are theoretical sites in which immanence and univocity are conceptually articulated, and thus cannot be seen as foreign to philosophical work. Eckhart’s texts do not ask us to make this distinction – in fact, they warn against it. Instead, understanding Eckhart requires the suspension of hostility and of the polemical inter-differentiation of philosophy and theology that we are all too often embroiled in. See François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 47, and more generally, 37–78. For an insightful introduction to Laruelle’s thought, see Anthony Paul Smith, A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature: Ecologies of Thought (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), esp. 59–110. John Ó Maoilearca, All Thoughts are Equal: Laruelle and Nonhuman Philosophy (Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 2015), 14–18 and François Laruelle, “ ‘I, the Philosopher, Am Lying’: A Reply to Deleuze,” trans. Taylor Adkins, Ray Brassier, and Sid Littlefield in The Non-philosophy Project: Essays by François Laruelle, eds Gabriel Alkon and Boris Gunjevic (New York: Telos, 2012), 39–73. Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, 32–3 François Laruelle,Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (London: Continuum, 2010), 31, emphasis original. It is true that in his 2007 work,Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains, Laruelle explicitly critiques Eckhart’s metaphysical and mystical entanglements with transcendence. I have tried to suggest how reading Eckhart immanently might not only address those critiques, but also transform the trajectory and tonality of non-philosophical thought in Alex Dubilet, “‘Neither God, nor World’: on the One foreclosed to transcendence.” Palgrave Communications (2015). Special Collection: Radical Theologies. Available online at www.palgrave-journals.com/articles/palcomms201527 For the problem of immanence and non-philosophy, see Anthony Paul Smith, “What Can Be Done with Religion? Non-Philosophy and the Future of Philosophy of Religion” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, eds Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastleupon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Laruelle, “ ‘I, the Philosopher, Am Lying’,” 48 Ibid, 49 On the state of contemporary philosophy of religion, see Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, “Editors’ Introduction: What is Continental Philosophy of Religion Now?” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern. (Cambridge Scholars Publishing: Newcastle upon Tyne, 2010). On thinking immanence beyond this binary, see Dubilet, “Speculation and Infinite Life.” For more on this see, Dubilet, “‘Neither God, nor World.’” One generous hermeneutic engagement with Deleuze’s immanence is offered in Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God. I discuss the necessity of hermeneutic generosity in non-philosophy in Dubilet, “‘Neither God, nor World.’” Deleuze “Immanence: a Life,” 27. What I am additionally suggesting is that perhaps the terminological distinction between radical and absolute immanence that Laruelle proposes as a way to contrast his own project to Deleuze’s is unnecessarily rigid in establishing its demarcations.

14 ‘Not peace but a sword’ Žižek, Dionysius and the question of ancestry in theology and philosophy Marika Rose

Everybody knows that theologians are preoccupied with sex; and it doesn’t take much to see that this preoccupation goes all the way down. Theology traces its pedigree through genealogies, long straight lists of who begat whom. It pledges its allegiance to its Fathers, and it strictly forbids miscegenous liaisons with that which is foreign to it. And – like all those who are proud of their pedigree – it is eager to overlook the peccadilloes of its illustrious forebears whilst demanding that its descendants toe the line or forfeit their inheritance. This hypocritical puritanism has tended to characterise its relationship with philosophy. Theologians have rushed to retrospectively baptise those pagan philosophers whose beliefs were embarrassing to orthodoxy and yet whose intellectual legacy was too rich to be hastily cast aside; whilst theology’s attitude to contemporary secular philosophy has resembled that of the parents nagging their rebellious teenagers: ‘After everything I’ve done for you, the least you could do is to come to church with me once in a while’. But philosophy itself is not much better. The emergence of the secular relies, as Daniel Colucciello Barber argues, on a whitewashing purification of philosophy’s bloodline, purging the taint of Hebraism from its Hellenic inheritance ‘through the racist affirmation of the Aryan and negation of the Semitic’.1 Philosophy is immune neither to the lure of pedigree nor, as Luce Irigaray has so amply demonstrated, to a rather questionable erotics.2 Mystical theology is, at least on some versions of this complicated family history, at the heart of the mutual entanglement of theology, philosophy, the erotic, and the policing of bloodlines. In this chapter I will, first, discuss the marriage of Christian theology and Neoplatonism which takes place in the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and some of the problems which arise from this remarkably fruitful liaison. Then, second, I will trace the line of descent which leads from Dionysius to Žižek, who takes this inheritance and mutates it in ways which are potentially generative for theology and philosophy, both in relation to one another and to desire.

246 M. Rose

The sins of the fathers: the congenital disorders of Christian-Neoplatonism Denys Turner argues that Western Christian thought traces its lineage back to the coupling of Christianity and Platonism. Specifically, it is born from the meeting of two climactic moments: the biblical narrative of Moses’ encounter with God at the peak of Mount Sinai; and Plato’s allegory of the cave. This encounter, issuing forth in Dionysius’ Mystical Theology, begets two of the determining metaphorical pairs of later Western theology: darkness and light; ascent and descent.3 For all his talk about the conceptual importance of eros for Christianity, questions of gender, sexuality and family are often strikingly absent from Turner’s work, not least in his discussion of Dionysius.4 For Dionysius, mystical negation is preceded by theological affirmation: by the long line of proper names for God, handed down from fathers to sons, unsullied by the touch of women. Exitus and reditus, affirmation and negation, are consistently sexed: from the pure pedigree of theological tradition and the dark, womb-like cave of Platonic allegory which must be left behind if men are to encounter truth, to the women who are excluded from the hierarchical and priestly mystical encounter with God both implicitly – because Dionysius inhabited an all-male community – and explicitly – because by virtue of their sex women are necessarily excluded from the Christian priesthood, and therefore also from eucharistic rites to which the mystical climax belongs. And yet, as for Plato, desire remains central to this pattern of descent and ascent, exitus and reditus; in the absence of women’s bodies, theology can become all the more perfectly and purely erotic. It is the desire of God which gives birth to the long lines of ‘begats’, to the hierarchy of the church; and men’s desire for God which returns them to their source, which brings them to the mystical summit where their desire can be consummated. Writing in the more exclusively male confines of Eros and Allegory, Denys Turner points out the centrality of eros to Dionysius’ Christian-Neoplatonic synthesis.5 Eros is important for the celibate men who comment on the Song of Songs because it allows them to solve key philosophical problems which arise from the conjunction of Neoplatonism with a Christian account of creation and redemption – the problem of freedom, and the problem of differentiation. Christian Neoplatonism begins with the absolute simplicity of God: ‘God is above all else unity, a oneness beyond all differentiation’. In God there is no distinction, no multiplicity, no change. And yet creation, by contrast, ‘is multiplicity’.6 The created world is differentiated not only within itself but also from God; it is distinct, it is multiple, it is changeable. Creation depends on God and yet God does not depend on creation; how then can it be that the unchanging, undifferentiated God who has no need of any other can bring into being the dynamic multiplicity of the created world which depends on the divine for its being? The problem of creation here is twofold. First, why did the self-sufficient God – who has no need or lack – create? Second, how does the multiplicity of

‘Not peace but a sword’ 247 the world emerge from the absolute simplicity of the divine oneness? According to Turner, for Dionysius it is eros which makes it possible to answer these two questions. When we desire, Turner says, we are at the same time both utterly free and utterly compelled: to love is to be the willing slave of the beloved. And for Dionysius, Turner implies, though he does not exactly say, it is not only we who love God in this freely willed submission to the other, but God who loves us in the same way. God does not need to create but God freely chooses to create because of the divine desire for us: God too, freely chooses to be enthralled and enraptured by creation.7 Likewise, for Turner, desire holds together oneness and differentiation. To love, he says, is to desire absolute union with the beloved; and yet at the same time to be absolutely individualised by the encounter with the beloved other. I am never more myself than when I love and am loved, Turner argues, and yet to love is to wish to become one flesh with the other. So it is desire, Turner says, which enables us to understand how God, who is one, brings forth creation, which is many; and how God, who needs nothing and wants nothing, comes to create the world. But this account of desire and the generation of the world is not without its problems for Christian theology, and particularly so in its relationship to philosophy. Here I will explore, briefly, three of these problems: freedom, materiality, and universalism. Freedom The notion of the simplicity of the One – important both to Plato and to the Neoplatonists – is the idea that all good things – justice, freedom, life, beauty etc. – come together and are identical within the One which gives rise to everything that exists. Just as all things come from the One, so all things are to return to the One; this return is both the inherent telos of human life and the ultimate good for human beings. So two questions arise. First, if all being comes from the One and is, in the One, identical with goodness, where does evil come from; how can evil exist at all? Second, if everything that is desirable and good for human beings is in the One, why would anyone choose to do anything which was not directed towards their end in the One? How, as Dionysius puts it, ‘could anything choose [evil] in preference to the Good?’8 Dionysius’ solution is simply to suggest that evil does not exist. All being comes from God; and so anything which has being cannot be entirely evil because insofar as it exists at all it must continue to participate in God.9 Evil is a distortion, a corruption; not a thing in itself but ‘a deficiency and a lack of perfection … evil lies in the inability of things to reach their natural peak of perfection’.10 Yet although it is ‘weakness, impotence, a deficiency of knowledge … of desire’, those who sin are nonetheless culpable because, Dionysius says, God ‘generously bestows such capacities on each as needed and, therefore, there can be no excuse for any sin in the realm of one’s own good’.11 Evil is only inexplicable as a lack, a failure, a weakness; and yet those who fall short are to be held responsible for doing so because they were strong

248 M. Rose enough to do otherwise. There can be no reason, no justification for sin; sin, in short, is structured in a manner which exactly parallels creation itself: as an excessive, unjustifiable, inexplicable act. Yet where the free excessive act of the God who is neither being nor nonbeing is fertile and generative, bringing into being all the multiplicity of the created world, the free excessive act of human and demonic beings which has neither being nor nonbeing can only bring death and dissolution. The free act of evil is thus arguably the point at which humans most closely resemble the God who created them: it is where human beings are most divine in their relationship to the economy of creation; and yet, it is precisely this act which brings for them death and condemnation. Where God exceeds the economy of cause and effect out of the overflow of divine goodness, the human transcendence of economy can be thought only as lack. This account of evil as privation gives rise to an inability on theology’s part to acknowledge that anything new can be produced by human thought which has not already been given by God, and so, insofar as philosophy diverges from the truths which are handed down by theology, it can give birth only to nothingness. Something like this, I think, underlies the frequent accusations of ‘nihilism!’ levelled by theologians at secular philosophers. Perhaps it is a similar faith in heredity which underlies philosophy’s frequent reluctance to acknowledge kinship with theology, fearing to be drawn back into captivity within the womb-like cave of the mother Church. If newness is impossible then the genealogy of theology is destiny. Materiality A second problem with Dionysius’ account is the difficulty of reconciling the traditional Christian affirmation of the goodness of creation with the erasure of materiality in the mystical ascent. In the hierarchical ascent of Plato’s Symposium, the desire of the lover leads him upwards in a process of increasing abstraction away from the material and the particular:12 beginning with the love of an individual beautiful body, the lover comes first to reject attachment to this particular body in favour of an appreciation of all beautiful bodies; next to the realisation that beautiful practices are more beautiful than beautiful bodies, beautiful knowledge than beautiful practices, until finally he comes to love above all ‘that particular knowledge which is knowledge solely of the beautiful itself’.13 The goal of the philosophical quest for knowledge is to get as far away from the body as possible.14 How then can the goodness of the created world be affirmed? Matter is good, Dionysius argues, because insofar as it has being it participates in the Good. It is not a heavy weight which drags souls away from God and towards evil.15 And yet the structure of Dionysius’ thought makes it impossible to maintain this affirmation. Evil is a falling away, a lack of the good: and yet, on Dionysius’ account, the hierarchy of created being is defined precisely as the hierarchy of greater or lesser participation in the good. Of created things, some

‘Not peace but a sword’ 249 share completely in the Good, others participate in it more or less, others have a slight portion only, and, to others, again, the Good is but a far-off echo … this has to be so, for otherwise the most honoured, the most divine things would be on the order with the lowliest.16 It is perhaps here that the exclusion of women from the consummation of the erotic return to God is most immediately apparent: as Grace Jantzen points out, by associating progress towards God both with progress up the ecclesiastical hierarchy and with intellectual ascent, Dionysius’ work doubly excludes women, who have historically been refused access both to positions of ecclesiastical power and to education. By seeking to maintain both that God is immediately present to all being and also that beings are differentiated precisely by their relative closeness to God, such that the telos of human existence is both increasing participation in God and also continuing, distinct existence, Dionysius does not escape the Neoplatonic queasiness towards materiality but simply adds to it a Christian affirmation of the material world. The conflict between these two persists as a central antagonism within his work – an antagonism which, as I have argued elsewhere, persists through much of the Christian tradition.17 This antagonism in turn is entirely of a piece with the absence of women from so much Christian theology; a problem which is of course shared with philosophy (assuming that we are in fact willing to see the absence of women as a problem). Universalism Because, for Dionysius, those lower down the ecclesiastical hierarchy are further away from God and therefore have a lesser capacity for good, progress towards God is understood to take place along a straight and narrow path. Progress towards God is a straightforward process of ascent along what Mary-Jane Rubenstein describes as ‘a specific – one might say prefabricated – journey’.18 The logic of this model of spiritual progress is perhaps best articulated by the Orthodox theologian Alexander Golitzin, who says that ‘the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is our context, our world, the place of our strivings and the milieu of our encounter with Christ.… Nothing of any validity or truth may be accomplished outside of our hierarchy.’19 To be outside the church is, simply, to be further away from God and therefore from the truth. This attitude is perhaps not unfamiliar to anyone who has read a lot of Christian theology; the real problem is not its arrogant refusal of the possibility that theology might have anything to learn from that which is outside it, but the basic contradiction which it reveals within Dionysius’ thought. Here, at the birth of Christian-Neoplatonism – a bastardisation of pagan philosophy whose legacy will continue to run deep within Christian theology’s bloodline – we find a model of theology which cannot conceive the possibility of its own existence; which would rather assert – against all the evidence – belief in virgin birth than accept the possibility of its progenitors’ promiscuity.

250 M. Rose Whatever Dionysius might say, Christian theology has always been an illegitimate child, its heredity undeniably enriched by the Fathers’ promiscuous liaisons with foreign gods. And yet, as for the Israel of the Hebrew Scriptures, these practices of miscegenation and queer kinship are persistently accompanied by the rhetoric of purity and unsullied lines of descent.20 The double rhetoric of descent via a pure pedigree and return to universality and away from contamination by the material, the particular, and the feminine is not escaped by the secular philosophy which emerges, later, from theology’s loins, but – all too often – is merely repeated differently, with theology simply transposed to the realm of the material and the particular which is to be transcended in the quest for universal truth.

Unto the third and fourth generation: Žižek and the mutation of Christian inheritance There is no such thing as a pure line of pedigree when it comes to thought, however much the sterility and congenital disorders of many contemporary theological and philosophical debates might suggest otherwise. But I do want to trace what I think is the development of a particular family characteristic – the entanglement of desire, ontology and epistemology – from Dionysius to contemporary continental philosophy. For Dionysius, the focus of erotic longing for consummation lay at the meeting point between God and the world: the world being, naturally, embodied in the single figure of a male intellectual and leading amongst other things to a decidedly queer flourishing of monastic meditations on the Song of Songs as the model for the individual soul’s quest for God. But a crucial mutation took place somewhere between Descartes and Kant, such that the central problem for philosophy was no longer the consummation of the love between God and the world but the question of whether the individual subject could ever know the world; knowledge here, of course, is to be taken in its full biblical sense. It is for this reason, at least in part, that psychoanalysis came to be taken seriously not only as a science of the individual subject, but as philosophy. Curiously enough, this re-emergence of the question of desire, and its re-centring around the individual subject, made possible the re-emergence of mystical theology, whose intense eroticism had come to be associated with the body, and hence with women, and therefore came to be seen as unphilosophical, insufficiently high-minded and universal. All it really needed to re-emerge into philosophical respectability, however, was a man to speak for it and to claim this inheritance as his own. Several such men put themselves forward; but the two who are of interest for our purposes are Lacan and Hegel, whose work fathers the oeuvre of Slavoj Žižek. In contrast to the metaphysics of Dionysius’ Neoplatonic Christianity (which sees everything safely contained within the closed economy of participation, within which the material world and everything associated with it is viewed as something to be escaped and where no newness can be permitted to degrade

‘Not peace but a sword’ 251 the pure bloodlines of theology) Žižek offers a materialism in which both past inheritance and future descent are genuinely at stake. The material world exists, for Žižek, as a system which is intrinsically ruptured not from without but from within. It comes into being beginning with the separation of nothingness from itself, an intrinsic inconsistency within materiality. Žižek talks about this inconsistency at the heart of the material world both in terms of the biblical account of creation (in which God brings the world into being precisely through an act of distinction, of separation), and also in terms of quantum physics, which, according to Žižek, holds that ‘mass consists only of the surplus generated by [the electron’s] movement, as though we’re dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself’.21 This gap within the material world is, for Žižek, ‘a kind of generative lack, a withdrawal that opens up space, a lack which acts as a surplus’;22 it is out of this paradoxical coincidence of surplus and lack, the intrinsic incompleteness of the material world, that beings emerge in what Žižek describes as an atheist creation ex nihilo. Because of this incompleteness of materiality, the system of cause and effect is not closed but is always ruptured: every effect exceeds its cause. This has two consequences: first, not only is the future genuinely open but the past is also at stake. What happens now changes the meaning of the past: every genealogy can be rewritten. And, second, it means that as particular entities emerge from the creative incompleteness of the material world, they become, in a sense, their own cause, their own ground of being (and here Žižek draws on the contemporary biological notion of autopoiesis, which describes organisms as ‘bootstrapping’ themselves into existence).23 We can become more than, less than, other than our inheritance; and our descendants, too, may escape our grasp. This account of the material world is also an erotics. Žižek’s work draws on Lacan’s account of the difference between masculine desire and feminine drive, which Lacan explicates precisely in relation to the Neoplatonic account of the One as the origin of all things, from which everything that is originated and to which it will return, drawn back by desire, by eros. In this sense, the problem of creation in Christian Neoplatonism is precisely the opposite of the problem of desire for Lacanian psychoanalysis. Where for Dionysius the problem of creation is how to make two from one, to bring to birth an immense multitude from the absolute simplicity of God, for Lacan, ‘Eros is defined as the fusion that makes one from two, as what is supposed to gradually tend in the direction of making but one from an immense multitude’.24 But, Lacan argues, this gathering of the many into one is a fantasy: as his famous phrase goes, ‘the sexual relationship does not exist’; however much we may long for oneness, for perfect union, we cannot have it. Here Lacan refers primarily to the union of male and female in sex, but something similar applies to the union of God and the individual in mystical ecstasy. It is only insofar as we exist as separate that we exist at all; it is only insofar as we know ourselves to be distinct from the world around us that we are alive. Perfect union is – as the mystics well know – essentially indistinguishable from death.

252 M. Rose Instead of eros, the gathering of everything into union, Lacan says that analysis seeks to assert the existence of the One as a singular individual, and to explore not desire but love.25 In love, he argues, the gender of the other person is irrelevant, because gender is always a system of making two into one. To love according to drive, by contrast, is to refuse the desire to absorb the other person into oneself. Žižek takes this Lacanian erotics and couples it with Hegel’s account of the development of human societies and quantum physics’ account of the emergence of something from nothingness. For Žižek, everything comes not from the One but from an inherently inconsistent nothing: the problem of creation is not how multiplicity and contingency could emerge from a perfect and self-contained One, but how identities emerge from inconsistent nothingness and, more importantly, how the multiplicity and complexity of the world might be sustained in the face of the ever-present threat of the return to nothing. This allows for a kind of reconfiguring of the antagonisms within Dionysius’ work, as we can see by returning to the three themes of freedom, materiality and universalism to show how Žižek repeats them differently. Freedom For Žižek, as for Dionysius, desire is what makes it possible to hold together freedom and necessity. Love is, he says, ‘a state in which activity and passivity, being-active and being-acted-upon, harmoniously overlap (the paradigmatic case, of course, is the mystical experience of Love)’.26 And yet, unlike for Dionysius, for Žižek it is possible to imagine a love which is truly generative, really productive of newness. Like the subject and the symbolic order, materiality works, for Žižek, on the feminine logic of the non-all, where effects always exceed their causes. It is in this non-all gap in the economy of causation that freedom is located: every effect has its causes, but can never be entirely accounted for in terms of those causes. This excess which is inherent to causation does not just account for human freedom; it also means that human freedom itself is excessive. Žižek’s materialism means that ‘we created our world, but it overwhelms us, we cannot grasp and control it’.27 Unlike Dionysius, then, Žižek both recognises and fully endorses the formal parallel between God’s excessive, unjustifiable act of creation and the excessive, unjustifiable human act of sin, positioning Christianity, philosophy and being itself firmly on the side of excess and rupture rather than harmony and union. To be human, for Žižek, is to do precisely what the God of traditional Christian doctrine did: to love not out of necessity or compulsion but out of an excess which is both free and unfree. To be human is to love this thing, this person, not because we need them or because they are better than anything else in the world, but simply because we love them; and to love them without seeking to absorb them into ourselves but precisely insofar as they are not us. This promises, I think, not only an alternative to patriarchal notions of desire and reproduction as necessarily linked to ownership, but also to prevailing

‘Not peace but a sword’ 253 models of the interactions of theology and philosophy, which can relate to one another only in terms of pedigree or absorption, which cannot find anything they love in one another without seeking to possess it. If the intercourse between theology and philosophy can be liberated from the demands of inheritance – from the need to honour parents, to produce heirs, to maintain the crumbling piles of stately canonical tradition – perhaps this opens up space, too, for pleasure; for mutual enjoyment. Materiality Likewise, Žižek resolves the tension in Dionysius’ thought between the desire to affirm materiality and the desire to escape it by making two moves: first, he rejects the existence of a pure source of transcendent otherness outside of the material world. Everything that is, is material. Second, he sides not with the masculine desire for completeness, perfection, a clear line of patriarchal inheritance and an end in God the Father who holds all things together, but with the feminine principle of the non-all. Everything that is, is material, but materiality itself is non-all, inherently incomplete, failed. Completeness and perfect union are neither possible nor desirable: instead we find that the abject, the liminal, the seeping fluids and inconsistencies which both philosophy and theology seek to expel by the silencing and exclusion of women are right at the heart of every identity. Theology and philosophy confront one another, then, not as master and slave, to kill or be killed, to possess or incorporate, but as two imperfect, incomplete entities who might, improper though it seems, come together without absorbing one another to give birth to something which is neither of them, to something which is new. As Jean-Luc Nancy says, in his Lacan-inflected meditations on sexuality, newness and pleasure are not the same thing: although there are regions we might choose where genitality and therefore generation are tied up with eroticisation … the significance of the one need not be exhausted in the other: pleasure and the child might be two distinct figures of incalculable excess, but it might not be possible to superimpose one on the other.28 Universalism Where the notion of divine simplicity means that Dionysius envisages everything that is both beginning from and returning to union with God, the emphasis of Žižek’s work is not on union but on separation. Žižek is fond of citing Jesus’ strongest rejection of family allegiance: Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against

254 M. Rose her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.29 But he also quotes approvingly Chesterton’s argument that Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces.… All modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separate and sets free.30 Kinship is to be rejected precisely in the name of love for one’s kin; to reject inheritance, family, genealogy is to liberate both oneself and others, to recognise that it is division and separation, not union or absorption which constitute life, which open up the possibility of love. There is no such thing as a pure line of descent; philosophy and theology cannot lay claim to unsullied and coherent identities because no identity is unsullied or coherent. For Žižek, even nothingness is not at one with itself but inconsistent and antagonistic, and every identity is riven by internal conflict, by failure. The drive is the logic of borders, of separation between things, of that which shatters and disrupts economy. Similarly, what constitutes universality for Žižek is not the universal participation of all things in the single, simple source of all Being but precisely the rupturing of all things, the fact that every identity is constituted by an internal inconsistency. What is universal is failure. Every cultural iteration of the difference between men and women is a particular attempt to grapple with the universal problem of sexual difference, which in turn is ultimately the universal problem of the incompleteness of every individual. Every society is a particular attempt to resolve the class struggle which constitutes society. And for Žižek, this means two things. First, that, as above, what is universal to every particular identity is what is excluded. And second, that what is at stake is the meaning of the universal. Žižek speaks about the ‘concrete universality’ which is the totality of every attempt to grapple with a particular problem.31 The concrete universality of the Bible ‘lies in the very totality of its historically determined readings’; the concrete universality of class struggle is the totality of human history.32 And because what happens later can change the meaning of what comes before, this means that everything is at stake in the struggle for the way in which the universal problem will be imperfectly articulated in this particular instance. The universal is neither safe, as for so much of classical Christian philosophy and theology, nor hopelessly unattainable, as for so much continental philosophy in the deconstructive tradition. Nor, crucially, is it a colonizing universal: ‘concrete universality’, Žižek says, ‘does not concern the relationship of a particular to the wider Whole […] but rather the way it relates to itself, the way its very particular identity is split from within’.33 What is universal, ultimately, is failure; but what matters more than anything is how we fail.

‘Not peace but a sword’ 255

Conclusion: miscegenous liaisons For Dionysius’ mystical theology, desire reaches its climax in the mystical encounter with God which is also, within the structure of Dionysius’ theology, the celebration of the eucharist, an act which is no more a final resting point than the climax of the sexual encounter from which it draws so much of its analogical heft. The pedigree of God’s chosen people may have culminated, for Christianity, in the person of Jesus Christ; and yet the church carries on, spinning out new lines of descent which are as tangled and disrespectable as any human genealogy, loath though it is to acknowledge the more disreputable members of its family. Philosophy, too, has struggled to scrub the taint of theology from its bloodline. What Žižek’s work offers, I have tried to suggest, is a surprisingly queer reading of philosophical and theological genealogy: an infidel fidelity to the theological and philosophical inheritance with which he, like us, continues to grapple. Philosophy and theology remain, perhaps, uncomfortably close cousins, both at times a little reluctant to acknowledge the acts they have accomplished together in the mystical darkness of unknowing. And yet perhaps what we ought to ask of them in their relationship to one another is that question so beloved of chaste Catholic clerics: can their intercourse bring into being new life?

Notes 1 Daniel Colucciello Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion and Secularity (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 106. 2 Luce Irigaray, Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 3 Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 11–12. 4 Women are consistently relegated to the margins of The Darkness of God, whose central chapters all focus on exposition of works by male mystical writers; the book as a whole sets out as its project the goal of recovering an account of mysticism more faithful to the genealogical origins which is not merely indifferent but actively opposed to an understanding of mysticism which takes experience as its central focus. This shift in the idea of mysticism from one in which ‘dialectical epistemology’ is central to one in which this meaning has been ‘evacuated’, the metaphorical meanings refilled ‘with the stuff of “experience”’ is one which both Turner and, he argues, the fathers of mystical theology ‘reject’ (The Darkness of God, 7). The Darkness of God was, interestingly enough, published in the same year and by the same press as Grace Jantzen’s Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) which argues that both the mystical appeal to experience and the rejection of this appeal as not properly theological must be understood within the context of an ongoing struggle between women seeking to lay claim to theological authority and men seeking to deny it to them. 5 Throughout The Darkness of God, questions of desire are persistently referred to Turner’s Eros and Allegory: Medieval Exegesis of the Song of Songs (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1995) where the focus of the book allows him to exclude women entirely from the discussion: “I confine myself to male writers, not because they are male, but because I confine myself to writers of formal commentary on the Song of Songs, and they are all male” (Eros and Allegory, 18). Lest we worry that

256 M. Rose

6 7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22 23 24

some queerer kinship might emerge from this homosocial eros we are repeatedly assured on the first page of the book’s preface that no “Freudian explanations” for this “male celibate enthusiasm for the imagery of eros” are to be entertained (Eros and Allegory, 18). Eros and Allegory, 50. Eros and Allegory, 56–64. ‘The Divine Names’ in Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo- Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987), 84. ‘Divine Names’, 85 ‘Divine Names’, 92 ‘Divine Names’, 96. I use the male pronoun here as Plato does because it is indicative of the gendered assumptions of Plato’s thought and his persistent – though not entirely consistent – tendency to assume that men are better fitted for philosophical contemplation of the truth than women. Plato, The Symposium, eds M. C. Howatson and Frisbee C. C. Sheffield, trans. M. C Howatson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 49–50. Here, though, it is worth noting Grace Jantzen’s argument in Death and the Displacement of Beauty. Volume One: Foundations of Violence (London: Routledge, 2004), 193–221 that, although on balance Plato sides with the universal and abstract against the particular and the material, there are elements of his work which disrupt this emphasis. ‘Divine Names’, 92–93. ‘Divine Names’, 86. Marika Rose, ‘The Body and Ethics in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae’, New Blackfriars 94.1053 (2013), 541–551. Denys Turner similarly suggests that “the stress of these tensions [between Dionysius’ affirmation of hierarchy and of the direct dependence on God] will leave their mark upon the imagery which he left as his legacy to Western theologians” (The Darkness of God, 48). ‘Dionysius, Derrida and the Critique of “Ontotheology”’ in Re-Thinking Dionysius the Areopagite, eds Sarah Coakley and Charles M. Stang (Oxford; Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 204 Alexander Golitzin, Et introibo ad altare dei: The Mystagogy of Dionysius the Areopagite (Thessalonika: Patriarchikon Idruma Paterikôn Meletôn, 1994), 167. As Gil Anidjar points out, the logic of purity becomes so fundamental to Christian theology that it actually invents the notion of a kinship carried in the blood (Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)). That this new notion of blood as kinship and the mark of distinction between Christians, Jews and Muslims should be so entangled with new articulations of the literal reality of the blood of the Eucharistic elements, themselves dependent on the infusion of new ideas from Jewish and Muslim scholarship, neatly illustrates the persistence of Dionysius’ double logic of descent and denial. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 22. ‘There Is No Sexual Relationship’ in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 217. See, for example, Žižek’s discussion of Francisco Varela’s work in The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 204–205. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge. Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (London: W. W. Norton, 1998), 66. It is no coincidence that Lacan refers this problem of desire to both neoplatonism (67) and mystical theology (76); where the problem that concerns Turner is that of creation, exitus, the emergence of multiplicity from the oneness of God, the problem that concerns Lacan is

‘Not peace but a sword’ 257 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

consummation, reditus, the return of multiplicity to the (fantasy of) oneness of perfect union with the (m)other. This move bears some parallels to the central argument of Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros (trans. Philip S. Watson (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953)) that agape and eros, love and desire, ought to be treated as two distinct notions, the former being properly Christian and the latter pagan. For Nygren, eros is primarily acquisitive whereas agape is generous and creative; although unlike Lacan he conceives of love as something which individuals receive from God and pass on to others (Agape and Eros, 725, 737). Lacan does in fact mention Nygren during his discussion of feminine jouissance as a philosopher who writes “on the subject of love”, suggesting that Nygren is “no stupider than anyone else”, though commenting that “Christianity naturally ended up inventing a God such that he is the one who gets off!” (Seminar XX, 75–76). Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 69. In John Milbank and Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (London: MIT, 2009), 244. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus II: Writings on Sexuality, translated by Anne O’Byrne (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 17. Matthew 10:34–36 (NRSV). From Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, quoted in Monstrosity of Christ, 39. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 359 Less Than Nothing, 359. Less than Nothing, 361–362.

Index

active spirituality, Eckhart’s 80 Aelred of Rievaulx: approach by current study 5; biblical interpretation in On Jesus at the Age of Twelve 52 agency, attention and 8 Ages of God 32 Akedah (binding of Isaac) 8, 198, 202, 204, 206 ‘alterity’, concept of 77, 78 ancestry see genealogy Angelus Silesius 167 antinomianism and negative theology 81 apophaticism: approach by current study 1, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10; Augustine’s 189; cataphaticism and 10, 74, 120, 125, 168; as challenge to religious formalism 82; Derrida’s understanding of 74, 76; Dionysian see Dionysian apophaticism; ‘formal apophaticism’ 168; modern interpretations of 82; negation of 71; process of 189; revelation and 91; subversive nature of 81 Aristotle, Plato and 101, 138 atheism: apophaticism and 83; and ‘death of God’ 47, 48; Heidegger and 131; immanence without 231 attention: agency and 8; approach by current study 8; freedom of total attention 186; intended attention 188; to interiority 198; and paradox of intention 185; paying attention 181 Augustine of Hippo: apophaticism 189; approach by current study 3, 6; Eckhart and 238; education, concept of 189; Heidegger and 131; Marion’s reading of 111, 118, 121, 125; on metaphysical questioning 121; on metaphysics 118; Plato and 189; on transcendence 78 authorial intention 64

becoming, Platonic dimensions of 217 being: equality of 225, 226, 228, 232; exteriority and 96; Hegel on 102; hierarchy of 248; love and 114; and self-understanding 63 beyond being (hyperousious): God as 36, 72, 74, 124, 232; necessity and 96; non-being as 6, 71, 79, 97; and other to being 76 biblical interpretation in Aelred’s On Jesus at the Age of Twelve 52 Boehme, Jakob: Hegel and 40; Luria and 33; syncretic theosophy 5 cataphaticism: apophaticism and 3, 10, 74, 120, 125, 168; and double negation 170; metaphysics and 124, 125; and monastic contemplation 51; and negative theology 167 causation, freedom and 252 Christian kabbalah: and German Idealism 5; Hegel and 32, 42; Luria and 32; Neoplatonism and 32; Schelling and 42; Scholem on 32, 35 Christian Neoplatonism: absolute simplicity of God 246; Dionysian 245, 251; limitations of 246, 249; problem of creation 251 church hierarchy 246, 249 contemplative prayer: and active spirituality 80; apophaticism and 8, 197, 198, 212; cataphaticism and 51; discipline of 189; medieval monastic tradition 5; and otherness of God 202; secrecy and 212; silence of 202 continental philosophy: anti-universalism 81; concept 1; current study content 2; current study main themes 3; current study scope 3; and mystical theology 1, 10

Index 259 contingency, exteriority and 96 ‘contingent necessity’ 106 ‘convergence’ of language 22, 23 cosmology: and mystical texts 23; Platonic 97 creation, freedom of the 95, 104 cultural products, mystical texts as 15 Cusanus, Nicolaus see Nicholas of Cusa death as counterfeit freedom 105 ‘death of God’ philosophy: atheism and 47, 48; Hegel and 34, 35; Tsimtsum and 5 death of the world, exteriority of 103 deconstructionism: approach by current study 5; denegation of 76; and Dionysian apophaticism 5, 71 Deleuze, Gilles: approach by current study 3, 9; on Eckhart 234; on immanence and transcendence 100, 231, 236, 240; on logic of the infinite 217; on Spinoza 34, 35, 233, 241; on universalism 81 Derrida, Jacques: apophatic criticism of 76; approach by current study 5; negative theology 5, 71, 76, 124, 207 Descartes 9, 115, 240, 250 desire see love determinism, Marxist 95 differentiation without hierarchy 237 Dionysian apophaticism: approach by current study; deconstructionism and 5, 71; Derrida’s understanding of 81; hierarchy, concept of 83; and institutional religion 82; ’negative way” interpretation of 81 Dionysius: apophaticism see Dionysian apophaticism; approach by current study 5, 9; Divine Names, The 6, 71, 72, 77; and John of the Cross 210; and Julian of Norwich 173; Mystical Theology, The 6, 71, 246; negative theology 6, 118, 124; Neoplatonism 9, 80, 245, 249; Plotinus and 72; spiral of theology 173; Žižek and 245, 250, 255 divine see God Divine Names, The (Dionysius) 6, 71, 72, 77 double negation, cataphaticism and 170 Duns Scotus: Heidegger’s thesis on 132; Luria and 34 Eastern Orthodoxy 6, 91, 95, 99, 101, 104, 106, 200, 249 ecclesiastical hierarchy 246, 249

Eckhart von Hochheim see Meister Eckhart education: attention and 8; Augustine’s concept of 189 equality: of being 225, 226, 228, 232; gender and 83; generation of 226; with God 221, 222, 228, 237; hierarchy and 83, 225, 232; maximum equality 224, 225; ontology and 228, 236, 241; unity and 225 eros see love eschatology: ethical mission of 103; finitude and 99, 100, 104; mysticism and 59; revelation and 93; of theosis 104 ethics, freedom and 105 exteriority: being and 96; contingency and 96; of death of the world 103; interiority and 84, 197, 198, 200, 204, 212; and mystical theology 199; necessity as 96; ontology and 101; and otherness of God 78 face-to-face see interfacial relation (faceto-face) faith and religious power 143 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard) 8, 198, 201, 205 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas von 117 finitude: eschatology and 99, 100, 104; infinity and 47, 118, 124, 226; metaphysics of 4, 32, 34, 36 freedom: causation and 252; and Christian Neoplatonism 246, 247; of the creation 95, 104; death as counterfeit 105; Dionysius’ theory of 247; divine 41, 79, 81, 113; eros and 9; ethics and 105; history and 45; human 79, 81, 104, 106, 188, 252; immanence and 232; love and 9, 252; modernity and 235; necessity and 92, 252; philosophy and 234; prayer and 207; Schelling’s essay on 33, 43; of the self 206; total 187; of total attention 186; of will 79, 81, 106; Žižek’s theory of 252 gender, hierarchy and equality 83 genealogy: of immanence 235; patriarchal 9; rejection of 254; rewriting of 251; theology and 245, 248, 255 German Idealism: Christian kabbalah and 5; Hegel and 33; Luria and 32; Scholem on 32 gnostic flight from materiality 212 Gnostic theology, Hegel and 35

260 Index God: as actor 80; Ages of 32; angry 40; attention on 201; as beyond being 36, 72, 74, 124, 232; ‘death of God’ philosophy 5, 34, 35, 47, 48; equality with 221, 222, 228, 237; eye of 79; freedom of 41, 79, 81, 113; indistinct identity between human and divine 79; infinity of 221, 228; inner relation to 8; intention of 39; intimacy with 79, 134, 199, 202; jealous 40; kenotic self-effacement 38; and love 1; and modernity 4; the One, concept of 72, 75; otherness of 78, 79, 202; presence of 10, 16, 79; as rational intellect 79; self-withdrawal 38; simplicity of the One, concept of 247; and theology 3; transcendence 78; union with 79; wrathful 40 Hadewijch 1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: and Angelus Silesius 167; approach by current study 3; on being 102; Boehme and 40; and Christian kabbalah 32, 42; ‘death of God’ philosophy 5, 34, 35; Feuerbach and 117; German Idealism 33; and Gnostic theology 35; Heidegger and 134, 138, 142, 172; Kant and 142; Luria and 33, 34, 43; on otherness 205; phenomenology 33, 41, 42, 46; on questioning 147; Schelling and 32, 33, 34, 41, 43, 134; Spinoza and 34; Tsimtsum 5, 34, 39, 43; Žižek and 45, 250, 252 Heidegger, Martin: approach by current study 6; and atheism 131; on attention 179; Augustine and 131; Habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus text 132; Hegel and 134, 138, 142, 172; lectures on medieval mysticism 135; Levinas and 164; mysticism 7; phenomenology 7, 114, 131, 180; ‘principle of reason, The’ (Satz vom Grund, Der) 7, 152, 164, 165, 168; on questioning 147 hermeneutics and monastic contemplation 5 hidden see secret hierarchy: of being 248; differentiation without 237; ecclesiastical 246, 249; equality and 83, 225, 232; gender and 83; and mystical theology 198; ontological 222, 223, 224; philosophy and 234 history, freedom and 45 Hugh of St Victor 5, 54, 65

human freedom 79, 81, 104, 106, 188, 206, 252 hyper-communication: approach by current study 3, 4; intimacy of 29; structure of 13 hyperousious see beyond being immanence: Eckhart’s 234; freedom and 232; genealogy of 235; Laruelle on 240; Levinas on 232, 233, 240; and negative theology 232; nonphilosophical 231, 239; philosophy and 231; transcendence and 9, 100, 231, 236, 240; without secularization 231 importance of the negative 5, 33 Infinite, the see God infinity: finitude and 47, 118, 124, 226; of God 221, 228; and maximum equality 224; paradox and 9, 218, 228 intention: of attention 188; authorial 64; God’s 39; paradox of 185; of questioning 149; self-withdrawal 40 interfacial relation: intimacy and 17, 24, 28; science and 17 interiority: affirmation of 198; attention on God 201; attention to 198; exteriority and 84, 197, 198, 200, 204, 212; importance of 8; intimacy and 199; philosophy and 231; pure 201; secret 198, 199, 201; silent 201 intimacy: contours of 13; with God 79, 134, 199, 202; of hypercommunication 29; interfacial (face-toface) 17, 24, 28; interiority and 199; of mystical texts 4, 13, 16, 22, 24; philosophy and 17; presence and 16; secret space of 199; silence and 202 jealousy of God 40 Jesus at the Age of Twelve, On (Aelred of Rievaulx) 52 John of the Cross: approach by current study 8; contemplative prayer 209; Dionysius and 210 Julian of Norwich: approach by current study 4; and Dionysius’ spiral of theology 173; Eckhart and 13, 28; language, use of 24; mystical texts 24 kabbalah see Christian kabbalah Kant, Imanuel: Descartes and 9, 240, 250; Hegel and 142; Neo-Kantianism 132, 133, 139, 144; and questioning 147, 159

Index 261 kenotic self-effacement 38 Kierkegaard, Søren: approach by current study 8; Fear and Trembling 8, 198, 201, 205; Philosophical Fragments 9, 218, 219 language: ‘convergence’ 22, 23; Eckhart’s use of 26; history of 19; Julian of Norwich’s use of 24; linguistic consciousness, origin of 20; materiality and 19, 27; modism and 164, 167, 168, 173; and mystical texts 22; Platonic theory of 53; reality and 168; speculative grammar 7, 164, 165, 171, 173 Laruelle, François: approach by current study 3, 9; on immanence 240; and Marxist determinism 95; on transcendence 102 ‘Learned Ignorance, On’ (Nicholas of Cusa) 9, 72, 218, 223, 225 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, principle of reason 7, 8 Levinas, Emmanuel: ‘alterity’ 77, 78; approach by current study 8; on God’s self-withdrawal 38; Heidegger and 164; on immanence and transcendence 232, 233, 240; metaphysics 125; ‘ontologism’ 44 linguistic consciousness, origin of 20 logic of ideas 5, 24 love: apophaticism and 10; being and 114; freedom and 252; God and 1; materiality and 9, 248; and mystical theology 9; ontology and 1, 10; Platonic model of 73, 75, 246; Žižek on 252 Luria, Isaac: approach by current study 3, 4; on being 44, 45; Boehme and 33; and Duns Scotus 34; and German Idealism 32; Hegel and 33, 34, 43; kabbalism 32; Scholem and 32, 36, 38, 44, 45; Tsimtsum 5, 34, 36 Marion, Jean-Luc: approach by current study 6; on Augustine 111, 118, 121, 125; on Augustine and metaphysics 118; love and ontology 1; phenomenology 111, 116, 118 Marxist determinism, Laruelle and 95 materiality: Dionysius’ theory of 248; gnostic flight from 212; incompleteness of 251; language and 19, 27; love and 9, 248; and non-all, principle of 252, 253; nothingness and 251; otherness of

42; transubstantiation of 212; Žižek’s theory of 253 maximum equality 224, 225 Meister Eckhart: approach by current study 6; on attention 179; Augustine and 238; on the eye of God 79; on immanence 234; and Julian of Norwich 13, 28; language, use of 26; mystical texts 24; Neoplatonism 236; principium, concept of 7; on questioning 147; on union with God 79 metaphysics: apophaticism and 6, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 99, 103, 116; approach by current study 6; Augustine and 6, 112, 118, 119, 120, 121; being and 101; cataphaticism and 124, 125; deconstruction of 74; Dionysius and 6, 250; Eckhart’s 84; of finitude 4, 32, 34, 36; Heidegger and 16, 164; Levinas and 125; limitations of 112; love and 10; Marion and 6; of modality 92, 97; modernity and 40, 48; and negative theology 111; and Neoplatonic Christianity 250; ontology and 93, 98, 105, 111; phenomenology and 6, 112, 124; philosophy and 100; questioning and 121; religion and 141; universalism and 81; Žižek and 10 modernity: freedom and 235; God and 4; mysticism and 141; and ‘New Age’ 5, 38 modism: language and 164, 167, 168, 173; and principle of reason 7, 173, 174; speculative grammar 165 monastic contemplation see contemplative prayer mystical texts: approach by current study 4; biblical interpretation in Aelred’s On Jesus at the Age of Twelve 52; cosmology and 23; as cultural products 15; intimacy of 4, 13, 16, 22, 24; language and 22; linguistic ‘convergence’ 22, 23; modern reading of 5, 16, 82, 139; readership 15 mystical theology: continental philosophy and 1, 10; current study content 2; current study main themes 3; current study scope 3 Mystical Theology, The (Dionysius) 6, 71, 246 mysticism: eschatology and 59; of Heidegger 7; Heidegger’s lectures on 135; key concepts of 139; modernity and 141; phenomenological approach to 135; phenomenology and 131; and self-understanding 15

262 Index necessity: and beyond being (hyperousious) 96; as exteriority 96; freedom and 92, 252; Plato and 97, 99; Žižek on 252 negative see importance of the negative negative theology: antinomianism and 81; apophaticism and 72, 76, 207; beyond being (hyperousious) 74; cataphaticism and 167; Derrida’s interpretation of 5, 71, 76, 124, 207; Dionysian 6, 118, 124; double negation 170; hierarchical 238; immanence and 232; metaphysics and 111; Neoplatonism and 75; and political theology 81; and secret something 72; transcendence and 5, 238 Neo-Kantianism 132, 133, 139, 144 Neoplatonism: beyond being (hyperousious) 71; Christian 245, 246, 249, 251; and Christian kabbalah 32, 40; ‘creative mistake’ of 75; of Cusa 218, 223, 225; Dionysian 9, 80, 245, 249, 251; Eckhart and 236; emanation, doctrine of 32, 34, 39; limitations of 246; model of love 73; and negative theology 36, 75; the One, concept of 72, 75, 77; pantheism and 36; simplicity of the One, concept of 247 ‘New Age’ (nova era): modernity 5, 38; of the Spirit (die Neuzeit) 32; Tsimtsum and 36 Nicholas of Cusa: approach by current study 3; ‘Learned Ignorance, On’ 9, 72, 218, 223, 225; Neoplatonism of 218, 223, 225 non-all, principle of 252, 253 non-being as beyond being 6, 71, 79, 97 nothingness, materiality and 251 Oetinger, Friedrich Christoph 5, 32, 33, 34, 40 One, The see God ‘ontologism’, concept of 44 ontology: apophaticism and 92; eros and 10; exteriority and 101; hierarchy and 222, 223, 224; love and 1; questioning and 7 Orthodoxy see Eastern Orthodoxy other to being, and beyond being 76 otherness: of God 78, 79; Hegel on 205; of materiality 42; self and 204 paradox: Deleuzian notion of 9; infinity 228; infinity and 218; of intention 185 patriarchal genealogy 9

phenomenology: Hegel’s 33, 41, 42, 46; Heidegger’s 7, 114, 131, 180; Marion’s 111, 116, 118; metaphysics and 6, 112, 124; mysticism and 131, 135; of silence 181 Philosophical Fragments (Kierkegaard) 9, 218, 219 philosophy: continental see continental philosophy; freedom and 234; hierarchy and 234; immanence and 231; interiority and 231; intimacy and 17; theology and 9; theosophy and 5 Plato: Aristotle and 101, 138; Augustine and 189; becoming, dimensions of 217; cosmology 97; model of love 73, 75, 246; and mysticism 60; and necessity 97, 99; and negative theology 74; Neoplatonism see Neoplatonism; Plotinus and 73, 76; and questioning 157; simplicity of the One, concept of 247; theory of language 53 Plotinus: Dionysius and 72; One, The 75; Plato and 73, 76 political theology and negative theology 81 positive transcendence 5, 74 prayer: apophaticism and 197; approach by current study 8; contemplative see contemplative prayer; freedom and 207; secret 200, 207, 212 presence: fullness of 16; of God 10, 16; intimacy and 16 principle of reason (principium) (Eckhart): apophaticism and 167; approach by current study 7; Heidegger and 165, 169; principium, concept of 7, 165, 166 ‘Principle of Reason, The’ (Satz vom Grund, Der) (Heidegger): approach by current study 7; Eckhart and 164, 169; key insight in 165; language and reality in relation 168; publication of 152; spiral-vortex metaphor 173 principle of sufficient reason (principium sufficientis rationis) (Leibniz) 152 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite see Dionysius questioning: Hegel on 147; intention of 149; metaphysics and 121; ontology and 7; Plato on 157 reading see mystical texts reality: language and 168 reason, principle of see principle of reason

Index 263 religious power: challenge to 82; faith and 143 religious renewal, apophaticism and 82 revelation: apophaticism and 6, 91; eschatology and 93 Satz vom Grund, Der see ‘principle of reason, The’ Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von: approach by current study 4; Christian kabbalah 42; essay on freedom 33, 43; Hegel and 32, 33, 34, 41, 43, 134; Tsimtsum 5, 40, 43 Scholem, Gershom: approach by current study 5; on German Idealism 32; on kabbalistic thought 32, 35; Luria and 32, 36, 38, 44, 45; on Tsimtsum 39 secret: approach by current study 8; interiority 198, 199, 201; mystical theology and 198; prayer 200, 207, 212; silence and 197; space of intimacy 199 secularism see atheism self: apophatic 197, 207; freedom of 206; other and 204 self-effacement: God’s 38; of intention 40 self-understanding: being and 63; implicit and explicit 23; mysticism and 15 self-withdrawal by God 38 sexuality see gender silence: approach by current study 8; breaking of 201; of contemplative prayer 202; interiority and 201; intimacy and 202; and mystical theology 197; mysticism and 198; phenomenology of 181; prayer and 200; secret and 197 simplicity of the One, concept of 247 speculative grammar 7, 164, 165, 171, 173 Spinoza, Baruch 34, 35, 233, 241 sublation 5, 33, 34, 225, 227 Sufficient reason, principle of see principle of reason syncreticism, theosophy and 5

Teresa of Ávila: approach by current study 8; contemplative prayer 209 theology: genealogy and 245, 248, 255; God and 3; negative see negative theology; philosophy and 9; political see political theology theosis, eschatology of 104 theosophy: philosophy and 5; syncreticism and 5 Thomas of Erfurt: modism 7, 8, 165; speculative grammar 7, 173 totality: of attention 186; of freedom 187; transcendence and 100 transcendence: immanence and 9, 100, 231, 236, 240; Laruelle on 102; Levinas on 232, 233, 240; and negative theology 5, 238; totality and 100 transubstantiation of materiality 212 Tsimtsum/Tzimtzum: concept of 5; and ‘death of God’ philosophy 5; and God’s self-withdrawal 38; Hegel and 34, 39; and kenotic self-effacement 38; Lurianic 5, 34, 36, 38; and ‘New Age’ 36; Schelling and 40; Scholem on 39 unity, equality and 225 universalism: anti-universalism 81; Dionysius’ theory of 249; diversity and 81; love and 9; metaphysics and 81; separation and 253; Westernisation and 82; Žižek’s theory of 253 will, freedom of 79, 81, 106 Žižek, Slavoj: approach by current study 3, 9; on ‘contingent necessity’ 106; Dionysius and 245, 250, 255; on freedom 252; Hegel and 45, 250, 252; on love 252; on materiality 253; on necessity 252; on universalism 253

Taylor & Francis eBooks Helping you to choose the right eBooks for your Library Add Routledge titles to your library's digital collection today. Taylor and Francis ebooks contains over 50,000 titles in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Behavioural Sciences, Built Environment and Law. Choose from a range of subject packages or create your own! Benefits for you

Benefits for your user

Free MARC records COUNTER-compliant usage statistics Flexible purchase and pricing options All titles DRM-free.

df b k b k b kb k b bk k

Free Trials Available We offer free trials to qualifying

academic, corporate and government customers.

Off-site, anytime access via Athens or referring URL Print or copy pages or chapters Full content search Bookmark, highlight and annotate text Access to thousands of pages of quality research at the click of a button.

eCollections - Choose from over 30 subject eColiections, including: Archaeology

Language Learning

Architecture

Law

ASian Studies

Literature

Business I:< Management

Media I:< CommUnication

Classical Studies Construction

Middle East Studies

Creative I:< Media Arts

Philosophy

Criminology I:< Criminal Justice

Planning

Economics

Politics

MusIc

Education

Psychology I:< Mental Health

Energy

Religion

Engineering English Language I:< Linguistics

Security

Environment I:< Sustalnabllity

Sociology

Social Work

Geography

Sport

Health Studies

Theatre I:< Performance

History

TOUrism, Hospitality I:< Events

For more information, pricing enquiries or to order a free trial, please contact your local sales team: www.tandfebooks.com/page/sales Routledge T,yloc&F"omGwup

The home of I Routiedge books

www.taneoos.com