Gillian Rose – I prefer another Angel

In Walter Benjamin – Out of the Sources of Modern Judaism, Gillian Rose’s wonders if we might be inclined to follow Klee’s Angelus Dubiosus rather than Benjamin’s preference for the Angelus Novus.

 

 

The contrast between the two images is striking. As Rose asks, do we seek to aberrate mourning or do we inaugurate true mourning; do we rest easy in endless deferment and never quite arriving hope, our do we stake our solace in our transformation and the fact that our hunger, desire and eros presuppose satiation? Anything less, as Rose concludes, is sever eros from logos, which has become the driving characteristic of postmodern philosophy.

Summarizing Benjamin’s use of Klee’s Angelus Novus, Rose states:

In philosophical terms, I would argue, Benjamin only knew the dialectical image as a lightning flash, ‘the Then… held fast’, in the Now of recognizably. The rescue that is thus – and only thus – effected, can only take place for that which, in the next moment, is irretrievably lost. It is this unequivocal refusal of any dynamic of mutual recognition and struggle which keeps Benjamin’s thinking restricted to the stasis of desertion, aberrated mourning, and the yearning for invisible, divine violence… Unable to praise God, this is Klee’s traumatized Angel, who appears in the ninth thesis – the New Angel. Propelled backwards into the future by a storm from Paradise, he cannot stay and he cannot dissolve, but must impotently watch in horror the single catastrophe of History, the internal raging caused by the same paradisiacal storm, as it piles up its debris at his feet.

I prefer another angel of Klee’s, Angelus Dubiosus. With voluminous, blue, billowing and enfolding wings in which square eyeholes are cut for the expanse of rotund, taupe flesh to gaze through, this molelike angel appears unguarded rather than intent, grounded and slack rather than backing up and away in rigid horror. To me, this dubious angel suggests the humorous witness who must endure (209).

Rose phrase, “the stasis of desertion” seems so very important. It’s tempting to rest easy in endless deferment, to be ever clearing your throat but never saying anything. Such “aberrated mourning” is indeed static, it doesn’t do anything but cast the bereaved back upon the absence of death and back upon finitude that only finds meaning in “feeling” as reason is barred.[1] It misses the dynamic of the Angelus Dubiosus, the hope of the heavenly banquet that is intimated here and now with each paschal sacrifice.

 

 

And there’s more. Rose’s Angel represents a humdrum hope of the simple garden variety. It does not mirror an ethics in extremis nor tend toward abstraction, but is characterized by bathos.[2] “It appears commonplace, pedestrian, bulky and grounded – even though, mirabile dictu, there are no grounds and no ground,” writes Rose (10). It is not beyond reason, nor beyond metaphysics, but firmly entrenched within – eros and logos together. For Rose then, hunger is not perpetual deferral, but the transformative energia of God. Our task then is to “break the hard heart of subjective judgment; to soften the rigid stare of the Angelus Novus, the angel of history” (182).

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[1] Perhaps Rose is picking up on Hegel’s description of “Protestant grief” in Faith and Knowledge. “God is something incomprehensible and unthinkable. Knowledge knows nothing save that it knows nothing; it must take refuge in faith. All of them agree that, as the old distinction put it, the Absolute is no more against Reason than it is for it; it is beyond Reason.” Religion characterized thus for Hegel “ builds its temples and altars in the heart of the individual. In sighs and prayers he seeks for the God whom he denies to himself in intuition, because of the risk that the intellect will cognize what is intuited as a mere thing, reducing the sacred grove to mere timber.”

[2] Ethics in extremis “irrupts into the political arena, but it does not fundamentally transform it. The political tends naturally to the uniform and degenerate, and the most ethics would appear capable of is to shake it up from time to time. One might contrast this with a socialist or feminist morality, for which political change is the ground of transformed ethical relations between individuals. Such politics on this view is not simply a superaddition to existing modes of political existence. Far from being an outside intervention into the polis, it is a specific way of describing it.” Terry Eagleton, The Trouble with Strangers, 244.

 

Milbank on Divine Passibility

H/T to winged keel and crumpet for sharing John Milbank’s Encyclopedia of Christian Theology entry on Divine Impassibility.

What stands out in Milbank’s critique is that “christologies of kenosis” distort the Christian message “into sickly celebration of sacrifice and weakness,” and represent a downright refusal to engage Nietzsche’s poignant critique of such theologies.  What’s more, Milbank’s attack on those who want to move beyond metaphysics into a suffering God end up valorizing suffering for suffering’s sake and make a virtue of disempowerment or dispossession, which implies that one had power to begin with. But for those truly undergoing suffering does such a God make sense, and what virtue is there in suffering when one’s entire life is made up of suffering?

At first sight, one might think that theologies of a compassionate or essentially historical God, and christologies of kenosis, in which the Logos loses its character as God, free the biblical vision from the shackles of metaphysics. What one sees instead is surrender to secular categories, for all these constructions assume the prime reality of evolution and the idea of progress through struggle and sacrifice. The ideas of an original perfection of creation and of the Fall (original sin) recede into the background, and a human experience is idolatrously projected upon God and made absolute. Mozley cites the Anglican Storr, for example: “He God enters into creation, experiences the struggle, feels the pain of the whole of His creation. He does so because it is love’s nature to go out of itself in self-sacrifice.” God comes to be regarded as worthy of love and worship simply because he is involved in the same struggle as human beings and has played a supremely heroic part in it. These theories have had two consequences. First, the idea that redemption involves a transformation of our mortal condition is lost sight of; instead, purely human goals—the struggle of mankind for the future and the quest for the perfect city—are made absolute. Second, the nature of redemptive suffering is misconstrued, for where suffering is eternally inevitable (as in the common 19th-century idea of “a cross always in the heart of God”) and sacrifice is held to be the essence of virtue (virtues), the evil occasion of suffering is secretly celebrated as the occasion for heroism (Mozley). The truth is that suffering is only redemptive when embraced (if necessary) in order to manifest a free self-bestowing gift prior to all evil, such that to suffer is to continue to give in dire circumstances, rather than to prove oneself “virtuous.”

The reaction against the idea of impassibility therefore risked distorting Christianity into a sickly celebration of sacrifice and weakness. Given this development, Nietzsche’s reaction was salutary; and yet his lesson has scarcely been learned by much 20th-century theology.

John Milbank, “Immutability/Impassibility, Divine” in Jean-Yves Lacoste’s Encyclopedia of Christian Theology, 762.

Apocalyptic and the Jewish Psalter

Buried within Evelyn Underhill’s Worship lies an interesting gloss on the relationship between the Christ event as absolute rupture and its abiding connection to history. According to Underhill, the ritual enactment of the Jewish Psalter forms the basis for a proper understanding of apocalyptic. Christianity brought something absolutely new into the world, yet paradoxically did so on the basis of what came before.

The Jewish Psalter became the first hymn-book of the Church, and still remains the backbone of its ordered daily worship: the reading and expounding of the Old Testament, stressing the historical character of the Christian revelation, as from the beginning a vital part of the ministry of the Word. Thus Christian worship, though from one point of view it was indeed a “new song”, from another accepts and completes the devotion of the synagogue, and shows forth in its fullness the spiritual mystery towards which the sacrifices of the Temple looked. Here as elsewhere the revelation of God, breaking in upon history, accepts and clothes itself in historical forms (194).

For Underhill, there is no reason to cast an either/or between historical continuity and the absolutely new. The unique characteristic of Hebraic poetry, symbolism and Temple imagery is to hold together the new and the old, to “carry forward the gifts of the past” (215). Underhill convincingly shows that this principle is operative throughout the entire New Testament corpus.

But more than simply forming a conceptual link between the new and the old, the liturgical rite of the Psalms have abiding significant here and now. As Jesus knew and prayed the Psalms and as the God of Israel was being formed in him, so too are we to know and pray the Psalms, letting Christ be formed in us. The Psalms provide a sacramental window into “the depth and breadth and height of the devotional landscape within which the historic incarnation took place, for it is the gate which admits us to the inner world of Israel’s spiritual experience: the world into which Jesus was born, and in which the real preparation of the Gospel was made” (215). In this sense the Psalms cast us back into history and in the selfsame act back into the Christ. As Underhill so beautifully expresses, the Psalms give voice to “the broken middle.”

If, therefore, our worship is true to the totality of its Judeo-Christian inheritance, it will not be all bright and clear, thin in color, humanistic and this-world in feeling. It will retain the ancient sense of cloud and darkness, otherworldly fire and light, which still lives in the Psalter; the awe before sacred mystery which is with us yet never of us, the deep sense of imperfection, and above all the unconquerable trust and the adoring love for a God who has set His glory above the heavens and yet is mindful of the children of men” (216). 

Christianity and the Social

John Milbank discusses the need for reinvigorating our theological sense of sociality and the reality of a common life. As it stands today, the absence of an ethical economy – mediated through church, synagogue, mosque, union, guild, professional organization, etc. – has left us with “just a big pile of numbers.” According to Milbank,

Belief in the “invisible hand” – as the only remaining economic and social bond – has left us with both rampant individualism and excessive abstraction. And if we go on denying that we have anything concrete in common, then the common good will be reduced to an increasingly unreal idea of wealth – just a big pile of numbers, with most of us assigned very few of them. But now that egotism and virtuality have stopped delivering the economic goods, we are realizing that even capitalism needed more cooperation and reciprocity than liberals have believed.

If you don’t trust your colleagues within your own firm or bank, then a kind of anarchy ensues. To contain the anarchy, we have imposed a form of top-down impersonal management – the sort that kills cooperation, tacit interactive processes and creativity. And so what we are now seeing is rampant de-professionalization, the abolition of any true sense of vocation.

Working people have, of course, faced this for centuries: their guilds, self-regulating bodies and the ownership of their own means of production, homes and workplaces, along with the right to organize their own time and labor, were removed long ago. But now this de-professionalization, this removal of self-regulation and an ethical ethos governing work is hitting the middle classes as well.

Friday Fun: Catholic vs. Protestant Heaven

Some Friday fun, tinged with a bit of Milbank.

But surely, in the case of Christianity, the more authentically ‘Catholic’ reality is the blend of the very sophisticated with the very popular – omitting the half-baked ‘bourgeois’ mode of positivistic piety.

John Milbank, “A Closer Walk on the Wild Side: Some Comments on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age,” Studies in Christian Ethics, 98.

Julian of Norwich: “it seemed to be all God”

Denys Turner mounts  a defense of Julian Norwich’s notion that between God and our essential being there is no difference. He also provides a helpful gloss on how we conceptualize this distinction or the lack thereof.

Julian writes,

And I saw no difference between God and our essential being, it seemed to be all God, and yet my understanding took it that our essential being is in God: that is to say that God is God, and our essential being is a creation within God; for the almighty truth of the Trinity is our father, he who made us and keeps us within him; and the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our mother, in whom we are all enclosed; and the great goodness of the Trinity is our lord and in him we are enclosed and he in us (LT, 54).

Julian concludes this section by stating “it is no less than a right understanding with true belief and sure trust of what we cannot see, that in our essence we are in God, and God in us.” As Turner explains, much hinges on what Julian means by our ability to see or not see the distinction between God and the soul.

Julian is quite right: the distinction between creature and Creator is impossible to see. But this is not because the distinction does not exist. On the contrary, it is because it is too absolute, too total, for our minds to grasp. Our minds can take hold only of finite distinctions that obtain between things that differ in this or that respect. I can literally see the difference between red and green because they differ as colors do. I can see, in the sense that I can conceptualize, the distinction between what it is for something to be red and for something to be circular because they differ as colors and shapes do. Differences can be discerned only against shared backgrounds in the manner that colors and shapes differ as characterizations of surfaces. But we cannot discern in that way the difference between God and creature, not because that difference is reduced to zero, but because it is maximized to an infinite degree, that is to say, because there is not and cannot be any common background between God and creatures against which their distinction can be measured. The phrase “infinite degree” makes the point. “Infinite degree” is an oxymoron: infinity is not a “degree” at one end of a continuum occupied at the other end by the finite. To be on a continuum of any kind is to be finite. The infinite is off every posible scale (whether of comparison or contrast) with the finite… 

[Julian] can insist that the distinction between God and our substance is imperceptible, because God and our substance do not and cannot differ as kinds of things differ, since God is not a being of any kind, cannot belong to any species. Julian can say that in our substance we are all that God is, for we are as creatures all that God is as Creator, that is, in our substance we are not distinguishable from God – except infinitely (179-80). 

 

 

 

 

Holy Saturday: “the real image of our human condition”

Alexander Schmemann writes about the oft-neglected day of Holy Saturday, a day where the sorrow of Good Friday is not simply replaced by Easter, but transformed.

The “Great and Holy Sabbath” is the day which connects Good Friday, the commemoration of the Cross, with the day of Christ’s Resurrection. To many the real nature and meaning of this “connection,” the very necessity of this “middle day,” remains obscure. For a good majority of churchgoers, the “important” days of Holy Week are Friday and Sunday, the Cross and the Resurrection. These two days, however, remain somehow “disconnected.” There is a day of sorrow, and then, there is the day of joy. In this sequence, sorrow is simply replaced by joy . . . But according to the teaching of the Church, expressed in her liturgical tradition, the nature of this sequence is not that of a simple replacement. The Church proclaims that Christ has “trampled death by death.” It means that even before the Resurrection, an event takes place in which the sorrow is not simply replaced by joy, but is itself transformed into joy. Great Saturday is precisely this day of transformation, the day when victory grows from inside the defeat, when before the Resurrection, we are given to contemplate the death of death itself… all this is expressed, and even more, all this really takes place every year in this marvellous morning service, in this liturgical commemoration which becomes for us a saving and transforming present…

Christ rose again from the dead, His Resurrection we will celebrate on Easter Day. This celebration, however, commemorates a unique event of the past, and anticipates a mystery of the future. It is already His Resurrection, but not yet ours. We will have to die, to accept the dying, the separation, the destruction. Our reality in this world, in this “aeon,” is the reality of the Great Saturday; this day is the real image of our human condition. We believe in the Resurrection, because Christ has risen from the dead. We expect the Resurrection. We know that Christ’s death is no longer the hopeless, the ultimate end of everything. Baptized into His death, we partake already of His life that came out of the grave. We receive His Body and Blood which are the food of immortality. We have in ourselves the token, the anticipation of the eternal life. All our Christian existence is measured by these acts of communion to the life of the “new eon” of the Kingdom, and yet we are here, and death is our inescapable share.

But this life between the Resurrection of Christ and the day of the common resurrection, is it not precisely the life in the Great Saturday? Is not expectation the basic and essential category of Christian experience? We wait in love, hope and faith. And this waiting for “the resurrection and the life of the world to come,” this life which is “hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:34), this growth of expectation in love, in certitude; all this is our own “Great Saturday.” Little by little everything in this world becomes transparent to the light that comes from there, the “image of this world” passes by and this indestructible life with Christ becomes our supreme and ultimate value.

Every year, on Great Saturday, after this morning service, we wait for the Easter night and the fullness of Paschal joy. We know that they are approaching — and yet, how slow is this approach, how long is this day! But is not the wonderful quiet of Great Saturday the symbol of our very life in this world? Are we not always in this “middle day,” waiting for the Pascha of Christ, preparing ourselves for the day without evening of His Kingdom?

Herbert McCabe: Good Friday

If God will not forgive us until his Son has been tortured to death for us then God is a lot less forgiving than even we are sometimes.

Herbert McCabe, God Matters, 92

Rowan Williams: The Whole Easter Complex

Rowan Williams on why it’s critical to live into the whole “Easter complex.”

The pivotal event [of Christianity] is the whole of that Easter complex, if you like, not just the resurrection, which is why a realistic representation of the crucifixion on it’s own won’t say what has to be said. And curiously, along the history of the church, the way it’s been done in the church’s liturgy and art very often doesn’t seem very realistic in that sense.

You walk through the experience of Holy Week from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday in a sort of ritual way: picking up a bit of the gospels here, a bit of the prophets and the psalms there; performing certain ritual acts (in the Catholic tradition particularly); watching through the night; participating in a very curious and distinctive liturgy for Good Friday, with the bare cross being brought in and unveiled. All of that is an attempt to say what a mere recitation of the story, or a mere photograph, couldn’t say.

I remember years ago somebody saying to me that, given the choice between having a video of the Sermon on the Mount, and having half an hour with St Peter after his betrayal, he’d go for the latter because you would see in the complexities, the changes, the tensions, that Peter had undergone, something you wouldn’t see just on a video of the sermon – which would land you back in all the problems of what would you really see there, what would you really hear.

The liturgy is not an addendum to an otherwise pure, unmediated faith, but the very mode of encounter with the risen Christ. In not being “realistic,” Holy Week allows us to say “what has to be said.”

Surprised by Hegel

Sometimes it’s important to remember that theology needs to be “for and against” Hegel, especially when one comes across a beautiful passage like this.

We can tell those who assert the truth and certainty of the reality of sense-objects that they should go back to the most elementary school of wisdom, viz. the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus, and that they have still to learn the secret meaning of the eating of bread and the drinking of wine. For he who is initiated into these Mysteries not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it; in part he brings about the nothingness of such things himself in his dealings with them, and in part he sees them reduce themselves to nothingness. Even the animals are not shut out from this wisdom but, on the contrary, show themselves to be most profoundly initiated into it; for they do not just stand idly in front of sensuous things as if these possessed intrinsic being, but, despairing of their reality, and completely assured of their nothingness, they fall to without ceremony and eat them up. And all Nature, like the animals, celebrates these open Mysteries which teach the truth about sensuous things.

~ The Phenomenology of Spirit, 109.