The Deus absconditus and the postsecular quest.pdf

The Deus absconditus and the post-secular quest Amy Bentley Lamborn Seekings and soundings In the mid-20th century, in the years following the Second World War, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt described the modern world, plagued by doubt and deep uncertainly, as a spiritually secular world. Having fled twice from the Nazis and witnessed the horrors of the Second World War, Arendt was familiar with the doubt and uncertainty she described. Arendt rightly predicted that the problem of evil would become the most critical question of post-war Europe. And, like her fellow intellectuals who wrestled mightily with that critical question, she did so in the wake of God’s death; that is, following the announcement of the death of God by Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud.1 By the “death of God,” Arendt understood that a certain kind of deity had died— specifically, the God of the theologians and philosophers, entangled in complex and abstract metaphysical systems. In The Life of the Mind, Arendt wrote, “It may be wise to reflect upon what we really mean when we observe that theology, philosophy, and metaphysics have reached an end—certainly not that God has died, something we can know as little about as God’s existence . . . but that the way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing; if anything can be dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.”2 I begin with this extended reference to Arendt for two reasons. First, her words conjure up something of the spirit of the secularism which we must have in mind as we consider the meaning of the post-secular, a term that I will soon define more precisely. Second, Arendt’s understanding of the death of God resembles Jung’s explicitly 1 psychological and symbolic interpretation of the phrase. In his 1937 essay “Psychology and Religion,” Jung wrote: “(perhaps) we could say with Nietzsche that ‘God is dead.’ Yet it would be truer to say ‘He has put off our image, and where shall we find him again?’”3 Jung believed that God was still active as the Deus Absconditus, the hidden god, an unknown quality in the depths of psyche.4 Now, in this new millennium, the quest for the hidden God has become an urgent one among post-secular philosophers and theologians. While these thinkers have nuanced the term post-secularism in a variety of ways, there nonetheless remains a discernable definitional core. Post-secularism, in essence, attempts a double delimitation: of Enlightenment rationalism, including its preferential option for objectivity, on the one hand, and of Enlightenment secularism, including its suspicion of subjectivity and matters of faith or belief, on the other. Simply put, post-secularism seeks to combine a renewed interest in religious and spiritual matters with the practice of critical inquiry. So we are beginning to see fresh attempts to think God otherwise than the ways God has been traditionally been thought, beyond the ways that, for many, no longer convince.5 This post-secularist sensibility is evident, for example, in philosopher of religion Richard Kearney’s recent book, Anatheism. “What comes after God?” Kearney asks. “What follows in the wake of our letting go of God? What emerges out of that dark night of not-knowing, that moment of abandoning and abandonment? Especially for those who—after ridding themselves of ‘God’—still seek God?”6 Kearney advocates for a renewed quest for God after God—a quest that he describes as anatheistic: “Ana-theos, God after God. Ana-theism: another word for another way of seeking and sounding the things we consider sacred but can never fully fathom or prove. Another idiom for receiving back what we’ve given up as if we were encountering it for the first time.”7 2 In this essay I explore three interrelated seekings and soundings that mark the post-secular quest: the Open, the Other, and the Chora. Each of these themes, I suggest, images a topos, or place, for the hidden God. Each evokes a potential, phenomenological answer to the question of Jung’s where: “(God) has put off our image, and where shall we find him again?”8 My method, inspired by Jung, will be to stick as closely as possible to these images, insofar as I understand Jung’s guidance and given the constraints of time. My aim is to identify points of correspondence between these philosophical and theological images and images of depth psychological process and, thus, to begin to discern their symbolic potential. The Open Philosopher Charles Bigger has noted that following the death of God, “’what matters most’ . . . or, for that matter, anything mattering is in question.”9 So while the poets of the early nineteenth century celebrated the presence and movement of the Sacred as something that mattered, later poets “hollowed out a place seemingly beyond being where the yearning for the dead God could be expressed.” According to Bigger, this hollowing out process culminated in Rainer-Maria Rilke’s idea of the Open in the Seventh and Eighth Duino Elegies.10 We glimpse the Open in these oft-quoted lines, taken from the beginning of the Eighth Elegy: “With all its eyes, the animal sees/the open. Only our eyes are/as if reversed and set as traps/encircling it, all around its open exit.”11 It is difficult to say exactly what Rilke means by the Open, arguably the central image of the entire poetic cycle. Interpreters of the Elegies generally agree that the Open is an affective and ultimately ineffable concept. As David Oswald writes in the introduction to his 3 translation of the Elegies, “What Rilke means by the open . . . goes beyond words into non-interpreted experience, which can be approached through the images he uses. It is something that animals, lacking our kind of consciousness, can see; it resembles being in love without needing one’s lover . . . . It is a quality of consciousness that he is after, a quality of ‘being here,’ a state of relationship with this world, without being possessed by its performance.”12 Bigger describes this quality of consciousness as one in which the distinction between subjective and objective is overcome and a space is cleared for our letting-be of things rather than our constant appropriation of them.13 The Open thus images an encounter with things as they give themselves, without distortion. Using the terms of analytical psychology, we say that we glimpse this quality of consciousness, however ephemerally, whenever we withdraw our projections from the outer world and recognize them as part of our own inner experience. It is a process by which we build up a symbolic consciousness. So what can be said about the God who lies hidden in the Open? What does the Open offer the post-secular imagination in its quest for the God after God? Theologian Joseph O’Leary suggests that The Open has set off a “deconstructive ferment” in theological thinking.14 The God hidden in The Open is a God who dismantles and relativizes our overly fixed images of God. Such divine-deconstructive activity, as I see it, has a telos—a goal that can, itself, only be evoked by images. “If we empty out the inherited God languages of all delusory stabilities and identities,” O’Leary writes, “then that to which we reach out in using the word ‘God’ becomes a space of potentiating withdrawal.”15 What is potentiated in this empty, hollowed out space? Nothing less, it seems, than our encounters with an Other that resides beyond our projections; an Other 4 that transcends our categories of subjectivity and objectivity; an Other, that might escape our otherwise limiting gaze. The Other What do we see when we look upon the letting-be of things as they give themselves in the Open? Philosopher John Manoussakis claims that “we see the Other (or we become aware of ourselves as seen by the Other—for it is not so much that we see the Other; rather, it is the Other that shows itself through the World to us).”16 I think that the decisive point here has to do with the relationship between the “big O” Other and the world. In the post-secular imagination there has been a movement away from the notion of radical Otherness, as in Emmanuel Levinas; a movement away from the idea of an utterly remote and removed Other. The post-secular Other is making a return from beyond Being and Time, back down into the seemingly mundane world. For it is here, in the midst of everyday embodied life, where we meet with Otherness. According to Kearney, the Other appears to us through the accidental and anecdotal. And so he argues that we are bidden to “revisit the primordial sphere of the everyday sayings, expressions, presuppositions, beliefs, speech acts, convictions, faiths, and commitments”, for it is in this realm of our “primary speech” that we encounter the Other, vis-à-vis, or face to face.17 Whenever we see the extra-ordinary in the ordinary, transcendent and immanent, as categorical descriptors of Otherness, mix and mingle, re-arranging and re-positioning each other. This idea of Otherness resonates with fundamental notions of Jungian psychology. Following Jung’s translation of the alchemical imagination, we claim that 5 spirit is in matter, so matter matters. The ego can only build up its connection to the self in the midst of the matters of everyday life. The archetypal (transcendent) layers of psyche can only be reached through the personal (immanent) layers of psyche—all the particulars of embodied life, including the influences of family and culture. As Jungian analyst Roger Brooke puts it, the transformative moments and movements of individuation appear to be “. . . less the retreat of psychic life from one’s engagements with the world than the deliteralizing of these relations into metaphoric structures.”18 The process of individuation, Brooke claims, “does not evaporate incarnate reality but situates imaginal life.”19 What about the God who lies hidden in the Other? What might the Other of the post-secular imagination offer the quest for God after God? For most post-secular philosophers, the paradigmatic Other is God, a God “curled at the heart of quotidian existence.”20 Here God appears hidden in the face of the Other. And discerning the Other requires a symbolic, “as if” consciousness. For the face of the other both is and is not God. It is both the site of divine disclosure and always, also, a target for our projections. A symbolic, metaphorical consciousness is critical for the post-secular quest for God after God. “Metaphor,” Kearney observes, “involves a transportation (metaphora) between self and other. And as such the metaphorical as contains within itself a mixed copula of is/is not.”21 The metaphorical consciousness is a symbolic consciousness in which the fictive (as if) is sustained as the figural. And it is the figural that stands to save God from the literal, for in this place of paradoxical tension, faith leaps.22 The Chora 6 But what if the Other we encounter is faceless—more absent than a present . . . without form or name? Chora has appeared as a distinctly postmodern image of God—or another site for encountering this God, “in the far extremities of the via negative,” or way of negation.23 The God imaged in chora is the God of the abyss, the God we might meet up with in the abyss, the “abyssal” God, the God of the depths. Before considering several key postmodern musings on chora, we must recall the contours of what is perhaps its most significant pre-modern context. As a philosophical concept, chora first appeared in Plato’s Timaeus dialogue. There, Plato posits the possibility that the eternal and unchanging Forms and their Copies could not, on their own, exhaust the inventory of this world. And so he asks one of the most fundamental and perennial of all questions: what is the primordial origin of all that exists, of all things that come to be? After struggling to identify the conditions for the possibility of being, and a world of being, Plato argued for a third type, a triton genos, a category distinct from both Forms and Copies. Chora was the name Plato gave this elusive “third thing,” a mysterious placeless space that contains all being and becoming.24 Plato used a variety of images to describe this elusive chora, including mother, receptacle, nurse, space, a base material for the making of perfume, a country or region, and a winnowing sieve used in the bread-making process. Common to each of these associations is the idea of a vessel or matrix, that which contains the possibility of emergence and the actuality of becoming.25 But, despite his metaphorical generosity, Plato insisted that chora remain an untranslatable concept—a mysterious and ineffable thing—thus challenging our usual categories of reason and sense. Plato in fact argued that chora could only be properly apprehended through a dream-like state of consciousness, a kind of fantasy thinking or 7 reverie. This elusiveness and womb-like emptiness of chora has rendered it an appealing conceptual plaything for a host of contemporary thinkers, including philosophers, psychoanalysts and theologians. Jacques Derrida, for example, seized on the placeless spatiality of Plato’s chora and appropriated it as a kind of deconstructive next-of-kin for his notion of différence. Chora, according to Derrida, is the abyssal chasm, the formless matter of form, the wholly other that transcends all rational categories. It is a barren and naked place that gives nothing—a tropic of negation, a sort of black hole that even swallows up Being itself.26 John Caputo, a philosopher of religion influenced by Derrida, argues that chora overturns and negates even the Platonic system in which it first unfolded and thus emphasizes the “no-thing-ness” of chora. “Khôra is neither present nor absent, active nor passive, the Good nor evil, living nor nonliving,” he writes. “Neither theomorphic nor anthropo-morphic—but rather atheological and nonhuman—khôra is not even a receptacle, which would also be something that is itself inscribed within it.”27 Alongside these cosmological and a-theological readings of chora, we can productively place Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytic reading. Kristeva offers a psychosemiotic interpretation by which she takes chora to represent the earliest stage of psychosexual development; a pre-verbal/pre-linguistic domain characterized by a chaotic mixture of feelings, needs, and perceptions. Chora stands for the pure physicality and materiality of existence where there is as yet no differentiation between infant and mother, self and other—just a chaotic mix of drives. Nothing is as yet signed or signified.28 8 Theologian Catherine Keller links chora with the tehom of the opening verses of the Book of Genesis—that deep and watery chaos that, as the story has it, exists before the beginning of creation, right next to the tohu vabohu, the formless void. Through her creative exegesis of the biblical tehom, Keller also claims the ancient sense of chora as a generative matrix—a space for emergence and becoming.29 This small sampling of “choral” reveries suggests to me two projective clusters— one that borders on a kind of nihilistic negation (devoid of any divinity), and another that is centered on the possibility of generation, emergence, and becoming; a primordial matrix (over which the divine spirit creatively hovers). There is a tendency to privilege one of these categories of projection over the other. Each has numinous qualities. Each harbors a potentially numinous appeal. Indeed, John Manoussakis compelling argues that “(the) common language within which both God and khora appear creates proximity that contaminates both; “God looks like khora and khora like God.”30 So, in this milieu of postmodern conflation, some have suggested that a choice is required of us: God . . . or chora? The dark night of the soul . . . or the barren dessert; a no-place with no ladders on which we might climb up toward a utopian view (heavenly or otherwise)?31 Others have suggested a third way with this “third thing” named chora—namely, that of sustaining a paradoxical attitude. And it is in this way of paradox, where the opposites are held together, that I see the chora revealing its topos, a placeless space for the hidden God. Kearney offers two examples of this paradoxical third way with this “third thing.” In an essay entitled “God or Khora,” Kearney lays out his basic claim that chora “is neither identical with God nor incompatible with God but marks an open site where the divine may dwell and heal.”32 This quote hints at the interconnectedness of the Open, the Other, and Chora. 9 Elsewhere, Kearney suggests that chora might well be reinterpreted as “the primordial matrix of the world which God needs to become flesh” (211). This proposed reinterpretation of chora evokes Jung’s notion that matter and the feminine are the Fourth in relation to the Christian Trinity. Kearney references murals that decorate the interior of the Chora Church near Istanbul, Turkey. These 14th century Byzantine works depict Mary, Mother of God, as “Khora tou akoretou,” the “Container of the Uncontainable.” Others portray Christ as “Khora of all the Living.”33 Kearney’s interpretative strategy with the chora, and his associations to the artful interior of the Chora Church, call to mind some additional bits of Jung’s writing about the Deus absconditus. Jung saw Christ as “the typical dying and self-transforming God.” And he understood this process of dying and transforming, which is not unique to the Christian myth, as a necessary process. “The death or loss must always repeat itself,” Jung writes. “Christ always dies, and always he is reborn.34” The regeneration of a godimage depends upon the symbolic death of the god-image. The process is necessary psychologically. Containment: the uncontainable and livingness The Open, the Other, and the Chora: a letting-be space; a space of “deconstructive ferment” and “potentiating withdrawal;” a space opening onto an encounter with the Other; the divine “curled at the heart of quotidian existence;” the Other hidden in the face of the other; a faceless Other who thwarts our attempts to make meaning and sense; a placeless space where there is both chaos and destruction, generation and ordering, disuinctio and conuinctio. In the Visions seminars Jung writes: “The Self as the Deus absconditus can undo its own symbolism for a certain purpose. When an individual has been swept away up 10 into the world of symbolic mysteries, nothing comes of it, nothing can come of it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has happened when that individual was in the body . . . the Self wants its own destruction as a symbolic reality.”35 What I see Jung describing is a destructiveness that works to free up the reality beyond our images of God—a reality that, referencing Rilke, refuses to be caught in all the traps we set in circles around it, all around its open exit. Ann Ulanov has movingly described the purpose of this destructiveness—a destructiveness that characterizes each of our three post-secular themes. “This plowing up from the depths,” she writes, “this destroying our God-images to free God is the work of the Deus Absconditus, the God of the Depths, from the dark, from the light so bright it blinds.”36 This plowing up—this hollowing out—is the hallmark of the post-secular quest, the search for God after God, the anatheistic way of seeking and sounding the things we deem sacred but cannot fathom or prove--of getting back what we have given up as if it were our we first encounter with it.37 I think the symbolic potential of the Open, the Other, and Chora is exquisitely expressed in the murals of the Chora Church, the Container of the Uncontainable and the Container of all the Living. In them, chora does its ancient and contemporary work, functioning as a third space: between the divine logos and human embodiment, between self and Other, between destruction and aliveness . . . between hiding and being found. 1 H. Arendt, “Religion and Politics,” in J. Kohn, ed., Essays in Understanding (New York: Harcourt, 1994). 2 Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt, 1978), p. 10. 3 C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Religion,” in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and F. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1958, § 144. 11 4 Ibid. 5 Phillip Blonde, ed., Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, (New York: Routledge, 1998). 6 Richard Kearney, Anathesim: Returning to God after God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p. 3. 7 Ibid. 8 Jung, CW 11, § 144. 9 Charles Bigger, Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor’s Metaphysical Neighborhood (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 23. 10 Ibid. Rainer-Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 3rd ed., trans. David Oswald (Einsiedeln, Swizterland: Daimon Verlag, 2012), p. 81. 11 12 David Oswald, trans., “Introduction,” in Rainer-Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, 3rd ed. (Einsiedeln, Swizterland: Daimon Verlag, 2012), p. 15. 13 Bigger, Between Chora and the Good, p. 23. 14 J. O’Leary, “Questions,” in J. Manoussakis, ed., After God: Richard Kearney and the Religions Turn in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), p. 199. 15 Ibid. 16 John Manoussakis, ed., After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006) p. 28. 17 R. Kearney, “Epiphanies of the Everyday,” in J. Mannoussakis, ed., After God: Richard Kearney and the Religious Turn in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006) p. 12. 18 Roger Brooke, Jung and Phenomenology, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 35. 19 Ibid. 20 Kearney, “Epiphanies,” p. 5. 21 Kearney, Anatheism, p. 15. 12 22 Ibid,. pp. 14-15. 23 John Manoussakis, “”Khora: The Hermeneutics of Hyphenation,” Revista Portugeusa de Filosofia 58 (2002): 93. 24 Plato, Timaeus 52a-b, trans. Donald Zeyl, Complete Works, ed. J. M. Cooper (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997) p. 1255. 26 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002). 27 John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002) pp. 35-36. 28 Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (London: Blackwell, 1986) p. 93. See also pp. 94-8, 108-9, 115-17. 29 Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (New York: Routledge, 2003). 30 Manoussakis, “Hermeneutics of Hyphenation,” p. 97. 31 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods, and Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2003) p. 202. 32 Ibid., p. 194. 33 For more information on the art and intellectual history of the Chora Church, see Paul A. Underwood, The Kariye Djami, 3 vols. (New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1966). 34 Jung, CS 11, § 129. 35 C. G. Jung, The Visions Seminar, vol. 2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). p. 1313-1314. 36 Ann Belford Ulanov, The Unshuttered Heart: Opening to Aliveness/Deadness in the Self (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2007) p. 228. 37 Kearney, Anatheism, p. 3. 13