Form & Fragment: The Recovery of the Hidden and
Incomprehensible God
Modern theology has marginalized two traditions: the realism
of the cross which acknowledges
God's hiddenness, and apophatic theology, which displays God's incomprehensibility.
By David Tracy
About the Author: The Center's 1999 Palmer Lecturer, David Tracy has been a member of the faculty of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago since 1969, and currently holds the Andrew Thomas Greeley and Grace McNichols Greeley Distinguished Service Chair.. He has been a guest lecturer at the Beijing Institute for the Scientific Study of Religion; Trinity College, Dublin; Gregorian University, Rome; Catholic University, Leuven; Lund University, Sweden; the Hartmann Institute, Jerusalem; and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. His published works include Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism In Theology; The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism; Plurality and Ambiguity: Hermeneutics, Religion and Hope; Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue; and On Naming the Present: Reflections on God, Hermeneutics, and Church.
I am deeply thankful to give this lecture at the distinguished Center of Theological Inquiry. I am especially thankful since, these last two autumns, the Center has made it possible for me to complete the first volume of a proposed trilogy entitled This Side of God. The outstanding leadership of this Center through Wallace Alston (that administrator and theologian extraordinaire of genuine theological discussion) and Robert Jenson (clearly America's most distinguished Christian systematic theologian) have allowed me to finish the book. They were aided by an exemplary staff and outstanding colleagues whose work I thankfully acknowledge here and will specify, when appropriate, in the footnotes of the larger book to which this lecture tries to provide a brief and somewhat cryptic introduction. I have tried to keep this essay as much as possible in its oral form as it was delivered and, therefore, have not given the scholarly endnotes. The full notes and the fuller arguments may be found in the forthcoming book This Side of God. In the meantime, I hope this brief essay may introduce (little more, I realize) some of the principal motifs of that larger study. Again my deepest thanks to the Center.
I. On Form, Fragment and Gathering
In a first volume I study the relationship of form and content and thereby the recovery of what I claim to be two forms in the Christian tradition that have been rather marginal: namely the apocalyptic form issuing in an understanding of the hidden God beginning with Luther; second the apophatic form, or more accurately, the apophatic mystical, and there the key figure is Dionysius the Aeropagite. The recovery of both these fragmenting forms will theologically allow, in a second volume, a turn to the classical form for naming God in the Christian tradition, namely the Trinitarian form. In sum, the first volume and this lecture concentrate on fragmenting forms of apocalyptic and apophatic-mystical. The second volume is called The Gathering of the Fragments. Here I study the forms of ordering or gathering fragments in the Christian tradition. The first form of gathering may be found in the structure of the liturgy for almost all of Eastern Orthodox theology and almost none of Western theology. That Eastern choice of liturgical structure to gather the fragments is a fascinating difference and the main reason why Orthodox theologians from Dionysius to this day with Yanarras, Zizioulas and Lossky the major theological problem is how can a Christian be seriously both radically negative-—apophatic—and mystical and at the same time Trinitarian. The second and third historical forms of gathering or ordering are narrative, especially in the gospels, and creeds-the emergence of creeds and later attempts at creed-based system. That theological systematic ordering is the terminus ad quem of this interest in forms and fragments. But, first, we must study the two classical fragmenting forms, the apophatic and the apocalyptic. Why do these fragmenting forms suddenly seem so important to so many of us today? What exactly are those forms and what do they tell us about God? How does the naming of God as Hidden, function beginning with Luther, in the Christian tradition? How does the naming of God as Incomprehensible function, beginning with Dionysius, to show the need for negative or apophatic language for naming God and eventually for mystical language. Precisely these two forms are critical to recover even though they have both been marginal in most of the mainline Christian traditions. Now suddenly they can be at the center of our attention and they, in turn, can help a systematic rethinking of what might be called the classical theological ways of naming God through Trinitarian narrative, creed, systematic theologies and liturgy.
First, however, the notion of form and content and especially the form of the fragment. In modern thought since the early German Romantics to the great literary modernists like Joyce, Proust or Virginia Woolf in the twentieth century to what are now called the post-modern thinkers, earlier classical and Enlightenment forms have yielded to the form of the fragment. Any form which attempts totality or closure, for defenders of the fragment, needs fragmentation. And yet there is little hope among most contemporary thinkers to return simply to some pre-modern form not of totality but of achieved harmony. The peculiar form of fragments became for more and more artists, both Romantics and modernists, and then for thinkers, both philosophers and theologians, a form well forged to challenge any totality system especially that of modernity. Fragments were first forged by the Romantics to disclose the 'sparks' of the divine. These sparks which even Kant in a few brief places calls the intuitions of the divine-or which the great literary modernists like Joyce called 'epiphanies' or Virginia Woolf `lucid moments' or Eliot `unexpected moments' are fragments still retrievable for contemporary use. It is time for theologians to join this conversation and to reflect on fragments in their own uniquely theological way. Indeed part of my larger argument is that the literary and philosophical discussion of fragments needs theological reflection-even by philosophers. But that is a larger and more complex story than the one I wish to tell in this lecture.
First I would like to give just some brief reflection from literature and from philosophy and theology on the curious and heterogenous history of this form called `fragments'. Fragments were first invented by the great German romantics Schlegel and Novalis in their books of that name—Fragments. The discussion of fragments is part of the wider discussion in literary theory, philosophy, and now theology. The hope is that fragments can heal the famous separations of modernity: the separation of reason from passion, theory from practice, and allied to them, the separation of form from content. In my judgment there are widely available resources for all theologians and philosophers for trying to undo the first two separations. Recall since the Romantic attack on the Enlightenment, the consistent post-Romantic attempt in Western thought to undo the Enlightenment separation of reason from passion through such crucial post Romantic positions as the great Anglo-American empirical, not empiricist, tradition of philosophy from William James: indeed it could be said even before James in Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Emily Dickinson. Through the entire Anglo-American tradition of James, Whitehead, Dewey and all process thought a major consideration has been to expand the notion of experience, to allow for not only the sense experience but mood, feeling, emotion. Or consider as a second example, this time in Europe, the remarkable shift in Western phenomenology from Husserl's early work which attempted a purely "scientific phenomenology" to the break made by Heidegger and Scheler and even more so now by the so called `new phenomenology' where the study concentrates in such characteristic phenomena called saturated phenomenon as 'gift'.
As for the modern separation of theory and practice, it is hard to find a form of theology today that does not attempt to undo this separation. Certainly the great attempts to reintegrate theology and spirituality are part of this new tradition. As are the attempts in liberation, political, feminist, womanist and mujerista theologies to relate theories to the explicit practices of a particular people, or community. Indeed the latter are the outstanding examples of attempts to heal the modern separation of practice and theory in theology.
However, as far as I can see, the third separation of modernity—the separation of form and contents has received much too little attention from both philosophers and theologians until very recently. To be sure in theology those amazingly complementary theologians, Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar, paid significant attention to the question of what forms theology should take. They understood form not as some extra aesthetic addition to content but form as that which renders the content so that the search for the right theological form is at the very same time the search for the right theological content. In Karl Barth's case this interest is omnipresent, if largely implicit, as Hans Frei argued in his wonderful studies of the shift of form in Karl Barth. From Barth's early German expressionist, indeed fragmentary, form in the Romans commentary to his Anselm work where a more doctrinal realistic form appears eventually, as Frei argued, a history-like realistic narrative form became predominant as the Church Dogmatics unfolded. It was Barth who was highly attentive to the kind of form needed on behalf of the content. This interest in the proper form for theological content is even more striking in Barth's Catholic theological friend Hans Urs von Balthasar's great trilogy: from the first volume, Seeing the Form, to his studies of the individual forms of past theologies and poetry and philosophy, as is in his extraordinary readings of Dante, Dionysius, and Bonaventure and all those whose forms he especially approved, as forms that disclose the harmony of both the goodness and beauty of God. In the second set of volumes of his trilogy von Balthasar turned to the form of drama and liturgy for trying to understand theology—deeply influenced, I believe, by his own scholarly work in the Eastern tradition, especially in Gregory of Nyssa and Dionysius the Areopagite.
One can learn a great deal on the use of form for theological content in Karl Barth and Hans Urs von Balthasar even if one is neither Barthian or Balthasarian (as I am not). However, on the category of the form of fragment these two great theologians are not notably helpful. Barth indeed is enormously helpful for anyone interested in the form of fragment in his early work, especially his commentary on Romans, as well as for anyone interested on how theologically one may gather the fragments into a systematics by his turn to the form of narrative in his Church Dogmatics. But his later work is mainly concerned with gathering the fragments with a strange silence of the early fragmentary form he himself first used in theology in the Romans commentary. Balthasar, moreover, is also not particularly helpful for the form of fragment. As far as I can see, he consistently made a basically negative judgment on the form of the fragmentary. Read, for example, in his early work the apocalyptic character of modern German thought and literature in his first great work, The Apocalypse of the German Soul. Recall as well his insistence throughout his theology on the need for the classical harmonizing forms, not fragmentary forms, but the classical forms of the Greeks, the patristics and the medievals-the forms of harmony, order and beauty which he believed modern theologians and philosophers had largely abandoned and only certain poets like Hopkins, Peguy or Claudel had continued into the modern period.
Now there are today very few defenders of the Romantic understanding of fragment. Most contemporary thinkers share of course the Romantic's distrust of the modern Enlightenment totality system and what has become known as its attendant ontotheology. However, contemporary theorists do not share the romantic great hope (as many theologians still do) in the form of the symbol as distinct from sign. Symbol, after all, was a Romantic innovation first in Kant, (one of the few Romantic moments in Kant) then in Schelling and most of the later Romantics. The form of the symbol inspired many fine modern theologians, Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner for example. However, the symbolic representations of a new whole too easily became a new Romantic totality system. That is the principal problem with depending on the form of symbol alone, great as it undoubtedly is.
Unlike the category of infinity any totality demands a closure. Therefore eventually in every totality system we find a reduction of everything to more of the same and thereby an exclusion of anything that is genuinely other and different. The choice for most contemporary defenders of the fragment is not really between an enlightenment modernity totality system and a Romantic one. There is in the category `fragment,' pace Derrida, no necessary connection of the fragment to a Romantic nostalgia for a lost unity. Part of course of what the Romantics were doing with the form of fragment was using it to break the totality of the enlightenment and see infinity through what they called these fragmentary sparks, these intuitions, these moments of awareness: to see that which could not close. They were largely panentheists or pantheists in naming God: think of Wordsworth, Emerson, Dickinson, almost the whole English speaking Romantic tradition. But the Romantics, whatever their defects, were the first ones who attempted to develop a category like the fragment and thereby the Impossible. They saw clearly that once modern thought has laid down the rules for what is possible according to modern rationality, 'the Impossible' becomes a purely negative category. The Romantics, the literary modernists, and theologically, Soren Kierkegaard, were the first thinkers explicitly to use the category of the Impossible to fight the totality system of modernity.
A key phenomenon that has provoked new study across the disciplines is religion. Religion seems so obviously a candidate for what moderns considered Impossible in a negative sense. Clearly it seems time to reopen the debate on religion and modernity. As several contemporary philosophers especially in Europe claim, it may well be that religion is the non-reductive and in their phrase 'saturated' phenomenon par excellance. But before such a philosophical case can be made it may be necessary to clear the decks of some further cultural debris. Religion has usually been the unassimilatable as distinct from the conquered or more usually the colonized other of Enlightenment modernity. Any saturated form of the religious phenomenon had to be marginalized by the Enlightenment. Religion did not fit what would be allowed to count as rational and therefore possible from modern rational minds.
Other developments in Western culture fought this marginality of religion. Consider the romantic discovery of symbols, fragments, archaic rituals and Schleiermacher's recovery of religion on Romantic grounds in his Speeches. Or consider in the nineteenth century, the Western interest in Hindu excessive forms for the sacred to the twentieth century interest in the Buddhist insistence on formlessness. Recall how Schloem's research into the kabbalistic mystical traditions of Judaism undid the pretense to master so rich and complex a heritage as the Jewish as only a modern ethical monotheism. For many modern Jewish thinkers (e.g. H. Cohen) kabbalistic and mystical and Hasidic traditions were at the very best marginal and slightly embarrassing. Indeed it is my belief that, with the great exception of Kierkegaard, it is Jewish thought that first makes the breakthrough theologically in Rosenzweig to the notion of fragments.
All these saturated religious phenomena as distinct from the Enlightenment's notion of a rational natural religion are clearly other to the demands for intellectual closure in what modern rationality will allow to count as rational. Why otherwise in modernity the now seemingly bizarre parade of isms for naming God starting with deism in the late 17th century? The modern isms—deism, theism, atheism, pantheism and the best of the list, panentheism—seem to have too little to do with trying to understand God as a religious phenomenon, much less religion as a saturated phenomenon disclosing the Impossible. Those 'isms' were intended to control the discussion of the ultimate religious Other in any modern reflection on God. But can the question of God really be controlled, as a religious and theological question, only by such narrow modern clarifications as are made available through the modern inventions of naming God beginning with deism—the great modern invention—through pantheism and its modern form, modern atheism, modern theism, or even in what I still consider the best achievement of modern Western religious thought, panentheism from Bruno to Hegel to Whitehead and process thought.
Even before the categories of the other and the different became such central philosophical cultural, ethical and religious categories for many, some contemporary Western thinkers sensed the temptation of the West to reduce all reality to what Foucault nicely called more of the same or at best the similar which really seemed to serve too often as a synonym for the same. First sensing this totalization temptation of modern thought, the German romantics especially Schlegel and Novalis, privileged the metaphor fragments over any totality form. They interpreted religion and God through the richer symbols and the forms of myth rather than through one more ism.
Beyond this early Romantic groping after 'fragments' which helped to challenge the stranglehold of the Enlightenment system lay the two greatest unveilers of modernity's secret dream to be the logos of its own secret, ontotheology—Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. Is there anyone, even today, better than Kierkegaard at exposing the bizarre drive to totality of almost all modern rationalist, idealist systems including Christianity become Christendom. What Kierkegaard showed is that Christendom, not Christianity, is an attempted triumphalism, a triumphant totality system that could not and cannot survive any experiment with authentic Christian living. Philosophy should abjure its modern pretensions to a total understanding of life, the individual, art and religion and learn to think anew from the new forms for dialectical thought invented by Kierkegaard in two of his greatest works; the works by Johannes Climacus, entitled Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. He left us what? fragments and inconclusive post scripts. Both are fine forms indeed to challenge Hegelianism, the then reigning totality system of Kierkegaard 's culture. As several post-modern thinkers now argue Kierkegaard's fragments smashed not only Hegelianism with its temptations to totality but any modern system, including any Christian theological system of totality. It is Kierkegaard, in several of his works, who first begins to use the category the 'Impossible'. He strove, through Johannes Climacus, not for the actual, nor the possible, but for the Impossible. In nearly all his work, on how religion-both religiousness "A" and religiousness "B" (Christian religion for Kierkegaard) showed how to render what would otherwise be considered Impossible.
Kierkegaard will do almost anything to break the reified ice of what he considers modernity's hold on all our thinking or Christendom's hold on Christians. He will, for example, write under pseudonyms. There is no Kierkegaard there is only Johannes Climacus, Judge William, Johannes de Silentio, The Seducer, Don Juan, et al. He will forge a new and indirect discourse for the sacred to undo any claim to adequacy of direct discourse in the idealist version of totality. He will try to invent ever new forms to render that content. He will invent the form of diary for the seducer. He will recall Mozart to show the form of life of one who lives only possibilities, i.e. who can never actualize any possibilities: Don Juan. He will invent Judge William (by which he partly meant Kant) to show how duty actualizes a possibility especially through marriage. But then what about this breakthrough into a form for the Impossible, into grace? Kierkegaard will try any form, the diary, music, Don Giovanni, exercises, dialogues, edifying discourses, narratives-except what was for him the forms for rendering the Impossible present-preaching and sacrament-for he never thought he had the right to preach. He will also try anything except a system. Kierkegaard's famous charge to Hegelian systems applies to all modern rational systems. If only Hegel had written the words 'Thought Experiment' at the beginning of all his books then he, Kierkegaard, would be the first to say "Hegel is the greatest of all modern philosophers." But Hegel of course did not and could not without the system collapsing into fragments. Kierkegaard did not have the calling to preach. He had contempt for any effort at a totality system. Therefore, he invented form after form to render present the one content modernity denied—the reality of the Impossible—grace, Christ, God.
Kierkegaard's paradoxically anti-Christian double, Nietzsche, plays the same fragmentation role for Christendom and Enlightenment modernity alike, but now with a hammer. When Nietzsche's hammer becomes too blunt a tool against Christianity as well as against bourgeois modernity, he too, like Kierkegaard will try any form, any genre, any intellectual strategy to try to break out of any totality system. He forged style after style just as Kierkegaard forged genre after genre. From Nietzsche's early essays to his quasi-gospel genre in his great Thus Spoke Zarathustra to genealogical analysis through aphorisms piled upon aphorisms to fragments juxtaposed to fragments Nietzsche organized in what seems to me in an increasingly desperate attempt to recover (as a former professor of ancient rhetoric) not merely the controlled rhetoric of Aristotle's topics but the out of control rhetoric of the tropes, especially the trope of irony careening with joy at the very edge of what he saw as the Abyss or Void opened up once the totality systems collapsed. Nietzsche is not one: he is clearly anti-Christian, yet he is just as clearly interested in and fascinated by the saturating othering phenomenon of religion itself. In my opinion he was a profoundly religious thinker, very anti-Christian of course, in a very Christian, Lutheran way. As he says, German philosophy was born in the Lutheran parsonage. He should have included his own. Indeed Nietzsche was far more creative in finding forms for religion and its saturation quality than many of the official defenders of religion as in his famous tirade against the liberal Christian theology of Strauss. Religion, like Nietzsche, was somewhere else and something else than someone like Strauss could even imagine. Religion, as a phenomenon that which demanded another kind of attention. Religious content needed another kind of form than modern liberal theologians like Strauss' could envisage.
Christian theology today, informed by its own needs and its own classical fragmentary forms, especially the highly suggestive fragmenting forms of apocalyptic and apophatic, can be greatly aided by the work on fragments not only of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche but also of the great Jewish thinker Franz Rosenzweig. Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption is the first explicitly theological work, which develops through the theological categories of creation, revelation and redemption, a strategy to fragment any circle, any philosophical totality system of God, the world and humanity. The 'star' of course is, precisely as pointed, meant to break any circle. Rosenzweig's first work, after all, was on Hegel's totality system for politics. The reason why so many of us are reading Rosenzweig now is precisely because he was the first modern religious theological thinker to try to find the form—in his case the Star of David—that would fragment and break every totality system. Recall, for example, Rosenzweig's influence on Emmanuel Levinas whose own early work, including Totality and Infinity is still one of the best philosophical defenses of the category the 'Impossible'. Or recall Rosenzweig's influence on Walter Benjamin, whose whole thought from his doctoral dissertation on the German Romantics to his last, fragmentary Theses on History can be read, as a whole, as a lifelong attempt to develop a theory of the fragment for political and literary philosophical, theological purpose.
I can only sketch here what a Christian theological theory of fragments might be. That theory I have argued elsewhere, was first developed in United States theology by the remarkable shift in African American theology from European holistic and sometimes, it must be admitted, totalizing categories, to the category 'fragments' explosive in the African-American spirituals, the blues and the slave narratives. Witness the development and the shift in James Cone's theology, and the even further shift by the appeal to folk tales, fragmentary tales in womanist theologies. To return, however, to a theological theory of the fragment: first in terms of anthropology—this is just a brief statement of what I try to argue in the length needed in these books mentioned above—Christians should reinterpret such texts as Lamentations, Job, the unnerving gospel and apocalyptic gospel namely Mark, Paul, and the Book of Revelation. Thereby we will find some possibly pre-Augustinian resources for Christian reflection on humankind from these fragmentary texts. This reflection might in turn allow Christian theologians to not only re-Judaize Christian thought—an absolutely necessary enterprise in my opinion—but also to re-Hellenize Christian thought along such lines as Simone Weil saw when she tried to work through the classical Greek relationship of tragedy and philosophy for her Christian thought.
One must trace this history of forms for naming God, to the Christian metaphor and analogy, `God is Love' (I John 4:16) which occurs first in letter form on the first meditative gospel on the gospel. Indeed a good deal of Christian theology from I John forward on naming God (especially Trinitarian namings which I strongly affirm) is really a reflection on the Johannine metaphor `God is Love'. A good deal of the patristic and medieval naming of God is really an attempt to understand intelligence and love as the principal clues for naming God. In the twentieth century William Temple is the theologian who uses the metaphor of love to try to rename all reality through renaming God. Process thought has the right to one of its major hermeneutical claims in that it can provide the categories, the second order concepts, that can render coherent the Christian affirmation `God is Love' because God, and God alone, both affects all reality, as all monotheists would say, and is affected by all reality as modern panentheists would say. At the same time, why is it that the early Christian theologians ignored the tragic tradition of the Greek, which would seem so natural for reading Mark's gospel or even, as Simone Weil saw so clearly, for Jesus' lament on the cross in Mark and Matthew, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
What Nietzsche called the optimism of reason of the Greeks on philosophy is epoch-making. Indeed we are all still living on that optimism. But why were the tragedies ignored by those Christians who read Paul and Mark? Or why was the tragic side of Plato, even Plato at the end in the Timaeus, ignored, since Plato was so crucial for the development of Christian theology? Or why in the Christian naming of God was there so little attention to the tradition of lamenting towards God in the Jewish tradition, even anger at God—in the book of Job, in Lamentations. In fact, the metaphor 'God is love' cannot be understood only by taking the story forward (in patristic and medieval thought) into the question of whether intelligence or love is the central clue for naming God. No 'God is love' must also be read backwards taking it back into the passion narrative. That also means that we should expand the discussion of the Greeks in terms of not only the philosophy but also the tragedies and thereby expand the Christian reading of the Hebrew Bible, become the First or Old Testament, into those biblical traditions that were also too marginal for Christians. It is remarkable, as has been observed by scholars, how 'Lamentations' plays so central a role in Jewish liturgy and so minor a role in Christian liturgy. These are clues that something is awry here in the Christian naming of God—something in the very heart of trying to name God. For example anthropologically with the forms tragedy and lament we could free ourselves from that aspect of our Augustinian heritage which seems inevitably to blame humanity for all suffering and evil. I love Augustine and teach him all the time But on this question he was to me a most unfortunate influence on Western Christianity. The lament tradition seems gone. The tragic version of the Greeks is either ignored or denounced for its emphasis on fate. Augustine therefore seems to be left with his too influential dilemma. Evil is caused either by God or by us. It cannot be by God. And yet there are, in my judgment, other resources in the Bible itself that appear more complex than the impasse Augustine reached. And thus the attempt to bring apocalyptic a posture lamentation and the hidden God of history in conversation with a new post-Augustinian anthropology.
A second step forward in theological fragments: not anthropology but Christology. Christian thinkers could learn to take far more seriously the radically apocalyptic strand of Mark, Paul and the Book of Revelation in relationship to our need to recover a non fundamentalist reading of apocalyptic, and thereby the central symbol of the Second Coming. That symbolic form expresses the ever deepening not yet in Christian thought. It has been a great mistake by mainline, especially progressive, Christians effectively to hand over apocalyptic as a symbol of the Second Coming to fundamentalists who literalize it and render it useless (and non-fragmenting). In fact the Second Coming is as central as symbol for understanding Christ as is incarnation, cross or resurrection. But where is it in mainline Christian theology? Apocalyptic is, after all, throughout the New Testament. The first document of that Testament is said to be Thessalonians, an apocalyptic text. The first gospel is Mark—apocalyptic. The last writing is the Book of Revelation. Apocalyptic is everywhere in the New Testament. But where is it in our theology? This in turn suggests that for the fuller already/not yet dialectic of redemption Christian theologians need to try to keep alive the inherent fragmenting tension present in the great Christological symbols, incarnation, cross, resurrection by increasing the tension through adding more explicitly (as the New Testament does) the fourth great Christological symbol—the Second Coming. Incarnation, cross, resurrection, second coming are the central Christian symbols for understanding who Christ is and thereby for Christians who God is, and how God is to be named and who we might become. Christian theology is better described not as christo-centric, but as theo-centric, and christo-morphic. It is the form of Christ that allows for the naming Christianly of God, of humanity, of cosmos.
And if the christologized form is reduced to just incarnation or just resurrection, or just cross, or just the Second Coming without the full complexity of fragmenting and disclosive symbols then we may be depriving ourselves of the full Christian naming of God. Therefore a fully Christian theo-centric vision, a Christian naming of God, could be effected better by retrieving and developing the theological theo-centric implications of the two great fragmenting forms of both Judaism and Christianity, the apocalyptic and the apophatic. By those means Christians thinkers would reflect again, naming God as hidden in the traditions of prophecy and apocalyptic as in Luther, Calvin, and Pascal. We must also add the second great fragmentary language, God as the Incomprehensible One reaching its greatest expression in the apophatic and mystical traditions from early Christianity to this day. This would also demand a new theological working out of the relationship of naming God as Hidden and naming God as Incomprehensible rather than merely juxtaposing them.
Hence this appeal to fragments and especially to the fragmenting power of the apocalyptic and apophatic forms as the two classical fragmenting languages of Christianity could encourage new reflection on the central Trinitarian naming of God for Christians. At least this would be the case if theologians paid greater attention to non-totalizing attempts at gathering the fragments. Originally after all 'gathering' is a liturgical and biblical metaphor in the great orderings of the fragments in liturgy, in narrative, in doctrine, and in biblical creed and their common naming of God in Trinitarian terms. As well as attempts at non totalizing systematic theologies in such classical non closing models as The Sentences, or The Summa, or The Institutes, or Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre and most modern contemporary attempts at systematics. The Eastern Orthodox tradition, I have come to believe, can show a way forward for all Christian theology by its consistent attempt to relate apophaticism and Trinity. But what Eastern Orthodox theory seems to lack may be found in the Western tradition as the ever pressing need to relate the Hidden God tradition, emerging explosively in the West with Luther, to the Trinitarian tradition. The general directions that a Christian systematic theology might take if it began with this category of fragments need not end with fragments, but should end with the gathering of fragments. But begin with fragments, pay note to it, see it is worthwhile to spend some time thinking again in this new context of these two great languages of our tradition where 'fragment' in its full Christian sense lives: the great apocalyptic tradition and the great mystical apophatic tradition for naming God as Hidden and Incomprehensible.
II. Apocalyptic and the Hidden God
Christian apocalyptic thought—with its dualisms, its sense of an end, and often its violence—can surely seem an unlikely candidate for many for such a contemporary theological enterprise. Better to speak, most theologians seem to think, of eschatology. Better to hope for the hope of prophetic not apocalyptic language as the fragmenting language we need, as indeed we do surely continue to need prophetic language. Indeed, that is the reasonable case which most Christian theologians, even eschatologically-oriented ones, tend to make. There is truth in this modern Christian theological suspicion of apocalyptic language. The truth I think is this: if apocalyptic language so fragmentary of continuity in history, does not also fragment itself through, for example, deliteralization as Augustine already insisted in The City of God and as such theologians as Bultmann, Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Rahner following Augustine also insisted, it is totalizing and deadly. Indeed, if apocalyptic does not also fragment itself, all could be lost. For all one would then possess is a fragmentary form that tries to avoid the void in the terror of history as that history is experienced by marginalized and oppressed peoples only by literalizing when the end will occur and by dualistically, even violently, separating all reality on behalf of its own all too certain sense of injustice, hardened into a sense of a community's finally fundamentalist self-righteousness.
Ernst Kaeseman may well have exaggerated, as many New Testament scholars would now say, in detail. But in principle surely he was on to something provocative and important for all theologians to remember in his famous statement: "Apocalyptic is the mother of all Christian theology." It is impossible, as far as I can see, to understand the New Testament without apocalyptic, and thereby Christianity. Not only in the obvious sense of the important apocalyptic texts there—Paul's Epistle to the Thessalonians, Matthew 24, almost the whole of Mark, and especially the fascinans at tremendum power of the Book of Revelations.
The New Testament does not merely begin, in terms of Gospels, chronologically with Mark's strange apocalyptic Gospel. It ends not in triumphalist closure, even after the resurrection, but with the plaintive unsettling cry "Come Lord Jesus, come". The whole Christian Bible ends with that cry. The New Testament cannot be adequately understood without that, if I may call it so, apocalyptic tone of "Come." One needs always, with the great historical critical exegetes of our time, to remember the historical settings and the social occasions of these New Testament texts—the importance of the fall of Jerusalem as a tragedy, indeed an apocalyptic tragedy, not only for the Jews but for the Jewish Christians and for all four Gospels, probably including Mark. We must always remember as well the importance of the historical mission to the Gentiles and all the other important historical events that influence the texts we now read. But above all we need to have great sensitivity, which is often lacking, to the event that did not occur—the event of the Second Coming of this Jesus the Christ, of the Son of Man—and what that non-occurrence might mean for a reading of the New Testament itself.
Without the symbol of the Second Coming, without apocalyptic, Christianity can settle down, into a religion which no longer has a profound sense of the not-yet, and thereby no longer a profound sense of God's very hidden-ness in history. Apocalyptic should, when deliteralized, fragment any triumphalism, any sense that history is a pure continuity ending in us the victors. Apocalyptic shows the ruptures in that history, the fragments in that history, and the disclosure of the hiddenness of God in that history. Martin Luther was nervous, as you may remember, about apocalyptic, especially with the Anabaptists and the peasants' revolt, and he would not comment (even Calvin did not write a commentary) on the Book of Revelation. The great reformers must have been very nervous indeed. Luther is not at all an admirer of the Book of Revelation. But Luther's view of history—not Calvin's but Luther's—is apocalyptic. He sees history as a series of ruptures and conflicts with his intense sense—if you read Obermann and others—of apocalyptic as meaning 'he comes like a thief in the night; it could happen now. Time could end right now.' Luther surely had that apocalyptic sense powerfully. His sense, both of nature (thunderstorms, fear, the awe) and of history are apocalyptic. In my view, his development of the hidden God is implicitly apocalyptic.
In fact the understanding of God's hiddenness that may come back as needed naming of God in our period may be found by recalling one of the classic expressions of that often underground reflection, the unsettling radical reflections on God of Martin Luther. It is true, as my medieval colleagues tell me, that there are some predecessors for Luther on the hidden God, especially Mechtilde of Magdeburg and even a Pope—Pope Gregory the Great, in his famous nightmare visions of God. I have read them and admire them. But still they are not Luther, with his incredibly unsettling understanding of the hiddenness of God. I have read no other Christian like Luther on the Hidden God.
Indeed, most of the time and with great consistency, Luther spells out this position on God's hiddenness through his articulation of his theology of the cross. The heart of Luther's insight into God is, of course, that God's revelation is through hiddenness—that is, that God discloses God's self to sinful humans—sub contrariis—life through death, wisdom through folly, strength through weakness. A hidden God is not merely humble but humiliated—deus incarnatus, deus absconditus. The hidden God is deus crucifixus—the crucified God (Moltmann). That is the God also implicit in much liberation and political theology and implicit, in my opinion, in the recovery of an apocalyptic sense of history itself is found in Luther.
Luther's extraordinary theological insight into God's revelation through the hiddenness of the cross is central. That insight remains valuable today and has been shown to be valuable in the great existentialist theologies earlier in this century, such as in the Lutheran Bultmann or the Lutheran Tillich. An insight into the hiddenness of God is even more valuable for grasping the strictly theological implications of political and liberation theology's insistence on the dialectics of God's revelation, not in the troubled, estranged, alienated individual of Bultmann and the later Gilbert, but in the suffering of oppressed and marginalized peoples. The memory of their suffering, the suffering of people who have even disappeared, must be part of what we remember.
The crucified God remains the central insight for Luther's naming of God. Today that insight of God through the hiddenness of suffering, negativity, cross, can be rendered not merely into the highly brilliant personal terms of Luther but in the historical-political terms as seen in so many liberation and political theologies. And yet there is a second understanding of God's hiddenness in Luther, which is not merely different from but, at crucial moments seemingly in contradiction with Luther's own profound christological and word-centered insight into God's hiddenness sub contrariis in the cross. The greatest statements on the hiddenness of God by Luther are found not only in The Bondage of the Will but in his Commentaries on Genesis and Isaiah and the Psalms. I know no other Christian who read these biblical texts that way. Calvin on the hidden God is also fascinating, except that in the editions of his Institutes Calvin keeps changing the place of the hidden God! And, if you contrast what he does in the Institutes with what he does in his Sermons on Job, you can see in the sermons something as unnerving as what you find more usually in Luther (Schreiner). Luther, I notice, never wrote on Job. It must have been too much.
The central dilemma for Christian self-understanding is that Luther does speak in these commentaries and in Bondage of a second sense of hiddenness. He even dares to speak of a second sense of hiddenness as behind or even `beyond' the word. At the very least, this literally awful, ambivalent sense of God's hiddenness can be so overwhelming that God is sometimes experienced as purely frightening, not tender, sometimes even as an impersonal reality—"it"—of sheer power and energy signified by such metaphors, such fragmentary metaphors as abyss, chasm, chaos, horror. It is this sense of God's radical hiddenness, I believe, which inspired the great Lutheran phenomenologist Rudolf Otto to his brilliant description of religion and the reality of God as both numinous and holy. It is this radical sense of God's hiddenness which one senses in Paul Tillich at his most dialectical in his pleas for a `God beyond God', and in such artists, inspired by Swedish Lutheran culture, as Ingmar Bergman in his early films of ministers losing faith—i.e. moving, one might say, from the hiddenness of the cross to the radical sense of Hiddenness `beyond the Word'.
Luther's second sense of God's hiddenness, for some of us, has become an important sense that has been too long ignored, even by those who speak so well and so eloquently of Luther's theology of the cross and the first sense of God's hiddenness. This same, deeper sense of hiddenness is also present in Pascal's reflections on the awfulness of both nature and history. For Pascal, at the end of early modernity, when almost everyone else remained as happy with the thought of God as Infinite as Nicholas of Cusa, earlier had. Indeed, for the great Nicolas, infinity becomes a powerful naming for God. For Giordano Bruno infinity becomes a name for God. But then at the end of early modernity, Pascal, a Jansenist and a great mathematician and scientist, speaks of 'the terror' he experiences at the silence of infinite space. Any ancient sense of our participation in the cosmos is totally gone, and the naming of God as both hidden and incomprehensible comes together first in Pascal.
The hidden God first articulated with the intensity and theological clarity that the category demands in Luther can be found in both the senses that he described. In the word, in the cross, in and through the cross; and beyond the word. This Hiddenness allows for a new theological recovery of apocalyptic as a fragmenting form in our own period. Indeed, to 'let God be God again' is also to let that awesome and numinous strand of our common Christian heritage be heard again with the kind of clarity and courage that Luther found in his apocalyptic visions of history and nature alike, and, in his willingness to dare to speak of God's hiddenness in the full sense. That sense may now be heard again by all those who have rediscovered, whether in secular or religious ways, an apocalyptic, fragmentary way to name God as Hidden.
Alexander Golitzen, the Russian Orthodox scholar, is probably right that Dionysius was a 6th century Syriac monk who was deeply involved in the disputes on monothelitism and even more involved in the liturgical reforms of the period. At any rate, as Hans Urs von Balthasar states, in the West, Dionysius is second only to Augustine in terms of influence on medieval theology. And so that the relative silence on Dionysius including by theologians who love medieval theology, like the neo-Thomists of the 20th century, is startling. Thomas himself, after all wrote a commentary on Dionysius which to my knowledge has never even been translated into English.
There have been two great historical reasons for the collapse of the influence of the Dionysian tradition. Happily, for us, Dionysius has returned with power. The first attack on Dionysius on naming God was from Thomas Aquinas, who shifted the principal positive or cataphatic naming of God the `Good' to `Being'. That shift to God as Being influenced all of Western theology and philosophy. The Western tradition never really recovered until recently the Dionysian naming of God as the Good, except in a few figures, like Nicolas of Cusa. The second attack on Dionysius was Luther who was originally very positive (you might say in his pre-Luther period) in his early commentary on the Psalms. However, we need not and must not choose between Luther and Dionysius. We need to recover both of these great fragmenting namings of God through these two great fragmenting forms apocalyptic and apophatic mystical, then see how they might relate. I can only hint on how they might relate in this lecture in order to be faithful to the complexity of Luther and Dionysius.
The apocalyptic form linked to the originating forms of proclamation and prophecy is one of the two great classical fragmenting forms of the Christian tradition. The other is the apophatic. Just as the apocalyptic form focuses on evil, on innocent suffering and thereby on time and history and the non-closure of history, so too, on my reading at least, the apophatic form focuses on two other constants in human experience—thought and language. Just as apocalyptic, once de-literalized, fragments any triumphalist totality system for understanding history and time and releases the fragments of the memory of suffering of whole people's and the memory of the passion of Jesus Christ to a theology of the cross, as Luther saw so well, so too the apophatic form fragments any intellectual or linguistic totality system. Where the apocalyptic opens up time and history by its reflection of suffering and evil, the apophatic tradition opens up language and thought, thus the great interest in negative theology by so many post-modern thinkers of a de-constructive thought. The fragment form appears in the apophatic as in the apocalyptic but functions differently.
As a first step, I will give a reading of the classic Christian apophatic mystical theology of Dionysius, the Areopagite, to illustrate this second Christian theological fragmentary form. In terms of the form of the fragment: first, the apophatic precisely as such, clearly negates, de-constructs, fragments even our best positive or cataphatic namings for God. Dionysius is as clear as any other Christian theologian, in spite of his critics, pace Luther, Harnack, and many contemporary interpreters of his difficult texts, that the cataphatic namings he gives for God are all namings to be found in revelation; more exactly in biblical revelation. Dionysius has too often been dismissed by his enemies as a neo-Platonist and not a Christian, and I think that is totally wrong. As strongly as the fragmenting form apocalyptic is grounded in the earlier forms of proclamation and prophecy, so too the apophatic is grounded in the manifestation traditions of the biblical wisdom traditions. Dionysius, as much as Karl Barth, would allow no cataphatic namings of God which are not biblically, that is revelatorily, based. From the sensible, biblical images for God like 'rock', to wisdom oriented intellectual images that he found either explicit in or clearly implied by the biblical revelation like wisdom or sophia, word or logos, being, the one and especially the Good, ton agaton. Indeed, unlike Plotinus and Proclus for whom the highest positive or cataphatic naming for ultimate reality is the one, for Dionysius—and here is his great innovation even within neo-Platonism—the one, although to be sure a proper name for God, is the lowest on the list of positive namings of God. The highest name for God is the Good, which as von Balthasar correctly insists is also an immediate expression of the beautiful.
The good, therefore, God as the Good cannot not give itself freely as creation, as redemption, as the good, the beautiful, love. In the history of Western theology and philosophy, no greater change occurred in the naming of God, than when Thomas Aquinas read Exodus 3:14 in the Latin translation of the Deus sum qui sum 'I am who I am', and developed what Etienne Gilson nicely named Thomas's Metaphysics of Exodus 3:14. Thomas thereby insisted that God's principal name was not, as it was for his contemporary Bonaventure and the whole Dionysian thought prior to him, the Good, but Being. That is to say God's principle cataphatic or positive naming was Being, the one Being whose very being it is to be. The one being where there is no distinction between essence and existence for God's very essence is to exist. That is a brilliant metaphysical insight, but it shifts everything theologically.
It need take away no credit from Thomas's metaphysical insight, especially his shift over Aristotle whereby Aristotelian act became Thomist esse, to bemoan the loss of the Dionysian naming of God as the Good for so much subsequent Western theology and philosophy. Thomas delivered the first blow to the Dionysian tradition even though in many respects he was himself Dionysian. He was much more apophatic than later Thomism allowed for. All these recent books on the apophaticism of Thomas are, in my opinion, entirely correct. Where Thomas delivered the first blow Luther delivered the second. And the second became in Luther something like a death blow to the Dionysian tradition for the Reformation tradition and the theologies that followed, just as Thomas' blow became something like a death blow for the Dionysian traditions in the Catholic theologies. In Luther's case, it was his charge that in spite of his own early love of Dionysius, this naming of God as Good was more Platonist than biblical. Dionysius has remained a figure of great and controverted import of Eastern Christianity to this day.
If Dionysius had stopped with this cataphatic naming of God as the good, we would all still be in his debt. But notoriously if you will, or happily as I believe, Dionysius did not stop there. He insisted rather that every cataphatic name for God must be both affirmed as revealed—-that is to say as God's own self naming in biblical revelation, and yet negated fragmented by us with our finite minds, that is to say, as always intrinsically inadequate for naming the ultimately un-nameable, Incomprehensible God.
Moreover, there is a second, a double negation in Dionysius' thought in his 'mystical' theology. Dionysius' fragments not only fragment, negate, all positive language for God but also insist that language move beyond the language of predication and beyond even the best philosophical and theological thought for naming God to force the thinker, now as worshiper, to enter the language not of predication but of praise and prayer. We move with Dionysius not merely beyond our usual Western binary oppositions of positive and negative namings of God, but (and this is why the post-moderns read Dionysius now) to an excessive language, i.e. excessive to all predicative namings of God—negative and positive—and even transgressive to all experience as we ordinarily consider experience. Experience of God, by what Dionysius calls a mystical union, is not a knowledge about God. We stutter God's name in such a state of an experience which cannot be experienced on the usual criteria of experience, by oscillating back and forth in praise, in hymn, in prayer, in contemplation between positive and negative namings of God in the ever more fragmentary language of the disclosure or manifestation that Dionysius believes is fragmentarily present in mystical union with the Incomprehensible God.
In the apocalyptic case our theories, mainly our theodicies, are broken and opened over the fragmentary language of apocalyptic and the memories of suffering that emerge. We are open to flee anew with Luther to the cross of Jesus Christ. In the apophatic case, our best positive and negative namings of God are also broken in terms of predication and may be released with Dionysius and the liturgical and contemplative traditions into this unitive experience of God as the Incomprehensible one—indeed, the Incomprehensible Good. In both cases, we are finally freed from the role of the actual, or even the possible into what Kierkegaard was the first to see as what is really needed, namely, the realm of the Impossible. Today such thinkers as Levinas, Marion, Derrida, Caputo, myself, and many others, are attempting, in different even conflicting ways, to work out this meaning of the category 'the Impossible'.
Is it possible to affirm both Dionysius' naming of God as the incomprehensible one and Luther's radically hidden God without either having finally to choose between them or merely juxtapose them? Surely, it must be if Christian theology is to prove genuinely ecumenical and learn finally, as I think any Christian theologian today must from all our traditions generically from the Orthodox, the Catholic, and the various Reformation traditions. It is possible to affirm both Dionysius' Incomprehensible God and Luther's Hidden God though I regret, I cannot show how I try to do it here, but if I have l succeeded at all in this lecture perhaps theologians will address the same problem.
Theologians usually seem to choose one of these namings. But some—I think especially of Pascal, Kierkegaard, and in our own period, Simone Weil—try to choose both. Weil tried it by trying to rethink our Greek heritage in relationship to the New Testament and to rethink therefore the relationship of tragedy and philosophy to Plato. Kierkegaard tried to rethink it by developing a series of forms that would break all totality systems and by that very breaking and by means of it, to open up what he calls the realm of the Impossible. Pascal tried to do it by allowing one to see clearly, how the incomprehensible is first glimpsed at the very edge of what he called the order of intelligence when language and predication become inadequate. Pascal even speaks of the fall of thought into language, and then in an ecclesial setting and a contemplative setting, of the possibility of what he calls the order of charity, the order of what today is the Impossible.
The contemporary apophatic namings of God name God as Incomprehensible. Apocalyptic
also desires to name God in terms of the Impossible but not merely to render
that naming in language and thought but more importantly to render it in time
and in history where the Impossible becomes a matter of justice, justice which,
to be sure, seems entirely impossible given the present world's reign, is
promised and threatened as the Hidden-Incomprehensible God's own possibility
for us.
