Abby: well, i’ve had sex. and my poetry still…sucks–though maybe that was just the word i needed to end my final rhyme… and yeah, i believed in god for a very long time. and my theology then was actually more naive, more unbelievable. it was forced when i believed.

Jake: so you’re saying you had less imagination, less authenticity, even though you experienced god?

Abby: oh, so to believe in god is to experience god? i see…as with your sex analogy. well. then it breaks down there. i never believed in sex. though i’ve experienced it now.

Jake: and…?

Abby: and…i guess in both cases i’ve forced the experience. the experience never came to me. i sought it, did all the hard work of making sure something happened. really, with god and with sex, the results were too short-lived considering all the mind games i had to perform.

Jake: why are you alive if you don’t believe in god or sex?

Abby: i believe others do, and that keeps me curious enough to live.

Jake: curious enough to live? that’s terrible.

Abby: is it? who doesn’t decide to keep living based on curiosity, which is just the stem of hope or expectation… the curiosity of whether things can change, what will happen? what is possible? what are my limitations? those are questions that make time move forward for me.

Jake: well, suit yourself.

Abby: i will.

Jake: you seem kinda dead to ecstasy, you know that?

Abby: ha! what do you think curiosity does for me?

Jake: not enough. the decision to live isn’t ecstasy. ecstasy is what takes you out of life for a moment, gives you a view that makes life okay.

Abby: i’ve not had the god’s eye view very often. not my privilege.

Jake: what about the sex eye view?

Abby: i don’t know what that even means. sex is great. it’s fine. doesn’t teach me anything other than my body can feel extraordinary things and then return very quickly to itself.

Jake: i’m glad i’m talking theology with you.

Abby: why?

Jake: because never has god made me so horny.

Abby: well. great. glad to be of help, asshole.

are furred with age and lack of wash

with chapped flaps and red-rubbed gums

let her stop patient smiling

she has waited long for her lover

should have waited for death

if only the grin would stop and fold

behind the silence of staying

she would then begin to speak, at first a whisper, saying:

“the lips, the tongue, the teeth

have forgotten to lick, to taste, to eat.”

and dust and skin her meager meal

would be all for the parting.

an aspirated word and silence

you were so stunned by yourself

and what you had become

it’s an easy mirror to hold

your world to your eyes

and see the little deaths walking

we smile toward suns

yes, i see that child leap

over a cement ball placed

as an obstacle for others

she is not perplexed but invited

and i want to be like that

you too, to turn significantly back

words were the kin of laughter

and no one knew what secrets we told

they were all air

and carved in cement.

Misperception is a kind of forgetting. I thought this when my mother no longer saw my father. Put otherwise, she had forgotten what she had once seen, twenty-five years ago, in love or in desire. I asked her, “But surely you once loved him?”

She took off her glasses and rubbed her tired eyes, “No. I don’t think I ever did. I felt sorry for him.” And then I knew: pity was a mutual reduction. As a burden, he was always a partial person, an ideological weight. As avowed, she had to love him, not with her self but with her sense of obligation. But obligation emerges as a cataract on the eyes of desire. And a human, let alone a love, without desire could only be the pawn of gods. “I prayed to God that I would love him, that things would get better. And I do not know why God did not soften my heart.”

I tried not to confine her words to my own frustration. How was it God’s responsibility to force you to love him, if you couldn’t even force yourself? Is love duty? I listened. Silence. And then her tears matched my own questions with genuine inquiry, each tumbling drop a question to God. She continued, “I could only ever see him for his lies. His excuses. His childish dependency. His inability to communicate. His spending habits. He is a good man, but… I just couldn’t wait for him to change. He was never going to change.”

I never really knew my father, because I always thought I did. It is the paradox of knowing–you know–when it is a list and not a love. Accounting, not accord. What I could tell you: he used to wear Paul Sebastian aftershave (my mom and I would struggle to find it every Christmas, even when they were divorced); as a teenager, I often treated him like he didn’t understand (consequently, he didn’t try); driving me in middle school, he’d play Sting in the car or Saint-Saens, then kiss me on the cheek before I left (I was not embarrassed of him, then); he gave up smoking (crying and probing, I would catch his confessed ‘slips’); as kids, we called his spot in the bed ‘crusty-ville’ (we assumed the flecks were flakes of his skin, his scabs).

Recent years have provided a different accumulation of facts: he listens to country music; he drinks wine; he avoids sugar; he calls his friends ‘brothers and sisters’; he attends a church that tells him what to think in order to please God; he has non-invasive bladder cancer; he tells me in silence that he is scared to die alone; he says he prays for me every day.

I should allow him his changes, and recognize what abides. (What does remain in any person? And is that abiding their essence, or is not the flow and inscrutable flux essential?) Even if what abides is simply a shadow of what (I thought) I knew, I still say to him, “I love you.” (What could that even mean—to speak fidelity to sides of a man that are not wholly him?) Admittedly, I wrestle to maintain the gap between his facticity and his transcendence; but it would seem the gap has simply been maintained between us. It is a wound really. I cannot excuse its violence. Misperception is a kind of amputation.

II) “Philosophy will always, to my way of thinking, be an aid to discovery…”[ii]

Families can have shadow figures that do not seem real until they are not there.[iii] And then you realize, that if they were not ‘there’ before, it was not for lack of presence; it was for lack of seeing. So when they are not locationally present, their absence seems double: the loss of not seeing them physically, and the continued awareness that you never fully saw them.

When misperception marks an incompleteness, one could blame the holes in memory. Perhaps I never fully retained the times my dad and I walked the dog—those nights when I was sick at home, stir crazy for a semester. I have the vague impression that in the dark, he felt more comfortable being himself. Or I was craving conversation so much that I finally heard him. I remember he spoke of God in a way that surprised me. (What did he say?) For all our shallow ‘knowledge’ of him, he had his depths. He just could not speak them when afraid. In fear, his thoughts were diffuse, and never claimed as his own.

When misperception raises a wall, one could blame the deficiencies in desire. Perhaps I never honestly desired a relationship with my father. He was a mystery to me, and not an inviting one. My mother often remarked about his foul breath, his overpowering, nervous laugh, his sweat, his unkempt hair. His difference was rendered unappealing. She only needed him to be closer to her image in order to see him. We all did. Dad, why are you afraid of showering like we do? (We’d forget his water accident as a child.) Why are you never contributing to housework, like we do? (We’d discount his imperfect attempts). Why don’t you think critically about your expenditures, like we do? (We never understood why spending brought him so much happiness). And the questions stopped there for many years. Frequently, desire was not present to ask the questions that mattered. This man could only be as good as his words, his reasoning—to say nothing of whether he was worthy of respect for simply being present, a person inhabiting our home. His fallibility was our alibi for limited grace. We forgot who he was; we knew him.

When misperception is a subtle form of amnesia, one wonders about the difference between forgetting and forgiving. And why forgiveness, as time’s erosion of hardened flaws, was not chosen in place of forgetting. Forgetting was convenient, easy as my father’s omissions.

The phenomenological project favors a more difficult, more rewarding, progression toward perception. Ideally, it honors the people who strive, even through tears, to see with the eyes of time—ever patient, ever attentive, to the dimensions that surprise expectations and fulfill hopes. Love is this lasting desire to know without the temptation to stop learning. In this way, love is patiently engaged with time. Its intersubjectivity hinges on incompleteness.

In this paper, I suggest that being in time favors desire over disdain, flow over stasis. In short, fidelity within flux prevents the perceptions that limit beings. Perception as ongoing allusion can expose these perceptual illusions—both the omissions that reduce persons, and the hardened concepts that resist change. I begin by citing Gabriel Marcel on the occurrence of reducing persons to ideological objects. I nuance a similarly harmful reduction of intersubjectivity to perceptual rigidity by integrating Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s “incarnated mind.” I then draw a comparison with Casey’s project, which critiques the reduction of place to absolute time-space. Just as Casey privileges concrete places over abstract space, I turn to Edmund Husserl for a more layered sense of temporality. Husserl’s phenomenology of time, as play between “retention” and “protention,” thwarts a reduction of the present to a now-point. Tying together these strands—multi-dimensional approaches to time, place, and person—I arrive at Levinas’ call for vigilance, and Marcel’s call for patient perception. Levinas’ “ethics of the infinite” approaches Marcel’s “metaphysics of hope,” especially resonant on Marcel’s conception of “the pluralisation of the self in time.” As Marcel writes,

Patience seems, then, to suggest a certain temporal pluralism, a certain pluralisation of the self in time. It is radically opposed to the act by which I despair of the other person, declaring that he is good for nothing, or that he will never understand anything, or that he is incurable…[iv]

The reductions exposed by these thinkers each enact a collapse of time’s dimensionality, a kind of despairing fatalism (“nothing…never…incurable”) or undifferentiating absolutism (everything…always…everywhere).[v] I will conclude, then, not far from Marcel’s own position, by signaling the contributions of art and religion in preserving dimensionality and irreducibility. In their respective ways, both the arts and religious beliefs can startle the misperceptions that would otherwise deny the gifts of manifold time: forgiveness, change, hope. Both provide ways of resisting the violence of the fatum—which may be after all a fatal reduction of time, place, and spirited body. By modeling how the finite can engage an infinite, art and religion have the potential to reverse this violence: awakening us to a perception that is beyond the moment, beyond the single interpretation, even perhaps, beyond perception itself.

XX. Correspondences:

Twelve Reflections on Renewal[vi]

1.

Quantum Postulate

Time, it has been proven, does not exist. Only time which lays in the wild obscurity beyond our conceptions.

2.

What Exists Nevertheless

The green dawn before memory. Consciousness’s home in the origin of all things.

3.

Perplexing forms of Animism

That concepts make their home in the flesh of consciousness, and, like all that is animate, must be sustained.

4.

Curiosité

That levity of spirit is sustained: despite the ensnaring gravity of the Mind’s thicket.

5.

In Light of

The undiminished instinct to target with violence—the impulse to rise.

6.

Taboo of Hope

The hushed consonant and supplicant vowel: suspended like the whisper of a spider across the lips.

7.

To be Ill at Ease with Events

When what could be, but never should be, crosses over the threshold of the imagination: a trespassing of history.

8.

What Must be Healed

The traumas of history, which preclude the possibility of renewal of the spirit.

9.

Unproven Theorem

Contained in time is also the possibility of rebirth—a forgiveness of history.

10.

La Durée Difficile

The waiting that absolves memory and allows for forgiveness.

11.

Quantum Correction

Time would remake us in its image: fluid, and participants in the circular and unending path.

12.

Naïve Hypothesis

That the Spirit, digging deeper around the sunken weight of time, can find the way to endure and flourish.

III) “In Light of: The undiminished instinct to target with violence…”[vii]

Ellen Hinsey’s Update on the Descent began as a research project on war and human division. In launching from her “Twelve Reflections on Renewal,” I do not mean to reduce global atrocities to family dissolution. However, a subtle sort of violence also occurs on domestic stages and in interpersonal relations. Gabriel Marcel articulates the reduction, violent in nature, of a person to an object (simulacrum). In this way, he speaks alongside several philosophers writing around the two World Wars. Many were asking, how is it possible for a world to forget its humanity so sufficiently as to enact mass destruction and genocide? This forgetting is of course two-fold: the reduction of the human to spectator (forgetting the agency of the self), and the reduction of the human to agenda (forgetting the personhood of the other). The perpetrators and bystanders, as well as the victims, lose their humanity—one in assuming a mechanistic role, the other in suffering the ideological reduction. Marcel’s insight reveals how these reductions take place not only in wars, but even in relation to those we claim to love.

In his Gifford Lecture, “The Mystery of Being,” Marcel begins by citing the gap between acquisition and illumination. One mode of knowledge uses metaphors of grasping information, thus the words ‘apprehend’ and ‘comprehend’ stem from the roots of prendre (to take). Marcel states that this mode is useful perhaps only in habituation. However, these metaphors of possession prove detrimental if unaccompanied by the possibility for illumination (a light received). Illumination, quite contrary to the possession of knowledge, entails a sudden recognition of a light from elsewhere, “a sudden access to some reality’s revelation of itself to us.”[viii] This mode of knowledge is part discovery, part creative openness to what reveals itself in the person, place, or object of one’s intentionality. Though phenomenological intentionality could be seen as a sort of reaching toward ‘the things in themselves,’ it is a reach that aims to receive, not to grasp in any total way.

At the site of phenomenal revelation or “givenness,” the observer runs the risk of thematizing or objectifying an experience of illumination. It is a risk inherent in the attempt to preserve an “initial, living experience” as if it “could survive only on condition of degrading itself to a certain extent, or rather shutting itself up in its own simulacrum.”[ix] Though the simulacrum is helpful for retention, as such it is subordinated to the perceiver’s usage—try as it might to break free and exist as another subject. Even memory, which acquires the ideological object post-illumination, may forget to recall the very “invisible and gradually less and less palpable presence.”[x] In short, Marcel is concerned that anamnesis (a presence made present) will be reduced to mimesis; the presence conjured by memory will be reduced in a functionally reproductive or possessive usage of ideological objects. For the mind that desires acquisition, openness toward what one does not know (or cannot readily see) is more difficult, if it is even admitted at all.

It may now be clear as to why Marcel is crucial for thwarting the biased, often violent, reductions that found war. But even in times of ‘peace,’ Marcel warns against governments that would reduce individual people to techne, to the “social whole,” or an equality that eradicates creativity.[xi] Again, as I mentioned, these very moves toward totalitarianism occur on interpersonal levels, not just international scenes. When Marcel describes the process of reducing a presence to a simulacrum, he explicates it in the difficulties of love’s knowledge. He gives the example of describing someone you love, or someone whom you have spent many years befriending. In the effort to describe her essence—both to yourself or to others—you not only reduce her to the capacities of your words, but also to the observable phenomena. Though these are somewhat necessary reductions for purposes of communication, the dilemma arises when the beloved, over time, is reduced to what one can or has communicated. The simulacrum formed by speech and rigid ways of knowing may come to obstruct the concrete and incommunicable aspects of a person. Furthermore, the abstracted reduction may even change your attitudes or behavior toward the person. No longer is perception and language a relation between two subjects, but rather between the self and an ideological object.

IV) “Perplexing forms of Animism: That concepts make their home in the flesh of consciousness”[xii]

Marcel expressed concern for the ways in which speech and perception can fall toward harmful reductions; as if drawn toward some gravity of mental possession, the self inevitably constrains meaning to make it available for usage (in memory or in words). However, is there a way of engaging the world and language that does not wish to equate phenomena with narrow perception? Or, as if in the tones of Marcel, Merleau-Ponty asks, “Could one conceive of a love that would not be an encroachment on the freedom of the other?” He then responds:

There is a paradox in accepting love from a person without wanting to have any influence on her freedom. If one loves, one finds one’s freedom precisely in the act of loving, and not in a vain autonomy….the perspectives remain separate and yet they overlap….As Alain has said, to love someone is to swear and affirm more than one knows about what the other will be. In a certain measure, it is to relinquish one’s freedom of judgment.[xiii]

Maurice Merleau-Ponty here resembles Marcel’s concept of creative fidelity.[xiv] But he also, in describing the paradoxes of intersubjectivity, posits a new concept of perception—one that is dynamic, distinguishing overlaps and separations, while resisting closure (definitive judgment). Given his comments above, the analogy of ideal perception would be a loving relationship between self and other, selves and world.

Perception itself is rooted in a dynamism inherent to the body. The mind then is “an incarnated mind.” In summarizing this phrase within his work, Merleau-Ponty writes, “I have tried, first of all to re-establish the roots of the mind in its body and in its world, going against doctrines which treat perception as a simple result of the action of external things on our body as well as against those which insist on the autonomy of consciousness.”[xv]  Correspondingly, he suggests that language is a sort of being that touches upon or gestures toward its referent.[xvi] And this referent is not solitary; because of time and space, the referent is always already allusory (allusio, playing-with), reaching through a web of co-mingling schemas.[xvii] Both his concepts of perception and of language recognize that reality is necessarily intersubjective. This requires a thinking then, not unlike breath or porous contractions, and a perceiving not unlike a metaxu—drawing connections even as it distinguishes.[xviii]

In his essay, “The Children’s Relations with Others,” Merleau-Ponty asks how it is that one comes to acknowledge the self as distinct, yet related, to the other. Distinct in that I become a self, and only I know my psyche, but related such that I can tell the difference between a man and a mannequin.[xix] Merleau-Ponty writes the essay as a foundation for intersubjectivity, showing how a child comes to learn through engagement with the world (against the intellectualism approach) and not always in causally determined ways (against the naturalism approach).[xx] He submits instead an intersubjective process, made known through phenomena studied in developmental psychology. This process, he notes, is one of ‘informing’: “a more profound operation whereby the child organizes his experience of external events—an operation which thus is properly neither logical nor a predicative activity.”[xxi]

Merleau-Ponty notes that a child’s conception of the world is more fragmentary than totalized, especially including those objects that are not near to his or her experience (“ultra things” like the sun). Similarly, language acquisition has its own gaps, or rather, a supreme openness not yet restricting the words “to come.”[xxii] Language then begins as an assimilation, or a habituation: “the learning of a structure of conduct.”[xxiii] The assimilation of language and perception begins with ambiguities that are then affected by “the personality and by the interpersonal relationships in which the child lives.”[xxiv] Again, Merleau-Ponty pushes for the intersubjective approach as a mediation between idealism and naturalism—or phenomenology, more broadly as the perceptual mitigation of relativism and positivism.

He starts with the example of a child whose thinking is psychologically rigid (answers without nuance, black and white categories). Borrowing the studies of Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Merleau-Ponty suggests that in authoritarian environments, children are likely to dichotomize, first in terms of “authority and obedience” and later carrying the dualistic structure into ambivalent attitudes. Ambivalence can see dualisms in a person, but never fully reconcile them in a complex way. Ambiguity, however, is a “phenomenon of maturity….It consists in admitting that the same being who is good and generous can also be annoying and imperfect. Ambiguity is ambivalence that one dares to look at face to face.”[xxv]

The rigid separation of ambivalent thinking can lead to projection, where the child displaces “outside himself the part of himself [or his parents] he does not want to be.”[xxvi] As an adult this process takes place in scapegoating entire people groups. It can also manifest between the sexes, where women and men become both “accomplices and enemies”—projecting onto one another the parts of their sexual identity or gender stereotypes that they do not want. In all cases, psychological rigidity was correlated with perceptual rigidity.[xxvii] Because psychologically rigid subjects are more faithful to their prejudgments or projections than they are to the other subject before them, Merleau-Ponty classifies them as “a subject [who] rebels against all aspects of the phenomenon of transition.”[xxviii] In essence, the subject cannot account for the changes that time brings. Or even aside from time, the subject cannot discern differences not only within people but between people. As Merleau-Ponty explains, “There is an abstract or rigid liberalism which consists in thinking that all men are identical.” True liberalism is at least able to distinguish between different historical and cultural situations.

Ambiguity, as the virtue of mature cognition (and nuanced perception), is what ambivalent cognition cannot internalize. Everyone presumably experiences ambiguities, but it is a matter of how one treats these complexities. To be sure, the society of a person influences their potential to be ambivalent or to internalize ambiguities in their cognitive schemas. However, through language, the subject can come to discover nuance, and as if “elastically” he can restructure his surroundings. Language can be a means of identification, “To learn to speak is to learn to play a series of roles, to assume a series of conducts or linguistic gestures.”[xxix]

But language begins also as a process of distinction: identification and difference. Merleau-Ponty offers the example of a young girl who one day meets her new baby brother (and is overcome with jealousy). She thinks that the present in which she was the only child had been absolute. But she has to learn a new “now,” as opposed to “then,” before a new baby brother. Through this decentering, in Piaget’s terms, the daughter has to make distinctions between what was once absolute and is now relative to another locus of subjectivity. Through a series of intersubjective engagements, the little girl learns both a concept of present and past and, in Heidegger’s terms, mineness. She comes to assert “me” and “I”—the use of which suggests to Merleau-Ponty that she is conceiving of the future.[xxx]

Now the original dilemma of how a self comes to know the other: it seems to occur through a process of gestures. I cannot know definitely that another has a psyche except through perceptions of their gestures—verbal and bodily. The perception of the other as an organism with a psyche is possible because my visual image of the other is compared to my introceptive and extroceptive imaging of self. This would seem both a necessary projection or reduction, that of identification, because it acknowledges that we are both human beings capable of intentions and volitions. This is an identification that constricts in order to complicate. A false identification—an egoism resembling empathy—would actually be detrimental to this process. If I am not fully a self, I cannot recognize the other as another subject. The collapse of self and other, or their false construal, is a regression in the process of intersubjectivity.

Symmetry or sameness is not the goal of intersubjectivity, similarity perhaps (which implies some measure of difference). To be aware of one’s own psyche within the body, and to recognize that the other is not just a mannequin (or even an ideological phantasm) are the dual functions of Merleau-Ponty’s incarnation.[xxxi] However, he elucidates that the perception of one’s self and an other do not always occur simultaneously:

On the contrary, we shall see that the perception of one’s own body is ahead of the recognition of the other, and consequently if the two comprise a system, it is a system that becomes articulated in time. To say that a phenomenon is one of “form” (Gestalt) is in no way to say that it is innate in its different aspects or even in a single one of its aspects….Gestalt theorists have by no means limited the use of the notion of “form” to the instant or the present. They have, on the contrary, insisted on the phenomenon of form in time (melody)….The notion of form is essentially dynamic.[xxxii]

Merleau-Ponty concludes his essay with Henri Wallon’s account of dynamic development. At the foundation of Wallon’s description of intelligence is the relation of reciprocity. But in order to gain a healthy reciprocity between phenomena and others, one must move through jealousy, mimesis (where the other invades the self), transitivism (projection), and even sympathy since it can be “the absence of a distinction between the self and the other.”[xxxiii] These are all symptoms of poor boundary development—either the eradication of walls, or the impermeability of walls. Intersubjectivity requires a certain porosity without syncretism. It requires a crystallization of distinctions, but a fluidity that can perceive likeness and change. Otherwise, a lapse occurs which, in adults, manifests as the inability to differentiate the sign and the referent.[xxxiv] In an underdeveloped perception,  this can also manifest as “an inability to conceive space and time as environments that contain a series of perspectives which are absolutely distinct from one another.” This phenomena of spatial indistinction is not confined to children. It occurs even in the most respected of philosophies. As Merleau-Ponty points out, “Descartes was right in setting space free. His mistake was to erect it into a positive being, outside all points of view, beyond all latency and all depth, having no true thickness.”[xxxv]

V) “What Nevertheless Exists…Consciousness’s home in the origin of all things. ”[xxxvi]

In his philosophical prolegomena, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” Edward Casey introduces the questions of his project, “Can place do anything but specify what is already the case in space and time? Or might it be that place is something special, with its own essential structures and modes of experience, even something universal in its own way?”[xxxvii] He wonders how it came to be that concrete places have been reduced to the theoretical blandness of absolute space and time. And what ‘thickness’ is forgotten in this move?

These questions appear beneath a series of quotes that would seem to anticipate his answer. For example, he gives the foundational statement of Archytas, “All existing things are either in place or not without place.”[xxxviii] Immediately Casey’s project is stated: a return to the concrete experiences of place that are in some way universal. He then suggests with Aristotle (“The power of place will be remarkable.”) that places have their own specific potencies so that not two places are lumped into absolute, undifferentiated space.[xxxix]

Casey begins explicating these conclusions through Husserl’s critique of the “natural attitude.” The natural attitude encompasses the beliefs or predispositions that a society (specifically those dominated by modern science, naturalism, materialism, etc.) accepts as given. Casey argues that since Kant and Newton, one of these accepted beliefs is that space is prior to place, and that place is merely derived as compartments of space.[xl] He suggests Kant and Newton as the creators of an absolute space: empty, infinite, an a priori ‘tabula rasa.’[xli]

Casey wonders—alongside anthropologist Fred R. Myers—about the reverse process through which a space becomes a place or ‘country.’ How is that we come to endow upon specific places and objects a story that animates their particularity? However Casey distinguishes his project by stating, “For the anthropologist, Space comes first; for the native, Place; and the difference is by no means trivial.”[xlii] Casey is not after the theorist’s superimposed space, or the natural attitude of “absolute space.” Rather, he returns to the experience of place as local knowledge, which roots him in a phenomenological approach where perception is primary. He does not follow Kant’s assumption that “though all our knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it arises out of experience….General knowledge must always precede local knowledge.”[xliii] To the contrary, Casey begins from the “pre-position” of phenomenology: what does it mean to inhabit a place and how can it be perceived?

Between the experiential “horizons” asserted by Husserl and the sensation of “depth” named by Merleau-Ponty, Casey presents a mode of perception that ties space and sensation to “emplacement.”[xliv] Sensations are not tacked onto place no more than space can be imposed as a theory of place. This means that, contrary to Kant, “Knowledge of place is not, then subsequent to perception…but is ingredient in perception itself.”[xlv] Therefore the perceiver does not merely receive perceptions, but as a being-in-the-world (in place), she experiences perception as “a kind of passivity in activity.”[xlvi] This phrase, provided by Husserl, claims that perception—as it occurs inextricable from place—is co-constituting, intersubjective. There are therefore no ‘brute facts’ (Hume) or compilations of atomic sensations (Kant). Culture, history, place: all permeate perception, and the individual “placeling” in turn makes sense of place by placing her senses.[xlvii]

Casey explains that for Descartes, Galileo and to some degree, Newton, “space was homogenous, isotropic, isometric and infinitely (or at least, indefinitely) extended. Within the supremely indifferent and formal scene of space, local differences did not matter. Place itself did not matter.”[xlviii] Newton attempted to categorize absolute and relative—but really the latter was a portion of the former, a position in “God’s infinite sensoria.” Kant also aggrandized and abstracted place as “pure forms of intuition” internalized within a human subject’s “position.”[xlix]

In order to recall that human beings are “spatially localized” (Husserl), Casey suggests that a more nuanced understanding of place must begin in a return to the body.[l] Because the body itself is subtle and multiple, it is crucial in dispelling the beliefs of monolithic space. Contrary to Galileo’s depiction of body (governed by laws like a body qua object), Casey suggests Merleau-Ponty’s lived body. The lived body connects to its environment through intentionality. Casey adds, “A place, we might even say, has its own ‘operative intentionality’ that elicits and responds to the corporeal intentionality of the perceiving subject….It is a matter of what Basso calls ‘interanimation.’”[li] It would seem then, that the inability to perceive variegations of place would be correlative to a body’s inability to recognize its own inherent dimensionality. There is much at stake in this mutually erosive inability to permit nuance.

Casey reminds that the emplaced body is significant to perceiving place in five ways: (1) kinesthesias and synethesias allow motion within a local to be processed; (2) the immanent body can perceive directionality and depth (what Kant abstracted to Cartesian coordinates); (3) the body’s specific density and mass allow it to perceive “thickness” in a place, while also recognizing its difference from the place; (4) the particularity of the body is related to the particularity of place, “partak[ing] in the ‘this-here’”; and (5) as opposed to a “windowless monad,” the body’s boundaries are marked by porous skin, thereby able to perceive the “valences of places.”[lii] Thus, the body is a profound experience of motion, which Casey categorizes as: “staying in place,” “moving within a place,” and “moving between places.”[liii]

Why is this significant? Remember Merleau-Ponty’s discovery that much of psychological rigidity is a failure of porous schemas, a misconstrual of boundaries, and moreover, an inability to transition or change. In some way, the perceptions we gather are a function of the Casey’s thesis that place gathers. The body as a place, emplaced in this world, suggests a parallel between how the mind “holds” place and is held within place. Here the terrain of memory and thought makes of place “the generatrix for the collection, as well as the recollection of all that occurs in the lives of sentient beings, and even for the trajectories of inanimate beings. Its power consists in gathering these lives and things”—and I would add, moving among them.[liv] The mobile body, in both the transits of sensation of action, gathers place and perceptions; and their arrangement depends on one’s capacity to process variability.

In this understanding, place is less an object for ideological reflection, and more an event of gathering of “grasping-together.” Casey’s frame of ‘place as event’ is crucial. As opposed to time-space categories (causality or stasis), “place is something for which we continually have to discover or invent new forms of understanding….Its peculiarity calls not for assumption into the already known—that way lies site, which lends itself to predefined predications.”[lv] The priority of place, in that it cannot be predetermined or pre-defined, gives it both a “formal universal” quality within experience; and yet, it is “always contentful, always specifiable as this particular place.”[lvi] Place may be like a “mist” that gathers, but it is not simply this insubstantial mist around things; it is inextricable from the things and people who live within place and define it.

Casey calls place a “concrete universal”—“belonging both to special worlds and to a common world….It is thus a relational universal that consists in its very capacity to assemble things as well as kinds of things.”[lvii] It is this relational structure that keeps place from forming “hierarchies of increasing abstraction.”[lviii] Because place is relationally construed through bodily perceptions, naming, and interhuman activities, it ideally can never be reduced to sameness. If sameness exists it is not homogeneity, but regions of similar structures. Place can never be absolutized into a generalized object; nor can place be so concrete that it exists only for the individual.[lix] Like the psyche or the human body, place is both singular and intersubjective.

This also factors into Casey’s concept of culture. Culture as “pervading bodies and places and bodies-in-places” can never be exhausted.[lx] Culture carries a certain “wildness”: it resists reduction even in its signification. He thus concludes, “because of the ubiquity of such wildness in body, place, and culture, the temptation to espouse the idea of a primary ‘precultural’ level of experience is difficult to overcome.”[lxi] Casey thus asks for a resistance toward privileging origins; these origins (as theorized) forge a false relationship. Because bodies are inextricable from place and culture, the myth of foundations dissipates. And if there is no theoretical origin (or ‘original place’), there is likely no room for subordinations that would reduce “persons to subjects—and, still more extremely, to minds.”[lxii] If a being is emplaced, there can be no “strict distinctions” between what is internal and external, between what is natural and what is cultural. It is as if place construes these divisions in a more fluid exchange, to keep one from being the determined successor of the other.

Like Merleau-Ponty, Casey speaks in refrains of co-existence or co-constitution, place as a holding or grasping together via the body-in-place. But if his notion of place is to take into account time, it must also accord a dynamic re-reading of Leibniz’s time as “the order of succession.”[lxiii] Just as Casey would replace absolute space with place, he would exchange time for “date” or “event.” Because these latter terms ask particularity, they maintain a relation to place. If time is anything for Casey, it is what makes possible the “porosity of boundaries between places.” Time occurs as a sieve-like or elastic measurement, allowing transit through ceremonial actions and journeys of exchange. Thus, time is deeply connected to the body navigating the horizons of place as event. Consequently, all knowledge is local, proximate, never outside of place in pure time (the eternal) or absolute space (the infinite).

VI) “Unproven Theorem: Contained in time is also the possibility of rebirth…”[lxiv]

However, what about Casey’s concept of the relational as concrete universal? What is it that makes possible our transits and links between places, between people? And is not the philosopher’s task to stand outside this link between universal experience and concrete life, in order to see it more clearly? At least Husserl seemed to think, at the end of his career, that the philosopher “ought not to think like the external man, the psychophysical subject who is in time, in space, in society, as an object is in a container.”[lxv] So, can there be a reduction of the phenomena, or an abstraction from the world (as in the “natural attitude”), that does not lead to the reduction of persons or of mystery?

The phenomenological reduction aims at a sort of meta-understanding (asking what it means “to be,” while yet being in the world.) It does not suspend the natural attitude or bracket the world in order to remain separate, but rather to better examine the links that “bind us to the physical, social, and cultural world.”[lxvi] It is because the philosopher acknowledges her individuality, temporality, and contingency that she can then examine herself as one possibility among many. Because the phenomenologist admits her body, she can admit the plural, irreducible body of the world. The phenomenological bracket is a departure with the reflex of return. As Merleau-Ponty remarks, “Husserl admitted that the first result of reflection is to bring us back into the presence of the world as we lived it before our reflection began.”[lxvii]

If the phenomenological reduction seems an uprooting of place in some manner, it is not at all permitted to negate time. Merleau-Ponty recalls that, for Husserl, there are several ways to live time. A person can live inside time passively, submitting to it. A person can “take over this time and live it through for oneself” in a more active way.[lxviii] Either way, temporality is inescapable. And furthermore, because it is dynamic, it resists totalities. On this point, Emmanuel Levinas expresses another way of conceiving time as an eschatological relation:

Eschatology institutes a relation with being beyond the totality or beyond history, and not with being beyond the past and the present. Not with the void that would surround the totality and where one could, arbitrarily, think what one likes, and thus promote the claims of a subjectivity free as the wind. It is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality, as though the objective totality did not fill out the true measure of being, as though another concept, the concept of infinity, were needed to express this transcendence with regard to totality, non-encompassable within a totality and as primordial as totality.[lxix]

So the question becomes: how do I desire to conceive and live within my conception of time? Is it something that happens to me, stealing from me my days in this world (life as passing)? Is it something that I manipulate for my projects or use to flesh out my intuitions (life as futural)? Put another way, is there a manner of eschatological relation to time, which goes beyond history in some way but also beyond the objective totality? Levinas suggest that yes, in fact by considering the infinite, the “surplus” on other side of the finite totality, we can think of time as both elusive and excessive in some way. These words resonate with Husserl’s own expression of time as the interplay between retention (the surplus of what passes) and projection (the surplus of the present toward the future). Something remains, something passes away, and internal time consciousness is what propels the retained into the futural reach of protention.

Before unpacking Husserl’s phenomenology of time, it would be helpful to state his views on history in relation to the present. For Husserl, history requires an absence of judgment. Because history has not ended, and is more fluid than historians relay, one cannot simply judge history without escaping it though moves into the “ideal sphere.”[lxx] This is precisely what Levinas warns against (the ideal sphere), but he also warns against a perspectivalism that allows totality to sink into the void. Levinas does not want definitive judgment (totality) nor relative arbitration where each “subjectivity [is as] free as the wind.” And yet he claims some depature from history is possible, even necessary, in order to resist totality.

Husserl’s contemporaries were concerned to construct a history deeply caught in the present (so as not to escape time via ideological reductions). However, in working against ideological departure by choosing a “view of the world,” they also took leave of a certain “science of the world.”[lxxi] Philosophers such as Dilthey expressed a need to “live in light of a reflection and to arrive this way at effective, practical conclusions” within one’s lifetime.[lxxii] In other words, because beings are finite, they only have so long to make the judgments that make their time in this world functional, responsible even. As Husserl assesses, “[These philosophers] place their end in the finite. They wish to have their system, and then time to live in accordance with it.”[lxxiii] Philosophers of the Weltanschauung (“view of the world”) school, according to Husserl, privileged certain facts over against the range of possibilities. They had confined themselves to what is and not always considered what can be, or even what structure or essence could possibly ground what is.[lxxiv]

Husserl’s phenomenological approach therefore seems to require not only intentionality toward what phenomenally reveals, but an openness to the potential of what is concealed. This almost sounds like Levinas’ relation to the transcendent Other revealed in the ethical relations of this world,[lxxv] while requiring our metaphysical desire.[lxxvi] Perhaps this advances what Levinas means in the eschatological relation rightly conceived. It is a relation to time which does not confine itself to history (or the “natural attitude”); but neither does it abandon the past and present for some ideological reduction or totality. Time desire’s permission, always extending, while retaining its sources of departure. Time, as the Other, always escapes while yet calling us.

To deepen these more poetical-ethical explanations of time, we retrace to Husserl’s terms of retention and protention. In her explication of “Developments in the Theory of Time-Consciousness,” Lanei Rodemeyer tracks Husserl’s thought not simply to contribute to the phenomenological structures of temporality, “but also [to] provide the subject with an openness toward what is new and unknown—an aspect which is necessarily integral to our intentionality and which founds our link to subjectivity.”[lxxvii] This is not to say that time admits a haphazard openness; rather, a deeper understanding of temporality presents a relationship between mobility and constraint, possibilities within an actuality.

Even in his earliest explorations of time, Husserl linked intentionality to a futural anticipation. In 1893, for example, Husserl stated that interest, which comes before intuition, influences what is actualized.[lxxviii] Husserl speaks of the process of actualizing an intuition in terms of “striving” and “attraction.”[lxxix] We tend to be pulled toward an unsatisfied intuition; the future is what allows these intuitions to be fulfilled. The “now-moment” necessarily “extends beyond itself” unless we choose to be satisfied with what is presently known.[lxxx] The desire for complete intuitions actually reveals that the momentary intuitions are incomplete. And the object of our intentionality draws us forward such that our attraction is “necessarily futural.”[lxxxi] Husserl emphasizes the futural structure of time, since the streaming direction of time always presses the standing now from remaining statically. Protention is the “not-yet” fringe of the now that expands forward.[lxxxii] So for Husserl, any attempt to reduce the present to a mathematical “now-point,” is a move toward a fictive reducation.

As opposed to “now-point,” Husserl uses the notion of a primordial impression (Urimpression) to denote the moment when an intuition is actualized. But this does not mean he conceives of the present in a singular instant. He speaks of a “‘living present’—the constituting activity of protention, Urimpression, and retention.”[lxxxiii] Husserl first concludes that retentions motivate protentions; but he then acknowledges that “retentions are also motivated by protentions.”[lxxxiv] One has the image of a snake swallowing its own tail, a sort of circularity inherent to time. What I anticipate for the future is somehow based in what has already passed. And because time keeps climbing even as it sinks, what I once protended can come to a fulfilled intuition that then leads to an ongoing engagement through retention.[lxxxv] A better image would be a tidal overlap, where waves are not only carrying what they advanced over but what they pulled back. Another image is that of the circulatory system: where the blood in the heart marks the present—even though it is merely a container of what has already passed through and what is coming in (though not without modification which occurs in the very circulation event).

Rodemeyer summarizes, “As a fulfilled moment passes into retention, then, it is not a retention of a momentary former now-point—that would be the ‘mathematical’ explanation; it is the retention of a fulfilled protention, one which itself protends toward the next fulfillment.”[lxxxvi] Rodemeyer then gives the example of how this works in speech. As the speaker, I must not only retain what I have just said but maintain where I know myself to be directing the sentence (“active protentions” for the words to come). The hearer also has to retain the words just said while measuring them within the context of the complete sentence (or “actualized fulfillment”).[lxxxvii] This not only happens in speech but in the very act of moving between places; navigation forward works with memory of where one has just been.

Experientially we are generally focused forward, but our memories as retentions may weight us backward. Or far worse, the memories become a crystallized retention that has no desire to protend a different intentionality than the one achieved by the accepted, static, now. Husserl’s concept of time moved away from the “now” (and even his own term, Urimpression) insofar as it could be readily misconceived as stasis. It would thwart the phenomenological project, let alone the experiential striving that one might have toward a phenomenon, if one claimed to have realized all its potential. If I confined myself to the now, I would have very limited views confined to the presentation of this moment. Place would be static without time; metaphorically, it would be a photograph instead of a film. So too people—if we remove them from this dynamism of time—could readily be reduced to our words about them or the simulacrum we have constructed (protentions restricted by rigid retentions).

It is no wonder then, that a gracious perception requires a certain time-giving, and expansion into what was and will be. What then is forgiveness in this understanding of time? Through, Husserl, I invoke time as a sort of grace: an interplay between what is remembered and what is hoped for. But how does forgiveness fit in this dynamism—if it is not to be simply an erasure of the past and an abrupt starting over. To reduce the now to a mathematical point is no different than reducing a ‘new, redemptive start’ to an arbitrary point. Perhaps the freedom of the will (in other words, desire) in relation to time can establish the difference between forgetting and forgiving. Forgetting is involuntary dissolution occurring within the self’s memory or even a community’s collective memory. Forgetting can be a kind of undifferentiating perception not always consciously chosen, but nevertheless implied within humanity’s limitations. Forgiving is a voluntary absolution permitted to another; it does not simply wash over the particularities of an offense, but rather sees these offenses within the range of wider possibilities. The possibilities are in some way opened by the perceptual act of forgiveness itself. Forgiveness is inherent in the choice against reduction: it keeps us from reducing history, time, being, and place to one dimension or set of errors. Forgiveness is the release of an impediment that would stop the flow of potentiality. But this sort of forgiveness, therefore favors vulnerability, exposition that cannot rely on retention alone. As Levinas writes about the ongoing ethic of “saying” versus the prematurely closed time of the “said”:

Saying is ethical sincerity insofar as it is exposition. As such, this saying is irreducible to the ontological definability of the said. Saying is what makes the self-exposure of sincerity possible; it is a way of giving everything, of not keeping anything for oneself. Insofar as ontology requests truth with the intelligibility of total presence, it reduces the pure exposure of saying to the totalizing closure of the said.[lxxxviii]

Ethics, like time or forgiveness, flies in the face of a static intelligibility. A certain demand for intelligibility forgets; it shaves off nuance, mystery, and irreducibility. However, to acknowledge one’s life as a constant saying, one’s ethical actions as an ongoing exposition to the other, is to live fully within time, not closed by it. Perhaps this is why, when Levinas, credits Husserl’s phenomenology, he writes, “What counts [in Husserlian phenomenology] is the idea of the overflowing of objectifying thought by a forgotten experience from which it lives.”[lxxxix] Phenomenology aims for a restoration of the forgotten—both in time and in being. This restoration is always in favor of a more dynamic, intersubjective reality. Phenomenology is the forgiveness of dualistic thinking; it recovers through the very co-constitutions demanded by body, psyche, time, and place. In some way, its brackets favor the patient repair of a world marred by misperception. Phenomenology is an attempt to be of the world and not in it, such that one might see anew with the ever-protending eyes of time.

VII) “La Durée Difficile: The waiting that absolves memory and allows for forgiveness.” [xc]

For Marcel, “ a philosopher worthy of the name [has] no more important undertaking than that of reinstating experience in the place of such bad substitutes for it.”[xci] The philosopher has the task of returning objects to their more mysterious and dynamic presence. This does not mean that nothing can be acquired or communicated, but rather that what is acquired must remain dynamically related to the possibility for future illumination. Retention cannot be the sole matter of time. Protention, as the reach of intentionality past its fulfillment, must also function within time’s dynamism in order to thwart inadequate perceptions.

Hence, for Marcel, the phenomenologist as well as the perceptive lover must engage in “creative fidelity.” Marcel acknowledges the difficulty of remaining constant to someone or some belief, while also being fully present, reaching in receptivity. His concept of love in terms of creativity, then, is a willingness to remain open to the other, at his or her disposal—while respecting the other’s permeability and my own. Creative fidelity as love, or as ethical commitment, occurs when the self is in a constant state of creation to meet the demands of fidelity.  This often occurs in the artist’s relationship with her vision, as Gabriel notes in Rodin’s advice to Rilke. The virtue of creative fidelity is, “Patience, humility in the presence of the object, of the two-fold act by which the artist opens up to it and by which it opens up to the artist.”[xcii] Therefore, both the self and the other (be it a phenomenal object or a person) are called to intersubjective opening, not one-sided subordination.

Phenomenology, as a discipline of attending phenomena, requires both the opening of the self in intentionality and the opening of the world in a sort of disclosure.[xciii] But because phenomena conceal and reveal, time’s accumulations can (in an ongoing construal) permit the observer a sense of both continuity and incompleteness. I see that person in this light now, as it relates to previous notions and the present context; but if persons or phenomena are not simply to be ideological objects, they must be permitted their agency in and through time. Furthermore, if we are to permit change, we must fundamentally alter our conception of time. For Marcel, the consciousness of time as “closed” or “time as a prison” leads to despair, and the dead-ends of its reductions. In contrast, “hope appears as the piercing through time; everything happens as though time, instead of hedging consciousness round, allowed something to pass through it.” Something was allowed to move through the deadlock.

Perhaps this is why Levinas laments the violence that imprisons persons under a totality. The infinite potential, one’s dynamic relation permitted by time, is forged into an unnatural stasis. As he clarifies in his preface to Totality and Infinity,

…violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry our actions that will destroy every possibility for action.[xciv]

We might hear in these words echoes of Marcel’s lecture, when he speaks of reducing the mysterious being to a simulacrum. Surely, both what Levinas describes and what Marcel warns against are versions of subordination, repression. It can reduce my neighbor to a specific role, or the stranger to a specific bias. Both these moves would in fact ignore the “continuity” of their essence, its ongoing development and the portions of their lives prior to our meeting.

Therefore, the self’s perception of the other, if it is not to be violent, must accord the other its agency, its priority even.[xcv] Because the shift is from an autonomous individual to heteronymous responsibility, my desire to preserve the other is infinite (ongoing, and necessarily incomplete). It is an asymmetrical relation that can never collapse into symmetry; it is diachrony that cannot resolve in synchrony.[xcvi] The other, existing in time, can never be equated to me. Because of time, we do not occupy the same space. As Levinas explains, “The non-simultaneous and non-present is my primary rapport with the other in time. Time means that the other is forever beyond me, irreducible to the synchrony of the same. The temporality of the interhuman opens up the meaning of otherness and the otherness of meaning.”[xcvii] Though we cannot occupy the same position in absolute space, we each share the common place of our world (as Casey reminds). If we accept this common place in its varieties and nuance, then so too we must accept the irreducibility of our neighbors. And if this so, then the phenomenologist cannot be an “absolute thinker.” Thus, Merleau-Ponty reminds that the incarnated being in time and place:

… undergoes a continued birth; at each instant it is something new. Every incarnate subject is like an open notebook in which we do not yet know what will be written. Or it is like a new language; we do not know what works it will accomplish but only that, once it has appeared, it cannot fail to say little or much, to have a history and a meaning.[xcviii]

Inherent to Merleau-Ponty’s claim is an injunction to perceive the other as capable of newness, continual coming into being like pages always being written. The story of a person changes, and these changes are not without meaning—even if they initially seem as unintelligible as another language. A beautiful metaphor challenged perhaps by Levinas’ claim that we are tempted to reduce an ongoing ‘saying’ to a ‘said.’ Marcel hears this reductive option and offers the work of hope. Should trials come upon the notebook from without—torn pages, erasures of the self through the violent misreadings of others–the self as ever-renewing can exercise patience, even hope. When a person experiences trial, does she contract her ego, and close her perception? Has she been cut short by an external totalizing? Patience through hope “means first accepting the trial as an integral part of the self, but while so doing it considers it as destined to be absorbed and transmuted by the inner workings of a certain creative process.”[xcix] Hope, like time, has the “power of making things fluid,” opening the said unto its adaptive saying.[c]

VIII) Epilogue – “Quantum Correction: Time would remake us in its image…”

            What would it mean to adopt the fluidity of time, as Ellen Hinsey’s poem concludes? It would be akin to Levinas’ “saying”—a way of thinking and being that is “pure exposure” as opposed to “totalizing closure.” It would require a certain perceptual openness—like desire, whose empty palms do not grasp so much as maintain their reaching. Merleau-Ponty speaks of how a painter quests in such a way, against the totality’s closure or a definitive grasp:

Just when [the painter] has reached proficiency in some area, he finds that he has reopened another one where everything he said before must be said again in a different way….It remains to be sought out; the discovery itself calls forth still further quests. The idea of a universal painting, of a totalization of painting, of a fully and definitively achieved painting is an idea bereft of sense. For painters the world will always be yet to be painted, even if it lasts millions of years…it will end without having been conquered in painting.[ci]

An elegant point: for painters, every apparent end is an opening. Every finite unit of accomplished knowledge or skill simply leads to another endeavor, another interpretation. Even if a particular vision is “said,” the painter does not cease with the said, but keeps endeavoring to express what has “yet to be painted.” Thus, Merleau-Ponty concludes by suggesting that artistic creations exist in an ongoing, far-reaching process of re-creation. They are not “possessed”  because they fade or “pass away,” but because they have a “life of their own.”[cii]

To be made in time’s image is to recognize an inner dynamism inherent to perception, to language, to being a human engaged in concrete places. A person placed and perceiving through time necessitates a thicker understanding of creation—of the possibilities for an individual to create anew, to revise, to restore, to repeat. Time permits change, for the better, for the worse, too. But if we are to accord one another (and our environment) this dynamism, this asks not only more responsibility, but more possibility as well. There are choices.

And to induce these choices we can experience other means (art, prayer, suffering, grace, memory, phenomenological attention) for disrupting our usual ways of perceiving. The aim is to be productively provoked in order to break out of problematic habituations of thought (hardened misperceptions). As Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei writes in The Ecstatic Quotidian, “Though quotidian life has its cadences, its energies and entropies, art and literature are manifestations of its capacity for self-renewal….[They] initiate reflection on the structure of experience, on the place of the human subject vis-à-vis the world, on the habits and structures, through which its familiar configurations holds together.”[ciii] Because artistic pieces provide the disruptive distance from which to view the ordinary or the habituated, they are not solutions in themselves, but ways out of reductive thinking.

In her essay on the works of Rilke and Frost, “The Mysterious and Poetry of the World’s Inner Horizons,” Gosetti-Ferencei articulates what lies beyond (yet deeply within) the quotidian realm. The mysterious does not leave the everyday, but takes root in it. So in our very reductions and habituations of thought, beneath their hardened soil remains indescribability, an otherness that cannot simply be reduced to problem and solution.[civ] This is not to say that this mystery eludes description, “rather I can be described according to the bonds between seen and the almost seen, between what appears and the invisible, as the peripheral, marginal, or horizonal.”[cv] In fact, the mysterious requires much nuance and is preserved in the relations between the ineffable and the everyday expression.

As the Christian contemplative, Meister Eckhart suggests in “German Sermon 8,” between silence and the unspeakable nature of God, the prophet chooses the ordinary to animate mysterious truths. The non-adequation between the “gross matter” and the God startles.[cvi] Because of this disproportion, religion has the potential to be a superlative form of encountering mystery. Religious belief stretches through incarnations of the divine in the daily, making tremble ambivalent distinctions (and their reductions). Religion is profoundly a reverence for what is unseen—the dead and the gods.[cvii] What is unseen is not dead or reduced to appearances, but terribly, mysteriously alive. Therefore, in similar ways both religion and the arts provide counterclaims to the “modern form of subjectivity, which reduces the world to the data of the statically given, the unmysterious, the “dull quotidian” [as the poet, Rilke, would say].”[cviii] For through the eyes of faith or the ekstasis of art, persons (and phenomenal encounters) have the potential to be more, in due time, than what they presently seem.

IX) Wakefulness and Surprise: To listen along the joints for all that surprisingly joins.[cix]

Misperception is a kind of slumber.

It would be easy to remember the arguments and the cold silences; these are the frequent punctuations of recall. But frequency is not the whole (as if people can be reduced to statistical regularity). There were extraordinary moments, but because they were so simple they nearly fall beneath memory. They are only dreams that a memory witnesses when it has stopped working.

In a dream, I once remembered the sound of my mother’s shears, saw the mousy clippings on the floor. Even though my parents often could not communicate, I do remember watching my mother cut my father’s hair. The way she tenderly handled his childish nature then: she would even touch his neck, or turn his head for him. I remember how she looked at him when finished, smiling, as if they had both submitted to a new creation—one that would satisfy her and therefore please him. In turn, the many nights he made dinner to please us, so fastidious in how he kneaded the dough, so adventurous in his recipes, and kind to receive our suspicions.

There were also the photos I would find of them, hidden in my mother’s wallet: pictures of them young, hugging one another at a barbecue or wedding. They had aged, and something had not abided through their changes. But my mom still made my father his favorite birthday cakes. And my dad still bought my mother fragrant candles every holiday. My father’s oblivion, sustained by hope. My mother’s despondence, laced with patience.

When my father learned to play “Hallelujah” on the piano so that we could sing it for my mom’s birthday—I knew. I knew in an inexplicable way that they loved one another. Or at least, I maintain a creative fidelity through this hope. And what I choose to see may be more than perception offers. This is not simply a phenomenological error; it is a gracious eye, intending always. It is a gift that I wait for time to say, and keep saying upon its wake.

[e.] Return

Goal of Difficult Attainment

To remain on the threshold of: particularity, oneness, and language—to negotiate along the joints of the world.

Unattainable Ideal

Perfect Wakefulness, like the moon ever-visible at midday.

Urgent Dilemma

To resolve how that which is both same and different can finally be called by its singular, Sacred name.

Return

Hence the implicit homecoming of metaphor: to reconcile what was arbitrarily broken, exiled in the mind.

Drawback

The Will listens in on all the manifestations of wonder.

Wakefulness and Surprise

To listen along the joints—for all that surprisingly jo

In the introduction of his book, On Liturgical Theology, Aidan Kavanagh speaks of himself, an author, professor, and Christian practitioner whose specialty is symbolic liturgical expression. He speaks in third person, perhaps to create a space where readers hear themselves.

In light of all this, the author is a living paradox. The creature of a deeply sacramental tradition…he tries to affirm and commend the embrace of the world which that tradition and its liturgical expression would convey to others of Christian faith met for worship. Simultaneously, however, his own monastic engagement must be taken not with reluctance but with a certain wariness…. While he lives happily in this earthly city, he realized that it does not abide and that his true enfranchisement is in another city which does abide but whose presence is not yet wholly consummated in space and time.[1]

I must admit to my own occupation of his “living paradox”—with a twist. It is this twist, both wrenching and freeing, that I will attempt to trace in my connections between scholarship and experiences of the Church of Christ.[2] Unlike, Aidan Kavanagh, I do not have an ecclesial role or deep liturgical commitments as my foundation for doing “secondary theology.”[3] He begins with a love of worship that then implies a love for the world. Lex orandi founds lex credendi, which leads to lex agendi.[4] Right worship gives birth to belief, which then bears the fruits of spirit-filled action in the world. Correspondingly, what we believe (lex credendi) affects what we ask of God (lex supplicandi).[5] According to Kavanagh, the statuat of orthodoxy undergirds these moves: a standard of praise that then shapes the canonicity of belief and behavior.[6]

My aim is not an exposition of his liturgical theology, so much as the recognition that for Kavanagh, worship informs how the Christian derives meaning. And liturgy does not often derive meaning in ways that the systematic theologian would expect. Kavanagh claims that liturgical structures manifest meaning in ways not readily accessible to those outside the structures.[7] While it would seem tautological to suggest that those who engage in the structures of worship best derive its meaning—Kavanagh draws us to two paradoxes. First, the liturgical calls him to embrace the world, however he prizes the ‘deeper structures’ that lie outside space and time. And the second paradoxical reality, several of this colleagues and students have long been outside the church, embracing the world to determine the value of liturgical structures.

The first paradox is his own. The second, from all appearances, would seem to be mine. At the time of writing this paper, I have not been to a church in several months, and yet I continue to attend classes offered by the Emory Graduate Department of Religion. The arrival at this paradox, I would suggest, is much more than Kavanagh charts. He has, albeit thoughtfully, imposed his readings on a position that he does not occupy. His hermeneutic is liturgical structures, specifically those of the Catholic Church. I have several lenses from which I ‘do theology’—and they are less systematically applied than Kavanagh. And yet, I find it important to examine his views on the possibilities of my rift.

He states that there are three outcomes for theological scholars working within academic institutions. First, one could leave academia since, “that academical stuff is straw compared to what one glimpses, however darkly, in contemplation.”[8] This comes with the implication that “worldly careers”—including that of the theological scholar—may miss something by very virtue of their secular requirements. Second, one can remain in academia slowly worn down until faith “transmut[ates]” into some surrogate, such as “counseling or social action.”[9] The third option requires a Christian whose beliefs are fortified—a “courageous witness” taken seriously because of her “ascetical study, disciplined methodology, a cold-eyed avoidance of sentimentality, prudent formulation of conclusions, [and] steady regard of one’s students and colleagues.”[10] Given these options, I am most presently inclined to take the second option—to be content with surrogates of theology. Initially this choice would be shaped by the fact that, at various moments, I have been an orphan within my own tradition.[11]  But predominantly, I would choose the surrogates of social action and counseling, because they seem more akin to Christ’s work than coldness, prudence, and calculated methodologies.

This third option, which apparently is Kavanagh’s position, complements the very academy he critiques. Kavanagh asserts that the academy’s demand for “total, factual, and impersonal objectivity presents serious difficulties for one whose object of study is the faith in which one puts one’s trust and to which one has dedicated one’s life.”[12] There are then two competing proofs of ‘what is true’—one, the lifelong fidelity to principles taken on faith, the other, a strictly empirical methodology that ignores one’s personal position. Obviously there is some overlap, in that one’s faith is empirical on some level—in ethical action, in worship. However, Kavanagh implies that scholarship does not consider what remains outside of the empirical. If in fact he runs in Enlightenment residue, then his commitments to a kingdom beyond space and time would be problematic. Understandably, he finds it difficult to subject what is so personal, and so supra-empirical, to the demands of facticity or totality.

I would agree that the sacred often lies on the margins of experience, at the edge of what can be systematically expressed or proven. However, the irony is that I come from a tradition steeped in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy. The great hope of Alexander Campbell is that we could all come to the text as if it were some objective truth, factual, total, and impervious to individual interpretations.[13] Though our autonomous church structure lends itself to some individuality, and our current worship songs allow personal piety, doctrine trumps dynamism. My experience of the Church is actually close to Kavanagh’s rebuke of the academy.

My childhood impression of the Church of Christ, now caricatured perhaps by time, was a place where I could not ask certain questions, where I had to submit to a superficial appeal to unity. I say superficial because a homogenous reading of scripture required a certain unthinking acceptance. There was little room for discussion. Furthermore, the Church of Christ initially established the Pauline rhetoric of pursuing the ‘foolishness of the Cross,’ and standing against ‘the ways of the world.’ Both appeals were often applied to silence any mediation I would like to make for those whom I loved ‘in the world.’ I remember thinking, “Under these parameters, I cannot be Christ.” I could not care for those outside of the Church’s lens, except in a sort of pitying, reductive way that changed people into missiological currency.

Contrary to Kavanagh’s evaluation, I found the academy prized my ‘being in the world’—in all its shades of elusive expression and personal experience. In theological education, my questions were welcomed, my resources widened. I found a greater respect for the “dedications of [my] life” that fall outside wooden readings of scripture—namely, those ‘things of the flesh’: the dramatic and literary arts, the pursuit of wisdom (philosophy).[14]

And perhaps marks it me as utterly lost to say that theological scholarship has been more a church for me than the Churches of Christ provided. However, take the very obvious example to clarify this shift. While my voice is not to be heard in worship, in the academy, I can write essays, give lectures, and enter into discussions about God. I do stress of course, about God. Here I understand Kavanagh’s distinction. The academy is not worship (to God). But I must confess that, with or without explicit ‘worship,’ I have encountered God most in the classroom. This may be a personal failing, or it may be that there are so many impediments for a woman’s ears, let alone my ears (which always hear what’s not said), my mouth (which wants to ask about the implications), and my body (which longs for actions that would make of this world a heaven). It could also be that the academy is where I meet God, because it is a place where I am recognized as fully human. A tragicomic irony, that.[15]

How could this come to be—that scholarship is more an act of devotion than the church’s “Order of Worship”?[16] I will respond in an existential way, first, through my academic engagement with performance, translation, sacramentality, and hermeneutic phenomenology. I will conclude with a correction to Kavanagh’s suggestion that liturgy (as church worship) is primary theology. It may be that before the erection of temples, before worship structures ever solidified, another relation founded one’s lens for God and world. And if this were so, could this foundation serve both the Church and the academy?

II) Body: Mimesis and Anamnesis

People, embodied people, are God’s creation. Eating and drinking signify the ability to live, to participate in God’s creation, and to praise God for the miracle of life…. Jesus’ vision of the reign of God gives the nations, and human bodies, a place for universal justice, rejoicing, and community.[17]

I begin with the body for three reasons. First, and most broadly, because it is the means by which we come to know and experience God in this world. As theologian, Karl Rahner reminds, “to be human is to be sense-endowed spirituality.”[18] Second, to adhere to my own chronology: performance studies came before my explicit pursuit of theological studies. And third, because the Churches of Christ have historically (along with other forms of Christian Platonism) ignored the significance of the body in worship.

In retrospect, my earliest motivations for pursuing theatre performance were theological. As a teenager I wanted to be a minister. I admired the way that sermons facilitated that move of the word becoming flesh. At the end of every sermon was either a call to baptism, or a call to repentance in life. This transition was mysterious and beautiful to me: analysis of scripture, explication through storytelling, all toward the culminating event of embodied change. Whether or not it was the stated theology, I construed that what begins moving in the soul continues moving in the body. The flesh was a means of interpreting the scriptures one loved; the flesh was also a means of communicating scriptures that challenged. The preacher was a performer, in the original sense: making meaning mobile through the constraints of his bodily and verbal forms.[19]

The church promoted fidelity to text; the worship climaxed toward the sermon. It’s not surprising then: my script analysis and acting. I was often ‘in my head,’ exegeting the script until the moment of rehearsal. Rehearsals were a midrashic experience; my interpretations would become richer in confrontations with others. Hermeneutic versatility, not only textual fidelity, was a virtue for making scripts become flesh. That is something the theatre taught me, over and above the church. I would also add this significant turn: the distinction between mimesis (the attempt at sameness, identification) and anamnesis (the presence of the other, difference).

Even on the level of natural revelation, the living canvas of the world does not overwhelm in sameness. It distinguishes, separates in order to fully co-operate. Contradistinctions converse. The world as a body, the church as a body, cannot settle for mimesis.[20] After all, our liturgical arts and symbols have not settled for mimesis; they utilize both relation to and difference from reality. In the space created by their simultaneous difference and dependence, the audience’s participation is summoned. What is this piece asking? What is it not saying? What are its sources of influence? Its context? What are its messages for the present? These are questions of anamnesis: recognizing the incomplete presence in the present, its trace of the past, and its allusion to the future.

Mimesis as imitation for the sake of representation manifests in art for art’s sake, religion for religion’s sake. Perhaps Plato and St. Augustine were onto something when they criticized the mimetic arts.[21] And perhaps criticizers of religion, such as Salman Rushdie[22] and Karl Marx[23] were also correct to call out the mimetic nature of belief (insofar as an orthodoxy of ‘sameness’ is the delusional source of identity). But they are correct only if the roles that believers play are affected (copied illusion) and not enacted and interactive (lived allusion). In order for the imitatio Christi to convey the presence of God, a spirit of dynamism must exist—God made present in us through his elusive Spirit. As Louis-Marie Chauvet writes,

…the Spirit’s function [is] to write the very difference of God in the body of humanity…. The Spirit appears as the agent of God’s communication with humankind in their radical difference. At the same time, as shown by the story of Pentecost, in opposition to the story of the Tower of Babel (Gen 11:1-9), the Spirit is the agent of communication among beings in the very institutions of a play of difference between them.[24]

Homogeneity utilizes mimesis and equating–monologue. But it must be heeded: theological unity is not predicated on mimesis alone. We are not simply to copy one another without distinction, swallowing abstract dogma without regarding diverse experiences.[25] Scripture is not a memo received and confirmed; it is a story heard and lived into, a dialogue. Theatre humbled me in this regard: never could one’s interpretation of a character be definitive of the text, even if the incarnation was remarkably ‘accurate.’ Illusion occurs in the attempt to definitively express what is infinitely relayed. Instead of claiming interpretations as such, we can be tempted to claim one’s perspective is the phenomena, or that the interpretation is adequate to the God.

In church, these quite prideful links occurred where natural links were suppressed. For example, the human capacities for anamnesis and mimesis were exclusive. The body mimed the actions of communion or prayer; and the mind, quite separated from the postures of the body, would strive to remember a Holy One not present. Hardly were the acts or remembering tied to Christ’s presence re-membered in matter—neither that of my body or that of the wafer. Consequentially, Christ could not be present in the elements or my body, only in my mind. Similarly, baptism was a ‘just a symbol’ of the burial and resurrection imitated by immersion.

In his comparison of liturgy and performance, Richard McCall’s defines mimesis as “the attempt to represent or make present that which is ‘somewhere else’ or ‘something else.’”  Signs and hollow illusions alike can achieve mimesis. But as God’s living art, humans are not simply stand-ins. As created beings, we are implicated in the dynamism of what (or whom?) we represent; we are inseparable from its movement. If living in praise of God, we are involved in a constant process of anamnesis, “re-calling, not in the sense of making present that which has a separate existence…but in the sense of constituting a new thing in the present of which the recalled event remains a symbol or image but is being constituted of its own power and presence in the present.[26] In the Spirit, we are made living symbols, like John the Baptist, pointing to Christ and the ‘to come.’^[27] In this way, symbols demand the body in an exceptional way, resembling the work of the liturgical sacraments—subverting finitude while inheriting matter.

In my childhood church, symbols were what the mind knew. Whether the body experienced the ritual—sensed the release from the weight of water, felt the cracker break at the tongue like Christ’s body at the spear—was secondary, if not irrelevant. The Church of Christ has two standard sacraments:[28] baptism and weekly communion. These are rich traditions, but as symbols they should not properly be relegated to the spiritual. As Richard McCall suggests, symbol is more complexly related to body. As a manifold allusion held by unity of form and diversity of content, it must be rooted in the bodies that remember, even as it extends to reconstitute what is not entirely present in the physical.[29]

As an actress within the ‘sense memory’ school of training, I had to align my bodily mimesis with an attempt to presence the character’s ‘essence’ on stage. I could not simply impersonate a character; I had to become, to incarnate, her spirit. It was only when my body could not keep up this unity with my spirit that I found myself turning to theology. If not more unified, I had hoped that the dualities promoted in church, would upon further study, prove more pliant and forgiving than the stage. In short, I sought a translation theory that could handle the deficiencies of communication—be they the breakdown of matter, or the ineffability of spirit (which may be after all, deeply interrelated).

III) Language: Traditions and Translations

Christianity, as a genuine revealed religion, cannot be a communication of knowledge, a “teaching,” in the first place, but only secondarily. It must be in the first place an action that God undertakes, the playing out of the drama that God began with mankind in the Old Covenant…[And] just because God’s covenant is in his battle of love with sinful man does not mean that this battle of love can be understood and assessed by man.[30]

I transferred from NYU to Harding University, turning to literary studies and mission work. I left the theatrical lifestyle because of the way it passed over a sick body. No doubt theatre values the body, celebrates it, but only while it is a fully functional instrument. When I became very ill in spirit and in flesh, the theatre business only cared about my adequacy for performance. In the end, one’s consistency was more significant than one’s humanity. Something had been lost in the translation from page to stage.

Ironically, I discovered a similar dilemma at Harding. In the translation of scripture into life, traditions often trumped human dynamism. It was likely an attempt to align the self with a particular approach to God’s call. This was often framed by a more problematic definition of faith: the adequation of one’s understanding to the ways of God.[31] I realized the dilemma of this false adequation while doing mission work in Prague. On the day we visited Auschwitz, I was struck by the human capacity to sacrifice persons to a mission. What sort of violent reductions had to take place for me to shape others into my identity? (They had to learn our language, through our Bibles, filtered through our soteriological agendas, becoming our ‘sort’ of Christian.) There is an underlying conceit to some missionary campaigns, a fundamental misunderstanding of bearing the message—which should be more a sort of embodiment than an exclusivist evangelistic claim. The mission of embodying Christ cannot be that our lives represent God’s presence perfectly and thus replace God or didactically answer all questions. Rather, our lives as sacraments can allude to and surface God’s possibilities for the present. To serve as a missionary, is to live worshipfully (latreia), is to both offer to others and defer to God.

I admit that these are competing orientations, say, in a life’s translation of the Biblical text. To offer the text to other is to privilege the transparency criterion of translation theory. The translator attempts to preserve the original sense of the idioms but not the exact phrasing. Fortunately, this makes the text accessible to present audiences. However, it tends to water down the text or make it more manageable, sometimes at the expense of its richness. To defer to the text’s authority is to privilege the fidelity criterion. The translator employs a wooden or literal translation in order to remain faithful to the original meaning. Unfortunately, this original meaning—its idioms, its contexts—may be lost, thus rendering the translation more opaque over time. Bible courses at Harding emphasized a fidelity of translation; but my artistic training welcomed a transparency of translation.

Jacques Derrida complicates these categories, “In the beginning is hermeneutics. But the shared necessity of exegesis, the interpretive imperative, is interpreted differently by the rabbi and the poet.”[32] The rabbi strives to be faithful to the text, a humble servant merely commenting. However, the act of translation, the existence of Midrash, testifies to the inclination of transparency. The rabbi is able to defer to the text and offer it to readers. The poet is a little more “impudent and autonomous, an outlaw.” She does not bow to the text, but is “wilder, freer.” It would seem that the poet has fidelity in producing a text that makes transparent her interpretation. The poet is involved in a simultaneous revealing-concealing, in short, a mystery given form.[33] Despite their different approaches, the impetus to make meaning mobile (as I discovered in the performance of the preacher) can share an origin. Derrida claims that perhaps they share in a desire for the other, in friendship:

Friendship and translation, then, and the experience of translation as friendship…born toward the thing, the text, or the other to be translated. Even if hatred can sharpen the vigilance of a translator and motivate a demystifying interpretation, this hatred still reveals an intense form of desire, interest, indeed, fascination. [34]

I wondered then if religion’s only tradition could be the translation made in love—both the desire for God and desire for neighbor. This translation would not aim to demystify either God or neighbor, but would strive to understand in such a way that ongoing relationship was necessary. Once I have God or my neighbor ‘figured out’—what sort of relationship can exist in stasis? What sort of love simply ‘lets be’ without giving room for becoming?

Perhaps the translation of scripture into body, into world, into relationships between bodies, is more significant than theological tradition. To translate is to carry over (translatus): to move from one place to another, from one language to another. This notably occurs in one’s prayer and praise to the God beyond space and time; but it also occurs when a virtue takes residence in the body, and speaks through ethical action. It requires moving from one mode of expression to another. Tradition has the etymological implications giving over (traditio): to hand down from generation to generation, and also to deliver over in treason. Traditions, as doctrinal articulations, often forget or betray their own inherent tensions. Alasdair MacIntyre would warn against such stagnant traditions, especially insofar as they forget the contradictions that make them living.[35] MacIntyre calls for a life made story, aware of its guiding cultural narratives, and pressing alongside them in its quest.

Hermeneutics, quest, and desire for the ‘other’: literary studies taught me the import of these words for theology. To remember that every perspective is a “seeing as,” and every step is a journeying toward, is to maintain the God of Desire.[36] Consequently, if theology is not simply a tradition or object that I can hold in my hands[37]—but a process of discovery, of lifelong unveilings, then perhaps mystery has its place. Otherwise, one might rest, prematurely secured; or far worse, so secure as to not only rest, but also to be static, dead in one’s position. Because scripture, traditions, and human beings are layered—the unknowns are not entirely eradicated, and questions are not rendered moot. It may be that mystery feeds desire, pressing against the tongue like hot coal, urging one to translate a glory which is far too great that it appeals to all of us: body, words, and even God.[38]

IV) World: Sacramentum and Mysterion

All worship appears as the manifest expression of mysterion. Though it may be valuable and helpful for liturgical theology, this concept leads to a dangerous theological ambiguity and deprives the Sacrament (in the strict sense of this word) of its “uniqueness” in the liturgical life of the church.[39]

Alexander Schmemann quite clearly opposes the dissolution of liturgical practices into mystery cults. “Theological ambiguity” must be averted. Otherwise, the sacrament is diluted. The sacrament’s uniqueness—as distinguishable from other ‘worldly’ encounters with mystery or grace—must be maintained. He expresses the problematic relation between mysterion and sacramentum. This tension has an etymological history worth unpacking.

The Greek, mysterion referred to the “secret thoughts of God, which transcend human reason and therefore must be revealed to those whom God wishes these secrets to reach.”^[40] When Jesus uses the word, he speaks of the mysteries of the Kingdom being given to the disciples. The mysteries of God are a function of God’s self-giving, which by nature of the giver—exceed our words and intellectualizations. However, this mysterious nature of God could lead to “theological ambiguity,” or what’s really at stake, the dissolution of church identity. If God is mysteriously other, than how can a church make kataphatic claims that distinguish it and secure its membership?

I suggest that sacramentum and mysterion offer different responses to this question. The word “sacrament” derives from the Latin word sacramentum—historically, the oath of allegiance or a promise given by a soldier.^[41] This word was chosen by Tertullian in the third century to replace the original Greek word mysterion. Notice, he did not choose the available Latin option of mysterium.[42] In choosing sacramentum, Tertullian shifted divine hiddenness into a cultural metaphor of open affiliation. Divine difference (excess over and against our categories) became the foundation of human affiliation (a Roman military oath, and now that of the church).[43]

However, if we retrace to the concept of mystery, we arrive at one of the most identifying marks of Christianity: incarnation. It is one matter to say that the incarnation requires Christians to promise and conquer through their identity in God. It is another to say that God’s incarnation is a mystery, beyond concepts and words, that yet risks itself to be made present in matter: in the body, in our actions, our articulations, our arts, our desires. Is the Christian identity in the creedal oaths or in the way of life? For ease of institutional distinction? —The former. For anamnestic fidelity to the mysterious moves of God? —The latter.

Tertullian and Schmemann would of course require both a Christian life and a Christian institutional identity. But as Regina Schwartz points out in Sacramental Poetics: At the Dawn of Secularism, it is ironically, the poets who bring Christians back to their mysterious origin. The scandal of sacramental theology is but an ongoing aftershock of the mysterious incarnation. Why should God reduce to inhabiting matter, to make Divine Will known? Why should God inhabit a man’s body–an ambiguous unthematizable representation? Why should God accept a cross—a scandalous death, not at all befitting out categories of lordship?

Artists, perhaps best address these questions, because they know in an existential way the risk of trying to translate an inexpressible encounter. They know the wonder of leaning into the world, into matter, for the resonances of their spirit. In turn, artists’ articulations (visual and literary) strive to materialize these resonances in ways that not readily reducible to one interpretation or system. The unity or identification exists then in this dynamic participation: the artist attends the spirit present in matter, and she creates in matter what goes beyond the moment. The artist is radically in tune with her own livingness, and the possibilities living in (or absent from) the world she creates in her work. Thus, artists, like God, enact a “sacramental poetics”:

…one in which the artist becomes indistinguishable from his art…in a deep sense we see the artist in his work. Conversely [and at the same time], a sacramental understanding of participation enfolds the reader and the viewer into this process. Entering the world of the poem, he participates in its discoveries…no mere spectator of the work, the viewer is changed during his encounter with it, rendering a sacramental poetics effective.”[44]

Under this explanation, the two poles of communicating a mystery are: (1) prescribing one’s understanding in theological systems, (2) creating an encounter, summoning one into a world rich with meanings mysterious and manifold. The latter pole requires a certain trust of the spirit to work in ways that a choking ideological grip cannot. Theological aesthetics, then, such as one finds in the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar, would encourage theologians to return to the sacramental nature of revelatory encounters. Von Balthasar states that a community of faith must enact God’s love “existential[ly] and sacramental[ly]” in order to know it (ahav, not gnosis). To rely on abstract doctrine (gnosis), is to make of the Word a cold corpse.[45]  For Von Balthasar as for the poet, abstract dictation is not so effective as concrete invitations.

It is not surprising that upon discovering Hans Urs von Balthasar, my eyes opened to an entire world riddled with divine encounters and divine absence.[46] It was as if the world evidenced a God still living, still dying, and still resurrecting.[47] Time itself became sacramental, as did nature.[48] This was a God not only present in scripture, but in history, in my story. As it turns out, aesthetic and dramatic categories are not simply lazy or even ‘hip’ ways of moving theologically.[49] They are the theological move—seeking to connect what I experience as a being in this world, with the vague sensation that I am always yearning for and working toward an otherwise world. This not merely a sentimental conclusion; quite the contrary. The world now not only becomes a location pierced by God’s light, it also becomes the site for recognizing that liturgy frames a God not entirely here.

V) Interrelation: Liturgy and Life

Each experiences joy of God in a different way, with him varying the joy he bestows, but desire is paramount: love is “constantly on the watch” and “whoever drinks of this water will thirst again” (John 4:13). “The soul no longer sees the Bridegroom as King, but as Beloved….He does not appear; he enters the soul. He touches and excites the heart, communicating his love without saying much” (31:6).

At this point, three years into my ‘theological education,’ I kept company with mystics and poets. Though poets would seem to value matter’s potential for relay meaning, mystics were more suspicious of sensorial reliability. I required both groups because I felt both the kataphatic reach and the apophatic humility. A variation on an old battle: can the body and the world be vessels for the divine? The performing artist in me says yes. The Platonic Christian in me says, barely and with much difficulty. During this battle over the significance of the body I came across the poet Paul Claudel, who claims that “everything in nature is a symbol and everything that happens is a parable.”^[50] Thus, the world and its history become poetic expressions in service of Divine meaning. Forms and events empty themselves as vessels to signify what is beyond; and yet, by doing so, they are filled with the richness of infinite interpretations. This giving (kenosis) engages fullness (pleroma). Likewise, when humans offer themselves to “give testimony concerning God,” they do so as finite forms admitting the infinite. And this testimony, if it is to become what it signifies, permits a space from which to invite participation. Hence why Paul Claudel says that theology “stands beside poetry and liturgy.”^[51]  He unites all three in their compelling call for participation, and the consequent motion made possible by porous form.

By porous form I mean those structures that allow multiplicity even as they constrain; the finitudes that engage with or permit the infinite. These forms from one view will look empty, denoting the recession of God, of meaning…the inexpressible. At another glimpse, they will mark the saturation of the world with meaning. A porous form flaunts its finitude: a poem constrained to few words, a painting crammed into this frame, a person restrained to this body. And yet, because they are somehow living, giving off new sources of reading and rereading, they mock us with their infinite nature. Liturgical structures can do this; though often the constraints of forms are emphasized over the diversity of their interpretations. I am more comfortable suggesting that nature and art are evidences of this mobility and constraint, of the infinite and finitude. And it is here that I return to my promise, projected earlier, that I seek the very relations between finite and infinite that found Kavanagh’s primary theology. I could take the route of Gerard van der Leeuw or even a thinker such as Marcel Gauchet—both of whom address how humankind conceived of the transcendent first in the mysterium tremendum of nature, then in theatrical rituals, and eventually in religious cults.[52] However, my coursework in philosophical phenomenology founds the position from which I enter Kavanagh’s “living paradox”—put otherwise, the paradox of living.

What have been the mounting concerns of incarnational life as I have expressed them? The invisible taking residence in the visible, the spirit interpenetrating the flesh, the abstract becoming concrete. At the heart of these moves is the God who makes Himself known but in necessarily incomplete ways. It is as everything in our three dimensions of our perception are only one dimension of God. Hence, both God’s empirical hiddenness and strangely felt fullness. This is the gap that gave birth to my present predicament. Between the theological promises of God’s presence, the artistic assurances of sacramentality, and the undeniable experience of a silent God, all I have left to resemble faith is Eros. As in Plato’s account of Diotema’s tale, I am the child of poverty (Penia) and fullness (Poros).[53] When I say eros, I mean the restlessness that cannot rest until it finds rest in God. I intend the metaphysical eros that a fully finite being feels in grasping after God in a desert, only to find mirages. So what liturgy can mark this desire, this strange worship, which is less temple material and more…tabernacle?

A priest and phenomenologist currently ministering in France writes:

We desire an eschatological proximity to God. But the liturgies that express this desire do not of course enjoy possession of the eschaton; the Absolute does not make itself present in the world without this presence conforming to the ambiguous modes by which the world manifests it (the world is not the field of theophany but that of the chiaroscuro, the field of a “kenotic” presence or of the sacraments). Moreover, if we acknowledge this fact, the truth at work in liturgical architecture is other than the truth at work in the temple where the sacredness of the earth is crystallized.[54]

Jean-Yves Lacoste marks my desire for proximity—which he calls elsewhere the desire for the Parousia presence. But he notes, in a way that resonates with Kavanagh’s paradox: this world is not the domain of the Parousia presence, much as it might be the location of desire for this Parousia in the present.[55] The empirical is not presently the eschatological. The “(historical) presence of God is not his Parousia. And yet this (patently true) proposition implies, among other things, that the world and history shroud in ambiguity every appeal we make to this presence.”[56]

Where Lacoste diverges from Kavanagh’s project however, is his use of the term liturgy or “liturgical architecture.” Lacoste is not explicitly discussing liturgy as worship. Rather, liturgy is the existential relation to God, the being-towards-God (as opposed to Heidegger’s being-towards-death). Lacoste is in conversation with Heidegger’s notions of the world, not Kavanagh’s Pauline concept. Because he is pushing with and against Heidegger’s world, he frames the liturgical being as on the margins of experience, bracketing out “world” and “earth.” So when he speaks of liturgy, it is the willingness to heed the “inexperience” of God.[57]  The inexperience of God is both God’s excess that cannot be found fully in our experience, but also the fact that we feel this excess as a recession. From this side of the infinite that exceeds us, we can only perhaps feel, perpetually left behind. The distance between the liturgical being and God parallels the distance one experiences between the liturgical nonplace and the place of this world. It is as if liturgical existence opens up a world within a world, or on the edges of it. From this distance, a sort of world qua liturgical hermeneutic, one can be called to the world while calling out to God. Praise and prayer aim to shorten the distance between a liturgical being and God, with the reflexive effect that the liturgical being draws nearer to the world.

This liturgical inexperience subverts one’s sense of place, usefulness, and the “historical closure (phenomenological and dialectical) of experience.”[58] Lacoste does not outline those activities that would constitute liturgical being, especially as it would confuse his categorization of liturgy as “inactivity.”[59] Essentially, the liturgical being is an openness, an exposition before God, and therefore as openness, she cannot be deluded into thinking that anything but God can close experience, or collapse distances.[60] This means that activity will not hasten the eschaton; “we renounce all pretensions to being the project managers of the definitive, and put ourselves in God’s hands as the giver of all that does not pass away….We are free to offer him our hospitality.”[61] This is not a faith without works. It is rather the belief that only the infinite can meet our Desire, and that our task in turn, is to be vigilant and hospitable. For the liturgical being, the whole of existence can serve as a vigil.[62]

As anticipation, the liturgical space is a “nonplace” where we confront our inexperience of God in the desire to host God. It is the vantage point, so to speak, that brackets the world. In this nonplace, we grasp our finitude and long for the infinite. However, it is also the space where the infinite calls us to ethical action. We re-enter the “world” as if on a perpetual pilgrimage, not entirely at home. This liturgy, as a spiritual a-topos, is prior to the existence of world and earth (in Heidegger’s terms). The non-place, prior to the historical temples or local communities, is a space “where determinations enter into a new order of signification and a new order of finalities.”[63] Lacoste is not overtly concerned about whether these new orders are kept for the church to provide. All that is needed to open up the “field of liturgy” is “our self-presencing before God and the expectation of God.”[64]

I do not sense that Kavanagh or other liturgical theologians would disagree. However, Lacoste might become suspect (except perhaps to Metz) on his next move. As a sacrament, or container of the Spirit in the world, a liturgical being resists a Hegelian “peace of unity.” Believers will often experience, in exposition and desire, an “unhappiness of conscience.” Even though Christ did come, he is still to come. And in the gap of those realities, some seek “reconciliation of the finite and the infinite, of heaven and earth [by] liv[ing] off an ‘endless nostalgia’ for the ‘unattainable beyond.’”[65] But the liturgical being knows that being-in-the-world and being-before-God are “thoroughly intertwined.”[66] They are not peacefully united, but rather in helix formation revolving around one another. Liturgy does exist on the margins of the world; it is able to critique the world from its position. But it is not to take leave of the world. If this best analogy is Good Friday, it is important to remember that no disciples left the world. So for Lacoste, the aim of occupying this space between the empirical self and the eschatological self is to remember that liturgy (again, in his existential terms, not worship) is a call. And here he suggests a link between the liturgical and the ethical vocation: “the liturgical unhappiness of consciousness redirects us from the Kingdom we anticipate in the margins of the world to a hold that, with the grace of goodwill, the Kingdom can exert over the very fabric of historical existence.”[67] He goes on to say that liturgy brackets Heidegger’s claims of being in the world, and in so doing, asks us to resume a “relation to the real in the element of praxis that anticipates the eschatological reign of God.”[68] Reestablishing a relation with God via praxis: here the liturgical makes possible a return to the ethical[69] that is somehow prior in time to this world.[70]

Here I take my departure from Kavanagh and other liturgical theologians that would name worship as primary theology. Perhaps I should not be so presumptuous to say that worship of God is not somehow primary, as I do not know what happened in that liturgical space outside of this world and its history. However, I will say that if worship in another world is primary, in this world, the ethical was an injunction before the church’s worship service.[71] In this regard, I am most aligned with Emmanuel Levinas (and in his rhetoric, Lacoste is as well). For Levinas, it is in the social relation that “The Transcendent, infinitely other, solicits us and appeals to us…His very epiphany consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan….The direct comprehension of God is impossible for a look directed upon him, not because our intelligence is limited, but because the relation with infinity respects the total Transcendence of the other without being bewitched by it, and because our possibility of welcoming him in man goes further than the comprehension that thematizes and encompasses its object.”[72] Levinas essentially states that ethics is worship without the risk of conceptual idolatry. God is made known in right intention and right action, orthodoxy and orthopraxy link. To fully regard a person in need is to create the liturgical field.

I am suggesting this ethical relation as a ‘liturgical architecture,’ in Lacoste’s sense of the phrase. Sanctuaries are built, in the truest sense, every moment we accord people as images of God, as sacramental bearers. The scandal of incarnation is perhaps most radical in Levinas, who sees the face of the Divine in the stranger, the widow, the neighbor in need. For Levinas, “Already of itself ethics is an ‘optics.’”[73] And if this is so, the divisions between practice and scholarship are subverted. So long we are vigilant in scholarship and in action, we will be open to the Christ who makes himself known not simply in churches throughout history, but in individual at every moment.

So I will confess that I stopped attending church (temporarily?), because I found that it required a certain blindness which theory, in my experience, has not. My studies have opened my eyes toward the faces of others. Even philosophical phenomenology has become a spiritual practice of attention and generosity, promoting a supple grip on truth. In my studies, and in my life, I am after essentially anything that requires me to carefully attend (re-legere), reread (re-legio), and reconnect (re-ligare) to the God that escapes me, the God that seems terribly absent. These etymological roots of “religion” ask a posture that is open to revision: in both the call to see anew, and the desire to change. If liturgical fields qua ethical action open this space of vigilant love for others, then I sense the incarnation will not have been for nothing.[74]

And it is because “morally wrong” is the heir of this concept [of injustice], but an heir cut off from the family of concepts from which it sprang, that “morally wrong” both goes beyond the mere factual description “unjust” and seems to have no discernible content except a certain compelling force…[i]

In the conclusion of her prophetic essay, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” G.E.M. Anscombe exposes several gaps that afflict the ethical enterprise: (a) morality has long been the highest (and most abused) appeal, often exercised over its inheritance of justice; (b) consequently, modern moral philosophy has made it possible to justify what is unjust so long as it abides by the ‘morally good’; (c) accordingly, her contemporaries do not have the philosophical equipment to pursue the just apart from the ‘emphatic ought’ of their predecessors; and finally, her main thesis, (d) moral duty and obligation are residual concepts of the divine good, rendered useless under secular pursuit of the good.

She exposes these gaps by first pointing to the fault lines of prior ethical movements. Kant’s concept of self-legislation does not hold, nor does a rationality judged by consistency and universality. Mill and Bentham, in their respective attempts to categorize and calculate good (as the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people) fall short on their qualitative categories—especially, she criticizes, in the notion of eudaimonia. Hume’s sophistry concerning the ‘brute facts’ leaves a noticeable gap between the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’, the empirical and the ethical. These ethical approaches are incomplete, hardly even accounting for the psychology of the person.[ii] Not surprisingly, they are deficient in their definitions of intention and pleasure.

Anscombe demonstrates that the work of empiricism (which disregards the ‘inner life’) is not easily translatable into the categories of what is ‘morally wrong.’ And yet, she sounds optimistic that if we use the categories “‘untruthful,’ ‘unchaste,’ ‘unjust,’” we would have more clarity.[iii] It would seem then, a corrective for those who want an ethics of divine-law without a divine legislator; she is calling for virtue ethics, a non-emphatic ought, to replace such a legislator. But what is this non-emphatic ought, this norm which operates from examples not simply super-imposing itself over some, repressing others? Anscombe leaves us with this “huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned.”[iv] However, she does advocate richer accounts of “human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all ‘human flourishing.’”[v] This challenge birthed contemporary virtue ethics.[vi]

While the modern discourse of virtue ethics is indebted to Anscombe’s leveling—this does not mean that her contribution is without its own holes. I would argue that her greatest contribution is this shared reality she exposes in the past and expresses for the future: ethical theory is deficient. And why? Because it cannot see all (theoria). There is a chasm between the empirical and ethical. There is a crevice between the moral and the just. What eyes could perceive their connection, or rather fill in the space in such a way that a non-emphatic ought is their link? Causality cannot. Duty cannot. Intention cannot always. And moral luck theorists would rather complicate the gaps than risk a naïve claim.[vii]

In responding to Anscombe, we must confront this riddle left from her wake: What can we give to one another than can never be exhausted (that is necessarily incomplete), and yet, can never be—properly speaking—owed or calculated? Anscombe settles on the word justice. And certainly, justice is necessarily incomplete—perfect justice is hardly ever achieved within the courts. Justice is too often still quantified: the cost of your loss, the cost of your emotional distress, the weight of her insanity, the weight of his desperation, the factors of his needs, the factors of their means. Justice is after equivalences, symmetry (iustitia, equity). It gets bogged down in “Exactly who is my neighbor?” “What do I owe them?” “What they owe me?” Retributive justice seems a complex mathematics, seeking balance with variables that are not always commensurable.

Justice itself is insufficient, always leaving a remainder unaccounted, despite its diligent bookkeeping.[viii] So, it meets the first part of the riddle; it is never definitively accomplished. It is always an impossibility, beyond being, but coming toward us in our striving.[ix] However, does it fit the second category of the riddle—never owed nor calculated? In our present legal system it is certainly calculated, and under Anscombe’s thesis it is owed, expected. While there is nothing unethical about expecting or deserving justice—there is little to keep justice from slipping into the pitfalls of deontology (duty) or utilitarianism (calculated owing).

Perhaps our answer to the riddle resides in the origin of justice Anscombe does not mention. Before morality was simply the offspring of a divine lawgiver and commands, justice was inherent within the wider concept of love. The origin of moral goodness is not simply obedience to divine law (contract), but relation to a divine Lover (covenant). Biblical connotations aside, even contemporary virtue ethicist, Martha Nussbaum, reminds of love’s priority over justice. In reviewing Bob and Fanny’s interactions in The Golden Bowl, Nussbaum seems to suggest that love is the link between ought (“his rules”) and is (“her perceptions”):

The dialogue between his rules and her perceptions is motivated and sustained by a love that is itself in the sphere of perception, that antecedes any moral judgment. James suggests that if, as members of moral communities, we are to achieve shared perceptions of the actual, we had better love one another first, in all out disagreements and our qualitative differences. Like Aristotle, he seems to say that civic love comes before, and nourishes, civic justice.[x]

Could love respond to the riddle of ethics: (1) can love ever be definitively accomplished;  (2) can love be owed or even calculated? If one assumes that the answer to both of these questions is “no”—then it may be that love, after all, lies as the superlative category, the Good Beyond Being. Love is not satisfied by checking off ‘justice served’ when an arbitrary equivalence is reached. Love does not keep records; though it is not blind to justice. “Ethics is the spiritual optics,” as Emmanuel Levinas suggests.[xi] Levinas names Justice as the means through which we see the Infinite; however, this vision occurs in interhuman relations—a sort of justice qua vigilant love. Levinas’ justice is love made explicit in Law, activated in how one regards the neighbor, the stranger, the Transcendent Other.[xii]

Approaching this ethics/optics of love, my paper will suggest three ‘virtues’ that baffle calculation and resist termination: humility, community, and desire.[xiii] Humility is the ongoing departure (the way), community the environs (the world), and desire the motivating energy (orientation)—in and through which love provides sight and bodies forth in action.

II) Humility: Martha Nussbaum, Gabriel Marcel, and Simone Weil

Before a literary work…we are humble, open, active yet porous. Before a philosophical work, in its working through, we are active, controlling, aiming to leave no flank undefended and no mystery undispelled. This is too simple and schematic, clearly; but it says something. It’s not just emotion that’s lacking…. It’s also passivity; it’s trust, the acceptance of incompleteness.[xiv]

In a collection of philosophical essays, Love’s Knowledge, Martha Nussbaum pushes ethicists into a discernment process that requires humility before a complex reality. For Nussbaum, reality is permeated by ambiguities; it has an unwieldy character that can break our systems if we are not willing to bend our schemas. Virtue ethics, therefore, must take into account a reason that requires both logic and emotion. She argues that discernment is not scientific: it cannot be quantitative when values are incommensurable. Additionally, ethical discernment requires that particularities hold priority over the universal.[xv] The ability to value the particular often borrows from imaginative capacities pursuing a “perceptive equilibrium.”[xvi]

This does not mean, however, that between perception and ethical response there can be only this mysterious gap, a tangle of incommensurability. It does mean that the interior life of ethical agents is not always “reducible to that of the overt acts they engender.”[xvii] Literature reveals this gap, not in a vagueness, but in a richness of manifold variables: intentions, motivations, interpersonal histories, cultural influences, even describing so much as the settings of conversations and revealing precipitating events. In literature, we can become more “finely aware”—which provides a richness to the way in which an individual is responsible within the whole of an ethical dilemma.[xviii] This ethical approach, ready to “surrender invulnerability, to take up a posture of agency that is porous and susceptible to influence, is of the highest importance in getting an accurate perception of particular things in the world.”[xix] And remember that for Nussbaum, perception is implicated in love. Love, as the willingness to surrender one’s systematic walls, is a way of combating misperception.

Key then to Nussbaum’s virtue of humility is the phrase “active yet porous.” It seems a sort of reaching receptivity. This resembles a phrase in Gabriel Marcel’s works as well, summarized by his concept of “creative fidelity.” Marcel explores the difficulty of remaining constant in fidelity to someone or some belief, while realizing that presence is an assertion that also requires receptivity. His concept of love in terms of creativity, then, is a willingness to remain open to the other, at his or her disposal—while respecting the other’s permeability and my own. Creative fidelity as love, or as ethical commitment, occurs when the self is created (in a constant state of creation) to meet the demands of fidelity. This often occurs in the artist’s relationship with her vision, as Gabriel notes in Rodin’s advice to Rilke. The virtue of creative fidelity is, “Patience, humility in the presence of the object, of the two-fold act by which the artist opens up to it and by which it opens up to the artist.”[xx] This gracious openness is not a virtue that one possesses (avoir), but is a way of being (être).[xxi] The artist and the person in love thus share an ethic of the creative vow, which “implies the combination of a deep personal humility and an unshaken confidence in life.”[xxii] However, even Rilke, whom Marcel holds up in his humility as a creative prophet, had a humility that led him away from community. A humility before objects of beauty does not ensure an openness to community, or even a sense of self-worth.

Unworthiness can serve as alibi against affiliation or strict fidelity. Even Simone Weil referred to her unworthiness as a reason why could not join any community—not any religious community on earth,[xxiii] nor any community of saints beyond.[xxiv] She claimed it was not humility but her own humanness. As opposed to unworthiness that keeps one from strict communal fidelity, humility gave Simone a flexible fidelity to the self. She explains, “Humility consists in knowing that in this world the whole soul, not only what we term the ego in its totality, but also the supernatural part of the soul, which is God present in it, is subject to time and the vicissitudes of change.”[xxv] This is not to say that Simone did not join group causes, of course. It is because she was so “finely aware and richly responsible” that she envisioned herself as part of the changes taking place. Perhaps another definition of community needs to be offered: one that welcomes a vulnerable self, and an openness to others.

III) Community: Aristotle, Alasdair MacIntyre, & Henri Bergson

It is conceivable that it will be the task of small communities coming together like swarms one after the other to form what we might call centres of example, this is to say nuclei of life around which the lacerated tissues of true moral experience can be reconstituted.[xxvi]

If it is so that humility leads to a rich inter-dependence and intersubjectivity (regarding the other as other, or as a fluid self instead of an object), a necessary correlate to humility is community. Before what or whom am I humbled, de-centered? What or whom affects me in my ethical discernment? And more so, what sort of ‘openness’ is required such that one is not merely subject to the ‘herd’ (Nietzsche) or inauthentically submitting to ‘the They’ (Heidegger)? These are complex questions that find some solution in Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.[xxvii]

Let us say that ethics has two poles: Nietzsche’s self-created values, or Aristotle’s rationality behind morality. The former manifests in the self choosing and then dictating to the community, the latter manifests in the self receiving the populace’s accepted virtues. In Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, for example, the self habituates virtues that are agreed upon and modeled by a wise community.[xxviii] This can foster a conservatism, not without its survival value—‘keep what you know to happen or work on the ground.’ However, virtue then relies on a sort of fortunate inheritance. It is for the land-owning men, philosophers especially.

MacIntyre mitigates this polarity by the concept of co-authorship. The self certainly has some personal quest in which inherited virtues are tested and reformed en route to the good. However this quest never occurs in isolation; the self within a society shapes practices.[xxix] If practices or an enacted virtue are said to be social, how then, is the self conceived? MacIntyre suggests that there is a unity of self, but multiply affected—a story with constraints that are in turn shaped internally by infinite possibilities.[xxx] In this way, a life is like an ongoing conversation. But if a conversation is to take place not only within a self, but among community members, there must be some intelligibility. This intelligibility serves as the “conceptual connecting link between the notion of action and that of narrative.”[xxxi] It allows one’s action to be read as contrary to or coherent within the arch of virtue.

As co-authors of individual and communal narrative, persons in a community are therefore accountable to one another.[xxxii] But the shared goal of virtue is only “partially teleological”[xxxiii] Partial in that virtue does aspire to a “possible shared future, a future in which certain possibilities beckon us forward and others repel us.” [xxxiv] However, this is always a partial goal because it is in part created, in part discovered along the way. Therefore, MacIntyre employs the image of “quest” in which a community is unified toward a telos of conceiving the good and ordering departures accordingly. And yet, on this quest, the end is unactualized—the quest itself realizing the goal as an internal good.

This unity is not homogeneity. The multiplicity within self and diversity among selves is accounted for in the richness that “story” and “questing” allow. Simone Weil’s self of vicissitude is permitted. And even inherited traditions of virtue prove layered. As MacIntyre observes:

Traditions, when vital, embody continuities and conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead….Within a tradition the pursuit of goods extends through generations….the narrative phenomenon of embedding is crucial: the history of a practice in our time is generally and characteristically embedded in and made intelligible in terms of the larger and longer history…[xxxv]

Because the self is inextricably linked to this longer history, humility and community operate together toward intelligibility. How does my story fit within the wider story—nuancing it such that my past is respected, my present created, and my future full of possibilities?

It is kind of like ethical life as a well-written Wikipedia article on the good—or if you like, open source software constantly under revision. There is a respect for the past and what has been regarded as objectively true or functional (practicable), while also open to new information. In his final book, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Henri Bergson seeks this open community.[xxxvi] His search is an outright critique of closed communities, namely those adhering to Kant’s categorical imperative (or even Aristotelian societies where particular virtues may be dismissed in light of ‘granted’ claims). Bergson does not dispose of the communal ideal with its abuses. Multiple perspectives and resources are essential to life. But when Kant suggests that there are universals, the marginal perspectives become illicit. The individual is called to do what it best for the community—as if this ‘what is best’ can be an objective, rational truth that ignores particular stories.

The problem, Bergson observes, is that the ‘closed community’ practices a sort of closed morality (or exclusivist evaluation, i.e.: majority rules). They do this in order to preserve identity—what will make my community survive. And this possessiveness, this lack of humility or vulnerability, makes the community rigid. Kant’s model is useful in this community because he suggests avowal to universals in order to resist the resistors. Closed communities construe stasis as stability.[xxxvii]

The ‘open community’ however knows that stability and survival is in flexibility, dynamism. Bergson highlights that this community does not have the fabulation function.[xxxviii] Unlike the closed community, they do not invent gods or authorities in order to insure social cohesion. This does not mean that they are not inventive. The two virtues of an open community are progress and creativity—respectively, the desire to strive forward, and the flexibility to build from the past and present toward desires. It is unsurprising that Bergson claims love as the most creative energy.[xxxix] It might be said that the core distinction between a closed and open community is whether their desires are satisfiable—or whether they are ever-creating and recreating in the community’s pursuit of the good.

IV) Desire: Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and Emmanuel Levinas

Plato envisages erotic love as an education, because of its intensity as a source of energy, and because it wrenches our interest out of ourselves….We may perhaps thus learn that other worlds and other centres really exist and have rights. But love can be a form of insanity whereby we lose the ‘open scene’: lose our ability to scatter our loving interest throughout the world, to draw good energy from many sources, to have a large and versatile consciousness, to possess many concepts. There is often (as I suggested earlier) a duty to fall our of love…[xl]

            The imperative to fall out of love would seem contrary to previous claims. However, in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Iris Murdoch is after a new vision of love, and consequently of the Good Beyond Being. This is not a superficial erotic love that can be satisfied by a few select centers of other worlds. It is an erotic love that strives to know but never ceases to learn, a combination of Plato’s Poros (plenty) and Penia (poverty).[xli] Ethics as Love must check itself against exclusive ‘loves,’ blind ‘loves’ that would seem to satisfy.[xlii] Love as the “Good beyond Being” is never complete, never full—partly because it is always giving, maintaining an inner space or “open scene.” To be so singularly devoted to a love, in ethics, would be the equivalent of ignoring several courses of virtuous action; it would be an ignorance of love’s wide perception. Therefore, Murdoch upholds the example of Christ’s selfless love, which seems a kind of desire to give while yet having a certain fullness of interiority, “Here Christ is an icon of the irreducible individual endowed with human privacy and inwardness, exhibiting personal yet selfless love and proving that it is possible.”[xliii] She advocates both a “private and personal space-time” from which we can let things be, while also freed to pursue the good.[xliv]

Murdoch’s ethical approach does not aim to possess the good; it is a love that regards its beloved in many “centres,” without desiring to consume any one of them. In this way she borrows from Simone Weil’s concept of vice as wrong desire:

We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends back to us our own desire for goodness….We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only …in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. … It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always … in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.[xlv]

For Murdoch as for Weil, the beautiful instantiates the good beyond being, if even inchoately. Erotic love that accompanies our desire for the beautiful, if applied unselfishly, motivates us to learn and habituate the beauty of the good. However, this goodness, like our encounters with beauty are nor reducible, not entirely digestible.[xlvi] The good is “transcendent” and mysterious like beauty, and yet, “necessarily [a] real object of attention.”[xlvii] As a united network of virtues, the good involves our regard, our attention. Even though Murdoch believes that the good is “un-representable,” it is available in the spiritual exercise of “appreciat[ing] beauty in art of nature.” Just as we are humbled before the beautiful and desirous of it, so we should be, before the good, “checking [our] selfishness in the interest of seeing the real.”[xlviii] Simone Weil would add that even though we cannot see the Good Beyond Being, or God, desire is what calls God near to us. Desire “raises the soul” in its devotions (be they math calculations or meditations on the virtues), and God descends to possess the soul in its desire.[xlix]

The debates surrounding how desire can be pure, if it is met, also surface in the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Like Murdoch, he would claim that goodness—in his rhetoric—the Infinite, is invisible and unimaginable. And yet, the Transcendent Other (God, the Infinite, Perfect Justice)—can be accessed in unselfish relations. He deals less explicitly with the Beautiful in nature and art, but rather the relationship between my self and an other whose face calls me toward ethical action. This face cannot be the object marking satisfaction. Ethics is like unsatisfied love, Eros, or even insomniac attention: “Love is the incessant watching over the other; it can never be satisfied or contented with the bourgeois ideal of love as domestic comfort or the mutual possession of two people living out an egoisme-a-deux”[l] This seems an ethic only a god could fulfill—this wakefulness; its “perpetual duty” seems an impossibility on behalf of finite beings. However, it is precisely this insomniac ethic—which can never be definitively renounced or neglected—that asks an ongoing reach toward love. Like Murdoch, Levinas is not after easy love or superficial Eros; he is speaking of metaphysical desire, an openness to the Other that can never be exhausted:

[The metaphysical desire] can not be satisfied. For we speak lightly of desires satisfied, or of sexual needs, or even of moral and religious needs. Love itself is thus taken to be the satisfaction of a sublime hunger. If this language is possible it is because most of our desire and love too are not pure….The metaphysical desire has another intention; it desires beyond everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness—the Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it.[li]

The social, ethical revealing of God as Other (neighbor, stranger) occurs because, like a human being, God is immeasurable. In this way (and more so, because God is ‘absent’), God is “a desire that cannot be fulfilled or satisfied—in the etymological sense of satis, measure. I can never have enough in my relation to God for He always exceeds my measure, remains forever incommensurate with my desire.”[lii] The Desired, therefore, is what evokes desire. As Simone Weil says, “If there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it.”[liii] Put in Levinas’ terms, if desire is truly insatiable, and if the thing desired (God) is truly light (Justice), the desire for Justice produces God. God as unattainable, but nevertheless perceived in the relation of beings as they enact justice, or put otherwise—the virtuous.[liv]

V) [Back] To the Beginning:

Why is justice the access to what cannot be measured? Justice seems something entirely measured, calculating the terms of retribution. However, Levinas knows how even justice—measured and tried by courts, is never fully satisfactory. The ethical pursuit of justice is never over because of this imperfection. And perhaps this is because, at root, justice is too fundamentally tied to erotic love, ever unsatisfied, ever longing and striving.[lv] Justice may be access to the Infinite, but the Infinite—like Levinas’ conception of God—is pure Eros. This requires a welcoming of ‘incompleteness’—which is after all, the Infinite viewed from the horizon of the finite. It is like MacIntyre’s quest—where the process of discovering goodness is as significant as its motivated departure. It is Murdoch’s process of attending the beautiful; Levinas’ call to the priority of the Other; Marcel’s creative fidelity; Nussbaum’s porous perception. It is the search of an otherwise world, communal flourishing to come, the Good Beyond Being—Love perpetually coming toward the soul raised by desire.

We can ignore our “metaphysical desire”; or we can see, “unselfing” from its “inner space.” [lvi] As if in bas relief, made possible by desire-deepened love, we recognize that ethics is always en route to its arrival. Yes, incompleteness shatters the illusions of autonomy, satisfaction, and self-preservation. However, an ethics of love is not imposed from without to break, strip, or confine the self, as in duty or utilitarian appeals. It is beautiful: compelling not compulsory. It is involving: collaborative not consuming. Virtue ethics rooted in love boasts necessary incompleteness: so that no one person can achieve the good alone; so that no one community can totalize the good and lord over others; so that no one relation can claim normativity. If there exists any ‘norm’ in virtue ethics, it is not a static measurement, but rather a dynamism. Virtue is a dance of taking space, risking a stance in ethical action, and making room in perception. As in Richard Kearney’s comparison with the trinity: “…what you’ve got here in the Three Persons is a love, a desire, a loving desire that cedes the place (cedere), that gives room. But it is also a movement of attraction towards the other (sedere), a movement of immanence.”[lvii] Analogically, these three virtues of humility, communion, and desire bespeak this dance—an often halted, but ever enduring Love, capable of moving at the core of human goodness.

life was never simple. although it seemed simpler, and that counts for something. the illusion of simplicity calls into account our current hurried, haggard, haphazard existence.

tonight he says, ‘i feel like i’m about to burst.’

he said he was filled to overflowing, and trapped.

the city does that. new york city in this economy does that. an actor trying to make it with four jobs does that.

he has his reasons.

and me? i just wished i could have held him together, so that if he burst, i’d have all the pieces in my arms, ready to rebuild.

he’s no humpty dumpty. and i’m no king’s man. but when a friend is pressing against his own skin with fury and craze and longing and burden, i just wish my arms were wide enough, or strong enough to endure the burst or fall or crash or slip.

right now, i offer little things, like old songs, and new wine, and a bad joke to make us both ashamed–and glad that we’re alive enough to know the difference between weight and levity.

We are slowly returning to the realization that those of the faithful who stand out by the way in which they live the Church’s faith, who used to be called “saints” (whether they were canonized or not), are the people in whose hands lies the whole destiny of the Church of today and tomorrow and who will determine whether or not the Church will achieve recognition in the world. It is by no means necessary that such “saints” as these should be exceptional individuals. Some have such a calling, but they are few and far between. And these are often only the spark that kindles a group, be it great or small, which does the work of spreading the new light…            - Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The Joy of the Cross”[i]

The effect of Incarnation is in fact to spread radiance, and it is just for that reason that today there can still be witnesses of Christ…

- Gabriel Marcel, “Testimony”[ii]

“There is nothing fundamentally unique about Christians as virtuous figures,” he remarked dismissively. “Besides the outliers, Christians exemplify unethical behaviors in Scripture, world wars, genocide, slavery, you name it…”

I had to ask about his terms—“I know your point and sympathize with it. But when you say ‘Christian’ what do you mean? Is there anything distinctive about the term ‘Christian’ if not the manifestation? Perhaps the definition is in the very outliers you dismiss? And we cut short the capacity of meaning, the possibilities of ‘Christian,’ by disregarding the exceptional figures?”

He moved past my questions, since, for him, the argument had been decided by history. I grant that the holy names of various traditions have been invoked and muddied by their calling, and at times, bloodied by their causes. John summoned the simultaneous evidence of other-worldly outliers (saints as Wolf might characterize/dismiss them), and all-too-worldly ‘insiders’ (‘Christians’ who remain trapped in the unethical opinions of their social milieu.) For many, these two poles would seem to cancel one another out, and render the Christian project void of meaning. In the very least, it seems too multiply translated to be singular or distinctively radiant. This ‘Christian’ radiance is too diffuse to be tied to a source. The asymmetry of the Christian witness seems mired in the competing claims of Christian agendas and behaviors.

Admittedly, I am recovering from an evacuation of meaning, experienced most profoundly in theological words. At some point in my summer, I became aware of the diffuse usage of words like Christian, saint, salvation, sin, etc. As they faded under over-use, their meaning was erased. I cannot honestly recall why theological concepts were once so substantial for my way of encountering the world. I have been trying to recover their significance—not only to theological articulation (church dogmatics), but also phenomenological expressions of belief (ritual, aesthetics), and existential testimony (virtue ethics, societal presence).

Thus, theological language is getting a philosophical overhaul in my own life. And perhaps, I am then not unlike John’s iconoclastic leveling of saints—or history’s bas relief of Christian horrors. I sit in the canceling out; in church, I feel estranged. The minister iterates certain words about ‘the world’ and decidedly different words about ‘Christians.’ But his delineation (to say nothing of Scripture’s) is not always true to my experience. So I must either re-experience or re-evaluate the language. Grace? What is it? Can’t non-Christians experience it? Can they not give it? I have received mercy and redemption in relationships with ‘non-believers’ of all kinds.

I am frankly at a crossroads, tempted to abandon theology for philosophy. Why philosophy? I like that it does not take for granted that only Christians know what certain words or experiences mean. And yet, I still bristled when John said the other night that there is nothing truly different about Christians. Much as I want to figure out what it means to be a flourishing human in a universally translatable sense, I cannot yet get away from the idea that Christ or certain saints could open particular ways of seeing. I bristled a bit because (a) John was right insofar as Christians atrociously apply scripture, but also (b) maybe my Christian roots do not bear fruits utterly unclassifiable to him. I remembered Marcel’s belief that God’s incarnation through Christ makes possible our spreading radiance. This is not the stereotypical radiance of Wolf’s ‘saint’—who inhabits rigid categories of morality. This is an incarnational ethics: unabashed grime and stench, in dust, in womb, in death, in pleasured joy.

In his chapter on the “Joy of the Cross,” Von Balthasar remarks that this paradox is key. The saint walks the line, bypassing categories of small or large action, normal or abnormal behavior, this-worldly and other-worldly. Their holy folly is not based on any criterion other than love and humility, which would seem to provide—respectively—self-giving and self-grounding, movement toward others, without levitation above them.

But what could this mean in terms of ethics? On one level, it would require a virtue that does not consider its heroism in the present (such as the Trocme’s). It is somewhat unthinking, certainly uncalculated, unthematized, and perhaps even resisting institutionalization (insofar as an institution relies on instrumentality or utilitarianism). Perhaps we approach Kierkegaard’s understanding of the religious that transcends aesthetics and ethics. The knight of infinite resignation is no saint; his hands are willing to be covered in the sacrificial blood of his son.

And yet, this would seem to return us to the problematic suggestion of my good friend, John. How is that every Christian’s cause can claim a higher court, an other-worldly reason, or a transrational justification? ‘I know slavery looks brutual, but it is the Lord’s will that slaves obey their masters.’ ‘I know genocide appears ghastly, but these people are of the devil!’

If injustice and Christianity cannot conspire (literally, draw and give the same life-breath), then the dirty saint (the incarnated radiance) cannot only hope to bend categories, but also break before the task of love. As Kierkegaard writes,

The absolute duty can lead one to do what ethics would forbid, but it can never lead the knight of faith to stop loving. Abraham demonstrates this. In the moment he is about to sacrifice Isaac, the ethical expression for what he is doing is: he hates Isaac. But if he actually hates Isaac, he can rest assured that God does not demand this of him, for Cain and Abraham are not identical.[iii]

In sum, I sense that a saintly virtue ethics suggest a slight asymmetry to Artistotelian virtues (which would prize temperance). This asymmetry exceeds the measured categories of ethical debate by prizing most the immeasurability of love and reverence—humility, as Weil, Marcel, and Von Balthasar would suggest. The irony is of course, that what seems excessive in the Saint does not place it necessarily above or outside ‘normalcy’ or materiality. Rather, the saint must walk nearest to the ground if her virtues should hope to be nourished by radiance. Spreading radiance will require not only reflect light above ground, but being rooted in and below it…to where even darkness is not a threat but a necessity. Perhaps the virtues of God’s kingdom remain not in an other-world, but in a capacity to see and act otherwise in this world.

oh, i’m sorry. i thought you just asked me about different ways of seeing.

you meant something else. in that case, let me teach you to dream.

‘but do you ever miss it?’ i asked, a bit incredulous.

‘miss what?’

‘your soul.’

‘no. not really. does your stomach miss food when it’s empty?’

perhaps a rumble isn’t dissatisfaction but loneliness.

as if reading my thought–so clear as they usually are across my furrowed forehead–she smiled and, ‘the gut’s gurgle is no love poem. it just is. a natural reaction to vacancy, a vacancy which fully intends to be itself again.’

‘so this is a cycle for you?’

‘mmm. yes, perhaps so. but i do not count its steps, just as i do not think about when my lungs are empty or when my mind is still. to think on it would be to change it immediately.’

i couldn’t help but wonder what peace, or what death, this was…and if it was as free as her hand, riding the wind as we walked.