The Art of Anatheism
256
The Art of Anatheism
256eBook
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Overview
The book asks the question – how can God happen again after the death of God? It answers it by proposing an ‘art of anatheism’ which attends to the recreation and return of the divine through certain forms of literature, painting, liturgy, music, and performance. Engaging students, scholars, and interested readers across a wide range of disciplines – philosophy, theology, aesthetics, literary criticism, poetics – the volume includes contributions from both practising artists and professional academics. As such it brings together examples from ancient religious wisdom traditions and cutting-edge contemporary cultural practices to suggest that the sacred is often most potent and persuasive when recreating the everyday world of our secular experience.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786605221 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 12/12/2017 |
| Series: | Reframing Continental Philosophy of Religion |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 13 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Richard Kearney is Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College. His many publications include Anatheism: Returning to God after God (2010), Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Contemporary Thinkers (2004), On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (2005) and Navigations: Collected Irish Essays 1976-2006 (2007).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
God Making
Theopoetics and Anatheism
Richard Kearney
PART ONE: THEOPOETICS
Why is "making" considered a sacred activity for gods and mortals alike? Making something out of nothing. Making something in the image of something else. Creators making creatures that remake their creators: in each other's images, shapes and songs, paintings and poems, dreams and crafts. One great game of holy imagination played with bodies and souls, with hands, tongues, ears, and eyes. Art as divine-human interplay, again and again.
Theopoetics names how the divine (theos) manifests itself as making (poiesis). The term dates back to the early centuries, meaning both the making human of the divine and the making divine of humanity. As the poet scholar Ephrem of Syria wrote: "He gave us divinity, we gave Him humanity." Or as Athanasius said in the fourth century: "God became human so that humans could become divine." Catherine Keller puts it succinctly: "The term theopoetics finds its ancestor in the ancient Greek theopoiesis. As poeisis means making or creation, so theopoiesis gets rendered as God-making or becoming divine."
Theopoetics carries an attendant claim that first creation calls for second creation — creation again (ana): a double act where humanity and divinity collaborate in the coming of the Kingdom. This play of recreation goes by the name of "ana-theism."
Most wisdom traditions involve an original story of genesis — or cosmogony — which serves as a paradigm for their subsequent spiritual narratives. In what follows I will draw mainly on Abrahamic and Hellenic narratives to trace a short history of theopoetics before illustrating the notion of sacred play with reference to the work of three artists: Andrei Rublev, Antonello da Messina, and Sheila Gallagher. My overall suggestion is that certain expressions of artistic imagination offer ways of responding to the call of creation that precedes and exceeds the abstract systems of philosophy and theology. Theopoetic imagination gives flesh to word and word to flesh. It works both ways.
a. The use of the term "poiein"— to make, shape, or form — occurs often in the Bible in relation to divine creation. This theopoetic motif features from the start in Genesis (1:1, 1:7, 1:27) where we read, famously, that "in the beginning God created (epoiesen) heaven and earth" (1:1), or, again, "let us make (poiesomen) man" (1:26). In Proverbs 8, we witness the great primal scene of God's creation (poiesis) of Wisdom:
The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works, before his deeds of old; I was formed long ages ago, at the very beginning, when the world came to be [poiesis], When there were no watery depths, I was given birth, when there were no springs overflowing with water; before the mountains were settled in place, before the hills, I was given birth, before he made (epoiesai) the world or its fields or any of the dust of the earth. ... Then I was constantly at his side. I was filled with delight day after day rejoicing always in his presence. (Proverbs 8:22–29)
In the Wisdom of Solomon, the formative power of Sophia is even more explicit: "God of my fathers and Lord of mercy, who by your Word (logos) made (poiesas) all things, and through your Wisdom (sophia) framed man" (9:1–2).
These early panegyrics of the play of Sophia echo the first book of Genesis where God creates humans in His image and likeness. The original Hebrew term "yzr" plays on the mirroring between (1) the divine Creator (yotzer) who creates (yazar) and (2) the human power to form and shape (yetzer) according to the secret alphabet of creation (yetsirah). It is telling that the Lord did not make anything on the seventh day, leaving it free for humans to complete. The unfinished Sabbath is a gap calling for perpetual recreation — in imagination and action. And Adam and Eve, as first creatures shaped from earth (adamah), deployed their power of "good imagination" (yezer hatov) to engender a human race capable of fashioning a Kingdom in the image of their God.
This play of mutual recreation between human and divine is what we call theopoetics. It involves creatures cocreating with their Creator. In this view, God codepends on us so that the promissory word of Genesis may be realized in embodied figures of time and space, image and flesh, art and action. Or as Thomas Mann aptly observes in Joseph and His Brothers: "God created for himself a mirror in his own image ... as a means of learning about himself. Man is a result of God's curiosity about himself." But greater than curiosity was desire. For in forming the human, God bore witness to a gap within divinity, a sabbatical cleft or crack from which the life-drive of Eros could emerge as desire for its other. God created because He desired a playmate, someone to consort with, as we know from Hosea and the Song of Songs. Or as the contemporary Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it: "God created man because two have a better time than one." Creation is a love affair. God is cracked about us. Theopoetics is theoerotics.
It is important to repeat that both Genesis and Proverbs declare that God is relation. Not a self-subsisting remote substance but a relationship between two — Yahweh and Sophia, Elohim and Adam — through the medium of a third (the breath of language). Indeed the fact that the Creator is also called by a plural name, Elohim, reveals that God is originally a community rather than some autonomous Supreme Being —"Let us make man." Divine creating is divine speaking from the start, as evidenced in the Hebraic word play on the first and last letters of the alphabet in Genesis 1:1.5 The first word of Genesis is dialogue, not monologue, and this is echoed in the opening of John's Gospel, which declares that "in the beginning was the word (logos) and the word was with God." The preposition "with" (pros) here actually means "toward" or "before," revealing a relation of face to face or person to person (prosopon): a dynamic liaison that mirrors the inaugural scene of Sophia (a feminine noun) playing before the face of the Lord (Proverbs 8). These Jewish and Christian claims to the primacy of relation between persons are later reinforced in the Patristic figure of creation as a Trinitarian dance (perichoresis). We shall return to this central point in our commentary of Rublev's icon of the Trinity later.
In Jewish Scripture the motif of theopoiesis extends well beyond Genesis and the Books of Wisdom to the Psalms and Prophets. Think, for example, of Isaiah 29:16 where the human creature is described as the clay of the potter, the handicraft of the craftsman, the art of the artist. Or, again, recall the Rabbinical and Kabbalistic commentaries on the making of Golems — human-like figures shaped from clay according to the Book of Creation (Sefir Yetsirah). One such version tells of how Abraham and his teacher, Seth, were invited by God to study the Sefir Yetsirah for three years "until they knew how to create a world." But lest they succumb to the temptation of idolatry — like Enosh who worshipped his own clay image — humans were admonished not to replace God's creation but only to repeat it so as better to appreciate the power of divine making. It was good to experiment with the divine letters of creation as art, exploration, and invention but not to actually substitute God with an idol. If one yielded to the temptation of literal imitation, the Golem risked becoming a monster who turned on its creator. So, to prevent such idolatrous destruction, the makers of Golems were exhorted to remove the "shem" (a parchment spelling emeth, meaning "alive") from their creature's lips so as to respect the difference between human and divine creation. The point was for humans to participate in divine yetsirah/poiesisin the right manner — namely, abiding by the Way (Torah) of the Creator (Yotzer) — rather than setting themselves up as mini-Gods in their own right. According to Hebraic wisdom, then, we are finite creatures called to collaborate with God in the completion of Creation.
In the later Christian tradition we find similar calls to cooperate in the coming of the Kingdom by joining the Trinitarian dance of perichoresis, thereby repeating the original act of genesis. Such a collaborative theopoetics between the divine Logos and human action seeks to follow Christ the God-Man in completing the "New Creation" (Galatians 6:15). We read in Ephesians 2:10 that "we are the handiwork (poiema) created by Jesus Christ for good works ... that we should live in them." As such Christianity may be understood as the historical-cultural task of carrying on and carrying out this "poem." Hence the notion of Christ as Lord of the Dance and Supreme Artist — echoed in the vibrant Christian traditions of image-making both in the iconography of Eastern Orthodoxy and in the religious art of the humanist Renaissance and after. We will return to a discussion of this iconographic culture in part III and ask the question of how divine poiesis relates to human praxis.
b. It is worth noting here that when, in the Greek philosophical tradition, Aristotle seeks a term for the divine mind, he chooses nous poietiko s — the mind that "makes." And in his Poetics (Peri Poietikes) — though now talking of human not divine making — Aristotle describes poetic creation as a mirroring-emplotting (mimesis-mythos) of life: an art of recreation involving, in Paul Ricoeur's words, a radical "refiguring" of our world. The term "poiesis" occurs in the very first line of Aristotle's classic text and regularly thereafter, referring to the transformation of everyday haphazard events — one thing after (meta) another — into a meaningful configured plot: one thing because of (dia) another. And it is by means of such creative refashioning of our experience that we achieve healing catharsis: namely, a poetic distillation of our basic drives of "pity" (eleos) and "fear" (phobos) into compassion and serenity. In short, for the Greeks "poetics" involves a "creative redescription" of experience that replays our actions and sufferings in a storied way that issues in the pleasure and wisdom of art. Configured by the poetic work we, the audience, refigure our lived existence. We refine our passions (pathemata) and are invited to become more serene and compassionate citizens of the polis.
c. Before concluding our preliminary note on theopoetics, let me recite what I consider to be a telling example from modern religious literature. Gerard Manley Hopkins was a Jesuit poet who combined a Scotist-Aristotelian aesthetics of singularity (haeceitas) with an Ignatian belief in the inherent divinity of "all things." He describes the moment of literary epiphany as a recreation of creation, or, as he puts it, an art of "aftering and seconding," a motion of "over and overing" that replays secular experience as sacred. Hopkins speaks of a retrieval of past time that, like Proust, repeats forward, proffering new life to memory, giving a future to the past. This poetic revisiting involves a detour through distance and disenchantment after which we may return to our first experience in a new light, in a second naiveté, over and over. Freud calls this temporal retrieval nachträglichkeit, and although he is speaking of "trauma," the same après-coup structure is operative in poetic or holy "wonder": both terms come from a "wound" of shock or surprise that explodes our normal sense of time and space. A sacred cleft. In Hopkins's work, this wounding expressed itself in a series of dark sonnets that prefaced his poetic epiphanies: I wake and feel the fell of dark not day ...
Oh the mind, mind has mountains,
Traversing such dark nights of the soul, the poet returns to a celebration of ordinary things as micro-theophanies:
Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:
A Catholic author, Hopkins performs a sacramental reimagining of everyday experience. But this notion of holy repetition is not confined to any particular religion. It extends to every poetic movement of returning to "God after God." God after the loss of God. As in the replay of a child's game, "gone, back again" (Fort/Da). We learn young that what disappears as literal comes back again as figural — that is, as sign and symbol, as a second presence in and through absence. And by symbol here we do not mean untrue or unreal. The return of the lost one — in the case of religion the lost God — may well be the most "real presence," theopoetically speaking. It may in fact be a more powerful and moving presence precisely because of the detour through separation and letting go. This involves a new notion of time — kairological rather than chronological — a time that traverses and reverses time, as in the Eucharistic formula: "We do this in memory of Him until he comes again." Theopoiesis is a coming back again (ana) — creating again time after time. In a word: anapoiesis. Theopoetics is anapoetics.
PART TWO: ANATHEISM
"Ana" is a prefix defined in the Shorter Oxford English dictionary as: "up in space or time; back again, anew." So understood, the term supports the deeper and broader sense of "after" contained in the expression "God after God." Ana opens a semantic field involving notions of retrieving, revisiting, reiterating, and repeating. But, as already mentioned, repeating forward not backward. It is not about regressing nostalgically to some prelapsarian past. It is a question, rather, of coming back "afterward" in order to move forward again. Reculer pour mieux sauter.
So it is in this sense that we use the term "ana-theism" as a "returning to God after God": a critical hermeneutic retrieval of sacred things that have passed but still bear a radical remainder, an unrealized potentiality or promise to be more fully realized in the future. In this way, ana-theism may be understood as "after-faith," which is more than an "afterthought" or "after-affect." After-faith is eschatological — something ultimate in the end that was already there from the beginning. And that is why the "after" of ana is also a "before." A "before" that has been transposed, so to speak, into a second after. As Sophia says when she plays before the face of the Lord, "Before he made the world I was there ... rejoicing always in his presence" (Proverbs 8). And this Hebraic sense of ana-chrony is echoed in Jesus's claim: "Before Abraham was I am."
But let us be clear from the outset: anatheism is not a dialectical third term that supersedes theism and atheism in a sort of Hegelian synthesis or final resolution. True, anatheism contains a moment of atheism within itself as it does a moment of theism. Or to be more precise: anatheism precontains both — for it operates from a space and time before the binary of atheism and theism as well as after. The double "a" of anatheism holds out the promise but not the necessity of a second affirmation once the "death of God" has done its work. But it differs radically from Hegel's "negation of the negation," which sees the return as an ineluctable synthesis or sublation (Aufhebung). In contrast to such a theodicy, the "ana" of theopoetics is always a wager — a risk that can go either way. It is a matter of discernment and decision on our part. A replay of wisdom, again and again. The event does not take place behind our backs, irrespective of our agency, like Hegel's dialectic of Absolute Spirit. There is no "Ruse of Reason." Anatheism is not some predetermined theodicy leading to a Final Totality. It is not about Upper Case Divinity. Au contraire! Anatheism has nothing to do with Alpha-Gods or Omni-Gods. It is about reimaging — and reliving — the sacred in the "least of these." It is lower case from beginning to end. It flowers out of nothings and nobodies. Or as James Joyce puns, "In the buginning was the woid" (Finnegans Wake).
(Continues…)
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