The Face of the Deep

A Theology of Becoming

Catherine Keller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134519224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This is a groundbreaking, highly original work of postmodern feminist theology from one of the most important authors in the field. The Face of the Deep deconstructs the Christian doctrine of creation which claims that a transcendent Lord unilaterally created the universe out of nothing. Catherine Keller's impassioned, graceful meditation develops an alternative representation of the cosmic creative process, drawing upon Hebrew myths of creation, from chaos, and engaging with the political and the mystical, the literary and the scientific, the sexual and the racial.
As a landmark work of immense significance for Jewish and Christian theology, gender studies, literature, philosophy and ecology, The Face of the Deep takes our originary story to a new horizon, rewriting the starting point for Western spiritual discourse.

Part I

CREATION NOW AND THEN

1

MYSTERY OF THE MISSING CHAOS

In the beginning, there can only be dying, the abyss, the first laugh.

(Helene Cixous¹)

I have heard what the talkers were talking,

the talk of the beginning and the end;

But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

There was never any more inception than there is now …

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

(Walt Whitman²)

Beginning is going on. Everywhere. Amidst all the endings, so rarely ripe or ready. They show up late, these beginnings, bristling with promise, yet labored and doomed. Every last one of them is lovingly addressed: “in the beginning.” But if such talk–talk of the beginning and the end–has produced the poles, the boundary markers of a closed totality, if “the beginning” has blocked the disruptive infinities of becoming, then theology had better get out of its own way.

In the beginning, theology starts again.

If something becomes, it is not what was before. Genesis–a becoming-text, a text of becoming, an unfinished narrative–is not a replication or a rearrangement. Always again there arises an element of the unprecedented. Does the new not come in this sense from nothing? Are we not created from this nothing–the bottomless shadow, tomb, or womb of ourselves? “We are created from everything!” exclaims a friend, gazing at his newborn child. He is thinking of the dust of stars, species, and genes, of histories and personalities, recycled in this unpredictable little nova, folded like a bud in his arms.³

In the face of the infinities of creation, then, the present work makes an infinitesimal move: to open up a possibility hitherto shut into the second verse of the Bible. Of course such a delicate maneuver can provide no prooftext. It does, however, offer the original pre/text, the narrative of that which–in flagrant paradox–precedes any singular origin.

I Billowing deep, bellowing word

What could have been created from nothing? The first something? The first time? If there was such a time: the strange clause of chaos opens before us. Not a theological proposition, not even a theo-logos–but a theo-gram: a wisp of text, sent but never quite received. The tohu vabohu, the depth veiled in darkness, the sea over which the spirit pulses. Would this oceanic string of icons together signify nothing but–nothing? Or then: was the matter of verse 2 already created (from a prior nothing) before a word was said? So by the logic of creatio ex nihilo, either the biblical chaos really is nothing; or God wordlessly created a chaos. In the wake of the Christian–and subsequent Jewish and Muslim–solidifications of religion as orthodoxy,⁴ these questions were not to be broached. So a theology of becoming begins more or less here, at the edges of a long silence. A silence vibrant with the unspoken Word.

One finds nowhere a full-fledged theology of creation from the deep. In a sense, the process theology spawned by Whitehead's cosmography comprises a family of exceptions. They postulate the creation from chaos explicitly, but as though in passing, and not as a theology of creation, with a hermeneutic of Genesis.⁵ Perhaps for a beginningless and endless cosmos, where every novum takes place in medias res, creation is indeed best noted in passing–in process. Discourse of “the creation” does invariably reinscribe “talk of the beginning and the end.” Likewise most feminist and ecological theologies jettison, with process theology, the omnipotent He-Creator and His linear salvation history. And they similarly move swiftly past this backwardslooking question.⁶ Most other theologies, even liberal and liberation sorts, presume, as we shall see, the creation from nothing.

In other words, the creatio ex nihilo has reigned largely uncontested in the language of the church since the third century ACE. This doctrinal hegemony might not surprise us, but for the untoward fact that the Bible does not support it. As Jon Levenson summarizes the situation: “the overture to the Bible, Genesis 1.1–2.3, cannot be invoked in support of the developed Jewish, Christian, and Muslim doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.”⁷ Among biblical scholars there has existed on this matter a near, if nervous, consensus for decades. The Bible knows only of the divine formation of the world out of a chaotic something: not creatio ex nihilo, but ex nihilo nihilfit (‘from nothing comes nothing’), the common sense of the ancient world. Yet theological orthodoxy has from nearly its own beginnings insisted on reading its nihil into the first chapter. Thus, for example, the fourth-century bishop Chrysostom performs an exegetical gesture that was becoming standard: he cites Genesis 1.1 for the desirable message and then simply ignores verse 2. “‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth.’ [Moses] well nigh bellows at us all and says, ‘Is it by human beings I am taught in uttering these things? It is the one who brought being from nothing who stirred my tongue in narrating them’ [3].”⁸ It is, however, Chrysostom himself, not Moses who “bellows at us all” what the text does not say–and so effectively drowns out what the next verse does say. Even among some of the least authoritarian revisions of the creation today, we will hear the echo of this bellow.

I want us to “hear into its own speech” (to cite a beginning-word of feminist theology⁹) the muted utterance of that next verse, the verse of chaos. But a theology of becoming can hardly go “back to the Bible,” competing for the changeless authority of origin. It may, however, solicit the chaotic multiplicity of biblical writings, genres, voices and potentials. For within this tohu vabohu of signification–something like what Nietzsche (not returning to the Bible) called “infinite interpretation”–a peculiar space of beginning yawns open. To affirm rather than cover up its hermeneutical multiplicity is to hold a sacred space for all the multiples of which the trembling web of the creation is woven. A culturally potent text like Genesis 1–no matter how variously incongruous, archaic, or vicious its effects–can be ignored. But it cannot be erased. Instead of ignorance or orthodoxy, I argue for a defamiliarization of the first two verses. I insist that this is worth doing, that this algorithmic expansion of a hyper-familiar old text, the tiny text of the creation from chaos, is not a hermeneutical hysteria or a nostalgia for origins, but a strong socio-spiritual practice.

The tehomic practice emerges in metonymic proximity to the key principle of chaos theory: “extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.” The “iterations” exhibited in fractal geometry comprise interrelations: it is a relational sensitivity, i.e. a responsiveness to an incalculable multiplicity of influences, that imports the “chaos” into a system. Through interrelation the iterations “amplify” the initial conditions. All theological interpretation (at least that which recognizes itself as interpretation rather than revelation) today exposes itself to an incalculable multiplicity of influences–movements, powers, protests, doubts, cultures, desperations, expectations. One pursues hermeneutical complexity. But one always risks chaos. Transcultural sensitivity to initial textual conditions iterates here the extreme sensitivity of the spirit hovering, or–in a century-old translation-tradition stemming from Gunkel–“vibrating over the face of the waters.” So the butterfly effect of chaos theory intercalates its oscillations with the fluttering of the mother dove or brooding waterbird– as also with the interdiscipline of theology and science.¹⁰

A theology of becoming returns to talk of beginnings precisely to distinguish “beginning,” which, as Edward Said has argued, is always relative, contested and historical, from “origin,” which is absolute.¹¹ It does so as part of a decolonization of the space of “the creation.” The term “creation” has the advantage of emphasizing the creative novelty, the mysterious event-character, of what comes to be (which is why astronomers like to use it). Thus we cannot simply exchange it for “universe,” “cosmos,” or “nature.” In theology “creation” emphasizes an event in relation, and so signifies a “Creator.” The term therefore comes barnacled with stereotypes: of a great supernatural surge of father-power, a world appearing–zap–out of the void; a mankind ruling the world in our manly creator's image; a gift soon spoiled by its creatures' ingratitude. But despite the drag of original cliché, a theology of becoming can only begin in contestation of and relation to the classical tradition. For the creation from chaos rules out its own originality–if not its own creativity.

In as much as the creatio ex nihilo lacks biblical warrant, its foundational authority (not its possible meaningfulness) would be based on false pretenses. So this book cannot avoid deconstructing the doctrine. Indeed we will find a certain theological ancestry of deconstruction hovering upon the very face of the troubled waters. But deconstruction, as its founder has always been at pains to protest, is not the demolition but the destabilization of founding certainties, a “trembling” proper to a transition between epochs, “operating necessarily from the inside.”¹² A tehomic theology operates with fear and vibration on the inside of a text whose interpretive boundaries have become more fluid than ever. The very use of scripture to determine what is “in” and who is “out” now trembles under the pressure of multiple interpretations. Even as the formative Christian-Jewish oscillations in their ongoing syncretisms with Greco-Roman, African, Asian and other local traditions shake into view, women open new floodgates of a Body that only queerly resembles a male Christ. “In the beginning”, writes Derrida, “is hermeneutics.”¹³

It is not the flimsy biblical case for the ex nihilo doctrine but a hermeneutical desire for a deeply resonant alternative that (in the beginning) provokes the deconstructive movement of the present writing. The gap between the nihil and the tehom provides an affirmative possibility: the chance for a creativity that does not confuse itself with control, for an order that does not effect homogeneity, for a depth that is not identifiable with subjectivity. Here, within a discourse of spirit, we may begin (again) to renegotiate the dominant oikonomia–the economics, the ecology, the ecumenism of order. Theology has not outgrown the subjection of the oikos to the dominus. The abiding western dominology can with religious sanction identify anything dark, profound, or fluid with a revolting chaos, an evil to be mastered, a nothing to be ignored. “God had made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He [sic] has made us adept in government that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples.”¹⁴ From the vantage point of the colonizing episteme, the evil is always disorder rather than unjust order; anarchy rather than control, darkness rather than pallor. To plead otherwise is to write “carte blanche for chaos.”¹⁵ Yet those who wear the mark of chaos, the skins of darkness, the genders of unspeakable openings–those Others of Order keep finding voice. But they continue to be muted by the bellowing of the dominant discourse. A tehomic discourse grows in the interstices of a maturing (but far from senile) tradition of unruly, disunited beginning-theologies (the liberation, political, feminist/womanist/ mujerista and ecological theologies, the postcolonial hermeneutics). These theologies clash as much as they conspire. They contour this topos of genesis, in which infinity becomes endlessly finite in our midst, as con/text.

If the tehomic i...