God Being Nothing

Toward a Theogony

Ray L. Hart

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780226359762
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In this long-awaited work, Ray L. Hart offers a radical speculative theology that profoundly challenges classical understandings of the divine. God Being Nothing contests the conclusions of numerous orthodoxies through a probing question: How can thinking of God reach closure when the subjects of creation are themselves unfinished, when God's self-revelation in history is ongoing, when the active manifestation of God is still occurring?Drawing on a lifetime of reading in philosophy and religious thought, Hart unfolds a vision of God perpetually in process: an unfinished God being self-created from nothingness. Breaking away from the traditional focus on divine persons, Hart reimagines the Trinity in terms of theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony in order to reveal an ever-emerging Godhead who encompasses all of temporal creation and, within it, human existence. The book's ultimate implication is that Being and Nonbeing mutually participate in an ongoing process of divine coming-to-birth and dying that implicates all things, existent and nonexistent, temporal and eternal. God's continual generation from nothing manifests the full actualization of freedom: the freedom to create ex nihilo.

Topos 1

Theogony (Θεογονία): Godhead and God

Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device.

—Paul the Apostle, Acts 17:29

Thinking theogony is a thinking of the determination process of deitas, or so I intend to argue. The philosophical theology under development here moves toward the explicit discrimination of Godhead and God. It does so by conceiving or envisioning the eternal self-generation of God, the determinate Creator, from the abysmal indeterminacies of Godhead. This task forms the crux of the first logical step in the unfolding of a monotheistic theogony and is to be the major matter of this chapter. Here I elaborate on the two extremities of that determination process: the abyssal indeterminacy of Godhead as unsearchable Wisdom and the determinacy of determinate God as logotic Creator and salvific Redeemer. Thereafter I seek to think the intermediating space of the determination process of deitas through the meontologics and semiotics of the chora (χώρα) in Plato’s later dialogues, particularly Timaeus.

It may be worthwhile to summarize proleptically what is to be thematized in these pages. Everything with which the human person reckons ultimately is in Godhead-God, whether indeterminately or determinately. Access to these elements qua purely indeterminate is by speculation alone; that is, by extrapolation backward from some determinate collocation. Such backward speculation toward sheer indeterminacy is entirely onto-meontological, whereas backward determinate speculation, by contrast, is theological: it concerns what in the Christian tradition has been called eternal creation (the self-generation of God the Creator from indeterminate Godhead), itself a backward speculation from temporal creation (what is not God and not other than God, the finite universe, created by God from nothing in and not other than God). If eternal creation is the infinite determinateness of indeterminacy—ranging from pure indeterminacy to nondeterminacy (indefiniteness) to determinateness—comprising the self-creation of trinitarian God the Creator, then temporal creation is the finite determinateness of the infinite determinateness of infinite indeterminacy. The glory and curse of temporal creation is that it delivers to the human creature, within the parameters of creation itself qua imago Dei et ad imaginem Verbi, responsibility for finite determinability, the range of which she or he is to discover by test and contest.

Eternal creation comprises (1) the sheer indeterminacy of the divine abyss, the very Godhead of God, which indeterminacy is rendered not determinate but nondeterminate or indefinite as the divine Wisdom, replacing the traditional Father, which indefinite Wisdom is rendered co-nondeterminate (2) as the divine Word or Logos, the traditional Son, and (3) as the divine Spirit, itself the eternal determinateness of the intermediation of Wisdom and Logos. Eternal creation comprises not only the self-generation of triune God the Creator from God’s own indeterminate, abysmal depths but also the eternal generation of what is not God but not so external to the Creator as to be wholly unrelated, internally, to God: hence Adam Kadmon, or man in Paradise, the Paradise of before, and Satan the Archangel (whose stature in John Milton reached the Sky) in the selfsame Paradise of before. Thus eternal creation includes the divine but untested (by temporal creation) determinate parameters of God the Creator’s Love and Wrath. The only immutability in the divine life—that of abysmal Godhead—is effaced in the triune determinateness of God, both as the Creator and as the Redeemer.

Godhead and God: Why Distinguish Them?

To come clean with it, the highest (if secret and usually unacknowledged) aspiration of theology, as impossible as it is necessary, is to write the autobiography of God. The ancient western classical theogonies were simulacra of this aspiration but amounted to mythological biographies, as philosophical theologies amounted to their literary and philosophical critique. Their own contemporary replacements (and displacements), now that late modernity or postmodernity has finished its instruction in the demythologization of history and literature, are historical and literary biographies of God.1 For the monotheistic religions, notably Judaism and Islam, a stupefying human arrogance lies at the heart of all theology in its highest aspiration. For Judaism the Holy One gives not so much as his name, and receives instruction only from eternal Torah and the commentary/argument of the people constituted by it through his principality. For Islam, Allah speaks himself exhaustively through the Prophet in the Koran, to which its hearers are to submit (the meaning of Islam). Thus for both Judaism and Islam theology has not the standing it has in Christianity, and certainly none of its pretense to some form of an autobiography of God. For Christianity the Bible is no less crucial, yet it is, as it were, but a daybook relative to geological time—a Lurianic diary entry covering a day, perhaps a week, in temporal creation—and the Christian theologian wants to know about eternal creation as well. The Jew, having eternal Torah, has the problem of temporalizing eternity; the Christian, having the Word in time, has the problem of eternalizing time. What Jews and Christians share in common (among much they share, not to discount how they differ) is temporal creation, although they come at it from opposite directions. So perhaps it is a peculiarly Christian theological aspiration to want a penetration of the eternal interiority of Godhead apart from all temporal creation (but Judaism has its kabbalistic En Sof too), an aspiration that led to the medieval discrimination of eternal from temporal creation, issuing later, say, in the phantasmagoria of a Böhme in respect of eternal Godhead, not so much replicated as temporally supplanted by Hegel’s differentiations and sublations of Spirit.

Apart from the obvious one, that the human author is not God, there are multiple reasons why the autobiography of God cannot be written, yet no one nor the sum of them diminishes the theological hunger or estops moves toward its partitive satiation. One is the way in which God is an autodidact. Human autobiographies have two functions. One is communicative, exhibiting oneself in the difference one has made in the stories of others; and when this function predominates, the autobiography is dismissed for the narcissism it is. The other is self-discovery on the part of the subject, the final instruction to oneself that coincides with the final self-(re)construction. The well-rounded human autobiography, balancing the two functions, is extraordinarily rare—and for very good reason. In the recounting or reconstructing of lived experience no precinct can be found that is exhausted by internal relations, nor a zone excavated that is exhausted by external relations (so the typical autobiography can identify only approximately where I controlled the environment and where the environment controlled me).

With God it is otherwise. God is mutually, we might say metaxalogically, autodidactive—the meaning of which depends upon the discriminations we are in process of making and elaborating. God lives two lives, neither isolated from the other nor forming an identity of conflation. There is the life of God exhausted by internal relations of immanent Trinity: there is God the determinateness of Godhead, the God who in that respect and only in that respect is external to Godhead. There is the life of God the Creator who gives rise to what is both externally and internally related to God, the selfsame God the Redeemer who does not abandon the creature to mere externality, comprised in the life of economic Trinity. Is it any wonder that for an autobiography aspiring to grasp the intercalation of these lives, intending to penetrate the divine mutual autodidacticality, the entries in the daybooks of the world’s religions could but serve as palimpsest footnotes?

Thus far I have been approaching the distinction between Godhead and God, a theo-logically necessary provisioning for the trek toward creation, with the discursive stealth appropriate to elusive quarry. By discursive stealth, because the prompts are at the same time the stops; every impulse to move forward is a warning, as though the boundary sign says “Admission to Trespassers Only—Stay Alert!” So (1) the effort to say the unsayable is a venture in the transgression of language in its very exercise, to say the Sayer-Creator from the said of creation (against which Calvin railed), by one east of Eden, an alien from the Paradise of their coincidence. Having exited Paradise through the exercise of determinateness over the indeterminacy delivered into one’s care, its very exercise could only be transgressive, as reentry (not back, but forward) could only be trespass. Creator and creation: each is the other’s asymmetric surplus and their redemptive coincidence, if ever, is not a Paradise of before but a Paradise of after (else temporal creation is nugatory), not alone because of their incommensurability but because of the excess of reserve in each and the derangement each works on the other in the Covenant between them. So (2) the transgressive flight from God is a trespassive flight toward God. And a very large question at whose threshold we cannot avoid arriving is whether the God from which we flee is God the Creator and what we flee toward is not God the determinate Creator but indeterminate Godhead. So many of the saints or mystics (those whose eyes and mouths are closed, muein) thought, and do they not have the best claim (although the last to make it) to having contributed a few sentences toward a chapter in the autobiography of God, they who were submerged in the sea formed by the cumulus of God’s tears, to which they added their own (and over which God brooded in saying “Let there be . . .”), making their own the autobiography of God (again, the last so to claim), vaporizing, volatilizing, effervescing those tears in the Cloud of Unknowing?2

There is yet another reason why the distinction between Godhead and God is imperative. For the western monotheistic religions, God is living. Not, mind you, God is life, in the manner of Lebensphilosophie; nor God is alive, but the present progressive: God is living. How could what came to pass for orthodoxy have affirmed the divine immutability, which carried with it an equally unqualified divine impassibility? Christian orthodoxy could do so and did so only by being in the grip of a metaphysics driven by the need for a ground, an immutable foundation accounting for all change. To say the same thing differently: orthodox theology came under the grip of a metaphysics dominated by coherence without regard to theophantic appearance (manifestation). Theology first, foremost, invariably, and properly is in the grip of its sourcing theophantic appearances, and its discursive practices of coherence are in the service of saving those appearances, which mutatis mutandis is the aboriginal metaphysical project of Plato—who, however, worked with different appearances. In Christian (though not only Christian) conviction the paradigmatic theophanies make manifest God as living. The divine living is complex, as it is perplexing, and can scarcely be accounted for by what once passed as the divine simplicity; it requires indeed the theo-logical discrimination of Godhead and God. For what is living is also dying, God not excepted (once again, given the panoply of theophantic manifestation). The one God living and dying is also an affirmation of hitherto normative orthodoxy, although made in widely and wildly various theological forms: most soberly in Aquinas3 and most profoundly in his contemporary resuscitator D. G. Leahy;4 in the dialectic of living and dying in Hegel’s speculative Good Friday;5 in the tilt toward the sublation of living in dying that eventuates in the death of God, the most radical resolution of the incoherencies of orthodoxy in Thomas J. J. Altizer’s absolute evacuation or kenosis of the divine immutability into the mutabilities of time.6

If classical orthodoxy saved the theophantic appearances—a claim that is disputable—it did so with both logical and ontological or metaphysical incoherencies.7 It got at least the perplexity of the complex of appearances, which complex, with the metaphysical resources at hand, could be rendered only as contradictory or incoherent: God is immutable and impassible, God is mutable and passible. To get beyond such incoherence yet stay within the grip of the apparent divine God (not the God of metaphysically driven entailment) requires, most generally, a theological ontology that enfolds meontology and, based on that revision, a speculative discrimination within the reality of the apparent divine God godself. No theology intending the divine God would claim that God the Creator is mutable in the way that created, contingent realities are, so the claim for immutability must vest in an interior dimension of the divine reality other than that of God the determinate Creator. Immutability, I shall claim, coincides with pure indeterminacy. That only can change which is in some respects determinate, for change is an alteration of determinacy. The speculative name (Eckhart’s unnameable name for the appearances of the desert of Godhead) for the divinely immutable indeterminacy is Godhead. Indeterminacy vitally sources, but does not ground, the living God; Godhead does not change into God the living Creator. Without metaphysics of any kind (per impossibile?), the language of ground would not arise in connection with God the Creator.8 With metaphysics of the right theological kind, the divine ground is none other than God the Creator, who embodies the primal determinate principial rupture of the (no less divine but groundless) indeterminacy of Godhead as principal, as the agent of eternal principiality, of principial eternity. Through the primordial determinateness (of the divine abysmal but immutable indeterminacy) that God the Creator is, mutability, change, becomes possible (and through creation, actual).

One could of course go on. God is living eternally and is dying temporally. The human creature is living temporally and dying eternally (although vocated to eternal life). Indeterminate Godhead a se is neither eternal nor temporal, properly speaking, since nothing lacking in any determinacy whatever can be either eternal or temporal, although groundlessly sourcing both eternity and time. Godhead is the site of the eternal self-generation of God. And so on. But we cannot go on, without going back, for the distinction between Godhead and God in the one divine life has been but broached in the form that shall claim attention, and is in want of elaboration if it is to have purchase on intelligibility, not to mention persuasiveness. Ours has been an age marked by a shift from the quest for foundations to the development of genealogies, a shift in which Nietzsche has had vast effect across many fields of human inquiry. The Nietzschean project has degenerated, as he presciently anticipated in horror, into a (trivialized?) sociology of the genealogy of ideas, instead of a genealogy of what ideas are about.9 The reader will have sensed long since that the project at hand participates in the shift from foundation-questing to genealogy, but to genealogy as prosecuted in Nietzsche’s venerated classical antiquity, genealogy as theogony—to be sure, a theogony of different theophantic appearances.10

The question heading this section is: Why distinguish Godhead and God? If on the trail of this question not many memorable reasons for the distinction have been adduced, that is itself for a very good reason. The intelligibility and force of a distinction lies in its deployment, as does its effective rationale. Moreover, the oldest rule governing distinction is distinctio est negatio: to distinguish is to negate or differentiate. And what is distinctionally (if not distinctively) to be negated or differentiated when the subject of distinction is God? We find ourselves immediately deposited in a test case, in a theological thought-experiment, of the claim that determinate intelligibles depend on a more ultimate determination process. How can one offer determinately intelligible reasons for making distinctions in the very midst of the determination process on which they depend? It is easy enough to pronounce Gelassenheit over these troubled waters, to let go of ratiocinative anxiety, to let the determination process have its way. But east of Eden one earns the bread of the mind by the sweat of the brow. And all this only because of a grand stipulation: what is there is finitely determinate and thus actually not (exhaustively) nothing because of what there is, an infinitely determinative process.

There are, of course, alternative and equally grand stipulations. Take Parmenides, for example, with whom I have decisively broken, along with all his metaphysical and Christian theological successor sycophants. There was a time when I was such a sycophant to this extent: I could affirm with Tillich that the only statement one could make of God flat-footedly is that “God is Being itself.” But if God/Being/One exhausts all reality, the matter of a determination process can only be ludicrous, a bad joke. With rigor, Parmenides was entitled only to his first affirmation, that there is only One/Being—not to his second, that only Being can be thought, because thought, itself intrinsically determinate and intending a determinate that is there, requires negation or differentiation, nor to his third, that only Being can be said, because all saying is an act of rendering determinacy, however episodic. The first to grasp something like the full spectrum of the determination process was the incomparable Plato, who in Sophist, by the sheer logic of determinate intelligibles, and in Philebus, by the ontology of the determination process, forced the friends of the gods into a severance with Parmenides (without falling into the arms of the friends of the Many-without-a-One), who had rendered all determination and process both logically and metaphysically imp...