Theopoetics of the Word

A New Beginning of Word and World

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• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137440624, 9781137440617
• eBook ISBN: 9781137440631
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry

Gabriel Vahanian's final work, Theopoetics of the Word weaves together Christian theology, continental philosophy and cultural studies to present a new theology of language and technology for the 21st century.

Chapter 1

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Wording the World and Worlding the Word

Polytheistic, monotheistic, or pantheistic, no system, including theism as well as atheism, ever dawns on the human imagination, that does not bear the seed of its own subversion. It makes no difference if one is Greek or Jew, for remember Socrates and Jesus were equally charged with atheism as also were the latter’s followers by the Roman authorities. Like history, religion too is written from the standpoint of the winner. This standpoint seeks either to belie or vindicate legends like that of Prometheus or in particular that of Abraham smashing idols of his father.¹ Not to mention Jesus and his strictures against the Temple.² So that, recalling Feuerbach’s laconic verdict, today’s would-be “atheism is tomorrow’s religion.”³ With this difference, however: today’s atheism is methodological rather than ideological, practical rather than “confessional.”⁴ Wasn’t it the Devil who, in the Gospel, put faith as well as God into question by leaning on Scriptures and, slyly, muttering, “Will God really be there when you need him?”⁵

1. Practical atheism only confronts an equally practical theism. It plays the experience of God’s absence against that of God’s presence: it settles for an argument about an experience actually no more felt than it is obsessively shouted about and, in this respect, scarcely differs from similarly obsessed fundamentalism or its latter-day sibling, Pentecostalism and the like.⁶ But the wedge it would drive between practical theism and its own variants only succeeds—as is equally the case with its theistic opponent—in avoiding the real issue, namely, the relation between belief and unbelief, faith and unfaith, on the one hand, and, on the other, the interlocking of language and God insofar as, whether affirmed or denied, “God” is a matter of words. Yet of words not stuck with a predetermined meaning so much as of words whose meaning only grows precisely out of their use. Else empty, though not as would a tomb or much less a mausoleum be, but as would a shell be without its user, the snail. Or as likewise are theism and atheism when they seem obstinately bent on sheltering this or that particular use of a word they have eviscerated of all meaning—as would the shell be that was eviscerated of the snail it grows on.

Or, again, as are even words obsessed with God, whether present or absent, though they do leave a trace: in a dictionary, if not in the world, and as provisional and providential as the world if not more so. Hence quite a particular trace. And so particular that a collateral question arises: no sooner worshipped than God becomes an idol—idol to which language is as allergic as it is propitious to God so long as that very God is and remains radically Other and is no more fused with the world than kicked upstairs or out. And is neither a stopgap nor a superfluous hypothesis like the cherry on a piece of cake.

God is but a word—as are all the other words of a dictionary through which language consists in both wording the world and worlding the word: a kenotic as well as proleptic performance in keeping with which, neither more nor less than immanence, transcendence is no matter of the presence or absence of God but of the radical otherness between the divine and the human; so radical that, neither more nor less than unfaith, faith consists, not in being freed from or by God as in being free even of God.

Wording the world and worlding the word, the very language of faith consists in calling things and beings into that reality of which the world is “all that is the case” and of which God is not the name. Having no name, or even not so much as an identity, God is the identifier through which “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28) and through which all that live, like the illiterate Dilsey in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, know that their name is written in the Book and they do not even have to read it. Long before Lacan’s subtle definition of atheism as consisting less in denying God than in affirming that “God is unconscious,” the biblical tradition ventures a risk by declaring through the Psalmist himself that God is blind⁷ and, through the apostle Paul, that God has no name other than that of Christ, be that the name of Jesus, that of “everyman,” a man tout court through which to be identified—as to the floating anchor of one’s own no less floating identity. Which perhaps is why, hasteningly misguided, believers and unbelievers alike tend to overcompensate and vindicate their allegiance to this or that twig of the imagination as their identifier, either claimed by themselves or affixed to them by their detractors.

As a tongue is to language so is identity to the human being in the process of being human—an empty tomb. As the risen Christ is to Jesus so is language to mortal tongues, religious or cultural, under whose aegis we still seem to continue being more and more obsessed with our conflicting inherited identities. In a globalizing world, language—that is, wording and worlding the human—can in no way meet the technological impact upon traditional identities unless it recovers its traditional capacity for “outsourcing”⁸ itself as exemplified (aside from biblical language) by the transit of the human being from the so-called body language of an “infant” (that which does not speak) to the act of speech (saying and doing). Not that I am advocating some kind of Esperanto or Newspeak, much less a “final vocabulary,” incompatible with the notion of a language outsourcing itself, unless of course no one is left to use and speak it.

From the Greek myth of the dying and rising God—Greeks don’t kill gods, they die—to Nietzsche’s God is dead (“we have killed him”) through Luther or Silesius and Hegel, the theme triggers a liturgical or historical rhetoric rather than a properly speaking theological treatment. Still, more acerbic a visionary of the theologian’s task than Nietzsche, you’re dead. Obsessed with salvation (a minister’s son and himself a former theological student, Nietzsche knew what he was talking about), we’ve exchanged the glorious theater of the word becoming flesh (that is, of reciprocally wording the world and worlding the word) for a stage on which, through self-indulging dramatics, we can only display our misery—misery all the more bound to revolt against itself even to the point not only of objectively killing God but also, Nietzsche suggests, of being stuck with all that ironically remains of it all, the Bible. An empty tomb? Would that it were, for it might then give rise to a new wording of the world as well as a new worlding of the word. And geared on changing the world rather than on changing worlds or trading this one for one after life. It was time, Nietzsche kept saying, to outgrow the otherworldly salvific understanding of language inherited from an outdated past, focused as it was on dying and rising Gods. A language Christianity was meant and tried all along to outgrow, but failed. A failure, possibly foreshadowed, in the third century, through the so-called patripassian theory according to which, in God, the Father suffered the death of the Son, but was declared heretical, charged as it was with downgrading the Son’s salvific work: “he dies for us.” Whether we asked for it or not? Or did we ask for it unbeknownst to us? And if so, how can we possibly be told we still do unless we subscribed to the mythological overtones that suffuse, or mar, the conception of that “salvific work” of the Son. More significant, however, is that, once apparently settled to the satisfaction of some and the dissatisfaction of others, the controversy marked the end of an era. Greco-Roman Pantheon and Jewish Temple collapsed. Developing a metaphysical Trinity still meshed, however, with an essentialist soteriological ontotheism, willy-nilly it points nevertheless to Jesus’s more fundamental option for the primacy of the kingdom of God over salvation and persists until ontotheism is itself challenged, even overcome in the 1960s by the so-called death-of-God theology: eschatic existence consists, not in changing worlds, but in changing the world—by wording it and worlding the word become flesh, time and again, once for all.

From one universe of discourse to another, we switch from one paradigm of religiosity to another to wit the same hierarchical system of entities. Highest Being or Clockmaker, a stopgap God is useless and superfluous. An idol—to which even language is allergic. As with Luther and Calvin’s predestination, the believer, freed from the obsession with salvation and its self-indulging identifications, is freed from as well as by God if that be the case. There was no sacred precinct in the Garden of Eden; there is no temple in the New Jerusalem. Still, the soteriological motif, maintained even by others for whom we are saved from God rather than by God, appears here and there wrapped in apocalyptic or humanistic garments, even in terms of a spiritual reappraisal of the secular if not of faith, say, in Jaspers’s sense—as exemplified in the notion of a destiny without a destination, a dogma that may as well be returned against its atheistic supporters.

Equally propitious to God and allergic to the idol, language is iconoclastic: no longer subservient to some hierarchical world of things and beings, lofty, but whose reality is belied by even their appearance. The order of the world has now become a word order, no longer under the primacy of some abstract being but of language (as laid bare by Heidegger, Gadamer, and, last but not least, Lacan).

Despite “genealogical” connotations of fanaticism, of rigorism, iconoclasm harks back not merely to the biblical prohibition of graven images but to its roots, the radical otherness of God, to God’s namelessness, whose worship itself must be guarded against every idolatrous corruption of faith. Most adamant in denouncing such inborn proclivity is Calvin’s comparison of the imagination with an idol-making factory that obfuscates one’s capacity for criticism by blinding its concomitant capacity for self-criticism.

Iconoclasm deals, not so much with the classic cleavage of image and word, flesh and spirit, as with the dialectic of literal and symbolic, according to which the literal is a parable of the symbolic and nothing is more symbolic than the very literal itself (the sun “rises”; “he is risen”) that lifts the world out of insignificance, not unlike an object it would pull out of the mirage of objectivism or a subject out of its own hallucination with itself. Biblical iconoclasm consists in the mutual debunking of divine and human—of religion through religion so long as, pictographic or alphabetic, visual or phonetic, the language that “speaks” to us is kept from becoming a cliché.

Creation debunks whether nature, as a matrix of religion, or history so far as it proleptically “caps” Israel’s exodus from Egypt. A similar role is played by the virgin birth (incarnation) with respect to Abraham’s descendants according to the flesh and the historical covenant of God with Israel. In keeping with biblical iconoclasm, and like Judaism, Christianity is no religion of a book but of the word. God is a God that speaks and the world falls into place. But the God that speaks can be silent—though the Devil, quoting Scriptures, can be all the more prolix. The idol is mute.

2. It would reduce language to mere technique, to a technique through which, deprived of the implicit common intent of its twin prongs, in whose light even God to whom language is propitious can become the idol to which it is allergic; and is in effect denied its inherent capacity for worlding the word and for wording the world. And for reminding us that—as does even the story of the temptations of Jesus in the Gospel when, so to speak, lording it over language, the Devil seeks to pull the rug from under it—language best displays itself as, in Luther’s formula, at once, the free lord of all, subject to none and the dutiful servant of all, subservient to none.⁹

Any more than technology itself and despite even Jacques Ellul’s well-intentioned strictures, language is not reducible to a technique (as sensed even through Heidegger, not to mention unlikely forerunners like transcendentalist Emerson or a dithyrambic contemporary theologian like Cardinal Daniélou defiantly stating that “nothing is more biblical than technology”¹⁰). Who am I, indeed, even from a religious point of view, when someone else’s heart beats in me?

Technology is a method. It is “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency . . . in every field of human activity.”¹¹ Somewhat ominously, this definition however keeps resting on the questionable presupposition that pits a technologically would-be materialistic efficiency against a traditionally religious understanding of the efficacy whether of grace or of prayer. And, further driving a wedge between the spiritual and the literal or between the religious and the cultural, would surrender religious language to some kind of Esperanto or glossolalia—that is, ironically and symptomatically, to that agelong persistent yearning for limitless freedom even while acknowledging that grace entails freedom from that lust. “For the antithesis of grace is no longer the perfectionist concept of Nature, even fallen nature. It is sin.”¹² Ellul’s assessment of technology overlooks the fact that, for a proper understanding of it, too (as with religion), concepts are required that differ from those of the very science that in part, goaded by Christianity, brought it about.¹³ And means, an ensemble of means, are all that technology can offer. Not unlike nature, technology is neutral, which Heidegger refrains from saying and Ellul strongly denies whereas Tillich wisely—yet not consistently—admits. Technology undermines “formulations of the eternal that are based on an earlier experience, [ . . . on] historical conceptions of God.”¹⁴

Even as a tool, technology is not merely a tool. It is a machine, but not merely a machine. It is a system in quest of a method as an instrument of its own ev...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction  Gabriel Vahanian: From the Death of God to Wording and Worlding
• 1   Wording the World and Worlding the Word
• 2   The Kenotic Utopianism of Language
• 3   God and the Fallacy of Identity: A Theological Disintoxication of the West
• 4   The Secular, a Christian Contribution to the East/West Dialogue
• 5   No Christ, No Jesus
• 6   Christ beyond Christ
• 7   Language & Co: The Conditioning of God, a Foray
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index