A Theology of Failure

Žižek against Christian Innocence

Marika Rose

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780823284085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology's failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity's violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church.The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite's uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius's legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.

1

Ontology and Desire in Dionysius the Areopagite

Even if it were desirable to do so, it would not be possible to obtain a knowledge of Dionysius untainted by the recent uses of his work in both theology and philosophy. The history of Dionysian scholarship in recent centuries is so thoroughly bound up with the range of concerns that have motivated his readers that it is no more possible to pry Dionysius’s texts cleanly from the fingers of those who have set out to attack, defend, or make use of him than it is to establish with any real exactness the identity of this pseudonymous author. As various commentators have pointed out, however, this is not necessarily a bad thing.¹ The concerns of Dionysius’s contemporary readers have given rise to an extraordinary flourishing of scholarship that has both unearthed previously unrecognized aspects of Dionysius’s thought and made it possible to draw on these discoveries in the interests of repeating Dionysius differently, which is the goal of this book.

However, it is necessary to start somewhere, to pick a moment at which to enter the hermeneutical circle, and so this chapter focuses on a discussion of Dionysius’s work, its distinctive characteristics—which arise principally from Dionysius’s idiosyncratic coupling of Christian theology and Neoplatonism—and the mixed legacy he bequeaths to his theological offspring. This account will function as a first attempt to sketch the contours of the Dionysian problematic, to which subsequent discussions in the book will return repeatedly, focusing in particular on his conjunction of eros and ontology, and the consequences of this marriage for his account of freedom, materiality, hierarchy, and universality.

Dionysius

Much ink has been spilled over the question of whether Neoplatonism or Christianity dominates Dionysius’s work; what is essentially unquestioned is that the Corpus Dionysiacum is characterized precisely by the conjunction of Christian orthodoxy² with Neoplatonism.³ Not only does the question of Dionysius’s orthodoxy obfuscate the perpetually contested identity of Christian orthodoxy (this is particularly clear in discussions of Dionysius’s work that have pitted Eastern and Western Christianities against one another);⁴ it also elides the deeply formative influence Dionysius had on the shape of theology in both East and West.⁵ It is clear that Dionysius was influenced by both Christian and Neoplatonic sources, and it is no less clear that in bringing these two together, he produced a synthesis in which both of its constituents were transformed by their mutual encounter. Rather than engaging with these well-rehearsed debates any further, then, I seek here to sketch out some of the key coordinates of Dionysius’s Neoplatonic Christianity and its legacy for subsequent theological thought.

In response to (what is perceived as) a tendency in Western philosophical engagements with Dionysius’s work to focus on the Mystical Theology,⁶ scholars such as Denys Turner have focused their attention on the connections between the Mystical Theology and Dionysius’s other works: the Divine Names, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the Celestial Hierarchy, and the Letters, and in doing so have both clarified what is distinctive about the theological system that Dionysius bequeaths to future readers and highlighted some of the deep tensions within his work—tensions that are, as I argue, in many ways as important to Dionysius’s legacy as his constructive solutions to theological problems.

Denys Turner argues that Western Christian thought has its origins in the convergence of Christianity and Platonism and, specifically, in the convergence of the narrative of Moses’s encounter with God at the top of Mount Sinai and Plato’s allegory of the cave, naming Dionysius as the most influential figure in this meeting of myths. This coupling—particularly clear in the Mystical Theology—begets two of the determining metaphors of subsequent Western theology: darkness and light, and ascent and descent.⁷ But there is, as Turner acknowledges elsewhere, more to Dionysius’s conjunction of Christianity and Platonism than simply the joining of these two narratives.⁸ Reading the Mystical Theology in the context of Dionysius’s work as a whole, key themes that emerge are Dionysius’s use of the Neoplatonic language of Oneness to describe the source of all things;⁹ his equation of Neoplatonism’s basic pattern of emanation and return with the Christian narrative of creation and redemption;¹⁰ the invocation of Plato’s Symposium in the use of the language of eros to describe that which drives this movement; and his invention of the term hierarchy to describe the structures of authority in both the church and the angelic orders—both of which become, on Dionysius’s account, deeply entangled with the process of progressive ascent by which creatures make their way up to the creator.

Dionysius’s conjunction of Christianity and Neoplatonism, then, binds tightly and almost inseparably together being, language, and the structure of human society around the figure of what is, essentially, a closed economy in which everything that is takes its origin in the One, God, from which it emerges into multiplicity and complexity only to return to union with the source from which it came. Slavoj Žižek argues that ontology consists essentially of the claim that “thinking and being are the same,” that “there is a mutual accord between thinking (logos as reason or speech) and being.”¹¹ In this sense, the Corpus Dionysiacum is profoundly ontological. Moreover, it is thoroughly erotic insofar as it is eros, desire, which drives both creation and redemption, both emanation and return; which forms the basis for God’s relation to the created world, the created world’s relation to God, and the relationships between creatures.

Eros and Ontology

As Turner argues, eros plays a crucial role in Dionysius’s Christian-Neoplatonist synthesis.¹² In particular, as I discussed briefly in the introduction to this book, eros solves two key problems of the Neoplatonic account of creation—the problem of divine freedom and the problem of differentiation. However, in its Dionysian form it also creates a number of interconnected problems for theology—the problem of human freedom, the problem of materiality, the problem of hierarchy, and the problem of universality. All of these bear some relation to economy.

The problem of creation is essentially the problem of how an economy comes into being. Neoplatonism begins with the simplicity of the One—that is, the One’s entire self-sufficiency, completeness, and lack of differentiation. The One needs nothing and is eternally unchanging. So how can the world come into being? To begin, to start something, to decide without cause for doing so, is to rupture the economy of the One, which is in its simplicity perfectly complete, lacking nothing. This is the problem of divine freedom: If God wants nothing, needs nothing, and is entirely complete unto Godself, why would God create? And if the One is perfectly simple, entirely without parts, how can it give rise to the multiplicity and diversity of the material world? The problem of creation, then, is twofold: Why did God create, and how does One become two, and three, and many?

Turner argues that it is the language of eros that makes it possible for Dionysius, and the theology that comes after him, to deal with the problem of creation. He says that, in human experience, it is in eros that “the polarities of freedom and necessity, oneness and differentiation” are held together.¹³ To love is, Turner argues, to feel compelled to undertake particular obligations to the beloved while recognizing that this erotic obligation is entirely free, the free gift of lover and beloved to each other.¹⁴ Similarly, to love is to desire absolute union with the beloved and yet to be absolutely individualized by the encounter with the beloved other. I am, Turner argues, never more myself than when I love and am loved, and yet to love is to desire to become one with the beloved other. Love is that in human experience that makes most sense of the paradoxical language that Dionysius uses to describe the human encounter with God: the “brilliant darkness” where one “knows beyond the mind by knowing nothing.”¹⁵

Freedom

Yet this language of eros, steeped as it is for Dionysius in the myths and metaphysics of Plato and his interpreters, is not without its problems. The notion of the simplicity of the One—important both to Plato and to the Neoplatonists—is the notion that all good things—justice, freedom, life, beauty, etc.—come together and are identical within the One that gives rise to everything that exists. Just as all things come from the One, so all things are to return to the One; this return is both the inherent telos of human life and the ultimate good for human beings. Everything that is good or desirable is united in the One. And so two questions arise. First, if all being comes from the One and is, in the One, identical with goodness, where does evil come from? Can evil exist at all? Second, if everything that is desirable and good for human beings is in the One, why would anyone choose to do anything which was not directed toward their end in the One? How, as Dionysius puts it, “could anything choose [evil] in preference to the Good?”¹⁶

For Plato, these questions were relatively easily resolved: The essential problem was ignorance. Nobody wants to be unhappy; desiring anything other than the good makes a person unhappy; therefore the only explanation is that they think that what they want will make them happy—and therefore that what they want is good—but they are wrong.¹⁷ Although there is an element of discomfort with materiality which (as discussed below) becomes, especially as filtered through Neoplatonism, in some ways close to a sense of the world’s fallenness, it is only really in the encounter with the Christian doctrine of sin that evil becomes a problem for Neoplatonic ontology. For Dionysius’s predecessor Gregory of Nyssa, the solution is to make human beings wholly culpable for their ignorance: God is the sun that enlightens the world, and if we are unable to see clearly it can only be because we have chosen to shut our eyes to the divine light.¹⁸ Dionysius shares this dual emphasis on evil as willed ignorance, and yet his discussion of where evil comes from focuses much more strongly on the question of the ontological status of evil. What is evil? Where did it come from? What caused it?¹⁹ These are at heart economic questions: How was the divine economy, the cycle of cause and effect, emanation and return, ruptured? Dionysius’s solution is simply to suggest that evil does not exist. All being comes from God; and so anything that has being cannot be entirely evil because insofar as it exists at all it must continue to participate in God.²⁰ Just as, for Plato, those who desire evil do so only because they are ignorant of the good, so for Dionysius those who are evil are so only insofar as they have fallen away from both knowledge of and participation in the good.²¹ Evil is a distortion, a corruption; not a thing in itself but “a deficiency and a lack of perfection … evil lies in the inability of things to reach their natural peak of perfection.”²² It is parasitic upon the good and can neither cause itself nor be desired for what it is in itself.²³ Yet although it is “weakness, impotence, a deficiency of knowledge … of desire,” those who sin are nonetheless culpable because God “generously bestows such capacities on each as needed and, therefore, there can be no excuse for any sin in the realm of one’s own good.”²⁴

As thorough as Dionysius’s account of evil is, however, it does not exactly solve his basic problem. Evil is only explicable as a lack, a failure, a weakness; and yet those who fall short are to be blamed for doing so because they were strong enough to do otherwise. So why would anyone—human or angel—ever sin? There can be no reason, no justification for sin; it is a lack which somehow escapes the created economy. Sin, in short, is structured in a manner that exactly parallels creation itself: as an excessive, unjustifiable, inexplicable act that ruptures economy. This parallel is mirrored even in Dionysius’s account of the relationship of evil to being: Just as God “falls neither within the predicate of being nor of nonbeing,”²⁵ so also evil “is not a being … nor is it a nonbeing.”²⁶ And yet where the free excessive act of the God who is neither being nor nonbeing is fertile and generative, bringing into being all the multiplicity of the created world, the free excessive act of human and demonic beings that has neither being nor nonbeing can bring only death: It “never produces being or birth. All it can do by itself is in a limited fashion to debase and destroy the sub...