The Post-Modern Re-Naming of God as Incomprehensible and Hidden.

Rethinking God's reality in post-modern theologies.

Post modern movements of thought, precisely as post-modern, have attempted to think the unthought of modernity. By calling into question the forms of modernity's central self-understanding, including the onto-theo-logical form of modernity's naming of God, post modern thinkers have initiated new ways, at once radically new and curiously ancient, for naming and thinking God. In the course of these new namings with new forms, post-modern thought has also cast doubt on any over-confidence in traditional pre-modern forms (e.g., narrative, symbol, drama) for naming God.

A great deal of post-modern thought is directed towards exposing two illusions of modernity: the unreality of modernity's belief in self-presence in modernity's self-understanding as the present: and the unreality of the modern understanding of the autonomous, self-grounding self. Both presence and self, moreover, are claimed to be expressed, in the forms of modern onto-theo-logy.

In an earlier theological form, the theology of the "death of God" can serve as a first harbinger of post-modernity in theology. But like the earlier existentialist reception of Nietzsche, the death of God theology (at least in the central work of Thomas Altizer) is dependent, above all, on a notion of presence -- indeed, as Altizer does not hesitate to state, "total presence." In the post-modern work of Mark C. Taylor, by contrast, presence is deeply in question even if, as Taylor states, his position is a hermeneutic of the death of God. A hermeneutic, it must be stated, that challenges both traditional hermeneutics and the traditional death of God in favor of characteristically post-modern suspicions of all modern language of presence and self. [1] To expose the illusory belief in pure presence of much modern thought is no small achievement. For several forms of modern thought are always attempting to ground themselves in their own self presence. Much of modernity, like Descartes, longs to build for itsel f its own foundations in a consciousness deceptively pure and an identity deceptively secure. As the post-moderns make clear, the modern self, unfortunately for its foundationalist pretensions, must also use language. And the very self-deconstructing, non-grounding play of the signifiers in all language will assure that no signified, especially the great modern transcendental signified [theism or ego-ism (the modern subject)] will ever find the pure identity, the clear and distinct self-presence it seeks or the totality it grasps at. That self-grounding, self-present modern subject is dead: killed by its own pretensions to grounding all reality in itself. That subject, I believe, should be unmourned by all along with the modern totalitized systems built upon it. [2]

Through deconstructive gestures of critical reflection the post-moderns also act. Their best acts are acts of resistance: resistance to the temptation to a complacent, humanist self-image; resistance to a concept of the present bearing the illusion of pure presence; resistance to an a-linguistic and a-historical consciousness; resistance to the onto-theological complacency in all the modern isms, including theism; resistance to what Foucault nicely names "more of the same"; resistance to that "same," above all on behalf of difference and otherness.

Like Foucault, many of the post-moderns strive to write a "history of the present." At their best they write their histories in such manner that the formerly forgotten, repressed other of the modern tradition -- hysterics, the mad, mystics, dissenters, avant-garde artists, subjugated communities of resistance in the past and present are finally allowed to speak on their own terms. Otherness, difference, transgression, excess become the alternatives to the deadening sameness, the totalizing systems, the false security of the modern self-grounding subject. Nietzsche returns. But now he comes now not as the "old" existentialist Nietzsche but the "new Nietzsche" laughing at the abyss of indeterminacy he exposes in the self-portrait of the modern self and the non-presence of the modern present as his stylistic experiments disrupt modern theism and modern atheism alike.

In naming and thinking God the post-moderns retrieve two radicalized and largely marginalized figures of the tradition: prophets and mystics. First, the mystics. In terms of an approach to forms, post-moderns make two characteristic moves: either explode or transgress the form of love -- beyond modern notions of love as relationality (e.g., process theism and Hegel) and beyond pre-modern forms of love as overflow and emanation (neo-Platonic) into love now understood as sheer excess and transgression. Traditional prophetic forms are also characteristically transgressed in more ethically oriented forms of post-modernity -- as in Walter Benjamin or in his Christian theological disciple, Johann Baptist Metz -- into the transgressive form of apocalyptic interruption, disruption, excess. Where any form, whether modern or pre-modern -- is not driven to such transgression and excess, it dissolves for some post-moderns into sheer formlessness, into the void. Perhaps more accurately post-modernity often understands em ptiness as form, form as emptiness. The traditional Eastern religious dialectic of form as excess (e.g., Hinduism on naming and thinking God through an excess of forms) and formlessness (e.g., Buddhism) reappears in the post-modern rethinkings and retrieval of negative theology -- as one can see in contemporary theological and philosophical retrievals of the apophatic and mystical traditions exemplified in the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite. [3]

In the Christian tradition there are four principal forms of mystical theologies. Two of these -- love mysticisms and apophatic mysticism -- have proved remarkably important for post-modern thought. There is little doubt of the importance of love mysticism for many post-moderns: in the influential work of Bataille on excess and violence, in Lacan's work on the jouissance of Teresa of Avila, or Kristeva's studies of Bernard of Clairvaux and Jeanne Guyon, or Irigaray's work on the love mystics or de Certeau's brilliant studies of the emergence of the language of mysticism as marginal language and the experience of excess in seventeenth century France, in Francoise Meltzer's work on Joan of Arc. In every case, the language of love of the mystics, along with their use of erotic as well as sometimes violent, transgressive language, have attracted several quintessentially post-modern thinkers starting with Bataille.

There is another strand of post-modern philosophical and theological thought that finds itself more at home in wary relationships with the radically apophatic traditions of mystical thought: Here the recent philosophical works on religion of Jacques Derrida, John Caputo and others are especially significant. [4] What is striking about these mystical traditions is this singular fact: the principal interest here is not, as with the moderns, on love as relationality nor, as with the pre-moderns on image and Trinity, but often in radically apophatic positions like that of Pseudo-Dionysius, Scotus Eriugena, Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Cusanus. Moreover, the post-modern appeal to our lack of knowledge is not interpreted in the way it was for the existentialists (e.g., Tillich and Merton). They appealed, in effect, to a dark night of the soul of the solitary and deeply troubled modern existentialist seeker. Rather the post-modern thinker is far more likely to affirm the positive reality of the notion of the radical incomprehensibility of God and/or the Void. In sum, this post-modern category of Incomprehensibility refers not only to our human finitude and lack of understanding of God but rather to Incomprehensibility as a positive affirmation of God's very reality (Karl Rahner). For others, the apophatic mystics serve as a pointer to the never purely available Void (Maurice Blanchot) or as a question-mark hovering somehow between God and the Void (Derrida, Caputo, Taylor). For other Christian theologians, the Incomprehensible God is the most adequate way to name the Reality of God as mystery. Here Meister Eckhart's "Godhead beyond God" finds its proper home. Whether these apophatic traditions can also yield a further insight into God's intrinsically relational reality -- as love, as wisdom, as Trinity -- the debates within the great and widely ignored tradition of mystical theology (e.g., Eckhart vs. Ruysbroeck), as well as the emerging Buddhist-Christian dialogue, may help all Christian theology to understand again. Even before these conversations, however, the affirmation of the radical Incomprehensibility of God not only at the limits of our possibilities of comprehending God (with Kant on God as a "limit" concept) but as a new place to start understanding God as God may well prove one of the singular achievements of the post-modern forms of theology. For these theologies accept the anti-onto-theo-logical character of most post-modern thought so fully that they move the Christian understanding of the Divine Reality beyond the usual forms of relationality, whether process, analogical, or dialectical, to a position more like that found in the apophatic traditions of Christian though that undertow which occasionally surfaces like a whirlpool in marginal Christian thinkers. For the Christian understanding of God, this first, mystically oriented form of post-modern thought is the most suggestive one for rethinking the radicality of the Divine Mystery as positive Incomprehensibility.

With some notable exceptions, however, too many post-modern thinkers feel free to deconstruct the history of past and present without actualizing any concrete ethical-political hope. They wish to deconstruct the status quo in favor of the fluxus quo. And yet they cannot, without further reflection on the ethical-political import of theft own deconstructive exposures. There is an implied ethics of resistance in post-modern thought. But that ethic is one that is present sometimes against the grain of theft own reflection on the impossibility of any determinateness. How can resistance be secured without some agent--not, to be sure, the false, self-grounding subject of modernity, but rather the responsible self of the great prophets? Emmanuel Levinas, that most severe, partly because so close a critic of the post-moderns, knows this secret flaw of post-modern thought. He, like them, knows that a desire for totality is the concealed wish and death-dealing fate of modern reason. [5] Levinas knows that the principa l issue today is the issue of otherness, not more of the same. But unlike many other post-moderns, Levinas also knows that the issue must be ethical-political: the face of the genuine other should release us from all desire for totality and open us further to a true sense of Infinity for naming and thinking God. The face of the other must also open us to the Jewish more than Greek traditions constituting Western culture. For the face of the other can open us to ethical responsibility and thereby to hear anew the call of the prophets to political and historical agency and action.

Along with Levinas and more recently Derrida post-modern feminist thought is the conscience of post-modernity. When reading a thinker like the early Julia Kristeva, one finds the unmourned modern subject dead. But one also finds the emergence of a new subject beyond the usual no-self of the post-moderns: the subject-in-process-on-trial. The metaphor of process in Kristeva's thought is not merely another expression of a quietly modern evolutionary consciousness of unending process. Kristeva's metaphor is rather both the relational metaphor of process and a legal metaphor of process as trial. We are all subjects-in-process-on-trial now.

The modern seemingly autonomous self thinks itself alive in those forms of modern ego-psychology which promise release, while finally returning the ego to accepting the status quo. In Lacan's post-modern reading of Freud (which I strongly prefer over later optimistic, consoling ego-psychologies and therapies) the Otherness of Freud's Unconscious is a real, frightening awesome other. At the same time, there are emerging other new voices through all those others marginalized by the official stories of modern Western triumph. Those others, especially the poor and oppressed in all cultures, (women, African-Americans, native Americans, and Latinos in American culture) now speak, unlike the post-moderns, as historical subjects with new and old narratives, songs, rituals, symbols of both resistance and hope. They insist that the future as both promise and judgment must interrupt all presentness even beyond the post-modern exposures of the false sense of self-grounding the presence in modernity.

In many ways these new, prophetic traditions are also recognizably post-modern, especially in their implicit (too rarely explicit) understanding of God. Like the earlier neo-reformed theologies, these liberation, political, African-American and feminist-womanist-mujerista theologies should find the understanding of the prophetic Hidden-Revealed God more appropriate to their understanding of God than the mystical Comprehensive-Incomprehensible God. Unlike the early neo-orthodox theologies in their existentialist mode (Bultmann), these new theologies are less likely to find the revelation of God's hiddenness in the experience of the cross as the estrangement of the alienated self of modernity. [6] Rather the cross is now read as the revelation of God in weakness which here will mean principally not modern alienated individuals but rather the concrete reality of those individuals and groups designated "non-persons" by the dominant culture: the oppressed and marginalized in all history, the internally and extern ally colonized of Western thought. Their categories are familiar to all post-modern thought: otherness, difference, marginality, resistance, transgression, excess. Like earlier biblical theologies, these new theologies of God as a God who acts in history are likely to turn to biblical accounts of God's actions as the signal clues, even now, for God's self-disclosure and thereby God's reality. Unlike earlier biblical theologies, however, God's actions are here more typically to be found in their reality of the disclosure of God in the cross of God's preferred ones, the oppressed and marginalized of history. For history understood, here as the locus of God's actions, will mean neither what will be read as the homogeneous and empty evolutionary time of liberal and modern theologies of historical consciousness, nor the historicity of the solitary individual of existentialist and transcendental theologies. Rather history will now be seen as the focus of God's self-disclosure in the survival, struggle, and conflict of oppressed and forgotten people, living and dead: in otherness, difference, marginality.

These prophetic, indeed apocalyptic, theologies find the revelation of God's reality in the voice of God's own suffering in the oppressed of all history. These new theologies have also become, not merely by desire (as does nearly all Western post-modernity), but by action and mode of thought non-Eurocentric. Every people must be encouraged to find further forms to express theologically theft experience of God as a God disclosed in conflict, in suffering, in weakness, in the cross and joy, in history as concrete struggle and survival. These theologies -- as African-American theologies, native-American theologies and Latino theologies in our culture -- speak from not the dominant power, but from those others once subjugated by the dominant culture. These others, in turn, may help the dominant to let go into the otherness with themselves for the Unconscious awaits them too as does death--the Void and/or God?

The first, mystical forms of post-modernity also find the Incomprehensible God in the other typically marginalized figures of our culture -- the mystics, the hysterics, fools, avant-garde artists, and dissenters of all kinds. So, too, the new apocalyptic post-modern theologies find not merely ethical-political practice but the naming of God's very reality in the Revelation of the Hiddenness of God as the vulnerability and useless, innocent suffering of whole peoples in the cross of the history past and present: For these new theologies the principal self discourse of God's reality in our day is mediated in the powerful voices of all these others as well as in ethical-political action for these others.

"History" here is neither a secretly social-evolutionary "historical consciousness" nor the philosophical "historicity" of modern consciousness. History here is acknowledged, as it once was by Hegel himself, as a "slaughter-bench." But there is no longer a Hegelian Aufhebung nor a Christian theological triumphalism to save the day. Marx and the other left-wing Hegelians through the early Frankfurt thinkers saw much more clearly that: we must rethink our concrete history to save history from its own madness and, with Jewish and Christian hope, political, feminist-womanist-mujerista and all liberation theologians must struggle with articulating the presence/absence of the Hidden God of history on behalf of the living and the dead.

The prophetic and apocalyptic theologies of post-modernity find their own mystical roots in their further reflections on God's reality in, for example, the "popular religion" of the people (once so despised by earlier liberation theologians as mere "fatalism"). So too the mystical theologies of post-modernity find that they too need to understand God's reality in relational, as ethical-political, prophetic terms and even in disruptive apocalyptic terms (Metz). The re-thinking of God's realty presently occurring across all the major forms of post-modern theologies cannot be located in either the apophatic or the apocalyptic trajectory alone. Rather an adequate contemporary naming of the Divine reality, in our contemporary period, may be found, above all, in the very otherness and difference of those forms invented by the marginalized voices through whom God manifests Godself with an interruptive, Othering power reminiscent of honesty to life as it happens in history and read through the central prophetic and apocalyptic biblical narratives and Greek tragedy alike. The Hidden-Revealed God and the Comprehensible-Incomprehensible God have never been closer in theological self-understanding. It is that conjunction, I believe, that will free both the apocalyptic and the mystical-apophatic trajectories of post modern theologies to find one another once again, and in so seeing the other, find a new, further disclosure of the unfathomable Mystery of God as the Incomprehensible and Hidden One.

DAVID TRACY is Professor at the University of Chicago and author of a number of influential books in theology, including Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology.

Notes

(1.) Mark C. Taylor, Erring (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983).

(2.) See the essays in Theology at the End of the Century: A Dialogue in the Postmodern, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).

(3.) Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

(4.) Inter alia, see Jacques Derrida, "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," in Language of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literacy Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); see also the essays in Robert P. Scharlemann, ed., Negation and Theology (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).

(5.) This is, of course, the central claim of all Levinas's work, especially his magnum opus, Totality and Infinity. See also the essays Face to Face with Levin as, ed. Richard A. Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986).

(6.) Contrast here the more traditionally Reformation theme of the theology of the cross for understanding God and the self in Eberhard J[ddot{u}]ngel, God as the Mystery of the World (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1983) with the same theme rendered into a political theology in J[ddot{u}rgen Moltmann, the Crucified God (London: SCM, 1974).