Author Archive for A.D.
Here’s something speculative for all y’all. I’ve taught lots of World Religion classes in the last few years, and I’m always wrestling with the question of what meaning other religions have for Christianity. The Eastern meditative tradition that culminates in Zen has been especially intriguing to me, just because it seems to be talking about something that Christianity just doesn’t address, namely, nothingness as Bliss, nothingness as real (and distinct from both God and Creation). Now I know that there are plenty of theologians of the apophatic ilk that probably do get into this territory, and I should probably read up more before posting. . . .but this is a blog, right? so here goes. . . . Continue reading ‘3 + 1 + 3′
If the later Heidegger went to great lengths to reinvigorate the ancient sense of thaumazein or wonder, which should be the root of all philosophy, he forgets that the Christian revamping of this wonder was not done without reason. It is just as possible to be flabbergasted by the Horrific as by the Good (see Kant’s sublime, and Lacan’s undoing of it), and it is of no small importance to determine what is the Good in this case. Dante’s Divine Comedy ends in wonder, but it is not wonder, simply, at that which we cannot comprehend — it is not the wonder at the void — but the wonder of gazing at the trinity, which we might call, inasmuch as it is a three in one, the ultimate example of rationality (of the triad, the minimum of knowledge) married to the beyond, the one (the maximum of unknowing). Thus Dante erects a bulwark in his poetry, the sense of wonder of the ancients, alied with the dogma of the Christian God. And the water does not run from his hands, even through these centuries.
The Watchmen: a film about castration, a film in which each super-hero is made into a superb failure. Written during a time of success (Reagan’s era, we didn’t even know how much money we would make) it can only be fit for the general public at a time when the failure is right in our faces, like a CEO in a $10,000 suit complemented by handcuffs, as the cock of Dr. Manhattan faces us flacidly the whole movie through. As Seinfeld says, “That’s just not something you want to see.” We don’t want to see this failure hanging off the body of the most powerful super-hero of them all. Several times during the film the director has the audacity to show us the erect (Twin!) Towers glooming on the Manhattan Skyline. Luckily, he has the original comic script to blame it on. Those erect towers are now simply wrecked. They have failed, just like the ability of Dr. Manhattan to please a woman, even when he has more than one body. More than one body, more than one tower; it doesn’t matter, the terror and the truth will take them all down. Dan (Nite Owl) also has a moment of failure (with the same woman), which he fixes by trying to save the world. It is only when that fails irrevocably is he able to perform again, on his comfortable, small scale. Bourgeois, attractive. It is a failure which keeps desire alive, and mankind is no happier than when the ultimate goal (peace on earth) is both an utter success (in that Russia and U.S.A become common enemies of the imp Manhattan) and complete fiasco (in that Manhattan is innocent).
So here is how I hash out the failures: Ozymandias, which is pretty obvious, in that he sacrifices the city of New York, and its anonymous millions, for a supposedly secure peace on earth. It is peace based on a lie, but it is the best we can hope for: the logic of sacrifice. It is realistic. This is the failure of ratiocination.
Manhattan, even though he can meld and mold matter at will, ultimately agrees with the unconscionable act of Ozymandias, and departs, a lame duck of a super-hero to “create other galaxies” or some bullshit like that. He condones the murder of millions and departs never having known love. His departure seals the peace. His truth seals the lie. This is the failure of scientia.
The Silk Spectre, the only prominent woman, fails in a fit of sentimentality, for she actually weeps when Dr. Manhattan tells her he is going on his venture of creation without love. She is turned on by the idea of it, and this way, as she’s making love to Dan in their suburban hovel, she might think of these creations millions of light years away and work herself up to an orgasm. This is the failure of concupiscence.
Dan, Nite Owl, he is the big nerd who actually has big muscles, kind of like a boy ugly duckling. He has a fit of conscience when he sees what Ozymandias is doing, but he only gets angry for a little bit, and then realizes that what is realistic for him is just to settle down, fight crime on the weekends, and bone his wife in the ship on the way home. This is the failure of common sense.
Rohrshach. O, how close we came to a hero here. For he was the one who tracked down Ozymandias, he was the one who would never back down to a suburban existence, who would never let the truth be trampled by such a thing as peace. But in the end he is only seeking suicide. He is only seeking death as an escape from a world of people whom he hates. He holds onto the truth, but he has no love for it - just as Dr. Manhattan has knowledge to create without love, so Rohrschach has truth but without compassion for his fellows.
There is no super-hero here, but its funny that we’re left with a pretty super movie. It was noted a couple nights ago that the best candidate for hero in this story is actually Rohrschach’s journal, which, because of the intractable rapacity of the media will have a chance to see the light of day, to open up the possibility of Ozymandias’ guilty, to re-introduce the threat of nuclear war between earthly enemies – but it is possible that Rohrschach loved his journal, and if he did, the truth there will most suredly see its day.
So I just presented this at the Popular Culture/American Culture conference up in Niagara Falls. Dan is making me post it here, so if you don’t like you can gnaw his ear. Actually, I’m trying to work it into an article so I’d love to hear comments:
GK Chesterton has been staging something of a comeback in the last few years. While he has always been popular among Catholic thinkers who value his fresh formulations of their tradition, and also, over the past 20 years or so, with thinking Evangelicals, who have been turning to him as proof that one can keep one’s faith without losing ones mind; its only recently that his voice has been heard among the philosophers and the critical theorists, mainly through his influence on two of the most interesting representatives in these fields. One, Slavoj Zizek is a Marxist and strict Lacanian, who has annoyed his audiences by saying that he is a Christian atheist and by claiming that Lenin got it all right. The other, John Milbank, is British, a member of the Anglican church, who has become well known as the most articulate defender of a philosophical and theological movement that goes by the name Radical Orthodoxy, and emphasizes a rediscovery of patrisitic and medieval theologians while at the same time being well read in Jacque Lacan and Karl Marx. Zizek and Milbank have appeared at conferences together as well as edited volumes, and are even co-writing a book. Though they come from radically divergent points of view both Zizek and Milbank see the necessity of philosophy and theology being in close discussion with each other and both have seen Chesterton as a good way to do that. Continue reading ‘Revolution, Paradox, and the Christian Tradition: A Chestertonian Debate between John Milbank and Slavoj Zizek.’
“Sophiology: Divine Sophia”
By Aron Dunlap, Temply University
In the hands of Bulgakov Sophia is described under two general forms, Divine Sophia and Creaturely Sophia. Divine Sophia goes under many names, one being that of the ousia, the Being, of the very Godhead, in distinction to the persons, the hypostases of the Father, Son and Spirit:
The first part of the dogma, that is, the doctrine of the relationship between the three hypostases with their hypostatic qualities and distinctive features, has been to a certain extent elucidated in the process of the Church’s dogmatic creativity. But the other side, the doctrine of the consubstantiality of the Holy Trinity, as well as the actual conception of the substance or nature, has been far less developed and, apparently, almost overlooked.1 Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 5′
- Bulgakov, Sophia: The Wisdom of God, 24.↩
In the latest installment of the Batman series, the Joker has been wonderfully distilled to the essence of the Satanic. He is radically evil for this reason only: He does not care about money (like mere criminals), but he only cares to corrupt those around him, to show that they are just as vile as he is, and that goodness is always a ruse. Kant said that only a good will is truly good. The Joker aims to prove that this good will exists nowhere. The movie in large part proves that he is right, but for those of us who are still trying to be good, this is strangely inconsequential. As dark as the movie is, and Heath Ledger’s perfomance as the Joker is riveting, his character more often elicits laughs than gasps (of which there are a few, but not all supplied by the bad guys). The Joker is a great character because he reminds us of Satan’s basic predicament. He has refused to bend his knee to a “good” God, and has dedicated his life to distorting those who are stupid and weak enough to spend half their lives kneeling and praising. Basically, then, he is lonely and wants company. Continue reading ‘A Devil of a Joker (slight spoiler alert)’
I recently interviewed for a teaching job and the interviewer asked me what I meant by saying that I respected and imitated the teaching methods of the Rabbis. I was referring specifically to their search for “surface irregularities” and the manner in which their interpretations of these glitches, holes, and repetitions enables a deeply particular creative form. As I’m preparing for teaching this summer, I just read a famous portion from the Talmud in which one rabbi asks for a sign from heaven to prove his point, at which point the sign is given, but then another rabbi jumps up and says, quoting, “It is not in heaven” at which point the Holy One (that is, God) starts laughing, saying, “my children have won over me, my children have won over me!” In no other religious tradition do we see this kind of resolute orthodoxy and textual mastery mixed with the most stubborn sense of the rightness and space of the human spirit. This sense that God must abide by God’s own law, respecting the sanctity of man’s response. But instead of obsessing over the fact that this seems to limit God, we should notice how much freedom and spirit it gives to man. And putting aside the question of how and whether God works on his own, let’s take note of the fact that God has given men and women an astounding responsibility, one to which even nature pays heed (check out Baba Mezia, 59a-59b, Talmud). It was this Jewish spirit (as found in Kabbalah) from which Pico della Mirandola took his inspiration when he penned one of the most optimistic calls to human action and responsibility, in his famous Oration, and in many of his other writings. In my meager researches in Sophia, this is something that immediately came out to me about her, that she was the spirit of human action and necessity–almost, in a way, putting aside the question of what God can do, here we are faced with a divine humanity whose limits have not yet been spanned. The Rabbis saw the formation of the Talmud as man’s response to the Divine Word given on Sinai, and the limits of this response were something that even God seemed to respect. I would argue that Sophia should be conceived in an analogous manner.
The movie begins with us inside the voice of the old, soon to retire sheriff, and though ostensibly the action occurs elsewhere, we realize at the end of the film that we’ve never left this voice, in fact we’ve fallen deeper into its Texan cracks, even into its dreams. How do we know this? We know this because, like a sheriff, and unlike a movie, we miss most of the action. Sure, we come upon it in anticipation, but most of the killings are (literally) veiled from our eyes. We can’t figure out who the heroes are because they keep dying in very anticlimactic ways, right before, or right after, our attention has been called. I’m so excited that a filmmaker (two even!) have resurrected the art of “not showing”–Hitchcock definitely had that one down, as did many others, though perhaps in part out of regard for the censors. Well the censors have mostly gone home, but the viewers remain, and No Country for Old Men is described as a “violent” film or one that is “action packed,” but these lines come from censors who were once viewers. The truth is that the film simply shows us what it’s like to be an old man who is too slow, too peaceful, and too intelligent, for the world of terror.
The (very very) bad dude in No Country for Old Men is presented as our male hero: brave, loyal, trustworthy, unafraid, and most important of all, true to his word. He must kill an entirely innocent victim just because he said he will. He doesn’t enjoy evil for its own sake, but he simply performs what evil deed he must in order to live up to, even sacrifice himself for, some higher principle. He clearly enjoys his evil deeds, but whence cometh this enjoyment? We ask the same question about him that Augustine asked about himself when he remembered the theft of the pears, which he did not do because the pears were good to eat, or for any other reason, but simply to indulge in the shame of the act. Augustine actually doesn’t give us a good answer as to why he commits his crime–it is clearer in the film: Sigur Anton (bad dude) is the last man around, the only character with character, strength and values. A true hero, and yet when he crumbles into a puddle at the end of the film there shines a ray of something totally different, in the irrational refusal to live in his world of a cute girl who works for Wallmart, we see the beginnings of a glory on the far side of the American man.
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