THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

Here’s why there hasn’t been much action here, lately.

Bonaventure’s reduction of the arts to divine wisdom, with special emphasis on the seven days of creation and Hugh of S. Victor’s triad of divine attributes.

©TLOU, 2011

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So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.
Paul’s letter to the Philippians (2.1-2)

I recently read Philippians with my intro class, and promptly issued a quiz the following day. One of the questions went something like: “Paul exhorts the Philippians to be of the same _______.”

Many of the students answered religion, community, etc.. Many got it (MIND). But one answered “Be of the same body.”

I remain fascinated by this answer. Part of me simply believes that this is a well-catechized catholic who, while not knowing Philippians, of course, was actually thinking eucharistically. I know, I’m an idealist.

He could have been thinking politically. Be of the same body-politic. And I’m sympathetic to this reading, too. Again, idealistic, I know.

Without discussing with the student, I really have no idea what he was thinking. But for my own work, my own sacramental-politics, I love the idea of Paul exhorting the Philippians to be of the same body.

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call — one Lord, one faith, one baptism, 6 one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.
(4.4-5)

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Pixar’s Wall-E (2008) tells the story of an impolite robot, a world that is collapsing in every imaginable way (biologically, socially, economically), and a human race that has divorced itself from that world. The demi-god of the ruling commerce culture declares that the planet is toxic and forbids the return of the exiles. Freed from the tragic cost of doing business terrestrially and floating aimlessly in space aboard their interstellar pseudo-ark, the Axiom, humans decline into overweight, non-ambulatory automatons, divorced even from each other, aside from superficial conversations via the heads-up video display inches from their faces that filters out the real for the virtual, the simulacra. The fact that the H.U.D. is transparent is more a salve to their eroded consciences than it is a legitimate window to the real. In one of the most poignant scenes of the film, the robot Wall-E, having stowed aboard the Axiom, interrupts several of the ship’s denizens in their dematerialized reverie, and introduces himself. And for many on the Axiom, robot and human alike, the introduction of this personal, conversant presence is unwelcome. Wall-E does not accept, or rather can not fathom the terms of their anti-dialogical existence. He lives for relationship and, even in this alien environment, can not help but make friends. But, at times, even making friends can be an impolite act – to contest what in Wall-E was really toxic, the exchange of real conversation for a fetish with commercial simulacra.

This is the kind of impoliteness that Graham Ward calls for in The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Post-Material Citizens. The act of being a citizen does look crass next to the polished acquiescence to consumerism and endless materialism. But for the theologian, who is not a citizen of this world, Ward’s is a call to a radical kind of impoliteness, the scandal of the Christ.

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Let the Christian remain in the world, not because of the good gifts of creation, nor because of his responsibility for the course of the world, but for the sake of the Body of the incarnate Christ and for the sake of the Church. Let him remain in the world to engage in frontal assault on it, and let him live the life of his secular calling in order toe show himself as a stranger in this world all the more. But that is only possible if we are visible members of the Church. The antithesis between the world and the Church must be borne out in the world. That was the purpose of the incarnation. That is why Christ died among his enemies. That is the reason and the only reason why the slave must remain a slave and the Christian remain subject to the powers that be.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 264-5

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Religion will not go away; it will not be repressed; it will not succumb to instrumental reasoning. There will be no new Enlightenment. So let us herald the advent of the postsecular state.

- Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 301

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One’s identity within the body of Christ is worked out in Christian terms of practices of faith, hope and love that go beyond the naming and labeling of the churches, fellowships and denominations in this world. While remaining a Greek, a Jew, a male, a female, a slave, or a freeborn, one is also and more significantly a member of the body of Christ. It is a body that is “heavy with meaning” that is not possible to translate. One condition or identity is not necessarily effaced in the other, but it is transformed in ways beyond telling. one discovers one’s somatic nature in the tranquility of recollection; it is not self-evident. It is discovered not discretely but by continuing to work within the body of Christ, a new polity, with new relationships and new distributions of power that can never find their full realization in any political system in this world and that therefore resist accommodation with the politics of this world and offer possibilities for an alternative politics. The altar on which Paul asks the Roman Christians to present their bodies as a living sacrifice can never be identified with a particular throne. The body is continually being given, continually moving out and being enacted elsewhere, and so it continually transcends strict identifications that it imposes on itself or are imposed on it. The body is never there as such (as if a static object in a freeze-frame still photo); the body is there only because it moves, it circulates, it acts, it disseminates its knowledges, rejecting, absorbing, and adapting itself to new knowledges. It is in this way that it can be deemed apophatic.

-Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 255-56

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The contours of the kingdom that is already among us do not readily present themselves and they are not – following Augustine (and Metz) – identical with the institution of the church or, rather, the different ecclesial institutionalizations that call themselves churches or Christian denominations across the world… Yet, by faith, we believe that Christ is among us now as well as coming again, and the body of Christ also. By “a certain continuity,” I mean that we are already living within the future messianic return. Eschatological remainder alerts to a messianism operative now – a messianism that Agamben explores. Such continuity views eschatology not as what is lacking in all the secular ideologies of the future, but what is excessive and superabundant to them.

Ward, The Politics of Discipleship, 170

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The image, in its simplicity, has no need of scholarship. It is the property of a naïve consciousness; in its expression, it is youthful language. The poet, in the novelty of his images, is always the origin of language. To specify exactly what a phenomenology of the image can be, to specify that the image comes before thought, we should have to say that poetry, rather than being a phenomenology of the mind, is a phenomenology of the soul. We should then have to collect documentation on the subject of the dreaming consciousness.

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, xiv-xx

The transmutation is a reforming of the language, not the disappearance of the praised object into existing patterns of words foreordained responses. It is, as David Jones said of all art that is in any sense representation, a ‘showing forth under another form’; and for this to be serious, it entails some sens at some stage of loss of control, unclarity of focus. A celebratory work that simply uses a repertoire of stick techniques that direct our attention not to what is being celebrated but to the smooth and finished quality of its own surface is a failure. So with the language of praise for God: it needs to do its proper work, to articulate the sense of answering to a reality not already embedded in the conventions of speech; to show the novum of God’s action in respect of any pre-existing human idiom.

Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology, 9

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The true politico-economic nature of Globalism

What is evident is that globalization is not at the vanguard of of democratization. Indeed, it cannot be because no one controls the unbounded market and therefore no one is accountable to it, whereas democracy’s requirements for checks and balances demands means whereby a public governance can be made. Globalization is transforming democracy, undermining what makes democracy flourish – a vigorous civil society. As mentioned in the last chapter, one of the key characteristics of the postdemocratic condition is the increasing government of state policy by economic matters. Does, then, the correlation between aggressive democratic states and aggressive multinational corporations come about because of copycat managerial strategies or because, where power is increasingly understood in terms of economic and military strength, negotiations have to be made between international leaders of commerce and key national governments implicated in empire?

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Admirable as it may be, man’s capacity to manufacture and produce useful objects even of the highest quality, such as the machines of our modern technological civilization, is not to be directly associated with human personhood. Perhaps on this point the contrast we have been making here between man as a person, on the one hand, and man as an individual thinking or acting agent, on the other hand, becomes more evident. The ‘creation’ of a machine requires man’s individualization both in terms of his seizing, controlling and dominating reality, that is, turning beings into things, and also in terms of combination of human individuals in a collective effort, that is, of turning himself into a thing, an instrument and a means to an end. Hence, it is only natural that the more collectivistic a society, that is, the more it sacrifices personhood, the better the products it achieves. But when we say that man is capable of creating by being a person, we imply something entirely different, and that has to do with a double possibility which this kind of creation opens up. On the other hand, ‘things’ or the world around acquire a ‘presence’ as an integral and relevant part of the totality of existence, and, on the other hand, man himself becomes ‘present’ as a unique and unrepeatable hypostasis of being and not as an impersonal number in a combined structure. Un other words, in this way of understanding creating, the movement is from thinghood to personhood and not the other way round. That is, for example, what happens int he case of a work of real art as contrasted to a machine. When we look at a painting or listen to music we have in front of us ‘the beginning of a world’, a ‘presence’ in which ‘things’ and substances (cloth, oil, etc.) or qualities (shape, colour, etc.) or sounds becomes part of a personal presence. And this is entirely the achievement of personhood, a distinctly unique capacity of man, which, unlike other technological achievements, is not threatened by the emerging intelligent beings of computer science. The term ‘creativity’ is significantly applied to art par excellence, though we seldom appreciate the real implications of this for theology and anthropology.

John D. Zizioulas, Communion and Otherness, 216

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