(Ir)religiosity

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I posted a comment yesterday on Callid Keefe-Perry’s latest vlog over at The Image of Fish that I think bears further reflection.  It relates to some of my latest thinking on some of the reading I’ve been doing in preparation for my thesis next year.  It’s a nascent idea and not at all developed, but I thought I would float it and see what sort of feedback it might get.

Callid is commenting in large part on some of the responses to Jason Derr’s excellent piece over at HuffPo Religion on the role of poetry in the religious imagination.  The aim of Derr’s article is to argue that theology ought not be couched primarily as a scientific enterprise (in the modern sense) mainly interested in cold hard facts and what can clearly be empirically observed in the world.  Instead, theology after modernity might look more like a mythopoetic enterprise, a discourse more akin to work of the poet in her exploration of the contours of human experience — our passions and desires — than the misguided quest for objectivity of epistemological certainty.  As Derr writes, “Poetry and metaphor are important as ways of doing theology. In a world so divided by absolute claims, using metaphor and poetry allows us to have room for flex.”  He even picks up on a metaphor I used in my last post in describing theology as a type of seeing-as which is not so much concerned about complete descriptions of reality as it is communicating reality through imagery and symbol, of exploring what is going on in reality phenomenologically.  For Derr (and others) this is the work of theopoetics.

Like I mentioned, Callid’s post is primarily a thoughtful response to some of the more negative, one might even say uncharitable, feedback Derr’s piece has received.  This seems to be part of a larger trend I’ve notice on some more popular sites like HuffPo that now have an active religion section.  I don’t have the time or the desire to wade through all the comments that posts like this illicit (frankly, most of them aren’t worth it), but I do try to gauge the overall response from time to time.  And usually the response tends to sway in favor of a sort of antagonistic, positivistic outlook toward religion, the likes of which the so-called “new” atheists are now infamous for advancing.

One of the points Callid takes up in the video is the age-old modern criticism that, in the final instance, religion isn’t really about reality it all, that ultimately the existence of a deity cannot be proved, that when you get right down to it “there is nothing there there.” One commenter on Derr’s piece cites a Thomas Paine quote which I think serves as a good, succint summation of this sort of criticism.  See the quote after the jump.

The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on nothing; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing and admits of no conclusion.

A classic sort of Enlightment, “religion within the limits of reason alone” (or not at all!) type of critique which eschews any scent of ambiguity and is only satisfied by an airtight discourse with clear parameters and demarcated boundaries. Callid, in his rejoinder, notes the importance and weight of this criticism for theologians and religious persons vis-a-vis the role of doubt in the life of faith and then goes to more or less reject, as does Derr, the supposition that religion, like science, is about quantifying reality in an objective manner by taking stocking of what is empirically observable.  His main and most persuasive point is to note that the full breadth of human experience is not reducible to an empirical, scientific standard though it does not preclude it.  Phenomenologically, religion — like philosophy one might argue — functions as a node on the spectrum of human understanding which, to go back to my previous post again, operates on the basis of a different type of faith or desire.

I share these points with Callid, but I want to offer a different, perhaps more oblique criticism to Derr’s cultured despisers of religion.  My contention is that these claims of religion being a discourse about something which does not exist, rather than being flat out wrong, do not go far enough.  To paraphrase Zizek’s statement in In Defense of Lost Causes apropos to Heidegger’s Nazism, they are right steps in the wrong direction.  Theology, or so I would want to argue, is always first phenomenology.  It is a discourse of events, concerned not with what is but with what may be, with what is inside what is happening as Deleuze puts it. For it is only by adopting such a posture that we can hope to “not be unworthy of what happens to us.”¹

To continue with Deleuze, there is a provocative and intriguing passage in The Logic of Sense which makes possible what I am calling theology as the study of inexistence.

It is our epoch which has discovered theology. One no longer needs to believe in God. We seek rather the “structure,” that is, the form which may be filled with beliefs, but the structure has no need to be filled in order to be called “theological.” Theology is now the science of nonexisting entities, the manner in which these entities —divine or anti-divine, Christ or Antichrist—animate language make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions.²

There many ways to take such a rich passage.  For these purposes, though, I would want to put a highly eschatological gloss on Deleuze’s claims that “theology is now the science of nonexisting entities,” radicalizing Moltmann’s insistence that eschatology must be the heart and soul of theology from beginning to end.  A theology of the event, then, is not so much about what is but what is yet to come in the future.  It is a discourse of possibility, a poetics of the (im)possible, one might say, which locates itself in the interstitial space of the Pauline already-not yet.

I am reticent, pace Deleuze, to call this a theology — or theopoetics — of nonexistence. Rather, I would want to call such an understanding a theology of inexistence as it is not primarily about nothingness per se but of the structure of the event, of the work of calling these “nonexisting entities” into being at the level of the religious imagination.  As I put it in my original comment on Callid’s post:

Theology is about the exigency of calling [these] things into existence, of not being satisfied with what “merely exists,” and allowing the possibility of those things to animate our language and our imagination such that we are open to the incoming event of the future, of the possibility that lies within but is still beyond what exists, demanding its irruption.  It seems to me that if theology is only about what exists, only about the boring, predictable state of things that are immediately knowable, then it is a disappointingly reductionistic — I daresay nihilistic — discourse that can only ever offer justification for the way things are rather than casting a vision of hope.

In an earlier post, I made the claim, vis-a-vis Catherine Keller, that the task of the theologian in a post-Enlightenment context is to take responsibility for what it is that we call “God.”  To get back to Derr’s original ideas, what I am calling a theology of inexistence involves the work eschatological work, through poetic metaphor and symbol, of heeding the injunction of the divine event and calling into existence that which is thought to be impossible and dead.  It is the process of explicating and demarcating that which we call God at the level of the religious imaginary such that newness becomes a palpable possibility.

In one of his fairly recent works, Moltmann makes the fascinating claim that “Christian eschatology must separate itself from the messianisms of the modern world, and out of this world’s ruins must rescue the categories of redemption.”³  It seems to me that this must first take place at the level of the imagination or else we will continue with the paralyzing inability to conceive of something other than what is.⁴  A theology (or better a theopoetics) of inexistence which is first and finally shot through with a decidedly eschatological —  and thus political — edge can, I think, address that problem.  For unless our language is ruptured and our normal categories for thinking irrupted we will continue theologizing about what is rather than what may be, on the evental horizon.

1. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, (Continuum), 169. [↩]
2. Deleuze, 322 [↩]
3. Jürgen Moltmann, God For a Secular Society: The Public Relevance of Theology, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1999), 220. [↩]
4. As far as this goes, I find it interesting that some of these new atheists who vehemently reject this kind of thinking are also some of our best apologists for the political status quo and right-wing militarism (not to mention Islamophobia).  Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are two good examples. [↩]