#altizer

Can we join Zarathustra in his hymn of praise to joy? Can we, too, repudiate every reversal of the present, every flight from pain, every backward movement to eternity? But this is to ask the Christian if he dares to open himself to the Christ who is fully present, the Christ who has completed a movement from transcendence to immanence, and who is kenotically present in the fullness and the immediacy of the actual moment before us. If a contemporary epiphany of Christ has abolished all images of transcendence, and emptied the transcendent realm, then we can meet that epiphany only by totally embracing the world. Dare we bet that Christ is fully present in the actuality of the present moment? Then we must bet that God is dead, that a backward movement to eternity is a betrayal of Christ, and that a flight from the pain of existence is a refusal of the passion of Christ. The radical Christian calls us into the center of the world, into the heart of the profane, with the announcement that Christ is present here and he is present nowhere else. Once we confess that Christ is fully present in the moment before us, then we can truly love the world, and can embrace even its pain and darkness as an epiphany of the body of Christ. It is precisely by truly loving the world, by fully existing in the immediacy of the present moment, that we will know that Christ is love, and then we shall know that love is a Yes-saying to the totality of existence.      Christian love is an incarnate love, a self-giving to the fullness of the world, an immersion in the actuality of time and the flesh. Therefore our Yes-saying must give us totally to the moment before us, and if we accept its actuality as the "center" which is everywhere, then we can be delivered from every temptation of regressing to a backward movement which is a reversal and diminution of an actual and immediate present. By turning away from the totality of the present, we engage in a regressive movement dissolving the actuality of the immediate moment, thereby disengaging ourselves from the fullness and the finality of existence. In naming Christ as the full embodiment of love, the Christian confesses that Christ is the fullness of time and the world. Christ is the pure actuality of the total moment, a present and immediate moment drawing all energy forward into itself, and negating every backward movement to eternity. Every nostalgic yearning for innocence, all dependence upon a sovereign other, and every attachment to a transcendent beyond, stand here revealed as flights from the world, as assaults upon life and energy, and as reversals of the full embodiment of love. The Christian who chooses the ancient image of Christ as the Son of God, or who is bound to an epiphany of Christ in a long-distant past, must refuse the Christ who is actually present in our flesh. He wagers upon a purely religious image of Christ even at the price of forfeiting the actuality of our time and history. But the radical Christian wagers upon the Christ who is totally profane. He bets upon the Christ who is the totality of the moment before us, the Christ who draws us into the fullness of life and the world. Finally, radical faith calls us to give ourselves totally to the world, to affirm the fullness and the immediacy of the present moment as the life and the energy of Christ. Thus, ultimately the wager of the radical Christian is simply a wager upon the full and actual presence of the Christ who is a totally incarnate love.

. . . truly to know evil is to know that evil which is most deeply within. Every association of evil with an exterior cause or necessity is to evade or dissolve true evil, an evil which is only deeply within, and which can be realized as such only by grace or enlightenment.

A new silence is no doubt a decisive key to our world, and if what we once knew as both transcendence and immanence is now silent, this need not mark only an ultimate absence or void. It could well be the site of a truly new distance or chasm between immanence and transcendence, one so overwhelming as to dissolve or obliterate any possible relation between them, and there with to dissolve any manifest presence or sign of either transcendence or immanence. Such a condition, and such an ultimate condition, could be understood as a truly new dualism, but a dualism so radical and so total that neither pole is now hearable or in sight, for when the chasm between these polarities is uncrossable, then so, too, becomes unspeakable and invisible the horizons of their respective poles. A genuine parallel to such a condition is present in ancient Gnosticism, when the name and the image of 'God' becomes unhearable and unseeable as Godhead itself, and the name and the image of body and world passes into an abyss of chaos or nothingness. In the ancient world, only Gnosticism could purely know such an absolute abyss as the very center of both God and the world, or the Creator and body itself, an abyss alone making possible a passage into Godhead itself, or into a primordial pleroma that is absolutely distant from every other horizon. Here, true immanence can only be identical with absolute transcendence, and if no real difference is possible between them, no openness is possible to any other horizon, and therefore world itself becomes invisible and unhearable.      Innumerable critics know our world, or our uniquely new world, as a rebirth of Gnosticism. Yet it is a reverse or inverted Gnosticism, one knowing immanence and immanence alone, and therefore a new immanence, a new immanence that is every bit as vacuous and unnamable as an ancient Gnostic transcendence, and one that is equally distant from any possible body or world. Therein it is profoundly different from that immanence celebrated and embodied in modern poetry and painting, for if that immanence is a truly incarnate immanence, the new immanence open to us is a truly disembodied one; or, insofar as it is embodied, it could only be so in a new vacuity or a new emptiness, one which is untouchable and unseeable, and only actually embodied as vacuity itself. Certainly that vacuity resonates with an ancient Gnostic vacuity, but it nevertheless deeply differs from it, and does so as a nameless vacuity, one invisible and unheard, or unheard and invisible as an actual vacuity, for its very namelessness is a true anonymity foreclosing all possibility of attention to itself. Gnostic naming is truly unique in the world in terms of the very violence of its naming. Only Gnosticism can know body itself as a truly bottomless abyss, or can know the Creator not simply as an absolutely alien abyss, but as a purely negative abyss, with no possible origin except a purely negative origin, and therefore no possibility whatsoever of transfiguration. Now this is just what our abyss or vacuity is not, and cannot be if it is a truly nameless or anonymous vacuity, and thus a vacuity with no possible origin, or no origin upon our horizon. And if ultimate origin has vanished for us, we know a truly new silence, and so far from being a pure or primordial silence, that silence is a truly actual silence, and an actual silence precluding the very possibility of a primordial silence.      Gnosticism can know an absolute gulf between a primordial plenum and the very actuality of the world. No such gulf is possible for us, we can hear no genuine echoes of a primordial silence, and cannot if only because we can hear an actual silence, and even if that actual silence is an actual anonymity, and an anonymity which is all in all, that very anonymity speaks or is actual as itself, thereby foreclosing the possibility of a hearing which is truly the hearing of a primordial ground, or the hearing of a primordial ground which is not fully empty and vacuous. So it is that our vacuity is not truly a Gnostic vacuity. Indeed, it is its very opposite, and its opposite if only because it is so finally closed to every opposite which is the opposite of itself, or every opposite which is an actual opposite. Gnosticism is the purest dualism that has ever appeared upon a Western horizon, and its very distance from us unveils the impossibility of such a dualism for us. Yet it does not preclude the possibility that ours is a truly new dualism, a silent and invisible one, if only because opposites as such are invisible to us, an invisibility which could mask their very presence in a new vacuity so vacuous and anonymous as to be without any trace of opposition itself. Could that disappearance of manifest or actual opposites be a decisive sign of the advent of a new God?

Do we hear God in our abyss? Must we hear God in knowing and realizing an absolute abyss? Is an absolute abyss possible apart from a realization of God, and a realization of the very voice of God, a voice that is a pure and absolute abyss, one whose realization silences every other voice, or silences every voice that is not the voice of abyss?

At the very least, echoes recording a primordial sacrifice lie deeply buried within ourselves. Freud could discover the unconscious only by discovering the Oedipus complex, a complex which is the consequence of the very advent of consciousness; and this is an advent which is the consequence of a primordial sacrifice. So, too, Nietzsche could discover ressentiment as the consequence of an original repression, an original repression which is a primordial sacrifice, and a sacrifice giving birth to our very interior, and to that interior which we know as the 'I' or the center of consciousness. This is the 'I' that Nietzsche knows as the 'bad conscience,' a wholly guilty or wholly repressed 'I.' This 'I' is the very center of a uniquely modern imagination, a doubled or dichotomous 'I,' one which can act only by acting against itself, or which can realize itself only by negating itself. This self-negation is a self-sacrifice, and thereby one clearly renewing primordial sacrifice. But we must never lose sight of the Hegelian realization that if an actual sacrifice is possible and real for us, and truly actualized in our deeper movements of consciousness, then this is only because the Godhead must have already sacrificed itself, a sacrifice which is our deepest origin and ground.      This ground is ever called forth in our most actual moments, moments which are actual only in their self-negation or their self-emptying. That self-emptying realizes an actual interior emptiness, but that emptiness makes possible a full engagement or a full presence. Here fullness and emptiness are inseparable, as we are fully present only by being fully absent or 'other' from ourselves. This is just what we have known as sanctity or sainthood, a sanctity only possible by way of a deep self-emptying, a self-negation or a self-emptying of everything that is simply given to us, or everything that is simply and only ourselves. Therefore sanctity and sacrifice are inseparable. The saint is certainly not a simply natural or simply innocent being, but one who is the consequence of a deep and continual self-emptying, and whose most integral acts embody self-emptying. Saints are neither known nor manifest apart from their acts, and if such acts induce our deepest veneration, and do so even when they occur in seemingly secular realms, we respond to them not simply as moments of true power, but as moments embodying our deepest even if most elusive ground. Hence they inevitably call forth not only veneration but worship, a worship which can only truly be given to Godhead itself, but which is irresistible when we encounter moments of genuine self-emptying. Thereby we are recalled to our ultimate origin, an origin that could only be an absolute sacrifice, but an absolute sacrifice that is an original or primordial sacrifice, and one actually recalled or renewed in our deepest and most actual moments.      Now it is of fundamental importance to realize that we are not simply called to sacrifice, but recalled to sacrifice. Only recall can be actual for us. This is a recall to that which has not simply occurred, but has ultimately occurred, an ultimacy actually present when we are recalled to primordial sacrifice. We can observe the power of such recalling simply by noting the sheer intensity of our response to Freud or Nietzsche, or to Dostoyevsky, Kafka, or Beckett, for the very enactment of primordial sacrifice inevitably overwhelms us, and does so most deeply when it is dissociated from our given religious traditions, or our apparent or manifest religious worlds. A pure power is present here which is absent from everything that we can actually know as 'God,' a power not only irresistible but which we deeply seek. We seek it even knowing its profoundly destructive power, and perhaps precisely because of its ultimately negative power. While that power is seemingly wholly beyond us, it is nevertheless profoundly within us, and even if such power is seemingly unnamable, it calls forth not only our deepest silence, but also our purest speech. While such speech finally defies even our deepest hermeneutics, such a hermeneutics is possible only within the horizon of this speech, only within the horizon of a language that is pure darkness and pure light at once.

Now if it is true that our deepest prophetic and apocalyptic traditions have known the deepest abyss as the very enactment of God, an abyss unnamable apart from a naming of God, so that abyss itself is a primary image of God in this tradition, here the naming of the deepest abyss is inevitably a naming of God, and a naming of God inseparable from the deepest naming of abyss. Indeed, it is precisely when an absolute abyss is most fully named and embodied that the most radical and paradoxical naming of God occurs, one dissolving or reversing every name of God that is not the name of absolute abyss. Then the very name of God itself becomes either absolutely empty or absolutely alien, but its primal identity as the name of God resolutely remains itself, and not only remains itself but enacts itself, and enacts itself in a comprehensive universality of naming, wherein everything whatsoever is named and enacted as absolute abyss. 'God' is the one name in our history that has been known and enacted as a universal name, that name of names that is the ultimate source of every name, and if this is the very name that is born in the prophetic revolution, and born as the realization of absolute abyss, this is a realization that has been reborn in our history, but now reborn as totality itself.

. . . the task of theology is to unveil and make manifest the universal presence and reality of Christ.