#thomas 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.

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?