Worshipping the lizard God

Jean-Luc Marion is a French phenomenologist (that's philosophy which tries to think about the world starting with the way it appears to us), who has written both theology and philosophy (he claims the two are separate for him but, predictably, they're not really). Like Yannaras, he's a 20th century thinker who thinks that apophatic theology in general, and Dionysius the Areopagite in particular, have something to say to the contemporary world, especially in light of Nietzsche and Heidegger. The Idol and Distance: Five Studies is Marion's most sustained engagement with apophatic theology, although he continues to deal with it throughout his work, and gets into some barneys with Jacques Derrida over whose reading of apophatic theology is more right.

Marion thinks that the 'death of God' doesn't mean that God has totally disappeared, but says that God's absence is 'the modern face of his eternal fidelity.' Marion thinks that the way that God the Father gives birth to God the Son is by withdrawing himself, making space for the Son to be born, and God's withdrawal from the world today is meant to make space for us to become sons of God. Marion uses his own version of the ontological argument: any god whose existence can be disproved, any god who can die, can't really be God, and so any proof that God doesn't exist doesn't destroy God but an idolatrous idea of God. God's like a lizard who always escapes our grasp, leaving only his tail behind.

At the heart of Marion's book is a distinction between the idol and the icon. An idol is a face we make for God to show up in: it's our way of controlling what sort of God we encounter, and where and how we encounter the divine. But an icon doesn't try to make God present, it just points beyond itself. The whole point of an icon is that it isn't the thing it represents. Idols can be destroyed by philosophy; icons cannot.

Marion discusses three thinkers who share an interest in distance: Nietzsche, Hölderlin and our old friend Dionysius the Areopagite. He argues that what Nietzsche's work does is to articulate the distance which appears when idolatrous ideas of God stop being plausible. But Nietzsche tries to bridge the gap with his own will to power, another form of idolatry, and so his philosophical project fails and he goes mad (take note, kids: idolatry is dangerous). Hölderlin also recognises the distance between humanity and God, but thinks that the solution is not to overcome the distance but to remain in it, which we do through poetry, which expresses the tension between union and distinction.

Finally, Dionysius offers a similar solution to the distance between humanity and God. Dionysius says that we can't speak about God in predicative language (statements about God like 'God is love', 'God is drunk' etc.), because that sort of language is all about trying to control meaning. Instead, we need to speak about God through prayer and praise, which don't name God but acknowledge our relation to God as recipients of God's gifts, as an expression of love and gratitude. But it's not enough just to praise God: we can receive God's gifts only insofar as we pass them on ("Love is something if you give it away *clap clap* you end up getting more..."). This receiving and giving of God's love maintains the distance between us and God, and mirrors the distance within God in the relations of the persons of the Trinity. The distance between God and the world is an icon of the distance between the Father and the Son. God's gift to us is expressed most fully in the incarnation of Christ, the Word, who gives us the words of Scripture which we then use to praise God. To be a Christian is to accept the words of Scripture as God's gift to us and to praise God with them. To be a Christian is to recognise that everything that exists is a gift of God, and to respond to that gift by giving to others, by generosity.

Being a bit fairer to Meister Eckhart

Now, I blogged a little while ago about Meister Eckhart, the 13th/14th century Dutch mystical theologian (see below for link), and suggested that maybe he was a bit horrendously dualistic. Having read some more and thought a bit more about what he's saying, I realise that I was was probably a bit harsh, and have repented accordingly. It's always less fun to argue that someone's thought is complex and nuanced than that they're totally right or completely idiotic, but in the name of fairness, I thought I ought to have another go at some Eckhart-exposition.

Eckhart starts with a fundamental distinction between the oneness of God and the multiplicity of the world (check out my blog on divine simplicity if that makes your head boggle – link below). The closer to God things are, the simpler they are; the further away, the more multiple. In line with lots of other people who espouse divine simplicity, Eckhart tends to see physical, external things as more multiple than spiritual and intellectual internal things, so he tends to privilege minds over bodies and what we want and choose over what we actually do. It's not that external actions don't matter; it's just that they're less important than what's going on inside us. In addition, we can control what goes on inside us more easily than we can what goes on externally: we can't stop our annoying friends coming round and being annoying, but we can make sure that our minds are fixed on God at all times so we're able to love them even when they're idiots. We can't feed all the hungry people in the world, but we can get ourselves to the point where if we could, we would: and Eckhart thinks that for God, that's as good as actually doing it. We can't ignore what goes on around us, and we have to get involved with it, if only because we need to eat and drink and wear clothes just to not die; but the more we care about God, the more we'll be preoccupied with what's going on inside us, because that's the part of us that's most like God, and the less we'll care about whether our food is tasty or has maggots in. But at the same time, Eckhart does realise that external things can reveal God to us - an amazing steak can speak to us of the goodness of God - so we need to both let go of external things and also grasp God in and through them.

It really comes down to this: that everything comes from God, and if we want God more than anything else then our relationship to all of those other things will fall into place naturally: we'll see everything in terms of its relationship to God. But if those things are more important to us than God is, our whole way of seeing the world gets snarled up, and the good things God made becomes dangerous temptations into sinfulness and idolatry.

Creation, for Eckhart, is about God giving of himself; and our response to his generosity should be to give ourselves in return. We are most ourselves when we're totally given over to God, when we're so united with God that God acts and wills through us, when we have chosen God so profoundly that God chooses God in us. We get so given over to God, in the end, that it becomes difficult to tell where we end and God begins (this is the bit that got Eckhart in trouble for sounding a bit heretical), and our relationship with God should, eventually, resemble the relationships of the Trinity, where God is one but also three. Getting to this place of perfect relationship with God isn't easy, at least at first. Eckhart says it's like learning how to write: when you start, it's really difficult; you have to concentrate really hard and it still looks like some drunken spiders vomited all over the page. But if we keep persevering, slowly training ourselves, then eventually be able to write beautifully without even thinking about it (That's perhaps a less comforting analogy for those who, like me, have always had dreadful handwriting). If we discipline ourselves to want God above all else, then choosing God will, eventually, become second nature, and we won't even need to think about how we relate to the physical things around us because with God at the centre of our lives, everything else will naturally assume its rightful place.

Slightly harsh post on Eckhart here.
Divine simplicity made simple here.

Photo: Eckhart extract.

Capitalism as a religion

In Capitalism as Religion, Walter Benjamin argues that capitalism is, essentially, a religion, serving to 'satisfy the same worries, anguish, and disquiet formerly answered by so-called religion.' As such, it has four key features:

- First, capitalism is a pure religious cult, more extreme than any religion before it. In the capitalist religion, everything has meaning only in relation to the cult: theology isn't a separate discipline, making space for other areas of knowledge. In the religion of capitalism, everything is spiritual (Rob Bell would love that).

- Second, capitalism isn't like other cultic religions where there are special feast days when you're expected to rock up to the temple, sacrifice some goats, sleep with some prostitutes, all that malarky. It's much more demanding than that: in capitalism, every day is the Sabbath; every day we must go to church.

- Third, where other religions are all about repentance, capitalism is all about blame. It is so suffused with blame, so entirely without any idea of repentance or salvation, that even God becomes guilty. The great hope of capitalism isn't a new heaven and a new earth, but obliteration.

- Fourth, capitalism hides its God.

Benjamin argues that, as a religion, capitalism is entirely parasitic on Christianity. We look to banknotes for glimpses of the spirit instead of to icons; we worry about money instead of feeling guilt for our sins; instead of pagans or heathens or atheists we have benefit cheats for enemies.

Picture credit: Ben Heine