God-Talk

The reality of God is mystery beyond all imagining. So transcendent, so immanent is the holy mystery of God that we can never wrap our minds completely around this mystery and exhaust divine reality in words or concepts. The history of theology is replete with this truth: recall Augustine's insight that if we have understood, then what we have understood is not God; Anselm's argument that God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived; Hildegaard's vision of God's glory as Living Light that blinded her sight; Aquinas's working rule that we can know that God is and what God is not, but not what God is; Luther's stress on the hiddenness of God's glory in the shame of the cross; Simone Weil's conviction that there is nothing that resembles what she can conceive of when she says the word God; Sallie McFague's insistence on imaginative leaps into metaphor since no language about God is adequate and all of it is improper. It is a matter of the livingness of God.

Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, (New York: Crossroad, 1994), 7.



At least three responses to the primary dilemma of transcendence are conceivable. The first response is silence. The second response is to distinguish between ways in which the transcendent is beyond names and ways in which it is not. The third response begins with the refusal to solve the dilemma . . .The dilemma is accepted as . . . unresolvable, but this acceptance, instead of leading to silence, leads to a new mode of discourse. . . .

Apophasis is the commmon Greek designation for this language. Apophasis can mean "negation," but its etymology suggests a meaning that more precisely characterizes the discourse in question: apo phasis (un-saying or speaking away). . . . Any saying (even a negative saying) demands a correcting proposition, an unsaying. But that correcting proposition which unsays the previous proposition is in itself a "saying" that must be "unsaid" in turn. It is in the tension between the two propositions that the discourse becomes meaningful.

Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) 2-3.

Terms


writing the body
construction and deconstruction
the metanarrative
making and unmaking of the world
liminality
radix/matrix
site of/locus of
slippage between issues
foregrounding
subverting
negotiating power/powerlessness
interrogating issues
through the lens of

Postmodernism




The typical postmodernist work of art is arbitrary, eclectic, hybrid, decentred, fluid, discontinuous, pastiche-like. True to the tenets of postmodernity, it spurns metaphysical profundity for a kind of contrived depthlessness, playfulness and lack of affect, an art of pleasures, surfaces and passing intensities. Suspecting all assured truths and certainties, its form is ironic and its epistemology relativist and sceptical. Rejecting all attempts to reflect a stable reality beyond itself, it exists self-consciously at the level of form or language. Knowing its own fictions to be groundless and gratuitous, it can attain a kind of negative authenticity only by flaunting its ironic awareness of this fact, wryly pointing to its own status as a constructed artifice.

Terry Eagleton. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997, 201-2.

Reading

DARKNESS AND LIGHT
Turner, Denys. The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism. Cambridge, New York & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

DESIRE
Freud, Sigmund. Check anthologies of theory.

Lacan, Jacques. Check anthologies of theory.

Robert Hass. 'Meditation at Lagunitas' In monographs and many anthologies.

ENCLOSURES:
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London & New York: Routledge, 1993.

THE GAZE
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley. New York & London: Routledge & BFI Publishing, 1988.

INTERTEXTUALITY/ALLUSION
Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993.

Ben-Porat, Ziva. "The Poetics of Allusion." University of California, 1973.

Ben-Porat, Ziva. "The Poetics of Literary Allusion." PTL: A Journal of Descriptive Poetics and Theory of Literature 1, no. 1 (1976): 105-28.

LIMINAL ZONES
Bridges, William. The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments. Cambridge Mass: Perseus, 2001.

Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation. New York: Harper & Row, 1958.
(Schreiter 1-9)

Trubshaw, Bob. The Metaphors and Rituals of Place and Time- An Introduction to Liminality or Why Christopher Robin Wouldn't Walk on the Cracks [Web-site]. Available from http://www.indigogroup.co.uk/edge/liminal/htm.

Turner, Victor. "Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites of Passage." In The Forest of Symbols. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Turner, Victor. Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology. New Delhi: Concept, 1979. Esp chapter 1.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine Publishing Company, 1969.

Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960.



LANGUAGE
Hart, Kevin. The Trespass of the Sign. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997. Chs 3 & 4.

Sells, Michael A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

MARGINS AND CENTRE
Boff, Leonardo. Faith on the Edge: Religion and Marginalized Existence. Translated by Robert R. Barr. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

PLACE
Kaufman, Shirley. ‘Here and There: the Use of Place in Contemporary Poetry’ in Stuart Friebert et al. A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Revised edition. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1997.

Levis, Larry. "Eden and My Generation." In A Field Guide to Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, edited by Stuart et al Friebert. Oberlin: Oberlin College Press, 1997.

Rose, Jacqueline. States of Fantasy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

POST-MODERNISM/MODERNISM
Kronfeld, Chana. On the Margins of Modernism: Decentering Literary Dynamics. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993.

WRITING THE BODY
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London & Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

Falk, Pasi. The Consuming Body. London: Sage, 1994. Church as sacred eating community.

Gilmore, Leigh. Autobiographics: a Feminist Theory of Women's Self-Representation. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Chapter 4 and 5.

Greenblatt, Stephen. "Mutilation and Meaning." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Mellor, Philip A, and Chris Shilling. Reforming the Body: Religion, Community and Modernity. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 1997.- Contains concept of Church as sacred eating community.

Rothfield, Philipa. "Bodies and Subjects: Medical Ethics and Feminism." In Troubled Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernism, Medical ethics, and the Body, edited by Paul A Komesaroff. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1995.

Rowe, Katherine. "'God's handy worke'." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Chapter 4. JTL SY50S286

Schoenfeldt, Michael. "Fables of the Belly in Early Modern England." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzia. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Slattery, Dennis Patrick. The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of Flesh. New York: State University of New York Press, 2000. (See especially chapter 10.)

Stevens, Scott Manning. "Sacred Heart and Secular Brain." In The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio. New York & London: Routledge, 1997.

Turner, Bryan S. The Body & Society: Explorations in Social Theory. 2nd ed. London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: SAGE Publications, 1996.

GOD-TALK
Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1994.
Sells, Michael A. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

OTHERNESS
Walton, Heather & Andrew W. Hass, eds. Self/Same/Other:Re-Visioning the Subject in Literature and Theology. Sheffield: Academic Press, 2000.

GENERAL
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Oxford UK & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1997.

Signs

Signifier= The word or image
Signified= The concept
Signifier + Signified = The Sign

Ferdinand de Saussure's two most famous theses are often termed his 'doctrines': of the 'arbitrariness' of the sign and of the a priori status of language vis-a-vis thought. Redefining 'word' not as the apparently solid entity that it is ordinarily considered to be but as composed, instead, of two elementary functions-the signifier or 'acoustic image,' by which sound is transmitted from speaker to hearer; and the signified, or 'conceptual image,' by which the sound-image is translated into a mental concept . . . Dramatically revising Kantian idealism, Saussure argues that language, rather than being a mere tool for expressing ideas, precedes all thought.

John Carlos Rowe, 'Structure' in Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, (eds), Critical Terms for Literary Study, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 29.


In our age there is an even greater crisis of representation. There is a sense that the reader of a text is caught within an endless chain of verbal signs; the meaning of a sign is to be found only in its 'difference' from others, and as what is signified becomes a signifier in its turn, final meaning is perpetually postponed.

Paul S. Fiddes, "The Quest for a Place Which Is 'Not-a-Place': The Hiddenness of God and the Presence of God," Silence and the Word, ed. Oliver Davies & Denys Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 39.

Periphery and Centre

In the OT depictions of the Temple (1 Kings 6), the Holy of Holies is placed at the center, surrounded by concentric circles of protection. This placing of the Divine at the centre is particularly significant in contrast with the crucifixion site in Hebrews, where "Jesus Christ , the mediator of the new covenant" (9:15) is sited in death in W. H. Auden's words in ‘Friday’s Child’, "suffering in a public place / A death reserved for slaves," on a rubbish dump outside the city. Hebrews 13:12-13 states: "Therefore Jesus also suffered outside the city gate . . . Let us therefore go to him outside the camp . . . "

This siting of the Divine outside has theological implications for someone like Leonardo Boff who wrote Faith on the Edge: Religion and Marginalised Existence, and for other liberation theologians, who believe that God privileges the margins over the centre, and that the Holy Spirit is especially to be found at work there.

The Liminal: Beach

John 21: 1-25.

Doubling Mark 1:16-20, Mark 14:66-72.

The Liminal: Thresholds

Exodus 12:21-3.

The Abject Body

Virtually all horror texts represent the monstrous-feminine in relation to Kristeva's notion of maternal authority and the mapping of the self's clean and proper body. Images of blood, vomit, pus, shit, etc., are central to our culturally/socially constructed notions of the horrific. They signify a split between two orders: the maternal authority and the law of the father. On the one hand these images of bodily wastes threaten a subject that is already constituted, in relation to the symbolic as 'whole and proper'. Consequently, they fill the subject- both the protagonist in the text and the spectator in the cinema- with disgust and loathing. On the other hand they also point back to a time when a 'fusion between mother and nature' existed: when bodily wastes, while set apart from the body, were not seen as objects of embarrassment and shame.

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), 13.

The ultimate in abjection is the corpse. The body protects itself from bodily wastes such as shit, blood, urine and pus by ejecting these things from the body just as it expels food that, for whatever reason, the subject finds loathsome. The body ejects these substances, at the same time extricating itself from them and from the place where they fall, so that it may continue to live:

"Such wastes drop so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit-cadere, cadaver. If dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be, the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached upon everything. It is no longer I who expel. 'I' is expelled."

Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. (London & New York: Routledge, 1993), 9, citing Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3-4.

The Body: Pierced and Inscribed

Two broad kinds of approach to theorizing the body can be discerned in twentieth-century radical thought. One is derived from Nietzshe, Kafka, Foucault, and Deleuze, which I will call 'inscriptive'; the other is more prevalent in psychology, especially psychoanalysis and phenomenology. I will refer to the second approach as the 'lived body.' The first conceives the body as a surface on which social law, morality, and values are inscribed; the second refers largely to the lived experience of the body, the body's internal or psychic inscription. Where the first analyzes a social, public body, the second takes the body-schema or imaginary anatomy as its object(s). It is not clear to me that these two approaches are compatible or capable of synthesis.

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 33.

The body can be regarded as a kind of hinge or threshold: it is placed between a psychic or lived interiority and a more sociopolitical exteriority through the inscription of the body's outer surface. Where psychoanalysis and phenomenology focus on the body as it is experienced and rendered meaningful, the inscriptive model is more concerned with the processes by which the subject is marked, scarred, transformed, and written upon or constructed by the various regimes of institutional, discursive, and nondiscursive power as a particular kind of body.

Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time and Perversion, (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995), 33.

Lacanian Desire



Desire: a term utilized by French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan to explain the development of the individual as a social and symbolic being. Although the notion of 'desire' can be and often is thought of as having to do primarily with relations between the sexes, Lacan traces the function of this fundamental concept to the very beginnings of an individual's identity formation as a result of the subject's extrance into the symbolic world of language. Lacan explains the development of an individual's identity in a child as movement from an 'imaginary' realm of seamless union with its surroundings to a 'symbolic' realm characterized by a sense of separation and thus the necessity to articulate needs. Prior to her entrance into language, the child does not perceive herself to be separate from her world or the things which meet her needs; there is only a continuous presence. When the child begins to realize her independent existence from the mother (a realization brought on in part through the insertion of the father into the mother-child dyad), there opens up for the child a gap or discontinuity, a lack where there has been wholeness . . . Without that seamless wholeness in which all needs were met, there will always be something missing. Because the child is now a symbolized subject, inscribed in the realm of language, and because there is by virtue of the representational nature of language an incommensurability between the signifier (the word) and the signified (the thing represented), there will always be for symbolic subjects this gap between what we need and what we demand. The difference between need and demand, which can neither be named nor satisfied, is desire.Because at its core desire is a longing for that imaginary prelinguistic wholeness and unity, we are destined to be continually desiring.

Anna Geronimo, 'Desire', in Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace (ed.), Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory, (New York & London: Garland, 1997), p. 111.



The child must now resign itself to the fact that it can never have any direct access to reality, in particular to the now prohibited body of the mother. It has been banished from this 'full', imaginary possession into the 'empty' world of language. Language is 'empty' because it is just an endless process of difference and absence: instead of being able to possess anything in its fullness, the child will now simply move from one signifier to another, along a linguistic chain which is potentially infinite . . . This potentially endless movement from one signifier to another is what Lacan means by desire.



Then the Lord God said, 'See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil' . . . He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life (Gen.3:22,24).

Intertextuality

My life is the gardener of my body. The brain-a hothouse closed tight
with its flowers and plants, alien and odd
in their sensitivity, their terror of becoming extinct.
The face- a formal French garden of symmetrical contours
and circular paths of marble with statues and placed to rest,
places to touch and smell, to look out from, to lose yourself
in a green maze, and Keep Off and Don't Pick the Flowers.
The upper body above the navel-an English park
pretending to be free, no angles, no paving stones, naturelike,
humanlike, in our image, after our likeness,
its arms linking up with the big night all around.
And my lower body, beneath the navel- sometimes a nature preserve,
wild, frightening, amazing, an unpreserved preserve,
and sometimes a Japanese garden, concentrated, full of
forethought. And the penis and testes are smooth
polished stones with dark vegetation between them,
precise paths fraught with meaning
and calm reflection. And the teachings of my father
and the commandments of my mother
are birds of chirp and song. And the woman I love
is seasons and changing weather, and the children at play
are my children. And the life my life.

'I Wasn't One of the Six Million: And What Is My Life Span? Open Closed Open I' in Yehuda Amichai, Open Closed Open. Trans. Chana Bloch & Chana Kronfeld. New York, San Diego, London: Harcourt, 2000.

Light, Darkness, Fire

In both the Allegory [of Plato] and in Exodus, there is an ascent towards the brilliant light, a light so excessive as to cause pain, distress and darkness: a darkness of knowledge deeper than any which is the darkness of ignorance. The price of the pure contemplation of the light is therefore darkness, even, as in Exodus, death, but not the darkness of the absence of light, rather of its excess—therefore a 'luminous darkness'. In both, descent from the darkness of excessive light is return to an opposed darkness of ignorance, the half-light of the cave, where there is only incredulity and ridicule to be had from those who cannot credit the witness to anything more real. Light is darkness, knowing is unknowing, a cloud, and the pain of contemplating it, is the pain of contemplating more reality than can be borne: '[humankind] may not see me and live'.

Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1995), 17-18.



On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. . . . Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently. . . . Then the people stood at a distance, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was (Exod. 19:16, 8. 20:21).




Lead us up beyond knowing and light,
up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture
where the mysteries of God's Word
lie simple, absolute, unchangeable
in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

Pseudo-Dionysius, "Mystical Theology," trans Colm Luibheid, Pseudo-Dionysius, the Complete Works (New Jersey: Paulist, 1987) 997A-B.




In chapter two of Mystical Theology, we are told of the necessity to deny all things of the 'primary' [God] 'so that we may unhiddenly know that unknowing which is itself hidden . . . so that we may see above being that darkness concealed from the light'. But yet, in the last chapter of the same work, Denys says of God, the 'Cause of all': 'Darkness and light . . . it is none of these. So, it is both darkness and light; it is a luminous darkness and a dark brilliance; it is neither darkness nor light. What are we to make of this?

Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 21-22.

Sinai
down from your peak
Moses bore the opened sky
on his forehead
cooling step by step
until they who waited in the shadow
were able to bear, trembling,
what shone beneath the veil—

Nelly Sachs, "Sinai," trans. Ruth and Matthew Mead, The Seeker and Other Poems (New York: Farrar, 1970) 95.

Moses came down from Mount Sinai. As he came down from the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand, Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God. When Aaron and all the Israelites saw Moses, the skin of his face was shining, and they were afraid to come near him. . . . When Moses had finished speaking with them he put a veil on his face . . . (Exod. 34:29-30, 33).



Some theologians of the apophatic tradition of negative theology

Pseudo Dionysius-the-Areopagite- Mystical Theology- end C5th.
Augustine
Bonaventure 1217-1274
Meister Eckhart 1260-1329
Author of Cloud of Unknowing England C14th
Denys the Carthusian
John of the Cross 1542-1591
John the Scot Eriugena