Poetry and Apocalypse: Theological Disclosures of Poetic Language (Cultural Memory in the Present)

POETRY AND APOCALYPSE

POETRY AND APOCALYPSE

Theological Disclosures ofPoetic Language

William Franke

STANFOR D UN I VE RSITY P RESS

STAN FO RD , CAL IF O R N IA 200 9

Stanford Un iversiry Press Stanfo rd, Californ ia

© 2009 by the Board of Trtlstees of the Leland Stanford Jun ior University. All rights reserved. Fundin g fo r this publication was genero usly provided by rhe Va nderbilt U nive rsity Research Scholar Grant Program. No parr of this book may be reproduced or rran smirrcd in any form or by any means, electronic or mecha nical, incl udin g photocopyi ng and reco rdi ng. o r in any info rm ation storage or retrieval system wi thout the prior wriucn permiss ion of Sranfo rd Universiry Pre.IOS . Primcd in thc Unitcd Stares of America on a,id ~ frcc , a rchi va,l-
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5910-6 (cloth : aIk. paper) I. Apocalyptic lircrat ure-H iscory and criticism.

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Christian poetry-

History and crit icism. 3. Epic poetry-Histo ry and criticism. 4. Christ iani ry and li tcr.tturc-History. 5. Negative theo logy-Christianity. 1. Ti de. BS646.F73 2009 809· 1'938 2 7-<:1C2.2

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Contents

Preface

IX

Acknowledgrnents

XU-I

PART I

I.

Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue: A Critical Negarive T heo logy of Poetic Language

I.

II. III.

IV.

v.

3

Being at th e Mercy of Oth ers

3

Apocalypti c Genres in Biblical Tradition

8

Literary Apoca lypses An Apocalypti c T heo logy of Dialogue Negative Capabiliti es for Peace

[lART 2

II.

Linguistic Repetition as T heologica l Revelatio n in Christian Epic Trad ition from Dante to Joyce

97

III. Typologica l Re-o ri gi nation and the Theological Vocation of Poetry; or, H ow to Read Finnegam Wake as the C ulmination ofChrisrian Epi c

12 5

1V. On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revela tion Today: From Apocalyptic T heology to Pos tmodern Negative Theo logy

159

Post-apocalypse

2 03

Index

207

To Xinyi “New One” For new inspirations and revelations

Preface

The essays in this volume are literary-critical in nature and at the same time ventures in speculative philosophy and theology. They propose a model for reading literature theologically, even as they illustrate a method for thinking through fundamental problems of theology in specifically literary terms. They constitute a quest for poetic and religious vision granted each in and through the other. Understanding language and its life as metaphor proves to be crucial to this endeavor. Although the path opened owes no specific allegiances to schools or movements, retrospectively it seems accurate to characterize the viewpoint that emerges as a postmodern negative theology of poetic language. This perspective is presented as an alternative to the apocalyptic theology of Thomas J. J. Altizer, since Altizer’s work similarly, but differently, apprehends genuinely epoch-making theology in works of literary and linguistic imagination. This positioning of the work finds its way to explicit articulation in the last of the four essays. These discussions of poetry and apocalypse fit into a broader project of reading Western literature from within the horizon of a poetics of revelation. Concertedly, they treat literature (in certain of its most potent instantiations) as religious revelation. But at the limit of apocalypse both terms of the equivalence lose their identity: revelation is no longer revelation, just as literature can no longer be literature. The mediation of the letter no longer has any place in the face of the immediate presence of apocalypse, and neither can anything be revealed any more, especially not in the literal sense of “re-velation,” or re-veil ing, when all veils have been stripped clean away by apocalypse. It is the region in between poetry and apocalypse that stimulates the sort of thinking that these essays embody and explore. The sequence of essays follows the mutual co-implication of literature and theology as modes of representation that parallel and con-

x  Preface verge upon each other up to the point where both would vanish into the apocalypse of what is beyond representation altogether. This Unrepresentable is what each of these modes of representation in its own way moves toward and evokes. Taken together, the essays suggest that poetry and apocalypse need each other. Each in some ways becomes vitiated when it loses contact with the other. The first essay exposes weaknesses of apocalyptic as a genre unto itself and discovers apocalyptic vision at its most authentic and vibrant rather in poetic prophecy. The second essay explores the radical secularization of revelation as poetry in the Christian epic tradition. It finds that even in James Joyce this poetry has not forsaken—and cannot shake—its vocation to be theological revelation. The third essay highlights a specific aspect of poetic representation that has played a crucial role in religious revelation—namely, typology. It shows how typological representation is constituted by the dynamic of repetition, a topic pursued further in the fourth essay. I have sketched a general theory of the metaphoricity of language elsewhere;1 here, I attempt to account for revelatory capacities inherent in the typological dynamics of figurative language due to the intrinsic, constitutive repetitiveness of the type. Nevertheless, a key to the mutual dependence of poetic representation and theological revelation in a general sense is the inherent metaphoricity of language (as discovered eminently by Vico): language originates in and as the radical disclosure of world as an ambit of truth or a revealment of things as they are (thought by Heidegger as aletheia), and at the same time in the weaving of the veil of representation, essentially the “turning” of the “verse,” which is poetic metaphor. The one actually takes place in and through the other, so that language in its intrinsically poetic character is inherently both revelation and at the same time a mediation interposing itself and, to that extent, covering over things as such—“reality” in its ultimate, unspeakable truth. This is reality such as it, presumably, would be presented by apocalypse. If apocalypse really takes place, then, it does so not in language at all. Apocalypse is the moment when language at its limits shatters and all beings are speechlessly present and open to one another, the moment when 1.  “Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33, no. 2 (2000): 137–54.

Preface   xi all articulable differences are surpassed. It is my conviction that this “moment” outside of and before speech must be the premise for all our discourses if they are to escape entrapment by invidious world-orders imposed in an inevitably imperialistic manner. I further maintain that such a speechless openness cannot be engineered by any logical process or protocol, but rather can be induced through the agency of poetry that bears language to its point of rupture. We must first become aware of the intrinsically poetic nature and underpinnings of all our communications. Then we need to see how poetry by its nature opens toward what lies beyond the grasp of our language, toward what is here being called “apocalypse.” This, I believe, is how understanding and tolerance among human beings committed to radically disparate belief systems can be fostered. These issues are highly theoretical, yet they are discussed with a view to recovering modes of understanding necessary for enabling genuinely open dialogue and cross-cultural communication in increasingly apocalyptic times—times in which incomprehension between cultures threatens to precipitate the world into Armageddon. Particularly, the lead essay is framed, in sections i and v, by a pragmatic, hermeneutic meditation on the vital importance of learning to hear and interpret theological discourses, with an ear especially for their apocalyptic intransigencies and madness, in poetically open and sensitive ways, lest they become disastrously fractious—and not just within the academy. The three pieces following the first essay all revolve to a considerable degree around interpretations of James Joyce. Joyce emerges as a crucial figure for the question of apocalyptic poetry in modern times. He takes on an exemplary role in demonstrating a much more general apocalyptic vocation of literature. This specific focus is determined by engagement with current criticism presenting Joyce as the apocalyptic culmination of Christian epic tradition and projecting a suggestive new outlook on the mutual implication of literature and theology. Reading poetic language in Joyce’s transformation of the novel thus turns out to complement the focus on the language of lyric in the poetry of Paul Celan, Wallace Stevens, and others in the lead essay. Read as a coherent sequence, the essays trace, along a trajectory beginning from the Bible and then for the modern era with Dante, a genealogy for poetry as prophecy becoming apocalyptic.

xii  Preface The book thus breaks down into essentially two parts. The second part, comprising essays II–IV, elaborates a theory of poetry as apocalypse in the tradition of the Christian epic as it develops from Dante to Joyce. The first part, comprising the longer essay I, places the discourses of poetry and apocalypse, starting from the Bible, into the framework of a theory of dialogue. This theory is developed from the Frankfurt school’s critical theory of religion interpreted in a negative theological key that contrasts with Habermas’s thinking on dialogue. It probes the possibilities for dialogue between cultures, especially between theological fundamentalisms and modern secularisms. Poetic and apocalyptic discourses, through their mutual qualification and enhancement of one another, thereby prove to be pertinent, in an indirect but highly significant way, to our efforts to understand and communicate with each other on this precarious planet. Of course, this book cannot pretend to intervene directly in the political crises of our time. Still, our training in the humanities is not irrelevant to how we as a nation and culture relate to others, not least importantly on the international scene, and I urge that a sense of this relevance can well inform the way in which we pursue such studies. Studies in the humanities should contribute to refining the modes of thinking and communication that we need to employ in dealing with people around the world. Fed from our deepest sources of insight, such studies can help to nourish and shape the very spirit with which we undertake these critical encounters.

Acknowledgments

Parts of the essays in this volume have appeared before, in preliminary versions, divided into articles scattered among publications in a variety of disciplines. The first essay has never before appeared integrally, but parts of sections i, ii, and v were printed as an article in the International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion 47 (2000): 65–86, while section iii was the basis for an article in Literature and Belief 19, no. 1–2 (1999): 261–84. Section iv appears in German translation in the Salzburger theologische Zeitschrift 11 (2007): 217–49, and in English in the Journal of Religion 88, no. 3 (2008): 365–92. Section v was the basis for a talk subsequently published in Reconstructing Realities: Occident–Orient Engagements, ed. Ganakumaran Subramaniam, Shanthini Pillai, and Hafriza Burhanudeen (Kuala Lumpur: Pearson Malaysia, 2007), 41–52. A truncated version of the second essay appears in Neophilologus 90, no. 1 (2006): 155–72, and the third essay appears in Literature and Theology 20, no. 3 (2006): 251–68, likewise in drastically abbreviated form. An earlier and shorter version of the appendix to the third essay appeared as the preface to Gian Balsamo’s Scriptural Poetics in Finnegans Wake (Lewisburg, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002), v–xiii. Material from the fourth essay is incorporated into a chapter on Joyce to appear in Blackwell’s Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. Emma Masson, Christopher Rowland, Jon Roberts, and Rebecca Lemon (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), and into an article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion (forthcoming). Thanks to all publishers, including Oxford University Press and Springer Science and Business Media, for kind permission to reprint. Drafts of different parts of essays III and IV were delivered at the International James Joyce Symposium in Rome in June 1998, in Trieste in June 2002, and in Dublin in June 2004 in panels organized by Gian Balsa-

xiv  Acknowledgments mo and Giuseppe Martelli, whom I thank for their reactions to this work. I also thank Peter Hawkins, Kevin Hart, James Wetzel, Roy Gottfried, and Andrew Mitchell for critical readings of various parts or redactions of the manuscript. Except where specific English editions are cited, I have provided the translations myself.

Part 1

chapter 1

Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue: A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language

i. Being at the Mercy of Others In this current millennial transition, frequently there are dialogues that draw upon and display our basic beliefs about the world, about what it is all for, if anything, and where it is going, if anywhere. Particularly striking about such dialogue is the extent to which apocalyptic thinking puts to the test our ability and willingness to listen to and understand each other. The possibility of mutual understanding and acceptance, which includes also the responsibilities to respond and criticize, emerges as the most difficult and important thing needing to be learned in our not just academic world for the future: in fact, that there be a future at all may depend to a sobering degree upon it. For, in the world at large, we still do not know how to manage the clashes between our divergent beliefs so as to avoid war and terrorism against one another. I think it is no accident that the impasses to understanding inherent in any exchange among different individuals with diverse interests, ideals, and ideologies become starkly evident on precisely this topic, that of apocalypse, concerned with claims to the unveiling of an ultimate, absolute truth and a transcendent destiny or dimension of existence. Perhaps all fundamental impasses to understanding—beyond those arising from inevitable conflicts of interest, which can in principle be reasonably negotiated and fairly resolved—devolve, at least indirectly, from beliefs of this rationally intractable type.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue There is a temptation, especially appealing to articulate, dialectically skillful academicians, perhaps particularly in the postmodern climate where “deconstruction” has become as much a common denominator as a radical challenge, to say that every party to the discussion must simply avoid assertions presuming to any final disclosure of truth, or, in other words, that we must all learn to avoid “apocalyptic” discourse.1 But the viability of precisely this solution seems to me to have been belied by discussions even in purely academic contexts, such as an interdisciplinary seminar among humanities scholars.2 For this solution draws the boundaries of acceptable discourse in a tendentious and exclusionary way: it in effect makes a rational, pragmatic, relativistic approach normative for all. And to that extent, so far from overcoming the arbitrary and dogmatic method of absolutistic religious belief, it risks becoming just one further manifestation and application of it, the imposition of one’s own apocalypse, however liberal, enlightened, and philosophical it may be, on others. Indeed, any drawing of boundaries by us—that is, by certain of us, however the claim to being representative may itself be drawn—cannot but be tendentious and exclusionary. That is why we have no right to shut out the final judgment from above or beyond us—though, of course, also not to appropriate this judgment in order to use it, in the name of God or truth or the facts or the future, in our own biased way against others. The problem here is that an “anti-apocalyptic” position belongs to a system of oppositions with apocalypticist positions, and so can do no more than turn their violence in the opposite direction. The bracketing or banning of apocalyptic discourse, even when only by ostracizing it, does not solve the problem posed by this form of communication so difficult to ac1. Such a counsel, together with the impossibility of following it, is in play in Jacques Derrida’s D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie (Paris: Galilée, 1982), translated by J. Leavey Jr. as “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward and T. Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992). 2.  My own most concentrated experience of such dialogue was in a seminar on the Millennium at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. For the stimulation of their contributions I thank each of the other participating fellows: Kathryn Babayan, Myriam J. A. Chancy, Margaret A. Doody, Janet Schrunk Ericksen, Jay Geller, Michael P. Hodges, Ellen Konowitz, Frank W. Wcislo, and David Wood.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    commodate alongside others in an open, neutral forum of debate. It shifts the imposition of an absolute from the level of the expressed, the propositions affirmed, to the unending, free, unjudged and unjudgeable status of the conversation itself: anything may be said, but nothing must be said that would call into question this activity of unrestricted discourse and mark its limits against something that could perhaps reduce it to vanity and, in effect, end it. That would be a threat to the dialogue’s own unimpeachable power of self-validation. Higher powers, such as those revealed, at least purportedly, by apocalypse, must be leveled in the interest of this power of our own human Logos that we feel ourselves to be in command of, or that is, at any rate, relatively within our control. Of course, the “we” here depends on who is the most dialectically powerful, and it is established not without struggle and conflict. Learning to really relativize one’s own position and conviction—not to impose it on all as if it were a final truth “apocalyptically” revealed—requires something else besides renouncing assertions of a certain too extreme and final type that offend the decorum of rational self-conscious and self-ironic reflection. It involves the frightening experience of actually being at the mercy of others. Ultimately, this is what is at stake in apocalyptic thinking and what is refused in the refusal of apocalyptic modes of expression. As long as we are unwilling to accept being at the mercy of others, of one another, and potentially of an absolutely Other, we will be predestined by our own choice, with its logic and consequences, to arm and defend ourselves to the bitter end. In other words, this means war, even if the strategy used is no more—and no less—than that of marshalling arguments and mustering a common consensus against a discourse that appears to be recalcitrant and even threatening to our dialogue. Admittedly, this unwillingness to be at the mercy of others is also exactly what is being expressed, in another way, by the prophets of hellfire and damnation, who dilate prodigiously upon the awesome chastisements in store for others, those who do not heed the truth that the prophet himself is revealing and preaching. But we are quicker to perceive this and to align ourselves against the other person, the “prophet” who is telling us how it will all end, and whose blasphemous presumption is all too patent to us, than to see to what an extent we ourselves—despite all our good intentions to the contrary—are in fundamentally the same position, grasp-

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue ing after an oracle or a formula to rationalize all others in a dispensation based on our own Logos, where our values and virtues are the decisive ones on the basis of which, we assume, all others ought to be judged. Apocalypse, as the act of God that levels all human distinctions and justifications, on the principle that no one is justified before God (“There is none righteous, no, not one”; Romans 3:10–18, harking back to Psalm 14:3), stands in principle—though, admittedly, very often not in practice— for the denial of precisely this arrogation of being in the right to oneself, of the prerogative of having the final judgment over at least oneself, and perhaps others too. It relativizes every form and instance of our relativistic Logos—“our” rules for discourse and dialogue. In the face of apocalypse, it is not even “being right” in any human terms that decides what is right in the end, but something else entirely, something that cannot be judged definitively by any standard of our own. It is a disclosure that transcends our own comprehension but involves all who are living to the same absolute degree of deciding their life and death. Paradoxically, it is precisely apocalyptic discourse, by a logic or illogic of the pharmakon, that has the potential—and is indeed highly necessary—to inoculate us against an otherwise all too inescapable appropriation of a pseudo-apocalyptic pretension to possessing a truth with final validity ourselves.3 Such a final truth could be one that even in accentuating its own infinite revisionability nevertheless refuses to be subject to any standard of an altogether other, higher sort than itself, an altogether new truth that could undermine the very basis of its validity. To live with this sense of not being God, of not having within one’s own power the final judgment over the world, or over anything or anyone belonging to it, has proved itself throughout history, as well as to my mind in the course of current academic discussions of apocalypse, to be a necessary premise for genuine dialogue. This is what apocalyptic thinking should serve to teach and remind us. This may not be the lesson readily to be gathered from the phenomenon of apocalyptic preaching as it assaults us in the mass media, but I propose it as the deeper meaning of the apocalyptic strain so pervasive throughout Western culture, an element that 3. The notion of the pharmakon as a poison that is at the same time its own cure is developed by Derrida in “La pharmacie de Platon,” in La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    needs to be understood and appropriated (and so creatively transformed) if we are going to understand ourselves and accept our human condition as it is indeed disclosed to us by our history, as well as by our own contemporary experience of the conflicts engendered by a multiplicity of cultures. It is necessary above all to learn how to dialogue with discourses of apocalypse—in spite of, and in fact just because of, their own apparent refusal of dialogue. And first then will we achieve genuine dialogical capability ourselves, even though this means being drawn irrevocably beyond all powers and capacities that can be called “our own.”4 I emphasize that the merits of and motivations for apocalyptic vision and discourse must not be judged narrowly on the basis of television preaching and scare-tactic pamphlets that probably reveal more about the unreflective immediacy of these media than about the nature of apocalyptic thought and reflection as it has developed over many centuries, indeed more than two millennia, in confessional contexts and communities and in their literary traditions. There is something extreme about the apocalyptic viewpoint, but precisely for that reason it cannot bear, without grievous distortion, to be too baldly exposed and confidently handled in the more officious public arenas of representation. We need to return behind the immediate and aggressive images to sources, in the first instance biblical, and then, literary—the quasi-religious tradition of prophetic poetry—in order to make out the drift of apocalyptic as a perennial moment and, I contend, an indispensable impetus to the dialogue in which Western cultural tradition distinctively consists.

4. See, for example, the dialogical approach to study of the phenomena of apocalyptic beliefs among fundamentalist sects in the interview-based work of Charles B. Strozier, Apocalypse: On the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994): “I do feel that there is generally something unsteady about fundamentalists and there are some worrisome aspects of the apocalyptic within fundamentalism. But my larger purpose in this book is to argue that we are all unsteady in an age of ultimate threats to existence; fundamentalism is simply one form of response, and a more interesting one than has been appreciated, to what can only be understood as a kind of collective illness in our contemporary culture” (3).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue

ii. Apocalyptic Genres in Biblical Tradition Apocalypse, in biblical tradition, involves the end of the world, yet not simply an end but rather a finale, a consummation and—not to be forgotten—a fulfillment. Not just death and destruction, but salvation and everlasting life belong essentially to the concept and imagination of apocalypse that originally grow out of the prophetic books of the Old Testament. Isaiah 24–27, together with chapters 34–35, sometimes called, respectively, the “great” and “little” apocalypses of Isaiah, as well as Ezekiel 38–39, mark transitions from prophetic visions and oracles to apocalyptic. The prophetic interpretations of contemporary history and tradition, animated by a call to turn back to God and by denunciations of the evil social powers that have led a people astray, modulate into apocalyptic based specifically on revelations of the end-time at the furthest limits of history and even beyond. The “new heavens and a new earth” evoked by Isaiah (65:17; cf. 66:22) reappear at the climax of St. John the Divine’s vision of the apocalypse: “And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea” (Revelation 21:1). The essential matter of apocalypse is the revelation of the end of the world and the advent of eternity. This is tantamount to a glimpse of the divine vision, since the prophet assumes a supra-human viewpoint and in effect “speaks for” God—“pro-phetes,” from fateor (confess, bear witness to, acknowledge, reveal) plus pro (for, on behalf of, instead of ). Apocalypse, Ô a|pokålyciq in Greek, is literally an emergence “out of hiding.” The English translation “revelation,” based on the Latin revelatio, suggests an unveiling. “Apocalypse,” then, as the extreme development of prophecy means a disclosure of the end of human life and history. And, as a final disclosure, it is envisaged from the point of view of God. The full disclosure of true values and their morally necessary final consequences is naturally represented in images of judgment and reward or punishment. Still within the Old Testament canon, though extremely late (167–64 b.c.), the book of Daniel most explicitly represents a Last Judgment, with separation of the damned, condemned to everlasting contempt, from the good, who are destined to shine like the brightness of the firmament for ever and ever (12:2–3). Zechariah, chapters 9–14, and Joel are also prophetic works turn-

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    ing apocalyptic by climaxing in descriptions of a day of final reckoning, “the day of the Lord.” The inter-testamental period sees the rise of the so-called “apocalypses,” the apocryphal works dedicated integrally to theological visions of the end that, together with the canonical books just mentioned, belong properly to the apocalyptic genre. They flourish from 200 b.c. to 100 a.d., an age in which Jewish prophecy as such was practically extinguished. During this period of domination of the Jews by foreign powers, first Hellenistic and later Roman, a more despairing and dogmatic tone sets in, and the vision of history turns deterministic. The book Fourth Ezra (2 Esdras 3–14) and the Apocalypse of Baruch, among the most notable of the apocalypses, are written in the wake of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Emperor Titus in 70 a.d.5 Filtered through this contemporary catastrophe, the 587 b.c. destruction of Jerusalem and the consequent deportation to Babylon is bitterly ruminated. Such works constitute apocalyptic literature in the strict sense, but they do not necessarily represent the high-water mark of apocalyptic as a type of vision and faith focused on a revelation of the end. It may well be rather the spontaneous eruptions of the apocalyptic mode in the prophetic books, together with its applications in the New Testament writings, that demonstrate the purport and religious significance of apocalyptic as a genre at its strongest. Indeed, the inter-testamental apocalyptic writers themselves are oftentimes ruefully self-conscious about having fallen away from their own originally prophetic inspiration. The prophetic books invite to a change of heart: rather than implacably dealing out unconditional destruction, they are animated by appeals for repentance and conversion. Their chief concern is not simply foretelling events in a mode of fully objectified representation, but rather shaping the future and, above all, seeking to reestablish and renew the fundamental relationship of their people with God. Prophetic visions, with their appeals for repentance, rather than just giving previews of a fate to be passively awaited, adumbrate guidelines for action to be carried out urgently in the present. The prophet himself is typically an integral part and a pivotal fac5. This was first established by Emil Schürer (see Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, 4th ed. [Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1909], 3:23). An updated discussion is found in the introduction to Fourth Ezra, ed. Michael Edward Stone (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 10.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue tor in the drama he represents. The apocalypses, on the other hand, have a tendency to represent a series of purely futural and absolutely irrevocable events as acts of a God who does not condescend to dialogue with human beings, while the apocalyptic seer himself has in many cases become just a passive spectator. This sort of contrast between prophecy and apocalyptic oftentimes informs a generally negative judgment against apocalyptic. Martin Buber, for example, writes: Prophecy originates in the hour of the highest strength and fruitfulness of the Eastern spirit, the apocalyptic out of the decadence of its cultures and religions. But wherever a living historical dialogue of divine and human actions breaks through, there persists, visible or invisible, a bond with the prophecy of Israel. And wherever man shudders before the menace of his own work and longs to flee from the radically demanding historical hour, there he finds himself near to the apocalyptic vision of a process that cannot be arrested.6

To these indictments is often added the charge that a jingoistic nationalism expressed in bitter vindictiveness against all gentiles, rather than anything more akin to the universally emancipatory vision of the later prophets, all too often inflames the apocalyptic scenario.7 Buber does also include a redeeming note on apocalyptic, when he admits that its ultimate aims and intentions may, after all, be good: “Yet in a mysterious manner, its goal, too, is the perfection, even the salvation of the world.”8 But its heavyhanded and often desperate means are nevertheless suspect. Paralleling the negative evaluations of their content, the style of the inter-testamental apocalypses is frequently assessed as being highly conventional and artificial and, at the same time, esoteric and obscure. Indeed, these apocalypses have abandoned the orality of the prophetic oracle, which is announced in a public forum, for what is clearly a scriptural and often predominantly hermetic mode. They are not infrequently taxed with being to a large extent compilations and even congeries and pastiches, gathering together indiscriminately materials from legend, allegorical 6.  Martin Buber, “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour,” in On the Bible: Eighteen Studies, ed. Nahum M. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1968), 183. 7. Cf. Antonino Romeo, “Apocalittica, Letteratura,” in Enciclopedia Cattolica (Firenze: Sansoni, 1948). 8.  Buber, “Prophecy, Apocalyptic, and the Historical Hour,” 181.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    exegesis, myth, and popular preaching, and forcing external interpretations upon such materials in disparate, incongruous styles. Of course, the charge of their lacking any unifying aesthetic sense perhaps expresses more the narrowness and prejudices of many modern readers. The apocalypses can certainly be engaging reading. Nevertheless, the poetic power of the prophets is often severely attenuated if not outright supplanted by a certain objective, fact-stating mode. To this extent, the apocalypses seem to entirely miss the sense of the mystery of dialogue with the absolutely Other. And their oftentimes crudely detailed and direct representation of the future can tend to discredit their attempt to express a truth and reality transcending human conception and representation. Hence scholars speak of a loss in apocalyptic of the productive, challenging tension between the vision of a world to come and engagement with present realities that is the characteristic strength of Old Testament prophecy: “Prophecy became transformed into apocalyptic when the tension between vision and reality was relaxed and then broken, and the attempt to relate the cosmic vision to the realities of contemporary life was abandoned.”9 The apocalyptic discourses of the synoptic gospels (Mark 13:1–31; Matthew 24:1–44; Luke 21:5–36) breathe generally a different atmosphere from that of the inter-testamental, apocryphal apocalypses. The same can be said for the explicitly apocalyptic passages in 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18 and 1 Corinthians 15. In the gospel texts, Jesus describes the end of the world and the Last Judgment in the breaking light of his overall message and ministry, while the epistolary descriptions are, in the first instance, Christological: they envisage a scenario of the end that is congruent with an unlimited relationship with Jesus. But it is especially in the Apocalypse of John, which closes the biblical canon, that the genre again reaches a peak of imaginative creativity and intensity worthy of its prophetic sources and forebears. It is not, as the apocalypses so often are, a collection of sup9. David Aune, Prophecy in Early Christianity and the Ancient Mediterranean World (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 113–14, based on research of Paul Hanson, The Dawn of Apocalyptic: The Historical and Sociological Roots of Jewish Apocalyptic Eschatology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1975). A related view of the apocalyptic genre as a degeneration of prophecy, as well as of wisdom literature, was propounded by Gerhard von Rad (see Theologie des alten Testaments, translated by D. M. G. Stalker as Old Testament Theology [New York: Harper & Rowe, 1965], vol. 2).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue posedly infallible predictions of events leading up to the end of history. It is rather, as its incipit states, “The revelation of Jesus Christ.” All possible knowledge of the destiny God has prepared for the world is absorbed into the mystery of the person of Christ. It is this relational and moral knowledge, which is symbolically expressed, and not purported facts about the future, that lies at the core of the meaning of the Book of Revelation.10 It is, then, not only, nor even primarily, in representations of the end, the Last Judgment, Armageddon, etc., that the essential outlook of apocalypse is expressed. We must cast our nets far beyond just the thematic material of apocalypse. For apocalypse is rather a moment pervading the whole of history as represented in the Bible, and in particular, with a new urgency, in the New Testament’s eschatological vision of history. In fact, Jesus is presented in the gospels as the eschatological prophet announcing the eruption of a new and definitive time of salvation. His essential message is, “Repent: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17; cf. Mark 1:15). Even in his human life on earth he seems to have been identified with the “Son of man,” the eschatological figure who comes at the end of time, according to the book of Daniel (7:13–14). That Jesus is the one who was and is to come belongs to his very identity as Messiah, the anointed one, Xristøq (Mark 2:17; Luke 12:49; Matthew 15:24). His baptism and transfiguration are presented by the evangelists as further confirmation of his being sent on an eschatological mission (Luke 4:16–30; Mark 6:4; Matthew 13:57; Luke 4:24). Indeed, in the Christian understanding of history, the end-time has already been reached and is inaugurated by Christ. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the general resurrection of the dead that figures at the center of the events expected finally to culminate in the apocalypse (1 Corinthians 15). The Lord’s Resurrection sets into motion a movement that is to be consummated with his Second Coming. But what is revealed 10.  It is also possible to find the most oppressive features of apocalyptic expressed in the Apocalypse of John, as did D. H. Lawrence in Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation (ed. Mara Kalnis [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980]). The antidote to such literal reading is to read the text for its visionary capacity of infusing new meaning and life into traditional images, as is done magisterially by Austin Farrer in A Rebirth of Images: The Making of St John’s Apocalypse (Glasgow: Glasgow University Press, 1949). Farrer later refined his interpretation in The Revelation of Saint John the Divine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    openly by the resurrection of Christ is in fact already realized in every step of Jesus of Nazareth’s earthly life as an eschatological figure living the perfection of the end immanently in the midst of history. This anticipatory mode of living and acting then becomes what every Christian is called upon to realize through following Jesus. The Church, consequently, by following in Christ’s footsteps, exists as an eschatological community. It is actively working in the world, yet it lives already the life to come as given from God through the Holy Spirit. By divine grace it is possible here and now to realize, at least in a preliminary, proleptic way, the life to which human beings are called in eternity. The implications of this existence projected upon the end of history are revolutionary. No longer need or ought one to live in a way conforming to this world, but rather in accordance with the new and fuller life to come. Apocalypse, then, as revelation of the end of history, is achieved already in embryo, and in fact in its most crucial and revealing form, in the Christ event. This event is an apocalypse that has already occurred, and it becomes the basis for the Christian’s life in history. To this extent, apocalypse does not simply stand outside of history as awaited beyond its furthest limit, at its end. The Christ event as apocalyptic model indicates that apocalypse comes about as the in-breaking into history of a radically other order of existence, the event of the divine, and therewith the revelation of the final truth and judgment that otherwise eludes humankind in history, throughout which we are confined within an incomplete and uncompletable succession of temporally delimited, fragmentary moments. This event can be conceived of as imminent in every moment and as immanent to human experience as such, so far as it is turned toward its own ultimate possibilities. Precisely this conception is clearly intimated in the Bible, and pervades particularly the New Testament, being expressed explicitly, for example, in such statements as, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live” (John 5:25), even to the point of the declaration that “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). Two views of the articulation between history and apocalypse, time and the end of time, may be distinguished within this generically Christian framework: they tend to be identified broadly as Protestant and Catholic, even though complicated reversals and crossings-over come about in

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue the course of theological history. In one view, apocalypse entails the annihilation of history, and in the other, history’s fulfillment. Indeed, in the Latin finis and the Greek tØ ‘skaton—to think in terms of just these two ancient sacred languages—both senses of “end,” that is, as “finish” and as “fulfillment,” are simultaneously present. In the first view, the emphasis falls on how history and “this present evil world” are going to be swept away by the advent of God, on the day of his coming: apocalypse reduces all that is human to naught, and only the saving grace of God, with no merit of any human being, will manage to salvage some remnant from the destruction. The other view emphasizes the redemption of history already underway, even before the final, inevitable catastrophe, by virtue of the cooperation of the Church as eschatological community. It envisages a progressive realization of apocalypse as already decisively inaugurated by Christ’s death and resurrection. Whichever view is taken, the point of apocalypse is to read history as a whole, to understand its meaning in the light of its final end. To this extent, apocalypse aims at or intends a higher degree of truth than is, or ever can be, reached from a point of view within history. And yet, as modern theologies like Rudolph Bultmann’s have emphasized, apocalyptic springs essentially out of history in the making. It is necessarily engaged with the history of its time and expresses a total vision of universal history, but always from a particular angle and on the basis of its interpretation of the times rooted in its own historically specific experience. Hence the ineluctable ambiguity of this “final” vision of the end of history that is, nonetheless, still leveraged from within history. Apocalyptic turns essentially on the application to—and from within—present historical reality of a revelation of the end. It is to this extent a hermeneutic phenomenon, an irreducibly contemporary interpretation of history in the light of a theological revelation specifically of “the end,” which symbolically means total revelation. This is a revelation of what remains always veiled from any perspective within the world and for so long as the world endures. This disclosure of truth is an event within history, and yet also beyond history, closing it and giving it its final, “true” sense. So far as it can be understood at all, apocalypse is, to this extent, an inextricably historical category: its essential content remains the interpretation of history and, moreover, as interpretation it is enmeshed in its own his-

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    torical moment, even while straining to peer beyond it, to see the final end revealed already within it. Oftentimes apocalyptic seems to impose the procrustean plan of a transcendent God on all of history. Indeed, it typically offers just this kind of representation. But, in application, apocalypse can and should work for the opening rather than the closure of the adventure of history, and for open engagement with the burning issues of the moment. Its envisioning of the end ideally is deployed in the service of clearing away the actual impasses of the present, breaking out of the patterns of conflict and oppression in which history becomes entrapped, even when only by representing them as played out in extremis. As the application of a vision of the end—the revelation of a definitive meaning for the whole of human life— to history and its challenges here and now, apocalypse remains rooted in the moral-prophetic, biblical milieu in which it originates. Its vision of the end, if taken seriously, is a challenge first of all to the ongoing cultural process and play of interpretation of history that aspires to influence what is realized pragmatically in world-transforming action.11 It can hardly be overemphasized that the very soul and inspiration of apocalyptic is the application to contemporary history of a theologically revealed vision of the end. This intrinsically hermeneutic dimension is the element in which apocalyptic springs to life, and it must be heeded if we are to understand apocalypse at a deeper level than that of its surface imagery. This imagery, admittedly, is meant to horrify and appall, yet only as a means of pointing out what is horrifying and appalling in the realities being actually lived through in current history. The extreme imagery of apocalyptic is undoubtedly an expression of despair, but it is a despair that is connected with hope, a despair in the historical order that is continuous with a hope for its transcendence into a radically new order of existence. Not the images themselves, but their impact on the present in opening it to the future by interpretive projection, constitutes the final import of apocalyptic representations. It was indeed an exegetical work, Karl Barth’s commentary on Romans (Der Römerbrief ), that gave the decisive impulse to the rediscovery of the fundamentally apocalyptic bearing of Christian revelation that 11. Cf. Ernesto Grassi, “Apocalisse e storia,” Apocalisse e insecuritas (Milan– Rome: Fratelli Bocca, 1954).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue determined some of the defining motives of twentieth-century theology. Leaving behind an age of progressive liberal theology that had no use for eschatology but equated redemption with the incremental realization of a moral ideal of human perfection through following Christ’s teaching and example, Barth maintained that Christianity is wholly eschatological in outlook, without remainder. Following Romans 8:24—“in hope we are saved. Now hope which is seen is not hope”—he maintained, furthermore, that the hoped-for redemption is necessarily invisible and intellectually inaccessible: “Redemption is the unseeable, impossible, that meets us as hope” (Erlösung ist das Unanschauliche, Unmögliche, das als Hoffnung uns begegnet).12 The end and its perfection cannot be represented within the present parameters of the world. This emphasis on the unrepresentability and intrinsic openness of apocalypse has been pursued further, particularly by Jürgen Moltmann in his “theology of hope,” likewise predicated on restoring the absolute centrality of apocalypse and eschatology to Christian faith: “The eschatological is not merely an attribute of Christianity, it is rather the very medium of Christian faith, the keynote to which everything is attuned, the tint of dawn of a new, awaited day in which everything is immersed” (Das Eschatologische ist nicht etwas am Christentum, sondern es ist schlechterdings das Medium des christlichen Glaubens, der Ton, auf den in ihm alles gestimmt ist, die Farbe der Morgenröte eines erwarteten neuen Tages, in die hier alles getaucht ist).13 Alluding evidently to Saint Augustine’s cor inquietum, Moltmann maintains that it is the apocalyptic promise of hope that keeps the experience of history open, preventing it from being reduced to a representation closed in on itself: “It is the promissio inquieta, which does not let human experience of the world become a cosmic picture of divinity closed in on itself, but rather holds the experience of world and history open” (Es ist die promissio inquieta, die die menschliche Welterfahrung nicht zum in sich geschlossenen Kosmosbild der Gottheit werden läßt, sondern die Welterfahrung der Geschichte offen hält).14 12.  Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief, 2nd ed. (1922; repr., Zurich: EVZ-Verlag, 1954), 298. 13.  Jürgen Moltmann, Theologie der Hoffnung: Untersuchungen zur Begründung und zu den Konsequenzen einer christlichen Eschatologie (München: Charles Kaiser, 1964), 12. 14.  Ibid., 78.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    This revaluation of apocalypse as a fundamental aspect of theological comprehension, and as the very essence of Christian revelation, rather than just a crazy extreme, has far-reaching consequences for practical concerns about the conditions and limits of dialogue. We need to be talking to each other as if in a new world order, where the entrenched contradictions that divide us are miraculously lifted, so that we can understand in a way that is no longer only just our own but is rather open to self-transcendence. Rather than forcing submission of others to our preconceived schemas of comprehension, or else submitting, more than provisionally, to theirs, we need to learn to travel together with open expectations into the unknown of the future. While, superficially considered, apocalyptic imagination may seem to attempt to predict and practically dictate this future, more deeply it is an attempt to express the irreducibly other, open character of the future with respect to the world as we know it. Of course, human needs for psychological comfort and even the worst kinds of revenge are often unmistakably present as well. But the movement of commending oneself and one’s world into hands beyond one’s own, a letting go of the compulsion to control one’s own final fate, even while not completely losing hope, acts out the even deeper impulse motivating apocalyptic belief and expression. We need to have enough trust in order to let the future give itself to us, rather than attempting to preempt it and hold it within the parameters of our already achieved understanding. For the latter alternative means being limited by the irreconcilable conflicts and irresolvable contradictions that we already know all too well: we know them as not merely accidental eruptions and defects but as structural maladies and impasses inherent in our commonly shared social existence. Only openness to apocalyptic thinking—in its many, for the most part unrecognized, forms—by its gesture of opening toward what was previously inconceivable can usher in the creative change that society needs in order to renew itself and foster new hope that enables people once again to live together meaningfully and productively. The notion that it should be checked, stomped out, expunged, so as to end a syndrome that has plagued Western civilization for millennia is in my view short-sighted and itself a desperate denial of the complexity of human beings and history, a refusal to accept all that belongs to them (that is, to us). The prescription of amputating a certain troublesome excrescence in order to heal a diseased cul-

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue ture does not see far enough into the contradictions of human history. It takes for granted a still far too sanguine anthropology. The deep pessimism about “man” that is expressed so poignantly in apocalyptic in the broad sense that involves, for example, the religious view of a humanity needing to be redeemed from itself, forms part of the necessary basis for the hope of transcending the present state of things. This is a truly revolutionary hope, and it does not have to wait idly for its time to come, but rather can and must reach proactively into the future and bring it closer by beginning to realize its possibilities in the present. Apocalypse stands for the contradiction of all that is human and of every worldly order—Moltmann’s “contradiction of the given reality” (Widerspruch zur gegebenen Wirklichkeit)—by the advent of a higher power and authority. This “other” order is unspeakable within the present world order. It is what cannot be represented. But it operates as a limit to all that can be represented and as a boundary of discourse in general. Recognition of this boundary can prove highly necessary to all that is represented in language and to communication among different cultures, as well as even just among different individuals, given their different mindsets and the different world orders that they envision. As such, apocalyptic thinking is a serious and indispensable exercise in imagining possible worlds and even the possibility of no “world” at all as we now know or represent it. Apocalyptic visions are a critical instance of representation precisely because they envisage the limits of every possibility of representing a world. Their expression of the consciousness of human and worldly limits includes, at least implicitly, a reminder of the limits of representation itself. By imagining the in-breaking of the absolutely Other, apocalyptic represents even its own impossibility, that is, its incapacity to grasp and to adequately represent what it is intent upon. To this extent, apocalyptic makes use of techniques of allegory: it tends to flag itself as imagery bearing a symbolic meaning not identical with its immediate sense and therefore calling for hermeneutic effort to disclose further levels of meaning. This occurs, for example, in the modulation from an apparently historical reference to “the king of Babylon” to the archetypal “Lucifer, son of the morning,” in Isaiah 14:4, 12. In this way, apocalyptic tends by its very na-

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    ture toward literary self-consciousness, and indeed it is literary apocalypses in the end that may be most revealing of the ultimate significance and drift of the genre.

iii. Literary Apocalypses The possibility of seeing beyond the limits of time and mortality vouched for by the Bible with its prophetic-apocalyptic visions was discovered early on by Christian authors to be represented also in classical pagan literature, notably in the descents to the underworld for revelations of their personal destinies by Odysseus in Book XI of the Odyssey and by Aeneas in Book VI of the Aeneid. This epic topos of an otherworldly voyage in quest of knowledge from the dead that will illuminate the path of the protagonist’s life is expanded by Dante into the whole of his epic journey in the afterlife as recounted in the Divine Comedy. Most poignantly, Dante’s meeting in Paradiso XIV–XVIII, with his ancestor Cacciaguida, a hero and martyr of the Second Crusade, brings the modeling on ancient epic tradition to a dramatic climax. In the guise of a precious gem refulgent in an illuminated cross of light in the heaven of Mars, Cacciaguida appears to Dante as lovingly as the shade of Anchises appeared to Aeneas, his son (“sì pia l’ombra d’Anchise si porse”; Paradiso 15.25). Dante pairs this sort of pagan precedent for his otherworldly journey with its analogues in the Bible, particularly Paul’s famous raptus to the “third heaven.” Indeed, the inevitable comparison to Paul’s elevatio ad coelum has already insinuated itself from the outset of the Paradiso, with Dante’s statement that he saw things that it is neither permissible nor possible to retell (“vidi cose che ridire / né sa né può chi di là sú discende”; 1.4–7), echoing 2 Corinthians 12 concerning Paul’s having heard “unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (verse 4). Dante’s doubt later in this passage about whether he is underway on his paradisiacal journey in the body or outside it (“S’i’ era sol di me quel che creasti / novellamente, . . . tu ‘l sai”; 1.70–75) likewise echoes Paul’s uncertainty in 2 Corinthians 12: “whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth” (verse 2–3). The comparison to these prototypes is unmistakable, notwithstanding Dante’s disclaimer earlier, at the beginning of the

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue Inferno, protesting that he is neither Aeneas nor Paul (“Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono”; 2.32). Absorbing a host of medieval allegorical vision literature into this synthesis distinguished by a new sense of history as the arena in which the final truth of human existence is revealed, the Divine Comedy marks a beginning, or at least a new departure, in the modern development of apocalyptic outside of and well beyond the canonical and sub-canonical books of the Bible in a broader stream of imaginative, creative religious literature. Dante works from the theological vision of the Bible and its patristic and medieval interpreters, including Saint Augustine. He synthesizes this background with a classical and especially a Virgilian vision of a universal, imperial, providential order. Taking up the mantle of the poet-vates, Dante becomes the interpreter of world history and of the destiny of his civilization. He thereby exceeds all the roles accorded to modern vernacular poets, otherwise known simply as makers of rhymes (rimatori). He becomes a modern prophetic poet in the mode of the ancients, after the pattern both of the biblical prophets, particularly Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and of the ancient Greek and Latin epic poets in the following of Homer. Throughout the modern period, creative, visionary poets such as Milton and Blake have followed Dante in uniting the office and vocation of the prophet with those of the epic poet and in imaginatively interpreting history as the revelation of a divine plan and purpose, that is, as prophecy, and specifically, apocalypse. These modern poets assume the prophetic role of “speaking out”—pro-fateor, from pro-fhte¥v—for the correction of the world in the light of a revelation of its true end and destiny. In this, too, they are following Dante, who writes “in pro del mondo che mal vive” (for the good of the world that lives ill; Purgatorio 32.103). In Milton’s case, this end is reflected primarily into the image of its Edenic beginning, but even so, the final two books of Paradise Lost unfold a climactic revelation by the archangel Michael to Adam, in an explicitly apocalyptic mode, of the whole course and final end of human history. Dante’s synthesis of classical and Christian traditions establishes the parameters for a new genre of writing about human existence and history seen from the standpoint of the revelation of its end. The “great flame” that Dante, with false modesty, wishes to ignite with his “little spark” (Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda; Paradiso 1.34) can be seen in retrospect to have

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    flared up in the form of a modern tradition of Christian prophetic poetry. There are important Christian poets, who are not devoid of prophetic vision, such as Sedulius and Prudentius, already in antiquity, as well as in the Middle Ages before Dante—for example, Alain de Lille and Bernardus Silvestris. But with Dante the genre takes a decisive, specifically apocalyptic turn. This is achieved especially by the eschatological thrust of the Divine Comedy, which envisions all history as a figure for eternity: it reveals the decisive acts of individuals’ life stories as prefiguring the eternal, freely chosen destinies of their souls to punishment, purgation, or beatitude. This eschatological-apocalyptic frame first brings all the other elements—lyric, elegiac, speculative, didactic—coherently into the overarching perspective of poetry as prophecy. All that happens in history is seen by these poets in the perspective of its final significance in history as a whole, and consequently the vision of history they offer is in and of itself apocalyptic. In this way, apocalypse is envisaged not just as removed into an inaccessible future that can only be passively awaited, but as actually realized in history. Such vision is consonant with the New Testament theology of the Christ event, Jesus’s historical death and resurrection, as itself eschatological, as already the beginning of the end that will be consummated with the general resurrection at the Last Judgment. By seeing the end as occurring exemplarily and repeatedly within history itself, the apocalyptic poem attempts to realize the possibility of living in and from the revelation of the end, as well as of acting in accordance with its truth, and even of contributing to bringing about this final consummation. As Thomas Altizer’s readings of prophetic-apocalyptic poetic literature in its various specific historical contexts clearly show, the vision of the end does not put an end to history but first sets it free to begin realizing its ultimate human possibilities. Altizer sees the radical visions for world renewal of apocalyptic writers including Augustine, Dante, Milton, Blake, and Joyce in this sense, moreover, as revolutionary: their sense is determined by the way they aim to impact and redefine their historical worlds.15 Such poetry might be considered more precisely “eschatological,” to the extent that it envisages the end-time being realized as Kingdom come 15. Thomas J. J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue anticipated already within historical experience. In this paradoxical dimension of “already but not yet,” one lives the future proleptically. Such anticipation stands, nevertheless, under the interdiction of apocalypse as the radical rupture with all representations of the world to come. All pretensions to possess the divine or eternal life must be swept away by the apocalypse that guards the enigma of the supra-historical world: this other, higher reality is kept out of sight behind the flaming sword of the Cherubim. The apocalyptic moment remains ultimate, since its impact on history does not give access to the supra-historical in any graspable form of knowledge. Some of the richest literary applications of apocalyptic tradition to contemporary historical realities flourished in the Middle Ages. Especially influential in this connection was Joachim of Flores. His Liber Figurarum (1202) combined historical interpretation and biblical exegesis in announcing an immanent apocalyptic age of the Spirit to succeed the ages of the Son and the Father, corresponding respectively to the New and Old Testaments. He inspired, to some extent, even Saint Bonaventure’s biography of Saint Francis, the Legenda Maior, which consistently envisions the Saint as an apocalyptic figure. Many of the major poetic monuments of medieval literature, including Jean de Meun’s portion of the Roman de la rose, William Langland’s Piers Plowman, the Canterbury Tales, and, of course, The Divine Comedy, have lent themselves to intensive reading as apocalyptic texts deeply engaged with the history of their times, which were marked by apostate popes, plagues, and so forth.16 Thus, a genre of writing that is usually read more as literary than as religious, more often in English classes than in theology courses, becomes perhaps the most remarkable torchbearer of apocalyptic vision. In 16.  For some suggestive readings, see Apocalyptic Imagination in Medieval Literature, ed. Richard K. Emmerson and Ronald B. Herzman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992); Marjorie Reeves, “The Development of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Weittreich (New York: Cornell University Press, 1984), 40–72; Morton W. Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-Century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961); Ernesto Buonaiuti, Dante come profeta (Modena: Guanda, 1936); and Dennis Costa, Irenic Apocalypse: Some Uses of Apocalyptic in Dante, Petrarch, and Rabelais (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1981).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    the wake of Dante, outstanding exponents of this genre in modern Christian tradition are Milton, Blake, Spenser, and Tasso, and it would not be difficult to adduce further representatives, such as Klopstock and Novalis, Hugo and Claudel. By further broadening this mode of “prophetic poetry” beyond any and all confessional boundaries, one might include the whole semi-secularized prophetic poetry of the Romantic movement and the symbolists.17 Hölderlin, who expressly identifies with John’s vision on Patmos, and Rimbaud, who rewrites the traditional revelatory sojourn in hell, are in this broad sense prophetic-apocalyptic poets. All are concerned with vision into some radically other possibility of existence applied energetically to the interpretation of their own contemporary realities. As Rimbaud writes in Une saison en enfer, “La vraie vie est une autre” (The true life is an other).18 Prophecy in this tradition, as also in the biblical tradition from which it derives, is essentially a totalizing—but at the same time an engaged and applied—interpretation of history. Prophetic poetry proposes interpretations of history from the standpoint of a revelation of eternity. And this means envisioning some end or finality beyond the bounds of history as the key to interpretation of all inner-worldly, intra-historical phenomena. Of course, the concrete, historical experience of the poet remains the basis for the projection of an end beyond the historical. And yet this particularity need not determine the confines of the vision in any reductive way, for it is itself endlessly open to interpretation. It is indeterminate, except within one or another preestablished historical framework, and all such set schemas are necessarily swept away by apocalypse. Apocalyptic vision strives to open outward from its very historical specificity, by a movement of self-transcendence, so as to receive a grace and thereby escape from the deadlocks of its own historical predicament. This is possible only by virtue of a gift and a granting that arrives from beyond the horizon of the present. The end intended by apocalypse is necessarily 17. A certain region of this literature is illuminated by Morton D. Paley, Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 18.  Great works of prose fiction, such as Alessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi (1840), are, of course, equally important sources of apocalyptic representation. The next essay in this volume will deal with the apocalyptic import of poetic language in the novel.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue non-present and proves itself in practice, moreover, to be ultimately unrepresentable. It can be fathomed only so long as it can be longed for and striven after as a goal, without, however, yielding itself to any adequate, finite representation. One of the most momentous results of the extension of the apocalyptic mode to poetic literature by self-consciously creative artists is the reflection on the nature of representation and, inevitably, the pushing of the possibilities of representation to their furthest limits. The prophetic poets have each in their own way felt out the limits of representation. All, as a consequence, make extensive use of the topos of “ineffability.” The essence of their poetic vision defies expression. They unanimously testify to the paramount importance of this sense of limits for all that falls within the range of representation and, consequently, for all that can be remembered and preserved as “history.” At least implicitly, apocalyptic literature reflects on representation in general as, in effect, by its very nature, offering fixed forms that are inadequate not only to transcendent reality, the eternity inaugurated by apocalypse, but also to historical reality in its inherently temporal dynamism. Such critical reflection by poetry upon itself tends to reveal all representation as in a sense apocalyptic—that is, as pretending to disclose how things really are in the end—and at the same time as inadequate to the infinitely rich and evasive realities that apocalypse would disclose. The whole tradition of prophetic poetry reveals most insistently the extent to which apocalypse, so far as we grasp it, is an irreducibly poetic event, that is, a product of human making and imagination. It is, of course, directed by its self-understanding toward an event beyond all human power and control. It shows how the human—especially the creative making of humans—reveals something other than and beyond itself. In their invocations of divinities such as the Muses, for instance, prophetic poets typically acknowledge a transcendent presence as an inextricable lining within all human creation. As poets, they naturally privilege language as the scene of this revelation in and through aesthetic creation, a revealment and a re-veiling both together. For in poetry, language is broken open to let the previously inconceivable appear. Poetic language, most overtly in modern times, is to this extent itself conceived of as apoc-

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    alyptic. In it, the world is made over again new.19 The work of destruction wrought by poetic language, by the language of “visionaries,” has been a central theme, especially since Rimbaud (particularly in the Illuminations), but it can be seen retrospectively at work even in premodern poets such as Dante.20 The tradition of prophetic poetry in particular, like poetry generally, lives from the opening up of the rules of the game of language to what cannot be articulated within the grammar and vocabulary of any already formulated system of language. Language is always yet to be discovered, or rather, “made,” by poiesis. Fundamentally, apocalyptic is radical openness to what is other than all that can be represented. The unrepresentable source of making, alias poiesis, from which all representations poetically emerge, cannot itself be represented as such, but it can always, volcanically, act up and manifest itself anew, and all representations can be reduced to naught and be contradicted and annihilated by the world-shattering, world-renewing event of poiesis. Poiesis is in this sense apocalypse, and so far as our experience of it can be conceptualized and communicated, apocalypse is poiesis, with the proviso that poiesis embraces not only the positive poetic moment of giving form, but equally the dissolution of form and the annihilation of all orders of representation. Nietzsche’s distinguishing, in The Birth of Tragedy (Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872), between Dionysian and Apollonian moments in tragic art effectively fig19. This outlook characterizes especially the French poetry and poetics of “la nouvelle critique.” The idea of poetic language, particularly that of Mallarmé, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud, as inherently new and revolutionary has been pursued vigorously by Julia Kristeva in La révolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), as well as by Georges Poulet in La poésie éclatée (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980). Maurice Blanchot presents the view of writing as rupture with all that exists, influentially in “La littérature et le droit à la mort” (in La part du feu, 5th ed. [Paris: Gallimard, 1949]). 20. This radical newness of poetic language is effectively emphasized by Jacqueline Risset’s reading of the Paradiso in Dante l’écrivain: ou L’intelletto d’amore (Paris: Seuil, 1982), and in “Dante e l’esperienza del limite” (Poetica 6, no. 65 [September 1993]: 29–36). Risset is often inspired by Osip Mandelstam (see Entretien sur Dante, trans. Louis Martinez [Paris: L’Age d’Homme, 1973]).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue ures the twofold creative-destructive movement of poiesis, in which the order of the world originates and, conversely, is destroyed.21 When apocalyptic is understood not in terms of a fixed repertoire of representations, but rather as the radical power of poetic representation to renew and revolutionize itself and the world, to think and see and thereby to be otherwise, to invent—and, above all, as the negative capability to suspend belief even in one’s own representations for the sake of what one cannot represent, the unrepresentable—it need not appear to effect closure and to be stifling. For example, the Christian apocalyptic code as a, to some degree, stable or at least recognizable semiotic system has been repeatedly evoked by prophetic-apocalyptic poetry. Nevertheless, any meaning, even of symbols remaining nominally the same, has to be created anew and poetically validated by the new experience proposed in each new, would-be apocalyptic poem—witness Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Fairie Queene, Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem, Hölderlin’s “Patmos,” Hugo’s La légende des siècles and Dieu, Rimbaud’s Une saison en enfer, Klopstock’s Der Messias, Novalis’s Hymnen an die Nacht and Geistige Lieder, Claudel’s Le soulier de satin, and perhaps even Allen Ginsberg’s Howl or James Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim. Each original apocalyptic poem has had to address its own epoch in unprecedented and inimitable ways in order to make its apocalyptic theology or a/theology meaningful. The meaning of the Christian apocalypse first comes to light with a novel and unexpected bearing, with previously unsuspected significance and implications, in each new, genuinely creative work of prophetic-apocalyptic imagination. A positive and productive sense of apocalypse, I submit, is to be gathered from this poetic literature. There is much violence in these texts, 21.  In an ingenious inversion of the apocalyptic motif and mood that prevailed so ominously in Germany in the 1930s, Martin Heidegger’s “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerks” (1935–36), in Holzwege (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1950), develops the idea of the work of art, in its essence a work of poiesis, as the origin of a world: the human, historical world, as the opening of an ambit of disclosure of things in their truth, struggles against the Earth and its absorption of all revealed worldly orders of significance back into itself. More broadly, on apocalypse in modern German thought and culture, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, Apokalypse der deutschen Seele: Studien zu einer Lehre der lezten Haltungen, 3 vols. (1938; repr., Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1998), and particularly “Dionysos-Prinzip,” 2:3–15.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    as in the apocalyptic outlook itself, but there is also a power for engendering the desire for renewal and for instilling hope in a new possibility of relatedness for human beings, a new order in which self is not inevitably pitted against other. The effort to ground these ultimate ethical principles in a vision of the end is not misguided, even though it is necessarily poetic and projective. The attempt at comprehensive interpretation of the human story as a whole, the striving to imagine what life looks like sub specie aeternitatis—though in every case this means a vision the more radically rooted in its own time and specific historical reality—are efforts that have never proved definitive, but that, nevertheless, have remained open to and have stimulated further interpretation and appropriation in each successive age. Their universality in this sense makes them models for the kind of communication across cultures and epochs, or simply between divergent viewpoints, that discussion of the topic of apocalypse in particular shows to be so great a challenge. Any representation of a final end, permitting a representation of history as a whole, is necessarily partial and perpetually open to completion, whether it explicitly says so or not. Apocalypse in theory consists in reading history into a completed configuration of an end that reveals a divine purpose for all. But in poetic practice, this revelation remains infinitely open to interpretation and opens previously inconceivable possibilities for history, rather than closing them and ending it. Apocalyptic representation even opens toward what can only be represented as inconceivably other than representation and than everything that can be exhaustively, or even just adequately, represented. It is only the indeterminacy inherent in representation as such, that is, as a process rather than a product, that can represent—or rather indirectly signify—the end intended by apocalypse. Poetic representations of apocalypse gesture toward an ultimately unrepresentable final revelation precisely by effacing themselves and negating any apparent finality of their own. The marriage of apocalypse with poetry accentuates the imaginative dimension of this theological concept, or rather non- or supra-concept, and reveals every representation of apocalypse to be essentially poetic, a supreme fiction. To say this is not to deny or cast doubt upon its “truth,” but to highlight the fact that it points to a kind of truth, or disclosedness, that cannot be contained within any achieved order of representation. Such a

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue truth is displaced to a level having to do not exclusively with what happens within history and the world but rather with the limits of representation of anything such as a world or history in the first place.22 Paradoxically, the self-transcending, temporal character of human existence cannot but represent itself in images that are totalizing by their very nature and that in their static form ineluctably embody the finality of an end. This structural necessity inherent in representation has recently become acutely problematic because in postmodern times the suspicion of all totalizing structures has been elevated to a credo, or a “ground belief,” in its own right. Today, accordingly, the remnant, or perhaps the dispossessed heir, of prophetic-apocalyptic poetry tends to be a poetry that is purely evocative by constantly breaking off before what it does not and cannot say. This has seemed to be the only way to express the “truth” of our historical times. Poets have, furthermore, oftentimes relinquished confidence in language as the disclosure of a world or truth and have rather pushed language to and even past its limits in order to expose its incapacity to express reality. Theoretically searching poets of recent date, in their concern to express the essence of language, typically highlight its incongruity with reality, and even its intrinsic nullity. And yet, even this negativity remains an orientation toward an otherness that corresponds, at least formally, to the unnameable, inexpressible divinity of negative theology. This movement of rejection of all verbal formulations still belongs to theology more than it is able to escape it. Poetry becomes the cultivation of an articulate silence about the inexpressible, a dwelling upon its own incapacities, and yet a hinting, by negation, at what cannot be expressed because it is beyond the reach of representation. The one avenue of expression that seems capable of being sustained even in this predicament is the discourse of address, as in prayer. Paul Celan, especially considering his sense of the poem as a dialogue with an unattainable, indefinable you, emblematically represents this 22.  In “Typology II: Phases of Revelation, Seventh Phase (Apocalypse),” his interpretation of the apocalyptic mode, Northrop Frye emphasizes that “What is symbolized as the destruction of the order of nature is the destruction of the way of seeing that order that keeps man confined to the world of time and history as we know them” (The Great Code: The Bible and Literature [New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981], 136).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    pervasive orientation, or disorientation, in modern poetics. That the poem indeed speaks and that it “speaks for,” “tends toward,” and “has need of ” an Other, indeed a “wholly Other” (dieses “ganz Anderen”), inviting into “the mystery of the encounter,” are key theses of Celan’s reflections on poetry. Precisely the poem’s inability to express and belong to reality, its “loneliness,” paradoxically makes it the focus of a secret, mysterious encounter with otherness. For “the poem today,” in Celan’s view, “shows unmistakably a strong leaning toward becoming silent” (das Gedicht heute— zeigt . . . , das ist unverkennbar, eine starke Neigung zum Verstummen).23 And precisely this “growing dumb” (Verstummen) of language witnesses to the otherness that resists speech. The implicit negative theology lurking in this linguistic impasse is more directly expressed, for example, in formulas describing and addressing No One, who is yet unmistakably spoken with and even prayed to in a manner befitting God, despite the negation of all identity, in Celan’s poem “Psalm.” The poem appears in a 1963 collection significantly, though anonymously, named Die Niemandsrose (The No One’s Rose), a title taken from an expression occurring in this very poem. Niemand knetet uns wieder aus Erde und Lehm, niemand bespricht unsern Staub. Niemand. Gelobt seist du, Niemand. Dir zulieb wollen wir blühn. Dir entgegen. Ein Nichts waren wir, sind wir, werden wir bleiben, blühend: die Nichts-, die Niemandsrose. 23. See Paul Celan, “Der Meridian: Rede anläßlich der Verleihung des GeorgBüchner-Preises” (1960), reprinted in “Der Meridian”: Ein Versuch zur Poetik und Dichtung Paul Celans, ed. David Brierley (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1984).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue Mit dem Griffel seelenhell, dem Staubfaden himmelswüst, der Krone rot vom Purpurwort, das wir sangen über, o über dem Dorn. (No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, no one conjures our dust. No one. Praised be your name, no one. For your sake we shall flower. Towards you. A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing-, the no one’s rose. With our pistil soul-bright, with our stamen heaven-ravaged, our corolla red with the crimson word which we sang over, O over the thorn.)24

The relation to the unnameable No One is a fertile one, as suggested by the image of the flower growing toward and for the sake of no one. And yet it is a fertility drenched with blood and suffering. The flower’s soulbright pistil, its stamen wasted and ravaged by its connection to heaven, its corolla stained by verbal crimson, and the blood sung over the thorn in the final stanza all evoke, in accordance with the conventional symbolic 24. Celan’s poetry is quoted from Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1972).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    value of the rose, the passion of love, a love transcending nature and even possibly the passion of Christ, with his crown of thorns. For all their anonymity, prayer and passion here are redolent of theological traditions from Genesis to Apocalypse. These traditional motifs and motivations, however, are presented in the poem as being about nothing, or more exactly about no one, no one that can be named. The result is that the impulse to apotheosis articulates itself only in terms of nothing, “das Nichts,” as again, powerfully, in the litanies of “Mandorla”: “In the almond—what dwells in the almond? / Nothing . . . In Nothing—who dwells there? The King” (In der Mandel—was steht in der Mandel? / Das Nichts . . . Im Nichts—wer steht da? Der König). The obsessive concern with transcendence via negation is explicitly wedded to eschatological-apocalyptic thematics in Celan’s later poetry, in particular in the sequence of “Jerusalem poems” written in connection with his trip to Jerusalem in the fall of 1969, a few months before his death in 1970.25 One poem of this series, “Die Pole,” is particularly suggestive of the negative theology, that is, the “apophatic” discourse that affirms only by means of denial, which is constantly operative in Celan’s poetry. The poles of the title refer to poles within us, the limits of our existence as chartable or representable. They cannot be surmounted except in sleep, when the unconscious escapes from the logic of difference and exclusion into a place of mercy: DIE POLE sind in uns, unübersteigbar im Wachen, wir schlafen hinüber, vors Tor des Erbarmens . . .  (THE POLES are inside us, insurmountable when we’re awake, we sleep across, up to the Gate of Mercy . . . ) 25. See Richard Reschika, Poesie und Apokalypse: Paul Celans “Jerusalem-Gedichte” aus dem Nachlaßband “Zeitgehöft” (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1991).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue In this no-man’s-land, where the merciless barriers and divisions of representation can be forgiven and suspended, every distinct identity is lost, most importantly that of “the you.” Yet it is lost also into “the you.” ich verliere dich an dich, das ist mein Schneetrost . . .  (I lose you to you, that is my snowy comfort . . . )

This may mean that every known and identifiable “you” is lost into an indeterminate “you”—what will be snowily figured as “your whiteness.” And this brings at least some cold consolation. Although a “you” that has lost all identity and thus become seemingly impersonal, this is perhaps after all what is ownmost to each and all of us. The impossible proper name for us all is “Jerusalem,” and the consolation is that this is where the “you” disappears to when it is lost. The “you” being lost, it becomes possible to say that Jerusalem is: sag, daß Jerusalem ist. . . .  (say, that Jerusalem is. . . . )

Being, the “is,” the object of naming, is now, miraculously, given back. After the negations and annihilations in the mode of a negative theology, being is given back, but it comes now from the other, that is, the other name of us all, “Jerusalem.” I and you are infinitely other to each other, and they can say Jerusalem each as the other, at least in the subjunctive mood (“wäre”), for the you has become the lost identity of the I and the I the lost identity, or indeterminacy, of the you, its “whiteness”: sags, als wäre ich dieses dein Weiß, als wärst du meins. . . .  als könnten wir ohne uns wir sein, ich blättre dich auf, für immer, du betest, du bettest uns frei.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    (say it, as though I were this your whiteness. as though you were mine. . . .  as though without us we could be we I open your leaves, for ever, you pray, you bed us free.)

This is being without you and I, without us, without identity. It is you and I, but without any determination, “white.” It is “your white,” but that of a you lost in its own indeterminacy. In the contradictory language characteristic of apophatic discourse, it is “we without us” (wir ohne uns), and this is “eternity” (für immer) and freedom. We are normally, in time, confined and defined by poles of identity and difference. But here “I” loses itself in the indefinable otherness of the “you,” and vice versa. And this is the condition for the unqualified, infinite is (ist) called “Jerusalem.” Yet this “is” is a kind of being without being, for it must not be anything determinate: it can only be said: “sag.”26 This is a signifying that cannot be reduced to being, but is only in being said.27 And to say it, one really needs other, even improper words, in which being is undone. Without objectifying and reifying you, I open you in the scattering of your identity like leaves, as your prayer frees “us.” You “bed” us free—where the mere vocalic slippage from a long to a short ‘e’ between “betest” (pray) and “bettest” (bed, used unusually as a verb) phonetically realizes the juxtaposition of prayer and intimate proximity in a more profane sense. This perhaps hints that sexual encounter may be a laying down of self-identity in deference to the other that is potentially comparable to what one does in prayer. In any case, it is just such a not properly utterable relation of proximity to 26.  Paradoxically, the ineffable, since it is disabled as referencing any object, becomes identified with the absolutely verbal. Michel de Certeau emphasizes this, for example, in “L’énonciation mystique” (Recherches des Sciences Religieuses 54, no. 2 [1976]: 183–215). 27. Derrida’s De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967) is, in its entirety, an argument against reduction of the signifying trace to a supposedly antecedent order of being.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue the other that can annul all independent self-determination. For this first frees the self from itself in opening it at—and even before—its own origin toward the other, in order that it be in the sense in which Jerusalem is said to be, or better, that it transcend being altogether, that it be free from and “beyond being,” as Emmanuel Levinas would say.28 Celan gives what may be the most penetrating, albeit also scarcely accessible, rendering of what are in essence among the most widely diffused motifs of contemporary, theoretically searching poetry. In the wake of Mallarmé, in certain respects the greatest poetic influence on Celan, this necessarily objectless search is still being conducted to further extremes by many of France’s most distinguished recent poets. Bernard Noël characteristically fishes for the other in the emptiness of the Open, the O, where there is “neither depth nor subject but only the forgetfulness where one fishes” (il n’y a pas de sujet / pas de profondeur / seulement de l’oubli / où l’on pêche). For Eugène Guillevic, the core of poetry consists in its halts and pauses, blank spaces and silence—“This silence gone off / in search of itself ” (Ce silence parti / À sa propre recherche) (“Un clou”). And Michel Deguy dwells upon the collapse of language’s power of purchase through figuration and, consequently, of the sense of sense: “the loss of credit in the figurative moon. That is the sense, and that has no sense” (la perte de créance en la lune figurative. C’est le sens et ça n’a aucun sens).29 Of this sort of poetry that fights to avoid yielding its own or any meaning, one can say with John Ashbery, “These accents seem their own defense” (“Some Trees”). Only the ineffable is the subject of every poem, though talk about the weather, for example, often serves as nominal subject to cover the deliberate lack of thematic meaning in a poetry that is obstinately about nothing: such poetry is rather an escaping from all sense and a demotion (or promotion) of the sign to a signal pointing nowhere. In the American context, the office of ministering over the negative theol28. Emmanuel Levinas, Autrement qu’être et au-delà de l’essence (Paris: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), translated by Alphonso Lingis as Otherwise than Being and Beyond Essence (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991). See also Levinas’s essay on Celan, “Tout Autrement,” in Noms propres (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976), 65–72. 29.  Bernard Noël, “Chant un,” in L’été, langue morte (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1982); Michel Deguy, À ce qui n’en finit pas (Paris: Seuil, 1995).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    ogy intrinsic to language in its inherent hollowness has been assumed not only by T. S. Eliot, especially in his Four Quartets, but also by Wallace Stevens, who in the persona of “The Snow Man,” for example, “nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the Nothing that is.”30 In “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,” for example, Stevens approaches the Unrepresentable at the source of all that is by perceiving the inventedness of all that we see and represent. If all that we perceive is of our own invention, then any uninvented source even of this very invention must remain unperceived by us. It may be impossible for us even to conceive of something not invented by us. The idea that there should be an unrepresentable source of all world and representation, and of invention itself, Stevens calls “the inconceivable idea of the sun.” This is the idea of the sun or source of all as inconceivable, as in effect the God of negative theology, who is inconceivable and of whom it is possible to know only what he is not. It Must Be Abstract I Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.31

To see the sun clearly in the idea of it is to see that it is invented, that it is but an idea, our idea. That is to say, the sun that we perceive is an idea we have invented. But to understand this is to “perceive” that it cannot be the source and ground of all we do see, what in Western philosophical, specifically Platonic, tradition (evoked by the address to “ephebe”), figures as 30. An excellent brief reading of Stevens that presents him as a poet of the unsayable can be found in Alfred Corn, The Metamorphoses of Metaphor: Essays in Poetry and Fiction (New York: Elisabeth Sifton Books [Viking], 1987), chapter 1: “Pilgrim in Metaphor: Wallace Stevens,” 3–15. 31. Stevens’s poetry is cited from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (1954; repr., New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue the sun.32 The same must be said for the source of all that we can conceive, figuratively, the intellectual sun, the idea of which is also our invention and conception. To see this is to become ignorant again. For the insight into the inventedness of our world, of everything under the sun and even of the sun itself as we see it or conceive it, has revealed that the sun and the very gods as we know them are but representations and inventions, and consequently not the true source of being, which remains—and must remain— “inconceivable” to us. Therefore: Never suppose an inventing mind as source Of this idea nor for that mind compose A voluminous master folded in his fire. How clean the sun when seen in its idea, Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven That has expelled us and our images . . .  The death of one god is the death of all, Let purple Phoebus lie in umber harvest, Let Phoebus slumber and die in autumn umber, Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was A name for something that never could be named. There was a project for the sun and is. There is a project for the sun. The sun Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be In the difficulty of what it is to be.

Ignorance of the underlying ground of things is secured only by the death of the gods, that is, by the realization of the fictiveness of our representations of this ground. Artful syntax makes it even sound as if “Phoebus,” the god, is but a projection or permutation of “ephebe,” the learner/ seeker, who is in turn an avatar or reflection of the deity. Since any God we name and represent is in some way a reflected image of ourselves, the source of being and intelligibility (metaphorically, the sun), which is not invented, can only be nameless and unrepresentable. This inconceivable 32. The capital importance of the metaphor of the sun to the whole foundation of metaphysics is discussed by Jacques Derrida in “La mythologie blanche: La métaphore dans le texte philosophique,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    idea must not be comprehended as the invention of any mind, for that would be to ground it again in something representable as its source. The project of the sun is for it to be without a name. This involves projecting from the visible world and representation beyond into the unnameable and unrepresentable. When all the gods that can be named and represented are exposed, precisely, as representations, and thus “die,” it becomes possible again for the Unnameable to be “perceived,” and remaining nameless it is preserved in the difficulty of what it is to be—that is, without being reduced to any category or concept that would simplify and render conceivable what is not invented and therefore not commensurate with our concepts or with any category of being. With all idolatrous representations of God stripped away, the unnameable source of all that is seen and thought, metaphorically, the sun, the absolute light in which all is revealed, can once again be sensed or “perceived,” though it cannot be properly named or conceptualized. When any name for it is seen as just an idea, it is “washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven / That has expelled us and our images.” Seen thus in the cleanliness of its idea, it is not seen at all as any positive presence or image, but is “seen” to be necessary as source for all the ideas and perceptions that bear the taint of having been invented and that cannot therefore be the source of themselves. What has been discovered and obliquely illuminated, then, is something anterior to us and our representations, the “first idea,” which is not of our own invention. It is embodied by Adam in his createdness, not excogitated by Descartes through the inventions of selfconscious reflection. IV The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There was a muddy centre before we breathed. There was a myth before the myth began, Venerable and articulate and complete. From this the poem springs: that we live in a place That is not our own and, much more, not ourselves And hard it is in spite of blazoned days.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue There is an anteriority to representation and to all speech, to “us” (“The clouds preceded us”), and this is what poetry strives to evoke. All this suggests why the poem, in general, is essentially about what it does not and cannot say. Yet even in its extremely reductive, postmodern form, the impulse of poetry to become apocalypse—to point toward and perhaps catalyze contact with a radically other power and to announce the possibility of another world or of the world as other—cannot but be descried, even if, in the first instance, only ironically by denial. As in Noël’s previously quoted poem: “we search everywhere for the nowhere of an other earth” (nous cherchons partout le nulle part / d’une autre terre). The idea of an ultimate revelation is obsessively present, or else is made only the more conspicuous by absence, in an enormous range of the most widely discussed contemporary poetry.33 Whether this revelation is of the fullness of reality or of its emptiness changes the valence but not the structure of apocalyptic disclosure. It is the search, even in all its inherent negativity, for an otherness, in effect an apocalyptic disclosure, that keeps the poetic word from being completely still and renders silence articulate. Whatever may lie beyond the veil of representation, what is revealed in poetic language is ultimately the re-veiling that is the very nature of representation. Behind all positive apocalyptic imagery lurks always a mystery of the divine, about which it is possible to express only what it is not. This inexpressible divine mystery has been emptied out and, to a large extent, substituted for in modern poetry by the mere form of the negative. The ultimate inexpressibility of any extralinguistic being was pointed out first by the Greek sophists.34 The ambiguous negativity of language—its being neither simply something nor nothing, by virtue of its representing something else besides itself—has been explored by poets with more and more intense concentration. They have increasingly translated the traditional problematic of negative theology into more and more purely literary terms. In this sort of negative poetics, in effect a version or inversion of negative theology, theological structures undergird language and every possibility of discourse in our culture, in some sense perhaps in human cultures generally, at least insofar as we are able to engage them in dialogue. 33. Some indications can be found in Marjorie Perloff, Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 34.  Gorgias, in his Encomium of Helen, famously maintained that language can express “nothing but itself.”

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    Prophetic poetry may have become virtually silent today, but this is the inevitable expression of the negative theology of the incomprehensible and inexpressible that must be held together with apocalyptic revelation as its secret source, abiding beyond the reach of rhetoric, its other face, the dark side of its luminous truth. This is the sort of insight that can be gleaned from assiduously frequenting poets particularly of the prophetic bent. Hence, according to Harold Bloom, the only sort of authority that survives the ravages of modernity is that of negative theology and its analogues in literature.35 This is not apocalypse in the form of affirmations about who will be damned, but rather the revelation that the radical otherness and the negativity of unrepresentability always underlie representations at any level. This primal negative moment of apocalypse may be appropriately expressed by affirmations of disaster, although in this case the latter are but necessary metaphors for a negativity not otherwise perceptible or expressible. Thus, Maurice Blanchot emphasizes how the disaster is refractory to every discourse. He affirms “le dés-astre” (literally, “the unlucky star”) as what is rather outside everything representable or thinkable, “the intense, silent, and disastrous affirmation of the outside” (l’affirmation intense, silencieuse et désastreuse du dehors).36 Given these barriers to representation, all positive apocalyptic expressions must be taken as metaphors for what they cannot adequately express. Thus, metaphor, taken as the core of poetic language and perhaps of language per se, as intrinsically negative, a disclaimer of what it predicates, has itself been understood in recent theory in terms of a negative theology according to which no language about God can say what it means except by means of analogy. This results in theories of metaphor in general as expressing the inconceivable, what necessarily escapes concepts.37 Such a view constitutes the reprise in literary criticism of an ancient theological 35.  Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). On the question of the negative essence of literature, see further Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), in particular the contributions of Derrida and Kermode. 36.  Maurice Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 14. 37. Especially instructive in this regard is Hans Blumenberg, “Ausblick auf eine Theorie der Unbegrifflichkeit,” in Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer: Paradigmen einer Daseinsmetapher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 75–93.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue tradition stemming from Parmenides and Plato and reaching maximum peaks in Plotinus, John Chrisostom, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, John Scott Eriugena, Thomas Aquinas, Meister Eckhart, Margaret Porete, Gregory Palamas, Nicolaus Cusanus, and Silesius Angelus, not to mention eminent representatives such as Moses Maimonides and Ibn al-’Arabi in non-Christian traditions and the even more conspicuously and integrally negative-theological premises of Eastern, particularly Taoist and Buddhist, thought. The “apophatic” thought of modern times, eminently that of Wittgenstein and of Heidegger, each in his way so obsessed with the limits of language and with the mysteriously calling silence (“Geläut der Stille,” in Heidegger, “Die Sprache”) beyond this threshold—that is, with the Inexpressible (“Es gibt allerdings Unaussprechliches,” in Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.522), continues in this broad tradition. Envisioning an end to the game of the present in all spheres of social and political life, with its embittered alignments and its entrenched impasses, as insidiously difficult as that may be for us to “do” (as Beckett’s Endgame so wittily insinuates), enables us to envisage, and so also to begin to enact, new possibilities. And yet, apocalypse, as the advent of the end, is nothing that we can do, though we can be aware of and perhaps cooperate with its happening to us. Indeed, from a certain point of view, this is already what our tradition itself is all about. Apocalyptic, as the ultimate expression of transcendent, metaphysical vision in poetry, rather than being taken as an aberration, symptomatic of a pathology of Western civilization that could be cured, should be accepted as part of the whole and as standing for the possibility of renewal inherent within this tradition. From this type of imagination, new and different proposals unceasingly draw their inspiration. All representations and imaginings have their limits. Apocalyptic thematizes this inherent destiny for every order of imagination to have its end and give place to a new, thitherto unimaginable order. Every imagination of the end in apocalyptic style is the occasion for new orientations toward the open space we call the future. This future, however, is not for us to name, in the end, since it is beholden to the Other. And this may mean—and has meant, in the terms forged by a certain tradition embracing Dante, Celan, and Stevens—being beholden to an apocalypse, to the revelation of an “eternity” that surpasses us utterly and unutterably.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language   

iv. An Apocalyptic Theology of Dialogue This has been a deliberately oblique reading of Western apocalyptic in the tradition of the Bible. I have attempted to bring out of this tradition not what is most obvious but what is for the most part implicit, if not suppressed, in it as what we most need to pay heed to at the present juncture of cultural history. Indeed, ostensibly apocalyptic literature calls for anything but dialogue. It endeavors to speak authoritatively in the voice of God. Yet the literary aspects and underpinnings of apocalyptic reveal this authority to be elusive and to remain endlessly open to interpretation. Representing the voice of God in literature cannot help but expose the divine Word to a dialectic of interpretations. The effect is not necessarily to undermine theological authority, but rather to mediate it by human discourse and thereby to heighten awareness of the mediating role of human language, of the “making” of poiesis, in theological revelation. Literary self-consciousness enters into apocalyptic writing in some novel and far-reaching, as well as emblematic, ways in the Divine Comedy. As a revelation of the other world of the eschaton—divided into Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, in accordance with the anticipated results of the Last Judgment—this work is an apocalyptic vision throughout its whole extent. More specifically, however, the symbolic visions and revelations at the end of the Purgatorio, in its concluding cantos, 32 and 33, with their prophetic representations of the vicissitudes of church and empire in the age of the Avignonian exile of the papacy, employ the traditional materials and modes of the genre of apocalyptic. And yet they represent a “strong enigma” (forte enigma; 33.50) rather than clear directives or disclosures in objective terms of things that are to come.38 At the climax of these revelations is the annunciation of “un cinque cento diece e cinque” (a five hundred ten and five), the number 515, or in Roman numerals, DXV. These letters can be transposed, by techniques analogous to kabalistic interpretation, to DUX, suggesting a duke or Lord, such as Henry VIII of Luxembourg, who became Holy Roman Emperor in 1308 and then descended into Italy in 1311 on a campaign hailed by Dante with great enthusiasm (Epistle 10). However, the campaign failed, 38.  I quote and translate from Dante Alighieri, La divina commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. G. Petrocchi, 4 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1966–67).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue and Henry died in 1313. Although he is the best candidate (a number of others have been proposed and debated by scholars), he would hardly serve Dante’s purpose of prophesying the ultimate triumph under God of a presumably secular ruler of the world. That the apocalyptic prophecies of these concluding cantos of Purgatorio, replete with allegorical visions in cryptic codes, are sphinx-like (33.47) and obscure is admitted expressly by Beatrice in her reference to her own “dark narration” (la mia narrazione buia; 33.46), which the facts themselves (“li fatti”) will have to clarify. The enigma of the 515 is a transformation of the mysterious apocalyptic figure of the greyhound (veltro) from the opening canto of the Inferno (1.101): this passage first adumbrates the millenarian expectation of a historical messiah, a savior toward whose coming the whole poem yearns. All the efforts of Dante exegesis have not availed to solve this riddle—except perhaps by the suggestion that the expected redeemer be identified with the poem itself. The place he is to come from is designated as “between felt and felt” (tra feltro e feltro; 1.105), which might be taken to refer to writing implements—the felt blotter between whose folds the quill, from which writing materially issues, was wrapped and kept in store.39 Such a quintessentially modern solution in terms of textual self-referentiality or reflexivity (imitated at the level of the signifier in the repetition of “feltro”) makes the interpretive process itself the very content of apocalyptic revelation. Of course, for Dante this would not mean that human interpretations are all that there is to apocalypse, but rather that they are integral to theological revelation as such, a reverberation of transcendent lightning in the human, phenomenal order. In effect, Dante exploits the constitutive obscurity of apocalyptic revelation in order to call attention to the inevitable inadequacy of representation. It would not suit the true purposes of apocalyptic revelation for Dante to give his apocalyptic figures a reference that is unequivocal in historical terms. Apocalyptic revelation, more profoundly understood, is not about giving accurate representations of the world of the future, but about opening the whole world of representation to what forever exceeds representation as well as every worldly kind of realization. The foregoing discussions have insisted on the stark contradiction between apocalypse and its representations: representations tend to con39. See Claudia Rattazzi Papka, “ ‘Tra feltro e feltro’: Dante’s Cartaceous Apocalypse,” Dante Studies 107 (1999): 35–44.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    fine apocalyptic revelation to finite images, whereas the deeper meaning of apocalypse is the breaking-open of all finite forms, their shattering and opening up toward the Unrepresentable. I have elicited from apocalyptic representation what is ostensibly the opposite of its overt intention, in order to illustrate the measureless power inherent in and released from the breaking-open of closed discourses and their circularly defined, self-validating meanings. Such is the import of “apocalypse,” taken as signaling a limit to representation operative in poetic “making.” Traditionally, such creative making or inspired invention is an interface where the human is invaded by the divine appearing in the guise of the Muse(s). This limit of apocalypse, present at the edge of human discourse, is also an enabling condition of what I take to be genuine dialogue. My approach through dialogue is not the most natural way of thinking about apocalypse, nor does it provide philologically the most centered and comprehensive interpretation of the apocalyptic tradition and its texts, from Daniel and the Book of Revelation to the Divine Comedy and beyond. Nevertheless, it means to be a philosophically illuminating interpretation of apocalypse as we can and, I submit, must understand it today. Without openness to the radical alterity of apocalypse, we cannot be open to dialogue in an unrestricted sense. My proposal is that revelation, and particularly texts purporting to deliver apocalyptic revelations, must be understood essentially as forms of communication. Apocalypse is not just the positive content of ideas and images that express apocalyptic revelation, but the very opening of the space in which such representations can be communicated between radical alterities. It takes a certain openness to apocalypse—to this shattering or breaking-open of one’s own world—in order to communicate across different and even incompatible world views and cultures. Communication that is universal, in the sense of being without any definable, built-in limits, is in and of itself already apocalyptic in import. For all human understanding presupposes limits. Communication that remains in principle infinitely open is itself an embodiment of transcendence of the whole finite order. Such communication brings together in a revelatory event, an “apocalypse,” what remains otherwise incommunicable, since it opens upon a region that is normally or humanly unknowable and is unchartable in terms that any one system or party or logic can command. I am proposing a concept of communicative revelation that is analogous, in certain ways, to Jürgen Habermas’s concept of communicative

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue reason. I believe that such a reconceptualization is key to enabling revelation—including apocalypse as its limit-case—and the different religious traditions in which it is embedded to become a positive cultural resource fostering truer, freer understanding and exchange of ideas among people. Alternatively, concepts such as apocalypse, which are laden with culturally specific meanings, tend rather to become a divisive force for promoting rigid identity politics that lead inevitably to opposition and conflict. In order to be viable, the apocalypses and revelations of religious traditions, which are embraced by millions, have to prove themselves to be true to life by orienting individuals in productive, sustainable ways toward the world, others, and the future. Beyond the historically specific terms of each revelation, there are also more general principles of love, humility, and surrender that are communicable to others who are not of the same religious persuasion or even culture. At this level of meaning, appreciation of the sense of apocalypse can contribute to a general enlightenment of the whole human race. This is, in fact, the express goal of theological revelation, culminating in apocalypse, in each of its specific manifestations, notably the Jewish, the Christian, and the Islamic. If revelation of this order can be understood as fundamentally communicative in nature, it can become the vital bond uniting people together in their search to respond appropriately to the exceeding power and the claim of life and being. Failing such understanding, belief in apocalypse tends rather to become a fractious ideology by means of which one group strives to dominate or eliminate or, at any rate, menace and condemn others. Not resoluteness in resisting the infidel, but suppleness in engaging in dialogue beyond all cultural and confessional boundaries, has become necessary for survival in our globalized world order. A certain hermeneutic of communication, potentially across cultures, is purportedly fostered by Habermas’s theory of communicative action oriented toward mutual understanding.40 Since this theory, self-described as a recovery of 40. The most systematic development of Habermas’s theory is found in Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981), 2 vols., translated by Thomas McCarthy as The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). See especially V.2: “The Authority of the Sacred and the Normative Background of Communicative Action,” and V.3: “The Rational Structure of the Linguistification of the Sacred.”

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    the outlook of the European Enlightenment, is prima facie directly opposed to any possibility such as theological revelation, I wish to examine some essential points in it and to engage in a search for common ground specifically in understanding the nature and stakes of dialogue. My vision of dialogue as in its deepest intrinsic nature needing to be open to theological revelation and apocalypse, with special attention to their mediation by poetic language, could hardly find a more challenging foil than in this preeminent theory of dialogue by a resolutely rationalist, secularist, Marxist philosopher. This is the counterpart to my consideration of how the apocalyptic literature I have examined, despite being ostensibly closed to dialogue, indeed its antithesis, can hardly keep from embodying, in effect, an appeal for the breaking-open of dialogue of the sort I am advocating.41 It is particularly Habermas’s concept of reason as communicative action that matches up surprisingly well, in certain regards, with my notion of apocalyptic revelation. Against subjectivist, non-social concepts of rationality Habermas develops his conception of communicative reason, which requires relinquishing one’s own subjective understanding and submitting to the process of communicative exchange, in which consensus is sought intersubjectively. This process of rational communicative action can, of course, be manipulated in all sorts of ways, but it is in principle open to an “unconditioned moment” of freedom and truth uncoerced by power. This is what I would recognize as the moment of a negative theological revelation, in which all determinate representations are relinquished for the sake of unconditional openness itself. One would have to leave all determinate representations and their inevitable ideological inflections behind in order to enter this space of absolutely undistorted communication (or at least communicative potential). This moment of unconditional communicative openness is in my terms theological, or, to be precise, negatively theological: it is open to the infinite and indeterminate. Habermas, however, 41. Nicholas Adams, Habermas and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), has similarly engaged Habermas, with a view to reversing his prejudices against religious thinking. Adams’s approach pivots on the communicative practice of “scriptural reading” common to the three Abrahamic religions, whereas my approach rethinks fundamental concepts of reason and revelation apophatically in order to bring out the potential resources—as well as what Adams calls the “theological blind spots”—of Habermas’s thought as it engages religion.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue wishes to see theology as having been superseded in the course of history that leads toward an enlightened society constituted by free and undistorted communication. In Part I of his Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas follows the thought of Max Weber, and in Part II that of Émile Durkheim and George Herbert Mead, in order to trace the development of society from religious bases through progressive rationalization to a dispensing with religion, which dissolves eventually into “discourse ethics” as the force binding the members of society together into one.42 The rationalization of religion and revelation through science and technology defines the overall direction of development of modern society as understood in the works of Weber, Durkheim, and Mead, taken as foundation stones for Habermas’s critical theory. The general thesis is that “the authority of the holy is gradually supplanted by consensus held, at each stage, to be rational or grounded” (die Autorität des Heiligen sukzessive sich durch die Autorität eines jeweils für begründet gehaltenen Konsenses ersetzt wird; Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 118). I propose, rather, a theological interpretation of rationality as not possessed of its own ground of immanent teleological evolution through self-reflection but as standing open to an abyss that puts it in a position of being in effect dependent on the infinite, on what religious traditions interpret typically as “God.” My contention is that in postmodern times, as at comparable junctures in earlier cycles of history, “rationality” breaks open into something of a divine mystery and revelation in its own right, reversing the supposedly one-way course of history from revelation to reason, from religion with its myths and rites to the progressive rationalization of society.43 Many thinkers have discovered again in late modernity (or postmodernity) that reason is not fully understandable to itself on a purely rational basis, but must rather be understood in terms of revelation or of a dis42. This aspect of Habermas’s theory is further developed, among other places, in Jürgen Habermas, Erläuterungen zur Diskursethik, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992). 43.  I have outlined the cycles of modern and contemporary intellectual history swinging between rationality and its collapse in the face of the inarticulable in my “Franz Rosenzweig and the Emergence of a Post-Secular Philosophy of the Unsayable,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 58, no. 3 (2005): 161–80.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    closure of religious mystery of at least a negative sort.44 The inadequacy of purely rational accounts of reason and of reason alone to achieve genuine freedom and enlightenment had actually been cardinal insights of Critical Theory all along, since its inception with the discovery of the dialectic of enlightenment.45 Every apparent gain for rational enlightenment turned out at the same time to be a step backward into darkness and barbarity, producing eventually the social jungle of the modern metropolis, where humanly produced systems and machinery become at least as menacing as the irrational forces of nature. The consumer society and its culture industry are some of the dubious effects of the instrumentalization of all reality by reason. Adorno’s “negative dialectics” further exposed the ambiguities of all supposedly positive realizations of reason in history.46 In such a perspective, there is a dialectic of reason and revelation, rather than simply a supplanting of the latter by the former through the progress of history. Characteristic of Critical Theory is that reason becomes critical of itself and exposes itself by rational analysis as a new mythology. By undermining all its own expressions, critique becomes practically a negative theology of reason or, again, in Adorno’s terms, a “negative dialectics,” condemning as idolatrous any achieved form of reason that is exalted to absoluteness and identified with the truth itself. In this manner, reason opens up from within to the infinite—that is, to a limitless self-criticism.47 44. Abundant witness can be found, for example, in The Postmodern God: A Theological Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), in particular in Ward’s introduction; as well as in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), ed. Graham Ward, and Religion, Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), ed. Paul Heelas. See, further, Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter: Religion in der modernen Kultur (München: C. H. Beck, 2004). 45. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1944). 46. Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966). 47.  I have traced this theme of reason’s limitless self-criticism from its Neoplatonist matrices to its postmodern apotheoses in “Praising the Unsayable: An Apophatic Defense of Metaphysics Based on the Neoplatonic Parmenides Commentaries,” Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 11, no. 1 (2006): 143–73.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue Similarly, a classic formulation of theological reason offered by Anselm of Canterbury in his Proslogion in effect takes reason as nothing but infinite openness of mind, openness to thinking “that than which nothing greater can be thought” (id quo majus cogitare nequit)—hence something always greater than any humanly achieved conception. Every conception of God is to be critiqued and revised ad infinitum. This infinite openness of mind through faith in what reason cannot comprehend but is forever seeking to comprehend (“fides quarens intellectum”), in effect opens, in Anselm’s ontological proof, into an intellectual realizing or enacting of God.48 This realizing of God as infinite openness of mind needs to be carried through not only on an intellectual level but also in a variety of pragmatic ways. And this is where Habermas’s theory of communicative reason serves as guide to rethinking revelation as infinite communicative openness—as unrestricted dialogical openness and even as openness to a transcendent Other. Habermas’s robust confidence in reason is salutary, but I believe that this endlessly resourceful reason must open itself toward what can best be understood as revelation—first, but not only, in the phenomenological sense of manifestation of what truly is. This, of course, involves reason in an act of self-abnegation. It is not that revelation has any extra content beyond reason that would be a necessary supplement to it. Rather, reason, to fully realize itself, must be kept open to the infinite and indefinable that operates within it and yet is not comprehended by it. Reason must be willing to sacrifice any finite identity or definition of itself. Meister Eckhart expounded just such a notion of reason as unlimited, infinite intellectus.49 He conceived it as the divine nature itself and as strictly Nothing in terms of finite objects. Reason, self-reflected all the way through to its own limits, must conceive itself in this unlimited way. But it cannot 48. Anselm, Proslogion, chapter 2. See, further, Karl Barth, Fides quaerens intellectum: Anselms Beweis der Existenz Gottes im Zusammenhang seines theologischen Programms (1931; repr., Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1981), and Jean-Luc Marion, “L’argument ontologique relève-t-il de l’ontologie?” in L’argomento ontologico, ed. Marco M. Olivetti (Padua: CEDAM, 1990), 43–70. 49. See his Questiones Parisiensis 1, in Master Eckhart: Parisian Questions and Prologues, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1974), together with John Caputo, “The Nothingness of the Intellect in Meister Eckhart’s ‘Parisian Questions,’ ” The Thomist 39 (1975): 85–115.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    perhaps do this on its own. It needs to be challenged from outside itself— or rather, these boundaries of within and without need to be broken down altogether. Hence the necessity for transcendence not just “from within” (the type of transcendence that Habermas embraces50): a transcendence from without—and ultimately one which confounds this very dichotomy—is also necessary. Habermas understands reason as communicative, as essentially embodied, culturally embedded, and historically situated. He does not see it as necessarily open to a theological dimension, to the Other in the form of an other of humanity. For Habermas, we must place our confidence simply in the human community and its potential for reasonable, fair action tending toward the emancipation of all. Reason is this purely human resource, and it must be defended against the kinds of thinking that undermine it as such. According to Habermas, postmodern thinkers such as Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, and even Adorno all veer into discourses that exempt themselves from rigorous rational grounding of their claims to validity (“Geltungsansprüche”) and are therefore to be refused. Literary discourse, as well as talk of revelation and theological faith, by evading this rational accountability, disqualify themselves, in Habermas’s judgment, from laying claim to universal validity.51 For Habermas, rational argument aimed at unforced agreement from others—communicative reason—is the indispensable basis for enabling a just society to come about. Apocalyptic visions and pronouncements do not, apparently, come from this source of human good; they may even interfere with its undistorted operation and growth toward fulfillment. There is, accordingly, no room in this vision for a faith open to apocalypse. Revelation seems to invoke a higher authority that is not bound to justify its claims on rational grounds and thus threatens the whole process 50. See “Transzendenz von innen, Transzendenz ins Diesseits,” in Jürgen Habermas, Texte und Kontexte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 127–56, translated as “Transcendence from Within, Transcendence in this World,” in Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 67–94. 51.  Habermas takes Derrida and Adorno to task in chapters 7 and 5, respectively, and faces off against Foucault in chapter 9 of Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue of a rational adjudication based on unforced agreement through mutual understanding. Habermas believes that secular reason is the necessary presupposition for the culture of recognition of others and for a universal dialogue of cultures. The founding principles (Grundsätze) for a “culture of recognition” are for him derived from “the secularized world of moral and rational-juridical universalism” (Kultur der Anerkennung, die ihre Grundsätze der säkularisierten Welt des moralischen und vernunftrechtlichen Universalismus entlehnt).52 He does recognize how deeply philosophy is indebted to the Judeo-Christian tradition and its fundamental qualification of Greek philosophical premises, for example, to its sense of the infinite worth of the particular individual as a creation of God. Nevertheless, he maintains that theology itself must borrow the philosophical concepts of the European Enlightenment in order to think through its claims for universal justice and respect for individuals in their practically sacred singularity. And yet these concepts themselves, he admits, in turn derive once again from the covenant community of the Bible. So why privilege a secular culture as the basis for dialogue? This turns out to be more of a personal prejudice than a philosophical necessity. It is a preference that will go over well among modern, Western, secular intellectuals, but not among those who deeply believe in theological world views. Habermas insists that communicative action deals with “criticizable validity claims” (kritisierbaren Geltungsansprüche). However, I am suggesting that there are some claims which do not allow themselves simply to be subjected to criticism, but that also question the claim of criticism itself as a culturally specific discursive form. To see this is to recognize something not reducible to cultural terms, something of the nature of an unlimited openness of mind that can serve as a basis for critique even of criticism itself, in whatever historically determinate, culturally specific form criticism may take. Such openness is achieved recursively through unlimited self-criticism, and through recognition of one’s own insuperable limita52.  Jürgen Habermas, “Israel oder Athen: Wem gehört die anamnetische Vernunft?” in Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen Ausdruck: Philosophische Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), 110, translated as “Israel or Athens: Where Does Anamnestic Reason Belong?” in Habermas, Religion and Rationality, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 129–38.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    tions. It takes such self-negation as a basis for positive openness toward what even criticism cannot adjudicate in any authoritative manner. By this exemplary act, such a self-critical openness aims not to coerce but, at most, to influence others to enter and dwell in a like-minded openness. Through recognition of the relativity of all our own renderings even of purportedly absolute values or revelations, the parties to dialogue can agree to aim at a truth and justice that involves and binds them all beyond any finite, human determinations of such principles. Recognition of an unnegotiable absolute, of a dimension of transcendence, or at least of the legitimate possibility of believing in such a thing, is crucial in order to relativize all positive, finite formulations and conventions that are otherwise bound to be proposed as universal and therefore as coercing agreement. One’s own self-critique sets an example and enables others likewise to relinquish their absolutes—or rather their particular interpretations and mediations of what they hold to be absolute. This release can be motivated by a certain faith that our absolutes will return to us in terms that are no longer narrowly our own. It is through a mediation with others, whose starting-point is different from ours, that we will rediscover our own groundbeliefs as they are reflected back to us in a somewhat different guise. In this manner, agreement can be sought in the form of mutual, free acceptance of plausible interpretations of a possibly absolute basis for dialogue that no one party or discourse can definitively comprehend or appropriate. Habermas recognizes that any attempt to achieve rational consensus may always meet with dissension. The Lebenswelt (lifeworld) is supposed to solve this problem by providing resources for reaching agreement in the shape of common assumptions that go unquestioned even by opposing forms of conceptualization and argument within a given culture. Habermas appeals to the Lebenswelt as the basis of unproblematic, shared assumptions and know-how (as opposed to knowing that) of a pre-propositional nature, a “forgotten foundation of meaning” (vergessenen Sinnesfundament).53 The Lebenswelt is what can seal up the otherwise ever-threatening risk of dissent (“Dissensrisiko”). Still, the fact that only members of a given culture share the same Lebenswelt leaves the problem of how to es53.  Jürgen Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken: Philosophische Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 85.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue tablish rational agreement with members of other cultures whose unconscious assumptions may not be concordant with our own. Habermas argues that there is a pre-reflexive form of implicit knowing in natural language.54 This is a universal rationality. However, it is still a positive content peculiar to a specific shared language and culture. In reality, only the negative theological matrix of indeterminacy—requiring the relinquishing or at least relativization of all verbal forms and images—stretches beyond and between specific cultures and their expressions, and thereby forms the condition of sense that can be shared in common without limit.55 This is a dimension whose awesome mystery and power has likely never been better expressed than by the revelations of world religions. These revelations employ an abundance of metaphorical language, but, understood in negative theological terms, what they reveal—by concealing and re-veiling it in images—is what cannot be linguistically determined at all. What, really, is revelation? Understood in light of negative theology, revelation tends toward and must finally realize itself as pure potency devoid of all positive content of representations of the object of religious revelation.56 The critical force of negative theology undermines the adequacy of all representations. Negative theology, in fact, belongs especially to periods of critical reflection pursuant to the creative bursts in which religious revelations, generally rich in representations, originate. Jewish Kabbalism, Christian Mysticism, and Islamic Sufism, as reinterpretations of the Pentateuch, the New Testament, and the Qur’an, respectively, are fruits of such critical reflection on the insuperable inadequacy of all representations to the divine transcendence. Neoplatonic philosophy of the Hellenistic age is the historical cradle of this type of thinking. Neoplatonic philosophers 54.  Ibid., 69. 55.  In a similar spirit, Michael Kühnlein, in “Aufhebung der Religion durch Versprachlichung? Eine religionsphilosophische Untersuchung des Rationalitätskonzeptes von Jürgen Habermas” (Theologie und Philosophie 71 [1996]: 390–409), presses Habermas’s thinking toward this limit of an “extra-discursive moment” (diskursexternes Moment) with “unmistakably religious connotations” (unverkennbar religiöse Konnotationen) (398). 56. An excellent history of concepts of revelation viewed from the standpoint of negative theology is offered in Gregor Maria Hoff, Offenbarungen Gottes? Eine Problemgeschichte (Regensburg: Pustet-Verlag, 2007).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    such as Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, and Damascius follow in the wake of the Greek Enlightenment, and reinterpret in its light Greek mystery traditions, including the Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries, the Chaldean Oracles, the Corpus Hermeticum, and the Pythagorean Golden Verses. This philosophical negative theology, born of apophatic reflection in a critical vein, gives decisive impulses to the negative theologies that evolve in each of the monotheistic traditions.57 Negative theology flourishes in highly reflective and critical ages of culture and offers a path for reinterpreting religious revelations that, in the course of time and reflection, typically have been downgraded to myths. It shows these myths to be reminders of a religious revelation that necessarily transcends all representations produced even by this revelation itself. Reflection of this type was vigorous in Habermas’s own historical context—for example, in the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno and in the negative theologies of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.58 These powerful precedents manifestly influence his thinking, though not without causing considerable tensions within it. Habermas, nevertheless, pursues his program for a rational ordering of society in continuity with the ideals of the Enlightenment taken as an unfinished, rather than a failed, project.59 Although part of the agenda of the Enlightenment was to supplant revelation by reason, it must be emphasized that reason and revelation are not finally opposed. From within the heart of the German Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing saw human culture and education as carrying forward the work of theological revelation, rather than as abandoning or undermining it. He maintained that “education is revelation 57.  I have sketched the historical lineaments of this apophatic tradition in the introductory essay to On What Cannot Be Said: Apophatic Discourses in Philosophy, Religion, Literature, and the Arts, vol. 1 (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 58. See Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch, and Modern German Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (1985): 78–124. 59. See Habermas’s programmatic lecture “Die Moderne—Ein unvollendetes Projekt,” in Kleine politische Schriften (I–IV) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), 444–64, translated as “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” in Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity, ed. Maurizio d’Entreves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue for the single individual: and revelation is education that the human race has undergone and still undergoes” (Erziehung ist Offenbarung, die dem einszelnen Menschen geschieht: und Offenbarung ist Erziehung, die dem Menschengeschlechte geschehen ist und noch geschieht). The training of natural and rational capabilities achieves essentially the same thing that revelation does, although less quickly: “Revelation gives the human race nothing that human reason, left to its own devices, would not come to on its own, but it gave and gives humans the most important things of this kind earlier” (Also gibt auch die Offenbarung dem Menschengeschlechte nichts, worauf die menschliche Vernunft, sich selbst überlassen, nicht auch kommen würde: sondern sie gab und gibt ihm die wichtigsten dieser Dinge nur früher).60 The convergence and eventual identity of reason and revelation in a “Mythologie der Vernunft” (mythology of reason) was indeed the vision of the original outline of German idealism that was formulated by Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin, the thinking they shared in common already as students at the Evangelischer Stift in Tübingen.61 It was envisaged throughout his life by Johann Georg Hamann (1730–88) in a perspective based on language, such as has again become crucial since the linguistic turn of philosophy in the twentieth century.62 Already Hamann began to turn the Enlightenment’s faculties of critique against itself in questioning the opposition between faith and reason. He argued that both have a common basis in experience and therewith in language as the basis for all hu60.  Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts” (1780), in Lessings Werke (Salzburg: Bergland-Buch, 1964), 1016. For a detailed history emphasizing efforts to reconcile reason and revelation in the Enlightenment, see Max Seckler, Aufklärung und Offenbarung, in vol. 21 of Christlicher Glaube in moderner Gesellschaft, ed. Franz Böckle, Franz-Xaver Kaufmann, and Karl Rahner (Freiburg: Herder, 1980). 61. The crucial document, “Das älteste Systemprogramm des deutschen Idealismus” (1796), can be found in Frühe Schriften, in G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 1:234–36. 62. See, for example, Johann Georg Hamann, KONXOMPAX: Fragmente einer apokryphischen Sibylle über apokalyptische Mysterien, in vol. 5 of Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Herder, 1949–57).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    man powers of knowing whatsoever.63 In conceiving reason as language, he was well on the way toward a pragmatic position like Habermas’s, as well as toward postmodern language philosophies. Language is the common mother of reason and of theological revelation: “Sprache, die Mutter der Vernunft und der Offenbarung, ihr A und V.” (Language, the mother of reason and of revelation, their alpha and omega).64 These two offspring of language separate into enemy brothers only through misrecognition of their irrevocable kinship. Such is the perspective underlying my vision of apocalyptic revelation as operative in poetic language. I differ from Habermas in that I believe that communicative reason cannot understand itself in opposition to theological revelation and poetic discourse but needs to find its most crucial challenges precisely in dialogue with them. Habermas has shown himself to be open to and engaged in dialogue with a wide spectrum of philosophies and even theosophies. But he still wishes to define his Enlightenment ideal in terms of argumentative reason and as secular—as non-theological or “methodologically atheist,” albeit no longer “pure” reason in the Kantian sense. I am urging rather that we recognize what reason cannot rationalize as fundamental to what gives it its character—which is achieved only when reason is broken open. This is a reason that can recognize God—at least as its own Other, as exceeding and yet conditioning reason absolutely. What, after all, is reason? My claim is that if “reason” goes deep enough into its own (self-posited) ground, it discovers “revelation,” in the sense of an unlimited openness that can be most profoundly interpreted as theological. In effect, what I am suggesting is that apocalyptic revelation is essentially communicative reason—that is, reason as the power of unrestricted communication. Unconditional communicative openness is the 63. See, especially, Estetica in nuce (1796), and Des Ritters von Rosencreuz letzte Willensmeynung über den göttlichen und menschlichen Ursprung der Sprache (1772). See, further, Josef Nadler, Johann Georg Hamann: Der Zeuge des Corpus mysticum (Salzburg: Oggo Müller, 1949), particularly 320–64 on “Vernunft und Offenbarung.” 64. This formulaic phrase from Hamann’s 1785 letter to Jacobi is quoted by Walter Benjamin in his essay, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen” (1916), in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 2:1.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue nature of reason and of revelation alike. Whatever their represented content, it is in giving this up in the encounter with others and (perhaps indistinguishably) with the unnameable Other that the ultimate act of communicative rationality and of revelation is consummated. Revelation, taken to the extreme of apocalypse and understood in terms of negative theology, I submit, must likewise be stripped of positive content and become nothing but the openness to revelation. This very openness, moreover, is reason. At this limit, which is “apocalypse,” therefore, reason and revelation converge and may even coincide. Of course, this is a revelation without finite bounds of representation, and it is a reason that has been exploded as a self-possessed human faculty. It is now open to transcendence beyond itself—just as in its original disclosure among the Greeks, especially in Heraclitus and Parmenides, to whom Logos first revealed itself as universal and (indissociably) divine. For Heraclitus, Logos was revealed as the divine presence in all things that rendered possible a commonality and indeed universality of thought transcending all particular opinions of individuals. Sextus Empiricus records that Heraclitus discovered the universality of the Logos as a divine principle present in every rational soul: “Reason that he [Heraclitus] makes the criterion of truth is not any reason whatever but the common and divine [tØn koinØn kaÁ ue¡on]” (Adversus mathematicos 7.127). This is the “common and divine reason by participation in which we become rational” (7.131).65 It is through negating the personal opinions of the individual and apprehending cosmic order and principles that we make our reason conform to divine reason. Chalcideus states that Heraclitus, concordantly with the Stoics, “connects our reason with the divine reason that governs and orders the things of the world” (rationem nostram con divine ratione conectit; In Timaeum 251). Heraclitus’s fragments, moreover, formulate the universal divine principle of Logos in precisely negative theological terms: “The one and only Wise wishes and wishes not to be called by the name of Zeus” (Diels B.32), indicating that even the highest human name for God is not adequate and is used ambivalently. This explains why all characterizations in language of the divine are contradictory: God is day-night, winter-summer, war-peace, satiety-hunger (Diels B.67). 65. Citations are from Hermann Diels, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, ed. Walther Kranns, vol. 1 (Zürich: Weidmann, 1951); my translation from the Greek.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    In a similar spirit, Parmenides, in his poem Peri Physis (c. 500 b.c.), section 1, enframes his philosophemes concerning the uniqueness of Being and its identity with Thought by an initiatic chariot ride to the portals of the goddesses Diké and Themis, representing human and divine justice, respectively. Both of the corresponding faculties, reason and revelation, are driven ineluctably by their own intrinsic energy and impetus to the point where all is disclosed in its final truth. In more figured terms, reason itself, as discovered by the Greeks, is born as a divine revelation. In my theory of dialogue as the medium of this disclosure, then, reason and revelation are alike boundless and open into the discourse of the divine Logos: as such, they aspire toward and converge upon the total disclosure of apocalypse. I attempt to develop this thesis concretely in dialogue with Jürgen Habermas as the thinker who has been most insightful on the nature of dialogue in the tradition of the Enlightenment, which is apparently at the antipodes with respect to the apocalyptic tradition from which my own reflections hail. Habermas has developed his theory of dialogue on the basis of insight into reason as communicative in its innermost nature. Reason, for Habermas, has no metaphysical postulates or purely transcendental structures, but is communicative through and through, revealed in practical action and communication.66 Rather than possessing an essential truth of a metaphysical nature, reason is essentially open to intersubjective validation. No positive definition in terms of explicit rational criteria can be adequate to what rational discussion and argument reveal to be true (“wahr”) and truthful (“wahrhaftig”) by communication directed toward mutual understanding in a circle of communication that opens itself without limit. This reason, open to an “unlimited communicative society” (unbegrenzte Kommunikationsgemeinschaft), constitutes the “unconditionality” (Unbedingtheit) that for Habermas supplants any supra-temporal, metaphysical type of unconditioned transcendence.67 Habermas’s theory of communicative reason maintains, furthermore, that there is, beyond linguistic competence, an innate competence for communicating that is universal and therefore also the basis for bind66. See Habermas, Nachmetaphysisches Denken, particularly chapter 4: “Handlungen, Sprechakte, sprachlich vermittelte Interaktionen und Lebenswelt.” 67.  Habermas, “Zu Max Horkheimers Satz: Einen unbedingten Sinn zu retten ohne Gott ist eitel,” in Texte und Kontexte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 124.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue ing rational principles. This competence need not be innate like Noam Chomsky’s grammatical competence. It can develop from experience in society. But it is nonetheless universal and binding for all human beings. It has, therefore, a certain normative content, and Habermas wishes to derive his philosophy as an ethics of discourse from this content. This seems in some sense to be an extension of the Kantian project of defining synthetic a priori principles that would be conditions of possibility of experience and therefore constitute necessary and universal knowledge. Ultimately, Habermas proposes that reason can refound society through its own powers of self-reflection and critique. But in so doing, he is liable to fall prey to an idolatry of the social. I maintain that this selfsufficiency of reason, even when redefined as communicative reason, is illusory unless reason opens to a ground that transcends it—and not only “from within,” but in a way that it cannot control or encompass. Although Habermas tries to found reason as a positive paradigm and reliable basis for dialogue, the most challenging sort of dialogue, I contend, begins with recognition of its “impossibility”—of barriers that are rationally insuperable, that, in other words, no humanly defined formula or principle may be adequate to remove. Then the unconditional openness that imposes no determinate rational framework makes truly open dialogue possible for the first time. Habermas’s idea of reason embraces a dialogue among diverse rationalities. But it is only when we fully recognize the impossibility of dialogue and glimpse the need for something else beyond ourselves and all our own solutions, in effect, for an apocalypse, that a breaking-open of dialogue becomes paradoxically possible. The shattering of every set formula and framework for dialogue first opens the Opening in which genuine dialogue can occur. This moment of shattering of our world or discursive order is what I am calling “apocalypse.” The word “apocalypse” signals that the world order as we understand it collapses around us.68 Such a collapse is precipitated through the attempt to communicate with the incommensurable. When we do not know how to proceed, then a progression beyond 68.  “The apocalyptic element involves a quantum leap from present to future, from exile to freedom. This leap necessarily brings with it the complete destruction and negation of the old order” (Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse,” 86).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    our impasses may become possible again. This is the necessary “theological,” or more precisely negative theological, moment in human dialogue. It will be pursued further, as it is revealed especially by poetic literature, in the essays that follow in this volume. Paradoxically, the moment of its (rational) impossibility renders (radical) dialogue possible for the first time. Habermas is profoundly right that language is founded on a search for common understanding. This very seeking is itself constitutive of human reason and discourse. What he ignores is that the idea of reason as intrinsically dialogical breaks it open to an Other that cannot be constrained or encompassed and that leaves reason gaping open infinitely.69 It is at its breaking-point that reason can be illuminated and in fact become a locus of revelation. When reason breaks open to the Other of reason, when something becomes compelling that reason cannot itself account for, this opens a space for revelation and even apocalypse. The bindingness of such a supra-rational instance as these notions envisage is its communicability. Binding in this sense is what other minds and cultures are able and willing to embrace, even without explicit, logical entailments that are necessary by some prior principle or logic that is already in place and recognized as authoritative. For then there must be something driving conviction from beyond the reach of reason. There is, moreover, an unconditional freedom at work in such rationally unaccountable choices and beliefs adopted by human beings even as the ultimate moral or religious frame of reference for their ways of life. This level of freedom, as an inalienable human capacity for interpretation of the whole of existence from its ground up, constitutes a transcultural sensitivity for what lies beyond any culture’s linguistic formulations and conceptual schemes. Habermas insists that agreement has to be rationally founded, that grounds or reasons have to be given for the beliefs that are adhered to. This is what makes them binding and universal. But is there a sharp distinc69.  Habermas does endeavor to recognize an Other of reason, for example, in his discussion of Hartmut Böhme and Gernot Böhme’s Das andere der Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), which postulates “a comprehensive reason” (eine komprehensive Vernunft) (352) beyond Kant’s that would embrace Swedenborg as his nocturnal twin brother (see section II of Habermas’s “Ein anderer Ausweg aus der Subjektphilosophie—kommunikative vs. subjektzentrierte Vernunft,” chapter 11 of Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue tion between grounds that are rational and ones that are not? Beliefs about one’s world as a whole, its permanence or transience, its moral value and purpose or else its arbitrariness, may not be rational in any obvious or average sense. And yet such beliefs may be practically binding for individuals living within specific communities of belief. Habermas himself invokes only a pragmatic criterion of bindingness—basically, what it is good for us to believe.70 Of course, rationality must also be adherent to the world. We cannot agree about just anything and call that rational. Rational beliefs have to be testable, and in that sense verifiable. Yet, again, such beliefs may not be epistemologically separable from the other sort of beliefs that may not be in practice verifiable, at least not in this world. What all this means is that rationality is part of the question and not the answer to the general question of what beliefs can be binding for all people. It is impossible to exclude from the discussion a priori apparent irrationalists like apocalypticists without committing a certain violence that is not rationally justified, except in a limited, reductive, parochial sense of “rational.” Unrestricted rationality must remain always open to redefinition through open dialogue and cannot be defined in advance so as to serve as a stable foundation. To press further the dilemmas of defining rationality, we must ask: How can Habermas presuppose that there is any kind of a standard of argumentative discourse in relation to which discourses can be measured as to their rationality? And what gives argumentative discourse its presumed natural advantage? Discursive speech is not an absolute or a given; it is not even one with itself. It consists in a diversity of forms. What holds them all together and makes them recognizable as discursive speech does not as such appear in them at all. This common sense is the undefined basis of sense for all definitions of determinate forms of discourse. It becomes manifest only in agreement, which may not have a basis that can be determined in any prior sense as “rational.” Karl Jaspers describes such an invisible basis for belief that is common and even binding as “philosophical faith” (philosophische Glaube). 70.  Habermas’s pragmatism is modeled on that of Charles Sanders Peirce rather than that of William James. Peirce shows how everyday communication appeals to ideals that claim validity transcending specific contexts. His “archeology of the sign” suggests how time is structured through the presence of a signifier bonding the impression of an object experienced in the past with possible future recognitions (see “Transzendenz von innen, Transzendenz ins Diesseits,” 146).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    He describes it in terms very close to those I am proposing, of reason as limitless communication coinciding with a revelation of truth. His vision is based, furthermore, on the temporality of human existence as it was disclosed especially by Heidegger: Reason requires limitless communication; it is itself total will to communication. Since in time we cannot have truth as the one eternal truth in our objective possession, and since existence is possible only together with others, it comes to itself only with the existence of others, therefore communication is the shape of the becoming revealed of truth in time. . . . For here both propositions are true: truth is what binds us—and: truth has its origin in communication.71 (Vernunft fordert grenzenlose Kommunikation, sie ist selbst der totale Kommunikationswille. Weil wir in der Zeit die Wahrheit als die eine ewige Wahrheit nicht im objektiven Besitz haben können, und weil das Dasein nur mit anderem Dasein möglich ist, Existenz nur mit anderer Existenz zu sich selbst kommt, so ist Kommunikation die Gestalt des Offenbarwerdens der Wahrheit in der Zeit. . . . Denn hier gelten die beiden Sätze: Wahrehit ist, was uns verbindet—und: in der Kommunikation hat Wahrheit ihren Ursprung.)

The unrepresentable potency of absolute truth or apocalypse that is the common goal of reason and revelation alike is manifest simply as the unlimited ability and will of human beings to communicate. It is not essentially a content. It is apprehended more accurately as pure communicativity. Accordingly, the validity of such apocalyptic truth depends purely on its being communicable. This very communicability becomes the binding force that forms community. The openness to what can be conveyed to and shared by others—communicative reason—has normative value, but not in virtue of any definable norms. It can be verified only a posteriori— as if it were the work of an invisible hand of providence. Through history, reason is revealed in ways that cannot quite be rationalized. Moreover, reason is not in control of its own criteria. In a dialogical application, where it is infinitely open, what is capable of producing agreement must come as a revelation—that is, not as the property and deliberate production of any one party, but in and through the unlimited openness of all parties to each and to every Other, and therewith to what is beyond them all. Radical critical theory tends to undermine reason as a self-sufficient faculty, just as radical negative theology undermines all supposedly ad71.  Karl Jaspers, Der philosophische Glaube (München: Piper, 1974), 40.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue equate conceptualizations of God. The founding figure of the Frankfurt school, Max Horkheimer, was constantly thrown back upon theological convictions that for many seemed to contradict or undermine his secular, Marxist, and rationalist project.72 In a way congenial for Western, secularminded intellectuals, Habermas blunts this theological edge of reason itself in rejecting Horkheimer’s theological impulses and his skepticism regarding reason (“Vernunftskeptizismus”).73 But this comes at the price of an adequate understanding of Horkheimer and, even more importantly, of our being able to comprehend theologically radical cultures and particularly the challenge of Islam. In its most thoroughgoing and consistent form, critical theory shows us how reason opens to its own abyss. It is the aporetic moment in dialogue—when it breaks down and breaks open—that is the enabling condition for dialogue of the more radically necessary sort for which we cannot dictate the premises. Reason is being challenged today by the need to pursue dialogues aimed at understanding and agreement with others who ostensibly hold some other principle besides what we recognize as reason to be more authoritative than reason itself. They seem to have their reasons for subordinating reason itself to a supra-rational, theological revelation. We can question whether this is reasonable, but we cannot appeal to any fixed notion of reason in doing so. The open search itself is the form that reason must take. Communicative openness is the very nature of reason. Being true to this communicative vocation of reason cannot but take us into genuine dialogue with theological discourses and belief—those of other cultures as well as our own. We need to endeavor to understand anew how theological belief can still be compelling, even after the full realization of rational enlightenment—indeed as its most challenging result. The fact is that whether we understand theological premises to be necessary or even possible as premises for valid beliefs about ourselves and the world, other people do. We have to start with a conception of human 72. See Max Horkheimer and Hubo Staudinger, Humanität und Religion: Briefwechsel und Gespräch (Würzburg: Johann Wilhelm Maumann Verlag, 1974). 73.  Habermas, “Zu Max Horkheimers Satz: Einen unbedingten Sinn zu retten ohne Gott ist eitel,” 110–26, translated as “To Seek to Salvage an Unconditional Meaning Without God is a Futile Undertaking: Reflections on a Remark of Max Horkheimer,” in Religion and Rationality, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    reason that admits the presumptive rationality of such an outlook. Whether reason can rely on itself or needs to open to a higher authority than its own cannot be resolved as a matter of fact and prior to dialogue. Whether or not this is true cannot perhaps be settled finally at all. The very openness to the question of a higher authority than we can rationally comprehend is what is dialogically necessary, both in a pragmatic and in an ethical sense. What is particularly significant about Habermas is his attempt to think reason as communicatively open. Not any abstract essence, but only what is communicable and enables agreement is in principle rational. This makes reason a normative principle of a sort that cannot be positively circumscribed and stated. There is something transcendent about it. And it tends toward an infinite openness of mind. However, Habermas conceives all this in purely “procedural” (prozeduralistisch) terms, as if a formally fair procedure could be neutral as to worldviews and cultures.74 He excludes theology and revelation as claiming unreasonable prerogatives, whereas rational procedures, he supposes, are universal. But this is mistaken. Genuine impartiality and openness is not just a matter of a neutral procedure, but of a deeper critique in which the authority of reason and reasonable procedures can be questioned and must be relinquished in order to let even the premises of rationality emerge from dialogue in a truly unconstrained and unprejudiced way. In my view, negative theology offers a model and opens the deepest kind of insight into this type of self-critique. This is where I differ from Habermas, who thinks that reason must guard itself against turning theological. Still, the difference may in the end be only that between thinking theology as a set of fixed representations and think74. Others have uncovered this limit to Habermas’s thinking from an ethical rather than a theological point of view. Steven Hendley, in From Communicative Action to the Face of the Other: Levinas and Habermas on Language, Obligation, and Community (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2000) follows Charles Taylor in bringing out the shortcomings of Habermas’s merely procedural understanding of communicative reason for a discourse ethics. Habermas attempts to be fair to all parties to dialogue without prejudice regarding any substantive interpretation of the good such as that supplied by Levinas with his notion of infinite obligation vis-à-vis the Face of the Other. Both Levinas and Habermas discern an inherently moral dimension to language that is binding. But Habermas sees only procedural imperatives enjoining impartiality, not the ethical relation to the “height” of the other, and certainly no theological exigencies.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue ing it negatively as the critique of all representations—exposing them all as idolatrous. I agree with Habermas’s aspirations toward the universal and normative. It is crucial to not abandon these ideals of Enlightenment thought. However, Habermas’s constructive project, like Kant’s, is based on too narrow an interpretation of reason. Habermas widens the concept of reason such that it is no longer “pure” in the Kantian sense, and rather realizes itself in and with its other in the act, or rather inter-action, of communication. And this is very promising. But he does not open the very structure and method of reason to being determined through this process of interaction. He still operates with a distinction between the rational and the irrational that precedes the interactive process of dialogue and the choices that must emerge from it without prior justification on rational grounds. A theological theory of communicative reason is more radical in opening reason to its hidden grounds in “revelation.” Revelation, too, is not self-evident, but rather is open to infinite mediation with manifestations of reason, as well as with what appears as unreason. Habermas cannot fully admit that what communicative reason communicates at the deepest level is nothing but pure communicativity itself. This pure potency without stateable content evades all positive conception in the same way as does the God of negative theology (or, at any rate, “das ganz Andere” of Horkheimer and Adorno). This purely negative conception of what enables human community was linked with the originally universalistic vision of the first generation of thinkers forming the Frankfurt school of Critical Theory. It grew out of the secular apocalyptic messianism of Benjamin and Bloch during the First World War. Benjamin, for example, thought on the basis of “the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word.”75 This is a word of language before it was debased to a mere means of communication of some content of thought (the “bourgeois conception of language”). This word is, for Benjamin, in its very essence, nothing other than “pure communication.” For Habermas, such an understanding is not progressive, but this indicates once again where he is himself at odds with the deeper inspiration of the school of Critical Theory out of which his own thinking emerges. 75.  Benjamin, “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” 2:149.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    Habermas’s idea of communicative reason is revolutionary, and yet not radical enough, to the extent that he still wants to define it in oppositional terms over against revelation and poetry. Habermas adheres to the Enlightenment ideal of argumentative reason, but this itself is a drastic narrowing of the Enlightenment that included, as has already been pointed out, theological thinkers like Hamann. Hamann was an inspiration to Benjamin in his esoteric theory of language as revelation, as immediate presentation of absolute reality—apocalypse—and not indirect, conventional, arbitrary signifying by signs. It is worth comparing also Vico, another thinker who shows how “enlightenment” is originally inextricable from theological revelation.76 This other Enlightenment (reacting against the Cartesian and the Kantian versions) demonstrates that reason must open up to its own infinity, as already demonstrated in the works of Eckhart and the pre-Socratics, rather than being conceived in opposition to theological insight and poetic vision, as is the case in modern understandings of reason, which are by and large modeled on science and technology. The first-generation thinkers of Critical Theory were critical of this latter concept of reason as leading to a mechanistic society in which reason is reduced to its instrumental applications. Habermas is alive to this risk and wishes to restore to reason its normative capacity within a discourse ethics. He is reluctant to write off religion, in the style of more aggressively secular types of Enlightenment thinking, as an outmoded use of reason.77 But he does not really embrace the inherently theological use of reason as infinitely self-critical and as poetic beyond all narrowing to rationally explicit criteria of judgment. Habermas has engaged in recurrent, probing discussions with theologians that have gradually induced him to qualify and complicate his views.78 Nevertheless, his program remains ideally one of substituting for terms such as “reconciliation” and “solidarity”—with their religious seman76. See, particularly, the sections on “Metafisica Poetica,” “Logica Poetica,” and “Morale Poetica” in book 2 of Vico’s Princìpi di scienza nuova (1744). 77. See, most recently, Habermas’s Glauben und Wissen: Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels 2001 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). 78.  In addition to his own essays collected in Religion and Rationality, ed. Mendieta, see Habermas und die Theologie: Beiträge zur theologischen Rezeption, Diskussion und Kritik der Theorie kommunikativen Handelns, ed. Edmund Arens (Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag, 1989).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue tics—the secular, rational terms of communicative action and discourse ethics. He sometimes comes very near to recognizing that such translation is as much a realization as an erasure of theological content; he has been induced to become more and more accepting of this type of insight through his dialogues with theologians.79 Still, however, in the spirit of the Enlightenment and of Hegelian Aufhebung, or negation and absorption of religion by philosophy, Habermas believes that a communications theory is destined to offer the final explanation of authority in society, supplanting that offered by theological revelation in previous ages. “God” is ultimately “a name for a communicative structure, one which obliges human beings, on pain of loss of their humanity, to rise above their contingent, empirical nature, inasmuch as they encounter one another mediately, that is, in relation to an objectivity that they themselves are not” (“Gott wird zum Namen für eine kommunikative Struktur, welche die Menschen bei Strafe des Verlustes ihrer Humanität zwingt, ihre zufällige empirische Natur zu überschreiten, indem sie einander mittelbar, nämlich über ein Objektives, das sie nicht selber sind, begegnen”).80 This is a subtle formulation, but it still entails reduction of the meaning of “God” to some social structure or phenomenon, rather than opening social reality to the infinity of meaning(s) it has or can take on in open communication among any and all parties to dialogue. This formulation endeavors to distill God into discourse, in accordance with the program of “Versprachlichung”—that is, of “linguistification” of the sacred. As such, it is an attempt to supplant revelation by reason. Such was, in essence, the project of the more militant, anticlerical strains of the eighteenth-century movements of Enlightenment, signally that of the philosophes of the 79. See Hermann Düringer, Universale Vernunft und partikularer Glaube: Eine theologische Auswertung des Werkes von Jürgen Habermas (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), especially Part I on religion in Habermas’s work and his replies to theologians Johann B. Metz and Helmut Peukert, among others. 80.  Habermas, Legitimationsprobleme im Spätkapitalismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), 167. Cf., however, Zur Rekonstruktion des Historischen Materialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 101: “God indicates only approximately a structure of communication, which forces participants, on the foundation of the reciprocal acknowledgment of their identity, to transcend the contingency of a merely external existence.”

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    French Lumières. It often entailed an ideology that erected reason into a fortress power on high, so as to usurp the absoluteness and authority that had been wielded by the ruling classes in the name of “God.” Such pseudotheological authority was used to inculcate fear, and abused as an instrument of coercion. This discourse, naturally, succumbed to the challenge of rational critique. But enlightened critique itself, by usurping absolute authority in the name of another human instrument or function, namely, instrumental reason, was also in need eventually of being deposed. Critical Theory has long been distinguished by the depth of its negative-theological insight into the wholly Other, das ganz Andere that transcends all discourses and baffles them.81 For Horkheimer, the fact “that we can say nothing of God” (daß wir über Gott eben nichts sagen können) is not only a Jewish article of faith; it is also “a decisive principle of critical theory” (ein entscheidender Grundsatz der Kritischen Theorie). He explains, “We cannot represent the Absolute; when we speak of the Absolute we cannot say much more than this: the world in which we live is relative” (Wir können das Absolute nicht darstellen, wir können, wenn wir vom Absoluten reden, eigentlich nicht viel mehr sagen als dies: Die Welt, in der wir leben, ist eine relative).82 We experience the negation of absoluteness in our mortal, compromise-rife, and pain-ridden existence, and precisely this gives us a relation (at least in desire and hope) to something absolute. The Frankfurt school, whose heritage Habermas assumes and develops but at the same time also delimits and compromises, emerged from the matrix of a negatively theological Jewish messianic utopianism. Eduardo Mendieta characterizes the latter as a “secular, apocalyptic, utopian and pessimistic messianism of the Jewish thinkers of the generation of 1914.”83 It is a theological apocalypticism that can only be discerned negatively. Adorno, for example, had the keenest sense of a Transcendence that staid and complacent verbal formulations cannot but travesty: 81. This phrase was given currency especially by Max Horkheimer (see Die Sehnsucht nach dem ganz Anderen: Ein Interview mit Kommentar von Hellmut Gumnior [Hamburg: Furche-Verlag, 1970]). 82.  Ibid., 57. 83.  Mendieta, introduction to Religion and Rationality, by Jürgen Habermas, 2. See, further, Mendieta’s introduction to The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers (New York: Routledge, 2005).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue Anyone who would pin down transcendence can rightly be charged—as, for example, by Karl Kraus—with lack of imagination, anti-intellectualism, and so with a betrayal of transcendence. (Wer Transzendenz dingfest macht, dem kann mit Recht, so wie von Karl Kraus, Phantasielosigkeit, Geistfeindschaft und in dieser Verrat and der Transzendenz vorgeworfen werden.)84

Adorno is acutely aware that any rational formulation of transcendence betrays it, but also that without this dimension of transcendence and, correlatively, of a prospect of redemption of existence, “the human spirit would become an illusion, and the finite, conditioned, merely existing subject would eventually be deified as carrier of the spirit” (schließlich das endliche, bedingte, bloß seiende Subjekt als Träger von Geist vergottet).85 Adorno is asking whether revelation, as an alternative to “immanence,” might not still be relevant in ways that contemporary culture is scarcely capable of recognizing. “Immanentism,” the utter denial of a possibility of radical transcendence such as theological revelation affirms, seems to have a stranglehold on the modern world, and especially on contemporary consumer culture, reducing it to a fetishism of the object as commodity. This is why the apocalyptic mentality can hardly help but appear untimely today and seem a mere regression. And hence also its supreme importance as contradicting the self-enclosed, disenchanted world of modernity subjected to natural law and utterly without transcendence. Of course, Adorno takes a position against any return to revealed religion (“Offenbarungsreligion”), but that is because he identifies it completely with its representations and turns away from the fact that the negative theological perspective actually is an integral part of this type of religion all through its history. Such a negative theological perspective relativizes representations as all inadequate to the transcendence of the divine and as in fact idolatrous if taken in and for themselves. Adorno realizes that revealed religion resembles what he himself is seeking to articulate in opposition to the objectification and commodification of reality he saw and abhorred all around him in the modern world. But by taking revealed religion literally and thereby identifying it with its representations, he is bound to dismiss it as offering no viable alternative. Revealed religion con84. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 392. 85.  Ibid.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    sists for him in apocalyptic and other-worldly types of imagery rather than in a search for what is incommensurable and “non-identical” (Adorno’s own preferred locution) in terms of the present world and any of the concepts it furnishes. Adorno concludes his essay on “Reason and Revelation” with the statement: “Therefore I see no possibility besides the greatest asceticism towards every belief in revelation, the strictest faithfulness to the interdiction of images, far beyond that which was once intended in the original place” (Darum sehe ich keine andere Möglichkeit als äusserste Askese jeglichem Offenbarungsglauben gegenüber, äusserste Treue zum Bilderverbot, weit über das hinaus, was es einmal an Ort und Stelle meinte).86 Curiously, this rejection of revelation is modeled on the revelation of God’s unrepresentability in the Bible (“Thou shalt make no graven images”; Exodus 20:4). Adorno suggests that he is going beyond what this prohibition meant when it was first handed down, that he is being more true to its intent than it perhaps intended. How so? By proscribing belief in God altogether? But this too has been built into the tradition: in terms of negative theology, any determinate, articulable belief must be abjured as mistaken and idolatrous. The third commandment, which is against using God’s name in vain (Exodus 20:7) and follows the second commandment against graven images, in effect proscribes all verbal formulations for the “divine” and “infinite.” Religious belief at this level can be nothing but the openness to belief. Adorno, in fact, knows this and objects that it reduces faith to nothing at all: If one would simply disregard every concrete, social-historically mediated determination and literally obey the Kierkegaardian dictum that Christianity is nothing other than a NB, a nota bene, that God once became man, even without that moment as such, as concrete and historical, entering into consciousness, then in the name of paradoxical purity revealed religion would decline into the wholly indeterminate, into a Nothing, that would hardly allow itself be distinguished from its liquidation. (Würde man aber schlechterdings von all jenen konkreten, gesellschaftlich-historisch vermittelten Bestimmungen absehen und buchstäblich dem Kierkegaard86. Adorno, “Vernunft und Offenbarung,” in Stichworte: Kritische Modelle 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 28.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue schen Diktum gehorchen, das Christentum sei nichts anderes als ein NB, das Nota Bene, daß einmal Gott Mensch geworden wäre, ohne daß jener Augenblick als solcher, nämlich als auch seinerseits konkrete geschichtlicher, ins Bewußtsein träte, so zerginge im Namen paradoxer Reinheit die Offenbarungsreligion ins ganz Unbestimmte, in ein Nichts, das von ihrer Liquidation kaum sich unterscheiden ließe.)87

But the relation to what we can apprehend only as Nothing is the very basis of faith in its inexhaustibly rich expressions, as understood from the perspective of negative theology. So what Adorno says may be accepted: revealed religion is not about establishing itself, but about its own liquidation.88 That is what Christ and his self-sacrifice on the Cross reveal. The final essay of this volume will pursue an interpretation of this kenotic self-sacrifice as the essence of authentic Christian religion in debate with Thomas Altizer. I will, however, against Altizer, emphasize the negative theological character of Christianity as also essential to its apocalyptic vision. I grant that this is not the most obvious way to take apocalypticism, which ostensibly tends to be positively assertive, but it may nonetheless define the deep and abiding import of apocalypse today as the final moment of Christian revelation. A dimension of apocalypse as communicative openness registers in the apocalyptic tradition particularly at moments of acute self-conscious reflection, such as that represented by Dante. I wish, therefore, before returning to Habermas and concluding this section, to point out that my concept of apocalypse as marking the limits of representation, and as opening to a specifically communicative dimension, does leave unmistakable traces at precisely this crucial juncture within the apocalyptic tradition and its texts. Dante evinces a clear sense of the inherently open, communicative nature of Christian revelation, for example, when he affirms that all miracles adduced as proving the faith are nothing as compared to the miracle that the Church’s proclamation has been believed and embraced the world over: “Se ’l mondo si rivolse al cristianesmo”    diss’io “sanza miracoli, quest’uno   è tal, che li altri non sono il centesmo.” (Paradiso 24.106–8) 87.  Ibid., 28. 88.  Jean-Luc Nancy, in La Déclosion (Déconstruction du christianisme, 1) (Paris: Galilée, 2005), argues this explicitly and specifically about Christianity.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    (“If the world turned to Christianity”    I said, “without miracles, this one   is such that the others are not one hundredth.”)

Considered strictly in terms of its logic, this is a lame sophism. It takes the fact that a doctrine is so widely believed to be a demonstration of its truth, rather than independently establishing its truth and therewith its worthiness to be believed by all. But precisely this kind of formal, logical exigency is no longer binding for Dante, who is conceiving reason and revelation in communicative terms as what effectively transmits its meaning to others, including other peoples. This entails a different kind of basis for the justification of claims to truth or validity. This trumping of strictly rational logic by the historically-pragmatically effective communication of belief may be seen, moreover, as inherent in Christian revelation all along. It is urged, particularly, by Saint Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18ff, which pits the “foolishness of God” against the “wisdom of men.” All that can be proved or shown to be reasonable by logical representations turns up as folly when faced with the contradiction of the Cross. This apocalyptic revelation of the Cross demonstrates its power by igniting faith irrepressibly in those who believe, who receive a truth communicated to them by the Spirit in defiance of common worldly wisdom and its rationality. The “miracle” of the world’s conversion to Christianity was, of course, celebrated in Christian tradition—for example, by Augustine in De civitate dei XXII.v and by Thomas Aquinas in De veritate Catholicae fidei I.vi. These are perhaps premonitions of the modern world and its mentality in which no authority remains external to historical experience and its sometimes unaccountable “reasons.” However, Dante’s poetic divulgation of Christian revelation on the threshold of the Renaissance gives this all a new kind of scope and import. He is moving toward a new understanding of truth, even revealed, theological truth, in terms that make it intrinsically open to a communicative dimension that cannot be accounted for by supposedly transparent, self-validating logical principles or canons of thought. History reveals what is effectively communicated to humans from an evidently divine dispensation of things. The “evidence” of such revelation consists precisely in its exceeding any merely human, rational logic and understanding. Dante was, of course, working largely within a rationalization of revelation in the spirit of the Scholastic synthesis of the High Middle Ages. There was also, however, a powerful dose of awareness in him of the limits

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue of reason, of God’s action as un-rationalizable for human beings. He says so expressly in expostulations such as, State contenti, umana gente, al quia;    ché se potuto aveste veder tutto,      mestier non era parturir Maria . . .  (Purgatorio 3.37–39) (Be satisfied, O human race, with knowing that;    for if you had been able to see all,      there would have been no need for Mary to give birth . . . )

indicating that we cannot know God’s reasons, but can know divinity only through the senses and by virtue of the Incarnation. This is why reason must be broken open to revelation in Dante’s view. However far reason can see, it always stands to be flatly contradicted by the revelations of God’s inscrutable Will. The salvation of pagans like the Roman emperor Trajan and the Trojan soldier Riphaeus, who as far as human understanding can see should have been damned, is highlighted in Paradiso XX.79ff as having just this significance. Revelation is understood as a negation of human reason with all its calculations; revelation occasions theoretical reflection on the inadequacy of all our own discourse to disclose the ineffable reality of God. This rational insight in turn undermines the Commedia’s revelations as accurate, apodictic representations and redefines their truth as poetic, as conveyed via metaphors. God’s word is always infinitely in excess (“in infinito eccesso”) of what can be conveyed by anything within the created universe, as is stated in the eagle’s discourse beginning in Paradiso XIX.40. By reciprocally checking one another’s totalizing claims, reason and revelation in this way are both made to open toward what exceeds finite representation and the world altogether, or, in other words, toward apocalypse. This leads me back once more, for final comments, to my disagreement with Habermas, based on my conviction that in order for reason to establish itself by means of rational self-reflection it must recognize its necessary, internal relations to apocalyptic revelation and even to poetry. Habermas has spent considerable energy in attempting to control both of these borders.89 Like Adorno, he naturally fears shipwreck for critical reason if 89. See, in particular, “Philosophie und Wissenschaft als Literatur?” chapter 9 of Nachmetaphysisches Denken, and “Exkurs zur Einebnung des Gattungsunterschiedes zwischen Philosophie und Literatur,” chapter 7 of Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    it becomes indistinguishable from poetry and revelation. But his rupturing of this primordial unity of the rational, the poetic, and the revealed also betrays the fundamental inspiration of the Enlightenment registered in the early sketch attributed variously to Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin (“Das älteste Systemprogramm des Deutschen Idealismus,” 1796) and pursued throughout his life most ingeniously by Hamann.90 The distinctions that must necessarily be made between these different modalities are heuristic and do not determine Truth to be the exclusive province of reason more than of revelation or poetic invention and insight. Reason must remain in communication with precisely these faculties in order to remain true—true to itself no less than to the Truth. The nature of reason cannot be to arbitrarily and prejudicially exclude its Other. Opening to others is the heart of rationality, the very meaning of Logos as sharable, participable word. This is the essence of the vocation to universality that was discovered in the Greek Enlightenment with the birth of philosophy in the sixth century b.c., and it has been rediscovered periodically throughout history as the inspiration for a universally human culture. It might well seem that such an openness to theological revelation is incompatible with communicative reason directed toward mutual understanding as developed by Habermas. Habermas works in continuity with the tradition of the (modern) Enlightenment. He stresses that the overarching structures that condition the meaning of all possible statements are dialectically intertwined with acts of making sense within the world. This is an important insight and one that helps us to form a more concrete and realistic idea of what revelation entails. Considered in relation to its linguistic medium, revelation involves the making of sense through a kind of poiesis. Such has been the light shed by the other Enlightenment, that represented, for example, by Hamann and Vico, for whom reason and revelation were not opposed. 90.  It is worth noting also that Johan Gottlieb Fichte attempted a deduction a priori of the concept of revelation from principles of pure reason (see Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung [1792], in vol. 5 of Sämtliche Werke, ed. J. H. Fichte [Berlin: Veit und Comp., 1845]). This argument also opens reason in the direction of revelation, even while tending to reduce revelation to the measure of reason. German Idealism’s early program for unifying philosophical reason with religious revelation led later on in the Romantic period to the heterodox and orthodox philosophies of revelation respectively of Schelling and Franz von Baader (see Peter Koslowski, Philosophien der Offenbarung: Antiker Gnostizismus, Franz von Baader, Schelling [Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001]).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue I, too, conceive of communicative action oriented toward mutual understanding as of the nature of reason—but also of revelation, or at least of the openness to revelation that is prerequisite to genuine dialogue. The representations with which apocalyptic texts are rife must be decoded, so as not to be identified with the true revelation conveyed by those texts but rather as necessarily inadequate figures calling to be negated. Then the movement beyond any discourse and representation creates an openness in which revelation, leading up to apocalypse, and reason, in its ideal of completeness, alike are fully realized. They are realized as a relating in unknowing to the unrevealed, yet this very relation is itself a positive gift that founds reason and reveals all as issuing from what transcends us. Habermas rejects Heidegger, Bataille, Foucault, and Derrida as all accepting irrational aesthetic and religious motives that distort and betray reason,91 but really it is the unlimited openness of reason, its deep nature as communicative, that is the strength and virtue of reason, even by his own account. We have taken glimpses into the historical development of this conception of reason as it emerges cyclically in enlightenments—ancient, medieval, and modern—at moments when revelation and reason seem quite close, particularly for thinkers married to language (Logos) as the medium of disclosure. Hamann treated reason as revelation in language. In different terms, Vico too shares this view of poetic language as theological revelation and the disclosure of rationality all at once. This is, in effect, the type of vision that I am attempting to restore in mediating revelation with reason through poetic language. The terms are, of course, somewhat different for our own times. Writers like James Joyce have given us a new vocabulary with which we will explore these questions further in Part 2. The essential point, which Habermas frequently emphasizes, is that speakers and their statements make claims to validity (“Geltungsansprüche”) that reach beyond their own situations and contexts. They claim a universality that transcends the particular time and place to which their meaning, nevertheless, is bound by the pragmatic conditions of every speech act. Even though meaning is always shifting, its truth projects something final and context-free. There is some unconditionally valid disclosure that is built into the intention of the utterance. It is a moment of 91. See Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, particularly chapters 6, 8, 9, and 7.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    unconditional truth at the heart of the process of seeking common understanding. This is the dimension that can and should be recognized, in effect, in theological terms, as apocalyptic: I urge that we recognize it as such. Only if we can understand revelation and even apocalypse as possibly valid for ourselves will we be able genuinely to accept it as a valid belief for others. This potential sharing in common is the rational nature of understanding and the condition of its universality. To this extent, rationality does not exclude but rather requires openness to revelation. Breaking down the barriers to such understanding is crucial for true understanding and mutual acceptance, as opposed to calculated strategies vis-à-vis one’s opponents, not to say enemies, or even “natural enemies,” to the extent that gaps of understanding and acceptance seem to be insuperable. On this prospect and potential hang the possibilities for peace in our world today. My conviction, based on this vision of the nature of a rational universality as inherently open to “revelation,” in the negatively theological sense I define, is that world peace can be brought about not through the imposition by a dominant power of a unified order, but only by openness to transcendence of all our own orderings. This entails recognizing a necessary openness to an unconditioned authority that none of us can define or control, but that conditions us all. Some may understand this authority in moral terms, others in terms of the limit-conditions of nature, and still others in terms of revealed religion. But all must eventually recognize the relativity of their own terms of comprehension, whatever they are. Reason and revelation are ostensibly old antagonists, vying for the soul of Western culture from age to age. The swings of the pendulum can be traced from classical times to Hellenistic, from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and from modernity to the various postmodern counter-movements that it provokes. The insight I have attempted to develop here is that both reason and revelation in their ownmost intrinsic nature demand unlimited openness, particularly communicative openness to others and to the irreducibly Other. Both are ordered to a total disclosure, whether it is figured as Truth or as Apocalypse, that cannot be comprehended by any finite individual, nor even by any defined group or single culture. Only in being open to others, and thereby to being modified and enriched, can this unlimited disclosure remain open toward the totality

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue that it blindly envisages. In this openness toward a total, unrestricted disclosure of all, reason and revelation ultimately agree and practically come to coincide. Total openness to an unlimited insight and disclosure is the goal toward which reason and revelation alike aspire. Reason, just like revelation, reflected on and thought through completely, empties itself of determinate content or theses and becomes pure openness to what it cannot grasp or define. This is the extreme limit at which reason, considered pragmatically, comes to coincide with revelation: and both are bounded by apocalypse. “Apocalypse,” as final or total disclosure, can be seen as the limit-case, the regulatory ideal or goal, of both revelation and reason—the point where all is revealed to the soul after death or is disclosed to fully enlightened reason. Such is the vision of philosophical reason at its origin in the pre-Socratics and again in its rediscovery by Anselm, as well as in its mystical metamorphosis in Eckhart. But Habermas understands reason in essentially modern terms, and apocalypse in modern times tends to become unintelligible—unless it is understood negatively. The cul-de-sac of modern philosophies based on the postulate of the subject (Descartes’ “I think” that leads to Kant’s transcendental subject of apperception) has been declared in concert by philosophers, from Heidegger to Foucault and Derrida, who are highly critical of modernity, and indeed lay down the premises for postmodern thought. Habermas agrees with them about the dead-end of thought founded on the individual subject. However, he is dissatisfied with their rejection of the whole project of modernity, with its goal of a rationally governed society, and wishes to reconstruct this, in his view, “unfinished,” rather than failed, project on a different basis—that of communicative reason.92 He proposes replacing the epistemologically and metaphysically objectified subject, the one for whom the world exists as an inert, disenchanted object, by an interpersonal, speech-produced, physically embodied and historically situated intersubjectivity. Such an intersubjectivity cannot be objectively located or identified with any simple, particular thing or individual, but takes place in the social process of communication. By such means, Habermas seeks another way out of subject-centered philosophy besides that of the critique 92.  “Ein anderer Ausweg aus der Subjektphilosophie—kommunikative vs. subjektzentierte Vernunft” (see chapter 11 of Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    of metaphysics (Derrida) or of the theory of power (Foucault) or of submission to the destiny of Being (Heidegger)—an alternative way that need not give up on modernity and its aspiration to a rational, universally human society. Against the postmoderns, Habermas proposes a different critique of Logos through intersubjective understanding that is historically inflected, bound to the body, and language-dependent. Habermas’s essential insight is that rationality, taken in more than just a formal sense, cannot be objectively defined by any direct relation of propositions to facts and objects. It is communicative; it depends on common understanding. I would suggest, furthermore, that there can be no objective limits to what might count as rational. The outer boundary of the rational can be determined only as the open-mindedness that is open to seeking genuine understanding with others as to how the world is to be understood; and this involves understanding of how others actually understand their world. This is where an apocalyptic dimension of what exceeds the parameters of our world cannot help but enter into play. One must try to understand, or at least allow for, the reasons of others for their religious beliefs. This is the very nature of rationality, and is not opposed to it. Habermas has pointed us the way to such understanding, but he has also restricted it in ways that may not be generally, or even rationally, valid. For Habermas, ritual praxis, for example, reduces the degree of communicative freedom. It is for him not unconstrained, but is, to a degree, forced communicative behavior. However, he ignores at this point the extent to which everyday behavior (or “praxis”) is beholden to rituals, even at unconscious levels, from which reason can never disentangle itself. “Natural language,” which Habermas appeals to as the medium of all rational action, is in fact already ritualized aboriginally and ineradicably. James Joyce brings this out, especially through the negative “nat language” of Finnegans Wake, as we shall see in Part 2. Habermas emphasizes that reason is situated in history. However, the truth (as revealed exemplarily by the Crucifixion) is not just that reason is situated in history as its all-encompassing context, but that history itself is structurally open to contradiction and reversal, to having what seemed to be its significance voided or overturned by “apocalyptic” disruption. History and society provide no solid bedrock for communicative action and

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue interpretation. Whose history, and what kind or level of society? These ideas, too, open up to infinite indetermination. Habermas misses the essential brokenness of reason, despite all his willingness to acknowledge reason’s being conditioned by language, embodiment, and enculturation in history. Only reason’s openness to revelation fully expresses its recognition of its helplessness to be self-founding. This recognition does not render reason useless—quite the opposite. But it inscribes reason’s lack of an absolute foundation of its own into its most basic operations. Once this lack of self-sufficiency has been acknowledged, reason’s critical ability to show this lack of absolute foundations in every discourse, starting in the present tense from its own discourse on itself, makes reason absolutely indispensable to the human community in its attempt to negotiate inevitable, well-nigh irreducible differences. Such a reason that is self-critical without limit recognizes that no human framework can be sufficient, but only the openness of all frameworks toward what exceeds them. This must entail openness even toward “apocalypse,” since no possibilities can be legitimately ruled out on merely finite, human grounds, or on the basis of what has hitherto been the case. Only reason that has completely lost and surrendered itself can be found again as having still an unlimited critical function that remains essential to human community. Logos dies and must rise up again, having relinquished its finite certainties and thenceforth opened up—through its wounds—to the infinite. This Christian narrative shows itself as a compelling, scarcely to be circumvented interpretation of the nature of reason as having a history and as mortal, that is, as not being apprehensible apart from the mortal beings who reason. This is the insight on which Habermas’s revision of Enlightenment rationality, after all, is based, but he has only partially followed this insight through to its own dialectical undermining even of the secular, anti-theological premises of a certain Enlightenment. Habermas offers a necessary kind of critique of a philosophy (or negative theology) of revelation that guards against abuses of mystagoguery. When philosophers like Heidegger absolve themselves of responsibility to rational control, blind force may be let into power. Of this, Heidegger’s own dark history in the time of Nazi Germany affords an all too sobering reminder. This helps us to understand why Habermas feels himself com-

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    pelled to draw the limits of reason in such a way as to exclude the pretensions of theological revelation, as well as of other forms of irrational aesthetic-mystical vision, for example, in the style of Nietzsche. But what Habermas forgets is an apocalyptic dimension of violence to which human beings even as rational agents prove historically to be subject. This violence has been connected with divinity, since the beginning of human society. There is no reason for it. It is inaccessible to reason. Yet history reveals it, repeatedly. And it is typically dealt with by ritualistic acts of exorcism and sacrifice. Repetition, ritual, and sacrifice with its violence, cannot be adequately coped with by reason. Through them, history reveals, in light of theological concepts, what reason does not through its own resources comprehend. These will be key topics in the second part of this book. Habermas drastically eclipses the insight that the concept of communicative reason could shed by not opening the discourse ethics that he propounds to a deeper dimension of negative theology.93 His thought does not reach deeply enough into the dilemmas of seeking to come to common understanding with others over the validity of our claims concerning what really is. It is not just a matter of reaching “agreement,” even though such an aim and ideal may be inherent in the very concepts of language and communication.94 I think that Habermas’s definition of communicative reason in terms of “agreement” about something within the world is too narrow. It is not necessarily in thinking or maintaining the same thing that reason is communicated. Divergence is as much a part of communication as is convergence. Communication entails dissonance and deflection together with connection and agreement. Their common denomina93.  For this refusal, see “Kommunikative Freiheit und Negative Theologie: Fragen für Michael Theunissen,” in Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen Ausdruck Philosophische Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997), translated as “Communicative Freedom and Negative Theology: Questions for Michael Theunissen,” chapter 5 in Religion and Rationality, ed. Mendieta. 94.  For Habermas, what constitutes rational grounds is defined by coming to unforced agreement about the validity of a certain proposition concerning things in the world. Accordingly, “the concepts of speaking and of reaching understanding interpret each other reciprocally” (Die Konzepte des Sprechens und der Verständigung interpretieren sich wechselseitig). His formulaic principle is: “Understanding dwells in human language as its telos” (Verständigung wohnt als Telos der menschlichen Sprache inne) (Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 1:387).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue tor is an opening to the other. In “communication,” and not just exchange of information, there is typically a complex sense of sharing something that cannot be very precisely defined and that tends ineluctably to change and thus to evade every attempted formulation. It is also, therefore, not adequately communicated in terms of “argument.” Propositions and arguments comprehend only one level of meaning. They are not all that is communicated nor necessarily what is most deeply communicated in intercultural dialogue and exchange. Discourse is prone rather to witness to truth that is experienced but that passes right through the meshes of argumentative language.95 Habermas’s theory of communicative action opens the claim to validity and truth to its pragmatic conditions in the expression of the speaker’s intent, the correspondence with facts in the world, and the relations established with hearers. Communicative, as opposed to strategic, action intends to reach understanding with others about something in the world. Rationality is defined by this process. It is intersubjective rather than the property of any individual mind or consciousness. But this involves a measure of faith that action and behaviors that seem to indicate understanding really stem from the same understanding among speakers and hearers. Faith is required in order to establish or even just to seek a common understanding. My point is that rationality defined as common understanding is never just a given but is produced in projective faith that there can be a meeting of minds. This can never be proved definitively, but stands always in need of further confirmation. It is open to the future. Even when we confer upon common projects achieved only thanks to necessary agreement on certain points, we may find out later that there were misunderstandings concerning what we thought we agreed about. We act, however, in faith that our common understanding is good enough to see us through at least to the completion of specific projects. Habermas’s view, and that of the Enlightenment as he construes it, is that we must take control of our lives and history and rationally mold them 95. This is substantially the criticism that Hermann Düringer levels, in Universale Vernunft und partikularer Glaube, as the final argument of his book, in terms of a distinction between objective and subjective reason. The latter is of the nature of “confession” (Bekenntniss), and Habermas elides or suppresses its necessary role in the rational process as a whole (343ff ).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    to conform to the highest human good. The apocalyptic view is the opposite. It holds that we must relinquish control and conform ourselves to an event summoned from beyond us. Although we must act energetically, such action will all be in vain without that movement of acknowledgment of what we have no control over. This entails not only recognizing necessary constraints external to reason, which Habermas and other Enlightenment thinkers surely realize they must do. It involves an acknowledgment which turns over authority and makes space for an Other altogether beyond what we can define and order in our own human terms. Such an openness and willingness, I maintain, proves indispensable to undistorted communication, even just on a human level. It is a necessary check against absolutizing one’s own operational framework. Without it, we are bound to have superpowers attempting to dictate unilaterally what is right for all alongside dictators unheeding of all powers except their own. Habermas’s theory envisages no ground, or telos, for communicative action beyond society and its striving to achieve the human good and perfection. But it is difficult to understand how such a theory can avoid making an idol of society as the last resort, the source and end of all action. Indeed, Habermas too has an absolute or last frame of reference that effectively circumscribes reason from without. He calls it society. It is not crudely reified: Habermas understands society to be communicatively constructed. Yet the sense of responsibility to society is, in effect, a limit-condition of reason, without which reason would not know how to function. If, then, society is conceived of as finite, it becomes an idol. If it is conceived of as infinite, then it is in effect theological. It is no object of human cognition, but a superior instance transcending, and yet conditioning, all human knowing. When Habermas closes himself to the theological, he is restricting reason and making it no longer free to explore its full range of powers—or to suffer its uncontrollable passion—without artificially imposed limits. He, too, unavoidably makes it an instrument of an ideology, indeed an idolatry of the social. We almost inevitably make some idea into a foundation, a god, an idol. Theology offers the most developed discourse gathering the experience of untold ages into the wisdom that rejects idolatry through the critical-dialectical power of reasoned reflection. Habermas’s social philosophy of the modern perhaps serves a similar purpose, but that is only one more

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue reason why it should not remain alienated from this human heritage of theology. It remains unreconciled, alienated thinking, unless it can recognize an aspect of itself in theological revelation. The unconditionally free nature of human reason, which Habermas and the Enlightenment aim in principle to affirm, is itself infinite and theological in the sense I advocate. Excluding this dimension of its wholeness is tantamount to a sacrificium intellectus. Ironically, that is exactly what Habermas is determined to avoid. It is crucial to resist reification of this last “ground” of cohesion, whether it is socially or theologically construed. Theology as a discourse is built on rooting out idolatry even in its own midst: particularly as negative theology, it has paid the acutest attention to the epistemological pitfalls of reifying the objects of one’s belief.96 Poetry, then, is called in as a discourse breaking apart language’s inherent propensity to objectify and reify. Poetry is, of course, itself inherently objectifying and productive of representations, an objectification of feelings, intuitions, and thoughts in language. Yet, as poetry by the likes of Paul Celan is peculiarly apt to demonstrate, it is also the unmaking of what it makes. It exposes language at a level of creativity prior to its designation of settled objects. The world of Homer is brilliantly objectified in all its exquisite details, yet its representations are not per se objects but revelations of another world, that of the gods as well as of an idealized, heroic society of an age of yore. Poetry’s magic here is its ability to make a non-objective or imaginary or even divine world seem real, seem as if it were objectively present. Poetry thereby demonstrates its access to a world that is anterior to real objects and ordinary reality. The earliest testimonies of enlightenment in Greece, from the Odyssey on, show reason, under the ensign of Apollo, to be born in and with theological representations. The same lesson must be gathered from the rebirth of reason in the Middle Ages with Anselm, and again in the eighteenth century with Vico and Hamann. Reason in all these incarnations understands itself essentially as theological revelation. It is universal and universally communicable. But it is this by virtue of being open to what is higher than itself, to what illuminates its own darkness. This rationally 96.  Particularly instructive here is Jean-Luc Marion, L’idole et la distance: Cinque études (Paris: B. Grasset, 1977).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    inconceivable Other breaks into reason’s self-enclosure with the lightning of apocalypse.

v. Negative Capabilities for Peace In this current millennial transition, the nature and legitimacy of holding beliefs about the end of the world, as well as the ends and means of expressing and exchanging them, very often come directly into question. Different theologies make their claims upon beliefs of this order. And secular points of view make theirs too, including sometimes the view that really it would be better to refrain from making any such claims at all. Judged from this vantage point, what lies beyond the horizon of the present world, if the thought of such a thing is even thinkable, should not be mythically distorted by totalizing interpretations pretending to finality, by “apocalyptic” visions such as the religions of the book especially furnish in abundance. For such pretended vision beyond ordinary mortal limits is in any case unwarranted, and, even worse, can become antisocial and be used to incite to violence. Yet this rejection of apocalyptic vision itself involves a claim, and it is not without pretenses of its own. It wishes to draw the bounds of legitimate representations and to circumscribe what ought and ought not to be brought to the table as lying within the compass of discussion. And to set the limits and establish the law for representation is in and of itself to assume a position beyond all representation.97 There is perhaps an apocalyptic theology (or its negation and inversion) buried even here, a belief about what ultimately is true or, at any rate, about what makes a difference or really matters in the end. Rather than attempting to exorcise this residual, haunting presence of truth, or at least of a pretended disclosure of what is decisive in the end, I submit that we should accept it as belonging to the very dialogical nature of our common pursuit. For to the extent that we gather to talk 97. As Hegel pointed out, to draw the bounds of any realm, such as that of pure reason, is of itself already to assume a position outside of and beyond that boundary (see “Einführung,” Phänomenologie des Geistes [1807]).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue and exchange views with one another and argue over them, we are seeking some generally valid and communicable understanding. And yet the dialogue can have no pre-established framework that would not be biased—the work of some and an imposition on others. Any delimitation of a framework for dialogue that is not itself open to all potential parties to dialogue, unless they have previously accepted conditions that are not of their own making, does presuppose what in crucial respects is indistinguishable from an absolute, “theological” type of authority, a sort of positively given “revelation.” To this extent, the dialogical process itself is based in practice on what amounts in essence to a theological revelation: parameters of dialogue must simply be “given,” be recognized as self-evident and thus as binding for all. It is paramount that this “revelation” be able to be recognized as such by all parties in common, so as not to seem simply an imposition by some human beings upon others. Any general framework— necessarily an obligatory, coercive order—which is not so given will be experienced by some as oppression. Even a purely secular order, if it is beyond discussion, not open to dialogue—which means open dialogue that does not already itself necessarily presuppose a secular framework—is not neutral but, in effect, a theological or counter-theological type of authority, for it is beyond the range of question and critique. It is absolutely centralized, for no position is allowed to be outside it. And it is transcendent with respect to the actions and evaluations of all who have to simply accept it. Such a purportedly secular framework for dialogue must be based at some level on uncritical belief, since the whole ground and basis for any belief can never be totally objectified and evaluated, without presuppositions, all at once.98 This acknowledgment of the way in which even secularizing, antitheological discourse may itself be considered, in this sense, theological after all is invoked here for the value it may have in bringing out common ground for dialogue, where previously only mutual intolerance could be 98. See Jürgen Habermas, “Der Universalitätsanspruch der Hermeneutik,” in Hermeneutik und Dialektik, Festschrift für H. G. Gadamer, ed. Rüdiger Bubner (Tübingen: Mohr, 1970), 1:73–104, translated as “The Hermeneutic Claim to Universality,” in Contemporary Hermeneutics, ed. Josef Bleicher (London: Routledge, 1980).

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    descried. For we live in a world plagued by religious intolerance—and sometimes, inversely, by intolerance of religion per se. Not infrequently, we hear the wish expressed that all religions should simply disappear from the face of the earth. But one would not be likely to eliminate or even assuage the problem that way. The impulse from which religious belief springs, and which can easily lead to strife and war to the death, would be far from eradicated. All the same motivations that irrepressibly produce religions and their theologies would remain inherent within the very communicative mechanisms on which we rely. The very possibility of human society as a communicative system is to this extent inextricably bound up with some evidently positive, in effect “revealed,” basis (even if it is innocuously called “self-evident”) for distinguishing communications that are ultimately valid from those that are not. The apocalyptic pronouncements of various religions arrogating to themselves the right to judge all the inhabitants of the earth epitomize the self-enclosure and repression of others that seem to be lurking in religious dogmatisms and fundamentalisms. Yet to repress this expression is not to root out the repression but rather to ignore its rootedness in us and to respond in kind with violence against violence. This violence can take the form simply of exclusion from dialogue, even when this be perpetrated by no more than a supercilious or dismissive attitude, making an implicit appeal to the common sense of rational—or right-thinking—individuals. For there is still a violence in exclusion, even when the excluded party itself violates the rules for dialogue as we define them. This is the violence of any imposition of order by some human beings for—but therefore also upon—others. On any humanly constructed model of dialogue, in order not to build in exclusions from the dialogue, we must begin with one another’s theological or atheological beliefs as they exist, and not presume to have a superior ground that shows the fallaciousness of them all or, in some way, affords a better standard for judgment. Dialogue begins here from its own impossibility—from the existence of incompatible absolutes and the negation of any common basis—rather than with the imposition of a general framework and code to which all must conform. The (hypothetical) original setting up of the premises for dialogue must itself be dialogical and cannot but be dialogically negotiated, even in the absence of any acknowl-

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue edged common basis for dialogue. Thus, the first moment of dialogue can be determined only as the openness to dialogue. Any more definite determination of the parameters for dialogue would preempt it. This means that we cannot lay down the rules of the game. We are already in a game in which the rules are irrevocably open to interpretation by all players, all of whom have their ways of thinking that are, in effect if not in intent, based on principles that are absolute for them, absolved from critical reflection, since their thinking is already in process prior to (or at least coevally with) every possible self-critical act of reflection. Paradoxically, precisely those nominally most closed to dialogue—for example, religious “fanatics” of the apocalyptic sort—turn out to be essential here for representing an all too easily overlooked aspect of dialogue among different ways of thinking, where any one way of thinking cannot help but absolutize its own constitutive criteria and unconscious presuppositions. To exit from this deadlock of conflicting and even incommensurable interpretations, only something on the order of a revelation will do: required is the emergence of an authority that is able to claim us all beyond any one party’s ability to rationally account for or codify it. Of course, what I am invoking here is not any authoritatively dictated, positive protocols, but simply the openness to a higher authority than our own. The relative irrationality of extremists may be the most efficacious challenge for reminding us that nothing but total openness from human participants, together with what can perhaps be called the desire for love, can be conducive to initiating the type of dialogue that does not only reinforce the implicit consensus of the like-minded but surrenders itself to the discovery of the unknown through genuinely open, shared exploration together with other participants whom we cannot predict or control. Precisely what is objected to about theologies is their claim to an absolute knowledge that is not subject to critique by any standards that others outside the belief system can also accept as binding. But the fact is that we all have different criteria, even when it is just “reason itself ” (however we happen to understand this “universal” endowment), that may not be binding for others at all, and that therefore are our “theologies.” They are that for others, even though intending them as such may be the furthest thing from our minds. By accepting that our belief, too, shares a common structure with other “theologies,” insofar as we interpret others from a cer-

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    tain matrix inevitably centered in our own beliefs and culture, we may for the first time be ready to enter into dialogue with them. Another way of putting this would be to say that critique cannot take for itself a position outside of or over and above ideology, including religious ideology, but must rather begin in dialogue with it. To dialogue with Islam, for example, Western democracies will have to relinquish the presumed superiority of their own secular, liberal standards. They must become open, through dialogue with Islamic societies, to seeing these standards exposed from otherwise inaccessible angles, which can show up some of the hypocrisies they may be based on in practice.99 This need not mean fully relinquishing what we may take to be inviolable moral certainties, but simply acknowledging the ambiguities of all our own articulations and realizations of such ideals. We need to admit the possibility that other ways of life, despite their apparent ideological repugnance, may have much to reveal to us about ideals such as truth and justice, as well as about the blindness and repression of our own ways of pursuing such principles. I believe the only solution to impasses of understanding is to learn to accept the absolute truths that others live by and die for, that is, their theologies, as authentic and possibly true, at least in some sense—metaphorically or morally, in part or in principle. We may, of course, sense that this is not how these beliefs are intended and propounded, indeed that they are forced coercively upon others as literal and absolute truth—the whole truth and nothing but—with no respect at all for those others’ personal, or at any rate alternative, points of view and convictions. Undoubtedly, this is all too often the case. It testifies to the regrettably all-too-human will to dominate and prevail over other, weaker parties. Indeed, safeguarding the rights of individuals and protesting against their violation are surely among the most important contributions to world dialogue of highly individualistic Western societies. But there is also more to theologically grounded, revealed truths than manipulation and exploitation of more vulnerable members of society. The excessively absolute mode of expression of religious truths derives also in good part from the nature of religious experience itself as absolute, as demanding total and uncompromising response or “surrender.” 99.  Instructive on this head is Kevin Dwyer, “Dialogical Anthropology,” in Moroccan Dialogues: Anthropology in Question (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue There is a paradox here for human finitude in its disproportion with the Infinite that proves more often than not to be too much for human logic to deal with. The experience of the absolute seems logically to demand a corresponding absoluteness in its expression, but really it can be served only by the exact opposite. The experience of the absolute, unfortunately, all too often induces human beings to adopt absolutistic forms of expression, whereas it is for this experience above all that poetic expression alone—the indirection and self-negation characteristic of metaphor, for example—is appropriate. This is the crux of the strategy discovered by negative theology to be necessary for expressing the inexpressible. PseudoDionysius the Aeropagite, accordingly, deemed the best analogies for God to be the elements of the universe that are evidently the furthest removed from the nature of divinity—we may think of mud or worms or demonic beasts—because they are the least apt to create an illusion of adequacy as representations (De caelestis hierarchia, chapter 2). Unfortunately, given the inflexibility of human logic, unless it is employed together with supple poetic understanding, the experience of a revelation of religious truth, such as apocalyptic disclosure envisages, tends inevitably to express itself in absolute terms, even though these terms are not themselves the Absolute and, in fact, are infinitely separated from what they attempt to express: they are far removed from what has been authentically experienced in the great moments of revelation in which religions are founded—or revivified and reformed. There is an enormous, ironic incongruity here, one to which—whatever other merits they may have—aggressive, assertive forms of religion are blind. Paradoxically, the most absolute experience and revelation of truth can be most accurately expressed only by the most indirect and tentative, that is, interpretively open, forms of expression. Indeed, every revelation in apocalyptic representations is also, at the same time, necessarily a covering over of the unnameable that has been revealed. For apocalypse, which by definition is beyond the horizon of this world, is what cannot properly be disclosed within the world. And, consequently, every pretended or attempted disclosure of it is but metaphor, every revealing a re-veiling representing it as something it is not. The very nature of metaphor is to effect the concealment of what it reveals, presenting it only under the aspect or mask of something else.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    Such theoretical acceptance of the paradoxes of representation of the absolute may seem to make important practical questions unanswerable. How, for instance, can we defend ourselves against apocalyptic sorts of claims, claims to the revelation of a superior truth that to us are morally repugnant and potentially deleterious, sometimes on a monstrous scale? By the law of non-contradiction, having just rejected the assuming of postures of superiority vis-à-vis apocalyptic thinking and preaching, it would seem reasonable and fair then not to tolerate this sort of attitude from those apocalyptic groups who are themselves protected by its being repudiated. Yet precisely this logical implication does not necessarily follow, given the asymmetries of the relation between self and other. There is no objective truth here of who has what right, but only the certainty that it is other than all that we can grasp and define, and hence the unconditional obligation to the other.100 Whenever we make recourse to unconditional truths or rights that we ourselves define, we are abstracting from the concrete human context out of which all such definitions (though not necessarily the truths and rights themselves) necessarily arise. Where fundamentalism may be blind on one side, it may have much to teach me on another side, where I am blind: all my dialectical mediations may stand to be critiqued by its strength of conviction and simplicity of heart. Even with conceptual errors—and is not all conceptualizing errant?—in some ways fundamentalists may be closer than the most subtly negative theologians to accepting concretely into their lives the awkward, incommensurable, apocalyptic otherness of divinity. Our differences can always help us learn from one another, for we may be weak where another is strong, encumbered where they are clairvoyant. I submit, therefore, that even radical expressions ought never to be forcibly suppressed. And surely many apparent differences in belief would dissolve of their own accord if there were no more need to assert and defend them by fighting against others who appear to be intolerant of them and of us. Of course, there is a fine line where “expression” crosses over into an act of incitement to violence, 100. This infinite, unconditional obligation to the other has been pursued in ethical terms influentially by Emmanuel Levinas—for example, in Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence. I would, however, insist equally on an ethically heuristic and healthy self-centeredness, in the image of, and dependent on, a self-sustaining God, beyond all deconstruction of such metaphysical concepts, as a necessary basis even for sacrificing or sharing oneself with others.

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue and this cannot be accepted, but then it is no longer a matter of judging and condemning others’ reasons, but of restraining violent acts by appropriate sanctions. We will have less need to attack—and in the end will not need to attack at all—the apocalyptic claims of others if we learn to be secure in our own openness to truth.101 This means not possessing truth. It is achieved by virtue of the “negative capability” of being able to remain in suspense, of not needing to decide definitely one way or the other regarding the claims of others concerning ultimate truth. Only so will we be able to remain genuinely open to truth’s occurrence in all forms. Thus, we will be in a position to recognize what in vital ways succeeds in ringing true for us, even while allowing others to judge for themselves what is true for them and accepting the opportunity to learn from them something about an aspect of what is true or believable to which we perhaps have been less open than they. A crucial step to recognizing and accepting a plurality of belief systems or theologies is recognizing one’s own beliefs as not superior to others, as perhaps sharing in the inherent blindness of belief that is most evident in full-blown theological systems. We need to accept other parties’ theologies as valid for them and as, in any case, the other human being’s prerogative, so as to be able to discuss pragmatically our common interests and conflicts of interest. It may be that theologies would to a large extent collapse and deflate, or at least make themselves invisible, if this degree of reciprocal tolerance were reached. In any event, this need for learning how to allow and seek out mutual understanding across differences in fundamental beliefs can be heard screaming aloud in events, including catastrophic conflicts, all over the world every day. It must be granted that apocalyptic pronouncements seem to want to put a stop to the free play of unending discourse by definitive declarations of the end. But, in reality, in the complex dynamics of a discourse in which people’s hopes and anxieties express themselves, the situation is much more contradictory, much more nearly just the reverse. Apocalyptic discourse too belongs to the dialogue, and is even essential to it. For it is above all in apocalyptic discourse that we are asked to confront our condi101. Cf. Gandhi’s satyagraha, that is, “firmness in adhering to truth”; see, particularly, Mahatma Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or, Indian Home Rule (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1946), chapter 16.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    tion of being at the mercy of others. And learning to accept and live with this predicament is presently the greatest challenge for humanity in its attempt to get along on this planet. The unwillingness to be at the mercy of others is fully understandable, one would even want to say “justified,” were it not that any institution of right that begins from oneself and one’s own needs and interests is presumptuous and reflects the chronically self-centered and anthropocentric posture of our own culture. Yet being at the mercy of others is also totally unavoidable; it belongs to our very condition as social and even as biological creatures. And learning to live with this fact is virtually as necessary to us as life itself. It is precisely in its teaching of how to live this condition of radical risk and contingency, of being potentially a pawn and plaything for powers beyond our control, powers sometimes apparently reckless and unscrupulous and even totally ruthless, that the apocalyptic tradition broadly considered (and understood from the admittedly oblique angle of its breaking-open of dialogue that I am advocating here) has an indispensable contribution to make. “Apocalyptic” in the proper sense is a biblical or apocryphal literary genre that develops especially in the inter-testamental period, but it must also be understood more broadly as a mode of vision that views life as destined to convert into something utterly strange and different: it envisions our life as radically relational and as dependent ultimately on an absolute Other. This is the vision of the Bible and of the plethora of disparate cultural outlooks and religious ways of life that it has spawned.102 Apocalyptic in this sense raises the issue of the ultimate groundlessness of all our own judgments through opening up beneath them the abyss of a judgment by which they are all to be judged: their partial perspective is then set to be measured against a whole vision and absolute standard. We need to leave open a place for the possibility of such an absolute standard and last judgment in order to avoid assuming the role of God and the prerogatives of revelation ourselves, thereby setting dialogue into a frame not itself open to dialogue and negotiation. But is there any judgment beyond our human judgments? This question is a stumbling block for discussions of apocalypse or other religious 102. One particularly luminous representative of the type of vision in question is Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung (1921; repr., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), translated by William W. Hallo as The Star of Redemption (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985).

   Apocalypse and the Breaking-Open of Dialogue themes in an academic context. If there is such judgment, none of us who are taking part in the discussion is going to be able to represent it, certainly not in any definitive or even remotely adequate way. Yet only its indefinable possibility and potential presence can keep us truly open to dialogue. Otherwise we will decide ourselves what the final truth is, convincing ourselves of one belief or another because it is of the kind that tends to engender consensus from types of individuals such as ourselves with the kind of interest in and indifference to the subject at hand that we share.103 Even if it only takes the form of deciding what the framework for legitimate discussion is, this means setting the ultimate law ourselves rather than being open to the ordering (or disordering) event beyond all laws that we can conceive and institute. The meaning of all we do and say is ultimately very different from all that we mean and intend. We are not in control of the effects and ends of our own statements and activities. It all depends far too much on others. This, at least in principle, is what the apocalyptic preacher, perhaps unwittingly, teaches. Apocalypse—the kind that we cannot avoid no matter how much we try, but that also has the potential to save rather than only to destroy—is what is unveiled by what actually happens and by what this reveals beyond all the meanings that we wish to assign it: it is the Judgment that judges all our judgments. Religious search, together with the apocalyptic expression that it takes on in various phases of the development of a religion, such as that of the Bible, is a way of cultivating an openness and readiness to respond, in the service of others, to this other, to this “last” judgment, negatively defined as beyond every judgment of our own. Apocalypse prima facie refuses and makes an end of dialogue: it thunders down invincibly from above. But for this very reason the greatest test of our dialogical capacity is whether we can dialogue with the corresponding attitude or must resort to exclusionary maneuvers and force. What is called for here is a capacity on the part of dialogue not to defend itself but 103. Such a theory of intersubjective consensus as the last court of appeal is advanced by Richard Rorty; see his “Solidarity or Objectivity,” in Post-Analytic Philosophy, ed. John Rajchman and Cornel West (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Rorty, self-identified as a modern, Western, secular intellectual, resists being treated as a “relativist,” but his type of thought leads quickly to the relativism to “interpretive communities” advocated by Stanley Fish—for example, in “Interpreting the Variorum,” Critical Inquiry 2, no. 3 (1976): 465–85.

A Critical Negative Theology of Poetic Language    to let itself happen in interaction with an attitude that is apparently intolerant of dialogue. Letting this possibility be, coming into contact with it, with the threat to dialogue itself, may seem to be courting disaster for dialogue. It is indeed a letting down of all defenses. Can dialogue survive such a surrendering of itself in utter vulnerability to the enemy of dialogue? Or perhaps we should ask, can it rise up again, after this self-surrender, in new power for bringing together a scattered, defeated humanity to share in an open but commonly sought and unanimously beckoned Logos of mutual comprehension and communication? May this, after all, be the true and authentic “end” of dialogue provoked by apocalypse? For what it is worth, my apocalyptic counsel is that we must attempt the openness to dialogue even in this absolute vulnerability and risk. The world is certainly not a safe place, and it will surely continue not to be such, short of something . . . apocalyptic. Needed, ever again, is something on the order of an apocalypse, not just a new attitude or a new anything that we can ourselves simply produce. Philosophy itself, thought through to its own end, can hardly resist concluding that “only a god can save us” (Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten).104 But can not our attitude make a difference—perhaps make possible the advent of apocalypse beyond all our powers, even those of our own imaginations? I will wager an answer to this question only in the optative mood. May we bring a voice speaking up for mutual understanding onto the horizon of discourse in our time, a time marked by the terrifying sign of apocalyptic discourse. May we do this not by judging apocalyptic discourse, but by accepting that our condition as humans is as much to be judged as to judge and that all our relatively justified judgments are such to the extent that they offer themselves to be judged rather than standing on their own ground as absolute. In other words, may our discussions remain open to apocalypse, open to what we cannot represent or prescribe but can nevertheless undergo in a process of transformation that can be shared with others—and that may be genuinely dialogue.

104.  Martin Heidegger, in an interview published in Der Spiegel, May 31, 1976 (shortly before his death), reprinted in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1975), 652–83.

Part 2

chapter 11

Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation in Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce

The Divine Comedy was recognized first in 1914–15 by György Lukács as the archetype of the modern novel.1 Since then, many scholars have pursued this genealogy, among them Gianfranco Contini, particularly via the comparison of Dante with Proust.2 Vittorio Russo’s Il ‘romanzo teologico,’ borrowing the denomination “theological novel” (romanzo teologico) from Benedetto Croce but reversing its pejorative connotation, made Dante’s inauguration of a novelistic mode into the guiding insight for reading his poem.3 Also in later revisitings of this thesis,4 Russo emphasized a variety of features in virtue of which the Commedia anticipates the genre of the novel: its multilingualism, its realistic representation of 1.  György Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans: Ein geschichtsphilosophischer Versuch über die Formen der grossen Epik (Neuwied am Rhein: Luchterhand, 1963). 2.  Gianfranco Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta della ‘Commedia,’ ” in Varianti e altra linguistica (Torino: Einaudi, 1970). 3.  Vittorio Russo, Il ‘romanzo teologico’: Sondaggi sulla ‘Commedia’ di Dante (Naples: Liguori, 1984). 4.  Vittorio Russo, “Dire Dante secondo Dante (per una esecuzione teatrale della ‘Commedia’),” in Teatro italiano I, ed. Pietro Carriglio and Georgio Strehler (Bari: Laterza, 1993).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation historical, as well as of contemporary, persons and events, its narrating “I” presenting the author as protagonist. All of these features were to be developed to the full extent of their possibilities particularly in the novel. Taken together, they open a new field for representation of reality that the novel would make peculiarly its own in subsequent centuries.5 Nevertheless, each of these aspects of literary representation emerges from and remains bound to the Christian epic tradition. Just as in the canonical revelation of Holy Scripture, so in sub-canonical literary representation, especially in the genre of the epic, literary language becomes the medium of a disclosure of human life in its full and final meaning. The deep connections between the emergence of poetic narrative as a form of poetic-prophetic revelation in the Christian epic and the sort of experience crystallized in Joyce’s novels reach down to the very roots of modern consciousness. Translating the revelation of the divine Word into worldly words of literature continues in the modern period as an enduring ambition of major poetic texts. Pursuing this common project, Christian epics represent a signally revealing point of departure and Joyce’s novels a fittingly apocalyptic culmination. Christian epic, particularly in the tradition founded by Dante, proposes the experience of an individual subject as a definitive revelation of the ultimate reality of human existence and thereby also of divinity. The persona who says “I” in the Divine Comedy opens a prophetic purview into the eternal truths of the life to come and, finally, into the divine essence itself. He achieves this by relating his personal experience in an extensive autobiographical narrative. It is the richness of Dante’s own personality as it pervades every encounter with historical and contemporary figures in the poem that transfigures even abstract theological doctrine, making it into an eminently personal revelation felt in the intimate recesses of individual consciousness. This can be verified from the beginning to the end of the poem, in representations ranging from Francesca to Ulysses to Bellacqua, and further to Beatrice and Bernard, and in the personal accents and passions giving every episode its distinctive character and poignancy. Since the figures, as Dante encounters them, are all his own interpretations, the whole poem in every aspect can be read as an exercise in self-interpretation, a building up of individual self-consciousness in a way that Hegel was 5. This was famously demonstrated by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (Berne: Francke, 1946).

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    to apprehend and communicate to Auerbach, and thereby to the common heritage of Dante criticism. As Hegel observed: In this matter Dante’s Divine Comedy has an especially remarkable position. In it the epic poet himself is the one individual to whose wanderings through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise each and every incident is linked, so that he can recount the productions of his imagination as his own experiences and therefore acquires the right, to a greater extent than is allowed to other epic poets, of interweaving his own feelings and reflections with the objective side of his work.6

Everything encountered by the protagonist at the same time reflects upon the author and his interpretation of his existence in evolution toward God. Dante leads in appropriating what he assumes to be the eternal verities of Christian revelation for an imaginative re-elaboration of the concrete, historical experience of an individual. This experience is filtered through the medium of poetic language and is thus expressive of inner motives of action and nuances of feeling. He thereby opens a field to be explored in the ensuing centuries by Christian epic in its myriad forms, including, finally, the form of the novel. The modernity of Dante’s appropriation of Christian revelation can be gauged especially by its phenomenological method of exploring a purportedly transcendent truth in the immanence of experience. The technique of phenomenological reduction, as developed by Edmund Husserl, in effect identifies the real with what appears in experience.7 Dante’s poem, in making his experience a revelation of ultimate reality, applies a comparable method, which, more than a “reduction,” is an opening up of a new field of possibilities for individual consciousness to explore. Still, this discovery of true reality as verified and even constituted by experience essentially links Christian epic as it emerges from the Middle Ages with the most characteristically modern patterns of thought and experience that will eventually be embodied in their extreme implications in Joyce’s writings. This tremendously empowering innova6.  G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics III, III, bb, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 1066; a particularly significant passage is found also on 1103–5. Auerbach alludes to Hegel expressly in the chapter on “Farinata and Cavalcanti” in Mimesis. 7.  Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1950–76), vols. 3–5 of Gesammelte Werke.

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation tion places religion on a new foundation where an individual’s personal experience is its source and authority, and this is the vein of revelation that Joyce’s religious vision works in collaboration with the entire Christian epic tradition. Of course, Joyce is exemplary rather than exceptional in this regard. Many other masters of the modern novel have followed in Dante’s tracks by adapting traditional motifs of revelation, such as the descent into hell, to the exploration of experience from the point of view of the interiority of consciousness. Noteworthy cases include Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Virginia Woolf, and Peter Weiss.8 In a different vein, Georges Bataille, both as novelist and theorist, continued this line of exploration of religious revelation in the pursuit of “inner experience” to certain extremes of possibility.9 The re-situating of theological revelation in the existence and consciousness of an individual numbers among its consequences the shattering of revelation into an open set of reenactments or repetitions. The time and place of disclosure of truth depend on the particular protagonist immersed in the contingencies of a singular existence. The reader, then, becomes a further locus of revelation by repeating the experience and the discoveries of the protagonist. Revelation and repetition become mutually dependent moments: only in being repeated can revelation be realized and validated.10 This identification of experience as it is accessible to an individual subject with the truth of things themselves also constitutes the premise of the phenomenological current of modern philosophy, broadly considered, as it develops from Hegel, with his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), through Husserl and beyond to thinkers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jan PatoČka. Hegel established a certain concept of revelation, inescapable for moderns, by defining reality as Spirit—that is, as essentially the 8. See David L. Pike, Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997). 9.  Georges Bataille, L’expérience intérieure (5th ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1943; 6th ed., Paris: Gallimard, 1954). 10.  In Dante’s Interpretive Journey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), on the basis of Heidegger’s existential-phenomenological elucidation of repetition (“Wiederholung”), I analyze Dante’s unprecedented addresses to his reader as soliciting a repetition and re-enactment of his journey, with all its traumas and impasses, in the interpretive experience of the reader.

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    act of self-reflection and self-manifestation. He thereby made manifestation of the real essentially a phenomenon for consciousness. Even the various Heideggerianisms active today, especially in literary-theoretical circles, while oftentimes rejecting the postulate of the subject, still adhere to the immanent self-manifestation of phenomena as the locus of a revealment of truth—what in Greek thought was conceived of as disclosure or “unforgetting”: aletheia. The immanence to consciousness of the phenomena that appear to it is not taken as cutting these phenomena off from reality. The phenomena of mind are no longer condemned to the status of merely subjective impressions, as in modern empiricist philosophy. Rather than being treated as removed from the reality of things, as mere appearances, phenomena become the scene of the realization of historical reality. The Cartesian dualism separating subject and object is transcended or suspended, as experience itself is taken to be the realization of the real. The Christian poet-prophet as epic poet, from Dante onwards, effected a fundamental transformation in the biblical tradition of revelation: the truths of the other world were realized in the sphere of consciousness as phenomena rendered concrete by the medium of poetic language. The individual consciousness, the one who says “I,” became the center of the epic and its revelations in Dante.11 This autobiographical bent of Christian epic is confirmed strongly in the tradition following Dante. Key to Milton’s Paradise Lost are the autobiographical proems to Books I, III, VII, and IX, which insert the poet into the vision he relates. And Blake, in turn, in his Milton, invents the story of how his great poetic predecessor returns to temporal existence and enters, through his heel, or “tarsus” (echoing the name of Paul’s native city), into Blake himself, in whom the forerunner’s prophetic mission will at last be fulfilled. This portrait of a coming-to-consciousness of his prophetic vocation on the part of the young artist constitutes the overture to Blake’s “apocalypse,” Jerusalem, which is again riddled with autobiographical obsessions in its polemics and in its very nomen11. Octavio Paz, in his essay “Poesía y modernidad” (La otra voz: Poesía y fin de siglo [Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1990]), places into broad historical perspective this role of Dante and his first-person narrative in instituting a new and modern poetic discourse: “In Christian poetry a new element appears: the poet himself as hero. . . . The ancient poem was impersonal; with Dante the I appears” (En la poesía cristiana aparece un elemento nuevo: el poeta mismo como héroe. . . . El poema antiguo era impersonal; con Dante aparece el yo) (14).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation clature from the outset: a list of names like Hyle, Ham, Coban, Kwantok, Peachey, Brereton, Slayd & Hutton, etc., mixes together a Greek word for “matter” and a biblical protagonist with Blake’s personal enemies and legal antagonists, otherwise unknown to history. This use of autobiographical material in epic is but the surface of a deep structure of subjective reflection that is explored to its limits within the genre. The infinite interior reflection of a self made possible by the recognition of a transcendent Subject or God who is more interior and more intimate to the self than itself, and at the same time above it and hence more authoritative—Augustine’s “interior intimo meo,” “superior summo meo” (Confessiones 3.6, 3.11)—is the presupposition of the modern, self-reflective subject, and thereby of the whole phenomenological-theological adventure in representation pursued by the Christian epic. The interior reflection of the self, as it is expressed eventually in the novelistic techniques of interior monologue and stream of consciousness, can be shown to have been made possible first by Augustine’s discovery of an infinite dimension of interiority in himself in relation to and as mirroring the infinite abyss of a transcendent God.12 The subject discovers its own inward infinity only by seeing itself as made in the image of God, the one whom Augustine addresses and responds to in the Confessions, in basic ways the founding text of autobiographical narrative. To this extent, Christian epic opens within and extends Augustine’s horizon of subjective reflection. As was to be demonstrated most systematically by Hegel, it is especially by reflection, and eminently by self-reflection, that all spiritual and artistic revelation in the modern world is enabled to occur. Actually, this was already implicit in the paradigm of the Trinity, wherein the Father is reflected in the Son through the Holy Spirit, as it emerged in Augustine’s speculative development of the doctrine, specifically in his understanding of the threefold Godhead in terms of psychological analogies to the threefold faculties (Memory, Intellect, Will) of the human mind and its self-reflexive powers. Such speculation laid down essential premises for linking the experience of subjective reflection with theological revelation. With Dante’s Paradiso, the self-reflexivity inherent in the divine as well as in hu12. One particularly cogent analysis of this derivation is found in Thomas J. J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), chapter 2, on Augustine.

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    man nature shows itself to be conducive to the human possibility of apprehending the divine, particularly to the aesthetic expression of divinity in the form of poetry. This expression takes place exemplarily in the saturated specular reflexivity of the Paradiso’s lyrical language, which is cast into terza rima. Trinitarian divinity becomes manifest phenomenologically, and is thus reflected into experience, particularly into the subject’s experience of self-reflection in the mirror of poetry. This experience is intimately bound up with the experience of language, and especially of the self-reflexive linguistic structures such as rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and assonance, that are most intensively deployed in poetic and particularly in lyrical language. A certain limit of this broadly phenomenological development is reached in Joyce. Joyce certainly pushes self-conscious reflection in narrative to an extreme, producing first what he calls an “epiphany,” and later breaking self-consciousness wide open into a total disclosure that knows no bounds, whether of self or of consciousness. He apparently abandons all effort to integrate this disclosure into the unified consciousness of an individual, although loosely it may all still belong to the protagonist’s experience. An autobiographical presence, moreover, still haunts Finnegans Wake, through many allusions and through a specific, mordantly ironic self-parody in the figure of Shem the Penman. But even more than consciousness and self-consciousness, the medium of revelation, or “epiphany,” becomes language. For consciousness is constituted in and by language. Just as consciousness is the medium in which revelation or the appearing of phenomena takes place, so its own medium is language, and consequently it is in language that revelation comes to be realized. Hence, the relentless search of modern poets for an ultimate disclosure via the fully sensual incarnation of thought and reality in language. And Joyce, particularly the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, can be placed in the vanguard of this experimentation with poetic language as coextensive with the world and consciousness.13 13.  Joyce criticism pursuing this direction of interpretation is legion. Issues concerning disclosure through linguistic deviance are brought to focus especially by Fritz Senn, in Joyce’s Dislocutions: Essays on Reading as Translation, ed. John Paul Riquelme (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). See also Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Some recent contributions can be sampled in James Joyce and the Difference of Language, ed. Laurent Milesi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation The reflexivity characteristic of self-consciousness reveals and realizes itself concretely in the self-reflexiveness of language. Joyce purposefully dismantles every conventional organizing structure of narration and takes completely to pieces any familiar order of language itself. Yet, in this process, the self-reflexive essence of language is heightened rather than obliterated, and it reflects into everything Joyce represents. He remains obsessed with phenomena of recurrence, of repetition, that is, of “recirculation,” as it is termed from the opening lines of Finnegans Wake. The very linearity of time, its “riverrun,” in the classic Heraclitean metaphor, presupposes a circularity whereby a certain sameness enables elements to be perceived as belonging together, as forming a series, be it only a series of two or three letters or syllables, in which repetition structures the stream of speech into units with a wholeness holding them together. Without such recurrences, the universe would just be infinitely dispersed, whereas recurrence effects a movement of recuperation and recapitulation in and out of dispersion.14 Joyce led consciousness, particularly the self-consciousness of the individual as represented in his protagonists and alter-egos, down a path of progressive dissolution. He reflected self-consciousness so deeply into itself that it shattered and was no longer clearly set off against either the consciousness of others or the world itself. His stream of consciousness flooded over all conceivable embankments and immersed the whole world of consciousness in a sea of the unconscious, where individual identities were no longer distinct but merged into one another. The dissolution of individual consciousness and its dispersal into the body certainly represents one crucial strand of Joyce’s development of the novel as a generic form. But bound up with this—as Finnegans Wake renders particularly palpable—is the disintegration of the medium by which consciousness consti14. This has been perceived, though not perhaps as positive and empowering, for example, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Milles plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980), 12: “The words of Joyce, rightly said to be ‘of multiple roots,’ do not effectively shatter the linear unity of the word, or even of language, except in positing a cyclic unity of the phrase, of the text or of knowing” (Les mots de Joyce, justement dits “à racines multiples,” ne brisent effectivement l’unité linéaire du mot, ou même de la langue, qu’en posant une unité cyclique de la phrase, du texte ou du savoir). Joyce ends by affirming, in their view, “a superior, properly angelic unity” (une unité proprement angélique et supérieure).

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    tutes itself and in which it is also dispersed, namely, language. It is in the transformations wrought upon language that we grasp most readily how the “revelation” Joyce proffers can still be considered, in essential ways, theological in nature. Joyce realizes what in the end is not only a breaking and fragmenting and profaning of language, but also what can be called, in the jargon of theology, a eucharistic transfiguration of the word. It is “transfiguration” in the sense of a transfer of potency from figure to figure that affirms the word—even in its distortion and demolition—as an enhanced and empowered version of itself. This revelation may be considered theological at least in the minimal sense that the word’s very dissolution reveals a submerged centeredness of sense—of all sense in an implicit, amorphous reservoir of sense—precisely in the moment that this centeredness comes undone.15 It is not at first obvious that any theological motivations determine Joyce’s strident violation and dispersal of the word. So it is necessary here to pose very basic questions. One of the most challenging theological questions regarding Joyce is that of how language as a dynamic happening, continually in process of formation and deformation, as epitomized by Joyce’s self-confessed “work in progress,” can be a revelation, a locus of the happening of truth, a truth transcending the isolated material elements into which language and all reality fragment when every ideal structure collapses and all prefabricated sense is smashed. Does the prophetic claim to revelation on the part of Christian prophetic poets, then, have a counterpart in Joyce’s further transformation, apparently an exasperated deformation of Christian epic tradition? The traditional epic and prophetic ambition to represent the totality of history, myth, and cosmos is still very much alive in Joyce’s epic, as is suggested by the proper names alone of Finnegans Wake, beginning with Adam and Eve and including Ceasar, Brutus and Cassius (that is, Burrus and Caseous), Tristan (confounded with Tristram) and Isolde (Issy), Abra15. A non-metaphysical fundamental theology of sacramentality is offered by Louis-Marie Chauvet in Symbole et sacrament: Une relecture sacramentelle de l’existence chrétienne (Paris: Cerf, 1987). Chauvet concentrates simply on the given practice of the sacraments without attempting to explain their origin. He examines how the sacraments structure Christian identity in relation to an absence. They work against the desire to see-touch-find, which orients to the dead body of the resurrected Christ: they require rather that we listen to a word.

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation ham, Isaac, Noah, Shem, Japheth, Buddha, Mohammed, and, most inclusively of all, Here Comes Everybody (H.C.E.).16 This all-inclusiveness is confirmed by the spatial and geographic dimensions of the novel, with its presumable center in Dublin’s Howth Castle at the mouth of the river Liffey (names in which places and persons coalesce) but ranging across continents, straddling, from the very first lines, “Nord Armorica” and “Europe Minor,” from there to spread linguistically to the Orient and remotest corners of the earth. Another index of the work’s all-inclusive catholicity is the unrestricted range of languages it draws into its linguistic mix. Of course, the inclusiveness in question can never be definitively totalized and remains perpetually open to new inclusions. Mutations, equivocations, virtual identifications, and associations wrought with these and other names open up pluralities of possible interpretations that prove inexhaustible. In general, Joyce’s literary formulations serve as functions for producing new connections. It is their limitless generative potency rather than any definitely circumscribed field of references, however comprehensive, that constitutes their opening into a universal and open embrace. Given this unrestricted range, it often seems that any sense of a centered narrative and of unity of consciousness is destroyed by Joyce in his disarticulation and dismembering of all conventional narrative forms together with his transgressions of all linguistic norms down to basic grammar and orthography. Still, such fragmentation and deliberate scrabbling of form may be pursued for the purpose of effecting, or at least enabling, a reintegration at another level, a level perhaps transcending every possible system and even every conceivable principle. Such a quintessentially modernist pattern takes on a clear doctrinal motivation, for example, in T. S. Eliot’s poetic development from The Waste Land ’s fragments shored against his ruin to the mystic music of Four Quartets. Eliot made public his return to Christianity and his adherence to the Anglo-Catholic Church. By contrast, for Joyce there is no declared doctrinal allegiance, nor perhaps intent, but still his language itself manages to trace a path of return 16. Already Ulysses was based on the ambition to write the book of books in which everything is said in every relation, by each thing in its own language. As Hélène Cixous infers, “This monstrous epiphany will therefore be the total manifestation of reality through language” (Cette monstrueuse épiphanie sera donc la manifestation totale de la réalité à travers le langage) (L’Exil de James Joyce ou l’art du remplacement [Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1968], 264).

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    and to center itself through repetition. For repetition is per se a revelation of some structure transcending the merely fragmentary: it constitutes or suggests an at least virtual joining together in a higher synthesis of a hypothetical whole. Repetition produces a sort of eternal time of the text, whose end is at the same time its beginning. This time of repetition is realized in the simultaneity of all elements, including latent ones, together in language. The rhetorical philosophy of Giambattista Vico in the Scienza nuova discovers this dimension as an “ideal eternal history” (storia ideale eterna), a synchronic structure or “common mental dictionary” (vocabulario mentale comune) giving history—even in its diachronic unfolding—the unity of a recurring cycle.17 Finnegans Wake expressly connects its vision of history to Vico’s in locutions like “Our wholemole millwheeling vicociclometer” (614.27) and “PROBA- / POSSIBLE / PROLEGO- / MENA TO / IDEAREAL / HISTORY” (262.3–8), which play with Vico’s concept of history as providential, highlighting both its ideality and its realism, as well as the conjunction of the two.18 To the extent that the structures of centeredness and totality created by repetition are essentially theological, as has become more and more evident over the course of postmodern, and particularly post-secular, thought,19 Joyce can be read as re-proposing the theological vision of Christian epic in a new, more radical form, freed from dogmatic accretions but activated in its essential creative energies. If there can be any overarching theme to Finnegans Wake, then it is best defined as the theme of recurrence signaled in Viconian terms from the book’s very first phrase, with its mention of “a commodius vicus of recirculation” (3.2), and enacted in the closing words, which circle back round to become the beginning of the first sentence. In fact, recurrence is inscribed already into the title. The name “Finnegan”—that is, “Finn again”—sounds like the end, finis, over again. This theme coalesces with 17.  Giambattista Vico, Princìpi di scienza nuova (1744), in vol. 1 of Opere, ed. Andrea Battistini (Milan: Mondadori, 1990); citations are from paragraphs 7 and 162. 18. All citations to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (originally published in 1939) are to the third edition, published by Faber and Faber in 1964 [hereafter cited as FW, with page and line numbers]. 19. See Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology, ed. Phillip Blond (New York: Routledge, 1998).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation that of resurrection, of a summoning of all Irish or all humans to wake up to life, if we read the title as plural and verbal, as indeed the lack of an apostrophe invites us to do: (All) Finnegans Wake (Up)! As an imperative addressed to all Irish, and by synecdoche to all humanity, in the name of a mythic ancestor, the title announces not so much an end, “fin,” as a beginning again, a reawakening or even a resurrection. Of course, any solemn, sacralizing reading of resurrection can be but partial and is set up to be raucously reversed. “Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you’re going to be Mister Finnagain!” roars boisterous and exultant. The uproarious spirit of the whole book and its author is condensed into the deformative declensions of the name in the title: “Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you’re going to be fined again!” (5.8–11). How many different meanings recur in the course of a phonemic phenomenon that slides from fin to fun to fine? To be fined here suggests, in addition to being monetarily penalized, also being ended, finished, and perhaps also, transitively, being made fine, that is, being refined, a recurrent motif in modern literary tradition from its troubadouric origins in fin amor. All these virtual evocations involve repetitions of cultural tradition, a notion confessedly suggested to Joyce by the historical cycles of Vico, the corso and ricorso. There is, in fact, constant recurrence to this theory of Vico’s in formulations such as “he cursed and recursed” (FW, 29.9) or “It was corso in cursu on coarser again” (FW, 89.11). Donald Phillip Verene, with an acknowledgment to Adaline Glasheen, shows how completely beholden Joyce was to Vico for the general conception and project, and not just the “scaffolding,” of Finnegans Wake, and in particular for the whole vision of history as repetition that animates it.20 Joyce emerges in Verene’s comparative study as the authentic resurrection of Vico in the twentieth century: just like Vico in his Autobiography, so Tim Finnegan, in the popular ballad from which the Joycean title is taken, fell from a ladder, broke his skull, and was brought back to life. 20. Donald Phillip Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and Finnegans Wake (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). The rediscovery of Vico as an intellectual foundation for Finnegans Wake owes very much also to John Bishop, Joyce’s Book of the Dark: “Finnegans Wake” (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); see chapter 7: “Vico’s ‘Night of Darkness’: The New Science and Finnegans Wake.”

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    Verene demonstrates, furthermore, that Joyce’s own embedded fictional autobiography is inextricably entangled with Vico’s. Giambattista (short for Giovanni Battista, that is, John the Baptist) is cast in the role of Joyce’s brother, John Stanislaus, who rivals and even outshines James by his practical savvy and worldly success. In the Wake, this sibling rivalry is played out by the characters Shaun and Shem, Irish for John and James, respectively. This sets up further repetitions with transformations of Vico’s and Joyce’s life stories as repeats of perennial human archetypes. Most striking of all in this odyssey in which history repeats and everyone is also someone else is the identification of the novel’s protagonist H. C. Earwicker with Vico. Joyce’s way with repetition shows how history is always being rehashed in every apparently insignificant, eminently forgettable non-event of our lives and identities. This happens constantly in the minutest details, phonic and graphic, throughout the text of the Wake. Verene points out that the first initials of Earwicker, H. C., are also those of Vico, G. B., advanced forward one letter each in the alphabet, as would suit a re-incarnation of Vico one phase later in history. Moreover, W is V doubled, whereas the Latin v is pronounced as a w, and thus, to the ear, Wicker comes close to Vico. This is especially so when a British accent attenuates the final r of Wicker, making it sound more like a vowel. Furthermore, Wick, signifying a row of houses, is actually derived from the Latin word for street, vicus, the Latin form of Vico’s name that Joyce evokes from the book’s opening phrase (“vicus of recirculation”) and later interprets explicitly as “Vico’s road” (FW, 246.25). Vico is also equated within the fiction with one of the protagonist’s alter egos, “the producer (Mr. John Baptister Vickar)” (FW, 255.27), for he is a vicar (a word derived from vice, or “stead”), as Verene explains, “both in the sense of the custodian of divine knowledge and as the representative of the divine on earth—the agent of providence, the vicar of history.” Accordingly, Verene is able to conclude that “Vico is the protagonist of Finnegans Wake. He is Earwicker.”21 21.  Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, 24. In meticulously documenting Joyce’s many hints and explicit statements concerning Vico as the key to Joyce’s final work, Verene relays the author’s advice to contemporary inquirers that the way to read Finnegans Wake is to let the “linguistic phenomena affect one as such” (17).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation Of course, the identification with Vico is not meant to be restrictive or binding, but rather to serve as an anchor for further identifications and resurrections. Indeed, repetition can be a way of freeing oneself from the alienation of the past by assuming it and, in effect, doing it all over again oneself, freely, as one’s own. In this sense, repetition frees the future from being mortgaged to the past. Kierkegaard theorized a form of repetition oriented toward the future, and comparable notions have been developed philosophically by Nietzsche and Heidegger. Nietzsche’s declaring “Thus I willed it” with regard to everything, in order to overcome resentment and consequent oppression by the past and its “it was,” fixed like letters on a gravestone, is a repetition designed to reenact the past in a dimension of freedom, so as to no longer be conditioned by it as by an albatross about one’s neck, an inert mass or fatality that cannot be changed. The act of repetition in this way becomes the origin of a new universe, the beginning of a new history. These more characteristically modern emphases on originality possibly amplify the concept of repetition that Joyce borrowed avowedly from Vico. In any case, this view of repetition captures an important aspect of Joyce’s thought and illuminates what he means by recirculation and ricorso. Essential to this view is that even in its act of negating the totality of the past as past, repetition creates a new totality of all that was past, only now centered in itself, in the present act of repetition, and projected toward the future that is anticipated—which is equivalent to its being proleptically repeated. Repetition, by the role it takes on in Joyce’s text, constitutes the last remnant—but still the very essence, stripped to its core—of a centered and totalized order. In this minimal phenomenon of repetition, a totality centered in the syllable or in a sequence of letters—whatever serves as a minimal fragment reflecting the order of the universe—is made present or is at least glimpsed as a fleeting, yet structuring and necessary moment. Centeredness and totality are irreducibly theological postulates, for they imply consciousness and ultimately an infinite consciousness. A center and a whole do not and cannot exist divorced from all subjectivity, nor from a perspectival horizon that is in principle infinitely extendable. They are perceptions, phenomena, structures that need to be perceived in order to be at all—even though the final grounds on which such perceptions rest must prove to be endlessly elusive.

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    Even if there may be simply given configurations of matter in some purely objective universe, the organization of elements into a whole with a center is inevitably a subjectively conditioned phenomenon. Consider the perfect organization of a flower with its arrangement of leaves and petals surrounding a corolla in rich array surpassing even King Solomon’s pomp (Matthew 6:28–29). Is this perfect object more than a miraculous coincidence of blind forces producing meaningless shapes? Not without or apart from the assumptions of purposiveness—what Kant’s teleological critique terms Zweckmässigkeit, literally, “being measured to an end,” on which the perception of organic form is based. Arguments for the subjective validity of aesthetic perceptions may not be able to prove that any such thing as aesthetic value actually exists, but they nevertheless do demonstrate that the concept of aesthetic form is linked structurally with the concept of a subject. Even in the most ordered systems and functions which, removed from human values, may be but random arrays and expenditures of energy, the organization of elements into a whole with a center is a perception— that is, it is for someone. If phenomena of totalizing and centering are in fact perceived, then necessarily some instance of subjectivity has been presupposed. Every particular conception of a subject may prove dispensable and inadequate. All are but interpretations of a subjectivity that is in its own nature unknowable because infinite. But at this level, beyond the possibility of being objectively known and articulated, the absolute Subject of theology still remains in play. Ostensibly, subjectivity and mind are dissolved by Joyce into language. And this is certainly true for any given construction of a subject. Nevertheless, an unspecified subjectivity, an indefinable “divine” mind, still plays through the orchestrations of meaning that emerge from Joyce’s linguistic experiments and their unaccountably graceful turns and re-turnings. In this regard, Joyce is ever his re-joyceful self, like “The Gracehoper” who was “always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity” (FW, 414.21–22). For Derek Attridge, “a crucial effect of the Wake’s dissolution of the distinction between center and periphery is to reveal the constructedness, and hence the radical instability of any such distinction.”22 This is undoubtedly true, but focusing exclusively on this “revelation” tends to be22. Attridge, Peculiar Language, 236.

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation come closural, a final answer that arrests the infinite play of signification. Of course, this is just what Attridge would abhor, since he intends to celebrate the open-ended production of endless constructions of center and periphery. Yet, by making our activity of construction the first source and the last answer concerning all phenomena of centering and dispersion, unveiling the mystery as really just a human production, we short-circuit the process as a whole that reaches beyond us. We exclude grace or, put another way, the creative chaos that theology envisages at the primordial origin of creation as expressed, for example, in the phrase of Genesis 1:2: “the world was without form and void.” The “lesson” of the Wake for Attridge here seems to come to a definition of the ultimate source of all as human construction: “As long as we need centers and digressions—and it is difficult to imagine not needing them—we will find them. The lesson of the Wake is that we do not stop finding them, and building on them, when we know that they are our own productions.”23 But this description of ongoing inquiry and unfinished activity of interpretation nevertheless tends to circumscribe the field. Now we know that we are dealing only with our own constructions. But do we really? Is that not perhaps too much for us to know? This revelation is itself inscribed within a textual unfolding of meaning that we do not know or control. We do not necessarily want, nor are we entitled, to deem “constructedness” to be the final answer to the question of where differences come from, however much we do want to see the operative elements and effects of constructedness in all we survey. Vico would distinguish here between the true, which we can know because we have made it (verum esse ipsum factum), and the certain, what is simply there, empirically given, prior to us and our constructions. The humanly made world of history and culture can be known and understood in its grounds or truth, but nature, for all the certainty of its being there, is alien to human making and therefore impenetrable to human understanding. The certain is simply given and is external to our consciousness because it is made by God. Such a theological perspective can serve to preserve the sense of a transcendent mystery. This renunciation of positive knowledge must not be allowed to harden into any sort of rigid doctrine or mystification, but it is nevertheless important to allow for the negating of all our differences and constructions, since we may not be the “only 23.  Ibid., 237.

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    maker” of the differences and digressions we experience, whether in a text or in the world. Jacques Derrida, for one, to whom Attridge acknowledges his greatest debt, has felt an urgent need to keep deconstruction, with its relentless exposures of the constructedness of differences, in dialogue with theology.24 Discourses of negative theology and deconstruction taken together can remain infinitely open to difference, whereas either one alone, without its antagonist, would lack the dimension of dialogical openness and, to that extent, shut difference down.25 I am very much in agreement with Attridge’s agenda for re-casting Finnegans Wake as revealing the way literature and language in general work, and therefore also with his resisting the tendency to consign this work to the margins of literature as a freak, or even as hardly an instance of literature at all. Indeed, one of the major motivations for reading the work in continuity with Christian epic tradition and its claims for poetry as a type of religious revelation is precisely that such reading enables us to place Finnegans Wake in the center of our experience of literature. For his own different motives, this is what Attridge too is attempting to do. However, I believe this requires theological perspectives that lead beyond human constructions to the overmastering divinity of chaos—that is, to an order that appears to our own efforts of comprehension to be chaos because we did not construct it, since, as Vico reminds us, the human mind can comprehend only what it has itself made.26 The exemplarity of Finnegans Wake is to be found perhaps preeminently in its foregrounding the working of repetition in any making of 24.  For Attridge’s debt to Derrida, see ibid., 7. For Derrida’s need to keep deconstruction in dialogue with theology, witness his many writings on negative theology, some of which are collected in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. H. Coward and T. Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992); see, further, John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). 25.  Most instructive here is David E. Klemm, “Open Secrets: Derrida and Negative Theology,” in Negation and Theology, ed. Robert P. Scharlemann (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992). See also Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), especially chapter 2: “Hypertheology,” and chapter 4: “The Generous Repetition.” 26. This principle of Vico’s thought is stated programmatically in Scienza nuova, sec. 331.

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation sense in literature and language alike. In discerning repetition, we are indeed constantly thrown back upon human constructions in the effort to see whatever determining principles, human or divine, are at work in language. We observed earlier, however, that perception of repetition presupposes consciousness, and even possibly infinite consciousness in the case of repetition without limit. Of course, phenomena of consciousness as they are actually apprehended are always only constructions of consciousness. Still, the constructions are not themselves their own final explanation, and they are not finally circumscribed by the consciousness in which they are inscribed. They remain always open to being comprehended anew and differently by a larger consciousness than that which has already comprehended them. Joyce’s method is not to combine perfectly conceived senses into savant syntheses of a conceptual nature in order to make language say the extraordinarily complex thoughts he has conceived. To the extent that his verbal rhapsodies express thoughts at all, they are thoughts immanent to language and emergent from it. Joyce explores thoughts as they arise directly from language or even remain caught in the throat of speech—speech spoken particularly in the voice of his own mother tongue, however mischievously twisted, as an Irish orality plays delightful havoc with English orthography. Thought, dianoia, is elicited and interrupted by a diction, lexis, that plays every trick in its “trictionary” to disrupt and recombine the syllables of sense. And indeed, words are a mine of homologies or relative samenesses, relations which consist in recurrences of some always only elusively identifiable element. Despite the renunciation of control from above, language itself displays a knack for repeating itself, for finding its own patterns of recurrence and thereby forging the structures and sutures that link it internally. Sub-semantic values become revelatory of the incipient and implicit senses of words beneath their codified, conventional sense. Accordingly, the coherence of absolute chaos—what Joyce calls a “chaosmos”—presents itself spontaneously, as a miracle. There is method in this madness, thinking in this speech without normal conscious control. Of course, it is the lack of any overarching structure or golden thread that distinguishes this universe of the “chaosmos of Alle anyway connected” (FW, 118.21). To open up all possible relations and so exclude nothing from the totality, Joyce’s language

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    must be receptive to any connections whatsoever, as well as to the dissolution of them all. It is precisely this acceptance of total dissolution that defines the totality in which the book finds its unsurpassable liveliness.27 Thus the unrelenting exposure of the chaos of the world and its words at the same time expresses the marvelous connectedness of it all. It is a “panepiphanal world” (603.13) and this epiphany of all takes place in words. Words are mined so as to uncover hidden veins in which circulates unsuspected linguistic lymph with great gusto for the minimal deformation that makes suddenly appear a formerly lost network of relations. Little slips such as slight misspellings can conjure an unsuspected verbal constellation out of eclipse and re-contextualize the basic sense of a given word by catapulting it into a different, perhaps diametrically opposed galaxy of meanings, typically substituting for the hallowed and sacred the unabashedly profane. Such rich repetition in its total saturation is very apt to involve a coincidence of opposites, as Joyce exercises his penchant for calembours, prompted by the imp of the improper. Having mentioned a mother Mary coming “in her white of gold with a tourch of ivy to rekindle the flame on Felix Day,” Joyce re-invents her name in a way that brings out of this sacred icon the opposite of its customarily solemn significance: “They called her Holly Merry” (27.11–14). The primitive nature worship of a female principle that comparative religion detects in the Catholic Marian cults is registered here and distilled gaily into the name of a festive plant, holly, and an adjective for frolicsome celebration, or “making merry,” that, taken together, constitute a version of the sacred name “Holy Mary.” “Holly Merry,” moreover, perfectly renders the sound of this name prayed aloud with a Gaelic accent in the monotonous repetitions of the Hail Mary in its second breath or strophe (“Holy Mary, mother of God . . . “), giving this free linguistic play a sharp satirical point. A further permutation of these phonetic forms into “hellmuirries” (FW, 81.28) will make the blasphemous possibilities here even more evident, though this may only mean that the distance between blasphemy and piety has been collapsed, since, as the text 27.  Umberto Eco, in Le poetiche di Joyce (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), writes of a “rebirth through the total acceptance, without reservations, of dissolution represented in its elementary nucleuses transposed into a linguistic key” (rinascita attraverso l’accettazione totale, senza riserve, della dissoluzione, rappresentata nei suoi nuclei elementari, trasposti in chiave linguistica) (127).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation elsewhere reminds us, everything is sacred for a blasphemer: “tout est sacré pour un sacreur” (18.29). Joyce’s ostensible subversive dissolving and dismembering of language in this way actually brings its indestructible propensity toward interconnectedness to the surface. Though oftentimes his puns may be impertinent and apparently superfluous to all specifiable intents and purposes, their sap and savor and seductiveness are such as to make any superimposed programs of meaning pale by comparison with the mutations’ own intrinsic suggestiveness. One is persuaded to abandon the attempt to understand words as used to mean something preconceived, in order to let them stray from their standard senses and proliferate in meanings in a promiscuous, carnivalesque engendering of identities of each potentially with all. The poets of the Christian epic had shown that divinity could be experienced as immanent to the subject, as not an Other in objective form but as dwelling in the very self-reflexive structure of consciousness. Divinity so experienced is in the form rather than in any determinate or objective content of experience; it is experienced, therefore, as infinite rather than as finite. Going one step further, Joyce shows that language itself, without any preconceived subjective intent, is already inhabited by the essentially theological structures of centeredness and totality as manifest in the irrepressible life of linguistic repetition. Theology here is not any mere intention, or velleity, of the writer, but is disclosed as inherent in the writing and in the words themselves. Repetition, as enacted by Joyce, implies a structure of return and even of a hypothetical whole. By thematizing this circular pattern, Joyce establishes the grounds for faith that alpha and omega belong to the same language-in-process—though this may consist in many amalgamated languages—across all the dislocations that unrestricted combinatorial play with the alphabet can invent. Indeed, language can no longer be conceived of as a self-enclosed system proper to a national entity or ethnicity, but is itself opened up as a field traversed by an indeterminate set of uncircumscribable idioms. Joyce has realized in his texts that neither his nor any finite creature’s thought will ever exhaustively comprehend the sense that is present and absent, alive and dead, mummified and vibrant in its language. And yet telltale verbal mutations, such as “somethink” (FW, 83.14; emphasis mine), suggest that there is an anonymous thought of someone behind everything, everything that language can name as “something.”

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    Late in Finnegans Wake, Joyce asks the question, “Where did thots come from?” (597.25). In a sense, this is the question upon which the entire text is suspended. The origin of thoughts remains always open, questionable, and mysterious. This is so even given the cycles of repetition within which thoughts occur and recur—in fact, at least on the showing of this text, especially on such a basis. The mystery is theological in nature, furthermore, as Joyce suggests by naming it with the name of the Egyptian god, Thot. But it is at the same time every child’s question about where children (“tots”) come from. The question of thought or consciousness or subjectivity is the question of one’s own origin, and at the same time it is the question of God. It comes up ineluctably in the midst of the argument that phenomena of repetition, deeply understood, presuppose an endless, indefinable subjectivity and thereby also a sort of divinity—Thot, but also precisely thought, in one of the many different senses Joyce gives this word all at once.28 In another complex jousting with this idea of the intrinsically divine mystery of thought, Joyce writes: For if sciencium (what’s what) can mute uns nought, ’a thought, abought the Great Sommboddy within the Omniboss, perhops an artsaccord (hoot’s hoot) might sing urms tumtim abutt the Little Newbuddies that ring his panch. (FW, 415.14–18)

The thought of God, the supreme authority or boss of all (“Omniboss”), may change and profit us nothing. But within this God, in which all live and move and have their being, is a great Somebody (“Sommboddy”), more literally and concretely some body, the one that is “highest” (“summa” in Latin or “somma” in Italian) and the sum of all. This is what may be sung in epic poetry (“might sing urms,” as in the incipit of the Aeneid: “Arms and the man I sing”), with an emphasis on epic’s striving to represent the original “ur” event, even while it represents, according to the letter, a dead civilization, an “urn.” For science cannot silence us (“can mute uns nought”) with all its apodictic certainties. Much more than science can fathom is clamoring in the harpsichord of language, in which apparently 28.  Jennifer Schiffer Levine draws out different senses of “thot” from the line “Where did thots come from?” in her discussion of Finnegans Wake, in section 2 of “Originality and Repetition in Finnegans Wake and Ulysses,” PMLA 94 (1979): 106–20.

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation insignificant nobodies and, at all events, new bodies budding by artful accord and contingency, or per hops (“perhops”), can resonate and “ring,” not so much in the mind as in the tummy, or “panch.” The “Great Sommboddy” morphing into “Little Newbuddies” in this way constitutes a negative-theological and -anthropological reversal: negatively theological in identifying God as Nobody and negatively anthropological in that the individual person, somebody, is negated as just a body, and then, further, as little buds, cells destined for future growth. This reversal, rather than projecting into empty intellectual abstraction, makes carnally concrete the ultimate unknowability of the body as the allencompassing (and to that extent theological) mystery that thought can never exhaust, but within which it nevertheless manifests itself. Repetition is a mechanism that structures Joyce’s language, just as it structures any language, most conspicuously poetic language, and it is here thematized microscopically, in minute hints that stumble upon otherwise scarcely perceptible reiterations, as well as in the Wake’s overarching “theme,” as signaled from the opening lines. Not only are etymological origins of words evoked by Joyce’s morphological deformations. All sorts of random associations, having nothing to do with words’ etymological histories, are also forged: Finnegan’s living “in the broadest way immarginable” (FW, 4.19) raises the question of whether the imaginable is impossible to marginalize, placing linguistic imagination into the central focus and testifying to its inventivity as without confinement, as unlimited and unstoppable, precisely “imm-arginable” (arginare in Italian means “to set limits,” literally, “to dam”). Language is a maze and a matrix of such gratuitous connections and suggestions. Without presuming actual historical relations of derivation and dependence, phenomena of repetition multiply with their unlimited hints and simulations of sense. Buried in any of Joyce’s word lists are myriad, incalculable such associations. What are the presuppositions of this universe of recurrences in which the master narrative is fragmented and submerged? Might these unmistakable elements of association, of ineluctable reiteration, be signs of a theology that has simply become less obvious but more pervasive, invading the very sub-semantic, pre-linguistic constitutive material of the word? Joyce shows that Vico’s ricorrenze, or the cycles and returnings of history, are inherent within language itself: they constitute this medium’s own

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    intrinsic energy. Beyond all the purposes consciously pursued by the artist, language has purposes and directions of its own. To disclose this mind inherent in his medium itself, Joyce has to deliberately undo the determinations consciously given to language from without: he has to neutralize or nullify his own use of it as an instrument to express his thought—except insofar as the thoughts that emerge from his language themselves happen to be those he is in search of beneath all conscious surfaces of his thinking. The returns or repetitions where synthesis takes place are thereby exposed as produced spontaneously by language itself in its own errant perambulations and unmasterable metamorphoses. Of course, it is well known that Joyce lavished unrelenting labors on the construction and elaboration of his language, through innumerable drafts, of the various sections of Finnegans Wake. The spontaneity he achieves with language is not reached by avoiding all conscious work upon it. On the contrary, these inherent energies are released by the artist’s carefully calculated interventions. F. R. Leavis scathingly criticized Joyce for pursuing the development of his medium for its own sake rather than in response to “a pressure of something to be conveyed,” such as he found it especially in the model of Shakespeare’s language. Edmund Wilson similarly worried over “what seems Joyce’s growing self-indulgence in an impulse to pure verbal play.”29 This autonomy of the word with respect to any fully extralinguistic field of reference, however, is a mode of revelation already thoroughly integrated into Christian poetic tradition from Dante’s Paradiso on. Milton, too, is ever again taxed with simply overwhelming his reader with “organ music” in purely rhetorical excesses that obfuscate referential sense.30 But there is a sphere of revelation immanent to the word—the more so wherever it may also be believed to be a theological Word. Whatever he may have believed theologically, Joyce shows how the whole universe in its infinity can be teased out of words in their inexhaustible permutations and inarrestable engenderings of sense. The question remains whether this triggering of language into the unfettered release of its untold energies is to be under29. Leavis’s and Wilson’s essays are quoted from The Importance of Scrutiny (New York: New York University Press, 1964), ed. Eric Bentley, 316 and 367, respectively. 30. This interpretation goes back to T. S. Eliot, “Milton,” in On Poetry and Poets (New York: Farrar, 1957).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation stood as the demise or as an apotheosis of theology. In either case, it is a transformation of theology. Not any fixed doctrine or dogmatic discourse, theology must be understood rather as the divinity of the word itself in the infinity of its creative capabilities. Such is the divine word—theou logos— revealed most basically by repetition in the language of Finnegans Wake. Criticism of Joyce has been greatly enriched by certain distinguished efforts to read him back into the Christian epic and biblical-prophetic traditions. In particular, Northrop Frye excavated the Blakean parallels and overall pattern of Finnegans Wake, identifying Blake’s Albion, a giant form embracing a whole nation and all humanity, as model for Finnegan.31 More consolidated and programmatic in their theological intent are Thomas J. J. Altizer’s ambitious and compelling readings of Joyce in the context of Christian epics, especially those of Dante, Milton, and Blake.32 A somewhat differently theological approach has been offered, as we have seen, by Donald Phillip Verene in his Knowledge of Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and Finnegans Wake through Vico, who, after all, is Joyce’s acknowledged source for thinking repetition. Verene highlights Vico’s theory of the repetition of natural law (ius naturale gentium) in history as revelation of divine providence in such a way that “the inner form of every event in the human world is a cycle.”33 Yet another recent contribution with some attention to Vico and a sense for Joyce’s writing as theological revelation in the tradition of Dante—in some sense a repetition of Dante at the heart of the modernist project of “making it new”—is Lucia Boldrini’s study of the literary relations between Dante and Joyce.34 Such studies point the way toward what is now opening up as a very fertile field for further investigation and for theologically sensitive methods of reading Joyce. In a reversal of the rejection of theology that has been typical, if not constitutive, of the dominant modern critical frameof-mind, theological modes of thought and representation are thus discovered to be integral to Joyce’s articulation of his quintessentially modernist vision. Provocative new work, particularly by Gian Balsamo and 31. Northrop Frye, “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963). 32. Altizer, History as Apocalypse. 33.  Verene, Knowledge of Things Human and Divine, 201. 34. Lucia Boldrini, Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    Giuseppe Martella, aims programmatically to redefine our understanding of the possibilities of theological disclosure in action in Joyce’s language and texts. This work finds the typological poetics of the Bible employed with dazzling originality by Joyce to make himself the father of his own predecessors, just as the New Testament claims to reveal the truth of the Old.35 Martella shows the dialectic of genres, particularly the genres of law, prophecy, and gospel in the Bible, to be the basis for the complex interplay between forms of writing, such as the novel, romance, and history or chronicle, in modern discourse as reformulated by Joyce.36 Joyce redeploys these traditional, biblical modalities of revealing truth in a burlesque, parodic manner that undermines them and yet elicits from the resulting farrago of equivocation and contradiction a divine comedy that triumphs as the only possible form of true and total disclosure in the modern age. Joyce’s poem, which rewrites the sacred history of Western culture in an ironic key, is thus unveiled as paradigmatic for modern epic literature and for a revolutionary, modern approach to theological vision as well. This line of criticism is demonstrating with increasing éclat how religious revelation can be continued and carried beyond the confines of the biblical canon by self-conscious literary artists, and can be fused with their presumably secular projects of disclosing human life and history in some semblance of their total meaning. These concerns are shared at the heart of their endeavors by the classic Christian epic poets and Joyce alike. I have attempted to probe the theological disclosure that is latent yet inherent nonetheless within poetic language as it is rediscovered by an ostensibly anti-theological modernity. Does poetic language itself become the still living, growing tip of religious revelation in the secularized prophetic poetry of the Romantics or in the symbolist poetics of Rimbaud or Mallarmé, or even in modernist assaults upon and destructurations of language as diverse as those wrought by T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and Samuel Beckett? Certainly, the case of James Joyce, and particularly of Finnegans Wake, 35.  Gian Balsamo, Scriptural Poetics in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 2002), and Rituals of Literature: Joyce, Dante, Saint Thomas, and the Tradition of Christian Epics (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003). 36.  Giuseppe Martella, Ulisse: Parallelo biblico e modernità (Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria, 1997).

   Linguistic Repetition as Theological Revelation offers an especially provocative example of how this might indeed be the case. Of course, this creative and critical orientation is not just a matter of applying theology as a preconstituted discourse to literary interpretation. Rather, theology is completely transformed and, in effect, re-invented by the thoroughgoing mediation of poetic language in these literary texts. But perhaps this was implicitly the case with theology all along from its origins in myth. Conversely, literature, or originally, poetry, devolves from theology, that is, the two are hardly separable in the earliest stages of culture, the archaic matrices that modernist literature—and eminently Joyce’s modernism—endeavors to repristinate. Literature is not a self-enclosed discourse that can simply translate theology into itself. Through its engagement with theological paradigms and expressions, as Christian epic and Joyce reinvent them, literature discovers an originally theological vocation at its own core and origin. In this perspective, neither literature nor theology is a fully autonomous organism: each is revealed in and to the other as they repeat and translate themselves into one another’s languages. This essay has interpreted Dante and his successors, particularly Joyce, as carrying out the mission of religious revelation within the modern horizon of disclosure as manifestation of phenomena to consciousness: revelation is transposed to the sphere of individual experience as realized especially in the event of poetic language, and then beyond that to the dynamics of language released from subjective control. Nor is this continuity of phenomenological revealment with theological revelation only a matter of the thematic connections and citations of tradition. Inquiring whether there cannot also be an essentially prophetic inspiration in the effort of secular writers to extend theological revelation in the Bible into the sphere of literary, artistic endeavor, this discussion has found theological revelation, in the broadest sense, to be operating, arguably, in the very repetitive structure characteristic of poetic language—and, more generally, of all language, in its inherent poeticality. The fourth and final essay in this volume pursues further this question of the theological vocation of literature in relation specifically to Finnegans Wake by taking up the critical interpretation of Thomas J. J. Altizer. Altizer’s framework is Hegelian, and thereby an extension of the phenomenological outlook adumbrated in the present essay. Altizer works

Christian Epic Tradition from Dante to Joyce    out some of the overarching ideas of his theology, furthermore, largely as a reading of the tradition of Christian epic, in which this odyssey of consciousness is carried through and performed in full phenomenological detail. He reads revelation in this literature as apocalyptic in nature. I share Altizer’s conviction that poetry becomes theological revelation in the tradition of the Christian epic, but I propose a different view of its nature, emphasizing rather the re-veiling at work in literary revelation—not the total presence of apocalypse, but its continual repetition in representation. This comparison of different ways of interpreting poetry as revelation serves as a vehicle for evaluating some of the main thrusts of Altizer’s theology and becomes the occasion for contemplating some contrasting views of theological and poetic truth in their intimate, inextricable relatedness. But before pursuing this debate with Altizer, which is also the continuation of the present essay’s reflections on linguistic repetition as theological revelation in Finnegans Wake, I wish to turn to the typological reading of Joyce proposed by Gian Balsamo. Here we find Joyce criticism working out concretely the means by which a specific type of repetition—the repetition of types conveyed discursively in literature—emerges as inherent in and fundamental to theological revelation.

chapter 111

Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry; or, How to Read Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic

The figurative powers that predispose poetic language to perform the work of revelation in a sense akin to and even indiscernible from religious revelation are evinced with particular force in the operation of literary and theological types and in the compositional and exegetical methods of typology. Under various names, the type is one of the most classical topics in figurative rhetoric. The recognizability of characters and events as typical—as based on and repeating, as well as establishing, precedents—is fundamental to literary and symbolic significance in general. More specifically, typology has been indispensable to biblical interpretation since ancient times and has parallels in the methods used for interpreting Homer and other poets in pagan antiquity.1 Even more primordially, typology is inextricably bound up with the repetitions of religious rite, and particularly sacrifice. For the type is inherently a form of repetition, and sacrifice is an 1. A milestone of scholarship in this area is Jean Pépin, Mythe et allégorie: Les origines grecques et les contestations judéo-chrétiennes (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1958). Especially comprehensive is Johan Chydenius, The Typological Problem in Dante: A Study in the History of Medieval Ideas (Copenhagen: Centraltryckeriet, 1958).

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry archetypal origin that is typically repeated. Typology has taken on a new life in contemporary literary criticism, and especially in very recent criticism of James Joyce. Gian Balsamo is currently applying an innovatively typological method, inspired by biblical typology, in a penetrating reading of Joyce and Christian epic.2 Balsamo shows how primordial sacrifice is repeated by literary representations or types that reinvent and fulfill the primitive motifs that they subsume. This enables us to see literature as fulfilling a unitary purpose, from ancient Greek tragedy, through the Christian epic, to Joyce and the novel: literature, in all these guises, is discovered as being deeply liturgical in nature and as responding thereby to a theological vocation. Viewed typologically, literature gives an original access to direct, especially sensuous experience of the divine; it even reveals this experience as the origin of human society and consciousness. These are, in fact, perennial ideas concerning the mission and function of poetry that can be traced all the way back to Orphic sources, in which Orpheus is designated as the institutor of the sacrificial rites of Bacchus,3 but they are now being worked out with unprecedented critical acumen in a perspective that can help us to discern a new horizon for the experience of literature and religion. I will elicit from this work on typology aspects that bear particularly on linguistic repetition as a means of theological revelation, in continuity with the argument of the preceding essay. After treating religious rite, liturgy, and sacrifice, the essay will return to issues precisely of typology in its closing movement and appendix. Balsamo’s work on scriptural poetics and James Joyce conducts poetry back to its originally theological inspiration by showing how the expe2.  Balsamo has recently published four books on this subject. I refer especially to Rituals of Literature: Joyce, Dante, Aquinas, and the Tradition of Christian Epics (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003), though its arguments are closely intertwined with those of Scriptural Poetics in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (Lewistown, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2002); Pruning the Genealogical Tree: Procreation and Lineage in Literature, Law, and Religion (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999 / London: Associated University Press, 1999); and, most recently, Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence and the Messianic Self (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005). 3.  Illuminating here is Thomas Taylor’s 1787 dissertation, “The Mystical Initiation; or, Hymns of Orpheus,” in Thomas Taylor the Platonist: Selected Writings, ed. Kathleen Raine and George Mills Harper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969).

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    rience of literature today, that is, in the day of James Joyce, is really not to be understood fully except in terms of an experience of liturgy that further entails an experience of primordial sacrifice. This clears a vista for overviewing the purport of poetry quite generally that extends beyond our customary field of vision, opening a wider panorama in which poetic literature can be seen as responsive to a theological vocation. In former ages, poets made claims to theological inspiration with great frequency, but such claims seem to many to have become virtually unintelligible today. It is striking, then, that out of the midst of the high modernist writing of Joyce, Balsamo evokes primordial types or archetypes for envisioning literature— the very existence and inexhaustible concreteness of literature—as theological in its deepest motivations. In Joyce’s works it becomes fully clear that the literary, at the level of seriousness represented by Christian epics, operates fundamentally as religious rite. This emerges clearly, moreover, as having been at stake in Christian epic all along. Joyce and the Christian epic tradition, taken together, show how literature can be understood as the actualization of religious ritual, and how authentic religious rite is the re-actualization of sacrifice that is not just recollected but actually lived. Balsamo contrasts this ritual function enacted in literature with the Eucharistic rituals of official religious institutions that make the sacrifice of Christ, at least as a sensuous experience, over and done with—and therefore not something that is actualized in the worshipper’s or reader’s experience here and now. According to Balsamo, the enactment of sacrifice in literature, specifically in Christian epic literature, preserves the deeper sense and promulgates the disclosure of truth inherent in sacrifice, whereas its conservation in the cults of institutionalized religion systematically distorts and destroys the meaning of sacrifice. The truth of religion in this way turns out to be grasped best, and perhaps only, in literature. Just this truth would have been betrayed, ironically, by the religious institutions deliberately designed for its preservation and transmission.4 For the Greeks, Balsamo maintains, sacrifice (thysia) was fully participated in by each individual in his or her ownmost experience. It was not just decreed dogmatically as a fact to be 4.  While I do not endorse Balsamo’s interpretation of institutional religion, and specifically of the Catholic sacrament of the Eucharist, I accept it as a foil for his exposition of the peculiar potentialities of imaginative literature for fulfilling the purposes of liturgy and religious rites.

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry publicly acknowledged by the community. Balsamo argues that this possibility of actualization was lost in the ecclesiastical institution of the Eucharist as a sacrificial meal in which there is no longer any direct, sensual experience of blood sacrifice. Precisely the direct witness of blood is explicitly denied by the Thomistic theology of the Eucharist. Consequently, the identification of the bread and wine with the body and blood of Christ would remain only as invisible and therefore as a purely metaphysical postulate.5 By contrast, the actualization of sacrifice in all its sensuous immediacy was preserved in epic literature by virtue of this genre’s characteristically vivid and dramatic imagery (direct and imagined sensation being collapsed together as a continuum in this outlook). Primordial sacrifice is re-actualized by Joyce with a vengeance in the total eucharistic rituals of both his major works. This entails a profaning of the Eucharist that is palpable in a line like “God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain.”6 But it also entails a releasing of the Eucharist from the confines of abstract sanctity into full engagement with actual life. In his fully eucharistic vision of the self-offering of the word in literature, Joyce assumes the biblical paradigm of the self-sacrificed Word as celebrated in the Catholic rite, but he also interprets and often reverses its connotations, suggesting what is really true and alive in it for readers still today. The result is a creative understanding of sacrifice as self-offering that binds the Christian epic together in a coherent tradition from the Bible through Joyce. Sacrifice, alluded to in Buck Mulligen’s shaving blade and the communal meal already in the opening pages of Ulysses, constitutes an overarching motif of the whole book. Its epic sequel, the Wake, similarly announces itself as religious ritual in literature right from its title.7 Specifically 5. At exactly this point, Balsamo’s interpretation of Church ritual, and specifically of Thomas’s theology of the sacrament, appears too narrow to me. It is important to remember that Thomas, embracing Aristotle, holds that human understanding even of purely intellectual or metaphysical entities is based always on sense experience (“Omnis nostra cognitio a sensu initium habet,” Summa theologica, I. q. 1, art. 9). Nevertheless, the polemical stance toward Thomas undoubtedly captures an aspect of Joyce’s own attitude. 6.  James Joyce, Ulysses, originally published in 1922, corrected edition by Hans Walter Gabler et al. (New York: Random House, 1986), 50. 7.  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964 [1939]).

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    the motif of the Eucharist as a sacrificial sharing out of the ultimate revelation of the word broken and dismembered in the absolute sacrifice which is self-sacrifice emerges as coterminous with Joyce’s epic oeuvre as a whole. Joyce’s literary creation can be understood as repeating the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist. The sacrificial death on the Cross issues in life, the resurrected life. Indeed, Crucifixion and Resurrection are run together by Joyce in a typological condensation throughout the novel. They are conflated, for example, in the following scene that starts off as a reenactment of the Last Supper just after closing in a Dublin pub. The disciples are represented preeminently by the four gospel writers in the guise of judges who drive four nails into the condemned victim. “Laying the cloth, to the fore of them,” in addition to indicating the preparation of the table, suggests that the four of them are also ecclesiastics using the “cloth” as a facade. Their very names are prone to repetitiveness as they work in chorus (“in core”) in creating the core of a sacrificial liturgy. Laying the cloth, to the fore of them. And thanking the fish, in core of them. To pass the grace for Gard sake! Ahmohn. Mr. Justician Mathews and Mr. Justician Marks and Mr. Justician Luk de Luc and Mr. Justinian Johnston-Johnson. And the aaskart, see, behind! Help, help, hurray! Allsup, allsop! Four ghools to nail! Cut it down mates, look slippy! They’ve got a dathe with a swimminpull. Dang! Ding! Dong! Dung! Dinnin. Isn’t it great he is swaying above us for his good an dours. Fly your balloons, dannies, and dennises! He’s doorknobs dead! And Annie Delap is free. Ones more. We could ate you, par Buccas, and imbabe through you, reassuranced in the wild lac of gotliness. One fledge, one brood till hulm culms everdyburdy. Huh the throman! Huh the traidor. Huh the truh. (FW, 377.29–378.6)

Rather than the blessing of bread, thanksgiving for and even to the sacrificial victim here becomes “thanking the fish,” the fish being a symbol of Christ, who is sacrificed in the Eucharist. (This symbol, of course, is based on the Greek word for fish, |ixu¥q, transliterated IXTHOUS, used by ancient Christians as an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”: Iesous Xristos THeou ‘Uios Salvator). Scratching the surface of “To pass the grace for Gards sake! Ahmohn” yields “Pass the grapes, for God’s sake! Amen.” Grapes are present in the canon of the Mass as “fruit of the vine,” while passing grace on to others defines the general purpose of the Christ event and its sacramental commemoration. The “sop” is given to the be-

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry trayer (John 13:26), or “traidor,” who has become everyone (especially in a money economy in which all people are traders), all who partake or sup: “Allsup, allsop!” at the Last Supper, at which Christ institutes the Eucharist. The “aaskart,” suggesting a cart used for executions, can also be tied to the donkey on which Christ at a prior moment (now left “behind”) entered Jerusalem. It may also, more pruriently, intimate “a skirt” and ass behind, to be seen above the grace of a garter. The ingestion of Christ’s body as bread or “fish” repeats primitive cannibalistic, bacchic sacrifice (“We could ate you, par Buccas, and imbabe through you”). “Per Baccho!” (pronounced “pear bakko”) is the Italian equivalent of “By Jove!” As an interjection it has the same force as “Par Buccas,” where Buccas sounds like Bacchus and also in Latin means “cheeks,” an equivocal anatomical part. The communal meal involves, furthermore, a eucharistic imbibing that issues in babes, rebirth—and in fact a collective resurrection as the body of Christ returned to its infancy—so as to become a fledgling brood whose earthy energy and fertility culminates or consummates everybody (“One fledge, one brood till hulm culms everdyburdy”). This orgiastic, eucharistic sacrifice making one flesh, one blood (“One fledge, one brood”) of every body effects a sexual liberation, with swelling “balloons” for both guys (“dannies”) and gals (“denisses”). It declares the freeing of a knee and the lap (“Annie Delap is free”). “Annie” also reads as a diminutive anus needing to be enlarged. The sacrificial death in this way becomes a handle, a “knob” for opening doors (“He’s doorknobs dead!”) and, of course, metaphorically, other orifices. Bound up with this event of sexual liberation and unity of all in one body through the death and emptying out of self in every body is the realization of God as emptiness, lack. One is more (“Ones more”) than the mere sum of individuals in this repetition (once more) that enacts the self-emptying of divinity. The inaccessible lake of the Godhead (“wild lac of gotliness”), or primal reservoir of divine spirit in each person, taken as a lack, brings a renewed assurance (it can never fail, since it is nothing), profaned to an insurance policy renewal (“reassuranced in the wild lac of gotliness”). It is also a sort of willed (“wild”) inheritance like Original Sin, the inherited corruption of the will that God’s self-sacrifice counteracts. Through his own sacrificial death and self-negation in the Eucharist, God makes Godhead available to all everywhere. God, the One, has become fertile humus or mulch disseminated into the Creation by death.

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    This sacrifice is celebrated by all as one, traitor and truth together with “throman” in a theatrical Trinity. The rite is performed in three cheers with a truncated hurrah, a “huh” that registers the preconscious, uncomprehending, instinctual impulses that pullulate all through the linguistic magma of this scene. The third cheer invokes the Spirit of truth (“Huh the truh”) as an empty hole (“truh” sounds just like “trou,” that is, “hole” in French). This formula repeats the simultaneously jubilant and desperate “Help, help, hurray!” (a variant of hip, hip, hurrah) of a few lines earlier. Christ is crucified for the good of all, his and ours, as well as for opening those doors (“Isn’t it great he is swaying above us for his good an dours”), doors which are intimately “ours” if they are doors to our bodies. By participating in this eucharist, everybody is ever dying, or dies ever day by day (yielded by scanning “everdyburdy” into “ever dy bur dy”). Since “as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death” (Romans 6:2), the death involved may also be construed as a hurrying forward toward a date (“dathe”) with baptism, which is made sport of by turning the baptismal font or basin into a swimming pool with builtin spiritual pull (“They’ve got a dathe with a swimminpull”). Indeed, the name “Daíthí” turns out to mean the last unbaptized Gaelic king, who seems thereby to be predestined for this baptismal date inscribed into his name.8 It is, then, not irrelevant, in this general promiscuity of words and rites, that in another sense a date can also be an occasion for mating and even for producing bastards. Having collapsed death and resurrection together with incarnation of all as one body in the babe, the passage goes on to collapse together the sacraments of communion and baptism. Both sacraments entail producing rejuvenated collective bodies (the body of Christ) by sacrifice of ghostly selves or selfhood. The abstraction of self from such embodiment produces a purely negative spirit, or “lac of gotliness,” in each of us that, if it is not given up in sacrifice, makes us “ghouls,” evil spirits or phantoms, “morbidly interested in death” (Oxford English Dictionary). For undying attachment to this self that ineluctably dies issues in our obsession with mortality. This is the sinister fixation that the gospel writers are charged with having fostered. By virtue of committing to writing the universal sacrifice 8. See Brendan O Hehir, A Gaelic Lexicon for ‘Finnegans Wake’ and Glossary for Joyce’s Other Works (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 208.

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry of divine life, and thus fixing it with nails as the canonical narrative of the Crucifixion, the four evangelists make it abstract and static. The constant ecstatic change of life into death and back again that runs all through the universe in something of a mystic dance is thereby turned into a ghoulish horror story. According to the gospel as enacted in the Wake, we can be saved rather by the “lac of gotliness,” or godliness as lack, as a giving up and emptying of self in continual sacrifice of all that becomes hard and fixed in us as self-identity (as something we have “got” or possess as an essential “gotliness”) and so separates us from the ongoing sacrificial flow of life into death and back to life again. This is the salvation offered us in Christ’s sacrifice of himself, which is continually in process of reenactment, unless it is nailed down by ghouls in Scripture. Then Christ is indeed dead, dead as a doornail, as the proverbial saying goes, whereas Joyce’s writing endeavors to open those doornails up into doorknobs (“He’s doorknobs dead!”) and thus to pass through the open door of death and the letter into life in all its unscriptable bodily fullness. For this purpose, to write less is recommended (“Cut it down mates, look slippy!”)—or perhaps to write in a negative mode, in the “nat language” (83.12) of the Wake, a continual carnival of self-sacrifice of words to their own essential vanity. The same sacrifice by individuals of their ghostly interiority, their inner “lac of gotliness,” can liberate them as one resurrected body, free to participate in the eucharistic celebration of life and death mingled eternally together. These interpretations are meant to give some indications of how Joyce literarily “actualizes” the Christ event in a variety of outlandish, irreverent, and yet irresistible ways. The resurrection of the Word in the body, of course, is one of the central proclamations of the Church, and particularly Catholic ritual has always sought to realize this resurrection in the Eucharist. The crucial difference between Joyce’s and the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy is that his literary apotheosis of the religious rite avoids hallowing particular bygone moments and events that are thereby placed out of reach of any possible reinterpretation and so become opaque. Such original events are then attributed an absolute significance and potency which is, however, no longer actually experienced. The literary, in contrast, is in its intrinsic nature mobile and protean and in process of recurring ever again in new and different guises. Literature posits no such ab-

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    solute authority or extra-experiential truth to be believed in despite the evidence of the senses, but rather opens the holy to actually occurring and being performed in a self-emptying or kenotic humbling unto the death of the Cross (Philippians 2:5–11). In this manner, the untrammeled, infinite power of self-sacrificial love no less than divine is made fully actual in the interpretations that mediate it and posit nothing besides themselves as mediations. The typological pattern of sacrificial death on the Cross issuing in life, the resurrected life, is inscribed in the letter itself and is repeated ever after in the letters of literature in general, and of Joyce’s epics in particular, emblematically in the name of his final epic’s main protagonist. This name, Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, transmutes to “Hircus Civis Eblanensis!” (FW, 214.27), literally the “goat citizen of Dublin,” that is, the scapegoat. Of course, this is but one of its many transformations, and is not in any case a restrictive identification, since everything whatsoever is consumed and consummated in the cosmic Mass enacted by the book’s liturgy. On the basis of these same three initials, HCE, the name metamorphoses, for example, to “Here Comes Everybody” (32.18–19), making him an every man, to “Haveth Childers Everywhere” (535.34–35), hinting at his ubiquitous fertility, to “Heinz cans everywhere” (581.5), bespeaking an unseemly consumeristic littering (which Joyce associates with “lettering”), and to “Howth Castle and Environs” (3.3), identifying a Dublin topography. Still, we must not allow the more specific liturgical sense to be lost in this indiscriminate clutter. It is perhaps most obvious when these initials are transposed to HEC, thereby suggesting the formula by which the priest consecrates the host in the Eucharist: “Hic Est Corpus meum.”9 This happens, for instance, in the phrase “and if hec dont love alpy then lad you annoy me” (332.3), which makes reference to Earwicker together with the female protagonist, Anna Livia Plurabelle, by modified renderings of their initials, respectively HCE and ALP. That HEC is actually a deformation of the word HIC used in the Eucharistic formula makes it another illustration of the potentially comic degradation that sacraments are apt to undergo in their historical transmission (like “God becomes man becomes fish”). For we may, then, hear it 9. Lucia Boldrini, in Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations: Language and Meaning in Finnegans Wake (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), for one, reads it this way (40).

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry even as “heck,” vulgarly substituted for “hell” as a swear-word. The liturgical subtext turns every man (Here Comes Everybody) into Christ at the moment of his sacrifice as commemorated in the Catholic Mass. In this way, the motif of the Eucharist, as a sacrificial sharing out of the ultimate revelation of the Word broken and dismembered in the absolute sacrifice which is self-sacrifice of life itself, emerges as coterminous with Joyce’s epic oeuvre as a whole.10 Before proceeding with theoretical reflection on literary ritual and typology, I would like to trace this encoding of the theme of liturgical sacrifice further into the filigree of Joyce’s text. Direct encounter and struggle particularly with the texts of Finnegans Wake in their tortuous difficulty, in their unpredictable turnings and re-turnings, cannot be avoided if we are to experience how they enact theological revelation typologically. Joyce associates “Hec” with the calamity of the Crucifixion, with its lashings and flaying, which took place under Tiberius Caesar, 14–37 a.d., though only to be repeated cyclically as “whiplooplashes” in every age. He does so in a passage that alludes to the protagonist’s initials that are embellished round to the extent of being obliterated or buried in a name associated with the emperor under whom the violence of the Crucifixion took place (“tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker”). By compression and compenetration of opposites, this calamity is presented in the passage as at the same time a saving and a making safe, “columis,” or a placing in safety, “columitas” (Latin). History, according to Joyce, is rife with such paradoxes, since even the meanest motives sometimes prove fruitful in magnetically attracting the chance of a fortunate fiasco or calamity (“calamita” means “magnet” in Italian): For, with that farmfrow’s foul flair for that flayfell foxfetor, (the calamite’s columitas calling for calamitous calamitance) who that scrutinising marvels at those indignant whiplooplashes; those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds; the touching reminiscence of an incompletet trail or dropped final; a round thousand whirligig glorioles, prefaced by (alas!) now illegible airy plumeflights, all tiberiously ambiembellishing the initials majuscule of Earwicker: the meant to be baffling 10. The seed of this motif is present already in Stephen Hero’s citation of Christ’s cry from the Cross—“Sitio” (I thirst)—as exemplary of the one line and even one word of verse sufficient to immortalize a man (Stephen Hero [London: Jonathan Cape, 1975 (1944)], 189).

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    chrismon trilithon sign , finally called after some his hes hecitency Hec, which, moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller D, fontly called following a certain change of state of grace of nature alp or delta, when single, stands for or tautologically stands beside the consort. (119)

There is much more in this passage than can be expounded fully here, and of course no exposition can do more than select certain elements and directions from among others that could also be pursued. But at least something can be smelled out of the obscurantisms of signifying by sacrament (“the meant to be baffling chrismon,” that is, in Greek, a holy unction or anointing that confers spiritual grace). The passage points to the stiflingly rigid ritualization (“those so prudently bolted or blocked rounds”) of rites or repetitions that potentially are uplifting, glorious dance (“round thousand whirligig glorioles”). It is an exposé of the lies of the titles and significances produced by letters, which as material, literally “threestone” signs (“trilithon sign”), are themselves rudimentary sacraments, that is, material marks bearing and making manifest a supposedly spiritual significance. Here the spiritual significance, beyond being Christological (“chrismon” can also be abbreviated to “xr,” a symbol for Christ, consisting of the first two letters of his name in Greek), is specifically Trinitarian. The Trinity is represented by three letters or a three-pronged sign like a dolmen ( ) and also by the figure of a triangle. On the printed page, the triangle looks like a pyramid, recalling some of the more primitive symbols of religion that are sublimated beyond recognition (“illegible airy plumeflights”) by the progressive institutionalization of significances that wrap them round. Hieraticized geometrical symbols and letters (from whatever font) alike are prone to amputate and diminish or efface what they supposedly would preserve and commemorate (“reminiscence of an incompletet trail or dropped final”). Writing itself, a flight of the plumes of the pen and, in essence, the original sacrament, institutes this lamentable loss (“alas!”), introducing the signs by which the real, the hic, is “prefaced,” but thereby also defaced and indeed effaced. The passage makes mockery of the way sacraments degrade and befoul and destroy what they would presumably sanctify and venerate and glorify. Recurrent reiterations, or “rounds” of “reminiscence,” embellish and, in effect, disfigure and disperse the primitive, stony (“lithon”) fact of the “this” (hic). Similarly, letters (combined into words, or used as in-

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry signia) substitute stylized figures for the undisfigured things they signify, thereby exchanging brute nature for an ironic state of “grace.” They reduce to the status of caricature their “consort” among real things, the referents to which they must be married in order to have significance. “Hec” is already a mutation, a corruption posturing as transfiguration, of “hic,” “this.” It bears holy connotations as echoing the words of consecration of the Eucharist (“Hic Est Corpus meum”). At the same time, the text furtively detects a fouler, fetid smell (“foxfetor”) in all this, more like sex with a farm woman, the “farmfrow” (Frau, German for woman)—slyly suggesting that it may be profanely productive after all. Joyce here is not primarily celebrating the transformative, transfiguring powers of letters and language, symbols and sacraments. He is, rather, preoccupied by the sacrifice of flesh made to the letter, and to any other kind of “title in sigla.” For the letter or sigla, consisting of initials, abstracts from the real embodied individual and erects a monument like a tomb in its place. The reduction of living persons to names, and then even of their names to just initials, epitomizes the process of abstraction on which language is based. Yet Joyce also attempts to resurrect from these linguistic elements, and even from their fragments, a frolicking afterlife of the letter. This does not prevent him from registering and even ruing the ruthless sacrifice that is made and that imitates and re-enacts the sacramental sacrifice of Christ. This sacrificial scenario is presented as pathetic and killing. However, letters can also move “contrawatchwise,” that is, against time, to undo the process of abstraction and sublimation. Letters do this, notably, when used anagrammatically: they can mate anew and produce—or reproduce—the fecund, sensuous body that has been destroyed or denied by the initial and reiterated codifications. And in this way opposites meet in a strange state of “grace of nature.” When moved back in time (or maybe even back before time, that is, before mechanically calculable, linear time that is reckonable by the clock), back presumably to the “this” before it is substituted for by letters and symbols, Hec, the initials of the male protagonist, can be identified with the smaller delta, insignia of the female protagonist (“Hec, which, moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller D”). This is a sort of change of nature, indeed a sex change, or more precisely a gender fusion, and perhaps a graceful one (“a certain change of state of grace of nature”). It can likewise spell a change or erasure of rigid individuation,

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    such that the female alone (“when single”) can be or is already immediately identified with the male, or at least “tautologically stands besides the consort.” Prior to the differentiations effected by signifiers—male and female, one and many, self and consort—all is one and each is identical with every other. The passage indeed presents a plethora of diverse signifiers as open to and flowing promiscuously into one another. Their potential secret meanings become unlocked and even interchangeable depending on how they embrace and interlock with one another. Beneath all the symbols and letters and sacraments, to follow out this thematic strand, the female charms (“lashes” and “rounds”), being “prudently bolted and blocked,” nevertheless are “touching” and exert “calamitous” attraction. They do so even by virtue of what is missing and imperfect or “dropped,” by what is not seen or watched (“contrawatchwise,” in yet another sense). They exert their charm on the playful yet punishing (“flayful”) “foxfetor,” who “scrutinizing marvels” of this sort presumably is intent on ferreting out females in order to flay them. It is as if they were feminine Christs, and as if the sadistic side of sex, this playful flaying, were somehow a replay of the Passion, though the protagonist also seems hesitant. Paradoxically, the sacramental formula and abstraction of the insignia HEC, when changed back to HIC, also has an archaic meaning as the thing itself, “this,” which in this context of regression to primal indifferentiation or interchangeability of genders also means, among other things, the female sex. Such is the “it” or “this” indicated by “alp or delta” as the smaller, feminine version of “Hec, which moved contrawatchwise, represents his title in sigla as the smaller D.” The smaller delta [D], as it is fondly named (“fontly called”), is an iconographic token for women’s sex. It does not stand only for the pyramid presiding, with hieroglyphic aplomb, over the mystery of phallic, pharaonic immortality; it also covers over a familiar, affectionately called (again “fontly called”) piece of flesh. Will exposing this thing itself enable the male protagonist to overcome the hiccup of his stuttering hesitation (“his hes hecitancy”) caused understandably by—or simply equivalent to—all these removes and mystifications effected through the interposition of letters? The word “hecitency” recurs in another context of ritual celebration or sacrifice, this time at the altar specifically of consciousness. It is written with certain capital letters so as to highlight the protagonist’s initials. That

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry it grates on this altar (ara in Latin) is voiced in a reproach made on behalf of a body part against the proliferation of verbiage: “HeCitEncy! Your words grates on my ares” (431.23). Words as merely signs are always deferral (and distortion) of the concrete, empirical referent, and to this extent are inherently hesitation, though they also become a kind of immediacy, a this (hic) in their own right, offering sensuous stimulation of their own, and thus paradoxically are both this and its deferral (or hesitation) together: precisely “hecitency.” Consequently, the altar of consciousness, on which life is sacrificed to letters, is also a kind of “sheltar,” as is suggested in the immediately preceding sentence: “CelebrAted! Shaun replied under the sheltar of his broguish, vigorously rubbing his magic lantern to a glow of full-consciousness” (421.21–22). Though in certain respects its antithesis, causing it to atrophy, consciousness can also be protective and preserving of sensuality, indeed a shelter. For consciousness not only abstracts into reflective thought; it can also, in a roguish manner, actually stimulate sensuality. It excites sensation through thoughts, inciting sense with its images. This process is catalyzed particularly by the incarnation of thought in language. Thus, an Irish brogue may deform the (hypothetical) pure intelligibility of the English language, giving it a thick, palpable, ungainly, sensory plasticity or patina, but it thereby also rubs and stimulates (“broguish, vigorously rubbing”) the language into an imposingly physical, sensual presence. These are further cuts of the double edge of sacrifice, sacrifice specifically to language, as simultaneously preserving and destroying. The paradoxically productive destructiveness of literacy is captured another way in Joyce’s mordantly playful invention of the name “Gutenmorg” (20.7). It alludes, of course, to the invention by Johann Gutenberg of the printing press using moveable type in ca. 1439 that revolutionized modern communications and therewith society. Its nearness to the cheerful daily greeting in German: “Guten morgen!” enhances the locution’s wittily macabre optimism, once we are willing to hear it in more than one language at once. A blessing in disguise, in fact, in the guise of death—literally “Good morgue!”—is encoded into the standard meanings of the German and English components taken together, “Guten” and “morgue,” respectively, of this hybrid word. Disseminating writing in the form of print spelled death to certain forms of ecclesiastical authority and to the living word of prophetic pronouncements at the same time as it lent the letter an unprecedented power of diffusion and animated new possi-

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    bilities for public life and community. This hints again at how the sacrificial death of life in its spontaneous uniqueness and immediacy on the altar of the standardized letter may also be saving, in effect, a kind of “sheltar,” where bloody catastrophe and deathly disaster serve strangely to protect and save. Commemorating Christ’s death at the altar in the “celebration” of the Eucharist, complete with eating of his flesh and drinking of the cup of his blood, that we may have eternal life in him, bears just such an ambivalent, or at least paradoxical, meaning. Joyce insists on these life-death ambivalences of the letter as sacrifice. The same ambivalence applies to literature understood especially as repeating the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist. Primordial religious cult, in both its deathly terror and its power of vitality, is all too present and accessible in literature as Joyce rediscovers or reinvents it. Balsamo’s exhumation of the cultic matrix of Christian epic poetry, with due acknowledgments to Thomas Altizer, is guided by Nietzsche’s discovery, in the Birth of Tragedy, of primordial religious rites beneath the forms of Attic tragedy. Just as literature, and particularly tragic theatre, revealed its origins in the religious rites of Dionysus, similarly from the vantage point of Joyce, and especially of Finnegans Wake, Christian epic is unveiled as a reenactment of archaic sacrifice through a literary rendition of liturgy. Finnegans Wake thereby emerges as the final apocalypse that first enables the genre of Christian epic to be clearly defined in terms of its deeply liturgical motivations. Fundamentally, in this view, Christian epic, by its literary-liturgical celebrations, preserves the authentic experience of Crucifixion and the likewise crucial experiences of Incarnation and Resurrection that are covered over and forgotten in the institutionalized rites of the Church. In light of the passages from Finnegans Wake just examined, furthermore, we can see these rites as elaborations of the symbols, sacraments, sigla, and letters that are the foundation stones of human institutions and civilization generally. Paradoxically, the same rituals and signs become also the tombstones burying the live impulses from which such institutions spring. In particular, the Eucharistic theology of Thomas Aquinas, in which the Christ event is commemorated, but as having happened once and for all, and so as already over, and therefore as not presently experienced and relived, emerges as an antithesis to the re-actualization of a Eucharistic liturgy in the litera-

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry ture of the Christian epics.11 The aseptic doctrine of abstract, metaphysical transubstantiation, without any sensible change, promulgated by Aquinas empties the liturgical formulas of experiential content. But such formulas metamorphose into living and authentic sacrificial experience in the secular Christian epic that Dante inaugurates with richly sensuous imagination. This type of liturgical imagination comes to a culmination in Joyce, in the insistently ritualistic performances of language embodied in his consummate epic work, Finnegans Wake. This work enacts a self-sacrifice of language, breaking its sense into fragments that can miraculously nourish the whole world. Prerequisite to this rediscovery of a liturgical underlay as the deeper meaning of literature is a reassessment of current theories of sacrifice. Balsamo reviews alternative interpretations of sacrifice in order to recover the original imaginative and emotional power of blood sacrifice, the negation and actual annihilation of life. This terrifying side of sacrifice has often been lost by emphasis on the positive, reconstituting virtues of sacrifice for reaffirming the social order. The reaffirmation occurs especially around the sacrificial meal shared by the surviving members of the community, with hierarchically determined distribution of the different parts of the victim. But more than the communal meal, it is the moment of violent killing of the victim that works powerfully on the imagination and dominates the emotional responses of the participants in sacrificial rights.12 And this is 11. This Altizer-Balsamo approach offers a radically different perspective on Joyce’s relation to Catholic doctrine and especially to Thomas Aquinas from that of critical classics such as William T. Noon’s Joyce and Aquinas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), and Robert Boyle, S.J.’s James Joyce’s Pauline Vision: A Catholic Exposition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978). 12.  Balsamo is influenced here by Jean-Pierre Vernant, whom he, however, creatively misreads in suggesting that the moment of death was crucial for Greek thysia in general. Vernant actually underscores how the official Greek institution of sacrifice itself elided and obscured the moment of death that obsessed rather unofficial, splinter groups working out their alternative religiosities in the margins of Greek society. Vegetarian sects like the Pythagoreans denounced the bloody murder at the heart of sacrificial rites that public institutions were at pains to dissemble and legitimate. At the opposite pole, Dionysiacs regressively reveled in this murder that the official institution dissimulated as something other than simply a brutal killing (see Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Théorie générale du sacrifice et mise à mort dans la uysºa grecque,” in Le sacrifice dans l’antiquité, ed. Jean-Pierre Vernant and Olivier Reverdin [Geneva: Vandoeuvres, 1980], 1–21).

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    the level of feeling that can be so effectively reactivated in the imaginative experience of literature. It is an individual dimension in which each participant becomes self-aware as individually responsible—because individually threatened by death—and as beholden to higher powers and to a community for the gift of life. This level of awareness motivates ascetic renunciation of self and of one’s own immediate impulses for the sake of the community, and it thus forms the foundation for a social order, as Émile Durkheim taught.13 Imaginative literature, by evoking the pathos of human life at risk, and by calling to mind the vulnerability of each individual to violence that only the social order can keep at bay, performs essentially the same function as sacrifice at the origin of human community. This parallel illuminates the religious sense of imaginative literature in terms of its social function. Such a function is still quite present and palpable in imaginative literature today, and it casts the representations of ritual and liturgy in Joyce’s epic works into a revealing new light. It reveals them as reminiscent of the liturgical matrix from which literature of this most necessary order springs. In the absence today of the public forums that served for performance of sacrificial rites as open spectacles in archaic communities, or, again, for lack of the tragic theatre to which the whole citizenry was convoked at festivals in ancient Greece, the ritualistic, liturgical significance of literature has become obscured. In literature today, the “rite” typically transpires only in the invisible spaces of an individual’s own private consciousness and activity of reading. Nevertheless, literature can still have the profound effect of inducing individual conversion to a sense of receiving one’s life as a gift in and through a divine mystery and, conjointly, of being beholden to the community for guaranteeing one’s personal survival and security. This implicit, deeply submerged function of literature can be detected diffusely throughout an enormous range of literary works and genres in all times and places, but it is operative in especially concentrated ways, and in exemplary fashion, in what emerges from the perspective of Joyce as the Christian epic tradition. This tradition is delineated by Balsamo as deriving from Virgil and the Bible and leading via Dante, Malory, Spenser, Milton, Blake, and Goethe to Joyce. 13. See Émile Durkheim, Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse: Le système totémique en Australie, 2nd ed., rev. (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1925), book III, chapter 1: “Les rites ascétiques.”

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry According to Balsamo, the originality of the theological vision embodied in the experience of sacrifice and carried forward by imaginative literature, exemplarily by Christian epic, is crystallized especially well in the indispensable role it accords the senses for any genuine experience of divinity. The senses have often been held in deep suspicion by theologies and ecclesiastical authorities. But sacrifice belongs to a stage of religion that has not yet been purged of the participation of the senses in the experience of the divine. Whereas the sensuality of the archaic experience of sacrifice has long been lost to the rites of institutionalized religion, it can be and has been kept uncannily alive in literature at the level of experience that we call “imaginative.” Imagination is indisseverably connected with the senses, and consequently, so is literature. This theological vision of literature is one that never abstracts itself from sense and image, but it is not any less theological for that reason. The originally and distinctively sensuous experience of the divine in archaic sacrifice is preserved (and in some sense is even re-originated) precisely in, and by, literature. Literature in this way turns out to be continuous with rites of sacrifice that are not estranged from the senses. Dante, at the beginning of the tradition of modern Christian epic poetry proper, inaugurates a revaluation of the senses as genuine and indispensable vehicles of divine vision (visio Dei). His beloved Beatrice, his guide through the heavens to the presence of God, stands in her ravishing beauty as the emblem for an erotic and sensually mediated love that is fully integrated into the soul’s search for salvation and beatitude. This type of sensation vehiculates intimacy with the divine. Such a sensual experience of divinity contrasts with the doctrinal and even the anagogical modes of knowledge practiced by the traditional poeta theologus, particularly in the context of Renaissance humanism, and even by Dante himself at the preliminary stage at which he wrote his Convivio. It harks back rather to the kind of experience of the senses and of religious awe and consequent “conversion” to social responsibility that was effected by archaic religious rites of sacrifice.14 14. See, for example, Jean-Pierre Vernant, L’individu, la mort, l’amour: Soimême et l’autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). Of course, institutional rites, such as the Catholic liturgy of the Eucharist, also rely very heavily on sensuous poetic imagery, and for this reason, contrary to Balsamo, I wish to stress the continuity between cultic ecclesiastical Eucharistic celebration and imaginative reenactments of sacrifice in literature.

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    Dante forms the central link between Joyce and the Bible in this secularization of religious revelation effected by Christian epic. Far beyond translating theological doctrines into terms fit for literary consumption in the manner of a humanistic poeta theologus, as he does in the Convivio, Dante becomes a genuinely prophetic poet in the Commedia, where poetry becomes in and of itself truly prophetic and even apocalyptic. The idea that revelation can be consummated in poetry, in fully human interpretation and language, is seen to follow from revelation’s ineradicably typological character, its actually constituting itself through literary repetition, right from the most canonical of all sources, the Bible itself. The original and unmediated is, in any case, always just projected backwards from its mediations (at least it can actually be experienced only in and through, and indeed as, such mediations). Literature as mediation of theology, which it becomes consciously and programmatically in Dante, discovers itself thereby as truly theological revelation. Dante’s Convivio takes the initial steps toward a recovery, under the figure of the poeta theologus, of a poetics of revelation such as would be pursued by the Renaissance humanists. But whereas in the Convivio Dante’s writing is still subservient to theological doctrine, in the Comedy he re-creates in poetry the “intimacy with divine knowledge,” as Balsamo phrases it, that only liturgical experience can give. Although this perhaps becomes clearly discernible only from the perspective on the whole of the Christian epic tradition that emerges from the vantage point of Joyce, Dante’s Commedia already offers a liturgical poetry that reenacts primordial sacrifice. In the retrospective made possible by Joyce it becomes starkly significant that the very title, “Convivio,” or “Banquet,” makes reference to the communal meal of the liturgy—that is, to the aftermath of sacrifice, the dramatic moment of death having been elided. In the opening lines of Canto 24 of the Paradiso, in contrast, this liturgical meal is marked as integral to a sacrificial rite by explicit reference to the blessed Lamb, the victim, who feeds the community: O sodalizio eletto a la gran cena del benedetto Agnello, il qual vi ciba sì, che la vostra voglia è sempre piena. . . .  (O elect community called to the great supper of the blessed Lamb, who feeds you so that your desire is forever full. . . . )

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry Though under a symbolic veil, this Lamb of God, is, of course, Christ who feeds the community with his own flesh, shedding his blood on the Cross, in order to become thereby the salvation and fulfillment of the whole fellowship. Dante repeats almost verbatim the benediction from the Apocalypse of Saint John the Divine: “Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb” (19:9). Such liturgical experience in literature of the Christian rite of the Eucharist is literally “crucial” to accounting for the uncanny power of Dante’s poetry throughout the Commedia. It is manifest already from the reappearance of Beatrice, sacrificial victim of an untimely death, according to the Vita nuova, at the height of Mount Purgatory in the guise of a liturgical Christ, as she is hailed with the liturgical formula “benedictus qui venis!” (Purgatorio 33.19). This type of literary performance of liturgy is more painfully, indeed excruciatingly, evident in the Inferno’s climaxing in the “bestial sign” of Count Ugolino’s consumption of his sons’ Christically offered flesh (see, particularly, Inferno 33.61–63, where one of the sons bids the desperate father to take back or eat the flesh he gave them). Such poetic, liturgical evocations of the sacrifice of Christ, experienced powerfully in the hypnotic rhythms of Dante’s terza rima and in the irresistible enchantment of the poem’s lyricism, reactualize the communication with divinity that has been the experience conserved all along by religious ritual from its origins in archaic sacrifice. Dante’s literary re-enactment thereby remains still in close communication with the primordial experience of blood sacrifice as it persists submerged in Catholic liturgical practice. The advantage of Dante’s secularized, imaginative medium of poetry is that it is not all doctrinally prescribed and circumscribed, but is open to the spontaneity of individual experience and interpretation. The deeper, more serious purposes of literature, fundamental to even as uproariously jocular a work as Finnegans Wake, are disclosed by Balsamo (and already by Thomas Altizer) as liturgical in nature, and we have seen that liturgy is to be understood first and foremost in relation to the rite of sacrifice. This paradigm works astonishingly well in reading the texts of Joyce and then, in their wake, of the Bible, along with an extensive tradition of secularized religious literature in between. It works so well that we cannot help but wonder how the typical motif of sacrifice acquires the enormous scope and synthetic power it is shown to have in Joyce by Balsamo’s reading.

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    Although not explicitly included within the compass of Balsamo’s project, certain philosophical insights into sacrifice and death as lying at the origin of humanity—insights of the sort that devolve from Hegel and are developed, for example, by Alexandre Kojève and Georges Bataille— seem to be presupposed.15 In this perspective, sacrifice is the quintessentially human act by which the human being first becomes human: in fact, in sacrifice humanity becomes the origin of itself. Only by ministering death to a victim with which it nevertheless identifies does the human being come into possession of itself as a free, finite existence. Life is revealed in its finitude by death: it is grasped for the first time as a whole, from its endpoint, and therefore as having a defined, finite significance, and so as human. Only in this way, at its origin, in its emergence, that is, in sacrifice, can humanity be grasped wholly and indeed as holy. “Sacri-fice” may be analyzed as the artifice that makes holy, that is, the fictio, the making up (as in poiesis) that makes something—life—sacred. Fiction is how sacrifice makes life sacred and therefore also complete. Paradoxically, this occurs precisely in and through a negation, by a cutting off, a setting apart: sacer. A whole is conceivable only contrastively: it emerges first through rupture with the all, through a severing from the rest. The human being conceives itself as whole only by cutting itself off from something and setting itself apart—vicariously, through sacrifice. Only as a negation of indeterminate, infinite, holy life can a finite, human life produce itself as a completed whole. Such a Hegelian thanatology, proposing death as the origin of humanity, is developed very compellingly by Alexandre Kojève.16 Sacrifice, of course, took place historically, and it effectively mediated religious experience on which the social order was founded, but it 15. See, particularly, Bataille’s “Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice,” in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1971–88), 12:326–45. 16. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Gallimard, 1947). Although in the last two paragraphs I am not following Balsamo’s own explicit development of the concept of sacrifice, such a Hegelian view is at the basis of Thomas Altizer’s thought—for example, in History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), which is a direct and acknowledged precedent for Balsamo. Likewise, the interpretations of Joyce’s texts earlier in the essay are not based on Balsamo. Altizer cites the passage that begins “Laying the cloth to the fore of them,” but without analyzing its specifics.

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry did not take place without fictions. A prime example is scapegoating—the heaping of all evils throughout society on one supposedly guilty individual who can be punished by death as sacrificial victim and thereby purge the community as a whole. The motivations of sacrifice are necessarily obscure: it functions, as René Girard stresses, only to the extent that its mechanisms remain at least partly unconscious and are misrecognized by its participants.17 This suggests why sacrifice can still be interpreted in terms of our fictions today. For our literary fictions likewise endeavor to make things holy, that is, in a certain sense whole again, even though this may mean precisely showing the whole shebang as exploding irrevocably into the dispersion of infinite entropy. From this point of view, literature (alias theology) can emerge in its vital purpose for human culture as harboring the unique possibility of envisioning culture comprehensively and from its (always re-originating) origin. In light of the rite of sacrifice, literature can be seen as fulfilling a unitary, or at least analogously similar, purpose from ancient Greek tragedy through Christian epic to Joyce and the novel. This purpose cannot but be described as “liturgical” in the sacrificial-typological sense being defined in this essay. In Joyce’s epic works, religious rite appears particularly in the recurrent reenactments of the rite of the Eucharist. In order to understand the significance of the Eucharist in terms of primal sacrifice, Balsamo, we have seen, insists on the need to liberate the Eucharist from a certain Thomistic theology of the sacrament as a purely metaphysical transubstantiation without any visible manifestation of blood. The eucharistic theme in Joyce bespeaks a eucharistic purpose of thanksgiving and praise at the very origin of poetry. But the praise embodied in such celebration is inseparable from the terror of blood sacrifice evocative of the mysterium tremendum famously analyzed by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy (Das Heilige, 1917), for only this religious awe enjoins and motivates recognition of life as a divine gift and thereby makes a claim upon each participant as a responsible individual. The Crucifixion, as the moment of blood-shedding, is the crux of the Eucharist as Balsamo reconstructs it in the light of primal sacrifice, and this, accordingly, is the valence, often somewhat veiled, of the eu17.  For example, see René Girard, La violence et le sacré (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972), 19 and passim.

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    charistic liturgy of literature in Joyce and in his Christian epic predecessors. This interpretation places the Christian rite back into communication with pagan sacrificial rites, thereby illuminating the significance of the eucharistic imagery that recurs in Joyce’s writings. The blood covenant of the Hebrews, along with Druidical practices of sacrifice, turn up thus as relived in the eucharistic celebration of the Crucifixion. These powerfully synthetic modes of envisaging literature and religion show literature in its deep and inextricable connection with the most archaic and basic forms of religious experience—that is, with originary theological revelation in the rite of sacrifice. Joyce’s pervasive religious motifs can, in this perspective, be seen in their deeply systematic significance. His renegade and satirical Catholicism actually rewrites the whole history of civilization, and rather than dismissing religion finds the sense of all things to be deeply embedded in it. His texts become the locus of a radically religious revelation that reverses millennia of distortions of the originally religious meaning of experience as it is revealed in sacrifice. An emblem of this reversal of the ascetic refusal and denial of the senses that has characterized so great and authoritative a part of Christian theology can be found in the figure of the patriarch Noah. Joyce projects a primal scene of sodomy, hinted at in Genesis 9:21– 27, in the description of the relations between Noah and his sons, into an archetypal dimension for revealing the brutally profane significance of human life as part of its wholeness and holiness. Revelation of humanity and its inalienable sanctity is achieved in a spectacular reversal of the sanctimonious connotations that it typically has in more solemn theological tradition.18 Joyce’s Catholicism is profoundly parodic and encompasses extreme profanity; only thereby does it become a veritable apotheosis of catholicity. All that is most abject is blessed and made holy within the whole of the Joycean cosmos—and, of course, vice versa, the supposedly holy is made abjectly profane. Joyce’s very obscenity explodes all pretensions to piety, as it smears the Eucharistic sacrament up and down the whole body of a 18.  Joyce’s reworkings of Noah-Ham-Japhet, along with other biblical figures, are examined by Balsamo in his article, “Typestries” (James Joyce Quarterly, forthcoming). Another article, “The Necropolitan Journey: Dante’s Negative Poetics in Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ ” (James Joyce Quarterly 40, no. 4 [2003]: 763–81), gives yet another sample of Balsamo’s typological method of reading.

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry crassly vulgar universe. In this manner, Joyce (re)defines traditional types that operate as metaphors for vast regions of representation, and he reveals thereby disparate orders and ranges of experience in their connectedness and inner, generally invisible coherence. This has been the vocation of theology, when it has not become frozen or formalized into dogma but has managed rather to remain open to the creativity with which human language relates to and actually irradiates raw experience. This has occurred preeminently within the theological vision embodied in Christian epic tradition, particularly as it is recapitulated and reelaborated by Joyce. Balsamo’s thesis concerning the liturgical character and import of Christian epic recuperates the original and vital essence of this poetry. The religious ritual at its root is one that appears fully incarnate in the form of literature, and its power is poetic. Hence, Balsamo’s books are also about the essence of poetry, specifically about its religious significance as affording intimacy with divinity, as in the experience of sacrifice. This character of poetry in its original essence as religious rite is pervasive even outside the Christian epic tradition brought to focus by Altizer and Balsamo. We may think of the sensuous experience of sacrificial divinity in works such as Shelley’s lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound or Hölderlin’s epistolary novel Hyperion. Nevertheless, this specific tradition, the Christian epic, emerges as exemplary in its responsiveness to the theological vocation of poetry, which certainly represents one of the most vital of missions for cultural creations generally. The Christian epic tradition, as it becomes discernible from the standpoint of Joyce and his transformations or anachronistic reinventions of biblical types, offers a preeminent model for how this theological dimension of cultures at their origins is registered and brought to expression. Of course, any claims concerning the “origin” and “unity” of a tradition presuppose a thoroughgoing revolution in these concepts. The original turns out to be what is subsequently produced by continued reelaboration of types that gives them a precise significance gathered out of the many diverse valences they can have in the “original” source texts and traditions. In this sense, origin and unity, as understood from the paradigm of Scriptural typology, are reconstructed origin and synthesis of unity in the self-assertive in-dividuation of the type that reinvents its own predecessors. Arché and Telos, as the bases for the corresponding logological operations

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    of archeology and eschatology, define one another reciprocally: origin and end reveal themselves in relation to each other in a process of a mutual interplay that itself becomes the revelation of both. Once patterns and their copies are viewed rather as typological in the sense Balsamo demonstrates, insisting on the reversible interplay between type and antitype, between original event and its recurrence or commemoration, origin can be grasped as leveraged from present reinterpretation, and accordingly the whole tradition can be revealed “originally” by Joyce. This reinterpretation is total, in that it manages to appropriate—or to murder and consume—its predecessors in an act of “reverse filiation” that absorbs its precedents into itself, deconstructing the natural hierarchies and priorities of biological and chronological precedence. Typological repetition emerges as the only mode in which such precedence and authority can be asserted. Only the power of a creator’s metaphors to re-create the past and anticipate—setting the terms for—the future gives the measure of that author’s universality and, in effect, omnipotence within the world that is created as a result. Theology in a primordial sense concerns the origin—and consequently embraces also the wholeness—of a culture. This turns out in Balsamo’s work to be a kind of non-origin, a deconstruction of any absolute origin fixed once and for all and that is not, rather, belated and derivative. It becomes possible again to speak of origins and to envisage culture as whole from its origins only once origination is understood, pursuant to the Derridean critique of presence, as an ongoing, anachronistic process of revision and reinterpretation, such as has constituted, paradigmatically, the canon of Holy Scripture. Seen in this revisionary perspective, the methods and techniques of representation that constitute arché and eschaton, genesis and apocalypse, alike in Western culture prove to be remarkably consistent. They start from the typological methods of representation in the Bible and continue through the reworkings of epic traditions of Christianity to Joyce’s revisionary typologies. Joyce conceives of the possibility of reinventing the world by assuming the archetypes on which history is founded and re-fathering them. By this act of reverse filiation, he absorbs all precedents and predecessors into his own work, which thereby proposes itself as origin of itself and of everything else besides. This unconditioned creative power is, in effect,

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry theological in character: by usurping all (re)creative power and authority to itself, it becomes the God of its own world. Although this constitutes a deconstruction of conventional images of divinity as chronologically first, as before and outside all relation to anything other, and especially to any materials of creation, it can be an original actualization of divinity as an absolute creative power. Literature itself, in its typological dynamic, thereby performs the religious rites out of which divinity—or at least the human sense and imagination of divinity—is born. In a day and age when the whole category of the theological is often said to be dead and is genuinely felt to be bankrupt and transparently irrelevant to the real driving forces of culture, epic poetry of the order of Joyce’s resuscitates the unique power of theology for envisioning culture in its source and origin and as a whole. This is a power that is indeed uniquely theological, a power for the lack (or at least the denial) of which modern culture has often seemed to be merely the embodiment of an unraveling without rhyme or reason. Yet, understood theologically, modern culture turns out to be startlingly coherent even in its disintegration. It is, conversely, this theological vision embodied in poetry that makes poetry again what it was at the origin of virtually all known cultures: the inspired articulation of the very enabling conditions of human life and society. Perhaps no proposal within literary criticism today is so challenging as that we should read literature, and particularly Christian epic poetry, as liturgy understood in its deepest intents and purposes. This opens the dimension in which poetry assumes vital significance, and it shows poetry to be viable today as much as ever. Perhaps poetry has never been more necessary than now, when institutional modes of religious experience, at least within modern Western countries, seem to be weakening in relevance for the members of technologically super-saturated societies in the throes of the explosion of information disseminated through electronic media. Opening especially the literary texts of Christian epic tradition to their deeply theological significance and motivation as liturgy projects them into a whole new dimension of experience where their significance as poetry is re-opened to examination in light of individual experience and responsibility. For just as cultic sacrifice was experiential and called upon the individual responsibility of its participants, so liturgical poetry, as the re-actualization of this cultic rite, catalyzes irreducibly personal, spontane-

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    ous, unique experience and response. The analysis of typological re-origination in this essay demonstrates that whenever poetry can be brought back into contact with actual, living experience its significance again becomes open and inexhaustible. Poetry, viewed in this perspective, envisions and expresses what makes a culture possible as a whole and from its deepest roots. Such theologically laden types as sacrifice and eucharistic celebration reveal human, or at least Western, culture in its development from both Greek and Hebrew antiquity to its ultramodern apotheosis in Joyce, as one ongoing negotiation with itself. Culture is a continual reworking and revisioning of traditionary types that run from the beginning to the end of history—and back again—becoming the overarching metaphors that connect everything in the universe of human experience together.

Appendix: Literature as Liturgy and the Interpretive Revolution of Literary Criticism What remains is to draw out more fully the general methodological significance of the typological approach to theological poetics elaborated by Gian Balsamo particularly in relation to the Scriptural types of James Joyce. To fully appreciate the significance of this approach, we need to begin by meditating on the revolution in the method and conception of literary-critical interpretation that this work exemplifies and contributes to developing. Broadly construed, the aim here is to extend theoretical cognizance of what criticism as a form of culture and creation can do. Since roughly the 1960s, literary criticism has advanced audacious claims to being the growing tip of philosophy in the broadest sense. The most effective means of penetrating the increasingly complex intellectual problems of the day began to be considered in certain quarters to be no longer speculative thinking and analysis of facts and concepts but rather reading and textual interpretation as they emerged within the ambit of “theory.” Enhanced and empowered by new techniques of reading and a new ethos and self-understanding, criticism began to invade and revolutionize the whole spectrum of humanities disciplines by reconceptualizing their vocabularies, methods, and media in literary and textual terms. Even

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry in philosophy, previously in various ways the methodological master-discipline of the humanities, as well as of the social and natural sciences, some of the most challenging thinking could be construed no longer as gazing upon an object from a distance and then analyzing it into parts, according to the model of either perception or contemplation, but rather, according to the models offered by reading and dialogue, as a mutually interactive and involved process between the subject and object of inquiry, without impermeable lines of demarcation and domination of the one by the other. What comes to light with apocalyptic éclat through Balsamo’s thoroughgoing integration of the biblical and Joycean imaginative visions is how one of the most illuminating paradigms for this sort of reciprocity and transformativity, which have become pervasive epistemological postulates across all fields of intellectual endeavor in the humanities and beyond, can be found in Scriptural typology. It is because perception of individual characteristics is ineradicably typical that biblical typology turns out to be so revealing for the process of understanding in all literature and in fact in all significant representation of character and event. We always read, inevitably, in terms of types. Our very perceptions and intuitions are themselves constituted by repetitions and projections of recognizable elements that are only definable in terms of their recurrences and as referred to repeatable paradigms or “types.” In this sense, every conscious present is always necessarily inhabited by traces of past and future. Thus, consciousness is never purely present to itself, but is always contaminated and conditioned by something other than itself, some heritage or destiny. How and why this should be so, and what it implies for the sort of knowledge we can attain through literature and through any other medium relying on letters, or really on any kind of sign, can be understood paradigmatically with reference to Scripture. Scriptural typology, distinguished by Balsamo from dogmatic typological systems that he calls “Christian typology,” brings with it an incomparable wealth of reflection and theory about typification, or the functioning of literary types and figures in tradition and history. The study of typicality in the Bible and in the literature it spawns thus opens an inexhaustible field for theorization of the fundamental facts of the creation of culture: particularly well illuminated are the powers of literature for engendering the worlds of historical significance in which human beings live

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    and construct their cultures and, not least importantly, their religions. The dynamics of typology emerge from within this perspective as preeminently revelatory of the basic nature of reading and textual significance, and thereby of general human and historical understanding. The typological method of interpretation was developed originally by rabbis and Church fathers in order to read Scripture, but it was adopted also as a technique of symbolic representation in secular literature, especially by poets in the Christian epic tradition. For Balsamo, as already for Thomas Altizer before him, the legacy, or the spirit, of Scriptural typology and hermeneutics was pursued most faithfully and creatively within a secular literature of Christian epics. This is the tradition within which Joyce in his enormous significance as a religious, and particularly a eucharistic, writer becomes newly and startlingly readable. Yet this whole tradition is constituted only in and by its own undoing. Pivoting on the dynamics of typology, as typology evolves from the Old and New Testaments through the Christian epics, this tradition is based throughout its whole extent on the sort of ceaseless, radical revisionism that can be observed operating not just within the Bible but also well beyond it. The full import of Scriptural typology comes into its own with maximum relief, far outside the compass of Scripture proper, in Christian epic tradition and ultimately in the writings of Joyce. Thus, the aspects of Scripture that open it to typological—which means to prospective and retrospective—creations of significance are placed most vividly into evidence by an author near the end of the historical parabola of the Christian epic, in what remains one of its most challengingly modern incarnations. Our way of reading Scripture stands to be affected as powerfully as our reading of Joyce is illuminated by the conjunction of the two through their mutual implication in typology. This is what Balsamo’s work brings out in richly documented and skillfully argued ways. Balsamo begins his argument from the Derridean critique of presence as never simple and only itself but rather always borrowed from and contaminated by non-presence, by a remembered past and/or an anticipated future. This is conspicuously the case in Scriptural typology, where each character or event intrinsically refers to others and has its “own” being only outside itself in these relations. Furthermore, this predicament illuminates a general condition of whatever beings we encounter in reading and per-

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry ception and, indeed, in any type of experience whatever. The intrinsic iterability of literary existence is paradigmatic for all experience of beings. The Derridian critique of presence thus catalyzes a reassessment of the relation between types and their antitypes, making it no longer a one-way street from origin to fulfillment but rather a process of ongoing retrospective revision in which filiation is reversed and the chronological progenitor (the biblical type) is produced—in the sense of being radically redefined—by the chronological successor (the Joycean reprise and re-elaboration of the biblical type). This is, in reality, the reciprocal dynamic of Scriptural typology as the Church fathers and medieval theologians, quoted extensively by Balsamo, discovered it. Biblical typology, as practiced and as re-elaborated constantly throughout subsequent ages of interpretation, is indeed remarkable for the way it resurrects typical characters and features of tradition in order to reanimate them in new historical contexts. This relation of reinterpretation and revitalization characterizes already, paradigmatically, the New Testament as a recasting of the Old. The New Testament radically displaces the authority of the Old in Christian contexts. It embodies an interpretive revolution that reveals the true meaning of Moses and of every Old Testament motif in Jesus and therefore as outside the Hebrew canon altogether. Thus, Scriptural typology itself provides the basis for a revolutionary relation between type and antitype, reversing chronological relations of filiation. This revolutionary potential is obscured and betrayed only by certain tendencies to doctrinal narrowing which, for Balsamo and presumably already for Joyce himself, are represented emblematically by Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas’s codification of typological hermeneutics into the famous system of the fourfold senses built on the literal, historical sense misrecognizes the interpretive, totally revisionary essence of the process itself, in the nature of which there is no static sense that can remain fixed and intact outside it. What is so peculiarly revealing in Joyce, especially the Joyce of Finnegans Wake, is the way language is twisted, broken, and crucified, so as to openly display the amalgamations and accretions and permutations by which it is temporally constituted. This display takes place in constant transactions between language’s reservoirs of crystallized meaning and its projections of possibilities and promises of sense. Language opened to view and exposed in this way becomes an archeology that is also a teleology. It

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    shows the potentialities that were inherent in linguistic elements all along but that are born openly to the light of day only in terms of their distant progeny and prospects in language of later ages. This progeny itself, then, filiates its own ancestry by the new twists and turns—which can include radical shifts and reversals—that it gives to its heritage as a whole. Through hints at the microlinguistic level, Joyce’s Ham, for example, becomes the pivot-point for re-reading the Biblical Ham, as well as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in a surprising new light. This is specifically the lurid light cast by the scene of primal incest that remains so largely latent and implicit in the precedents, particularly in the Genesis story of Noah and his sons. The theme is worked out in excruciating detail—that is, with reference also to the primal sacrifice of the Crucifixion—in its later Joycean incarnation. Joyce’s rendering, in fact, becomes an unreserved revelation or “apocalypse” of this Scriptural type—to use and abuse, that is, to modify and re-create another category typical of Scripture itself and key to Balsamo’s reconstruction of “Scriptural poetics.” Joyce’s appropriations and disappropriations, his re-elaborations or re-inventions of Biblical types are not only anachronistic, thereby making the child the father of the man; they are also anarchic. Typological engendering is a mutual process for both the type and its antitype, the prefiguration and its fulfillment, without any element that is more origin than destination, more beginning or arché than mediation. There can thus be no fixed doctrinal or even semantic paradigm that delimits a priori the range of significances that these types bear or can take on. Joyce’s linguistic procedures of amalgamation, accretion and abbreviation, substitution and emendation, work in unrestrained ways to bring novel significance and latent, unsuspected relations out of each and every type related “everywhichway” to one another. Joyce exploits especially etymological sedimentations, as well as the proleptic suggestions of homophonies and homographies, very often crossing between and among various languages, in the words that name and describe his types, in order to release them into the ambit of unrestricted connectedness. These techniques simply extend and enhance the operations of language already inherent and at work in the Bible itself taken together with its adherent tradition of interpretation. This is an anarchy (or “noarchy”; FW, 80.24) in which time no longer binds things into unilateral relations

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry of domination and derivation. Time, rather, operates flexibly as a medium for freely ranging backwards and forwards, revising and re-envisioning past types which are only whatever they can become in being reinvented. This essentially is the legacy of Scriptural typology, when it is unbounded by imposed dogmatic superstructures, and it finds its fulfillment and, in a manner, its apotheosis in the writings of James Joyce. Such is the revelation of the process of reading and interpretation as it works on the basis of typological transformation that Balsamo enables us to discern with acute clairvoyance in the tradition that links the Bible together with Joyce. Balsamo’s carefully elaborated arguments, by a further extension of this typo-logic, help us gauge more accurately just how profoundly the reciprocity of text and interpretation has fundamentally changed the status of literary criticism in recent decades. Literary works now are seen to be fully realized—and thus in a significant sense to be actually “made” (poieta)—by their interpretations. The literary critic is no longer confined to a role of producing commentary on a static text and canon, but assumes responsibility as an agent in forming the texts by, in some sense, performing them and producing the actual visions of literature. The Bible and Joyce, connected via a (dis)continuous tradition of Christian epics, as excavated by Balsamo and Altizer, form an axis that is peculiarly revealing, and in some ways normative, for the sort of revisionary, projective, and retrospective dynamic that has, in just this sense, revolutionized criticism in relation to literature. The Bible, as the archetypal literary text and model for all canons, is placed in the awkward position of being anachronistically engendered by the ultramodernist project of James Joyce. This is how the tradition and canon have to live, if they are going to go on living at all, and in fact it is how they always have lived throughout the past. To this extent, the fracturing and demise of an invulnerable, intact canon is shown to be present in the core and origin of this canon itself, as inseparable from the canon’s very own possibility. Curiously, the assertion of autonomy by literary criticism as a speculative discipline rivaling or even absorbing philosophy, theology, and the whole spectrum of anthropologies turns out to be the most convincing testimony to the authority of literature in the contemporary world, even in the midst of its crises. Precisely literature’s lack of explicit foundations, which is doubled by the criticism that translates it into intellectual dis-

Finnegans Wake as the Culmination of Christian Epic    course, sets it free to be a sort of unqualified, untrammeled inquiry into all that concerns human beings. These concerns are in crucial ways leveraged from the ultimate concerns traditionally treated in the field of religion. For literature, understood as Balsamo understands it, is transfigured as liturgy, as liturgical re-enactment of primordial rites of sacrifice, such as can be discovered and even re-experienced through the midwifery of literary criticism. Literary criticism mediates (and thereby, in a sense, creates) this very possibility of non-originary, of re-visionary origin. To this extent, criticism becomes not only a universal hermeneutic of history and culture à la Vico, but also the realization of primordial human being at the level of its originating ground in archaic sacrifice. Hence the sense that criticism has graduated from the status of a service discipline to being, or at least mediating, an originary occurrence of thought and being. This revolution in the practice of literary criticism, which seems to lead to a chaos of “anything goes,” leads in Balsamo’s work to what seems a paradoxical result. Literary criticism, un-disciplined in this way, makes the extraordinary discovery of poetry’s theological vocation, that is, of literature as liturgy. The complete freedom and autonomy of criticism leads back, though this is also a movement forward, to a theological vision. The un-mastering of the disciplines by undelimited theoretical criticism actually brings back a unifying, synthetic vision leveraged from the perspective of the most traditional and most authoritative of all disciplines, namely, theology. Theology, more than any other discipline, and in open strife with philosophy as the presumable breeding ground of free thinking, has in the course of history often asserted its right to exercise control over the free development of culture. But here, in its guise as criticism, this authority is set free from all doctrinal, just as much as from all disciplinary, constraints and is only itself—simply the authority of the disclosure inherent in literature read forwards and backwards revealing all, all that it can reveal, without claiming to be anything more than this disclosure itself. Balsamo’s work is exemplary of a breakthrough for criticism and culture, for it achieves the wholeness of transdisciplinary thought—a wholeness in which theological vision, apparently lost to modern culture, emerges suddenly again into prominence and even a certain kind of dominance, given its unrestricted scope and freedom. Only very privileged moments in the history of culture have afforded thought this full range of freedom.

   Typological Re-origination and the Theological Vocation of Poetry It is the element of literary-critical interpretation that enables different disciplines and modalities of human experience to communicate with each other, and so to lend and borrow and share together a common language. All that happens in culture, from the original sacrifices with which human culture begins, happens in an element of interpretation and is realized as this reciprocal lending and borrowing (“inter-pret ation” reads as cognate with French prêter and Italian prestare, both meaning “to lend”). Literary interpretation becomes the performing of literary texts and thereby the actualization of the liturgies that lie deeply submerged in these texts. It rises thereby to the height of unrestricted celebration of all that is. Such is the ground on which poetry and theology meet. In the end, Balsamo’s work is intent on showing how tradition is produced by a process of re-reading and revision in which there is no true origin nor any final end, for the process itself is absolute. The endless, reciprocal, self-redefining circulation constantly in act between Logos and Telos is itself the only foundation tradition has. Its endlessly reproductive possibilities are the seedbed out of which tradition springs. The poles of the Bible and Joyce, with Dante and Christian epic broadly considered in between, set off most strikingly exactly how this process works at its most dramatic and in its most radically revisionary potentialities. Constantly, we read types that are anchored to no full presence either in the Logos of their origin or in the Telos of their fulfillment. It is the mediation they undergo in the text as literature and in the process of reading that defines them absolutely. This process itself is their uncircumscribable significance, which assumes thereby the openness of an ongoing event. It is embodied in religious revelation and apocalypse as they take place and are actualized in literature. Joyce’s epic texts are emblematic of this transfiguring of religious revelation as literary mediation that has become the hallmark of an especially dynamic approach to criticism that is in emergence even as I write.

chapter iv

On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today: From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology

A rapidly growing body of work in the field of religion and literature increasingly subjects literary texts to scrutiny through theological categories and religious lenses. Furthermore, literary modes and critical methods such as textuality, narratology, and reception theory have become more and more explicitly concerns of theological reflection. In the midst of this ferment, a central question is that of the relation between literary processes and theological revelation: Under what circumstances might literary expression become a mode of religious revelation? To what extent is revelation inextricably literary, or, in other words, indelibly stamped by the literary means that condition its history and event? And most provocatively of all: Might a fundamentally literary understanding of revelation make belief in it compelling again and real in a world that otherwise may have lost the ability to receive revelation, or even to accept it as a viable possibility? These questions emerge from the history of criticism focusing on religious literature that can be followed from the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, George Santayana, and T. S. Eliot through more recent generations of literary scholars such as Louis Martz, Helen

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today Gardner, René Girard, and Nathan A. Scott.1 The relations of literature and religion are a burning issue at present.2 Among those posing most incisively the question specifically of literature as a form of theological revelation are theologians at the Center for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religion in Salzburg, especially Gregor Maria Hoff and Hans-Joachim Sander, in the wake of Gottfried Bachl and, more broadly, of Hans Urs von Balthasar.3 Groundbreaking contributions in this area of scholarship have also been made by Kevin Hart, Mark C. Taylor, and Thomas Carlson— and not without specific reference to James Joyce, as we shall see. The present discussion, however, focuses on a contemporary American theologian who is sometimes felt to be awkward in the academy, for he speaks with a prophetic voice and tone that tend to violate the usual decorum of academic discourse. In order to confront the question of poetry as theological revelation, I wish to engage the overall theology, and specifically the Joycean interpretations, of Thomas J. J. Altizer. Altizer offers an explicitly, programmatically theological reading of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that insists on the genuinely theological character of these works. According to this reading, Christian revelation is consummated in Christian epic literature, of which Joyce’s epic novels are the culmination. In what follows, I embrace 1. See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual: or, The Bible the Best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight: A Lay Sermon (Burlington: Chauncey Goodrich, 1832); George Santayana, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1900); T. S. Eliot, “Religion and Literature,” in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1935); and Nathan A. Scott Jr., The Broken Center: Studies in the Theological Horizon of Modern Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966). 2. This can be seen, for example, from recent works and edited collections by Regina Schwartz and Graham Ward, among many others. See, particularly, Regina Schwartz, ed., Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2004), and Graham Ward, Theology and Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: MacMillan, 2000). 3. See Gregor Maria Hoff, Offenbarung Gottes? Eine Problemgeschichte (Regensburg: Pustet-Verlag, 2007); Gottfried Bachl, Über den Tod und das Leben danach (Wien: Styria, 1980); and Hans Urs von Balthasar, Herrlichkeit: Eine theologische Ästhetik (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1961– ). I wish to acknowledge my particular indebtedness to the Center for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religion, which hosted me as Fulbright Professor of Intercultural Theology at the University of Salzburg during the spring semester, 2007.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    these premises in working toward what turns out to be an understanding of theological revelation in literature that is rather different from Altizer’s. This is a difference in view as to what theology and literature reveal: in the end, it is a difference in view about theological as well as poetic truth. I must acknowledge, however, that precisely this difference is what I find to be most revealing. I do not believe that my own view or any other is in itself true, except as a way of seeing into and exposing the sorts of differences that can emerge from this type of dialogical engagement. Between visions scintillates some intimation of truth that is no longer definable in terms of any discrete discourse and its own exclusive viewpoint. It is this movement between views and languages, more than any single one of them taken in and for itself, that is the revelation of truth—or, rather, that refracts insight of a theological and also of a poetic order. Let us, then, attempt to face critically some of the implications of Altizer’s theology, taking his interpretation of Finnegans Wake as focal point. As an integral part of his own theological vision, Altizer attempts to interpret James Joyce, and in particular Finnegans Wake and Ulysses, in the context of what he calls the Christian epic tradition.4 Thinking Christian theology through in a rigorously modern and especially Hegelian framework, Altizer discovers Joyce as an incomparably revelatory moment in this tradition of revelation, which he understands as specifically apocalyptic in character. Dante and his successors, Milton, Blake, and finally Joyce, are seen as carrying out the mission of realizing theological revelation as apocalypse in the modern world. Their poems show the full and final meaning of human life and death in the light of Christian revelation. Beyond the plethora of thematic connections and citations of Christian tradition, Joyce is aligned with a continuous prophetic movement comprising the efforts of secular writers to extend apocalyptic revelation from the Bible into the sphere of literary, artistic endeavor. 4. Altizer’s theses on Christian epic are developed in detailed literary-critical studies of his selection of Christian epic poets in History as Apocalypse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985). These views are integrated, furthermore, into his general theology, especially in Genesis and Apocalypse: A Theological Voyage toward Authentic Christianity (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1990), and again in The Genesis of God: A Theological Genealogy (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993).

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today The connection with prophetic inspiration on the biblical model is obviously present but vexed in Joyce. Northrop Frye read Joyce’s contribution to literature and culture in the perspective of a continuity with the Catholic tradition that remained his intellectual root: “In Joyce’s personal life his break with the Catholic Church meant not that he wanted to believe in something else but that he wanted to transfer the mythical structure of the Church from faith and doctrine to creative imagination, thereby exchanging dogmatic Catholicism for imaginative catholicity.”5 Robert Alter emphasizes rather more trenchantly the Bible’s purely literary canonicity, parallel to that of the Odyssey, in Joyce’s work. Nevertheless, Alter too shows how, despite his unsparing parody and subversion of the Bible, Joyce still writes with a strong sense of continuity with the biblical tradition. Joyce counts among the modernist writers who challenge but also “reaffirm the continuing authority of the canon as a resource of collective memory and as a guide for contemplating the dense tangle of human fate.”6 Alter senses the potential of Joyce’s playful and subversive deformations of biblical tradition to reinsert themselves back into that tradition and so to continue its revelatory claim: “In the extraordinarily supple and varied uses to which the Bible is put in Ulysses, it is converted into a secular literary text, but perhaps not entirely secular, after all, because it is reasserted as a source of value and vision.”7 At the very same time as it declares the secularizing force particularly of Joyce’s readings of the Bible, this sentence evinces a suspicion of the still, at least covertly, theological character of disclosure—or perhaps revelation—in Joyce’s writing. Altizer’s interpretation, in contrast, accentuates unequivocally the radical rupture with the Catholic tradition, insisting on Joyce’s deliberate apostasy and obstinate heterodoxy—yet precisely in order to highlight the specifically apocalyptic thrust of Joyce’s vision. And this apocalyptic vision he esteems to be, after all, an authentic realization of theological truth, the theological truth of apocalypse that orthodox Christian tradition all along had been betraying. Altizer sees Joyce’s work, particularly Finnegans Wake, together with Christian epic in general, as realizing the death of God that 5. Northrop Frye, “Quest and Cycle in Finnegans Wake,” in Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963), 256–57. 6. Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 20. 7.  Ibid., 182–83.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    for him is the core of true, eschatological Christian experience and, consequently, theology. He reads theologians from John and Paul through Augustine and Luther to Hegel and Nietzsche as all deeply realizing the death of God. But just as fundamental are the revelations of the poets, particularly Dante, Milton, Blake, and finally Joyce. Their epic works become eucharisties in which the death of God the Word is shared out in tormented and martyred words with the readers. Readers realize in their own experience and interpretations of broken, mortified meaning the apocalypse that is proclaimed by the Christian gospel and that is actually accomplished by Christ’s Crucifixion/Resurrection. It is by ending the era of belief in a static, self-identical God who is immutable in his transcendence that the death of God, in Altizer’s view, opens up a genuinely new conception of divinity. For Altizer, authentic apocalyptic Christianity stands in opposition to previous religions and their myths of eternal return. Altizer derives this idea, which remains fundamental all through the development of his thought, especially from Mircea Eliade’s work in comparative religions.8 In this perspective, Christianity inaugurates the vision of divinity revealed in a unique, irreversible historical event, an incarnation in flesh that is a final and irrevocable submission to death. The self-emptying of divinity in death without return to an eternity outside of and over and above time marks for the first time in the history of religions the real and actual beginning of finite historical existence that never returns but passes toward a future that is genuinely new and apocalyptic. The past is now totally past and finally vanishes in real and irrevocable death, and a future that is not just a return of the past is now really born in all its astonishing newness. Unique, finite, historical existence is finally free to be just itself in its definitive perishing once the past has been nailed to the cross and is thus crossed out forever. This is resurrected life, and it is no longer beholden to any past. Only now is full and absolute presence of the embodied individual and the incarnate historical act possible. And just this “total presence” is what would have been realized by Joyce in the apocalypse of Finnegans Wake.9 Altizer emphasizes the heretical character of Christian epic and at the same time the absolute necessity of Christianity as ground not only of 8. See Thomas J. J. Altizer, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1963). 9. Altizer’s Total Presence: The Language of Jesus and the Language of Today (New York: Seabury Press, 1980) gives an outline of this and several other guiding insights that remain crucial for him throughout his career.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today the epic but of the whole modern world. Joyce, like other modern epic poets in Altizer’s view, performs a dialectical reversal of Christian tradition, and so of every kind of dogmatic Christianity, in favor of an apocalyptic, visionary Christianity concerned not with conserving tradition but with ending, that is, with consummating the world. This reversal is necessary in order that Christianity be rediscovered as the religion of the novum, of the absolutely new, as against the return of the same. Its eternity is won precisely by ending the cycle of eternal return that dominates pre-Christian religion and also Christianity itself as grounded in an eternal and transcendent God, a God who is only transcendent and eternal and does not, at least not in his own person, die. The actuality of the event of Christianity is at the same time a definitive ending of the inactuality of the eternity outside time of all such purely transcendent religious presences. Altizer insists on the absolutely new and different eternity that is inaugurated by death, specifically the death on the Cross. This is the eternity of an event that remains forever irreversible precisely because it is the event of becoming definitively past, of perishing, never to come back again. Thus, the full actuality of events is made possible by the death of God and takes place decisively in the central, literally crucial event of Christianity and of all history, the Crucifixion. This new world and fully apocalyptic history has been apprehended and represented, according to Altizer, most completely and perspicuously, and in a contemporary language, by Joyce in Finnegans Wake. This can be seen most readily from the way that Crucifixion and Resurrection are deployed as key themes of the work. At the center of the Wake, in pages which happen also to comprise the first to be written, is an event that Altizer describes as “a divine acceptance of death.” It is concentrated into the utterance: “I’ve a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorribleday” (FW, 381.23–24).10 This phrase articulates a terrible, perhaps errant resignation to death as due (“todue”) today, as to-be-done presently—in the torrid heat and torrent of the present tense: “today” (Latin: hodie) becomes synonymous, by dint of quasi-homophony, with “to die” (todie). Altizer reads this statement as extending Joyce’s total demythologization of the divine death at the end of the Proteus episode in Ulysses: “God becomes man be10.  James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 3rd ed. (London: Faber and Faber, 1964 [1939]), 381.23–24. The passage is quoted in Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 171.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    comes fish,” which for Altizer describes “a victim wholly dissociated from any mythical form of Christ, a victim who is pure victim as such and no more, and hence by necessity a nameless or anonymous Christ.”11 Of course, it should not be overlooked that Joyce is also alluding to how this naked victim is inscribed into Christian symbolism, since the word for fish in Greek, |ixu¥q, transliterated IXTHUS, was used by ancient Christians as an acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior” (Iesous Xristos THeou ‘Uios Salvator). Joyce’s “God becomes man becomes fish” exploits a latent comic potential inhering in what was initially a reverent symbol of the holy, before it came to be transformed in the course of tradition. He explodes thereby the aura of holiness that would elevate the divine victim above the material world of ordinary comestibles. Altizer also quotes the “prayer”: “Grant sleep in hour’s time, O Loud!” (FW, 259.4), in which the name of the Lord has become just loud noise. Prayer here confesses itself to be distracted by distraction to the point where, prayer being impossible, only sleep can be wished, a wish for extinction in time, in an “hour,” which is also what is most essentially “ours.” Joyce is echoing, of course, the Book of Common Prayer: “Grant peace in our time, O Lord.” But as this refrain reverberates in his text, it suggests that our being has been fully disclosed as temporal to its very core, and thus as most essentially a perishing. This indeed is how Altizer takes it.12 However, there is also another crucial implication that imposes itself as the same parodic play is pursued in further deformations of liturgical formulae such as “Loud, hear us! / Loud, graciously hear us!” (FW, 258.24–25). Insistent vocalization of “Lord” pronounced with a thick Gaelic accent as “Loud” mischievously exposes the resonant emptiness of language as flatus vocis. We hear the holy mystery of the Name of God, from which all language derives and on which it all depends in monotheistic theologies of the Divine Name, reduced to a linguistic fact or flub. We are reminded, moreover, that language conjures up what it is not out of thin air, out of the insubstantiality, the near immateriality of voice, and this holds even in the case of the Divine Name. The name of the Lord, which substitutes for the 11. Altizer, History as Apocalypse, 218. 12.  Viewed in this way, Joyce’s project parallels Heidegger’s almost contemporary disclosure of being as time and of human existence as “Being-towards-death” (Sein-zum-Tod) in Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927). I examine Joyce’s affinities with modern phenomenological philosophy in Essay II.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today unspeakable Name of God, sounds aloud (literally as “Loud”) this uncannily pregnant and productive nothingness into which the purported presence of God evoked in prayer is evacuated. This voiding of the Holy Name accords with Altizer’s stress on the self-emptying of God in order that he become incarnate in a profane, contemporary language. But it also points another direction toward the death of God as a virtuality inherent in language as such. This might even be taken as deactualizing the death of God, as discovering God’s absence to be already harboring in language in a way preceding and conditioning all possible events, and thus as beyond realization by any actual language and its supposed apocalyptic significances. In the passage leading up to the prayer just quoted, a further phrase—“The timid hearts of words all exeomnosunt” (258.2–3)—by echoing the Latin exeunt omnes, as in the stage direction “all leave,” meaning alternately “all die,” likewise evokes the divine absence enshrined in every word. It bespeaks an emptiness of language that works as its omnipotence, its unlimited power of creation from nothing. These terms will furnish a basis for formulating the question concerning negative theology versus death-of-God theology in the interpretation of Joyce’s linguistic apocalypse. For the moment, however, my main concern remains to read with Altizer rather than against him. Altizer shows, furthermore, the full extent to which Finnegans Wake enfolds an interpretation of the history of civilization and cosmos in the perspective rendered uniquely possible by Christianity. The work begins with a fall that, in the context of Christian epic tradition, reads as the fall of Satan. As a literary act, moreover, it aims to embody, and perhaps succeeds in embodying, to a superlative degree, the total presence of immanent historical consciousness that coincides with a new vision of eternity. The total immanence of God in the Word, that is, the word that is broken and dispersed and profaned in the unrelenting, audacious linguistic outrages and sacrileges that make up this extraordinarily blasphemous work, is brought into clear and convincing focus by Altizer’s interpretation. But it is especially the possibility of celebrating a new humanity on the basis of the total collapse of any established social and cosmic order that makes Joyce’s vision apocalyptic in the sense Altizer advocates. Finnegans Wake thus takes on unique significance for Altizer as the definitive modern apocalypse. It functions as the culmination of Christian

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    epic and as fully realizing the truth of Christianity, its gospel of the death of God.13 The Wake, according to Altizer, reveals something that all Christian history struggles to render intelligible, something, however, that can become fully evident for the first time in the modern period alone. In this perspective, the utter demise of a transcendence which is only transcendence rather than divinity revealed in dying, in emptying and giving itself without reserve for the benefit of all, has been fully embraced only by distinctively modern consciousness. And Joyce’s epic is constantly evoked by Altizer as the privileged site and crowning enactment of this revelation. The modern realization of death, specifically the death of God, is the key to this fulfillment. What has been said so far suffices to suggest preliminarily how Finnegans Wake can be read, in company with Altizer, as a further transformation of the tradition of Christian epic and prophetic poetry that can be traced from Dante. It secularizes and thereby realizes theological revelation, even in aggressively undermining all dogmatic interpretations of revelation that would separate it absolutely from any admixture of poetry, and consequently from adulteration by the profane life of language. This theological revelation occurs through the sacrificial death of divinity, especially as refracted in language and in the world as language construes it. Indeed, Joyce’s strident violations of linguistic norms and propriety might be seen as the means by which he mimetically continues and actually carries out the sacrifice of God through sacrificing sense and order in language. However, as an alternative to Altizer’s emphasis on the definitiveness of the death of God, I wish to argue that Finnegans Wake is theologically revelatory particularly by virtue of its structures of repetition, linguistic and typological. My stress on the role of repetition in revelation runs counter to the emphasis Altizer gives to the finality of death, the uniqueness and irreversibility of death as the definitive, apocalyptic event, the death of God. For him, death is the “actualization of eternity in an irrevocable event.”14 This divergence will become crucial as we sift the significance of Altizer’s theology for the possibility of a poetics of apocalypse and of revelation generally. 13. Cf. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheology (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966). 14. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 36.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today The profound theological drama of the resurrectional, life-giving, sacrificial death of God in Joyce’s works has been illuminated brilliantly by Altizer’s ideas, and in the light they shed I would like to propose a detailed reading (independent of Altizer’s own exegeses) of a couple of passages from Finnegans Wake. They will show how the Christ event emerges clearly as a sacrificial, liberating death, celebrated in the Christian Eucharist and re-enacted even in the most vulgar and profane banalities of ordinary people’s lives as represented by Joyce. All life, however degraded in the common and contemporary world, can be seen as transfigured in the perspective of this event of sacrifice and crucifixion that itself becomes the resurrection to fully incarnate life. For in Joyce the original event narrated in the gospels as the Christ event is broken open, divided up, and scattered abroad. It is dispersed eucharistically so as to become all events—however mean and trivial—rather than remaining fixed as determined by a single narrative about one identical subject. Yet we will see that these texts, while among those most directly concerned with the sacrificial death of the divine, do not stress the definitiveness of this event as revealing the final and absolute significance of history so much as the continual repetition of the same scene with significances that always seem to be different and to escape into further revelations that thus avoid ever becoming complete and total, or “apocalyptic” in Altizer’s sense. If they are apocalyptic in the sense of disclosing an ultimate meaning or meaninglessness of history, they are such by dint of letting the past come back and by affirming that one is never done with the past but is always reliving it and beholden to it, always unwittingly retracing the steps, however unheroically, of some former Ulysses. Although we differ about the role of repetition, Altizer and I agree that language is the arena in which Joyce’s poetic apocalypse is achieved. As was observed with regard to the passages concerning HEC that were examined in the preceding essay, Joyce sees grammar itself as at least one factor accomplishing the sacrificial death of God which runs the Crucifixion and the Resurrection (and the Incarnation) together inextricably. The sacrifice of God on the altar of grammar features as a recurrent motif, especially in the funeral elegy for HCE pronounced at the end of the first chapter of Finnegans Wake. Joyce bases this elegy on the idea that “the grammarians of Christpatrick” (26.21) have violently killed and buried God, in a scene

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    that Andrew Mitchell revealingly connects with Nietzsche’s staging of the death of God in the Gay Science, sec. 125.15 The novel’s protagonist, as a surrogate for God (as will become clear in the sequel), is in effect put on trial posthumously as part of his sacrificial ordeal: our old offender was humile, commune and ensectuous from his nature, which you may gauge after the bynames was put under him, in lashons of languages, (honnein suit and praisers be!) and, totalisating him, even hammissim of himashim that he, sober serious, he is ee and no counter he who will be ultimendly respunchable for the hubbub caused in Edinborough. (29.30–36)

God, or his alter-ego HCE, and indistinguishably also Adam (“our old offender”), is made responsible (“respunchable”) ultimately, in the “end” (“ultimendly”), but also ill-timedly or anachronistically, for the chaos pursuant to the fall that occurred in Eden (“the hubbub caused in Edinborough”). The story of the Fall—and its modern repetitions—is thus linked to the sacrifice of the divine victim or scapegoat. In addition to being made responsible, the victim is made repeatedly punishable, or, more exactly, punchable, like a thing, in Latin a res (“respunchable”). The sacrificial victim is lashed particularly by language (“lashons of languages”), with the intimation of his being lashed down and so bound by language, verisimilarly by grammatical rules and restrictions; but at the same time we hear that the latchings-on of language are multiple, and indeed wrought in a plurality of “languages.” The burgeoning multiplicity of his names, as well as of words in general, which bind him as he goes on trial and is sacrificed, is at the same time a source of untold fertility. He becomes the common humus that humbly nourishes (“humile, commune”) his community. Yet this nourishment of names also plagues nature infectiously (“ensectuous”), recalling the plagues of insects like flies and locusts that infested Egypt (Exodus 7–11). This ill-effect is due at least in part to his being divided up by names (“bynames”) into sects (“ensectuous”) which totalize him (“totalisating him”). In particular, Muslim and Jew, with their languages, seem to make mincemeat of the One supposed to be God above all, making of him a hash: “even hamissim of himashim.” These word-conglomerates sound 15. See Andrew John Mitchell, “ ‘So it appeals to all of us’: The Death of God, Finnegans Wake, and the Eternal Recurrence,” James Joyce Quarterly 39, no. 3 (Spring 2002): 419–34.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today like Arabic and Hebrew, respectively: moreover, in English, “himashim” is a third-person version of the phrase “I am that I am,” by which the Lord designates himself to Moses in Exodus 3:14. Joyce’s concocted locutions suggest that God is missed and mashed, and perhaps even worshipped as ham. Of course, Greek and Christian, too, totalize their conceptions of divinity and represent God as One and Being: “honnein,” where the Greek on, for Being, is aspirated (as in ∏ ]n, the One) to become hon and combines with German ein, for One, but equally with nein, for Nothing. In this last language-family or culture, Christianity from its Greek to its German expressions, God is also simple repetition of simplicity (“he is ee and no counter”). In Paradiso 26.133–35, Dante has Adam say that I was the original human Name of God: “Pria ch’i’ scendessi all’infernale ambascia, / I s’appelava in terra il sommo bene / onde vien la letizia che mi fascia” (Before I descended to the infernal dismay, the highest good whence comes the delight that wraps me round was called I on the earth). “I,” which is pronounced in Italian like “e” in English, is the simplest sound the language affords; it is without the difference of a consonant, with no sound “counter” to it. It comes from Adam, in his first moment of consciousness, as an ecstatic acknowledgment of the source of all his delight, in a spontaneous act of naming and of praise for his Creator.16 But this human utterance is offered to and, at the same time, offers up a God who will be cheered and jeered countless numbers of times (“he is ee and no counter”). Heard another way, this phrase suggests that the divine name is repeated countless times as a sort of stutter in language. Paradoxically and tragicomically, or fortunately-calamitously, the divine essence, “his nature,” which is in principle absolute simplicity and the source of all goodness and healing, becomes malefic through its appropriation into human languages. The divine nature is made divisive and sectarian essentially by names (“which you may gauge after the bynames was put under him”) used as instruments of appropriation that subvert divinity’s sovereign impartiality. Truly, these are bi-names, since they inevitably split the divine nature’s unity: they appropriate God by one name in one language and op16.  In De vulgari eloquentia 1.iv, Dante describes Adam’s first word, or primiloquium, in just these terms. In this earlier treatise, he still held Hebrew to be Adam’s language in Eden, and thus “El,” the Name of God in Hebrew, to be the first word humanly spoken. The later substitution in Paradiso 26 of “I ” as the original human Name of God evidences a greater depth of speculative reflection.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    pose him to another name in another language, and thus oppose one people to another. The elegy is for the death of “the G.O.G! He’s duddandgunne now” (FW, 25.23). At least initially, ecclesiastical authorities dispose of the legacy of the sacrificial event: “the company of the precentors and of the grammarians of Christpatrick’s ordered concerning thee in the matter of the work of thy tombing” (26.21–23). But, of course, these preceptors, unmasked as lustful and duplicitous centaurs (“precentors”), cannot control divinity and its self-sacrifice exclusively, and God is resurrected in other, popular guises. He is eulogized in this text as open at the “fore” for the laps (and lapses) of goddesses or working girls (“when you were undone in every point fore the laps of goddesses you showed our labourlasses how to free was easy” (25.20–21). These lasses are made free of labor, laborless, by what is offered as free love, though it could of course make them laboring lasses in another sense too. There is something divine in the freedom of this sexual activity, although it is also an undoing, presumably of pants, but also of self (“you were undone in every point”). There is thus a hint here of sacrificial self-surrender, the ultimate model for which is Christ’s sacrifice, his kenosis, his being undone completely, even to the point of death on the Cross (Philippians 2:8). But coupled together with this, the arched, stiff or stolid, and pointed as well as soiled and spending, phallus looms fecund and loaded with seed as it lowers itself in the lines: “If you were bowed and soild and letdown itself from the oner of the load it was that paddyplanters might pack up plenty.” This reminiscing over his prowess and potency climaxes in the goggling exclamation elegiacally evoking the deceased with a thinly veiled “By God”: “Begog but he was, the G.O.G!” The eulogized is an awkward figure whose title in this distillation of initials has a clumsy consonance with “God” (much like “Godot” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot). From beyond the bounds of orthography and orthodoxy, the text begins to suggest what the deceased has meant and means, or could mean, to his community at large. In the spirit of Joyce’s prolific displays of the endless fecundity of linguistic corruption, this dissemination of significances would potentially embrace everything, even the most perverse things, as accepted, graced, transfigured. “Gog” appears in Ezekiel 38–39 as the arch foe of Israel in a doomsday battle: “On that day I will give to Gog a place for burial in Israel . . . ”

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today (39:11). Gog is defeated and becomes carrion for birds and wild animals, as well as a sacrificial meal for Israel: “Assemble and come, gather from all around to the sacrificial feast that I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast on the mountains of Israel, and you shall eat flesh and drink blood” (Ezekiel 39:17). Viewed typologically, this invites to mixing together the vengeance on Judgment Day against the “Gog and Magog” (Revelation 20:8) with the Eucharistic sacrifice of God in Christ, especially given the eating of His flesh and drinking of His blood. And, of course, Christ’s sacrificial dismemberment is linked with the punishment of Man after the Fall. Joyce evidently revels in conflating together and confounding all these in fact theologically interdependent and mutually inextricable moments of epic history from Creation to Apocalypse. Even so, the crucial event, the death of God, has not yet changed things, not apparently anyway: “Everything’s going on the same or so it appears to all of us, in the old holmsted here” (FW, 26.23–26). The work of the Church, in providing a secure home, which is instead something of a hole (as suggested by “holmsted”), goes on as God’s entombing. This includes, presumably, the writing of the gospels among the linguistic means of mastering the sacrificial catastrophe and its uncontainable grace. Nevertheless, God, or “Gunne,” as this character is also called, making him out, not without irony, to be a big-shot, has proved to be a dud, like a shot that fails to fire (“He’s duddandgunne now”). True to his name when dead, he is “gunne now,” which evidently says that he is “gone now” but at the same time also hints that he is “going to now,” that is, become actual, become finally present—Gunne now! This, I suggest, might be taken to be “total presence” in exactly the sense Altizer intends, the total presence made possible uniquely by the death of God as a transcendent reality beyond and inaccessible to the present. These elucidations are meant, in the first instance, to provide an example of the potential productiveness of Altizer’s frame for reading Finnegans Wake—and universal history as well, for that matter—in terms of the sacrificial, apocalyptic death of God. The Wake seems to open such a comprehensive view of everything “immarginable” (4.19). And yet it does so without comprehending it. The whole story is made rather incomprehensible, at least to all familiar, available faculties and instruments of comprehension. There is definitely a sense of the sacrificial scenario as inescap-

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    able and totalizing, yet it is the unlimited equivocity of it all that comes out in Joyce’s texts every time, and indeed as prior to the apocalyptically clear, final, theological sense that Altizer’s reading inevitably elicits from it. The languages that totalize God are bound and undergirded with latencies that are not actually or exhaustively revealed. The praise of him goes on as a “suit,” a musical suite or hymn, but also a “following” or sequel, if we hear the French nuances of this word. The phrase “honnein suit,” of course, also says “honey an’ sweet,” even in praising the lashes— to mention one more of the contradictory significances compressed into this phrase. Totalizing itself is changed by the gerund continuative into an ongoing process of “totalisating.” This sort of wild equivocity of meanings in the unrestricted linguistic play that the text invites and even obliges us to participate in is bounded only by a principle of repetition, whereby we must be able to recognize elements that have occurred elsewhere, and so are already familiar, as being actualized here and now, albeit with other meanings pointing in different directions. These endless intricacies of repetition are incalculable at innumerable levels, as can be seen straight from the staging of the overarching theme of the “fall” on the first page of the Wake: The fall (babadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself prumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes. (3.15–21)

This passage projects the fall of Adam and Eve, oldest human couple or pair (the “oldparr”), named at the outset of the book a few lines before, backward to the fall of Satan, “unquiring one” from among the angels, “well to the west” perhaps suggesting the setting of the morning star from Isaiah 14:12: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning.” The passage projects from here forward to the fall of language at the Tower of Babel (the syllables “babadal” beginning a long imitation of babalese). The trajectory of repetition reaches further into a very different register with the reference to the nursery rhyme about Humpty Dumpty’s fall from a wall, as well as to an event nearly contemporary to composition, namely, the crash of the stock market, “wallstraight,” in 1929. This word

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today also hints that the confines of Eden may have been claustrophobic, such that the Fall was fortunate, as also in Milton’s Paradise Lost, according to which, once expelled from the straights of the Garden and its wall, the human pair face an exhilarating prospect opening before them: “The world was all before them” (12.646). These piggy-backed falls are all replayed also in the ballad “Finnegan’s Wake”—which gives Joyce’s work its title—about Tim Finnegan falling off a ladder and rising again on the strength of the whisky spilled at his wake. All these fallings announce what Harry Levin indicated as the work’s “central theme” of the problem of evil and original sin.17 Typically, the repetitions of falling are riotously sacrilegious reversals: this is emphatically so when they are “retaled” in Joyce’s “meandertale” (FW, 18.22), which unearths by circuitous routes unsuspected origins and primitive ancestors. Joyce finds an emblem for this recirculation of history in language in the phoenix, cyclically reborn anew from its own ashes. He links this figure with the idea of the happy fall, the felix culpa, which is hailed: “O foenix culprit” (23.16). The babelic fall into a multiplicity of languages is the precondition for any such exercise as the Wake’s own macaronic mélange of languages. Joyce’s genius is to discover the trace of patterns of recurrence compressed into words and to release it by tweaking them in such a way that everything seemingly excluded by their proper sense reappears in the deformations that devolve from the resultant, impishly perverse and corrupted form. Minimal slips and shifts of orthography can totally reverse sense and make it ridiculous, diverting it in unexpectedly devious directions. The recurrences that result entail the wildest meetings of opposites and coincidences of contraries. They also result in what it has been customary to term the “layering” of Joyce’s text, ever since Richard Ellmann’s observation concerning Joyce’s “working in layers.”18 There are many different levels or layers at which the repetitions alluded to by the text are simultaneously operative. In the paradoxical anti-summa of Finnegans Wake, the archives of civilization are ransacked in order to show how every past is contained in 17.  Harry Levin, James Joyce: A Critical Introduction (London: Faber and Faber, 1960 [1941]), 134. 18. Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 546.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    every present and will be presented again in every future. This is to continue without any end that is not destined to be repeated: “fin again.” As in dream, where distinctions of tense collapse, time here consists in cyclical repetitions that at the same time evoke an eternal “wake.” Already in Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, an undistinguished modern man on an ordinary day, was able to repeat, at whatever distance, making for pathetic parody, the fabled adventures of the Greek epic hero Odysseus, known as “Ulysses” through the relay of Latin tradition. The whole story is “history repeating itself with a difference”: in the opening episode Stephen thinks lucidly, “I am another now and yet the same,” as he assists Buck Mulligan in performing his mock eucharistic rite and morning ablutions.19 In Finnegans Wake the possibilities of repetition are multiplied by the myriad different linguistic levels or layerings. One does not even know what language to use to decipher any given word. The text hints that every word in it might be read in seventy different ways, according to its different “types”: “every word will be bound over to carry three score and ten toptypsical readings throughout the book of Doublends Jined” (20.14–16). Although this may well mean that “three score and ten” is the number of languages used in the book, following rabbinical and patristic tradition in envisaging a total of seventy nations and a corresponding number of separate tongues on the earth,20 the possibilities are actually unlimited, to the extent that the languages in play are not discrete and separate but combine and generate, proliferating in new codes beyond and between their presumable boundaries. That the book makes its ends meet in doubleness (“Doublends Jined”), or, as it elsewhere says, in “doublecressing twofold truths and devising tingling tailwords” (288.3), suggests a self-replicating, endlessly open circulation that spills out always more from its top, or trails off still a remainder from its tail, rather than completing itself in a closed circuit. This heady (and also tailish) dynamic provides the fulcrum for Derridean spins on Finnegans Wake, in terms of a general equivocity of language that engenders ever new connections with incalculable speed. Der19.  James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1934]); quotations, pp. 638 and 12. 20. See Laurent Milesi, “L’idiome babélien de Finnegans Wake: Recherches thématiques dans une perspective génétique,” in Genèse de Babel: Joyce et la création, ed. Claude Jacquet (Paris: CNRS, 1985), 155–215.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today rida’s reading, in “Deux mots pour Joyce,” pivots on the binary “He war,” where English “war” and German war, meaning “was,” war with each other in producing dissonant senses. My reading emphasizing revelation via repetition is akin to Derrida’s, which is itself based on a principle of “iterability.” Derrida’s concern with the necessarily iterable signature, and with the affirmative, the “yes,” as always already presupposed and implicitly repeated by any utterance, any linguistic performance, suggests how repetition is built into language as its sine qua non.21 The repetition in question, of course, displaces and in effect re-originates whatever it repeats in an endless process that the Wake’s own wacky language describes as “contonuation through regeneration of the urutteration of the word in pregross” (284.19–21). Any “ur” utterance is but a continuation of the then not-so-original thunder (Italian: “tuono”) with which language begins as the language of the gods, according to Vico. More than a beginning or origin, it is an ongoing rumbling tone, or “contonuation.” The word, as a preexisting quantity, or “pregross,” is actually heard, in the event, as a word in progress. The repetition is thus at the same time an erasure of the original, a negation through oblivion of the arché, in “the obluvial waters of our noarchic memory” (80.24). And just as any staking out of a first beginning is destined to be washed away by what comes after, so also no ending can be final in this tumultuous “chaosmos” (118.21). In the passage on the “pftjschute of Finnegan” (from the French chute for “fall,” with onomatopoeic elaboration of the initial consonant), there is a suggestion that Finnegan falls by virtue of a perversion or negation of inquiring. This sin repeats the unauthorized inquiring after knowledge of good and evil in Eden that turned it into an unquiring, a false note of disobedience marring cosmic harmony. His fall “well to the west,” furthermore, is the repetition and, in effect, repeal of a line from the Easter Vigil 21.  Jacques Derrida, “Deux mots pour Joyce,” in Ulysse gramophone (Paris: Galilée, 1987). A kindred approach to the babble of languages in Finnegans Wake is developed by Derek Attridge (see “The Wake’s Confounded Language,” in Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). Although likewise inspired by Derrida, Sam Slote finds in the Babel passage of Finnegans Wake (258.5–18) a schema of silence and exile rather than Derrida’s complex ethical call to respond (see “No Symbols Where None Intended: Derrida’s War at Finnegans Wake,” in James Joyce and the Difference of Language, ed. Laurent Milesi [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003]).

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    liturgy: “Lucifer, dico, qui nescit occasum,” about the bearer of light, who knows no setting. It alludes to Christ’s rising like the morning star (Revelation 22:16 and Luke 1:78) never to set, and is quoted in Ulysses at the very moment that “Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect.”22 There, too, the fall is “to evening lands,” that is, to the West, just as in the Wake passage, with a hint that this is at the same time a Crucifixion scene (“I thirst”). There may even be a reminiscence of the Dantesque “altezza d’ingegno,” height of genius or pride of intellect, which lies behind the fall of Guido Cavalcanti adumbrated in Canto 10 of the Inferno (line 59). But the Wake’s destitute, modern-day Satan, collapsed together with Christ crucified, falls to evening lands in quest not of high intellect but of clumsy and trivial “tumptytumtoes” at the low end of his body, as he tries to put on his drawers perhaps, having risen or rather fallen out of bed in the morning. This is a good example of how Joyce translates the liturgical past into utterly contemporary language, as Altizer compellingly maintains. The tremendous creative power of Joyce’s language flows indeed, in large measure, from its assuming the most crass, banal, meaningless language of common, contemporary life—including its advertising slogans and consumer product brand-names, its popular songs, its technical and professional jargon, the trite banter of people in pubs—and transfiguring it all within the frame of a mock-heroic epic that re-enacts revelation of everything in everything else. It thus becomes possible to see the contemporary world and its characteristic speech in an apocalyptic light as re-echoing the most holy verbal heritage of Joyce’s civilization as it is garnered and transmitted signally in the Latin liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. Other civilizations, too, are represented by incorporations especially of otherworldly and apocalyptic motifs from texts including the Egyptian and the Tibetan Books of the Dead, the Koran, the Indian Vedas, the Chinese Book of Changes, etc. Such is the powerfully syncretistic apocalyptic vision that Joyce actualizes in his epic. The apocalyptic motive that is operative in all this is crucial, and it has been brought to light brilliantly by Altizer. In this light, Joyce’s text may even be admitted to realize authentic theological apocalypse—as long as it does not directly say so. For if it were to say so, it would immediately become something else entirely. It would then claim to offer a theological 22.  Joyce, Ulysses, 50.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today truth and to state this in an adequate language rather than to proffer a poetic truth that occurs in the breaking open of language, an apocalypse that language cannot as such state. This sort of explicit statement of apocalypse is exactly what is to be found everywhere in Altizer, where apocalypse operates as a theological metanarrative. That, however, is exactly what the “nat language” (83.12) of the Wake seems determined to avoid and indeed fends off by design. Poetry has a powerful message of apocalyptic import, on condition that a negative theological consciousness keep it from ever identifying itself fully with apocalyptic revelation, for that would make it a new thesis statement designed to replace old ones in a serial replay of the Oedipal drama that the death of God, according to Nietzsche and Freud, plays out. Ironically, this would be exactly the betrayal of the radically new time inaugurated by apocalypse, according to Altizer: it would mark a return to old Chronus devouring his children. Altizer’s language seems to suggest that the truth can be delivered in theological concepts. But his theology’s consistently pointing to poetry indicates where apocalyptic revelation—and its re-veiling—truly are to be found. Altizer’s own theological discourse, in effect, passes into the poetic discourse it illuminates. It does not present itself this way, and the fact that he is always chastising orthodox and contemporary theology for not being apocalyptic enough implies that theology ought to be stating, clearly and explicitly, the apocalyptic truth. That is what is demanded by the ideal of perfectly adequate statement and conceptual transparency. However, it is really through a deflection of theological discourse into critical discourse, which then hands the baton to poetry, that Altizer succeeds best in conducting us to the apocalypse that he so zealously proclaims. The problem here is that Joyce’s poetry and its language cannot defend themselves against being sublated (aufgehoben) to a conceptual language, that of theology.23 This essentially carries out Hegel’s project for the sublating of art and religion to the concepts of philosophy. He called it “absolute knowledge.” Altizer speaks rather of the “total presence” of apocalypse, but by becoming totally conscious and revealed in theological 23.  Mark C. Taylor, “Betraying Altizer,” in Thinking Through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer, ed. Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), also makes the point that in Altizer literature or art gives way to theology (18).

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    apocalypse, Joyce’s language and its poetry cannot but be translated out of their natural idiom of poetic images into a language of concepts. Becoming totally conscious and revealed in apocalypse, it seems, must surpass the essentially veiled, oftentimes virtual nature of poetic language. To the extent that poetry is always but a medium and a mediation, a re-veiling, it is not apocalypse. The characters of Finnegans Wake are all traces of characters, the plots are all traces of plots. This text avoids definitive or unambiguous positings of the real person, the real plot. Altizer supplies the “true” scenario, in effect, as the Christian narrative of the self-sacrifice of God. He interprets this story, in his resolutely heterodox manner, as the story or rather history and even presently real event of the death of God. Altizer has given an invaluable impulse to readings of Christian prophetic poetry, including Joyce’s epics, as specifically apocalyptic in import. The light he sheds obliges us to investigate his theology of apocalypse further and to consider how far it can guide our insight into poetry as apocalypse in general. But the engagement with Altizer in the remaining segment of this essay will lead to envisioning also some limits to the identification of poetry with apocalypse. The limits to direct disclosure in language of any final and total truth are what make specifically poetry necessary as a means of expression for apocalyptic vision. Consequently, alongside apocalyptic theology, a negative theology is crucial for explaining the role of poetry as prophetic and apocalyptic, for poetry is precisely the veil that covers over and prevents total disclosure of what theological apocalypse in principle would reveal. Altizer’s apocalyptic theology is not inclined to concede anything to this twilight zone of the not fully revealed, or of the “re-veiled,” that is, the concealing that is intrinsic to the unconcealing or revelation itself. His theology proposes a total presence in pure immanence. But the faith embodied in this vision is not the same as the faith that animates the literary works he reads, nor is it even necessarily the same as the belief that is actually operative in his own literary-critical insights. I have chosen to read passages that I believe compellingly illustrate the pertinence of Altizer’s paradigm for reading Joyce. Yet reading in them a total sublation of the past to a present that is totally present seems to me to violate the poetic character of Joyce’s writing. Joyce’s text entails a trace of otherness in repetition, in its typological structures. This is what refuses to yield itself to the total presence that Altizer’s apocalypse proclaims. In-

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today deed, this otherness is the God that Altizer wants to kill and erase, or if not identifiably “God,” then at least an openness to such a possibility as God. It is because of repetition, because what we experience has come to us we know not whence, not exhaustively, and surely not as purely our own production, that “God” cannot be eliminated from our world. This is the acknowledgment of an apocalypse that is not totally present, of a possibility that transcends our horizon. It is probed in poetry, and poetry remains the veil that keeps this apocalypse from becoming final and authoritative within our world, and consequently leaves that world free. Precisely this horizon of transcendence must be erased for Altizer’s apocalypse of total presence to take place. Altizer eliminates this horizon, together with all residues from the past, in order to affirm an absolute beginning as necessary in the constitution and emancipation of the free, autonomous subject for whom God is dead. In The Genesis of God Altizer argues that only an absolute beginning can “foreclose the possibility of the repetition of beginning and of the eternal repetition of beginning, a repetition that finally and actually ends with the ultimate enactment of a pure and total irreversibility” (66). He maintains that “the absolute necessity of a unique and absolute beginning is the absolute impossibility of eternal return” (67). Altizer’s theology styles itself and indeed is an atheology. God is definitively erased by the self-originating beginning of an absolutely free, autonomous, individual, modern consciousness. This entails “the absolute negation of eternal return” (48–49), for “only an absolute negation and transcendence of eternal return makes possible a subject or an ‘I’ which can only be itself, an ‘I’ which is a once-and-for-all and unique ‘I’ ” (49). Now it must be admitted that Altizer, too, often gives an ostensibly crucial place to repetition in his theological thinking and in his reading of Joyce. In History as Apocalypse he writes, “The fall, condemnation, and crucifixion of H.C.E. is the dominant epic action in the Wake, and it is repeated again and again, even as the host is ever broken in the mass” (239). He writes further of “a ritual presence above all in the eternal repetition and return of a primordial and divine sacrifice” (237). It is not that Altizer ignores the dynamics of repetition: they purportedly belong centrally to his conception of the realization of apocalypse. He embraces repetition in the form particularly of the Nietzschean doctrine of the Eternal Recurrence, which he takes to be the reversal of all myths of eternal return,

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    for Nietzsche’s doctrine would supposedly identify apocalypse with the fully actual, with what happens in history.24 Yet the result of this concern is to reverse repetition, so that it becomes annihilation rather than affirmation of what it repeats. The “return,” as Altizer understands it, is so total and without residue that it frees itself absolutely from the past and owes it nothing. It is repetition that completely erases that which it repeats, which is quite simply everything.25 Altizer acknowledges and indeed insists that apocalyptic vision is the repetition of all of history and of the cosmos and quite simply of everything whatsoever. Yet the repetition is not for him an affirmation of continuity with this past, but just the opposite. It is a final and definitive severance from this past, and even more decisively the irrevocable annihilation of this past as in any sense past, as in any way inaccessible. All such barriers and veils are broken down—this precisely is the etymological meaning, after all, of “apocalypse”—as when the curtain of the temple is torn from top to bottom at the moment of Christ’s death (Matthew 27:51), along with other apocalyptic signs (the earth quaked, rocks were rent, and graves were opened and the bodies of saints rose up and appeared to many). And Altizer always takes this stripping away of veils to be total. That is what makes him the uncompromisingly radical thinker of apocalypse that he is.26 Altizer approaches repetition from the standpoint of apocalypse, so that it too becomes total revelation in the here and now of the totally actual. Total presence and the final revelation of death is what is repeated. There is nothing else, nothing that remains hidden, no mystery, no transcendence of any kind. I suggest rather an approach from poetry and from the mediations of language, which can arguably become apocalyptic, though we never quite grasp fully or finally what is revealed. Total apoca24. Altizer dedicates an essay specifically to Nietzsche’s teaching with “Eternal Recurrence and the Kingdom of God,” in The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, ed. David B. Allison (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985). 25. Edith Wyschogrod, “Crucifixion and Alterity: Pathways to Glory in the Thought of Altizer and Levinas” (in McCullough and Schroeder, Thinking Through the Death of God ), demonstrates from another angle Altizer’s erasure of the past as “the trace of the Other.” 26. Altizer comments on “multiple forms of a uniquely modern apocalyptic totality” and discusses the necessity for “totalizing apocalypticism itself ” in Godhead and the Nothing (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 93.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today lypse, in this view, is a possibility we may glimpse or sense rather than a manifest truth, and much less a stable or achieved platform from which we can organize the world. Repetition does, in my own view as well as in Altizer’s (and Nietzsche’s), in some sense abolish the past, but the present does not thereby become fully actual and without residue, so as to be picked clean of anything latent or virtual. Whereas for Altizer repetition abolishes the past definitively and irrevocably, for me it abolishes the past only as merely past. In repetition, as I understand it, the past comes back and becomes actual, but always only partially actual. There is also a past that never becomes fully actual, because it was never actually present in the first place.27 Such an archaic past forever subtracts itself from history and hides in an apocalyptic totality that is never manifest. This sort of inarticulable totality is typically seen by Altizer (as by Hegel before him) as antimodern or “regressive.”28 In “Ritual and Contemporary Repetition,” Altizer discusses the redemption of the past through repetition, that makes it fully present in “a moment of full or total time,” in modern masters, particularly Proust and Rilke, along with Kafka, Eliot, and Joyce.29 This aesthetic moment of total presence is a higher, more essential, spiritual reality that is ideal without being abstract. It represents for Altizer a human overcoming of archaic repetition and its subjection to an inhuman eternity. Through its openness to contingency, contemporary repetition is thus a “full reversal” of cultic repetition, which rather abolishes contingency by the enactment of eternal archetypes. Altizer rightly maintains that repetition is total—it is the way that the totality of the past can come back into play even after having been lost, however definitive and irrevocable the loss seemed. Repetition is the mechanism that enables history to be totalized. This claim to totality, moreover, 27. The roots of this idea, which has been much bandied about by Levinas, Blanchot, and Derrida, lie in Schelling’s 1811 essay fragment “Die Weltalter” (“The Ages of the World”). See an essay by Slavoj Žižek, with the text of Schelling’s “Die Weltalter” (second draft, 1813) in English translation by Judith Norman, in Slavoj Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom / F. W. J. von Schelling, Ages of the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). 28. See, for example, The Genesis of God, 33 and 69. 29. Altizer, “Ritual and Contemporary Repetition,” Dialog 19 (1980): 274–80; quotation, p. 279.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    is the characteristic mark of theological vision. Yet precisely this completeness and comprehensiveness is what cannot be represented nor, consequently, be definitively and exhaustively revealed. It is what refuses to give itself up to apocalypse, to final disclosure. It remains a thing rather of poetry, of “making” (up) and metaphor, where metaphor furnishes an image that is always only partially identifiable with what it evokes. The authority of theology, as Altizer evokes it, overwhelms and kills the poetic mode of disclosure of Joyce’s language. The problem is that Altizer’s theological discourse attempts to state the apocalypse, that the poetic discourse he interprets manages to insinuate and enact, without explicitly formulating it. Altizer’s discourse is brilliant as a critical discourse enabling the poetic language of the epic text of Joyce and others to be understood and experienced as never before in its theological challenge and audacity. But, as theological discourse pretending to unequivocally state the apocalypse, it becomes also something more than that. It becomes an appropriation of the literary text. This theological takeover results especially from its authoritative, prophetic tone. Despite Altizer’s insistent declarations of the death of God—and in defiance of every type of rhetoric—the past is never dead once and for all; no matter how many times it is killed, it keeps coming back again. It haunts us in unconscious and virtual ways over which we can never completely gain control. Hence the ancient impulse to exorcise it and lay the ghosts of the ancestors to rest. Now Altizer, too, conceives of a resurrection together with death, but it is not of the past; it can be resurrection only of the future, which for the first time is genuinely future because of its absolutely abandoning and burying the past. Thus is realized the divine power to be in and for oneself alone without extrinsic origin in the past or in any otherness. This is how Altizer’s apocalypse entails a “repetition” that actually reverses Nietzsche’s eternal return of the same and finally annihilates the past without repeal. Altizer’s total presence as the total actualization of all that has ever been marks in reality the end of the Eternal Return.30 30. David Leahy, “The Diachrony of the Infinite in Altizer and Levinas: Vanishing without a Trace and the Trace without Vanishing” (in McCullough and Schroeder, Thinking Through the Death of God ), also argues that Altizer’s apocalypse entails “not the eternal recurrence of all things, but the end of the eternal recurrence of all things,” in effect an “absolute inversion” of Nietzsche (106).

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today For Altizer, what is repeated ad infinitum is an actual event, the death of God, the event of the finite. The actual, the finite, our world or ourselves, the sphere of immanence is the only reality for Altizer, just as for Hegel, at least as Altizer reads him, and it is therefore infinite, undelimited by anything outside itself. This is really divine power: to be only oneself and unconditioned, to be the beginning of a history that is itself alone and therefore absolutely actual, not the re-enactment of some other scenario, of someone else’s story. God, accordingly, is to be understood wholly in terms of this world. Against Altizer, I am choosing to see this world more as a gift than simply as an existential and empirical given; it opens upon a mystery of whence and wherefore, rather than being itself ultimate, final, “apocalyptic” presence. This is more like the attitude of faith in religious traditions, and it is often expressed clearly enough in Christian epic. Beyond all the secularizing tendencies of this tradition, Dante, Milton, and Blake open a horizon that extends past this world of ours and its actuality. All that is actual they take to be also the enactment of other worlds, eternal worlds such as Blake imagines in declaring his “great task”: To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity Ever expanding in the Bosom of God. the Human Imagination . . .  (Jerusalem, Plate 5, lines 18–20)31

This is not the actual world, the external world, the world of history. It does express a strong secularizing sense that God and humanity are one in the Imagination, which is within, in worlds of thought, and it thus avoids alienation into the inaccessible other world of an afterlife. The other world is discovered in its presence as another dimension of perception of this world rather than as any separate region or universe. The other, the eternal world is to be found in the here and now, but it is not fully consummated here and now with the definitiveness of the historically factual. On the contrary, it is an openness to worlds of the imagination reaching infinitely beyond the actual and factual. Altizer’s theology entails very simply a decision to exist in and for oneself out of one’s own existence here and now as absolute actuality which is not beholden to any other—to any predecessor or ground—that is not 31.  The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David W. Erdman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    itself. All that is past has simply perished. Neither can there be any Other that is purely and only other. By this decision to absolutely affirm one’s own existence, every past and every other is annihilated—is made as nothing—for the one that so decides and acts. Whatever is “repeated” is appropriated totally and thereby made so “new” as to have no trace of connection whatsoever with anything past or other. No past could have any consistency of its own as in any way enabling it to offer a minimum of resistance to such total appropriation. Any such acknowledgment would cause consciousness, according to Altizer, to fall short of the modern affirmation of self as an absolute beginning in an irreversible historical time that can never return to what was. There is a rage to totalize in Altizer that is typically theological. But it is quite different from another kind of characteristically theological impulse that is a willingness to be part of a totality, to be part of an order which one does not constitute or even grasp the principle of because it has a beginning that transcends one. This, too, is a theological attitude, one that is open and expectant toward what is external to oneself. It is theological in relating to a ground or supreme principle of things as a whole, though it cannot grasp or know or articulate its God—nor can it, therefore, pronounce Him definitively dead. Altizer rages against this kind of openness, which represents for him a regressive hankering after primordial unity and wholeness and a persisting alienation from oneself as finite and historical. This is what Altizer thinks Christian revelation and crucifixion, and the modern world they give rise to, have finally overcome and even rendered impossible.32 For Altizer, faith in this sense is no longer really a viable choice, not a live option in the modern world, and he presents this situation as a plain fact, thereby covering over the way that it is his choice to consider faith in a transcendent God to be outmoded and even “impossible” in modern times. His is a fateful and courageous, but not a necessary or inescapable decision. There are actually innumerable witnesses in modern and postmodern culture to the possibility of faith in an Other beyond one’s reach and beyond everything that can be grasped as “actual.”33 Many orient their 32. This, incidentally, is where I differ from Mark Taylor as well. Even though Taylor often comes out as a strong advocate of the wholly Other, he is often averse to perceiving it at work in Christian tradition and its transcendences. 33. Some good examples can be found in Schwartz, Transcendence.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today existence to such an otherness to all that is revealed, rather than taking the immanence of their own existence as isolated individuals to be absolute and without exit. Such an Other is indeed unthinkable and unsayable, but that does not prevent us from relating ourselves to it and orienting the fractured openness of our existence toward it. In the end, the deepest poetry, as a metaphorical language of the unsayable, is concerned with nothing other than this. For some, such an attitude might seem nostalgic, but for me it is not a question of nostalgia so much as of acknowledgment of the other external to me and my freedom. This is a difference of theological posture, an attitude of faith very different from the self-assertion and self-realization, even in absolute self-annihilation à la Blake, that Altizer advocates. What is intended in this acknowledgment is not known. It is silent and invisible and cannot be delimited. It is a “bad infinite” in Hegel’s terms and “Mystery” as the whore of Babylon for Blake. But acknowledging it affords an alternative to consuming oneself in the isolated apocalypse of one’s own absolutely inescapable presence. This acknowledgment entails a choice to live in relation to the Other that is not actually revealed, rather than to consume oneself totally in the apocalypse of self, of identity and its absolute disintegration into the Nothing of self-annihilation. There is, of course, a kind of freedom and even salvation in this latter approach to existence. It is a decision to assume utter responsibility for oneself. Yet modernity and its self-certainty, its apocalypse of chaos, may not after all be all there is, and indeed it still proves possible to live in faith toward what is entirely other than ourselves. Phrased in these terms, the question is not so much about whether one imagines that there is some superior Mind in control of things; it is not about what we can imagine at all, but rather about what we cannot imagine. This question arises once we opt, or at least allow, for a faith that would point us beyond what we can comprehend and thus would make room for an origin antecedent to ourselves of the order by which we so often find ourselves surprised. Are we going to respect this ordering principle, whatever or whoever it is, and acknowledge ourselves to be beholden to it, or are we going to make our freedom and its unconditional exercise its own foundation or abyss? Altizer opts for the latter. He is not incapable of recognizing order as it is given in the universe, but he evidently feels

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    compelled to appropriate it, to deny it as belonging to someone else, to kill it as God or God-given, thus to deny it as a possible manifestation of divinity. He is compelled to do this in the name of a humanity that he thinks must shake off self-imposed tyranny and assume itself and its, in truth, unconditional freedom. Others will opt to live in a world in which we are not unconditioned and yet recognize and orient ourselves to the unconditioned as Other. It is my contention that this choice can be persuasively motivated by the astonishingly grace-ful turns and re-turnings of a text such as Finnegans Wake. Emblematic is its “Gracehoper” hopping by haphazard felicities from hap-piness to hap-piness, or from contingency to contingency: “The Gracehoper was always jigging ajog, hoppy on akkant of his joyicity” (FW, 408.21–22). Faith, after all, is by definition faith in what is not seen but rather hoped for. This is so in Paul’s definition, or that, anyway, of Hebrews 11:1: “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Taken this way, theological revelation becomes purely openness to revelation. Positive declarations concerning what is or has been revealed betray the transcendent sovereignty of divinity by lashing it down in language of human forging. Poetry, by springing open the latches of language, can effectively engender this openness, which is apocalyptic. It is disclosure within a certain absoluteness, the limit-case of unconditional openness, openness to God, to God’s advent or event. However, this also puts apocalypse back in the hands of God and rejects any human claim to “realize” it. Such faith gives no positive directions in pragmatic social terms, and it could never be used to run a religion. Nevertheless, it does point a direction. In fact, it entails a whole orientation of life. Everything that we live and do from within this outlook and existential stance is shaped by its relation to what might be recognized as God, indeed as the absolutely sovereign Lord of my life and of life tout court. This I consider to be the apocalyptic revelation to which poetic work of the order of Finnegans Wake is apt to open us, even though it shies away from all programmatic agendas for the realization of apocalypse. I am suspicious that apocalypse degenerates to ideology when it assumes the field of representation. Poetry is representation, and to that extent not apocalypse, but it is representation that can be peculiarly adept at canceling itself out as representation, and that is what enables it to approach very near to and open itself into apocalypse.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today Metaphor in particular embodies these negative capabilities of poetry. Metaphor is language that denies its own literal meaning in order to project toward some other, previously inconceivable meaning. Metaphor opens meaning beyond the actual and factual. As “live metaphor,” it projects a new meaning on the basis of the old by turning it in a different direction.34 It thereby generates its own new signified, where none is given in advance in the existing system of concepts making up a given language. Poetic metaphor is brought into relation with religious faith by opening toward an indeterminacy of meaning which is, however, anchored to some concrete, particular given or gift, an image.35 There is a concrete element in a metaphor that projects beyond itself to unlimited further meanings, some even of an abstract nature. This is the element that repeats itself in all the innumerable possible meanings that open in the perspective opened by the metaphor. The type, whether literary or theological, repeats itself in this manner too. The type similarly gives a new twist to a traditional figure by placing it concretely in the present and opening its meaning to being construed in fresh directions from within undelimited new contexts. I have in the previous essay in this volume evoked a religious kind of faith as belonging to the openness with which we attend to the open possibilities of meaning in any given type-figure from Scripture or literature, and this is the same sort of attention as is required to discern the meanings of metaphor. It is an active openness to letting meaning be given. It means remaining undecided as to what comes from the indeterminate source or Giver of meaning and what, on the other hand, is determined by the form of reception imposed by the human discerner.36 34. Cf. Paul Ricoeur, La métaphor vive (Paris: Seuil, 1975). 35.  For the idea of metaphor as leading to indeterminacy of meaning, see Gerhard Neumann, “Die ‘absolute’ Metapher: Ein Abgrenzungsversuch am Beispiel Stéphane Mallarmés und Paul Celans,” Poetica 3 (1970): 188–225, and Karsten Harries, “Metaphor and Transcendence,” in On Metaphor, ed. Sheldon Sacks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979). 36. The superimposition of human ingenium upon divine creatio continua is at the origin of language in Vico’s conception. His theory, as the culmination of a long tradition of speculation in rhetoric and theology, is studied in detail by John Milbank in The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico, 1668– 1744 (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 1991), part I, chapter 5.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    At the same time as it effects a rupture with the logic of language as literal statement and a negation of the world that simply is, metaphor also works at another level to evoke unprecedented possibilities of unrepresentable unity. A metaphor is a monad in which all things can be seen together from a particular perspective. Metaphor, through a single image, can give an entirely new angle of vision upon the whole world construed as through a window opened by a principle of similarity replicated ad infinitum.37 The universe is re-envisioned under the aspect of the likeness of all in accordance with the content of the metaphor. It is turned into unity—a uni-verse—by the turning (versus in Latin, from vertere, “to turn”) of the trope. The Christian apocalyptic vision of the unity of all things reconciled to God in Christ through the blood of his Cross (Colossians 1:20), so that “Christ is all, and in all” (3:11), is paradigmatic of this sort of ultimate apotheosis of metaphor. It constitutes a quintessentially metaphorical type of vision, turning typically on such tropes as “one body” for the Church as the mystical body of Christ and “one flesh” for the sacrament of marriage, which turns out, with the marriage of the Lamb, to be the culminating metaphor in the Apocalypse of John. This illustrates how metaphor bears the apocalyptic vision of all things brought back to unity in God or in absolutely simple Being. Radical, or what Northrop Frye calls “anagogic,” metaphor entails an unqualified assertion of identity between different things or ideas (“A is B”).38 It projects an apocalyptic transformation and renewal of the world, since such utter oneness is not in the least possible in our spatio-temporal universe, where everything is separate and divided up in space and time. Frye conceives the regaining of identity at all levels, cosmically of the oneness of Paradise, as the motive for metaphor and the universal purpose of literature.39 This anagogical, apocalyptic sphere can be evoked by metaphor, 37. The monadic metaphysics of metaphor are suggestively discussed by Jorge Luis Borges (see “Apuntaciones críticas—La metàfora,” Cosmópolis 35 [1952]: 395– 402, and “Examen e metàfora,” in Inquisitiones [Buenos Aires: Sur, 1952]: 65–75). 38. Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 123. Frye further develops his conception of metaphor as identity in Words with Power: Being a Second Study of the Bible and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), chapter 3: “Identity and Metaphor,” 63–96. 39. See Northrop Frye, “The Motive for Metaphor,” in The Educated Imagination (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964).

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today even if it cannot be objectively represented. Metaphor, if it is believed, instills something like faith that all things come together in the end, but it does not produce this vision actually and objectively worked out as a system. It tacitly suggests, through an image or picture, a wholeness that it cannot logically articulate. This is a kind of wholeness and gift that Altizer’s theology can never admit. It is a wholeness which is always only partially realized, as in Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Motive of Metaphor,” where things are seen “With the half colors of quarter-things,” under the obscurity of the moon, and not even death is experienced as total: “You like it under the trees in autumn, / Because everything is half dead.” Metaphor leaves unrealized the totality which it nevertheless evidently presupposes and intimates, even as it departs from what language literally denotes according to “The ABC of being.” There is repetition of words here and endless metamorphoses of sense, but as if without meaning, since meaning in any proper sense is always broken or crippled and is, in the end, as indecipherable as the wind: “The wind moves like a cripple among the leaves / And repeats words without meaning.”40 For Altizer, the cosmos has become totally chaos because he is certain that there is no transcendent principle to order and unify it. This is what “knowing the death of God,” in a phrase he often repeats, entails. The only order consists in purely human orderings. But in Joyce’s texts an order of things keeps cropping up mysteriously, as if through no one’s control. It is not perhaps possible to disentangle it from the order that I as reader project and impart to the text, but is this latter ordering, then, all there is? Does the text not give me something too that I cannot account for? Might not everything I do in interpreting the text just as well be seen as already contained within it, as consisting in implications that I simply bring out into the open? This text might yet be a revelation of a divinity, even in all of its sacrilegious exposures and plain profanity, as in the text of Joyce. For Altizer, that divinity is totally dead, and thereby makes possible the beginning of new life in the present and as totally present. Resurrected life fully begins for humanity only after the definitive death of God. But this is to abstract oneself from the process of the text, to have apprehended 40.  “The Motive of Metaphor,” quoted from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1923–90).

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    it already. And, then, for this kind of reading, it is no longer a poetic text. Then the text no longer reveals itself to us—rather it is made to reveal only what we have already pre-comprehended. This is to circumscribe the open revelation that is true theological mystery—or ongoing poetic manifestation and disclosure. Fundamental to his vision is Altizer’s arresting insistence that it is death that establishes actuality and thereby the final sense of things. Events are real and irreversible actuality in their perishing, that is, in “the full and final presence of perishing and death.” This actuality, moreover, is what breaks the “silence of undifferentiated plenitude.”41 God is revealed in the death of Christ, specifically in its finality, but thereby God is also identified with beginning, with its irrevocability, and with the Word that speaks in the beginning. Ultimate beginning, for Altizer, is a Word which says I AM and thereby interrupts the timelessness of undifferentiated eternity. The verbal self-naming of “I AM” realizes a pure actuality and self-individuation, against which every return to the undifferentiated and static is idolatry. This is a beginning that is necessarily and totally “speakable,” the irrevocable “death of silence.” But such an emphasis, in its striving after totality, can hardly avoid eclipsing anything genuinely other than itself. This occurs, for example, in the conception of language as pure actuality, from the original word of Creation to the eucharistic word of Apocalypse. There is no space left for virtualities or for anything unexpressed or inexpressible. In his theological memoir, Altizer writes: Yes, the primary calling of the theologian is to name God, and to name that God who can actually be named by us, and if this calling has seemingly now ended, that could be because the theologian has not yet truly named our darkness, and thus not yet truly named God. While silence is now the primary path of the theologian, and above all silence about God, this is a silence which I have ever more deeply and ever more comprehensively refused, for I am simply incapable of not naming God.42

The silence of eternity is what Altizer has been struggling to escape all along through his loud pronouncements of the death of God. Hearing 41. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 32. 42. Thomas J. J. Altizer, Living the Death of God: A Theological Memoir (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006); this passage is quoted also by Mark C. Taylor in his foreword to that work (xviii).

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today and interpreting this silence is another calling for theology, but one that he refuses. Altizer’s theology emphasizes exclusively the event character of language without allowing room for any antecedent structure as necessary in order for this event to have any sort of sense. In effect, it would seem that his vision is all parole with no langue (or at least that it collapses these two together). Langue, the system of language as defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, is a network of virtualities that impinge on the sense of any actual word or phrase. Langue is always presupposed for any actual instance of language, any particular discursive act or parole. Altizer exalts the revolutionary, rupturing power of the new act, in speech as in history, but what are the conditions of its having the revolutionary significance that it has in his view or, for that matter, any significance at all? It is indeed possible to emphasize the dependence of langue on parole, for without the singular events of language the system remains purely abstract and does not actually realize itself. But there is also a structure to the event of language in any given instance, and this is what binds any given speech act to a language that makes it possible. This linguistic paradigm holds at the level also of theology and culture as discourse. Archaic structures of ritual and myth are what Altizer’s “uniquely modern mode of experience,” a “uniquely human form of transcendence,” definitively overcomes and does to death.43 Accordingly, Altizer sees the relation between structure and event exclusively in terms of ending the antecedent tradition: the new act, as it has been understood in modern times by Hegel, Blake, and Joyce, is itself a totality and an absolutely new beginning that dialectically negates all antecedents. Of course, in Altizer’s apocalyptic perspective, any pair of opposites dialectically interpenetrate and fully disappear into one another. Nevertheless, by his emphasis on the finality of death and on the completeness of the consummation of all in this event, Altizer tends to obscure the fact that events have antecedent structures, that is, that they are structured, precisely, as repetitions. In order to have any sense at all, they must be re cognizable. Altizer’s ideal of language is immediate presence, the eschatological presence that he takes to be incarnate in the language of parable as spoken presently: this he holds to be the authentic speech of Jesus. Such language erases “every trace of a beyond which is only beyond.”44 This era43. Altizer, “Ritual and Contemporary Repetition,” 273–74, 279. 44. Altizer, Total Presence, 3–8; quotation, pp. 7–8.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    sure of the trace of transcendence makes the event and death—its God— all powerful. In effect, Altizer offers not only a death-of-God theology but a theology in which death is God. All life and grace—and the very sanctification of the world—are received as flowing directly and exclusively from death and its powers of negation. This expresses perfectly, perhaps, a certain outlook prevalent in modernity. But it is not so clear that the heart of Christian revelation has been revealed in its truth only in modern times, as Altizer’s view implies. Altizer proffers an unreserved affirmation of negation, of the negativity which has perhaps been the characteristic mode of modernity, but his apocalyptic poets typically take another view of modernity as a less privileged epoch in the history of the West. Dante, denouncing relentlessly his contemporary world with its “gente nuova” (Inferno 16.73), the nouveau riche, and their crass commercial values, expresses what is already in medieval times a mistrust of the modern as falling away from noble values and the religious vision of truth that is positively embodied in Christian revelation. Blake, for whom rational, conceptual consciousness per se is fallen, abhors the age of Newton and Locke. Milton, too, is ambivalent, wary of embracing the supposed gains of Galileo with the consequent dismissal of the Ptolemaic universe, and keeps one eye looking nostalgically backwards to the Garden, even in insinuating that the Fall may, after all, have been fortunate. It is not primarily modernity and its negations which the poets celebrate, but a spontaneous imaginative wholeness of vision, a primordial, Edenic vision preserved from the irreparable breach of modern consciousness. In the foregoing essays and in other writings, I have championed a possibility of genuine theological revelation as embodied in Christian epic and as extending the revelation of the Bible, a revelation of some beyond, of a divinity transcending all that can be humanly comprehended. For Altizer, in contrast, the essence of Christianity is a disclosure of total immanence, of the truth that all truth is consummated in the here and now, in actions on this earth and in history, which embodies a total presence that eliminates any possible reference to a beyond of pure transcendence. In this way, any vestige of a dualism of heaven and earth is overcome, and this may indeed be considered a gain, but then the earth itself must be acknowledged in its mystery and otherness. For Altizer, Christianity, and particularly the Crucifixion of Christ, is a total disclosure of the ultimate

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today meaning of life as a perishing that is at the same time its resurrection as unconditioned, as totally free. The very finitude of life, namely death, renders it absolute. The lucidity of Altizer’s argument is breathtaking. It is no longer necessary to believe anything that is not fully evident and demonstrable, as only time can tell and death demonstrate what really happens to us in the end. Yet this sort of apocalyptic knowledge is perhaps too much for a finite human being to attain to and sustain. To know in this manner is to wipe away all hesitations over human self-sufficiency as mere Unmündigkeit, as immaturity and as not yet having come of age.45 It is to fly in the face of all cautionary voices in tradition, signally in wisdom literature, warning that humans do not fully possess their own end and that they must abide within the natural limits of their finite consciousness and correspondingly respect what is beyond them. Altizer’s thought seizes full possession of our beginning and end as fully revealed in the Cross of Christ and as totally consummated on Calvary, leaving no mystery veiled behind. This is indeed an updating of Hegel’s dialectical transformation of Christianity, converting it into absolute knowing. Altizer’s “authentic Christianity” is compelling because it is fully within reach for any individual to realize—and immediately: there is no need to believe in any beyond. But is it possible, or advisable anyway, to believe exclusively in the here and now and in what we perceive as happening to us as historical individuals? Belief is invested not purely in events, however actual, but also in significances and motivations, and it reaches into regions of virtuality and ultimacy that perhaps are most themselves when not fully unveiled. Is it not possible that “actuality” is the West’s most peculiarly characteristic mythic invention? Are we not increasingly discovering that history is myth, that myth infiltrates the historically “real” and “present” and the whole fabricated web of such categories and concepts?46 45. The reference, of course, is to Kant’s classic essay, “What Is Enlightenment?” (“Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?”). A rebuttal to Kant and therewith a defense of remaining unenlightened, by the illusory “Nordlicht” or “aurora borealis” of the age, is given by Johann Georg Hamann in his letter of December 18, 1784, to Christian Jacob Kraus. See Essay I, section iv, above. 46.  Hayden White’s work, for example, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), is emblematic of this sea change of historical consciousness. Donald Phillip Verene, in Knowledge of

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    Recent readings of Finnegans Wake have found in it precisely an intimation of the inactuality of the world. Joyce’s work is found to embody the invention rather of a mystical reality, a “Wakeful sleep.” Bringing out the extent to which Joyce is steeped in Catholic medieval mysticism, and invoking the motto “against actuality,” Colleen Jaurretche reads Finnegans Wake as attuned to the apophatic discourses of negative theology.47 Thomas Carlson similarly finds pervasive resonances in the Wake of the apophatic theology particularly of John Scott Eriugena (c. 810–c. 877), a fellow scion of Erin with whom Joyce shared a common sensibility for theological aesthetics that are thus seen to have characterized the Irish theological imagination from the ninth century to the twentieth.48 As Carlson points out, Joyce’s Wake is marked as following in the wake of Eriugena by its imagination of Creation as “erigenating from next to nothing” (FW, 4.36–5.1), as well as by echoes of his teachings, for example, in the reference to the “woid” at the “buginning” of “the miraculous meddle of this expending umniverse” (410.16–17). Eriugena’s stamp of negative theology may be seen impressed on phrases like “imeffable tries at speech unasyllabled” (183.14–15) or “intuitions of reunited selfdom (murky whey, abstrew adim!) in the higherdimissional selfless Allself ” (394.36–395.1–2). Some of the declarations of total immanence in the actuality of the here and now in which Joyce abounds are to be heard in this context—for example: “the pancosmic urge the allimmanence of that which Itself is Itself Alone (hear, O hear, Caller Errin!) exteriorizes on this ourherenow plane in disunted solod, likeward and gushious bodies with (science, say!)” (394.32–35). But even here, the infinite self-creation of God in man on an outward plane in disunited solid bodies does not seem to exhaust without remainder the mysterious recesses of divinity. Rather than full and final revelation, human Things Human and Divine: Vico’s New Science and Finnegans Wake (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), especially part III, brings the philosophical underpinnings of this outlook, as it derives from Vico and his reflections on myth and the metaphor of history, into contact with Joyce, and specifically Finnegans Wake. 47. Colleen Jaurretche, The Sensual Philosophy: Joyce and the Aesthetics of Mysticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997). 48. Thomas A. Carlson, “And Maker Mates with Made: World and Self-Creation in Eriugena and Joyce,” in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (New York: Routledge, 2001).

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today and divine subjects both prove incomprehensible even to themselves: “the one the pictor of the other and the omber the Skotia of the one” (164.4–5), where the idea of shadow (Italian: “ombra” turned to “omber” in order to chime with “other”) is set in apposition to Skotia, evoking the Greek word skotos (dark, obscure) and thereby also the middle name by which Johannes Scotus Eriugena was generally referenced in medieval Scholastic tradition. This name also evokes Eriugena’s land of origin, known as Skotia Minor in the Middle Ages. Such a dense web of allusions hints that this medieval, mystical Joyce is an important corrective to the quite exclusively modernist emphasis that takes control of Altizer’s reading.49 For Altizer, events “are finally actual events only as the consequence of the death of God, for only that death finally releases events from a transcendent ground, so that only now can they be fully and finally manifest and real as events which are only themselves.”50 Would Altizer maintain that the events of Finnegans Wake are only themselves, without any shadow of transcendence or repetition of something other that is invested in them? Are all events then identical with each other as the absolute perishing that is their common essence in Altizer’s view? Is this the ground of the seemingly limitless connections and identifications that Joyce’s language ceaselessly suggests? Exclusive focus on the actual may restrict insight by eliding virtualities that fundamentally condition vision. This absolutely intense vision of actuality leaves no room for the unseen. When Altizer insists on the revelation of ultimate beginning and perishing, on “unique events, events which happen once and no more, and therefore events which as such can never be repeated” but are “real and irreversible actuality in their perishing,” we must ask: In what exactly do such events consist? He would have them be totally utterable, but actually it is impossible to say, for any such event has become precisely nothing that can be said or signified.51 Whatever memory traces or records may be 49. See, further, the variety of new approaches in Middayevil Joyce: Essays on Joyce’s Medieval Cultures, ed. Lucia Boldrini (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003). 50. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 149. 51.  Altizer quotes are from Genesis and Apocalypse, pp. 149 and 31. On the basis of Vico’s vestigial theory of language as bearing the etymological sediments of words passed on as a genetic linguistic endowment such as Noam Chomsky envisages, Gian Balsamo offers an account of this unspeakable, apophatic dimension that lies below all Joyce’s words and representations (see his Joyce’s Messianism: Dante, Negative Existence and the Messianic Self [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004], chapter 2).

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    left are something else entirely, for Altizer has radically divorced this singular occurrence from everything else that is and from everything to which it could be related: all that can be said about it is that it is not. It perished. But, actually, things that are, because they are also relations (that is, their very being is relational), do not cease to be quite so completely. They are more than sheer and mere “actuality.” We do not know quite what they are. Their being is, in fact, never completely revealed and perhaps never so completely vanishes. It is by insisting on total revelation as “total presence” that Altizer arrives at total annihilation, and his preferred term for all this is “apocalypse.” Yet these absolutes are conceptual creatures. Our actual experience of things in time is partial and relational, not total and absolute. It is only a totally self-conscious subject that totally vanishes when it dies, for only such a subject totally centers its world and is exclusively for itself. Deeper than any conscious construction of a subject as “I,” there is a self or me that is only partly conscious of itself whenever “I” am genuinely in relation to “you” or “us.” The testimony of literature and of poetic works generally has agreed with that of religious revelation in pointing toward something other than the manifest, to something that remains inaccessible to all our instruments of knowledge, to some kind of truth transcending the immediacy of experience, the “naked immediacy” that Altizer finds revealed in modern writers such as Proust, Rilke, and Joyce.52 Literary language has long been defined by critics and theorists in terms of this difference, whereby it evokes something beyond what ordinary language can denote. Christian epic has embodied in eminent degree this vocation of literature to reveal (or at least intimate) the radically other. It has represented the very epitome of literature in its vocation to open language beyond the bounds of the manifest to a radically new and strange dimension of reality. All this is swept away by Altizer’s total apocalypse in the immanence of the actual, a revelation that is fully accessible and which discloses that there is no revelation beyond the ultimacy of death—a realization that renders life its full presence as real and totally actual. This may be viewed as a supreme affirmation of life in its naked immediacy against all abstraction that one way or another theologizes it, but it may also be viewed as an amputation of latent dimensions of life that are not fully actual and present. If we wish to retain even a modicum of belief, not just in theology but even in poetic literature as a distinctive sort of disclosure of life and its 52. See Altizer, “Ritual and Contemporary Repetition.”

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today significance, we need to make allowances for what transcends our comprehension and remains beyond the horizon of our vision, however “apocalyptic.” The Christian epic and, I believe, Joyce’s final epic, too, indeed do this. These literary visions lack the total lucidity of Altizer’s theology, but they have the advantage that it is possible to live within them, and perhaps to glimpse an apocalypse that has not already so completely claimed one as to make death the only reality. They are inhabited by an otherness that remains undisclosed. For Altizer, even pure otherness comes only from death. It is precisely the ultimacy of perishing that “unveils ultimate difference itself.”53 For Altizer, as for Hegel before him, otherness does not transcend the self and its actuality in time, but is only the difference that time makes: even absolute otherness is a product of total immanence, which cannot but totally reverse itself in death.54 For this reason, Altizer is able to understand revelation or apocalypse only dialectically and thus as a reversal of some previous understanding of revelation. He champions Christianity as the reversal of archaic religion based on the myth of the eternal return of the same, and he champions a series of heretical movements within Christianity that he perceives as reversing mainstream forms of Christianity in order to achieve its authentic apocalyptic message. This dialectical and totally negative understanding of revelation is fully modern, as it indeed proclaims itself to be. The pure power of negativity operates in it and is affirmed. The divine gift itself, as Altizer understands it, is an act purely of self-annihilation. Only negation gives this theology its impetus, along with the very object of its concern. It is true that Christian epic derives a great part of its force precisely from its translation into secular terms of the theological revelation of the Bible, and to this extent Christian epic constitutes a negation of various purported forms of Christian revelation. Altizer finds authenticity always precisely in this negation. But the Christian poet-prophets do not necessarily share Altizer’s consistently negative view of their relation to traditional Christianity. They are all revolutionary in their ways, but they wish also to medi53. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 56. 54.  In a critique of Altizer that likewise features his reading of Finnegans Wake, Mark C. Taylor similarly aligns Altizer with Hegel’s ultimate effacement of difference by identity (see his “p.s. fin again,” in Tears [Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990]).

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    ate a gift of God that is indeed a given and that does not need, before all else, to be negated, but first of all to be received. In Altizer’s dialectical view, the new can first emerge only as the negation of the old. It can never be given by itself as such. It is “a new creation that can only be the consequence of the final ending of an old totality.” Or again: “Only the ending of an old world makes possible a new naming of beginning.”55 By saying what a new creation can only be, Altizer’s affirmation is in fact a negation. Indeed, this is the way conceptual thought proceeds, as we know most fully from Hegel. But, thank God, it is not the only resource of knowing. Poets in particular are open to something that transcends concepts and their necessarily negative power, the logic of negation. Altizer knows this well, as his opting for a logic of contradiction, of coincidentia oppositorum, shows. It is in transcending the exclusionary bounds of concepts that visionary, poetic truth is revealed. But this comes about for him, as for Hegel, only by the labor of the negative. Where is the gratuitous gift that comes to us—Emmanuel!—rather than being produced by our own negating labors? Certainly it is present in, in fact all over, Christian epic poetry, for example, under the figure of inspiration. The gift of inspiration is arguably what drops out of the Christian epic tradition in Joyce—in which case he may no longer be representative of the genre—and yet the happy chances of his language constantly tripping into unforeseeable serendipities are perhaps as good a translation of grace into a modern idiom as could be imagined. Inspiration is fundamental to Christian epic and prophetic poets through Blake and onward to modern poets like Paul Claudel, author of Le soulier de satin, or Miguel de Unamuno, in El Christo de Velazquez, whom Altizer does not consider, presumably because they are not generally reputed to be heretical and therefore do not obviously serve to radically reverse what Altizer takes to be normative, non-apocalyptic Christianity. (He might also not consider them to be truly epic poets.) Admittedly, even the gift that is not given by negation, if it comes to be understood, will be understood by opposition and negation. But understanding does not necessarily come first. We have necessarily and inevitably negation first only when we take knowledge to be first, and in conceptual discourse this always works, but in actual living 55. Altizer, Genesis and Apocalypse, 22, 28.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today something else, something other may happen. And Scripture and poetry alike witness to its happening. Altizer might aptly respond that these genuflections to an unspeakable otherness are mystifications, and perhaps they are. Still, the question I would pose is whether they correspond to our human situation better or worse than does total apocalypse. Is life not a bit mystifying? Can it not be left that way? Altizer has revealed the thrust of Western thought and culture with overpowering penetration and fidelity. A sharper, more relentless focus than that provided by his theology on what this history reveals hardly seems possible. This theology recapitulates Western Christian theology (qualified as Reformed and Lutheran, though with a passion for the Catholic theology it reverses), and more broadly materialist or historicist culture, followed out to its radical consequences in a totalizing perspective. But we may be concerned ultimately with what this history—perhaps the only “history” in a strict sense—does not reveal. Altizer is faithful absolutely to this tradition that can be called “our own,” if any can. But might “our own” after all betray us? It could be that this worry expresses a wish to escape from ourselves, and Altizer courageously refuses every such escape. But it may also be that Jesus as God means to offer us an alternative to this tragedy, which is all too much our own. For Hegel, revelation is in the pure immanence of the phenomenon. This is the power and the limit of his view.56 In Altizer, this absolute immanence becomes “apocalypse.” The second essay in this volume proposed another view of revelation in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake as based not on apocalypse but on repetition, and this view was extended in terms of typological repetition in the third essay. By privileging not apocalypse so much as repetition as inherent to any process of representation, my interpretation takes up an approach opposite to Altizer’s insistence on the unique historical event as the essence of revelation in Christ. I explore linguistic repetition, a mechanism fundamental to Joyce’s novel, in its intrinsic propensity to become revelation in a theological sense. And this entails the coincidence of theology and literature, but it also preserves the literary mediation without 56. Cf. Michel Henry, “Appendice: Mise en lumière de l’essence originaire de la révélation par opposition au concept hégélien de manifestation (Erscheinung),” in L’essence de la manifestation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), 2:863ff.

From Apocalyptic Theology to Postmodern Negative Theology    yielding it wholly to apocalypse. One would think that Altizer, conversely, had sublated literature to the absolute truth of apocalypse—except that, to the extent he goes on writing, he is nevertheless mired in linguistic mediations. The consciousness he presents, or rather represents (for books are not total presence), does not coincide with, but only signifies apocalypse—repeatedly, with each new instance of his prolific production. In a critique avowedly indebted to Altizer and strikingly similar to the one I have reached by a different route, Andrew Mitchell likewise valorizes ambiguity, undecidability, hesitancy, and argues that repetition cannot be erased even in the final apocalypse of the death of God. For the killing of God is never finished. Referring to the Nietzschean text from the Gay Science (sec. 125), Mitchell observes, “If one must become a God to be God’s murderer, then God is not killed but serially replaced.” And further, “God’s death cannot be regarded as a fait accompli, because He dies only to reappear again, each appearance announcing a subsequent death. And would not an infinite God require an infinite death, repeated at each moment?”57 This remark points to the circumstance that nothing finite like death can ever exhaust the infinite. Believing in the ultimacy of death or in the finitude of God (as conceived by Hegel) is an article of faith. Altizer, like Hegel, negates the infinity of God and derives divine power from the finitude of death. Yet negation itself is infinite; it is never final or exhausted. And beyond any God that is negated, this infinity of negativity is still operative as the “divine” life in which we live and can relate to a God that outlives every “apocalypse.” Of course, Altizer’s point is that death is, nevertheless, for us final, irreversible negation—end of story. But are we within or outside of this story? The same question must be posed with relation to God. Posing the question is, in a sense, already taking up a position outside. The question at least remains infinitely open—at least as long as we live and go on asking. Before concluding, and in order to conclude, I must acknowledge a piquant irony. In order to express a view on Joyce and Christian epic, I have found it necessary to insistently negate the interpretation of Thomas Altizer, which nevertheless I am awed by and in fact believe at least as much as I believe anything I myself am able to write, whether by way of 57.  Mitchell, “ ‘So it appeals to all of us’: The Death of God, Finnegans Wake, and the Eternal Recurrence,” 420, 423.

   On the Possibility of a Poetics of Revelation Today addition or detraction, about it. Does this not show, inadvertantly corroborating Altizer’s thesis, the inescapability of negation, the inevitability of denial, at least in critical discourse, vis-à-vis the most powerful mediators of the truth or apocalypse we wish to embrace? By a negatively theological logic, do we not confirm the inexhaustibility of that power and truth in our never finished, yet ever so limited, attempts to resist it? Can this very gesture of negating, given the coincidence of all opposites, not be read as a giving up of oneself to the other in this still too ungrateful way?

Post-apocalypse

W. H. Auden once expressed a poet’s sense of impotence in avowing that “poetry makes nothing happen” (“In Memory of W. B. Yeats”). Certainly, considered as an efficient cause, poetry appears to be far removed from the momentous events of the day and their potential to impact the world and its history. But its power is of a different kind and of an order more akin to that of final causation: at its most significant, poetry illuminates the order of things as a whole and influences our understanding of the ends for which we exist, the goals that we and the whole cosmos might be striving to achieve. The historical and oftentimes religious mission of poetry as an instrument of revelation that, at its limit, becomes apocalyptic revelation of all things in their final meaning has been pursued in a wide variety of poetic traditions and modes. Among them, Christian epic and prophetic poetry—signally in the works of Dante, Milton, and Blake—has distinguished itself by focusing poetic vision upon the furthest edge of history, where apocalypse bursts on the horizon. And yet, from a certain postmodern perspective, the constructive projects of representation and the intricate poetic systems produced by these comprehensive visions are not necessarily the most revealing legacy the poems have left us. There is another aspect of their poetic language, a less assertive one, a negative and even self-negating faculty intrinsic to the poetic word and its metaphorical energy, which proves essential to the power of poetry to become—or rather to lead up to and induce—apocalyptic revelation. These negative capabilities (to borrow Keats’s phrase) by virtue of which poetry can become the prelude to apocalypse have become more and more evident in late modern poetry—for example, in the lyrics of Paul Celan, where poetic language undertakes to unsay itself in startlingly resourceful and often devastating ways. This is emblematic of a widespread tendency of poetry today to seek its own undoing, to work

   Post-apocalypse against and undermine language. The negative poetics of Emily Dickinson or of contemporaries like Geoffrey Hill (in Tenebrae), in various, sometimes deliberate ways, emulate the logological practices of negative theology in its millenary incarnations across a wide diversity of cultures. Sufi discourses in Islam—which were distilled into the poetry of Rumi—and Kabbalistic expressions within Judaism make moves and evince motivations analogous to those of the so-called negative theologies of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart, which similarly find their poetic counterparts in the verses of John of the Cross and Silesius Angelus. In all these traditions, all “revelations” committed to language are themselves revealed as artifices and images. They become idols if they are identified immediately with the truth or transcendent reality or apocalypse toward which they rather aspire in the manner of mediations. In James Joyce and particularly in Finnegans Wake a certain terminus, or at least an extreme, is reached in the poetic undermining and dismantling of language. I have attempted to show that this process of disintegration is, in fact, best understood in the context of Christian epic tradition and even as the culmination of its aspiration toward apocalyptic revelation, albeit in a negative vein. In fact, the very project of poetic apocalypse or disclosure of all reality, human and divine, in poetic language appears in a penetrating light from this vantage point and makes us realize more acutely than ever before the fundamentally negative status of all revelations in language. We become critically aware that language is itself always already a negation. Whatever it conveys it shapes, at the same time, in its own (and this means also our own) image: language screens us from the reality that only its destruction can release and thereby disclose, or at least evoke. The negation of this negation that language intrinsically is by a poetic language that learns to unsay itself may, after all, be a powerful unveiling of what language cannot say, of reality as absolute rather than as always already relativized by the terms of our interpretation of it in language. To this extent, it is especially in its self-negation that poetic language can become apocalyptic revelation. In poetry taken to the limits of its expressive powers by poets and thinkers who have endeavored to sound its depths, poetic language approaches apocalyptic intimations by self-subversion, by its own effacement and erasure. Beyond all its analytical capabilities for disclosing not things

Post-apocalypse    themselves but their various determinate qualities and aspects, language as employed in poetry attempts to disclose a more essential reality of the world. It cannot, however, do so directly or thematically so much as by its withdrawals, in letting be what cannot be said but rather “shows itself,” as Wittgenstein put it (Tractatus 6.522). This negative disclosure can be understood to be the deeper meaning of the more positive claims to revelation made throughout the tradition of theological and, finally, apocalyptic poetics. The two must be taken together, just as Dionysius the Areopagite’s negative or apophatic theology was expressly meant to work in tandem with the positive, kataphatic theology that it presupposed. The immense canvasses of representation unfurled first by the apocryphal apocalypses themselves and then by Christian epic poems, beginning with the Divine Comedy and including such works as Gerusalemme liberata, The Fairie Queene, and Paradise Lost, may have been most suggestive in attaining the limit where their art foundered and allowed something else that could not be represented, except as the negative of representation, become inarticulately present and palpable. In this perspective, Joyce’s exacerbated scrabbling and scrambling of language in Finnegans Wake is the most telling revelation of the truer, more subtle sense of this tradition of poetry as apocalypse. Language is dismantled as representation, but is disclosed as repetition, as the perpetual re-enactment of a dynamic event of disclosure that defies presence and representation because it aims to evoke what is before and beyond language. Just what this beyond of language is cannot be said. It is a matter of faith in some irreducible sense that is both poetic and religious. In faith, we can repeat and thus, in some sense, enact or enable the apocalyptic revelation that we cannot objectively know. To do so, we must abandon ourselves to becoming totally transformed, apocalyptically, into a new creature. This is to open ourselves to the poetic process as a formative making and re-making—but also a deformation and an unmaking. We have seen this process to be characteristic of that poetic language in which language is wrought to its uttermost and breaks. This breaking-off is the point where we have been able to descry the place and the potential for a breaking-open into apocalypse. We have followed the path of poetry as a production and destruction of language to the point where it must leave off and look out from its own shore upon another realm and element, upon an unfathomable sea

   Post-apocalypse of transcendence that is the dominion of religion. However, religion too is mute in the face of this mystery that transcends language, and in fact religion can only turn to poetry to evoke what no theology, no Logos whatever, can adequately articulate. In this way, poetry, which issues from and ends in silence, and apocalypse, as the ultimate instance of religious revelation, need and at the same time delimit one another: each leads up to and loses itself in the other. This recognition of the limits of the word in both poetic and theological discourse is, furthermore, the necessary premise, the sine qua non for veritable dialogue. It delimits the reach of any one discourse, which can never be complete on its own terms, with its own Logos, and opens a space for others to be given a say in constructing a genuinely dialogical discourse, an effectively open conversation. Any discourse desiring truth must aim to be whole and is guided by an ideal of inclusiveness. This means for it to be open universally to including all potential participants and their viewpoints, so as to avoid being arbitrarily discriminatory. But this also means breaking down its own inevitably totalizing structures from within and opening its barriers outward toward what it cannot comprehend. In this sense, any dialogue, in order to remain genuinely open, must be open to both poetry and apocalypse. These are limit-cases where discourse is forced to confront and to take account of what is other than itself, both from within language and from without. Moving in opposite directions, from inside and from outside language, respectively, poetry and apocalypse both produce paradigms of discourse that discovers and becomes obsessed with its own beyond. Poetry and apocalypse, poetry as apocalypse, poetry is (and is not) apocalypse: we have traced the conjugation of these terms through a number of radical metamorphoses. Each of the terms has served to point to something absolutely essential in the other that, however, was not said in it and was rather covered over. Together they have been played with and against each other and in the end have been plied to point beyond language altogether. This is where poetry and apocalypse meet—in the beyond of language that they both intend with all their inextricably verbal energy and intensity.

Index

Adams, Nicholas, 45 Adorno, Theodor, 47; on negative dialectics, 47, 53, 68n; on theological apocalypticism, 67ff Aeneid, incipit, 117 Alter, Robert, 162f Altizer, Thomas, 161ff; 21, 70, 102n, 120, 122–123, 145n; on repetition, 180; and atheology, 180; against desire for primordial unity, 185; and human freedom, 186–87; on death and actuality, 191; and I AM, 191; and refusal of silence, 191; and modernity, 192; on Crucifixion, 194; and transcendence, 198 Anselm, 48, 76 Apocalypse, definition of, x; Armageddon, xi; as discourse, 4, 6; as apocalyptic genre, 91; and limits of representation, 18, 24; and mass media 6, 7; and final significance of history 21; as poetic event, 24; as poiesis, 25; in Finnegans Wake, 166ff; and negative theology, 170; and transcendence, 198 Apophasis, 40 Ashberry, John, 34 Attridge, Derrek, 103; on constructedness, 111f; on babble of language, 176n Auden, W. H., 203 Auerbach, Erich, 98n Augustine, Saint, 71, 163; on Trinity, 102

Baader, Franz von, 73 Bachl, Gottfried, 160n Balsamo, Gian, 125ff, 121; liturgical sacrifice, 140n; 196n Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 26n, 160 Barth, Karl, on Anselm, 47 Bataille, Georges, 74, 100n; on sacrifice, 145 Beckett, Samuel, 40, 121, 171 Benjamin, Walter, 64 Bible: Apocalypse 19:19, 144; 20:8, 171; 22:16, 177; and marriage of Lamb, 189; Colosians 1:20 and 3:11, 189; 1 Corinthians 1:18ff; Genesis 1:2, 112; Exodus 20: 4 and 20:7, 69; 3:14, 170; Ezekiel 38–39, 171–72; Hebrews 11:1, 187; Isaiah 14, 18; John 5:25, 13; Luke 17:21, 13; 1:38, 177; Matthew 6:28–29, 111; 27:51, 181; Romans, 6; Romans 8, 16; Romans 6:2, 131 Bishop, John, 108 Blake, William, 20ff; and autobiography, 101–102; Albion, 120; and Christian epic, 161n; infinite worlds of imagination, 184; and selfannihilation, 186; and mystery, 186; and modernity, 193 Blanchot, Maurice, 39 Bloch, Ernst, 53, 64 Bloom, Harold, 39 Bloomenberg, Hans, 39 Boldrini, Lucia, 120, 133n Bonaventure, Saint, 22 Borges, Jorge Luis, 189n

   Index Boyle, Robert, SJ, 140n Buddhism, 40 Caputo, John, 47n Carlson, Thomas, 195 Celan, Paul, 28ff, 82; 203 Catholic and Protestant, on apocalypse and history, 13ff Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 100 Cixous, Hélène, 106n Claudel, Paul, 199 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 160n Communicative Action, 44ff Contini, Gianfranco, 97 Corn, Alfred, 35 Chauvet, Louis-Marie, 105n Chomsky, Noam, 58; 196n Christ, as eschatological figure, 12–13; event of 13, 21; and kenotic selfsacrifice, 70, 132, 136, 139, 171; as IXTHUS, 165 Christianity, as apocalyptic 16–17; as religion of the new, 164 Communication, unrestricted, 61; as rationality beyond argument, 80 Critical Theory 47ff; 62ff Croce, Benedetto, 97 Crucifixion, as Resurrection, 129; as kenotic, 133; as Eucharistic, 146; as linguistic, 154; as central event of history, 164 Cusanus, Nicholas, 40 Dante, on DXV, 41; and Cacciaguida, 19; and apocalyptic, 19–20, 40; 70–71; and communicative revelation, 70–72; Divine Comedy as novel, 97f; and individual selfconsciousness, 98ff, 101; and selfreflexive lyrical language, 103; on word as revelation, 119; and sensuous imagination, 140; Vita nuova, 144; as secularizer, 167; and Adam’s language, 170; and high genius, 177; on modernity, 193

Death of God, 163ff; and Nietzsche, 169 De Guy, Michel, 34 De Vries, Hent, 113n Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 104n Descartes, 37, 76; and dualism, 101 Derrida, 4n, pharmakon, 6; on white mythology 36n; on grammatology, 33n; critique of Habermas, 49; critique of modernity, 76; critique of metaphysics, 77; and deconstruction, 113; critique of presence, 153–154; on equivocity of language, 175–176 Dialogue, 43ff; with apocalyptic discourse, 7, 17; its radical impossibility, 58–59; openness to, 86 Dickinson, Emily, 204 Dionysius the Areopagite, Pseudo-, 88, 205 Durkheim, Émile, 46, 141 Düringer, Hermann, 66n, 80n Dwyer, Kevin, 87n Eckhart, Meister, 40, 204; and reason as intellectus unlimited, 47 Eco, Umberto, 115n Eliade, Mircea, 163 Eliot, T. S., 35, 106, 119, 121, 160n Ellmann, Richard, 174 Enlightenment, 43ff, 47, 53f; Lumières, 67; and rationality, 80–81; Aufklärung, 194 Eriugena, John Scot, 40; 195f Eschatology, 12–13 Eucharist, and transfiguration of word, 105; as church ritual, 127f; as primal sacrifice, 138, 146 felix culpa, 174 Fichte, Johan Gottlieb, 73n Finnegan, as name, 107–8 Fish, Stanley, 92n Foucault, Michel, 49, 76; critique of power, 76 Franke, William, 46n, 53n, 100n Frye, Northrop, 28n, 120, 162n, 189 Fundamentalism, 85ff, 89

Index    Gandhi, 90 Girard, René, 146 Gladsheen, Adaleine, 108 God, as emptiness, 130; as transcendent, 163; as erased, 179 G.O.G., 170 Gorgias, 28 Grassi, Ernesto, 15n Guillevic, Eugène, 34 Gutenberg, 138 Habermas, Jürgen 43ff; methodologically atheist, 55; dialogue with theologians, 65f; rationality and revelation, 72ff; against postmoderns, 76–77; idolatry of the social, 81–82 Ham, 155 Hamann, Johann Georg, 54f; and the other Enlightenment, 65, 73 Harries, Karsten, 188n Hec, 133ff, 168 Heidegger, Martin, x; and apophasis, 40; against modernity, 77; and mystagoguery, 78; and salvation, 93; on repetition, 110; Being-towardsdeath, 165n Hegel, G.W.F., Systemprogramm, 54n, on drawing limits, 73; on Dante, 98–99; on self-reflection, 102; on sacrifice, 145; on absolute knowing, 178; and bad infinite, 186; and transcendence, 198; and effacement of difference, 198n; on pure immanence of phenomenon, 200; on finitude of God, 201 Hendley, Steven, 63n Henry, Michel, 200n Heraclitus, 56, 104f Hill, Geoffrey, 204 History; and redemption, 13; and apocalypse, 13, 77–78; and interpretation 13; as revelation, 79; and repetition, 109 Hoff, Gregor Maria, 52, 160n Hölderlin, Friedrich, 23, 26n, 148

Homer, 82, 162, 175 Horkheimer, Max, 62 Husserl, Edmund, and phenomenological reduction, 99 Ineffability, 24, 88 Jaspers, Karl, 60–61 Jaurretche, Colleen, 195 Joachim de Flores, 22 Joyce, James, 74, 77; and self-conscious reflection, 103ff; and sexual liberation, 171; and grace, 187; and medievalism, 195; and epiphany, 103; and Finnegans Wake, 161ff, 103ff, 128ff; and “Holly Merry,” 115; and “thots,” 117; and “todue todie,” 164; “Hec, hic,” 134ff; “Laying the cloth,” 129ff; and Name of God, 165; and death of God, 166ff; and phenomenology, 103ff; and typology, 125ff; and sacrifice, 127ff John, Saint, the Divine, 144, 163 John of the Cross, 204 Kojève, Alexandre, 145 Kabbala, 52, 204 Kant, Immanuel, 58, 59n, 64, 76; teleology, 110; and enlightenment, 194 Keats, John, on negative capability, 203 Kierkegaard, Søren; on repetition, 110 Klemm, David E., 113n Koslowski, Peter, 73n Kühnlein, Michael, 52n Language, as game, 25; as medium of revelation, 103ff; self-reflexivity of, 104ff; as chaosmos, 114; as inherently theological, 116; and repetition, 118, 205; as archeology and teleology, 154–155; and the unsayable, 206 Leahy, David, 183n Leavis, F. R., 119 Lebenswelt, 51 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 53

   Index Levin, Harry, 174 Levinas, Emmanuel, 34, 63n, 89n Levine, Jennifer Schiffer, 117n Liturgy, and sacrifice, 133ff Literature, and individual conversion, 141; and criticism as philosophy, 151; and theology, 156–57; as canon, 156, 162 Lukács, György, 97 Maimonides, Moses, 40 Mallarmé, Stephan, 34, 121 Mandelstam, Osip, 25n Marion, Jean-Luc, 82n Martella, Giuseppe, 121 Mary, Holy, 115 Mead, George Herbert, 46 Mendieta, Eduardo, 67n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 100 Metaphor, ix, 39, 88, 183; as language of the unsayable, 186; negative capabilities of, 188f; as monadic unity or wholeness, 189f Metz, Johann B., 66n Meun, Jean de, 22 Milbank, John, 188n Milesi, Laurent, 175n Milton, John, 20ff; and autobiography,101; word as music, 119; and Christian epic, 161n; and Fall, 174; and modernity, 193 Mitchell, Andrew, 169, 201f Moltmann, Jürgen, 16 Myth, 53; of actuality, 194 Nadler, Josef, 55n Name of God, 165f, 169f natural language, 52, innate 57–58 negative poetics, 38, 203–204 negative theology, 39–40; against idolatry, 82; and apocalypse, 69 Neoplatonism, 52f Nietzsche, Friedrich, 25, 79, 163; on eternal recurrence, 110, 183; on tragedy and archaic sacrifice, 138; on repetition, 182; death of God, 201

Noah, 147, 155 Noël, Bernard, 34, 38 Noon, William T., 140n O Hehir, Brendon, 131 Orpheus, 53, 126 Otto, Rudolf, 146 Paul, Saint, and foolishness of God, 71 Parmenides, 40, 57 Patõcka, Jan, 100 Paul, Saint, 33, 85, 101, 154, 163, 177, 201 Paz, Octavio, 101n Peirce, Charles Sanders, 60n Pépin, Jean, 125n Peukert, Helmut, 66n Pike, David L., 100n Plotinus, 40 poeta theologus, 142–143 Poetry, as prophecy, 21, 82, 143; as liturgy, 126ff; as theological revelation, 150–151; as apocalypse, 178ff; as veil of apocalypse, 180; as representation and not apocalypse, 187 poiesis, 25; 41ff postmodern god, 47 Prophecy, definition, 20 Pythagoreans, 140n Rabinbach, Anson, 53n, 58n Reason, as converging on revelation, 54ff; as unrestricted, 60; as communicative, 61; and dialogue, 62; as procedural, 63; as crucified Logos, 78; and faith, 80; as universal and binding, 86f Reaves, Marjorie, 22n Renaissance humanism, 142–143 Repetition, as revelation, 107; as theological, 110ff; in Finnegans Wake, 167ff; as iterability, 167; as eternal recurrence, 180ff; its reversal, 181, 183; as total, 182f Revelation, as re-velation, ix; as negation, 1; and negative theology, 52; language as medium of, 103ff; and repetition, 107

Index    Ricouer, Paul, 188n Rimbaud, Artur, 23, 25; Illuminations, 26n; 121 Risset, Jacqueline, 25n Ritual, and everyday praxis, 77, 105 Rorty, Richard, 92n Rosenzweig, Franz, 91n Russo, Vittorio, 97n Sacrifice, 126ff; of sensuality to language, 138; and the senses, 142; as making holy, 145; Druidical, 147 Santayana, George, 160n Secularity, x, xii, 23, 50, 55, 62–67, 78, 83–84, 167 Schelling, F.W.J. von, 73, 182 Schwartz, Regina, 160n, 185n Scott, Nathan A., Jr., 160n Senn, Fritz, 103 Shelley, Percy, 148 Shem the Penman, 103 Silesius Angelus, 204 Stein, Gertrude, 121 Stevens, Wallace, 35ff; and the motive for metaphor, 190 Stoics, 56 Subject, individual, 98ff; and selfreflection, 102ff; infinite and theological, 111; as essential lack, 132 Sufism, 52, 204 Tao, 40 Taylor, Charles, 63n Taylor, Mark, 178; 185n, 191n; 198n Taylor, Thomas, 126n Theunissen, Michael, 79n Thomas, Aquinas, Saint, 71; theology of the Eucharist, 128f, 139–140, 146; hermeneutics of four-fold senses, 154

Thot, 117 Truth, 83; as aletheia, 26n, 101; as satyagraha, 90n; and certainty, 112 Typology, 105ff; of arché and telos, 148–149; and reverse filation, 149, 154–55; Scriptural paradigm, 152; in secular literature 153ff; and repetition, 188, 125ff Ugolino, 144 Unamuno, Miguel de, 199 Unnameable, 37, 88 Unspeakable, 18, 24, 28; 186; and the beyond of language, 206 Verene, Donald Philip, 108ff, 120; 194n-95n Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 140f, 142 Vico, on metaphoricity of language, x, 188n; and the other Enlightenment, 65, 73; and recurrence, 107ff; identified with Earwicker, 108–110; on the true and the certain, 112; hermeneutic of history, 157; on language of gods, 175 Ward, Graham, 160n Weber, Max 46 Weiss, Peter, 100 Wilson, Edmund, 119 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 40; 205 White, Hayden, 194n Woolf, Virginia, 100 Wyschogrod, Edith, 181n Žižek, Slavoj, 182n