A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus

On Being Left without a Prayer: A Response to Carlson

On Being Left without a Prayer: A response to Carlson John D. Caputo “. . . horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” — Exodus 15:1 Thomas Carlson, one of the new stars in the firmament of continental philosophy of religion,1 has identified the nerve of Prayers and Tears. This book is framed by an Introduction, “A Passion for the Impossible,” and a Conclusion, “A Passion for God,” that are meant to signal the endless translatability of “God” and “the impossible,” the substitutability of the one for the other, which I have called, following Derrida, the problem of “exemplarism.” If we knew which was the translation of which, which the exemplar and which the instantiation , there would be no problem of undecidability. If we knew whether the passion for God boils down to a passion for justice, or our passion for justice is but a form of a passion for God, then we would know what is what. But we do not, resulting not in chaos, but in a mutual exposure of religion and deconstruction , as passions of a comparable kind, which are joined at the point that I call “religion without religion.” This phrase, used by Derrida to describe Kierkegaard and Levinas and others, I attribute to deconstruction itself, and that Derrida does not decline it when it is put point blank to him by Dooley.2 Carlson’s formulation of this argument is remarkably powerful and insightful formulation of what is going on in this book. Tom Carlson then goes on to see if he can nudge me away from some of the things I say about negative or mystical theology, which I called a “high ousiology .” By that I meant that throughout the darkest nights of negative theology, throughout all its profound renunciation of concepts, judgments and argumentation —“God is neither this nor that”3 —there persists a still more profound movement of unity with God. The negations of apophatic theology are part of a larger or deeper economy, a way of negating every name of God (deus est innominabile) in the name of saving God’s name, for God is everything save the names we give to God. Carlson wants to weaken the links I have made between mystical theology and Hellenistic metaphysics. Now I am happy to be 276 nudged and instructed by Tom Carlson on several points. I accept Carlson’s point that in Christian Neoplatonism kataphatic theology is not Greek but biblical , because it is the Scriptures that teach us to name God in personal terms, as loving and merciful, for God is love, while it is the Neoplatonist side of these thinkers that lead them to talk of a divine abyss or desert behind or older than the divine persons. That indeed is part of the trouble that Meister Eckhart, who belongs to the Neoplatonic tradition fathered by Gregory and PseudoDionysius , bought for himself with his Franciscan inquisitors (a diversionary tactic mean to distract attention from William of Ockham!). I tried once to balance this Christian and Neoplatonic components in this equation, at least as regards Meister Eckhart.4 I am also happy to embrace Carlson’s point about the structure of epectasis, of insatiable desire beyond desire, happy to be nudged in the direction of Gregory of Nyssa, about whom Carlson offers a suggestive and persuasive account, which would build an important bridge to the structure of messianic expectation. The main point, however, as I see it, concerns being “lost,” and this—if this does not seem too ornery—it seems to me, is still standing. I think Prayers and Tears is right on track about being lost. Mystical theology as such, that is, mystical writers in their first or dominant voice, precisely insofar as they write from out of an experience of divine things, pati divina, are not “lost,” however long, wide and deep the string of renunciations they profess . Now I do not claim that mystical theology is the “flip side” of ontotheology , or the negative “reversal” of kataphatic theology. I said it was “the jewel in its crown,”5 inasmuch as it abandons representational thinking (all concepts: univocal, analogical, or equivocal; all propositions: affirmative or negative; all arguments, transcendent or transcendental), all language, all différance, in order to be admitted into a simpler, non-discursive, nonlinguistic , non-spatial, timeless, unitative experience of divine things. That at least is its desire. So nothing is gained from my point of view by pointing out that mystical theology, which leaves...