Between Chora and the Good: Metaphor's Metaphysical Neighborhood

Chapter 4: To Feel and to Know

121 To Feel and to Know 4 Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. T. S. Eliot 1. The World Soul Thanks to Whitehead’s rather elliptical mention of the consequent nature of God and recent discussions in quantum mechanics, the Holy Spirit now may have a relevancy it has not enjoyed since Joachim of Fiore, Hegel, or Karl Rahner. The way beyond being is dual; there is first the rather uranian Good (agathon) beyond being (Rep., 509B) which is the cause of knowing and being, and then, in the late dialogue Timaeus, its chthonic supplement, the procreative receptacle that gives beings place. Though neither is on the surface a promising subject for further discourse, we will find the chthonic aspect to be of special importance and relevant to theology. The Good and the matrix can hardly be named, much less known. That might well be the end of it, except that in our religious tradition the Good reveals itself as love hypostatizing in a Trinity one of whose members became fully human and lived among us. Why? That we might dwell in Him and He in us and thus participate with Him by whom all was made in a new creation. I welcome this kenosis, but 04_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:13 pm Page 121 would Plato? Perhaps not. There is also the even more elusive Holy Spirit who would, on Jesus’ promise, be with us as a Comforter. Granted that you and I will do most of the comforting, still Christ’s invitation in the “comfortable words” of the Anglican Communion rite, “Come unto me all that are heavy laden and I will refresh you” echo in my heart and I cannot reduce our Savior to responsibilities to others. This immanent aspect of God is usually taken to be the work of Providence; we shall, with the help of the anima mundi and some recent physical theory, integrate it into the archival doings of the hypodoche. We can bring these great classical principles into the neighborhood of Faith with the help of ancient myth and an icon that illuminates the hypodoche and the writings of some Greek Fathers who will close the gap with the Good. The latter were either oblivious to or in ignorance of Aristotle and worked within neo-Platonic and even Platonic schema. They found in apophatic theology a way of ascent to God as this ineffable and unknowable Good. One must begin with the Good as cause (aitia), taken in terms of God’s self-emptying initiative , and not ascend to it from the world with which there is no proportion and no analogy. Though I gloss Marion’s term “distance” as “proximate alterity” within the rubric of participation as koinonia and not as his “imparticipable participation,” it is an important approach to patristic mystical theology. Patristic theology recognized neither the way of affirmation nor negation, but sought a way beyond them in which the divine names direct one to a non-object from whom, as Marion says, “one receives determinations so radical and so new that they speak to me and shape me far more than they teach or inform me . . . They expose me to what lets itself be said only for the sake of no longer permitting me to say it, but to acknowledge it as goodness, and love it.”1 “The unthinkable, as the distance of Goodness, gives itself, not to be comprehended, but to be received. It is therefore not a question of giving up on comprehending (as if it were a question of comprehending and of not being comprehended). It is a question of managing to receive that which becomes thinkable, or rather acceptable, only for the one who knows how to receive it . . . If love reveals itself hermeneutically as distance . . . only love is able to welcome it.”2 Does an emphasis on distance instead of proximity neglect the latter’s attendant vulnerability and thus religion’s chthonic roots? Our Apollonian frameworks hover unstably over their Dionysian roots, which are most prominent in the orgiastic religions of the 122 ■ Between Chora and the Good 04_chap_Bigger.qxd 04/02/2005 7:13 pm Page 122 earth mother, in Ti’amat, Gaea, Cybele, Artemis, and the like. Early myths said something about the mystery of divinity that is eliminated by their...