"Miracle, Mystery and Authority": a Deconstruction of the Christian Theology of Omnipotence

"There are three powers, three powers alone, able to conquer and to hold captive forever the conscience of these impotent rebels for their happiness—these forces are miracle, mystery and authority": so speaks Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (320). I would like to show how those three powers, those three forces, can be derived from the Christian theology of omnipotence, and accordingly how this theology forms a place of scission between ethics and the religious. To that end, I shall pick up some of the conclusions from a forthcoming book, Genesis of the Sovereign God (Genèse du Dieu souverain), the second volume of an archaeology of power that I began earlier in God without Power (Dieu sans la puissance). These two books form a diptych that highlights two symmetrically opposed figures of the divine: the Aristotelian model of a god without power and identical with the Good; and the Christian model of an omnipotent God who can be posited as beyond the Good and even capable of evil.

However, along with this theological mutation, my goal is also to identify an ontological mutation that is indissociable from the theological one and that, in my interpretation, lies at its core: that is, the mutation that substitutes the modern ontology of power and action for the Aristotelian ontology of in-potency and act (dunamei/energeiai). In other words, my aim is to identify afresh the emergence of what Agamben calls the "ontology of operativity" (Opus Dei 4) and Heidegger, in "Metaphysics as History of Being," "the representation of being as efficiency," but also to show that this ontology is built not on the basis of the Aristotelian one, to which it is usually referred, but against it.

This deconstruction and new sequencing not only illuminate a turn in the history of metaphysics, but also reveal within it—and even more, at its source, with Aristotle—an alternative ontology and an alternative theology. These in turn prompt us to call into question certain equivalencies inherited from the Nietzscheo-Heideggerian tradition (such as the one between the God of the metaphysics, the omnipotent God and the moral God),² and moreover to reformulate the question—the old question—of theodicy.

1. "Miracle, mystery, authority"

To begin, let us see how the three powers of the Grand Inquisitor also constitute three names of the Almighty.

a. Miracle, first. The divine attribute of omnipotence is the basis for Christianity's key dogmas such as ex nihilo creation, incarnation, and resurrection.³ It accounts for that which is unthinkable to Greek rationality. One of the founding texts of the theology of omnipotence, Peter Damian's De Divina omnipotentia, thus opens with the question of whether God can restore virginity to a woman who has lost it—a seemingly minor and somehow ludicrous issue, but which amounts to asking if God can undo the past. Now, for the pagan tradition, to undo the past, or "make what has been done undone" is an absolute impossibility, even for god or the god: "This only is denied even to God/The power to make what has been done undone," writes Aristotle, quoting Agathon, in the Nicomachean Ethics (VI, 2, 1139b5–12). Alexander of Aphrodisias and Pliny the Elder also mention this example in their lists of things impossible even for god—such as making something out of nothing, raising the dead, or making 2+2 equal 5.⁴ But for Peter Damian, defending omnipotence means exempting it from the laws of logic as well as of nature, maximally extending the field of contingency, positing, at least in principle, a world of miracles and marvels.

Now, and this is what interests me here, in the Aristotelian scheme, what is against nature is called violent: there is a strict opposition between what is φύσει and what is βίᾳ (cf. Phys. IV, 8, 215a 1–4; Gen. et Corr. II, 6, 333b 29–31). The Christian conception of miracle focuses to a great extent on undoing this opposition, that is to say, on positing that what is not natural...