The God Who May Be: A Hermeneutics of Religion

Conclusion: Poetics of the Possible God

101 conclusion: Poetics of the Possible God How do we describe the infinite May-be? What metaphors or figures, what images or intimations from our religious or philosophical heritages, might we deploy to speak of this unspeakable enigma? Taking some pointers from the above sketches of an eschatology of the possible, I explore here in conclusion (a) a hermeneutic retrieval of certain key, if all too often neglected, readings of possibility to be found in the Western heritage of thought (e.g., Aristotle, Cusanus, Schelling); and (b) a reinterpretation of these in light of the paradigm of God-play. My aim here, as throughout this volume, is to break open new sites and sightings of the God-who-may-be. Hermeneutic Retrievals (1) The Aristotelian reading of dunamis which has informed most philosophical and onto-theological concepts of the possible has, as noted, been considered as a subjugation of potentiality to actuality. Now while this is certainly true in the case of material dunamis being subordinated to formal act (morphe, energeia, entelecheia), it is not necessarily the only reading of duna- The God Who May Be 102 mis available in Aristotle. Might it not be possible, for instance, to re-read the Aristotelian doctrine of the nous poetikos (De Anima 3.5) in the light of an eschatological perspective? And might such a perspective not prompt us to reinterpret the ‘‘making mind’’ as a divine power which empowers, in the sense of enabling and transfiguring, the latent capacities within the human mind? If the human intellect is indeed, as Aristotle holds, a material ‘‘capacity to become all things,’’ then might we not reconstrue the nous poetikos as a making God who ‘‘brings all things about . . . in just the way that a state, like light, does.’’∞ We could thus invoke later theistic commentaries of the nous poetikos by the likes of Avicenna or Suarez to the effect that this ‘‘light’’ is a metaphor for the transcendent separate power of the divine creator without which all human thought or meaning would remain impossible, that is, in the dark. When Aristotle tells us accordingly that the light of the ‘‘eternal and immortal’’ nous poetikos makes the latent color quality of things visible, is this not at least conceivably analogous to the transfiguring power of the Creator, as outlined in Genesis, Exodus, the Sefer Yetzirah, or the eschatological writings of Paul and the early patristic commentators? Going beyond a narrow metaphysical dualism of potency versus act, we might then be in a position to say that for the eschatological God possibilizing is actualizing and actualizing is possibilizing— indeed that that is precisely what divine transfiguring means. Or, again, to put it in terms of Mark 10, what remains impossible for our passive mind is made possible by the divine ‘‘maker mind.’’ This puts quite a different spin on the concluding claim of De Anima 3.5 that the material human intellect ‘‘thinks nothing without the other’’ (nous poetikos). Both need each other. Creatures need a Creator and a Creator needs creatures. Certain Christian and Arab commentators, in particular Averroës, went so far as to suggest that the human mind can, through ongoing contemplation of truth, enter a sort of intimate mystical communion with the divine nous poetikos . So doing, we may eventually approximate to a condition of beatific and blissful transfiguration, becoming more and more like the divine Maker in whose image we are made. So fearful was Thomas Aquinas of the powerful influence such teaching was having on the Christian West that he made a point of vehemently denouncing Averroës as a ‘‘depraver of philosophy’’ (philosophiae depravator).≤ In a commentary entitled ‘‘What Does the Maker Mind Make?,’’ L. A. Kosman poses this intriguing question: ‘‘does the maker mind make the potentially thinkable actually thinkable or does it make the already actually thinkable actually thought’’?≥ In other words, does nous poetikos possibilize thought by making us really capable of thought or does it do the thinking for us by determining our actual thoughts as well? My eschatological reading is more inclined to the former reading in that it sees the divine Creator as transfiguring our being into a can-be—a being capable of creating and recreating new meanings in our world—without determining the actual content of our creating or doing the actual creating for us. This seems to be what Alexander [13.58.112.1] Project MUSE (2024-04-24 16:15...