Theology

God behind painting. by Gerardo Muñoz

In one of the glosses in Marginalia on theology, Erik Peterson provides a remarkable pictorial image of thought of death and resurrection through the activity of washing a bowl. Peterson writes: “When washing a dirty dish, our thoughts may turn to the dead, to the dead as a genus, as an inferior genus that perhaps unconsciously influences our actions, as angels and demons do in another way. This probably happens because the dead have something in common with dirty, unclean dishes. Imagine this cleanliness however you like: perhaps we can say that death as such is an act of purification. To think of death in this way, endowed among things – like a bowl – gleam just like the voice of god in the bush” [1]. It is a fragment where Peterson comes closest to the specific nature of painting: what is painting if not the transference of muteness to the gleaming of the visible that opens before our very eyes? And like the divine voice in the bush in Exodus, what does it take to grasp and see the divine between or behind a dirty bowl as it lays on our hands? If washing a dirty dish entails receiving the dead in our thought, the passive act of painting seems always to lay a claim about the mystery of presence outside language. 

If I elevate Peterson’s remarks to a terrain that the one that he intended, is connected to two Vermeer’s pictures exhibited these days at the Frick Collection gathered around the theme of “letter writing”. In both pictures there is a lady seating at a table drafting a letter – one of them has already concluded it fully attentive to the visitor on her right side; the other a maid gazes at an open window  – but what is always unnerving in Vermeer’s work is the sense of the ineffable and impenetrable in the disclosure of the picture (an exposure that that is usually aided by a side curtain that welcomes us in). What is this impenetrable divinity that lurks in Vermeer picture in pure presence? Although we do not have a name for it, it is like the god that dwells in the dirty bowls or in the nocturnal bushes of Peterson’s gloss.

The painting does not speak in revealing, it only bear witness of the absolute fall of language as it becomes imperturbable in the picture. Contesting the vulgar interpretations on Vermeer’s Catholic conversion in Delft, Daniel Arasse notes that the vortex of his pictorial theology is bounded to the threshold in which images become alive (in the tradition of au vif) outside itself: “Vermeer’s painting are constructed such a way as tho render this life equally present inaccessible, near and impenetrable. What is seen is not a crete of nature observed, but a mystery within the painting itself” [2]. In Vermeer’s pictures, presence and the invisible collapse not through the inception of a metaphor of nature, but rather through the painting’s light when it casts a shadow beyond any instance of closure.

This is why in Vermeer’s paintings surfaces mandate an order of theatrical presence, while simultaneously making room for a perturbance that is forever barred from the conceptual. Unlike Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers”, Vermeer’s pictures are not endowed by the mysterious force of an alienated nature that man can measure and master; rather, the mystery resides in the whispering of the invisible that cosigns the amoris causa of the appearance of painting. If for Peterson what gleams in the dirty bowl is the cleansing of resurrection; what befalls Vermeer’s pictures can only be understood as the faith in the painterly emergence of appearance dependent on the path opened by its light.

The question of god as appearance is always posited as a challenge to the meaning of reality as totality no longer as what emerges in the open, but as what which retracts lagging behind. And we know that only appearance is seductive enough to stand for faith well beyond the fact of being visible [3]. Hence, a way to supreme subtlety of painting (picturae summa subtilitas): no longer a matter of perspective and contour, but of the mysterious indiscernibility that mounts depth between vision and the divinity of presence.

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Notes 

1. Erik Peterson. “Fragmentos”, in Tratados Teológicos (Ediciones Cristiandad, 1966), 251-252.

2. Daniel Arasse. Vermeer: Faith in Painting (Princeton University Press, 1994), 75.

3. Consider Heidegger’s response to a question in the Zurich Seminar, 1951: “If I were yet to write a theology then the word ‘being’ would not be allowed to occur in it. Faith has no need of the thinking of being. If faith has recourse to it, it is already not faith. I believe that being can never be thought as the ground of God”. Séminare de Zurich (Paris, 1980), 60-61.

“An angel passed by”. by Gerardo Muñoz

In the Spanish language there is a wonderful idiom that has gone out of fashion in our times to express a sudden silence: “ha pasado un ángel”, or an angel passed by. The phrase is commonly used whenever a sudden silence imposes itself in the middle of a conversation, which leads to obvious discomfort and embarrassment among those engaged. It is almost as if the invisible angel reminds human beings that conversation rests as much in words as in silence; and that the shadow of silence sooner or later interrupts any communicative practice. According to historians and lexicographers, the inception of this idiom into Spanish remains a curious enigma, since although used in early modernity it does not have a Latinized version, and its origins can only be traced to classical Greek antiquity. In fact, Plutarch notes in his De garrulitate that whenever silence is introduced in a meeting it is said that Hermes has joined the company [1]. The angel thus stands for the nonpresence of language in language, just like an icon is the sublimation of presence in pictorial representation. 

We know that in Antiquity the angel as a minor divinity (angeloi) was a mediator between heaven and earth, only that in that moment that an ‘angel passed by’, it is not all clear on which side is there heaven and where earth [2]. In his beautiful book Angels & Saints (2020), Eliot Weinberger reminds us that for Saint Augustine the angels were first and foremost original gardeners of Paradise – given that they are free from felix culpa and sin – and that they are messengers between the living and the divine, as documented in the beggar Lazarous carried by angels to the bosom of Abraham [3]. Here it seems that the invisible inception of the angel relates fundamentally to the dead and conclusion, which also carries its aspiration in the lacunae of a conversation that reaches an impasse, and that for a moment effectively dies. 

The angel that accompanies the dead and the poor – and thus our structural poverty in language, being in the language that always lacks a grasping signifier – is also confirmed by lexicographer Alberto Buitrago, who in his entry on the idiom writes that the expression has its origins in the fact that in antiquity whenever a dead person was mentioned or brought up in conversation there was a silence held, because it was thought that his “spirit” (his angel) had become present in its nonpresence of language [4]. Although Buitrago does not provide any documentation for his assertion, it does bring to bear that whenever we are in communication, whether we like it or not, we are in the communion of angels that are expressing the soul of the dead through the litany of their names. 

This is why Antelme could suggest the similar enigmatic notion that being powerless and in poverty means to ‘have to forever be’ in a silence adjourned so that language can continue speaking. This is why perhaps the irruption of authentic silence has the effect of a certain petrification of the human expression, as masterfully captured in Velázquez’s Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan (1630). It is through silence that we encounter the divinity that for a moment places itself outside of language in order to contemplate it, letting the angel make his entrance. The language of computational machines is not only a language that has renounced its poetic and ethical instance; it is also a form of gated communication that has expelled itself from the angelic visitation of its own contemplation. 

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Notes 

1. Plutarch. “Concerning Talkativeness” (De garrulitate), Moralia 6 (Loeb Classical Library, 1939 ) 502F.

2. Paula Fredriksen. Sin: The Early History of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 2012), 54.

3. Eliot Weinberger. Angels & Saints (New Directions, 2020), 30. 

4. Alberto Buitrago. Diccionario de dichos y frases hechas (Espasa, 2007), 333.

Charity and faith. by Gerardo Muñoz

In a letter dated from January of 1962 to his friend Carlos M. Luis, José Lezama Lima makes a case for the intimate relation between language and charity: “What lasts [la cantidad] is only possible through faith. Because what lasts with faith is charity. Omnis credit – believe all things. Charity is belief in anticipation. And what is poetry (the image), but this superabundance of charity that always presupposes creation? [1]. The question in the last sentence – a question that could have only come from a great poet – is not all naive, since it is also a slight displacement from the canonical source underlying the notion of charity. In fact, the expression caritas omnia credit comes from Saint Augustine’s Confessions (Book X, Section 3), where the Church Father treats the reception of his testimony to the rational knowledge of the “hearing of men” who will be attending to his words [2].

This means that for parole to be heard and enunciated in its original presence, there has to be a gathering in charity that makes not just ‘true’, but most importantly, a garment of faith in the occurrence of language. This means that for Lezama Lima, there was no distinction between “theological language” and “language as such”, or “poetic register”, since they are all participants in the mystery of charity, because only charity can welcome language as abode. Poetics as such is understood as facticity of parole. But for Lezama, the word depends on having grasped the motion of charity. 

Lezama’s test for Carlos M. Luis was quite high: if you lose your faith, you would have given up on language as creation. This was not a new problem for the poet who already in his essay “La dignidad de la poesía”, mentions caritas omnia credit, as a process of destruction of representational (merely transactional and duty driven language) communication that arrives at the order of charity through language as intangible and inexistent by virtue of transcending what does not exists, thus manifesting itself as possible [3]. This is the moment in which the charity of language appears as both presence and promise, and what Lezama calls “el resurgimiento del verbo” (the reemergence of the word). Poetics is thus neither the subject matter of poets, nor the master dogma of theologians; rather it is the faith in language that once enunciated it can only move towards a greater opacity of the shadow of mystery. This is why a great Christian theologian says that charity (agape) is partial knowledge of the divine, otherwise there will be only a detestable army of mere academics, scribes, and administrative experts  [4]. 

In other words, charity does not belong exclusively to the Saints, but it runs through All Souls and its dead. The long history of the Church has betrayed the parole of charity, going as far as transforming it into a social mechanism of distributed goods that has become known as the subsidiarity principle. But for Lezama Lima, in an esoteric pauline tone, charity had nothing to do with political absorption and pastoral power; it was fundamentally a problem of language as a relation of reciprocity between beings in order to subsist as species, to paraphrase a well versed French priest on the matter [5].

In our days we see that “believing in language” has become in the public the inverse: non-belief through credit; that is only after possessing it (I do not need to believe in you insofar your credit validates who you are). It has been noted that by a kind of philological accident in the history of secularization, the word charity in English came to be understood one handedly as almsgiving and subsidiarity over the original divine love, which is love supreme in language. A language that does not unify, but that creates ethical relations; in fact, this might be the only uninstructed means of allowing them to fruition. 

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Notes 

1. José Lezama Lima. Cartas a Eloísa y otra correspondencia (Verbum, 2013), 324.

2. Saint Augustine. Confessions (Penguin Books, 1961), 208.

3. José Lezama Lima. “La dignidad de la poesía”, in Obras Completas, Tomo II (Aguilar Editor, 1977), 774.

4. Claude Tresmontant. Saint Paul and the mystery of Christ (Harper & Brothers, 1957), 157.

5.G. Desbuquois, S.J. Charity (Fides Publishers, 1965), 33.

Marruz’s Mount of Transfiguration. by Gerardo Muñoz

In 1947, the very young Cuban poet Fina García Marruz published the liturgical poem Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Ediciones Orígenes, 1947), which stands in the modernist tradition series of attempts to probe the divine nature of language after the flight of gods and the triumph of the new secular jargons. If earlier in the century a well known Italian philosopher will predict that the international language of the future will be that of technical terms; the English Catholic poet David Jones, will reaffirm that we are “living in a world where the symbolic life (the life of the true cultures, of institutional religion and of all artists) is progressive eliminated – the technician is master. In a manner of speaking the priest and the artists are already in the catacombs, but separate catacombs – for the technician divides to rule” [1]. And if “liturgy” originally meant “public service” and the sphere of gestures, as suggested by Lubienska de Lenval, then Transfiguración has to be read, even into our days, as an attempt for language to measure to the transfiguration of revelation, in which the poem is a sacramental form that retracts language to possibilities of retaining communication.

In fact, Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte, reinforcing the liturgical repetitions of an hymn and a sacred chant, enacts a flowing rhythm (“en tanto que”) that assesses the limits of the ineffable; a pure exteriority that is the negative or wound of language without ever being able to transcend it. In this sense, Marruz’s poem is only the poetic anabasis to the impossibility of a guided sacrament to organize interiority and visibility. Only the mystical can mediate between exteriority and the crisis of appearance. In an almost programmatic fashion, we read in the second part of the poem: “oh, difícilmente podríamos comprenderlo / Él se ha vuelto totalmente exterior como la luz; / Él ha rehusado la intimidad y se ha echado totalmente fuera de sí mismo” [2]. Transfiguration is the event that exiles oneself from the self (phygé), and in which language can generate contact with something other than its own conventions. This is why they [the witnesses and the martyrs] cannot provide an account about the transfigured revelation – just like anyone cannot truly provide a narrative, except by betraying the experience – except by their hearts as if being mysteriously called by a singular name (“ellos sienten que dentro de su corazón alguien / los ha llamado misteriosamente por su nombre”). 

How can language disclose a sense of exteriority that is capable of moving past the autonomy of signification and self-referentiality of language? Can language befall into exteriority? Marruz provides an answer to this question, which can be taken as her contribution to the aporias of modern poetics: poetry can only attune to transfiguration as a cohabitual of a communicating being. In the year that the poem was published, Marruz also wrote in the winter issue of 1947 Orígenes a dense essay titled “Lo Exterior en la Poesía” (“The exterior in poetry) where she claims that “the heart of poem is always outside of it – it should not be that the poet can offer infinite variations of a secret self-possessed knowledge, but rather to rediscover the liturgy of the real; the extreme degree of visibility, which is also its great escape” [3]. What could the “liturgia de lo real” have meant for Marruz in 1947? Marruz does provide a clearcut theological definition of the exteriority as the “angelic”, which does corroborate the hymnological dimension of language, a transcendence between beings of the invisible. The liturgy of the real that defines the exteriority of the poetics of life does not entail a Romantic elevation by the Poet, but the effort to animate reality beyond an alienated monologue. This is why Marruz writes that “only a dialogue can realize an impossible communication, mystical, whenever it does take place in all of its purity” [4].

In 1947 Marruz went a step further than her fellow poets Gaztelu & Lezama Lima, who had defined transfiguration as a learning exercise of the potentia dei of the divine (“a todo transfigurarse sigue una suspension y el ejercicio del Monte era solo un aprendizaje”) [5]. Read side by side with Antelme’s Angel of Reims, one could very well say that for Marruz there is an event of transfiguration whenever transcendence delivers communication between beings, soul to soul; a relation that can one truly speak of the ungrounded and commencement. The liturgy clamored in language is not the memory of an original Adam severed from Nature, but the transfiguration of a linguistic relationship with the world. This might be the secret to Marruz last two verses: “como la infancia que acuña nuestro Rostro allí / donde no puede ser despertado”. If transfiguration also entails recapitulation, this means that this is not a process of forward becoming, but of retaining the atemporal detention that, like that of childhood, traces our silhouette as both figural and pure presence in the bushes of language. 

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Notes 

1. David Jones. “Religion and the Muses” (1941), in Epoch and Artist (Faber&Faber, 1959), 134.

2. Fina García Marruz. Transfiguración de Jesús en el Monte (Orígenes, 1947), 6.

3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 19. 

3. Fina García Marruz. “Lo Exterior en la Poesía”, 22

4. Ángel Gaztelu & José Lezama Lima. Editorial: “Éxtasis de la Sustancia Destruida”, Nadie Parecía, Número IX, Nov, 1943, 1.

On reciprocity. by Gerardo Muñoz

Surely friendship does not depend on obligations or frequency, but it does posit expectations on something like a movement of reciprocity. In fact, movement (κίνηση) and reciprocity are so intertwined that without it, there would not be any separation, only a compact bundle in unity without relations. But, what is at bottom reciprocity? If this notion merits anything thought at all, it must be removed from any conception of exchange in the manner of the quid pro quo and the the ius talionis, where at first sight reciprocity seems to reside as a form of levelling differentiated quantities. In social exchange there is levelling but surely there is no reciprocity except by the legal force enacted by the pressure of duties and obligations. Already in the nineteenth century, at outset of bourgeois society, Søren Kierkegaard with extreme lucidity denounced social levelling as a form of glittering vice: “The idolized positive principle of sociality in our time is the consuming, demoralizing principle, which in the thraldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida. Levelling is not a single individual’s action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power” [1]. 

What is reciprocal in social exchange is no longer the incommensurable relation between beings, but the enactment of language saturated by its own completion, which is the aim of social organization. If there is no reciprocity in the age of kallopismata orphnes as the reduction of rhetorical language it is because there is no longer a missing word in the event of communication, given that, potentially, everything has been already communicated (it is obvious that today this process can only intensify with the planetary deployment of Artificial Intelligence). The only determination of reciprocity that should be of interest is the one that accounts for the lacunae in language that halts force of social levelling. To reciprocate does not mean to give each his due that defines the Western legal operation; it is rather the mutual codependency in the unforfeited event of language. 

At this point, an etymological observation might be useful. In On the Latin Language, Varro records reciproca as a condition of elasticity; that is, a present quality that allows a thing to return to the position from which it has started. Reciprocare thus entails to move to and fro, and to demand [2]. But if we adapt this observation into the sphere of language, we immediately notice that in language there is no previous position nor set origin, which means that reciprocity can only be the undisclosed and disclosed movement of language. Breathing, articulating, speaking: the animus that escapes from the mouth as a mirror of the god of words. The erosion of reciprocity in modern society, thus, goes deeper than the first appearance in fact that human beings are witnesses to a crisis of communication; more importantly, humans have ceased to sense reciprocity because they believe that there is only god where language is mute, and there is language when gods are extinct. Such is the long vigil of computing language as an idol that is neither divine nor of the essence of the human voice. To reciprocate today means to re-divinize the world through words; and through our words greet incoming worlds.

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Notes 

1. Søren Kierkegaard. “The results of observing two ages”, in A Literary Review (Penguin, 2001), 76. 

2. Varro. On the Latin Language, Vol.1 (Loeb Classical Library, 1938), 335.

Desvivirse. by Gerardo Muñoz

The common Spanish verb “desvivirse” resists obvious translations. Could one translate “desvivirse” as “unliving”, “constructing by destroying”, or “fulfilled life”? It seems that none of them capture the full meaning of an expression that is anchored in practical use. It is important to note that when the term emerged in the intellectual discourse of Spanish twentieth century, its depth was intimately connected to its meaning (life, living, vocation) that it immediately took the life of a concept for cultural milieu and national character. In his lecture “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, Manuel García Morente suggested that “vivir desviviendose” was the singular form of life of Hispanic being that attained eternity while on the terrestrial world: 

“Porque lo típico del hombre hispánico es, por decirlo así, su modo singular de vivir, que consiste en “vivir no viviendo”, o, dicho de otro modo, en “vivir desviviéndose”, en vivir la vida como si no fuera vida temporal, sino eternidad. El hombre hispánico no considera la vida eterna. O la salvación del alma como el remate, término y fin de la vida terrestre, sino como remate, término y fin de cada uno de los instantes y de los actos de la vida terrestre. La salvación eterna no es para él solamente un objeto de contemplación; ni tampoco solamente una norma de conducta, sino que es, ante todo y sobre todo, lo que da sentido y finalidad concreta a cada uno de los actos en que se descompone la vida terrestre” [1]”. 

For García Morente, the specific meaning of “desvivirse” entails a tension between interiority and exteriority; and, by extension, between life and death, and in fact of death in life that leads to resurrection and a new life. He writes: “La vida del alma hispánica es un constante morir y resucitar para volver a morir; hasta que la última resurrección” [2]. “Desvivirse”, quite literally, happens at the level of the soul when life continuous through finitude and concrete death. This is why the notion of “desvivirse” has a clear theological underpenning that one can pair with the divine apocatastasis in intramundane life. “Desvivirse” is never about personal salvation and the economy of election, which is why Americo Castro would emphasize that this vocation does not align well with modern individualism, because the “vivir desvivido” experiences its own ruin like a joyous and exuberant Saturnalia” [3]. 

As in the indication by García Morente, for Castro “desvivirse” entails something like an external perspective in which life can ultimately only take place from its transcendence with a relation to what’s outside of itself. This outside is neither determined by politics nor rhetoric [4]. To live “desviviéndose” entails an intensity that persists not just as an interior affirmation of self-preservation, but as an erotic relation with what is most desired and venerated (many Spanish thesaurus of the nineteenth century would define desvivirse as “to love or desire with eagerness”, “amar con ansia”). If extracted from the cultural and identitarian historical context, “desvivirse” appeals to the object of passion that overflows the senses of human life. 

This overflow is embedded in the word itself. The great Spanish scholar of Benedictine monasticism, García Colombás, in his book El monje y el Misterio Pascual (1984), made a simple, and yet remarkable lexicographical observation about the word “desvivirse”. Colombás noted that while in most of monastic literature the prefix “-des” donates privation and deficiency, the function of this prefix in “desvivirse” suffered a complete inversion, since now it entails to love intensively and thoroughly, as in “se desvive por complacer a todo el mundo” [5]. As a theologian, it should not have passed Colombás that the term in question is a triad of three linguistic units: -des/vivir/-se. This means that it is not just that the prefix exerts the meaning of privation of “life”, but also makes room for the reflexive “se”. It is curious that in in Spanish grammar “vivirse” is often used in relation to location (i.e. “el va a vivirse al campo”), and never as a conventional reflexive action (i.e. “él quiere vivirse solo”, “el se vive solo” = this would be incorrect). Taking this cue, one could perhaps say that the inversion so keenly perceived by Colombás acts upon the living so that they can repeatedly making space for the unfolding of life, rendering possible the soul’s crossing the inside and outside in every form of life. 

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Notes 

1.  Manuel García Morente. “Ideas para una filosofía de la historia de España”, in Idea de la Hispanidad (Espasa-Calpe, 1947), 215. 

2. Ibid., 216.

3. Américo Castro. España en su Historia: Cristianos, Moros, y Judíos (Editorial Losada, 1948), 45.

4. Ibid., 279. 

5. García M. Colombás. El monje y el Misterio Pascual (Ediciones Monte Casino, 1984), 132.

Antelme’s smiling angel of Rheims. by Gerardo Muñoz

Among Robert Antelme’s posthumous writings the short text “L’ange au sourire” has a decisive place if we are to explain the transfigured theological experience of the French writer. To anyone familiar with French  architecture history the title should sound familiar, since the ‘l’ange au sourire’ was already a common expression used by French scholars of architecture during the interwar years. Charles Sarazin, arguably the most important scholar of the architecture of Reims, penned a separata titled “Le Sourire de Reims” (1929), in which he celebrated the mysterious smile of the angel Gabriel that was severely damaged due to shell fire of the Cathedral during the fall of 1914 [1]. But a decade prior to the destruction, art historian Arthur Gardner, in a detailed essay on the sculptures of the facade of the Rheims Cathedral, also took note of this angel’s gaze writing that: “…the angel Gabriel of the Annunciation in which the French smile has almost become a grin, the beginning of the contorted expressions frequently found over the border in Germany.” [2]. The particular aspect of this unique angel’s face that Antelme undresses from the cloak of authority is also wonderfully documented in the photographic book by Pierre Antony-Thouret, who also showed pictorial interest in the way that angel Gabriel was chipped in a large area of the right frontal relief (image 1) [3]. 

Image 1. Reims au lendemain de la guerre (1928), plate 52.

This curatorial context informs the historical background of Antelme’s reference to destruction and what he references as the crushed: “But not crushed by this building, or by that event, or by some power. It has always been crushed, crushed forever” [4]. For Antelme the tenuous, almost imperceptible, smile of the Angel of Rheims is what outlives absolute destruction because to be destroyed cannot be executed absolutely. It is the soul of existence that, because of its exteriority to history, is powerless “to have forever to be”.  Even if this being has become petrified and immobile from its original plastic appearance auf vif of sacred art. This is what Malraux captured in his brief mention of the  “L’ange au sourire” in The Voices of Silence (1951), where he also compares it to the Buddhist faces of Oriental sacred art (image 2): “The Smiling Angel of Rheims is a statue whose “stiffness” increased with every century; but at its birth it was a similar incarnate, a face that had suddenly come alive – like all faces sponsoring a discovery in the field of the lifelike” [5]. In order words, to see in the muteness of the face the nothingness that allows expressive relations to emerge in the open. This holds for Antelme’s description as well: “Radiant or hidden, inevitably it is there. Word, image, music: everything expresses it, and nothing. It lies at the heart of that realm where all relations are born. Forever starting anew. Possessing nothing, capable of nothing, it must be there, forever”. 

Image 2. Angel of Rheims in The Voices of Silence (1964).

But what Antelme was able to capture through the smiling angel of the Rheims Cathedral was not a problem of iconology of art forms, but rather the very essence of the theological problem of angels as it relates to the poetics of life itself. The angel is not a promythical figure scaled to a specific historical moment, but an instantiation of the divine appeals to the withdrawal the possibilities and modes of the human being. This is why Antelme can state that “the only transcendence is the relation between beings”. Even in its muteness, the theologica depth of the angel is the poetic speech of divinity through a surge in language that has no end, but only celebration or hymnology.

This is why Erik Peterson writes towards the end of  “The Book of Angels” about the intimate relation of angels in human existence: “A human being can draw near to the angels because the angel too – as its name already indicates – can draw near to humanity. […] The angels are more than poetic ornamentation left from the storehouse of popular fables, they belong to us. For us, they stand for a possibility of our being, a heightening and intensifying of our being – but for the possibility of a new faith…as a passion for mental clarity and an authentic existence” [6]. It is fair to say that, although the figure of the angel does not show again in Antelme’s work, all of his vision and witness accounts in the face of political horror must be placed in the endless vigil of a nocturnal life that is shared with the ethos of angels (utirur vigilis, angelorum vitam procul dubio meditatur). 

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Notes 

1. Charles Sarazin. “Le Sourire de Reims” (s.l.n.d, 1929). 

2. Arthur Gardner. “The sculptures of Rheims Cathedral”, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, V.26, 1914, 64.

3. Pierre Antony-Thouret. Reims au lendemain de la guerre: la cathédrale mutilée, la ville dévastée (Jean Budry, 1928). 

4. Robert Antelme. Textes inédits sur l’Espèce humaine (Gallimard, 1996), 14.

5. Andre Malraux. The Voices of Silence (Secker & Warburg, 1964), 317. 

6. Erik Peterson. “The Book of Angels”, in Theological Tractates (Stanford University Press, 2011), 139.

Nuclear deterrence and Christian silence. by Gerardo Muñoz

Almost at the end of the Cold War, arguably the most important natural law jurist of the West, John Finnis, published a very acrimonious and provocative essay in dialogue with the Christian theological morality and dogmatic tradition entitled “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988). In many respects, this essay speaks volumes to our present, but it also solicits new questions around limits that have been severely traspassed in the current atomic age headed towards extinction. It is worth noting that from the outset, Finnis reminds us how a fellow Catholic liberal theologian, Jacques Maritain in a lecture of 1955, claimed with surprising conviction that “America is today the area in the world in which…the notion of Christian-inspired civilization is more part of the national heritage than any other spot-on earth. If there is any hope for the sprouting of a new Christendom in the modern world, it is in America…” [1]. If this sounds completely analogous to the current program of “national conservatism” that today animates American political elites, defined by the ruthless attempt at the convergence of instrumental Christian vocation and political imperium, it is because these prophetic words have been thoroughly realized. 

Finnis does not hesitate to put his thumb on the theological monstrosity maintained by Maritain at mid century – although he does not say it explicitly, it is a concrete restitution of imperial Eusebianism decades before denounced by Erik Peterson in his famous essay on political monotheism – that by accepting nuclear deterrence as a form of uncontested ‘minor evil’ in face of the Soviet menace Christians were endorsing heretic positions at odds with the teachings of the Second Vatican Council. As Finnis argues, the logical structure itself of nuclear deterrence, precisely due to its affirmative promise to exclude “target populations”, fails to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants in an endgame that promises the potential massacre of innocent human beings [2]. This means, first and foremost, that nuclear deterrence (as well as its new preventive forms that have become normalized among global hegemonic powers) terrorize human communities as a direct public act of forthcoming devastation [3]. 

Even though Finnis does not stop to reflect about the notion of “public act”, it is very clear that this action, insofar as it is a linguistic act, aims at the effective cancellation of the possibilities of language and communication. Nuclear deterrence and proliferation are instruments that speak publicly, and that by doing so, it contributes to the atrophy of human language. As a rebuttal to Maritain’s celebratory artificial gnosis, Finnis sees in the language of nuclear deterrence coincides with the language of ‘utopia’ as a new absolutization of morality. This means that Maritain’s philosophical error – which Finnis calls the “theologian’s position”, since it also implicates an official sector of the Church – is to abandon practical reason of allocated goods (including human life) in the name of a comprehensive aim of building a civilizational “Christendom” coupled in a national community [3]. But whoever fully identifies the spiritual-providential realm with the political-legislative order is already at the mercy of an utopian project embedded in the sacrificial structure promoted by nuclear deterrence.

Towards the end of his essay, Finnis laments (implicitly repeating Karl Barth’s well-known 1930s essay but in an opposite direction) that the relationship between Church and State from the point of view of the atomic age and nuclear deterrence has now been completely altered. From now on, the atomic age demands a Christian vocation based on conscience. Specifically, Finnis calls for a position of refusal and minoritarian observance against the general options of radical evil: “The choice to reverence human life by refusing to participate in public choices to destroy it, is thus a choice is material of the Kingdom and has real and truly lasting effects…even when worldly wisdoms understand it only as a choice of greater evil’ [4]. And citing Cardinal Ratzinger, Finnis endorses the position of Christians as “belonging to a minority” finding courage in nonconformity within the normative order of social space [5]. The Finnis-Ratzinger’s position was still oriented by a Catholic commitment to dogmatics and public reason and virtue, which depends on the luminosity of the subject of religion. 

But the objection of conscience is a subjective reduction of modern secularization. In this sense, it might be pertinent to compare Finnis’ position to Ivan Illich’s own stance in the wake of nuclear testing in Germany in the 1980s, which he witnessed in “horrified silence…in order to make the horror visible” [6]. For Illich, who had come to see the triumph of civilizational mysterium iniquitatis in the institutional deformity of the conspiratio of the human species towards controlled subjectivity (conjutario) amounting to “intolerable realities”. The language of Christian prophecy is not the same as the language of silence, because only in the second we can become witnesses through the voice of pain and experience, because pain can uplift a contact with the world without redemption. As Illich made clear in his text “The Eloquence of Silence”, it is through the condition of silence that the word can become flesh and prepare a new life. It is very telling that in a later footnote to the essay in the 2011 edition, Finnis appears doubtful about the religious ground stating that: “Over twenty years later, the unsatisfactory state of Catholic teaching on the matter remains just as it was in 1988” [7]. What changed? At the end of the eighteenth century Novalis had noted that for any orientation of public reason in the West to materialize there needs to be a substrate of the divine mystery, but this is precisely the substrate that desecularization has effectively untied and obliterated from the public. A public where general annihilation percolates without restraints.

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Notes 

1. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), in Religion and Public Reasons, Collected Essays: Volume V (Oxford University Press, 2011), 

2. Ibid., 280. 

3. Ibid., 286-287.

4. Ibid., 288.

5. Ibid., 289.

6. David Cayley. Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journal (The Penn State University Press, 2021), 80. 

7. John Finnis. “Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom” (1988), 290. 

We are all mystics. by Gerardo Muñoz

It is too often that we hear a common critique raised against the theoretical skepticism of the primacy of politics in the form of an alleged prefigured “mysticism”, as if the destructive operation against sufficient political reason would entail an ineffable silence. It is a striking claim because there is some truth to it. But we must also question its assumption: can the proponents of political primacy ascertain a ground that can escape the mystical position that it seeks to avoid? The task of intellectual history is infinite and rewarding, but that does not mean this enterprise can positively mobilize a breakthrough within the epochal collapse of modern politics. If this is true, then it would follow that everyone is, more or less, a defaced mystic, insofar mysticism is the condition that runs against the limits of language and the current of the negative. In the same way an American judge famously said that ‘we are all [legal] originalists now’, one could very well say that ‘we are all mystics now’. It all depends where we put the emphasis and the tone. 

If we are to reject the totality of political administration and intraworldly legitimacy, this does not necessarily mean that we can immediately sketch what a coming politics would look like. According to Karl Barth in his Ethics, the position of mysticism always denotes a weak “us” that emerges from disobedience with respect to the world; concretely, against the system of planning and delegated orders (schools and the police). So mysticism is an archirealist position because it traverses the world, but only to depose the transcendental closure of its authority. In this way, the skepticism against the mystical position, perhaps unconsciously, is also an indirect skepticism against anti-social stance that is deficient from the vantage point of advantageous political realism. But the insistence of political realism is only anti-mystical on the surface, because it depends on an article of faith on the social reproduction and the overall general political economy between subjects and objects, value and the administration of life. 

The mystic cannot be confused with a guru, a magnetic theologian, nor a priest in robes. On the contrary, the mystic is a sibling to the pícaro, a figure of the Spanish Golden Age, that made his life unarrating the social protocols of the emergent social space, revealing and subverting the “autoridades postizas” (fictional authorities) of his epoch, according to the beautiful formulation of Santa Teresa de Ávila. Whoever has read any of the Spanish picarescas will immediately recall that the pícaro does not endorse static or monastic life of interiority, he upholds a temporality of life that coincides with the events of a world that becomes unfixed and betrayed. And the pícaro lives and outlives himself in this gestaltic confrontation. This vital mysticism in how he uses the world is more practical than any political justification for consensual common action.

It is worth noting that Carlo Michelstaedter in a gloss on courage and the persuaded life, divided the world – and his world was that of the Austro-Hungarian interregnum, a transitional epoch of decline filled with specters and monstrosities, very much like ours – between mystics and the dishonest or tricksters, but only the first could be named “heroes” because only them knew the secret of their unique persuasion unto death, renouncing to petty morality, self-interest, and social orders [1]. The mystic inhabits not just the silence that arrests the truth for which he cannot speak; more fundamentally, he also exerts, in every act, the task of freedom as embedded in thought and contemplation of the soul, that according to Michelsteadter is a personal struggle that bends to the real gnosis, “because to know oneself is ultimately to know the universe and to name it…only there is life” [2].

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Notes 

1. Carlo Michelstaedter. La melodía del joven divino (Sexto Piso, 2009), 43. 

2. Ibid., 53.

Prados Such’s Dormido en la yerba (1953). by Gerardo Muñoz

Emilio Prados Such’s postwar book Dormido en la yerba (1953), long out of print since its publication, is the most clear and straightforward literary document of a poetic voice that stands as one of the foremost attempts at thinking the nexus of existence to the divine in the tradition of the twilight of the gods. Dormido en la yerba (1953), albeit its direct Lucretian overtone, does not enact a metaphoric appeal of a return to the physis of nature; rather for Prados, to dwell, imagine, and inhabit language is only possible in coexistence with the caducity of the natural world including life itself. In the poem that names the book, “Dormido en la yerba”, Prados writes that “La vida se te va / y tu te duermes sobre la hierba”, at first sight claim on appearance that seems to endorse the tempus fugit motif of the Spanish Renaissance verse. However, the temporal course in the poem is immediately redirected to a mysterious proximity that befalls existence in nature’s shadows, plunging the voice into the depth of the abyss that colors the caducity in a place. At this point, we note that Prado’s poetics is traversed by a mystical register that transfigures the temporal continuum with that of making of space that is eternal because it has neither end nor beginning. 

It is in this sense that Emilio Prados’ theological drift in his poetry is neither about making transcendence palpable through the animation of the world; nor does it imply the absolute immanence of the divine presence towards a new reenchantment of the world. The status of the liberated theos in Prados, like in the mythic understanding of the platonic “gods of place” (theos aisthetos), is an event that can only take place once existence is attuned to the minuscule surrounding of the world. This means that there is never a “God” as a matter of a divine economy that orients a moral predicament; rather, as Maria Zambrano argued in an essay on his work, Prados’ instantiation with the divine is always expressed in the most diminutive melody of the common things as they are. A way of multum in parvo such as the “diminuta yerba”. Hence, God is not the agent of creation of individuation, rather God is an “idea” that expresses in each thing that we are affected to, such as every blade of grass, the spacing of the clouds, the invisible direction of the wind, a human face.

The event of the divine, thus, is not a matter of mental or international faculty between objectivity and consciousness, existence and the natural world; the irruption of the divine names the genesis of appearance and disappearance. And this means that the divine (Dios) is ultimately an affection of the soul, that animation that provides birth and death as relations that move world. It is for this very reason that Zambrano could claim that the opaque sun irradiating Prado’s work is disclosed by the “dios que está naciendo”, or the god that is birthing [1]. Of course, the birth of God is far from being a transcendental revelation that weaves the history of salvation; in the manner of Meister Eckhart we can say that the god is nothing else but the affection that makes his birth take place in the soul like a harvest; that is, leafy, bright, and green [2]. God is the possibility of sensation in the world that is ineffable because it is always on the path of natality. For Prados, the eternal dimension of the birth of gods is only temporary because it presupposes spacing; it presupposes being thrown somewhere, like in the lucretian trope of lying happily above the grass. Above the grass and infinitely outside the world, dwelling and world are irreductible whenever they come into its uttermost nearness. To dwell – which is the central meaning of laying on the grass – on the crust of the Earth is to liberate God, and the liberation of God is what allows us entry into the world. 

As Prados wrote in a remarkable letter to his friend Zambrano in March of 1960: “Un cielo sin reposo” que es Dios: Dios no quiso morada y nosotros, como tú dices: edifica que te edifica… Y Dios, sin reposo. No buscamos reposo para Dios y nunca lo tendremos… En la guerra, me acuerdo, unos campesinos prendieron fuego a una iglesita en lo alto de un monte. Cuando bajaban, lo hacían como iluminados y decían: “¡Hemos libertado a Dios!” ¿No es hermoso eso?” [3]. To liberate God from dogmatic commands is also the liberation of world as detachment. There is dwelling for us, but never for the unresting divine presence of god. 

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Notes 

1. Maria Zambrano. “Emilio Prados”, Cuadernos Americanos, Vol. 126, 1963, 165. 

2. Meister Eckhart. “Sermon 2”, in Selected Writings (Penguin Books, 1994), 116.

3. “Un cielo sin reposo. Emilio Prados y María Zambrano: correspondencia” (1998), El Colegio de Mexico: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/320/oa_edited_volume/chapter/2584791