Spiritual Discernment
Bathroom Mirror as Metaphor
Introduction
On the morning of July 11, 2014, I went into the bathroom, walked over to the sink, picked up my toothbrush, put paste on it, and then raised my head to the mirror over the sink to look at my face, but my face was not there. Gone! In shock, I wondered what had happened. Had my face been ripped off in the night as I slept? Instead of my face I saw a white, lily-white sheet, an impenetrable, blank, white background staring monstrously back at me. For a moment I thought the skin of reality had been torn off and I was confronted with the horror, the raw flesh of reality, which was inert and irreal. In a split second I realized what had happened. The mirror had been removed from the face of the cabinet. I could not discern my face because the mirror that cracks reality and splits me into two persons was not in its place; only a white metal frame that formerly held it in place remained.
We know that a mirror does not just reflect appearances and return images. A mirror, as Jean-Pierre Vernant argues, “opens a breach in the backdrop of ‘phenomena,’ displays the invisible … and lets it be seen in the brilliance of a mysterious epiphany.”1 Given this specular connection between reality and discernment, we will be well served to adopt a method of inquiry that can deal with mirroring and invisibility. In a sense, the art and practice of discernment is holding up a mirror to reality, helping us to figure out the cracks that enable us to see more clearly, to see the not-yet (or more precisely the invisible, that which is not visible or sensible as of now).
Discernment as a religious art presupposes two dimensions of reality. First there is the first-order reality, the phenomenal realm. Then, there is an unfathomable X (abyss) to it, an impenetrable core that is mysterious and elusive. This second part lurks behind the surface, and I can presumably get to it through the deployment of my spiritual (religious) sense and sensibility, acumen, training or practices, or “looking glass.” On the summer morning after the mirror fell off the wall in the night and my wife heard it, woke up, and cleaned up the broken pieces without telling me until the horror of my encounter, I was denied the apparatus for discernment. Discernment of my face was frustrated, impossible, because reality was a complete whole without fissures, and I was not split.
Our relationship with mirrors, whether physical or supernatural, is a complicated one. The apparatus, which enables us to see the breach in the phenomena of reality, is also a veil over the very reality (or the Real) that it attempts to reveal. The mirror, a veil of appearance, serves as a protective wall against the monster of the noumenal dimension of reality. That is, when the mirror was gone I was directly exposed to the unfathomable X (abyss) of my face or the white pre-face of the wall as an other. This is the nature and contradiction of discernment in Pentecostalism: discernment reveals secrets that hide secrets and drives the discerning person to seek after the ultimate mystery and impenetrable core of reality or creation. A mirror cracks space and light in order for me to see the appearance of my face. The mirror itself cracks. My composure cracks in the crack of the morning. Where do I crank up the energy to deal with all the cracks in a broken world? Discernment is about acknowledging cracks in reality and in our selves and creating the capability to live in the crack of life, the gap that cannot be closed or foreclosed. The goal of discernment is improvements in levels of protection, prosperity, faith, and obedience.
In another sense, discernment is the art of investigating three different kinds of bodies as foundations of knowledge. The first kind deals with natural bodies, the body with its general features, specific social practices, and with the knowledge of lived experience. The second kind deals with spiritual bodies, in particular invisible, intangible beings, their actions, passions, and reasons, and interactions with visible, tangible beings. And the third kind is with artificial bodies; that is, the rhizomatic networks of relationships between natural bodies, spiritual bodies, and between natural bodies and spiritual bodies. Often the energies of these relationships can connect, summon, or activate the inner energetic forces and inner processes that presumably lie behind the concrete forms or representations of the natural and spiritual bodies.2 These relationships that emerge from the natural and spiritual bodies mediate their encounters in ways that tie the relations between truth and meaning to a particular theologico-ethical constellation.
This tripartite structure engenders a triadic conception of reality and foundation of knowledge. There is the man, his image in the mirror, and the relationship between the man, his reflection in the mirror, and his grooming habits. This triadic reality is always marred by cracks, the gaps between the Real and experience as always mediated. The art of living or keeping sane concerns “covering up” the constitutive cracks in reality, even as we allow or summon or indwell the cracks as gateways for the creation of new things, emergence of new possibilities, the exploration of new dimensions, and for securing specific insights and guidance for interpreting life. Discernment as part of the art of living is directed at addressing the cracks.
I have laid out in very simple and homely style a general understanding (concept, if you like) of discernment at its deepest level. What specific form does discernment then take in communities with different key characteristics? In other words, what is the nature of discernment, say, in African Pentecostalism? To answer this question, we need to first lay out some key features of African traditional religions as the common font of inheritance or the environmental air that African Pentecostals breathe and thus inform their theory and practices of spiritual discernment.
Relevant Features of African Traditional Religions
There are several ways to list the key characteristics of African traditional religions (ATR), but here I want to list those attributes that will shed relevant light on the subject of our discussion. First is what I will call split or crack. The basic belief is that reality is cracked or split: phenomena and noumenal, the thing and the thing-itself. Then with the appropriate training, the equipment of “seeing eyes,” and sensibility, a person (or the diviner, native doctor, priest) can “know” the Real, the thing-in-itself. Simply, all human beings are not under the universal limitation of phenomenality. We should be careful not to think this is a peculiarity of ATR. Religions in general make some claim to piercing the phenomenal veil insomuch as they claim to give access to nonmaterial spirits, angels, demons, and gods.
Second, in addition to the claim of split reality or thing, there is also a split in the self. The self can be split as a person can be possessed or imbued by spirits (good or bad) or by power from outside him- or herself. There are also parts of the person that venture into witchcraft, act in different places, when the person is asleep. Another way the self is split is in the Pauline (Romans 7) sense. The self wars against itself as spirit and flesh. There is a duality in the core of personhood, and the person who harbors this duality is quite capable of dealing with each of the agonistic parts of the self. The flesh (the body) can be “mortified,” “crucified,” during various disciplines or technology of the self in order to elevate the spirit.
Third, though discernment often occurs in consultation with religious specialists, it can occur anywhere and at any time. In fact, it often occurs at the busy intersections of life, not in the quiet grooves, serene shrines, and appointed offices of priests. A split in a “decision tree” provokes the quest for discernment. For instance, a man who is faced with a crucial decision when there is more than one path to the solution has to discern the best course of action. Discernment may take the form of deciphering the probabilities of occurrence of various states of nature or allowing for only the two extreme points in probability distribution. Like the four lepers in 2 Kings 7:3–4, African Pentecostals can discern a future course of action based on a decision tree that shows relevant distribution of probabilities between zero and one. But there are times when the probability distribution is limited to either stark zero or one and nothing in between. For instance, if a bird flies across a fisherman’s canoe from the right to the left while the fisherman is on his way to his fishing ground and he subsequently suffers a poor catch, he will attribute the poor catch to the bird’s flight. He will say that a medicine man or an angry competitor sent the bird. He will not think of coincidence or the probability of an event happening. In his conceptual scheme (or the discerning mindset based on cracked reality in which the phenomenal is in the grip of the noumenal, the unseen realm) an event either happens or it does not. The probabilities of events are either zero or one. The fisherman does not ponder or accept the chances of anything happening. Similarly, there is no concept of randomness, meaning an event is completely unpredictable, or that the event cannot be explained. He does not believe that there are events his spiritualistic theoretical model cannot explain. Not to have an explanation for the religious person, who works with a two-point probability distribution, means there is no causality.
Fourth, one major effect of split reality on the nature of religion is that religion in such an environment tends to gravitate more toward the dimension of explanation, prediction, and control than communion with gods.3 According to anthropologist Robin Horton, the Kalabari (Niger Delta, Nigeria) use the idea of an unobservable underlying reality of gods to make sense of the contingencies of everyday existence. They interpret the vast diversity of everyday experience in terms of a scheme of three forces: ancestors, founding heroes, and water-spirits. They use this interpretative scheme of these three forces to transcend the limited vision of cause and effect relationships provided by common sense, reaching to causal explanation of events. Thus, Horton argues, Kalabari religion is more about explanation, prediction, and control (hereafter, EPC).
EPC cannot be separated from the way the Kalabari interpret the world, which is to see inner processes of forms with their inner sense (mind’s eye) and understand them to have meaning and significance through their relations with other things present or absent. As Horton himself argues, explanation kicks in when a thing appears to have more to it than ordinarily meets the pure sensory organs, when it appears as a form of something.4 Kalabari say jenso ani bio emi, meaning, “There is something else in the matter.” The immediate case points beyond itself; it is something other than itself. To understand this “something else,” to extend their vision, to re-present to themselves causes that are not present in the commonsense world, they create theoretical models: they trace an analogy between the structure of certain observations they want to explain and the structure of certain phenomena whose regularities of behavior are familiar to them.
Fifth, this “something else” or more to reality is keyed to or underpinned by the concept of the sacred in African religion. The concept of the sacred is captured by So in Kalabari. The concept of the uppercase So directs the people to both note their limitations, the set of possibilities opened to them or excluded from them, liberatory potentials for the transformation of selves and structures of society, and the sum of possibilities conceivable given their level of social, technological, and economic development. So also refers to the infinite possibilities in the sacred.5 The Kalabari So relates not only to the people as a whole, but also to individuals, institutions, lineages, and communities.
In addition to the uppercase So, we have the lowercase so. The lowercase so are the possibilities available to an individual, cultural institutions, and social structures. The uppercase So are the possibilities excluded from them. More precisely, it is the universe of possibilities from which some are defined as available to persons and institutions and others remain either unfulfilled or the set of possibilities excluded from them at any given time. It should be noted that the uppercase So and lowercase so are not opposites. Thus what is not part of the lowercase so is not confined to extinction. The uppercase So is the ground of lowercase so. The lowercase so is only a set of appropriated or available possibilities at any given time. For instance, a person may have the so to be a good teacher from all the possibilities that are available to members of the community and even beyond. If she dislikes being a teacher, she can go to a diviner and ask for her occupation to be changed and thus draw another career from that unlimited urn of possibilities that the uppercase So can give, and it is a pool that can never be completely realized. Though a person can literally ask for any possibilities, So (the sacred) has the right to defer or “project into the future whatever may be too much for any community or society [or the individual] to fully experience or acknowledge in the present.”6 Because an individual can only be given or allotted a part of the set of all possibilities available to the community at any given historical moment, what she has “always points beyond itself to the full range of possibilities for either salvation or destruction.”7
So in contemplating a person’s so, the Kalabari are going beyond the appearance of a quotidian life to what lies beyond it. Thus there is always more to a person, more from where a person can draw strength, power, and direction for life or initiate the new. There is more to a person than what other human beings can comprehend with the naked or inner eyes. What enables this comprehension beyond the physical eyes, the krokro eyes? It is the faculty of imagination. This faculty plays a very crucial role in discernment. It is what allows the Kalabari people to go beyond the merely physical and apparent to the something else. The Kalabari cannot engage in explanation, prediction, and control without imagination. This imagination is not only the precursor of EPC, but also the capping segment of the process or connections of EPC, its principle of finality. When a diviner is consulted and goes through the entire process of EPC, the process inevitably involves the act of forming a particular narrative—sequence of events, noisy data of experience, past and anticipated—into a particular shape. Imagination (productive and reproductive) figures in the form, forming, and thinking/reflecting in the narrative logic that engenders comprehensible patterns of experience. It is impossible to also separate EPC from imagination as an element in motivating people to engage in it.
Before Kalabari persons can explain, predict, and control their environment, they must understand it. At the minimum, understanding requires that they apply categories, concepts, and laws to nature. They are able to impose these concepts on their experience of phenomena through the image-forming power of imagination. In explaining, predicting, and controlling events, Kalabari people are not just applying specific culture-brewed concepts to nature and social systems, and directing their thoughts to some regulative telos; they are also applying specific rules or concepts to particular situations, or they are moving from the particular to the universal (je’ne bu pakaye). In this latter case they are deriving or inventing a rule or concept that the particular points out to them. For example, someone might frame a new principle to account for a particular situation instead of forcing it to fit under an established principle. This is the search for pattern (a pattern internal to it), a frame within which the observed facts, events, abnormality can fit, by assuming a kind of finality of nature, a design (principle of finality). This mode of reflection, this form of assumption, is driven by imagination, the challenge to find an order within a chaotic situation—this is the task of bringing an event or object under understanding. If a particular event falls outside of established rules, representing a temporary form of chaos, then creative, productive, and appreciative imagination enables people to find a rule that it exemplifies. Every budding forth of EPC presupposes understanding and imagination.
The movement from phenomenality to noumenality that is facilitated by imagination is fraught with danger. (Discernment as a spiritual practice is always problematic.) The passage from the symbolic world of phenomenal reality to the noumenal universe of spiritual contact might demand tarrying with the negative. This negativity may well point to the nocturnal abyss of subjectivity that is glimpsed with the cracking of phenomenality. Here imagination in a Hegelian fashion (“night of the world”) discomposes, dissects, and dissolves reality before harmonizing and synthesizing it in the faculties of intuition and understanding (in a Kantian fashion) to give us the content of revelation. Hegel expresses, in these terms, the monstrous character of understanding, and, hence, the frightful nature of tarrying with the negative.
Man is that night, that empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity: the wealth of an infinite number of representations, of images, not one of which comes precisely to mind, or which [moreover] are not [there] insofar as they are really present. It is the night, the interiority—or—the intimacy of Nature which exists here: [the] pure-Ego. In phantasmagorical representations it is night on all sides: here suddenly surges up a blood-spattered head; there, another, white apparition; and they disappear just as abruptly. That is the night that one perceives if one looks a man in the eyes; then one is delving into a night which becomes terrible; it is night of the world which then presents itself to us.8
Imagination thus constitutes the sixth attribute of ATR that we want to highlight for the purpose of this chapter. The seventh and final feature is forms of knowing. All things have two dimensions: physical (material) and spiritual (immaterial). To know is to understand one dimension by way of common sense or physical laws, the other is by spiritual (metaphysical) laws. The primary way of knowing is pragmatic common sense or physical laws, and the Kalabari resort to spiritual explanation as a second-order reflection when there is a (an inexplicable) pattern to events, sufferings, or misfortunes. In order to reach for this second-order level of understanding, one needs certain non (meta)-physical apparatuses such as “seeing eyes,” “hearing ears,” or other sensory organs that can penetrate the object or pattern of events, just as scientific instruments penetrate objects to reveal their inner contents. While the scientist reaches deep down into the physical domain, the spiritual tool penetrates the ontological level.
The immaterial penetration is principally not intended as invasive or violent but moves toward intimacy. The knower engages the object (his or her partner in the unveiling of truth) with care and affection. Sometimes, this involves knowing the needs, logic, and dynamics of the partner and taking care of them. The production of esoteric knowledge requires penetrative and receptive intimacy as in sexual intercourse. The intimacy is penetrative because the seeker attempts to enter into the inner dimensions, functions, and processes of the object to ferret out wisdom. This can also involve the knower penetrating him- or herself through interior intuitive means. The intimacy is said to be receptive when the being or object being investigated “possesses” the seeker or knower and reveals its inner workings through him or her. The affinity between the penetrative and receptive intimacy of knowledge production that evokes sexual intimacy is suggested by the Kalabari word nimi, “to know.” Nimi, which also means knowledge, wisdom, recognition, or awareness, is used to also refer to sexual intercourse, just as the word yada does in Hebrew.
A part of knowing a person or object is to place her or it in her or its webs of social, symbolic, cosmic, and temporal relationships, and lawful possibilities (so in Kalabari). It is in this situatedness and embeddedness that reality, which starts off dyadically divided between noumenal and phenomenal, becomes triadic. Phenomena and noumena are related to the evolutionary processes and rhythms of human characters, habits, and actions (which are both physical and spiritual, always vacillating between regularity and irregularity) in history, and together they either elicit or divert final cause (destiny). The praxis or methodology of knowledge production that interrelates the two dimensions of reality creates a supervening, emergent dimension of connectedness (a force field of presence and interactions) that places truths in their teleological setting. The perspective or third dimension of situatedness enables the seeker to understand that there is a kind of final cause that draws persons to their destiny (temporal trajectory).
This final cause, however, is neither mechanistic nor random. It is more like a tendency toward an end state, such that with proper discernment and appropriate actions, persons can exploit their open-ended nature to allow for the emergence of novelty and benefits of deliverance and prosperity. This is why individual character, habits, and social relations take on a huge significance in African traditional divination-diagnostic practices.
This dimension of relationality may become under certain scenarios the most important part of the triadic metaphysical system that undergirds and informs discernment in African traditional religions. Take, for instance, the Kalabari philosophy of religion, which holds that it is human attention and relationship with certain material beings or objects that generate the noumenal dimensions of existence. The gods or spirits (except the Supreme Being) who are the products of such phenomenal relationships could be disempowered and dethroned if they overstep their bounds in the relationship or become too demanding. The mechanism for such a radical rejection and annulment of the power of any god is the collective withdrawal of worship, sacrifice, and attention by the members of the community.9
We have here a complex metaphysical dynamic at work. The triadic structure can collapse to a monistic one, and a monistic structure can transition into a dyadic one and eventually a triadic one. In this logic, discernment examines not only the body (matter) alone, but also the spirit (soul) and the myriad relationships between matter and spirit, matter and matter, and spirit and spirit.
Ethos of Discernment: From African Traditional Religion to African Pentecostalism
The seven features that we have laid out are important in understanding the character and nature of and interest in discernment in African Pentecostalism.10 By and large, African Pentecostalism has appropriated these features, and the key difference between discernment in ATR and in Pentecostalism is in the (claimed) categories of gods as the main sources of the power of discernment. Pentecostals hold that they focus on or work only with the Holy Spirit and that adherents of the ATR do not. Never mind that this claim presupposes a capacity to distinguish the Holy Spirit, who is present and active in the world, from other spirits who are (might be) similarly functioning in the world.
Pentecostals in Africa, like their ATR brethren, are invested in the search and creation of knowledge by fissuring phenomenal reality, by tarrying with the negative, the crack.11 For African Pentecostals this epistemological quest, this form of spiritual discernment, is indicative of what it means to live in the Spirit. They will ask, when a person is set free by the Spirit, is she not supposed to go beyond her phenomenal capacity, which is part of the causal chain, to reach her noumenal capacity (the actual place of freedom) to interrupt the automatism of her causal enchainment and begin something new? African Pentecostals contest any watertight distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal realms. For them life in the Spirit involves the divine gifts and capabilities to live, move, and have their beings in both realms.
Life in the Spirit is not merely a heightened execution of the techniques of the self on the self. It is to “crucify” the sinful, heavy flesh so that the flesh is “resurrected” as a transformed body, a “transphysical” body, whose still-corporeal sensory organs are able also to “transcend bodily normal limitations.”12 African Pentecostals believe that life in the Spirit, as far as embodiment is concerned, can asymptotically approach Jesus’s resurrected body (John 20:19, 24–28; Luke 24:30). If this view interprets the new physicality of life in the “life in the Spirit,” then how is the Spirit interpreted in the same phrase? Spirit is the experience of new creation by the transphysical body, its transforming encounter with new possibilities from the sacred infinite set of possibilities that characterize the Holy Spirit. The “in” in “life in the Spirit” connotes involvement in and an enveloping by the work and grace of the Spirit as on the day of Pentecost. On this day, the Spirit was felt as a surrounding presence, physical-transphysical touch on the human flesh as the tongues of fire, and as an empowered voice that declared and proclaimed newly acquired transforming truths.13 In sum, life in the Spirit is a life (body) that is increasingly revealing its pneumatic elements as it approaches the finer, thinner nature of the Spirit.
African Pentecostals are phenomenalizing the noumenal, to put it crudely. They are also noumenalizing the phenomenal: everything becomes the thing-in-itself; the mundane becomes miraculous; the ordinary becomes magical and extraordinary; everything, every event, is receptive to divine interpellation. In short, they “supernaturalize” the natural. Their thinking is that the significance of the phenomenal cannot be equal to itself, such that there is always a quest for the new in order to understand what has already taken place and what is about to be retroactively ignited. God is present and acts in the phenomenal, and that is why the significance of what we do, say, or hear is infinitely richer than what is encoded and immediately readable in the phenomenal register, the hard, concrete situation of action. On the whole, knowing goes beyond the level of epistemology and reaches into ontological issues. The possibility of knowing is concerned with the possibility of human existence, which means the possibilities written in our actions, temporality, finitude, embodiment, and destiny. We have described the character of discernment in African Pentecostalism, and now how do we interpret it?
Discernment as Tarrying with the Negative
To theologize or theorize discernment is to determine how access is given to discernment. How does a people or religious community get the access through which discernment occurs? This is a tricky question or endeavor to undertake. Indeed, there is no point outside this access on which we can stand to assess this access. We can only find the split within the access, the fracture within discernment, to understand discernment. “As a result, it is only a presentation of presentation [a discernment of discernment], a vision of vision, but also the originary fragmentation that all vision is in itself, in its always being outside itself, exposed to the gaze of the other.”14
Discourse of discernment is the advent of discernment as an other. The discourse is an expression or representation of the mirror, with its split dimension and depth, holding a meta-image. Discernment is always a discernment of discernment, splits within splits, and like the mirror, it ultimately hides the reality it purports to reveal. Finding the access is akin to finding the ultimate elephant on which the earth stands. First, there is a crack, a gap in the human will that makes discernment possible. The fact that the will can be divided against itself makes it possible for us to get periodic flashes of insights. We lose the reflective capacity to deliberate or think on our tendencies to action if there is a unified will. A will that is perfect, undivided, and thus clearly sees the right, good, and truthful path to take does not need discernment, the cultivation of sensitivity necessary to decide when temporal turns of events challenge embedded traditions or demand new thinking. A perfect will has foreordained closure and completeness. It only “imposes” on the world. But in an existential world of becoming, division or incompleteness is a sign of livingness.
A will with a single orientation or inclination does not work well with discernment, which is an immanent process that grows from the unfolding intersection of embodied thinking and situation. It is because the will, the self, is divided against itself as Paul points out in Romans 7—because the self cannot comprehensively know its situations or cannot always do what is right—that it looks toward the aid of discernment. As we have seen, this split self sees or wills a split reality to both decipher and paper over the splits in social relations.
Second, discernment has a much wider semantic range in African Pentecostalism than it does in Catholic or Protestant mainstream theologies. It includes, for example, four categories: social, technological, textual, and the Real. The social category of discernment involves believers consulting pastors or anointed ministers to figure out fractures and fissures in social relations as causes of problems and crises and ultimately to heal or proffer solutions for them. A typical pastoral diagnosis (which makes use of experience, reflection, attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, meaning-making, and spiritual exercises) determines that a person’s life course is not going on well because of fractures in social relations. There is a neighbor, relation, in-law, or coworker who is fouling the person’s chances for a good life. Such an interferer is declared demonic, and therefore appropriate ritual and deliverance exercises are prescribed to help the troubled person repair the relationship, effect healing, or protect him- or herself.
The technological category of discernment refers to the everydayness of the noumenal as spiritual antennae. The feel or orientation to the numinous antennae, which is ready-to-hand in everyday ordinary life activities, grounds the worldhood of daily human and nonhuman interactions. This form of discernment enables Pentecostals to relate to the visible and invisible realms as a coherent and smoothly functioning single world. Once in a while there is a breakdown of the equipment, the antennae, and a disruption of the world occurs as when my bathroom mirror fell down and broke. Forced to step back from the everydayness of existence, the believer merely sees disparate objects, hopes, accidents, and gaps in life. The world is discerned as an other. It is time then to summon the anointed pastor to help cover the gaps and restore the specific aroundness of the momentarily broken-down world! The bestirred believers now head for the “consulting clinics” of the expert for either social or textual “prescriptions.”
What I call the textual category involves discernments that create fantasies to cover and support the social relations and the gaps in the world. These fantasies enable people to live and survive, to manage and manipulate the gaps between the recalcitrant social circumstances they must endure and those alternative situations they deserve or desire. Pastors and deliverance ministers weave certain narratives with yarns of prophecies, scriptural interpretations, and visions to discern acceptable, sound future states of the people, which enable individual persons to confront tough situations and go on with the act of living with hope. Many Pentecostals recognize the ritualistic nature of such discernments and their associated expressions. Ministers who make such prognoses are not often held accountable for their words.
The last category is the Real, the invisible realm. It is ontological in its orientation. Discernment is not so much the path to good decision, but rather it engenders the ontological context within which decisions and actions ultimately make sense. In other words, it supplies the contexture within which dilemmas and challenges are related to ultimate reality. This form of discernment accents the impossibility of a person or thing being completely itself. The invisible is always part of what is visible; it is like Alain Badiou’s null set that is part of every situation. There is always something else, something more to a situation, and that something extra is the fount of possibility, but yet it appears constitutively absent from it without the equipment of “seeing eyes.”
The quest for this something more, the pursuit of which can lead to the grotesque mazes of ontological existence, is an indication that hermeneutics (interpretation) has not replaced visionary experiences (prophetism) in African Pentecostalism as it has generally happened in the larger Christian world.15 These four categories of discernment indicate that to properly interpret the discernment practices of African Pentecostals we must always decipher the character of each of the categories and understand how access to them is theologically (biblically) justified. The scholar must not only work to understand their discernment practices, but she also has to know how the discerners ground or distinguish their practices.
Third, discernment is always a fracture within discernment, requiring a split within the very access it grants. The African Pentecostal quest for noumenal knowledge within the framework of Christianity appears to split the very framework that grounds it and denies Christian theology a separate place to assess African Pentecostals’ access to discernment. Their epistemological quest tracks the way things are divided internally within Christianity or Christian theology. The life in the Spirit (an invitation and participation in the fullness of life) that African Pentecostals celebrate is grounded in Christianity and eros toward God, and they distinguish it from other forms of life by their fervent commitment to the Holy Spirit. They claim to be God’s subjects. Yet in this very strength of commitment lies a weakness. The African Pentecostals’ penchant for the noumenal, the thing as such, thing-in-itself, actually reverses the Christian notion of the subject: the subjectivity as structured by the Word, the Logos. Christian subjectivity is not a Hegelian phantasmagorical representation; according to the New Testament, the pure self is not surrounded by night; rather, it has been clarified by the Word, by the true light, which enlightens everyone that cometh into the world. Here is the paradox of pentecostal epistemology: the African Pentecostals’ effort to access the noumenal, nontransparent stuff of existence is saying to us that the Word fails to shine enough light on the “night of the world.” It fails to give spiritual shape to the shapelessness of subjectivity (and of existence). But then, is their epistemological quest, their practices of spiritual discernment, not what it means to live the life of the Spirit? Are all visionary experiences or prophetism dead in Christianity? Indeed, there is no point outside this very Christian access on which to stand and assess the African Pentecostal access to discernment. By faith and experience African Pentecostals believe that the world was framed by the word of God, so that what is seen is not made out of things that are visible; they also believe that the Spirit will disclose to believers what is to come, show them all things (Heb. 11:3; John 16:13).
The access to this promise, they argue, is kept open by a life in the Spirit, risking one’s life, being exposed to the chaos and possibility of death in the night of the world. This is how access to discernment is given. Spiritual powers enable believers to pierce the phenomenal veil, gaze at the face of death, and in Hegelian terminology, the anointing strengthens them to not shrink from death or devastation but to endure and defeat them. In their lights, to discern is to open things up. Discernment is the un-closing, dis-enclosing, of theology. Discernment in African Pentecostalism works to retrieve truths that modern liberal theology and even some segments of pentecostal theology in academe have barred.
Finally, discernment is also an access to market or serves as a context for commodity exchange. Discerned truths or advisory products founded on the mystique of the invisible world are produced and consumed along the lines of the economic logic of the market, along the lines of values that approximate market ethos as the health-and-wealth gospel gains ascendancy in African Pentecostal circles. There is now a shared community of production and consumption of discerned truths as Pentecostals increasingly look for ways to improve their well-being with an increasing propensity to truck, barter, and exchange information. The ethic of production demands a morality that emphasizes a this-worldly asceticism, fasting, long prayers, and self-denial. This ethic promotes the production of spiritual insights, information, analyses, and knowledges. There must be people who are motivated to consume these spiritual products in the form of advisory services. So there is a real market or shadow market for discernments. There are now contractor-prayer warriors and “fasters” who undertake deep spiritual exercises on behalf of paying clients. Financial payments are the mirror reflecting the value of the visions and information extracted from the noumenal realm, a measure of the confidence in the spiritual representation of the phenomenal reality. In the language of Plato’s allegory of the cave, discernment in this shadow religious system is a measure of the collective trust of consumers in the “seeing eyes” of the producers to interpret the shadows on the noumenal walls. The producers of discernment mirror (mediate, represent) the numinous shadows, the market in turn mirrors them, and the market price further reflects the desires and expectations of consumers, situated in concrete phenomenal settings, for revelation knowledge offered in the market. Indeed and ultimately, the phenomenal lives of the consumers show themselves as shadows on the noumenal (cave) walls. Spiritual information is trapped in a self-reflexive cycle whereby discernment is a mirror unto itself. Are philosophy or psychoanalysis correct to insist that there is no direct access to the Real?
The Face, the Mirror, and the Real of Discernment
All this brings us back to my bathroom mirror, which was procured from the market and not from Venus, babalawo (master of secrets), or anointed Pentecostal pastor. And as you now know, it broke into pieces on July 11, 2014, and the discovery of this awful mundane fact sent me meandering in an ontological void.
The shock of July 11, 2014, demands further thought as we begin to bring this chapter to a close. My face was taken from me. How could this be? The mouth that uttered, “Where is my face?” that fateful morning and the brain that organized the thought were parts of my head or face. Technically, it was the reflection of my face, that image produced by the play of light and the opaque background of the mirror that disappeared. It was the discernment, the appearance of my face that was absent, while the face was still there. Was it really there? How did I ever know that I had a face? The mirror produced and informed me that I had one. It was the mirror as glass, water, human glances, and human faces that assured me that I had one. I assumed that since other human beings had faces, I too must have one. My eyes could not see themselves, could not see my face sui generis. Alas, the eyes could only see through constructed lenses. The objects the eyes see through the constructed lens begin their lives outside the eyes but become integral parts of them. The pupils always take in the objects standing in front of them. Next time you stand close to a person, look into his or her eyes and you will see yourself standing in them, you will make an appearance in them. You will see yourself in them looking at yourself. The eyes that see their world through the pentecostal constructed lens see a Pentecostal. But is this not what discernment is all about? Believing is seeing! And believing-is-seeing easily slides into seeing-is-believing. Discernment is the image of the reality of the connection between the discerner and the form of her world or the inner processes of her world, of knowledge and its mutuality.16 The Spirit makes an appearance inside our constructed lens. Or rather, the Spirit lets the image of time or a cut of possibilities stand in our lens.
My face makes its appearance every morning in the light of the bathroom mirror. Before July 11, every morning the mirror cracked the space between my eyes and the infinite depth of space before them to show me my face. The mirror was the means through which my face, an other to my body, was seen, recognized, and greeted every day. Over time, the mirror morphed from being a piece of equipment that permitted the appearance of my face into a preternatural figure. My fervent commitment to it every morning, standing in front of it with the offering of toothpaste, over and over again, gave me access to a “noumenal” world. The mirror is a god, household god, spirit of light-and-space religion that enabled me to read my invisible face every morning. It creates light and darkness. It creates my face, as an object outside myself, after my own image. In the revelation of my invisible face it hides or cannot reach the back of my head and what is inside my head. The capacity to reveal that which is hidden or to make visible the invisible is at the same time an incapability to reveal. It gives and denies access through images.
The physical eye limits itself to the constructed mirror in order to see the invisible. The eye of the scientist limits itself to the microscope or telescope to tell the truth. But the spiritual eyes of the Pentecostal, aided by splendid imagination, want to see within and behind the mirror, telescope, or microscope. They always want to go beyond. The very refusal of Pentecostals to accept the impossibility of direct access to the Real (“the beyond”) inaugurates their entire order of prayer language, the symbolic, and self-world correlation, which ties truth and meaning in a particular theologico-ethical constellation.
But when the mirror removed itself in my bathroom for my pentecostal eyes to see what was behind it, the beyond of the mirror, the eyes recoiled in horror instead of experiencing perfect jouissance. Consequently, I, the owner of the eyes with toothpaste-laden toothbrush in one hand, screamed: “Woe is me, for I am undone! Because I am a man of physical mind, and I dwell in the midst of Pentecostals with transphysical minds; for my eyes have seen the Real, the black white hole where light does not escape. The Real is a white metal panel of my bathroom cabinet door.” And the white metal panel calmly responded: “No access today.”
Concluding Thoughts
“No access today”—is this not, perhaps, what the angel with the flaming sword said to Adam and Eve after God had driven them out of the garden of Eden and they wanted to go back in? They transgressed God’s commandment by knowing how to discern good and evil on their own, and for this disobedience they were rendered nude and sent out of their home. Just before they left, God graciously clothed them with animal skin.
When Adam and Eve transgressed God’s commandment, for the first time their eyes were opened and they noticed their nudity, saw their appearance as a privation of clothing. Before this occasion, even though they were without clothing (presumably covered by the “clothing of grace” or supernatural grace), they were not considered naked. Sin makes their bodies visible, so to speak. God eventually covers them with animal skins; grace (“grace with skin”) covers them again, conceals their naked, pure corporeality. Grace is a garment.17
But grace operates differently in the pentecostal quest for invisibility; grace (gift of spiritual eyes) is nudity. The pentecostal understanding of the divine gift to lift the phenomenal veil is aptly rendered as “opening of the eyes” or “opening the spiritual eyes.” The eyes that are open can lift the “clothing” over the phenomenal to denude it because seeing the invisible is linked to nudity and gaining knowledge is connected with nakedness. Pentecostals often direct this gift of lifting of the clothing over the phenomenal to their neighbors or “enemies.” They aspire to render their neighbors (unbelievers) and their innermost secrets visible but prefer that they themselves remain invisible to the neighbors; the Holy Spirit will protect them from the penetrating gaze of neighbors or the “enemies.” Here we see the quest for visibility of the other and invisibility of the self. This combination of visibility and invisibility takes my mind to the myth of Gyges. According to this myth as related by Plato in the Republic (359d–360b), after an earthquake one of the shepherds of the king of Gyges found a ring in a tomb, and this ring could make him invisible to others by turning it toward himself. While he remains invisible to them, they are visible to him. When the ring is turned away from him, he becomes visible to them and he continues to see. Having this power of invisibility at will, he seduces the queen, kills the king, and becomes the new king. Emmanuel Levinas interprets the myth in this way: “The myth of Gyges is the very myth of the I … which exist[s] non-recognized. … [When one sees] without being seen … [it is] a determination of the other by the same, without the same being determined by the other.”18
So one way grace is deployed in Pentecostalism is to use it to uncover that which is concealed. The quest for invisibility is the becoming visibility of nature’s (reality’s) nudity. Grace in the name of anointing exposes the inner, secret nature of the unbelieving neighbor and renders him legible—and possibly suitable for voyeuristic enjoyment. The neighbor in the moment of “revelation,” in that moment of denudation, becomes obscene homo sacer—impure, killable by Holy Ghost fire—and is not considered sacred (saved).
This turning of the biblical relationship between grace as represented by clothing and nature as represented by nudity into grace as nudity and nature as clothing forces us to rethink the Genesis writer’s presupposition of grace. For the writer, grace always already presupposes a naked nature. Erik Peterson makes this point clear.
Finally, we also reach this ultimate truth: that just as clothes veil the body, so in Adam supernatural grace covers a nature abandoned by God’s glory and left to itself. This is presented as the possibility of human nature degenerating into what the Scriptures call “flesh,” the becoming visible of man’s nudity in its corruption and putrefaction. There is therefore a profound significance to the fact that the Catholic tradition calls “clothing” the gift of grace that man receives in Paradise. Man can begin to be interpreted only through such clothing of glory that, from a certain point of view, belongs to him only exteriorly, just like any piece of clothing. Something very important is expressed in this exteriority of mere clothing: that grace presupposes created nature, its “absence of clothing,” as well as the possibility of it being denuded.19
Pentecostals (as the seers in the Bible) presuppose that created nature is clothed (there is the fabric of unknowability over it) as well as the possibility that this nature can be denuded. This slight shift of emphasis is important for understanding the way Pentecostals see the world. The shift represents a desire to see reality or nature in all its transparency. What is this pentecostal gaze that can only be satiated by nudity, that can better understand or interpret reality only when the phenomenal piece of clothing is laid aside?
It seems Pentecostals have rendered grace inoperative, taken it out of its original relation with reality and directed it to new needs and desires. The exercise and inoperativity of grace come together in their quest for invisibility. The “old,” “original” use of grace as clothing for nature or reality’s nudity is not abolished, but the new use displaces it toward a new direction even as “it persists in it and exhibits it.”20 All this presents to us for meditation a higher “technological paradigm” of grace. What does it mean that Pentecostals are making a slight adjustment to grace’s relation with nature or phenomena so it works according to their desires or cultural inclination? The next chapter will attempt to respond to this question.