The Sacred as Im/possibility
Expect a Miracle!
Introduction
Pentecostals are noted, good or ill, for their love of miracles. They expect and talk about miracles without qualms, even in so-called respectable, enlightened, rational-intellectual circles. Those intellectuals subjected to the pain of listening to their “babbles” often think that by miracles Pentecostals mean a transcendent God (Power) regulating or intervening in the empirical reality to enact favors for believers. They berate them for their “precritical minds” that strive to gain direct insight into things-in-themselves or for a naïve, even childlike dependence on an omnipotent father figure. This criticism is only based on a limited or distorted view of what Pentecostals understand as miracles. The pentecostal notion of miracle is much subtler than the common view of transcendence, eternity, or spirit breaking into history or nature. While Pentecostals contest the limitation of human knowledge to the domain of phenomenal representations, the majority of their miracles arise from the density and intensity of the phenomenal realm. Pentecostals more often expect and talk of what I will call “immanent miracles” than direct intervention of a faraway God in an existing causal network.
In the Pentecostal movement there is an understanding that encompasses both views of miracles: as an external, inbreaking power or an immanent-temporal irruption in becoming. Miracle is an impossible possibility in a world of enspirited matter. Miracle represents an impossibility (excluded, prohibited, or deferred possibility) that has been anticipated or has emerged but is transcended such that new possibilities are revealed, and this critical transformation is endowed with a sense of the momentous or produces a feeling of wonder.1 The miraculous is part of the mundane and everyday life and is not necessarily transcendent. Miracles are events, occurrences, and manifestations that induce wonder and awe in a given context. The miraculous is in the ordinary or extraordinary, regular or irregular, explained or unexplained, utilitarian or holy, personal or social, and even in the quotidian practices of rationally relating means to ends. Each of these is an embodiment of surplus possibilities. Simply put, miracle is an event or occurrence that cannot be fitted into the existing causal network or fully accounted for by preexisting conditions. This “inability” to bring an event into a covering causal network or its preexisting conditions may be due to epistemology (the limitation of knowledge), ontology (an understanding that reality is always incomplete and subject to the chaotic power of becoming), spirituality (we can not always understand the mysterious working of God), or everyday mysticism (an intense passionate attachment to the phenomenal that shatters its coordinates).
From whence came this broad and labile notion of miracle? The only way to come to grips with the pentecostal notion of miracle is to reexamine the notion of the sacred. As we shall show, a proper understanding of the sacred will enable even the cultured despisers to make sense of why Pentecostals see miracles everywhere. The pentecostal understanding of the sacred is a bricolage; it is complex, robust, and innovative. I will try to delineate its vast contours by passing through an African concept of the sacred, engaging in conversations with a sociologist of religion (Richard Fenn), a theologian (Catherine Keller), and spicing the engagements with these scholars with philosophical insights from continental philosophers (Slavoj Žižek and Quentin Meillassoux) and a religious scholar (Mark C. Taylor). The summary of these engagements and conversations is that for Pentecostals the sacred is always at hand and it is primarily conceived in terms of possibilities and potentialities. Some of these preexist their manifestations and others happen without a place in any preexisting set, only retroactively creating their conditions of possibility. We are however getting ahead of my plan to carefully lead you to a deep insight into a robust understanding of the sacred. I begin the unfolding of this plan with a personal reflection (infused with some African energies) on the sacred. These energies will not only shed light on the sacred, but will interrupt the narrowly Americanized readings of Pentecostalism and the liberal disdain they fuel.
The Sacred as Sets of Possibilities
The sacred is near all human beings at all times. We encounter its omnipresence in our everyday possibilities and we are always trying to shape it even as it shapes us. In fact, the sacred emerges from how we understand, relate, treat, and divine im/possibilities of our everyday life. In every society there are three sets of possibilities: one that is open to all individuals, another that is available to only a few and the rest of society is excluded, and the universe of possibilities that are yet to be fulfilled or not yet available to all persons and institutions. The latter is actually the horizon of unfulfilled possibilities.
And there is the law (as acts of legislature, nomos and ethos, symbolic structures that regulate practices and representations, or specific regimes of interpretations of the [oral or written] scripture/faith, and so on). The law acts to bring the range of possibilities to manageable proportion and distribute them into the three sets. There are included and excluded possibilities in every existing state of affairs. It is the law that defines the boundaries of these three sets, what is possible and what is impossible. The law is the power that regulates possibilities and access to them. It is the law that tells members of a community what works within a given framework of relations.
There is also grace or its equivalent in every society. Grace has the power of the exception (to use Carl Schmitt’s language), which can act to stop, suspend, reopen, or open the enjoyment of certain possibilities. Sometimes, grace can transcend laws or boundaries from within them, such that potentialities are actualized not in spite of the restrictions of the law but through them. This is like a player mastering the rules of a game and then initiating new skills to overcome obstacles. Every invention, every innovation, every revolution, and every scientific breakthrough has always been about extending the boundaries of the possible, making what was once impossible to become possible.
How does this knowledge of the three sets of possibilities lead to a conceptualization of the sacred? The person-to-person encounters of our daily lives constitute a ground for the “holy” to emerge. These encounters are often parts of social practices, overlapping social practices, and generative of social practices. While a particular social practice fulfills a finite set of possibilities, the originative space of the encounter of person to person that engenders the social practice is a horizon of unfulfilled possibilities. The excluded or the unfulfilled is a primordial soup out of which can crawl the religious, the sacred. This originative site is the sphere that social practices try to exclude from view or reckoning. What is excluded and unfulfilled is believed to transcend the passage of time, and this makes it sacred. What is sacred in any society is believed to always have a purchase on eternity. As sociologist Fenn has recently argued, the sacred is the embodiment of unfulfilled possibilities.
Because the sacred embodies only unfulfilled possibilities, it always points beyond itself to the full range of possibilities for either salvation or destruction. This set of all possibilities, both actual and hypothetical, I call the Sacred, and it is to the sociology of religion what dark matter is to astrophysicists, or “the god above the god of theism” is to theologians.2
This realm of unfulfilled possibilities haunts the realm of realized possibilities and pushes it toward the not-yet. In every human-to-human encounter that both limits and enhances the power of being in each self, something develops that lies beyond such an encounter. No matter how innovative a social practice or law is, it always defines the limits of aspirations and “institutionalizes” the set of possibilities of human interaction that the system of society is willing to allow at a given moment or deems practicable. Yet the law or social practice is haunted by the unfulfilled possibilities. Over time, this brooding sense of the haunted will give rise to some kind of resistance; something brings the awareness of such unfulfilled possibilities into popular consciousness for a more abundant life.
The idea that the holy emerges from social practice has long been something that many in traditional African cultures take for granted. Among the Kalabari of the Niger Delta in Nigeria, the holy, or a god’s power, is an emergent phenomenon of human worship; like social systems, it realizes itself through practices. The holy emerges and is ensconced in the social practice of worship. The gods arise from such practice insofar as their power of being is in it. The gods are conceived as a source of tremendous power. But the power that the gods possess is believed to depend on the social practice of human worship. Their powers derive from human worship and as such humans can reduce or completely efface the power of any god by withdrawing worship.3
Most believe that spirits and gods do not have intrinsic powers of their own such that the withdrawal of worship from or worshipful dependence on a god deprives it of power and authority to act on humans or control human activities. Kalabari insist that a god that is not worshiped loses its power. So if a god becomes too furious or demanding, they will tell it from which tree it was carved (agu-nsi owi baka kuma en ke o kara sin en dugo o piriba).4 This means that a community can unanimously annul the power of a god by refusing to worship it.5 Robin Horton interprets the aphorism this way:
Literally, if a spirit’s demands become too burdensome, the whole congregation can join together to destroy its cult objects, and by this unanimous act of rejection render it powerless to trouble them further. … Broadly, then, the more people lavish offerings, invocations, and festivals upon any spirit, the more powerful it becomes both to reward and punish them. And conversely, the less they attend to it the less powerful it becomes—up to the point at which unanimous rejection results in the complete loss of power. Generally, of course, a single man cannot reject a spirit at will; for while he is only one among a congregation of many, it will have the power to punish him.6
This way of thinking is not at all surprising once one grasps the importance of relations as constitutive of both society and personhood in Kalabari communities. Worship is not just reverence, obeisance, praise and exaltation, or appropriate response to deity, but the dynamic maintenance of deep, thick relations, social bond with a deity. All forms of power, be it political or spiritual, are always predicated on the strength of social bonds among persons and the fracture or rupture of the bond or the displacement of harmony in the bond means erosion of power and authority.
In the Western tradition, Émile Durkheim long ago pointed out to us that individuals generate some sort of divinity when they come together. In the collective occasion, they discover their connectedness with each other, deem themselves transformed and transfigured, and discern a set of possibilities that lie beyond the community. The sacred emerges in this setting of corporate identity as “collective effervescence” and claims for itself the capacity to transcend the ravages and passage of time. The numen is generated when the individual sense of identity is merged with that of the group or collective. Under these conditions the sense of possibilities soars to new heights, repressed elements jostle to float to the surface, and the numen emerges. The crowd or the collective comes to embody—however temporally—the impulse of the numen. To experience the numen “is to find oneself in the grip of a passion or presence that seems to come from beyond oneself.”7 But often this feeling of being affected by a presence that seems physically absent or distant is also the experience of ecstasy, “of being beside oneself, or being captivated by the presence of another soul who seems to take precedence over one’s own.”8
To experience the primitive (numen) one may feel that it is God, a distant and invisible being, who is present and at work beneath the forms of everyday life. Alternatively, one may settle for the unseen but palpable presences of angels and saints.9
The Structure of the Sacred
In the Kalabari (Niger Delta, Nigeria) worldview and philosophy, the notion of the sacred as a set of possibilities is encapsulated in one of the words for God, that is, So.10 The word So refers to both destiny or directing-destiny and the sum of possibilities available to the people. In a sense, the two meanings of the word are not different. Destiny in Kalabari understanding refers to the set of life possibilities allotted to a person before his or her own birth. So in the sense of destiny refers to the dialectical outworking of the telos of individuals, communities, and the world. It is an unfolding world process that is not confined to follow a fixed groove. The shaping of destiny is done by or rather understood via the possibilities that So makes available to each person, group, or institution. (So when applied to individuals is called so, to households is wariteme-so, and to communities is amateme-so. We will refer to this application of the notion to particulars—the matter of destiny—as lowercase so.) The directing concept of So is not just about working out of preassigned telos. The concept of 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. Let us call So as applied to the sum of possibilities as uppercase So. The uppercase So is the set of possibilities excluded to individuals, cultural institutions, and social structures. 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 simply the set of possibilities excluded to them at any given time.
When lowercase so and uppercase So are taken together, we get the sense that So is the ultimate source of possibilities, and the principle of limitation or selection. This combination of infinity and limit defines the structure of the sacred as lived experience in the Kalabari worldview, shedding important light on our idea of the three sets of possibilities that mark the sacred.11
I would like to note that the uppercase So and lowercase so are not opposites in Kalabari. Thus what is not part of uppercase 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 dancer from all the possibilities that are available to members of the community and even beyond. If the person dislikes being an artist, he or she can go to a diviner and ask for it 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. A person can literally ask for any set of possibilities, but So has the right to defer or “project into the future whatever may be too much for any community or society [or the individual] fully to experience or acknowledge in the present.”12 Because an individual can only be given or allotted only a part of the set of all possibilities available to the community at any given historical moment, what he or she has “always points beyond itself to the full range of possibilities for either salvation or destruction.”13 As Richard Fenn puts it,
At some level, societies know that they are based on the foreclosure and postponed fulfillment of possibilities for both life and death. Every social system … creates an index or prohibited satisfactions. … The sacred always offers only a very limited embodiment of unfulfilled possibility.14
The individual may encode within her the possibilities allotted to her by the social system (or the gods), but she always stands to look upon the uppercase So as the embodiment of unfulfilled possibilities. Humans can imagine alternatives not currently available to them and can take steps to attain what is denied them. In fact, this is the whole impetus and impulse behind bibibari, recanting of destiny.15
What does the Kalabari notion of So tells us about the nature of the sacred as an im/possibility, the impossible possibility? There are three principles or forms of relationship in what the Kalabari call So, and they will help us to address the question. First, within what the Kalabari named as So there is an uppercase So as a kind of creative force, the inexhaustible ground of (impossible) possibilities that overflows into human activities. So in this sense is considered as Tamuno, the Supreme Being. Second, there is So as the principle of limitation—the part that gives meaning and structure to the infinite possibilities and results in modification and concretion so that there is no chaos. Third, there is a feedback mechanism that works to properly align the interaction of the first two principles in the context of a particular person’s or group’s life. This mechanism is called bibibari. This is the continuous process of retooling the actualization of potentialities, the appropriation of possibilities and their reshaping.
Bibibari is the process through which past possibilities that determine a person, institution, or group are themselves retroactively changed. The past in this process becomes something like Deleuze’s pure virtual past. The Kalabari believe that a person is created to embody a certain destiny: there is a virtual self that follows her, and in this sense her concrete deeds do not add to her virtual past as they only unfold what she is, as she only becomes what she is. The fact that bibibari is part of this process means that ultimately the Kalabari do not take a literal teleological reading of a person’s destiny. Destiny as a necessity is an outcome of a contingent process. A person’s deed is not a mere acting out of her atemporal encased set of possibilities as any of her numerous acts can retroactively reconstitute her past. She can change her eternal past, the transcendental coordinates of her existence. “We have thus a kind of reflexive ‘folding back of the condition onto the given it was the condition for’: while the pure past is the transcendental condition for [her] acts, [her] acts do not only create new actual reality, they also retroactively change this very condition.”16 This change in the condition for her acts now gives her life a new necessity (destiny), but it is only a necessity she contingently created. In this process of bibibari, there is unfolding, folding, and enfolding of possibilities that are reversing necessity into contingency and in turn contingency into necessity.
The overall lesson the Kalabari notion of the sacred teaches us is that the realm of the im/possibility, the impossible possibility, is the sacred. Put differently, it teaches that how a society understands, treats, and manages its possibilities or sense of possibilities defines its notion of the sacred. The sacred is not understood only as a site where a society constructs and deconstructs its notion of impossibility; it is also the site where, in the open sight of everybody, the people perform the trick of making what they regard as “transcendence” (beyond, impossible, not-yet possible) to be internal to the world, integral to the process of unfolding possibilities, to work in immanental ways. It appears that without these sleights of hand in society, in social life, civilization itself becomes impossible. If there are no impossible possibilities in the sacred, everything is impossible. The founding order of the sacred is that the forbidden acts or jouissance are already impossible. If the sphere of the impossible does not exist in the sacred and by extension in the society it encompasses, then one finds oneself at any moment trespassing the limit of the possible, breaking arbitrary or nonexistent boundaries. In this scenario any act or movement is already forbidden, a transgression of a nonexistent impossibility. The constant transgression of a nonexistent impossibility means anything one does is impossible. Thus every possibility is forbidden.17 We need the limits set by the sphere of the impossible to know that our actions are within the sphere of the possible, within the acceptable bounds of our community. If we do not know where the limits of the impossible begin, then it means they begin anywhere and everywhere, are within the realm of the possible, and thus members of society would appear to be trespassing the limits of the possible all the time.
The basic paradox of impossibility is that it is both possible and unavoidable. It is never fully eliminated, always there, but, simultaneously, overcome. Every conversion of impossibility into possibility generates a possible impossibility; every conquering of impossibility generates a new horizon of impossibility, limitation, and so on. Possibility creates the impossibility it tries to subdue. So if we eliminate impossibility, we also remove possibility. This reversal provides the definition of the realm of impossibility. It is the result of itself or the outcome of possibility, which all mean the same thing. All this suggests that the sacred plays some functions in social existence. Its invention, discovery, or imposition serve to oversee aspirations, hopes, and expectations of the members of its community. It encourages the search for alternative possibilities. The sacred becomes corrupted or works against itself and society when it discourages the search and implementation of alternative possibilities. Sooner or later it will be replaced or displaced by another (new) form or version of what members of the society consider sacred.
With mindful ignorance, let me say that the purposeless purpose of impossibility is to make possibility possible.18 The sacred forbids an act because it is trying to impose a rational order onto prerational chaos of the universe of possibilities. The perverse core of the sacred is to encourage or nudge us toward an abyssal act of freedom, to act outside the enchainment of possibilities open at any given moment in order to impose a novel rational necessity on uppercase So, the universe of possibilities. As if through the act of freedom, the fecund void of numinous impossibility directly transforms itself into phenomenal possibility. The act momentarily tears the veil that separates possibility from impossibility, forcing all obstacles into the past. The act happens in the present but changes the past itself. For without such freedom (as per Kant or Schelling) a society and its sacred cease to promote human flourishing. In the case of bibibari, this kind of act can reach deep into the eternal past to re-create a person’s terrestrial destiny. This is not dissimilar from the temporal event of conversion in Christianity, which rewrites the eternal past of predestination. Connecting this view of conversion to Kant’s notion of freedom, Slavoj Žižek has this to say:
The later Kant articulated the notion of the noumenal act of choice by means of which an individual chooses his eternal character and which, therefore, prior to his temporal existence, delineates in advance the contours of his terrestrial destiny. Without Divine act of Grace, our destiny would remain immovable, forever fixed by this eternal act of choice; and the “good news” of Christianity, however, is that, in a genuine Conversion, one can “recreate” oneself, that is repeat this act, and thus change (undo the effects of) eternity itself.19
So what does all this tell us about the so-called realm of impossibility? The sacred stands for the paradox of impossibility that maintains its status of impossibility precisely by its stubborn attachment to the dimension of possibility that serves as its unacknowledged vitality. Without impossible possibilities, then impossibility ends up as an empty, lifeless, self-identical void. The fare or the implicit claim of the sacred is that its declaration of impossibility is none other than the assertion of not-yet possibilities, possibilities waiting for the act that will transform them from the numinous to the phenomenal.
I can almost hear you, the reader, turning in your chair. If impossibility is only not-yet possibility waiting to materialize, then there is really no true impossibility, only psychic (or “false”) impossibility. This line of thinking misunderstands the sacred; it is irrelevant whether the realm of impossibility exists or not, as long as it is effective in constructing the way our deeds, insights, or breakthroughs pass from myth to existence, serving as a reference point to make sense of the improbable character of our accomplishments. “By definition, there is something so improbable about all [novum] that one is in effect questioning oneself about its reality.”20
One more point before I drop this topic. For two reasons, the distinction between psychic and true impossibility is unnecessary. First, the impossible is impossible because it does not exist, but nonetheless we attribute properties such as being excessive to it and forbidding intercourse with it. This is why a couple of pages ago we stated that the founding order of the sacred is that the forbidden acts or jouissance are already impossible. This nonexistent thing presides over people’s actual striving and, if its effects on actual persons are to disappear, then the texture of the sacred as we know it will dissolve. The sphere of the impossible is the Real around which the sacred as a system operates.
Second, the sacred, according to the Kalabari who can tell a god from which wood it was carved, is neither some kind of a transcendental spirit who controls human history, nor does it ossify possibilities. It is none other than the human process of dealing with life’s possibilities—reflexively shaping and reshaping potentialities amid obstacles—through which the process of knowing So takes place and human consciousness of mega-Spirit thus arises. Out of the foaming ferment of human creativity in dealing with the entangled possibilities of coexistence, So arises fragrantly, as Hegel might be tempted to put it. (Let us not forget that the very emergence of the sacred is in itself mysterious or adds to the “sacredness” of social intercourse. An “objective order” emerges out of the interactions of individuals, and once it appears it cannot be reduced to the interactions and it stands above or is viewed by them as a substantial agency that now determines, controls, or conditions their lives. This is what Slavoj Žižek calls “the ultimate mystery of the so-called human or social sciences.”21)
Once this So, the sacred, arises among the people, it is not a just a blind “mental” process of fears and hopes that regulates social life or the interactions between possibility and impossibility. There are persons, practices, rituals, dances, utterances, and institutions that proclaim its status as sacred and it thus appears to develop self-consciousness, a life of its own.22 Here I am using self-consciousness in the sense Hegel applied it to the state, as “the self-consciousness of a people.”
The self-consciousness of the state has nothing mental about it, if by “mental” we understand the sorts of occurrences and qualities that are relevant to our own minds. What self-consciousness amounts to, in the state’s case, is the existence of reflective practices, such as, but not limited to, educational ones. Parades displaying the state’s military strength would be practices of this kind, and so would statements of principle by the legislature, or sentences by the Supreme Court—and they would be that even if all individual (human) participants in a parade, all members of the legislature or of the Supreme Court were personally motivated to play whatever role they play in this affair by greed, inertia, or fear, and even if such participants or members were thoroughly uninterested and bored through the whole event, and totally lacking in any understanding of its significance.23
Impossibility as the Sacred
The way and manner we have conceptualized the sacred—the set of possibilities cast against the background of impossibility and that which imposes itself over the collective life of a community as a “being”—differs from that of religious scholar Jeffrey Kripal, who talks about impossibility as the sacred. Whereas we have focused on possibilities and im/possibility in social existence, Kripal takes the possibilities of the paranormal as the sacred. He argues that what rational thinking, modern science, and materialism consider as impossible, enchanted events (psychical phenomena) happen in the physical, objective, material world and it is this paranormal impossible possibility—the weird and wonderful—that is the sacred. The sacred is the reality of the paranormal within a materialistic, disenchanted worldview. Kripal maintains the psychical is “the sacred in transit from the traditional religious register into the modern scientific one.”24 The sacred proper, he adds, is “a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to the palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment,” which modern science rules out as impossible.25
Another important difference between my conceptualization of the sacred as the im/possibility and Kripal’s view of the sacred as the impossible is that he keys his notion of the impossibility to an underlying metaphysical reality, which a disenchanted, established modern scientific method cannot access. For us the sacred is not necessarily the supernatural or metaphysical but the social structure (“the hypertext”) that arranges, distributes, blocks, and invents possibilities over time in the lived world.
Mark C. Taylor’s view of the sacred also disagrees with the ontotheological stance of Kripal. To Taylor, the sacred is neither being nor nonbeing; it is “the condition of possibility and impossibility of both being and non-being. If the sacred were a ground, which it is not, it might be understood as the ground of the ground of being, which otherwise is ‘known’ as God.”26 In simple language, he views the sacred as interstitiality, a relation of neither/nor rather than binary opposition. It is relation “as such.” The sacred as interstitiality does not mean the sacred is an instantiation of the interstitial. Taylor argues that “the site or more precisely, the para-site of the sacred is the interstitial. I would not use the term ‘instantiation’ in the context because it suggests too much stability or fixity. Rather, the interstitial is the domain of alternation (one of the nuances of altarity) where the sacred oscillates in an approaching withdrawal and withdrawing approach. The interstitial is neither here nor there; it is not present and yet not absent.”27 In other words, the sacred is fragile, fleeting, and slippery.
Catherine Keller, in her recent book Cloud of the Impossible, represents an alternative theological position to the stance of both Taylor and Kripal.28 While Taylor insists that the neither/nor of his a/theology is not mysticism à la negative theology, Keller takes the position that the im/possibility of existence is elucidated (but not grasped) by a mysticism-hugging negative theology. Her negative theology, she holds, is not a mere opposite of theology or a simple absence of metaphysics of being, but a “denegation” of the attributes of God and contestation of the knowability of God. She, unlike Kripal, does not decipher the fleeting presence of concretions caught in the interstices of being and nonbeing or in the trail of the cloud of impossibility as the sacred. Her negative theology does not take a stance opposite that of the established scientific worldview. It is rather about the struggle over time by theologians and physicists to say the unsayable with language that is recalcitrant to the logic of neither/nor. This neither/nor, which she situates in the density of relation that constitutes the fabric of existence and creativity, holds the key to deciphering the sacred, the site of the im-possibility. Amid the noise and nonteleological entanglements of relations in and impossibility of revelation from the infinite density of our micro and macro worlds, there emerges signification—an overture, at least, to the production of a sacred order. But there is no necessity to its emergence from the network of relations. What she calls “the cloud of the impossible” and what she leaves unthought in her book hold tantalizing clues to her thinking about the sacred.
The Trails of the Cloud of the Impossible
Though Keller does not directly theorize the sacred, there are hints that she understands the sacred as the set of all possibilities. Let me lay out the logic that warrants this assertion, a position based on my interpretation of her book and the implications of her line of arguments. (And this position is also a condensation and clarification of what I have already said about the sacred, now filtered through the lens of the Cloud of the Impossible.) The position is inherent in Keller’s thought, but Keller did not comprehend its implications deeply enough; she felt she was dealing with negative theology rather than a theory of sacrality. Keller explains that existence is a network of evolving relationships. Possibilities or potentialities are nothing but aspects of relationships. Relationships define possibilities and potentialities.29 We live in an expanding universe of relationships. Some of the possibilities are background independent and others are background dependent. (Being background independent means, inter alia, that an event emerges that was not in the cards by retroactively positing its conditions of possibility.) Time seems to “evolve” with the event; time and event appear to be codependent. The sacred, the floating site of im/possibility is where the pressure and tension of the relationships coincide, where they simultaneously push apart (pressure) and pull together (tension). Religion names the coincidentia oppositorum as deity and the pressure and tension as wrath and grace, respectively. Religion is articulated around the belief that something (agency, deity) external to the universe of relationships and possibles not only imposes order on it, but also ultimately makes the choice of possibilities and potentialities for us. If a religion does not admit to an outside agency, it posits that the agency is the power of the universe of relationships as a whole. Religion helps human beings to organize and conceptualize their experience of the sacred.
Let me now take the reader through some of Keller’s suggestive statements on the sacred, even as I endeavor to unearth their creative impulses. My initial reading is that the closest she comes to conceptualizing the sacred is what she calls “the primordial locus of possibilities,” which at the same time urges the actualization of possibilities.30 This primordial locus is another name for the impossible that engenders the possibility itself, which is endlessly made and undone. At the core of this never-ending process there is a lure of planetary creativity and disregard for congealed hierarchy. More precisely, the sacred is our infinite entanglement that invokes, invites, and sustains care for its finitudes. She argues that the entanglement and creativity that sustain it are theopoetic, that is, God-making or the bodying of God. But this God, in keeping with her negative theology and expansive process theology, cannot be positively determined or known. This God is not some kind of positive agent that guarantees or underlies creativity itself. The “divine element in the universe” is not a “congealed God-entity,” not an idol.31 We do not really know this God or what we designate as God. At best God, whom she argues is an outcome of creativity itself, is the lure of all other creatures. This unknowing of God, she holds, should energize an alter-knowing of the relation between God and world or at least a rejection of the inherited classical view of the God-world relationship. Over and over again she rejects the idea of a discreet, unentangled God (subject) acting on God’s world or human bodies (object). She maintains that God is entangled in the relations of all creation and is part of non-ex-nihilo creation that unfolds, folds, and enfolds within the primordial locus of possibilities, the site of im/possibility.32
The divine boundlessness that enfolds and unfolds within the im/possibility of relations is not only marked by the Cusan logic of the coincidentia oppositorum, but also by reversal of classical verticalism. Not only transcendence and immanence coincide in relationalism, in non-absolute Absolute, but also the experience of the Absolute is evental, manifesting in vulnerable flashes. The Absolute in Keller’s thought is evental, mediating creativity in a process in which the temporal, the creatable, is everlastingly infini.33 And this Absolute (Resolute) itself is a fragile, changing concretion, the “Most-Moved Mover.”34 The logic here is that the eternal in the classical sense is unstable, changing, and the non-eternal (created, creativity) is what is everlasting. Between the ultimate category of creativity and becoming nature (becomings in process), the Absolute (Resolute) shines forth, entangling each actual occasion in new possibilities.
Keller’s book invites the reader to meditate on the “possible impossibility.” This is to say the reader is mindfully to ponder how what is now considered impossible can generate new possibilities. Impossibility birthing new possibilities! This is an inversion of commonsense logic. In this vein the vertical relation between the eternal (above, spirit, “uncreated”) and the temporal (here and now, the flesh, created) is inverted, not in the sense of transcendence demoted to immanence but in the sense of the flesh being more lasting and continuous than the spirit.
To reiterate, for Keller the impossible is the sacred—at least according to this reading. This is not because the impossible is God or God is the impossible, but because the sacred is the traces of the possible impossibility woven through all the processes of life, or it is the cracks in the network of relationships that turn up possibility that had appeared as the impossible. The cracks or traces are not engendered or bolstered by an inaccessible transcendence, outside power, external entity, or independent substance but by the energy of the relation itself, the cloudy radiance and resonance of the effervescence of life that form and deform existence.
I need to quickly point out the methodology of my engagement with or critique of Keller’s work. I do not here present an orthodox engagement with Keller’s thought in the Cloud of the Impossible. I am only attempting to follow a trail of the clouds of her original thinking as it folds, enfolds, and unfolds implicitly through the book. I invite the reader to join me to regain or uncover the creative impulse that Keller missed in the actualization of her thought, to walk with me to connect to “what was already in [‘Keller] more than [Keller] herself,’ more than [her] explicit system, its excessive core.”35 This is to say, reading Keller to isolate the key breakthrough of her thought in this book as it relates to the notion of the sacred as a set of possibilities and impossibilities, im/possibility, then show how she necessarily missed this key dimension of her own discovery, and “finally, showing how, in order to do justice to [her] key breakthrough, one has to move beyond [Keller].”36 This going beyond means betraying the “letter” (actual) of her thought in order to grasp its “spirit” (virtual). So precisely what is the dimension of the sacred that shines through in the explosion of thought on the clouds of impossibility and negative theology and its concrete actualization in her book but slipped into the virtual state and haunts any close reading of the book? What is the proper embodiment of this excess betrayed by Keller’s book?
Let us begin this exercise with her description of negative theology. She dwells brilliantly on the nature of negative theology, arguing it is about lack or contrariness. It is all about excess that escapes speech.37 Contrariness designates a form of difference within classical theism or authorized space of talking about God, while the excess that escapes speech designates ways of talking about the divine that gesture to a breakdown of the preapproved linguistic and “rational” space for talking about the divine element in the universe. Here it appears she has unknowingly stumbled onto two types of lack: there is the lack proper and hole.38 There is a constitutive lack that does not threaten the system of knowledge or order of being per se. A hole designates a gap in the system or order of being. In this sense the contrariness or lack she mentions—to use Žižek’s words—is only “a void within a space, while a hole is more radical, it designates the point at which this spatial order itself breaks down (as in the ‘black hole’ in physics).”39 Her book did not explicitly name the hole, which would appear to provide the aim and goal of her brand of apophatic theology. Its goal is to circulate around the concept of God within the theological space without reifying God, claiming a certainty of knowledge, or providing a contemplative sanctuary in the face of uncertainty, and its true aim is endless circulation around its goal-object. Perhaps, its satisfaction is its repeated failure to pin down God or the impossible possibility that ever eludes the human reach.
She conveyed the sense of the second type of lack, the hole in the ontotheological knowledge space, with her brilliant discussions of entangled particles with their mutuality characterized by “faster-than-light relationality.”40 She was able to transmit the apophatic affect of the quantum world of particles and waves in her discussions. Their world of unbroken wholeness “actually appears as the discontinuous quantum jumps and jitters.”41 Here the very lack seems to be holes in the system, entangled particles that dance and operate in unanalyzable, indeterminate ways. Their apophatic entanglement appears to demand that we drop the whole mechanistic order that informs scientific imagination in order to analyze it. Quantum entanglement is an impossible possibility. She missed the key dimension of hole as a form of lack in her work.
Keller’s focus on ontological relationality robbed her of the idea of another hole, “black hole,” in social reality or sociality, the play of impossibility in reality. This hole gestures to the im-possible and to the terminally difficult term God and God’s existence or inexistence. Following the creative impulse of her thoughts, one could reach the conclusion that the new emerges, an impossibility becomes a possibility, because there is no power in social existence that controls the preconstituted totality as possibilities. The im/possibility is the inherent immanent power of creativity in human communities that can retroactively create the condition of possibility of the novum. She may or may not agree on what the existence of black holes in the fabric of social reality (cracks in the fixity of potentialities) represents. Perhaps for Keller the “black holes” in social reality express the One of Creativity (Becoming) or there is no underlying Oneness (created or creatable).42 Nothing or Something? The notion of the sacred does not rule out one or the other. The answer depends on the community.
Žižek argues that the existence of “black holes,” an impossible possibility in reality, means that God does not exist. But for Pentecostals their presence confirms the existence of God; there is a God, transcendent or immanent, that springs surprises on the extant configuration of things. It appears both Žižek and Pentecostals share the same sense of the sacred—at least in the sense we have interpreted it in this chapter, as a common field of potentialities and possibilities without omega point. But Žižek and Pentecostals differ on where to place God in (en) the oceanic plenum of the sacred.43 Pentecostals place God in (en) it and nominate same as its anchor and guarantee.44 Žižek rejects all these, preferring a simple sacred without father or mother and without site of privilege or reification within it.
Let no one think that Žižek’s rejection puts his position absolutely at loggerheads with Pentecostalism. Pentecostalism’s two-pronged position on the sacred (godly and special mundane events or “potentiality” and “virtuality”) is always mediated by the playful character of the pentecostal spirit. Pentecostalism “profanes” the sacred without abolishing the sphere of the sacred. It deactivates the aura that attends to the rites and stories (myths) of the sacred sphere.45 Pentecostalism demystifies the sacred and shows the profane as inherent to the sacred.46 This is not done in disbelief and indifference toward the divine, but as “a behavior that is free and ‘distracted’ … released from religio of norms before things and their use.”47 For Pentecostals the sacred is dispersed into multiple sites of encounter (space is cut so that the “trans” of transcendence is not a “cross over or going beyond” but a tracing of “being-with”). Pentecostalism is the sacred in a playful mode.
We have gone too far ahead of ourselves in our plan to discuss the missed opportunity in Keller’s second type of lack (negative). Let us now return to it by unveiling what French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux understands by potentialities and possibilities. His conceptualization of these terms will help to shed light on what we have come to consider as the set of possibilities, the play of im/possibility in reality. Meillassoux makes the distinction between virtuality and potentiality.
Potentialities are the non-actualized cases of an indexed set of possibilities under the condition of a given law (whether aleatory or not). Chance is every actualization of a potentiality for which there is no univocal instance of determination on the basis of the initial given conditions. Therefore I will call contingency the property of an indexed set of cases (not of a case belonging to an indexed set) of not itself being a case of sets of cases; and virtuality the property of every set of cases emerging within a becoming which is not dominated by any pre-constituted totality of possible.48
Meillassoux’s definition gives us a new language to conceptualize the sacred or to reexplain what Kalabari or the Pentecostals understand by the sacred as a set of possibilities. He shows that events can happen because of their potentiality, something comes out of a preexisting set of possibilities. If we roll a single die and any of the numbers (1–6) come up, then that is a possibility becoming actualized. But if we throw the die and number seven comes up, then virtually something new has come up. Number seven has no place on the die, in the set of preexisting possibles, but the emergence of the new retroactively creates its own condition of possibility. As Meillassoux put it, “Time creates the possible at the very moment it makes it come to pass, it brings forth the possible as it does the real, it inserts itself in the very throw of the die, to bring forth a seventh case, in principle unforeseeable, which breaks the fixity of potentialities.”49 As if in a gesture ahead of its time, Meillassoux throws a view of the emergence of phenomena ex nihilo before Keller’s creatio ex profundis, not as a denial that events draw from their situation but the assertion of radical contingency based on an ontology of non-All or radical becoming. He continues, “If we maintain that becoming is not only capable of bringing forth cases on the basis of a pre-given universe of cases, we must understand that it follows that such cases [the New] irrupt, properly speaking, from nothing, since no structure contains them as eternal potentialities before their emergence: we thus make irruption ex nihilo the very concept of a temporality delivered to its pure immanence.”50
Here we are seeing in different registers what the Kalabari and Pentecostals consider as the operations of the sacred. The virtuality, the emergence of the new that is not mere actualization of preexisting possibility, that Meillassoux is describing here resembles the entangled particles of the micro-quantum world that Keller describes. Meillassoux—and Žižek following him—clearly sees the potential theological or religious use of his argument of ex-nihilo emergence of the new and quickly proceeds to block it by giving a materialist interpretation of them. Meillassoux states, “Every ‘miracle’ thus becomes the manifestation of the inexistence of God, insofar as every radical rupture of the present in relation to the past becomes the manifestation of the absence of any order capable of overseeing the chaotic power of becoming.”51 Žižek then concurs.
This emergence of a phenomenon ex nihilo, not fully covered by the sufficient chain of reasons, is thus no longer—as in traditional metaphysics—a sign of the direct intervention of some super-natural power (God) into nature, but, on the contrary, a sign of the inexistence of God, that is, a proof that nature is not-All, not “covered” by any transcendent Order or Power which regulates it. A “miracle” (whose formal definition is the emergence of something not covered by the existing causal network) is thus converted into a materialist concept.52
This play of potentialities, possibilities, and virtuality in social existence is what I mean by the sacred. Materialist scholars like Žižek and Meillassoux obviously call it another name and religious people like Pentecostals view it differently. For some it is strictly profane, for others it is strictly holy and religious, and for Pentecostals and Kalabari, as we have seen, it is in coincidentia oppositorum with the profane.
The kind of a new discourse of the sacred that is in some radical coincidentia oppositorum with the profane has been extracted from a trail of the clouds of Keller’s original thinking as it folds, enfolds, and unfolds implicitly through the Cloud of the Impossible. We have attempted to uncover the creative impulse that Keller missed in the actualization of her thought, to walk in the trail of the clouds to connect what was already in Keller more than Keller herself. We will continue to isolate the key breakthrough of her thought in the Cloud of the Impossible as it relates to the notion of the sacred. As stated earlier, in this kind of exercise we will betray the “letter” (actual) of her thought in order to grasp its “spirit” (virtual).
In reading Keller in light of our theory of the sacred, it is important to bear in mind how her implicit view on the sacred differs from the argument in this chapter. This difference enables us to search for the proper embodiment of the “excessive core” in her thought betrayed or neglected by Cloud of the Impossible. One source of this difference relates to the orientation of her book. She focuses more on ontological relationalism than on the regulative force of sociality.53 As a result we have to think her thought after her to show, for instance, that the sacred is constructed out of the feelings of possibilities at the level of language, culture, and materialist affectivity. What does the fold between our unknowing of the divine and planetary nonseparability mean for bodies in interactional/intra-active ritual chains? If one enfolds and unfolds her idea of the body of God, the enfleshing of infinite entanglements, and dehierarchization of the typical divine-human relation, the thought arises: Is sacred, the lure of something, not the fleeting event over the density of entanglements of bodies? Her work, which examines the entanglement of the divine and unknowing in many facets of human and beyond-human lives, does not explore how entangled human bodies generate the sacred or the sense of the sacred. She fails to explore how her own conceptualization of the relation between unknowing and relationality itself moves her reader to ask, how do entangled bodies become surfaces for the fleeting appearances of the unknowable God? Or how does God temporarily construct Godself (or God’s flesh) from and in relations of entangled bodies as real presence?
For a scholar intensely focused on entangled bodies and relationalism and interested in the discourse of the sacred in some radical coincidentia oppositorum with the profane, the neglect of real presence as a locus of the divine is somewhat surprising. In my opinion, real presence, which is experienced across (almost) all religions, provides us with an important perspective to develop a planetary ecumenical and doctrine-resistant sense of the sacred. If Keller has applied her analysis of im/possibility to how the divine manifests in the forms of affectivity of bodies, words and voices, relics and arts—that is, to real presence—she would have given body to some lines of argument that now haunt her text.54 This is an opportunity that what was already in the Cloud of the Impossible more than in Keller’s conscious articulation of her ideas. There are lines of argument in the book of which Keller herself is unaware, arguments that will help us understand a dimension of the sacred as experience or enacted in co-affective worship services.
Now, in order to understand the pentecostal logic and practice of the sacred as revealed in co-affective worship services, we turn not directly to her explicit arguments, but to her logic. For some time I have been mulling over the pentecostal logic of sense, trying to understand how Pentecostals invert the eternal-temporal order to “construct” God on their bodies and senses. This skill of inversion is something they share with Keller. She is patently good at inverting any transcendence-immanence schema in constructive theologies. How does one ferret out this hidden line of similarity in Cloud of the Impossible? Before my active contemplation of the pentecostal practico-ethical and enkinaesthetic theology and Keller’s constructive-theoretical theology, Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense had indirectly taught me how inversion takes place in worship services. Deleuze, following the Stoics before him, inverted Plato’s dualism between the eternal ideas and material things, which are only fleeting appearances of the eternal in the empirical, sensuous world. For Deleuze this view shows that material bodies are the “substance and cause,” and the fleeting becoming of Sense located at the interstices of Being and non-Being is the immaterial virtual effect.55 In his words:
The Stoics are the first to reverse Platonism and to bring about a radical inversion. For if bodies with their states, qualities, and quantities, assume all the characteristics of substance and cause, conversely, the characteristics of the Idea are relegated to the other side, that is to the impassive extra-Being which is sterile, inefficacious, and the surface of things of things: the ideational or the incorporeal can no longer be anything other than an “effect.”56
Keller missed the opportunity to examine how bodies entangled in worship display and play the sacred or how immanent sensing bodies engrossed in affective reciprocity also invert Plato’s dualism in the fashion of the Stoics and Deleuze. This is so because she does not connect or extend her notion of planetary entanglements, clouds of the impossible, and im/possibility to worship services, where literally bodies and their sweat, breath, and agitated dust create clouds of their own, folding, enfolding, and unfolding the divine. Careful observations of pentecostal worship services after thinking hard about Keller’s book, Deleuze’s logic, and Žižek’s notion of fragile Absolute lead this scholar to discover the pentecostal logic of sense. Pentecostals in their worship services appear to invert the dualism of eternal and fragile material reality into the dualism of sensuous material bodies and such bodies generating the eternal or the Absolute as fleeting experiences, moments, or waves of divine presence, which in turn serves as their opposite. So instead of the human body being the extremely fragile, fleeting reality, it becomes the hard particle and the Absolute appears fragile, as flashes or bursts of energies in the matrix of bodies.
Pentecostalism gives us a deep sense of how the sacred is constructed and, as Annalisa Butticci’s work on the concern for the real presence among African Pentecostals in Italy shows, how the poor and marginalized migrants deal with what we called impossible possibility.57 Catholic and Pentecostal aesthetics of real presence encounter each other in agonistic contact zones. African migrants, parts of no-part in the Italian society, are attempting to invert the powers relating to the generation and control of real presence. Butticci narrates the story of the encounter between African Pentecostalism and Roman Catholicism in Italy, the story of the weak and the powerful sharing a common space, from the lens of the powerless. In doing this she exhibits the sensitivity and acumen of James Scott and Michel de Certeau in highlighting the everyday practices and weapons of the weak that African Pentecostals are using to subvert overbearing authority in the Catholic stronghold of Italy. She clearly shows how the subjugated, marginalized, and racially degraded Africans are struggling to carve out a space to worship God, earn basic human dignity amid the Italian Catholic ordering of space and privileges, and create possibilities for their own human flourishing.
At the very sophisticated theoretical level that Keller performed her thought, Cloud of the Impossible could not shed light on the sacred as an entanglement of the bodies pushing the boundaries of the senses and social spaces or as a concrete struggle for the distribution of the im/possibility. More importantly, the nonexamination of the “cloud” of impossibility as it might relate to the sacramentality of the (im)possible, a nonexistent thing, shows that to do justice to her book one has to move beyond her thought in order to grasp its spirit. The impossibility, impossible possibility, is not only the nonexistent thing that has properties and exercises effectivity, but also it is the Real around which society or religion operates. I wish Keller worked out the way in which “false” impossibility operates as the reference point around which the system of possibilities deduces its truth and the sine qua non of the way systems in general operate. It is around our belief in the realm of impossibility that our phantasy about possibility and alternatives is articulated. And, Hegel has taught us, this belief is “objective” as it materializes in the way a system or society functions.
Keller’s brilliant analysis of the non-knowing (unknowable) cloud of impossibility operates mainly in a very different epistemological register to Pentecostal thinking, like most of the mainline theologians and philosophers of religion, and she thus missed a key dimension of applying her thought to charismatic and spiritual movements, which mark the public resurgence of religion in the twenty-first century. The mystery of impossibility that she focuses on is the mystery and mystique of unknowing, suffering, uncertainties, ecological catastrophe, and the religious other. It is not the intense, passionate attachment of an everyday mystic who struggles to inhabit the perceived tiny crack or gap between noumenal and phenomenal so he can erotically approach things-in-themselves. What would it mean for Keller’s understanding of the mysticism of the impossible possibility if she were to consider an intensity of eros toward the mystery of God so strong that it shatters (however briefly) the very transcendental coordinates of knowing and unknowing, it releases our perceptions from their human coordinates, pushes them outside human reality (as per Deleuze)?
All these insights bring us to the pentecostal notion of the noumenal, things-in-themselves. Often modern theologians see the noumenal in Kantian terms, opposition between phenomenal and noumenal. But this is only a limited way of interpreting what Pentecostals understand as the noumenal. The noumenal also refers to impossible phenomena, things that are excluded from taking place in the extant order of being/things. The noumenal is the impossible whose happening shatters the coordinates of our symbolically constituted common reality. “The gap that separates us from noumenal is thus primarily not epistemological, but practico-ethical and libidinal: there is no ‘true reality’ behind or beneath phenomena; noumenal are phenomenal things which are ‘too strong,’ too intense or intensive, for our perceptual apparatus, attuned as it is to constituted reality.”58
Keller’s missed opportunity is this: having rejected a transcendent, classical godly dimension to human reality, she was unable to reverse or transcend the Kantian logic of opposition between noumenal and phenomenal, of the inaccessibility of things-in-themselves.59 What she needed to do in a Hegelian fashion was to transpose the split between noumenal and phenomenal unto a split within the phenomenal itself, as the split between normal “gentrified” phenomenon within usual human coordinates and “impossible” phenomenon outside symbolically constituted human reality.60 (Though the “impossible” phenomenon is outside human coordinates, it is still part of the human reality, nothing but a fragment of the sacred.)
This distinction between “gentrified” phenomenon and “impossible” phenomenon helps us to get a better conceptual grip on Pentecostals’ understanding of miracles. The commonest, everyday meaning of miracles in pentecostal circles is akin to what Alain Badiou calls event. Like event, what composes a miracle or “impossible” phenomenon “is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc.”61
Concluding Thoughts
The key idea of this chapter is this: the sacred could be considered the set of possibilities, opened, closed, hypothetical, or unimagined to a society. But the sacred is not a set of all sets; it is not an absolute totality of all possibilities in a given society. There cannot be a set or entity that is a collection of all possibilities, sets of possibilities, and all there is. French philosopher Alain Badiou in Being and Event used the mathematical theories of Georg Cantor (1845–1918) to show that such an entity cannot exist; no set can belong to itself. The number of parts or subset of elements in a set is larger than the elements themselves—there is an irremediable excess of subsets over elements such that there cannot exist a set of all sets.62 The sacred is infinite, but it cannot be the largest, the last infinite.
We do not want to miss the opportunity of stating that the sacred in one crucial sense is about how a society understands “the concept of the new.” How does the new emerge? How does it come forth as causality constrained by historical life, amid preconditions, and yet in the new is “underivable” from its conditions? The sacred is the most constitutive and determinative modality for liberating or chaining the “virtualizing power of time” or for creating the new.
The sacred in this sense of possibilities and the emergence of the new is common to all societies (secular, profane or neither) across time. Where societies differ is with the name they give to the sacred. They also differ on the basis of whether or not they conceive it entitatively or non-entitatively, or some combination of both. In the past the deity is referred to as the Sacred Itself, no distinction between god(s) and the sacred. Religion is only one of the institutions deployed by societies to manage human interactions with the infinity of possibilities. Priests tell people how to approach the deity in small doses of possibilities, never presupposing that members of their societies can face the full ply of possibilities in any one moment. And once in a while an apocalyptic prophet comes around to slightly lift up the veil on the sacred and we see in staggering detail the “monstrosity” of the sacred.63 The veil is often so lifted to “spell” the “end of history” to those the prophet wants to see come to ruin. Richard Fenn puts it well.
Direct exposure to all the possibilities contained in the Sacred would of course stagger the mind and the imagination. Who can stand in the presence of the deity, the Sacred itself? That is why the deity is best approached in the form of lower-case sacred, since it is crucial that the entire range of possibilities for both life and death itself remains unfulfilled if even limited access to them is to be granted. Otherwise, as the apocalyptic imagination has long known, were these possibilities for salvation or destruction to be fulfilled, the end would have come.64
Today, in the postmodern, postindustrial society, religion no longer has a monopoly of overseeing access to the sacred, and many people no longer equate the sacred with the god(s) or deity. But there is a lingering attitude toward the sacred that is a carryover from the premodern time into our secular or postsecular society. Actually, making a distinction between past and present society on the basis of secular/profane and nonsecular is not an adequate way to understand attitudes toward the sacred. The correct approach is to investigate whether the predominate worldview about reality is an All or non-All. Belief in All (One or Being) means the world is governed by law: there is “a determinate set, finite or infinite of possible cases—a law, deterministic or aleatory, always comes down to the specific set of indexable cases.”65 Time is what enables the actualization of these cases or eternal possibles. But belief in a non-All reality means that reality is always incomplete, and time is not subordinated to the role of effectuating the universe of possible cases and it has the power to modify the set of possibles. Insofar as postmodern society or traditional societies of the past always find a way to circumvent the “pure power of chaos of becoming,” the argument about secularity and sacredness of societies as keyed to historical periods is not very convincing.66 Let me here quote Meillassoux, on whose work I have relied to make my arguments on the periodization of secularity.
In the guise of a radical evolution, it seems that since the Greeks, one conception, and one only, of becoming, has always imposed itself upon us: time is only the actualization of an eternal set of possibles, the actualization of Ideal Cases, themselves inaccessible to becoming—this latter’s only “power” (or rather “impotence”) being that of distributing them in a disordered manner. If modernity is traditionally envisaged … as the passage from the closed world to the infinite universe, it remains no less true that modernity does not break with Greek metaphysics on one essential point: finite or infinite, the world remains governed by the law—that is, by the All, whose essential signification consists in the subordination of time to a set of possibles which it can only effectuate, but not modify.67
In this regard, whether it is religion or other institutions, the conception of the sacred has been “reduced” to the effective practices and procedures directed by a society to enable the cosmos and nomos to maintain themselves against the threat of chaos by strengthening and renewing the ethos. One of the primary roles of religious imagination and the habits of other organs overseeing the forbidden aspirations of people is to explain, control, and predict the pattern of appropriate responses to the passages, damages, and surprises of time. Religion, political systems, the economy, and others often function to assure society of its mastery over passage of time. The sacred (in this constricted viewpoint or shortened as religion) is how a society oversees life with regard to continuity between the past and the present and the future. The key goal of the practices and procedures of the sacred-as-religion is to control the passage of time over life and society’s institutions by subordinating the “virtualizing power of time” to a superior power or set of powers.68 The aim of the controlling intent is to ensure that novelties, radical (or unauthorized) ruptures, do not emerge to defeat all continuity between the past and the present and the future. For such novelties or “miracles,” to paraphrase Meillassoux, will become a manifestation of the inexistence of order, of any power capable of overseeing the chaotic power of becoming and the aspirations of the people.
One result of these attempts to subordinate time to a set of possibilities as preset by the law of an All-reality is that the sacred comes to be primarily seen not only as a community’s energy brought to deal with the passage of time and change, but also as how a community experiences, understands, interprets, and strives to transcend time. Instead of thinking and doing something to overcome the subordination of time to an eternal set of possibles, scholars focus their scarce energies on theorizing sacred and profane times, temporal orientations, rate of time preference, and so on. The key question about the sacred today is how to liberate the sacred or the virtualizing power of time from religion or from oversight of so-called superior power(s).
Our earlier descriptions of Pentecostals’ understanding of the sacred and their penchant for miracles suggest that they are unconsciously rooting to overcome the subordination of time to an eternal set of possibles; their effective practices and habits appear to be beckoning for the “virtualizing power of time” in the twenty-first century.69 This is one good way to interpret the orientation of the Pentecostal movement toward miracles, radical ruptures in the continuity between the past and the present. There are also at least three problems with their understanding and approach to the sacred. The critical irony of the pentecostal appetite for miracles is that if their wishes are fully realized, we will be delivered to the world of pure power of becoming that no power or order can control. And as both Meillassoux and Badiou suggested, every miracle would then become a manifestation of the inexistence of God. Finally, can pentecostal theologians think the kind of sacred that is beyond religion and the profane, or beyond good and evil, without philosophizing about becoming, possibility, and potentiality—ideas not always celebrated by classical theism or by pentecostal preachers? For everyday Pentecostals, at least in part, the sacred is an affectivity of space and time. It is a manifestation or interstitiality of the space of possibilities and the virtualizing power of time. There is a certain impossible possibility of theologizing the sacred in the Pentecostal movement.