To make myself understood and to diminish the distance between us, I called out: “I am an evening cloud too.” They stopped still, evidently taking a good look at me. Then they stretched towards me their fine, transparent, rosy wings. That is how evening clouds greet each other. They had recognized me.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Stories of God
Knowledge will come to an end; love never ends.
—Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, 13:8
APOPHATIC ENTANGLEMENT. If it is the answer, just what was the question? It may be time to restate it, at this late point within a discourse that will already have undone its chance for a final answer. We hope instead for answerability: the ability to answer to an other, to answer for oneself, to respond. Across the registers of entanglement so far considered, response is an ability calibrated to the nonknowability clouding its relations. But then won’t the question already, with quantum alacrity, have been responding to its possible answer? The answer, if it keeps faith with the indeterminacy by which there is answerability at all, will accordingly keep itself questionable—able to be questioned.
The particular question of apophatically entangled difference that wants answering here, after all the self-implicating complications of this cloud, may now put itself more simply (recalling that even simplicity comes folded). How shall we greet the unknown before us? Not now the unknown or the uncertain in general, not the hazy crowd of all relations—but that which breaks from it to confront me, face me. It calls for my response, my recognition. Evening cloud or calamity, it appears, existentially speaking, as some particular face or ensemble of relation, some specific contraction of cosmos, presenting itself to me, smudging familiarity with nonknowing. It may appear in random unpredictability or alluring enigma, in anxious indecision or unspeakable horror. But it only matters, calls or questions me, because I am somehow implicated.
The unknown that is before me: the reader of this sentence, the friend breaking into tears, the viability of theology. The homeless face beseeching. The news flash enfuriating. Or the immediate future of Gaia facing us all. Before we are called out again by any possible apocalypse, however, let us take note of the odd grammar of the “unknown before us.” There is something peculiar in the preposition before. What comes before me signifies, after all, what has happened already, in the past of my present. This is the character of re-cognition: what is before me becomes knowable only by its repetition of a past. “They had recognized me.” Yet that which is before me is precisely that which is ahead of me, in the still unpredictable future of this present.
The unknown before me—how does it at once come in advance and after me? It “goes before” me; column of fire or cloud, I follow it. It precedes me like the dark precursor into the future. It is a virtual future, potential, indeterminate as to the actual outcome. Does the alpha before us in the past thus coincide with the omega before us in the future? If so—the clothesline of a temporality strung straight between the poles collapses. But coincidentia was never identity. Time itself does not fold down, nor do the differences of its tenses. In the multiple rhythms, speeds and series of becoming, time appears not straight but spiraling, surging, and breaking in waves. Is there superposed here the quantum space-time in which the observed already answers to the observer? Which comes before which at the immeasurable speed, if it is a speed, of entangled influences? What appears before us, in such a co-incident of an alpha and an omega?
The unknown before me precedes me in possibility. It implicates itself in me and me in it, intra-actively. And it yet fails on principle to determine what I become here and now. If we note here a certain co-incident of the before with its after, however, are we not once again simulating a timeless symmetry rather than an event of becoming? The antique visions of changeless eternity, Parmenides’ Goddess of the Eternal Present or the Advaita Brahman, exposed as illusion, maya, any time line of things running separately through the hoops of three tenses. But they also then canceled the reality of multiple becomings. If our nonseparable materializations will not melt away as illusion, we find their time neither dissolving into digits nor straightening into the line, but emerging in the spacing and the doubling of the fold.1 Space-time is the field composed of the relations between becoming events. We considered a triple fold in which the affect-charged repetition of the past in the present provokes novel possible futures.
So the alpha and the omega, in this co-incident, fold not into providential predetermination but nonseparable difference. “I am the Alpha and the Omega”—but not necessarily the Origin and the End. And it is that difference which comes before us at any moment—familiar or strange, soft or monstrous, the Other, the Others, the Hyperobject.2 It mirrors us back to ourselves enigmatically. It calls to us in the interplay of question and answer. And it selectively contracts a cosmos in which I am already enfolded. The relations in which it implicates me may be toxic. Or they may be antidote. They crowd dangerously, in any event, and in a new sense, bluntly and literally, into the macro-event of the anthropocene.
How to greet the unknown before us? That question perhaps transliterates for us here a prior question: what is the fold between our nonknowing and our nonseparability? For the “before” marks what enters into the space-time of perceptible relation, without forfeiting, as it enters, its dark nuance. That relationality remains in itself vastly amoral, that is, ontological: relations are neutral, good, ill, ambiguous. But mindfulness of our own entanglement, I have argued, forfeits moral neutrality. It implicates itself: it folds itself into its own plurisingularity, into a knowing-together that structures greater complexity and stabilizes wider cooperation. In other words, it stimulates responsive participation in entangled difference. For when the space-time of mutual entrainment is minded its subjects know themselves answerable no matter what. For they take part in one another across any space-time.
Such an altered subject we might say performs the self-implication of relation: that is, it knowingly folds multiplicity beyond knowing into a knowing-together. That con-sciousness knows itself hopelessly limited and, by the same token, gruesomely wide. It questions any fixed limit to the width of a possible conviviality. Beyond kin and ken, these relations.
The ethical implications become explicit—unfolded mindfully—in concrete events of particular self-implication. Implicating yourself in the others before you, your difference ceases (as in process theology God has ceased) to be the exception. You become exemplification. You mind your implication in all the ethically questionable systemic powers. You ply collective resonances with more affect and more effect, energizing the ripples, the fractals. You are not just you singular; you are not just you plural; you are plurisingularly you. Networks of resistance to the rules of planetary dominance gain strength; new collectives of transformation emerge across greater distances. The folds of past are unfolded and refolded in relation to the possibilities of future. This does not expunge any entanglement. But it unsnarls the knots that render entanglement a captivity and relationship a trap. It keeps self and other in question and so unfolding. Yet such questioning does not resemble criticism that dismisses, that cancels, that silences.
The negative theological gesture finds both its edge and its opening in questioning any name: “silent cry” (Dorothea Soelle) or “rebellious no” (Noelle Vahanian), neti neti or dark nuance.3 This is not, as we have seen, a perpetual skepsis machine, but an emancipation of mystery from mystification. So then the knowing self-implication of our nonknowing signifies questionability. What then, in the chiasm of apophatic entanglement, does the self-implication of our nonseparable difference yield? What is relation turned mindful of itself and therefore desirous, deliberate? What urges us into the mutual answerability—which is always also question-ability—of subjects? In other words, what lets us intentionally—and as should be clear by now not only humanly—enfold and be enfolded? Might enfolding then become embrace? In the face of all the complication, what makes possible, posse ipsum, the answerable embrace? Could it be that intensification of desire that is called “love”?
What a questionable notion. Love, just as wastefully overnamed as its most solemn metonym, God. But without it passion cuts free of compassion, respect goes limp, ethics for material space-times turns to timeless rule—and the world gets stuck. Hesed, agape, caritas, eros—that is all intensively and unsentimentally theological language, apophatic and kataphatic. And indelibly scriptural. Is this how we greet the unknown before us—in questionable love?
AUGUSTINE
Time’s stretch is ever in danger of becoming a grasping, a futile attempt to hold onto what was or will be. Eternity’s reach is not a grasping but an opening, an opening to the depth of the moment. Eternity is harbored within the flux of temporality, then, even as God is secreted within the abyssal capacity of bodies to smell, taste, feel, hear, see—finally to love—the abyssal beauty of bodies.4
—Burrus, Jordan, and Mackendrick, Seducing Augustine
In moments of enflamed love we can hardly miss the nonseparability of our difference. In fantasy or in flesh that other before me at once enfolds and eludes me. And in the unfolding of love, felt—so unquestionably—as the most vivid affect of a life, committing, full of hope and faith, we also learn its questionability. The uncertainties, fragilities, and betrayals that beset love are the stuff of every comedy, every tragedy. I do not need to elaborate. But on love I might. Is it the case that those loves live longer and stronger that have built into themselves the ability to be questioned? Then doubt—who is this before me, really, after all?—need not sink to despair. Then no discrete love need bear the full force of our desire. It can’t. Love’s indiscretion is boundless. Love, in other words, is never just a private affair. What movement of collective materialization—religious, political, ecological—has a chance if it fails to channel that passion, binding us to one another while stimulating our singular gifts? No other force is equal to the kin and ken of prior patterning.
In the West’s great narrative of self-questioning, Aurelius Augustine implicates, with all their shades of indiscretion, his own past loves. “I dared to run wild in different darksome ways of love” (2.1.1). He wanted only “to love and be loved” (2.2.2). As in recollecting he collects himself in the Confessions in the name of one embracing love, one question above all guides his narrative: “What is it then that I love when I love you?”5
The negative answer seems clear: “Not bodily beauty, not the clear shining light, lovely as it is to our eyes, not the sweet melodies of many-moded songs . . . not limbs made for the body’s embrace, not these” (10.6.8). Not finally any creaturely, temporal bodies—or souls. So are the authors of Seducing Augustine enticing us to a misreading? How would he sanction the abyssal love of bodies?
Perhaps precisely through the ascetic reordering of love that interprets for him the love of the neighbor: “each man insofar as he is a man should be loved for the sake of God, and God for his own sake” (On Christian Teaching I.27.28).6 All the creatures may be loveable, but all the creaturely loves fail—unless the creatures are loved not for their own sake but for the sake of their source. We are to “love all things in God” (4.12.18).7 This too familiar injunction “conveys a perhaps still un-appreciated proposal, namely, that by embracing ‘the friendship of mortal things’ both promiscuously and unpossessively, we are not bound but freed in love. Such a freeing love is, by definition, simultaneously love of creatures and love of that in which they transcend themselves, for indeed one can only love creatures ‘in God,’ just as one can only love God in the beauty of creation.”8 No creature is thereby unloved, but each is spared the onus of saving me—and I am spared the delusion that it might.
Any finite love, private or public, will capsize if it is made to bear the meaning of my life or the freight of the ultimate. And how quickly our fiery commitment to the particular other before us—person, community, institution, movement, planet—may then roar up into its impossibility and burn out. Alternatively, love may find the renewable energy of a sustainable relation: “Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new” (10.27.38).9 Its beginnings and endings reach beyond knowing. Such Beauty might relativize by mere subordination of the finite. Or by drawing all into relation in an alternate temporality. It surely knocks time out of line—“Too late have I loved you.” Better late than ever. Always before us, waiting all along. It twists space inside out, outside in: “you were within me, while I was outside” (10.27.8).10 Its Beauty—You—may relieve us of our amorous idolatries. Another strategy of passionate non-attachment? Tapping the supreme Love need not on the Augustinian model compete with the creaturely loves. The Christian tradition can be read, according to Kathryn Tanner (though she is stressing the contribution of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa) as the basis of a “noncompetitive economy.”11 Questions however remain. For instance Augustine famously explains that “if we love somebody for his own sake, we enjoy him [frui]; if for the sake of something else we use [uti] him. But it seems to me that he should be loved for the sake of something else” (On Christian Teaching, 1.22.20). That something in which “the happy life” is grounded. Ergo—and Hannah Arendt notes that “it is with some reluctance that he comes to the conclusion”—we must use the neighbor, not enjoy him or her.12 But is this not to instrumentalize the creature? And so to risk—in a move warped into the later and cruder Christian conquests and commodifications, using and enjoying voraciously, indeed—making any body a means to Christian ends? “I never love my neighbor for his own sake, only for the sake of divine grace,” in Arendt’s paraphase.13 And that grace is itself the instrument of “mere passage” to eternal life.
Surely in its biblical inscription another possibility had been signaled: when the listener is urged to “love God . . . and to “love the neighbor as yourself,” is the loving of God not a means to the love of the neighbor-creature—just as surely as, conversely, the love of the neighbor is a means to the love of God? To enfold each love in the infinity of love is one thing; to make it a mere means to an unquestionable End is another. If creatures become means alone, then it is not surprising that in the later Augustine a full-fledged and eternal hell could burn with a ferocity commensurate with the heavenly love. Oddly, Kant provided for a later ethics the needed corrective of this relational nuance of the Great Commandment: “So act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or that of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means.”14
Still, the inside-out Beauty of Augustine’s love teaching can turn his own triumphalist externality outside in. The interiority of “Augustine’s prayer closet,” writes Virginia Burrus, “does not appear at first glance to leave room for anyone else.” But his confession of the power of the world of relations to draw love so forcefully that it “turns to an acquisitive lust” may be what twists the space, the time, open again. “Augustine seeks to take lust around another turn, to convert it” at the very point “where earthly transience and heavenly eternity meet.”15
The ambiguity in which love entangles us is infinite. It may require an infinitude of love to free us. Whether the Augustinian love liberates us for and within rather than cleanly from the many relations, remains in the light of the eternal crowd of the City of God, possible; but also, in the light of the damned, indeed questionable.
“What do I love when I love my God?” (10.6.8) asks Augustine.16 And his answer does resound with a mindful unknowing of love itself: “I cannot measure so as to know how much love may be wanting in me to that which is sufficient so that my life may run to your embrace, and not be turned away, until it be hidden in ‘the secret of your face’” (13.8.9).17
. . .
In a spirit closer to Origin’s salvation of the whole, and to the Cappadocian epektasis, with the soul in love journeying infinitely to the infinite, Christian eschatology was not incapable of keeping its love apophatically open. It may then question every love as it falls short of the infinite and therefore betrays the finite loves of its own creaturely entanglement. But these loves are not one, and neither are the betrayals. Entangle mindfully, the cloud translates; to each love a universe clings. Where will it end? There before us come all the endlessly unknowable creatures implicated in those few we do know directly—at least in part. Love picks up where knowing leaves off. I do not in Augustine know the scope of my own love. What—whom—do I love when I love You? You, who? Whom I may address without naming.
And how is this amorous nonseparability a nonknowing of God?
To answer this question (however questionably) we go back to what comes textually ever before theology. Biblios still comes before us even in its double meaning: it is the book of books—a whole crowd of its own, enfolded permanently as canon, its alpha and omega entangled in the Western fate or fatality of the Book. Whenever love exceeds local bonds, duties and escapades—as for example in the “politics of love” among neo-Marxist commentators—its biblical intertextuality remains inescapable.18
GOSPELS
If I speak so little and late of Jesus, it is a silence of solidarity. He had enough of the “Lord, lord” sayers early on.19 Worshipping the Lord became the great Christian alternative to the love-risk. No Christology is forthcoming within this context, in which the logos of theos has posed a big enough question, one to which no logos of christos could offer itself as final answer (as for example: the Father is aloof, but in the Son He has fully revealed himself to us: the basis of every Christian positivism).The apophatic operation kicks in as soon as I hear “Jesus”: not God, not the same substance, not any substance, not the only Son, not the one Messiah. And not not.
The unpronounceable YHWH and the enigmatic I Am are echoing, as Richard Kearney captures it, in Jesus’ resistance to any categorical identity. “In fact it is only the ‘demons’ who claim to know Jesus, as in the exchange with the unclean spirit at Capernaum who called out ‘I know who you are—the Holy One of God.’ To which Jesus responds: ‘Be quiet! Come out of him’ (Mark 1.25’).” Nonetheless, here too, not only before the one he nicknamed Abba, not all naming needs exorcism. Mere silence becomes repression. I do not want, no more than does anatheism, to feed the secularist Christ complex, which pushes the originary texts and contexts for much of what it deems ethical progress out of hearing. This leaves them to the religious right and prevents them from questioning and being questioned (rather than dismissed) by the secular left. So the denial of Christian entanglement does nothing for the relational pluralisms and democratic convivialities protective of non-Christian perspectives. Let me try instead a christographic exercise, hoping that a few vivid strokes (admittedly and perilously homiletical) will illustrate an apophatic opening to and within the hermeneutics of the second testament.
Across their dialects the gospels ply Jesus as teacher, rabboni, annointed one, son of man, child of Sophia. Though interested in the communal construction—“who do you say that I am?”—it was not his own identity that he laid bare but his priority: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might; and the neighbor as yourself.” Here he just cites scripture.20 To do to others as you would have them do to you is to implicate yourself in the other. You enfold yourself in the becoming other, knowing the other already enfolded in you. It reverses the normal—do to others as they do to you—the common sense of a masked entanglement. The Nazarene does not propose a competition, a metaphysical exceptionalism, or a supersession. Versions of this ethics of the implicated self found form across the traditions of the world. The amorous priority of the Great Commandment—if Sunday School has not ruined this language—wraps affect and agency mindfully into relation to God and passes it immediately, superpositionally, to the “neighbor.” To whichever other comes before you. “As yourself”: difference is not reduced. The neighbor might be the enemy. The neighbor is not the self. But nonseparable: because you are entangled already in this relation, that relation is part of who you will be. You affect and are affected willy-nilly. Entangle mindfully.
What “heart,” the affect of love (and it was never, despite many ethical translations, reducible to mind and will), does is to pump entanglement toward a boundless flourishing, rhythmically entrained with time, undefeated by death. And with its radicalization in the love beyond kin and ken, not just of the stranger but of the enemy, it practices the courage (couer-age) that simultaneously expands and deterritorializes the self, dispossesses it of its properties, its substance.
In the christographics of the Gospel of Matthew, the theatrics of final judgment becomes a parable for the entanglement of Jesus with all of the hungry, the imprisoned, the sick, the “least.”21 And therefore—this is the point—for the participation of those who would follow him. Those for whom he comes before. From the eschatological viewpoint of the story, he questions the love of those who claim to know him. He is holding them answerable to that gruesome width—to that endless crowd of the suffering, the poor. He isn’t who they thought; his “I” exhibits a world of disturbingly precarious material relations. The parable exposes the “Lord, Lord” ruse.
This rabbi nonseparable from the embodiment of his teaching was then taught—and why not—as the incarnation of his own message: “the parabler became the parable.”22 The loving becomes the love. In this novel self-implication in the relations of an emergent collective, his plurisingular life displays no exclusive new truth, except when it backfires: where its truth turns unquestionable.
It is only the fourth gospel that proclaims the singular teacher as divine. He now appears as the Logos that comes before all things, through which they come to be, who now stands before them in the flesh. The incarnate God-word thus explicates a love implicated in the unfolding of the entire creation. John frames the enfleshment as gift of love itself: “God so loved the world that he gave his Son . . .” In context the giving is the gift of a new human chance. But that verse is endlessly yanked out of context as a prooftext that the Father donated his Son as blood sacrifice and only way to heaven. The language of John’s gospel, with its becoming-flesh of the Creator’s word, appears of the four the most foreign to Jesus’ own language. It is also the most susceptible to betrayal. It can all too readily be read as a litany of final answers. Similarly, and to devastating effect, a willful ignorance—ignorant first of all of its own implication in hermeneutics—severs “no one comes to the Father but by me” from its context. Relentlessly it hardens his Ego into The Way and final Answer. In context, however, that pointer is a gesture of love toward disciples grieving already his portended death.23 I am now part of you, my way is yours, you will not get lost. The text has nothing to do with rivalry between religions.
It is John’s gospel that draws the love motif into fertile figurations of entanglement: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” It is also a text of pruning—the cut. Relationality as constituent is not therefore comfortable.24 The prolific imagery of mutual indwelling offers not just a glimpse of ontological relationality avant la lettre but a strategy for its intensification. We come all mixed up together: in raw relation there is no salvation. The vining unsnarls and unfolds relation, entangling its branching multiplicity indissolubly with a particular life and its flesh. The flesh is vibrant matter, alive, eating and eaten. John makes of Jesus a sacrament: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”25 Flesh materializes here “not as a self-contained mass, but as an element transformed as it is given.” Thus Mayra Rivera unfolds this Johannine flesh: “Like bread, flesh is shared, becoming part of many bodies, transformed into the very materiality of those bodies that partake of it. The exchange entails not only his flesh, but also the carnality of those invited to share in its life. If in the prologue Word becomes Flesh and appears in the midst of people—exposed—here we are invited to imagine it in the people—as food nurturing spiritual life.” She points to a Latin American history extending from de las Casas to Dussel connecting the eucharistic bread and wine, its flesh and blood, with the life of the poor the bodies of workers and the productivity of the Earth.26
What is the way that gets incarnate in order to feed the hungry and lead the lost—but that of an amorous participation in each other’s flesh? In the “flesh of the world”? This abiding, dwelling (shakan) is not temporary shelter; it may repeat its intra-actions endlessly. Even at the quantum level, after all, entanglement may abide across any expanse of time and space. In the human flesh before us in John, it effects zoon aionios, “life of the age” precariously translated as “eternal life.” It is no timeless, worldless eternity, but the time-full entirety of the “age,” the cosmic expanse of relevant space-time.
The christographic difference of this gospel is figured as a divinely human exemplum for a people, a community, a species. Later in the age, he congealed into the absolute ontological exception: the God-man, metaphysically wrought of two separate substances, divine and human. The power of the exception, mimicking the dominance of a Sovereign, then infused empire with the political theology of unquestionable Lordship. Might we, with John’s blessing, let the power of the exception dissolve into the lure of the exemplum? Perhaps then the incarnation would get redistributed as intercarnation: no creature lives outside of bodied participation in its fellows. And therefore, to echo Cusa, in God. But some creatures more than others answer to the truth of that participation.
In the the self-implicating entanglement of our differences—not of the one exceptional difference—the Johannine Jesus predicts those who will do more and greater than he.27 He comes not as the one and only but the one who per exemplum made himself the most hospitable rhizome, the fruit of the vine, the edible host. And this self-implication of love in John’s epistle then spins back upon the meaning and the name of God: God becomes love. The very love by which we perform our communities, our worlds. This love signifies a relation, not an entity. Language of the Holy Spirit as love itself, relation itself, has held this fresh disclosure in language. But the Trinity would in the Western tradition render the Spirit subordinate to the Father and the Son,28 and relationality thereby gets subordinated, as befits the substantialist grammar of the Greco-Roman world, to the anthropomorphic subjects—personal entities who have relations. But if this God is more than an idol of human male power, then we have to do with a relation that exceeds knowing not just by way of unsaying but of feeling, action, and contemplation. Heart, will, and mind. We might provisionally say that “God” names our relation to everything, including God. Not just any relation, but an amorously boundless one. It is a relation, and so a God, which does not happen apart from our participation.
To the extent, however, that the “love of Christ” has been betrayed by its heirs, variously hardened, domesticated, and weaponized, has it failed? Well, surely, over and over. But does failure let us—the heirs—off its hook? When we interrogate the early christograms, finding even there no purity of origin, we may find that our questions mark and hook us further. Failure, as for instance J. Halberstam, in The Queer Art of Failure avers, offers the cloudy and negative chance to practice an alternative reality.29 But not without a more overt failure to know, a more apophatic entanglement, than the language of the gospels has articulated.
EPISTLES
It is in the Pauline corpus that love announces an unmistakeable apophasis: “Knowledge will come to an end; love never ends.”30 Paul’s Christ brings this amorous infinity into its enigmatic self-implication. We recognize an acute knowledge of unknowing: “to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.”31 Love partakes of the boundlessness incapable of epistemic or religious closure. Paul here in Corinth (not just at the altar to the Unknown God in Athens) anticipates the eros of negative theology, the amorous cloud of unknowing, the relationality of the docta ignorantia.
Knowledge is not repressed but surpassed, exceeded, rendered questionable: “knowledge puffs up, love builds up.”32 This edification (“building up”) alludes to the psalmist: “I will build all things with love.” Olam hesed yibenai.33 Olam actually means the whole or the universe as temporalized, as “very distant time,” past or future, close to the aeon misleadingly translated as “eternity.” The past is at once “before” one and “after” in Hebrew.34 So this love is building up all that comes—before. So then hesed, translatable as “loving-kindness, mercy, fidelity,” holds the Christian agape answerable to its actual spatiotemporal world. This building capacity pertains to any theology that calls itself constructive—and so resists the inflationary certainties to which confessional and systematic traditions are prone. Is it the apophatic excess that plies the construction—and recurrently undoes it? (If so, a constructive apophatics ceases to be an oxymoron.) Hesed, in responsive fidelity rather than self-same eternity, fired up prophetic ethics from the outset. The most oppressed, of course, may not need the love motive for exodus; those called to answer for them do. But all—at least the 99 percent—will need to be “built up” against the onslaught of impossibility. One can dangle eschatological threats and promises; but love has the fragile advantage of being its own reward. If it surpasses knowledge, is it passing into the cloud (another kind of puffy)—and through it into actualization? Into actions of intercarnation?
Paul pulses with the intensification of love in the embodiment of this “new law.” He cites Jesus citing the Hebrew love language. Fold after fold of torah: Paul, according to certain recent Jewish interpreters, is no longer to be read as the first Christian supersessionist, but as a radical Jew.35 He builds hesed into living cells of affective, risk-taking community: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”36 This apophatic love holds up in the face of the unspeakable. And it holds its members together not from the outside but as parts, nonseparably different, of an organism. The great figure of communal entanglement arises: the many gifted members of a body. “If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.”37 With an eye to the 99 percent, Joerg Rieger translates Paul’s metaphor of political solidarity, for example, into the language of trade unions: “an injury to one is an injury to all.” Pressing liberation theology into an explicit relationalism, Rieger points to “the complexity of our connections to other people, including the severe distortions in these connections.” Without seeing these connections “we will never be able to transform them in life-giving ways.” Rieger is riffing on the Pauline reception of the neighbor-love. The “as yourself” “reminds us that self-interest is always tied to others, whether we notice it or not.”38
Within a few verses burst the love lyrics of the Corinthian hymn: “If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”39
There may be no single more apophatically acute entanglement of negative theology avant la lettre in amorous relationalism. But if one has heard it intoned at too many wedding services (however queer) it may be—irony mounting—a rigorous Marxist and unequivocal atheist who will help us hear it with fresh ears “In the case of the preeminence of love,” writes Alain Badiou of this hymn, “which alone effectuates the unity of thought and action in the world, it is necessary to pay attention to Paul’s lexicon.”40 Reflecting on how “love . . . rejoices in the truth,”41 Badiou finds love in Paul a “subjectivation,” a motive-force that yields the following “theorem.” We may read it as a terse rendition of the ethical self-implicature of apophatic entanglement: “The subjective process of a truth is one and the same thing as the love of that truth.”42 This is a truth with and beyond knowledge, the activation of a perspective that, arising in a concrete spatiotemporal event, extends boundlessly outward. Of course we may question any claim of universality—especially of as carrying “the militant real.” When is it not just another particularism rendered imperial, one carrying, in this case, the supreme Christological sanction? Yet, without some version of “the universal address,” do we not we deny every answerability beyond kin and ken? It is not the universal but its repression in the name of a dominant particular, an ethnos, argues Badiou, that leads to the death camp. Perhaps, but the racialized ethnos does not fail to claim its own universal. Instead of pitting the universal truth against the particular, we may insist on the self-implicature of our own addresss, questioning the scope and the limits of our hesed. The public we address may indeed be that of the planet as a fold of the universe—the universalism, then, of a materializing cosmopolitics. We may with Badiou, and with the surprising new ensemble of non-Christian and nontheist fans of Paul, recognize in the militant (and nonviolent) love a dramatic breakthrough of radical egalitarianism.43 If so, it is repeating differently the exodus motif, at once internalized and universalized, upon the roads of the Roman Empire.
As to the human universal, Badiou does at least consider the standing problem of Paul’s sexism, the veil, and “man not made from woman, but woman from man.” He considers it all solved by the text three verses later: “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of man or man independent of woman. For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman; but all things come from God.”44 Now, in the newness of the event. Paul, in Badiou’s paraphrase, almost answers the feminist critique:“What matters, man or woman, Jew or Greek, slave or free man, is that differences carry the universal that happens to them like a grace.”45 And by this grace he has Paul mean, quite beautifully, “no instantaneous salvation; grace itself is no more than the indication of a possibility.”46
Paul and his assemblies do not evenly actualize the possibility. The gender hierarchy, the acceptance of the institutions of class and slavery, the heterosexual and, of course, Christocentric exclusivism will not be erased. The Pauline epistles will remain potent weapons of the Christian right. Indeed the same love-saturated letter to the Corinthians concludes thus: “Let anyone be accursed who has no love for the Lord. Our Lord, come!”47 Love or be cursed? Maranatha as messianic menace?
This is to say that Pauline love remains not expendable—but questionable. It displays the ambiguity of Christian love: the problem of a love identified with Christ, when Christ is identifiable with God and God is an . . . identity. Then the relation becomes the entity—and oh so knowable. The clanging gong overpowers the grace event.
Fortunately Paul’s apophatic nuance keeps returning. And here my colleague Melanie Johnson-DeBaufre offers such a revelatory exegesis of the Pauline apophasis of love that I quote her at length:
Paul invites the ethical practice of measuring all things by love. In English, such a declarative list—love is, love is, love is—tempts Christians to a confidence that love is definable, knowable, possessed by some and not others. But love here eludes and ever surpasses such sureties. In fact, the primary word in verses 4 to 7 is not is but not. Love exposes not-love. And stepping up the negation one more notch: love never ends. Love always exceeds and is beyond what is known, what is partial. In this sense it is always complete. But knowing cannot know its completeness, thus is it always also open-ended. For those of us troubled by some of Paul’s words, this sense that love never falls or fails leaves open that the meanings of even Paul’s words—regardless of their intention—can be known and measured as not-love. Paul’s idea of love that surpasses understanding exceeds his own completeness and our own and opens every present toward the possibilities of love.48
This questionable and questioning Paul stands before us past and future. The christographic difference did not need to turn into the christocentric exclusion. And so its universal address still plies the possibility of a perspectivally entangled planetarity. Deterritorializing the Roman order of separations—divide et impera—he stirred a dissident (Stoic) cosmopolis, diffracted through the contagious communalism of the gospel. In their context the epistles unfold ensembles with subversive possibilities of gender, ethnos, class. And even of an envaginated kosmos: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”49 Birth then signified a high-risk endeavor. The earth evinces a queerer eligibility now, with no eschatological guarantee of a final conviviality. In the meantime, the entangling excess that is love continues to lure Christians and not-Christians to surpass our not-loving certainties.
RECAPITULATIO
To greet the unknown before us: in an ancient christographics the eschaton before us implicates an aeon, past and future. The self-implication of the presumptive love takes the form of a recapitulation. Such enfolding is not a matter of mere summation. The second-century Irenaeus of Lyons introduced the doctrine of recapitulatio. This bishop in Roman Gaul drew the term from ancient rhetoric, signifying the “final repetition,” which sums up in “bringing to a head” (anakephalaio). “Therefore he came to his own in a visible manner, and was made flesh, and hung upon the tree, that he might sum up all things himself.”50 The repetition provokes the novel effect. He was not, however, thinking of the Deleuzean third repetition. Irenaeus is citing Ephesians: “All things in heaven and earth alike should be gathered up in Christ.” This cosmic Christ enfolds and iterates the entire history of our species. So the New Adam repeats with a difference the primal earthling in whose earth (adamah) we are all still entangled. Indeed the whole creation is repeated, it comes to a head: Christ becomes the paradigmatic kosmos-persona. The recapitulatio thus repeats the systemic distortion that original sin signifies; it implicates us all in the violence of the cross. And it does so not in chronological time but in the unstraightened repetitions of liturgy, story, and the whole species’ entanglement. As that one body enfolds a whole aeon in its life and in its death, we too are enfolded. And so we may unfold in our lives the life that can be redeemed from that death. At least this is a reading.
Yet in cloud perspective we question the Christological closure toward which Irenaean—and most Christian eschatology before process theology—unquestionably thunders. And there is a venerable tradition, particularly of feminist and womanist theologians, questioning any notion of atonement by sacrificial substitute.51 The cross has commonly been deployed to revictimize the vulnerable, beginning with the Jews. But the “final repetition” may unfold otherwise. We might, for example, supplement Irenaeus with a contemporary U.S. reinterpretation of that bloody symbol of the cross. I quote at length because the theopoetics is hard-won and revelatory, the exemplum prophetic: “All the hatred we have expressed toward one another cannot destroy the profound mutual love and solidarity that flow deeply between us—a love that empowered blacks to open their arms to receive the many whites who were also empowered by the same love to risk their lives in the black struggle for freedom. . . . We were made brothers and sisters by the blood of the lynching tree, the blood of sexual union, and the blood of the cross of Jesus. . . . What God has joined together, no one can tear apart.”52
Entangled we come. Altogether divergently. James Cone, finding the Black experience of the cross enfolded in the lynching tree, makes no excuses for the history of white supremacism, the crusades of the KKK, and the condescension of white liberals. Because some white folk became mindful of their own implication in the racism, another complicatio becomes possible. What we will together unfold remains perilously and promisingly uncertain, billowing in a dense cloud of multicontextual entanglements. Issues within issues, flesh within flesh, folds within folds. We will continue to snarl up the complexity. The most effectual love of the enemy may only exacerbate the enmity. And even where it works, it tangles. Some advance against racism may trade against sexual justice, religious difference, class, climate. That “profound mutual love and solidarity” enfolds us in crucifying histories, indeterminately overdetermined. Yet, as Elizabeth Freeman puts it, “nonsequential forms of time (in the poem, unconsciousness, haunting, reverie and the afterlife) can also fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye.”53 Thus the nonsequential forms of Black poetry, ancient scriptures, slave songs, liturgies of protest, and the blues vibrate through Cone’s work of militant love.
To recapitulate (and it is getting to be that time): life together does not get more convivial as it gets planetary.54 Barely recognizable others come before us already too familiar, in crowds culturally overextended, digitally mediated, poignantly needy. Without our widest aeon, our pasts recapitulated in the counter-narratives and queer temporalities of our most becoming perspectives, how can we greet the unknown yet before us? In other words, I see no way out of this cloud that engulfs love. Except to push deeper into it.
ANCESTORS IN THE CLOUD
We witnessed the ancient emergence of negative theology in Gregory of Nyssa’s exegesis of a passage of Exodus: “I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear . . . and so trust you ever after.” In an inaugural incident over a millennium later, between Sinai and Cappadocia, the luminous darkness again makes its appearance: “While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, ‘This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!’”55
The audio-visual cloud again, in the full luminosity of its opacity: in this precise echo of the public empowerment of Moses, the reveiling, revealing cloud is once more written into a desert wilderness. Recapitulation within recapitulatio: in the altered state of transfiguration, Moses and Elijah are here seen “talking with him.” Peter is disoriented by the multiplicity of this vision-crowd, by this alter-knowing. He wants, achingly hospitable, to build “huts” for each of them (apparently like the tabernacle/tent of the original epiphany). Far from any supersession, the cloud powwow performs Jesus’s nonseparability from the ancient spirit ancestors. He enfolds his collective in a solidarity with those that came long before them; the deep repetition prepares them to face the impossibilities of their future. Of betrayal, pain, loss, abandonment—but before that and after, still before us now, still barely possible, of the gathering of a planetary movement. His plurisingular life offers no exclusive new truth, except when it backfires: where, after the fact, its truth-relation turns unquestionable.
How to greet the unknown? With trembling hospitality, the text suggests. This time it may be the beloved there before us. Ancestral and messianic, alpha and omega. Just here and now.
. . .
Loving, after all, does invole softening and yielding our flesh one to another. There is no civic being, no fr iendship, no neighbor, no public, no commons, without a mutual yielding of our tissues and the shared embrace of social flesh, of intercorporeal generosity.
—Sharon Betcher, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh: A Secular Theology for the Global City
Shifting cloud formations meet us now, ancient visages appearing, mingling; they dissolve into an insinuation of old mothers, Thought Woman and Mary conferring with Gaia; the fond profile of a Buddha is glimpsed riding Ibn Arabi’s caravan of love just as it morphs into an exodus of endangered butterflies.56 But the cloud of witnesses never ceases to expand, engulfing the determinisms of past destruction in pasts that might have been, into possibility, forcefields of space-time that might yet be. Cocreating the field.57 Gestalt psychology had early contemplated the cloudy morphology of relationality. As my friend Deborah Ullman writes, “in the contemporary field-theoretically focused understanding of Gestalt, we are fundamentally and integrally part of the field, before we are separate beings. Not in the field only, but of the field. This understanding carries with it compelling ethical implications.”58 There arise new crowds, unpredictable movements (on this random morning church folk demonstrating for the rights of same-sex love in my denomination, students getting arrested for the love of the planet by the hundred at the White House) . . . The beloved diffuses into love itself. It always did. We didn’t always notice. It goes planetary, polyamorous. The social flesh softens.59 It confuses every defense against the swarming others. The deconstruction of the religious fortresses comes first. Otherwise this love does not implicate itself and so ceases to be lovable.
The hospitality of the cloud enfolds the pressing differences nonseparably even as they multiply. Scarcity precipitates new sacraments. And so a host, the one who once superposed the Passover Seder not as separation but as anticipatory grief and performative re/membering of his body, is radically redistributed.60 But this entangling materialization does not dissipate the nonlocal logos that the local Jesus signified. Intercarnation does not supersede, it multiplies the incarnation. Self-giving in the self-loved flow of the “relational power of jeong” (Wonhee Anne Joh) minds the stickiness of every ambiguous entanglement; in the “agapology” of a cosmic resource (Jung Doo Kim) or in the “kenotic erotics” that empowers even when sacrifice becomes unavoidable (Anna Mercedes): these new theological voices startle life into failed and faltering christo-logoi.61 Still the love, erotic or agapic, may not, just when we most want it, answer to the name “God.” We recognize our question, our plea, already plying its own response. We can break the mirror but not see through it. The indeterminate entanglements of our best knowledge will continue to knit the fringes of our relations into frustration as well as mystery. The love will remain intercorporeally questionable. It will precipitate disfigurations as well as transfigurations. So then shall we finally give up the logos of theos, the theory and the practice of God? We can honorably draw the line, dispel the cloud and march forward in the faith of progress after all. But can we do it honestly? Is there any depth of criticism, reason, science, liberation that does not push into a brilliant darkness of its own? “There is always something more to be said and understood,” writes Kearney, “some inexhaustible residue never to be known.”62 Then where would the line settle between my apophasis and yours? (My questions are turning rhetorical. They recapitulate a book. Their answerability begins to coincide with their questionability. They mean to answer to . . . you.) Is there any width of solidarity in which nicknames of the infinite complication are not whispered in the night? Is there before us any coming conviviality not becomingly questioning its ancestors? And after?