I wrote this a bunch of years ago. It was to be the last chapter of a long delayed Festschrift. I really like it, so I’m putting it here, in case somebody stumbles onto this page and has interest. It is long and it takes patience to follow me—not because of jargon so much as the oddity of the logic of this piece. Anyway, I spent a lot of time writing this and ended up saying pretty doggone close to just what I wanted to say.
One
In the over-invoked, but still disconcertingly suggestive year—1984—Random House released in English an anthology of texts by Michel Foucault, whose bright light went out in Paris, on June 25th of that year, when he was not quite 58-years-old, the casualty of a neurological disorder consequent to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome. Among the writings collected in this volume is the essay, “What is Enlightenment?” a previously unpublished lecture he had delivered the year before in Berkeley, while he was visiting professor at the University of California there, and had personally offered to the editor for the volume. It is an inquiry into an even more famous essay published exactly two hundred years earlier by Immanuel Kant: “Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?” Both thinkers, however “patient [their] labor,” it seems fair to say, were nonetheless characterized by a certain devotion to Enlightenment’s “impatience for liberty.” “Sapere aude!” Kant shouts in the first paragraph of his manifesto, daring his reader to know, to throw off the fetters of childhood, to stand tall on the firm, level, graded ground of maturity, to break through the walls of dogmatism. Foucault’s dare . . . is of a subtler but more transgressive kind.
Though Kant, too, understands Enlightenment to involve the crossing of certain customary boundaries, he is certain that it would be reckless to disturb proper boundaries. The mature know the difference. They do not wait for an authority to decree what they are to know, do, or hope—though, of course, as mature, they would never conduct their affairs with anything resembling anarchic intemperance. Certainly, if they are to be autonomous in any authentic sense of the term, their circumspective critiques of judgments, assumptions, procedures, conventions, and dogmas are not to be restricted—i.e., so long as they assiduously maintain the duties of their stations in life, e.g., as soldiers or taxpayers or clergymen. Just as a lieutenant must obey his orders, even if he later publicly critiques them, a clergyman must submit to the dogmas of the church to which he has pledged service, even though he, as a scholar, remains free all the while to publish reasonable arguments against them or in favor of alternatives. If he becomes convinced that what his church teaches is “contradictory to inner religion,” he is duty-bound to resign his post. The duties of his particular station in life are “private,” Kant says, and there he lacks liberty. However, as a thinker, he is also a citizen of the wider world. Here is his “public” life; here each man is free to think and to publish what he thinks, even though he is not free simply to act on it.
Foucault finds the fascination of Kant’s essay to lie not in its challenging, its daring, us to throw off our “self-incurred tutelage.” The Age is loud with recruitment officers for “reason.” What fascinates in this text, he maintains, is the manner by which it makes its call; in the way it approaches the time one is to shake off one’s childhood. That time, Kant says, is “today.” Kant’s today is not a box on a calendar or the representation of an era in a succession of eras. It is an “attitude,” “a mode of relating to contemporary reality . . . ; [indeed] a way of thinking and feeling.” It has force and specificity, i.e., it is “a voluntary choice . . . a way, too, of acting and behaving” “by certain people.” And “at one and the same time [it, first] marks a relation of belonging and [second] presents itself as a task.” It is thus from the first a battle against “attitudes of ‘countermodernity,’” ones that would bar the gates to freedom.
To clarify Kant’s vision, Foucault draws attention to the work of the nineteenth century poet, Charles Baudelaire. Baudelaire attends in a paradigmatically modern fashion to the temporary, the passage of time, the transient moment that appears and then disappears, that passes. However, he neither glories nor despairs in the ephemeral. Indeed, there is something in what passes that does not pass: for Baudelaire, “being modern . . . lies in . . . recapturing something eternal that is not beyond the present instant, nor behind it, but within it.” Modernity is as such an agonistic attitude—of boldness, of strength, indeed of “heroism”—before “the fleeting present.” “We are each of us celebrating some funeral,” Baudelaire writes, Foucault reminds us. Modernity is “the will to ‘heroize’ the present” precisely in the face of death! The modern man wills not to close the devouring jaws of time, but rather to seize out of them a substantial now—not to settle for appearance—but to pierce the façade of the moment that trembles before his gaze, in order to lay hold of its soul. “Baudelairean modernity is an exercise in which extreme attention to what is real is confronted with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects this reality and violates it.” To grasp the truth that waits in the “today” of ephemeral time, the modern man cannot remain as he is and has been; he must break out of his suffocating cocoon, rising to his full stature, assert himself, not as he was and is, but as he can become—i.e., if only he let his native power to create himself erupt. As for Kant, who shouts for the autonomy of the scholar, so also for Baudelaire, who shouts for the autonomy of the artist, such creativity does not set its sights on “the body politic,” but on something nobler, on the man himself—the man who would be autonomous—in his “permanent critique of our historical era.”
Foucault is here anything but nostalgic. He does not long for a return to the 18th or 19th century; he does not propose that we take up Enlightenment doctrines anew. That, too, would be a surrendering to dogmatism, “simplistic and authoritarian.” Yet he does call for a “permanent critique of ourselves” in the manner of Enlightenment, of modernity; not one, however, that looks for an elusive “essential kernel,” say, “of rationality,” or, to use Descartes’s metaphor, an immovably solid rock upon which to build. Rather our task—in our “today”—Foucault says, is to keep moving, to inquire historically into “what is not or is no longer indispensable for the constitution of ourselves as autonomous subjects,” i.e., to follow “a principle of a critique and a permanent creation of ourselves in our autonomy.” Unlike Kant, who would not counsel citizens to tamper with the duties of their assigned stations, Foucault looks hard for possibilities for the “transgression” of any constraint that is “singular, contingent, and . . . arbitrary,” looking indeed for “the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, and think.” That is, Foucault “is seeking to give new impetus . . . to the undefined work of freedom”—concretely, on the ground of the “contemporary reality” that we living human beings face; not some abstract, ethereal, and hitherto always mortally dangerous “global or radical” “project.” Certainly, this inquiry and experimentation in the transgression of historical limits will never be “complete and definitive,” it will always be “limited and determined”; “we are always in a position of beginning again.” But without an incisive, albeit tentative, historical critique of the ways we have been constituted as “subjects of . . . knowledge . . . [,] power relations . . . [, and] actions,” we are left with the intensification of those patterns that man and supply the containment forces that would keep us locked down and cut off from any “possibility of going beyond them.”
Two
At Max Yasgur’s dairy farm, in White Lake, New York, on August 15th, 1969, the first of what was advertised as “3 Days of Peace and Music,” the Woodstock Music & Art Fair opened. The unexpected volume of traffic it generated utterly overwhelmed every route to its rural venue. Its first act, guitarist and singer, Richie Havens, a descendant of Caribbean African slaves and of the Blackfoot people of the northern American Great Plains, was onsite, on time.
[EXT]As the festival’s first performer, he held the crowd for nearly three hours. In part, Havens was told to continue playing, because many artists scheduled to perform after him were delayed in reaching the festival location with highways at a virtual standstill. He was called back for several encores. Having run out of tunes, he improvised a song based on the old spiritual “Motherless Child” that became “Freedom.”[/EXT]
Neither of these songs, neither the spiritual nor its impromptu memorial, was formally composed. They rather happened, the way contingent events under pressure happen, the second an echo of the first, the first a lament from the strangled throats of slaves in the antebellum American Southeast, slaves ripped from their mother’s breasts, from their lovers’ arms, from their sisters’ sides, from their homes—and sold.
[EXT]1—O, sometimes I feel like a motherless child!
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child!
O, Lord!
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child!
Den I git down on my knees and pray, pray!
Git down on my knees and pray![/EXT]
The lament continues, calling out one deprivation after another:
[EXT]O, I wonder where my mother’s done gone . . . [and]
2—O, sometimes I feel like I’d never been borned . . . [and]
O, I wonder where my baby’s done gone . . . [and]
3—O, sometimes I feel like I’m a long ways from home . . . [and]
I wonder where my sister’s done gone . . . [and]
4—Sometimes I feel like a home-e-less child . . . [and]
I wonder where de preacher done gone . . . .[/EXT]
Each time voices call out, not to the God of the auction block and the whip, but to the God who heard and hears the cries of slaves, in the brickyards of Egypt, on the plantations of Atlanta, and—we might add—in the sweatshops and brothels of L.A.
[EXT]Den I git down on my knees and pray, pray!
Git down on my knees and pray![/EXT]
Richie Havens’s improvisational “Freedom” draws from the first and third verses of this song. It does not explicitly recall kneeling or spell out the word, “Lord”; but it laments. It is perhaps the extravagant repetition of the word, “freedom”—shouted eight and then ten times in a row—that carries it most dramatically into conversation with the allusions of “Motherless Child,” especially to the opening chapters of Exodus. Its even more abundant repetition of the word—“yeah”—constitutes its heart pounding “Amen!” Even the poetically awkward, “I’ve got a telephone in my bosom / And I can call him up from my heart,” yearns for the beloved who have been ripped away—“a long, long, long way.” In the footage of his performance featured in the documentary Woodstock the song is shown to end as Richie Havens, drenched in sweat, exhaustedly dances off the stage, all the while strumming his guitar with determined, rhythmic energy. The final lyrics, a call and often inaudible response, speak concretely to the ones toward whom this freedom yearns: “When I need my brother, brother / When I need my father, father / Hey, mother, mother / Hey, sister, yeah / When I need my brother, brother / Hey, mother, mother, mother / Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah.”
This freedom, the freedom of these two impassioned cries—neither of which was planned or formally composed, neither of which is agonistic, heroic, self-conscious, or plausibly seditious—this freedom differs from the freedom of the enlightened modern man of European reason. It does indeed revolt against the world order as it stands, the world order that—on the way to the auction block—would assign an exchange value to children, children who are about to be torn, root and branch, from their mothers and fathers. But it is not the freedom of one who would extrapolate a future from a dissected and monetized past and present. It is not the freedom of an aloof observer, a free agent, an analyst, a social engineer, a hacker, or a mole deeply embedded within the official channels of approved quid pro quo. It is not the freedom of the well heeled, the freedom to leverage investment opportunities, to exploit weak links, kinks in armor, soft underbellies, cracks in walls, signs of encroaching obsolescence, of a weakening grip, of a warder’s inattention, of an unlocked gate, of a sheltered path, of a new day for autonomy. It is the freedom, rather, that sings . . . apocalypses, that sways to the music of apocalypses, that imagines this fractured world through apocalypses, that does the sacramental work of apocalypses (Heb 11:1, 12:1–2). It is the freedom that would—without getting even, without shedding blood, without demolition professionals, and without the lawyers of thermodynamics—bring down the walls that enforce border policy and quarantine the outsider.
Three
The Oxford English Dictionary surprises no one, when it defines “dogma, n.” as “An opinion, a belief; [specifically] a tenet or doctrine authoritatively laid down, [especially] by a church or sect. Also: an imperious or arrogant declaration of opinion.” And this, our contemporary usage, does not significantly deviate from the formal, public trajectory of the word since the time Caesars and High Priests commanded the poor of Galilee to be taxed. In the ancient Hellenophone world, though dogma often signified what “seems right or reasonable, . . . [especially] of philosophical doctrines,” “[u]sually the emphasis [in the extant texts from that time] lies on the fact of ‘publishing a decree,’ i.e., [an] ‘official ordinance or edict’: of the king, . . . of the emperor, . . . [or] of the senate . . . . [In Philo and Josephus] Torah becomes a system comparable with the dogmata of philosophy.”
Seated thus in a tradition of the great and powerful whose interdiction the small and weak know as threat and injury, “dogma” would not likely stand out favorably to one whose knee would bend only to a dis-closing God, a God who breaks into an otherwise colonized, subjugated world, a God who sets captives free, who transgresses boundaries, who is pleased to dwell in the dis-integrated body of Jesus. It is, therefore, not unexpected that dogma fails to be seen in a favorable light in two Pauline epistles. Colossians 2:13–15: “And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with [Christ], when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands [dogmasin]. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.” Ephesians 2:14–16: “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances [dogmasin], that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it.” In these two passages, then, dogmas are said to be “nailed to the cross” and “abolished . . . through the cross.” These, to be more specific, are dogmas that condemn us, that divide us from and set us against one another. Yet do dogmas function otherwise? Is it not their only function to set up boundaries that we are not to transgress? What in any dogma might incline otherwise? Could a dogma do anything other than set up a “dividing wall”? Is it possible to imagine a dogma otherwise than as a conclusion?
Luke-Acts is the only other place in the New Testament where the term is used. Luke 2:1 and Acts 17:7 use it to speak of the decrees of Caesar. The latter sets the activity of the church—“people who have been turning the world upside down”—in direct opposition to the decrees [dogmato[set macron over the o]n] of the emperor,” viz., by their obeisance to Jesus rather than to him. Here, too, dogmas seize and crush us, though this time in Rome’s fist, not Jerusalem’s. However, Acts 16:4, the only other place in the New Testament the word is used, is perhaps more ambiguous: “As [Paul and Timothy] went from town to town, they delivered to them for observance the decisions [dogmata] that had been reached by the apostles and elders who were in Jerusalem.” The question here is whether this usage of dogmata resonates or clashes with its imperial usage. Does Luke-Acts here imagine walls buttressed or breached? Inasmuch as the dogmata of the apostles and elders had everything to do with yielding to the extraordinary work of the Holy Spirit among Gentiles—with releasing them from any requirement of circumcision or other adherence to “the law of Moses” (Acts 15:5), with drawing them, no longer as a threat and adversary, into the widening history of Israel—metaphors of control or exclusion or confinement hardly seem apt. These apostolic dogmata seem rather hastily cut avenues for the free acknowledgement of the prodigious influx of the Spirit and, by the Spirit, of those, now intermingling, who otherwise would simply recoil from or lay into each other.
A dogma that would set out to regulate the Holy Spirit of Luke-Acts would be a kind of blasphemy (Luke 12:10–12), a kind of falsehood (Acts 5:1–10), a kind of malign, strategic buyout plan (Acts 8:17–19), in any case a vain evasion of the Spirit. One wonders how anyone, however swift, might go about evading the Spirit without vanity. You “may as well try and catch the wind.” But what about the word “dogma” would suggest an open—rather than a closed—hand? Is it even logically possible to think and speak of a dogma of the Holy Spirit—even of a dogma so seemingly unrestrained as that the Holy Spirit is to be “worshiped and glorified [sumproskunoumenon kai sundoxazomenon] together with the Father and the Son,” as it is put in the creed of the First Council of Constantinople—the most overtly pneumatological of the ecumenical symbols?
Four
In 1963, in his 70th year, two decades prior to Foucault’s delivering “What is Enlightenment?” Georges Florovsky, while professor at Harvard Divinity School, far from his native Odessa, published an essay in the Greek Orthodox Theological Review that examined, among other things, the manner of emergence of the dogma of the deity of the Holy Spirit in the 4th century, i.e., on the way to the First Council of Constantinople (381), chiefly by adding a few lines to the Nicene supplementation, half a century earlier, of longstanding baptismal credos. Florovsky draws attention to the way Basil of Caesarea, in his treatise, On the Holy Spirit, distinguishes between ke[set macron over the e]rygma and dogma. The only significant difference between the terms, for Basil, is that ke[set macron over the e]rygma, quite often translated into English as “proclamation,” is “publicized,” while dogma is “unwritten” and “silent.” “This was a tradition that was handed down to neophytes in mystery and had to be kept in silence.” Dogmas, Basil maintains, are sacramental, liturgical, ecclesial, pneumatological; they are thus mysteries, by definition, never captured in the ipsissima verba, say, of scripture or of creed, i.e., in the abstract. No matter how honored by time, decree, saint, and martyr, words in themselves, on the page in a closed book or repeated by rote, do not carry with them the way of life in which they are to do their work. That is, dogmas are to be understood as they are lived.
This is not new with Basil; already Irenaeus maintained that scripture is alive only as it lives in a:
[EXT]“living tradition” entrusted as a new breath of life, just as breath was bestowed on the first man. . . . The use of tradition in the ancient church can be adequately understood only in the context of . . . actual use . . . . The Word was kept alive in the church. It was reflected in her life and structure. Faith and life were [understood to be] organically intertwined. . . . “Liturgy,” in the wide and comprehensive sense of the word, was the first and initial layer in the tradition of the church, and the argument from the lex orandi (rule of worship) was persistently used in discussion already by the end of the second century.[/EXT]
What will have been said and written and memorized will not have captured the sacramental act of testimony, of saying. Thus to testify, as a martyr might—e.g., that the Holy Spirit is to be worshipped and glorified together with the Father and the Son—is by the breath of the Spirit in and with whom the liturgical utterance of the symbol of Constantinople prays the baptized will always be gifted—by God’s good pleasure, as an act of life, in the anointing with oil.
Protestants, Enlightenment deists, rationalists, and naturalists, and “new atheists” are not the only ones who shake their heads before the phrase, “secret tradition.” It does not take a cynic to regard it as an ace up the sleeve of an authorized ecclesiastical enforcer, who is ready to slap it on the table, when the stakes are high enough. And yet a secret that remains secret, a mystery that remains mystery, a breath that will not be held without asphyxia, a speaking that does not settle into a line item on the transcript of a private business meeting of a closed fraternal society, will never lie in wait up anyone’s sleeve or win a bet. It will rather always slip through the grasping fingers of those with plans and schemes, as Ananias, Sapphira, the Lucan Pharisees, and Simon the Magician discovered. This is not to say that the theologian must cease teaching, say, the symbols of the church. The theologian is not to cease gesturing toward them and with them: telling, showing, pointing, pointing out. It is to say that theologians are expected to know how to keep a secret—or not this, but rather to understand that there is a secret that they cannot keep . . . or tell. Their task in fact is to gesture, to tell, to show, as often and in as many ways as an ephemeral occasion opens up, that there is a secret that they cannot by any means keep or tell. From Paris, where he lived in exile, studied, and taught, Russian Orthodox theologian, Vladimir Lossky, at the chronological midpoint between his birth in 1903 and Foucault’s Berkeley lecture, wrote of all theological discourse: “The dogma of the Trinity is a cross for human ways of thought. The apophatic ascent is a mounting of Calvary.”
Five
In 2010, six years after passing fruitfully through and beyond her Ph.D. program at Atlanta’s Candler School of Theology, Shelly Rambo, then Assistant Professor, in the Cradle of Liberty, at Boston University, published Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. It is, among other things, a pneumatology of Holy Saturday, that temporally twilit, restlessly silent, bracketed space between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, that day when the promise of a light not yet seen plays unheard on a pitch black needle’s point singularity. It is the day that halts the ordinarily relentless, linear progression from early Friday through late Sunday. It is the day that will not concede, when the living won’t stay alive and the dead won’t stay dead. It is the day of tarrying, abiding, the day of “remaining.” “On the one side, there is death in Godforsakenness; on the other, there is eternal life. To get from one side to the other, we need a means of crossing. But Holy Saturday declares the impossibility of bridging the two.” The gospel is above all the tale of the embrace of the Father and the Son, but Holy Saturday is “the point at which . . . the love between Father and Son . . . is most fragile.” Yet how—when the body of the Son, newly pried from the rough hewn cross, lies cold, limp, and dead—does their embrace not break, how is it not reduced to a Pietà with God the Father in the role of Mary? By what inarticulable miracle, by what defiance of the sweep of the second hand, could the Holy Spirit hover over the face of these chaotic waters—not bridging the wide chasm between them, but rather—without mechanics—bearing witness?
However, there is no direct, unambiguous witness to what is said to have transpired in, with, and under this peasant body—crucified, dead, and buried. Even on Easter Sunday, according to John’s resurrection narrative, Mary of Magdala struggled both to see and to understand, as she sat before the empty tomb in the hour just before dawn. She knew Jesus at once, not at first, but unquestionably after he called her name—though at no time did she reach out, as she could have, and touch him, she would testify (John 20:16–17). Distance, darkness, tears, disorientation, the failure of speech, ambiguities of many kinds, would call into question her reliability as a witness either for the prosecution or for the defense. Her testimony would crumble under cross-examination. The events of these days don’t become useful or persuasive discourse, convincing to a dispassionate mind. Indeed, they mark “life in ways that cannot be cognitively grasped.”
Jesus had earlier told his disciples, as he bid them farewell, that they were to remain in him, in his love. And he told them that, even with his departure, he would not leave them alone, but would send another paraclete to them, one who would come alongside them, one who would dwell in them, remain in them, witness to him, as they became witnesses. “As witnesses, [however, they] experience the dismantling of sight, sound, and touch in the wake of the passion; it is through, rather than despite, these obstructions that they witness to life where life is not recognizable as such.”
[EXT]In the biblical accounts . . . [Spirit] signals God’s presence in and with creation. . . . Jesus gives up his spirit, his breath, on the cross. . . . But the . . . breath of death . . . becomes the breath of witness to what remains . . . as a testimony to the inextinguishable remainder of divine love. This breath powers a testimony to what is unknown, unaccounted for . . . unsaid, unspoken, and inaccessible through language . . . [a testimony] that the Pauline text describes through the word “prayer” . . . . In the middle, love is reworked as a . . . love that remains, that persists, that survives . . . a death.[/EXT]
Rambo writes always mindful of those who suffer trauma, the trauma of war, of torture, of rape, of earthquake and hurricane, the trauma that breaks the body and the cognitive processes by which memory and hope, inside and outside, you and I meet and interplay, the trauma that breaks time and language. Holy Saturday speaks in particular to the traumatized, she maintains, those who do not have to be told that there is a blow that severs the body from its people, who do not have to be told that there is a dark past that will not stay in the past, who do not have to be told that there are words that won’t be spoken, who do not have to be told that there is a trust, bound in chains, that in stirring awakens headless giants who drag it by its bonds irresistibly back into the shadows. “Trauma tells us that death returns, haunting the life that follows. In trauma, ‘death’ persists in life.” She remembers the traumatized as she remembers the Spirit of Holy Saturday and those who by the Spirit, as witnesses, remain in the darkness.
]EXT]Spirit is the breath that cannot be cut off, that does not cease . . . that . . . is handed over into the depths, [where] there are middle-day witnesses who receive that breath. . . . The middle space is the descent into hell, the furthest reaches from all sources of life. . . . The trackless trek of the Son in hell was not active and victorious. The trickle of love . . . was an image of . . . love’s persistence. . . . This transformation, this redemption . . . , is not about deliverance from the depths but, instead, about a way of being in the depths, a practice of witnessing that senses life arising amid what remains. . . . Perhaps the divine story is neither a tragic one nor a triumphant one but, in fact, . . . the story of love that survives.[/EXT]
Six
Long, long before any of us uttered the first semblance of a vowel or consonant or found rhythm in her belly and throat, on her tongue and lips, through her hands and feet, her shoulders and her hips, long before she named the shadow marks of the lightning bolts released by intracranial storms to dance fleetingly across one after another ugly broad synaptic ditch, language held her, held me, held you, warmed and carried us, startled and comforted us, initiated us into deep pre-articulate ancestral secrets, softly and solemnly promising us times and places yet to come. We have always dwelt in language. It is our abode, our extended household, our neighborhood, our village, our tribe, our world—it is our home. It is the cosmos out of chaos—and it surveils us, keeps us, and guards us; polices us. It would have us carry on in a straight line or make an abrupt change of course.
It does so, certainly, in manifold ways. It does not need to generate, e.g., a special vocabulary in order to keep us safe and in place or to convince us that we are moving boldly out into uncharted territory. Familiar, ordinary, discourse works just fine. The most unequivocally orthodox identity markers—such as the phrase, “I am orthodox,” and the performances that are expected to accompany it—may work upheaval; the most unequivocally heretical ones—such as “I am heretical,” and its expected performances—may work retrenchment—the former shape-shifting into the improvised explosive devices of insurgency, the latter into the patented riot gear, rubber bullets, and tear gas of homeland security. The turn may occur subtly. It may be enough to narrow the eyes, to set the jaw, and to add a certain cadence and intonation, perhaps fashionably accessorizing frightened flesh with the cloak of world-weary irony and derision.
What we say and what we write are never simply as they seem. Indeed, there may not be an utterance, no matter how apparently blandly benign, that is not Janus-faced, that may not from time to time (and perhaps every time) signify up to 180º of variance from its pocket dictionary angle of signification.
Still, words do not come and go arbitrarily; they tend, they lean; they move with mass, velocity, and spin, their momentum transposed to other words with which they collide in discursive play. What a word will have done in particular, as it moves toward and into other words, marking them, being marked by them, is not always easily ascertained in advance. “The right word” is sometimes hard to find and not uncommonly, with its forthcoming, is acknowledged to be right less by adjudication from a lonely distance than by listening, memorially, for echoes and sound signatures—up close, intently, perhaps among passionately thoughtful friends.
Words configure variously, as they are used. There are complex patterns of family resemblance, but there are also the traces of their near and more remote ancestry, however illegitimate. (Even bastard words have ancestry.) As we hear tales of the historic journeys of familiar words, there may be moments when we, as if in talk therapy, are granted insight into what has been subtly at work in them all along. Thus, despite its contradiction to the ideal of independence and autonomy, there is something right about the day of discovery that the word “free” and the word “friend” have a common forebear. Of course, a word’s etymology is by no means always significantly at play in its usage, any more than the patterns of the childhood of one’s great grandmother, a slave, say, in antebellum Atlanta or the British West Indies, significantly shapes one’s way of reacting to the derisive asides of a colleague during a professional meeting. However, there are times—and times between the times—when the past will not stay in the past, times when what we would have sworn was dead and gone rises to walk among the living, not as a ghost or some other cold apparition, but as a warm, living word.
Storytelling and songwriting, composing textbooks and sonnets or free verse, but also smiling and gesturing with one’s hand, and, of course, the keying of theological prose into an electronic memory are all at the mercy of discourse. Even the theologian who would dare to speak of what has no place in any system of signifiers does so at the mercy of discourse, even if on occasion and after the fact its merchants would swear that they had been swindled. Still, at the risk of the appearance of ingratitude, when without calculative forecast a theologian, the upper limits of whose world have been ruptured from an impossible apocalyptic outside, writes of what cannot be written, writes of an uncanny life that will not be contradicted by death, it is difficult to understand how she might without unfaithfulness turn around and take any “tenet or doctrine” as “authoritatively laid down,” especially “by a church,” as anything but “an imperious or arrogant declaration of opinion” that denies, after it betrays, one into whom, through a rent sky, the Holy Spirit has descended like a dove. There would in fact be for her no mountain of dogma, of imperial or philosophical or ecclesiastical decree, that would not be cast into the sea—with Pharaoh’s army and the mountain upon which stood the temple that barred its doors to strangers and eunuchs. Yet she would also work trusting that the sea is in the end to give up its dead. And she would perhaps also admit that every language at the mercy of which she conducts theological work is an often subtle, but no less insidious, system of tenets and doctrines authoritatively laid down by some tribe of signatories. What she might do with tenets and doctrines, with dogmas, whatever their kind, trending or not, would and could rest on no established authorization; for when what is to come comes intemperately to make everything new, everything is disestablished—on that day, but also now by the audacity of a hope at work even in these fragmentary in-between days. Dogmas are to rise, but with all that is dust and ashes, with all that is human and humble and humous, into a glory not their own, a glory that would shine in a pariah’s city without sun or temple, without magistrate or jury or executioner, without threat or fear. Even now, so far from sanctuary, such a theologian might look upon the dogmas of her ecclesial household not as authorized decrees, but as hastily written baptismal letters of martyrs witnessing to a coming insurrection.
If the emperor’s old clothes, red or yellow, black or white, are there for all to see after the last scrap of imperious garb has been pealed away from dogma, what kind of nakedness remains? Perhaps something humble—and the origins of dogma are indeed humble, as may be glimpsed already in its primary ancient Greek denotation, “that which seems right or reasonable, opinion or belief.” It is a descendant of an even more humble Greek word, dokeo[set macron over the o], which Plato takes in the Gorgias as “merely to seem” and contrasts with einai, “to be.” From dokeo[set macron over the o] is also derived another and quite similarly ambiguous word doxa that, as “mere appearance,” is contrasted in Plato, this time in the Republic, with ousia, a word that is in Aristotle to become the marker of “being.” Yet doxa is also the word used in the Septuagint and the New Testament for “glory,” the radiant disclosure of the holiness of Yahweh, a holiness that by Yahweh’s good pleasure the creature may enter and with which she or he or it may be gifted, but which none can or may ever claim, own, possess, appropriate. To say “holy,” to say “glory,” is to speak not of something generic, e.g., a universal divinity, but of the insubordinate particularity of Yahweh, the one who chose Israel, the one who liberated Israel, the one who promised Israel a future—when Israel was nobody at all. Yahweh’s radiant doxa is the coming of that one, that one who will have always come—truly come—to Israel and Israel’s legitimate and illegitimate children, as the graceful God they—we!—are not and never will be.
If dogma, as Basil maintains, is sacramental, a mystery that remains, a mystery that never settles into the all-purpose public discourse, say, of the marketplace, a mystery that signifies only as its offering is greeted and welcomed, that signifies only as it prays by the breath of the Spirit of holiness, that prays only as a gifted hallowing work, and then, as with all sacramental works, to glorify the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, then it is to be performed in the Spirit through the Son to the Father of doxology. However, any doxological movement out into the Holy Trinity of Holy Saturday is as surely a movement out into this ravaged earth, as leaping into a swollen, raging river is a movement downstream. This glory is an abiding mystery, one that remains unspeakably with the lost and the lonely, the poor and the dying, the despoiled and the despised. It is dumb (as a sheep before her shearers); in part because where a body—hands and feet, face and back, belly and brain—is cast down, there is silence. Even though surely universal compassion always has the right thing to say, here where universality stands with blood up to its elbows, a particular lover would let all eloquence go, deferring to mutilated hearts and souls and minds and strength, to queer sisters and queer brothers who, blank-faced, on hard times, under the lash—in the space between willing and unwilling—have learned to forget how to speak. It is here that dogma is to shine, in this darkness. It is to pray, to kneel, to bow its head, blindly exposing its neck to a fatal blow. Dogma is for broken people, survivors whose survival remains uncertain. Dogma is a word unspoken (even when spoken), a word whose breath, released, trailing off, is given to be heard (if heard) as the “nevertheless” of Gethsemane.
As much anxiety as such talk must evoke in the enlightened, a dogma that will not leave the side of glory—a para-doxa—works with a kind of freedom that demands neither independence from nor mastery of others, that demands neither a law inscribed upon its own Kantian practical reason nor the satisfying inclusiveness of a Hegelian an und für sich, that demands neither construction on a Cartesian solid rock foundation nor deconstruction in a condominium crowded with unraveled yarn. It is a freedom that—without mediating the otherness of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—calls out, agape—never mediating, but reaching out to embrace one who without being assimilated would nonetheless be my brother, father, mother, or sister. “When I need my brother, brother / When I need my father, father / Hey, mother, mother / Hey, sister, yeah / When I need my brother, brother / Hey, mother, mother, mother / Hey, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah.”
The freedom of this uncanny dogma would thus resound with the prayers at play in texts with which ancient Israel traditioned its children: “The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out.” The freedom of this dogma is the freedom of a particular hope that remembers that, “Out of slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them” (Exod 2:23–25). It is the freedom that cries out in hope for the coming of a paraclete—the way a farmer during a drought, alone in a dusty field, might raise her face to shout at the sky for a wind bearing dark clouds heavy with rain. It is the freedom that stands up to the coming God before the powers that presume to make and unmake the future. It is the freedom that, standing up, declares, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go,’” understanding that these powers will not understand why those who remember that they are as insubstantial as dust would ever long to “celebrate a festival to [some deity so unlike any of us—and of all places] in the wilderness’” (Exod 5:1; cf. 2).
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