-I-
I wrote before about Alienation, Voiding and the Void. I had hoped to return to this topic days later, to cover more ground, but it would seem that it has taken me weeks -- almost a month -- to come back to it.
I did not start thinking about this by consciously thinking about it. I started to process this indirectly in my emotional life, in my visceral reaction to a TV show, the recent re-make of Battlestar Galactica (official site here).
Battlestar Galactica, which is set thousands of years in the past, begins with an attack on the "12 Colonies," the homeworlds of humans, by a race of robots engineered as human beings called "Cylons." The Cylons, who appear human, infiltrate the defenses of the homeworlds and attack, wiping out the planets. Only a little over 50,000 people survive, and immediately they are on the run, hastening through the Void of space, ever alert for the occasional and unpredictable arrival of the Cylons, who are sure to appear if they linger anywhere in the Void too long. The captain of the sole military vessel protecting the surviving caravan of civilian ships eventually claims (falsely) to know the location of the legendary planet Earth, which a 13th Colony was said to have traveled to thousands of years ago.
Nothing is certain. Cylons might attack at any moment, leadership is faced with administrative decisions that have heavy amounts of gray in them, the civilian and military populations have domestic problems that make any real community (not to mention relationships between two people) difficult if not nearly impossible to create and maintain. When things hold together, it is a precarious stability. Hope and purpose are precious and in short supply. The payoff of Earth is a faint and often unreasonable hope, the pilgrimage there punctuated by violence within and without, and the Void through which they travel, even if it does not smother hope or the truth of their hope, certainly voids many lives and relationships along the way. I cannot yet tell you how it ends, but if there is a bright ending, it will be eclipsed with the shadow of the Void, with the darkness that so many have fallen into.
-II-
What is going on in this show is an affective and visual expression of certain methodological (and perhaps ontological?) principles of Modernity, one of which is outlined by Adorno in his work, "Why Still Philosophy?" (the first entry in the compilation Critical Models). There Adorno writes:
After everything, the only responsible philosophy is one that no longer imagines it had the Absolute at its command; indeed philosophy must forbid the thought of it in order not to betray that thought, and at the same time it must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth. This contradiction is philosophy's element. It defines philosophy as negative. Kant's famous dictum that the critical path is the only one still open to us belongs to those propositions constituting a philosophy that proves itself because the propositions, as fragments, survive beyond the system that conceived them.
Truth only appears negatively. Truth is only disclosed when reality falsifies the maps and concepts we have of the world, or else when we critique these, and in critique, we see that our maps and our concepts break upon the shoals of reality and that reality shows up only in the cracks of these broken systems, whose propositional contents become debris that are changed and made the material for a new unity. As debris from a former map or concept, they show the truth negatively. Truth, however, remains inaccessible to thought or experience except when it is pursued negatively, except when hunted by critique. We shall never catch our quarry, but must always prize it Absolutely while we smash every appearance of it, or wait for the idols of these appearances to be dissolved (Adorno elsewhere talks about the second commandment in the context of endorsing unbelief -- not as justifying it, but as though unbelief is a form of the second commandment that goes well beyond what was originally envisaged).
-III-
It is in the context of such a model of the world that I would locate the trend in modern biblical studies that Wolfhart Pannenberg rightly identifies in his work, The Crisis of the Scripture Principle, one of his essays in Volume 1 of his "Basic Questions in Theology." There he seems to show that modernity has identified the Absolute as history, and has thus tried to have its thinking provisionally reach this Absolute through the debris of evidence that has come down to it. Re-assembling a historical moment seems ever-elusive, however, and Pannenberg looks for a way to bridge the inaccessible past and the present moment without misrepresenting the former:
What is today called historical-critical exegesis is, according to its goal, simply the endeavor to understand the biblical writings -- the intention and content of their statements -- out of themselves. The doctrine of the clarity of Scripture necessarily led to the demand that each theological statement should be based on the historical-critical exposition of Scripture. Nevertheless, the development of historical research led to the dissolution of the Scripture principle in the form Protestant scholasticism had given to it, and thereby brought on the crisis in the foundations of evangelical theology which has become more and more acute during the past century or so.
The modern view of the relation of theology to the biblical writings differs from Luther's in two respects. First, for Luther the literal sense of the Scriptures was still identical with their historical content. For us, on the contrary, these two matters have become separated. The picture of Jesus and his history which the various New Testament writers give us cannot, without further qualification, be regarded as identical with the actual course of events. The second difference is linked with the first. Luther could still identify his own doctrine with the content of the biblical writings, literally understood. For us, on the contrary, it is impossible to overlook the historical distance between every possible theology today and the primitive Christian period. This distance has become the source of our most vexing theological problems.
He soon continues:
For our historical consciousness, the "essential content" of Scripture which Luther had in mind, viz., the person and history of Jesus, is no longer to be found in the texts themselves, but must be discovered behind them. Thus, the question arose for theology as to which is now to be considered theologically normative, the biblical texts themselves or the history to be discovered behind them.
and again:
The gulf between fact and significance, between history and kerygma [preaching or proclamation], between the history of Jesus and the multiplicity of the New Testament witness to it, marks one side of the problem of theology today. On the other side is the equally deep gulf between the intellectual milieu of the New Testament texts and that of our own present age. We have already seen that these two aspects are intimately related. They have their common root in the exegetical principle that the contents of the biblical writings are to be understood first of all solely as their authors intended them to be understood and as their original readers understood them. By setting up this exegetical goal, however, the consciousness of the difference between the present situation of the interpreter and the intellectual world of the biblical texts will be continually deepened. And this must happen if one wants to understand what these texts mean in themselves. The only question is how the gulf created by this method can be bridged. Once it has become conscious of the depth of this gulf, no theology can understand itself any longer as "biblical" in the naive sense, as if it could be materially identical with the conceptions of Paul or John.
He does not even think that one can repeat Luther as a solution, for "in a changed situation, the traditional phrases, even when recited literally, do not mean what they did at the time of their original formulation."
Pannenberg thinks that the Absolute solution to this problem is eschatological, as only the Eschaton is the Absolute because in the Eschaton all history is present in and with God eternally and contemporaneously, and perfected. Until then, all truth claims are provisional. This may sound depressing, especially if one is looking for "solid ground" or even "proof" of such things regarding the Absolute that one may stand firmly upon, but "the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head," and we must keep our eyes upon Him and our hands laboring with Him and our feet following His.
-IV-
We can see, already, how the elusive problem of truth resonates with the elusive hope of Earth in Battlestar Galactica, and how the violence of Voiding every system (not only conceptual, but social and policital) in the pursuit of the goal is similar in form to the violence of the Void through which the Galactica sustains, both her crew and the fleet under her supervision. As I said in my former post, the Void becomes a practical absolute, and we understand it to be leading us closer to truth. Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not and is luring us out to our death, but we should not mistake it for merely a "method." It is most certainly a god. But will it turn out to be an angel or a demon, or do the demons wreak havoc by imitating this angel, only to void things that are good and life-giving, leading us by deathly lights down to the Gates of the City of She'ol?
N. T. Wright writes in "The Last Word" about "Postmodernists" (they are not really Post-modernists, but Hyper-modernists, if anything -- see Julian Young on Heidegger) constantly -- endlessly -- casting scripture in a new light, placing the biblical texts in new (and often inappropriate) contexts to see how it appears:
Postmodernity's effect on contemporary Western readings of scripture is thus, as with much else in the movement, essentially negative. Postmodernity agrees with modernity in scorning both the eschatological claim of Christiaity and its solution ot the problem of evil, but without putting any alternative in place. All we can do with the Bible, if postmodernity is left in charge, is to play with such texts as give us pleasure, and issue warnings against those that give pain to ourselves or to others who attract our (usually selective) sympathy. This is where a good deal of the Western church now finds itself. The fact that this position is merely assumed, not usually spelled out, makes it all the more potent, since post-modernity is currently what "feels right" in Western culture, and does not open itself to challenge by coming out into the open. Indeed, challenges are routinely dismissed as an attempt to go back to modernity or even pre-modernity, leaving us with a fine irony: an ideology which declares that all ideologies are power-plays, yet which sustains its own position by ruling out all challenges a priori.
This is, of course, exactly the situation that one finds in the Battlestar Galactica series by those who doubt that there is an Earth out there to which they are going, and who think that simply fleeing the Cylons aimlessly to enjoy the time that remains is the only goal. During times of widespread doubt that there is an Earth that the ship is going to, widespread panic and disaster begin to ensue.
-V-
There was music in the 20/30-something coffee shop I was in several weeks ago -- Radiohead-ish music, capturing the feeling of a new romance, a new venture, full of possibility and blinding light's dissolutions. It is always the new, always the newness of things that are felt like this, meaning that both "old" new things and the feelings attending them are voided as soon as they are not new, in favor of yet another new thing that can provide this feeling of "engagement" and initial thrill. A moderate degree of this is wise and good, insofar as we constantly seek new skills and new activities, new virtues. It becomes pathological when it forever uproots what came before, when former new things are constantly jettisoned and discarded, a revolving door, as America does. Consumer habits. The thrill of the airport and the new venture. Strong flavors and a Grocery Store aisle for sauces. There is no taste for wine or cheese, so to speak; no patience to remain faithful to something and age it to perfection. Speaking metaphorically with the imagery of Battlestar Galactica, there is no hope for Earth, there are only pleasures in the vacuum, and ultimately, terror.
This is the chief god we inhabit in modernity, and he only reveals himself negatively, manifested in so many effects. We as a culture love science because, in such a context, it appears to offer us the certainty we so desperately long for. We as a culture fear science because of what it has shown it can destroy, and because we fear that it will translate us into a context that well-expresses the enemy it was supposed to fight -- a chaotic, irrational, capricious Nominalist God, together with all the agnosticism about the world that Nominalism and it's God entail -- a feared context that is ignorance, dissolution and an inhuman, mechanical meaninglessness...the Void. In the end, of course, the humans made the Cylons who destroyed their world, and who hunt them.
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