“The No to Nothing, and the Nothing to Know”: Immanent Transcendence as Eschatological Mystery

B Putt

doi:10.3390/rel8040064

Abstract

At an annual American Academy of Religion conference thirty years ago, Robert Scharlemann presented a paper in which he compared and contrasted Barth and Tillich with reference to how they named God in their respective theologies. He suggested that the former labeled God the “no to nothing,” while the latter symbolized God as the “nothing to know”—appellations out of which he formed his presentation title “The No to Nothing and the Nothing to Know: Barth and Tillich and the Possibility of Theological Science.” I have purloined Scharlemann’s title for my own essay, with the intent not only to maintain its theological implications but also to use it as a rubric for prosecuting the putative relationships that obtain among anticipation, nihilism, transcendence, mystery, and eschatology. If there are various species of transcendence, and if one can use and not merely mention the word “mystery” in some constative manner, then how may one speak of the actuality and potentiality of meaning? Is there a futurity to existential significance that empowers a life-affirming hope, which, in turn, embraces the inescapability of the “nothing” without plunging, or leaping, into the abyss of nihilism—the “no to nothing?” Alternatively, may one genuinely anticipate eschatological aspirations while remaining open to the enigma of the unprogrammable aleatoric “to come”—the “nothing to know?” Furthermore, how might one name “God” under either of these circumstances, even were one not to hold to any type of confessional theological ontology? Using John Caputo’s radical theology of the insistence of “God” as my Virgil (or Beatrice, which ever applies!) to guide us through the various paths one might take towards a genuine hope, I propose to investigate the plurivocity of discourses on meaning by inter-relating Caputo’s “nihilism of grace” with several supplementary works, including Ray Hart’s God Being Nothing, Amie Thomasson’s Fiction and Metaphysics, Stuart Kaufmann’s Humanity in a Creative Universe, Catherine Keller’s Cloud of the Impossible, and Richard Kearney’s Anatheism. Additionally, I will also consult aesthetic vocabularies that address the issue, specifically the poetry of Robert Browning, Dan Fogelberg, and Wallace Stevens, along with the Abstract Expressionist work of Mark Rothko. I will conclude the essay by suggesting that although one may expound on the desire for existential meaning through diverse discourses, if there is genuinely any realization of that meaning, it will occur regardless of how it is articulated. That is to say, the creative and transformative function of any transcendent meaning may work ex opere operato in a manner similar to Shakespeare’s rose that does not depend on one exclusive naming.

Highlights

Scharlemann presented a paper in which he compared and contrasted Barth and Tillich with reference to how they named God in their respective theologies
God does play dice, a game of chance with grace” (Caputo 2013, p. 237). This eschatology of grace does not grant Caputo special knowledge about the foundations for a resolution or redemption of human existence. It remains a theology of the “perhaps,” an anarchical denouement that never ceases, even a “sacred anarchy” that promotes establishing both “God” and the divine Kingdom through acts of mercy that portend the messianic coming of a future that cannot be foreknown
Redemption as a check on the deleterious effects of a genuine nihilism depends upon an unfinished creation, one that remains exposed to difference and alterity, to acts of mercy and grace, and to any attempt to fulfill the autotelic essence of life itself

Summary

An Insistent Summons from Beyond

A cursory reading of Caputo’s radical theology might lead to the opinion that he rejects tout court any residual talk about transcendence, given that he so strongly critiques traditional metaphysical theism with its arguments and conclusions about the existence and superior essence of an entitative deity (Caputo 2013, p. 101). One may reject the reality of God as a singular being that transcends the space-time universe, one need not reject that God has a fictional reality, with certain perdurable traits, that functions as the guarantor of meaning and possibility in various literary narratives In a way, such a transfictional theism connects with Caputo’s recent emphasis on Hegel’s idea of Vorstellungen. Julia Davis would condense the aesthetic transcendence in Rothko’s works to the efficacy of “clouds” as a symbol for Rothko’s approach She specifies that he uses the word in certain titles, for example, Blue Cloud, 1956 and Light Cloud, Dark Cloud, 1957; she applies the word to the broader apophatic qualities of his classical period. The apophatic entanglement among artist, canvas, and spectator, habitually establishes a belief in a putative transcendence that transcendentally ratifies a no to nothing while leaving open the ambiguity of a nothing to know

The “Nihilism of Grace” as the End of “Why”

The Sacramental No to Nothing