Total Presence by Thomas J. J. Altizer

Abstract

492 BOOK REVIEWS Total Presence is Thomas Altizer's seventh book. He is one of the few THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER. New York: Seabury Press, 1980. Pp. 108. Total Presence is Thomas Altizer's seventh book. He is one of the few well-known contemporary American theologians who have produced a sizable body of work devoted to the elaboration of a single theological vision. Unfortunately, Altizer in his latest book comes no closer than before to giving us a convincing or even fully intelligible presentation of his vision. Altizer is continuing to elaborate the eschatological understanding of the Christian message and of Western history developed ten years ago in his The Descent into Hell. New in this book is his focus on the parables of Jesus. Altizer finds in these parables 'antistories ' which negate everything previously recognizable as meaning or identity. They actualize a presence that is total and that negates all horizons beyond the pure immediacy of its speech. In these parables, the Kingdom of God is immediately at hand. The eschatological message of Jesus is lost in the Church's pyrrhic victory over the Hellenistic vision. It is recaptured only in the modern revolution that has its roots in medieval apocalypticism, reaches its fullest philosophical expression in Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and is embodied in contemporary avant-garde poetry, painting, and music. The central targets of this revolution are, on the one hand, a transcendent God who can be spoken of as something other than totally and immediately present and, on the other, an interior, self-conscious center of individual identity. These interrelated concepts had an important part to play in the dialectical history of consciousness, but they are now dissolving and must dissolve before the advent of a new, total, and immediate identity in which God and humanity are anonymous, not because they are so distant from each other that naming is impossible, but rather because their presence to each other is so total and immediate that the distance involved in naming has been dissolved. In the new world of mass revolution and of an art in which the individual voice ceases to speak, the alienated, autonomous self-consciousness and the transcendent God which mirrored it both find realization only in their dialectical negation, universal presence. No one can deny the breadth of Altizer's religious vision or of his acquaintance with the Western avant-garde tradition. He writes well, almost too well. The rhythm of his rhetoric can tempt one to turn the page before one has grasped what has been said. Nevertheless, this book is unconvincing at a variety of levels. The presentation takes a form closer to a virtuoso soliloquy than to a contribution to public discussion. Contemporary theologians and philosophers are never mentioned, nor is their impact evident. Various major figures of the past are mentioned over and over again, but their ideas are never analyzed or discussed in detail. The book is-naturally-without footnotes. BOOK REVIEWS 493 The inadequacies of this mode of presentation are most obvious in the discussion of Jesus's parables. Here is one of the few places that Altizer's discussion becomes specific enough for critical evaluation. One presumes Altizer's interpretation grows out of the intense discussion, over the last decade, of the ways in which the parables mean. Altizer does not, however, explicitly draw on this discussion nor give us any idea of where he stands in relation to it. This omission would not be serious if Altizer's reading of the parables could stand on its own, but it cannot. Why should one think that ". . . the intention of parable is to realize an enactment of speech wherein a totality of speakable or realizable identity is wholly present and immediately at hand " (pp. 3f) ? What does it mean to say that parable shatters every speakable distinction (p. 12)? Altizer's interpretation would be easier to come to terms with if he analyzed even one specific parable instead of merely making generalizations about parabolic speech. Altizer's downfall in discussing the parables is the downfall of the entire book: sweeping statements with little evident supporting analysis. Sometimes his generalizations seem illuminating (e.g., that Greek philosophy...